Leighton looked shamefully at the ground.
‘Look, as long as we waste time eating nice food, and thinking up plans, people are dying! I know you have your demons, Leighton, but this is your chance to save someone else’s son or daughter.’
‘I know,’ he said flatly.
Vicki came over to sit with him and took his hand. ‘If you do this, the next time you go to the cemetery and stand by her grave, you won’t be so hard on yourself.’
Leighton’s gaze met hers.
‘I’ve never been,’ he said in a tone of contrition.
‘What?’
‘I’ve never been to her … you know … the cemetery,’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t want to stand there and make it okay, as if what happened was fair.’
‘Do you never feel like going?’
‘Yes, I do … every birthday, every holiday, each time I pass any cemetery or any florist. She loved daisies - those crazy, oversized ones.’
‘Then, why don’t you?’
‘Because I’m not that guy - I wasn’t there for her. Hell, I was supposed to keep her safe. And now to go there - to stand on that neat grass, playing the poor grieving father, while my daughter has nothing, seems wrong. Does that make any kind of sense?’
‘You’re a good father, Leighton.’
‘You don’t know me.’ Leighton shook his head. ‘I was average, at best. Even as a kid, there were things she loved, really loved. When she was eight years old, I took her over to the Bird Sanctuary in Del Mar, and she got all attached to this little injured Merlin hawk they had there - bright red, it was. We were there the day the rescue team brought it in and she held it so gently. Man, she pestered me every single weekend to go there.’
‘Did you go back?’
‘Only once or twice, but the Merlin was gone by then. You see – that’s the busy kind of dad I was. I bought her a little toy, one she took to bed every night, but by then, I’d already let her down.’
‘Nobody’s perfect, Leighton - I wasn’t the best daughter to my parents, or the best friend to some lonely girl stuck in a dust bowl town with no family, but that doesn’t make me label myself as bad and just roll over and quit. It makes me more convinced I owe it to my friend to stop the people who took her life.’
Something in Vicki’s eyes convinced Leighton she would not be dissuaded on this one.
‘Look,’ he sighed. ‘If we do this, we need to plan this out. I can call both the Bureau and the station in the morning. I can ask dispatch to let Gretsch know what we’re planning to do. Maybe they could send some support. But, if the bus actually shows up, you do not get on it, okay?’
‘Of course.’ Vicki nodded enthusiastically.
‘It might be better if I stood with you.’
‘Then, the bus maybe wouldn’t stop - all the missing people were travelling alone. Plus, if it slows down long enough for me to make like I’m going to get on, you would still be able to call in the cavalry.’
Leighton turned his head, and looked back towards the ocean.
‘If we are going to do this, I want you to be armed. Take my revolver, okay?’
‘Sure.’
‘You’ll be armed, you promise?’
Vicki nodded. ‘I promise.’
‘Okay, we’ll do it.’
33
The night shift in the Midland Truck Repair Centre was thankfully over for Mike Bernal. As he drove along the deserted stretch of road from Peoria to Blythe, he was lost in thought. When his radio crackled, and hissed to life he switched it off, and sighed.
Things between him and Janey had been at a low point, and he felt something needed to change. It seemed they rarely spoke, except to exchange functional information, and even these simple conversations seemed to be loaded with unexpressed dissatisfaction.
On some nights, he would go sit in the truck, smoking a cigarette, and listening to the emergency channels on his scanning radio. He knew it was illegal to listen in on those crackly frequencies, but it beat the hell out of cable television. As he sat in the darkness, he often stared at the stars, and visualised whatever drama was unfolding out there on the roads or in the nearby towns.
Mike wondered momentarily about whether he should have brought her flowers, like he had done the previous week. It had worked to the extent the conversation was, at least for the Saturday, less depressing. But, then, to continually bring home gifts to raise the atmosphere to normality would be seem to almost be rewarding her distance. It would possibly just be simpler to ask her what was wrong, but he guessed he already knew the answer to that.
Janey had turned forty years old just two months earlier. He still found her as attractive as ever, but he often found her scrutinising her reflection in the bathroom mirror. He suspected she was lonely. In some respects, he understood it couldn’t be easy living in such an isolated property, with no real neighbours for miles, but the secluded bungalow had been her dream house. At least, it had been, at first.
Mike’s jeep was rounding the curve of Tom Wels Road, when the speeding bus nearly hit him. The narrow road was neither designed for, nor accustomed to, an intercity bus. It thundered around the corner, taking up most of the middle of the road. The suddenness of the unexpected wall of metal, shuddering towards him, forced Mike to skid on to the dusty verge of the road. This misshapen verge of the road was so strewn with rocks the wheels of the jeep shuddered and threw up a cloud of debris, forcing him to a stop. He swore, as he slammed a fist against the dashboard. Glancing in his side view mirror he found - as expected - the bus was long gone into the cloud it had left in its wake.
Whilst he waited for the dust to settle, Mike pulled a packet of Winston cigarettes out of the glove box, removed one from the pack, and pushed in the cigarette lighter. When it popped, he used it, and blew a grey cone of smoke out. His brief brush with death left him off-centre for a minute. Staring into the dry scrub-land, his eyes fell on the distant Rockies, and he felt the soothing effects of nature. It seemed perhaps more important than ever to get things back on track at home,
Once his rattled state of mind had settled, Mike restarted the engine, and drove off the verge and back on to the road. He drove much more slowly around the next bend he came to. He knew this corner well, as it was located only fifty meters from his home. Perhaps if he had been driving faster, he would not have noticed the thing at the side of the road. This small fact would be something he would think about for years afterwards. But, the slow pace allowed him to catch a glimpse of it - a bright yellow tennis shoe, just like the ones his wife wore. This was not a soft pastel yellow, but rather the screaming bright colour of emergency services. Whenever she wore them around the house, Mike would call her Big Bird or BB for short. What a strange coincidence, Mike thought, that a shoe, just like his wife’s, should be discarded in the scrub land so close to their house.
Mike smiled to himself, and decided he would use this funny fact to break the ice when he got back to the house. He would ask Janey if her shoes had started breeding. Maybe they could take a walk along the verge together, so he could show her the lone shoe. He could tentatively take her hand on the walk back and offer to fix brunch, or they could go out to somewhere nice in Blythe - get back on track together.
Steering into the driveway of his sprawling bungalow, Mike switched off the engine, and stepped out of the jeep.
At the side of the house white, clean clothes were drying on the taunt washing line. This sight was always something which reminded Mike of his childhood, and he found inexpressible comfort in the fact Janey was so reliable in her quietly meticulous care of their home.