“Don’t I know it.”
He took the disposable phone onto the front porch and closed the door behind him. He dreaded having to tell Jane, having to add to whatever hell she was currently dealing with, but he wanted to get this done.
Apparently she was at the moment somewhere that didn’t have cell service. He couldn’t reach her.
26
At Oceanside, Dubose exits Interstate 5 and enters State Highway 76, heading east. They have traveled perhaps twenty-five miles when he says, “There you go.”
“There I go what?” Jergen asks.
Pointing through the windshield, Dubose says, “That’s County Highway 16 ahead on the left. The turnoff for Pala. The place you never heard of, where there’s a restored mission. See that pole? The cameras are on top of that pole, just like I told you they were. Low-profile cameras, so you hardly know they’re up there.” He slows the VelociRaptor. “It’s exactly like I told you, and then you went to the video, and the Rover had gone past, just like I said. That’s when Jane Hawk’s rampage began to come to an end, when the threat she posed began to unravel.”
He sounds as though he must be rehearsing for his role in some documentary that the Techno Arcadians will make, after their triumph, to glorify their ascendancy to total power.
Dubose accelerates. “About fourteen miles ahead, on the left, is County Highway 6, which goes to Palomar Mountain. That’s one more important milestone in the events leading up to the historic capture of Travis Hawk and the surrender of his mother.”
Carter Jergen is feeling increasingly cranky about Dubose’s guided tour of this historic journey. “Yeah, well, nobody’s captured anybody yet.”
“We’ll get the little shit,” Dubose assures him. “I smell him.”
“?‘Fee, fi, fo, fum,’?” Jergen says, wondering if that literary allusion might go over the head of a Princeton man.
A short while later, Radley Dubose says, “And there ahead is the turnoff to Palomar Mountain. Two more low-profile cameras high on that pole, even now recording us as I race toward the endgame of this ugly business.”
“Damn it,” Jergen grieves, “I should be driving.”
“Palomar Observatory,” says Dubose, “has the two-hundred-inch Hale telescope, an important national asset.”
This is too much. Jergen reminds him of what he’d said earlier: “Where the astronomers sit around smoking weed and jerking off.”
“Might very well be the case, my friend, but I’d advise you not to say such a thing publicly. You’ll only be mocked and derided, and the powers that be will decide you are seriously unserious.”
27
When Jane had left the makeover items, Jessie had doubted that anyone would fail to recognize her in such a getup. But regarding herself in the bathroom mirror, she admitted that, as usual, Mrs. Hawk had known what she was doing.
She returned to the kitchen, her straight black hair pinned under a modified-afro wig, which worked because her multiethnic heritage left her with a café-au-lait complexion, allowing that she might have a trace of Africa somewhere in her roots. Her Irish-green eyes were hidden behind contacts that turned them brown.
Travis said, “Aunt Jessie, you look great this way, too.”
“You do,” Gavin agreed. “It’s suddenly like my wife’s out of town and here’s this total fox.”
“Oh, baby, now that’s just the kind of thing a foolish man says, thinking he’ll score some points.”
Gavin grimaced. “Heard myself saying it, couldn’t believe I was saying it. What I think happened is I was for a moment possessed by the spirit of a really stupid man.”
They had come now to a moment that made Jessie uncomfortable, but she couldn’t figure a way to get around it. They were going to leave Travis alone for an hour and a half, maybe two hours.
He had two canisters of Sabre 5.0 pepper spray, of a strength used by law enforcement, which they’d trained him to use when he first came to live with them. He would have the dogs, who adored him and were vigilant and protective by breed and training. Although he was not yet six, the boy was at least as responsible as the average ten-year-old. The house would be securely locked. It was broad daylight. Borrego Valley had virtually zero crime, in part because more than a third of the population was over sixty-five and the median age was maybe fifty-seven, fifty-eight. In the years that the house had stood empty except for Gavin’s monthly visits, there had never been a break-in or vandalism.
Travis was arguably safer here than he would be with them, and yet Jessie worried.
The plan was to shop for food and other necessities that would get them through a month. Even with their appearance altered, she and Gavin didn’t want to be venturing into Borrego Springs on a regular basis. In a town that small, with a population of less than four thousand, new people would be noticed quickly, especially new black people, considering that the black population was about 1 percent. The less they showed themselves, the better. And if no one saw them with Travis, they wouldn’t match any description of two fugitives with a child. They were regular folks, probably campers, RV types, visiting Borrego Springs for a few weeks.
There was every reason to think they couldn’t have been tracked to this relatively remote place. The traffic monitors and public-space surveillance cameras that were ubiquitous in urban and even suburban areas, as well as on interstate highways and major state freeways, had not yet been installed on back roads or in places as small and as out of the way as Borrego Springs.
Nevertheless, if Gavin went shopping alone, there would be times when he would be distracted and when both his hands would be occupied with one task or another. He would be vulnerable, and in their current circumstances, every moment of vulnerability was an invitation to Death.
At all times, one of them must have a hand on a gun. Jessie could do that by pushing the shopping cart that Gavin filled, keeping her pistol in her open purse.
Although it might be unlikely that he would be spotted and pursued during his first visit to town, minimal prudence required that Jessie go with him and remain at all times aware of their surroundings. They were in a war now, and no one could fight a war alone.
There was Cornell in his library. But poor Cornell, stressed by Gavin’s recent visit, had asked him to leave and would not have recovered enough to welcome the boy this soon.
“You’ll be okay here for two hours,” she assured Travis, though it made her stomach turn to think of him here by himself.
“I know,” the boy said. “I’ll be okay.”
“Don’t answer the door if anyone knocks.”
“I won’t.”
“Stay away from the windows.”
“I will, Aunt Jessie.”
“Nobody’s going to break in, sweetie.”
“Okay. I know.”
“If someone does break in, which they won’t, let the dogs deal with them.”
“All right. I will.”
“If the dogs can’t deal with them—which they will, they’ll tear ’em up all right, but if they can’t—only then should you use the pepper spray.”
“I know how.”
“Once you’ve sprayed them in the face, run like hell, out of the house. Go to that barn door, sweetie. Cornell will know, and he’ll let you in.” She looked at Gavin. “Won’t he let Travis in?”
“Of course he will.”
She could tell from her husband’s expression that he wasn’t a hundred percent certain what Cornell would do.
“You’ll hardly know we’re gone, honey. We’ll be back in no time.”
Travis sighed. “I’m not a two-year-old, Aunt Jessie.”
She knelt and hugged him and said, “I love you, Trav.”
“I love you, too, Aunt Jessie.”
She might have spent another ten minutes reassuring the boy if Gavin hadn’t said, “Jess, you might not know this, but Bigfoot has never been seen in this area, and Godzilla is in Japan.”
Jessie got to her feet. “You’ll be fine, sweetie.”
The boy said, “So will you.”