The inside of the container was more claustrophobia-inducing than Dryden had guessed. In a normal one of these units, an adult could stand upright with headroom to spare. Not this one. It had been compressed by the tons of weight piled atop it. The metal roof sagged in bulges, reducing the ceiling height to maybe five feet. The walls bowed outward to compensate. Here and there, where the sides met the top, the welded seams had torn like foil under the stress; scrap metal crowded inward through the ripped openings.
The floor of the unit was pooled with rainwater in places, all of it rusty brown. Half submerged in the farthest of these, just visible in the light beam, lay the remains of some animal, probably a raccoon. Dryden could see a rib cage and a few tufts of fur.
Much closer, only a few feet from the doorway, someone had made a crude bed out of a bench seat from a pickup truck. There were ratty old movers’ blankets hanging off one end, as if kicked there after a night’s sleep.
Dryden put a hand on Marnie’s arm and guided the light to a point beside the bed.
Where the floor was spotted with blood.
“Shit,” Marnie whispered.
“Hand me the light.”
Marnie pressed it into Dryden’s hand; he crossed to the bench seat and knelt beside it. The blood was mostly dried on the metal floor, in little dime-sized spatters. But a small amount had filled an indentation in the surface, some kind of stamped rivet hole about as deep as a tablespoon. The blood that filled it wasn’t exactly liquid, but it wasn’t dry either. In the harsh glare of the Maglite beam, it looked tacky.
Marnie crouched next to him, her eyes fixed on the same indentation.
“I’ve seen plenty of blood,” Dryden said, “but I never had to guess how long it’d been there. This is more like your line of work.”
Marnie leaned closer, narrowing her eyes. “Maybe twelve hours. Maybe longer.” She pointed to the sides of the indentation, discolored by a kind of high-water mark of dried blood. The tacky portion was lower down in the dimple. “It’s had time to settle. Time for some of the water content to evaporate off. I never know for sure until I hear from forensics, but after a while you get pretty good at guessing what they’re going to say.”
At the edge of the light beam, beneath the makeshift bed, something caught Dryden’s eye. He reached under and drew the object out into the light: a leather wallet. He flipped it open.
Most of its contents appeared to have been taken. There were only empty slots where credit cards would have been. Only a bare plastic sleeve in place of a driver’s license. No cash, of course.
All that remained was a ticket stub from a movie theater: AMC CUPERTINO SQUARE 16.
“Cupertino is a few miles from San Jose,” Marnie said.
Dryden nodded. “Where Dale Whitcomb lived. Where he worked, anyway.”
He stared at the stub, then at the dried and congealing blood.
“If the Group figured out that Whitcomb was coming here,” Marnie said, “then they could have known about the meeting, too. Including the time it was supposed to take place. They could be hidden somewhere outside right now.”
“If it’s the Group that got him. If it wasn’t just some transient that lived in this container, and attacked him out in the scrapyard and dragged him back here. Granted, that doesn’t sound all that damned plausible, when you look at the odds. I mean, if someone killed him, I guess the smart money should be on the people hell-bent on killing him. Except…”
He trailed off, his attention suddenly fixing on the wallet. The empty sleeve where the driver’s license would have been. And the ticket stub.
“Interesting,” Dryden said.
“What is?”
Before Dryden could answer, the space around them darkened. On impulse, they both looked at the flashlight, but its beam still shone as bright as before.
Then, from behind them, came a man’s voice. “Weapons down. Slowly.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Dryden felt his hand tense around the Beretta. Felt Marnie’s entire body go rigid beside him, the sensation transmitting through the point of contact between their shoulders.
“Do it,” the man in the doorway said.
Marnie turned her head halfway toward Dryden, her breath coming in fast, shallow bursts.
Dryden pictured the sequence of moves it would take to open fire on the newcomer. Four things to do: spin in place from his kneeling position, raise the Beretta, center it on the target, pull the trigger.
The man in the doorway only had to do one thing—assuming he had his weapon leveled already. Or two things. Two shots in rapid succession. Dryden and Marnie, right there in the guy’s field of fire, at can’t-miss distance. Damn near punching distance.
No contest.
“We’re putting them down,” Dryden said. “Stay calm.”
Marnie’s head turned the rest of the way, her eyes locking onto his. Are you sure?
“It’s okay,” Dryden said. He lowered his shoulder and eased the Beretta onto the metal floor, and let it go. Marnie hesitated, her breathing still fast, then did the same.
“Stand up and turn toward me,” the newcomer said.
Dryden got his feet beneath him and stood. He turned and saw a man maybe sixty years old, dark hair going gray, hard features, sharp eyes. The guy was just outside the doorframe, lit by the indirect sunlight in the channel between the scrap piles.