She stepped through the gate, onto the walk, and opened up on them before they saw her, spraying the back of the house with bullets. Though she was not on top of her targets, she was in range—ninety feet was not far—and they dove for cover. She could not tell if she hit them, and she didn’t continue to fire because even with a magazine of four hundred rounds expended in short bursts, the Uzi could empty quickly; and now it was the only automatic weapon she still possessed. She backed out of the gate and ran after Brenkshaw and Chris.
They were just going through a wrought-iron gate at the back of a property on the other side of the alley, two doors down. When she got there and stepped into the yard, she found that old eugenias were planted along the iron fence to the left and right of the gate; they had grown into a dense hedge, so no one would spot her easily from the alley unless they were directly in front of the gate itself.
The physician had pushed the wheelchair all the way to the back of the house. It was Tudor, not Victorian like Brenkshaw’s, but also built at least forty or fifty years ago. The doctor was starting around the side of the place, into the driveway, heading toward the next major street.
Lights winked on in houses all over the neighborhood. She was sure that faces were pressed to windows, including those where lights had not appeared, but she didn’t think anyone would see much.
She caught up with Brenkshaw and Chris at the front of the house and halted them in shadows near some overgrown shrubbery. “Doc, I’d like you to wait here with your patient,” she whispered.
He was shaking, and she hoped to God he didn’t have a heart attack, but he was still game. “I’ll be here.”
She took Chris out to the next street, where at least a score of cars were parked at the near and far curbs along that block. In the rain of bluish light from the streetlamps, the boy looked bad but not as awful as she had feared, not as frightened as the physician; he was growing accustomed to terror. She said, “Okay, let’s start trying car doors. You take this side, I’ll take the far side. If the door is open, check the ignition, under the driver’s seat, and behind the sun visor for keys.”
“Gotcha.”
Having once done research for a book in which a character had been a car thief, she had learned among other things that on average one out of seventeen drivers left his keys in his car overnight. She hoped the figure might be even more in their favor in a place like San Bernardino; after all, in New York and Chicago and LA and other big cities, nobody but masochists left their keys in their cars, so for the average to work out to one in seventeen, there had to be more trusting people among other Americans.
She attempted to keep an eye on Chris as she tried the doors of the cars along the far side of the street, but she soon lost track at him. Out of the first eight vehicles, four were unlocked, but no fans were in any of them.
In the distance rose the wail of sirens.
That would probably drive off the men in black. Anyway, they were most likely still searching along the alleyway behind Brenkshaw’s house, moving cautiously, expecting to be fired upon again.
Laura moved boldly, with no caution whatsoever, not concerned about being seen by residents in the flanking houses. The street was lined with mature but squat, stunted date palms that provided a lot of cover. Anyway, if anyone had been aroused at this dead hour of the night, they were probably at second-floor windows, not trying to look down at their own street through the palms but over toward the next street, toward Brenkshaw’s place, where all the shooting had been.
The ninth vehicle was an Oldsmobile Cutlass, and there were keys under the seat. Just as she started the engine and pulled her door shut, Chris opened the door on the passenger’s side and showed her a set of keys that he had found.