"There's your change." Mason handed me a couple of wadded-up bills but no receipt. He probably had screwed me out of a couple bucks, but I wasn't going to say anything about it.

"Thanks." I shoved the cash inside my jacket, in the little pocket below the one in which I carried the .357. "I mean for everything."

"Like what?" He scowled, momentarily puzzled. "Didn't do squat for ya."

"Well . . . you helped me talk it out. What I'm going to do." Granted, it was the same thing I'd been doing before, and there wasn't any Plan B, but still. At least I knew that now. "Plus, there was the lasagna." Before heading off to buy the helmet, he'd brought that out to me in a Styrofoam take-away box. "I was starving."

"You must've been, to eat that c.r.a.p."

I'd already tossed the box and the plastic fork into the dumpster, so there was nothing left but to wipe my hands off on the napkins he'd also brought, then zip up my jacket and climb onto the Ninja. I slung Dalby's bag onto my back while Mason had been running his errand, I'd fixed the broken strap by loosening it a bit, then tying the ends together.

"Oh " Mason suddenly remembered something else. He fumbled around inside his own jacket, then pulled out something small, black, and plastic. "Here. Take this."

I looked down at the cheap cell phone lying in my palm. "What am I supposed to do with this?" It was another indication, beyond the jailbird tattoos on his arms, that he'd been in the life, doing stuff that solid, boring-type citizens don't do. Low-level crooks and mules always have dozens of those cheap little burner phones around they just throw 'em away as soon as they have reason to believe the police are onto the number. Beats me how they keep track of them all.

"I got the number for it. So if something comes up like if I hear something, you know, about what's been going on around here I'll give you a call."

That wasn't likely, I figured. By this point, I was pretty much humoring the old guy. Granted, he'd helped me sort out my options, or at least get me to the point where I admitted I didn't actually have any options. Sure, I would've gotten there by myself eventually. But in a business like this, let's face it, I didn't often get a chance to do something nice for somebody. I already was concerned about the, um, corrosive effects that doing this kind of stuff was having on me. I didn't want to wind up as hard and bitter as some of the people I've had to work with. When you're in that bleak, dead-end zone, you're basically waiting for someone to come along and kill you. That's if you're lucky bad luck is when you have to stick your gun in your mouth and take care of the job yourself.

So I'd let some old guy who'd been too long in the life himself and wound up with nothing to show for it but a work-release kitchen-monkey job and a parole officer checking up on him if he so much as sneezed in the wrong direction I'd let him talk and scheme and mull things over, just as though he were still a hooked-up bad boy, running numbers on the straight world. Reliving his youth that's the sort of little kindnesses you do, figuring you might want somebody to do them for you one day.

I let those bittersweet notions roll around inside my skull as I turned out of the strip mall parking lot and onto the street, heading back toward the freeway on-ramp. That way, I could take a break from worrying about what was going to happen soon as I was on my way again, heading north to my delivery point in San Francisco. Chances were good, just as Mason and I had talked it out, that the people who already had taken a shot at me were ready to do it again. Or at least some of them I hadn't witnessed close up what'd happened to the guy in the souped-up Challenger, but what I'd heard of the car getting rammed by the eighteen-wheeler indicated that he'd be out of the action, temporarily if not permanently. So that. at least. was one vehicle I wasn't scanning for as I cruised along, looking for the signs to the freeway.

As it turned out, I didn't have long to wait. Not for seeing the way to the on-ramp, but for finding out what was going to happen next. No sooner had I pulled up at the nearest stoplight to the strip mall, waiting for it to turn green, than I heard and felt the little burner phone going off inside my jacket pocket.

I fished the phone out and thumbed the answer b.u.t.ton. I already had the helmet visor up, so I just had to wedge the phone past my cheekbone to hear who was on the other end.

It was Mason.

"Come on," I told him. "I've gotta get on the road." I was starting to regret being so kind to the old jailbird. "You can't be calling me every five minutes."

He ignored what I said. "We need to talk "

"We just were."

"This is important," came Mason's voice. "I've got your Plan B."

There was a surprise waiting for me. After I'd turned the bike around and gone back and listened to what Mason had come up with. It was good or at least good enough.

