Page 42 of Hero

The bomb squad had disconnected their containment vessel so they could lower a ramp out the back door of their truck, and now a bomb squad officer was using a remote-control panel to make the squad’s robot move on its treads down the ramp. The robot was only about four feet high. She remembered it had a human name, but right now she couldn’t remember what it was. Andros? Its name was Andros. The robot had grippers on the ends of its arms, cameras that fed a display on the pilot’s remote panel, and the ability to fire a shotgun shell to obliterate an explosive device. As the pilot walked along behind therobot, two other officers went ahead to open doors. The robot was a big attraction, and Justine’s group was drawn to it, craning their necks to watch it move into the hotel lobby.

Cops in standard uniforms arrived at that point to prevent civilians from moving any closer, and Justine joined the swirl of people diverted past the bomb squad truck and away from the building. Justine walked along with them, then paused for a moment to look in every direction, trying to judge which one was most likely to be safe and lead to a spot where Joe Alston could pick her up.

Now that she’d seen that the police were about to search the building, she knew she had to move more quickly than she’d anticipated. Searches took time, and people who stayed at hotels like Le Chateau d’Or were not the kind who would stand patiently outside much longer than they already had, waiting for the police to let them back in. People were already activating Uber and Lyft apps or calling cabs. She had to get out of the area before too many others did and there wouldn’t be enough people to hide her.

He was winning. He had found the hotel where her lawyers had hidden her, and he had scared the police into evacuating the hotel so all the occupants were standing in the open and unprotected in the night. In a minute she could be dead, and he would be driving to get out of sight before anybody had any idea what had happened.

Why wasn’t she dead already? The thought seemed to have an energy of its own, making her shoulder and back muscles tighten and a wave of heat rise to the back of her neck. She knew he must be nearby doing something to make her death more certain. She looked around her again and still couldn’t see him, so she kept looking.

She heard a quickbeepbeephorn behind her and saw a knot of people part to let a police car crawl past, and on the far side, following in the wake of the black-and-white car, was the killer. He was wearing a blackbaseball cap, a dark pair of pants and shirt that matched, and a green-and-white reflective vest. He had a lanyard around his neck with a piece of laminated plastic that implied identification but could have said anything. He turned and she could see the back of his shirt had white letters on it that were mostly obscured by the safety vest, but looked to her like the upper parts of the word “SECURITY.”

She considered trying to get to the police car, run in front to stop it, and point him out to the cops, but the car was moving faster now, only delayed for a few seconds. She could never catch it. Instead, she began to circle toward the area where the bomb squad truck was. That was the center of things, and there were cops nearby to keep people away. As she approached, she saw there were more police cars parked on the far side of it now. After a few more steps she could see one with a shotgun upright in its holder behind the center console.

She veered toward the car and kept her posture stiff and upright. She only moved her right arm a few inches to grasp the driver’s side door handle. It was locked. She walked on, looking for the next patrol car. There was one near the yellow tape, one of the units that was still sitting at an angle with its doors open, but it was much closer to her killer than it was to her, and the space she would have to cross was now less crowded than it had been, so she would be in the open all the way. She dismissed the idea.

As she moved away from the hotel she felt as though she was seeing more clearly. The killer was wearing emergency gear and she wasn’t. If she had pulled a shotgun out of an open patrol car and pumped it, somebody, maybe even her killer, would have shouted, “Gun!” and the nearest half dozen cops would probably have opened fire on her.

She walked faster away from the front of the building, where most of the light and activity was, and toward the north side. In that directionshe could get off Wilshire to Sixth Street and head for dimmer, emptier streets where she could meet Joe Alston. She stopped to look back and didn’t see her killer, but she was already feeling that her plan to have Joe swoop in and take her away was ill-formed and foolish. She knew her impulse to steal a police shotgun and fight the killer off had been desperate and crazy, but walking away to get picked up was too easy for the killer to defeat. It was also the only chance she had left. It was time to text Joe. “I’ll be on Fountain, east of Crescent Heights.” She pocketed her phone and kept walking and looking.

Some of the other hotel evacuees might have rides on the way, but so far, she hadn’t seen any car pull up near the hotel that wasn’t official, and she hadn’t seen any of them open a car door and get inside. It was entirely possible that the police had roadblocks on all of the streets leading to the hotel. As she thought about it, the idea seemed obvious. It would be insane for them to allow cars to enter this area if they had reason to believe there was likely to be an explosion. She crossed Sixth Street, and looked back to see she had left the crowd behind. It was time to run.

She began to trot, increasing her speed gradually for the first block so she didn’t strain a muscle or turn an ankle. She turned to the north and kept goading herself to add more speed. Much of her attention had to be on the sidewalk ahead—both for dangerous obstacles and for unexpected human beings. It was after oneA.M.There were men in the city who would see a woman like her running alone as a gift from the universe, a perfect victim. She had just seen the killer minutes ago on foot by the hotel. She hoped that meant he didn’t have a car nearby either. If he was on foot, she at least had a chance to outrun him. She had to try.

Justine glanced over her shoulder a few times to see if her killer was running or driving after her, saw a few sets of headlights and realized there would be no way to spot him in a car until it was too late. Her beststrategy had to be to get off the major streets, so she put it into execution at the next opportunity, took a left and then a right to head north toward Fountain. Now she was on a street with apartments, where an assailant couldn’t just overtake her and trap her between the street and an unbroken wall of locked businesses. Here she would be able to pass between buildings and disappear into darkness. This part of Los Angeles was a long slope that began in the hills that separated Hollywood from the San Fernando Valley and swept down all the way to the ocean. North was all uphill, and she had chosen that for a reason too. Hunters didn’t have as strong a motive for running as their prey had.

