She heard the sirens, the neighborhood dogs barking in their yards, and realized the cops could have dogs too. Angel ran in a blind panic for half a block, then ducked, panting, behind a parked car to think.
Get yourself straightened out. Get a plan. .
First she’d have to get off the streets and get under cover. The cops would own the streets.
A swarm of sirens was building in the night. Most of them up ahead, in the direction she’d been running. Instinctively she got up and moved in the opposite direction, away from the sirens. Off the street now, she picked her way through the dark yards. . weaving around hedges and fences.
She reached the end of the block and burst into the open to cross the intersection. And nearly collided with some damn kid on a skateboard doing solo routines. The boy immediately grabbed his board and stepped back.
But he’d glimpsed her. The light was not good enough to see her face, but Angel realized she was running with a pistol in one hand and her makeshift silencer in the other.
She ducked back into the yards, praying she didn’t encounter dogs. Twice she had to backtrack when she ran into six-foot fences.
Angel darted across a street and ran toward a trio of houses with dark windows. Three blocks to the west, a circular wind of red flashers lashed at the motionless trees and rooftops. But here it was still dark.
They were concentrating on the direction in which she’d initially run.
But that damn skateboard kid. .
Okay, right now, hide; catch your breath. She scrambled up a limestone retaining wall into a yard and crouched behind a dwarf lilac hedge. She wiggled the backpack from her shoulders and stuffed the silencer and her latex gloves into it. Put it back on. Her bare knees tickled in the night dew collecting in the grass. She was dizzy. More than fear. The scent of foliage and humid earth made her head swim.
She could hear snatches of staccato disembodied traffic from the cop radios. And still the sirens were coming. They were cordoning the streets, but still to the west.
Then a cop car roared past her in a scream of sirens and whooping red lights and pulled a screeching U-turn almost right in front of her.
Angel’s heart started to count down to implosion in her chest. The cop car stopped. A man jumped out and ran into the shadows about a hundred yards from her. The cop in the car turned on a searchlight. The long beam swung across the facades of the dark houses; it played across the porch behind her.
Her hand closed over the pistol. I won’t be taken alive.
The idea of putting the filthy barrel in her mouth repelled her. Better to put it to the temple.
Won’t be taken.
Won’t.