"What are the odds of their finding us just by cruising around in a city this size, waiting to pick up our transmitter's signal?"
"Not good. But it could happen. It must have happened that way. How else would they find us?"
"The witch," Joey said from the back seat." She has.
magic powers. witch powers. stuff like that." Then he lapsed into moody silence again, staring out at the rain.
Charlie was almost ready to accept Joey's childish explanation.
The old woman was inhumanly relentless and seemed to possess an uncanny gift for tracking down her prey.
But of course it wasn't magic. There was a logical explanation. A hidden, miniaturized transmitter made the most sense.
But whether it was a transmitter or something else, they must figure it out, apply reason and common sense until they found the answer, or they were never going to lose the old bitch and her crazies.
The windows had unsteamed.
As far as Charlie could see, there were still no white vans in the parking lot.
He had looked through everything in the purse without finding the electronic device that he had been sure would be there. He began to examine the purse itself, seeking lumps in the lining.
"I think we should get moving again," Christine said nervously.
"In a minute," Charlie said, using her nail file to rip out the well-stitched seams in the handles of her purse.
"The exhaust fumes are making me sick," she said.
"Open your window a little more."
He found nothing but cotton padding inside the handles of the purse.
"No transmitter," she said.
"It's still got to be the answer."
"But if not in my purse. where?
"Somewhere," he said, frowning.
"You said yourself that it had to be in the purse."
"I was wrong. Somewhere else. " He tried to think. But he was too worried about the white vans to think clearly.
"We've got to get moving," Christine said.
"I know," he said.
He released the emergency brake, put the car in gear, and drove away from the shopping center, splashing through large puddles.
"Where now?" Christine asked.
"I don't know."
For a while they drove aimlessly through Santa Barbara and neighboring Montecito, mostly staying away from main thoroughfares, wandering from one residential area to another, just keeping on the move.
Here and there, at an intersection, a confluence of overflowing gutters formed a lake that made passage difficult or impossible.
The dripping trees looked limp, soggy. In the rain and mist, all the houses, regardless of color or style, seemed gray, drab.
Christine was afraid that Charlie had run out of ideas. Worse, she was afraid he had run out of hope. He didn't want to talk.
He drove in silence, staring morosely at the storm-swept streets.
Until now she hadn't fully realized how much she had come to depend upon his good humor, positive outlook, and bulldog determination. He was the glue holding her together. She never thought she would say such a thing about a man, any man, but she had to say it about Charlie: Without him, she would be lost.
Joey would speak when spoken to, but he didn't have much to say, and his voice was frail and distant like the voice of a ghost.
Chewbacca was equally lethargic and taciturn.
They listened to the radio, changing from a rock station to a country station, to one that played swing and other jazz. The music, regardless of type, sounded flat. The commercials were all ludicrous: When you were running from a pack of lunatics who wanted to kill you and your little boy, who cared whether one brand of motor oil, Scotch, blue jeans, or toilet tissue was better than another brand? The news was all weather, and none of it good: flooding in half a dozen towns between L.A. and San Diego; high waves smashing into the living rooms of expensive homes in Malibu; mud slides in San Clemente, Laguna Beach, Pacific Palisades, Montecito, and points north along the stormy coastline.
Christine's personal world had fallen apart, and now the rest of the world seemed dead set on following her example.
When Charlie finally stopped thinking and started talking, Christine was so relieved she almost wept.
He said, "The main thing we've got to do is get away from Santa Barbara, find a safe place to hide out, and lie low until Henry can get the organization functioning again. We can't do anything to help ourselves until all my men are focused on Grace Spivey, putting pressure on her and on the others in that damned church."
"So how do we get out of town?" she asked." This car's hot."
"Yeah. Besides, it's falling apart."
"Do we steal another set of wheels?"
"No," he said." The first thing we need is cash. We're running out of money, and we don't want to use credit cards everywhere we go because that leaves a trail. Of course, it doesn't matter if we use cards here because they already know we're in Santa Barbara, so we'll start milking our plastic for all the cash in it."
When at last Charlie swung into action, he moved with gratifying speed.
First they went to a telephone booth, searched the yellow pages, and made a note of the addresses of the nearest Wells Fargo and Security Pacific bank offices. In Orange County, Charlie had his accounts at the former, Christine at the latter.
At one Security Pacific office, Christine used her Visa card to get a cash advance of one thousand dollars, which was the maximum allowable.
At another branch, she obtained a five-hundred dollar advance on her Mastercard. At a third office, using her American Express Card she bought two thousand dollars worth of traveller's checks in twenty- and hundred-dollar denominations. Then, outside the same bank, she used her automatic teller card to obtain more cash. She was permitted to withdraw three hundred dollars at a time from the computerized teller, and she was allowed to make such withdrawals twice a day. Therefore, she was able to add six hundred bucks to the fifteen hundred that she had gotten from Visa and Mastercard. Counting the two thousand in traveller's checks, she had put together a bankroll of forty-one hundred dollars.
"Now let's see what I can add to that," Charlie said, setting out in search of a Wells Fargo office.
"But this ought to be enough for quite a while," she said.
"Not for what I've got in mind," he said.
"What is it you've got in mind?"
"You'll see."
Charlie always carried a blank check in his wallet. At the nearest Wells Fargo branch, after presenting an array of ID and after speaking at length with the manager, he withdrew $7,500 of the $8,254 in his personal checking account.
He was worried that the police might have informed his bank of the warrant for his arrest and that the Wells Fargo computer would direct any teller to call the authorities the moment he showed up to withdraw money. But luck was with him. The cops weren't moving quite as fast as Grace Spivey and her followers.
At other banks, he obtained cash advances on his Visa, Mastercard, Carte Blanche, and American Express cards.
Twice, in their travels back and forth across town, they saw police cruisers, and Charlie tried to duck out of their way. When it wasn't possible to duck, he held his breath, sure that the end had come, but they were not stopped. He knew they were swiftly running out of luck.
At any moment a cop was going to notice their license plate number-or Spivey's people were going to make contact again.
Where was the transmitter if not in Christine's purse? There had to be a transmitter somewhere. It was the only explanation.
Minute by minute, his uneasiness grew until, at last, he found himself sheathed in a cold sweat.
By late afternoon, they had put together a kitty of more than fourteen thousand dollars.