Cruz leaped from the front steps and both he and Del Rio ran toward the fleet car. Gomez seemed to have gone from zero to almost sixty in no seconds flat, but I saw her face as the Impala shot past me and made a hard right turn on two wheels.
Gomez didn’t look afraid. She looked determined.
Del Rio yelled to me, “Should I call the cops?”
I shouted, “Yes.”
I got into my car, made a U-turn, and followed Cruz and Del Rio east on Stagg, a narrow road, not a speedway.
Gomez was out in front and gaining ground, driving through the residential development as if she were both drunk and crazy. She took out a mailbox, sideswiped a couple of parked cars, and ran a stop sign.
She took another two-wheel turn, this time a sharp left onto Laurel Canyon Boulevard, scraping the side of an SUV that was headed north in her lane of traffic.
I got onto the boulevard in time to see the red car rocket ahead in the inside lane. Horns blared. The Impala weaved—left, right, back to the inside lane. Cars swerved. Hubcaps rolled across the road. Cruz and Del Rio drafted right behind the Impala but couldn’t pass.
Gomez wasn’t just running, she was escaping like a wildfire was burning up the street.
Sirens blared as we flew through the intersection of Laurel Canyon and Strathern Street, an area cluttered with minimall shops: a liquor mart, a flower shop, a 76 station, fast-food joints.
Then the road flattened into a straightaway that ran between two- and three-story commercial buildings on both sides.
Del Rio’s call to 911 and Gomez’s outlaw run had brought out the cruisers, and when Carmelita Gomez turned, six squad cars were screaming behind us. The sounds of others were in the distance.
Gomez didn’t slow, stop, or falter.
In fact, the more cars pursuing her, the faster and crazier she drove.
CHAPTER 112
CRUZ WAS DRIVING the fleet car, Rick in the seat beside him, Jack’s blue Lamborghini filling the rearview mirror. Ahead of them, Carmelita Gomez was sending all of their speedometer needles into the red. Cruz kept his foot on the gas, staying close, aware that if Gomez braked or plowed into another car, he couldn’t stop in time.
The woman was guilty of something, for sure.
Cruz tried to get his mind around what Tyson Keyes had said about her, and he was picturing that cute but snooty woman in a whole different way.
He flashed on her standing near the wardrobe at Havana, wearing that tight pink dress, not looking at him the way women usually looked at him. At all.
He remembered her later, sitting next to him in the car, finally giving up a guy she said was her driver, Billy Moufan, saying that Moufan knew the killer’s identity.
But there was no Billy Moufan. Anywhere.
Tyson Keyes had been her lover and her driver. And he had said Gomez was a man-hater who had sex with men for a living. How twisted was that?
A car horn blew loud and long as the speeding caravan forced a Caddy tight up against the median strip.
Del Rio said, “Pay attention, Emilio.”
“Pay attention? I’m driving in a straight line. It’s too fast, man? You want me to pull over and you drive? That’s okay with me. I want to piss my pants, you hear me?”
The Impala made a sudden screaming right onto Neenach, and Cruz followed, Jack tight behind them.
Neenach was residential, a lot like the street where Gomez lived, two lines of facing single-story stucco homes fronted by low walls or small gardens, a few trees sprouting up between the houses and the asphalt.
Cruz didn’t want to take his eyes off the road long enough to check the speed, but his gut told him they were going ninety down Neenach, flying toward the intersection at Haddon.
But Gomez didn’t take the turn at Haddon.
There was a sound wall up ahead where Neenach Street dead-ended at the freeway. Gomez wasn’t stopping. She sped into the cul-de-sac, a dead end with a semicircle of houses, maybe six of them, facing the high cement wall that separated them from the freeway.