I swing around and face him, and see he is astonished. He is surprised by what he sees. I am not surprised by his surprise. If someone sneaks into a military base and shoots out the tire on a van, she is not expected to look like me.
“What are you doing here?” he says. “Why did you attack me?”
“I didn’t,” I say, fumbling from the beginning. Wanting to explain and knowing there are no good words for this. “Maybe you had a blowout?”
He raises his eyebrows at this. We are no longer in shadows. We are standing right at the gap in the fence, and I realize I was moments from making good my getaway. He is much larger than I am. He would not have fit through the hole.
“You shot out my tire,” he says again, ignoring my denial. I may as well not have spoken at all. There is wonder in his voice, though and it is doubly clear that, whatever he was expecting, it wasn’t me.
I don’t say anything. For the moment, it seems the wisest course. After all, what can I say? He doesn’t wait for words, though, and he’s caught me unawares. I’m not quite sure why. There is him, this military man in his fatigues. And then there is me, clearly in the wrong. So, when he snakes out one meat-like fist and squeezes my left arm behind my back in a half nelson, I am unprepared, though I should not have been. Even as I think that, I realize the fruitlessness of the regret. He had the jump on me, plain and simple. I could have played it differently, but I’d probably still be right here.
“Your weapon, please,” he says politely. Calmly. He may look ineffective, but he is duty trained. I should not have expected less.
“I told you,” I say through my discomfort. “You had a blowout. I don’t have a weapon. The blowout had nothing to do with me.”
He puts some pressure on my arm, bending it upwards, beyond the place where it is meant to go.
“Please don’t make me break this,” he says. There is no malice in his voice, I note. But I can also tell he doesn’t believe in the coincidence of his blowout and my showing up.
I don’t respond, and he pushes a little further on the arm I’d already thought was close to breaking.
“Okay, okay,” I say, through my pain. “Uncle.” The squeezing stops right away, but doesn’t disappear. I can feel him waiting.
“Gun is in my purse,” I choke out. It is heartbreaking to me, this giving up of the Bersa. But better my heart break in this way than my arm.
He lets me go and scoops up my bag in the same motion. With the Bersa in his hand, I imagine I see a smirk, but in the next instant it is gone so quickly I wonder if I didn’t imagine it in the first place.
“Handy little gun,” he says grudgingly.
I keep my mouth shut. It doesn’t seem like anything I could say at this point will move this situation ahead. I am silent and watching. There are a number of ways all of this can go. Mostly none of them are good.
“Who are you here with?” Now that the gun has been secured and tucked into his waistband, I am no kind of threat. He looks around in comfort, trying to see whatever accomplices I might have. Clearly, I can’t have done this thing by myself.
“I am alone,” I say. It’s not quite the truth, but I don’t think the dog counts.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
I AM SCRAMBLING through my brain for ideas, but nothing is coming. I want to say something that will make it all better. Will make all the bad stuff go away while also making him give me my Bersa back. I am scrabbling and scrambling but I know I don’t have much time and no big ideas are coming to me.
“Are you a terrorist?” His face has no expression when he asks. Whatever else he is, he is a trained soldier. And me? I have never felt more alone.
“Do I look like a terrorist?”
“I don’t know,” he says. Clearly, all of this is outside of his experience. As well it should be to a nearly forgotten soldier playing security guard at a shut-down military base and airfield in rural California. “I don’t think so. No.”
“I’m not a terrorist.”
“I don’t think a terrorist would say they were one,” he says as though considering. I search his face for a trace of humor at the words, but I don’t see any. Instead, he looks like he’s trying to work something through, but nothing is lining up.
“I’m not a terrorist,” I repeat, but I see the growing doubt in his face. He is younger than he should be to be posted out here by himself. And there is the faint hint of a gin blossom growing on both cheeks, probably, I think, the result of too much time spent on his own with nothing for company besides a bottle. If I weren’t in such a weird predicament, I’d feel sorry for him.
