The Watchman Read Free Page A

hand on her thigh.
    “Larkin, look at me.”
    She clenched her eyes and kneaded her hands.
    “Three men just died. Three more men.”
    He made his deep voice soft.
    “I won’t let anything happen to you. Do you hear me?”
    She still didn’t look.
    “Do you believe me?”
    She nodded.
    Pike swerved through an intersection. He slowed only enough to avoid a collision, then accelerated onto the freeway.
    They had been at the house in Eagle Rock for twenty-eight minutes. He had killed three more men, and now they were running. Again.
    He was sorry he lost the Colt. It was a good gun. It had saved them last night in Malibu, but now it might get them killed.
     
     
     

2
     
     
    BLASTING NORTH on the 101. Pike gave no warning before horsing across four lanes of traffic to the exit ramp. They fell off the freeway like a brick dropped in water.
    Larkin screamed.
    They hit the bottom of the ramp sideways, Pike turning hard across oncoming lanes. Horns and tires shrieked as Pike turned again up the opposite on-ramp, back the way they had come. The girl was hugging her legs, hunched into a knot like they tell you to do when an airplane is going to crash.
    Pike pushed the Jeep to the next exit, then pegged the brakes at the last moment and fell off again, checking the rearview even as they fell.
    The girl moaned.
    “Stop it. Stop—Jesus, you’re going to get us killed.”
    They came out by USC, busy with afternoon traffic. Pike cut into the Chevron station at the bottom of the ramp, wheeling around the pump islands and office, then jammed to a stop. They sat, engine running, Pike pushing bullets into the Kimber’s magazine as he studied the cars coming down the ramp. This time of day the ramp filled fast. Pike studied the passengers in each vehicle, but none acted like killers on the hunt.
    “Did you recognize the men at the house?”
    “This is insane. We’re killing people.”
    “The one in the front yard, you passed him. Have you seen him before?”
    “I couldn’t—God, it happened—no.”
    Pike let it go. She hadn’t seen the two he killed earlier, either; just dark smudges falling. Pike himself had barely seen them: coarse men in their twenties or thirties, black T-shirts and pistols, cut by bars of shadow and light.
    Pike’s cell phone vibrated, but he ignored it. He backed from the end of the building, then turned away from the freeway, picking up speed as he grew confident they weren’t being followed.
    Ten blocks later, Pike eased into a strip mall, one of those places where the stores went out of business every two months. He turned past the end of the mall into a narrow alley and saw nothing but dumpsters and potholes.
    Pike shut the engine, got out, circled the Jeep, and opened her door.
    “Get out.”
    She didn’t move fast enough, so he pulled her out, keeping her upright because she would have fallen.
    “Hey! What—
stop it!”
    “Did you call someone?”
    “No.”
    He pinned her against the Jeep with his hip as he searched her pockets for a cell phone. She tried to push him away, but he ignored her.
    “Stop that—how could I call? I was with you, you freak. Stop—”
    He snatched her floppy Prada bag from the floorboard and dumped the contents onto the seat.
    “You
freak
! I don’t have a phone. You took it!”
    He searched the pockets in her purse, then pulled her duffel from the backseat.
    “I didn’t call anybody. I don’t have a phone!”
    Pike finished going through her things, then stared at her, thinking.
    “What?
Why are you staring at me?
”
    “They found us.”
    “I don’t know how they found us!”
    “Let me see your shoes.”
    “What?”
    He pushed her backwards into the Jeep and pulled off her shoes. This time she didn’t resist. She sank back onto the seat, watching him as he lifted her feet.
    Pike wondered if they had placed a transponder on her. Maybe she had been bugged from the beginning, which was how the U.S. Marshals and Bud Flynn had almost lost her. Pike