OUT OF THE PALM GROVE, in the open near the fountain, she saw them coming at last. Two guys hurried this way from the library lot, which was west of her, and three others sprinted in from the street on the north side of the park, none in uniform, though they were surely not citizens out for the exercise.
The Ford Escape stood at a meter a block to the south of the park, but she didn’t want to lead them toward the car if it might be still unknown to them.
She fled east, into the longest sward of this green zone, glad that she had been avoiding carbs, doing stretching exercises every evening, and running regularly.
Even at a distance, she could tell that the five on her tail were formidable enough to have qualified for the NFL at defensive positions: huge guys, big muscles, serious stamina. But she weighed a hundred fifteen pounds, and each of her pursuers bulked twice her size; greater weight required additional energy to move it. She was lean and fleet, and her motivation—survival—gave her a more powerful motor than anything that might be driving them.
She did not glance back. To do so would slow her. She would be caught or not, and the race was more often won by the quarry that had confidence in its endurance.
The second lightning bolt seared the sky, brighter than the first, and cleaved to the heart the tallest tree in sight, a nearby live oak, from which foamed showers of fiery splinters, incandescent chips of bark. A slab calved from the main trunk, bearing a limb of intricate branches like some fantastic microwave mast receiving signals from uncountable worlds.
Although the toppling mass crashed short of her, Jane raised one arm across her face, protecting her eyes from the shrapnel of shattered branches, twigs, and crisp brown oval leaves set afire and swarming like a pestilence of beetles.
As the last of the debris fell behind her and the crash of thunder rolled away through the city, as she came to the east end of the park, the once-dark sky paled, abruptly glaucous, and cataracts of rain fell hard, fat droplets hissing through the trees and grass, snapping off the pavement, plinking the metal hoods on trash cans, carrying with them the faint bleachy odor of ozone, a form of oxygen created by lightning’s alchemy.
The torrents of silver rain were suddenly threaded through with red skeins as brake lights revealed drivers reacting to the abrupt drop in visibility. Without hesitation, she leaped off the sidewalk, into the street, blacktop glistering underfoot, and plunged into the mid-block traffic, greeted by the blare of horns and the banshee shriek of brakes. She briefly glimpsed some startled and some angry faces in the wake of thumping windshield wipers before they blurred behind the fresh rain sluicing down the glass.
Arriving on the farther sidewalk intact, she turned south and ran flat out, dodging among other pedestrians who might have been annoyed but not surprised to see a young woman, sans umbrella, in a hurry to find shelter. She turned north at the corner, sprinted half a block before trading the street for an alleyway, then the alleyway for a narrow service passage between buildings, suitable only for foot traffic.
Halfway along that claustrophobic accessway, she at last risked a look back. She saw none of the five bulls from the park, but she knew she couldn’t have shaken off all of them. They were in the area, and likely to cross her path by surprise.
She paused only to drop her disposable cell phone through the bars of a drainage grille. Even above the chorus of the rain, she could hear it splash into dark water below, and then she ran once more.
19
* * *
FROM THE NARROW ACCESSWAY, she entered a new street mid-block. She was about to cross it when she noticed, fifty or sixty yards to her left, on the opposite side of the avenue, a large man in dark clothing, soaked as she was, standing oblivious to the bustling pedestrians around him. He might have been anybody, nobody, looking for somebody else, but intuition cautioned her to back off toward the passageway from which she had a moment earlier departed.
Just before she would have ducked out of sight, she saw him see her. He raised his head and stiffened, as an attack dog will freeze for just an instant when it catches the scent of quarry.
She retreated to the three-foot-wide accessway and ran, blinking rain from her eyes, dispirited by the sound of her labored openmouthed breathing. Throat hot and getting raw. Heart knocking. A thin acid refluxing into the back of her throat.
Insane, this womanhunt in broad daylight, in a busy city. Insane and incredible, but no more incredible than Nick killing himself with his Ka-Bar, than Eileen Root hanging herself in the garage, than jihadists crashing a plane into hundreds of cars, trucks, and buses on a crowded expressway.
Bursting into the alley she had traveled previously, acutely aware that she didn’t have time to reach either end of the block before her pursuer arrived, she saw a truck parked at the back of a restaurant, the logo of a bakery emblazoned on its flank. Delivering bread or pastries or both, the driver wore a yellow rain slicker as he finished stacking four large rainproof plastic cases on a hand truck, which he rolled into the receiving room or kitchen of his customer.
She darted to the driver’s door, glanced into the cab through glass partly clouded by interior condensation, saw only that no one occupied it, and hurried to the back of the vehicle. She decided against the cargo area, where the driver had left one of the two doors ajar, most likely because he had more goods to offload. She boarded the front of the truck on the starboard side, pulling the cab’s passenger door shut behind her, and she slid below window level, as far into the footwell as she could go.
Rain streamed across the windshield, and the windows in both side doors were partially obscured by condensation. The interior cab light was off, the dashboard dark. As long as she stayed low, she probably would not be seen—unless her pursuer yanked open a door. But he was more likely to think she’d found an unlocked entrance to one of the businesses that backed up to the alley, most obviously the restaurant.
As she tried to quiet her breathing, she heard sounds outside. She couldn’t make much of them over the rataplan of rain.
Then came the distinctive crackle of a voice transmitted on a walkie-talkie, the words not quite discernible.
The man holding the walkie-talkie was close, too close. He must have been standing beside the bakery truck. His voice was deep and muffled, but just clear enough. “Half a block east of your position. Behind some joint called Donnatina’s Restaurant.”
The far voice crackled, and again Jane couldn’t understand it.
“All right,” said the nearer man. “You two in the front. Sweep the joint hard, restrooms, everything, drive her to me.”
His voice faded as he stepped away from the truck toward the back entrance of Donnatina’s.
Jane thought of drawing her pistol. But curled in the footwell, with her back wedged between the seat and the passenger door, facing the steering wheel, she wouldn’t be able to take a smart shot at anyone if it came to that.
Anyway, they wouldn’t give her a reason to shoot first. Whether they were remotely a legitimate authority of any kind or a totally rogue group, they would want to take her away for interrogation.
They.
Although she might not be able to name them now, she would know their identity one day. That was what she’d promised Nick, and even though it was a promise made after he was weeks in the grave, she would damn well keep it as if it had been made to the living man, hold it as sacred as she had held their wedding vows.
A couple of minutes passed before the driver opened the cargo-box door that he had left ajar when he’d taken the first part of his delivery into the restaurant.
The pass-through slider between the cab and the back of the truck had been left open. She heard the guy with the walkie-talkie, his voice no longer muffled, querying the driver. “You see a woman, brunette, five-six, a looker but half drowned like me?”
“Seen her where?”
“Here, the alley. Maybe going in this joint?”
“When was this?”
“Since you got here.”
“I been delivering.”