Again, the signal dropped a few words.
“—but as a one-time soldier, I understand your choice. I know the feeling of the calm before the battle.”
Caitlin recognized an upcoming turn in the road as the way to Tammy’s trailer park. “Great, Scott, so any advice other than don’t die?”
“Of course. Make—”
This time, the signal loss had to be addressed.
“Scott, I’m losing you. What did you say?”
“I said, make peace before you go to war.”
Hoping to boost the signal, Caitlin pulled the phone off the charger and set it on the dashboard. “Yeah, I don’t think these assholes are going to want to shake hands and walk away.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice? No, of course I mean make peace with your past, then walk into battle with a clear head and a true heart.”
“My past, huh?”
“Can you forgive Mama Maya? Can you forgive your father?”
“If she’s even telling the truth.”
“Whether she is or isn’t, can you accept that the man you’ve told me so much about may have been flawed?”
“Dad didn’t break the law,” Caitlin said. “He was the law.”
“Surely, but was he the letter or the spirit?”
“Of the law?” Caitlin double-checked the air-conditioning control on the car’s console. She had it cranked, but sweat still soaked her back. “If you mean, am I familiar with the law enforcement concept of the terms, I am.”
“Growing up Jewish, I doubt you know Second Corinthians.”
“Is that the ‘Love is kind, love is gentle’ wedding thing?”
Scott laughed. “Not quite. It’s a plea in one of the apostle Paul’s letters, saying basically to see the forest through the trees. Without going into the fine points of semantics, years of translation—”
Caitlin jumped on that. “Or centuries of corruption and manipulation of text by men to keep women subservient?”
“Getting to my point,” Scott continued, “it’s widely accepted that Paul said, ‘The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.’ Meaning, don’t get caught up on whether you should stone someone for telling a lie, as the letter of the law would demand, if the lie was told to get people out of the valley before a flood. Surely the act of saving their lives would honor the spirit of the law more than nitpicking who did what for what reasons. If not—”
His voice stopped.
“If not, what, Scott?”
She waited for an answer but got none.
“Scott?”
She picked up the phone, saw the Dropped Call warning. Once again, her phone had lost signal.
She looked down at the map. Her next turn would take her back to God’s Hill, maybe ten minutes at the most. She turned the stereo’s volume back up but got only static. A twist of the knob left her with only the sound of the car speeding along the wooded road and her own thoughts.
“I know my dad was flawed,” she said, “but could he have lied to me for—”
She stopped, picturing Matt Bergman once again in his prime, and spoke directly to him. “Is it true? Did you know you were my real dad every day of my life until you died?”
She listened for a response but got only tires on asphalt as the road rose into the hills.
It didn’t add up. The man fought injustice every day of his career.
“You ended in Internal Affairs, for God’s sake.”
Still nothing.
“Speaking of you, God. Care to chime in?”
The road took a sharp turn to the left, then another to the right. When she straightened out, a flurry of gray specs hovered over her windshield and in front of the headlights.
“If that’s your answer, I don’t care for it.”
From years of Los Angeles wildfires, Caitlin recognized the sudden flurry falling from the sky as ash, not snowflakes. It also meant the wind carrying the firestorm from the south had turned her way.
Her headlights happened upon a roadside reflector, then another, and finally the yellow metal gate.
“Fine,” she said, parking Stupid Tom’s car in the same place she’d found it. “My mother was a porn star, an addict, a prostitute, and joined a cult. My father may have been a liar who couldn’t admit he’d knocked up a porn star, all to protect his career and marriage.”
She reached for the limited bag of supplies she’d brought from Hazel’s house, rummaged past the bottles of water, and came back with a foot-long Maglite-style flashlight.
“I come from stupid, lying people who made dumb decisions for dumber reasons.”
She opened the door and immediately tasted the smoke in the air.
“Which makes me the perfect candidate to save Promise from doing something idiotic.”
CHAPTER
54
“I THOUGHT WE AGREED not to talk,” Beverly Chandler said, the gravel of three in the morning in her voice. “Have they found Linda?”
Lakshmi led with an apology. “Sorry about the hour—”
“I’m not asleep. Tell me.”
Lakshmi told Beverly Chandler everything she knew.
Beverly listened intently without commenting, then sighed. “Where are you now, Lakshmi?”
“Koreatown,” she said. “My apartment.”
“No, the address. I’m sending a car.”
“A car?”
“I’ll meet you in Burbank in an hour. We’ll take my plane into North Bend and do whatever we can.”
“Beverly, all Caitlin needs is a message.”
“Are you kidding? For more than twenty years, the Dayans have been waiting for the end of the world. Now a wildfire is moving toward God’s Hill. Those women won’t leave until they see the face of God or burn alive. They don’t need a message, they need evacuation.”
CHAPTER
55
DESMOND STEPPED BACK and looked at the luggage on top of his bed.
After all the years, his life boiled down to two suitcases’ worth of shit.
Well, not complete shit.
