into the desert, bulldozing through a stand of thorny mesquite before coming to rest amid a miniature sandstorm generated by the car's own bumpy landing.
'Hah!' Morton gloated. 'Serves them right!' Iiz crossed her fingers, praying that the officers were okay. She stared intently, hoping to see the troopers emerge unscathed from their wrecked vehicle, but the gritty cloud obscured her view, and the Chevy literally left the crash scene in the dust as they made their getaway, Okada still whimpering quietly to himself.
Liz searched the empty roadway stretching out behind them. She spotted no sign of either the Jeep or Maria's Jetta. Had the police car chased them off? She didn't need extrasensory perception to appreciate the dilemma her friends must have been in. I'm on my own, she realized, numb with horror. No cavalry was coming, not right away, leaving her alone and helpless with a man who had already come close to killing her once before. Maybe this time, she thought, my luck has run out.
Consumed by a crazed desire to get as far away from the stranded State Patrol vehicle as possible, Okada kept his foot to the. Gas pedal, tlov sonnv!\%xwqL 3ncj nwr. vte.U into the foothills of the looming Guadalupe Mountains. 'I don't believe this! This can't be happening!' Okada kept repeating over and over, apparently unable to believe that his career as a legitimate scientist had led him to this bullet-strewn flight from justice; Liz would have felt sorry for him if her own future career prospects, along with her life, weren't also hanging by a thread.
'I've been thinking,' Okada said, glancing nervously back at Morton. 'Maybe we should just turn ourselves in, before anybody gets hurt.' The Chevy slowed to under fifty mph, so that the reluctant fugitive could concentrate on persuading his volatile partner. 'I mean, this whole thing is getting way out of control. Testing some spacy metal you liberated from the feds is one thing, but taking hostages, shooting at police cars-that wasn't part of the deal!'Forget it!' Morton said forcefully. 'Nobody's talking to the police about anything.' He gave Liz a murderous look. 'Let me worry about the girl.'But Okada wasn't taking no for an answer. 'I'm serious, Morton. You're going to get us both killed, in a police shoot-out, probably!' Mustering all his courage, the rebellious scientist tried to lay down the law. 'Well, no way. I'm a PhD, not a desperado. My life is worth more than that!'Why, you-!' Morton lunged from the backseat, losing his temper, but stopped himself before actually attacking the man driving the car. He took a deep breath, regaining control, then contemplated his mutinous accomplice with a calculating look upon his ruddy face. 'Okay,' he said eventually. 'Pull over to the side so we can talk this over.'Liz didn't like the sound of this, but she kept her mouth shut. If there was any chance that Okada could talk Morton into letting her go, she was all for it, even though that prospect struck her as extremely unlikely. Stay out of this, she told herself prudently. You don't want to get between two desperate men, especially when one of them is armed.
Coming to a halt next to some desert shrubs, Okada parked the Chevy, then turned to confront Morton. 'About time you started seeing sense,' he said, wiping the perspiration from his forehead. 'Things are bad enough already. We don't want to let this disaster escalate into a full-fledged bloodbath!'Yeah, whatever you say,' Morton grunted. He shoved Liz down into her seat. 'Don't move a muscle!' he threatened her before swinging open the back door and stepping out of the convertible, where he then yanked open Okada's door as well. 'Get out,' he ordered the scientist.
'What? I don't understand?' Okada peered up fearfully at Morton, suddenly very reluctant to surrender the wheel.
His Adam's apple bobbed up and down like a sine wave as he made another stab at reasoning with the stocky gun man. 'I thought we were going to talk about this 'Get out, I said!' Morton bellowed. He plucked Okada's glasses off the shocked scientists nose and hurled them into the gravel at his feet. Liz heard glass and plastic shatter beneath the gunman's cowboy boot. 'Talk time's over,' Morton snarled, grabbing hold of Okada's collar and dragging him out of the parked convertible. He spun the smaller man around so that Okada's back faced the desert scrub, then pushed him away. Sneering coldly, Morton raised his gun. 'Guess I don't need you anymore, professor.'No, wait!' Okada cried out, trying to ward off death by throwing up his hands. He stumbled backward, almost tripping over a patch of plump cacti. 'Let's work this out!'Liz knew she should look away, but all she could do was cover her ears as a single gunshot permanently ended Okada's scientific career. His crumpled body lay amid the cacti, a crimson stream irrigating the sun-baked soil. Morton gave the body a savage kick that sent it rolling into a deep ditch beside the road. 'How much is your life worth now, Mr. PhD?' he remarked snidely.
