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When a car slows down on a freeway, a spreading wave of brake lights flickers on behind it; cars further back slow in response, and then cars behind them, and even when the original car has sped up again, the wave of deceleration continues to move backward. Sometimes the wave seems to take on a life of its own, and moves backward for miles.

Even on this Sunday afternoon, traffic on the 405 freeway curling down the California coast past Los Angeles International Airport was stop-and-go, and inland the northwest slant of the 5 had sluggish patches through Downey and Commerce; on “Old Man 10,” as the freeway-side gypsies called the Santa Monica Freeway, traffic had just resumed its normal sixty-mile-an-hour, twenty-five-cars-per-minute pace after one of the retro-waves had moved away down the lanes to the east, where it might reach Alameda or even cross the LA River before it would disperse.

The freeway-side oleander bushes on the shoulder shook now in the intermittent wind from fast-passing trucks, and a plastic water bottle flew away from the jaws of the hand-held pickup tool wielded by one of three men in white hard-hats and orange vinyl vests. Through protective dark glasses he squinted after the bottle as it skittered away along the dirt shoulder until it bounced off the post supporting a sign that read adopt a highway—this mile maintained by lady galvan taco wagons and was swept away in the once again rushing traffic.

The man sighed, hefted his white plastic bag and stepped back into the shade under the boughs of a pine tree, and took off his gloves and hard-hat. Three nylon-web beach chairs had been set up in a little clearing at the top of the embankment away from the freeway, and he sat down and used the pickup tool to grab a can of Coors beer from the ice chest in the center of the clearing; the jaws slid off the wet can, so he dropped the tool and leaned out of the chair to fish up the beer with his hand.

At the east side of the clearing, in the center of a ring of glass jars, a two-foot tall wooden metronome pole rocked rapidly back and forth on its wide metal base. A crudely whittled wooden head had been stuck onto the top of the metronome’s pendulum, and its glass-chip eyes glittered as it moved.

He looked past the thing, out over the receding rooftops and towers of central Los Angeles, and popped open the beer can. An intermittent breeze from below pushed the scent of citrus blossoms against the exhaust reek of the freeway behind him.

A man followed him into the clearing and dropped into another chair. He shed his gloves, took off his dark glasses and hard-hat and pushed back locks of damp white hair, then peered with raised eyebrows at the first man. “Gonna drive with beer on your breath?” he asked.

“You think she’ll have us driving today? We also serve who only pick up trash.”

The other man nodded past him at the wooden head on the jerking pendulum.

“That’s a heavy current, Vick. Any driving she wants done is gonna have to be by experts.”

“Spectral warming,” Vickery agreed reluctantly. He frowned toward the swinging metronome and then set the beer down in the dirt beside his chair. He reached under his orange vest and pulled out a cell phone and squinted at it. “Nothing yet,” he said; then sighed and waved behind him, toward the muted roar of the freeway lanes. “But yeah, Ramon, tell ’Turo we might as well clear out. Let’s sign off the log for the day and pack up the metronome and the trash bags—we’ll all probably be chauffeuring—”

The oleander branches on the west side of the clearing thrashed, and then a black-haired boy in jeans and a white T-shirt emerged from the greenery and stepped up beside Vickery’s chair. He was panting, and the leather bands he wore on his wrists were dark with sweat. Vickery knew him—the boy’s name was Santiago, and he was rumored to be a freelance watcher and courier.

The boy nodded down the slope. “Woman looking for you,” he said cheerfully, “gave me ten dollars to find you. Dressed nice, business woman, and she got a gun under her coat in the back, I can tell.” He brushed long green leaves out of his hair. “You give me ten dollars and I’ll tell her you’re nowhere around.”

Vickery’s fingertips were tingling as he quickly took off the dark glasses. “Is she a, a cop?” he asked, afraid that she might not be. “Did she know my name?”

“Cop or close enough, I think. No, she just say the guy who drove up in the taco wagon. She—ah, she comes up now, even with good shoes!”

Vickery stood up and tucked the glasses in his shirt pocket. He could hear someone scuffling up the embankment west of the clearing, behind the boy. “Is she alone?”

“I guess. Got out of a Chevy Caprice down on 20th.”

