Shadowfires (15 page)

He was as expert at evasive driving as he had proved to be at hand-to-hand combat, and Rachael wanted to say,
Who the hell are you, anyway, not just a placid real-estate salesman with a love of trains and swing music, damned if you are,
but she didn’t say anything because she was afraid she would distract him, and if she distracted him at this speed, they would inevitably roll—or worse—and be killed for sure.

 

Ben knew that the 560 SL could easily win a speed contest with the Cadillac out on the open roads, but it was a different story on streets like these, which were narrow and occasionally bisected by speed bumps to prevent drag racing. Besides, there were traffic lights as they drew nearer the center of town, and even at this dead hour of the morning he had to slow for those main intersections, at least a little, or risk plowing broadside into a rare specimen of crosstown traffic. Fortunately, the Mercedes cornered about a thousand times better than the Cadillac, so he didn’t have to slow down nearly as much as his pursuers, and every time he switched streets he gained a few yards that the Caddy could not entirely regain on the next stretch of straightaway. By the time he had zigzagged to within a block of Palm Canyon Drive, the main drag, the Caddy was more than a block and a half behind and losing ground, and he was finally confident that he would shake the bastards, whoever they were—

—and that was when he saw the police car.

It was parked at the front of a line of curbed cars, at the corner of Palm Canyon, a block away, and the cop must have seen him coming in the rearview mirror, coming like a bat out of hell, because the flashing red and blue beacons on the roof of the cruiser came on, bright and startling, ahead on the right.

“Hallelujah!” Ben said.

“No,” Rachael said from her awkward seat in the open storage space behind him, shouting though her mouth was nearly at his ear. “No, you can’t go to the cops! We’re dead if you go to the cops.”

Nevertheless, as he rocketed toward the cruiser, Ben started to brake because, damn it, she’d never told him
why
they couldn’t rely on the police for protection, and he was not a man who believed in taking the law into his own hands, and surely the guys in the Cadillac would back off fast if the cops came into it.

But Rachael shouted, “No! Benny, for Christ’s sake, trust me, why don’t you? We’re dead if you stop. They’ll blow our brains out, sure as hell.”

Being accused of not trusting her—that hurt, stung. He trusted her, by God, trusted her implicitly because he loved her. He didn’t
understand
her worth shit, not tonight he didn’t, but he did trust her, and it was like a knife twisting in his heart to hear that note of disappointment and accusation in her voice. He took his foot off the brake and put it back on the accelerator, swept right past the black-and-white so fast that the light from its swiveling emergency beacons flashed through the Mercedes only once and then were behind. When he’d glanced over, he’d seen two uniformed officers looking astonished. He figured they’d wait for the Caddy and then give chase to both cars, which would be fine, just fine, because the guys in the Caddy couldn’t catch up with him and blow his brains out if they had the police on their tail.

But to Ben’s surprise and dismay, the cops pulled out right after him, siren screaming. Maybe they had been so shocked by the sight of the Mercedes coming at them like a jet that they hadn’t noticed the Cadillac farther back. Or maybe they’d seen the Caddy but had been so startled by the Mercedes that they hadn’t realized the second car was approaching at almost the same high speed. Whatever their reasoning, they shot away from the curb and fell in behind him as he hung a right onto Palm Canyon Drive.

Ben made that turn with the reckless aplomb of a stunt driver who knows that his roll bars and special stabilizers and heavy duty hydraulic shock absorbers and other sophisticated equipment remove most of the danger from such risky maneuvers—except he didn’t have roll bars and special stabilizers. He realized he’d miscalculated and was about to turn Rachael and Sarah and himself into canned meat, three lumps of imitation Spam encased in expensive German steel, Jesus, and the car tilted onto two tires, he smelled smoking rubber, it seemed an hour they teetered on edge, but by the grace of God and the brilliance of the Benz designers they came down again onto all fours with a jolt and crash that, by virtue of another miracle, did not blow out any tires, though Rachael hit her head on the ceiling and let out her breath in a whoosh that he felt on the back of his neck.

