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Page 135
back. "You're doing fine," Morgan said, and squeezed her shoulder.
At the hilltop interchange a sign read PACIFICA 9 and HALF MOON BAY 20. Anna headed the car seaward again.
The highway skirted downtown Pacifica. It was much modified and improved since the last time Morgan had passed this way. The fog grew thicker as they fled down the road. Their headlights barely penetrated the weblike wall before them. As the town fell behind, they began to climb through a wooded tunnel of ghostly eucalyptus and pines. Suddenly the woods vanished and the road cut deep through the spurs of land thrusting into the Pacific, a half mile away. The wounded mountains lay in steep pitches, striated with naked layers of ancient sediments. The road builders did little more than hold their own on this stretch of coast. Every hundred yards or so there were signs warning of rock slides and of sheer drops to the sea, and admonitions that this was an area where climbing, or even walking, was forbidden. Morgan had seen it in daylight many years ago, formidable and frightening. It was called Devil's Slide.
The slide was infamous. A year seldom went by without either the roadbed collapsing and falling hundreds of feet into the sea or some careless motorist losing control of his car and plunging off the cliff. It was also a favored place for itinerant killers to dispose of their victims.
The fog had lightened and the lights behind them were gaining again. Morgan frowned. How stupid could he be? He should have known. The damned car was bugged. While he had sat bemused by Anna Neville in the Bella Italia, their hunters had put a bug on the car.
They sped along the narrow highway as it clung precariously to the cliff. The sheer edge to the sea was protected by an occasional rock barrier, but most of the time there were only sand berms, meant to discourage passersby from plunging over the edge and into the surf.
"Stop," Morgan said.

 
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