"What about the one to get ready?"
"He's with me."
The cops eyed Kinsella and Matt as they followed her and the dancing flashlight beam, not sure which one was the temporarily paroled desperado.
The usher was quaking in his fallen house when they came up the stairs into the lobby. More uniforms had gathered.
"Where'd the DEA go?" Molina asked one.
"Vehicular pursuit."
"Get me wheels."
The man nodded. Molina made for the entrance, pausing only to fix Kinsella with a look half-warning, half-challenge. "Follow if you can."
He sprinted out the door before her and collared a valet in an ersatz Oriental uniform. "The black Taurus. A hundred bucks if you have it here in one minute flat."
With a screech of brakes, a white Crown Victoria careened slantwise across the street.
Kinsella swore like a sailor and then he swore like a French legionnaire.
"I'm going along," Matt squeezed into the backdraft from the obscenities.
"Watch those taillights as long as they're visible." Kinsella sent a look after the Crown Vic that Matt hoped never to be on the other end of this side of Purgatory.
The Taurus screeched up in its turn. Matt barely got around to the passenger side before it took off in a squeal of tires and the flutter of a hundred-dollar bill.
"Left onto ninety-five, in the left lane," Matt said, still straining to see the impossible as he jerked on the seatbelt.
The Taurus wove through the late-night traffic like a ninja armored in sheet metal. They must have been doing seventy.
Matt glanced at Kinsella, who grinned. "Had it upgraded. They're using a Taurus platform at NASCAR, did you know?"
"No." Matt cared little about cars.
"It's what's not visible that counts."
Matt nodded, straining to spot the right pair of red taillights among a host of beady red beams.
"There! Is it them?"
Max nodded. "Look. They're putting the cherry on top. Thanks, Lieutenant."
"Not for us?"
"Not for us. For speed. But they won't shake us. We'll run in their wake like Ahab after the white whale."
Matt couldn't suppress his nervous bark of laughter. The big white Crown Vic was very like the Moby Dick of the automotive world.
"What's happening?" he asked, hating to ask Kinsella but needing to know more than he needed his pride.
"Drug bust. That was the principal deal. The rest--you and Molina--were ride-alongs."
"And Temple?"
"Unscripted. Wild card."
"Is she--?"
Kinsella shook his head. He'd probably forgotten his loosened hair, why ever he'd done it, and didn't realize he resembled a wild man of Borneo. Matt took in his primitive streak, and wondered about Temple. Wondered about himself. Molina he didn't wonder about. She was doing her job. The rest of them were trying to save their own lives. And maybe each other. He had to give even Kinsella credit for that.
They accelerated like a whip-snake into the on-ramp lane, then were greased lightning on Highway 75, heading north.
Kinsella eased up on the gas. "Don't want to make the cops paranoid."
"She knows we're coming."
"She knows we'll try."
Suddenly they were "we." It gave Matt chills. What if Temple's death were the one thing that could draw them together?
"You're sure she's not back there--?"
"The game is distraction. The aim is a moving target. If Temple were back there, she'd be dead."
"God! Don't say that!"
"It's the truth. As long as someone is running, there's a chance Temple is worth something to them."
Matt grew silent. He couldn't drive like a demon, not without a vehicle; he couldn't pull a gun and flash a badge, not without a license. All he could do was pray. And be there. For whatever would be.
"More taillights at the same speed." Kinsella's chin jerked to-ward the windshield. "It's a caravan. Major bust. Molina and her case is icing."
"And Temple?"
"Temple is ... an innocent bystander and the point of the game."
"Then you know who?"
"I know who the target is. I don't know why."
Kinsella's hands left the wheel, then pounded back onto it in a death grip.
Matt knew dread, and knew for the first time in his life that prayer was not enough.
******************
Temple rocked and rolled in her padded cell.
Temple despaired. She shouldn't have had that scotch and water. With all this motion, all this stress, all this hallucinogenic high, she might have to go to the bathroom. And if she died, well ... it would be embarrassing. If she lived, it would be even more embarrassing.
Amazing what really mattered.
Not being a kid. Not losing it. Not freaking out. Not... choking to death on your own fear because you were locked into this human-size jewel case in the dark, bouncing back and forth like heisted emeralds, only emeralds don't have to go to the bathroom, afraid you might die and afraid you might live and never live it down, this awful claustrophobia, this turning of yourself inside out, this delirious buzz that's supposed to be a kick if you pay for it but is sheer hell if someone does it to you.
Oh, Lord. Think how disappointed everyone would be if she died? Poor Max. Guilt would move right in and pay rent. Poor Matt. Another guilty party. They could blame themselves for decades. And her poor aunt Kit, who would blame herself for ever letting Temple leave New York City for the Wild West. And her mother and father, who always knew she should never go off on her own, especially with a man. Especially with That Man. And her brothers, who started all her phobias by holding her under the fruit crate when she was four, and threatening to never let her free, and laughing.
She guessed they didn't really mean it. But it had felt like it at the time, because she was smaller and a girl, both things they didn't seem to like much at their grand ages and sizes of ten, twelve and thirteen . . . she had hated the dark and closed-in places ever since . . . remember how she had grabbed Matt's arm in the haunted house? Not so very long ago. Much more recently than she had encountered her terror in a fruit crate.
Those creepy ninjas, masked men. Weren't going to get her down. Okay, she was down. She was almost out. But she was conscious. Sort of. And her feet were free. Maybe she could pry the lid open. Wriggle her wrists out of the handcuffs. But she'd tried, and it's like they knew her wrists were small. All she did was wear off her skin. And the upholstery was up, down and all around. Muffling.
No one would hear her. She tried chewing the silken gag into a narrow strip and shouting around it. But it was spiderVweb strong, the silk and all she managed were a few puny mews, like a sick cat.
Sometimes she thought the dark and the drug haze and the endless nauseous motion would gag her. Or that she'd stop breathing. Just because. And then her heart raced until her ears pounded. And she thought, no, someone wanted this to happen to her, and the last thing she wanted was to give in to someone who wanted her to give in. Did that make sense? No.
They would be so sad that she'd had to leave them. She could hardly stand it. She could face leaving, but she couldn't face leaving them alone, with only sadness to remember her by.
All right. She wasn't dead yet. They could have killed her, but they didn't. She was still alive, and she wasn't quite crazy, although the possibility of that seemed the scariest of all. And her feet were free. And they were wearing very spiffy shoes. If she died, she'd be put in a funeral casket, and then no one would see her spiffy shoes.
Not to be tolerated.
She kicked off one of the shoes, put both hands to her mouth and pulled on the tight rope of silk until it seemed her lips would peel off. But finally she managed to work one side over her chin.
Her handicapped hands tussled the fabric down to her neck, where it hung like a cowboy's kerchief.
Her face and mouth were sore, worn, but it was great to know she could really holler if she had to.