Where in God's name is Erica now?
“So we had two crimes they might have committed, but the timing is all wrong. A real pickle. If they're on the way to California, what kept them so long in Tennessee?”
The telephone rang.
“That's probably Shirley Rinnick calling now. Best not take it.”
A dozen more rings, plaintive, then resigned, and the caller gave up.
“Maybe they got lost somewhere. A question I'll have to ask her if we find her. Our real break came later. Seems there was another robbery in Oklahoma, though we didn't make the connection at first. Man runs a general store in a flyspeck town, and these two kids come in one afternoon, and he starts jotting down a description, just before they rob him. Shot him twice, first by the boy in the shoulder, then he takes a load of buckshot in the face. Thank God, they didn't kill him. From his hospital bed, he told the tale to the Okie police, gave them a good description. The field office down there tracks them west, straight as an arrow, to Abilene, Texas. They hold up the Yellow Rose Cantina, and one of the waitresses there remembers talking to a young woman—though the description doesn't match your daughter—and her boyfriend who made a getaway in a red car with Tennessee license plates. Witness at a motel says they are runaways, though he can't be considered entirely reliable. The local sheriff finds a drawing one of the kids made in the waxed tabletop.” From his pocket, he pulled an index card with a crude approximation of the AOD logo with the rampant wings. “You seen this before?”
“In the boy's room,” Paul said. “Stenciled on the closet door.”
“AOD—Angels of Destruction. The Bureau has been playing catchup since then, and we knew their destination. To meet up with a dissident counterculture revolutionary cell in San Francisco, essentially the brainchild of a petty criminal named John Wesley Cromartie, aka the Crow. Of course our offices out there have been keeping an eye on the Angels for over two years now. If we count Wiley Rinnick and your daughter. Now, we don't know if she went willingly or was kidnapped, but there were at least seven of these Angels—”
“Willingly,” Paul said, “but she didn't know what she was doing. She's just a child.”
“—before the accident. I'm sorry to have to tell you.” He paused and waited for them to settle themselves. “We believe that this Cromartie and Rinnick were constructing some sort of explosive device—”
A hand clips a wire to the wrong post, and in that instant the light expands and diminishes all at once. The destroyer of worlds becomes clear. A thousand suns burst open. The flash penetrates his consciousness as the bomb rends them asunder and time roils and fastens to the certain knowledge of the glorious mistake.
“If there's any consolation, they died instantly, as sudden as a sneeze. Mrs. Rinnick took the news as well as could be expected.” Beside her, Paul melted away into the sofa as Linnet ticked on like an alarm clock. “The other Angels have flown away, so to speak, maybe left the country or gone underground, we don't know. But we will keep looking, if she can be found.”
After the rush of air, after the thought of flash and the fire, after the interrupted cry, after the last breath and beat, silence expanded to fill the void, and what had once perched in Margaret's soul took wing.
31
Racing away in true fear, she kept looking over her shoulder, expecting at any moment a phalanx of police cars to roar over the receding horizon, sirens blazing. He had come back into the Yellow Rose like a madman, the guns natural in his hands, a look of pure anger on his face, the shaved head beet red, demanding that they all get down on the floor. As usual, not enough cash in the register to justify the risk, and he put an angry hole in the ceiling with a shotgun blast. Pulled by the vortex of his emotion, she followed to the car, deaf to his laughter and exhilarated yell. By the time they escaped the Texas scrubland and were welcomed to the Land of Enchantment, she allowed herself a deep breath. Little traffic passed in either direction, and he drove possessed into the deserted landscape, the sagebrush and chaparral floating on a sea of orange dirt, the mesas to the west mutable shadows underneath the broad sky crowded with clouds as big and graceful as ocean liners. She could feel Wiley's angry energy in the way he steered the car, and he said virtually nothing until Tucumcari, with its curio shops and old motels lining Route 66, and they stopped for a late lunch.
“I have to get to a doctor's,” she told him over enchiladas. “Take the pregnancy test, find out for sure.”
“One step ahead of you, baby. That's why I got us some more cash. Next big city, we'll stop and kill the rabbit. We'll find you a clinic where they can check you out.”