Relief surged over her in a cresting wave.
“I made it,” she said aloud, the words tentative and tremulous, like a child’s prayer. “Oh, God, I made it, I really did, I got away.”
She was rounding the nearest curve when headlights flared in her rearview mirror. Domelights twinkled. A siren rose in a ululant wail.
The police car. But Sanchez and Porter were dead. Weren’t they?
Then she understood.
The Gryphon had taken the car. He was still after her. He refused to give up.
Wendy laid her foot on the gas, demanding speed, while behind her the blue and red beacons spun closer, gaining ground.
The road coiled into a series of tight turns. She shifted into low gear for better traction and climbed higher. She knew she’d made a mistake in heading north. Should have gone south into the city. Nothing she could do about it now. She would have to get over the mountain and find help in the San Fernando Valley on the other side.
The Camaro shuddered with a sudden impact from behind. Wendy looked in the rearview mirror. Saw the patrol car accelerate to ram her again. A sharper blow this time. The steering wheel jerked free of her hands. The road skewed sideways. The Camaro skidded into the shoulder, tires kicking up sand and gravel. A telephone pole expanded in the funnels of her headlights. Wendy swerved left. The pole brushed past, shearing off the Camaro’s sideview mirror on the passenger side.
Close one, she thought shakily.
The sour taste of vomit rose in her throat. Her stomach bubbled.
She crested the mountain and was swept onto Mulholland Drive, the winding ribbon of road that ran along the spine of the Hollywood Hills. The dark, hunched shapes of houses whipped past, first on one side, then on the other. In those houses were people who had no part in any of this. The thought seemed unreal.
The patrol car, domelights blazing, siren caterwauling, rear-ended her again. Wendy was flung forward in her seat, the Camaro wobbling drunkenly toward the white guardrail. Beyond the rail, noting but black space and a sheer drop. The Camaro thudded into the rail and skidded along it with a screech of tortured metal, shooting up white pinwheels of sparks. She spun the wheel hard to the left and swung back onto the road.
The siren was abruptly cut off. “Got you now, you bitch!” boomed a thunderous male voice, God’s voice, loud in the sudden stillness. “Got you now!”
What the hell…?
The loudspeaker. In the squad car. Not God. Just him. Just the Gryphon.
“Got you!” he roared again. The squad car accelerated as the siren screamed to life once more.
“No, you don’t,” Wendy breathed. “You motherfucking bastard, you don’t.”
She veered into the other lane, then hit the brakes. The patrol car rocketed past her, taillights streaking like a time exposure, siren lowering its pitch.
Wendy was behind him now. She could execute a U-turn, try to get away. The most logical thing to do. Of course it was.
She arrowed the Camaro at the squad car. Shot forward. Punched a dent in its rear bumper.
“How do you like that, you asshole?” she yelled, her voice high and thin and ragged, keening like the rush of air through the shattered window. “How the hell do you like that?”
She rammed him again, again, again. She thrilled with the impact of steel on steel, enjoying the hard shock of contact. She was fighting back, going on the offensive, not running anymore. She’d run for too long, too many years, her whole life. The world had abused her, and she’d responded by hiding her pain, curling up inside herself, learning fear and smallness. Now at last she was taking action, lashing out, and it felt good, so good.
“Fuck you!” she shouted as she hit him once more, crunching one of his taillights like a sea shell. “Fuck you!” Another impact; his left rear tire blew and shredded. “Fuck you!” His trunk lid sprung a latch and popped up, flapping fitfully.
She no longer knew if she was screaming or laughing or both, and she didn’t give a damn. She was free. Free.
Over the siren’s wail, a sound like an engine backfiring. A gunshot.
A hand hung out of the squad car’s window on the driver’s side, a gloved hand with a pistol in it. The gun kicked again. The Camaro’s windshield exploded. Wendy threw a hand over her face. Glass shards bit her palm.
“Fuck you,” she said again. She would not be intimidated. Would not back off.
She put on a burst of speed and plowed into the black-and-white, delivering a blow hard enough to crack both cars’ axles. The gun retreated as the Gryphon tried to steady the cruiser, now weaving wildly, the shredded tire smoking, the one taillight tracing red curlicues like the burning end of a cigarette in a restless hand.
Wendy careened into the patrol car again, her fender a shark’s mouth chewing metal, and then, because she knew it was the last thing her adversary expected, she dropped back, giving him room to maneuver. He straightened out the car and cut his speed, falling back to pull alongside her on her right, no doubt intending to squeeze off another shot from closer range, but before he had the chance, she angled the nose of the Camaro at the squad car’s door and lunged forward, crushing the door like a tin can and shoving the cruiser off the road into the shoulder, where it ought to have smacked into the guardrail, except there was no guardrail this time; there was only dry brush edging the void of a bottomless descent as deep and dark as the black well of death.
The two cars barreled off the shoulder onto a thin strip of dirt scruffy with weeds. The abyss loomed. Wendy wrenched the steering wheel sharply to the left. For a bad moment she thought her bumper had locked with the twisted metal of the black-and-white’s door. Then with a grinding roar it tore loose, and she was skidding back onto the road while the police car, propelled by momentum, kept going, racing toward oblivion, one brake light glowing uselessly, siren whooping in terror.
The cruiser dipped abruptly. The single taillight shot high into the air like a red signal flare as the car’s front end lurched down. An instant later the car was gone.
Wendy stood on the brake pedal with both feet. The Camaro spun completely around and came to a dead stop straddling the double yellow line. Then she was running in her wool socks across the road. At the edge of the cliff she looked down and saw it, the crackling glow on the mountainside two hundred feet below, where the twisted remains of the police car had impacted. A rumble, a shock wave, and the ground shivered as fire bloomed in a blue-red cloud like the domelights’ last furious display. The gas tank had ruptured, caught, blown, and now the car was a fireball, blossoming red, reminding her of a flower with petals unfolding, a red hothouse flower that, like a carnivorous jungle plant, was consuming the car and its contents, consuming the man who’d killed Jennifer and Jeffrey and Sanchez and Porter and who’d tried to kill her, tried and tried again, but had failed each time, and who’d finally paid with his life.
“Fuck you,” Wendy said one last time, her voice groggy and slow.
She staggered back to the Camaro and sank into the driver’s seat, thinking vaguely that she had to go somewhere, call someone, do something. But she couldn’t concentrate; her mind had gone blurry; weakness was spreading through her like the sudden onset of flu. She let her head fall back on the headrest. Her eyelids fluttered weakly, then shut, and a buzzing roar closed over her, all but drowning out the siren rising in the near distance.
Siren.
She jerked half-awake with a last jolt of adrenaline and terror.
The police car hadn’t crashed. The Gryphon was still after her, still chasing her with his siren shrieking, the gun hot in his hand…