Leaving Santa Monica, all the way into the San Fernando Valley, Joe had seen no suspicious vehicle in his rear-view mirror. This van had been able to stalk him while streets away or miles behind, out of sight.
As a reporter, he had once gone on a mobile surveillance with federal agents, a group of high-spirited cowboys from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, who had used a similar but less sophisticated system than this.
Acutely aware that the battered Blick or one of the other two men might trap him here if he delayed too long, Joe swivelled in his chair, surveying the back of the van for some indication of the agency involved in this operation. They were tidy. He couldn’t spot a single clue.
Two publications lay beside the computer station at which Blick had been working: one issue each of Wired, featuring yet another major article about the visionary splendiferousness of Bill Gates, and a magazine aimed at former Special Forces officers who wished to make horizontal career moves from military service into jobs as paid mercenaries. The latter was folded open to an article about belt-Buckle knives sharp enough to eviscerate an adversary or cut through bone. Evidently this was Blick’s reading matter during lulls in the surveillance operation, as when he had been waiting for Joe to grow weary of contemplating the sea from Santa Monica Beach.
Mr. Wallace Blick, of the ANABOLIC tattoo, was a techno geek with an edge.
When Joe climbed out of the van, Blick was groaning but not yet conscious. His legs pumped, a flurry of kicks, as if he were a dog dreaming of chasing rabbits, and his cool red sneakers tore divots from the grass.
Neither of the men in Hawaiian shirts had returned from the desert scrub beyond the hill.
Joe hadn’t heard any more gunshots, although the terrain might have muffled them.
He hurried to his car. The door handle was bright with the kiss of the sun, and he hissed with pain when he touched it.
The interior of the car was so hot that it seemed on the verge of spontaneous combustion. He cranked down the window.
As he started the Honda, he glanced at the rear-view mirror and saw a flatbed truck with board sides approaching from farther east in the cemetery. It was probably a groundskeeper’s vehicle, either coming to investigate the gunfire or engaged in routine maintenance.
Joe could have followed the road to the west end of the memorial park and then looped all the way around to the entrance at the east perimeter, but he was in a hurry and wanted to go directly back the way he had come. Overwhelmed by a feeling that he had stretched his luck too far, he could almost hear a ticking like a time-bomb clock. Pulling away from the curb, he tried to hang a U-turn but couldn’t quite manage it in one clean sweep.
He shifted into reverse and tramped on the accelerator hard enough to make the tyres squeal against the hot pavement. The Honda shot backward. He braked and shifted into drive again.
Tick, tick, tick.
Instinct proved reliable. Just as he accelerated toward the approaching groundskeeper’s truck, the rear window on the driver’s side of the car, immediately behind his head, exploded, spraying glass across the backseat.
He didn’t have to hear the shot to know what had happened.
Glancing to the left, he saw the man in the red Hawaiian shirt, stopped halfway down the hillside, in a shooter’s stance. The guy was as pale as a risen corpse but dressed for a Margarita party.
Someone shouted hoarse, slurred curses. Blick. Crawling away from the van on his hands and knees, dazedly shaking his blocky head, like a pit bull wounded in a dog fight, spraying bloody foam from his mouth: Blick.
Another round slammed into the body of the car with a hard thud followed by a brief trailing twang.
With a rush of hot gibbering wind at the open and the shattered windows, the Honda spirited Joe out of range. He rocketed past the groundskeeper’s truck at such high speed that it swerved to avoid him, though he was not in the least danger of colliding with it.