Ramon had got up too. He nodded toward Vickery and muttered, “This sounds personal. I’ll be out with ’Turo in the current.” Snatching up his hard-hat and gloves, he turned and hurried back out to the freeway shoulder in the daylight. Vickery heard him call to the other man, “Down the east side here—andele!”

“Loop around above,” Vickery told the boy quietly, “where you can see her, and whistle if she drops the gun. Ten bucks for you.” The boy nodded and followed Ramon out of the clearing, and Vickery turned toward the slope and called, “You’re covered from two directions, lady—take out the gun and drop it.”

The sound of clumsy shuffling in the dirt stopped, but there was no other sound.

“Counting down,” Vickery called harshly.

Three seconds later Vickery heard the boy’s whistle and then a muttered curse from the shrubbery ahead.

“Okay,” Vickery went on, “come forward.”

His eyes narrowed and his face was suddenly cold when the woman pushed her way through the oleander branches into the clearing—she was paler now than when he had last seen her four years ago, and there were new lines in her cheeks; it occurred to him that she must be at least thirty by now. She wore a navy blue jacket and gray trousers and low-heeled gray pumps, and her short auburn hair was in disarray from her passage through the freeway-side bushes.

Vickery was tense, and ready to jump in any direction, but he nodded. “Miss . . . Castine,” he said, remembering.

“Mr. Woods,” she replied, a bit breathlessly. Her forehead was misted with sweat. “I don’t think you really had me covered.”

“Santiago, fetch the gun,” Vickery called; then said to her, “I will in a moment.” It was an effort to keep his voice level. “Do you have back-up, are you . . . arresting me?”

“You idiot.” She shook her head and went on, clearly angry, “They may very well arrest me. Early this morning we got a—” She paused for a moment, pursing her lips—and, Vickery thought, blushing—then went on, “—a sort of lead on you, and they checked it out, and a couple of hours ago they found your fingerprints in that apartment on Carson in Culver City. I had to find you and stop you from going back there.”

“Four years ago you helped arrest me.”

She inhaled impatiently through clenched teeth. “Oh, it’s different now. Or I know more now. This isn’t a safe place either—you need to get out of here.”

But Vickery stepped to the north end of the clearing and glanced down the embankment to the service road that ran behind the back walls of a closed bowling alley and a thrift store. From this elevation he could see most of the cars parked on the two nearest north-south streets, and he didn’t see any obvious signs of occupants or idling engines. If this is a trap, he thought, it’s needlessly elaborate.

He turned back to her; she was standing right behind him now, peering down past his shoulder at the streets as he had been doing. “How did you find me?” he asked.

She stepped back, throwing a quick glance at the glass jars and the rocking metronome. “Are you hearing me? You’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to get out of here, I was sitting in my car down there for too long, working up nerve to climb up here and do this—will you tell your, your Santiago to give me back my gun? They’re looking for you at the Carson Street apartment, but our chief routinely has two-man teams checking out these . . . freeway nests, looking for spots with particularly good depth of field.”

She took a step back toward the shrubbery, then stopped; he hadn’t followed her. She stamped her foot. “What does it—oh hell, what it was, I remembered you said you went to Latin mass on Sundays, and I figured maybe you still do. I Googled it after they all drove off toward Culver City, and Archangel Gabriel Chapel is the Latin-mass-type Catholic church closest to your apartment, so I went there and saw you. I followed you to that kitchen place on Western, and then when you got in your truck I followed you here.”

“What would you have done if I’d headed straight back from church to the apartment?”

“I don’t know. Honked. Collided with you. You’re lucky—I’m not lucky, but you are—that I even recognized you—your hair’s longer now, and you’re a lot darker.” In spite of her evident anxiety, she almost smiled. “And you used to be kind of chubby for a Secret Service agent.”

“I had a better appetite then.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “You go ahead, scoot. Thanks. I have to check out the local weather.”

“I need my gun.”

“Give me ten seconds.”

He crossed to the ring of glass jars around the rocking metronome and crouched beside the one farthest from the freeway. It was half filled with water, and a popsicle stick with a string tied around its middle had been laid across the top of the jar; the string, visibly wet, hung down to within an inch of the water’s surface.

Over his shoulder he told her, “Look at this.”

“For God’s suffering sake!” Castine whispered, but she hurried over and crouched beside him. “What?”

“Watch the water.”

