Somewhere around the thirtieth mile on the trip counter, he began to yawn. It was the beer, he told himself, a self-indulgent mistake. He turned on the radio. All he could get was a country-and-western station out of Boise. He turned it up, but it didn’t help. A couple of times, he almost nodded off, but was jolted awake by a pothole. He rolled down the windows.
The effect was instantaneous. The freezing desert air hit him in the face like a bucket of ice water. Falling asleep was no longer a danger. What with the noise, the dust, and the cold, he was uncomfortable enough to stay awake without having to work at it. And the stars were amazing. Distinct and glittering, with the Milky Way draped across the night like a bridal veil.
He rolled up the windows, thinking he’d rather die in a crash than freeze to death. At least, it would be quicker.
Three hours later, he was hunched over the steering wheel, using his windshield wipers against the dust and bug spatter. He was looking for the blue trailer with the pink flamingos, and he was worried. Wilson’s ranch was so isolated that surprise was out of the question. He’d see the headlights from a long way off, and even if Burke were to kill the lights (without somehow killing himself), the noise was inescapable. The car sounded like an avalanche of rebar tumbling down a mountainside.
If he saw the ranch soon enough, he could leave the car and walk in. But “soon enough” was a big question mark in the wide-open spaces he was driving through. And if Mandy was right about this solstice thing, Wilson wouldn’t be asleep at all. He’d be getting ready to dance.
He’d fire the transmitter at first light, Burke thought. And that would be the end of it.
Though, who knew what Wilson was planning to do. If he wanted, he could probably vaporize half the country, à la Tunguska. Just clear-cut the place, from sea to shining sea. But he won’t do that, Burke told himself. Wilson was about the Ghost Dance, and the Ghost Dance was all about the land. Loving the land. So it wouldn’t be Tunguska on a grander scale. It would probably be a reprise of Culpeper, but bigger. If Wilson could permanently disable the electrical and electronic infrastructure of the country, it would be a disaster of geological dimensions. Nearly every economy in the world would crash, and millions would die. People everywhere were dependent on modern technology for everything from food and water to transportation, medicine, and lighting. It would be the end, if not of the world then of the last five hundred years of progress. It would be 1491, all over again.
The idea was so outrageous that Burke didn’t want to take it seriously. It kept spinning away, like the radio signal out of Reno. The body count in San Francisco had “stabilized” at 342. Police were looking for…
A new signal overrode the old. Repent.
Ten minutes later, a clusterfuck of pink flamingos materialized in the headlights in front of a darkened blue trailer, about fifty feet from the road. As Burke drove past, he saw that someone had sprayed the trailer with the words, “Bad Dog!” written large.
Two miles farther along, Burke turned left as he’d been told to do, and immediately, the road got worse. The washboards were now so tall and deep and insistent that it seemed to Burke that the car’s undercarriage wouldn’t be able to take it. Then the road rose up, and the car began to climb the side of a mountain – a feature the bartender had sketched as an inverted V.
His ears popped as he maneuvered through a series of hairpin turns, his headlights strafing the mountainside on his right, then shining off into the abyss on his left. Suddenly, a jackrabbit sprang into the car’s path and, reflexively, Burke slammed on the brakes.
Big mistake.
The car began to surf, riding the washboards, even as its rear wheels fishtailed out of control, spraying gravel. The sedan was moving on its own now, sliding over the road as if it were made of ice. Its relationship to the steering wheel and brakes was suddenly theoretical. In the end, the only thing that stopped the slide was the mountainside itself. The car slammed into a runoff beside the road. The chassis shrieked. There was a thud, a crunch, and the sideview mirror was airborne. Then the car came to a sudden and complete stop, one headlight shining toward the stars, the other in smithereens at the base of a wall of red rock.
Burke took a deep breath, and looked out the window, where the jackrabbit was contemplating with satisfaction his destruction of a once serviceable Nissan Sentra. Burke didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but was leaning toward the latter. At least I wasn’t going downhill, he told himself. If he had been, the skid would have taken him over the edge.
He tried the ignition.
Again and again. But there was no way it was going to start, and even if it did, Burke doubted he’d be able to get the car out of the ditch. Not without a tow truck. And even then, it wouldn’t be drivable.
He leaned in through the driver’s window, and squinted at the trip counter: 51.2. That meant he had about nine miles to go before he got to the ranch. About.
Not that he had any choice. Reaching into the car, he grabbed his new “cell phone,” and started walking.
It was harder than he’d expected, because he couldn’t really see. The road itself was easy enough to distinguish because it was paler than the abyss to his left and the rocks to his right. But whenever he tried to pick up the pace, he stumbled over rocks or stepped into a pothole. Twice, he went sprawling, and turned his ankle badly enough that it hurt like hell. He was thirsty, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it. A cloud of gnats hung in the air around him. They didn’t bite, but they got in his eyes, forcing him to stop and knuckle one out every few minutes.
After an hour of this, he began to cramp up.
It seemed like forever since he’d left the saloon in Juniper, but when he looked at his watch, he saw that he’d been gone only about five hours. During that time, he’d thought a lot about what he was doing, and why. His obsession with finding Wilson, he decided, wasn’t really about saving Tommy Aherne’s business. That was just an excuse, and even Tommy didn’t believe it. Eventually, the courts would resolve the matter, and that would be the end of it. No, Burke’s interest in Wilson was deeper, and darker than that. It was… what? The good guy’s version of “suicide by cop.” Burke’s pursuit of Wilson was suicide by terrorist, and it amounted to the same thing.
He hadn’t wanted to live anymore. Not without Kate. Or so he’d thought. But somewhere along the line, this had begun to change. Slowly, and then all at once. He didn’t know when it had happened. There wasn’t a moment when everything changed. These stars…
So all of a sudden, he needed a plan about what to do when he got to the ranch. Because getting himself killed had suddenly lost its attraction. Trudging over the uneven ground, he thought about it long and hard; and slowly, a plan began to form. And it was pure genius: first, he’d get inside. And then he’d knock Wilson out.
It was five fifteen a.m. when he reached the entrance to the ranch, which announced itself with a sign on a lodgepole over the driveway. The sign read “B-Lazy-B.” Cute, Burke thought.
About half a mile up the drive, a smattering of landscape lights glowed in the darkness. Over to the east, or what he guessed was the east, the sky was beginning to fade from black. One by one, the stars were winking out.
Burke crunched up the drive, alarmed by the noise his footsteps made. It wasn’t really bright enough to see very well, but the house was something, a sprawling stone-and-timber affair set in a little mountain meadow. A rustic mansion that reminded Burke of something you’d see at an upscale ski resort. Jackson Hole, maybe, or Telluride.