IN THE LIVING ROOM, she picked up the Uzi. She checked the magazine and found it fully loaded. This was a radical weapon, but these were radical times. Although she hoped never to have a need for the gun, she kept it.
She took a decorative pillow from one of the sofas, zippered open the case, stripped out the foam core. She went up to the second floor, returning to the dead genius’s study, though she would rather have gone directly to the Gurkha and retraced the route by which she had driven to the ranch. But in this new world, you could seldom afford to do what you’d rather do instead of what you must.
She didn’t look at the three bodies, but made her way directly to the open safe, where she stuffed the empty pillowcase with banded packets of hundred-dollar bills. She threw some gold coins into the makeshift bag as well. She was in a war now, and wars were damn expensive.
Downstairs, when she stepped into the kitchen, she found that it had been invaded by coyotes.
32
* * *
COUSINS TO WOLVES, they would have been beautiful in the wild, just doglike enough to charm the eye. Prowling the kitchen, however, stepping gingerly through broken glass, they were lean and ragged in their rain-sodden coats, lantern-eyed in the storm gloom, taking inventory with their flared nostrils and lolling tongues, like revenants out of Hell unleashed for Armageddon. When they caught sight of her, their black lips skinned back from teeth that could crack bones to get the marrow, and they greeted her in voices that were half menacing growls and half purrs in anticipation of their hunger satisfied.
She dropped the decorative pillowcase and took the Uzi in two hands and squeezed off a burst well wide of the Gurkha, by intention killing just one of the coyotes, hoping they would be wise enough to recognize superior power and sufficiently frightened by gunfire to be chased out by it. In fact, they scrambled over one another—five, six, seven of them—away into the family room and out through the opening where a wall of glass had been.
When she and Dougal had sprung from the armored vehicle to confront the Shennecks, they had left the doors open. She picked up the pillowcase, walked around to the passenger’s side, put the money on the seat, and closed the door.
Out in the backyard, the coyotes sounded as if they were in ferocious combat with something, and she kept a wary eye on the archway to the family room as she went to the driver’s side of the Gurkha. When she opened the back door to stow the Uzi, she came face-to-face with a lingering beast that had earlier invaded the vehicle.
She swung the Uzi up, not to fire it but to use it as a club, and the coyote sprang at her not to attack but, in its terror, to scuffle past her and escape. The impact of the creature staggered her backward, and she heard its teeth snapping hard against the barrel of the weapon, felt its feet clawing at her coat, smelled filthy fur and pungent musk and blood-soured breath, and then it flailed off her and bounded away.
Shaken and gasping for breath, wondering if the moment had turned supernatural, if Ground Zero Ranch might be fated to be her burial ground, she wanted to get out of there fast.
But she had to locate the ampules containing the control mechanisms. They were in the second refrigerator, on the top shelf, as Shenneck had said they would be. There were sixteen large ampules slotted in a foam-lined container, each neatly labeled.
She had to keep them cold.
The furious combat in the backyard continued. Her imagination drew for her an image of the coyotes contesting with a grizzly bear, though there were no grizzlies in California anymore.
How to keep the ampules cold?
Shenneck would have had to keep them cold when he brought them here from the lab in Menlo Park. Perhaps in a Styrofoam cooler, a picnic cooler, something like that.
Alert for the return of the coyotes or for whatever they might be fighting out there, she found the cooler in the pantry and filled it with ice and nestled the ampules in it.
She put the cooler and the Uzi in the back of the Gurkha, slammed the door, swung in behind the wheel, slammed that door, started the engine, and reversed out of the kitchen. She battered the tanklike SUV through ruined furniture and drove out of the house, across the terrace, onto the yard. No grizzly bear. The coyotes were savaging one another in the rain. Two of them were feeding on one of their own that they had killed.
If the entire world had not gone mad, this piece of it, this getaway property where life was meant to be a holiday, was surely mad, with predators eating their own, nature corrupted by the people who once had lived here, just as the people themselves had been corrupted.
She drove off the lawn and into the wild grass and up the long slope to the crest where she and Dougal had studied the house with binoculars. There she braked and looked back. The coyotes had not followed her; they were in a war of all against all.
She noticed then the blood on her right hand. She had not felt the sting of the scratch. Now she did. It was about two inches long and shallow, and she could imagine only that it had been inflicted by the coyote, the flick of a scrabbling claw.
She stared at the laceration for a long, still moment. There was nothing to be done about it just yet.
It was shallow. Bleeding very little. Not a major wound.
Using the disposable phone, she called Ronnie Fuentes once more. The helicopter had landed at Valley Air. They were in Nora’s Range Rover with Dougal, just then pulling into Nora’s garage.
“Call Dr. Walkins,” Jane said. “If he hasn’t left Santa Rosa, if he’s still getting the blood for Dougal, tell him also to bring a complete course of postexposure rabies vaccine.”
“The sergeant was bitten? By what?”
“Not Dougal. Me. And it’s just a scratch.”
After she had found her way back through the rolling meadows and open woods to a paved road, she got out and replaced the license plates that she and Dougal had removed on the way to the ranch.
The rain withered to an end as she finished the task, and the waning day came to an early twilight under the wrung-out clouds.
Entering the county road, switching on the headlights, she thought she heard a shrill wailing. When she put down her window, the sirens were piercing in the washed-clear air. She supposed she knew where they were headed, but she was not concerned, because she would be going a different way from them.
33
* * *
VALLEY AIR, ITS HANGARS and landing pads, was less busy on a Sunday than on other days, less busy on a Sunday of rain than on other Sundays, as quiet as a mausoleum in the lingering wet and deepening dark of a night such as this.
In the bathroom adjoining Ronnie Fuentes’s office, Dr. Porter Walkins watched as Jane gently but thoroughly washed the scratch on her hand. Although she had cleaned it earlier, Walkins insisted she do so again, under his direction, first with soap and water and then with povidone-iodine solution.
In a tweed sport jacket with elbow patches, a pin-striped shirt, a hand-fashioned bow tie, and pants held up with suspenders, wearing a pair of half-lens reading glasses pulled down on his nose so that he could look over them, Walkins seemed less like a doctor than like a college professor of poetry, circa 1960.
“You should be with Dougal,” she said.
“He’s stable. He’s conscious. He’ll make it. Blood loss, yes. But no evident organ damage. Nora can manage till I get back to him. Okay. Clean enough. Pat it dry.”
With a hypodermic syringe, he administered human rabies immune globulin, infiltrating much of it around the wound in her hand, using the remaining volume for an intramuscular injection in the upper part of that arm.
“Now another injection. Human diploid cell vaccine. In your other arm this time.”
The vaccine felt hot as it diffused through the deltoid muscle.
“You need to repeat the vaccine. It’s essential. Three more times. Wednesday. Again next Sunday. And the Sunday after that. I’d rather administer them myself.”
“Not possible, doctor. I have too much to do and too little time to do it. I’ll have to self-inject.”
“That’s not preferable.”