Sole Survivor

racing engine rose, concern crinkled the corners of her eyes and creased her forehead.

Joe turned to see what was troubling her. Along the road that he had traveled, a white Ford van was approaching at a far higher speed than the posted limit.

“Bastards,” she said.

When Joe turned to the woman again, she was already running from him, angling across the slope toward the brow of the low hill.

“Hey, wait,” he said.

She didn’t pause or look back.

He started after her, but his physical condition wasn’t as good as hers. She seemed to be an experienced runner. After a few steps, Joe halted. Defeated by the suffocating heat, he wouldn’t be able to catch up with her.

Sunlight mirroring the windshield and flaring off the headlight lenses, the white van shot past Joe. It paralleled the woman as she sprinted across the grave rows.

Joe started back down the hill toward his car, not sure what he was going to do. Maybe he should give chase. What the hell was going on here?

Fifty or sixty yards beyond the parked Honda, brakes shrieking, leaving twin smears of rubber on the pavement behind it, the van slid to a stop at the curb. Both front doors flew open, and the men in Hawaiian shirts leaped out. They bolted after the woman.

Surprise halted Joe. He hadn’t been followed from Santa Monica, not by the white van, not by any vehicle. He was sure of that.

Somehow they had known that he would come to the cemetery. And since neither of the men showed any interest in Joe, but went after the woman as if they were attack dogs, they must have been watching him at the beach not because they were interested in him, per se, but because they hoped that she would make contact with him at some point during the day.

The woman was their only quarry.

Hell, they must have been watching his apartment too, must have followed him from there to the beach.

As far as he knew, they had been keeping him under surveillance for days. Maybe weeks. He had been in such a daze of desolation for so long, walking through life like a sleeper drifting through a dream, that he would not have noticed these people slinking at the periphery of his vision.

Who is she, who are they, why was she photographing the graves?

Uphill and at least a hundred yards to the east, the woman fled under the generously spreading boughs of stone pines clustered along the perimeter of the burial grounds, across shaded grass only lightly dappled with sunshine. Her dusky skin blended with the shadows, but her yellow blouse betrayed her.

She was heading toward a particular point on the crest, as if familiar with the terrain. Considering that no cars were parked along this section of the cemetery road, except for Joe’s Honda and the white van, she might have entered the memorial park by that route, on foot.

The men from the van had a lot of ground to make up if they were going to catch her. The tall one in the green shirt seemed in better shape than his partner, and his legs were considerably longer than the woman’s, so he was gaining on her. Nevertheless, the smaller guy didn’t relent even as he fell steadily behind. Sprinting frantically up the long sun-seared slope, stumbling over a grave marker, then over another, regaining his balance, he charged on, as though in an animal frenzy, in a blood fever, gripped by the need to be there when the woman was brought down.

Beyond the manicured hills of the cemetery were other hills in a natural condition: pale sandy soil, banks of shale, brown grass, stinkweed, mesquite, stunted manzanita, tumbleweed, scattered and gnarled dwarf oaks. Arid ravines led down into the undeveloped land above Griffith Observatory and east of the Los Angeles Zoo, a rattlesnake-infested plot of desert scrub in the heart of the urban sprawl.

If the woman got into the scrub before being caught, and if she knew her way, she could lose her pursuers by zigging and zagging from one narrow declivity to another.

Joe headed toward the abandoned white van. He might be able to learn something from it.

He wanted the woman to escape, though he wasn’t entirely sure why his sympathies were with her.

As far as he knew, she might be a felon with a list of heinous crimes on her rap sheet. She hadn’t looked like a criminal, hadn’t sounded like one. This was Los Angeles, however, where clean-cut young men brutally shotgunned their parents and then, as orphans, tearfully begged the jury to pity them and show mercy. No one was what he seemed.

Yet…the gentleness of her fingertips against his cheek, the sorrow in her eyes, the tenderness in her voice, all marked her as a woman of compassion, whether she was a fugitive from the law or not. He could not wish her ill.

A vicious sound, hard and flat, cracked across the cemetery, leaving a brief throbbing wound in the hot stillness. Another crack followed.

The woman had nearly reached the brow of the hill. Visible between the last two bristling pines. Blue jeans. Yellow blouse. Stretching her legs with each stride. Brown arms pumping close to her sides.

The smaller man, in the red and orange Hawaiian shirt, had run wide of his companion, whom he was still trailing, to get a clear line of sight on the woman. He had stopped and raised his arms, holding something in both hands. A handgun. The son of a bitch was shooting at her.

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 paneled 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 Life Savers that spilled onto the floor — and a window envelope from the Department of Motor Vehicles.