Dryden thought he knew what was coming. If she really didn’t feel good about it, he was prepared to feel good about it on her behalf.
“I told him we had to run,” she said. “We opened the door and counted to three, and then he went. He got about twenty feet before the lights came on and everything started blaring—around the time he realized I hadn’t followed him. He turned around and saw me still standing in the doorway, and he understood. But by then there was nothing he could do about it. He had no choice but to keep running. I stepped out and hid in a shrub beside the wall, and right after that the soldiers came out and went after him. I waited until they were out of sight before I made my own run, in the other direction, and I heard the gunshots about ten seconds later. I don’t know how much of a lead I got by doing all that. A minute, maybe. I saw their flashlights behind me pretty soon after the shots.”
Her voice had dropped to nearly a breath by the time she finished.
“I know he deserved it,” she said. “I just don’t like telling myself people deserve it.”
*
They got back on the road. They came to Highway 58 and took it west toward the San Gabriels. Toward Bakersfield. Climbing into the foothills, Dryden glanced in the rearview mirror. The outlying sprawl of the Mojave glittered in the sun like a spill of broken glass. Like the shattered ruin of a city.
Whatever the information is that’s in my head, those people are terrified of it. They’re scared the way people get when it comes to really big things. Like diseases. Like wars. It’s like there’s … something coming.
In the passenger seat, Rachel shivered. She glanced at Dryden.
“It’s scary waiting a week to find out what I know,” she said. “Whatever it is, maybe I could warn people about it, if I could remember.”
Dryden thought of the drug they’d given her. Thought of the places he’d seen it used—little cinder-block rooms in Cairo and Tikrit, the holds of ships anchored at Diego Garcia. For a few seconds his background seemed almost to be another passenger in the Jeep, leaning forward into the space between himself and Rachel. He ignored the feeling and focused on the drug again. Focused on the specifics he knew about it.
“There might be a faster way to get to your memories,” he said.
CHAPTER NINE
Bloom where you’re planted.
The saying had become a kind of mantra for Gaul, over the years. The moral equivalent of a shoehorn, he supposed, though he preferred not to think of it that way. It was an assessment of reality, that was all. An organizing principle.
He’d gotten the phrase from a college buddy who’d gone on to be a successful defense attorney. This old buddy had once cross-examined a fifteen-year-old girl who’d been raped at a fraternity party. The girl was poor southern white trash, and the defendants were Tulane students from wealthy families—one had a federal judge for an aunt. Gaul’s buddy had explained to him over drinks, years after the fact, the mindset it took to put a teenaged girl on the stand and rip her to pieces in front of her family. There was a meticulous strategy to it. There was no question she’d end up crying in front of the jury, but that was okay, as long as you made her look like a liar before that happened. Yes, the jury was going to feel protective of her, and yes, those feelings would kick into higher gear when the tears came, but as long as you tripped her with her own story first, as long as you did it just right, then it wouldn’t look like you’d bullied the poor little thing. If you played it perfectly, put a little English on it, as they say, then the crying would actually work against her. It would lend weakness to her testimony. There was all that to consider, while in the back of your head, humming like an old fridge, was the knowledge that your clients had actually done it. Had held her down in a hallway off the frat house’s kitchen, the music so loud she could feel the bass in her shoulders and hips where they were pressed to the floor, so loud that people in the next room couldn’t hear her screaming when all three of the defendants fucked her. It wasn’t your job to wonder why they’d done it. Heat of the moment, too much alcohol, alphas being alphas and all that. Neither was it your job to find it fake as all hell when they looked contrite in your office a week later, their eyes full of nothing but fear for their own futures. No, your job was to help them salvage those futures. And if that meant shredding a little girl on the witness stand—violating her again, your conscience would say if you let it—well, what of it? You had to do your job. You had to bloom where you were planted.