He’d spread slightly more than eight hundred grand in cash between the two bags under layers of regular street clothes, not Dayan-made sarongs of red and white but jeans and T-shirts bought from the nearest Walmart. He’d forgotten shoes, actual honest-to-goodness tennis shoes made with real leather and closed toes, but would put a state between himself and Oregon before he bothered to shop again.
He had one American passport under his legal name, and two under an alias he’d purchased in the nineties. Both had been renewed multiple times without issue, despite the latest in biometrics. If he couldn’t get to a border in time, he had driver’s licenses from Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Utah, and enough credit cards to advance another hundred thousand.
What else?
Right, the license plate.
He looked over at the wall of monitors, glancing past the images of the fields, barracks, and God’s Hill, and confirmed the Jeep still waited just beyond the machine shop.
The second after his call with Tanner, he’d triple-checked that the vehicle had been gassed up, then filled an extra twenty-gallon can. If he got to the 5 freeway, he’d make it to Washington without being seen by an attendant at one of Oregon’s full-service stations.
He pulled the bottom drawer out of his dresser, set it on the carpet, ran his hand along the trim until he found a large manila envelope, and shook the contents onto the floor.
Two license plates, one Nevada, the other Arizona; one for him, the other for Daya when the day came.
“Sorry to make the trip without you, my darling,” he said, grabbing both and zipping them into the first hard-shelled suitcase. He lifted the bag off the bed, his muscles straining against the weight. Years of having other people waiting at hand hadn’t left his own body in great shape.
Screw it, once he got to Canada, he’d get a truck stop massage. After that, maybe a whole brothel in Mexico or Thailand.
He reached for the second bag, bu
t his eyes caught on movement from one of the monitors.
Not the wide-angle view of Ceremony Peak, though he could tell the work of the faithful progressed, but from the front gate. A blur of neon green passed by the guard tower without definition. Unmanned since midnight, the tower’s camera didn’t focus in time for Desmond to make out what had passed. A second monitor came to life, the camera just outside the machine shop, then the one looking down on the fields.
A teenager rode a motorcycle at full speed toward the front door of the Spirit’s Estate.
“Fuck me.”
Everything had been fine until Magda brought Promise Larsen to God’s Hill. Here she was again at the worst possible time. Where Promise was, her father was sure to follow.
Desmond zipped the second bag, then wheeled both toward the door.
He’d moved everything just outside the Gallery when the front doors of the Spirit’s Estate opened and the girl walked inside.
“Desmond? Where is everyone? Did I miss the Light?”
He turned toward her, pushing the bags into the darkened room, and opened his arms.
“You have returned to us just in time. Come, Promise, join me in the Gallery.”
CHAPTER
56
CAITLIN CONSIDERED THE two paths: the paved option leading to the landslide and the mix of dirt and rocks she’d driven the rental truck up through the woods. She’d need the rugged path on the way out, and some familiarity with the hard-to-see trail would be helpful, but it was pushing three in the morning. Her tired legs demanded she take as much pavement as possible.
She flicked the flashlight on and started up the road, noticing that the heat remained oppressive, even at the high altitude. The only saving grace was a strong wind whipping through the trees, intermittently sending swaths of cool air her way. More branches had snapped since she and Promise came down the road, a sign of how brittle the towering forest had become.
By the time she reached the fallen trunks of the landslide, sweat ran down her back and two words bounced back and forth between her ears: tinder box.
She moved the flashlight along the hillside, tracing the route she and Promise had used over the mass of dirt and rock. She could repeat the process easily enough, starting on the smaller, secondary log, then hopping down to the sturdy primary beam. Four feet onto the closest tree, she swung the flashlight across the chasm to the other end and stopped when the light tripped across a small, iridescent triangle. Not the reflective surface Promise had pointed out earlier, this small flash four feet below the opposing ledge of remaining pavement looked familiar.
Caitlin advanced, keeping her light’s beam on the steps in front of her. Climbing down to the larger tree trunk, she swung the flashlight toward the area under the ledge again.
“Shit,” she said, finding not only the original triangle but a second one two feet lower down the landslide. The iridescent triangles she was seeing were from the backs of running shoes.
A body lay sprawled on the hillside, motionless, facedown and aimed downhill.
She took another ten steps across the log. Twelve feet from the safety of the opposing ledge, Caitlin could tell the body was a man. A handgun had fallen from his hand, maybe ten feet lower than her current position.
“Hey,” she said.
A gust of wind blew through the canyon, louder than her own voice. Bits of dirt from the hillside rolled down past her. She steadied herself, looked again.
The flashlight revealed blue letters over a white T-shirt: F.B.I.
“What the hell?” she said, crouching. Another glance showed the words Federal Bikini Inspector.
The body she assumed was Stupid Tom didn’t move.
Neither did she.
Chances were, Magda had killed Tom seconds after Caitlin and Promise took his car. Then again, her mother wasn’t the only woman packing heat on the mountain. Caitlin had no idea who’d put Tom in the landslide. Hell, his name was Stupid Tom. Maybe he’d fallen all by himself.
Still, she’d spent every year of her life yelling at people in movies who passed by free guns without picking them up. She ran the light over the area.
