The Husband

heart attack."
    He had hoped to be able to pull the car into the driveway and leave it where he'd found it, with nobody the wiser. But a woman had come out of the house into the street. She spotted him turning the corner.
    She looked terrified. She must have thought that Norman had gotten behind the wheel.
    "YOU'RE A BAD SONOFABITCH, A BAD, BAD SONOFABITCH!"
    Mitch stopped in the street near the woman, put the car in park, tramped on the emergency brake, grabbed the trash bag, and got out, leaving the door open behind him.
    Fortysomething, slightly stout, she was an attractive woman with Rod Stewart hair that a beautician had painstakingly streaked with blond highlights. She wore a business suit and heels too high to be sensible for a trip to the pie store.
    "Are you Debbie?" Mitch asked.
    Bewildered, she said, "Am I Debbie?"
    Maybe there was no Debbie.
    Norman still shrieked in the car, and Mitch said, "I'm so sorry. Big mistake."
    He walked away from her, toward the first of the four corners around which he had driven Norman, and heard her say "Grandpapa? Are you all right, Grandpapa?"
    When he reached the stop sign, he turned and saw the woman leaning in the car, comforting the old man.
    Mitch rounded the corner and hurried out of her line of sight. Not running. Walking briskly.
    A block later, as he reached the next corner, a horn blared behind him. The woman was pursuing him in the Lexus.
    He could see her through the windshield: one hand on the wheel, the other holding a cell phone. She was not calling her sister in Omaha. She was not calling for a time check. She was calling 911.

Chapter 62

     
    Leaning into the resisting wind, Mitch hurried along the sidewalk, and miraculously escaped being stung when a violent gust shook a cloud of bees out of a tree nest.
    The determined woman in the Lexus stayed far enough back that she could hang a U-turn and elude him if he changed directions and sprinted toward her, but she maintained sight of him. He started to run, and she accelerated to match his pace.
    Evidently she intended to keep him located until the police arrived. Mitch admired her guts even though he wanted to shoot out her tires.
    The cops would be here soon. Having found his Honda, they knew that he was in the area. The attempted theft of a Lexus just a few blocks from the gun shop would ring all their bells.
    The car horn blared, blared again, and then relentlessly. She hoped to alert her neighbors to the presence of a criminal in their midst. The over-the-top urgency of the horn blasts suggested Osama bin Laden was loose on the street.
    Mitch left the sidewalk, crossed a yard, opened a gate, and hurried around the side of a house, hoping he wouldn't find a pit bull in the backyard. No doubt most pit bulls were as nice as nuns, but considering the way his luck was cutting, he wouldn't run into Sister Pit but instead would stumble over a demon dog.
    The backyard proved to be shallow, encircled by a seven-foot cedar fence with pointed staves. He didn't see a gate. After tying the twisted neck of the trash bag to his belt, he climbed into a coral tree, crossed the fence on a limb, and dropped into an alley.
    Police would expect him to prefer these service alleys to streets, so he couldn't use them.
    He passed through a vacant lot, sheltered by the weeping boughs of long-untrimmed California pepper trees, which whirled and flounced like the many-layered skirts of eighteenth-century dancers in a waltz.
    As he was crossing the next street in midblock, a police car swept through the intersection to the east. The shriek of its brakes told him that he had been seen.
    Across a yard, over a fence, across an alley, through a gate, across a yard, across another street, very fast now, the plastic bag slapping against his leg. He worried that it would split, spilling bricks of hundred-dollar bills.
    The last line of houses backed up to a small canyon, about two hundred feet deep and three hundred wide. He scaled a wrought-iron fence and was at once on a steep slope of loose eroded soil. Gravity and sliding earth carried him down.
    Like a surfer chasing bliss along the treacherous face of a fully macking monolith, he tried to stay upright, but the sandy earth proved to be not as accommodating as the sea. His feet went out from under him, and on his back he slid the last ten yards, raising a wake of white dust, then thrashed feetfirst through a sudden wall of tall grass and taller weeds.
    He came to a stop under a canopy