“I’m afraid that’s privileged information,” Driscoll said. “I would like to speak to her, though.”
“The moment I hear anything,” Mahler assured them.
And then he motioned for the man in black to show them out.
***
“Sorry about the card,” Driscoll said. He was at the wheel of the car that Terrell had had waiting for them at the Palm Springs airport, guiding them back down the driveway toward the farm-to-market road that had brought them through the desert to the isolated compound.
Deal shrugged, still going over what they’d heard from Mahler. “He wasn’t going to tell us anything, no matter what.”
Driscoll nodded, gave him a look. “You did pretty well in there.”
Deal found himself smiling. “I’ve been studying your technique, Driscoll. Slow but sure.”
“That’s the ticket, pardner.” Driscoll smiled back. “No sign of the big guy?”
Deal shook his head, distracted by something he couldn’t put his finger on. “There was somebody in the hallway for a moment, but I couldn’t be sure,” he said absently.
“So what’s your take on Mahler?” Driscoll asked.
“He’s full of more shit than a Christmas turkey,” Deal said. It would have been the clincher, of course, seeing the big man who’d been driving Paige that night. But all his instincts told him it wasn’t necessary. “I don’t know why, but he’s got her. She’s in that house somewhere,” he said. “At the very least, he knows where she is.”
Driscoll sighed and nodded. “I feel the same way,” he said, throwing up his hands. He’d had to stop while a set of electric gates swung open at the end of the lane, allowing them to cross over a cattle guard and back out onto the gravel public road.
“So what are we going to do?” Deal asked.
“We could always try going into town,” Driscoll said. He swung the car out through the gates, then turned south, in the opposite direction from the way they’d come. “We could talk to the cops, see if we could get someone to come out and take a look.” But the way he said it didn’t inspire Deal with much confidence. It might be better than trying the same tactic over the phone, the very prospect of which had sent them flying out here, but just thinking of where to begin the story they’d tell the local authorities made him match Driscoll’s doubtful stare: “Hey, you know the millionaire who lives down the road in Xanadu? We’d like you to go down and bust him for murder and kidnapping. We’ll explain it all to you on the way.”
Deal glanced at Driscoll. “Assuming she’s there, and even if we could convince somebody to come out,” he said, “what’s to stop them from moving her someplace in the meantime?”
“What I figure,” Driscoll said, “we let everybody wake up and start making their movie or whatever it is they’re doing, then I find a way in and have a look around without Kato and his gang watching. Unless you have a better idea.”
Deal shook his head. The road was moving through rugged territory, climbing toward the mountains more steeply now, paralleling a high chain-link fence that cut the nearby underbrush. The fence was at least eight feet tall, topped with inward-leaning strands of barbed wire, one course of reinforcement cable running along the bottom. Formidable as it looked, it had been constructed for the purpose of keeping things in, Deal knew. There was no evidence that the thing was electrically charged, no sign of sensors or other electronic devices.
He knew why it had been put there because he’d seen similar fencing at a series of hunting preserves his father had dragged him along to in Central Texas. The idea was to keep the prey of choice—deer, antelope, longhorns, even exotics such as ibex and gazelle—contained in a space just large enough to provide some semblance of sport without leaving the issue of the successful hunt in doubt for the well-heeled patrons.
Deal had once seen a deer, pursued by a hunter in a Jeep accompanying their party, make a magnificent leap toward freedom on a hillside not far from Austin. The deer had come up about a foot shy, however, had hung its hindquarters up on the barbed wire, and the man who thought of himself as a hunter had shot it while it thrashed madly about in the concertina wire.
All his father’s reassurances about how much more humane it had been to put the animal out of its misery than to allow it to cut itself to ribbons on the fence fell on deaf ears for Deal, who was twelve at the time. He’d jumped out of their own vehicle and ran at the Jeep, leaping over the side to flail at the so-called hunter, who was readying himself for a second shot at the dying animal, had to be pulled away kicking and screaming by his father. Deal had never gone “hunting” again, and he hadn’t seen such a fence since, not in all those years.