'You-you killed him,' Liz stammered, the callous execution nearly triggering another post-traumatic flashback to her own shooting. She clutched her stomach protectively, but, with considerable effort, forced her tumultuous thoughts to stay firmly rooted in the present. I have to keep my wits about me, she realized, if I want to get out of this alive.
The odds of that were looking slimmer and slimmer, though. Liz knew that Morton would not have shot Okada right in front of her if he had any intention of letting her go. The only reason she wasn't dead yet, she figured, was that Morton still wanted to know how she and her friends were connected to all this, not to mention how they man- aged to generate force fields, change the color of moving cars, etc. Couldn't hurt to remind him of all those unanswered questions, she judged, just in case he was thinking of disposing of her at the same time as Okada.
'You know, my friends are going to keep looking for me,' she warned him, crouching in the backseat of the Chevy. 'They're very talented. They can do all sorts of things.' It felt weird to hint, even obliquely, at the hybrids' special abilities to such an untrustworthy character, but at this point, Liz reasoned, the paranormal cat was pretty thoroughly out of the bag. 'You don't want to make them too angry.'Was that a flicker of fear in Morton's bloodshot eyes? 'Yeah? Well, you don't want to get me mad, little lady.' He placed a fresh clip into his handgun and lumbered toward the front seat of the convertible. Before he could sit down, however, another siren wailed nearby. The same patrol car, Liz wondered, or reinforcements? For her friends' sake, she hoped Max and the others were keeping a low profile.
'Damn!' Morton cursed. He eyed the Chevy dubiously, suddenly seeing it as a liability. He checked the dashboard and grunted. 'Almost out of gas anyway,' she heard him mutter, moments before he grabbed the attache case from the passenger seat and picked up a canvas backpack from beneath the glove compartment. He tossed the backpack, which she recognized as the one Alex had donated to Michael and Isabel's con routine, at Liz, hitting her in the chest. 'Take that,' he ordered brusquely, taking a long, hard look at the arid wasteland and the ocher foothills beyond. 'We're going for a hike.'
22.
The cave was dark and gloomy, the only light coming from a narrow entrance about twenty feet away. Liz squatted on the dank stone floor, her hands tied behind her back with duct tape, while Joe Morton checked to make sure the tape was secure. 'Okay, that should hold you,' he grunted, lurching to his feet behind her. He circled around so she could see the pistol tucked into his bulging waistband. 'Don't try anything. I'm watching you.'They must have hiked a couple miles into the hills, before stumbling onto this primitive hideaway. Must be one 0/ those unexplored caverns 1 read about in the guidebook, Liz guessed; it was even possible that they were back on the park grounds somewhere. Unfortunately, it didn't look like any tour guides would be coming along soon.
In search of better light, Morton trudged up to just within the cave's secluded entrance. Muttering irritably to himself, he dialed a number on the cell phone he had claimed from the glove compartment of the abandoned Chevy. 'Damnit,' he grumbled, lifting the phone to his ear. 'He'd better be there!'Liz wondered whom he was calling, but not for long. 'Ramirez!' the surly gunman barked into the phone. 'This is Morton. What the hell were you thinking, sending those two air force clowns to surprise me?… Don't play dumb with me! They told me they worked with you, and they had the goods to prove it. Yeah, more leftovers from '47. Crazy stuff, too. An alien crash helmet and some kind of glow-in-the-dark antenna or something…What do you mean you've never heard of anything like that? I saw this merchandise with my own eyes!'Liz realized he was talking about Isabel and Michael, and the phony alien gizmos they had whipped up at the Days Inn. She looked over at the canvas backpack, currently resting against the notorious attache case on the floor of the cave, only a few feet away. She assumed the bogus artifacts were still in the pack. Why else would Morton have forced her to carry it all this way? Not that this was likely to do her much good; even if she managed to get her hands free, what could she do with a shower cap and a twisted wire hanger? It took several minutes, but Ramirez somehow managed to convince Morton that he'd had nothing to do with the uniformed strangers at the Denny's. 'Okay, okay, maybe you're on the level,'