"How's that sound?" He had ground out his cigarette b.u.t.t under his heel, when he'd finished giving me all the details of the plan he'd concocted. "Think it'd work?"

"It might." I'd nodded. "It just might . . ."

So I was heading out again, but not toward the freeway on-ramp. There was someplace else close-by, where I had business now.

That was when the surprise came. Out of the side of my new helmet's visor, I saw some kind of van pull up alongside me. And not just any van this one I recognized. Or at least I did soon as I saw the word PARAMEDICS printed in big red letters on the side and the ambulance-style light bar mounted on the roof.

One of those guys, the fakes who'd tried to run that number on me back on the freeway, leaned out from the driver's-side window. The baby-faced one who'd actually tried to clap the anesthetic gas mask onto my face now he had one hand on the steering wheel, while he rested his elbow on the van windowsill.

"Hey " He gave me a smile. "We need to talk."

This time of night, with everything on the strip mall shut down, there was no other traffic on the street. Which was convenient for me, because I didn't hesitate to take one hand off the Ninja's handlebars, then reach inside my jacket. "Buddy " I pulled out the .357 and swung it around. "Does this look like I feel like talking?"

"No problem." He raised both hands from the steering wheel. "That's cool." All the blood had drained from his face, leaving him as stark white as the side of the fake paramedics van. "I can understand that you've got some issues with "

"Issues? Oh, that does it." Sitting on the bike, I was a foot or so lower than the van's side window, so I had to angle the gun up toward his face. "I don't have issues. But you've got problems. Major problems."

"Jerry . . ." Past the driver, the guy sitting in the pa.s.senger's seat was visibly sweating. "Let's just go. It's not worth it."

"Don't worry I've got this." Jerry if that was really his name managed to keep his nerves under control, even though his hands had gone white-knuckled on the wheel. "Look." His voice hardly shook at all as he talked to me again. "I know we got off on the wrong foot "

I couldn't believe it. There was just no end to this guy's bulls.h.i.t.

Plus, eventually somebody else was going to come along. I didn't feel like being spotted out here in the middle of the street, all visibly poised to blow some idiot's head right off. So this weird little conversation had to be brought to an end.

Which, of course, I wasn't going to do blow his head off, that is. As much as I would've liked to. But enough havoc had gone down near here, with me in the middle of it, that I didn't want to cause any more, at least while I still had a chance of a clean getaway and making my scheduled delivery up in San Francisco. If the police were looking for a young Asian female on a motorcycle, last observed in hot pursuit of a malfunctioning drone on the freeway, I didn't want to make myself a higher-priority item on their agenda by leaving at least a couple of dead bodies in a phony paramedics van, their foreheads drilled through with .357 slugs. Obviously, if I iced this Jerry guy, I'd have to take out the witness sitting there on the other side, plus however many other members of the outfit were riding in the back of the van.

I could remember some words of advice from my old mentor Cole Keep the body count down. Unless you're wrapping things up. Some more wisdom from the guy who'd gotten me into this business Just do the professionals. They're the ones who give you grief.

Which was why I pulled the .357 back from the face of the van driver. As much trouble as this bunch had caused me back on the freeway, they were obviously way out of their depth when it came to pulling off an operation like this. I was dealing with amateurs here.

"Take off." I nodded my head to one side as I gazed up at the one named Jerry. "Before I change my mind."

"No, seriously." He didn't take the hint. Given the opportunity, most people looking at a p.i.s.sed-off female with a gun in her hand like me would've hit the gas and disappeared into the night. "We really do have to talk. This is important. For all of us."

Actually, he did seem serious. I raised an eyebrow in puzzlement as I studied him. For a nonprofessional, he really was hanging in there. "More important," I said, "than this?" I held the gun up higher.

"Oh, yeah." He nodded fervently. "Way more."

I was still suspicious. "What exactly do you think you can tell me that I'd be interested in hearing?"

"How about if I tell you what's going on?" He took a hand from the steering wheel and pointed. "And like what's in that bag you're carrying?"

Bingo.

If there was one thing this guy could've said to make me want to hear anything more from him, that was it. Even if I hadn't already started out on the Plan B Mason had come up with, I still had some doubts running through my mind. All of which I might have been able to sort out, if I knew what I was actually carrying. If I could find out why these people wanted it so badly, and more important, how they'd known I was making the delivery, I'd have a better idea as to whether Mason had been right about Dalby setting me up, with some weird scheme for s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g me over on this job. That was the bit that would change everything, if it just happened to be true.