Gazing at it now as its posts flashed by, paralleling the rapidly deteriorating road, he could only imagine Paige Nobleman somewhere within its confines, as helpless as that deer, and Marvin Mahler as corrupt and brutal as the hunter he’d wanted to bring down at twelve.
As their car made its way around a steep turn, he caught a glimpse of the red-tiled compound lying behind them. “I’m going in with you,” he said.
Driscoll gave him a look. “You’ve already done your part, you know. You got us out here, you went inside, looked around. I can take it from here.”
Deal stared at him. He’d met the man who was responsible for Barbara’s death, who’d ordered them killed, who was likely planning the same for Paige, all his instincts told him so. But still, there was that nagging doubt.
He stared down, realized he still held the card Driscoll had handed Mahler: DealCo and the other particulars of his so-called normal life on one side, the cel-phone number Driscoll had scrawled on the other. Runes from two impossibly different dimensions of existence flipping alternately before his eyes as he turned the card idly, over and over. And then he stopped, fixing on something that had been nagging at him since their conversation with Mahler earlier.
“He called us ‘two private detectives from Florida,’” Deal said, raising his gaze to Driscoll abruptly.
Driscoll gave him a blank look. “Yeah, so?”
“So how would he get that? The card you gave him says I’m a contractor.”
Driscoll shrugged. “Maybe he didn’t look close.”
“He didn’t,” Deal insisted. “Not until we were on the way out. That’s when he noticed what it said. But he’d already called us a couple of private detectives.”
“Maybe he just assumed.” Driscoll had to slow down, guide the heavy car around a deep gouge cut in the road by some storm or mountain runoff. “Fucking boat,” he grumbled.
But Deal wasn’t paying attention. “That’s how those two guys found us so easily,” he said abruptly.
“What are you talking about?” Driscoll said. He was busy wrestling the car around a narrow turn. They had reached the foothills of the mountains now and the road had taken a sudden swing upward. The fence veered away beneath them, following the course of a dry streambed that led off in a nearly opposite direction. “Looks like this is the place,” Driscoll was saying.
Deal turned back to him, still distracted. “I gave Paige Nobleman one of the Driscoll & Deal cards,” he said, “and I wrote my home number and address on the back of it.” He turned to point over the seat, back in the direction they had come. “The sonofabitch sent those guys to kill us, Driscoll,” he was saying, and then he broke off, too surprised to register the irony of his words.
The roar that came from behind them drowned out his cry of warning to Driscoll, but Deal doubted it would have done much good. The big black Suburban must have been doing fifty as he watched it come out of the turn behind them, and it was gathering speed—like some four-wheeled shadow of doom, he was thinking—when its massive brush-cutting bumper slammed into them. Deal had one instant of clarity—a flash of steel, the wash of light over the Suburban’s windshield, an unobstructed view through glass, and no real surprise to see the hulking man who sat there, staring at them impassively at the moment of impa
ct.
“What the fuck,” Driscoll managed as his head snapped back with the force of the blow and the wheel spun out of his hands.
Deal made a lunge for the wheel, but even as he clambered at the blurring spokes, he realized it was a wasted effort. They were over the side and airborne now, and Driscoll, who never listened when Deal nagged at him to wear his goddamned seat belt—a cop, for Chrissakes, and he just wouldn’t do it—big, blocky Driscoll seemed to rise in slow motion, like an astronaut in a capsule designed by a car maker, his head crunching into the roof liner at the same moment the nose of the Lincoln finally crashed down for the first time against the side of the cliff. They began to catapult then, end over end, and Deal lost track of what had become of Driscoll. He saw flashes of sky, of rock, of scrub oak and piñon trees, all of it moving faster and faster like an out-of-control film flying off the sprockets, and he was ready for the final launch and free fall that would put them into eternal orbit…
…when there was a bone-jarring crash and a sudden jolt that ended everything. Deal, momentarily blinded by the whirl of dust stirred up inside the car, felt an intense pressure building in his head, and a similar force pressing against his shoulders and hips. He blinked his eyes into focus, sure, despite the fact that he’d buckled himself in, that he’d suffered some awful nerve damage, was experiencing the onset of paralysis…then he stopped as he saw what had happened.
