Dryden stepped back out of the light and turned toward the Honda to make his features less visible. A woman’s face appeared in one of the small windows, and Dryden waved her out frantically. If there was any recognition in her eyes, it didn’t show.
“Please help me!” Dryden yelled, indicating the car. “It’s my daughter!”
His desperation, every ounce of it sincere, apparently came across. The door swung inward, and a woman in her fifties emerged.
“Are you Dena Sobel?” Dryden asked.
She nodded, eyeing the Honda. Dryden was already running to it, opening the back door.
“She’s hurt,” Dryden said.
In the backseat, Rachel sat holding her now-exposed arm. Dryden had pulled into a parking lot en route from the high school, gotten in back, and helped Rachel remove the top half of the kiln suit. He’d verified at last that the arm was her only injury, but how badly hurt it was, he still couldn’t tell. He doubted the artery had been fully severed—if it had, Rachel would be unconscious or dead by now—but there was some chance it had at least been nicked, or that some different but still significant damage had happened.
Dena was beside him at the door now. She pushed past him, leaned into the backseat, and got her first look at the injury.
“This is a gunshot wound,” she said. “Why the hell did you bring her here? She needs to go to the ER—”
She’d turned back to look at Dryden as she spoke. Now she cut herself off, seeing the SIG in his hand.
He wasn’t pointing it. He held it low at his side, aimed down, his finger outside the trigger guard.
“I need you to help her here,” Dryden said. “In the house. No hospital. No police report.”
“I’m not doing that.”
“You have to. If there’s any official report of where this girl is, she’ll be dead within the hour.”
Dena stared at him. Her eyes went to the gun once more, then returned to his face and stayed there.
“You’re the guy on TV,” she said.
“I’m the guy on TV. But whatever they’re saying is bullshit. We can tell you the truth—we can even prove it—but right now you need to take care of her. Please.”
“Why should I believe you?”
Rachel leaned toward the open door from inside the back of the car. “Think of a four-digit number,” she said.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Sources in law enforcement are confirming, just in the past few minutes, that the events in Fresno are tied to the Homeland alert we’ve been reporting on since early today.”
The CNN anchor looked appropriately grave delivering the lines. The thrum of excitement behind her practiced expression was only just discernible.
Dryden was standing in Dena’s living room, watching the coverage on the wall-mounted television. On-screen was a live aerial feed of the high school football field, the Black Hawk centered in the shot. It was sitting right where he’d landed it, angled across the 50-yard line. Flasher-equipped vehicles from what looked like half a dozen state and federal agencies were parked around it on the field.
For the first ten minutes after bringing Rachel inside—and parking the stolen car in a strip mall four blocks away—Dryden had stood in the spare bedroom where Dena was tending to Rachel. Dena had given her 800 milligrams of ibuprofen, then set to work examining the arm. The key points she’d been able to assess immediately. “The bone’s intact. No damage to the brachial artery or the deep brachial. Exit wound’s consistent with a solid bullet coming out—no fragmentation inside.” Each word had fallen over Dryden like the answer to a separate prayer.
“I can clean it up and start antibiotics now,” Dena had said. “Another thirty minutes, the meds will have the pain knocked down a bit—not a lot—and I’ll give her stitches.” She’d given Rachel a long all-over glance then. The two halves of the girl’s kiln suit lay on the carpet, and her clothing was all but pasted to her skin by half-dried blood. The heavy suit had contained nearly all of it, keeping it inside where it could saturate her shirt and pants.
“While we’re waiting on the painkillers, I’ll clean you up,” Dena said. Her tone was softer than it’d been. “My daughters kept a lot of their old outfits. I’ll find something that’ll fit you.”
Dryden had taken this as a cue to step out of the room. Now, half an hour later, he’d seen enough of CNN and Fox to understand what’d been airing all day.
It was bad.
Very bad.
The bullet points, repeated every few minutes, were straightforward enough: Based on solid but still-undisclosed evidence, Homeland Security believed there was a man inside the United States with a working radiological bomb—a dirty bomb. This man had all the knowledge and tools necessary to arm and detonate the weapon, and there was credible intelligence that he intended to do so. The money quote had come from the Homeland secretary himself: We are working in a time frame of perhaps hours. We need everyone looking for this man.