Shiver

23

Wendy was gazing past the cop in the driver’s seat, watching the modest high rises that lined Santa Monica Boulevard sweep by, when suddenly it came to her, wordless and unsettling-an eerie sense of deja vu.

Blinking, she shifted her focus from the view framed in the windshield to the cop directly before her. She could see nothing of him but the top of his hatless head rising over the headrest. A few wisps of curly brown hair.

She stiffened.

The armchair in her living room. A glimpse of a stranger’s head as he ducked down.

The same brown hair she saw now.

No. Crazy. Impossible.

She was turning paranoid, that was all. Probably half the male population in America had brown hair, for God’s sake.

Calm down, Wendy. He’s a police officer. He has to be.

But what if he weren’t?

It occurred to her that a police car, even an unmarked car, ought to be equipped with a special radio, as well as a microphone clipped under the dash and other paraphernalia she remembered from Sanchez and Porter’s cruiser last night. As surreptitiously as possible she peered between the two front seats. She saw no microphone, no squawkbox, only what looked like a perfectly ordinary AM/FM radio and… and a cassette player.

No police car would have a tape deck in it. She was certain of that. Almost certain. But suppose this car had been confiscated in a drug bust or something. Then it would have come with all sorts of options already installed. Okay, that made sense-maybe-but it still didn’t explain the absence of a police radio. Unless the radios in unmarked cars were concealed in some way. That might be the answer.

But she wasn’t convinced.

She glanced around at the interior of the car, looking for a way out. Just in case, she told herself, just in case.

There was no way out. She was trapped. Had the Dodge been a four-door model, she could have thrown open a rear door and jumped clear if necessary. But the car was a coupe, and from the backseat she couldn’t reach the door handles.

She remembered lying on the floor and thinking of a coffin. Her coffin.

Oh, come on, she told herself shakily. Take it easy, will you?

But she couldn’t take it easy. She kept staring at the brown curls above the headrest, while she thought of Officer Sanchez, whose body, according to Delgado, hadn’t been found.

Had she checked the nameplate on this man’s uniform? She knew she hadn’t.

The car reached Sepulveda Boulevard. Abruptly the cop-if he was a cop-spun the steering wheel hard to the left, veering south.

But the police station wasn’t south. It was west. Due west.

Wendy was trembling now. Trembling all over.

She cleared her throat and tried to act casual and unconcerned. “Hey, aren’t we, uh, heading the wrong way?”

“Well, yes, I guess you could say so,” he answered laconically as auto-body shops and health spas ticked past. “Thing is, I believe we’ve got one of those TV news vans on our tail. So I’m taking a little detour to shake him loose.”

Which made sense-sure, it did-except that when she glanced out the rear window, she saw no van. She saw only a wide, empty street.

Again the steering wheel blurred under his hands. The Dodge swung left onto Missouri Avenue, then immediately hooked right, nosing into an alley.

Wendy’s heart was beating fast, very fast.

Gravel crackled under the tires. The alley was narrow, bracketed by fences and cement walls scarred with black spidery graffiti. Utility poles marched down its length, their power lines cutting the blue sky like cracks in a mirror.

Halfway down the alley, the Dodge eased to a stop behind a parked car. An ancient Ford, dressed in white paint and polished chrome.

Wendy swallowed. Pounding pressure filled her head. She wanted to ask him why he’d stopped, but her mouth was dry and she couldn’t seem to form the words. Anyway, it didn’t matter. She knew the answer already. She knew. She knew. She knew.

Slowly the man in the driver’s seat turned to face her. In his right hand there was a gun, the blue-black Beretta 9mm from his holster. She heard a click as he thumbed down the hammer.

He smiled. His teeth shone white and looked cold, like chips of ice, below the black ovals of the sunglasses shielding his eyes.

“Hello, Wendy.”

He whispered the words, and for the first time she recognized his voice.

She stared at the Gryphon, numbness spreading through her like an injection of painkiller.

“Now,” he said softly, with the ominous politeness she remembered, “here’s what we’re going to do, you and I. First, we’re getting out of this car. And you won’t give me any trouble when we do that. Right?”