The car had come to a halt upside down, and Deal was dangling like a bat, still held securely by the webbing of the seat belts. His view was straight out one of the side windows—it took him a moment to be sure it was the driver’s window—and it took him another moment to realize that they had not plunged to the bottom of the ravine, nor anywhere near it, for that matter. He was staring into a dizzying drop another fifty feet or so, straight down to the rocky streambed below. Were he to fall out of the snarl of strapping that held him, he’d plunge straight to his death.
In the sudden silence, he heard the ticking of the Lincoln’s stalled engine and the steady drip of liquid. He smelled burned oil, unidentifiable fluids cooking themselves on the engine block, the faint hint of gasoline from somewhere. A rock clattered down the slope from above, crashed against the side of the car, then spun off into space. There was a considerable pause before he heard it thud into the streambed below.
He heard a groan from somewhere below him and turned his head carefully, craning his neck until he made out the form of Driscoll crumpled into the shelf space between the shattered rear window and the backseats. There was a gash on the ex-cop’s forehead and one of his arms was twisted in what seemed an impossible angle behind his body. Driscoll was half conscious, his eyes fluttering open and closed, his feet stirring through the shattered window against the rocky slope where they lay.
Deal felt a shudder pass through the car then, and there was a sickening movement—an inch maybe, maybe more—as the big Lincoln responded to the pull of gravity at the precipice.
“Driscoll,” Deal said, his voice a fierce hiss. “Driscoll!” he repeated, and the ex-cop’s eyes fluttered open.
“Listen to me,” Deal said. “You’ve got to stay still. We’re hung up on the side of a cliff, okay? But the goddamn car is ready to go on over the side. Do you understand me?”
Driscoll’s eyes blinked a few times. “Fucking boat,” he murmured through his swollen lips. “I told you.”
“Just lie still,” Deal repeated. “Let me get out of here, so I can help.”
“I lie still,” Driscoll said, suppressing a cough that Deal feared could shake them into oblivion. “And you jump down. I got it, Deal. Send me a postcard from the place you end up, okay?”
“Be quiet,” Deal said. He heard another scattering of rocks, smaller ones this time, rattle down upon the undercarriage of the car.
He hooked one hand under the seat above him, found a solid hold, then groped about with the other until he found the catch of the seat belt that was gouging into his hip. He tried to brace himself as he pressed the release button, but one of his feet was waving freely above him and the other slid awkwardly down the inside of the windshield despite anything he could do.
He finished a kind of half somersault with his feet against the roof liner, balled into a fetal-like crouch. He was sure that his movements had doomed them, but he heard only a creaking of metal, and then there was silence again.
Very carefully, he worked his legs straight out the driver’s window, the knowledge that half of him was now waving freely in space sending a brief wave of nausea through him. He fought off the feeling and got himself turned so that he could see Driscoll again. They lay now staring at each other, their noses a couple of feet apart.
“This is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into, Ollie,” Driscoll said, his eyes glassy.
“Be quiet,” Deal said. “Come on,” he said. “Give me your hand.”
“Here,” Driscoll said, reaching out toward Deal. “This is the only one I can feel.”
Deal took it, brought in one foot and braced it against the door frame, then began half guiding, half pushing Driscoll out the opposite window, up the rocky hillside. The ex-cop had nearly cleared the car, had disappeared all the way past his belt-line, when there was a pause.
“I’m stuck,” he said. “I’m too fucking fat.”
“That’s not it,” Deal said, pushing at Driscoll’s rump as hard as he dared. He could see a good inch of clearance between Driscoll’s back and the window frame. It didn’t make any sense, he was thinking…and then he saw it: Driscoll’s twisted arm, numb to all feeling apparently, had gotten hung up on the clothes hook above the rear seat. Deal had to maneuver himself over Driscoll’s legs, pop the button on the ex-cop’s sleeve to get him free.
“Go on,” Deal urged frantically. “Go.”
