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 bushes, 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 thirty-seven, 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's 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 past at a crawl, and the guy with the mustache looked right at Ben for a moment, or seemed to, stared right between the oleander branches that Ben was holding slightly apart. Ben wanted to let the branches close up, but he was afraid the movement would be seen, slight as it was, so he just looked back into the other man's eyes, expecting the Caddy to stop and the doors to fly open, expecting a submachine gun to start crackling, shredding the oleander leaves with a thousand bullets. But the car kept moving past the house and on down the street. Watching its taillights dwindle, Ben let out his breath with a shudder.
He crept free of the shrubbery, went out to the street, and stood in the shadows by a tall jacaranda growing near the curb. He stared after the Cadillac until it had traveled three blocks, climbed a small hill, and disappeared over the crest.
In the distance, there were still sirens, though fewer. They had sounded angry before. Now they sounded mournful.
Holding the thirty-two pistol at his side, he hurried off into the night-cloaked neighborhood in search of a car to steal.
In the 560 SL, Rachael had moved up front to the driver's seat. It was more comfortable than the cramped storage space, and it was a better position from which to talk with Sarah Kiel. She switched on the little overhead light provided for map reading, confident it would not be seen past the property's thick screen of trees. The moon- pale glow illuminated a portion of the dashboard, the console, Rachael's face, and Sarah's stricken countenance.
The battered girl, having been shaken from her catatonic state, was at last capable of responding to questions. She was holding her curled right hand protectively against her breast, which somehow gave her the look of a small, injured bird. Her torn fingernails had stopped bleeding, but her broken finger was grotesquely swollen. With her left hand, she tenderly explored her blackened eye, bruised cheek, and split lip, frequently wincing and making small, thin sounds of pain. She said nothing, but when her frightened eyes met Rachael's, awareness glimmered in them.
Rachael said, “Honey, we'll get you to a hospital in just a few minutes. Okay?”
The girl nodded.
“Sarah, do you have any idea who I am?”
The girl shook her head.
“I'm Rachael Leben, Eric's wife.”
Fear seemed to darken the blue of Sarah's eyes.
“No, honey, it's all right. I'm on your side. Really. I was in the process of divorcing him. I knew about his young girls, but that has nothing to do with why I left him. The man was sick, honey. Twisted and arrogant and sick. I learned to despise and fear him. So you can speak freely with me. You've got a friend in me. You understand?”
Sarah nodded.
Pausing to look around at the darkness beyond the car, at the blank black windows and patio doors of the house on one side and the untended shrubbery and trees on the other, Rachael locked both doors with the master latch. It was getting warm inside the car. She knew she should open the windows, but she felt safer with them closed.
Returning her attention to the teenager, Rachael said, “Tell me what happened to you, honey. Tell me everything.”
The girl tried to speak, but her voice broke. Violent shivers coursed through her.
“Take it easy,” Rachael said. “You're safe now.” She hoped that was true. “You're safe. Who did this to you?”
In the frosty glow of the map light, Sarah's skin looked as pallid as carved bone. She cleared her throat and whispered, “Eric. Eric b-beat me.”
Rachael had known this would be the answer, yet it chilled her to the marrow and, for a moment, left her speechless. At last she said, “When? When did he do this to you?”
“He came… at half past midnight.”
“Dear God, not even an hour before we got there! He must've left just before we arrived.”
From the time she'd left the city morgue earlier this evening, she had hoped to catch up with Eric, and she should have been pleased to learn they were so close behind him. Instead, her heart broke into hard drumlike pounding and her chest tightened as she realized how closely they had passed by him in the warm desert night.
“He rang the bell, and I answered the door, and he just… he just… hit me.” Sarah carefully touched her
