CHAPTER 45

Tuesday, May 2

12:06 P.M.

ANTELOPE VALLEY

SOMETIMES a man with a gun gets to have things his way.

When we first got on the San Diego Freeway, I started saying that I thought this was a bad idea, that I would be missed.

“Just shut up and drive,” he said.

He had a gun and I didn’t, so I stopped talking about what a big mistake he was making. I held tightly to the steering wheel and tried to make myself think clearly, but strategies about survival weren’t coming to me as quickly as they might have if I had been given a little time to mull things over.

The man with a gun was in a big hurry.

He wasn’t sitting within reach, so even if I had summoned the nerve to try it, I couldn’t take the gun away from him. He was in the back of the van I was driving. The van was some sort of working van, although it looked as if it had been adapted so that it could be used for either passengers or cargo. The middle section of seats had been taken out, but a bench seat in the back was in place. That’s where he was.

I glanced at him in the rearview mirror.

He wasn’t a big man, or a young man. That didn’t matter. More important, and not so good for my own chances of a future, were the three A’s-he was anxious, angry, and armed. No, there was a fourth. He was an asshole.

The sweat that had stained his shirt at the armpits an hour ago now drenched the front as well, dampened his forehead, and plastered his hair to his head at the temples. The stench of his fear reached me, masking the scent of my own. Knowing he was afraid did not comfort me at all.

I could have taken chances with his aim, tried to escape, or driven the van in a way that would throw him off balance, then jumped out while he stayed in it to crash. After all, his gun wasn’t pointed at me.

It was pointed at Carrie.

Although he had bound her wrists and ankles with duct tape, and placed a fat strip of it over her mouth as well, he seemed to think she would yet escape him, and never let her move more than a few inches away. Most of the time, he clutched one of her slender, pale arms in a bruising grip.

Her blue eyes were dilated almost to black with fear. Blue eyes that caught mine in the mirror, pleading.

I looked away, to the off-ramp just ahead. I couldn’t think clearly about much at that moment, but I knew that I couldn’t sacrifice her life in an attempt to save my own.

So I got off the freeway just like he told me to, driving this van, which would shield anyone’s view from what was going on in back. They could only see me, and no one seemed to notice I was terrified.

Terror never stays at the same level over time, though, and the initial adrenaline rush had passed off even before we were ordered into the van. But the cold knot of fear in the pit of my stomach seemed to have amazing staying power in this situation. After over ninety minutes of it, I was having a hard time not driving erratically, or in any manner that would displease him.

I did not want him to be any angrier, any more nervous than he already was.

Sometimes a man with a gun gets to have things his way. I didn’t even object when, on one of the slow stretches of Interstate 5, he began going through my purse, which he had picked up off the floor of the foyer. He pulled out my cell phone and pocketed it.

As time passed, I began to wonder what had happened to Bonnie. To wonder where Carrie’s “dad,” Roy Fletcher, and the other three children were right now, and how long it would be before they missed Carrie. To wonder how long it would be before I was missed by anyone.

I followed his curtly delivered directions, and now we were in the high desert area north of Los Angeles, the Antelope Valley. The valley lies on the north side of the San Gabriel Mountains. He told me to exit the freeway in Palmdale and made a call on my cell phone.

“It’s me,” he said.

After a pause he said, “Palmdale, but-”

He sighed. “I know, I know. Yes, I know I’m late! Listen to me…Yes, there are…”

He glanced at me and lowered his voice. “Things are a bit complicated. Carrie wasn’t alone when I found her.”

I could hear someone cussing him out.

He hung up. He gave me another series of directions, so that we were headed east.

A few minutes later, my cell phone rang. He looked at the caller ID display and pressed the button that answered the call, but didn’t speak.

He was getting cussed out again, but this time he said, “Shut up or I’ll hang up again and do as I damned well please.”

He looked more nervous than he had been five minutes earlier. He glanced constantly between Carrie and me. He still held the gun on her. I had formulated plans to throw his aim off if he actually looked as if he was going to lose it and squeeze the trigger. Unfortunately, almost all of them seemed just as likely to result in my own death, if not also causing her life to be lost in a crash.

“She was with that reporter. Yes, Irene Kelly. I-I-I didn’t know what to do… Of course not. Not there…no. Oh really? Well, you weren’t there, Cleo, so I had to come up with something, right? So she’s driving. By the time I got everything arranged, we hit traffic.”

There was another silence.

“Well, thank you. Really? Well, I thought it was the smartest thing to do. I mean, under the circumstances…yes, yes. Exactly. All right.” He made a kissing sound into the phone and hung up.

His anxiousness seemed to evaporate. I wasn’t sure I liked him looking so smug, though.

We went through a town called Lake Los Angeles, the existence of which I would have doubted if I hadn’t seen it myself. We turned south, toward the mountains, without seeing either a lake or angels. I’m sure both were there somewhere.

We crossed the California Aqueduct and kept going south. He started watching ahead more often, calling out directions more quickly. We were soon in desolate territory, turning onto potholed roads that seemed to have been laid out for communities that never materialized, some developer’s mirage, now abandoned. We left those for an even more isolated dirt road.

We were in the foothills when the angels belatedly made their appearance. We passed a side road, and less than a minute later I saw the red light of a law enforcement vehicle-I couldn’t see any markings to make out the agency. I had to fight back tears of relief-we would be rescued! In the next moment I realized that things weren’t exactly resolved. How would the gunman react to the news I was about to give him? Not knowing what it might literally trigger, I braced myself and said, “We’re getting pulled over.”

His reaction seemed odd. He smiled, then quickly frowned and said, “Pull over and act natural. Don’t do anything to make him suspect what’s going on back here, or the girl dies.” He was talking like a TV gangster. He forced Carrie to lie down and covered her completely with a blanket.

“I’ll need my wallet,” I said.

He smiled again, found it, and tossed it to me.

Something wasn’t adding up. I kept the engine running. I had one weapon-the van. I didn’t see many possibilities to use it that would lend themselves to happy endings.

A single uniformed officer got out of a vehicle I couldn’t see. The officer had almost reached my now-lowered window before I realized she was female. The uniform looked damned familiar. Frank was already in Detectives before I married him, but I knew what a Las Piernas Police Department uniform looked like.

We were way the hell out of Las Piernas’s jurisdiction.

The style of this uniform was known as a Blauer, with the officer’s name embroidered over the pocket.

D. Fletcher.

The rest of the outfit wasn’t a convincing fake job. She was missing most of the fifty pounds of equipment a patrol officer carries. Her sidearm was holstered and she made no move to reach for it.