I plowed toward him, swiping at my eyes to keep him in focus. He heard me coming. Pulled himself around and then, when I was only half a dozen strides away, heaved staggering to his feet. He had something long and dark and bulky in one hand-
Piece of driftwood, watch out
— and I broke off to one side an instant before he sprang at me, swinging the driftwood club at my head. I heard the rush of it going past close; heard him grunt and curse. The unchecked thrust had put him off balance. I twisted back, down to one knee, and pitched myself at his legs. My shoulder caught him a glancing blow over one knee, sent him spinning away into the surf.
I made it to my feet, saw him trying to do the same. A wave broke against the backs of his legs and toppled him again. Without hesitation I went out there after him.
It was like wading into Arctic waters. The surf boiled around my ankles; the sand shifted under my feet, so that I had to flap my arms to maintain balance. There was a treacherous undertow along here; if you got caught in it it would drag you straight out to sea. Vega fought free of its pull before I reached him, came all the way up shaking his head and blowing like a sea lion. He still had the piece of driftwood clenched in his hand. As soon as he located me he lunged, arm upraised-and another wave smacked him, a big one this time, and hurled him past me and then knocked me tumbling after him.
Salt water poured into my mouth and throat and took my breath away. The churning surf roughed me this way and that before it finally let me go. I flopped over, fighting for air, and dug my hands into the running sand to keep from being dragged backward. I couldn’t get my legs under me before the next wave broke; instead I scuttled forward crablike, so that when the surf foamed around me again I was far enough up on the beach to avoid being submerged. When that wave receded I crawled another few feet, lay still in a pile of slimy seaweed, gasping and coughing water out of my lungs.
Vega, I thought then, and rolled over, tensing, ready to fend him off another time. But he wasn’t anywhere near me. I didn’t see him at all until another breaker finished punishing the beach; then I spotted him, all humped and bobbing like some sort of sea creature. When the surf released him he made little trembly movements but didn’t try to get up. Hurt? Or faking it? No, he’d been too wrought up to think of clever games, particularly when he was being thrown around by an angry sea.
I stood-and fell right back down again; my legs felt numb and wood-block heavy. I crawled partway to where he was, held myself in place as another wave mauled him, then tried again to stand. This time I was able to keep my feet. Another wave surged and ebbed. I let the receding water pull me along, leaned down and got hold of his jacket collar and started to drag him inland. The next wave and the shifting sand threw me down but it didn’t make me lose my grip on Vega’s collar. I got up and kept on dragging him. Maintained my balance somehow when the next one splashed down and kept right on dragging him until my legs gave out on firmer sand.
I sat there shivering, sobbing a little from exhaustion. Thinking-when I could think clearly again-that I was lucky not to be dead. Not by Vega’s hand; from a stroke or a heart attack. Fifty-eight years old … you can’t punish your body this way at my age and expect it to keep chugging along in fine shape. The pain was still there in my chest, a tightness with a little pulsating core. Not out of the woods yet …
When I had enough strength I crawled over next to Vega and pushed him onto his back. He was alive but not conscious, his face twisted into a grimace of pain; I could see his chest moving, hear strangulated sounds in his throat. Swallowed water, I thought, and I turned him on his side again so he wouldn’t suffocate on it. He quit making the choking sound; water dribbled out of his mouth. But his breathing stayed irregular, and when I felt his pulse it was weak. Hurt when the wave knocked him down and pummeled him … but in the dark I couldn’t tell where or how badly. Chances were he needed medical attention, and soon, before pneumonia set in.
Let the son of a bitch die, I thought.
No, I thought, no. The rage was seeping out of me now, and along with it the scum of bloodlust. There was nothing more Vega could do to me. He wasn’t my real enemy anyway; he was just a soldier, a weapon primed and aimed by a general behind the lines. The general was my real enemy. And the general had to be Coleman Lujack. How else would Vega have known where to set up in ambush for me? Nobody other than Glickman and the Lujacks had been told about my undercover work at the Hideaway. Ithad to be Coleman.
I was shivering badly now: move or run the risk of catching pneumonia myself. I got up slow, stayed up, but my legs trembled with weakness. And even though the chest pain had finally eased, my breathing was still labored and short. There was no way I could carry Vega from here to the Great Highway. Leave him where he lay, then; no other choice. I put my back to him, smudged him out of my mind, and set off through the clinging sand.
I don’t know how long it took me to find the trail and climb off the beach. I don’t know how many times I fell and got up again. Fatigue and the shroud of fog robbed me of any sense of time or distance. At first, when I neared the dunes, I couldn’t find the path; I slogged south along the base of them and there it was. Then I didn’t have enough strength left in my legs to walk all the way up the incline, and I had to crawl the last ten yards or so to where the trail crested. I stayed there on all fours, peering over toward Taraval.
An L Taraval streetcar was sitting at the line’s terminus, an oasis of light in the mist. But there were no police cars, no activity of any kind. The disarming of Vega, the foot chase, had gone unnoticed by anyone except the driver of the car that had almost hit Vega, and like most urban dwellers these days, he’d chosen to pretend it had never happened.
I waited until the streetcar moved up past the Hideaway before I stood again. I walked down to the bicycle path that flanked the Great Highway on this side, turned onto it. Nearby was one of the old beachfront convenience stations, locked at night these days because of vandals. I leaned against its wall, resting, while a car pulled up to the curb on 48th and somebody got out and went into one of the buildings. Then I crossed the highway, crossed 48th into Taraval-all in a gait as tanglefooted as a drunk’s.
I had dropped my keys when I took the revolver away from Vega, but I did not have to hunt for them; they were lying right there in the street and I stepped on them when I walked up alongside the car. With the key ring in hand, I fumbled around under the car and found the gun-lightweight belly-gun, from the feel of it. I had to use the door handle to haul myself up so I could unlock the door. Then I collapsed inside.
For a couple of minutes I sat with the engine running and the heater on high, rubbing my hands and face dry with the car blanket. The gun I locked away in the dash compartment. The mobile phone then: 911, a terse message in a voice that didn’t sound like mine, telling the Emergency Services operator where Vega was and that he might be badly injured, and a fast disconnect when the operator asked my name.
It would take the paramedics and the first police car not much more than five minutes to get here, which didn’t leave me enough time to hunt up Vega’s Buick and search it. Just as well; I was in no shape to do any more shambling around on the street, and I had already used up most of my allotment of luck. Wasn’t likely there’d be anything incriminating in his car anyway.
I put mine in gear and headed home to do more battle, this time with my own private demons.
* * * *
Chapter 16
You think you know, based on past experience, exactly how your mind and body will react to a certain set of stimuli — but you’re not always right. The subconscious has its own perversities. I thought that when I was alone in my flat the episode with Vega would trigger another anxiety attack, or at least an edgy and mostly sleepless night. I thought that Saturday, when it finally came, would be one of the now-rare bad days-and that I would have to spend part of it wiring myself back together again.