He would tell Whitney about Eric Leben hiding in the trunk of Rachael's car. With any luck at all, Rachael would not stop on the road, would not give Eric an easy opportunity to go after her, so the dead man would wait in his hidey-hole until they were all the way into Vegas. There, forewarned, Whit Gavis could fire about six rounds of heavy buckshot into the trunk as Eric opened it from the inside, and Rachael, never having realized she was in danger, would be safe.
Everything was going to be all right.
Whit would take care of everything.
Ben finished tapping in the number, using his AT&T card for the call, and in a moment Whit's phone began to ring a hundred and sixty miles away.
The storm was still having trouble breaking. Only a few big drops of rain spattered against the glass walls of the booth.
The phone rang, rang.
The previously milky clouds had curdled into immense gray-black thunderheads, which in turn had formed still-darker, knotted, more malignant masses that were moving at great speed toward the southeast.
The phone rang again and again and again.
Be there, damn it, Ben thought.
But Whit was not there, and wishing him home would not make it true. On the twentieth ring, Ben hung up.
For a moment he stood in the telephone booth, despairing, not sure what to do.
Once, he'd been a man of action, with never a doubt in a crisis. But in reaction to various unsettling discoveries about the world he lived in, he had tried to remake himself into a different man — student of the past, train fancier. He had failed in that remake, a failure that recent events had made eminently clear: He could not just stop being the man he had once been. He accepted that now. And he had thought that he had lost none of his edge. But he realized that all those years of pretending to be someone else had dulled him. His failure to look in the Mercedes's trunk before sending Rachael away, his current despair, his confusion, his sudden lack of direction were all proof that too much pretending had its deadly effect.
Lightning sizzled across the swollen black heavens, but even that scalpel of light did not split open the belly of the storm.
He decided there was nothing to be done but hit the road, head for Vegas, hope for the best, though hope seemed futile now. He could stop in Baker, sixty miles ahead, and try Whit's number again.
Maybe his luck would change.
It had to change.
He opened the door of the booth and ran to the stolen Merkur.
Again, lightning blasted the charred sky.
A cannonade of thunder volleyed back and forth between the sky and the waiting earth.
The air stank of ozone.
He got in the car, slammed the door, started the engine, and the storm finally broke, throwing a million tons of water down upon the desert in a sudden deluge.
30
RATTLESNAKES
Rachael had been following the bottom of the wide arroyo for what seemed miles but was probably only a few hundred yards. The illusion of greater distance resulted partly from the hot pain in her twisted ankle, which was subsiding but only slowly.
She felt trapped in a maze through which she might forever search futilely for a nonexistent exit. Narrower arroyos branched off the primary channel, all on the right-hand side. She considered pursuing another gulch, but each intersected the main run at an angle, so she couldn't see how far they extended. She was afraid of deviating into one, only to encounter a dead end within a short distance.
To her left, three stories above, Eric hurried along the brink of the arroyo, following her limping progress as if he were the mutant master of the maze in a Dungeons and Dragons game. If and when he started down the arroyo wall, she would have to turn and immediately climb the opposite wall, for she now knew she could not hold her own in a chase. Her only chance of survival was to get above him and find some rocks to hurl down on him as he ascended in her wake. She hoped he would not come after her for a few more minutes, because she needed time for the pain in her ankle to subside further before testing it in a climb.
Distant thunder sounded from Barstow in the west: one long peal, another, then a third that was louder than the first two. The sky over this part of the desert was gray and soot-black, as if heaven had caught fire, burned, and was now composed only of ashes and cold black coals. The burnt-out sky had settled lower as well, until it almost seemed to be a lid that was going to come down all the way and clamp tightly over the top of the arroyo. A warm wind whistled mournfully and moaned up there on the surface of the Mojave, and some gusts found their way down into the channel, flinging bits of sand in Rachael's face. The storm already under way in the west had not reached here yet, but it would arrive soon; a pre-storm scent was heavy in the air, and the atmosphere had the electrically charged feeling that preceded a hard rain.
She rounded a bend and was startled by a pile of dry tumbleweeds that had rolled into the gulch from the desert above. Stirred by a downdraft, they moved rapidly toward her with a scratchy sound, almost a hiss, as if they were living creatures. She tried to sidestep those bristly brown balls, stumbled, and fell full-length into the powdery silt that covered the floor of the channel. Falling, she feared for the ankle she had already hurt, but fortunately she did not twist it again.
Even as she fell, she heard more noise behind her. She thought for a moment that the sound was made by the tumbleweeds still rubbing against one another in their packlike progress along the arroyo, but a harder clatter alerted her to the true source of the noise. When she looked back and up, she saw that Eric had started down the wall of the gulch. He'd been waiting for her to fall or to encounter an obstacle; now that she was down, he was swiftly taking advantage of her bad luck. He had descended a third of the incline and was still on his feet, for the slope was not quite as steep here as it had been where Rachael had rolled over the edge. As he came, he dislodged a minor avalanche of dirt and stones, but the wall of the arroyo did not give way entirely. In a minute he would reach the bottom and then, in ten steps, would be on top of her.
Rachael pushed up from the ground, ran toward the other wall of the gulch, intending to climb it, but realized she had dropped her car keys. She might never find her way back to the car; in fact, she'd probably either be brought down by Eric or get lost in the wasteland, but if by some miracle she did reach the Mercedes, she had to have the keys.
Eric was almost halfway down the slope, descending through dust that rose from the slide he had started.
Frantically looking for the keys, she returned to the place where she'd fallen, and at first she couldn't see them. Then she glimpsed the shiny notched edges poking out of the powdery brown silt, almost entirely buried. Evidently she'd fallen atop the keys, pressing them into the soft soil. She snatched them up.
Eric was more than halfway to the arroyo floor.
He was making a strange sound: a thin, shrill cry — half stage whisper, half shriek.
Thunder pounded the sky, somewhat closer now.
Still pouring sweat, gasping for breath, her mouth seared by the hot air, her lungs aching, she ran to the far wall again, shoving the car keys into a pocket of her jeans. This embankment had the same degree of slope as the one Eric was descending, but Rachael discovered that ascending on her feet was not as easy as coming down that way; the angle worked against her as much as it would have worked for her if she'd been going the other direction. After three or four yards, she had to drop forward against the bank, desperately using hands and knees and feet to hold on and thrust herself steadily up the incline.