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voice. He couldn't even inhale.
        Spencer could have slammed the weapon-a compact submachine gun, judging by the feel of it-into his adversary's throat, crushing his windpipe, asphyxiating him on his own blood. A blow to the face would have shattered the nose and driven splinters of bone into the brain.
        But he didn't want to kill or seriously injure anyone. he just needed time to get the hell out of there. He hammered the gun against the cop's temple, half checking the blow but knocking the poor bastard unconscious.
        The guy was wearing night-vision goggles. The swat team was conducting a night stalk with full technological assistance, which was why no lights had come on in the house. They had the vision of cats, and Spencer was the mouse.
        He rolled onto the grass, rose into a crouch, clutching the submachine gun in both hands. It was an Uzi: he recognized the shape and heft of it.
        He swept the muzzle left and right, anticipating the charge of another adversary. No one came at him.
        Perhaps five seconds had passed since the man in black had crept past the ficus tree.
        Spencer sprinted across the lawn, away from the bungalow, into flowers and shrubs. Greenery lashed his legs. Woody azaleas poked his calves, snagged his jeans.
        He dropped the Uzi. He wasn't going to shoot at anyone. Even if it meant being taken into custody and exposed to the news media, he would surrender rather than use the gun.
        He waded through the shrubs, between two trees, past a eugenia with phosphorescent white blossoms, and reached the property wall.
        He was as good as gone. If they spotted him now, they wouldn't shoot him in the back. They'd shout a warning, identify themselves, order him to freeze, and come after him, but they wouldn't shoot.
        The stucco-sheathed, concrete-block wall was six feet high, capped with bull-nose bricks that were slippery with rain. He got a grip, pulled himself up, scrabbling at the stucco with the toes of his athletic shoes.
        As he slid onto the top of the wall, belly against the cold bricks, and drew up his legs, gunfire erupted behind him. Bullets smacked into the concrete blocks, so close that chips of stucco sprayed his face.
        Nobody shouted a goddamned warning.
        He rolled off the wall into the neighboring property, and automatic weapons chattered again-a longer burst than before.
        Submachine guns in a residential neighborhood. Craziness. What the hell kind of cops were these?
        He fell into a tangle of rosebushes. It was winter; the roses had been pruned; even in the colder months, however, the California climate was sufficiently mild to encourage some growth, and thorny trailers snared his clothes, pricked his skin.
        Voices, flat and strange, muffled by the static of the rain, came from beyond the wall: "This way, back here, come on!"
        Spencer sprang to his feet and flailed through the rose brambles.
        A spiny trailer scraped the unscarred side of his face and curled around his head as if intent on fitting him with a crown, and he broke free only at the cost of punctured hands.
        He was in the back-yard of another house. Lights in some of the ground-floor rooms. A face at a rain-jeweled window. A young girl.
        Spencer had the terrible feeling that he'd be putting her in mortal jeopardy if he didn't get out of there before his pursuers arrived.
        After negotiating a maze of yards, block walls, wrought-iron fences, culde-sacs, and service alleys, never sure if he had lost his pursuers or if they were, in fact, at his heels, Spencer found the street on which he had parked the Explorer. He ran to it and jerked on the door.
        Locked, of course.
        He fumbled in his pockets for the keys. Couldn't find them. He hoped to God he hadn't lost them along the way.
        Rocky was watching him through the driver's window. Apparently he found