by Dean Koontz
The most prominent features in the image are two ruby-red heat signatures brighter and larger than the others.
As Rupert works the keyboard, the static image evolves into a video stream. The red signifiers move through the gray featherings toward a bisecting band without pattern near which are clustered reddish geometric shapes representing six or eight buildings.
“By the time the Chicom satellite passed over here, the Hawks had already gone almost twenty miles from their ranch.”
“How do you know those aren’t a couple deer?”
“A female deer tends to follow a male, behind and a little off to one side. And deer won’t travel as directly as this. They wander. These are horses under the guidance of riders.”
“But we can’t know this is Clare and Ancel Hawk.”
“The satellite captured them at two-ten A.M. There’s not likely to be a pair of other riders out at that hour.”
“What’re those buildings?”
“Another ranch. The band of gray without pattern is the state route that passes through Worstead before it gets to this place.”
When the video ends, Egon Gottfrey says, “That’s all you have?”
“Satellite’s moving damn fast. You don’t get a feature-length film of anything.”
“What if they didn’t stop at that other ranch? They might have passed it by, crossed the road, and gone somewhere else.”
Rupert turns to the second laptop and calls up a file. “Just finished putting this together before you knocked.”
The first photo, captured from Google Street View, shows a gated entrance to a property and a sign that reads LONGRIN STABLES.
Rupert clicks away the first photo and splits the screen for two Texas DMV images of driver’s licenses, one for Chase Longrin, one for Alexis Longrin. They appear to be in their early thirties, good-looking in spite of the poor quality of DMV photography.
“Husband and wife,” Rupert says. “We recently became suspicious of them. Maybe they’re a conduit for messages from Jane to her in-laws. Nick Hawk and Chase Longrin were best friends in high school.”
Gottfrey considers the two faces. Chase still looks like a high-school jock. Alexis is a pretty woman.
It’s noon. Almost ten hours since the two riders on horseback—if they were riders and horses—had been captured by the satellite.
Gottfrey says, “Let’s go have a chat with the Longrins.”
18
THE WOMAN IN RESEDA, KNOWN as Judy White but also as Lois Jones, neither of which was her real name, claimed to be a Syrian refugee, though her accent sounded sometimes like Eastern European Slavic, at other times flat-out Russian. She didn’t answer her phone in any traditional manner. “You have wrong number, go away.”
From experience, Jane knew neither Judy nor Lois would hang up.
“We’ve done business before.”
“I not in business. Read palms. Tell fortunes. My gift. Is life mission, not business.”
“Enrique introduced us.”
“You have wrong number, go away.”
“When I saw you a week or so ago, the last thing you said to me was, ‘Go. Go where you go. You want to die, so go die.’ ”
“Was nothing personal. Just opinion. Observation. My gift.”
“You’re going to get two photos by email.” Jane explained what she needed. “I want to stop by and get everything in three hours.”
“Want, want, want. Everybody want. Is impossible, three hours.”
“I’ll pay triple the usual.”
“Don’t die on way here, nobody to pay us.”
“I’ll do my best to get there alive.”
“So you say.” Judy and Lois terminated the call.
19
THIS GUY SAID HE KNEW a guy who bought cars from Enrique de Soto, reworked wheels to outrun anything a cop might jack around in. This guy who knew a guy, he swaggered like some TV-wrestling star.
Enrique’s product started out stolen and went for a makeover in Nogales, Mexico, where its identifiers were removed and the GPS was stripped out. The vehicle was either given a new engine compatible to the Batmobile or otherwise supercharged. Anything you purchased from Enrique came with a valid California DMV registration or with one from a DMV of your choice in any Canadian province.
This guy who knew a guy also knew what sweet prices Enrique charged for his merchandise, and he was dumb enough to think that Enrique kept a bank’s worth of cash on the premises.
Ricky de Soto worked out of several weathered barns on a former horse ranch near Nogales, Arizona, directly across the border from Nogales, Mexico. The front barn held no vehicles, but was stocked with junk furniture and other items to provide Ricky with cover as an antiques dealer.
So that morning, this guy who knew a guy came into Ricky’s office without an appointment, smelling of some pussy-boy cologne. Obviously a bodybuilder. Shaved and waxed bullet head. Tattoo of a snake around his throat. Wearing a loose black raincoat in a warm rainless morning. He was accompanied by a nervous dude who resembled Mick Jagger but even skinnier, with the bad teeth of a methhead.
They evidently didn’t think they looked like what they were. The one with the tattoo mentioned a good customer of Enrique’s and started talking cars, a lot of shit picked up from bad movies. The methhead thought he was casual, easing around the office, pretending to admire the cheap vases and the mantel clocks that passed for collectibles, but he was moving away from his buddy and into a backup shooting position.
Bullet Head’s raincoat didn’t hang right, because there was no weight on the left side to balance the concealed sawed-off shotgun in a sling under the right-side panel of fabric.
Ricky didn’t worry that he might have misjudged his visitors. In the event that he was mistaken, he would have no regrets.
