Evade

evade
verb, intransitive. To slip away; to take refuge in evasion.
verb, transitive. To elude by dexterity or strategem; to escape; to avoid facing up to; to avoid the performance of; to circumvent; to avoid answering directly

The man wearing the dark-brown sweater and patched jeans was following her, Emma decided. She stood at the window of a gift shop, watching the reflections in the glass instead of looking at the items on display. The man was across the street, about three doors down. Instead of looking into the window of the store where he idled, he had his back to it. His gaze moved about, but returned to her more often than anywhere else.

Emma leaned closer to the glass as if straining to see something better and weighed possibilities. Was he a cop? She doubted it. He had been too easy to spot. That left one of Holland's underlings, or a mugger. Either way, he was a problem that needed solving.


She rummaged for her compact and opened it, her back still to the stalker. She snickered when she saw him flinch, turn and move two doors further away, spooked by the mirror. What an amateur! Didn't he realize that she had been observing his reflection on the window for several minutes? She snapped the compact shut and knew that he would be easy to evade. The gift shop connected to a clothing store by a side door inside, and that store had a coffee bar with an outdoor seating area in the back. Because Emma had worked there, a long time ago, she knew about the hidden gate in the courtyard wall that opened onto an alley.

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.