Shadow Woman: A Novel Read online

  Then the Highlander turned into the middle-class neighborhood, and Lizette breathed a sigh of relief.

  The relief didn’t last long. The gray sedan was still a short distance behind her, not riding her bumper but staying fairly close.

  Without using her turn indicator, she took the next left, sharply and cleanly. Huh. The Camry, which she didn’t think she’d have chosen for herself, handled pretty well. On the side road, she slowed her speed. She checked the rearview mirror and saw the gray car turn onto the road behind her.

  Her pulse rate jumped. She took a deep breath, and something deep inside her seemed to settle down. Coincidence, like the Highlander? Hell, no. One coincidence was more than enough for one day. She wouldn’t take the risk that this was another. She checked for oncoming traffic, then slammed on her brakes and spun the steering wheel, making a one-eighty turn in the middle of the street and heading back toward the main road. As she zipped past the gray car she didn’t look at the driver, not directly. She could see well enough with her peripheral vision to identify him as the man from the grocery store parking lot, though.

  He didn’t look directly at her, either.

  Stalker, robber, rapist … innocent bystander? She wasn’t going to take a chance, regardless.

  She pulled back onto the main drag and hit the gas. Traffic was light, so she didn’t have any problems swerving in and out between cars, changing lanes, putting some asphalt between her and the man in the gray car. She was so intent on the traffic, on the cars she passed with no more than a hair’s breadth between them, that she didn’t dare check her rearview mirror to see if the gray car was behind her.

  But when she hit a fairly clear stretch of road, she checked the mirror. Was that him, a quarter of a mile or so back? His car was so ordinary, it was impossible to tell, and she couldn’t make out the details of his grill and headlights.

  Several blocks past her office building she took a fast right, slowing just enough that she could maintain control. She took the next right, too, then a left. She passed a slower-moving black pickup, made another turn, then pulled into the parking lot of a small apartment complex, turned a corner, and slid her vehicle into a small space between a white van and a gray pickup, two high-profile vehicles that hid her smaller car from view, if anyone had been able to follow her to this point.

  Just in case, she popped her seat belt and slid down low in the seat so that anyone who did drive by wouldn’t see that she was in the car. Automatically she reached for her purse, as if there should be something there she needed, but her fingers stopped well short of the leather strap. What was she reaching for? Her breath mints? Fingernail clippers?

  Yeah, she could be flip about it, but in the back of her mind she knew exactly what she’d been reaching for. I need my weapon.

  Her heart was beating hard but not terribly fast; her legs trembled in reaction, to either fear or adrenaline. Right now, she couldn’t tell which.

  Maybe she should call the police, but what the hell would she say? She hadn’t gotten a license plate number, and even if she had, the man in the gray car hadn’t done anything illegal. Scaring a paranoid woman wasn’t a crime, last she’d heard. No, no police. Besides, putting the battery in her cell phone and turning it on would let whoever was following her triangulate her position.

  Oh, shit. The car had a GPS. It might have a separate tracker hidden on it somewhere, for all she knew. If her pursuer was tracking her movements, the gray car would show up any minute now, and there was no way she could evade him for good, at least as long as she stayed with the car. A part of her mind screamed that she should get out of the car now, that sitting here she was in a position of weakness, but out there … out there in an unfamiliar neighborhood with no gun, no backup, no one to call, was she any better off than she was right here?

  No gray sedan showed up, and after a while she had to conclude that it wasn’t going to. If the guy had been following her, she’d lost him. Which brought up two possibilities: either her car didn’t have a tracker on it, or he was some random pervert who didn’t belong with Them. He might have seen where she’d turned off the main road, but there were too many possible routes after that, including more than one that would have taken her back to the main road. In her mind she replayed the drive, the twists and turns, the close calls, the speed.

  The freakin’ rush.

  Where in hell had she learned how to do that?

  Well, maybe she was getting a little too proud of herself. She hadn’t exactly driven a Le Mans race. There was also the more-than-fifty-fifty chance that the guy hadn’t been following her at all, and she’d risked life and limb escaping from nothing.

  She waited another five minutes, then finally sat up in the seat. Then she waited some more, wanting to see what was going on around her. Her position here was a good one, she decided. No one passing by on the street would see her vehicle. They’d have to be in the parking lot and right up on her to have a clue. And if that happened she was pretty much screwed, unless she put the car into a low gear and rammed them. She’d have to keep that in mind.

  But no one drove past. The only activity she saw was apartment residents coming and going from the Dumpster twenty yards away. She made herself sit there a while longer. How long did she need to wait before she could safely leave? She couldn’t stay here, but she didn’t see how she could leave before dark. Hours from now. Finally she grabbed her purse and pulled the strap over her shoulder, then left the car, easing around the van on the driver’s side to sneak a peek toward the road. There was no traffic, nothing but a few kids playing ball. There wasn’t much beyond this complex, so the road didn’t serve as a throughway to anywhere. Anyone who drove back this way was either coming here or lost.

  No one would expect her to hide here.

  She popped the trunk, shaking off that weird thought, and ruefully lifted the grocery bag with the softening frozen yogurt in it out. No way would it survive much longer; and she wasn’t leaving this parking lot anytime soon. The chicken would have to go, too. The temperature in the trunk was plain damn hot, and she didn’t want the yogurt melting and the chicken spoiling there. She might as well get rid of them both while she could.

  She walked toward the Dumpster, purse strap cross body, one bag of groceries—a.k.a. garbage—in hand. What a waste! Now she’d have to wait until next week to find out if she liked blueberry pomegranate frozen yogurt, because she was damned if she was going back to the grocery store until then. She almost laughed; she was losing her mind—or not—and she was worried about the yogurt.

  She was aware of the girl’s presence long before the kid opened her mouth.

  “If you don’t live here you can’t use our Dumpster, and you don’t live here. I know everybody here, so don’t lie to me.”

  Stifling an inner sigh, Lizette turned to face the girl. Twelve years old or so, she guessed. Skinny, stringy blond hair under a faded blue baseball cap, blue eyes, good bones. She’d be very pretty, one day, if no one messed with her face. She kept a cautious distance between them.

  “I didn’t know.” She lifted the bag slightly. “Do you like blueberry pomegranate frozen yogurt? Slightly melted, of course.”

  The girl narrowed her eyes. She was so young, but her gaze was already suspicious. “I don’t know. Never tried it.”

  “Neither have I, but it looked good. Wanna trade? Frozen yogurt and chicken for that hat.”

  A hat would hide her hair, disguise her profile when she finally did leave here. Such caution was probably an exercise in uselessness, but she couldn’t stop herself from making the effort.

  “I’m not an idiot,” the girl snapped. She scowled. “Is it poisoned? Drugged?”

  “Of course not,” Lizette said indignantly. “I’m just not going home as soon as I thought I would, and I’d hate for it to go to waste.”

  “You were headed for the Dumpster with it. Why should I give up my hat for your garbage?”

  Good point. At least she was no longer b