“Got it ready. Thought you’d need it,” Bernie said, passing the license through the open window.
The agent scanned it with a device that resembled a small flashlight and returned it to him.
Jane’s document source in Reseda had digitally massaged the photo that Bernie emailed them, so that it still resembled him as much as the average DMV portrait resembled anyone, while altering certain features enough to ensure that photo-recognition software would never match the picture on Albert Rudolph Neary’s license with any photograph of Bernie Riggowitz.
Returning the license to Bernie, the agent said, “Mr. Neary, I am respectfully requesting your permission to have Homeland Security agents board your motor home in order to search it. You have the right to refuse this request, whereupon I will ask you please to pull off the highway and wait while we seek a search warrant.”
“No need for any of that, sir. Rudy Neary is as damn proud to be an American as anyone, maybe more proud than most these days. Have a look, have a look.”
Two agents came aboard through the starboard-side passenger door, the first one young and lean with buzz-cut hair and eyes like wet slate. He wasn’t wearing a sport coat, and a pistol was ready in his belt holster. “Is anyone traveling with you, Mr. Neary?”
“Nope. Just lonesome me.”
“This will only take a couple minutes,” he said as he moved into the living space behind the cockpit.
Bernie thought, Adoshem, Adoshem, make these men stupid and blind and careless. He felt reasonably confident they wouldn’t find Jane or Luther, or the weapons and other gear that were secreted in the hollow bases of the dinette booth benches.
The second agent was older, his brown hair threaded with white, pure snow at the temples. He was about twenty pounds overweight, with a pleasant rubbery face and an avuncular manner. No coat. Another belt holster. He sighed wearily as he sat in the copilot’s chair and smiled warmly enough to toast a slice of challah. The ID on his lanyard said he was Walter Hackett.
“Quite a vehicle you have here, Mr. Neary, a real beauty. I dream about getting one of these when I finally hang up the shield.”
“My son-in-law says it’s too big for me. I guess he thinks the only thing just my size is either a La-Z-Boy recliner or a coffin.”
“My daughter married one of those,” Hackett commiserated. “What brings you to Borrego Springs, aside from escaping the son-in-law?”
“I hope you won’t arrest me when I tell you, but my wife’s last wish was to have her ashes spread on the desert here, where all the wildflowers bloom in the spring. I’m pretty damn sure it breaks one crazy damn environmental law or another.”
“Sorry to hear about your loss. But no reason to worry. I don’t work for the EPA.” Hackett’s eyes were the gray of iron with specks of rust. “You have them with you now—her ashes?”
“Oh, no. That was four years ago. I just come back to visit on every wedding anniversary.”
“She was a lucky woman, married to such a romantic. What was your wife’s name?”
Bernie made no effort to summon tears. They welled in him naturally at the thought of Miriam, even though he’d never spread her ashes here or anywhere. “Penelope. But nobody ever called her anything but Penny.”
“I lost my wife nine years ago,” said Hackett, “but a divorce doesn’t hurt as much, even when you never saw it coming.”
“Either way, it’s hard, I think,” said Bernie. “It’s a lonely world, either way.”
“True enough. How long do you intend to stay here in the valley?”
“I’m booked three days at the RV park. But with all this here commotion, I’m nervous about staying. Grim reaper’s gonna get to me soon enough. Don’t want some damn terrorist doing his job for him.”
“Relax, Mr. Neary. There’s no terrorist threat here. Just a man on the run we need to find.”
16
JANE HAWK CASKETED in the stifling dark, listening to muffled voices, footfalls on thinly carpeted floorboards, doors being opened and closed …
The motor home was convincingly staged. Bernie had brought two suitcases of clothes and had hung them in the closet, folded them in dresser drawers. He had laid out his toiletries in the bathroom. A couple of magazines and a book lay on his nightstand, another book and half a cup of cold coffee were on a side table next to the sofa in which Jane hid. He was an old man traveling alone, and no detail had been overlooked that might betray her and Luther’s presence.
Yet the search seemed to be taking too long.
Her arms were resting full-length at her sides. When something crawled onto the back of her left hand, she twitched involuntarily to fling it off, and her hand bumped against the inner face of the front board of the sofa platform.
The sound was soft, a muffled thump, that surely couldn’t be heard above the grumble of the idling engine. But the voices fell silent, as if in reaction to the noise she’d made.
The crawling thing found her again. Its feelers, legs, and busy questing suggested that it must be a sizable cockroach that had come all the way from Nogales. She allowed it to explore her fingers, the back of her hand, her wrist.
17
ROOM BY ROOM, here is an urgent prophecy of a post-Armageddon landscape, a future of mindless destruction and inescapable ruin, condensed into symbolic wreckage and presented like an elaborate installation by an artist driven mad by his vision. Ripped and tangled draperies torn down from bent rods. Lovely paintings gouged and slashed in broken frames, as though beauty itself so offended the destroyers that they could not abide it. Upholstery slashed, entrails of stuffing spilling out of gutted furniture, deconstructed chairs. A large-screen LED television unracked from the wall and cast down and hammered with a brass lamp, its electronic window to a world of wonders now crazed like the blinded eye of a beaten corpse. Porcelain figurines beheaded and dismembered, likewise a collection of antique dolls violated with such apparent ferocity that Jergen could only assume that those who rampaged here found the human form, in civilized depiction, an intolerable affront. Damp yellowish arcs of urine sprayed across panels of wallpaper. Books thrown down from shelves and urinated on, and in one open volume a deposit of feces. Glassware reduced to sparkling splinters, shattered plates and cups. In the demolished dining room, the half-naked remains of a ravaged man, the husband, hideously disfigured, his mouth gaping in a silent cry of havoc, genitals missing. Room by room, here is a vision of an apocalypse without revelation, without meaning, a scorched-earth war of all against all, when time past will be obliterated and neither will there be time future, only the perpetual storm of time present, the nights long and cold, the horror unremitting.
Each with his pistol drawn and in a firm two-hand grip, arms extended, Jergen and Dubose proceed with utmost caution, without comment, quick and low through archways and doorways, every closet door a potential lid to a lethal jack-in-the-box. Jergen is aware that the front sight of his weapon jumps on target, while Dubose’s remains steady, but he can’t settle his hands without stilling his heart, which booms as it never has from mere physical exertion. Failing to find Minette on the first floor, they ascend the stairs.
The upper floor is untouched. No one has come here in thrall to a destructive fury. Although downstairs there were bloody prints of a woman’s bare feet, there are none here. Nevertheless, they clear the rooms and attendant spaces one by one, until they can say with certainty that she is gone.
Lowering his pistol, Dubose says, “She must have run straight through the house and out the back door before we even posted the deputies to watch for her.”
“Gone where?”