After a few seconds a bump appeared on the surface of the water, and then it formed a drop that fell upward and soaked into the string.

Castine gave a huff of surprise.

“It’s arcing,” explained Vickery. “Amplified possibility field. Stuff rides on that. I’d rather not drive on the freeways right now if I’m not getting paid for it.”

“I,” she whispered, “hate all this shit.”

They both stood up and crossed quickly to the other side of the clearing, and Vickery lifted a leafy branch out of her way. “Santiago,” he called, “bring the gun down here.”

Castine stumbled ahead of him down the narrow winding path through the overgrown bushes, stepping over old beer cans and diapers. “I left my phone and my pager at the office,” she said, “I’ve got to get back there and hope they don’t look at the GPS record on my car. They don’t know about your taco wagon connection—get into it and disappear.” She paused to look back at Vickery, brushing damp hair back from her forehead. “Where’s that Santiago?”

Vickery lifted his head. “Santiago! Ten more bucks!” After a few seconds he shrugged and waved ahead. “Gun’s worth more than ten bucks, I’m afraid.”

Castine rolled her eyes, and Vickery thought she was near tears. “Damn you people! I’ve got three hundred, but if things go wrong I can’t get much more, even if I can get to a Versatel.”

“Your call.”

“Santiago!” she yelled at the clustered greenery uphill. “Three hundred, right now, cash—or I report it stolen! And it’s government issue!”

“Keep moving,” said Vickery. “He’ll be down there on the service road, or not.”

Castine exhaled and resumed edging down the path. “Have you got a gun?”

“Haven’t touched one in four years.”

Below the tangled plantings on the freeway-side crest, the embankment was just littered dirt, and Santiago rode a bicycle down the slope to their left, kicking up dust in the sunlight.

Vickery and Castine made their way down the last few yards at a clopping run, their arms out to the sides, and Santiago, on the cracked service road pavement now, swerved his bike in a half-circle to meet them. The boxy brown-and-gold food truck stood a dozen yards away, by the thrift store loading dock, and its perpetual aroma of spicy carne asada contended with the rotten-strawberries reek of a nearby Dumpster.

“Lady wanna buy a pencil sharpener?” Santiago asked merrily.

Castine didn’t answer, but pulled a leather billfold from an inside jacket pocket and quickly passed the boy a sheaf of bills. He counted them, then lifted his T-shirt and pulled a stainless steel semi-automatic handgun from the waistband of his jeans and held it out. Vickery recognized it as a SIG-Sauer P229, probably .40 caliber.

She tucked the billfold away, then took the gun and reached around with both hands to hike up the back of her jacket—but a moment later she was staring past Vickery, and her eyes widened and she quickly swung both hands to the front, holding the gun pointed at him.

“Play along and say nothing!” she snapped.

Vickery’s chest felt suddenly hollow, and after a moment he slowly raised his hands. Santiago was just sitting on his bicycle, his brown eyes darting back and forth. Vickery heard a car door slam, and then footsteps knocking on the concrete behind him.

The muzzle of Castine’s gun was shaking, and she was whispering, “Fuck fuck fuck . . .”

A man stepped into Vickery’s view on the left; he was wearing a long-sleeve white shirt and a dark tie, and he was holding a gun like Castine’s. He stepped back and aimed it at Vickery’s stomach.

“What have we got, Castine?” he asked, then squinted closely at Vickery. “Damn, it’s . . . Woods, isn’t it?” he said wonderingly as another man appeared on Vickery’s right, also in a white shirt and tie and also now aiming a SIG-Sauer at him. “How the hell?”

“That’s Woods?” said the second man. “Here? He sure looks like shit these days. Probably been living in the shrubbery, not that apartment.” He freed one hand from the grip of his pistol and unclipped a cell phone from his belt. He tapped the screen and said into it, “We’ve got Woods!—out by one of the nests along the 10. We’re right by the car.”

“It’s my arrest, Mike,” said Castine unsteadily as the man reclipped the phone to his belt. “I’ll take him in.”

“Stand down, Castine,” Mike told her. “Terry and I have got this. You and the kid get out of here right now.”

“I’m taking it,” she insisted, and Mike turned his head to say something to her. The other man darted a quick glance at them.

Four years ago Vickery had memorably been in a situation very like this one, and now the remembered actions took over.

