limb, and dropped into an alley.
Police would expect him to prefer these service alleys to streets, so he couldn't use them.
He passed through a vacant lot, sheltered by the weeping boughs of long-untrimmed California pepper trees, which whirled and flounced like the many-layered skirts of eighteenth-century dancers in a waltz.
As he was crossing the next street in midblock, a police car swept through the intersection to the east. The shriek of its brakes told him that he had been seen.
Across a yard, over a fence, across an alley, through a gate, across a yard, across another street, very fast now, the plastic bag slapping against his leg. He worried that it would split, spilling bricks of hundred-dollar bills.
The last line of houses backed up to a small canyon, about two hundred feet deep and three hundred wide. He scaled a wrought-iron fence and was at once on a steep slope of loose eroded soil. Gravity and sliding earth carried him down.
Like a surfer chasing bliss along the treacherous face of a fully macking monolith, he tried to stay upright, but the sandy earth proved to be not as accommodating as the sea. His feet went out from under him, and on his back he slid the last ten yards, raising a wake of white dust, then thrashed feetfirst through a sudden wall of tall grass and taller weeds.
He came to a stop under a canopy of branches. From high above, the floor of the canyon had appeared to be choked with greenery, but Mitch hadn't expected large trees. Yet in addition to some of the scrub trees and brush that he had envisioned, he found an eclectic forest.
California buckeyes were garlanded with fragrant white flowers. Bristling windmill palms thrived with California laurels and black myrobalan plums. Many of the trees were gnarled and twisted and rough, junk specimens, as though the urban-canyon soil fed mutagens to their roots, but there were acer japonicums and Tasmanian snow gums that he would have been pleased to use in any high-end landscaping job.
A few rats scattered on his arrival, and a snake slithered away through the shadows. Maybe a rattlesnake. He couldn't be sure.
While he remained in the cover of the trees, no one could see him from the canyon rim. He no longer was at risk of immediate apprehension.
So many branches of different trees interlaced that even the raging wind could not peel back the canopy and let the sun shine in directly. The light was green and watery. Shadows trembled, swayed like sea anemones.
A shallow stream slipped through the canyon, no surprise this recently after the rainy season. The water table might be so close to the surface here that a small artesian well maintained the flow all year.
He untied the plastic trash-can liner from his belt and examined it. The bag had been punctured in three places and had sustained a one-inch tear, but nothing seemed to have fallen out of it.
Mitch fashioned a loose temporary knot in the neck of the bag and carried it against his body, in the crook of his left arm.
As he remembered the lay of the land, the canyon narrowed and the floor rose dramatically toward the west. The purling water eased lazily from that direction, and he paralleled it at a faster pace.
A damp carpet of dead leaves cushioned his step. The pleasant melange of moist earth, wet leaves, and sporing toadstools gave weight to the air.
Although the population of Orange County exceeded three million, the bottom of the canyon felt so remote that he might have been miles from civilization. Until he heard the helicopter.
He was surprised they were up in this wind.
Judging by sound alone, the chopper crossed the canyon directly over Mitch's head. It went north and circled the neighborhood through which he'd made his run, swelling louder, fading, then louder again.
They were searching for him from the air, but in the wrong place. They didn't know he'd descended into the canyon.
He kept moving — but then halted and cried out softly in surprise when Anson's phone rang. He pulled it from his pocket, relieved that he hadn't lost or damaged it.
'This is Mitch.'
Jimmy Null said, 'Are you feeling hopeful?'
'Yes. Let me talk to Holly.'
'Not this time. You'll see her soon. I'm moving the meet from three to two o'clock.'
'You can't do that.'
'I just did it.'
'What time is it now?'
'One-thirty,' Jimmy Null said.
'Hey, no, I can't make two o'clock.'
'Why not? Anson's place is only minutes from the Turnbridge house.'
'I'm not at Anson's place.'
'Where are you, what are you doing?' Null asked.
Feet planted wide in wet leaves, Mitch said, 'Driving around, passing time.'
'That's stupid. You should've stayed at his place, been ready.'
'Make it two-thirty. I've got the money right here. A million four. I've got it with me.'
'Let me tell you something.'
Mitch waited, and when Null didn't go on, he said, 'What? Tell me what?'
'About the money. Let me tell you something about the money.'
'All right.'
'I don't live for money. I've got some money. There are things that mean more to me than money.'
Something was wrong. Mitch had felt it before, when talking to Holly, when she had sounded constrained and had not told him that she loved him.
'Listen, I've come so far, we've come so far, it's only right we finish this.'
'Two o'clock,' Null said. 'That's the new time. You aren't where you need to be at two sharp, it's over. No second chance.'
'All right.'
'Two o'clock.'
'All right.'
Jimmy Null terminated the call. Mitch ran.
Chapter 63
Chained to the gas pipe, Holly knows what she must do, what she will do, and therefore she can pass her time only by worrying about all the ways things could go wrong or by marveling at what she can see of the uncompleted mansion.
Thomas Turnbridge would have had one fantastic kitchen if he had lived. When all the equipment had been installed, a high-end caterer with platoons of staff could have cooked and served from here a sit-down dinner for six hundred on the terraces.
Turnbridge had been a dot-com billionaire. The company that he founded — and that made him rich — produced no product, but it had been on the cutting edge of advertising applications for the Internet.
By the time Forbes estimated Turnbridge's net worth at three billion, he was buying homes on a dramatic Pacific-view bluff in an established neighborhood. He bought nine, side by side, by paying more than twice the going price. He spent over sixty million dollars on the houses and tore them down to make a single three-acre estate, a parcel with few if any equals on the southern California coast.
A major architectural firm committed a team of thirty to the design of a three-level house encompassing eighty-five thousand square feet, a figure that excluded the massive subterranean garages and mechanical plant. It was to be in the style of an Alberto Pinto-designed residence in Brazil.
Such elements as interior-exterior waterfalls, an underground shooting range, and an indoor ice-skating rink required heroic work of the structural, systems, and soil engineers. Two years were required for plans. During the