When the guy in the raincoat asked if he could smoke, just to explain why he was reaching into the right-hand pocket of his coat, Ricky stepped hard on the pedal in the knee space of his desk. A 12-gauge shotgun was mounted to the center rail that supported the desktop. The pedal drew taut a wire that pulled the trigger. The skirt on the front of the desk was a mere quarter-inch panel of Masonite. At such close range, the blast chopped Raincoat Guy mostly in the crotch and lower abdomen, and blew him down.
Skinny Mick had a gun in, of all places, an ankle holster. As the fool bent and fumbled for it, Ricky drew a pistol from a holster attached to the side of his office chair and stood and shot the meth addict twice. He stepped around the desk and shot the screaming guy in the raincoat, who wasn’t long for this world, anyway.
All the gunfire in close quarters left Ricky de Soto half deaf. He stepped around the bodies, left his office, pulled the door shut.
The would-be heist artists had arrived in a Cadillac Escalade, possibly stolen, in any case now hot. It would have to be boxed over to Mexico, given a new identity. Because he hadn’t paid some punk to boost it, there would be a good profit when it was ready for sale.
He didn’t work the operation alone, of course, but the other guys were in the barns farthest back from the highway. By the time he walked there, with grasshoppers springing out of the tall grass alongside the oiled-dirt driveway as if to celebrate him, his hearing slowly returned, though he would have tinnitus for a while.
He told Danny and Tio what had happened. They knew what to do without being instructed, and they headed directly for his office.
One of the benefits of having major acreage was that you had numerous places where graves could be dug discreetly with a backhoe.
Ricky didn’t immediately follow Danny and Tio, but stood yawning elaborately, trying to pop the tinnitus out of his ears.
His iPhone rang, and as usual there was no caller ID, because his clientele preferred anonymity. He took the call. “Yeah?”
She said, “Hardly mor
e than a week since I saw you. I must be the best customer you have.”
Sexy as she was, he knew her voice as much from dreams as from the times she’d done business with him face-to-face.
He said, “You’re so big now, maybe I shouldn’t risk doing any more business with you.”
“Like I’m going to believe your balls fell off. I’m only a few hundred miles away, I’d have heard them hit the ground.”
He laughed. “Bonita chica, maybe yours are bigger than mine.”
“I need a motor home. I’m sure you’ve fitted them out before with cute little hard-to-find compartments.”
“Could be I got a couple right now.”
“Gas, not a diesel pusher. Thirty-six to forty feet.”
“I got a Tiffin Allegro thirty-six. Total refit, custom paint. Nobody ever knew her would know her now, she’s so pretty.”
She told him the size of the custom storage spaces she needed.
She also specified a pistol that she required.
He said, “Doable on both counts.”
“I need everything by late tomorrow morning.”
“Shit, no.”
“I’ll pay a premium.”
“Tiffin Allegro thirty-six-footer, new off the showroom floor, would cost you a hundred eighty thousand.”
“Like you bought it right off the showroom floor. What was your wholesale price—four thousand to some booster?”
“Plus there’s the work you want done overnight.”
“Ricky, Ricky, Ricky. Will you pretend you have to charge sales tax? Listen, one thing you do need to add to the total is delivery.”
“You think I’m Amazon or somethin’?”
“You know the address near Palm Springs. You once recommended the man there to me, but I never needed him until now.”
Enrique’s nephew, Ferrante, operated a legit business in Indio, customizing limousines, high-end SUVs, and other vehicles, not only making them more luxurious than the original manufacturers had made them, but also armoring them and installing bullet-resistant glass and run-flat tires for wealthy people who watched the world grow darker and heard lethal violence justified from podium to pulpit.
In addition, as insurance against another government screwup that would sink the economy yet again and devastate his customizing business, Ferrante dealt in illegal arms from a secret basement under one of his factories. Because his mother, Josefina, Enrique’s sister, had for some reason raised the boy in the Church, he would not sell weapons to criminals, only to the upstanding citizens who purchased his armored vehicles, titans of industry and banking and social-media companies—and probably to a rogue FBI agent who was maybe more righteous than the people who accused her of treason.
“I assume,” Jane Hawk said, “your contact there will let your vehicle on his lot and let me prepare for a trip I have to make.”
“We’re tight. But I have to say he’s a weird duck. He does Mass daily, always saying his rosary like some old abuela who wears a mantilla even in the shower. He’s got this blood obsession.”
“ ‘Blood obsession’?”
“You meet him, you’ll see. But he’s not loco. He’s smart. He knows how the world works. I guarantee you can do your meet there.”
“I’m assuming the Tiffin Allegro can tow an SUV.”
“What SUV you want it to tow?”
She told him. “So how much will you rob me for?”
He stood thinking, watching the insects leap, watching a sudden flock of crows cackle down out of the sun, snaring the bugs in mid jump, glossy black wings thrashing the golden grass and fireweed, the singing of the grasshoppers now like thin screams.
“A hundred twenty thousand on delivery. You got that much?”
“Yeah. But you’re a true bandit, Ricky.”
“There’s a way I could let you have it for seventy.”
“What way is that?”
“Take a break from what you’re doin’, stay a month with me.”
“A month with you, Ricky, I’d be used up, worn out, no good for anything anymore.”