"Okay," I said. "You're right that could be interesting. So go ahead and tell me."

"It's kind of complicated." Taking his gaze away from me, he scanned around in the dark on either side of the van. "Takes a while to give you all the info, you know? So maybe we should go someplace where we could have a little privacy. Instead of out here in the open."

"And your idea for that place would be . . ."

"No problem." This Jerry guy gave a shrug. "I'll pull the van over to the side of the road " He pointed to a section farther on, out of reach of the streetlights. "Then you can climb in the back. And we'll talk."

"Oh, yeah. Right." The suggestion was so annoying that the .357 rose involuntarily in my hand, back toward his face. "Excuse me, Jerry that's your name, right? But the last time I was in that van, you and your pals tried to gas me unconscious. That's the kind of thing I tend to remember. You really think I'm going to give you a second try at it?"

"No, no that's okay." He raised both hands, palms outward whether to try and placate me or screen the gun from his sight, I couldn't tell. "We got rid of all that stuff. Here, take a look."

Taking his foot off the brake, he let the van roll forward a little way past me, into the empty intersection.

"Hey, guys " He called over his shoulder. "Open it up."

Somebody turned the handles from the inside, then the van's rear doors swung open. Leaning over on the bike, I could see all the way through, right up to back of the seats holding Jerry and the guy beside him. He'd told the truth the van interior had been stripped, right down to the metal. The two other members of the crew, whom I'd last seen hauling out the drone and setting it aloft, sat on the van floor, backs to the side walls. They looked a little nervous as they gazed back at me. A gun the size of the .357 in my hand tends to get that kind of reaction.

"See?" Jerry spoke again. "Everything's cool."

It pretty much was. Even though there were four of these guys and one of me, they weren't exactly the type I'd have much trouble with even without the gun. They looked as though they'd spent most of their lives peering into one sort of computer screen or another. Most of their muscular development was in their forearms, from all that keyboarding. Still, though, their devious little minds could be trouble for me. All that elaborate scheme with the fake paramedic gear and the drone had to have come from somewhere.

"All right." I swung my gaze toward the front of the van and nodded. "If you don't mind, though, I'll just keep this where you can see it." I held up the .357 again.

"Not a problem." Jerry leaned out from the side window. "If you need that to give yourself a sense of comfort while we're talking that's fine with us. Boundaries are important."

Boundaries, my a.s.s. This was the way people talk when they think they're smarter than you. So they can pull something over on you, and you'll even feel good about it, in some warm 'n' fuzzy psychological way. But then again, if I let him believe he was so slick, pulling it off and all . . .

I gave him a little smile. "I gotta give you guys credit," I said. "For persistence."

"Now do you want to talk?" The one who seemed to be their leader set his elbow on the rolled-down window of the phony paramedics van. "Because, believe me, we can save you a whole lot of trouble."

"If I'd really wanted to save myself trouble " I lifted the helmet's visor and looked back at him. "I would've killed you all when I first had the chance."

"I told you," said the guy in the pa.s.senger seat. "She's not really the negotiating type."

"You got that right." I stashed the gun back inside my jacket. "You fellas have a nice night I've got some work to do."

"All right," he said. "Maybe later."

"Much later. If at all."

He pulled himself back inside the van. The light turned green, and he drove through the intersection and toward the dark part of the street ahead.

I really don't like hospitals.

It's irrational, I admit it, but I've got a lot of negative history with them. More than most people, I figure. There are all the times I've been in and out of sterile, disinfectant-smelling s.p.a.ces with my brother Donnie, and all the operations and procedures he's had since he was a baby. He's doing pretty good now, but I knew there were more hospitals to come and then maybe there wouldn't be any more at all. That was something I tried not to think about.

Plus, the last memory I had of our folks was seeing them in a hospital. Donnie really had been a baby then he doesn't remember any of that. At least I don't think he does. And then there was just him and me.

And then there had been Cole I'd seen him in pretty bad shape, lying in an intensive care unit bed. I don't have to worry about seeing that again. He was long gone, through one of those cold doorways dug in the ground.

