At the third mountainside house, Ben nearly walked in among four young boys who were engaged in their own stealthy game of war, alerted at the last minute when one of them sprang from cover and opened fire on another with a cap-loaded machine gun. For the first time in his life, Ben experienced a vivid flashback to the war, one of those mental traumas that the media ascribed to every veteran. He fell and rolled behind several low-growing dogwoods, where he lay listening to his pounding heart, stifling a scream for half a minute until the flashback passed.
None of the boys had seen him, and when he set out again, he crawled and belly-crawled from one point of cover to another. From the leafy dogwood to a clump of wild azaleas. From the azaleas to a low limestone formation, where the desiccated corpse of a ground squirrel lay as if in warning. Then over a small hill, through rough weeds that scratched his face, under another split-rail fence.
Five minutes later, almost forty minutes after setting out from the cabin, he bulled his way down a brush-covered slope and into a dry drainage ditch alongside the state route that circled the lake.
Forty minutes, for God's sake.
How far into the lonely desert had Rachael gotten in forty minutes?
Don't think about that. Just keep moving.
He crouched in the tall weeds for a moment, catching his breath, then stood up and looked both ways. No one was in sight. No traffic was coming or going on the two-lane blacktop.
Considering that he had no intention of throwing away either the shotgun or the Combat Magnum, which made him frightfully conspicuous, he was lucky to find himself here on a Tuesday and at this hour. The state route would not have been as lightly used at any other time. During the early morning, the road would be busy with boaters, fishermen, and campers on their way to the lake, and later many of them would be returning. But in the middle of the afternoon — it was 2:55—they were comfortably settled for the day. He was also fortunate it was not a weekend, for then the road would have been heavily traveled regardless of the hour.
Deciding that he would be able to hear oncoming traffic before it drew into sight — and would, therefore, have time to conceal himself — he climbed out of the ditch and headed north on the pavement, hoping to find a car to steal.
27
ON THE ROAD AGAIN
By 2:55, Rachael was through the El Cajon Pass, still ten miles south of Victorville and almost forty-five miles from Barstow.
This was the last stretch of the interstate on which indications of civilization could be seen with any frequency. Even here, except for Victorville itself and the isolated houses and businesses strung between it and Hesperia and Apple Valley, there was mostly just a vast emptiness of white sand, striated rock, seared desert scrub, Joshua trees and other cactuses. During the hundred and sixty miles between Barstow and Las Vegas, there would be virtually only two outposts — Calico, the ghost town (with a cluster of attendant restaurants, service stations, and a motel or two), and Baker, which was the gateway to Death Valley National Monument and which was little more than a pit stop that flashed by in a few seconds, gone so quickly that it almost seemed like a mirage. Halloran Springs, Cal Neva, and Stateline were out there, too, but none of them really qualified as a town, and in one case the population was fewer than fifty souls. Here, where the great Mojave Desert began, humankind had tested the wasteland's dominion, but after Barstow its rule remained undisputed.
If Rachael had not been so worried about Benny, she would have enjoyed the endless vistas, the power and responsiveness of the big Mercedes, and the sense of escape and release that always buoyed her during a trip across the Mojave. But she could not stop thinking about him, and she wished she had not left him alone, even though he had made a good argument for his plan and had given her little choice. She considered turning around and going back, but he might have left by the time she reached the cabin. She might even drive straight into the arms of the police if she returned to Arrowhead, so she kept the Mercedes moving at a steady sixty miles an hour toward Barstow.
Five miles south of Victorville, she was startled by a strange hollow thumping that seemed to come from underneath the car: four or five sharp knocks, then silence. She swore under her breath at the prospect of a breakdown. Letting the speed fall to fifty and then slowly to forty, she listened closely to the Mercedes for more than half a mile.
The hum of the tires on the pavement.
The purr of the engine.
The soft whisper of the air-conditioning.
No knocking.
When the unsettling sound did not recur, she accelerated to sixty again and continued to listen expectantly, figuring that the unknown trouble was something that occurred only at higher speeds. But when, after another mile, there was no noise, she decided she must have run over potholes in the pavement. She had not seen any potholes, and she could not recall that the car had been jolted simultaneously with the thumping sound, but she could think of no other explanation. The Mercedes's suspension system and heavy-duty shocks were superb, which would have minimized the jolt of a few minor bumps, and perhaps the strange sound itself had distracted her from whatever little vibration there had been.
For a few miles, Rachael remained edgy, not exactly waiting for the entire drive train to drop out with a great crash or for the engine to explode, but half expecting some trouble that would delay her. However, when the car continued to perform with its usual quiet reliability, she relaxed, and her thoughts drifted back to Benny.
The green Chevy sedan had been damaged in the collision with the blue Ford — bent grille, smashed headlight, crumpled fender — but its function had not been impaired. Peake had driven down the dirt road to gravel to macadam to the state route that circled the lake, with Sharp sitting in the passenger seat, scanning the woods around them, the silencer-equipped pistol in his lap. Sharp had been confident (he said) that Shadway had gone in another direction, well away from the lake, but he had been vigilant nonetheless.
Peake had expected a shotgun blast to hit the side window and take him out at any moment. But he got down to the state route alive.
They had cruised back and forth on the main road until they had found a line of six cars and pickups parked along the berm. Those vehicles probably belonged to anglers who had gone down through the woods to the nearby lake, to a favorite but hard-to-reach fishing hole. Sharp had decided that Shadway would come off the mountain to the south of the cars and, perhaps recalling having passed them on his way to the cabin turnoff, would come north on the state route — maybe using one of the drainage ditches for cover or even staying in the forest parallel to the road — with the intention of hot-wiring new wheels for himself. Peake had slipped the sedan behind the last vehicle in the line of six, a dirty and battered Dodge station wagon, pulling over just a bit farther than the cars in front, so Shadway would not be able to see the Chevy clearly when he walked in from the south.
Now Peake and Sharp slumped low in the front seat, sitting just high enough to see through the windshield and through the windows of the station wagon in front of them. They were ready to move fast at the first sign of anyone messing with one of the cars. Or at least Sharp was ready. Peake was still in a quandary.
The trees rustled in the gusty breeze.
A wicked-looking dragonfly swooped past the windshield on softly thrumming, iridescent wings.
The dashboard clock ticked faintly, and Peake had the weird but perhaps explicable feeling that they were sitting on a time bomb.