Eleventh Hour

could disappear again. She slipped out the door, quietly closing it behind her.
    It was Savich, in a room three doors away, on the edge of sleep, who heard a car’s engine rev not far from their rooms. He was out of bed and standing naked in the Holiday Inn doorway, watching Dane’s rental car disappear out of the parking lot.

TWENTY-NINE
    Sherlock sighed. “Does she have any money?”
    “She can’t have much,” Dane said. “And that means that she’ll hitchhike. Oh damn, I take that all back. Nick’s not an idiot. Let me check.” He ran back into his room. After a couple of seconds he called out, “Does anyone have any handcuffs?”
    “Not on me,” Savich said.
    Dane was back in a moment, breathing hard. “When I catch up with her, I’m not going to rely on reason anymore. It’s time for brute force. Remind me to get some handcuffs from Detective Flynn. Here’s the deal. She didn’t just steal the car keys, she also has my AmEx and my SIG Sauer.” He stopped, looked momentarily baffled. “Why did she sneak out? Nothing’s really changed. Why?”
    Within ten minutes, Detective Flynn had an APB out on the Pontiac, driven by a young woman with shoulder-length blondish-brown hair, gray eyes, weight around one fifteen. Well, not just gray eyes, Dane thought, they were pure gray and large, with dark lashes. But she was thin, still too thin, although she looked better than she had when he’d first met her. Good God, it was just last Tuesday. And she was wearing a pair of dark brown slacks and a light brown sweater, he’d checked. Purse? Her purse was black leather, just like her short boots. Size seven and a half, yes, that was her exact shoe size. It was important to be accurate for the APB, and so he mentioned that her eyebrows were a dark brown, nicely arched. Jesus, he was losing it. She was about five-foot-eight-inches tall—well, maybe taller because she came nearly to Dane’s nose. Every officer in the LA area was alerted, in great detail.
    She’d taken all her clothes—all the clothes he’d bought her. He discovered very quickly that he’d never been so scared in his life. She was out there alone and she didn’t have any idea how to protect herself. She had his car and she had his gun. She wasn’t helpless, thank God. He was going to tie her down when he found her and not let her up unless they were handcuffed together.
    His healing arm itched. When his cell phone rang ten minutes later, he nearly fell over in his haste to get it.

    Nick left the Pontiac three miles from the Holiday Inn, in the middle of a long row of cars parked in front of an apartment complex. She locked it and left the keys on top of the front driver’s-side tire. Obvious place, but given Dane’s resources, the chances were that the police would retrieve the car before a thief decided he was hard up enough to steal it.
    His SIG Sauer felt heavy in her purse. She’d checked the clip. There was a full fifteen rounds in it. Other than that, she had twelve dollars and Dane’s AmEx. She didn’t quite feel like Rambo, but it was close enough.
    It wouldn’t be dawn for several more hours. No one had followed her from the Holiday Inn. It was dark and she was armed. With each passing minute there was more distance between her and both the bad guys and the good guys.
    She saw some kids in baggy pants on the corner of Pickett and Longsworth. They were probably dealing drugs. She didn’t even pause, just turned quickly and walked to the east. The freeway wasn’t more than a mile away and she’d flag down an eighteen-wheeler. She’d gotten to San Francisco riding high above the ground in big trucks and keeping company with at least a half dozen truck drivers. She’d even learned how to operate a CB.
    If she ran into a nut this time, she had the SIG Sauer. She flagged down a really big Foster Farms truck heading up I-5. A beefy guy named Tommy stopped because, he told her, he had to make it to Bakersfield, and he’d been driving without a stop for too long and was dead on his feet. Would she mind singing and talking to him until he let her out? She didn’t mind at all.
    He got her as far as Ventura County. “Hey,” he said, “I think we sing a pretty mean ‘Impossible Dream.’ ”
    An hour later, a smaller supply truck loaded with linens and bathroom supplies for one of the big ski lodges picked her up and began the climb to Mt. Pinos.
    It was cold in the Los Padres National Forest, but down at Bear Lake