“So you haven’t seen her.”
“In this shitty weather, wearing a hood, keeping my head down?”
A different male voice entered the conversation. “The bitch is slick, Frank. She’s somewhere else.”
Frank said, “I’ve got a real hate-on for the pig.”
“Get in line. Who’s this plastic banana?”
The driver in his yellow raingear said, “I’ve made deliveries here five years, never saw what you’d call a looker.”
To the new arrival, Frank said, “Bakery guy. He’s got nothing.”
“What I’ve got is work to do in this shitty rain. What’re you guys, anyway—cops or something?”
“Better you don’t know,” Frank said.
“Better I don’t,” said the driver, and he began to offload more waterproof plastic boxes of baked goods.
Jane waited, listened, expecting a face at a window, steam-blurred and menacing like a face in a dream.
Hard rain drumming the truck. No more lightning or thunder. Rain in California was seldom accompanied by extended pyrotechnics.
Soon the driver returned. She heard him lifting the dolly into the truck. He slammed the back door without speaking to anyone.
Jane almost eeled up from the footwell to scramble out of the truck—but then she heard the tinny, static-speckled voice of someone on the walkie-talkie, which had been turned louder to compensate for poor reception.
The driver’s door opened, and the deliveryman swung in behind the wheel before he startled at the sight of her.
“Please don’t,” she whispered.
20
* * *
THE DRIVER was about Jane’s age. His broad and pleasant face, sprayed with freckles and capped with rust-red eyebrows, suggested red hair under his bright-yellow cowl.
He pulled his door shut, started the engine, switched on the windshield wipers, and drove away from the restaurant. Before they reached the end of the block, he said, “All right, they’re behind us. You can get up now.”
“I’d rather stay down here for a little ways. Then you can let me out, maybe at your next stop.”
“I could do that.”
“Thank you.”
He braked at the end of the block. “But if there’s somewhere in particular you want to go, I could also do that.”
She considered him as he turned right into the street. “What’s your name?”
“Believe it or not, Ethan Hunt.”
“Why wouldn’t I believe it?”
“Well, Ethan Hunt—like Tom Cruise in those Mission: Impossible movies.”
“Ah. You get kidded about that, do you?”
“Not by anyone who knows the truth about bakery delivery. I disarm suitcase nukes and save the world about once a month.”
“Once a month, huh?”
“Well, every six weeks.”
She liked his smile. There was neither snark nor megalomania in it, as characterized so many smiles these days.
“I need to get to my car.” She told him where it was parked. “But if you see any of those goons, drive right on by.”
She squirmed out of the footwell and sat upright in the passenger seat.
Rain sheeted through the streets and gutters brimmed. The haloed headlights of approaching vehicles made the falling rain look like sleet and seemed to pave the blacktop with ice.
“Probably I better not ask your name,” Ethan Hunt said.
“That might be safer for you.”
“Don’t you believe in umbrellas?”
She said, “The drowned-rat look is so becoming.”
“Any drowned rat looked half as good as you, I’d marry it.”
“Thanks. I think.”
“I’m taking a roundabout route just to be sure it’s safe.”
“I figured that’s what you were doing.”
“Plus I want to keep this going a little while.”
“Been too long since a suitcase nuke, huh?”
“Seems forever. Those were some bad dudes back there.”
“Yes, I’m aware.”
“You sure you can handle them yourself?”
“Are you volunteering?”
“No way. They’d squash me like a bug. Just saying.”
“I’ll be okay.”
“It’d make me sick to think you wouldn’t.” He stopped beside her Ford Escape. “No goons in sight.”
“You’re a sweet man, Ethan Hunt. Thank you.”
“Guess there’s no way this could ever lead to a date.”
“Trust me, Ethan, I’d be the date from Hell.”
She got out into the rain, and as she closed the door, she heard him say, “But you wouldn’t be boring.”
21
* * *
THOSE WHO SEEMED to understand what lay behind the increase in suicides, who might even have engineered it, were clearly connected root and branch with as-yet-unidentified government agencies. Jane could only assume they would also have influence with authorities at the state level, including the California Highway Patrol.
Leaving the city, she avoided freeways because that was where the CHP patrols could be found in the greatest numbers. There were chokepoints at which traffic could be easily halted or slowed for close inspection. The drones had transmitted video of her, and the men from whom she’d escaped in the foot chase had seen that her long blond hair was now shorter and brown. A new description of her would already be in the hands of the searchers.
She had meant to head up-coast only a few miles to La Jolla, to see a man that evening and put a question to him that, depending on his answer, might decide her future. Instead, she followed a series of rain-sluiced surface streets toward the coast, circled the town of La Jolla, and found her way to Torrey Pines State Reserve.
There she connected with County Highway S12. This coastal route served a number of picturesque beach cities from Del Mar and Solano Beach north to Oceanside.
At Torrey Pines State Beach, she drove into the parking lot, which was deserted in this weather. From under the passenger seat, she fished a small tool kit and took from it a screwdriver.
She got out into the storm. The tall pines soughed. The driven rain danced on the pavement, raising from it a hissing like the threats of a thousand angry serpents.
Her wet fingers slipped on the screwdriver, but she managed to remove the front and rear license plates, all unobserved, as far as she could tell.
If there had been traffic cameras near where she had left the car before walking to the library, as there were nearly everywhere in metropolitan areas these days, agents would soon be reviewing time-stamped video from all the streets that radiated away from the park where she had nearly been apprehended. Even with clarity diminished by the rain, they would hope to find video of her leaving the car and returning to it. She had to assume both that they knew she was driving a black Ford Escape and that it had Canadian plates.
In California, a car without license plates didn’t often excite police interest, because dealerships didn’t provide temporary plates for new purchases. Better that she proceed without tags than go cruising with a pair that might be on every cop’s hot sheet within an hour or two.
She put the plates under the driver’s seat, got behind the wheel, and started the engine. Sopping wet again, she clicked the heater up a few degrees and accelerated the blower.
When the wipers swept the blearing rain from the windshield, she saw the nearby Pacific, storm-lashed and misted, rolling toward shore less like water than like a sea of gray smoke pouring off the fires of some vast nuclear holocaust.
22
* * *
AFTER STOPPING in Cardiff-by-the-Sea to refuel, she left the coastal highway for Interstate 5. She was more than twenty miles from the San Diego city limits, and the superhighway was worth the risk for the greater speed that it allowed.
She drove out of the storm just north of Oceanside, where the coastal plain was flat and scrub-covered and forbidding in the hard clear end-of-winter light.
During the drive, with time to think, she decided that her first mistake had been to answer Gwyn Lambert’s question, Where will you go from here? She’d said she had someone to see near San Diego.