by Meg Gardiner
The radio squelched, the dispatcher calling to tell Brinkley that backup was on the way. I held the transmitter up to the screen and pushed the button so that Brinkley could talk.
“We have two DBs here,” he said, “and a possible ID on them. Valerie and Alma Skinner.”
The dispatcher said, “Valerie Skinner? Did you say you’re at the Skinner residence?”
“Affirmative.”
“Detective Chang went with a citizen to help a Valerie Skinner.”
Oh, my God. I spun. “Who?”
Brinkley asked her.
She came back. “Detective Chang went with a Mrs. Hankins to assist Valerie Skinner. She’s apparently wandering along the edge of the rim road north of town.”
“Tell her to get Tommy on the radio,” I said.
Brinkley relayed that. The dispatcher came back. “Negative. He’s in Mrs. Hankins’s vehicle. We don’t have radio contact.”
I was feeling panicky. “What’s his cell phone number?”
Brinkley looked confused. “What is it?”
I started the cruiser and threw it in reverse. “We have to find Tommy and Abbie. They think they’re going to pick up Valerie. They’re wrong.”
“Hey—”
Brinkley slammed against the screen as I spun the tires, backing down the drive.
“Stop. Immediately,” he said.
I threw the wheel and the car slewed around. “They can’t get Valerie. She’s dead.” Jamming the gearshift into drive, I floored it. “If it’s not Valerie, it’s Coyote.”
30
Turning in to the underground garage at Argent Tower, Jesse tried one last time to get Evan on her cell. Nothing. The high desert had swallowed her, and he didn’t know if the China Lake Police Department would get his message to Tommy and McCracken in time. He needed to do more. He pulled into a parking spot, and Swayze once again knelt backward on her seat, packing up the stuff she’d taken from Coyote’s lair.
He stuck the phone in his pocket, opened his door, and stopped. His nerves felt like they’d been scraped raw with a cheese grater. He took the phone out again.
“What are you doing?” Swayze said.
“Calling the FBI.”
He scrolled through a list of stored numbers. The phone fell out of his hand.
A ringing sound came into his ears. He tried to lift his hand and couldn’t, couldn’t even close his fingers. He felt dizzy. His arms buzzed and his face felt numb. The lights were spangled. He turned his head and saw Swayze, calm and vicious and pleased, and now the view was spinning. He fell forward against the steering wheel.
“Wha’d you—”
His tongue refused more than that. Noise now, loud ringing. He fought to focus his eyes and saw his right leg, a hypodermic syringe sticking into his thigh like a tranquilizer dart. He fell sideways into white oblivion.
In the backseat of the cruiser, Officer Brinkley slapped his hand against the mesh screen. “Pull over. Let me drive.”
Dad shook his head. “That’s not going to happen, son.” I kept my foot down, fumbling for the radio with one hand. “Can I use this to make contact with a cell phone?”
From the description the radio dispatcher had given, Tommy and Abbie were driving up the rim road along the edge of the base, ten or fifteen miles north of us. No other China Lake police units were in their vicinity. A Highway Patrol car was near the Isabella turnoff on Highway 14, but we were several miles closer. Everybody else from the department was busy south of town at the train wreck and Shepard-Cantwell murder scene.
We reached the asphalt road. The car gained traction and leaped forward. It had a huge, snarling engine, and though it boated like the Exxon Valdez, all I cared about was getting hold of Tommy.
“Forget calling a cell from this radio,” Brinkley said.
I pushed the transmit button and held the handset to my face. “Somebody, come in.”
The police dispatcher answered. Aiming the car up the road, I yelled at her to contact Tommy’s cell. “And call this number, too. Jesse Blackburn.”
Brinkley shouted through the screen. “The China Lake Police Department is not a call-forwarding center.”
“I don’t care. If they can get Jesse, he can try to raise Tommy on the cell too. The point is, we have to get hold of him.”
But I had a bad feeling that Tommy’s cell phone was as useless right now as mine was. We were going to have to catch them in person.
“Don’t you get it?” I said. “Coyote came into town dressed as a man, this guy Robin Klijsters. Only that’s probably an alias.”
