“I know how.”
“I’d already left Santa Rosa. Then Ronnie called about this. I got this course of treatment from a physician here. The vaccine is nearing its expiration date.”
“But I’m not,” she said.
“We all are, Mrs. Hawk. See me Wednesday. For fresh vaccine.”
“There’s no reasoning with me, Dr. Walkins. I appreciate the risk you’re taking. But I’m a stubborn bitch. I’ll self-inject with what you’ve got.”
He gave her a Ziploc bag containing three ampules of vaccine and three hypodermic syringes in sterile packages.
As he taped a gauze pad over the wound in her hand, he said, “Do you know the symptoms of rabies?”
“I’ll bet you’ve written them down for me.”
“There’s a list with the vaccine.”
“I may not even be infected.”
“Doesn’t matter. Just so you give yourself those injections.” He picked up his physician bag. “I’m told I’m not making a mistake with any friend of Mr. Trahern’s.”
“I hope that’s true in my case, doctor. And may I ask…”
“What?”
“Why do you risk this off-the-record work?”
“I watch the news, Mrs. Hawk.”
“That’ll do it,” she said.
As Walkins departed, Jane shrugged into her sport coat and joined Ronnie in the adjacent office, where on the walls military helicopters flew in wars eternal.
He handed her a bottle of beer. She took a long, cold drink.
“Dougal asked about you first thing when he came around.”
“He once said someone was blessed to have me for a daughter. Tell him I’d have been damn proud to be his.”
Ronnie helped her carry her suitcases, the bag of autopsy reports, and the leather tote containing sixty thousand dollars. They loaded everything into the Gurkha.
As she drove away, she checked the rearview mirror. He watched her until she reached the end of the Valley Air approach road and turned out of sight.
34
* * *
AT THE FIRST TRUCK STOP on Interstate 5, she refueled and bought a turkey-and-cheese sandwich and a screw-top bottle of cola. Sitting in the Gurkha, she took apart the .45 Heckler & Koch, with which she had killed Robert Branwick, William Overton, and the dear soul who had once been Nathan Silverman.
She loaded the Colt .45 that she had taken from Overton’s safe on Friday night, which would now be her duty weapon. She would need to find a safe place to shoot and go through a couple hundred rounds until she understood the gun.
She drove south through the vast and lonely San Joaquin Valley, remembering Dougal in his pre-confession surly silence as they had come north less than twenty-four hours earlier, before she’d ever heard his sister’s name, Justine.
Every fifty miles or so, she stopped alongside the road and, when no traffic was near, threw a piece of the dismantled pistol into a field, in one case into a pond.
At the last of these stops, she found that she had left the overcast behind. The wide valley was crowned with stars, and the westering moon glowed with the promise of tomorrow’s light. Night air of crystalline clarity carried on it the distant lights of one farmhouse and another, of tiny communities where people lived out lives that the movers-and-shakers considered tedious if not squalid. All of it was grand beyond her powers of description, full of wonder and potential, all of it precious, all of it worth dying for.
Past midnight, not far from Buttonwillow, she exited the interstate to another truck stop, parked, bought fresh ice for the cooler, and then slept on the backseat, safe behind tinted windows. She dozed off with the soapstone cameo in her hand, and still held it hours later when she woke in morning light. If because of the cameo’s protection she could not say, but though she had earned a thousand nightmares, not one had troubled her sleep.
35
* * *
IN HIS IMMENSE GARAGE in Malibu, the actor helped her transfer everything from the Gurkha to her Ford Escape.
She said, “We thought it would be taking a lot of gunfire, but it never took a single round. Though it was still nice to have the bulletproof windows.”
If he found the Uzi more curious or more interesting than the suitcases, he did not remark on it. He was happy to know that his old sergeant was alive and would likely sell back to him the armored SUV, but he did not ask from what life-threatening injury Dougal was currently recovering.
When Jane was ready to leave, the actor said, “First, I’ve got something you have to see and someone you have to meet.”
“I have a heavy schedule,” she said.
“Humor me, Mrs. Hawk. You owe me a little humoring.”
She couldn’t disagree with that assertion, and she accompanied him to a home theater that seated twenty-four in an elaborate re-creation of an Art Deco movie house. She did not sit, but stood in the opulent darkness as he played for her a recording of a story from the morning news, sized up to the big screen. She saw herself with long blond hair and then as she looked now, and she heard herself labeled a rogue FBI agent, a ruthless outlaw accused of terrible crimes, suspected of two murders.
When Nathan Silverman had walked into Shenneck’s study in Napa Valley, she had known that something like this might be coming. By now she had thought through the means by which she might stay free long enough to get at David James Michael.
Nothing about the story surprised her, except that no reference was made to a violent event at a ranch in Napa Valley. Perhaps they felt that tying the death of Bertold Shenneck to her would wake a sleepy news media and lead them to make connections between Shenneck and Far Horizons, between Far Horizons and David James Michael with his billions, until eventually someone looked back to the innocuous story about regimented mice and saw in it more sinister potential than the value that brain implants might bring to animal husbandry.
When the news story ended and the theater lights came up, she said to the actor, “Yeah, that was something I had to see, sure enough. Now please tell me that the someone I have to meet isn’t going to arrest me.”
He regarded her with the solemn gravitas that he could bring to a role as a prosecuting attorney or a wise counselor of a superhero. “Whatever you’ve got to do, you’re not done doing it yet, are you?”
“No.”
“And you’re not going away to Mexico.”
“No.”
“You seem to have a world of good guys chasing you, but they’re not the good guys, are they?”
“No.”
“Do you have an honest idea of what your chances are?”
“Near zero.”
He fixed her with a long stare from which she did not glance away, and at last he said, “You need to meet my sister.”
36
* * *
THE MOVIE STAR’S SISTER, Cressida, owned a chain of high-end beauty shops and a successful line of cosmetics, but she claimed, with a laugh, to have no background in law enforcement, other than being, for a short time in her youth, on the wrong side of it.
In a guest bathroom, with an array of chemicals and what she called “industrial-quality appliances,” she stripped Jane’s hair of its brunette dye, colored the blond tresses auburn, and added just enough curl to fool the eye into thinking this was a different woman.
Later, in the garage, beside her Ford Escape, the actor gave Jane a pair of horn-rimmed glasses.
“I have twenty-twenty vision,” she said.
“And you’ll still have it when you put them on. It’s a movie prop, just clear glass for lenses. Get different hats and wear them. Not always the jeans and sport coat, a varied wardrobe. Think of different characters, roles you can play, and costume each one consistently. It takes only little things, like the glasses, to prevent people from recognizing you as the Clyde’s Bonnie they’re seeing on the news.” He gave her a card with his cell-phone number. “I can only offer you frivolous advice. I’ve played an FBI rogue, but I’ve never been one. You have money?”
“Yes.”
“Enough money?”
“More than enough.”