“I’d be gentle. You’d be surprised.”
“I know you’d be gentle. You’re chivalrous. But I’m a widow, you know, and figuratively speaking I’m wearing black.”
“I forgot the whole widow thing for a minute. My apologies.”
“Accepted. And don’t worry about the hundred twenty, it’s all in clean bills. Nobody’s looking for it.”
“I don’t worry about you,” he said. “I know you won’t screw me, not that way, and I guess not any other way.”
“Business and romance never mix, anyway,” she said.
“Guy who had this operation before me,” Enrique said, “hooked up with this lady customer, ended up with his head cut off.”
“There you go. Let’s keep our heads, Ricky.”
She terminated the call.
Up there at the barn in which Enrique had his office, at a door that couldn’t be seen from the highway, Danny and Tio were dumping a dead guy in the open cargo bed of a Mule, a nice little electric vehicle that was useful for a variety of tasks.
20
THE SHADOWS OF THE PARKING lot lampposts, sheathed at noon, now slowly extending west across the truck-stop blacktop, like swords drawn to defend against the dragon growl of diesel engines…
Enrique de Soto had come to Jane Hawk’s attention when she had tracked down Marcus Paul Headsman, a serial killer who’d stolen a car from Enrique. The FBI had too few agents and too many cases to care about the small-beer de Soto operation. Headsman was the game. Likewise, over in the Department of Justice, prosecutorial overload required a triage approach to selecting which criminals to proceed against. Jane had first purchased a Ford Escape from Ricky, shortly after she went on the run. She’d given him the impression that the law had never bothered him because she’d shredded the file on him, which was neither true nor necessary. Ricky was macho enough to convince himself that a good-looking FBI agent would be so drawn to him that she’d cut off the hands of justice to keep them from seizing him.
One of the most dispiriting things about her current situation was the need to work with criminals whom she would have liked to put behind bars. There were degrees of evil, however, and in these dark times, which seemed to darkle deeper every day, absolute purity of action ensured defeat. The armies of virtue were either too few in number or too cowed by the volume of political hatred to be counted upon. When bargaining with lesser evils to obtain what was necessary to wage war against Evil in the uppercase, she’d keep her footing if she was always alert to the stain it left on her, if she remained aware of the need for contrition, and if she would—supposing that she lived—eventually bring to justice those like Ricky de Soto with whom she’d had to traffic.
Now, in a remote corner of the big parking lot, with the Explorer Sport shielding her from observation by those coming and going from the truck stop, she knelt on the blacktop and used a hammer to pound a screwdriver into the charging port of the burner phone, destroying the battery and, with it, the identifier by which the phone might be tracked. She smashed the screen and broke open the casing, intending to cross the fifty yards of weedy field and throw the debris into the ravine toward which the land sloped.
In this age when every phone and computer and laptop and every car with a GPS and even every high-tech wristwatch was a beacon by which you could be tracked, measured paranoia was essential to survival. If the first call she made was to any person who might conceivably be a target of law enforcement, she discarded her burner after a single use. Luther Tillman’s location was unknown to all authorities, and Bernie Riggowitz was a most unlikely subject for surveillance; however, once she had spoken to Enrique de Soto, she needed to dispose of the phone, lest someone monitoring him might learn its identifier code and even now be committing the nati
on’s every resource to locate and apprehend her.
Recently she had destroyed a lot of disposable phones.
Of course, if these days Enrique was in fact a hot target of one law-enforcement agency or another, simply placing the order for the motor home had all but ensured Jane’s destruction. When the Tiffin Allegro 36 showed up in Indio, driven by one of Ricky’s people, soon thereafter a demon horde of SWAT-geared Arcadians would storm the place. However, she had no choice but to trust that Ricky had taken adequate steps to mask his true identity when he’d bought the smartphone and contracted with a telecom company.
She picked up the broken burner and rose to her feet and saw the guy first from the corner of her eye. He was coming through the bristled field, from the direction of the oaks and ravine, moving fast, a shotgun raised and ready.
21
FROM HIS ROVER, THROUGH BINOCULARS, Ivan Petro watches Jane Hawk exit the truck-stop diner with a bag of takeout and a tall drink container. Spine straight, shoulders back, with the grace and confidence of a born athlete, she exhibits none of the furtiveness or wariness that might mark her as a fugitive. The pixie-cut wig is different from the shaggy black number she wore the previous night, but neither the hair nor the horn-rimmed glasses can conceal her essential Janeness.
She returns to the Explorer and drives as far from the bustling business as the pavement allows and parks next to an open field.
After Ivan repositions his SUV, he uses the binoculars again, pulls her close, and sees that she is eating lunch. She has put down the window. A soft breeze stirs her hair, suggesting that she has also put down the front window on the passenger side.
He watches her, thinking. When she seems to be talking on a cellphone, he decides he better seize this opportunity.
His all-wheel-drive vehicle has a special GPS, developed by the NSA, which offers displays not only of highways, roads, and streets, but also off-road topography in considerable detail. Because Jane has chosen to have lunch in the most remote corner of the property, Ivan realizes that a way exists to get close to her without calling attention to his Range Rover or himself.