Free Runner (Sam Dryden Novel) by Patrick Lee Page A

slid out of Marina del Rey, turning away into the haze.
    “What did the girl know?” Marsh repeated.
    Gaul told him. By the time he’d finished, three minutes later, Marsh’s face had paled a shade or two. A sheen of sweat sharpened the lines on his forehead.
    “This is real?” Marsh asked. “This isn’t just some tech proposal someone worked up—”
    “I’m told it’s standing by to go active anytime. Do you understand, then, why the girl can’t be left alive? Under the wrong circumstances, she could interfere with it. There would be serious problems. This is bigger than a pissing match between defense contractors, Dennis. My orders to kill her came down from on high. I have to follow them.”
    Marsh nodded weakly. His mouth worked, his tongue trying to wet his lips.
    “Are you on board with this?” Gaul asked. “Are you going to help me?”
    Another nod, just perceptible. Marsh was staring past Gaul, his gaze taking in the spread of Los Angeles. Maybe he was seeing it in the light of what was coming.
    “Then we’re done here,” Gaul said. “You know what to do.”
    He didn’t wait for Marsh to nod again. He turned and crossed to his BMW, got in, and started it. He backed around in a semicircle, pointing the car’s nose downhill, then craned his head to look at Marsh again. The man was still standing there at the rail, lost in what he’d just learned. For a moment Gaul felt the same tinge of nervousness he’d had when Marsh first got out of the SUV. Just how much of a realist was the guy? How willing to play along? Then Marsh turned, his expression set with acceptance, and strode back to his vehicle.
    That’ll have to do, Gaul thought. He took his foot off the brake and coasted down toward the canyon road.

 
    CHAPTER TEN
    The man behind the counter in the sporting goods store was looking at a magazine with naked women in it. Rachel couldn’t actually see the magazine—the man had it down behind the countertop, out of view—but she could more or less see the pictures in his head. There were lots of tattoos in the images. There were metal rings and spikes stuck through skin. Now and again the man would turn his attention on a woman in the store. Rachel could feel his eyes tracking over the the smooth lines of girls’ legs, following them up to the hems of their shorts. Over these mental pictures came his thoughts, crude and simple. They seemed almost like animal noises. Nice nice nice, fuck yeah …
    Rachel tried to keep herself out of his sight as best she could. She stuck close to Sam as he pushed the shopping cart around. The sporting goods store was in Bakersfield. It was just past ten in the morning, and through the big glass wall up front, Rachel could see the parking lot and the city beyond, everything blazing in the sunlight.
    Right there, parked at the near edge of the lot, was the used car they’d bought down the street. A Toyota something, a RAV4, she thought Sam had called it. It was old, but he was satisfied with how it ran. They’d left the stolen Jeep in a long-term parking lot at the airport and walked to the dealership from there—after first hitting a Payless to get Rachel a pair of sneakers. But before they’d done any of that, before they’d even reached Bakersfield, they’d driven up a dirt road in the mountains southeast of town. At the base of a pine tree in the middle of the woods, Sam had dug up a plastic box with three things inside it. First was an envelope containing ten thousand dollars in fifties and twenties. Next was a handgun and a box of bullets. Last was a cardboard sleeve with three sets of fake identities inside it. All of these had Sam’s picture but different names.
    It helps to have friends in dark places, he had said.
    Rachel had asked him why he had this stuff hidden up here. He’d explained that with his old job, he’d sometimes worked against very powerful people. In a perfect world, those people would never learn his name, but in the real