I see him trying to process who I am and how I fit into his reality while he also figures out what to do. This is outside of the routine. Beyond the every day.
“Well, I’ll have to report you,” he says, as though talking himself through what should be done next. “Even if it was a blowout.” He eyes me suspiciously, but I can see him adding things up in a way that doesn’t compute. One-plus-one-equals-six or something like that. All of the pieces together don’t come to the right equation.
“There’s nothing to report,” I say. I can’t afford the connection to my real identity or for weight to be put on the identity I carry. I can afford no connection. “I … I just got lost.”
If I have any hope of this being easy and him just letting me go and forgetting he ever saw me, it goes out like a blown-upon flame with his next words.
“Let’s get to the office, and we’ll figure out what to do.”
With his van offline, we are forced to walk, and I trudge next to him towards an office in one of the hangar buildings. I have to trot to keep up with his long-legged stride. I shake my arm out a bit while we go. It seems likely to me I will bruise where he was holding me. Or worse.
When he pulls open the big barn doors, I am met by the smell of dust and disuse, abandonment and forty-year-old motor oil. It’s not a scent I’m moved to dab onto my wrists.
In the office, he indicates I should take a chair while he goes to the desk and fires up his computer. The computer is not as old as the rest of the stuff here, but it is clearly not this year’s model. I am trying to think fast, but I am running out of steam. As lame as it is, I am in a military installation and there is only so much I can do.
“They’ll probably have me put you in lockup.”
“I can’t be in lockup,” I say. “Please.”
“Look around,” he says, waving a hand airily. “You’ve broken into a United States military base. Do you think I can just let you go?”
I see his point. See the precariousness of my situation. But still.
“I understand, truly. But it would be just so much better if you did not phone this in. Please.” His face is implacable, and I decide I have nothing more to lose. I will try the truth, or as close to it as I can get. “I am hunting William Atwater.”
“The murderer?”
“Yes. Last seen driving a white van.”
“Ah,” he says. I see a light dawn. Whatever he makes of my statement, I know he believes it.
“Right. I thought you were him. And listen, it’s really important I find him. I think he has a little girl with him. I’m … I’m trying to save her.”
I’ve hesitated because, out loud, the words sound ridiculous, even to me. Who am to I think I can stop a murderer? I see I have his attention though. Even if he doesn’t believe me, it’s an interesting story, and he’s got nothing but time on his hands.
“It’s a U.S. military base,” he repeats needlessly. “You know I can’t just let you go.”
I nod. And I get it. Really. I do. Here’s this low-man-on-the-totem-pole soldier stuck here most of the time on his own. And then I plop into the middle of everything. Clearly, that’s going to be nothing but trouble. If I were him, I’d do the very same thing. Keep things simple and moving forward. I’m beginning to plot desperate measures doomed to fail when he speaks again.
“Atwater, huh?”
I nod.
“He’s the one killed the little kids an’ then got loose?”
I nod again, daring to feel the faintest hope flutter in my chest. “What makes you think you can get him?”
I consider before answering but, when I do, I can see I chose the right words.
“I’ve got nothing to lose.”
He grunts while he nods agreement. “I get that,” he says and I can see he means it. “Guy like that,” he says. “Would be better if he was dead.”
“I aim to kill him.” My voice is calm and determined.
He smiles at my words, but he isn’t laughing at me.
“Yuh. Better or worse, I think. That’s your aim. Can smell it on you.” Then a little more seriously, “I know that smell,” and then I understand that there is more to his story than just being shunted off to a backwater. Something led him here. Something happened first.
“I can’t let you go,” he says, and I feel the slender hope I’d held die at the back of my throat. It tastes like sawdust.
“Oh,” I say. I just don’t have any more words.
“Yuh. Can’t just let you go,” and I can hear him thinking now. I can almost hear the clicks of the wheels speeding up. “But maybe you got the jump on me.”
