The killer sped the Tercel onto the shoulder, passed the line of cars stopped at the light, lurched into the intersection and up the on-ramp to the Santa Ana. Ben redlined the cruiser’s V-8, rocketing up the left side of the Tercel. He leveled his revolver through the open passenger-side window and popped off a shot. The killer’s window exploded, sending shards across the cruiser’s passenger seat. The Tercel swerved, clipping the cruiser’s nose, and both cars slid along the guardrail, metal screeching metal, until the Tercel righted itself and flew down the emergency lane, spitting rocks and shreds of tire onto Ben’s windshield. Flashing lights filled the rearview, and on Santa Elena Road, just off the freeway, a line of cruisers converged on the next on-ramp. The Tercel veered erratically, clipping the guardrail and then shearing off a Volvo’s side-view mirror. Ben was pressing the nose of the cruiser against the Tercel bumper, the speedometer pushing 70, when a BMW swerved into the emergency lane. The Tercel’s brakes lit up and Ben stomped the floorboard and then a fender smashed the windshield and his head slammed into the collapsed steering column.
The brake lights outside went blurry, dashboard-indicator green bleeding down the edge of his vision. The Tercel was twisted in front of him, a puff of steam curling above the hood. And then the door opened and the killer’s legs slid out. Ben was pinned between the steering column and the door, but the killer unfolded himself from the collapsed Tercel, a line of blood running down his left shoulder. The killer stood there for a moment, looking at Ben just a few feet away. Ben heard the swirling pitch of sirens behind him somewhere, but the killer didn’t move. In Ben’s blurred vision, the killer’s face, Ricardo Martinez’s, was twisted and off-kilter, his eyes dark, nocturnal-looking, and he watched Ben as though waiting for him to die. And then he was gone, stumbling through the parking lot of cars driven by people trying to get home through traffic.
15
NATASHA WATCHED THEM THROUGH THE window in the door to his hospital room. Ben was unconscious—the left side of his face bandaged, an IV tube stuck in his forearm. Rachel’s forehead rested on the edge of the bed, and Emma rubbed her palm across her mother’s back.
The accident had been on the late-night news—the videotape of the cruiser accordioned on the side of the road, the slick of blood across the dashboard, Ben’s body being slid into the back of an ambulance—and she’d rushed down to Hoag Hospital, passing the site of the accident, panicked for lack of information. All she could think about was Ben laid out on one of her tables, Mendenhall charging her with performing the autopsy, knowing his body in that terrible way.
Ben’s chart was slipped into a plastic pocket next to the door. She snatched it from the wall and read it, her hands shaking. Hyphema, eye spasmed but intact. Inferior orbital blowout fracture. Split lacerations. Grade 2 concussion. She closed the file, breathed a sigh of relief. Not good, but it could be a whole lot worse. She stayed on the other side of the door, watching Rachel and Emma huddled at Ben’s bed. The bare toes on Ben’s right foot were exposed to the cold room, and Emma lifted the blanket to cover them. Rachel finally raised her head, eyes swollen and red, and Emma handed her a tissue. If Natasha had ever doubted Rachel’s feelings for Ben, it was out of her own hope and not for the evidence, she could see that now.
“You can go in,” a nurse said.
“No, it’s all right.”
She retreated to the waiting room and watched the breaking news on the television that hung anchored to the wall—a shot of the collapsed cruiser and Ben’s police portrait, a grainy mug of the killer, and a helicopter shot of miles of freeway, the pictures cycled over and over again—until, an hour and a half later, she watched Rachel and Emma walk arm in arm out through the revolving door.
—
WHEN HE WOKE, his vision starred and syrupy, a blurry Natasha sat curled into the visitor’s chair, watching him. She leaned forward and took his hand.
“Have I died and gone to the coroner?” he asked.
She smiled. “I bet you feel like a million bucks.”
He laughed, but it pounded his head. “Feel like I crashed into a steering column.”
“I should tell you that Rachel and Emma were here before,” she said. “Not trying to be an impostor or anything.”
“No, no,” he said. “It’s good to see you. There’re two of you, but they’re looking good.”
“Well, you look like you crashed into a steering column.”
“Don’t make me laugh,” he said.
She told him what the chart said, about the concussion, about the blood in his eye, about the fracture to the orbital bone, about how he was lucky he wouldn’t need surgery. Then they sat for a while, her fingers running up and down the outside of his palm. He had hoped to wake to Rachel, but he wasn’t disappointed to find Natasha here, and it didn’t feel so terrible to have her fingers on his skin, either.
“Did they get him? The serial?”
“No,” she said. “He dragged a woman out of her Beemer and raced the emergency lane. All points bulletin, but they lost him on the 91.”
“Helicopters couldn’t keep up?”
“They got grounded because of the wind,” she said. “He’s bleeding, though.”
He remembered getting the shot off, the driver’s side glass exploding.
“They’re already calling you a hero on the news. You got there in time to save that woman.”
“What about the highway patrol?” Ben said. “I mean, how could he get away?”
“I don’t know, Ben,” she said, squeezing his hand. “Hasn’t been my first concern for the last few hours.”
Then the rest of the night came to him in a flood of disjointed memories. Maybe it was his broken-down body, his head ballooned with pain, or maybe it was the medicine they had him doped up on, but something cracked open and he couldn’t hold it back. He told her everything she’d already guessed about Wakeland and about the things she didn’t know yet—the things he’d never told anyone, the things he thought he’d take to his grave. “It’s not your fault, Ben,” he heard her say.
“I don’t know why I let him,” he said.
Maybe he was telling it because Natasha already knew, and despite that knowledge she was here, holding his hand. He had wanted it to be known for so long, wanted it released from his body, and here she was taking it from him.
“It’s not your fault,” she said again. And he kept talking, expelling it, and she kept whispering to him, “It’s not your fault, it’s not your fault,” with every disgusting detail he plopped in her lap.
“I choked him,” he said, finally.
“What?”
“I met him tonight,” he said. “At the apartment. And I lost it.”
“Ben, is he dead?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t know.”
—
THE APARTMENT KEY was still in the pocket of Ben’s jeans, which were folded on a shelf in the corner of the hospital room. She drove across town, past an investigative unit measuring the skid marks of a Mercedes wrapped around a light pole, past the flashing lights of patrol cars guarding the entrance to the attempted-murder scene at the Puente Madera apartment complex.