Leo Sealy emerged from the space between the two buildings where he had entered it, and ran for the street. He had seen Justine Poole go into the passage, and he had been sure he could catch her in it, but he had underestimated her speed again, or maybe this time he had underestimated several things—her alertness, her stamina, and her ability to fit herself through a space designed to block a person. It had looked to him to be the kind of space where children got stuck and had to be rescued by firemen, but that had to be the way she had gotten out. He ran downhill, around the front of the building and up the street to Fountain, turned to the right to look, and saw her running far ahead of him.
She ran east on the sidewalk and then suddenly veered out to the curb. There was her voice, shouting. He couldn’t hear what she said, but it made a man in a car pull over sharply and stop. She ran, flung open the passenger door, and threw herself inside. He could see her fiddling with something in front of her—maybe moving something out of the way of her feet. As she slammed the door shut, Sealy saw something white fall from the car to the pavement. The driver pulled away from the curb and accelerated. Whatever she was telling him put the spurs to him because the car kept gaining speed, going slightly nose-upward as it went.
Sealy stopped running. He had no hope of getting close enough to the car to fire. He also had no chance of running back to the parking lot two blocks from the hotel where he had parked and driving back here in time to see where the man who had picked up Justine was taking her. He could only be sure they were heading east, but that could already be changing right now. When he got to his car he would go in that direction, because every other direction had even less to recommend it.
First, he had to see whether he had been imagining what he thought he had seen when Justine Poole had gotten into the rescuer’s car. It had been a flash of white, like a piece of trash, falling from the car just before Justine closed the door. He kept going, moving slightly slower because he wasn’t chasing her now. He kept his eye on the approximate spot where he had seen the white object fall. He decided that the best move would be to get off the sidewalk and run beside the curb at the edge of the street, so he would be less likely to miss it and go past.
Soon after he had moved to the edge of the road, he heard something, a hum that was just above a whisper—a car coasting along behind him, its rubber tires hissing on the asphalt as it came up on him. He glanced over his shoulder while maintaining the cadence of his steps, as runners did. He saw a pair of headlights, and behind them the unmistakable shape of a police car. The light bar on its roof was dark, and the car was moving barely faster than he was.
He wished he hadn’t been running. That didn’t look good after one A.M. He had taken off his reflective vest and the rest of his gear and discarded it as soon as he’d seen her cross Sixth Street—except his pistol, which was in his right pocket, the side away from the street. Now he wished he’d kept the vest. A lot of nighttime runners wore them, and looking as though they wanted to be seen at least made people assume they weren’t doing anything illegal. The cop drove along beside him for about a hundred feet, looking at him closely, and then rolled down his window and called, “Run on the sidewalk, not the street.”
Sealy waved, stepped up onto the sidewalk and went into a slow trot, and the cop sped up slightly and drifted past. The police car approached the spot where the other car had stopped to pick up Justine Poole, and then the cop appeared to get a call. The car’s light bar came on, the lights spinning and emitting blue and red flashes as the car accelerated sharply. As it passed over the bits of trash in the street some of it blew and swirled in its wake, including the white rectangle, which spun and then blew close to the curb.
The cop car was far away now and the cop had other things on his mind, so Sealy ran out into the street again to reach the spot before some sudden breeze could pick up the paper and blow it anywhere. When he got there, he found the white rectangle lying in the gutter among the dust and leaves. He stomped his foot on it to hold it down, not daring to trust its permanence even for the time it would take him to bend over and pick it up. He squatted and tugged it out from under his foot. It was an envelope, the kind that companies sent inside their solicitations for subscriptions or donations. He turned away from the nearest street lamp and held it up so he could read it. Harper’s Magazine. There was a preprinted square in the right corner that said, “No postage necessary if mailed in the United States.” There was no space asking for a return address, but one of those address stickers had been stuck there anyway. He read it. Mr. Joseph Alston, 327 Corcoran Way, Los Angeles, CA 90046.
Sealy folded the envelope and slipped it into his left pants pocket, then started to trot back toward the corner where he had first seen Justine Poole running for the car. After a hundred paces or so he changed his mind and slowed to a businesslike walk. Running was a risk. The cop who had passed him had probably not entirely acquitted him of being up to something. He had just been giving all of his attention to his radio call. That must have seemed serious, because he had sped off immediately.
Sealy had no further need to run. He sensed that the rules of the universe had suddenly reasserted themselves. The fact that she had flung open the car door and accidentally brushed the envelope off the dashboard or seat or pushed it out the door with her foot was amazing—but no more amazing than her eluding him for the past three days. Things seemed to be normal again. The race damned well was given to the swift and the battle to the strong.