Dryden took her point.
“I don’t know what her connection to Gaul is,” Rachel said, “but she knows me. She might know everything we’re trying to figure out. And if she’s in danger, we need to get to her—” She cut herself off. “Can we just call her? Look her up online in a library and—”
Dryden was already shaking his head. “If she’s really at risk from Gaul and his people, her phone’s already compromised.”
If she’s even still alive.
The thought was out before he could stop it. In his peripheral vision, he saw Rachel shudder.
“Sorry,” Dryden said.
“It’s okay. I’m thinking it, too.”
“We can still look her up on a library computer, but we’d have to contact her in person, one way or another. There are ways to do that without exposing ourselves to much risk, even if she’s being watched.” He considered the geography. Did the math in his head. “Amarillo’s probably ten or twelve hours from here.”
Rachel nodded. Her hands were fidgeting in her lap. Nervous energy.
For the next few minutes, neither of them spoke. At last the southern outskirts of Cold Spring emerged out of the heat shimmer. Dryden reached behind him and took the Oakleys and baseball cap from the backseat. He was just putting them on when Rachel screamed.
The pickup came out of nowhere, thirty feet ahead of the Honda. The road had been empty a second earlier, and suddenly the truck was there, lunging in from the side, from behind a shallow rise that had hidden its approach. Some local idiot out two-tracking in the desert—that was the impression Dryden’s mind instantly formed, based on the truck and the guy at the wheel. He got a tenth-of-a-second glimpse of overalls on top of a stained shirt, and a stubble-covered face the word yokel might’ve been coined especially for.
Dryden locked up the Honda’s brakes, and for an absurd second the truck actually veered toward the car instead of away, as if the driver in his panic had made exactly the wrong move. By then, though, the truck’s momentum had carried it right across the road, missing the Honda by a foot or two, spinning out sideways on the hardscrabble beyond.
On flat ground the truck probably would’ve just skidded to a stop, but the desert surface at that spot was sloped down at 10 degrees or more. The vehicle slid sideways another sixty or seventy feet, and then its wheels caught a rut and flipped it through a neat half-roll. The pickup came down on its roof, the cab pancaking almost flat with the hood and the truck bed.
Dryden brought the Honda to a stop and put it in park. He and Rachel stared at the crippled truck, a hundred feet away, its rear wheels still spinning under power. The door visible on this side—the passenger door—had been blown open by the crash, but against the desert glare Dryden could see only darkness in the crushed compartment beyond.
They had no cell phone in the car. They could tell someone in town to call an ambulance, if need be, but they themselves would have to be long gone before the authorities arrived.
Either way, they couldn’t leave here without checking on the guy. He could be choking on blood in there.
“Stay here,” Dryden said. “I’m coming right back.”
He opened the door and got out, then stooped and reached under the driver’s seat for the SIG. It was that last-minute swerve the truck had made toward the car—probably just a mistake, but damned strange all the same—that made him take the gun. He stuffed it into his rear waistband and stepped off the pavement into the desert.
*
Kill them, Owen. Crawl the fuck out of there and kill them. Right now.
Owen was hurting. Holy God, was he hurting. The pain was almost enough to distract him from the Gravel Man’s voice in his head. Almost.
You’re losing the advantage. What are you waiting for?
Owen twisted himself around; something in his shoulder popped, and it was all he could do not to scream.
At least that was his left arm. He used his right for the MP-5. He turned his head and saw it lying in a stir of dust, two feet away from his hand.
Outside, some distance off, a man called to him, “Are you hurt?”
Lucky you. He’s making it easy for you. Get the weapon and take care of him.
Owen reached for the gun with his right hand, but even that movement contorted the sore shoulder; he coughed at the pain and went still again.
You want me to hurt you? I thought we were past all that, Owen.