SITTING BEHIND THE STEERING WHEEL, Ivan Petro reminded Jane of a realistically detailed special-effects mannequin like those that had sometimes been used in old horror movies made before computer animation became ever better and cheaper, when the script called for the head to explode. The cords of muscle in his neck were as taut as winch cables. His skull almost seemed to inflate: flushed face swollen and streaming sweat, nostrils flared, eyes protuberant, the arterioles in his temples prominent and throbbing. Yellowish foam suddenly gushed from his nostrils, and he let out a cry that seemed to be an expression equally of rage and despair, and following that cry came a stream of vicious obscenities in a spray of foul spittle, as if he meant to kill her with the intensity of his hatred.
When she stepped close to the broken-out window in the driver’s door, she saw his right hand against the steering wheel, like the carved-stone fist of some wrathful god who could cleave the planet with a single blow; the zip-tie embedded in the flesh of his wrist, blood oozing as black as tar in the half-light, his shirt sleeve saturated to the elbow.
That band of hard, binding plastic was a quarter of an inch thick, and the angled teeth of the one-way ratcheted clasp was a marvel of design. The zip-tie had proved far more reliable than handcuffs. She had never known anyone to be able to free himself after being properly manacled. It simply wasn’t possible.
Ivan Petro surely realized the futility of this struggle. Yet his fury escalated, his hatred intensified, his effort increased, as though this brief imprisonment had driven him into raving madness, so that he’d strive to break free until a cerebral artery ruptured and death flooded through his brain.
The zip-tie snapped.
His sledgehammer fist flew from the steering wheel, braceleted in bloody plastic, a volley of blood drops spattering the dashboard, the windshield, even as the damaged hand dropped toward the pistol on the passenger seat. Cut muscle, sprained tendons, injured nerves didn’t affect him, as if some mystical entity had taken possession of him, some dark spirit not constrained by the laws of nature.
Jane said, “No,” and he said, “Yes,” and she shot him twice in the neck as his hand came off the passenger seat with the pistol.
Stunned, Jane backed away a few steps, feeling as if she had crossed from the waking world into a manic dream without the need to fall asleep. If he’d snapped the zip-tie, then maybe anything could happen. Maybe the ravaged flesh of his bullet-torn throat could mend before her eyes and the bullets whistle backward through the smoky air and into the barrel of her Heckler and return to the magazine, as if they had never been fired.
Ivan Petro remained slumped in the driver’s seat, however, and the dreamlike horror began to relent—until, as fire flared through the leaves around the Rover, she recognized something chilling about the angle of the dead man’s head. It was tipped slightly forward and toward his right shoulder. The posture of Petro, behind the wheel of the Rover, was similar to that of her Nick when she had found him sitting in the bathtub, dead by his own hand. No, not just similar. The same. The angle of the head, the bloody throat.
For a day after her beautiful Nick removed himself from this world, she had been in a state of shock. Before her muddled thinking cleared, before she grew certain he hadn’t been capable of suicide under any circumstances, those first twenty-four hours were like a century in Purgatory. In confusion and grief, she searched her heart for what guilt might be hers. What might she have done to turn him away from self-destruction? What could she have been for him that she had not been? Why hadn’t she recognized his precarious state of mind?
She had known him too well, however, to accept for long that he had taken his own life. They were not just lovers, not just husband and wife, not just creators of their lovely boy; their souls were so precisely configured to fit together that she and Nick were a two-piece puzzle, a puzzle solved when they took their marriage vows, the meaning of life made pellucid to them when they became as one.
Now the angle of Ivan Petro’s head and his gruesome throat wound put her back in Virginia on that terrible evening just days before Thanksgiving. For a moment, the world seemed so strange that she couldn’t hope ever to make her way through it to a place of peace—but only for a moment.
Part of Nick remained alive, their boy, and she could not fail Travis. To fail him would also be to fail Nick for real this time.
“Screw that,” she said.
She turned her back on Ivan Petro and sprinted across the glen, up the north slope, where thin strata of pale smoke moved west to east, layered ghosts swimming toward a different haunt. Shadow-robed trees loomed in solemn threat, like the unforgiving judges in some final court.
As she ascended, her eyes stung and her nostrils burned and her chest ached. When she drew near the crest, concussion waves trembled through her from the explosion of the Range Rover’s fuel tank, but she did not look back.
She broke from the trees into the field of weeds and ribbon grass, greedily inhaling clean air, blowing out the smell of smoke.
Passing the hammer that she had thrown at Petro, she plucked it off the ground. At the Explorer, she snatched up the screwdriver and the pieces of the shattered burner phone, threw everything onto the passenger seat.
When she went around to the driver’s door, she saw a dark and churning column just now emerging through the tree tops in the glen, a few tendrils of lighter smoke rising elsewhere.
She drove around the perimeter of the parking lot, toward the exit lane. It seemed that people at the truck stop had become aware of the fire in the woodlet only after the explosion and the sudden greater rush of smoke that followed it. As far as she could tell, no one associated her with those events.
Out of the truck stop, quick onto Interstate 5, southbound. Sirens in the distance. The wailing rose, rose higher, but then faded, and she never saw the sources or was able to deduce from where they came.
Fewer than ten minutes had passed in the glen. She was an hour north of Los Angeles, early enough to beat the rush-hour traffic that would clog every artery in and out of the city.
She thought of the dead man in the woods. The shakes took her.
Others might have hoped for good luck tomorrow in Indio and later in Borrego Valley, but in times as troubled as these, she placed no hope in the cruel gods of fortune. She trusted only in her own preparations and actions, in the power of love to inspire her to do the wisest thing to the best of her ability.
She pulled into a rest stop before the Tejon Pass, waited until she had the place to herself, located the transponder in the wheel well of her Explorer, and used her hammer to render it inoperative. The backplate of the device couldn’t be loosened from the epoxy that fixed it to the car. But when she examined the fragments that fell to the pavement, she was confident that the SUV was not trackable.
Once more racing south on I-5, she wanted music, a song written out of profound love. She chose pianist David Benoit playing “Kei’s Song,” which he’d written for his wife. She turned up the volume.
Piano chords and notes are known not only to her ears, but also are felt in her fingertips, weave through her heart, nourish her soul as milk makes strong the bones.
36
THE GRIEVING BOY, who'd taken most of the night to fall asleep, still slept and slept. The dogs needed to be toileted and fed, but leaving the boy alone seemed wrong. Cornell ought to do something—what?—to be prepared for when the mother came to collect her child.