Monster (Gone 7)

“Maybe,” Cruz said softly. “But she needs you, and so do I. You can call yourself an idiot, but I would give . . .” Her voice choked and for a moment she couldn’t go on, and when she did it was in an emotion-roughened tone. “I would give anything, anything in the world, to have just one person love me the way you love her.”

Malik placed his hand over her hand on his shoulder. Then he jerked his chin in the direction of the restaurant. “The superhero cometh.”

Cruz followed the direction of his gaze. “I think of her as being half human, half shark.”

“Yep. That’ll do,” Malik said.

“All right,” Shade announced through the window. “California and the hero track it is. Right? Because none of us had a better idea.”

“Fait accompli,” Cruz said.

It took them two days and three more stolen cars to reach California.

En route they listened to the radio for news reports, and Cruz kept an eye on social media, but there were no new sightings of Knightmare. The Coast Guard stopped the ship Knightmare had snagged at the Golden Gate and found no sign of Knightmare or the woman with him. The ship’s crew all agreed that the creature and the woman with him destroyed the ship’s radio and forced them to launch a lifeboat just off the coast of the Monterey Peninsula.

Shade, Cruz, and Malik approached Monterey, but they turned back when they got word of roadblocks ahead. They spent the night in a motel that accepted cash and monitored both the TV and the web. But there was no news of Knightmare.

The next morning they drove twenty miles and found a second motel, and again spent a night watching TV and cursing the slow wi-fi.

At the motel Kim Kardashian made an appearance. A very complete appearance, since Cruz had full-body shots to work with. An appearance that, to Shade’s undisguised disgust, managed to stop Malik in mid-sentence, despite the fact that he was prosing away about Eddie Van Halen’s guitar work.

By the third day of this, the hero option was looking hopeless. They heard of a fire raging in San Luis Obispo, but it was too far away for Shade to pull a dramatic rescue. They considered whether Shade could fly to a war zone and save a bunch of lives, but concluded that the FBI was quite likely to spot them if they bought tickets to Afghanistan.

They heard of two surfers lost beneath a freak wave, their bodies presumably swept out to sea, but it was hard to see where super-speed would be of any help there.

They watched The Incredibles and speculated about whether Shade could run on water like the kid in the movie.

And then: a sighting. Knightmare had ju

st emptied a bank vault in Salinas, and that was only six miles away. They raced to the scene, but stopped well away as the town was crawling with every variety of law enforcement officer.

“Knightmare’s got the same problem we have,” Shade said. “He can’t use credit cards, which means he’s either sleeping in the open or hiding out in no-tell motels he can pay for in cash.”

“There are dozens of those within an hour’s drive,” Malik said. “And the police will have figured that out, too.”

“Yes, of course they will. And they have the resources. Which means we need the same resources, we need to know what the cops know.”

“What if we had a police scanner?” Cruz suggested.

“That’s just the public frequency,” Malik said. “We’d need a radio tuned to whatever private frequency they’re using.” Then, to Shade, “How far can you run?”

“I don’t know. But we could park a couple miles away, that’s just a few seconds’ run. I can go right into Salinas and snag a radio.”

“Might be worth thinking about,” Malik mused, but Shade had already transformed and a second later was out the door. “Yes,” Malik called after her, “it was good to discuss all this and work it out in advance and not just go running off like a . . .” He sighed, sat back, closed his eyes, and said, “So, Cruz. Know any jokes?”

But before Cruz could think of any, Shade was back and holding a squawking police radio. “And I got these.” She handed a pack of Smarties to Cruz.

“Excellent,” Cruz said.

It took seven hours of listening to intermittent chatter between a CHP captain, an LAPD commander, an FBI special agent, and a person who was never identified by affiliation before they sat up suddenly.

“Suspects spotted, southbound PCH, nine miles north of Piedras Blanca lighthouse.”

“Map it!” Shade snapped to Cruz.

“We’re not far,” Cruz reported, and Malik pulled out into traffic.

“Left at the light,” Cruz directed.