Ironically, just after Dance had been shifted from criminal mode to civil, the administrative matter she’d come here about, taxation and insurance certificates, had just turned into a crime. A felony. Murder. Perhaps even a terrorist attack.
She said to Sanchez and Lanners, ‘Can you declare this a homicide? I can’t.’ A wry smile. ‘That’s the long-story part. And secure the scene. The drop-box, the truck, the oil drum, the club. Better go for the parking lot too.’
‘Sure,’ Lanners said. ‘I’ll call Crime Scene. Secure everything.’
With a dribble of a siren, a county ambulance pulled up and parked in front of the office. Two techs, large white men, appeared in the doorway and nodded. They spotted Billy and walked over to him to assess damage and mobility.
‘Is it broke, my jaw?’ Billy asked.
One tech lifted off the icy and bloody towel. ‘Got to take X-rays first and then only a doctor can tell you after he looks over the film. But, yah, it’s broke. Totally fucking broke. You can walk?’
‘I’ll walk. Is anybody out there?’
‘How do you mean?’
Dance glanced out of the window. ‘It’s clear.’
The four of them stepped outside and helped the scrawny driver into the ambulance. He reached out and took Dance’s hand in both of his. His eyes were moist and not, Dance believed, from the pain. ‘You saved my life, Agent Dance. More ways than just one. God bless you.’ Then he frowned. ‘But you be careful. Those people, those animals, they wanted to kill you just as much as me. And you didn’t do a lick wrong.’
‘Feel better, Billy.’
Dance found her shield, dusted it off and slipped it into her pocket. She then returned to the roadhouse. She’d tell Bob Holly what she’d discovered but keep the news from Charles Overby until she’d done some more canvassing.
She needed as much ammunition as she could garner.
As she approached the gathered press and spectators, she glanced toward a pretty woman TV reporter, in a precise suit, interviewing a Monterey County firefighter, a solid, sunburned man with a tight crew-cut and massive arms. She’d seen him at several other fire and mass-disaster scenes over the past year or so.
The reporter said to the camera, ‘I’m talking here with Brad C. Dannon, a Monterey County fireman. Brad, you were the first on the scene last night at Solitude Creek?’
‘Just happened I wasn’t too far away when we got the call, that’s right.’
‘So you saw a scene of panic? Could you describe it?’
‘Panic, yeah. Everybody. Trying to get out, just throwing themselves against the door, like animals. I’ve been a firefighter for five years and I’ve never …’
CHAPTER 11
‘… seen anything like this.’
‘Five years, really, Brad? Now tell me, it looks like the doors, the fire doors, were unlocked but they were all blocked by a truck that had parked there. A tractor-trailer. We can see … there.’
Antioch March lifted his eyes from his present gaze – the pillowcase of fine-weave cotton, six inches from his face – and glanced at the TV screen, across the bedroom in the sumptuous Cedar Hills Inn in Pebble Beach. The camera from the crew outside the Solitude Creek roadhouse panned to Henderson Jobbing and Warehouse, which was all of ten miles from where March now lay.
A mouth beside his ear: ‘Yes, yes!’ A moist whisper.
On TV, the anchor, blonde as toffee, came back into high-definition view. ‘Brad, a number of victims and relatives of victims are accusing the driver of the truck of negligently blocking the doors, accusing him of parking there to go to the bathroom, or maybe even sneaking in to see the show last night. Do you think that’s a possibility?’
‘It’s too early to speculate,’ the firefighter replied.
It’s never wise to speculate, March corrected Brad, early or late. The bodybuilding firefighter, not quite as buff as March, looked smug. Wouldn’t trust him to rescue me from a smoke-filled building.
Much less a stampede in a roadhouse. Brad did, however, go on to offer graphic descriptions of the ‘horror’ last night. They were quite accurate. Helped by Brad and the images he was describing, March turned his attention back to the task at hand, lowered his head back to the pillow and pulsed away.
Calista gripped his earlobe between two perfectly shaped teeth. March felt the pressure of the incisors. Felt her studded nose against his smooth cheek. Felt himself deep inside her.
She grunted rhythmically. Maybe he did too.
Calista whispered, ‘You’re so fucking handsome …’
He wished she wouldn’t talk. Besides, he didn’t know what to do with that sentence. Maybe she was hoping for this to be more than a couple-days thing. But he also knew that people said all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons at moments like this and he didn’t sweat it.
Just wished she wouldn’t talk. He wanted to hear. Wanted to see. Wanted to imagine.
Her heels banged against his tailbone, her bright crimson fingernails – the color of arterial blood – assaulted his back.
And he replayed what people often replayed at moments like now: earlier times. The Solitude Creek incident. But then, going way back: Serena, of course. He often returned to Serena, the way a top eventually spins to stillness.
Serena. She helped move him along.
Jessica he thought of too.
And, of course, Todd. Never Serena and Jessica without Todd.
He was moving more quickly now.
Again she was gasping, ‘Yes, yes, yes …’
As she lay under him Calista’s hands now eased up his spine and gripped his shoulders hard. Those GMC-finish nails pressed into his skin. He reciprocated, digging into her pale flesh. Her moaning was partly pain; the rest of the damp gusts from her lungs were from his two hundred plus pounds, little fat. Pounding.
Compressing.
Sort of like the people last night.
‘Oh …’ She stiffened.
He backed off at that. There was a balance between his pleasure and her pain. Tricky. He didn’t really need her to cry at the moment. He had all he needed.
‘Again, if you’re just joining us …’