So those were the sorts of pictures running through my mind as I steered the Ninja into the hospital parking lot. Only the rows nearest to the main door, and over by the emergency entrance, had cars parked there. Light spilled out into the dark from the hospital lobby. Hospitals seem like strange islands in the middle of the night you look up at the windows that are lit, and you wonder what's going on in there. Probably not anything good.

I didn't take the bike up close to the building. I found the darkest corner of the parking lot, killed the bike engine, and leaned it over onto its kickstand. I pulled off my helmet and set it on the back of the seat, then scanned across the lot and the hospital's main entrance. There wasn't anybody going to and from their cars, and the uniformed security guard inside was talking to the woman behind the reception desk so n.o.body had seen me. At least not yet, and I meant to keep it that way as long as I could.

Mason's prison buddy was waiting for me where I'd been told he'd be, smoking a cigarette out on the small loading dock at the rear of the hospital, where the food and linen services made their deliveries during the day. At night, there was no illumination except for the buzzing fluorescents on the other side of the access door that the guy had propped open with the handle of the mop stuck inside a wheeled plastic bucket.

"You Perry?" I emerged from the long row of shoulder-high oleander bushes along the hospital's one doorless exterior wall, the one that had screened me from view as I'd made my way from the far side of the parking lot. "Mason sent me."

"c.r.a.p." The guy looked down from the edge of the loading dock. "I wasn't expecting a girl." He was all fidgeting nerves, taking a final long drag off the cigarette, then flicking it away. He was about half Mason's age, still young enough to have a ratty ponytail that was only slightly streaked with gray. "He didn't say anything about that."

"Maybe he didn't think it was important." I brushed away some of the hedge's stiff green leaves that had gotten caught in my jacket zipper as I'd squeezed past the building's stucco. If I'd been any bigger, front to back, I wouldn't have been able to make it as it was, I'd had to unsling the backpack off my shoulders and keep it tucked it under one arm until I got to the building's corner. Now I pulled it back, snugging the waist belt tight as I could.

"That sonuvab.i.t.c.h is a little too close-mouthed sometimes, you ask me." Perry had that jailbird habit of leaving his cigarette pack in his shirt pocket and digging the next smoke out of it, rather than bringing it out. "Same way, back in the can." Even just watching this guy for a couple of minutes, I easily could believe that he and Mason had done a stretch together.

Which was how my Plan B had come together. Both these guys had gotten out at about the same time, with Mason maybe a few months earlier. He and Perry had wound up with the same parole officer and living at the same halfway house which enabled them to keep the same working relationship with each other, that they had formed while they'd been doing their stretches in prison. Mason had connived himself into a trustee's gig, working in the kitchen, which had given him access to all the ingredients he needed for whipping up illicit batches of pruno, that rancid alcohol prisoners and sailors brew from raisins and sugar and yeast. Perry had wheeled the library cart through the cellblocks, which had made him the perfect business partner, taking orders and making deliveries Mason told me all this, when I turned the bike around and went back to the strip mall parking lot, to hear what he'd found out. And what he figured I could shoot for as my Plan B.

"I called my buddy Perry up," Mason had said, showing me his own burner phone. "Over at the hospital. I asked him about anybody who'd been brought into the emergency room. And he went and found out and told me."

That's the advantage of having one of those mop-and-bucket work-release jobs this Perry guy could wander all over the hospital, and n.o.body would think twice about seeing him around. And snoop around and ask questions all the doctors and nurses and guards would figure it was just one of the janitors, and what did he matter?

"Your guy from the freeway." Mason had told me. "The one with the muscle car, who went chasing after the drone. He's here at the hospital. They brought him in an ambulance, after he crashed into the truck, and you got away."

And that was why I was at the hospital now. Because, as plans went, I like this a lot better. Any time I could get a chance to eliminate someone who'd come as close as the Challenger guy had to killing me, before he had another shot I'd be a fool not to. Then I'd be able to get on my way again, without worrying about him coming up behind me once more.

"What kind of shape was he in? When he showed up in the emergency room?"

"Not that bad, actually." Standing out on the hospital loading dock, Perry took another long drag off his cigarette. "All things considered. He must've had major protective gear built into that car he was driving. You know, like NASCAR stuff steel roll cage, restraint straps, all that sort of thing."

