Shupfer said, “Okay.”
I covered the next eleven miles in eight minutes. Gridlock streaked past. The GPS kept doing double takes, unable to comprehend how I was making such superb time in the face of bumper-to-bumper traffic. It warned me of snarls and slowdowns then hastened to revise my ETA as I rocketed by. The shoulder contracted dramatically, forcing me to ride the yellow line till I got too close and scraped the center divider. My side mirror ripped off and I shot the gap toward encroaching darkness, night and false night fusing to bring forth a horrifying sight: a seam of flame limning the far eastern horizon, as though the new day had dawned early and full of wrath; as though the points of the compass had been reversed.
I accelerated.
The seam widened, smearing its halo against a cyclorama of turgid gray-brown smoke, yawning like the mouth of a forge to feast on the line of cars offering themselves in sacrifice, exurbanites plodding toward planned communities on evacuation standby. Tonight they would toss in their beds, coughing, hearts clenched, giving up on sleep and getting up to check their go-bags for medications, photo albums, jewelry.
Was it worth it — their tiny slice of the promised land?
California was an abuser. Every year it strangled you, every year you forgave.
Nwodo called. This time I answered. “Tell me you’ve got a team in place.”
“Nobody can get there in under an hour. Your people are saying the same.”
“I’ll stall as long as I can.”
“Absolutely not. You do not engage. Under no circumstances.”
“I’m sorry, Delilah.”
“Clay. Pull over, stop the car, and wait.”
“I can keep apologizing, if it’ll help.”
She said, “Can I ask what it is you think you’re going to do when you get there?”
“Figure it out.”
My tires whistled.
“Hold shit down,” Nwodo said. “I’ll do my best.”
“Thank you. For everything.”
“Don’t talk like that,” she said.
Then she said, “Good luck.”
It was 6:42. “Luke Edison” had not replied to my text begging for a grace period. I sent another: On my way.
The nice robot bade me take the exit for South Vasco Road. I wedged into the stalled fast lane and began bushwhacking toward the off-ramp.
“Call my wife.”
“... hey there,” Amy said brightly. “How are you?”
My mouth felt gummy.
“Clay? Did I lose you?”
“I’m here.”
A red-faced man in a Subaru brandished his middle finger at me and leaned on the horn.
“On the road again,” Amy said. She sang: “I can’t wait to get on the road again.”
She was singing because she was still a little annoyed at me. Working not to be. I’d never met a better person.
I wanted to tell her that: You are the best person I know.
I said, “How was your day?”
“We’re about to sit down to dinner. Can I call you when we’re done?”
No, let’s talk now, let’s not wait.
“What’s for dinner?” I said.
“One guess.”
“Mac and cheese.”
“Pizza,” she said.
I laughed. She did, too. “I’m pretty sure Charlotte has scurvy,” she said.
We laughed more together.
“Did you get your errands done?” she asked.
“I did. I’m sorry we fought this morning.”
“That wasn’t a fight. That was a discussion.”
“Right, that’s what I thought, too.”
I felt her smile from hundreds of miles away.
“Talk soon,” she said.
“Amy? I love you.”
Silence.
She had to know something was wrong.
One of my moods, maybe, kicked up by being alone.
She said, “I love you, too.”
I barreled down the ramp, south and then east, through a hodgepodge of industrial parks and housing developments. Across Greenville Road blocky corporate campuses yielded to sad ranches where rawboned cattle gnawed stubble. Pumpjacks prayed. The boulevard devolved to a twisting country lane, and I pitched up into shorn hills, dwarfed by a tsunami of smoke that bore down like a murderous leer.
I thought about what would happen if I died. That I was putting myself in harm’s way not for a stranger but for Luke was no consolation. In a certain sense it was worse: Amy and I had a framework for death in the line of duty.
I’d voided the contract. Set it ablaze.
I swerved on the turnouts, rising toward the saddleback over asphalt that rippled like burnt skin, each crest the last, each layer of smoke peeling back to reveal another. A sawhorse got in my way, ROAD CLOSED NO ENTRY CAL FIRE — I obliterated it. Tried Nwodo. Tried Shupfer. Both calls fizzled. Luke would die in three minutes. I was fifteen minutes away.
“Call Cesar Rigo.”
Scratchy ringing.
“... Deputy. I did not expect to hear from you again so soon.”
“My brother didn’t kill Rory Vandervelde,” I said. “He was kidnapped by the men who did. They’re using him as bait for me. I’m going to meet them now. I need backup.”
“Surely you must agree that additional evidence is called for.”
He was breaking up, words crackling like crushed bone.
“Call Delilah Nwodo. She’ll vouch. She’s getting a team but I don’t know how long it’ll take. The end point is east of Livermore. I’m sending a map. Freeway’s fucked. I rode the shoulder. Just get here. Please.”
The map started to transmit.
The progress bar stopped halfway.
“Rigo,” I yelled. “Can you hear me?”
Electronic hash.
High along the ridgeline a row of wind turbines cycled their giant arms through torrents of smoke. My phone gave up trying to send the map and displayed a red exclamation mark. Sharp turn ahead, twenty miles per hour, I took it at fifty, gravel sprayed the guardrail, I righted the wheel just in time to avoid flying off the edge of the world and spit through a cleft in the bedrock, the road pared back to nothing, I hugged the cliffside while below me a gash opened in the earth, a steep terraced ravine, miles long, boiling with smoke. Wind savaged the slopes, harrying thousands more turbines stitched to the dirt like the souls of the damned, flailing in desperation, trapped between here and nowhere by a moat of fire.
The clock ticked to 6:53. My brother was dead.
The land sealed up behind, the grade plummeted, and I ran a gauntlet of electrical stanchions and high-voltage lines that delivered me out of the hills and to the verge of a vast, smoke-shrouded plain.
I was still descending, but gradually. Some accident of topography had stifled the wind and caused the accumulation of smoke, a woolen malignancy that bellied low, smothering the moon and the stars and muting the fires’ distant glow. I touched down in the depression. Smoke mobbed the car. I slapped shut the vents but could smell it streaming in. It wormed relentlessly into my sinuses, my eyes ran. Visibility halved and halved again. I wove over the rumble strips, navigating as much by the phone as by sight. The map had me passing through ranchland, but I saw no sign of life, nothing but curtains of smoke and barbed wire and the margins of dry grass. Stanchions came marching from every direction. A skeleton army with only its feet visible, converging on a single point: a mammoth power substation, four miles out.
The pinhead lay just past it, at the corner of Millar Ranch Road.
It was 6:59. My brother had been dead for six minutes.
I tore past a deserted employee lot. The substation loomed. Behind concrete walls towers and transformers bristled in smoke. I rounded onto the final stretch, chasing the smoke which whirled teasingly up and away. The intersection assumed shape. I braced for a bullet. For Luke’s broken body in the road.