The street began to change after a few blocks. More apartment buildings appeared as she moved closer to Third, then she saw Santa Monica Boulevard farther uphill. She turned to the east, then picked a north-south street that was even more dense and the apartment buildings bigger.

As she crossed the next street, she looked for a route that would keep her invisible for one more block and noticed a place where two buildings each had what looked like a new layer of gray façade. She could see a narrow walkway between them, and above it a strip of starry sky that was beginning to be obscured by wispy clouds. A dark, narrow walkway was a risk, but far ahead she could see nothing but darkness, which meant that the end, where the walkway led, was probably an intersecting walkway and another building rather than a street. If she was being followed, her killer would almost certainly be in a car by this point, and this walkway was only wide enough for a person. It was a perfect way to leave him behind, like a mouse running into a hole too small for a cat.

The first stretch of the walkway was about six feet wide, so she could run along it at the same speed. In the next stretch the space between the two buildings narrowed to about three feet, nearly shutting out thefaint glow of stars overhead and making it darker. As she ran, she felt her left shoulder scrape the wall, overcorrected, and a few seconds later her right shoulder bumped the right wall. She began to have nightmare images of the space narrowing until she would get stuck. She didn’t let herself stop moving ahead, but she went more slowly now, both hands up so she could prevent any more contact with the walls.

She heard something. It sounded like distant footsteps. She held her breath to be sure the sound wasn’t just an amplification of her own steps in the space of the walkway. No, she could still hear it, and it was behind her. Somebody had run into the space after her.

She couldn’t go back toward him, so she went on, now with more careful steps to keep from making noise. If it was him, he would certainly have a gun. Could he fire it in her direction and let the bullets carom back and forth from one wall to the other and hit her? It was a remote possibility, but the bullets would lose velocity rapidly. She turned halfway around and stayed sideways to keep her silhouette small. She couldn’t see him, but she had noticed even as a child that it was easier to see things in dark places if she looked to the side of them, not straight at them.

She leaned forward and moved her head from side to side, listening, then leaned backward to see if the change of angle helped. She rested her back against one wall, and held herself steady by bracing her walking shoes against the other. She had just discovered something, so she tested it. She raised her right shoe against the wall and pressed. She raised her left foot into the same position against the wall, and pushed harder. She pressed both hands against the wall behind her to bring her back out from the stucco surface, and found she could use her legs to push her weight upward a few inches.

She came to understand the way it worked—her legs and arms pushing upward during the seconds while she kept her back fromtouching the wall, and then letting her back press against the wall to hold her there while she took a step and prepared her arms to push off again. She began to walk herself up between the walls of the narrow passage.

Justine was up five feet in three steps, ten feet in six steps. She kept at it and began to improve her technique. By fifteen feet she had learned that if she rolled her back slightly to the right against the wall when her left leg was stepping and rolled to the left when her right leg was stepping, she could alternate arms and climb faster. Maybe she could get to a window, break it, and crawl into it. There were no windows. All they would look out on was another windowless wall. Could she make it all the way to the roof? A few feet later she heard something and paused to listen.

It was him. His breaths were quieter and slower, but he was moving closer. She held herself where she was, absolutely still. She wanted to look down, but she couldn’t move her head without dislodging her back from the wall. If he looked up, he would see her and if he saw her, he could kill her. Was he looking up already? She waited, terrified.

Justine’s uncertainty made her fear her muscles were weakening. How hard did she have to push with her legs to stay up? Was she still pressing hard enough? She searched for reasons to believe she would live through this. People were better gatherers than hunters, and part of the reason was that when they were in forests they seldom looked up, so they missed plenty of sights. In jungles, leopards and jaguars had no trouble waiting on tree limbs and dropping on humans passing below.

She heard her killer passing under her. She held her breath until she was afraid of making herself dizzy and then took slow, deep breaths. She heard him moving along the passage ahead of her. He kept going for a while. Had he gone all the way out to the next street? She wondered ifit was safe to try to walk herself back down. She eased down a couple of steps, but then she heard footsteps again and froze.

He moved more quickly now, stomping as he went back the way he had come. She waited until she decided that the steps had faded, not merely paused, and then strained to reverse her climb. It felt harder than the climbing had, partly because her muscles had become so strained. She forced herself to descend slowly. Dropping from fifteen feet, or even ten, could break her spine as easily as twenty.

At last, the time came when her left heel touched the ground. She eased her body down so she could sit for a few seconds. She was so relieved that she felt her eyes welling with tears. She stood up, brushed her hands across her eyes and began to move forward. In a few seconds she was moving more quickly. Something had stopped the killer and made him go back. Had he just given up the idea that she had come this way?

She kept going, working up her speed as her leg muscles stretched and loosened. Then she could see the end. It wasn’t a perpendicular walkway. What she had been seeing was the plain, darkened side of a building. She moved up to the end. The owners had planted a set of vertical bars into the concrete pavement that narrowed the opening to about ten inches, so a man couldn’t get through.

Justine slowly eased her left leg into the narrow space between the last bar and the building, facing the bar and squatting slightly to hold both legs sideways to slide her pelvis out through the space, felt the stucco scraping against her bottom, but kept going. She turned her head to look along her shoulder to present the narrowest silhouette of her head. She exhaled deeply to compress her rib cage, rotated her body to half-twist around the bar, and squeezed out.

She was on Fountain. She looked up and down the street. She was east of Crescent Heights. Now if only Joe would come.

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