The shooting went on for more than a minute, broken only by quick pauses as the gunner reloaded. When the barrage finally stopped, none of V-neck’s guys were screaming. There was no sound at all but the patter of liquid spilling onto the hard ground; both vehicles’ gas tanks had surely been ruptured.
The chopper started moving again. It turned and dipped forward and came in over the two vehicles, climbing as it did. From a height of two hundred feet it made a slow orbit of the Escalades, the man with the rifle staring down through a scope mounted atop it, taking stock of the dead. He was a big guy, bald and bearded, wearing an aviator’s headset and a pair of sunglasses. Dryden had never seen him or the pilot before. After a moment, the gunner said something into his headset microphone, and the chopper wheeled around. It descended and touched down on the hardpan, a hundred feet downwind of Dryden. Its rotorwash kicked up a storm of dust, which trailed away in the wind, across the highway.
Dryden got to his feet. He realized he still had the throwaway phone in his hand. He cracked its cheap plastic case in half, found the battery and detached it, then pocketed the two halves and ran for the chopper. The gunner had already unstrapped himself from his shooting position at the open doorway. He held out a hand and Dryden took it, and the man hauled him into the bay.
“Dryden?” the guy shouted.
Dryden nodded.
The gunner said no more; he just handed Dryden another headset with a built-in microphone. This headset had a cell phone plugged into it. Dryden put it on. The big muffled earpieces drowned out most of the chopper’s turbine scream.
“Hello?” Dryden said.
Marnie’s voice came through the headset’s earphones. “Jesus, you’re alive.”
“What the hell is going on?” Dryden asked.
“Claire got away from her captors,” Marnie said. “At least we think so.”
“I do, too,” Dryden said. “How did you find out?” Then, on the heels of that question, he said, “Do you know where she is?”
“We don’t know. I’ll explain everything when I see you. I don’t want to say much on the phone.”
She said good-bye and clicked off, and in the same moment the chopper’s engine powered up again and the aircraft lifted off the desert floor. It climbed two hundred feet and pivoted to point itself northwest, but for a moment it made no move to accelerate forward. It held its hover, and the big guy in the sunglasses reached into a seatback compartment and came out with a flare gun. He aimed it out through the open bay door, down toward the two Escalades and the pool of gasoline soaking the ground beneath them. The gunner fired the flare, and Dryden looked down and saw a sheet of flame erupt beneath the SUVs.
At last the chopper tipped forward, climbing as it gained speed. Dryden turned in his seat and looked back, and saw both Escalades fully engulfed beneath a thick tower of black smoke.
PART FOUR
SATURDAY, 9:10 P.M.–SUNDAY, 4:00 A.M.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
The chopper flew for just under two hours. It carried Dryden northwest over the Mojave, crossed the Sierra Nevadas, then turned and followed the range north, straddling the boundary between the mountains and the broad, flat expanse of the Central Valley. Dusk was falling by then. In the twilight, Dryden saw cities lighting up: Bakersfield and Visalia, like bright islands ringed by sodium-lit suburbs and the wide-open darkness of farmland beyond. He watched for a while, then settled back in his seat and shut his eyes, and fell asleep within a minute.
*
He woke to a change in the turbine’s sound, its pitch dropping through octaves. He blinked away the sleep and looked out the chopper’s window, and saw Hayden Eversman’s estate lit up in the dark. Landscape lighting cast a glow under the trees that dotted the grounds and outlined the pool, tucked in close behind the main house.
The chopper went stationary, dropping toward an open stretch of lawn out front. As it did, Dryden saw Marnie step out onto the pavers in front of the porch.
*
She met him halfway between the house and the chopper, and gave him a quick hug. She looked excited to share what she knew.
“Claire sent a text to your phone,” she said. “Your real phone, I mean. She sent it at seven fifteen tonight. I found out about it a few minutes after eight, when I turned my phone on to check for messages from my field office.”
“How did your phone show a text from Claire to me—” Dryden cut himself off. He knew the answer.
Marnie nodded. “When I was tracking your vehicle this morning, I was monitoring your phone, too. Any call you made or received, any text, I’d get a notification.”
She took out her phone, opened the message, and handed it to him.
The text was from a phone number Dryden didn’t recognize. He read the message:
Hey Sam its Jodi do you need me to stop over and give the cat her meds this week? I’m free today, but will be tending bar at Bond’s starting noon tomorrow. See you.
Dryden lowered the phone. Relief soaked into him like cool water to a parched throat. He looked up and met Marnie’s gaze.