He spun on the ball of his left foot, crouching as his right leg shot out and his sneakered foot struck the gun and clenched hands of the man on his left, Terry. The gun was kicked upward and went off with an earsplitting pop, and Vickery was instantly following through with a lunge, grabbing the gun barrel and tumbling against the man; he hooked a leg behind Terry’s knee to pitch him over backward, and the man’s hands were still loosely gripping the gun in front of him when the back of his head struck the pavement with a solid knock.

Vickery fell on top of him, and had just pried the gun out of Terry’s limp hands when a patch of concrete beside his head exploded in the same instant that another gunshot shook the air.

He lost the remembered sequence and just froze, his ears ringing and the breath stopped in his throat, and then a foot in a polished wing-tip shoe kicked the gun away.

“No!” came an anguished shout from Castine, and Vickery lifted his head to see Santiago pedaling his bicycle away very fast, and Mike leveling his gun in that direction. His finger was inside the trigger guard.

And this time it was this woman, Castine, who now fired her gun twice, and as the echoes batted away between the freeway embankment and the thrift store wall, Mike took two quick steps back and then abruptly sat down on the pavement and fell over onto his right side. Vickery saw blood on the back of the man’s neck and his white shirt collar, and he looked away.

Santiago kept pedaling his bicycle, and within seconds had disappeared around the corner of the bowling alley.

For a long moment Vickery stared at Terry’s gun gleaming in the sunlight a few feet away on the pavement, and he knew he had no choice now but to take it; and even before he reached out and slid his fingers around the grip, his hand knew the feel and the weight of it.

Then Castine had kicked him in the shoulder. “Get up, get up!” He rolled to his feet, and immediately she had caught his elbow and turned him around. A new Chevrolet Caprice, empty, was parked behind the Galvan food truck.

“Out of here in your taco wagon,” she gasped. “GPS tracking on all their cars.”

“Right.”

The two of them hurried back to the gaudy vehicle, but while Castine clambered in on the passenger side, Vickery tossed Terry’s gun onto the driver’s seat, then stepped to the wide left-side face of the truck, squinting up at the top edge, where a long steel cylinder extended from just behind the driver’s side window to the vertical back rail.

“Come on!” called Castine shrilly.

Vickery jumped and caught hold of two handles that dangled from the rooftop cylinder, and he pulled down a wide brown canvas sheet that concealed the vivid painting and lettering on the side of the truck. He fitted the handles around hooks at the bottom edge, then hurried around and did the same thing on the other side.

“Concealment,” he panted when he had climbed into the driver’s seat. He pushed the gun up under the dashboard, and when he withdrew his hand the gun stayed there. “Can’t have anybody noting a Galvan truck leaving here.” It bothered him to see that his hands were shaking.

The engine started at the first twist of the ignition key, and a few seconds later the truck had rocked down the service road and around a curve and made a left turn onto Washington Avenue. Vickery’s cheek stung, and when he touched it he saw blood on his fingers. That shot that struck the pavement right next to my head, he thought. Lucky a cement fragment didn’t hit my eye.

“You were supposed to cover Mike,” he said, “when I took Terry.”

A tiny metronome was glued to the truck’s dashboard, and as the truck rocked over uneven pavement its pendulum occasionally clicked back and forth.

Castine just exhaled and shook her head. “Is Terry dead too?”

“I don’t know.” After a pause, he said, “You didn’t take the other guy’s gun?”

“Of course not. You were crazy to take Terry’s. Think.”

“I had to.” To keep moving, now, he thought.

The breeze through the open window was sharp with diesel fumes. Midday sun glittered on close bumpers and back windows, and he steered into the right lane and idled along at thirty miles per hour, passing Mexican restaurants and Korean auto body shops and heavily bearded palm trees swaying over cracked sidewalks.

Castine was flexing her right hand in front of her face. “What did I just do?” she said softly. “Why? Oh, God, I wish it was ten minutes ago!”

Vickery took a quick glance at her. “Where’s your car?”

“Oh—I don’t think I dare go near it now.”

“You want me to drop you someplace?”

