"She'll have locked it," Dulcie said. "But she's meeting Hanni. Hanni leaves her phone in the car with the top down."
Joe Grey smiled.
Dropping from the oak tree, they crossed the parking lot running beneath parked cars and leaped into the back of Ryan's truck, settling down beneath the tarp ready for a ride up the hills.
A cat, at best, is not long on patience. Ask any sound sleeper whose cat tramps across his stomach at three in the morning demanding to be let out to hunt. Joe Grey was fidgeting irritably by the time they saw Ryan coming. Burrowing flat as pancakes beneath the folded tarp, they were glad that Rock had taken over the front seat, that he wouldn't leap into the truck bed nosing at their hiding place.
But as it turned out, it would be Rock who would nose out, for the cats, the connection between the church bomber and Rupert Dannizer's killer.
Ryan was pulling out of the parking lot when a horn honked. The cats didn't peer out from beneath the tarp, but when she slowed the truck they heard Clyde's voice over the sound of the idling antique Chevy.
"Can I do anything?" he said quietly.
"Thanks, but it's all in hand-at the moment."
"You okay?"
"So far. Just on my way over to the Landeau place to meet Hanni."
Clyde's car moved ahead a little. "Free for dinner?"
"Matter of fact, I am. That would be nice-something early? Burgers and a beer? And we can go over some last-minute details on tomorrow's work. Could I come by for you, and put this fellow in your yard?"
"Sounds good, and you can tell me about him. Around six?"
"See you then."
Clyde pulled out, shifting gears. As he drove away, and Ryan turned into the street, Joe's thoughts returned to the Farger clan, to Curtis's uncle Hurlie. Riding beside Dulcie half-smothered by the tarp, he was all twinges and prickling fur, the San Andreas connection compelling and urgent. Did Gramps get the makings for the bomb up in San Andreas with the help of Hurlie? Hurlie gave that lethal package to Curtis, and Curtis carried it down to Molena Point in the back of Ryan's truck? Curtis delivers the gunpowder or whatever in Ryan's truck, Gramps makes up the bomb, then sends Curtis up on the roof to set it off.
Of course the law would be onto it. Now that Ryan had found a connection between Curtis and San Andreas, Garza and Harper would be onto it like pointers on a covey of quail.
But was the law missing one piece of vital information? As far as Joe could tell, they had no clue yet about Hurlie Farger. Or, if they knew that Hurlie existed, they apparently didn't know that he was in San Andreas, that he was the San Andreas connection.
But Joe forgot Hurlie as Ryan turned into the drive before the Landeau cottage. As she pulled up to park, the big dog began to lunge at the window, leaping at the half-open glass roaring and snarling, pawing to get out.
13
The old man was a fast driver. He took the winding road at such a pace that, on the floor behind the driver's seat, the kit had to dig her claws hard into the thick black rug. The Jaguar fishtailed and skidded around the tight curves swaying and twisting ever higher into the hills. Against the late afternoon sky, she couldn't see any treetops but sometimes she could glimpse the wild, high mountains toward which they were headed. Behind the car, the sun was dropping, shifting its position as the road turned. She had no notion where he was going or how she would get home again; she was sorry she'd hidden in the old man's car. She'd started to be sorry when she heard him come across the parking lot and open the car door but already it was too late, he was starting the engine. Now the cold wind that swooped down to the floor of the convertible snatched at her fur and whistled inside her ears, and the sharp chemical smell that clung inside the small space burned her nose so that tears came. When the car began to climb even more steeply she felt her stomach lurch until soon she thought she'd have to throw up as she always did when riding in cars. But she daren't, he would hear her retching.
Soon, above the ugly stinks, she could smell sage and mountain shrubs. At every squeal of tires she hunched lower. When at last he skidded to a stop on dirt and gravel, she thought she must be a hundred miles from home. Even Joe Grey would not have been foolish enough to get in the car with this man. She could smell dry dust, and the rich scent of chickens, and more chemical smells. She was terrified he would look in the backseat and find her.
But he didn't look, he got out and slammed the car door. She heard him go up three wooden steps and into a house or building and slam that door too. She waited, shivering. When after a long time she heard nothing more she slipped warily up the back of the furry zebra seat and poked her nose over the edge of the door, looking.
She was so high up the hills that only the jagged mountains rose above her, tall and rocky and bare, their thin patches of grass baked brown from the heat of August and September, brown and dry. Down below her, the road they had taken wound sickeningly along the side of the cliff. The rough clearing where the car stood was only a shelf cut into the bank, just big enough to hold an unpainted cabin and two sheds, all so close to the edge that she imagined at the slightest jolt of earthquake the buildings sliding off into the chasm below.
She could see, farther down the cliff, three rough chicken pens made of wire, with plywood roofs, and though she could smell the dusty scent of chickens, she could not hear them clucking or flapping.
When she looked toward the shack she could see through a dirty window the old man moving around in there, she could hear him opening cupboards or shifting furniture, making some kind of dull thudding racket. Had that boy lived here with him? Curious to see more, she hopped to the back of the front seat. She was rearing up on her hind paws when the old man came out again suddenly. In panic she dropped to the ground beneath a clump of dry sage-leaving pawprints etched in the dust behind her.
Maybe he would think they were the tracks of ground squirrels or rabbits. Hiding among the bushes she watched him carry out four black plastic garbage bags tied at the tops, their bulging sides lumpy with what looked like boxes and cans, bags that stunk like a hundred drugstore chemicals spilled together or like the garden center of the hardware store with all its baits and poisons where she had wandered once and been scolded by Dulcie and Joe, smells that made her want to back away sneezing. Was this the bomb stuff? She tried to remember what Clyde and the police had said when they were talking about the bomb. She wasn't sure what she remembered and what she'd imagined about that terrible day. She remained frozen still as the old man loaded the dirty bags into his nice car. When he started the car she fled away deeper among the tangled growth that edged the yard.
He turned the car around in the clearing, its wheels just inches from the drop-off, and headed away down the twisting road leaving her alone. As the car descended snaking along the edge of the ravine she reared up looking at the land, hoping to see the way home. She could have been on the moon, for all the feel of direction she had after that blind and twisting ride.
Though anyone would know east by the rising mountains, and west by the dropping sun. The sun was dropping, fast. She did not want to be caught here at night. The kit loved the night, she loved to roam in the night, but up here in the wild high ridges where bobcats and cougar and coyotes hunted, night was another matter.
Standing at the edge of the clearing, her ears and her fluffy tail flattened by the wind, she looked west down curve after curve of summer-brown slopes, far down to the shifting layers of fog and to the tiny village, so far away.
Well, she wasn't lost. Cats didn't get lost. Not when they could see the mountains and the sun hanging low in the sky and the wide fog-bound Pacific. I'm a big cat now. And, scanning the falling hills for possible places to hide when she was ready to make her way home, she spotted the best of all refuges.