The clumsy lips, the imbalance of the accent: Dana wasn't reading him, so Bridger translated for her as best he could. She watched him carefully, then shifted in the chair. “But what do we do about it?” she asked, her face drawn down to nothing.
Milos' voice rode a current, higher now, as if a breeze had caught it. “You go,” he said. “You are Dana Halter too, no? You have proof?”
She nodded.
“Then that is “your” box.”
Sunday morning, early, they left San Roque in Dana's Jetta, headed north. Bridger had meant to tell Radko in person-he'd made his choice, for love, for support, for Dana-but in the end, he opted for the easy way out: e-mail. “Sorry. Gone one week. Emergency. Bridger. P. S. See you next Monday?”
The sun was behind them as they pulled out of town on the Coast Highway, the ocean gathering light and throwing it at the pavement, the car a leaping shadow just ahead of them. Dana sat in the passenger's seat beside him, her face soft and composed, her hair still wet from the shower and pinned up in a way that showed off the line of her jaw, the sharp angle of her cheekbone, her ear, whorled and perfect as a shell. She'd held him a long while that morning and then pulled back and signed “I love you,” the index finger pointing first to her heart, then both hands crossed in an embrace and finally the finger coming back to him, and he couldn't resist her. They'd made love the night before, slow and languorous, the bed a raft at sea in the dark and silence of the room, and they fell to it again, on the rug in the hall after she'd come dripping from the shower and given him the sign: “I… love… you.”
What was he feeling? Burnished. Shining. Polished like a gem. The radio was cranked and she was bent over her laptop, alternately tapping at the keys and glancing up to stare out over the stacked-up waves with pursed lips and unseeing eyes, isolated from the moment and this place and the world. The music crept into him and he tapped out the rhythm on the dash. An old song, familiar as blood. “Who, who, who, who, / Tell me who are you…”
Five
SHE LOOKED UP from the screen and saw the sea spread out before her, the stalled distant waves like interlocking tiles, the spilled milk of the clouds, sun like wax-“metaphor, everything a metaphor”-even as the dim dripping forest of La Bassine dissolved in a blaze of light on water. Bridger was beside her, present and visible, one hand on the wheel, the other beating time on the dash. His chin bobbed, his shoulders dipped and rose. One and two, one and two. And now he was singing, singing in perfect silence, his lips pursed as if he were blowing out a whole birthday cake's worth of candles. She glanced at the LED display on the radio: 99.9, classic rock. He was singing some immemorial song he knew and she didn't, singing to himself, everything about him alive and focused and beautiful, running with the sound. She didn't stop to think what it meant to go there, to that place where the hearing were transported in the way she was when she was writing or reading or locked away in the dark chest of the cinema while the shapes joined and convulsed on the screen and she saw with a clarity so intense she had to turn away from it; no, she just let herself feel it through him, through the weave of his shoulders and the rhythmic slap of his hand, and then she was beating time too.
The landscape sprang away from them. The dash gave and released, their two hands pounding. And then a car appeared in the inside lane and rolled silently past them and he shifted his eyes to her, his smile opening up, and he sang for her, sang to her, more insistent now, more vigorous and emphatic, his lips, his lips: “Who, who, who, who?”
She hadn't thought past the moment, past packing her bags and the two new credit cards she'd got to replace the canceled ones, because it had all seemed so natural, so logicaclass="underline" the thief was in Mill Valley and he had a postbox at Mail Boxes Etc. and they were going to go there and find him, watch him, stalk him. And then what? Call in the police. In her fantasy she saw him striding into the shop to check his mail while they sat outside in the car-they knew his face, but he didn't know theirs-and punched 911 into the cell phone. Or they'd get the mail themselves, find an address, an account number, trace him to his house and nail him there (yes, “nail” him, as you would nail a board to the floor). And in the fantasy she saw a SWAT team swooping down on him, men in flak jackets and protective headgear, candy-apple-red lights flashing on the cars, the helicopter slamming at the air, and she'd confront him then, spit in his face as he was led away in the same inflexible restraints they'd bound her up in, and she'd confront him again in court, the perfect witness in perfect control, the interpreter motionless at her side.
But that was the fantasy. The reality-and it made her stomach clench to think of it-might be less certain, might be dangerous. How stupid was he? How much in love with her base identifiers could he be when he knew he'd been found out? He might be a thousand miles away by now, more than a match for any amateur detective, and with a new name and a new persona. He could be anywhere. He could be anybody. But still, the thought of what he'd done to her without pause or conscience or even a trace of human feeling made her seize with the rage she'd felt all her life, the rage of shame and inadequacy and condescension. Revenge, that was what she wanted. To make him hurt the way she did. Only that.
They'd just passed King City when she looked up next. Bridger was no longer slapping the dash, no longer singing. He had one hand draped over the wheel, fingers dangling, and he was slumped down in the seat, looking tired. Or wiped, as in “wiped-out, eliminated, destroyed.” She touched his arm and he turned his head. “Are you tired?” she asked. “You want to maybe stop for lunch?”
He nodded and that was good enough because she couldn't very well expect him simultaneously to keep his eyes on the road and his lips in her field of vision. But then he turned full-face and said, “What do you feel like-Mexican?”
“Sure,” she said.
He was grinning even as he swung off the freeway and onto the main street-the only street-of a town that consisted of a grocery, a gas station, a cantina and two cramped and competing “taquerias” called La Tolteca and El Sitio respectively. “Good choice,” he said, turning to her as he killed the engine.
They chose El Sitio and couldn't have said why, no appreciable difference between the two places, both dark inside because electricity cost money, both run by the wives, grandparents and children of the men in the fields. There were four tables shoved up against the wall, a chest-high counter, the kitchen. The smells were dark and lingering, but good, a dense aroma of ancient chiles, refried beans in a pot crusted with residue, peppers and onions and the fry pan that was always hot. One of the tables was occupied by two super-sized white women with unevenly dyed hair-travelers like themselves-who were staring moodily down at the foil-wrapped remains of their burritos and clutching bottles of Dos Equis as if they were fire extinguishers. An old man, lizard-like in a white smock and trousers, sat at the table behind them, tentatively poking a pink plastic fork at a plate of scrambled eggs and beans. There was a handwritten menu on the wall.
Bridger consulted the menu a moment, then turned to the woman at the counter. He said something Dana didn't catch-was he speaking in Spanish, was that it? — and then looked to her. “You know what you want?”
“I don't know,” she said, using her hands unconsciously. She looked to the menu and back again. “I can order for myself.”
The woman behind the counter, as reduced and small-boned as a child, though her hair was going gray, watched them impassively. She was there to take their orders and their money and to give them a plastic chit with a number on it and to call out the number when the orders came up, and her eyes betrayed little interest beyond that. The menu was in Spanish: “taco de chuleta; taco de rajas; taco de cazuela; tamal de verduras.” It wasn't a problem. Dana had lived in San Roque for more than a year now and she knew the basics of Mexican cuisine as well as she knew Italian or French or Chinese, and to make it easier for her, since she wasn't prepared to wrestle with the pronunciation-English was challenge enough-there was a number attached to each item. She chose the fifth item on the list, “tostada de polio,” turned to the woman and said, as clearly as she could, “Number Five, please.”