The Woman (11 page)

She pressed her back against the masonry wall and listened.

Chapter 17

The glass slider slammed against the wall after the man violently pushed it full open. His foot slid when he stepped onto the fallen screen door. He quickly regained his balance by grabbing the wider plank at the top of the deck rail.

Linda took advantage of the cover provided by that noise to open the wooden, unlocked door to the storage area under her condo where she had planned to hide. But she was repulsed at the thought of being confined. Instead, she left the door standing open to give him the opportunity to assume she had gone in and enter himself. If that happened, she might be able to slam it shut and latch it with him inside. That door would not hold him inside for long, but perhaps enough for her to have time to determine if he had a helper out front. If he did, that second man might come to let him out. If so, she could make the front street and get far enough that they would not be able to find her.

No. The door was plywood, the latch small. He would smash through it as easily as she had burst through the screen door.

She looked up. The man remained on the deck. She remained beneath him, his bulk turning jagged the lines of moonlight passing through the deck planks. She then glanced toward her neighbors still watching News at Eleven. She prayed they had heard the commotion and had called the police, but nothing at their place looked any different. The neighbors played their television loudly. They had not heard anything. These madmen had already killed six people so they would not hesitate to kill two more.

The man just stood there. Listening. Watching. She imagined his hand above his eyes as he strained to find her running across the sand. She expected he would soon abandon that effort and drop down off her deck that had no stairs to the beach.

Linda kept her eyes upward while easing backward to the wall, then sideways, scooting her flat hand across each masonry block, down into each mortar line, then out and across the rough texture of the next block.

The sky went dark, a fleeting cover in the moon’s nightly hide-and-seek game with the earth. Her next move would take her out from under the deck and across open sand before she would reach the first patch of sea grass. That position still a full twenty yards from where she had left the gun wrapped in her sweat hoodie.

Damn it. I should have listened to Ahab, kept the gun with me.

She scooted forward on her belly the way she had seen soldiers do in the movies. Then stopped and parted the grass. The man was down off the deck now. Standing. He had not panicked. He had not rushed off in one direction or another. He had again paused, anticipating his eyes would soon find his prey. Her.

Like her hunter, Linda didn’t move. She wanted to. She felt eager to touch the cold of the gun. Turn it warm with her hands, feel its hardness. But to move now, would mean he would reach her before she reached the gun. She needed him to move a few yards farther, just a few yards. She again cursed herself for not having kept the gun. Had she slept with it, she could have flipped on the lamp and confronted him. But that wasn’t her reality.

Move. Damn you. Move.

Then, as if her will alone had been sufficient, he moved. He didn’t run, just a brisk walk toward the surf.

He wants to get beyond the sea grass, where he can look up and down the beach. He’s guessing he’ll see me running along the harder packed sand, and feels confident he can catch me. When he doesn’t see my tracks, he’ll know I’m here in the knee-high grass.

She rolled over twice before stopping to find him with her eyes. He was standing close to the surf’s edge. She glanced at the sky to confirm the cloud cover would hold a while longer, and then rolled twice more. Then she looked again. He remained in the same position, hands on his hips. She glanced at the sky. Then she focused on the nearby terrain. She had looked at these berms many times from her deck, watched the wind move through the sea grass, at times rhythmically, sometimes violently. Those same berms looked different from down below. Then her eyes found the goal, the clump where she had cached the gun. Ten yards, nine, maybe. No distance at all if a casual pursuit. But he was a hunter and she the prey. She raised enough to see that he had turned. He was now facing down-beach. Like the two in the alley, this man was a stranger, with one common bond with the two in the alley. They had all come for her.

She still hated guns, but right now getting that gun was the only thing in her mind.

She glanced again. He remained statue steady, staring. He was smart and careful. Without moving himself, he could more easily detect her movement. After another minute, the man turned quickly twice, each turn one hundred eighty degrees. First down-beach, then immediately back to up-beach, away from her position.

Linda moved through one more patch of sea grass. Then she rolled down the far side of the berm nearest the gun. There, she frantically dug the sand away. The gun was still there, right where she had left it. She pulled the hoodie open and looked at the gun without disdain. She clutched it tight, crawled up the berm and parted the grass. The man had turned, his concentration again down-beach.

Linda knew the pattern of the berms, where she would find the highest and densest grass. She also knew where she would encounter flat stretches of sand without grass or berms. Some of those stretches were parted by the small streams of fresh water that endlessly wound down from the hills east of town, under the main road, across the beach and into the sea. A few of those streams fed tide pools, parts of the ecosystem that kept beach things living. Hopefully, these same forces would also help keep her living.

The next time she looked for the man, he had left the surf line and was moving back toward the berms generally toward her condo. He must have concluded, she thought, having found no tracks on the firm sand that she had not gone into the surf or run upon the denser sand.

He stopped.

Then he stared off to Linda’s right, then exactly in her direction. Her heart raced. Then he looked off to her left. He was searching methodically, setting up the beach in visual grids, hoping that when he looked exactly toward her that she would panic and take flight like a flushed bird. She also knew that eventually she might have to do just that, but not yet. For now, she would continue her gradual progress up-beach with each opportunity. A few feet at a time, a yard, perhaps two, as much as she could whenever his behavior allowed her to move. She was in a game of hide-and-seek with death for the booby prize.

He was about fifty yards from her. If he broke into a short hard sprint, he could halve that distance before she could get up and get moving at top speed. Her options were quickly disappearing. If he kept coming, she would soon need to rise up and run for her life. She had the gun but lacked the confidence to get in a shootout with a man she imagined to be a trained assassin.

