The shooter’s surprise turned to a look of white-faced fear. She did an awkward rolling dive away from the front of the BMW.
I couldn’t afford to hit the BMW in a way that would risk disabling the van, and I didn’t want to injure or kill Carrie by sending her flying around the back of the van in a big collision. So I braked and skidded to a sliding halt, adding to the cloud of debris that was coming into the van. I lined up the back end of the van with the left front side of the Beemer, then threw the van into reverse and gave it some gas.
It made a loud bang, and I pulled forward. The BMW’s front wheel tilted at a nasty angle and the tire was flat. I had certainly done more than fuck up the paint job on the rest of the front end. Good enough.
I drove away like a bat out of hell.
AS soon as I felt sure that I had put enough distance between the shooter and us that we were out of immediate danger, I pulled over and went back to Carrie. She had managed on her own to free the blanket from her face, and maneuvered herself against the backseat. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “Are you hurt?”
She shook her head. Tears rolled down her face, over the tape across her mouth.
I glanced around. The floor of the van was littered with glass and the contents of my purse. My cell phone, alas, was out in the desert in a dead man’s pocket.
“I’m going to move you up by me so you don’t get cut by this glass, and then I’ll work on getting this tape off of you, okay?”
She nodded.
I pulled the blanket off, causing more beads of glass to fall. At least it had protected her from the initial shower of windshield fragments. I picked her up as carefully as I could, an awkward business in the confines of the van, but we made it to the front seats. I set her on her feet, brushed off the passenger seat, and helped her to sit down. I strapped the seat belt on her. “Just in case we have to take off in a hurry,” I said.
She nodded her understanding.
I started to worry that somehow the shooter would find some way to catch up with us. The woman was still armed, after all, and dressed as a police officer. Maybe she’d carjack a vehicle from someone, or use some shortcut I didn’t know about.
I reached into the glove compartment and found a first-aid kit. It contained a cheap pair of round-end scissors.
“I’m going to cut your hands free first so you can work on the rest,” I said to Carrie. “I want to try to get us farther away from that woman.”
She nodded enthusiastically.
I cut the tape between her wrists and left the scissors where she could reach them.
Unless you’re wearing goggles or a helmet with a face shield, driving without a windshield is not the freeing experience you might expect it to be. All kinds of grit, grime, and insect life came blowing up off the road. I made another stop and searched for my sunglasses.
By then Carrie had shaken the circulation back into her hands, cut the tape from her ankles, and bravely ripped it free from her face.
“Are you okay? Did he hurt you?” I asked, handing her the blanket so that she could use it to shield her face and eyes from debris.
“I’ll be okay,” she said, cautiously touching the tips of her fingers to the marks left on her face by the tape. “I’m just kind of scared.”
“Something would be seriously wrong with you if you weren’t. I’m sorry about the rough ride. But I think we’ve lost them, whoever they were.”
“My uncle Giles,” she said angrily.
“What?”
“Uncle Giles,” she said, pulling her feet up onto the edge of the seat and rubbing her ankles. “He runs the school. Fletcher Academy.”
I tried to let that sink in as we turned onto what looked like a promising road.
“On the phone, he was talking to someone named Cleo,” I said. “Do you know anyone by that name?”
“No.”
“A woman. Tall, athletic, short brown hair. Probably in her late twenties. At first I thought she was a man.”
“A woman who looked like a man?” She thought for a while, then said, “I have a lot of cousins, and I haven’t met all of them, but I can’t think of anyone who looks like that.”
If you asked me to retrace the route I took from there, it would require hypnosis to pull the memories out. I really didn’t have a clear idea of where the hell I was at any given moment, or where I was going. An aerial view of my progress would have made me look like the mouse voted least likely to find the cheese.
Eventually I ended up on Pearblossom Highway. We attracted a certain amount of attention, which I hoped would lead to some cell phone calls to the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, but I kept driving until I found a minimart gas station that was fairly busy.
We were both dirty and dehydrated, and I suppose our hair made it look as if we had tunneled out of a fright-wig factory. I found my wallet and went inside with Carrie. She took hold of my hand, which was fine with me-I wasn’t exactly feeling all that steady myself. I asked the clerk to please call the sheriff’s department, because someone had shot at us and blown out our windshield. He peered out at the van, then made the call. He was solicitous after that, allowing us to use the restroom to wash up a bit, not charging us for the bottled water we wanted to buy, and even letting me use the phone. A cynic might say that it was only about five bucks’ worth of kindness, but to us, after about three hours of terror, it seemed as if we had found the most generous soul on earth.
Frank, as it turned out, had been looking for me by the time I called.
“We were supposed to have lunch, remember? Then Lydia said you had hurried out, and I couldn’t reach you on your cell phone…”
“Sorry, but a dead man’s got it now. I was abducted. With Blake Ives’s daughter. We’re okay now, though. I think.”
I should have broken it to him differently, but I wasn’t thinking all that clearly by then. Now that I was out of the way of immediate harm, reaction was setting in.
I interrupted his own quite understandable reaction and said, “I’m borrowing someone’s phone, so I can’t talk long. Can you come out to the sheriff’s station in Palmdale-maybe see if you can get Zeke Brennan to come along with you? I’m not in as much trouble as I was in an hour ago, but I think I’ll need an attorney. And I…” I took a deep breath, struggled to stay calm. I tried to give him a condensed version of my day so far. He interrupted, asked for the phone number I was calling from, and wanted me to tell him exactly where I was and to give him the name of the store. So I handed him over to the clerk, who provided all of that information, then handed the phone back to me. He was looking at Carrie and me in wonder.
“Are you okay?” Frank asked.
“Getting there.” I asked him to call Blake Ives, and to try to reach Roy Fletcher, who might still be at Graydon Fletcher’s place. “And if he’s got a girl named Genie with him, I think that might be Caleb’s sister-Oh, here’s the sheriff’s department,” I said, seeing a cruiser pull up. “Oh, and the Express.”
“The Express is there?” he asked with some heat.
“No, but will you call them?”
“Maybe. That may cause some difficulties. Let me talk to the deputy.”
Apologizing to the clerk, I waited for the deputies to come inside, then handed the phone to one of them saying, “It’s for you.”
Before he took it, he asked his partner to wait outside with us.
Carrie, who had stayed huddled next to me, was trembling as we walked out. I put an arm around her shoulders, and her tears began to fall. Part of it was undoubtedly just the scare setting in, as it was for me as well, but it occurred to me that she had probably never been this far from home or around so many strangers at one time.