Sure enough, a clump of rocks two feet down led to a solid block of asphalt. She could climb down alongside the body, grab the gun, then get back up.
First things first. She lowered herself into the clump of rocks, then grabbed an avocado-sized stone and gave it a toss.
The stone landed an inch past where she’d aimed, square in Stupid Tom’s lower back. He didn’t shift or make a sound. Flashlight in hand, Caitlin leaned against the soil and slid down to the large chunk of asphalt.
“Tom, are you alive?”
Again, no answer. Not that she wanted one. She dropped into a squat, the chunk of asphalt wobbling beneath her feet, inches from Tom’s head; the gun was two feet further down the hill. She swung the light over Tom’s back again. No sign of chest movement, especially not with the red blossom of blood near his left shoulder.
Easing one shoe off the asphalt, Caitlin lowered herself another foot. Again, dirt followed her down the hill. She trained the light on Tom’s head with one hand, then reached for the gun with the other. Inch by inch, her hand crept along, her eyes shifting from the pistol to Tom’s head. Finally, she connected with the butt of the gun, one finger, then a second, and pulled.
Maybe it was a gust of wind, maybe the moving dirt, but as she got control of the handgun, she looked back up and saw Tom’s head move.
Not open eyes or moving limbs; just hair, blown by the wind.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Caitlin said, bringing the gun up to her chest in relief. The shift in her weight caused a shift in the chunk of asphalt. She fell backward, her head aimed downhill, her legs hitting the rough soil behind her.
“No—”
The word didn’t stop her body, nor the soil above. As fast as she slid, the chunk of asphalt followed her down. In seconds, she’d fallen eight feet down the landslide, coming to rest where a grouping of stones had wedged against a still-standing tree trunk. Her hands went up to protect her head, but the asphalt chunk hit lower, bruising rather than wounding her back.
“Sonofabitch,” she said, listening to the cascading dirt. Something else was gaining momentum.
She turned uphill, then wished she hadn’t. Stupid Tom’s corpse washed over her with a cloud of dirt, diagonally covering her legs.
Caitlin brushed the rough soil from her mouth and gasped for air. Once under control, she did an inventory. Her right hand still had the gun; her left still held the flashlight, though partially buried. She freed her hand, pulled her legs out from under Tom’s body, and sat up.
She looked up at the pale, cloudy sky, saw flakes of ash still falling like Shitmas morning, and laughed. “There’d better be bullets in this thing.”
She pulled back the automatic’s slide, ejected a single unused round, and released the clip.
Empty.
She searched the dirt for the single ejected cartridge, brushed it off, slid it into the otherwise empty clip, reloaded the gun, then sat back, one arm falling onto Tom’s body. Definitely dead. He would never inspect another bikini.
She swung the flashlight around to plot a way back up.
To her right, the uphill ledge would require a forty-five-degree climb up obviously loose soil. To her left, the downhill ledge could be reached somewhat easier through a pile of solid-looking boulders.
At the base, feet from her current position, the light reflected back at Caitlin.
“No way.”
She stood and moved closer.
The flashlight’s beam revealed a dark rectangle over a V of red paint. She moved the light left and saw the rectangle of a mirror, the same mirror she and Promise had seen earlier. A Dayan town car had been buried at the base of the landslide, and not accidentally.
Caitlin moved closer, brushed dirt from the dark rectangle of tinted glass, and tried to shine the light inside.
No good. She took
the butt of the gun and struck the window, breaking an orange-sized hole into the safety glass.
The contents of the town car might have sat there for a year, but sealed inside the glass and metal, a smell of stagnant decay somewhere between mildew and cheese hadn’t escaped until now.
Caitlin retched once, hard, then patted her pockets for her phone. Recording a video, she raised the flashlight and her camera phone and looked inside.
A red seat back visible to her left and an intact window several feet in front of her meant she was looking into the back seat. She coughed again, spit a mouthful of stomach acid to the side, then turned her camera slowly to the right, her hand shaking with each degree of rotation.
Despite the addition of light, the red of the opposing door’s side panel faded from dark crimson to a brownish black. She exhaled a held breath, looked down at her screen, then let her eyes follow the flashlight’s beam back through the opening. A dank, black film covered the paneling and what had to have been an explosion of sludge at some point.
“No,” she said, aware that sludge couldn’t describe the mix of scattered blood, mold, and worse. Her heart knew that not only had someone been killed in this car, but at least one body had been buried without modern funeral rites or preservation and sealed within. Fighting the tremble in her hand that threatened to rock her entire frame, she continued her slow pan to the back bench.
A group of red lumps in the same hue as the latest in Dayan fashion huddled in a pile in the far corner. Sections of black and bits of white appeared near seat belt level where hands might once have hung from sleeves. As she tilted her light up slightly, deep-brown and black patches revealed how wounds and natural decomposition had stained or eaten through fabric.
Taking another quick breath, Caitlin realized she’d started crying at some point. Tears ran down her cheeks, but something wouldn’t let her wipe them away until she saw the inevitable.
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