Deal didn’t have to repeat himself. In seconds Driscoll had vanished, his legs disappearing out the crumpled window frame faster than Deal would have supposed a groggy man his size could move them.
It took Deal a moment to realize what was happening. He hadn’t even noticed the fresh grinding sound—roof on stone—from beneath him. But then it struck him.
Driscoll hadn’t been leaving the car, the car had been leaving him. The thing was sliding on over the edge, taking Deal with it…
So that was it, then. So long, Driscoll. So long, world, he was thinking…and was so frozen with fear and despair that he actually had to tell himself to reach out and grasp the meaty hand that had appeared: Driscoll reaching back inside the compartment to save him. He felt Driscoll’s firm grasp on his own, prayed they weren’t going to be yanked over the side, and then felt himself being pulled free from the sliding car.
He glanced back as his knees dug into the rocky hillside, saw his feet emerge, saw the car grind on another yard, then hang up once again, teetering this time with its crushed nose pointed out into space.
He scrambled to his hands and knees, feeling relief flood into him with a force that made him weak, just in time to hear Driscoll’s weary voice.
“Look at that, would you. Every time you get one thing taken care of, something else comes up.”
Deal glanced up the slope of the cliff toward the roadway, not sure what Driscoll was talking about. He could see the snout of the big Suburban poised there at the shoulder, saw a couple of pines snapped off where the Lincoln had gone over, saw a trail of debris scattered over the rocks down toward them: wheel covers, chrome strips, the Lincoln’s truck deck, even its tiny spare tire.
Then he saw what Driscoll was talking about. The big guy who’d been behind the wheel of the Suburban had seen them emerge from the wreckage. He had jumped down off the roadway and was dodging through the screen of trees toward them, the now-familiar shape of an automatic pistol upraised in his right hand.
“Why did it have to be my shooting hand,” Driscoll was saying, clawing awkwardly at his ankle holster with his left.
Deal stared about for cover, but othe
r than the shattered car, teetering at the edge, there was nothing bigger than a wild-flower. Then he spotted something. He reached down into a pile of debris dumped by the Lincoln, picked up the jack handle in reflex, held it stupidly aloft as the big man swung passed the last of the stunted pines above and came down with the pistol braced in firing position.
Jack handle and a left-handed .38 against an M-10, at twenty paces, Deal was thinking, noting too that Driscoll, still groggy from the crash, hadn’t even straightened up yet.
He saw the look on the big man’s face above them, saw the satisfaction that comes when a man knows he has everything he wants from a situation…then saw the look replaced by surprise when his feet went out from under him just as he was beginning to fire.
There was a whine as some of the shots tore into the Lincoln’s carcass, the explosions continuing as the man slid on down the slope toward them, his finger still locked in reflex on the trigger. He was moving feetfirst, rocks flying up as he vainly tried to dig his heels in, picking up speed as he came.
He’d stopped firing, was nearly upon them now, trying desperately to lever up off the slope like a skier attempting to right himself in midfall. Driscoll staggered backward across the slope like an awkward crab, still trying to clear his pistol from his ankle holster.
Then, like something rising from a bad dream, the big man was up, his feet still skidding, but spread beneath him now. He brought the automatic back in front of him, trained it on Driscoll, was ready to fire again, when Deal stepped forward and swung.
He was just trying for the gun, but the big man saw the blow coming and threw up his arm. The barrel of the gun cracked across Deal’s wrist with a pain that went from white-hot to numbness in an instant and sent the jack handle flying. That was it, Deal thought, so much for heroism. In the next moment the big man would stitch him and Driscoll into shreds, all this would be over…
…and then he heard the strangled cry, caught a glimpse of the stunned look on the big man’s face and realized what had happened. Deal had been holding the knurled end of the tire iron, leading his swing with the big screwdriverlike point. When he’d lost his grip, the thing had turned into a kind of spear. Some law of physics was involved, Deal thought: physical bulk, angle of incline, speed of slide, not to mention the force of his own desperation. Whatever was to account for it, it seemed a kind of miracle.
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