The Eyes of Darkness

of the structure to the other, bursting those few windows that had miraculously survived the first blast.
    Tina watched, stunned, as flames leaped from a window of the house and ignited dry palm fronds on a nearby tree.
    Elliot pushed her away from the Mercedes so he could open the door on the passenger side. "Get in. Quick!"
    "But my house is on fire!"
    "You can't save it now."
    "We have to wait for the fire company."
    "The longer we stand here, the better targets we make."
    He grabbed her arm, swung her away from the burning house, the sight of which affected her as much as if it had been a hypnotist's slowly swinging pocket watch.
    "For God's sake, Tina, get in the car, and let's go before the shooting starts."
    Frightened, dazed by the incredible speed at which her world had begun to disintegrate, she did as he said.
    When she was in the car, he shut her door, ran to the driver's side, and climbed in behind the steering wheel.
    "Are you all right?" he asked.
    She nodded dumbly.
    "At least we're still alive," he said.
    He put the pistol on his lap, the muzzle facing toward his door, away from Tina. The keys were in the ignition. He started the car. His hands were shaking.
    Tina looked out the side window, watching in disbelief as the flames spread from the shattered garage roof to the main roof of the house, long tongues of lambent fire, licking, licking, hungry, bloodred in the last orange light of the afternoon.
     
     
     

19
     
    as elliot drove away from the burning house, his instinctual sense of danger was as sensitive as it had been in his military days. He was on the thin line that separated animal alertness from nervous frenzy.
    He glanced at the rearview mirror and saw a black van pull away from the curb, half a block behind them.
    "We're being followed," he said.
    Tina had been looking back at her house. Now she turned all the way around and stared through the rear window of the sports car. "I'll bet the bastard who rigged my furnace is in that truck."
    "Probably."
    "If I could get my hands on the son of a bitch, I'd gouge his eyes out."
    Her fury surprised and pleased Elliot. Stupefied by the unexpected violence, by the loss of her house, and by her close brush with death, she had seemed to be in a trance; now she had snapped out of it. He was encouraged by her resilience.
    "Put on your seat belt," he said. "We'll be moving fast and loose."
    She faced front and buckled up. "Are you going to try to lose them?"
    "I'm not just going to try."
    In this residential neighborhood the speed limit was twenty-five miles an hour. Elliot tramped on the accelerator, and the low, sleek, two-seat Mercedes jumped forward.
    Behind them the van dwindled rapidly, until it was a block and a half away. Then it stopped dwindling as it also accelerated.
    "He can't catch up with us," Elliot said. "The best he can hope to do is avoid losing more ground."
    Along the street, people came out of their houses, seeking the source of the explosion. Their heads turned as the Mercedes rocketed past.
    When Elliot rounded the corner two blocks later, he braked from sixty miles an hour to make the turn. The tires squealed, and the car slid sideways, but the superb suspension and responsive steering held the Mercedes firmly on four wheels all the way through the arc.
    "You don't think they'll actually start shooting at us?" Tina asked.
    "Hell if I know. They wanted it to appear as if you'd died in an accidental gas explosion. And I think they had a fake suicide planned for me. But now that they know we're on to them, they might panic, might do anything. I don't know. The only thing I do know is they can't let us just walk away."
    "But who—"
    "I'll tell you what I know, but later."
    "What do they have to do with Danny?"
    "Later," he said impatiently.
    "But it's all so crazy."
    "You're telling me?"
    He wheeled around another corner, and then another, trying to disappear from the men in the van long enough to leave them with so many choices of streets to follow that they would have to give up the chase in confusion. Too late, he saw the sign at the fourth intersection— not a through street —but they were already around the corner and headed down the narrow dead end, with nothing but a row of ten modest stucco houses on each side.
    "Damn!"
    "Better back out," she said.
    "And run right into them."
    "You've got the gun."
    "There's probably more than one of them, and they'll be armed."
    At the fifth house on the left, the garage door was