Neither of the men in Hawaiian shirts had returned from the desert scrub beyond the hill.
Joe hadn’t heard any more gunshots, although the terrain might have muffled them.
He hurried to his car. The door handle was bright with the kiss of the sun, and he hissed with pain when he touched it.
The interior of the car was so hot that it seemed on the verge of spontaneous combustion. He cranked down the window.
As he started the Honda, he glanced at the rearview mirror and saw a flatbed truck with board sides approaching from farther east in the cemetery. It was probably a groundskeeper’s vehicle, either coming to investigate the gunfire or engaged in routine maintenance.
Joe could have followed the road to the west end of the memorial park and then looped all the way around to the entrance at the east perimeter, but he was in a hurry and wanted to go directly back the way he had come. Overwhelmed by a feeling that he had stretched his luck too far, he could almost hear a ticking like a time-bomb clock. Pulling away from the curb, he tried to hang a U-turn but couldn’t quite manage it in one clean sweep.
He shifted into Reverse and tramped on the accelerator hard enough to make the tires squeal against the hot pavement. The Honda shot backward. He braked and shifted into Drive again.
Tick, tick, tick.
Instinct proved reliable. Just as he accelerated toward the approaching groundskeeper’s truck, the rear window on the driver’s side of the car, immediately behind his head, exploded, spraying glass across the backseat.
He didn’t have to hear the shot to know what had happened.
Glancing to the left, he saw the man in the red Hawaiian shirt, stopped halfway down the hillside, in a shooter’s stance. The guy, pale as a risen corpse, was dressed for a margarita party.
Someone shouted hoarse, slurred curses. Blick. Crawling away from the van on his hands and knees, dazedly shaking his blocky head, like a pit bull wounded in a dogfight, spraying bloody foam from his mouth: Blick.
Another round slammed into the body of the car with a hard thud, followed by a brief trailing twang.
With a rush of hot gibbering wind at the open and the shattered windows, the Honda spirited Joe out of range. He rocketed past the groundskeeper’s truck at such high speed that it swerved to avoid him, though he was not in the least danger of colliding with it.
Past one burial service, where black-garbed mourners drifted like forlorn spirits away from the open grave, past another burial service, where the grieving huddled on chairs as if prepared to stay forever with whomever they had lost, past an Asian family putting a plate of fruit and cake on a fresh grave, Joe fled. He passed an unusual white church — a steeple atop a Palladian-arch cupola on columns atop a clock tower — which cast a stunted shadow in the early-afternoon sun. Past a white Southern Colonial mortuary that blazed like alabaster in the California aridity but begged for bayous. He drove recklessly, with the expectation of relentless pursuit, which didn’t occur. He was also certain that his way would be blocked by the sudden arrival of swarms of police cars, but they still were not in sight when he raced between the open gates and out of the memorial park.
He drove under the Ventura Freeway, escaping into the suburban hive of the San Fernando Valley.
At a stoplight, quaking with tension, he watched a procession of a dozen street rods pass through the intersection, driven by the members of a car club on a Saturday outing: an era-perfect ’41 Buick Roadmaster, a ’47 Ford Sportsman Woodie with honey-maple paneling and black-cherry maroon paint, a ’32 Ford Roadster in Art Deco style with full road pants and chrome speed lines. Each of the twelve was a testament to the car as art: chopped, channeled, sectioned, grafted, some on dropped spindles, with custom grilles, reconfigured hoods, frenched headlights, raised and flared wheel wells, hand-formed fender skirts. Painted, pinstriped, polished passion rolling on rubber.
Watching the street rods, he felt a curious sensation in his chest, a loosening, a stretching, both painful and exhilarating.
A block later he passed a park where, in spite of the heat, a young family — with three laughing children — was playing Frisbee with an exuberant Golden Retriever.
Heart pounding, Joe slowed the Honda. He almost pulled to the curb to watch.
At a corner, two lovely blond college girls, apparently twins, in white shorts and crisp white blouses, waited to cross the street, holding hands, as cool as spring water in the furnace heat. Mirage girls. Ethereal in the smog-stained concrete landscape. As clean and smooth and radiant as angels.
Past the girls was a massive display of zauschneria alongside a Spanish-style apartment building, laden with gorgeous clusters of tubular scarlet flowers. Michelle had loved zauschneria. She had planted it in the backyard of their Studio City house.
The day had changed. Indefinably but unquestionably changed.
No. No, not the day, not the city. Joe himself had changed, was changing, felt change rolling through him, as irresistible as an ocean tide.
His grief was as great as it had been in the awful loneliness of the night, his despair as deep as he had ever known it, but though he had begun the day sunk in melancholy, yearning for death, he now wanted desperately to live. He needed to live.
The engine that drove this change wasn’t his close brush with death. Being shot at and nearly hit had not opened his eyes to the wonder and beauty of life. Nothing as simple as that.
Anger was the engine of change for him. He was bitterly angry not so much for what he had lost but angry for Michelle’s sake, angry that Michelle had not been able to see the parade of street rods with him, or the masses of red flowers on the zauschneria, or now, here, this colorful riot of purple and red bougainvillea cascading across the roof of a Craftsman-style bungalow. He was furiously, wrenchingly angry that Chrissie and Nina would never play Frisbee with a dog of their own, would never grow up to grace the world with their beauty, would never know the thrill of accomplishment in whatever careers they might have chosen or the joy of a good marriage — or the love of their own children. Rage changed Joe, gnashed at him, bit deep enough to wake him from his long trance of self-pity and despair.
How are you coping? asked the woman photographing the graves.
I’m not ready to talk to you yet, she said.
Soon. I’ll be back when it’s time, she promised, as though she had revelations to make, truths to reveal.
The men in Hawaiian shirts. The computer-nerd thug in the Quake T-shirt. The redhead and the brunette in the thong bikinis. Teams of operatives keeping Joe under surveillance, evidently waiting for the woman to contact him. A van packed solid with satellite-assisted tracking gear, directional microphones, computers, high-resolution cameras. Gunmen willing to shoot him in cold blood because…
Why?
Because they thought the black woman at the graves had told him something he wasn’t supposed to know? Because even being aware of her existence made him dangerous to them? Because they thought he might have come out of their van with enough information to learn their identities and intentions?
Of course he knew almost nothing about them, not who they were or what they wanted with the woman. Nevertheless, he could reach one inescapable conclusion: What he thought he knew about the deaths of his wife and daughters was either wrong or incomplete. Something wasn’t kosher about the story of Nationwide Flight 353.
He didn’t even need journalistic instinct to arrive at this chilling insight. On one level, he had known it from the moment that he saw the woman at the graves. Watching her snap photographs of the plot markers, meeting her compelling eyes, hearing the compassion in her soft voice, racked by the mystery of her words—I’m not ready to talk to you yet—he had known, by virtue of sheer common sense, that something was rotten.