engine.
Darkness fell over them.
The car’s hot metal made soft pinging sounds as it cooled.
The house was unoccupied, so no one came out to see what was happening.
And because the place was screened from the neighbors on both sides by
the wall and trees, no alarm was raised from those sources, either.
Benny said, “Give me your gun.
From her perch behind the seats, Rachael handed over the pistol.
Sarah Kiel was watching them, still trembling, still afraid, but no
longer in a trance of terror. The violence of the chase seemed to have
jolted her out of her preoccupation with her memories of other, earlier
violence.
Benny opened his door and started to get out.
Rachael said, “Where are you going?”
“I want to make sure they go past and don’t double back. Then I’ve got
to find another car.”
“We can change the tire-” “No. This heap’s too easy to spot. We need
something ordinary.”
“But where will you get another car?”
“Steal it,” he said. “You just sit tight, and I’ll be back as soon as I
can.”
He closed his door softly, sprinted back the way they had come, slipped
around the corner of the house, and was gone.
Scuttling in a half crouch along the side of the house, Ben heard a
chorus of distant sirens. Police cars and ambulances were probably
still converging on Palm Canyon Drive, a mile or two away, where the
bullet-riddled cops had ridden their cruiser through the windows of a
boutique.
Ben reached the front of the house and saw the Cadillac coming along the
street. He dove into a lush planting bed at the corner and cautiously
peered between branches of the overgrown oleander hushes, which were
heavily laden with pink flowers and poisonous berries.
The Caddy cruised slowly by, giving him a chance to ascertain that there
were three men inside. He could see only one clearly-the guy in the
front passenger’s seat, who had a receding hairline, a mustache, blunt
features, and a mean slash of a mouth.
They were looking for the red Mercedes, of course, and they were smart
enough to know that Ben might have tried to slip into a shadowy niche
and wait until they had gone past. He hoped to God that he had not left
obvious tire tracks across the short stretch of unmown lawn that he’d
traversed between the driveway and the side of the house. It was dense
Bermuda grass, highly resilient, and it hadn’t been watered as regularly
as it should have been, so it was badly blotched with brown patches,
which provided a natural camouflage to further conceal the marks of the
Mercedes’s passage. But the men in the Caddy might be trained hunters
who could spot the most subtle signs of their quarry’s trail.
Hunkering in the bushy oleander, still wearing his thoroughly
inappropriate suit trousers, vest, white shirt, and tie with the knot
askew, Ben felt ridiculous. Worse, he felt hopelessly inadequate to
meet the challenge confronting him. He’d been a real-estate salesman
too long.
He was not up to this sort of thing anymore, not for an extended length
of time. He was thirtyseven, and he’d last been a man of action when
he’d been twenty-one, which seemed a date lost in the mists of the
Paleolithic era. Although he had kept in shape over the years, he was
rusty. To Rachael, he had looked formidable when he’d gone after the
man named Vincent Baresco in Eric Leben’ 5 Newport Beach office, and his
handling of the car had no doubt impressed her, but he knew his reflexes
weren’t what they had once been. And he knew these people, his nameless
enemies, were deadly serious.
He was scared.
They had blown away those two cops as if swatting a couple of annoying
flies. Jesus.
What secret did they share with Rachael? What could be so damn
important that they would kill anyone, even cops, to keep a lid on it?
If he lived through the next hour, he would get the truth out of her one
way or another. Damned if he would let her keep stalling.
The Caddy’s engine sort of purred and sort of rumbled, and the car moved