I crouched down in my seat and peeked out the windows, looking for the gunman. But all I saw were joggers on the beach. Then I checked out the rearview mirror and let out a terrified scream. Staring back at me was a wide-eyed derelict. Omigod, how did he get in my car? What did he want from me? Had Marybeth’s killer paid him to kill and/or seriously maim me?

With my heart pounding, I sneaked another peek in the mirror. Strange, the derelict looked somewhat like me. I looked again. Oh, good heavens, it was me. My hair had gone completely haywire in the fog, giving me that finger-in-the-light-socket mental patient look.

When my heart finally stopped racing, I took another look outside. Still no sign of any gun-toting bad guys. But I wasn’t taking any chances. No way was I getting out of my car. I got out my cell phone and called 911.

Five minutes later, a squad car pulled up.

Two Malibu cops, tan enough to moonlight as lifeguards, got out of the car. One of them approached my window while the other started examining the tires.

“Someone tried to kill me!” I wailed to the cop at my window. “They shot out my tires.”

“Nobody shot your tires,” his partner said, kneeling over the front passenger tire.

“What?”

“Come here and see for yourself.”

Somehow I managed to pry my knuckles from the steering wheel and walked over to the front of the car.

“Looks like you ran over a box of nails.”

Indeed, my front tires were studded with dozens of industrial-strength nails.

“Gosh, it sounded just like gunshots,” I said, making a mental note to never again jump to conclusions based on movie sound effects.

The cop who discovered the nails shook his head, disgusted.

“What sort of jerk throws nails on the highway?”

“Probably kids,” his partner said. “Probably thought it was funny.”

Maybe it was kids, I thought. But maybe not. Maybe it was someone who wanted to intimidate me, and get me to stop my investigation.

No, I’d bet my bottom Pop Tart that the person who’d tossed those nails in the path of my car was Marybeth’s killer.

Luckily, I have an instruction booklet called How to Change a Tire in my glove compartment, one of the many useful gifts my mom has sent me from the shopping channel. Which made for very interesting reading while the Triple A guy actually did the job. (C’mon now. You didn’t really think that I, Jaine Austen, a woman who has trouble changing an overhead light bulb, was going to change her own tire, did you?)

By the time the Triple A guy drove off, my heart rate had finally returned to normal, and my hands had stopped shaking enough so that I could drive.