Two ruts in the sand, leading leftward. Good thing his wrecked eye was on the right and the lightning had flashed at the right moment, otherwise he’d have gone right past it.
Grinning, he backed up, then turned onto the path. Almost there. Poppy-bitch. Hope you’re enjoying your last hours on Earth.
15
“I’m scared,” Katie said, clinging to Poppy as the thunder shook the ground and the wind rattled the walls.
“It’s okay, honey bunch,” Poppy said, sitting on the bedroll and rocking Katie back and forth. “The storm’ll be over soon.”
“Scared o‘ storms, is she?” Lester Appleton said, licking his lips as he positioned a tin can under a leak. That made twelve containers scattered around his floor. “So’s most of the wimmins and kids. All probably hiding under their beds right now. Do it every time the thunder starts. That little girl’ll do well to get used to’em if she’s a-gonna stay. We get some real doozies out here.”
She ain’t staying. Poppy wanted to say, but didn’t want to be rude. All the Appletons had been kind to them today. Some of them said they remembered her stopping by with her daddy when she was a kid, but maybe they were just imagining it. The main thing was the way they’d welcomed her and Katie, sharing their home and their food… even their dolls, so to speak. The Appleton ideas of what was clean and what was cooked, of what was edible and what tasted good were light-years from Poppy’s, but they meant well. What they had was hers.
After all, she was kin…
Lester had said they could sleep in his place for now. His place: a ten-by-fourteen space lit by two kerosene lamps—one on a crate that served as his dresser and the other hanging from the six-foot ceiling. The walls creaked and shuddered under the wind’s attack, which set the hanging lamp to swaying. And the moving light did funny tricks with Lester Appleton’s nose-gazing eye.
Another crash of thunder and Katie tightened her grip on Poppy.
“Hope them stills is all right,” he said, swigging from a ceramic jug. “Wish my back was better—I should be out there helpin‘.” He shook his head. “First that heeliocopter, now the storm. Bad omens. I feel it in my bones— somethin’ bad’s gonna happen.”
The sight of the “heeliocopter” earlier had spurred her to run down to the clearing and pull the panel truck under some trees. That might have been like closing the barn door after the proverbial horse was gone, but she did it anyway.
And then the storm had hit and all the able-bodied men—the overly attentive Levon among them, thank you very much—and some of the women had run off to make sure the stills didn’t get damaged and the fires didn’t get too wet. Applejack was their major asset. They sold it for cash and bartered it for goods.
Poppy wondered how her Uncle Luke was faring with the feds. He’d said he was going to try and make a deal for her. What was taking him so long?
16
Carlos Salinas took the photo of Nixon from the wall and tossed it into his valise, then looked around the room. Nothing remained that he couldn’t part with, nothing that couldn’t be replaced with a simple telephone call.
As for records, Alien Gold kept all sensitive information on the office computer—verbally coded and digitally encrypted. He’d copied the pertinent data onto a Zip Drive disk and erased the hard drive. That done, Carlos had Llosa fire a few 9mm rounds into the drive—just to be sure.
“All set?” Gold asked, popping into the room for the third time in as many minutes.
Carlos nodded. Too bad, he thought. Leaving the United States and this wonderful setup. But if decriminalization went through, he’d be out of business soon, anyway. He regretted leaving Maria behind, but that was only temporary. He’d send for her later.
Llosa was waiting by the back door. Carlos nodded to him as he approached. Llosa stepped outside, then jumped back in.
Carlos skidded to a halt. “What is it?”
“A car! In the alley!”
“Oh, no!” Gold whimpered. “Oh, God! Oh, please, no!”
“Silence!” Carlos hissed as his heart began to thump. He turned back to Llosa. “Is anyone there?”
“I did not see anyone.”
“Look again.” Llosa opened the door a crack and peeked through.
He shook his head. “I see no one.”
“It could be nothing,” Carlos said.
“But it’s blocking our way.” Carlos thought of his waiting Gulfstream, fully fueled and ready to go. If he could just get into the air…
He turned to Gold. “Call a tow truck. Have someone come and move it. Pronto!” Gold nodded. His smile was sickly. “Right. No way I’m going near that car.”
In the single heartbeat it took Gold to reach for the phone, Carlos heard a roar, felt the floor tremble, saw the door shatter as an onrushing ball of orange flame swallowed Llosa and engulfed Carlos, but not before a million wooden daggers from the door ripped the silk suit and most of the flesh from his body.
17
When Snake reached the clearing, he saw four or five pickups but no panel truck. He began to curse and pound on his steering wheel in red-hazed fury.
The nearer he’d gotten to this place, to this blinking star on his GPS map, the greater his anticipation of finding Poppy, getting his hands on her, hurting her like she’d hurt him. He needed that as much as he needed the tape, and the need had grown until he felt ready to burst.
But she wasn’t here! She must have run off after seeing the copter overhead. Still cursing, he began angling the Jeep to turn around, and that was when he spotted it, hidden behind one of the pickups at the very edge of the clearing.
Snake leapt from the Jeep and ran through the deluge to the truck. Yes! This was it. This was Poppy’s. But where was she? He moved along the perimeter of the clearing… had to be a way out of here.
And then he found it. A break in the underbrush. Using lightning flashes to guide him. Snake pulled the Cobra from his belt and started up the path, a path to the “strange-looking house” the copter pilot had mentioned.
He headed for one of the few lit windows.
18
John had tuned the car radio to an all-news station, hoping for word of when the storm would break. Instead, he found himself listening to Heather Brent.
“Let me bore you with some more statistics. Federal, state, and local police made well over a million drug related arrests last year. Seventy percent of those were for possession—not sale or manufacture, simple possession. But they’re not even scratching the surface. Six and a half million people used cocaine last year. Twelve percent of Americans admit—admit—to illegal drug use. How many do not admit to it? If we pursue the stated goals of the war on drugs, we should be trying to jail all those tens of millions of Americans. Do we really want to do that? Wouldn’t the resources and countless man- and womanhours that went into last year’s million-plus drug arrests be better directed toward muggers, rapists, murderers, wife beaters, and child abusers?”
“I wish we had some of those resources and man-hours at our disposal right now,” Decker muttered.
John switched the station. He’d wanted weather, not Heather Brent.
“I’ll be damned,” Decker said, looking in the rearview mirror. “Someone’s coming.”
John Vanduyne twisted in his seat and looked through the fogged up rear window. Sure enough, two smeary blobs of light were bobbing their way through the downpour.
“Dear God, we haven’t seen anybody for hours, and now—It’s a miracle.” A big pickup with fat tires eased to a stop on their right. John rolled down the window and saw a weathered face grinning at him from the truck’s cab. A similar and equally weathered face, this one bearded, peered over the driver’s shoulder.