The longer I lie in this compressed condition, the more frustrated I get, and the more frustrated I get, the more sleep eludes me. Soon I’m more awake than I was when I first lay down. My mind wanders back over the spent day, over the scores of dusty miles already searched. I say a silent prayer for Susan, for Lauren; I think on the endless miles of road and trail that await us in the morning.
A distant pack of coyotes soon take up a chorus, yipping and howling at each other in their high piercing voices. I wonder if it was their fleeting shadows in our peripheral vision earlier tonight as we returned to camp.
Soon their howling and yammering is louder and mixes with the heavy breathing from the front seat. Then the ruckus quiets for a few minutes and I’ve just started to relax when I hear sniffing around the door by my head. I lay motionless, eyes wide, barely daring to breathe.
It’s just a coyote, I remind myself. But the creature brings with it visions of a dark, snow-covered forest, of a distant time and a distant place.
Then another nose starts sniffing at the other door.
Two coyotes! Three!
Still, I tell myself, if I sat up and opened the door right now, they would spook and be gone before I finished pulling on the handle. I will myself to pull the handle and open the door, but logic loses and primal fear scores a point. Next, I will myself to just kick the inside of the door, with me still fully inside the vehicle protected by sheet metal and glass.
Primal fear wins again.
Maybe it’s because they’re close cousins to the wolf, or because their howling and yipping really is that eerie, or maybe it’s just because they’re large predatory animals and I’m on their turf; how else do you explain such fear? In the end it doesn’t matter, I suppose. I’ll think of an excuse later; right now I continue to lay rigid and still in the backseat. I know how the rabbit feels cowering in his hole.
After a few minutes, the sniffing fades, nose by nose, until silence seeps in and the night shakes off a sigh. Then, minutes later, the chorus picks up again, moving away from the base camp toward the hills to the southwest. The pack moves on. The rabbit is safe.
I take my first deep breath in perhaps fifteen minutes. It feels good; helps me relax. Now I’m exhausted, utterly and completely. Between the long day behind me, the coyote-induced adrenaline rush, and the fear of what tomorrow brings, I’m done. I’m spent in every way imaginable: spent beyond measure.
It’s in this state that sleep finds me.
Blessed, contorted, uncomfortable sleep.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
July 9, 5:53 A.M.
The sun peeks above the rim of the world just before six the next morning. The weight of the darkness seems to hold it down at first, strapping it to the horizon, pushing it and stomping it down. But the sun will not be denied. It shoves past the darkness, casting it into the abyss behind, and rises into the deep blue of earliest morning.
Shadows flee before it.
It brings a new day, a new hope. It brings a chance to add a new page and a new chapter to the story of Susan Ault, so that her life won’t be a book half written and abruptly ended.
“Today we find her,” I vow to the sun. “She goes home today.” But it’s not just of Susan that I’m thinking. I grasp the locket in my front pocket and hold it for a long moment. Today we find them.
Jimmy’s got a half-gone mug of hot coffee in his hands when I join him outside the command vehicle. I open the large blue ice chest next to the RV door and sort through the various beverages smothered in ice until I find an eight-ounce bottle of orange juice. Shaking off the ice water, I peel the top back and take a long drink that nearly empties the container.
“Thirsty?” Jimmy says with a small laugh.
I nod, take another drink that finishes off the bottle, and wipe my mouth. “I think I’m dehydrated,” I say as I fish out another orange juice.
“I’m not surprised. You didn’t drink much while we were out there yesterday.”
“Aren’t you supposed to remind me of stuff like that?”
“I did; you ignored me.”
“Oh!” I say brightly, unapologetically. “I guess that’s why I’m dehydrated.”
Breakfast consists of two large boxes of fresh donuts and some leftover pizza retrieved from the small refrigerator in the command vehicle’s kitchenette.
The donuts have been thoroughly picked through, but there’s a single maple bar that was somehow overlooked; can’t go wrong with a maple bar.
“Trinity County’s sending us about thirty volunteers this morning,” Walt says as he retrieves a large folded map and spreads it out on the picnic table. “We’re getting close to the county line with Trinity, so it makes sense to bring them in. Besides, we can use all the help we can get.”
He circles an area on the map using his index finger. “SAR did a thorough job on this area yesterday and Ross thinks we should head north from where they left off.”
Jimmy nods and takes his turn at the map. “We covered a lot of ground in this section,” he says, circling an area northwest of the SAR grid. “The cell tower analysis from the phone company only approximated ranges, and so far we’ve been searching at the heart of that area with no luck. I think Steps and I are going to try something different today.”
That’s news to me.
“Like what?” Walt asks.
Running his finger along a line on the map that juts out from Platina in a northeasterly direction, he says, “I think we’ll load the ATVs up and truck them along Platina Road for eight or ten miles.” He looks closely at the map. “Maybe to this Bully Choop Road. That’ll take us into some pretty remote areas; we have to stop thinking like cops and think like Zell. He would have wanted to be as remote as possible, but still have access to passable roads.”
Sweeping his hand over the map, Jimmy says pointedly, “If we grid-search every square mile within range of any cell tower that bounced his calls, we’ll be out here for a week, maybe more. If Susan’s still alive, she doesn’t have a week. She probably only has what food and water Zell gave her and he would have controlled that in order to control her.”