And he saw her face change.
He would think about that moment a great deal, later. Because what he saw on the blonde woman's face, in the second before everything started, was not anger. Not at first. It was something more like despair. A look of total, crushing, hopeless panic, like someone standing on a beach watching a wave come in that is much too big to get away from. Her lips parted. Her pale eyes went wide and wet. One hand went to her throat, to the gold chains there, and gripped them.
And then, as Theo watched, the panic folded in on itself and turned into something else. Her face tightened. Her jaw set. Her eyes narrowed and went hard and bright. And she slammed the wing door of the orange car shut so hard that the whole car rocked on its suspension, and turned, and came marching across the wet asphalt toward pump one, her red heels striking the ground like hammers, click click click click, her blonde hair swinging, her arms already lifting, her mouth already open.
Theo took a step back without knowing he was doing it.
The tall young woman at pump one still did not turn around.
Dara heard her coming.
She had heard the car, of course. Everyone within half a mile had heard the car. She had heard it come roaring down Linwood, heard the squeal of the tires and the slap of the puddle and the deep, rising, chest-rattling snarl of the engine as it swung in under the canopy and stopped behind the SUV. She had felt it, too, a low vibration coming up through the concrete of the fuel island and into the thick rubber soles of her platform sneakers. She had not turned around. There had been no reason to. It was a car, at a gas station, waiting for a pump. It would wait. She had been taught, a long time ago, by a small gray-haired man in a white uniform, that the very first lesson of the ring is to never let anyone else decide where you are looking.
So she had kept looking at the pump. At the numbers on the little screen, climbing. Four point two gallons. Four point three. Twenty-one dollars and sixty cents. Twenty-two dollars and eleven cents. The tank of her grandmother's SUV held twenty-one gallons, and Dara had decided, standing at the pump, that she was going to fill it to the top, every gallon, whatever it cost, and that when she got home on Sunday she was going to show her grandmother the receipt and make her look at it. It was a small, stubborn, private rebellion, and it pleased her.
She had heard the door of the orange car open. She had heard it slam. She had heard the heels.
Click. Click. Click. Click.
Fast. Sharp. Hard. Coming straight at her, across the wet asphalt, from behind and to the right. She knew the sound of a person walking toward her with intent. She had heard it on a hundred mats, in a hundred gymnasiums, in the half second between the referee's command and the first exchange. It was the sound of someone who had already decided what was going to happen when they arrived.
She did not turn around. But she listened. And underneath the calm of her face, underneath the stillness that Theo Navarro was watching from twenty feet away and thinking was the calmest thing he had ever seen, something in Dara Whitfield came quietly awake and began, the way it always did, to measure. Distance. Speed. Angle. Weight. The heels were high and thin, she could hear that in the sound of them, and the ground was wet, and whoever was wearing them was moving faster than was sensible on wet ground in heels that high. Small, probably. Light. Not a threat, almost certainly. Just angry.
She did not turn around.
The heels stopped. A few feet behind her and to her right, near the rear corner of the SUV. And a voice exploded into the quiet of the forecourt, high and shrill and furious, so sharp that it seemed to cut the air.
"Seriously? Move your car!"
Now Dara turned her head.
Not her body. Just her head, a few degrees to the right, the minimum movement needed to bring the speaker into the edge of her vision. She saw a small woman, perhaps five foot four even in those heels, slim and pale and very blonde, dressed from neck to knee in glossy red. Big gold hoops swinging at her jaw. A pile of gold chains at her throat. Makeup so perfect it looked painted on. Sunglasses pushed up into her hair, though there was no sun. She was standing with her feet planted apart on the wet asphalt and her arms flung out from her sides, hands open, fingers spread, like someone presenting a disaster to an audience, and her face, under the perfect makeup, was flushed a mottled pink with rage.