“Kai Torrance,” Dad said.
“Yeah. Tommy’s still waiting for confirmation from military records, but that’s my bet.” I glanced at Dad in the rearview mirror. “If Coyote’s a woman, then Maureen Swayze was either wrong about Torrance, or she didn’t tell us all she knows.”
I saw him exhale heavily.
I held tight to the wheel. “Coyote killed Valerie and her mother. She did it before the reunion and hid the bodies in the back room. Then she disguised herself as Valerie. It’s all been a ruse.” I shook my head. “That suitcase on the floor in the spare bedroom isn’t the same one that Val brought on the plane.” For the fourth or fifth time I had to correct myself. “Coyote, I mean.”
And didn’t I feel like an idiot. “She got us all divulging everything we had learned about South Star.”
Dad nodded. “And because she seemed so ill, everybody overlooked the drastic change in her appearance.”
“None of us had seen Valerie for fifteen years. We didn’t know. Shit, Dad, she even told me she’d gotten a nose job.”
My head was ringing. How the hell did she even know about that? About all our high school memories? I could see her stealing Valerie’s driver’s license, but the rest was beyond me.
“She killed Valerie to get access to the rest of us,” I said.
And Tommy and Abbie still didn’t know. Coyote was going to get them if we didn’t get there first. The road stretched on and on. I jammed my foot harder against the gas pedal.
Abbie turned up the AC, trying to cool the interior of the van. In the rearview mirror she could see Valerie lying huddled on the backseat. Once more Tommy checked his phone, and once more he shook his head. They couldn’t call the paramedics. They had to get to the hospital.
“Where do you think he went?” Abbie said.
“Coyote?” Tommy said it uncertainly.
She gave him a nervous glance. “Still have that funny feeling?”
He ran his hand over his head, gazing at the asphalt road and blazing blue sky. “Couple more miles, we should have cell phone coverage. Keep it at the limit.”
The road topped a rise and rolled down a long hill. At the bottom it curved onto Rock Creek Bridge, the spot that locals called “the plunge.” She eased off the gas, lining up for the turn, and became aware of a presence, a rising behind her. The mirror darkened.
In the backseat, Valerie was sitting up.
But it wasn’t Valerie. It was someone else pulling off the brassy wig and tossing it aside to reveal brown stubble. The bulky coat came off. The billowy blouse came off.
The frail, dying woman was gone. In the mirror Abbie saw firm alabaster skin, cut musculature, a scar like a set of claws running down across one shoulder and under the fabric of a skintight wife-beater undershirt. Braless, nipples poking through the fabric in the chill of the air-conditioning.
Abbie’s mouth opened. “Tommy—”
The knife glinted into view.
Abbie swerved. The blade sliced Tommy’s seat belt and jacket and she saw a burst of blood. She braked, jerking the wheel. The van fishtailed off the road onto the dirt. The knife swung again. She gripped the wheel, fighting to control it, saw the bridge and saw they were going to miss it. She heard the back door of the van slide open. She braked, turned hard, trying to keep the van out of the gorge, and felt the wheels catch. The view flipped sideways. She saw sand and sky and air and shado
w. They rolled over the lip of the ravine.
Ahead, dawdling along the rim road, was a Jeep. We’d come eight miles up this road and it was the first vehicle we’d seen. On the far side of the cyclone fencing, the scrub and sand ran uninterrupted across the basin all the way to the wine red ridges of the mountains.
“How do I turn on the lights and siren?” I said.
“Just go around him,” Brinkley said.
Fine. I hit the headlights and swung into the left lane, roaring around the Jeep. Any other time, the look on the driver’s face would have been priceless. I pulled out my cell phone one more time, as though flipping it open could hex a signal into existence. No service.
I gazed at the shotgun that was locked upright next to the dashboard.
“I don’t know what kind of weapons Coyote has,” I said.
Brinkley said, “Besides that twelve-gauge I have my sidearm and another pump-action in the trunk.” He glanced at Dad. “You experienced with any of those?”
