The breeze died just before the clouds began to shed large pillowy flakes that spiraled in their descent, floating across the hood of the Explorer, streaming up the windshield without touching the glass, caught in the vehicle’s slipstream. Like a cold smoke, snow at first eddied across the pavement, but then it began to stick.
By the time that she reached the town of Lee Vining, Jane had to reduce speed, whereupon she needed the windshield wipers. The metronomic thump of the rubber blades and the monotone song of the tire chains hashed Rubinstein, so she switched off the music.
She pulled off the road and stopped in the parking lot of a convenience store. When she picked up the disposable phone, which was now charged, Hendrickson rose out of his self-cast spell and regarded the instrument with interest. He met her eyes as she prepared to key in the number of the burner that she’d left with Gavin and Jessie. Then he looked down at the twelve-button display.
His eyes were not the slick white of hard-boiled eggs, as in her dream. But there seemed to be an unwholesome curiosity in them, as if on some level he knew that he should still be her enemy, even if he could not act against her.
“Look away,” she said, to be sure that he wouldn’t see the number she meant to call.
Instead, he met her eyes again.
“Look away,” she repeated.
He turned his face to the window in the passenger door.
Maybe because of the remoteness of this place or because of the storm, she couldn’t get service. She would have to try later, though they were heading into even more remote territory and worse weather. She might have to delay calling until she crossed the border into Nevada and reached Carson City.
She drove back onto 395, in the wake of a highway department truck fitted with an enormous plow that skimmed the pavement. The rotating yellow beacons flung waves of light through the gray, alchemizing the falling snow into gold.
Still gazing out the side window, Hendrickson said, “They’ll find him.”
“Find who?”
There was no note of triumph or animosity in his flat voice, only a somber statement of what he believed to be fact. “They’ll find your son.”
As if she were a stringed instrument that Fate was tuning for a performance, Jane felt something tighten in her chest. “What would you know about it?”
“Not much. The boy wasn’t my primary focus. But recently…”
“Recently what?”
“They doubled the number of searchers looking for him.”
“What else? You know something else. Tell me.”
“No. Just that. Twice as many people chasing down leads.”
“They’ll never find him,” she said.
“It’s inevitable.”
Irrationally, she wanted to draw her pistol and whip the barrel across his face, but she had nothing to gain—and much to lose—by indulging that desire. There was nothing worse she could do to him than what she’d already done.
As he faced forward again, she said, “What was your primary focus?”
“Finding you.”
“How did that work out?”
After a silence, he said, “I don’t know yet.”
24
Radley Dubose’s idea is that if the Washingtons didn’t go south on Highway 79, which the archived video from Santa Ysabel confirms that they did not, then they must have gone north.
Jergen restrains himself from congratulating his partner on the brilliance of deducing the or in this either-or choice.
“But they wouldn’t have gone far north on 79,” Dubose says, peering into his laptop screen as though into a crystal ball, “because all that does is take them back to Orange County by a roundabout route. They weren’t just out for a pleasure drive.”
“Yes, I’m aware of that.”
“But the only road that connects with the entire northern leg of 79 is County Highway 2.”
“Therefore…?”
“They switched onto Highway 2. But that road goes south to the Mexican border, and I already figured they won’t try crossing the border with guns.”
“Was it you who figured that out?” Jergen asks.
Dubose isn’t listening closely enough to hear the subtle sarcasm in his partner’s voice. “However, Highway 2 doesn’t just go south. It offers them a binary choice.”
“Another either-or to test the clever sleuth.”
“Just as Highway 2 takes a sharp turn south, it intersects with County Highway 22. So it’s a damn good bet they took 22 east, which goes all the way across the Anza-Borrego Desert to Salton City by the Salton Sea.”
“Salton City by the Salton Sea. Sounds like a song title,” says Jergen.
“But if they wanted to go to the Salton Sea, they would have gone south on 79 to 78 to 86, ’cause those are all much better roads than 22.”
“All these numbers,” Jergen says, “are making my pretty head spin. So what is your conclusion?”
“Twenty-two only leads two places. Salton City is at the end of it, and before that, Borrego Springs.”
“Maybe we go to Borrego Springs and see what there is to see.”
Dubose looks up from his laptop. “Didn’t I just say that? It’s a hundred thirteen miles. We can be there in two hours.”
Jergen takes his laptop, Dubose leaves his in the room, and they go downstairs to the hotel’s front entrance. The day is warm and the palm trees tower majestically, and there are white gulls kiting high in the silence of the clear blue sky.
The valet confirms that an hour earlier a gentleman named Harry Lime had delivered a vehicle for their use. It came on a flatbed truck. He declares that it is one of the most amazing vehicles any of the valets has ever seen.
NSA personnel have replaced the two shotgunned tires, washed the VelociRaptor, and waxed it. The truck looks fabulous. Dubose drives.
25
In a barren condition, Gavin’s head wasn’t nearly as smooth as that of his cousin; it had topography. He returned to the kitchen from the bathroom, frowning as he slid a hand over his naked skull. “I’ve got a bumpy head.”
“Probably from all the times I’ve had to knock some sense into you,” Jessie said.
Travis said, “Uncle Gavin, you look like Vin Diesel.”
“The Fast and Furious guy? I guess you mean it as a compliment. But I’m not sure I’d have shaved off my hair if I’d known I’ve got a bumpy head.”
“Everyone’s got a bumpy head,” Jessie assured him. “That’s why phrenologists have something to read when they read your head.”
“Cornell’s head is as smooth as an egg.”
“Well, that’s not the only thing different about Cornell.”
“I’m not sure what I’m going to look like with a beard.”
“Hey, Aunt Jessie, the dogs are shedding a lot right now,” Travis said. “We could save some dog hair and glue it to Uncle Gavin’s chin.”
“Now that’s genius, Trav. We run that hand vac over Duke and Queenie, we’ll have more than enough hair. We can glue it tonight, get a preview of what my man will look like in a few weeks.”
The dogs had taken a special interest in Gavin, sniffing around his feet and up his pant legs, as though trying to determine if, like Samson after Delilah, he’d lost something more when he’d lost his hair.
To Jessie, he said, “We’ve got to go in town to food shop. So why don’t you start your makeover now, give me a chance to fire a little mockery back at you?”
“Fire too much, and you’ll have nothing for dinner but what the dogs get.”
After Jessie went into the bedroom, where they’d left their luggage, Travis said, “We wiped off the whole kitchen, Uncle Gavin. Now we have to wipe out inside the cupboards. This here is Lysol water. It stinks.”
“But it stinks good,” Gavin said. “Why don’t you start, and I’ll come help in five minutes.”
“Where are you going?”
“To hide where you can’t find me.”
The boy grinned. “I’ll find you, all right. Duke and Queenie, with their noses, they’ll find you all the way to Mars.”
When Gavin went into the living room, he discovered that Jessie had anticipated him. She handed him the burner phone that Jane had given them. “This is gonna hit her hard, baby.”