It takes a second for me to understand what he’s getting at and, when I do, I feel something grow in my chest. And the taste of sawdust is gone.
“Jump,” I prompt. Because I am not sure.
“Yeah.” His voice is brighter now. He can feel a purpose. “Because you had a gun. I couldn’t safely disarm you and you held it on me and …” He has an idea. I can tell because of the smile that floods his face. He is having fun with this. And maybe fun doesn’t come to him every day. And my mission? It’s a good one. He knows that, too.
“And I ran away? Scrabbled back through the fence?”
“Naw,” he says. The smile has dimmed to a grin, but it is still beautiful. “Or maybe. You got away from me. And then you hid or whatever. I didn’t see you get away. Don’t know where you went.”
He turns his back. Pulls the Bersa from his waistband and plops it on the desk. Raises his arms over his head like I’d told him to stick ’em up and says, “Good luck.”
I hesitate. And then I don’t. I move forward cautiously, in case it’s a trick. It’s not though, because he stays there like that even after the Bersa is back in my bag.
“Thanks,” I mumble.
“Don’t,” he says. “Just get ’er done.”
I put my hand softly on the back of his head—a silent thanks—and then I scurry away.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
I HEAD FOR the exit. Getting out of the compound is easier than getting in had been. Though I had feared some drama, in the end, it is easy. I just walk out the front gate.
Back at the car, the dog is ridiculously happy to see me. Ludicrously, rapturously happy. I open the door, and he practically pours out of the car in his joy. Maybe he’d thought he was a goner, trapped inside a car in the wilderness. I let him run around and do dog things for a few minutes, but I keep one eye on the empty road. From my perspective, the sooner we leave the area, the safer we will be. We get on the road, and I track us back to where I made my phone calls and it all starts again.
It does not take long before I come to the gas station at the fork in the road. It seems right. Correct. My excitement grows. Viewed from the north looking south, the gas station is located in the deepest part of a vee. Take the left road, she’d said. And so I stop. First, I take the dog around. It just seems the right thing to do. Then I park the dog and go inside.
I use the restroom. Buy a muffin and two large bottles of water. Garbage in, garbage out.
Among the chips and cookies and beef jerky and cheap electronic crap they are selling in the store, there is a rack of poorly made T-shirts. “San Pasado,” one declares, a map of the county front and center. “It’s where my story begins” is printed on the back. I take one off the rack, and if the clerk notices the rip in the shirt I am wearing while I pay for the new one, he doesn’t say anything. Some things are best unremarked. Most people know that.
In the car, I pull the shirt on over the one I’m wearing, then go back over my notes. She had been very clear. “Two roads. You understand? Go left.”
And am I actually following the advice of a psychic? I chide myself for maintaining even the faintest glimmer of hope that young Sara Jane Samaritano’s predictions will pan out. At the same time, I’m excited, though trying to hold that excitement down. The doctor I’d spoken to before I connected with the psychic is probably the one who is right: therapy is likely what I need, but I have a hunt on my hands. For better or worse, I put my head down and lean in.
After the dog and I do another round of the parking lot, we get back on the road. It is now fully dark, but my energy doesn’t falter. I am in the home stretch. I can feel it in my bones.
First, a gas station. And it’s dark. There will be a choice. You’ll fork to the left.
When I move through the parking lot and back to the car, I don’t see anyone moving in the shadows. Even when I pull back onto the highway, I don’t notice the car following me, and the dog is still riding comfortably.
I continue on my way to Verde Road, having taken the left fork. The road is convoluted. One of those coast-to-canyon minor highways you find nowhere quite as they are in California.
When I come upon three boulders blocking a roadway just as Sara Jane Samaritano predicted, I am so excited I nearly drive off the road. Clearly, I should have listened to her in the first place.