“Yes.” Dad leaned close to the mesh. “Evan, you’ll stay in the car if there’s the slightest hint of trouble.”
I angled back across the white line. “Does this cruiser have bulletproof glass?”
“No,” Brinkley said. “So stay down.”
I nodded. The car ate up the highway. We crested a humpbacked hill and swung over the Rock Creek Bridge across a ravine. The highway spread out again like a black whip, cracking on into the empty distance. Where were they?
Abbie heard the radiator hissing and smelled the tang of gasoline. She lay still. There was sky above, filling the V at the top of the ravine. She could see the bridge high overhead. She was only beginning to perceive the depth of the pain.
The van was upside down on top of her. She saw the open driver’s door and the splintered windshield, but she couldn’t see anything of herself below the hips. She was a big gal. How come the van seemed to be lying flat on the ground even with her under it? Fucking Detroit family-values piece of crap. Top-heavy ass of a vehicle.
High above, tires whined across the bridge and faded away. Pebbles tumbled down the side of the ravine.
Where was it? That thing from the mirror? She lifted her head and pain cleaved her, as if a machete had gone through her forehead.
She lay back against the ground. After a second she whispered, “Tommy?”
Behind black agony she heard a bubbling sound. She had blood in her mouth, but that wasn’t it. The sound came every time she drew breath. She moved her arm and her hand flopped. Her left wrist was broken. She put her right hand against her chest and felt the blood, not the drip of a cut but the wet slurp of a sopping diaper. She lifted her hand so she could see it. The blood was dark red, almost brown.
Within the van something creaked, and the frame of the vehicle pressed on her hips. She cried out.
“Abbie.”
It was Tommy. The van creaked again and she groaned. “Stop,” she said.
Slowly, agonizingly, Tommy’s head appeared above her in the open doorway of the van. His eyes were black, swollen shut, and his nose was smashed. Blood was trickling out of one of his ears.
“Sorry,” he hacked. “Where are you?”
“Down here. Where’s that thing?”
“Don’t know. Can’t see.”
“Get off me.” She hated sounding rude. “Please.”
“Gotta come out this way. Sorry.”
She steeled herself but still the pain deepened. Tommy slithered across the cracked windshield on his back, pushing with one leg, trying to get purchase with his heel. He got only a few inches toward the door before he stopped. She understood that one of his legs and both his arms were shattered. He wasn’t going anywhere.
“Where’s Valerie?” Abbie said. “Is she in the van?”
“Don’t know.”
She swallowed and tasted blood. “Where’s your gun?”
He tried to move one of his arms, in the end only bumping his biceps against the shoulder holster he wore under his jacket. His voice was broken.
“Gone.”
More pebbles came rolling down the escarpment. Abbie turned her head, trying to see what else was coming. A subsonic ache rang through her.
High above, near the bridge, Un-Valerie stood watching them. She was dusty and her skin had been scraped red from shoulder to elbow. Her face was a shimmering apparition, translucent white. She began walking down the ravine toward them.
Bighorn Flat, Shoshone Creek—the cruiser bore past places whose names crawled at me from my youth. Mirages snaked above the asphalt road. Doubt pitted my stomach.
“We should have seen them by now.”
In the rearview mirror Dad’s lips were pressed white. “Agreed.”
“Where’d they go? Did we miss them?”
“Pull over, Kit.”
This time I did it. Brinkley jumped out of the back, opened the trunk, and grabbed the second shotgun and a box of shells. He handed them to Dad. I slid across the bench seat and Brinkley took the wheel, turned the car, and began backtracking at eighty miles per hour.
“There aren’t any turnoffs, no junctions, no gates through to the base or even cuts in the fence that I’ve seen,” he said. “They’re either off-roading way off track, or—”
“The plunge,” I said.
He nodded. The plunge was the ravine beneath the Rock Creek Bridge, where every year some teenage hotrodder or drunken trucker managed to get his vehicle airborne. I scanned the empty expanse of rocks and sagebrush. The plunge was probably ten miles back this way.
Brinkley punched the accelerator. “Do you know how to load a pump shotgun?”
