Lightning

“Brand new Toyota,” he said.

“This’ll do,” she said.

The sirens were closer.

Chris pitched the Toyota’s keys away, hopped into the car, and rode with her to the driveway of the house on the other side of the street, farther up toward the corner, where the doctor was waiting in the shadows along the driveway of a house in which no lights had yet come on. Maybe they were in luck; maybe no one was home at that place. They lifted her guardian out of the wheelchair and laid him on the rear seat of the Cutlass.

The sirens were very close now, and in fact a police cruiser shot past at the far end of that block, on the side street, red beacons flashing, heading toward Brenkshaw’s block.

“You’ll be okay, Doctor?” she asked, turning to him as she closed the back door of the Cutlass.

He had dropped into the wheelchair. “No apoplexy, if that’s what you’re afraid of. What the hell is going on with you, girl?”

“No time, Doc. I have to split.”

“Listen,” he said, “maybe I won’t tell them anything.”

“Yes, you will,” she said. “You may think you won’t, but you’ll tell them everything. If you weren’t going to tell them, then there wouldn’t have been a police report or a newspaper story, and that record in the future, those gunmen couldn’t have found

“What’re you jibbering about?”

She leaned down and kissed his cheek. “No time to explain, Doc. Thanks for your help. And, sorry, but I’d better take that wheelchair too.”

He folded it and put it in the trunk for her.

The night was full of sirens now.

She got behind the wheel, slammed her door. “Buckle up, Chris.”

“Buckled,” he said.

She turned left at the end of the driveway and drove to the far corner of the block, away from Brenkshaw’s end of the neighbor­hood, to the intersecting street on which a cruiser had flashed by only a moment ago. She figured that if police were converging in answer to reports of automatic-weapons fire, they would be coming from different areas of the city, from different patrols, so maybe no other car would approach by that same route. The avenue was nearly deserted, and the only other vehicles she saw were not fitted with rooftop emergency beacons. She turned right, heading steadi­ly farther away from the Brenkshaw place, across San Bernardino, wondering where she would find sanctuary.

Laura reached Riverside at 3:15 in the morning, stole a Buick from a quiet residential street, shifted her guardian to it with the wheelchair, and abandoned the Cutlass. Chris slept through the entire operation and had to be carried from one car to the other.

Half an hour later, in another neighborhood, exhausted and in need of sleep, she used a screwdriver from a tool pouch in the Buick’s trunk to steal a set of license plates from a Nissan. She put the Nissan’s plates on the Buick and put the Buick’s plates in the trunk because they would eventually turn up on a police hot sheet.

A couple of days might pass before the Nissan’s owner noticed his plates were missing, and even when he reported them stolen, the police would not treat that news with the same attention they gave to stolen cars. Plates were usually taken by kids playing a stupid prank or vandals, and their recovery was not a high priority for overworked police laboring under heavy caseloads of major crimes. That was one more useful fact she had learned while researching the book in which a car thief had played a secondary role.

She also paused long enough to dress her guardian in wool socks, shoes, and a pullover sweater to keep him from catching a chill. At one point he opened his eyes, blinked at her, and said her name, and she thought he was coming around, but then he slipped away again, muttering in a language that she could not identify because she could not hear any of the words clearly.

She drove from Riverside to Yorba Linda in Orange County, where she parked in a corner of a Ralph’s Supermarket lot, behind a Goodwill collection station, at 4:50 in the morning. She killed the engine and lights, unbuckled her safety harness. Chris was still buckled up, leaning against the door, sound asleep. Lying on the back seat, her guardian was still unconscious, though his breathing was not quite as wheezy as it had been before they had visited Carter Brenkshaw. Laura did not think she would be able to doze off; she hoped just to collect her wits and rest her eyes, but in a minute or two she was asleep.