“Ah . . . I don’t know, man, I don’t know.”
Then they could see the mall south of the highway. Pilate said, “Doesn’t look that big. The malls in L.A. are twice as big.”
? ? ?
LUCAS SAID, “Easy now.”
“I really love this shit,” Letty said.
“Letty, goddamnit . . .”
“Well?”
“Okay, okay.”
“There’s the off-ramp,” she said.
? ? ?
IT ALMOST WORKED.
The red Taurus—Lucas had picked it out in the wing mirror—followed them right off I-494 and then down and up again on the Lindau Lane chute. Lucas saw two boring unmarked sedans jostle through traffic and get in behind the Taurus. Cop cars. The Taurus kept coming.
Lucas said, “We’ve got them boxed. Speed up, fast now, hit it and stay right.”
Letty dropped two gears and floored it and the Porsche virtually leapt down the chute.
“Don’t scrape the fenders! Jesus, don’t scrape the fuckin’ fenders.”
The car’s soft fat tires were squealing their hearts out when Letty went around the curve to the left, and ahead saw four squad cars on the ramp, with a small gap on the right side, big enough for her to get through. She’d gained two hundred yards on the Taurus, and it was now out of sight behind the curve. Letty didn’t slow down as they approached the gap and a couple of Bloomington cops on foot, who had apparently expected her to ease through it, jumped back.
Lucas said, “Jesus, Jesus,” as the concrete wall flew past a foot from his nose. Through the gap, Letty hit the brakes, hard. Lucas surged forward in his safety belt, and when they were stopped, he looked at her and opened his mouth but nothing came out, and she smiled and said, “Not a scratch.”
He popped his safety belt and jumped out. “Stay down.”
As soon as Letty had gone through the gap, one of the waiting Bloomington cop cars moved into it.
That’s when the glitch developed.
? ? ?
THE PORSCHE SUDDENLY leapt away from them. Kristen screamed, “What is . . . What are they doing, did they see us?”
“I don’t know, I don’t—”
Kristen had accelerated, in a futile attempt to keep up, and when she came around the turn, she had barely enough time to stop before hitting the cop cars that were blocking the road. An ugly yellow car was right on her tail, and she yelled, “Cops behind us.”
As they screeched to a stop, the car fishtailed a little, and Pilate popped the door and disappeared. Where did he go? She didn’t know. She got out of the car and held up her hands, heard cops shouting at her, and she stood still, but twisted her neck around looking for Pilate. He had vanished.
Then she saw Davenport running away from her, down the ramp, a gun in his hand, and a few cops trailing, running hard.
? ? ?
PILATE KNEW IT WAS OVER: the cops were going to kill him. Before the car had even stopped, he was out, and he took three steps to the concrete railing and looked down. Fifteen feet? He slipped over the railing, hung for a minute, then let go, landing on the grass below.
Something popped and pain surged through one foot, and he felt like his asshole had kept going when his body stopped. He ran under the ramp for a few seconds, but couldn’t stay there, and he darted across a narrow street, between two oncoming cars and into a bunch of small trees and headed for Nordstrom’s door.
He kept thinking, Gonna make it, gonna make it, gonna make it . . .
He was wearing the blue suit, with the .45 in his pocket, and he took the gun out as he ran. He’d jacked a shell into the chamber when they were tracking Davenport. He came up to Nordstrom’s, expecting to be hit between the shoulder blades at any minute, realized that the cops couldn’t shoot because of the crowd ahead of him: crowds were his friends, now. Off to his left, he got a glimpse of somebody coming after him, and realized that Davenport was only a hundred feet away.
Pilate blew into Nordstrom’s at a dead run, past a big bearded guy in a Green Bay jersey, knocked a kid down, then another one, like bowling pins, almost went down himself, and somebody yelled, “Hey,” and he went straight on ahead, clothes, shoes, purses, and cosmetics. He could see the exit to the mall proper, and he glanced back, and Davenport had closed the gap. He didn’t have time to turn and shoot, so he lifted the gun straight up and fired into the ceiling.
Shoppers shrieked and scattered in all directions, which helped a little, but not enough. He risked another look back and Davenport was even closer, and he had a gun.
Then he was out of the store, looking for any kind of help he could get.
? ? ?
WHEN PILATE FIRED into the ceiling and the crowd exploded into the aisles, Lucas was probably only fifty feet behind. He couldn’t shoot because of all the people milling around him, and in the shooting lanes behind Pilate. Even if he hit Pilate in the middle of the back, the slug could go on through and clip a bystander.
Pilate went straight out the store exit into the mall, then bent to the right around the escalators. Lucas went wider right, to make sure he wouldn’t be ambushed.
He wasn’t. Pilate had gone straight ahead and vaulted the counter at the Caribou Coffee, where he had a heavy young woman by her blond hair, his pistol aimed more or less at her face.
Lucas came around the escalator and Pilate screamed, “Get away from me! I want a—”
Lucas never found out what he wanted. A getaway car? An airplane to North Korea? A spaceship?
He never found out because the young woman picked up the large soy macchiato that she’d been steaming, and flipped it over her shoulder into Pilate’s eyes.
Pilate screamed and pulled away from her and in that sliver of opportunity, Lucas shot him through the bridge of his nose.
Then the screaming really got started.