The pharmacist rolled the metal gate up at nine o’clock exactly. Seth was standing at the counter when it got to the top.
She was about thirty, with reading glasses pushed up into her hair and a King Soopers fleece over her white coat. Her name tag said MAGGIE. She logged into the computer and typed for a while with two fingers.
“Name and date of birth?”
Seth gave her both. She typed some more.
“Dr. Galvin called this in at six fifteen this morning,” she said.
“She’s very dedicated.”
“She is. I’ll have it in a minute.”
She went into the back. Seth looked at his empty wrist out of habit. He had told Sam ten minutes. It had been about three.
Somewhere outside a car horn started.
Seth ignored it. Somebody was always honking in a King Soopers parking lot. Then he noticed that it had not stopped. It was one long blast.
Maggie came back with a white paper bag folded over at the top and stapled.
“Somebody’s having a day,” she said.
“Sounds like it.”
“Do you have any questions about this medication for the pharmacist?”
“Is the pharmacist you?”
“Yes.”
“Then no.”
She laughed and pointed at the card reader. Seth tapped his card on it. The horn was still going.
Seth knew that wasn’t a car alarm. He picked up the bag and started walking. By the end of the cereal aisle he was walking fast. He could hear exactly where it was coming from now.
He knew it was his horn before he was out the automatic doors.
The Rover was where he had left it, backed in against the grass. The back door on the passenger side was open. A man in a Broncos sweatshirt was halfway inside it, on one knee, reaching across the back seat. A woman in a puffy vest stood behind him holding the door. Cooper was barking his head off.
Seth ran.
People were stopped all over the lot. A woman by a minivan was videoing the scene on her phone. A kid in a green apron had let go of a long line of carts, and they were rolling slowly away from him toward Broadway.
The man had Samantha by the shoulder of her jacket. She was in the driver’s seat with both hands on the horn. Vlad was shoving at the man with his elbows. Marcus was yelling “Help!” at the windshield.
The man looked back out the open door, saw Seth coming, and smiled at him.
For thirty years Seth had been pitched by men who smiled like that. He guessed the man was very good at his job.
“Hey!” Seth yelled. He held up the white bag. “I already called the police! They’re coming!”
He didn’t have a phone. His phone was on his kitchen counter.
The woman in the vest looked at him. Then she looked at the minivan woman, and at the kid in the apron. She said one word to the man. Seth didn’t catch it.
The man let go of Samantha. He backed out of the car carefully, brushing the glass off the knee of his jeans, and straightened up.
“Sorry, folks,” he said, loud enough for the minivan woman. “Wrong car. I thought this was my brother-in-law’s.”
“It’s not,” Seth said.
“I can see that now.”
The two of them walked away together. They did not hurry. They went down the lane toward the silver car two rows back, and the woman got in on the driver’s side.
Seth’s hands were shaking.
He got to the driver’s door. Samantha was still on the horn.
“Sam. Sam. You can stop.”
She took her hands off the wheel. It was very quiet.
“You took the key,” she said.
“I always take the key. It’s my car.”
“Move,” Vlad said to her. “Let him drive.”
Samantha went over the console into the back, on the side without the glass. Cooper climbed into her lap immediately, all of him, and licked her face. Seth got in and pushed the start button. The engine turned over.
He tossed the bag onto Marcus’s chest.
“Take two of those,” he said. “Now.”
“With what?”
“With your spit, Marcus.”
The silver car backed out of its space. It did not turn toward the exit. It came up the lane and stopped crossways, right in front of the Rover’s nose, about six feet away. Through its windshield Seth could see the man in the passenger seat looking at him. He was not smiling anymore.
Vlad pulled the back door shut. It closed on a lot of glass.
“They are blocking us,” he said.
“I see that.”
Seth looked in the mirror. Behind the Rover was the curb, the strip of grass with the one small tree on it, and then a side street with nobody on it.
He had owned this car for six years and the roughest thing he had driven it over was the speed bump at the Whole Foods on Pearl.
He put it in reverse.
“Seth,” Marcus said.