She didn’t answer. Couldn’t speak.

He nodded, apparently interpreting her silence as acquiescence. “Fine.”

The door creaked open. He climbed out, then lowered the driver’s seat so she could follow.

She hesitated, her mind racing as she considered what few options she might have. She could lunge forward, plant her fist on the horn, honk for help. No, hopeless; he would shoot her long before help came, if it ever did. All right, then. Grab the gun, wrestle it from his grasp. Dammit, that wouldn’t work either; he was too strong for her.

“I’m waiting, my dear.”

Nothing. There was nothing she could do.

She left her seat and stepped out of the car, looking around at the alley. On one side, a wire-mesh fence screened off an empty parking lot. On the other side rose a crumbling cement wall, and beyond it, a house with boarded-up windows.

The area was deserted. She could scream for help, but her cry would echo down this stone corridor unheard.

The Gryphon jammed the gun in her side. “Now I’d like you to start walking. Please.”

Her shoes crunched dead weeds and broken glass as he guided her to the passenger side of the Ford. The door was unlocked. He pulled it open.

“Inside.”

If she got in the car, she was dead. He could drive her anywhere, kill her at his convenience. To live, to have any chance of survival, she had to do something, and she had to do it now.

She took a step toward the car, then spun sideways, away from the gun in her ribs, and pistoned out both arms, shoving the Gryphon off balance. He fell against the open door with a grunt of surprise. Then she was running down the alley toward the distant street, expecting at any second to feel a bullet in her back.

Behind her, the clatter of footsteps. Panting breath, hot and hoarse and close. Too close.

A hand closed over her arm and spun her around. She staggered, twirling in the killer’s grasp like a drunken dancer. He jerked her toward him. Her face, twinned and miniaturized, stared back at her from the lenses of his sunglasses. She drove a knee into his gut. He released his grip, wheezing. She whirled. Started to run. He kicked her feet out from under her. The gravel-strewn pavement came up fast. Bright glassy pain burst in her hip as she hit the ground on her side.

She twisted around to a sitting position and looked up. A shadow slid over her. His looming figure eclipsed the sun. She heard his low breathing, like the grunting rasp of an animal. She breathed the sour stench of his sweat. Her stomach fluttered.

Reaching behind her, she groped in the trash lining the alley for something to fight him with. Her bandaged hands sifted through a scatter of broken glass, the shards too small to be of use as weapons. Near the glass lay a mound of rain-soaked newspapers. A record album broken in two pieces. A Styrofoam fast-food container. Somebody’s shoe.

She picked up the shoe and pitched it at him, a final, desperate, meaningless gesture. He brushed it aside with a cough of laughter.

After that, she was finished; her pitiful last stand was over. She lowered her head and waited for him to do what he would. She hoped he would shoot her. A bullet would be quick.

Then softly he spoke to her, and strangely his voice was gentle, almost kind.

“Don’t be afraid, Wendy. I’m not going to hurt you. Not this time.”

Slowly she lifted her gaze and stared up at him through the webwork of hair plastered to her face.

“Oh, I admit I wanted to hurt you very badly last night. I wanted to do terrible things to you. But then I saw that I was wrong. That I’d missed the significance of what had gone on between us. That I’d failed to appreciate you properly. I saw that only a most exceptional woman could play the game so well.”

“The…” Her voice cracked. “The game?”

“I saw,” he went on, unhearing, the words dripping in a slow metronomic cadence, “that it could not have been an accident that I selected you. Out of all the lesser women I might have chosen, I had been led to the only one on earth who made a worthy adversary. Such things are never the product of chance. No, it was destiny that brought us together.”

He chuckled, embarrassed by his own eloquence.

“That sounds so cornball, doesn’t it? Like something in a Hallmark card. But I’m serious. I believe in destiny, in fate. I believe in a deeper meaning that transcends the ordinariness of life. And with that same faith, by the light of that same understanding, I believe we were meant for each other.”

He gazed down at her fondly. He was smiling. A shy, almost boyish smile.

“What I’m trying to say is… I love you.”

As Wendy watched, unable to move or speak or think, the Gryphon reached into the pocket of his coat and handed her a small clay statuette.