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The dinging continued relentlessly, a bird pecking on Mike’s spine. The pause felt as though it dragged out several minutes.

‘That flickering light in the lobby,’ Kat said.

Mike scratched his forehead with a thumb, grabbing the life-line his daughter had thrown him. ‘Right. Probably just a loose connection, but you always worry about arcing, you know? So we’re off to check the breakers.’ He pointed vaguely up the ramp.

The man flicked his chin at Kat. ‘She your assistant?’

Mike shot a glance back at the stairwell door. ‘It’s Bring Your Kid to Work Day.’

‘I thought that was in April.’

He’d heard of it?

‘They changed the date,’ Mike said. ‘Conflicted with Talk Like a Pirate Day.’

The man studied him, head cocked, and then his serious expression broke and he gave a big laugh. Stepping aside, he swept a hand at the ramp.

Mike unlocked his muscles and headed for daylight. The dinging grew louder as he hustled Kat up the ramp. They stepped into the sudden bright, the sun winking harshly off the domino row of windshields. All those matching patrol cars, neatly aligned, as if for sale. Slanted in the middle of the aisle, door still flung open, issuing the nerve- grating dings, was Graham’s Mercury Grand Marquis. A barbed-wire-topped fence hemmed everything in. On the ground before the exit at the lot’s end lay a thick black sensor cable, requiring the weight of an automobile to open the imposing electronic gate.

An angry banging overhead.

Mike looked up. Hammering the window three floors above, his face tight and angry, Graham bellowed down at them. He stood where Mike had been minutes earlier; in fact, they’d reversed positions exactly. Graham’s mouth wavered, spit flecking the glass, but his outrage, from below, was soundless. Standing beside him, looking not entirely displeased, was Cayanne.

Mike glanced from Graham to the electronic gate to the black Mercury. The door alarm meant the key was in the ignition. ‘Come on.’

Before Kat could get the passenger door closed behind her, Mike was accelerating toward the gate. As it rattled arthritically open, he dug the truck keys from his pocket. His fist guiding the wheel, he squeaked through the gap early, the gate’s edge grinding the side of the car and throwing up sparks. He screeched across the street and into the main parking lot, raking the tires the wrong way across the security spikes. The rubber shredded, Graham’s car skidding sideways, throwing sparks and grinding to a halt. Mike and Kat leaped out and into the pickup, and then they were motoring away, his eyes clicking from rearview to side mirror. The rucksack full of cash and the few plastic bags of their stuff rolled at Kat’s feet. Dusk was coming on, cutting visibility, making him feel incrementally safer. He accelerated through a red, cut up an alley, hit the freeway entrance on a slide, and ran the blacktop the length of two exits. Kat’s eyes were bright, and Mike realized that this was, in a manner, exciting for her.

Back on darkening residential streets, he prowled like the teenager he used to be. He passed over the German makes. He’d heard they had fancy security systems these days, the antilock brakes kicking in and the steering shutting down before you pulled away from the curb. And even if you cracked a glove box and lucked into a valet key, there was still LoJack, GPS. He needed something from his era, something he could work like a Rubik’s Cube.

A brown Honda Civic with a late-eighties body was nestled to the curb beside a high hedge, the nearest house quiet behind a substantial setback. Mike parked behind the car and hopped out. It occurred to him that each successive vehicle he’d taken was a stepping-stone to a prior time.

‘Grab our stuff.’

But Kat was too fascinated to obey. As he dug in the wheel-well toolbox, she watched from the curb, swiveling one leg and chewing her cheek. He didn’t find a crowbar, but there was a length of stiff electrical wire that he doubled, forming a hook with one end. His hands seemed to shape the wire by themselves, on muscle-memory autopilot. Clenching the wire between his teeth, he shoved a hammer into his back pocket and carried two flathead screwdrivers to the Honda. At the driver’s side, he jammed both screwdrivers between the top of the window and the rubber guard, about two inches apart, opening up a small gap.

‘Dad?’

The wire slid through, the hook grabbed the notched lock, and he was in.

‘Dad?’

Three smacks of the hammer knocked off the plastic ignition keyhole, and the wider screwdriver fit the hole. A turn of his wrist and the engine purred to life.

‘Dad?’

Finally he registered Kat’s voice and looked up. She was standing a few feet off the driver’s window, arms crossed, mouth slightly ajar with wonder.

‘Where’d you learn that?’

Chapter 36

His back stiff, his gaze constant on the door, Shep sat at Annabel’s side. Her chest rose and fell under her own power, the breaths long and sonorous. She was puffy around the eyes, bloated from IV fluids. The monitor ticked off hills and valleys.

The knob turned, and Dr Cha entered. Only Shep’s eyes moved.

It was late, and the halls were quiet.

She said, ‘I’m sorry, Shep, but visiting hours ended forty-five minutes ago. You’ll have to go now.’

‘I can’t.’

‘There’s nothing I can do. These rooms are for patients only.’

Shep reached over, plucked a Pyrex supply canister from the counter, and shattered it in his hand. Swabs and shrapnel fell at his feet. With a jagged shard, he carved a three-inch gash along the back of his forearm. Tendrils of blood snaked down his hand, running off his fingertips, drops pattering on the tile.

He parted the dividing curtain, moved to the empty bed across from Annabel, and sat. ‘I need stitches.’

‘You idiot. I should call security.’

‘From what I’ve seen of them, go ahead.’

She stepped in, letting the door suck closed behind her. A stare-down. ‘You’re a real piece of work, aren’t you?’

‘What’s that?’

‘Oh, you heard me.’

Shep said, ‘I will pay for the room. Cash – no HMO-insurance bullshit. But I want this bed.’

‘This is a hospital, not a cabana at Skybar.’ She snapped the phone off the wall, punched a button. ‘Security, please.’

Shep pointed across to Annabel with a blood-wet finger. ‘Your patient is in danger.’

Uncertainty showed on the doctor’s face. Quickly replaced by anger. ‘You don’t know that. The cops said she’s fine. That you’re the criminal.’

‘I am a criminal. But you don’t want to wake up tomorrow morning to find out that they’ve killed her.’

She kept the phone pressed to her ear. ‘Even if I could have men and women cohabiting in the same room, a few stitches don’t buy you the surgical ICU. They buy you ten minutes with a first- year intern in the ER.’

The faint voice on the other end came clearly audible off the hard surfaces. ‘Security. Security. Do you have a problem?’

Shep raised the glittering shard to his face. ‘Then what do I have to cut?’

Driving inland. A Honda Civic, his eight-year-old daughter, an unmarked revolver, and a rucksack stuffed with just shy of a quarter mil. The purple sky, half lit by the descended sun, had a portentous cast. An electronic billboard flashed a child-abduction alert, but they were past before Mike registered that it referred to Kat. He’d