"Come on," she said. She pulled him around the edge of the fence to the next apartment building and waited.
"I still can’t see his face," he whispered.
"The guy in the apartment building will come out and get into the car with his buddy. The second they’re around the corner, we sprint for our car. If they go to the police station, we forget it."
"If I have to sprint, we can forget it now. What if they go somewhere else?"
"We’ll see." Jane was preoccupied. If the killers were still here, they must be waiting for John, and that meant he was alive. It occurred to her that the pattern was to frame John for everything they could think of. Maybe the man had planted something that had belonged to John in the apartment. But why would he take pictures? And how could he expect to plant something after the police had already spent days going over everything? Nothing she thought of made sense.
Then she saw the man. She touched Jake’s shoulder. The man walked casually, his arms swinging and his head up, almost skipping down the three steps from the building to the sidewalk. He stepped across the lawn to the car. Jane whispered, "When he opens the door."
When the man grasped the handle and pulled, the dome light came on. It took three full seconds for him to swing it open, sit down in the passenger seat, and swing it shut again. They were both in their mid-thirties, dark-haired.
"It’s them," said Jake.
The car moved ahead slowly a hundred feet before the headlights came on. At the comer it turned right. "Let’s go," she said, and they hurried down the steps to their car.
Jake held both shotguns across his lap while Jane wheeled the car around and went after them. At the first block, she glanced down the long street on her left and saw nothing, and then the next, and the next. On the fourth street she saw a set of taillights a block away, so she followed them. "I hope it’s the right car."
"I think so," said Jake. "It’s green like the other one."
The car pulled straight across Milpas to the freeway entrance ramp, and then the light changed and Jane couldn’t follow. She kept moving, turned right onto Milpas to the next intersection, extended a left turn into a U to come back at the light, turned right, and came up the ramp.
The green car was far ahead now, and Jane pushed the rented car up to seventy until she could see the two dark heads in the back window, then dropped back and let a station wagon pass her. She went along behind it for a while and then let a big shiny steel tanker truck slip in front of her, too. "I can’t see him anymore," said Jake.
"And he can’t see us," she answered. "Just watch the exit ramps to the right."
Most of the familiar parts of town had slipped past them when the car suddenly moved to the right and coasted up the ramp at Sueño Street. Jane kept her direction for as long as she could before she too peeled out of the traffic and coasted up the ramp. What caught her eye now was the big blue sign at the end of the ramp that said SHERIFF. Maybe she had just stumbled on to something that had nothing to do with anybody, the local cops spying on each other. But the green car kept going past the lighted one-story sheriff’s complex, and past a taller building with a sign that said COUNTY ADMINISTRATION and an older, bigger one that said HOSPITAL, and then turned around in the street and came back at them. Jane said, "Get ready," speeded up, and flashed past the car as it came down the road back toward Santa Barbara. She took her foot off the gas pedal and kept going slowly, watching the car in her mirror.
It moved along a road parallel to the freeway, then turned to get back onto it. "Do you think they were trying to lose us or to see us?" asked Jake.
"I don’t know," she said. She turned around quickly and speeded up the road after it. "I think it was just a precaution."
The car kept going back through town and left the freeway at the Cabrillo Boulevard exit. Jane followed it, keeping the distance as great as she could without losing it. But instead of staying on the winding road past the bird sanctuary and on to the beaches and the harbor, it turned left toward Montecito.
Jane watched it until it moved up one of the little streets below the freeway. She pulled the car to the side of the road and turned out the lights.
’’This doesn’t feel right," she said.
"You think they know we’re following them?"
"You’re sure those are the men who tried to break into my house?"
"Positive."
’’The last time I saw them, they did something like this. They went ahead on a dark country road and waited for us." Jake was silent, so she took a deep breath. "Okay. Then we’re at crazy time now."
"What’s that?"
"I can’t just let them go away this time. They killed Harry. If they go now, chances are they’ll get John, too, sooner or later. Do you understand?"
"You’re saying you’re going to follow two killers up a dark road that’s probably a dead end," he said. "Sounds perfectly sensible to me."
"No, I’m saying it’s time for you to get out."
"You know anybody who does what you tell them to?".
"Lots of them."
"Oh," he said. "Should have brought them."
She drove ahead and pulled over on the gravel shoulder at the end of the street where the car had disappeared. Jake wrapped the two shotguns in his coat and got out of the car.
They hurried away from the roadside, into the darkness, where headlights wouldn’t reach them. Jane knew that walking along the road, even twenty feet from it, was probably what the men wanted them to do. There was a low fence beside her, with thick shrubs and vines entangled above it. She pushed some of the plants aside and stepped over, then held them so Jake could climb over too. When she looked around her, the land she saw didn’t seem to have the silhouette of a house on it. There was a long, curved plot of open grass. She moved along the fence in the direction the car had gone.
As they walked she began to feel more sure. They would be up ahead somewhere, waiting just out of sight of the road. When she had walked along the fence for a hundred feet, she saw the green car. It was on the other side of the field, just below the elevated hill that carried the freeway, parked behind a big grove of trees, its lights off, just about where it would be if the men were waiting for someone to drive up the dark street outside the fence into an ambush. She crossed the lawn above it and looked down.
"What is this?" asked Jake.
"I don’t know. A park or golf course or something," she said. She reached out and tapped the bundle Jake had wrapped in his coat.
He handed her one of the shotguns and put his coat on.
"Last chance," she said.
"No talking," he whispered.
Suddenly, there was a rattle of a car starting, but it came from the wrong place. Jane pulled Jake to the ground and aimed her shotgun toward the sound. There was a second car. This one was white. It was up along the hedge at the edge of the field, and now it was slowly moving along toward them. She pushed the safety off with her trigger finger and then put her hand on Jake’s sleeve. "Not yet."
The car moved closer and closer to them. She waited for the lights to come on, the window to come down. As it drifted past them, she kept her hand on Jake’s arm. She could hear the soft swish of its tires on the grass. She looked up and saw there was someone in the passenger seat beside the driver. On the bumper there was some kind of rental sticker, and then the car was going on into the darkness. There had to be a gate somewhere in that direction. In a moment she saw it coming back up outside the fence. She ducked down before the lights went on, and then it was gone.
She took her hand off Jake’s arm and started to make her way toward the green car, with Jake at her side. They moved onto the grass and approached the car from the side, keeping low along the hedge at the edge of the lawn. Jane touched Jake and put her mouth close to his ear. "Get down and get ready. If somebody shoots, take your time. You’re invisible until you pull the trigger."