4th of July

Chapter 114

MARTHA JUMPED ONTO THE bench-style front seat of the “big gold boat.” I strapped in and turned the key. The engine caught on the second try, and I pointed the Bonneville’s aristocratic nose toward town.

I was going to the gourmet grocer on Main Street, but as I made my way along the crosshatched streets of Cat’s neighborhood, I became gradually aware of a blue Taurus sedan in my rearview mirror. It seemed to be deliberately lagging behind me but keeping up all the same.

That creepy feeling of being watched tickled my spine again.

Was I being tailed?

Or was I in such a state I just kept seeing myself as a pop-up figure in a shooting gallery?

I took Magnolia across the highway and onto Main, where I whizzed past all the little shops: the Music Hut, the Moon News, the Feed and Fuel store. I wanted to convince myself that I was just being skittish, but damn—if I lost that Taurus for a block or two, it was behind me at the next turn.

“Hang on tight. We’re going for a ride,” I said to Martha, who was smiling broadly into the wind.

Toward the end of Main, I hooked a right onto Route 92, Half Moon Bay’s umbilical cord to the rest of California.

Traffic was going fast on this winding two-laner, and I merged into a bumper-to-bumper chain of cars going fifty in a twenty-five-mile-per-hour zone. The double yellow line went the distance—a full five miles of no-passing lane as 92 crossed the reservoir and linked up with the freeway.

I drove on, dimly aware of the hillside of scrubby trees and chaparral on my left and the twenty-foot drop a few feet from the right side of my car. Three cars behind, the blue sedan kept me in sight.

I wasn’t crazy. I had a tail.

Was it a scare tactic?

Or was the shooter inside that car, waiting for an opportunity for a clear hit?

The end of 92 intersected with Skyline, and at the near right-hand corner was a rest stop with five picnic tables and a gravel parking lot.

I didn’t signal for a turn, just hauled right on my steering wheel. I wanted to get off the road, let that Taurus pass me so that I could see his face, get his plate number. Get out of his sights.

But instead of gripping the road as my Explorer would have done, the Bonneville fishtailed across the gravel, sending me back out onto 92, across the double yellow line and into the stream of oncoming traffic.

The Taurus must have passed me, but I never saw it.

I was hanging on to the wheel of my spinning car when the lights on the dashboard freaked out.

My power steering and brakes were gone, the alternator was dead, the engine was heating up, and I was skidding around in the middle of the roadway.

I pumped the brakes, and a black pickup truck swerved to avoid creaming me broadside. The driver leaned on his horn and yelled obscenities out his window, but I was so glad he’d missed me, I wanted to kiss him.

By the time I skidded to a stop on the roadside, a cloud of dust billowed around me and I couldn’t see beyond the windshield.

I got out of the Bonneville and leaned against it. My legs were rubbery and my hands shaking.

For now, the chase was over.

But I knew it wasn’t really over.

Someone had me in his crosshairs, and I had no idea who it was or why.