The pilot announced that they were five minutes from the target.
Cedar City.
There was too much traffic to facilitate their escape, and too little to allow them to blend in and confuse Earthguard. She was also hindered by being on streets with gutters instead of on open highways with wide shoulders. And traffic lights. And that stupid pickup jockey insistently pounding, pounding, pounding his horn.
Ellie turned right at an intersection, frantically surveying both sides of the street. Fast-food restaurants. Service stations. Convenience stores. She had no idea exactly what she was looking for. She only knew that she would recognize it when she saw it: a place or situation that they could turn to their advantage.
She had hoped for time to scout the territory and find a way to get the Rover under cover: a grove of evergreens with a dense canopy of branches, a large parking garage, any place in which they might evade the eyes in the sky and leave the Rover without being spotted. Then they could either buy or heist new wheels, and from orbit they would again be indistinguishable from other vehicles on the highway.
She supposed she would earn a bed of nails in Hades for sure if she killed the creep in the Dodge pickup — but the satisfaction might be worth the price. He hammered on the horn as if he were a confused and angry ape determined to beat the damned thing until it stopped bleating at him.
He also tried to get around them during every break in oncoming traffic, but Ellie swerved to block him. The passenger side of the pickup was badly scraped and crumpled from when she had bashed into it with the Rover, so the guy probably figured that he had nothing to lose by pulling alongside and forcing her to the curb.
She couldn’t let him do that. They were quickly running out of time. Having to deal with the ape would consume precious minutes.
“Tell me it’s not,” Spencer shouted above the blaring horn.
“Not what?”
Then she realized that he was pointing through the windshield. Something in the sky. To the southwest. Two large executive-style helicopters. One behind and to the left of the other. Both black. The polished hulls and windows glistened as if sheathed with ice, and the morning sun shimmered off the whirling rotors. The two craft were like huge insects out of an apocalyptic 1950s science fiction movie about the dangers of nuclear radiation. Less than two miles away.
She saw a U-shaped strip shopping center ahead on the left. Skating on the fragile ice of instinct, she accelerated, hung a hard left through a gap in traffic, and drove into a short access road that served the big parking lot.
Near her right ear, the dog was panting with excitement, and it sounded uncannily like soft laughter:
Spencer still had to shout, because the horn-blower remained close behind them: “What’re we doing?”
“Got to get new wheels.”
“Out in the open?”
“Only choice.”
“They’ll see us make the switch.”
“Create a diversion.”
“How?”
“I’m thinking,” she said.
“I was afraid of that.”
With only the lightest application of the brakes, she turned right and then sped southward across the blacktop lot, instead of approaching the stores to the east.
The pickup stayed close behind them.
In the southwest sky, the two helicopters were no more than one mile away. They had altered course to follow the Range Rover. They were descending as they approached.
The anchor store in the U-shaped complex was a supermarket in the center of the middle wing. Beyond the glass front and glass doors, the cavernous interior was filled with hard fluorescent light. Flanking that store were smaller businesses, selling clothing and books and records and health foods. Other small stores filled the two end wings.
The hour was still so early that most of the shops had just opened. Only the supermarket had been doing business for any length of time, and there were few parked cars other than the twenty or thirty clustered in front of that central enterprise.
“Gimme the pistol,” she said urgently. “Put it on my lap.”
Spencer gave the SIG to her, and then he picked up the Micro Uzi from the floor between his feet.
No obvious opportunity for creating a diversion awaited her toward the south. She did a hard, fishtailing U- turn and headed back north toward the center of the parking lot.
That maneuver so surprised the ape that he put his pickup into a slide and almost rolled it in his eagerness to stay behind her. While regaining control, at least, he stopped blowing his horn.
The dog was still panting:
She continued to parallel the street on which they had been traveling when she had spotted the shopping center, staying away from the stores.
She said, “Anything you want to take with you?”
“Just my suitcase.”
“You don’t need it. I already took the money out.”
“You what?”
“The fifty thousand in the false bottom,” she said.
“You found my money?” He seemed astonished.
“I found it.”
“You took it out of the case?”
“It’s right there in the canvas bag behind my seat. With my laptop and some other stuff.”
“You found my money?” he repeated disbelievingly.
“We’ll talk about it later.”
“Bet on it.”
The ape in the Dodge was on her case again, blowing his horn, but he was not as close as he had been.
To the southwest, the choppers were less than half a mile away and only about a hundred feet off the ground, angling down.
She said, “You see the bag I mean?”
He looked behind her seat. “Yeah. There past Rocky.”
After clashing with the Dodge, she wasn’t sure if her door would open easily. She didn’t want to have to wrestle with the bag and the door at the same time. “Take it with you when we come to a stop.”
“Are we coming to a stop?” he asked.
“Oh, yeah.”
A final turn. Hard right. She swung into one of the center aisles in the parking lot. It led directly east, to the front of the supermarket. As she approached the building, she put her hand on the horn and held it there, making even more noise than the ape was making behind her.
“Oh, no,” Spencer said, with dawning awareness.
“Diversion!” Ellie shouted.
“This is nuts!”
“No choice!”
“It’s still nuts!”
Across the face of the market, sales banners were taped to the big sections of plate glass, advertising Coke and potatoes and toilet tissue and rock salt for home water softeners. Most were along the top half of those tall panes; through the glass, below and between the signs, Ellie could see the checkout stations. In the fluorescent light, a few clerks and customers were looking out, alerted by the strident horns. As she shot toward them, the small ovals of their faces were as luminously white as the painted masks of harlequins. One woman ran, which startled the others into scattering for safety.
