A figure walked slowly through the doorway. Dance turned to see Michael O’Neil, the senior MCSO
chief deputy she’d called earlier. She nodded at him with a smile, greatly relieved he was here. There was no better law enforcer in the world with whom to share this tough burden.
O’Neil had been with the MCSO for years. He’d started as a rookie deputy and worked his way up, becoming a solid, methodical investigator with a stunning arrest—and more important,conviction
—record. He was now a chief deputy and detective with the Enforcement Operations Bureau of the MCSO’s Investigations Division.
He’d resisted offers to go into lucrative corporate security or to join bigger law-enforcement ops like the CBI or FBI. He wouldn’t take a job that required relocation or extensive travel. O’Neil’s home was the Monterey Peninsula and he had no desire to be anywhere else. His parents still lived there—in the ocean-view house he and his siblings had grown up in. (His father was suffering from senility; his mother was considering selling the house and moving the man into a nursing facility. O’Neil had a plan to buy the homestead just to keep it in the family.)
With his love of the bay, fishing and his boat, Michael O’Neil could be the unwavering, unobtrusive hero in a John Steinbeck novel, like Doc inCannery Row . In fact, the detective, an avid book collector, owned first editions of everything Steinbeck had written. (His favorite wasTravels with Charley, a nonfiction account of the writer’s trip around America with his Standard Poodle, and O’Neil intended to duplicate the journey at some point in his life.)
Last Friday, Dance and O’Neil had jointly collared a thirty-year-old known as Ese, head of a particularly unpleasant Chicano gang operating out of Salinas. They’d marked the occasion by sharing a bottle of Piper Sonoma sparkling wine on the deck of a tourist-infested Fisherman’s Wharf restaurant.
Now it seemed as if the celebration had occurred decades ago. If at all.
The MCSO uniform was typical khaki, but O’Neil often dressed soft, and today he was in a navy suit, with a tieless dark shirt, charcoal gray, matching about half the hair on his head. The brown eyes, beneath low lids, moved slowly as they examined the map of the area. His physique was columnar and his arms thick, from genes and from playing tug of war with muscular seafood in Monterey Bay when time and the weather allowed him to get out his boat.
O’Neil nodded a greeting to TJ and Sandoval.
“Any word on Juan?” Dance asked.
“Hanging in there.” He and Millar worked together frequently and went fishing once a month or so.
Dance knew that on the drive here he’d been in constant touch with the doctors and Millar’s family.
The California Bureau of Investigation has no central dispatch unit to contact radio patrol cars, emergency vehicles or boats, so O’Neil arranged for the Sheriff’s Office central communications operation to relay the information about the missing Worldwide Express truck to its own deputies and the Highway Patrol. He told them that within a few minutes the escapee’s truck would be the only one not stopped at a gas station.
O’Neil took a call and nodded, walking to the map. He tucked the phone between ear and shoulder, picked up a pack of self-adhesive notes featuring butterflies and began sticking them up.
More roadblocks, Dance realized.
He hung up. “They’re on Sixty-Eight, One-Eighty-Three, the One-oh-One…. We’ve got the back roads to Hollister covered, and Soledad and Greenfield. But if he gets into the Pastures of Heaven, it’ll be tough to spot a truck, even with a chopper—and right now fog’s a problem.”
The “Pastures of Heaven” was the name given by John Steinbeck in a book of the same title to a rich, orchard-filled valley off Highway 68. Much of the area around Salinas was flat, low farmland, but you didn’t have to go far to get into trees. And nearby too was the rugged Castle Rock area, whose cliffs, bluffs and trees would be excellent hiding places.
Sandoval said, “If Pell’s partner didn’t drive the getaway wheels, where ishe ?”
TJ offered, “Rendezvous point somewhere?”
“Or staying around,” Dance said, nodding out the window.
“What?” the prosecutor asked. “Why’d he do that?”
“To find out how we’re running the case, what we know. What wedon’t know.”
“That sounds a little…elaborate, don’t you think?”
TJ laughed, pointing toward the smoldering cars. “I’d say that’s a pretty good word for this whole shebang.”
O’Neil suggested, “Or maybe he wants to slow us up.”
Dance said, “That makes sense too. Pell and his partner don’t know we’re on to the truck. For all they know we still think he’s in the area. The partner could make it look like Pell’s nearby. Maybe take a shot at somebody up the street, maybe even set off another device.”
“Shit. Another firebomb?” Sandoval grimaced.
Dance called the security chief and told him there was a possibility the partner was still around and could be a threat.
But, as it turned out, they had no time to speculate about whether or not the partner was nearby. The plan about the Worldwide Express trucks had paid off. A radio call to O’Neil from MCSO dispatch reported that two local police officers had found Daniel Pell and were presently in pursuit.
The dark green delivery truck kicked up a rooster tail of dust on the small road.
The uniformed officer who was driving the Salinas Police squad car, a former jarhead back from the war, gripped the wheel of the cruiser as if he were holding on to the rudder of a ten-foot skiff in twelve-foot seas.
His partner—a muscular Latino—gripped the dashboard in one hand and the microphone in the other.
“Salinas Police Mobile Seven. We’re still with him. He turned onto a dirt road off Natividad about a mile south of Old Stage.”