There was another silence.
“Well, thank you. Really? Well, I thought it was the smartest thing to do. I mean, under the circumstances… yes, yes. Exactly. All right.” He made a kissing sound into the phone and hung up.
His anxiousness seemed to evaporate. I wasn’t sure I liked him looking so smug, though.
We went through a town called Lake Los Angeles, the existence of which I would have doubted if I hadn’t seen it myself. We turned south, toward the mountains, without seeing either a lake or angels. I’m sure both were there somewhere.
We crossed the California Aqueduct and kept going south. He started watching ahead more often, calling out directions more quickly. We were soon in desolate territory, turning onto potholed roads that seemed to have been laid out for communities that never materialized, some developer’s mirage, now abandoned. We left those for an even more isolated dirt road.
We were in the foothills when the angels belatedly made their appearance. We passed a side road, and less than a minute later I saw the red light of a law enforcement vehicle-I couldn’t see any markings to make out the agency. I had to fight back tears of relief-we would be rescued! In the next moment I realized that things weren’t exactly resolved. How would the gunman react to the news I was about to give him? Not knowing what it might literally trigger, I braced myself and said, “We’re getting pulled over.”
His reaction seemed odd. He smiled, then quickly frowned and said, “Pull over and act natural. Don’t do anything to make him suspect what’s going on back here, or the girl dies.” He was talking like a TV gangster. He forced Carrie to lie down and covered her completely with a blanket.
“I’ll need my wallet,” I said.
He smiled again, found it, and tossed it to me.
Something wasn’t adding up. I kept the engine running. I had one weapon-the van. I didn’t see many possibilities to use it that would lend themselves to happy endings.
A single uniformed officer got out of a vehicle I couldn’t see. The officer had almost reached my now-lowered window before I realized she was female. The uniform looked damned familiar. Frank was already in Detectives before I married him, but I knew what a Las Piernas Police Department uniform looked like.
We were way the hell out of Las Piernas’s jurisdiction.
The style of this uniform was known as a Blauer, with the officer’s name embroidered over the pocket.
D. Fletcher.
The rest of the outfit wasn’t a convincing fake job. She was missing most of the fifty pounds of equipment a patrol officer carries. Her sidearm was holstered and she made no move to reach for it.
“License and registration.”
I played along, thinking that if I drove off, I might cause the man in the back of the van to shoot Carrie-or me. I needed a better opportunity. Or something that even vaguely resembled even half an opportunity. She moved to the front of the van and then around to the sliding side door. She knocked on it.
Now the gunman was frowning in earnest.
Still holding his gun, he moved awkwardly over to the door and opened it.
She had her own weapon out, a small handgun, and not the larger piece that was still holstered. The woman grabbed the wrist of his gun arm.
This, I thought, was as good a chance as I was likely to get.
The van was moving just as she pulled him out of it. I stepped on the gas, raising a huge cloud of dust. I heard a little popping noise and thought she was shooting at the tires.
In the side mirror, I saw the man drop in a heap.
The woman wasn’t looking at him.
She was staring after us.
CHAPTER 46
Tuesday, May 2
12:35 P.M.
ANTELOPE VALLEY
SHE might have been staring because she knew what I didn’t-that the dirt road ended a short distance ahead.
I braked and swerved to avoid going into a dry wash, yelled to Carrie to hang on or brace herself any way she could, and turned the van around. As I did, the side door slid on its tracks and shut again. At least Carrie wouldn’t roll out.
I had to disable the BMW. If the shooter got into her car, she’d easily outrun the van.
As I drove back toward her, she was smiling. She had unholstered the bigger gun. I think she expected me to simply surrender, because when I aimed the van at her, she looked surprised. Maybe it was wishful thinking on my part, but her hands seemed a little shaky. I crouched as low as I could behind the steering wheel, and I drove right at her. She raised the gun and fired. A spray of glass pebbles came at me as some of her shots blew out the windshield, and I heard the ping and hammer of the bullets hitting metal as they did some damage to the van, but I kept going, hoping to God that nothing was going to ricochet into Carrie or me.
The shooter’s surprise turned to a look of white-faced fear. She did an awkward rolling dive away from the front of the BMW.
I couldn’t afford to hit the BMW in a way that would risk disabling the van, and I didn’t want to injure or kill Carrie by sending her flying around the back of the van in a big collision. So I braked and skidded to a sliding halt, adding to the cloud of debris that was coming into the van. I lined up the back end of the van with the left front side of the Beemer, then threw the van into reverse and gave it some gas.
It made a loud bang, and I pulled forward. The BMW’s front wheel tilted at a nasty angle and the tire was flat. I had certainly done more than fuck up the paint job on the rest of the front end. Good enough.
I drove away like a bat out of hell.
AS soon as I felt sure that I had put enough distance between the shooter and us that we were out of immediate danger, I pulled over and went back to Carrie. She had managed on her own to free the blanket from her face, and maneuvered herself against the backseat. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “Are you hurt?”
She shook her head. Tears rolled down her face, over the tape across her mouth.
I glanced around. The floor of the van was littered with glass and the contents of my purse. My cell phone, alas, was out in the desert in a dead man’s pocket.
“I’m going to move you up by me so you don’t get cut by this glass, and then I’ll work on getting this tape off of you, okay?”
She nodded.
I pulled the blanket off, causing more beads of glass to fall. At least it had protected her from the initial shower of windshield fragments. I picked her up as carefully as I could, an awkward business in the confines of the van, but we made it to the front seats. I set her on her feet, brushed off the passenger seat, and helped her to sit down. I strapped the seat belt on her. “Just in case we have to take off in a hurry,” I said.
She nodded her understanding.
I started to worry that somehow the shooter would find some way to catch up with us. The woman was still armed, after all, and dressed as a police officer. Maybe she’d carjack a vehicle from someone, or use some shortcut I didn’t know about.
I reached into the glove compartment and found a first-aid kit. It contained a cheap pair of round-end scissors.
“I’m going to cut your hands free first so you can work on the rest,” I said to Carrie. “I want to try to get us farther away from that woman.”
She nodded enthusiastically.
I cut the tape between her wrists and left the scissors where she could reach them.
