Devil's Plaything - Matt Richtel [3]
I’ve hated witnessing her precipitous decline and her fragility. I’m helpless to do anything about it, or the acute and bizarre danger we find ourselves in at this moment.
I dial 911. This time, before I can hit send, I hear the piercing sound of a police siren. It’s coming from Lincoln Boulevard, the thoroughfare that runs along the park and is only a few hundred yards away. The siren seems to be heading our direction, suggesting a good Samaritan heard the shots and called 911, or maybe the cops themselves heard the telltale blasts.
They should be here in mere minutes.
I peer past Grandma and through an opening between two eucalyptuses and into the open field. Squinting in the poor light, I make out the grove of trees that I believe hides One Bad Person with Gun.
I see movement. Leaves rustling. Is the shooter on the move? Then, more rustling—a shape making its way from the grove.
“I’ll be right back,” I mutter to Grandma.
I might be nuts, but maybe I can get a look at the shooter, and play hero with a police department that doesn’t much like me these days. We can’t stay here, a pair of sitting ducks.
“A train can’t breathe,” Grandma mumbles.
“Stay here. Don’t move. Don’t make a sound.”
“It’s the man in blue.”
“What?”
“You look tired, Harry,” she says.
Harry. Her friend from the retirement home.
“Promise me you won’t move.”
“I promise.”
I trudge into the darkness. Hoping to get an eyewitness view from a safe distance, wondering exactly how I’ll do that and about the mysterious phone call, wondering about Grandma.
Danger.
How did she know?
Chapter 2
Dense foliage envelops my feet. I take two dozen loping steps away from Grandma. I trip.
I rise to my knees and say a silent agnostic’s prayer of thanks for cortisol. It’s the fight-or-flight hormone secreted by the adrenal glands that heightens the senses.
It explains why I can make sense of my surroundings despite the quick onset of twilight. To my right, I make out Grandma’s shape propped against the tree, motionless.
I wade a few more steps, moving parallel to the line of eucalyptuses, protected by it. I crouch where I can look through another gap between the big trees at the grove containing the assailant. More movement, I think.
Then I’m sure.
A shadowy figure exits the left side of the distant tree enclave.
I crouch, suddenly fearful he might not be escaping but still on the attack. Is he circling around the other way?
Squinting. C’mon cortisol!
Based on our past experiences, our brains try to make sense of situations with imperfect information. Through the darkness, I piece together that a figure is carrying an elongated bag. I can see he’s trotting to a car parked at the edge of the grove; he opens the trunk, tosses in the duffel bag, climbs into the driver’s seat. Shooter seems lumpy, amorphous; brain concludes he is muscular and wearing a hooded sweatshirt. Car has distinctive wide back; brain sends message: Prius.
Police sirens blare. They can’t be half a minute away. Brake lights from the Prius pierce the dusk. The car lurches forward and starts to pull away. I stumble through the tree line, knowing I couldn’t possibly create enough cortisol to allow me to make out a license plate, let alone fly through the air, bring the car to a screeching halt and make the driver apologize to Grandma.
I stop and watch the Prius drive away. And I almost laugh at the idea of our nearly quintessential San Francisco death: gunned down by the driver of an environmentally friendly car—and who has the courtesy to call my mobile to make sure I’m dead.
“The Idles live to see another day,” I tell Grandma.
“I know you. I taught you to drown,” she says.
I laugh, a release of adrenaline, my hands shaking.