“I’m Artie, by the way,” the tech said, stretching out his hand.
“Nice to meet you,” I said, shaking it.
“My uncle Chris has a Disaster Master franchise. You want me to call him? He can get this place cleaned up, like, pronto. I mean, you’ll go to the head of the line, Lieutenant. You’re one of us.”
I thanked Artie and took him up on his offer. Then I grabbed my handbag and took Martha out the back way. I fed Miss Piggy, then circled around to the patrol car in the driveway and ducked my head to window level.
“Noonan, right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Still on duty?”
“Yes, ma’am. We’ll be here for a while. The whole squad is watching out for you, Lieutenant. The chief and all of us. This really stinks.”
“I appreciate the concern.”
And I did. Harsh daylight only made the shooting more real. Someone had driven down this sweet suburban street, raking Cat’s house with automatic gunfire.
I was unnerved, and until I got my composure back, I had to get away from here. I jingled my car keys so that Martha flattened her ears and nearly wagged her tail off.
“We need groceries,” I said to her. “What do you say we take the Bonneville on a shakedown cruise?”
Chapter 114
MARTHA JUMPED ONTO THE bench-style front seat of the “big gold boat.” I strapped in and turned the key. The engine caught on the second try, and I pointed the Bonneville’s aristocratic nose toward town.
I was going to the gourmet grocer on Main Street, but as I made my way along the crosshatched streets of Cat’s neighborhood, I became gradually aware of a blue Taurus sedan in my rearview mirror. It seemed to be deliberately lagging behind me but keeping up all the same.
That creepy feeling of being watched tickled my spine again.
Was I being tailed?
Or was I in such a state I just kept seeing myself as a pop-up figure in a shooting gallery?
I took Magnolia across the highway and onto Main, where I whizzed past all the little shops: the Music Hut, the Moon News, the Feed and Fuel store. I wanted to convince myself that I was just being skittish, but damn—if I lost that Taurus for a block or two, it was behind me at the next turn.
“Hang on tight. We’re going for a ride,” I said to Martha, who was smiling broadly into the wind.
Toward the end of Main, I hooked a right onto Route 92, Half Moon Bay’s umbilical cord to the rest of California.
Traffic was going fast on this winding two-laner, and I merged into a bumper-to-bumper chain of cars going fifty in a twenty-five-mile-per-hour zone. The double yellow line went the distance—a full five miles of no-passing lane as 92 crossed the reservoir and linked up with the freeway.
I drove on, dimly aware of the hillside of scrubby trees and chaparral on my left and the twenty-foot drop a few feet from the right side of my car. Three cars behind, the blue sedan kept me in sight.
I wasn’t crazy. I had a tail.
Was it a scare tactic?
Or was the shooter inside that car, waiting for an opportunity for a clear hit?
The end of 92 intersected with Skyline, and at the near right-hand corner was a rest stop with five picnic tables and a gravel parking lot.
I didn’t signal for a turn, just hauled right on my steering wheel. I wanted to get off the road, let that Taurus pass me so that I could see his face, get his plate number. Get out of his sights.
But instead of gripping the road as my Explorer would have done, the Bonneville fishtailed across the gravel, sending me back out onto 92, across the double yellow line and into the stream of oncoming traffic.
The Taurus must have passed me, but I never saw it.