“In movies,” she repeated, incredulous at the suggestion.
“And I know that anything transmitting via an antenna can be triangulated,” DePresti said. “So I want to be better safe than sorry.” He looked at her. “Grace, this is serious business now.”
“No shit,” she responded. “We almost just died.”
He didn’t have a response.
“And Dr. Pham…”
His silence continued.
“What now?” Parkowski asked.
“We need to get out of here,” her boyfriend answered. “And we can’t go back to my house or your apartment. We don’t know if we were the intended targets or not.”
“Ok, so we go to the police?”
“We can’t go to the police,” DePresti argued. “We have no idea who those four people were on the pier. They could be from our government, a foreign government, an NGO, or a corporation coming from God-knows-where. For all we know, they could be in cahoots with the local cops.”
They sat in the car quietly.
“Can we go to one of our friends’ houses?” Parkowski asked.
DePresti considered it. “That’s not the worst idea. Reggie lives at the far side of Manhattan Beach up by El Segundo off of Rosecrans. He’s working from home today. Let’s pay him a visit.”
He started to back out of the parking spot and froze. “Cop car,” DePresti said quietly.
Parkowski saw it in her side’s rear-view mirror. The black-and-white SUV was coming towards the Subaru slowly, its lights on, but no siren blaring.
She sat as still as she could manage with her heart beating a thousand times per minute. Had they been caught? Why else would a police car be here, blocks away from a recent massacre? They had to be coming for them.
There was nothing they could do. Parkowski and DePresti sat motionless as the police SUV approached.
But it didn’t stop. Instead, the car with the flashing lights slowly passed their parked Subaru and continued down the residential street.
DePresti let out a short laugh.
“What’s so funny about that?” Parkowski demanded.
“I forget just how big the government is sometimes,” her boyfriend explained. “If the shooters on the pier were in cahoots with the government somehow, it’d take a dozen people to get through all of the layers needed to get down to the local cops. And that takes time, which means we have a chance to get out of this.”
“And if they’re not part of the government?” Parkowski asked. “I have a hard time believing that the U.S. government would indiscriminately murder people in broad daylight.”
“We’ll come to that if we have to,” her boyfriend said. “Right now, let’s just get out of here.”
He deftly pulled out of the parking spot and started driving north toward his friend’s apartment.
They stuck to the residential streets rather than the main thoroughfares of Ardmore Avenue and CR-1. The drive was silent; DePresti focused on driving while Parkowski kept an eye out for anything out of the ordinary.
She had a sick feeling in her stomach. Whatever had happened back there was her fault. If she hadn’t been so invested in figuring out what Bronze Knot was, her boss and all of those innocent people at the pier would still be alive.
“If I remember correctly, his apartment complex is off of this street,” DePresti said as he made a left onto a two-lane street.
She saw a black, late-model Chevy SUV with dark tinted windows parked alongside the street in front of a house in the opposite direction that she and DePresti were traveling. Parkowski couldn’t put a finger on why she felt a sense of danger, but the car had its lights on and engine running; seemingly just sitting and waiting for someone.
“Mike, don’t pull in,” she told her boyfriend.
“What?” DePresti asked. They were almost at the turn-in for the apartment complex, the only one on the street.
“Keep driving,” she repeated, “Something’s wrong.”
“Ok.” He increased his speed slightly and drove past the apartment’s entrance.
She turned around in her seat. The SUV had pulled out of its spot towards them.
“We’re being followed,” she told DePresti.
“Fuck,” he said, rolling through the stop sign at the end of the street and making a right to go towards CR-1. “That’s not good.”
“We should have switched cars,” Parkowski said, realizing their error. “Or stolen one.”
DePresti didn’t respond.
“What do we do now?”
“We lose them.”
He got onto CR-1 going north, the famed Pacific Coast Highway, which had lighter traffic than expected at this time of day.
Parkowski turned around and looked again. The black SUV was still there, two or three cars behind them, and if her eyes weren’t deceiving her, there was another SUV, the same make, model, and color, coming up from the south.
“I think we’ve got another tail,” Parkowski said to DePresti.
“Fuck,” he said again. “Just keeps getting better and better.”
“Can you lose them?”
“I think so,” he replied. “But, if we do, where do we go? Is there anywhere we can go? Or are we just going to be on the run until we get caught or forgotten about?”
