I reached out and tore the gun from his hand.
He neither pulled the trigger in reflex nor reacted in any other way. One second he was pointing the weapon at me; the next I had my hand on it and was ripping it free of his fingers. But I did not have a tight grip and I couldn’t hold on to it. It fell clattering; kicked under my car without going off. Vega made an astonished bleating sound, staggered backward with his eyes popping. I remember that plainly: His eyes seemed enormous, great bulbous staring things ready to burst from his skull. I think I made a noise myself, a kind of crazy roaring.
He turned tail and ran.
I would have caught him in the first twenty yards but I slipped on the wet pavement, ricocheted off a parked car and down to one knee. By the time I got my feet under me again he had opened up a thirty-yard lead. He ran in a loose-jointed zigzag fueled by terror, throwing wild looks over his shoulder as he pounded across the streetcar tracks and out onto 48th. Beyond, on the Great Highway, the vague lights of an oncoming car sliced through the fog from the north. If Vega saw the lights he misjudged the nearness of the car; he barreled up across the landscaped median strip between 48th and the highway, kept right on going under the furry red DON’T WALK signal.
Squeal of brakes, long angry horn blast, the headlights pinning him for a second, then veering away as the car swerved. The front bumper hit him, but the car was almost stopped by then and it didn’t knock him down. He bounced off in a kind of lurching pirouette, stayed on his feet, and plunged upward along the wide sandy path that led to Ocean Beach.
I lost sight of him for a few seconds; the fog had him in a tight gray embrace. As I pelted across the median strip, the car frog-hopped ahead through the crosswalk and stalled. I ran around behind it. The engine roared just as I cleared the fender, and the pavement took a skin of rubber off screaming tires; the driver did not want any part of Vega or me or our trouble.
When I came up onto the sandy trail I saw Vega again through rents in the mist, slogging upward less than twenty yards away. The sand was wet but not hard-packed and he couldn’t generate any speed. Neither could I, after another few strides along the path. But I seemed to be gaining on him anyway.
Over the pound of blood in my head I could hear the breakers for the first time-a dull muffled roar punctuated by the rasp of my breathing and the whisper and grind of my shoes digging into the sand. Years since I’d been to this section of Ocean Beach, before the sewer project began, but they couldn’t have widened or altered the shape of it much: low dunes flanking the trail here, stretching out parallel to the Great Highway; from the dunes to the waterline, fifty yards of flat, sandy beach … nothing on it but driftwood and sand dollars, dog crap and human litter. There was no place for him to go or hide out there. If I didn’t lose him in the fog …
Now he was up to where the trail crested and then dropped down to the flat part of the beach. The mist was thick here, eddying close to the ground and as wet as rain; I had to keep swiping at my eyes to clear moisture out of them. At that I saw him only in disjointed glimpses, as if he were a figure in one of those flickery early silent films.
Ten yards separated us now. He threw another look over his shoulder, and when he saw how close I was, panic drove him sideways over the waist-high chain link fence that bordered the path. On hands and knees he scrambled through ice plant and tule grass, up the side of the nearest dune.
I vaulted the fence in an awkward twisting motion, came down wrong and sprawled out on my face in a clump of ice plant. Its slick, wet, swollen leaves had the feel of a dead man’s fingers. I clawed up through it, getting my legs under me. Vega was almost to the top of the dune, but when he caught hold of a clump of grass to pull himself the rest of the way, it tore free in his hand and he slid partway back down. That gave me just enough time to get a hand on his ankle. He flailed wildly with his feet, kicked free, managed to pitch his body over the top of the dune. But I was still right behind him, digging hard into the sand. When I came up over the top he was scrabbling through a shallow depression to the base of the next dune. He wasn’t going to have enough time to climb that one and he knew it; he twisted around so that he was on his back, facing me with his legs and arms up like a cat in fighting position.
I threw myself at him. One of his knees dug into my belly, made me grunt in pain, and he shoved me off with enough force to roll me over. Wet sand got into my open mouth, down into my throat; I gagged, spat, shook my head as I scraped back onto my knees. He was right there, trying awkwardly to kick me in the head. I went at him again, knocked him backward. But I could not get my body on his, could not find enough leverage for a solid blow.
We punched at each other, squirming and sliding around. Neither of us did any damage. He kept screaming at me the entire time, garbled Mexican obscenities in a gasping voice soaked in fear. He thought he was fighting for his life. Maybe he was. The rage in me was as black and merciless as death.
The skirmish seemed to go on and on, like that dream where you’re trying to run away from something, or toward something, and you can’t move your arms and legs except in a dragging way that is savagely frustrating. It couldn’t have lasted more than a minute; it seemed ten times that long. We might have kept it up to the point of exhaustion if I hadn’t failed to protect my head after a wild swing. A handful of flung sand caught me full in the face and for a few seconds I went blind.
I reared away, pulling in on myself like a turtle while I struggled to clear my vision. But he didn’t press his advantage. Instead I heard him going away from me … flight, not fight. Through stinging eyes I looked for him, didn’t see him. But I could hear him-down now, not up. Then I knew where he was.
I scrambled across the width of the depression, came up at the edge of the slope that dropped off to the flat part of the beach. Fog roiled around down at the bottom, making Vega seem two-dimensional, wraithlike, as he got his feet under him. He looked up once to where I was and then began to run toward the hidden surf.
I threw myself over the edge, half-slid and half-rolled down the incline. By the time I fetched up at the bottom, he had disappeared. I ran staggering in the direction he’d gone. Ran blindly, waving my arms in front of me in a witless effort to tear away more of the mist. There was pain in my chest now and I couldn’t seem to take in enough air.
The ocean’s thunder grew louder, the sand underfoot a little more firmly packed: I was nearing the waterline. Icy wind, thick with the smell and taste of salt, burned my cheeks and numbed my bare hands. Another ten feet and the fog parted enough so that I could make out the surf foaming up white over the sand, the waves riding high and angry before they broke. Vega wasn’t anywhere in the fifteen-yard stretch visible ahead.
Which way, left or right? I started left, but to the right a gap like a doorway swirled open in the mist and I thought I saw something moving over that way. I changed direction, lurching badly now because each step sent splinters of pain up into my crotch. Ten feet, fifteen … and there he was, just out of reach of the frothy tongues of surf. Not running anymore; down on hands and knees, crawling through a scatter of flotsam and jetsam.