“Then we’re done here,” Gaul said. “You know what to do.”
He didn’t wait for Marsh to nod again. He turned and crossed to his BMW, got in, and started it. He backed around in a semicircle, pointing the car’s nose downhill, then craned his head to look at Marsh again. The man was still standing there at the rail, lost in what he’d just learned. For a moment Gaul felt the same tinge of nervousness he’d had when Marsh first got out of the SUV. Just how much of a realist was the guy? How willing to play along? Then Marsh turned, his expression set with acceptance, and strode back to his vehicle.
That’ll have to do, Gaul thought. He took his foot off the brake and coasted down toward the canyon road.
CHAPTER TEN
The man behind the counter in the sporting goods store was looking at a magazine with naked women in it. Rachel couldn’t actually see the magazine—the man had it down behind the countertop, out of view—but she could more or less see the pictures in his head. There were lots of tattoos in the images. There were metal rings and spikes stuck through skin. Now and again the man would turn his attention on a woman in the store. Rachel could feel his eyes tracking over the the smooth lines of girls’ legs, following them up to the hems of their shorts. Over these mental pictures came his thoughts, crude and simple. They seemed almost like animal noises. Nice nice nice, fuck yeah …
Rachel tried to keep herself out of his sight as best she could. She stuck close to Sam as he pushed the shopping cart around. The sporting goods store was in Bakersfield. It was just past ten in the morning, and through the big glass wall up front, Rachel could see the parking lot and the city beyond, everything blazing in the sunlight.
Right there, parked at the near edge of the lot, was the used car they’d bought down the street. A Toyota something, a RAV4, she thought Sam had called it. It was old, but he was satisfied with how it ran. They’d left the stolen Jeep in a long-term parking lot at the airport and walked to the dealership from there—after first hitting a Payless to get Rachel a pair of sneakers. But before they’d done any of that, before they’d even reached Bakersfield, they’d driven up a dirt road in the mountains southeast of town. At the base of a pine tree in the middle of the woods, Sam had dug up a plastic box with three things inside it. First was an envelope containing ten thousand dollars in fifties and twenties. Next was a handgun and a box of bullets. Last was a cardboard sleeve with three sets of fake identities inside it. All of these had Sam’s picture but different names.
It helps to have friends in dark places, he had said.
Rachel had asked him why he had this stuff hidden up here. He’d explained that with his old job, he’d sometimes worked against very powerful people. In a perfect world, those people would never learn his name, but in the real world, stuff happened—shit happened was how he’d phrased it in his thoughts.
What I mean is, this isn’t the first time I’ve had to think about vanishing, he’d said.
Which had made her wonder about something: Was it strange that she’d run into someone—she had literally run into him—who was this good at keeping her safe from Gaul and his people? Wasn’t that a doozy of a coincidence?
On the heels of that thought came another, this one from somewhere deep in her mind: Had it been a coincidence?
She couldn’t imagine what else it could’ve been, but the question unsettled her.
They were standing in front of a shelf full of something called freeze-dried meals: foil packets with pictures of hikers on the fronts, labeled with dish names like Lasagna with Meat Sauce and Chicken Teriyaki with Rice.
“Fair warning,” Sam said. “This stuff’s all going to taste terrible. Very light to carry, though.”
He filled half the cart with them. The other half was already full of clothing, his size and hers. Atop the clothing were two items: a propane cookstove the size of a CD spindle, and a hand-pumped water purifier. Tucked into the space beneath the cart were two backpacks, two sleeping bags, and two pair of hiking boots. Everything they would need to stay in the woods for a week or more. By the time they emerged again, she would know who she really was—if they didn’t find out sooner.
A middle-aged woman walked by. Rachel caught the fragmented spill of her thoughts: Still like the gray one, but … what’s over here? No, those are men’s.