I park in front of one of the boulders and get out of the car and use my smartphone flashlight to illuminate not much of the darkness. When you are trying to find your keyhole in the dark, it seems like a bright light. But here in pitch darkness, it is almost nothing at all. It is only by luck that the light catches a bit of a road sign reflecting out from the dried grass dying at the edges of the boulders. And when I pull the sign out to inspect it, I’m not even surprised when I see that it reads “Verde Lane.” Even in the dark, I can see the white cliffs looming above me and I have no doubt that this is the correct Verde. Too many of the signs are right. And my heart expands slightly to send quick thoughts of thanks to Sara Jane Samaritano and to allow for the idea of magic in the world, at least for a while.
From my position, I have a sense that, if I were to turn my head to the right, in daylight, I would see forever. Mile upon mile of waving wheatgrass and stubby hills in the direction of the sea. But it is dark. The sort of velvety night that envelopes the soul. And I suddenly feel that, from here, it all winds down with the inevitability of a candle burning out. It’s as though there’s only one way it can go.
By bumping through a shallow ditch, I bypass the boulders blocking the road. The dog looks at me quizzically at this suddenly bumpy ride, but he doesn’t comment.
From there, I inch the car ahead slowly, foot upon careful foot. It is so dark that a light up ahead on the slender track I follow seems to glow in the darkness. I stop the car when the road becomes too uneven to continue and get out into fragrant gloom, once again leaving the dog behind. This time, I feel only faintly ridiculous carrying my purse into the velvety night. Into the wilderness. The heft of the Bersa inside the bag restores my confidence. There isn’t much anyone would ever need to face that the Bersa could not help with, that is my thinking.
I pull a hoodie on against the cold and creep into the night. The scent of green oak drifts up to me as leaves crush under my feet. The sound of night birds and brash insects. The harsh hiss of a biting bug in my ear. And always ahead, the light, calling me forward. I push back the excitement I feel. After all, it truly is wilderness. If it is not what I am searching for, what else could it possibly be, here where we are miles from any houses or other signs of civilization?
After a while, I hear a thin cry. Light and feminine. I indulge myself in the sound. Not a woman, I think. A girl. I move more quickly, but keep my wits sharp and on e
dge. I stay aware of every current of air, every sound. I am close now, I’m sure of it. And a mistake at this stage could be fatal. For her. For me. I’m not sure, but fatality seems a distinct possibility. Its potential is all around me.
Closer still and the object of my search takes a shape. There is a tent tucked into the side of the looming cliff, the forest thick around it. Had it not been for the light, I would have missed it altogether. And it is like a replay of that time, weeks before, when Arden and I crept through the forest not far from here. I can’t help having a sense of déjà vu that I also know is real.
I approach the tent cautiously, the Bersa ready. I don’t know what I’ll find. And I jump, startled, when a branch breaks behind me, then stand still until no other sound follows. Some nocturnal animal, I think, as startled by me as I am by it.
Close to the tent, I can see how it’s made. The structure is a classic shape, maybe Army surplus. Pale, rough canvas. Crude and utilitarian. A center pole. Illuminated from within.
I am so close now, and then the cry again. Soft. Not desperate. Almost an aside. As though maybe hours of more strident sound have led to this pale mewling. An animal sound. And there is nothing of hope in it. It is the sound of a creature beyond hope.
The plaintive sound makes me bold. And it isn’t something I can walk away from, even if I wanted to. And I’ve come so far. And I don’t want to.
The Bersa is in my hand. As I push the tent flap aside with the muzzle of the gun, I don’t think about the unlikelihood of having hunches pay out twice in a row. I don’t think about psychics or odds or lottery tickets or any of the things that would have indicated I would never find this needle in a haystack. All I can think about is the child in front of me inside the tent.
In a heartbeat, I take in the scene. She is exposed to the night air, something horrid in that: her childish body, naked, spread-eagled, and tied on the tent floor. I can see now that her whimpering had been abject and without point or any real hope. If there had been fervor in the cries that came earlier, the ones I did not hear, she is spent now, almost hopeless against the torrent of what she has experienced. And she is alone.
Endings Page 19