For several seconds she didn’t speak. Finally, staring straight out through the windshield, she said, “I tracked you down at that church this morning, and then I sat for half an hour—I shouldn’t have, as it turns out, but I sat for half an hour in my car back there before I could make myself climb that hill—I was deciding whether I should break the law and probably commit treason, to save you. And then I, I did. And—killed Mike Abbott! And now they’ll probably—” Her voice had grown hoarse, and she just waved toward the traffic ahead.

“Why did you save me?”

“It was insane, I should not have.” She took a deep breath. “But when I helped them arrest you four years ago, in that Presidential motorcade on Wilshire, I didn’t know that they meant to simply execute you. You killed those two agents afterward in self-defense, didn’t you?”

Vickery squinted against the memory that this recent action had forcefully roused. “Yes,” he said.

She went on, “Just like I, God help me, killed Mike to save that . . . worthless boy. And whatever you are now, four years ago when you were standing post at that motorcade on Wilshire, you were a . . . clean, straight, dedicated Secret Service agent. You didn’t deserve what happened to you, just because you . . .”

“Talked to a dead guy, on the radio of the Countermeasures Suburban, in that motorcade.”

“Yes. That’s what you did. And they didn’t want, they don’t want, you to have heard whatever it was that the dead guy said.”

Vickery exhaled one syllable of a laugh. “I don’t even remember what it said. A quote from a poem, I think, or maybe the Bible.”

“And there was noise in the background,” she said dully. “Like pulsing, booming.”

He raised his eyebrows. “I’d forgotten that. But yes, there was.”

She shifted on the vinyl seat to look squarely at him. “Mr. Woods,” she began, in a voice that was shaky but resolute.

“It’s Vickery now. Sebastian Vickery.”

“I’d rather talk to Mr. Woods. I remember him. They were all sent out to kill you today, and I saved your life—twice! I stopped you from going back to your apartment, and I stopped them from taking you a couple of minutes ago. And now I’m in big trouble—they’ll at least be able to see I was there, my car . . .”

Her voice had gone hoarse again, and she looked down at her clenched hands. After a while she sighed deeply and said, “There’s a, an attorney, who’ll help me. He’s my fiancé. He might, he’ll probably help you too. If I ask him to.”

The traffic light ahead was green, but the food truck was behind a bus that had stopped at the curb. Vickery waited patiently for the bus to move forward. “I’m past the point of attorneys,” he said. “But you can use my phone.”

She nodded, then shook her head. “No—damn it!—even from a prepaid throwaway I don’t dare call him. Terracotta, that’s my boss, he’ll be . . . looking at my fiancé’s phone records now, scrutinizing every call he gets, starting with ten minutes ago, and he’ll certainly track every call that originates in the LA area. A call from a burner phone would rouse his suspicions—and a call from your phone would lead him to you.”

Vickery started to speak, but she waved him to silence.

“My guy’s in Baltimore,” she went on, “he couldn’t do anything today anyway. And right now I can’t check into a hotel, or use a credit card anywhere, or even show up on the security cameras at 7-Elevens.” She inhaled sharply at a sudden thought, then swung the visor to the side and flipped it down, and sat up straighter. “Or at traffic intersections!”

The bus moved forward, and Vickery lifted his foot from the brake. “What do you—”

“You’ve lived off their radar for four years, here.” She was glaring at him now. “You know how to. I don’t. But they’re after you, and I know how they work.” She shivered visibly. “I need to hide, and get out of Los Angeles as quick as possible, and I need help to do it. Will you help me?”

Vickery kept his face impassive as he steered north on Western, heading back to the commissary where the Galvan trucks parked. Castine had said that her people didn’t know about his connection with Galvan, and that seemed likely—he rented the apartment under a different identity, claiming a fictitious job, and Galvan didn’t fingerprint her employees, and the two men who had tried to arrest him a few minutes ago had clearly not been looking for him.

“Will you help me?” she repeated.

So she has to leave LA now, he thought. I don’t; and I might have to, or worse, if I get involved in her problems. And it would be hard to go dark in a new city. I’ve known the secret terrain of LA for decades—as a cop, as a field office Secret Service agent, and lately as a spectral-evasion driver. Can I really afford to take this woman under my wing, even briefly? My compromised, melting-wax wing?

She did save my life. Does that sort of thing even still count with me?

For another several seconds he just squinted at the cars and trucks in the lanes ahead.

At last he sighed. “All right.”



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