I wait. I watch. I guard.
On this trip, her only cargo sits on the seat beside her, rattling lightly—the open Mallomar box full of mail and someone else’s bullets. Sent to Lester Vogel, aka Gerald Dean, who just happened to be the prime suspect in her personal murder investigation. She’d already decided, once she took this box from Greta, not to tell Cooper about it, not yet. She wants to contact Ellis Gonzalez first and find out what he knows. Then maybe corner Lester Vogel back in town and confront him with these bullets. She wants to gather enough evidence that, when she does tell Cooper, he can’t dismiss it, refute it, or, even worse, co-opt the whole theory and take credit for it and claim it as his own.
Because this truth belongs to her. She uncovered it. Now she owns it.
Gable drinks with Dean; Dean lives next to Colfax; Colfax winds up dead in his home and Gable dead at the bar. And Dean’s getting bullets sent to him in the mail. And Ellis Gonzalez was working in the Blinds when Colfax died, then he left in a real big hurry. He’s got to know something, she figures—and now she’s discovered that someone’s running mail to the residents, through a postbox in Abilene, which happens to be where Ellis Gonzalez likely now lives. She doesn’t have an address for him, but she’s got a pretty good hunch.
She’s also considering whether she should stop somewhere in Abilene and purchase a firearm. There’s certainly plenty of places that won’t bother her about a wait period, though she doesn’t have much in the way of cash. Not to mention that she’s never held a gun before, though this seems to her like it might be a good time to start.
Just in case she runs into trouble.
Don’t get ahead of yourself, Lindy, she decides. There’s no situation that a gun doesn’t complicate. Besides, you’ve got the truth in a box beside you. And that should be enough, right?
Just wait. Just watch. Just guard.
The truth rattles as she tickles seventy.
Cooper’s visited Dr. Holliday’s ranch before on a handful of occasions but, even so, the sight of her homestead never fails to amaze him. Driving for hours on endless ribbons of West Texas highway—the same sun-bleached land and wind-scrubbed grass looming flat around every bend—then suddenly, boom, there it is. Dr. Holliday’s oasis, rising from the rough plains like a hallucination, like some new Garden of Eden, an explosion of flora and flowers. Her home is a low-slung, very modern, very boxy poured-concrete affair, lined along the outside with dark-tinted glass, which makes no effort or concession to blend in with the surrounding Texas landscape. And then there’s the grounds: a sprawling garden that spreads out from the main house in a tangle of exotic foliage, palm trees and ferns and forsythia and Japanese maples and palmetto plants. As if a jungle fell straight from space and landed with a thump on this patch of arid plain. A large stone patio stretches out from the house, shaded by grapevines that dangle from an overhead trellis. This is where Dr. Holliday entertains her guests. This is as close to the main house as Cooper’s ever going to get.
His pickup pulls into the roundabout driveway and Cooper quiets the engine. He’s practiced his pitch a dozen times on the long drive out here. This is it, he thinks: Do this, then do the other thing, and then it’s over. He taps the folded fax in his pocket, like he’s about to embark on a dangerous journey, and the fax is a relic he expects to keep him safe.
Dr. Holliday is already out on the stone path in front of her door, waving, greeting him in a loose white blouse, light linen slacks that drape over leather biker boots, with some kind of expensive necklace, stones of high polish, hanging heavy on a loop across her chest. Her white hair is pulled back in an intricate braid. Cooper doesn’t have a clue how old she is, but he guesses she’s older than him, maybe in her sixties, though she could be even older than that; either way, she’s definitely more well-preserved than he is. Cooper’s lifelong inability to achieve her brand of effortless Zen-like self-presentation is one reason, he thinks, he’s always gravitated professionally toward uniforms. Including, today, this rumpled, sweaty, and now slightly truck-stale brown shirt he’s wearing. So much for first impressions, he thinks, then steps out of the truck and says hello.
She motions him toward the patio, where a sweaty pitcher of pale juice sits waiting on a long stone table. She offers him a seat on a roughhewn wooden bench across from her. The table itself is made of some cool stone and looks like the kind of slab you might perform an autopsy on.
“How have you been, Calvin?” she asks, then nods to the pitcher. “Can I offer you a glass of apple cider? It’s cold-pressed. I have it shipped in especially.”
“At this point, I’m happy for anything wet,” says Cooper. He fills her glass from the pitcher, then pours a glass for himself. Their rapport has always been friendly, the few times they’ve met before; she’s his boss, technically, but more than that, she’s the den mother of Caesura. She runs it—she runs the whole Fell Institute now—and she helped create it, along with her ex-partner, the legendary Dr. Johann Fell. Cooper met her at his first job interview, just after Dr. Fell died.
“I see you’re still wearing your star,” Holliday says with a laugh. “I got you that as a gag gift, you know. To celebrate your first day on the job. I didn’t think you’d wear it.”
“Feels too funny to take it off now,” Cooper says. “Thanks for answering my fax.”
Holliday smiles. “People laugh when they see that old machine sitting in my office. But it’s the best way to keep your communications discreet, especially in this day and age. No satellite is going to eavesdrop on a fax machine.” She taps her fingers on her glass. “Speaking of discretion, I’d love an update on your recent incidents. I trust you have things under control in my town?”
“That’s what I came to talk to you about.”
“You met Agent Rigo, yes? He’s our new liaison. He’s a good man, Cal. I met him through our work with the Justice Department. He used to refer potential residents to us.”
“Sure, he came by.”
“Don’t hesitate to lean on him. He could be useful,” she says. “So what brings you out here today?”
Might as well just come out with it, Cooper thinks. “I need to see a few of the files. The blind files.”