The back wheels went up the curb with a bang. Something in the back fell over. The Rover tipped, leveled, and rolled backward across the grass, and Seth turned the wheel and missed the tree by about a foot. Then the back wheels dropped off the far curb, then the front wheels, and they were in the street.
Cooper barked once, happily.
“You are driving on the grass,” Vlad said.
“I’ve always wanted to.”
In the mirror the silver car had come up to the curb and stopped. It was a little sedan that sat low to the ground. It wasn’t going over a curb. The man got out and stood there looking at the grass with his hands on his hips.
Seth drove to the end of the block and turned right, then left, and went down an alley behind a row of townhouses where he had once looked at a condo for his assistant’s daughter. He came out on Broadway going north. Nobody was behind them.
“They’ll go around,” Samantha said.
“They will. It takes about two minutes. They know the car now, though. And the plate.”
“Yes,” Vlad said.
The fast way back to Doug’s was Boulder Canyon, and Seth figured that was the one road they would be watching.
“So we don’t go up Boulder Canyon.”
It took fifteen minutes to cross town on Broadway, from Table Mesa to the north end. Seth watched the mirror at every light. Then he turned left onto Lee Hill Drive. In two minutes the houses ran out and the road started to climb into the foothills, brown grass and rocks and a few ponderosas. Air came roaring in through the hole in the back window.
Marcus had the bag open and was trying to get the childproof cap off the bottle.
“How do I do this?”
“Push down and turn it,” Vlad said.
He pushed down and turned. Two pills fell into his lap. He found them both in his shirt and swallowed them dry and then made a face like he was dying.
“What happened?” Seth asked.
“The woman broke the window with a small tool,” Vlad said. “It looked like a pen. Then she reached in and opened the door. Cooper bit her arm.”
“Good boy,” Seth said.
Cooper thumped his tail against Samantha’s leg.
“How did they find us?”
Nobody answered. Vlad was turned around watching the road behind them. Marcus was looking out his window at the rocks.
Seth guessed they had been watching for his name. He had walked up to a counter in Boulder and given it to a pharmacist, along with his birthday. That was stupid of him.
He looked at Samantha in the mirror. She was white. Her hands were in Cooper’s fur.
“Sam. You scared the hell out of me,” he said. “The horn was smart.”
She didn’t answer.
At the top of Lee Hill they came down into Lefthand Canyon.
“Fuck,” Seth said.
The road was full of bicycles. There were forty or fifty of them, in matching jerseys, two and three across, grinding up the canyon at about eleven miles an hour.
“It’s Saturday,” he said. “In Boulder.”
He fell in behind them. He couldn’t pass on the curves, so he didn’t try. The rider at the back of the pack looked over his shoulder at the Range Rover with no back window and gave him a thumbs up.
Nobody behind them could pass either. If the silver sedan came up behind the Rover it would have to sit back there all the way to Ward, and Vlad would see it the whole time.
“Vlad. Watch behind us.”
“I am already watching.”
“I know. Keep doing it.”
They climbed behind the bicycles for forty minutes. The line of cars behind them eventually included a couple of Subarus, another Range Rover, a Ford F150, but no silver sedan. At Ward the bikes pulled off to the side of the road, and Seth turned south onto the Peak to Peak.
Every car in Denver was up here looking at the aspens, bumper to bumper in both directions. The aspens were bright yellow. Seth had driven this road every fall for twenty years. He had hated it every time.
“This is perfect,” he said.
“It is very slow,” Vlad said.
“So is everybody behind us.”
Since they were the only Range Rover on the road with a hole where the back window should be, Seth was worried someone would notice this before they got to Nederland. He hoped they wouldn’t have a signal on their phone.
Samantha was asleep sitting up, with her head against the window and Cooper on top of her. Marcus was asleep too, with the white bag in his fist. Seth was worried about all of them.
“Vlad. Is Doug’s code still four one seven seven?”
Vlad turned back around. He had glass in his hair.
“Yes,” he said. “He has not changed it since August.”
“Do you know where he keeps a tarp?”
“No.”
“Then we’re going to have to find one.”
Cooper woke up, got off Samantha, and stuck his whole head out through the hole where the window had been. His ears went straight back in the wind.