Sole Survivor by Dean Koontz

former Special Forces officers who wished to make horizontal career moves from military service into jobs as paid mercenaries. The latter was folded open to an article about belt-buckle knives sharp enough to eviscerate an adversary or cut through bone. Evidently this was Blick’s reading matter during lulls in the surveillance operation, as when he had been waiting for Joe to grow weary of contemplating the sea from Santa Monica Beach.
    Mr. Wallace Blick, of the ANABOLIC tattoo, was a techno geek with an edge.

    When Joe climbed out of the van, Blick was groaning but not yet conscious. His legs pumped, a flurry of kicks, as if he were a dog dreaming of chasing rabbits, and his cool red sneakers tore divots from the grass.
    Neither of the men in Hawaiian shirts had returned from the desert scrub beyond the hill.
    Joe hadn’t heard any more gunshots, although the terrain might have muffled them.
    He hurried to his car. The door handle was bright with the kiss of the sun, and he hissed with pain when he touched it.
    The interior of the car was so hot that it seemed on the verge of spontaneous combustion. He cranked down the window.
    As he started the Honda, he glanced at the rearview mirror and saw a flatbed truck with board sides approaching from farther east in the cemetery. It was probably a groundskeeper’s vehicle, either coming to investigate the gunfire or engaged in routine maintenance.
    Joe could have followed the road to the west end of the memorial park and then looped all the way around to the entrance at the east perimeter, but he was in a hurry and wanted to go directly back the way he had come. Overwhelmed by a feeling that he had stretched his luck too far, he could almost hear a ticking like a time-bomb clock. Pulling away from the curb, he tried to hang a U-turn but couldn’t quite manage it in one clean sweep.
    He shifted into Reverse and tramped on the accelerator hard enough to make the tires squeal against the hot pavement. The Honda shot backward. He braked and shifted into Drive again.
    Tick, tick, tick.
    Instinct proved reliable. Just as he accelerated toward the approaching groundskeeper’s truck, the rear window on the driver’s side of the car, immediately behind his head, exploded, spraying glass across the backseat.
    He didn’t have to hear the shot to know what had happened.
    Glancing to the left, he saw the man in the red Hawaiian shirt, stopped halfway down the hillside, in a shooter’s stance. The guy, pale as a risen corpse, was dressed for a margarita party.
    Someone shouted hoarse, slurred curses. Blick. Crawling away from the van on his hands and knees, dazedly shaking his blocky head, like a pit bull wounded in a dogfight, spraying bloody foam from his mouth: Blick.
    Another round slammed into the body of the car with a hard thud, followed by a brief trailing twang.
    With a rush of hot gibbering wind at the open and the shattered windows, the Honda spirited Joe out of range. He rocketed past the groundskeeper’s truck at such high speed that it swerved to avoid him, though he was not in the least danger of colliding with it.
    Past one burial service, where black-garbed mourners drifted like forlorn spirits away from the open grave, past another burial service, where the grieving huddled on chairs as if prepared to stay forever with whomever they had lost, past an Asian family putting a plate of fruit and cake on a fresh grave, Joe fled. He passed an unusual white church—a steeple atop a Palladian-arch cupola on columns atop a clock tower—which cast a stunted shadow in the early-afternoon sun. Past a white Southern Colonial mortuary that blazed like alabaster in the California aridity but begged for bayous. He drove recklessly, with the expectation of relentless pursuit, which didn’t occur. He was also certain that his way would be blocked by the sudden arrival of swarms of police cars, but they still were not in sight when he raced between the open gates and out of the