Last Breath

48

C.J. lay in a shallow ditch, flat against the ground, while headlights swept over her head.

The ditch had been excavated for the purpose of planting hedges. Heaps of dirt rose up on both sides. She had seen the depression in the ground and taken cover there, and now she waited, praying the car would pass by.

The car. Absurd to think of it that way, but on some level she saw the car itself as her enemy, the demon car with its shining halogen eyes and its engine’s guttural purr. Its tires were paws that meant to maul and savage her. Its exhaust was an animal’s panting breath. Its stops and starts, its pivots and reverses, were the maneuvers of a predator on the prowl.

More than once it had come close to grinding her under its wheels. But in the chase she’d had certain advantages over her pursuer. She could take shortcuts a car couldn’t use. She could cut down narrow alleyways, climb over piles of debris, dive into foliage and lose herself in shadows.

Growing up, she had seen hounds chase desert cottontails, and she was the rabbit and the car was the hunter, sniffing out her trail, relentlessly closing in.

She pressed her face to the dirt and waited. Above, near the edge of the ditch, the BMW slowed as if debating where she could have gone.

There were several possible hiding places within view. An unfinished fountain lay across the road in the center of an artificial pond, bone dry. She could have concealed herself there, or behind one of the concrete benches that ringed the pond, or in the ramada on the opposite side. Farther away stood a line of fig trees, newly planted, spindly, bare of leaves but still offering shelter. Behind her lay the start of what appeared to be a bike path or a hiking trail, winding between shelved hillsides landscaped with rocks and wildflowers.

Many places she could have gone. So why had the car stopped alongside the ravine, its engine idling dangerously?

She groped in the dirt and found a rock. A pitiful weapon, but she would use it if she had to. She would not go without a fight.

The car hesitated a moment longer-then backed up with a squeal of tires and shot across an open courtyard, past the pond, into the night.

Gone.

She’d done it. She’d gotten away.

She rose to one knee, then hung her head in exhaustion. She was dirty and bruised; her clothes stuck to her in patches of sweat; her sneakers were thick with clotted mud.

The mud would leave a trail. She kicked her sneakers against the ground until most of the dirt had been knocked loose.

Then she considered what to do.

The car, of course, was not her real adversary. Still, if she could conceal herself someplace where the car couldn’t find her, she was likely to be safe.

All she had to do was enter an office building, leaving no sign of trespassing, and then Adam could circle and recircle the complex for hours without success. Even if he did surmise that she was hidden in one of the buildings, he wouldn’t be able to search them all.

She nodded in approval of her plan and stood up, her legs shaky after the long helter-skelter run. Slowly she climbed out of the ditch, then broke into a weary jog trot, heading down an avenue lined with dark streetlights.

The nearest building was a three-story structure with tiers of windows checkerboarding the unpainted wooden walls. There were panes in the windows, crisscrossed with tape. She pushed upward on one window, but it was locked. To get in, she would have to break the glass.

Adam might notice a broken window. She wondered if she should find another hiding place No time.

The car was coming back. She heard the warning growl of its engine, louder than before.

He must have realized he’d lost her. He was retracing his route.

C.J. ran to the farthest window, partially screened by a sapling held upright by two taut ropes. She snapped off one of its branches and used it to punch through the glass, then brushed shards away from the frame to clear a larger entryway.

It was big enough now. Go.

She hoisted herself through the window as a memory of entering Ramon Sanchez’s converted garage flashed in her mind. How long ago was that? Ten hours? It seemed as if weeks had passed, and the scared man with the baby in one hand and the gun in the other was only a half-forgotten dream.

She dropped into a dark space-a room or stairwell or hallway-then risked a glance outside.

Headlights. The car was approaching.

If Adam saw the litter of glass, he would know where she was. She had to go deeper into the building, find a hiding place near an exit. If he searched the place, she would hunker down as long as possible, reserving the option to escape if necessary.

She turned and took a step forward into the darkness, and then somebody was screaming.

No. Not a scream. An alarm. Shrill and piercing, a hundred-decibel siren inside the building.

The place was equipped with a security system, and she had triggered it-not by breaking the window but by moving forward.

Motion sensor, probably mounted on the wall or ceiling, with at least a twenty-foot range…

Wasn’t important. What mattered was that the siren could be heard from outside. Through the window the glare of Adam’s headlights brightened.

She took off down a stretch of blackness that revealed itself as a corridor, then stumbled against a wall and groped her way to a doorway and went through into a large open space that would be a work area when it was finished. Now it was only bare walls and empty floor. The building was a shell. There was no place to hide. And still the alarm was reverberating throughout the hollow interior.

It occurred to her that now she knew why the power had been left on. The whole complex must be protected by a security system, which had been installed early in construction, so the wires could run inside the walls.

If the system was monitored by an outside agency, then a patrol unit would be dispatched to investigate the ringing alarm.

She could hope so. But no patrol unit’s response time would be fast enough to save her if she didn’t find a way out.

She crossed yards of emptiness and blundered into another wall, then crabbed along it, seeking a doorway. Her hip smacked against something that rattled-a worktable. She groped among a selection of tools and closed her hand over a large claw hammer. A weapon.

Finally she discovered a doorway and scrambled into a hallway that glowed with ambient light at its far end. She ran for the light and found herself in what must be the lobby. Windows flanked a central door. She got the door open and burst outside, shutting it behind her, muffling the alarm.

Let Adam waste time searching the building. Meanwhile she would find another, safer place to hide.

She was sprinting across the street when the BMW rounded the corner at full speed.

He hadn’t pursued her into the building. He had known she would escape out the front.

She flung herself sideways even as the car veered to mow her down.

A patch of scraggly weeds flew up into her face, and then she was rolling down a short incline while the car overshot its mark, screamed to a halt, and reversed.

At the bottom of the slope lay another office building, outwardly identical to the one she had just left. She tumbled up against the foundation as the car plowed down the slope. In the headlights’ dazzle she saw an opening between the foundation and the first floor.

Crawl space.

A shiver of fear eddied through her, but she fought it off and bellied inside. Fans of bright light wavered past her to illumine a low, claustrophobic passageway interspersed with lumber posts and knots of copper plumbing pipes.

She wriggled into the center of the crawl space and peered around in the glare of the headlights, looking for another way out.

There wasn’t any. The building, erected on uneven ground, allowed access to the crawl space only from one side. The other walls were flush against the foundation blocks.

The car eased to a stop. The headlights snapped off.

She was in total darkness now. Huddled, waiting, a hammer in her hand.

A child again.

Only back then she’d had a knife-a better weapon.

Maybe I was meant to die this way, C.J. thought. In a crawl space, in the dark.

She waited for whatever Adam would do next.