“Are you sure Mr. Russell was never here?” Watt asked the woman.
She shook her head. “Never.”
“We’re sorry to have bothered you, ma’am.” He turned to his men. “All right. Let’s head back.”
Gary wanted to object, wanted to pull out of the sheriff’s grip, run to the window of the room where he’d been held and yell, “See?” But he knew that was not possible and that any attempt he made would cause problems for him, not for her, and would further erode his credibility. So he said nothing but allowed himself to be led back to the car. Just before he got in, he turned around to look at the woman in the doorway. Neither the sheriff nor any of his deputies were facing that direction, and Gary expected her to give him a small smile, an acknowledgment that she had won and he had lost, but she did not. She stared at him blankly, impassively, then turned away.
Despite his lack of money and identification, despite the wild-goose chase on which he’d led the sheriff and his deputies, the sheriff’s office put him up for the night in a dusty one-story motel with no air-conditioning and an intermittently working ceiling fan—although it was made very clear that this was for one night only.
On top of his worries about Joan and everything else that had happened, he now had to find a way to get out of this town and back to California.
He opened the bag of fast food he’d been given and took out a greasy, soggy hamburger, some cold fries and a watery Coke. Turning on the room’s television to alleviate the silence, he watched part of a local newscast from a city in New Mexico whose name he had never heard before. The studio backdrop behind the desk was flat and fake, and the newscasters themselves were unprofessional and sad looking. The newscast depressed him, and he flipped the channels on the TV. Only four stations came in, and he settled on one that was showing an old rerun of Friends. He just wanted some noise to distract himself from the dreary silence of his room.
He’d considered staying, finding some way to rent a car and returning to the ranch on his own, but he was in hostile territory and time was wasting. The smartest thing he could do was get back to the real world.
He knew where the ranch was.
He could always come back.
Besides, it was clear to him that it was just a way station, a stopover. Joan was not there, and it was even possible that the woman, the man and whoever else lived at the ranch knew nothing of her whereabouts. The important thing was finding Joan. The aiders and abettors could be dealt with later.
Not for the first time, Gary wondered why he had been taken. He could come up with no plausible scenario, and the only thing that made any sense was that the Outsiders were going to use him as leverage against Joan, were going to threaten to torture or kill him unless she did what they wanted her to do or revealed what they wanted her to reveal.
Would they continue coming after him?
He thought of Kara and Teri Lim. Of course they would.
But then, why had they only taken Joan? Why hadn’t they captured or killed the rest of them at Burning Man? Had something changed in the interim?
None of it made any sense.
He called his parents after he finished eating. Gary had never before felt so alone, and more than anything else, he longed to talk to his dad.
He wanted to tell him everything.
He wanted to tell him nothing.
Confiding in his parents would make him feel better and would let him know that someone was behind him, but the entire situation was so outrageous that he wasn’t sure his parents would believe it. And if they did believe it, they would make him get his ass back to Ohio faster than he could say, “Call me Ishmael.”
He didn’t want that.
So he ended up telling his parents that he’d been the victim of identity theft. Some hacker, he said, had deleted seemingly every trace of him from every computer database in the country. “I’m not even sure my birth certificate is still on file,” he said.
“We have to report this,” his dad declared. “We have to contact the credit card companies, the DMV, the credit reporting agencies… .”
“What I’m worried most about right now is my grant and scholarship money. According to UCLA’s computers, I’m not even enrolled in school. And if I’m not enrolled…”
“I’ll take care of that,” his father said. “Don’t worry about it.”
Gary felt as though a smothering blanket had just been pulled from his face. He wasn’t a child anymore, and his dad wasn’t the omniscient savior he’d thought when he was a little boy, but it gave him a feeling of security and reassurance to know that his father would call the necessary authorities, individuals and institutions required to get his credit situation and his school funding straightened out. He doubted that Reyn had been able to make any headway on that issue, but he knew his dad would be able to get things done.
At that point, he almost told his father all. But then his mother came on the other line, having picked up enough of the conversation to have some idea of what was happening. “You need to come home. Now.” There was authority in her voice but also fear, and he knew that if he said the wrong thing, that fear would tip over into panic.
“I’m okay, Mom.”
“Okay? Okay? Your identity’s been stolen! They’re probably charging automobiles on your credit!”
“My limit’s nowhere near that high.”
“That’s not the point! They could be ruining your credit rating forever or opening up new accounts or… or God knows what kind of things they can do!”
“We’re taking care of that,” his dad said calmly.
“I think he should come home. It was a mistake to let him go out there. His girlfriend took off God knows where; his identity’s been stolen. For all we know, she did it.”
“Mom!”
“I’m just saying. You’re two thousand miles away. Something could happen to you, and we’d never know. It’s dangerous.”
You have no idea, he thought.
“We have perfectly good colleges here in Ohio,” she announced.
“I like California, Mom. And UCLA is one of the top schools in the country.”
She appealed to his father. “Robert? I need some support here.”
“He’s fine. What happened is a fluke. We’ll make a few calls, get everything straightened out, and things’ll be back to normal. The important thing is that you keep up with your schoolwork, keep going to class.”
His parents had no idea he was sitting in a dingy motel in a small town in the New Mexican desert, and he quickly wrapped things up and said good-bye, hanging up before he was tempted to tell them all. He promised to call them the following night, but asked them not to try to call him because he had to work tomorrow.
Friends had long since ended, and now a young Bob Saget was hosting a decades-old episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos. The faded picture and the sight of the 1980s clothes and hairstyles made him feel lonely and disheartened, and he changed the channel to Extra , which, although equally dispiriting in content, was at least current.
He sipped the last tepid dregs of his watery Coke and called Reyn. As expected, his friend had not been able to do anything but confirm that Gary was no longer enrolled at UCLA. The attempts he’d made to find out why had all been stymied.
“Don’t worry,” Gary told him. “I have my dad looking into it. And I’ll straighten things out once I get back. I have all my paperwork and everything else, and once I explain what happened, there should be no problem.”