“I’m five minutes out. Get me backup.”
Booth Hendrickson relishes—thrives on—the power and the perks of his position. But he delights as well, perhaps equally, in the trappings of such clandestine work, the code names and passwords and hush-hush and hugger-mugger, the secrets within secrets, the ciphers and signals and signs. There’s a quality of play about it all, which is exhilarating to one who, throughout his blighted childhood, was never allowed much playtime.
When he terminates the call, he tucks the iPhone in a coat pocket, which incenses the cowgirl. “That’s my phone. I paid for that phone.”
“Be good, you’ll get a new one free from the government.”
“I want that one. Gimme it.”
“Take the next exit.”
“Hey, asshole, this is America.”
“America is over and done,” he declares, putting the gun to her head again.
“The hell it is.”
“Take this exit!”
12
Jane had been in the blind-black garage when Gilberto Mendez called. Having carjacked some woman, Hendrickson would most likely get his captive’s cellphone, which upended the entire plan.
A minute later, upstairs in the kitchen, she recovered the lunchbox-size Medexpress carrier she had left there on first touring the house and once more hurried to the garage, where she switched on the lights.
Although she’d come to the house on foot, she didn’t have time to hike out of the community and all the way back to her Explorer Sport, which she’d left near an all-night supermarket in a shopping-center parking lot.
Rolls-Royce, Lamborghini, Mercedes GL 550.
In a workbench drawer, Jane found the key to the Mercedes SUV.
From the perfboard display of tools, she took two screwdrivers, one with a regular blade, one with a Phillips head.
13
With State Highway 73 behind them, racing west on Newport Coast Drive, weaving lane to lane, the cowgirl leans into the steering wheel, jaws clenched as though she’s afflicted with tetanus. As argumentative as she has been, she is that silent now.
Her silence is at first welcome, but then suspicious. Booth Hendrickson dislikes her even more than he dislikes other people, and he attributes her silence to the feverish scheming of a birdbrain twit.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” he advises.
“Fascist bastard.”
“Just drive. Get around these cars. Lay on the horn.”
She hammers the horn but says, “Nazi turd.”
Hendrickson doesn’t take such insults lightly. No one has ever called him a fascist or a Nazi until now; those are words he uses against others. “Honey, if you dress like a rodeo shitkicker, better not be calling other people names.”
“Communist bloodsucker.”
“What’s with the ridiculous half-size Stetson?” he counters. “Couldn’t you afford the grown-up cowgirl look?”
“It’s a uniform, you asswipe. I work in a theme restaurant. And I recognize your type.”
“My type?”
“Big-talkin’ cheap-tippin’ Commie-Nazi jerk.”
He wants so badly to hit her with the pistol, break out a couple teeth, but instead he snatches up his Department of Justice ID and shakes it at her and says, “Take the next right turn.”
“You ever really work a day in your life?” she asks.
“Right turn!”
She brakes hard, fishtails the car, slides onto the new street, as if she’s the offspring of demolition-derby drivers. “You sucked on your mama’s teat till you could suck on a government teat.”
If they weren’t one minute away from the front gate to the guarded community in which Simon lives, one minute away from nailing Jane Hawk, he would shoot this impudent bitch. Instead, in a voice he wishes were more in his control, he says, “Drive as if your life depends on it.”
14
Jane, in the stolen Mercedes SUV, thirty seconds from the front gate, was brought to a halt by a double-hopper truck pulling into the street from a vacant lot where excavation was under way for the construction of a house. Each of its twin hoppers was mounded with a few tons of dirt that inescapably reminded her of recent graves not yet grassed. The driver had to maneuver the big vehicle back and forth to get it fully into the uphill lane, and only then did Jane have room to risk oncoming traffic and get around the behemoth.
She topped the hill, crossed the crest, and sped down the other side, into the exit lane for the front gate. The electronic eye that monitored oncoming vehicles seemed slow on the uptake, so that she came to a full stop before the barrier began to roll aside. Trees had recently been trimmed, and a fragment of a yellowed palm frond had blown into the recessed track, so that the gate wheels stuttered against it, chewed at it, and finally began to roll through it.
Jane believed that, with free will and fortitude, anything within the laws of nature could be accomplished. She did not believe in luck, good or bad. But at moments like this, when obstructions were repeatedly raised at the most inconvenient times during the most urgent tasks, a chill of recognition whispered through her, for she discerned intention behind the impediments put in her way, could feel the mystery of the world’s dark governance beyond what was to be seen.
She drove through the open gate, past the guardhouse, between flanking colonnades of towering palm trees, fast along the entry drive that connected the community to the public road. She arrived at the stop sign just as the yellow Subaru appeared to her left, coming downhill at high speed.
15
By the Subaru’s erratic movements, Gilberto had deduced that, in spite of Hendrickson’s gun, there must be a continuing battle of wills being fought between him and the driver, if not also to some degree an ongoing physical contest. At first, he’d been able to see the woman and her kidnapper seeming to strike each other. But then the bright-yellow car spun 180 degrees on Bison and plunged recklessly through the cross traffic on MacArthur Boulevard. By the time he followed in the limo, with a modicum of caution, onto State Highway 73, they were well ahead of him. Although the Subaru didn’t weave from lane to lane as before, it sometimes drifted onto the shoulder before returning to the pavement.
Rather than try to close the gap that had opened between him and the car, Gilberto remained as far back as he dared, hoping that Hendrickson might not realize he was being tailed. There was every reason to expect that, having split the scene in such a dramatic fashion, the man assumed his escape to be complete and was too preoccupied with his resisting hostage to discover otherwise.
Gilberto considered using his burner phone to call 911 and report the carjacking. But he would be siccing the cops on a kidnapper that he himself had kidnapped. There were maybe ten thousand ways that could go wrong for him.
Besides, he quickly realized that Hendrickson was heading toward the southern end of Newport Beach, where Hendrickson’s brother lived in one of the several guard-gated communities in a neighborhood known as Newport Coast. He was trying to get to Jane before she ghosted away from Simon Yegg’s place.
Gilberto considered phoning her, decided against it. She’d be moving fast, her hands full. Anyway, she didn’t need a warning. She already expected that Hendrickson would have used his hostage’s phone to report her location to the battalions searching for her.
When the Subaru left State Highway 73 at Newport Coast Drive without reducing speed, in fact accelerating with much blowing of its horn, Gilberto closed part of the gap between them.
16