He saw the old man in the yellow Banlon shirt and the cocker spaniel even before the car stopped bouncing on its springs. They had been crossing the street in the middle of the block when he had come around the corner like a fugitive from a demolition derby. He was bearing down on them at a frightening speed, and they were frozen in surprise and fear, both dog and man, heads up, eyes wide. The guy looked ninety, and the dog seemed decrepit, too, so it didn’t make sense for them to be out on the street at nearly two o’clock in the morning. They ought to have been home in bed, occupied with dreams of fire hydrants and well-fitted false teeth, but here they were.

“Benny!” Rachael shouted.

“I see, I see!”

He had no hope of stopping in time, so he not only jumped on the brakes but turned across Palm Canyon, a combination of forces that sent the Mercedes into a full spin combined with a slide, so they went around a full hundred and eighty degrees and wound up against the far curb. By the time he peeled rubber, roared back across the street, and was headed north again, the old man and the cocker had finally tottered for the safety of the sidewalk—and the police cruiser was no more than ten yards behind him.

In the mirror, he could see that the Caddy had also turned the corner and was still giving chase, undeterred by the presence of the police. Crazily the Caddy pulled out around the black-and-white, trying to pass it.

“They’re lunatics,” Ben said.

“Worse,” Rachael said. “Far worse.”

In the passenger seat, Sarah Kiel was making urgent noises, but she did not appear to be frightened by the current danger. Instead, it seemed as if the violence of the chase had stirred the sediment of memory, recalling for her the other—and worse—violence that she had endured earlier in the night.

Picking up speed as he headed north on Palm Canyon, Ben glanced again at the mirror and saw that the Cadillac had pulled alongside the police cruiser. They appeared to be drag racing back there, just a couple of carloads of guys out for some fun. It was . . . well, it was downright silly was what it was. Then suddenly it wasn’t silly at all because the intentions of the men in the Caddy became horribly clear with the repeated winking of muzzle flashes and the
tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat
of automatic weapons fire. They had opened up on the cops with a submachine gun, as if this weren’t Palm Springs but Chicago in the Roaring Twenties.

“They shot the cops!” he said, as astonished as he had ever been in his life.

The black-and-white went out of control, jumped the curb, crossed the sidewalk, and rammed through the plate-glass window of an elegant boutique, but still a guy in the back seat of the Cadillac continued to lean out the window, spraying bullets back at the cruiser until it was out of range.

In the seat beside Ben, Sarah said, “Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh,” and she twitched and spasmed as if someone were raining blows on her. She seemed to be reliving the beating she had taken, oblivious of the immediate danger.

“Benny, you’re slowing down,” Rachael said urgently.

Overcome by shock, he had relaxed his foot on the accelerator.

The Cadillac was closing on them as hungrily as any shark had ever closed on any swimmer.

Ben tried to press the gas pedal through the floorboards, and the Mercedes reacted as if it were a cat that had just been kicked in the butt. They exploded up Palm Canyon Drive, which was relatively straight for a long way, so he could even put some distance between them and the Cadillac before he made any turns. And he did make turns, one after the other, off into the west side of town now, up into the hills, back down, working steadily south, through older residential streets where trees arched overhead to form a tunnel, then through newer neighborhoods where the trees were small and the shrubbery too sparse to conceal the reality of the desert on which the town had been built. With every corner he rounded, he widened the gap between them and the killers in the Cadillac.

Stunned, Ben said, “They wasted two cops just because the poor bastards got in the way.”

“They want us real bad,” Rachael said. “That’s what I’ve tried to tell you. They want us so very bad.”

The Caddy was two blocks behind now, and within five or six more turns, Ben would lose them because they wouldn’t have him in sight and wouldn’t know which way he had gone.

Hearing a tremor in his voice that surprised him, a quavering note that he didn’t like, he said, “But, damn it, they never really had much of a chance of catching us. Not with us in this little beauty and them in a lumbering Caddy. They had to see that. They had to. One chance in a hundred. At best. One chance in a hundred, but they still wasted the cops.”

He half wheeled and half slid around another turn, onto a new street.

“Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod,” Sarah said softly, frantically, drawing down in the seat as far as the safety harness would allow, crossing her arms over her breasts as she had done in the shower stall when she had been naked.

