Bailey turned and wagged the putty knife at him. “You know, you’re total bullshit. I helped you people and you’ve treated me like garbage because I got scared. My lawyer says you’re frustrated by your own inabilities and that’s why you come after me.”
“The people I work with think you’re a beach rat, Jimmy. They think you don’t have much upstairs and the wind blows through empty rooms, but I think they underestimate you. You’re a lot more connected and a lot smarter. You were dealing successfully out of San Diego for years and I think that’s where you first hooked up with him. That’s how come he’s willing to hire you up here. You’re a known quantity and you’ve got your cover all worked out. You look like a sunburned dock toad living on gin and tonics, but that isn’t the case at all, is it? But, you know what, Jimmy? The fun is just starting.”
“Dude, I know that, and I wish I was going to be there when it gets to you. I really fucking do.”
“When was the last time you were in Mexico?”
“Fuck off.”
“You’re going to get on your new phone when I leave here, but that conversation isn’t private either. It’s closing around you, Jimmy. You think you’re riding on a former relationship with the man, but you’re way over your head. They’ll come for you just the way they did Heinemann because you’re a liability.”
Bailey turned his back and farted loudly as he started scraping paint again. “That’s the last word, dude,” and Marquez walked away. He heard Bailey call after him, “Fucking asshole,” but Marquez never turned again.
The call came from Cairo at two that afternoon when Marquez was crossing the Golden Gate after leaving a meeting with the FBI. He could hear the worry in Cairo’s voice. Cairo had lost touch with Petersen and when he’d last talked to her she said she had a vehicle behind her that she was unsure of.
“The reception was bad. You know how it’s okay along the coast for a while, then goes bad immediately after you turn in?”
Marquez did know. “What do you think she was trying to tell you?”
“I couldn’t hear her well enough. I could hear her truck engine straining. I think she was on an uphill grade and pushing it.”
“How long ago?”
“Twenty minutes now.”
That wasn’t a lot of time, but Cairo didn’t spook easily. It must have been her tone. Cairo heard something, fear, maybe.
“When did you last try her?”
“Just before I called you.”
“What about her telelocator?”
“It’s not with her. I’m at the cold house. I just found it in the bedroom.”
“I’m coming to you.”
When he hung up, fear gripped him and his stomach knotted. But don’t think like that, yet. Cairo is going to call you back and say she just turned up. Twenty minutes is nothing. She could be in the Burger King; she could be anywhere. Maybe she’s lying above a cove with a video camera. He tried to hold that idea as he started north.
An hour later he had the whole team on the road headed to Fort Bragg and had called Keeler and Baird and asked for help from uniformed wardens and from the Coast Guard with a helicopter. He called the Fort Bragg police, gave them a description of her Toy-ota 4Runner and a physical on Petersen. When he got into Bragg, Marquez drove through town and continued north to where Cairo was.
The late afternoon sunlight had faded to an orange haze over the ocean. Cairo believed that Petersen had been somewhere in this area and Marquez left the coast highway and turned up Teague Ranch Road because he and Petersen had used spots up here on a surveillance a few years back. The road climbed steeply and he thought the steepest stretch would also have been the last place with clear phone reception. You could make calls from farther inland, but the reception sketched in and out on you and a lot of calls got dropped. The road climbed through grassland and hills that rose into coastal mountains, then folded back on itself and ran across forested slopes.
His radio crackled a couple of times and he talked to Cairo, then to Chief Keeler who let him know several uniformed wardens were on their way to help. The road entered trees and dipped as it crossed a creek bed, then climbed steeply up switchbacks to the next ridge and he turned around there because he could no longer see the ocean and reasoned that her purpose for driving up here would have been surveillance of the coves or bluffs below.
And then another idea occurred to him, of what she might do if she was being pursued and couldn’t get through on a cell phone or radio. He drove slowly back down, remembering the places they’d used before, locations where you could get a vehicle off-road. He returned to the concrete culvert that carried a creek beneath the roadbed, parked and walked down to the dry creek bed, looked in through the culvert pipe. A circle of light came through from the other side, the downhill side. Cool air flowed down through with the faint breeze up from the ocean. The bottom was stained dark and powdery moss had dried well up the curve. He crouched and walked through the culvert and on the other side saw a turned-over rock, the raw soil underneath. He looked down the dry bed and saw tire marks against a boulder. He found marks from scraped paint, studied the color, then tried to get Cairo on the radio to tell him he was going to hike down the creek bed. Farther down, he began to put it together, found a second set of tire prints and realized it had been a pursuit. He paused at broken taillight glass, knelt and picked it up.
Petersen wouldn’t wreck a vehicle to chase a jeep or anything else down a creek bed unless there’d been a very good reason for it. But this could be something altogether different, the paint color coincidence aside. Kids out four-wheeling and drinking beer, could easily be kids, he thought. He stopped at a gash in a tree, touched the blue paint left there, and looked at the V-shaped tire prints alongside the trunk, touched the grooves with his fingers. It was too violent. Someone had been chased. He tried Cairo again.
Where the creek dropped off a three-foot ledge, both sets of tracks cut into the topsoil, digging in as they made a hard turn and climbed away from the creek bed. They’d skinned the dry grass down to bare soil trying to climb up the slope. He climbed rapidly toward the ridge, having no trouble following the tracks. The driving had been rough. The lead vehicle had ploughed through low brush on the steep slope, tires tearing at the soil, and he guessed they’d been afraid of stalling and had pushed it hard, kept the engine revved. He neared the ridgeline, saw blue sky low at the tree bases and knew he was close to getting a wider view. At the top was a rock outcropping and looking down, he saw her blue 4Runner.
Standing on the outcropping, looking out on the ocean, he got through to Cairo and worked his way down to her truck while talking to him. The driver’s window and the back were open and the truck was empty. Droplets of blood had spattered on the dash and on rocks outside the truck and he told Cairo they’d need dogs. He clicked off the radio, yelled for her, and tried to follow the blood, but it petered out quickly. He smelled gas leaking from the truck and saw where the suspension had hooked on a rock. She’d been chased. It was a gutsy thing she’d been trying to do to get down this slope. Without doing anything to disturb evidence, he tried to think it out. If she was injured, bleeding, and still trying to get away, she’d take off in the easiest direction, or take up a posi-tion with her weapon. The bleeding was concentrated around one area of rock. Why had she stood in that spot? Held at gunpoint? Told to stand there? Or she got out of the 4Runner hurt, but with something pressed against the wound, dazed and trying to stop the bleeding before trying to escape. She’d go down the slope, try to reach the trees and lose herself. That was the next place to look.
From below, it was easier to see what had happened. It looked like the right rear tire had dropped off the side and when the truck started to slide off it had bottomed out. With enough time she would have freed it and he took that as another sign that someone was right on her. She didn’t have time to get the truck free and had gotten out. She must have been outnumbered or wouldn’t have run.