AS CARTER JERGEN AND RADLEY DUBOSE CRUISE the town of Borrego Springs, alert for telltale stains on the fabric of normalcy that might be a clue to the whereabouts of the Hawk boy, many pedestrians do a double take at the sight of the formidable black VelociRaptor. Jergen reads envy in the faces of many of the men, who would no doubt forfeit a year of their stunted desert lives to drive such a thrilling vehicle. He knows how they feel.
A Sphinx in sunglasses, his stony face carved by solemnity, Dubose says, “I don’t like what I’m feeling.”
“Then keep your hand off your crotch,” Jergen replies.
“This is no time for frivolity, my friend. I possess a highly developed intuition, almost a sixth sense, if you will, especially regarding trouble pending. At this very moment, I feel something portentous imminent. Something momentous and ominous. I can feel it in the ether, see it in the slant of sunlight, smell it in the dry desert air.”
In Carter Jergen’s mind, the hills of West Virginia, from which Dubose hails, are populated with rustic soothsayers and grizzled old men who, with a forked stick, can divine what they claim is the best place to drill for water, toothless old women who call themselves haruspices and foretell the future from the entrails of slaughtered animals, bible-thumping prophets of Apocalypse, and other backwoods Cassandras in great variety. Growing up among such occult-oriented hayseeds, Radley Dubose’s mind, such as it is, must be woven through with so many threads of superstition that the dons of Princeton had no chance of instilling in him the secular superstitions that they prefer.
“So will it be a plague of locusts, frogs, flies, boils?” Jergen asks.
After a thoughtful silence, Dubose says, “It’s something about Ramsey Corrigan.…”
“The one in ten thousand. Reptile consciousness. What about him?”
“Something …”
“So you said.”
“We overlooked something.”
“Something?”
“Yeah, something.” Dubose pulls to the curb and stops. As still as stone, the beefy lion-bodied man stares through his wraparound shades, through the tinted windshield, gazing at the Anza-Borrego wasteland as if it is an Egyptian desert in which some ancient truth lies buried in a sea of sand.
After a minute, Jergen says, “Okay if I turn on some music?”
Just then, a siren wails. A county sheriff’s patrol car turns the corner ahead, its lightbar flashing, and accelerates, heading south.
Dubose pulls the steering wheel hard to the left, arcs across two lanes, and follows the black-and-white, riding its tail as if it’s a police escort sent specifically for him.
“This is it,” he says.
“This is what?”
“The something.”
“How can you know that?” Jergen asks.
With evident pity, Dubose says, “How can you not know, my friend? How can you not?”
7
THE LOW BARRENS, A WILDERNESS OF SAND, where in summer there will be no surcease from heat, as there sometimes can be in high deserts, the sun already merciless here on the brink of spring, quivery thermals rising from the blacktop, like spirits liberated from graves beneath the pavement …
Out of Indio, cruising south on State Highway 86, boosted on his doughnut-shaped prostate-friendly foam pillow, Bernie Riggowitz handled the big motor home with confidence. Sitting high above the roadway seemed to empower him. When other motorists displeased him, he expressed his frustration colorfully. “Look at that schmo, going twenty miles over the limit. From the way he drives, a person could think he wears his buttocks for earmuffs.”
In the copilot’s seat beside him, Jane said, “Twenty-seven more miles to Salton City, then west on County Highway 22 for about thirty miles.”
Behind Jane, in the free-standing Euro recliner between her seat and the door, Luther said, “I’m looking at the sofa. You sure it’s the right fit?”
“I wouldn’t want to spend the night there, but maybe it’ll get me through a roadblock if there is one.”
Another speeder, faster than the first, inspired Bernie to say, “That schmo shouldn’t wreck himself and wind up with wheels for legs, but it’ll be a regular miracle if he doesn’t.”
Jane felt safe with Bernie at the wheel and Luther at her back, but the world beyond the windshield seemed more hostile than ever. The Salton Sea came into view on the left, a reminder that the land on this side of the Santa Rosa Mountains was depressed, the water surface more than two hundred feet below sea level. The sun made quicksilver of the salt water, which glimmered less like a mirror than like some toxic lake in a dream peopled by drowning victims who, breathless and salt-blinded, swam forever through the depths, searching for living swimmers to drag down and suffocate.
8
THE TWO-STORY CLAPBOARD HOUSE is surrounded by a mantle of real grass, shaded by four tall, flourishing phoenix palms. The property must have a deep-drilled well that allows the owners to pretend that they are living in a more hospitable climate than is the case.
A Buick Encore is parked alongside the road, twenty feet short of the driveway and north of the house. The sheriff’s-department Dodge Charger passes the Buick and parks just the other side of the entrance to the property, directly in front of the residence.
Dubose turns boldly between those vehicles, into the driveway, past a mailbox surmounted by a plaque bearing the name ATLEE. As he sets the brake and switches off the engine, he says, “Do you smell the something now, my friend? Do you smell it, see it, feel it in the very air?”
“Smell, see, feel what?”
“Looming crisis,” says Dubose and gets out of the VelociRaptor.
Jergen is relieved to see that the two sheriff’s deputies were among those at the market on Sunday, following the shooting of Gavin and Jessica Washington. They know Jergen and Dubose carry National Security Agency credentials. The locals forfeited jurisdiction on the Washington killings, superseded by federal authorities; and they are likely to relent without argument in this case as well, if that’s what Dubose wants.
“That’s Mrs. Atlee,” one of the deputies says, “Louise Atlee,” as a fortyish woman gets out of the Buick and approaches them. “She called nine-one-one to report a four-sixty.”
“Burglary?” Dubose says.
“Yes, sir.”
Agitated and distressed, Mrs. Atlee arrives. “Thank the Lord you’re here. Something’s gotta be done. I’m afraid maybe it’s too late, but something’s gotta be done. I turn in the driveway, a living room window shatters, just shatters! And … and …” Her mouth softens, her lips tremble, tears brim in her eyes. “And then my beautiful, beloved Wilkinson longcase is heaved into the yard like garbage to be hauled away. It was horrible, horrible.”
“Who is Wilkinson Longcase?” one of the deputies asks, his right hand resting on the grip of his service revolver now that burglary seems to have escalated to murder.
“It’s not a who,” Dubose informs him. “It’s a what. A George the Third longcase clock, what you might call a grandfather clock, made by Thomas Wilkinson, mid-to-late eighteenth century.”
With mixed emotions, none of them good, Carter Jergen regards his partner, the heretofore unrevealed antique-clock expert. Jergen is glad he wasn’t the one to ask who Wilkinson Longcase was.
Mrs. Atlee says, “My one antique, handed down through five generations, and now … now probably wrecked beyond repair.”