The wind was mild so she had to be careful about causing erratic movements in the grass. She continued to increase the space between them each time he looked away. Once with him facing toward the surf, she crab walked through an opening to reach another berm. She wanted to gain a hundred-yard lead before it became a footrace. With the hundred yards, she believed he would be unable to catch her. She had to assume he could run faster, but unless he was also a jogger, she figured he would be unable to endure a hot pace as long as she.

Suddenly, without warning, he ran hard away from her, his fluid gait unlabored, even in the sand.

Oh, Shit. He’s a runner
.

Linda grasped the opportunity to roll over another berm, crab across a patch of open sand, roll through the next berm, then, on all fours, she crossed one of the fresh streams. After one more berm, she stopped, turned, and looked back.

He had stopped running. He was just standing, staring. He was definitely trying to flush her, to panic her into rising up. His strategy was good, but so far his direction had been bad. She looked one more time and, in the full moonlight, saw him change direction to run hard toward her.

Each of his strides ate into her safety zone, now down to seventy-five yards, not the hundred she had hoped. For a moment, she held her position, hoping he would veer off or at least stop. When he didn’t, she knew.

The time for sneaking had passed.

Her feet began pushing small, soft piles of sand this way and that, her legs pistons forcing her forward. As she ran, she glanced back. He saw her. She knew he would. He had changed his angle slightly. He was now running directly at her.

Her life had become escape tonight or die tonight.

Chapter 18

The cat and mouse had ended. From here on, Linda’s life would be a flat-out race. She couldn’t treat it as a sprint, there was too far to go. She would need to pace herself some but make no mistake this was no jog. His stride would be longer than hers so she would need to run harder than he. Many years ago, she had run a short marathon called run-for-life. That one had been for charity. This time was literal, a run for her life.

Linda hit full speed in a few strides. Then she angled toward the surf. The firmer sand there offered less change of hitting a soft pocket and falling. Her legs already felt heavy after her long day of walking.

As she ran, her mind searched for a way to turn her intimate knowledge of this beach into an edge. Some kind of advantage that could increase her odds of making it, of seeing tomorrow’s sunrise.

The gun was working loose in her waistband. She reached down and pulled it free, gripping it in her right hand. Not like she would hold it to shoot. Just clutched it, strangled it. Her hand circled the trigger housing. Her pumping fists punctured the sky with each stride. She had jogged in this direction countless times. She knew where to angle out and in to avoid the spreading waves from snatching at her feet. Like a winding mountain road, the surf line jutted in and out repeatedly.

If she were to survive, she had to beat him for about three miles. Life had become that simple. That precise. That frightening. Three miles. Live or die.

The road in front of her condo would have been a mile shorter. She had considered dashing through her house, past the man in the chair, out the front door, but then she might run into the arms of his accomplice waiting out front, if he had one. She would not have had time to get her car out of the garage. She would have had to run the paved road to town because the tangled berry fields on the inland side were impenetrable. At this time of night, there was seldom anyone on the road and her pursuer would have followed in a car. She could have gone to a neighbor, but the killings at SMITH & CO. said these men had no problem killing innocent bystanders. Hell, I’m an innocent bystander, she thought, and they want to kill me. Besides, she had wanted to go out the back of the house to get the gun she now clutched. She hated guns. Right now, she loved this gun.

She had made the right decision, use the beach she knew. That was an edge in her favor. Would it be enough?

A moment later, Old Gray, a mangy dog who seemed to live on the beach, and had long ago accepted Linda as a fellow beachcomber, came out of the grass to run beside her.

Then a shot rang out, and Old Gray darted inland, disappearing into the sea grass.

She didn’t know where the bullet ended up, but it hadn’t ended up in her. A warning shot? A stop or I’ll-shoot-you, shot? This stretch of beach had no facing houses. No one would have heard the shot, not over the sound-swallowing sea. She guessed he had fired in the air hoping to scare her into stopping. If he was there only to kill her, she would have died in her bed. The same had been true when the two men forced her off the street into the alley. They wanted to control her first.

Why do they want me? What for?

Right now the why didn’t matter, not in the slightest. Survival, that’s what mattered now. Run. Get to town without being caught. She ignored the messages from her muscles and drove herself forward. She could not afford to give up any more of her shrinking lead. She needed to lengthen that lead.

Ahead another hundred yards or so, she would come to a group of beached trees, bleached white by salt and sun. North of town, the hills sloped down to the water and raging storms sometimes tore out huge hunks of hillside. When that happened, some massive old trees belly flopped into the surf where their branches were sheared off by the same storms that had torn them free of their roots. The trunks then followed the tide until the current beached them like albino whales with defective sonar.

Linda planned to jump over those tree trunks, and then hunker down to wait until her pursuer came close enough to see the whites of his eyes. If she were lucky, she could then put a shot or two into him.

Don’t try for a head shot Ahab had said. Shoot for the broad center of his body. Stop him. Make him bleed. Slow him. If you’re lucky, you’ll hit his heart, putting him down for the count.

As the logs came into view, the stubs of their branches in the distance appeared as pocks, the way eyes disfigure a freshly scrubbed potato. Two more strides brought the logs into clear view. Stretched across the sand, blocking her passage the way a military checkpoint impedes the progress of travelers on a desolate mountain road.

By the time Linda had drawn near enough to think in terms of the exact point in the expanse that she would attempt to hurdle, she changed her mind. Ahab had said, “Shoot only if you must.” At this point, the must didn’t apply, at least not yet. Still, she had to leap. If she did not, the time she spent circumventing the logs, her pursuer would spend to purchase more of her lead. He would come straight. He would leap. She had to leap. But she would not shoot. Hopefully she would never shoot. She feared his plans for her. Still, she didn’t want to shoot him. She didn’t want to shoot anyone.