“License and registration.”

I played along, thinking that if I drove off, I might cause the man in the back of the van to shoot Carrie-or me. I needed a better opportunity. Or something that even vaguely resembled even half an opportunity. She moved to the front of the van and then around to the sliding side door. She knocked on it.

Now the gunman was frowning in earnest.

Still holding his gun, he moved awkwardly over to the door and opened it.

She had her own weapon out, a small handgun, and not the larger piece that was still holstered. The woman grabbed the wrist of his gun arm.

This, I thought, was as good a chance as I was likely to get.

The van was moving just as she pulled him out of it. I stepped on the gas, raising a huge cloud of dust. I heard a little popping noise and thought she was shooting at the tires.

In the side mirror, I saw the man drop in a heap.

The woman wasn’t looking at him.

She was staring after us.

CHAPTER 46

Tuesday, May 2

12:35 P.M.

ANTELOPE VALLEY

SHE might have been staring because she knew what I didn’t-that the dirt road ended a short distance ahead.

I braked and swerved to avoid going into a dry wash, yelled to Carrie to hang on or brace herself any way she could, and turned the van around. As I did, the side door slid on its tracks and shut again. At least Carrie wouldn’t roll out.

I had to disable the BMW. If the shooter got into her car, she’d easily outrun the van.

As I drove back toward her, she was smiling. She had unholstered the bigger gun. I think she expected me to simply surrender, because when I aimed the van at her, she looked surprised. Maybe it was wishful thinking on my part, but her hands seemed a little shaky. I crouched as low as I could behind the steering wheel, and I drove right at her. She raised the gun and fired. A spray of glass pebbles came at me as some of her shots blew out the windshield, and I heard the ping and hammer of the bullets hitting metal as they did some damage to the van, but I kept going, hoping to God that nothing was going to ricochet into Carrie or me.

The shooter’s surprise turned to a look of white-faced fear. She did an awkward rolling dive away from the front of the BMW.

I couldn’t afford to hit the BMW in a way that would risk disabling the van, and I didn’t want to injure or kill Carrie by sending her flying around the back of the van in a big collision. So I braked and skidded to a sliding halt, adding to the cloud of debris that was coming into the van. I lined up the back end of the van with the left front side of the Beemer, then threw the van into reverse and gave it some gas.

It made a loud bang, and I pulled forward. The BMW’s front wheel tilted at a nasty angle and the tire was flat. I had certainly done more than fuck up the paint job on the rest of the front end. Good enough.

I drove away like a bat out of hell.

AS soon as I felt sure that I had put enough distance between the shooter and us that we were out of immediate danger, I pulled over and went back to Carrie. She had managed on her own to free the blanket from her face, and maneuvered herself against the backseat. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “Are you hurt?”

She shook her head. Tears rolled down her face, over the tape across her mouth.

I glanced around. The floor of the van was littered with glass and the contents of my purse. My cell phone, alas, was out in the desert in a dead man’s pocket.

“I’m going to move you up by me so you don’t get cut by this glass, and then I’ll work on getting this tape off of you, okay?”

She nodded.

I pulled the blanket off, causing more beads of glass to fall. At least it had protected her from the initial shower of windshield fragments. I picked her up as carefully as I could, an awkward business in the confines of the van, but we made it to the front seats. I set her on her feet, brushed off the passenger seat, and helped her to sit down. I strapped the seat belt on her. “Just in case we have to take off in a hurry,” I said.

She nodded her understanding.

I started to worry that somehow the shooter would find some way to catch up with us. The woman was still armed, after all, and dressed as a police officer. Maybe she’d carjack a vehicle from someone, or use some shortcut I didn’t know about.

I reached into the glove compartment and found a first-aid kit. It contained a cheap pair of round-end scissors.

“I’m going to cut your hands free first so you can work on the rest,” I said to Carrie. “I want to try to get us farther away from that woman.”

She nodded enthusiastically.

I cut the tape between her wrists and left the scissors where she could reach them.

Unless you’re wearing goggles or a helmet with a face shield, driving without a windshield is not the freeing experience you might expect it to be. All kinds of grit, grime, and insect life came blowing up off the road. I made another stop and searched for my sunglasses.

By then Carrie had shaken the circulation back into her hands, cut the tape from her ankles, and bravely ripped it free from her face.

“Are you okay? Did he hurt you?” I asked, handing her the blanket so that she could use it to shield her face and eyes from debris.

“I’ll be okay,” she said, cautiously touching the tips of her fingers to the marks left on her face by the tape. “I’m just kind of scared.”

“Something would be seriously wrong with you if you weren’t. I’m sorry about the rough ride. But I think we’ve lost them, whoever they were.”

“My uncle Giles,” she said angrily.

“What?”

“Uncle Giles,” she said, pulling her feet up onto the edge of the seat and rubbing her ankles. “He runs the school. Fletcher Academy.”

I tried to let that sink in as we turned onto what looked like a promising road.

“On the phone, he was talking to someone named Cleo,” I said. “Do you know anyone by that name?”

“No.”

“A woman. Tall, athletic, short brown hair. Probably in her late twenties. At first I thought she was a man.”

“A woman who looked like a man?” She thought for a while, then said, “I have a lot of cousins, and I haven’t met all of them, but I can’t think of anyone who looks like that.”

If you asked me to retrace the route I took from there, it would require hypnosis to pull the memories out. I really didn’t have a clear idea of where the hell I was at any given moment, or where I was going. An aerial view of my progress would have made me look like the mouse voted least likely to find the cheese.

Eventually I ended up on Pearblossom Highway. We attracted a certain amount of attention, which I hoped would lead to some cell phone calls to the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, but I kept driving until I found a minimart gas station that was fairly busy.

We were both dirty and dehydrated, and I suppose our hair made it look as if we had tunneled out of a fright-wig factory. I found my wallet and went inside with Carrie. She took hold of my hand, which was fine with me-I wasn’t exactly feeling all that steady myself. I asked the clerk to please call the sheriff’s department, because someone had shot at us and blown out our windshield. He peered out at the van, then made the call. He was solicitous after that, allowing us to use the restroom to wash up a bit, not charging us for the bottled water we wanted to buy, and even letting me use the phone. A cynic might say that it was only about five bucks’ worth of kindness, but to us, after about three hours of terror, it seemed as if we had found the most generous soul on earth.

Frank, as it turned out, had been looking for me by the time I called.

“We were supposed to have lunch, remember? Then Lydia said you had hurried out, and I couldn’t reach you on your cell phone…”