In his phone call to Jane, Gilberto hadn’t mentioned the make or color of the car that Hendrickson had jacked. But as she braked at the stop sign and saw the lemon-yellow Subaru streaking along the descending curve of pavement, coming in from her left as fast as any angry hornet, there was about it an aura of menace, a threat of ruin, that spoke to the ear of her intuition. And behind it, farther uphill, in immediate confirmation, came a white Cadillac limousine.
If Hendrickson at first intended to have his captive driver swing hard right into the entrance lane, he must have recognized the GL 550 as from his brother’s collection. The car braked and began to turn, but then corrected, aiming for the Mercedes.
Jane reacted just quickly enough, shifting into reverse. Brief banshee wails issued from the tires of both vehicles as the Mercedes smoked backward on the blacktop and as the Subaru imprinted skid marks before rocking to a stop athwart the two-lane community drive.
Gun in both hands, Hendrickson erupted from the car, clearly intending to open fire on Jane, but only then becoming aware of the limousine, a juggernaut in the wake of the Subaru. He squeezed off two shots at the Caddy. Starburst pocks appeared in the smooth sweep of windshield. A third round entirely dissolved the glass.
Jane put the Mercedes in park, exited fast and low, using the door as a shield, drawing her Heckler.
Hendrickson hitched and stumbled sideways, out of the path of the incoming limo.
The grinding of disc brakes and the shriek of tires molting skins of rubber on the pavement raised the expectation of a violent crash. But the impact of car and car was almost discreet: a crisp crumpling of metal, the crack of fractured plastic, the tinkle of shattered headlights cascading across the roadway.
As Jane came out from behind the open door of the Mercedes, she was relieved to see Gilberto scramble from the limousine, his pistol in hand. Two of them against Hendrickson, drawing down on him from different directions. The bastard would have to surrender.
Good. The last thing she wanted to do was kill him. She had other uses for him.
As Hendrickson reeled away from the crash and regained his balance, Jane was about to order him to drop the gun when the driver of the Subaru—booted, jeaned, wearing a rhinestone-cowboy shirt—intervened. Something like a scaled-down Western hat fell from the woman’s head as she launched at Hendrickson and leaped onto his back. Her long legs clamped around his middle, as if this were a rodeo ring and he the bull that must be ridden. The impact staggered him, almost took him to his knees, and the gun flew from his grip. His rider pulled fiercely on his mane of hair with her left hand and pounded on the side of his face with her right.
Gilberto scooped the weapon off the blacktop before Hendrickson could retrieve it.
Jane holstered her pistol and withdrew the bottle of chloroform from a jacket pocket.
If Hendrickson had ever been trained in physical combat, he remembered nothing he’d been taught. Bent under the weight of his assailant, he weaved in a circle, trying to reach back and tear her off, like some mad turtle offended by its own shell. His strength quickly deserted him, and he collapsed onto his side, taking his rider with him.
Even as Hendrickson went down, Jane dropped to her knees before him. He rolled his head and glared up at her, his patrician features distorted so grotesquely by rage that he resembled a gargoyle fallen from a high parapet. His mouth twisted in a snarl, but before one word of invective could escape him, she sprayed him with chloroform, and he passed out.
17
As if he’d read Jane’s mind, Gilberto hurried to the GL 550, boarded it, pulled a U-turn, and reversed toward Jane where she knelt beside Hendrickson.
Having been witness to car crash, gunfire, and struggle, the guard in the community gatehouse, about seventy feet away, might already be on the phone to the police. If Hendrickson had reported Jane’s whereabouts with his hostage’s cellphone, far more dangerous specimens than the local cops were on the way.
Hendrickson had no sooner passed out, nose and mouth wet with chloroform, than the scrappy girl in Western garb, clambering over him, extracted an iPhone from one of his coat pockets.
“I need that phone,” Jane said as the GL 550 braked behind her.
The cowgirl said, “I worked hard for it. You ever work hard or you just shoot people for what you want?”
“I’ll buy it,” Jane said, putting up the tailgate of the 550.
“Buy it? Like that makes any sense.”
The girl stepped aside while Jane rolled Hendrickson onto his back and Gilberto took hold of him by the ankles.
“Ten thousand bucks.” Jane and Gilberto lifted Hendrickson into the back of the SUV. “Throw in that red scarf, and I’ll pay cash.”
“It’s not a scarf, it’s a neckerchief. What’re you doin’ with that bastard?”
“You don’t want to know.” Jane asked Gilberto to get three packets from the attaché case on the front seat.
The girl glared at Hendrickson in the cargo space of the SUV. “He belongs in jail, what he did to me.”
Gilberto appeared with three banded blocks of cash and gave one to the girl at Jane’s direction.
“Ten thousand for the phone and the neckerchief,” Jane offered.
The girl’s eyes narrowed with suspicion.
“It’s real, and it’s not hot money. You’ll have to trust me.”
“Who trusts anyone anymore?” Nevertheless the girl handed over the iPhone. She slipped off the kerchief and surrendered that, too.
“This other twenty thousand,” Jane said, as she put the scarf over Hendrickson’s face and sprayed it lightly with chloroform, “is for saying my friend here wasn’t Hispanic. He was a tall, blond white dude. And this wasn’t a white GL 550, it looked silver. And this guy wasn’t chloroformed. We abducted him at gunpoint.”
Although she took the twenty thousand that Gilberto offered, the girl appeared fretful. “What’s it called—lying for money?”
“It’s called politics,” Jane said. “Better hide the cash.”
As Gilberto hurried to the driver’s door and Jane closed the tailgate, the girl stuffed two packets in her bra and shoved the third down the front of her jeans, into her underpants. “If you’re gonna hurt that Commie-Nazi piece of shit, hurt him some for me.”
“Deal.”
“Who are you, anyway?”
“Dorothy,” Jane lied.
The girl said, “I’m Jane.”
“Of course you are,” Jane said, climbed into the passenger seat, and closed the door.
18
They drove north on the Pacific Coast Highway, where ragged blankets of grass and scrub covered the sandy soil to the left of the road. Beyond that rough and prickly shore, a pale beach smoothed into a sea glinting with infinite knives of sunlight, but shadowed by its ceaseless heavings.
In Corona del Mar, with the sea lost to sight, they heard the first siren, saw the flashing lightbar atop a southbound Newport Beach police cruiser. Traffic deferred to it, and the siren waned.
The residential neighborhood west of the Coast Highway was known as the Village: picturesque streets of lovely houses leading down toward a bluff where parks overlooked the ocean. Gilberto pulled to the curb in a quiet block, and while he remained behind the wheel with the engine running, Jane got out with the two screwdrivers she had taken from the garage at Simon Yegg’s house.
Border to border, from sea to shining sea, police cars and other government vehicles had for some time been equipped with 360-degree license-plate-scanning systems that recorded the numbers of the vehicles around them, whether parked or in motion, transmitting them 24/7 to regional archives, which in turn shared the information with the National Security Agency’s vast intelligence troves in its million-square-foot Utah Data Center.
Authorities could track a fugitive by a license-plate number if the vehicle happened to be scanned often enough during its journey from point A to point Z. Now that Jane’s original plan had been upended by events, she and Gilberto needed to transfer Booth Hendrickson from the Mercedes to Gilberto’s Chevrolet Suburban and then ditch the superhot GL 550. But they didn’t dare do so if a series of scans would later allow the Arcadians to connect the two vehicles and put the entire Mendez family on a kill-or-convert list.