I had a pretty good idea what Perry was talking about. My brother Donnie was heavy into NASCAR, so I'd seen a lot of that equipment in action from watching the races on television. It was amazing what kind of crashes those drivers could get into, then walk away from once the flames were put out. Still "He must've gotten at least a little banged up. I saw him hit that truck pretty hard."

"They put a neck brace on him," said Perry. "Apparently at least this is what one of the interns told me they tried to strap up his left arm, but he wouldn't let them. Because he's checking himself out."

"What?" I stared at Perry. "You mean now? Right now?"

"Yeah " He nodded as he flicked the ash from his cigarette. "The doctors want to keep him around a while longer, run some more procedures on him x-rays, that sort of thing. I heard one doc tell the guy that he might be bleeding internally like maybe a ruptured spleen. You don't even know you're in trouble, until you fall over dead. But hey, that's his worry, right? If he wants to leave against medical advice, long as he signs the right papers, the hospital's off the hook." Perry studied the glowing tip of his cigarette for a moment, then glanced over at me. "Tell you what he's kind of a scary individual. If you know what I mean."

"I think I do."

"Really jacked up. Used to see guys like that in the prison yard, powering through sets on the weight equipment. Big sets, shifting a lotta iron. Guys like that, they don't just get bulked up they get kind of a crazy look in their eyes."

I knew what he was talking about. I'd already seen it up close, when I'd gotten my motorcycle near enough to the guy's Challenger to wrest the backpack away from him. When I'd pulled out the .357 from my jacket and aimed it straight at his face, and he'd realized in that one cold instant that there was nothing to do but let go and let me get away with it then I'd witnessed his eyes narrow down into little knife slits, with something so fierce and malice-filled behind that it could've taken my head right off my shoulders. Or it would have, if I hadn't been ready for it.

"Difference being," continued Perry beside me, "is that this guy isn't some dumb con, working off his stretch, day at a time. Guys get thrown in the pen for being stupid believe me, I'd know. The charge on the booking slip's just an excuse. And this guy's not stupid not like that, at any rate. He's smart." Perry turned a nicotine-yellow smile at me. "Like you. That's why you're both still out on the streets, doing your thing."

That was something else I already knew. That I'd seen in the Challenger guy's eyes. Doing what I do, I'd already encountered plenty of guys with minimum brains just smart enough to be really good at aiming a piece at whatever they'd been told to take care of, but not smart enough to worry about the consequences down the line. More of that type wound up doing this job than people like me and Cole, or my buddy Elton. Which was why they got hired a lot more often than my type. What the people who do the hiring figure is that brains make you dangerous to them. So it had to be a special sort of job, one your ordinary clod with a gun couldn't handle, before somebody like me would get a shot at it.

So whatever the deal was with this guy, the one I'd at least managed to send to the emergency room, I knew that Perry was right about him. In a flash, there on the freeway, I'd looked into the guy's eyes, and I'd recognized how smart he was, that there was something else going on inside his head.

And yeah, that made him dangerous. Like me.

Which was why, I'd had to admit, the Plan B Mason had come up with was better than just getting back on the road and shooting for the delivery point in San Francisco. He'd correctly figured that after the Challenger had crashed into the truck, down on the surface street below the freeway, that its scary-eyed driver had been taken to the nearest emergency room at which hospital his old prison a.s.sociate Perry was mopping floors. A contact like that, and I had all the information I'd need to eliminate this weird sonuvab.i.t.c.h before he could have another crack at me.

Or at least that was what I'd thought, until I'd left Mason again and gotten over here to the hospital. If the Challenger guy I was still calling him that inside my head had been banged up enough to be lying in a bed, maybe doped up on serious painkillers, then it would've been easy enough for me to sneak in and find the room, using Perry's back-door directions, and put the guy out of commission. And I mean permanently that was why I was toting the .357 inside my jacket. At one time, when I'd first been starting out, I might've had some qualms about pumping a round into somebody's head, but I guess I've toughened up since then. Comes with the territory.

But if the Challenger guy was in good enough shape to be checking himself out, with maybe nothing more than a couple ibuprofens rattling around in his gut then it was going to be a tougher job. And I'd need to hurry.