Sole Survivor by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online

had a lot of ground to make up if they were going to catch her. The tall one in the green shirt seemed in better shape than his partner, and his legs were considerably longer than the woman’s, so he was gaining on her. Nevertheless, the smaller guy didn’t relent even as he fell steadily behind. Sprinting frantically up the long sun-seared slope, stumbling over a grave marker, then over another, regaining his balance, he charged on, as though in an animal frenzy, in a blood fever, gripped by the
need
to be there when the woman was brought down.
    Beyond the manicured hills of the cemetery were other hills in a natural condition: pale sandy soil, banks of shale, brown grass, stinkweed, mesquite, stunted manzanita, tumbleweed, scattered and gnarled dwarf oaks. Arid ravines led down into the undeveloped land above Griffith Observatory and east of the Los Angeles Zoo, a rattlesnake-infested plot of desert scrub in the heart of the urban sprawl.
    If the woman got into the scrub before being caught, and if she knew her way, she could lose her pursuers by zigging and zagging from one narrow declivity to another.
    Joe headed toward the abandoned white van. He might be able to learn something from it.
    He wanted the woman to escape, though he wasn’t entirely sure why his sympathies were with her.
    As far as he knew, she might be a felon with a list of heinous crimes on her rap sheet. She hadn’t looked like a criminal, hadn’t sounded like one. This was Los Angeles, however, where clean-cut young men brutally shotgunned their parents and then, as orphans, tearfully begged the jury to pity them and show mercy. No one was what he seemed.
    Yet…the gentleness of her fingertips against his cheek, the sorrow in her eyes, the tenderness in her voice, all marked her as a woman of compassion, whether she was a fugitive from the law or not. He could not wish her ill.
    A vicious sound, hard and flat, cracked across the cemetery, leaving a brief throbbing wound in the hot stillness. Another crack followed.
    The woman had nearly reached the brow of the hill. Visible between the last two bristling pines. Blue jeans. Yellow blouse. Stretching her legs with each stride. Brown arms pumping close to her sides.
    The smaller man, in the red and orange Hawaiian shirt, had run wide of his companion, whom he was still trailing, to get a clear line of sight on the woman. He had stopped and raised his arms, holding something in both hands. A handgun. The son of a bitch was
shooting
at her.
    Cops didn’t try to shoot unarmed fugitives in the back. Not righteous cops.
    Joe wanted to help her. He couldn’t think of anything to do. If they were cops, he had no right to second-guess them. If they
weren’t
cops, and even if he could catch up with them, they would probably shoot him down rather than let him interfere.
    Crack.
    The woman reached the crest.
    “Go,” Joe urged her in a hoarse whisper. “Go.”
    He didn’t have a cellular phone in his own car, so he couldn’t call 911. He had carried a mobile unit as a reporter, but these days he seldom called anyone even from his home phone.
    The keening crack of another shot pierced the leaden heat.
    If these men weren’t police officers, they were desperate or crazy, or both, resorting to gunplay in such a public place, even though this part of the cemetery was currently deserted. The sound of the shots would travel, drawing the attention of the maintenance personnel who, merely by closing the formidable iron gate at the entrance to the park, could prevent the gunmen from driving out.
    Apparently unhit, the woman disappeared over the top of the hill, into the scrub beyond.
    Both of the men in Hawaiian shirts went after her.

4
    Heart knocking so fiercely that his vision blurred with each hard-driven surge of blood, Joe Carpenter sprinted to the white van.
    The Ford was not a recreational vehicle but a paneled van of the type commonly used by businesses to make small deliveries. Neither the back nor