I tossed him a glance. Either my driving skills had turned me into a junior police cadet, or he was scared freaking out of his mind.
“Yeah,” I said.
He gave me a key. “Shells are in the glove compartment.”
His hands were heavy on the wheel. “Detective Chang is a dead shot. If this guy’s taken him, then . . .”
I unlocked the shotgun and found the cartridges. They felt solid in my hand. “Then we’d better be ready.”
“Load the weapon.”
Un-Valerie picked her way down the ravine. Her sleeveless undershirt was torn, exposing one breast. Her pale skin gleamed in the sun. She looked unearthly, with those Renaissance features, that frail Madonna’s mouth beneath those freaky eyes.
Abbie whispered. “Tommy, it’s coming.”
She felt him struggle to move, saw him twist his head around to get a view. He managed to work one eye open. He inhaled sharply.
“Abbie, you gotta get out of here.”
That was when it sank in how truly screwed they were. “The van’s on top of me. I’m pinned.”
Un-Valerie sidestepped down the slope, now about fifty yards away. Tommy again pushed with one heel, trying to get some purchase. Abbie tried to get enough air to speak above the bubbling sound.
“Tommy. Before we crashed, it kept talking about our kids.” She saw him raise his head and look around the interior of the van. “It wanted to know where our kids are.”
Un-Valerie tripped on a rock and stumbled, falling to its knees.
“It wants to kill us, and Evan,” she said. “And it wants to kill our kids.”
Tommy groaned again. It was a sound of despair.
“It’s coming to find out from us where they are,” she said.
She heard the chill in her voice. It came from beneath the pain. It was a still and excruciating note of truth.
“Abbie,” he said, strained, “her weapons are here in the van.”
Her pulse surged. “Get them.”
He moaned with effort. The van rocked, pressing on her. The pain slammed down, and a gobbet of blood came up her throat. She vomited and lay coughing.
Tommy’s one good foot knocked around the interior. “Almost.” Metal sang against the frame of the van. “Can you see what’s there?”
She tilted her head and spotted the weapons that Tommy was
trying to kick out the door to her. Her vision, chill truth, grew sharper.
His voice was soft. “Coyote tortured Kelly and Ceci. She took her time. You understand?”
She stretched her hand toward the weapons. “Not close enough.”
He groaned again, inching with his shoulder, trying now to use his splintered arm to scoop the weapons out the door to her.
“Abbie, understand? I don’t have the strength.”
“Yes, you do.” She stretched her fingertips. “Come on; I almost have the knife.”
He gritted his teeth and let out a hard moan and shoveled the things out the frame. Abbie gasped and slapped her hand down. She managed to slow the grenade that came rolling toward her.
“Got it. You did it, Tommy.”
A knife lay near the grenade. She fumbled it into her hand, feeling how heavy it seemed.
More rocks came spinning down the hillside. Un-Valerie was back on its feet, dusting its hands on its pants and coming on again, picking its way down the uneven slope.
Tommy let his head fall against the roof of the van. “That’s not what I meant.”
“I’ve got the knife. Tommy, I’ve got it.”
“Abbie.”
She looked at him. He looked back, and she understood. Above her, Un-Valerie came on.
Brinkley slowed the cruiser at the top of the hill. Two hundred yards down the slope ahead, the road curved onto Rock Creek Bridge.
“Oh, my God.” I leaned forward, gripping the shotgun in both hands. “Do you see it?”
Skid marks. Brinkley gunned the engine.
“We missed it before.” My eyes were stinging. The gun felt heavy in my hands. “God.”
Skid marks were plentiful on winding desert back roads and, heading the other way looking for Abbie’s van, we hadn’t noticed them. But these, I could tell, were sharp and fresh and led to tire tracks that spun off into the sand and disappeared into the plunge.
From behind me, Dad said, “Lock and load.”
I pulled the action back and shoved it forward again. The first round chambered with a hard crack.
Brinkley hit the brakes.
Abbie felt the knife wobbling in her hand. Her palm was so slippery with her own blood that she could barely grip it. She had to get a better grip, had to get ready.