It would be close.
The next major street was Stone Avenue. Traffic was running north and south, but he skidded into a gap, southbound, and immediately hooked onto Grant again, racing west.
“Mary Twelve, we got a nine-one hang-up on that RP.”
She’d fled.
“ETA one minute,” the patrol unit responded.
They were still hoping to catch her.
Probably they wouldn’t succeed, but they would find the package she had left for them — unless Cray found it first.
He looked ahead. Coming up was Oracle Road, the six-lane highway he’d taken last night when he followed the Chevette south from the foothills.
A red light at that intersection would last a good two minutes, and he would have no chance.
The light was green as he approached, but the DON’T WALK sign was solid red, and he knew a change was coming.
Yellow.
He floored the gas, and his tachometer buzzed into the danger zone.
The car in front of him was stopping, damn it, and the lane to his left was jammed.
On the shoulder, then.
He swung the wheel, and the Lexus bounded around the slowing traffic and streaked through the intersection under a red light. Somewhere a horn blared.
Close now. Fifteenth Avenue was within sight.
The Circle K appeared in waves of shimmering heat, a mirage of hope.
Patrol car? He didn’t see one. Not yet.
Then he saw a flash of red shoot away from the curb a block past the Circle K, and he knew it was the hatchback with Kaylie McMillan at the wheel.
For an insane moment all he wanted to do was follow the little car, yes, follow it at a distance, unseen, follow until Kaylie thought she was safe, and when she pulled over—
Grab her. Take her away. Kill her slowly. And at the climax, lift her face from her skull, his greatest prize.
But he couldn’t do that.
The satchel was what mattered.
She must have left it by the phone.
The Chevette disappeared down the road, streaking toward the freeway, and Cray let it go.
Cutting speed, he hauled the Lexus into the Circle K’s parking lot and killed the engine.
Then he was out and looking around desperately for a pay phone. None was in sight. But there had to be one here. At the side of the building, perhaps. He checked one side — nothing. Ran to the other.
Two phone kiosks, neither in use.
The satchel, where was the satchel?
There. On the ground beneath the nearer phone.
He seized it, then looked outside and saw a Tucson PD Crown Victoria roll into the lot.
They were here.
And he was trapped at the side of the building with the evidence in his hands.
The store’s brick wall loomed on his left. A hurricane fence, too high to climb, faced him to his right.
Directly ahead of him, the two cops were getting out of the car.
He could ambush them, kill them both.
Except he couldn’t. He’d left his Glock in the Lexus.
Anyway, the bitch would have mentioned his name over the phone. Killing these two errand boys would serve no purpose except to confirm her story.
Run, then.
He turned and sprinted toward the rear of the store, the satchel thudding against his hip. Between the back wall and the fence protecting the adjacent vacant lot, there was a narrow gap, barely wide enough to squeeze through.
Cray eased into the gap and came up against a clutter of planks and cinder blocks, the remnants of some minor construction job, thrown back here and forgotten. The mess was high enough to block his path. He couldn’t advance.
Breathing hard, he hugged the wall and listened as the cops came around to the phones.
“—said there was some kind of bag she left,” one of them was saying.
“What are we, UPS, picking up parcels?”
“I’m just telling you what it said on the MDT.”
Mobile Data Terminal. The squad car’s computer. A fuller explanation must have been transmitted electronically, and the cop riding shotgun had read it while his partner drove.
“Well,” the driver said, “I don’t see any damn bag.”
“She was probably a mental case anyway.”
“Did they say what kind of bag?”