The Woman by David Bishop Page B

The firmer sand there offered less change of hitting a soft pocket and falling. Her legs already felt heavy after her long day of walking.
    As she ran, her mind searched for a way to turn her intimate knowledge of this beach into an edge. Some kind of advantage that could increase her odds of making it, of seeing tomorrow’s sunrise.
    The gun was working loose in her waistband. She reached down and pulled it free, gripping it in her right hand. Not like she would hold it to shoot. Just clutched it, strangled it. Her hand circled the trigger housing. Her pumping fists punctured the sky with each stride. She had jogged in this direction countless times. She knew where to angle out and in to avoid the spreading waves from snatching at her feet. Like a winding mountain road, the surf line jutted in and out repeatedly.
    If she were to survive, she had to beat him for about three miles. Life had become that simple. That precise. That frightening. Three miles. Live or die.
    The road in front of her condo would have been a mile shorter. She had considered dashing through her house, past the man in the chair, out the front door, but then she might run into the arms of his accomplice waiting out front, if he had one. She would not have had time to get her car out of the garage. She would have had to run the paved road to town because the tangled berry fields on the inland side were impenetrable. At this time of night, there was seldom anyone on the road and her pursuer would have followed in a car. She could have gone to a neighbor, but the killings at SMITH & CO. said these men had no problem killing innocent bystanders. Hell, I’m an innocent bystander, she thought, and they want to kill me. Besides, she had wanted to go out the back of the house to get the gun she now clutched. She hated guns. Right now, she loved this gun.
    She had made the right decision, use the beach she knew. That was an edge in her favor. Would it be enough?
    A moment later, Old Gray, a mangy dog who seemed to live on the beach, and had long ago accepted Linda as a fellow beachcomber, came out of the grass to run beside her.
    Then a shot rang out, and Old Gray darted inland, disappearing into the sea grass.
    She didn’t know where the bullet ended up, but it hadn’t ended up in her. A warning shot? A stop or I’ll-shoot-you, shot? This stretch of beach had no facing houses. No one would have heard the shot, not over the sound-swallowing sea. She guessed he had fired in the air hoping to scare her into stopping. If he was there only to kill her, she would have died in her bed. The same had been true when the two men forced her off the street into the alley. They wanted to control her first.
    Why do they want me? What for?
    Right now the why didn’t matter, not in the slightest. Survival, that’s what mattered now. Run. Get to town without being caught. She ignored the messages from her muscles and drove herself forward. She could not afford to give up any more of her shrinking lead. She needed to lengthen that lead.
    Ahead another hundred yards or so, she would come to a group of beached trees, bleached white by salt and sun. North of town, the hills sloped down to the water and raging storms sometimes tore out huge hunks of hillside. When that happened, some massive old trees belly flopped into the surf where their branches were sheared off by the same storms that had torn them free of their roots. The trunks then followed the tide until the current beached them like albino whales with defective sonar.
    Linda planned to jump over those tree trunks, and then hunker down to wait until her pursuer came close enough to see the whites of his eyes. If she were lucky, she could then put a shot or two into him.
    Don’t try for a head shot Ahab had said. Shoot for the broad center of his body. Stop him. Make him bleed. Slow him. If you’re lucky, you’ll hit his heart, putting him down for the count.
    As the logs came into view, the stubs of their branches in