Recoil almost denied Bipin the pistol, but he held the weapon now in a two-hand grip. At a range of mere inches, he shot Tolbert in the face once, twice.
The attacker fell to the right, mouth open in a silent scream, the architecture of his face remodeled by the double blast, his hair on fire from the muzzle flash.
Bipin sat up and frantically scooted backward on the vinyl-tile floor until a wall of the wraparound cashier’s station prevented further retreat. He struggled to his feet and stood with the pistol in both hands, arms fully extended, as though Tolbert’s resurrection and a renewed assault were a matter not of if, but when.
At thirty-five, Bipin Gaitonde had never before raised a hand against another human being. When he bought the pistol, Zoya had smiled and said that he was too gentle ever to use it, so empathetic that he would sympathize with a robber in need and not only give him all the cash in the register but also offer to write a check.
Weeping quietly, he stood over the dead restaurateur and did not look up from the corpse until a siren shrilled. It was a rare sound in Borrego Springs.
He turned his attention toward the shattered front window, but he didn’t expect the imminent arrival of the police. Intuitively, he knew this: The madness that had burst into his store was something new in the world, hydra-headed and already manifesting elsewhere.
10
THE DAY WAS THE SAME as itd had been before Jane went into the library for the end of the world: hot, dry, still, with the faintest alkaline smell to the air, the signature scent of a true desert. Unseen insects were engaged in a monotone celebration of life, and in the distance a low-flying twin-engine airplane sought cellphone revelations that she was not foolish enough to provide.
In spite of the sameness of the day then and the day now, she’d gone only a few steps from the dilapidated barn when that intuitive perception of things seen and unseen told her change had come, the degree of risk had risen, time was running out.
She halted, alert for threats, scanning the day more carefully. Luther was finishing the transformation of the Suburban from white to black. The solvent provided by Ricky de Soto appeared to be worth the outrageous price he placed on it.
If something had gone wrong, if a crisis was impending, Luther seemed unaware. His years in law enforcement and his intelligence had left him with intuition no less sharp than hers, so if he was unconcerned, perhaps she was just jumpy, more worried mother now than calculating cop.
Yes, but … Luther was handling the hose, and the water that sluiced the white paint from the Suburban drummed loudly enough to mask other sounds from him. Intuition was in part subconscious perception. What the busy surface of the mind might be too occupied to notice, the quiet inner mind perceived, interpreted; then it tried to pass along its concern by raising the hairs on the back of your neck or sending a faux centipede down the ladder of your spine.
If one of the five senses was compromised—in this case Luther’s hearing—intuition was to that degree crippled.
A few steps after leaving the barn, perhaps Jane perceived the merest suggestion of the figure in the doorway of the blue stucco house. In any case, she saw it more clearly when she had closed from seventy yards to fifty, its full nature undefined in those shadows but somehow peculiar—and beyond Luther’s awareness.
She didn’t call out to him at once, because he might not hear her. Besides, if the individual on the porch was focused on Luther and not yet aware of Jane, no need to shout and precipitate action.
No one lived in the house. Jessie and Gavin would have stayed there with Travis; but they were dead. They must be dead.
Jane walked fast but didn’t run. The faster she moved, the more she would call attention to herself in the stranger’s peripheral vision. She was thirty or forty yards from the house when the figure moved out of the doorway, farther onto the porch, and she saw that it was a woman. Not Jessie Washington. A naked woman.
The presence of the woman was itself a spanner in the works, but her nudity was so bizarre that she represented some greater crisis the nature of which Jane couldn’t comprehend.
Jane was less than twenty yards from the house when the naked woman saw her, which was also when Luther finished washing off the Suburban, killed the water, and dropped the hose. Running now, Jane saw something bright in the woman’s hand, maybe a knife, and she drew her pistol and called out, “Luther, the porch!”
Surprised, he turned first to Jane, then pivoted toward the unclothed woman.
The stranger was indeed holding a butcher knife in her right hand. She backed into the house and closed the door.
Luther had drawn his pistol by the time Jane reached him. “Who the hell—”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But this means we have to get out of here fast. Change the plates. I’ll go inside.”
“Shit, no. Not alone.”
“There’s no time to tag-team her. Change the plates.”
Ricky de Soto had supplied them with government license plates. Federal departments wore special plates with prefix codes specific to each—EPA for the Environmental Protection Agency, OEO for Office of Economic Opportunity, SAA for the United States Senate—and an FBI vehicle should be wearing the prefix J because the Bureau was under the purview of the Department of Justice. Some Bureau vehicles had FBI emblazoned on doors and roofs, though many did not. Calling attention to the Suburban by block-lettering it ought to let them slide around roadblocks and through chokepoints more easily, but the wrong plates would betray them as surely as would bumper stickers proclaiming COPS SUCK.
“What if she’s not alone in there?” Luther worried.
“Seconds count. We don’t just have Travis and the dogs now. We’re taking Cornell.”
“Holy shit.”
“Change the plates, but watch your back. Then drive to the barn and load up.”
She hurried toward the porch steps.
11
CARTER JERGEN FEELS that the desert—everything and everyone in it—is so alien to normal human experience that it might as well be on a planet in another galaxy. This feeling is further distilled when he and Dubose come across the wrecked vehicles littering the county highway.
The first is a cherry-red Honda sedan, turned on its starboard flank, its roof smashed against a roadside retaining wall built to prevent an eroding bluff from washing across the road in a flash flood. For maybe sixty feet leading to the Honda, the pavement is littered with pieces of the vehicle and wads of safety glass. The blacktop is scarred and imprinted with red paint, as if something impacted the car, overturned it, and then shoved it sixty feet before ramming it hard into the wall.
Jergen gets out of the VelociRaptor and goes to have a look at the Honda and comes back and gets into the passenger seat and says, “Dead woman in there.”
“What kind of dead woman?” Dubose asks.
“What do you mean, ‘what kind’?”
“Ethnicity, age, appearance, clothing, nature of injuries. In an investigation as complex as the one we’ve undertaken, Cubby, you just never know what detail may prove to be the little piece of the puzzle that makes sense of the entire picture.”
“Caucasian, maybe thirty, brunette, shorts and a halter top, all busted up.”
“Attractive?”
“What—you’re going to hump a corpse now?”
“Get real, my friend. If this is a crime scene and if the girl is attractive, her looks could have something to do with why she was murdered. A former husband. A jealous boyfriend.”
“Who is this jealous boyfriend—King Kong? He grabs a Honda and shuffleboards it sixty feet into a wall?”
“Sarcasm does not become you, Cubby.”
“Anyway, we’re not here to investigate murders.”
“She might have information we need. Are you sure she’s dead?”
“If she isn’t, she ought to be.”