Saturday morning, little more than an hour after first light, Gavin Washington had saddled the stallion, Samson, and young Travis had sat smart upon the pony, Hannah, and together they had ridden into the eastern hills of Orange County, where the chaparral was green from all the recent rain. There were still a few clouds in the wake of the previous night’s storm, but they were unraveling like cocoon silk, as if the sky were some great blue-winged wonder that had emerged from them.
They didn’t talk much when they rode, because horses were a kind of meditation, which Gavin had long appreciated and which the boy was learning. For a while they proceeded at a slow walk, with just the clop of hooves, the rattle of dislodged gravelstones, the creaking of the leather saddles, and the occasional whispering of a fitful breeze through sage and feather grass, Avena and long-stemmed buckwheat. Rabbits startled off the trail into the brush, and lizards watched wall-eyed from perches on sun-warmed rock.
They picked up the pace to a full walk when they turned north to put the morning sun on their right, but Gavin was not yet ready to let the boy ride at a trot except in the fenced exercise yard on their property.
High overhead, red-tailed hawks were gliding on the rising thermals, hunting mice and like creatures condemned to the rough life of the land-bound. The aerial ballet of those predators could be mesmerizing, and Gavin warned Travis to give equal attention to the trail ahead. Although west-leaning shadows of brush and rock still patterned the ground, the day was now warm enough for rattlesnakes.
They turned into an eastward-leading canyon, the walls of which sloped gently to a creek too swollen with recent rains to allow Travis to attempt his first fording. But the gentle grade of the ascending canyon floor offered an easy trail, and on their left, the ceaseless slide of surprisingly clear sun-spangled water over smooth stones was pleasing to both the eye and ear.
Past eleven o’clock, they came to an open grove of cottonwoods and dismounted and walked the horses to the creek and held the reins while Samson and Hannah drank, for the water was clean enough to give Gavin no reason for concern. There had been so much rain this season that the earliest storms had washed the stony creek bed clean of silt and debris.
They let the horses graze the sweet grass that flourished in the open grove and beyond, perhaps not just because of the seasonal rains but because of some aquifer under the canyon floor. They put down a blanket and sat in the shade to eat chicken sandwiches and drink iced tea from thermos bottles.
“Aunt Jessie does good sandwiches,” the boy said.
“The entire reason I married her,” Gavin said, “was her sandwiches, her homemade ravioli, and her peach pie.”
Travis giggled. “That’s bushwa.”
“Oh, is it? Since when did you become a bushwa expert?”
“You married her ’cause you love her.”
Gavin rolled his eyes. “What man wouldn’t love a woman with such sandwiches?”
He heard a curious buzzing noise in the distance, like a power tool of some kind, but when he cocked his head to hear it better, the sound faded away.
“How’s your sunscreen holding up, Travis?”
“I’m not burned or nothing.”
“We’ll apply some more before we set out for home.”
Gavin was from birth as dark as fire-scorched mahogany, but the boy had Celtic in him and needed to culture a spring tan slowly.
“I wish I was black like you.”
“Tell you what—we’ll make you an honorary brother tonight after dinner.”
“How’s that work?”
“We put some Sam Cooke on the stereo and some shoe polish on you, and we say the magic words.”
“That’s so silly.”
“I’ll tell you something true that’ll sound even sillier.”
“Like what?”
“There used to be whales swimming around these parts.”
“More bushwa, Uncle Gavin.”
“All this parched land and even far east into the true desert used to be a great, deep sea.”
“When?”
“Well, not last month. But four million years ago, for sure. They found baleen whale fossils in these parts. If you’d been out here eating chicken sandwiches four million years ago, you might have ended up like Jonah in the belly of Leviathan.”
The buzzing noise returned, and this time it grew steadily louder.
“What’s that?” asked Travis.
“Let’s have a look.”
Gavin got up and moved through the open grove, away from the creek, to the tree line. The buzzing seemed to originate overhead. Using his hand as a visor, he shielded his eyes from the sun, but he didn’t need to search the heavens for the sound.
Cruising at perhaps fifteen miles an hour, the quadcopter drone came from the east, below the canyon wall, like a ten-pound insect, a camera slung beneath it on a stabilization gimbal.
Although these canyons and hills seemed remote, they were not far from civilization. Many of Orange County’s scores of cities extended fingers into wild territory. On the other hand, he and Travis were not just around the corner from a housing tract of a thousand homes. They had never encountered a drone out here before.
There were numerous legitimate purposes for the intrusive damn things. Realtors filmed for-sale properties with them, and surveyors made good use of them. But this was permanent open space, land that would never be given over to houses or office buildings or shopping malls.
“What’s it doing?” Travis asked as the drone approached.
They were standing in the last shade of the trees. Gavin said, “Step back,” drawing the boy with him deeper into the cover of the cottonwood branches, where they lost sight of the buzzing craft—and could not be seen.
“What’s it doing?” the boy asked again.
“Probably some techno geek playing with his newest toy.”
“Way out here?”
“Better out here, where he won’t screw up and fly it into someone’s car windshield. Come on, let’s get back to lunch before ants get what’s left of our sandwiches.”
They returned to the blanket in the cool shade.
The open grove allowed space between the trees. If the drone had flown directly over the woods, the grazing horses might not have been entirely screened from above.
Gavin could still hear the buzzing craft in the distance. He finished his sandwich in two bites and then brought the horses to a nearby tree. He tied them to lower branches, where they now stood in full shade.
“Don’t want them getting overheated,” he told the boy. “We have brownies for dessert, if you’re interested.”
“I would’ve married Aunt Jessie just for her brownies.”
“Back off, cowboy. I saw the lady first.”
Gavin could hear two drones now, one more distant than the other. One perhaps tracking south to north, the other east to west. There might even have been three.
“There’s more of them,” Travis said.
“A whole damn club of geeks maybe having themselves some kind of tournament,” said Gavin, leaning back against a tree trunk, pretending to be unconcerned.
He wondered why he needed to pretend. His explanation was most likely the correct one. His and Jessie’s friendship with Nick and Jane had been a relatively short one and discreet. In the two and a half months they had been sheltering Travis, not one of the legions searching for the boy’s mother had connected them to her.
In fact, if those hunting for Jane had suddenly linked Gavin and Jessica to her, the bastards wouldn’t be chasing him and Travis with drones. They would be at the house right now, with Jessie in custody, waiting for man and boy to ride home, into their clutches.
29
When Jane entered the kitchen, Gilberto Mendez had not returned to his dinette chair and coffee. He stood by the sink, his spine straight and shoulders back and face solemn, perhaps as he stood at the entrance to one of his viewing rooms when he welcomed mourners to their last sight of a loved one.
Booth Hendrickson was still strapped to the gurney, in a three-quarter sitting position. Gilberto had stuffed a roll of gauze in his mouth and firmly sealed his lips with duct tape.
Even denied his voice, the Department of Justice magnifico was able to convey his contempt by keeping his chin raised, his eyes narrowed, and his brow smooth. Jane sensed that, behind the tape, his mouth was puckered in a pout of pure disdain.