Cops didn’t try to shoot unarmed fugitives in the back. Not righteous cops.
Joe wanted to help her. He couldn’t think of anything to do. If they were cops, he had no right to second-guess them. If they weren’t cops, and even if he could catch up with them, they would probably shoot him down rather than let him interfere.
Crack.
The woman reached the crest.
“Go,” Joe urged her in a hoarse whisper. “Go.”
He didn’t have a cellular phone in his own car, so he couldn’t call 911. He had carried a mobile unit as a reporter, but these days he seldom called anyone even from his home phone.
The keening crack of another shot pierced the leaden heat. If these men weren’t police officers, they were desperate or crazy, or both, resorting to gunplay in such a public place, even though this part of the cemetery was currently deserted. The sound of the shots would travel, drawing the attention of the maintenance personnel who, merely by closing the formidable iron gate at the entrance to the park, could prevent the gunmen from driving out.
Apparently unhit, the woman disappeared over the top of the hill, into the scrub beyond.
Both of the men in Hawaiian shirts went after her.
4
Heart knocking so fiercely that his vision blurred with each hard-driven surge of blood, Joe Carpenter sprinted to the white van.
The Ford was not a recreational vehicle but a panelled van of the type commonly used by businesses to make small deliveries. Neither the back nor the side of the vehicle featured the name or logo of any enterprise.
The engine was running. Both front doors stood open.
He ran to the passenger side, skidded in a soggy patch of grass around a leaking sprinkler head, and leaned into the cab, hoping to find a cellular phone. If there was one, it wasn’t in plain sight.
Maybe in the glove box. He popped it open.
Someone in the cargo hold behind the front seats, mistaking Joe for one of the men in the Hawaiian shirts, said, “Did you get Rose?”
Damn.
The glove box contained a few rolls of Lifesavers that spilled onto the floor—and a window envelope from the Department of Motor Vehicles.
By law, every vehicle in California was required to carry a valid registration and proof of insurance.
“Hey, who the hell are you?” the guy in the cargo hold demanded.
Clutching the envelope, Joe turned away from the van.
He saw no point in trying to run. This man might be as quick to shout people in the back as were the other two.
With a clatter and a skreeeek of hinges, the single door at the rear of the vehicle was flung open.
Joe walked directly toward the sound. A sledge-faced specimen with Popeye forearms, neck sufficiently thick to support a small car, came around the side of the van, and Joe opted for the surprise of instant and unreasonable aggression, driving one knee hard into his crotch.
Retching, wheezing for air, the guy started to bend forward, and Joe head-butted him in the face. He hit the ground unconscious, breathing noisily through his open mouth because his broken nose was streaming blood.
Although, as a kid, Joe had been a fighter and something of a troublemaker, he had not raised a fist against anyone since he met and married Michelle. Until today. Now, twice in the past two hours, he had resorted to violence, astonishing himself.
More than astonished, he was sickened by this primitive rage. He had never known such wrath before, not even during his troubled youth, yet here he was struggling to control it again as he had struggled in the public lavatory in Santa Monica. For the past year, the fall of Flight 353 had filled him with terrible despondency and grief, but he was beginning to realize that those feelings were like layers of oil atop another—darker—emotion that he had been denying; what filled the chambers of his heart to the brim was anger.
If the universe was a cold mechanism, if life was a journey from one empty blackness to another, he could not rant at God, because to do so was no more effective than screaming for help in the vacuum of deep space where sound could not travel, or like trying to draw breath underwater. But now, given any excuse to vent his fury on people, he had seized the opportunity with disturbing enthusiasm.