Shadowfires

think so.”
    “Yes,” Reese agreed.
    “Good God,” Mulveck said, “do you realize how black, how bitter,
how deep this hatred must be? Whoever he is, what could Mrs. Leben
possibly have done to make him hate her like that? What sort of
enemies does she have?”
    “Very dangerous enemies,” Julio said.
“That's all I know. And… if we don't find her quickly, we won't find her alive.”
    The photographer's camera flashed.
    The corpse seemed to twitch.
    Flash, twitch.
    Flash, twitch.

----
11 GHOST
STORY
    When the right front tire blew, Benny hardly
slowed. He wrestled with the wheel and drove another half block. The
Mercedes thumped and shuddered and rocked along, crippled but
cooperative.
    No headlights appeared behind them. The pursuing Cadillac had not
yet turned the corner two blocks back. But it would. Soon.
    Benny kept looking desperately left and right.
    Rachael wondered what sort of bolthole he was searching for.
    Then he found it: a one-story stucco house with a for SALE sign in
the front yard, set on a big half-acre lot, grass unmown, separated
from its neighbors by an eight-foot-high concrete-block wall that was
also finished in stucco and that afforded some privacy. There were
lots of trees on the property as well, and overgrown shrubbery in
need of a gardener's attention.
    “Eureka,” Benny said.
    He swung into the driveway, then pulled across one corner of the
lawn and around the side of the house. In back, he parked on a
concrete deck, under a redwood patio cover. He switched off the
headlights, the engine.
    Darkness fell over them.
    The car's hot metal made soft pinging sounds as it cooled.
    The house was unoccupied, so no one came out to see what was
happening. And because the place was screened from the neighbors on
both sides by the wall and trees, no alarm was raised from those
sources, either.
    Benny said, “Give me your gun.”
    From her perch behind the seats, Rachael handed over the
pistol.
    Sarah Kiel was watching them, still trembling, still afraid, but
no longer in a trance of terror. The violence of the chase seemed to
have jolted her out of her preoccupation with her memories of other,
earlier violence.
    Benny opened his door and started to get out.
    Rachael said, “Where are you going?”
    “I want to make sure they go past and don't double back. Then I've
got to find another car.”
    “We can change the tire-”
    “No. This heap's too easy to spot. We need something ordinary.”
    “But where will you get another car?”
    “Steal it,” he said. “You just sit tight, and I'll be back as soon as I can.”
    He closed his door softly, sprinted back the way they had come,
slipped around the corner of the house, and was gone.
Scuttling in a half crouch along the side of
the house, Ben heard a chorus of distant sirens. Police cars and
ambulances were probably still converging on Palm Canyon Drive, a
mile or two away, where the bullet-riddled cops had ridden their
cruiser through the windows of a boutique.
    Ben reached the front of the house and saw the Cadillac coming
along the street. He dove into a lush planting bed at the corner and
cautiously peered between branches of the overgrown oleander bushes,
which were heavily laden with pink flowers and poisonous berries.
    The Caddy cruised slowly by, giving him a chance to ascertain that
there were three men inside. He could see only one clearly-the guy in
the front passenger's seat, who had a receding hairline, a mustache, blunt features, and a mean slash of a mouth.
    They were looking for the red Mercedes, of course, and they were
smart enough to know that Ben might have tried to slip into a shadowy
niche and wait until they had gone past. He hoped to God that he had
not left obvious tire tracks across the short stretch of unmown lawn
that
he'd traversed between the driveway and the side of the house. It was dense Bermuda grass, highly resilient, and it hadn't
been watered as regularly as it should have been, so it was badly
blotched with brown patches, which provided a natural camouflage to
further conceal the marks of the
Mercedes's passage. But the men in the Caddy might be trained hunters who could spot the most subtle signs of their quarry's
trail.
    Hunkering in the bushy oleander, still wearing his thoroughly
inappropriate suit trousers, vest, white shirt, and tie with the knot
askew, Ben felt ridiculous. Worse, he felt hopelessly inadequate to
meet the challenge confronting him.
He'd been a