Behind Ben, sounding as shaky as he did, Rachael said, “They probably figured the police had gotten our license number—and theirs, too—and were about to call them in for identification.”

The Cadillac headlights turned the corner far back, losing ground more rapidly now. Ben took another turn and sped along another dark and slumbering street, past older houses that had gotten a bit seedy and no longer measured up to the Chamber of Commerce’s fantasy image of Palm Springs.

“But you’ve implied that the guys in the Caddy would get their hands on you even quicker if you went to the police.”

“Yes.”

“So why wouldn’t they want the police to nab us?”

Rachael said, “It’s true that in police custody I’d be even easier to nail. I’d have no chance at all. But killing me then will be a lot messier, more public. The people in that Cadillac . . . and their associates . . . would prefer to keep this private if they can, even if that means they’ll need more time to get their hands on me.”

Before the Cadillac headlights could appear again, Ben executed yet another turn. In a minute he would finally slip away from their pursuers for good. He said, “What the hell do they want from you?”

“Two things. For one . . . a secret they think I have.”

“But you don’t have it?”

“No.”

“What’s the second thing?”

“Another secret that I
do
know. I share it with them. They already know it, and they want to stop me from telling anyone else.”

“What is it?”

“If I told you, they’d have as much reason to kill you as me.”

“I think they
already
want my butt,” Ben said. “I’m in too deep already. So tell me.”

“Keep your mind on your driving,” she said.

“Tell me.”

“Not now. You’ve got to concentrate on getting away from them.”

“Don’t worry about that, and don’t try to use it as an excuse to clam up on me, damn it. We’re already out of the woods. One more turn, and we’ll have lost them for good.”

The right front tire blew out.

It was a long night for Julio and Reese.

By 12:32, the last of the garbage in the dumpster had been inspected, but Ernestina Hernandez’s blue shoe had not been found.

Once the trash had been searched and the corpse had been moved to the morgue, most detectives would have decided to go home to get some shut-eye and start fresh the next day—but not Lieutenant Julio Verdad. He was aware the trail was freshest in the twenty-four hours after the discovery of the body. Furthermore, for at least a day following assignment to a new case, he had difficulty sleeping, for then he was especially troubled by a sense of the horror of murder.

Besides, this time, he had a special obligation to the victim. For reasons which might have seemed inadequate to others but which were compelling to him, he felt a deep commitment to Ernestina. Bringing her killer to justice was not just his job but a point of honor with Julio.

His partner, Reese Hagerstrom, accompanied him without once commenting on the lateness of the hour. For Julio and for no one else, Reese would work around the clock, deny himself not only sleep but days off and regular meals, and make any sacrifice required. Julio knew, if it ever became necessary for Reese to step into the path of a bullet and
die
for Julio, the big man would make that ultimate sacrifice as well, and without the slightest hesitation. It was something which they both understood in their hearts, in their bones, but of which they had never spoken.

At 12:41 in the morning, they took the news of Ernestina’s brutal death to her parents, with whom she had lived, a block east of Main Street in a modest house flanked by twin magnolias. The family had to be awakened, and at first they were disbelieving, certain that Ernestina had come home and gone to bed by now. But, of course, her bed was empty.

Though Juan and Maria Hernandez had six children, they took this blow as hard as parents with one precious child would have taken it. Maria sat on the rose-colored sofa in the living room, too weak to stand. Her two youngest sons—both teenagers—sat beside her, red-eyed and too shaken to maintain the macho front behind which Latino boys of their age usually hid. Maria held a framed photograph of Ernestina, alternately weeping and tremulously speaking of good times shared with the beloved daughter. Another daughter, nineteen-year-old Laurita, sat alone in the dining room, unapproachable, inconsolable, clutching a rosary. Juan Hernandez paced agitatedly, jaws clenched, blinking furiously to repress his tears. As patriarch, it was his duty to provide an example of strength to his family, to be unshaken and unbroken by this visitation of
muerta.
But it was too much for him to bear, and twice he retreated to the kitchen where, behind the closed door, he made soft strangled sounds of grief.