“Maybe,” Delauney said. “But tomorrow it’s the ghost town, okay?”
“You won’t be disappointed,” I said.
Sophie was looking at me. She seemed unconscious of the intensity of her gaze or that I might be aware of it. I wondered what she saw in my face, whether there was something there that revealed more than I wanted her to see. There was a spray of freckles splashed beneath her eyes and across the bridge of her nose. She was beautiful. I wanted desperately to know what was inside her head at that moment, but Delauney leaned close and whispered something to her. Something I didn’t catch. She laughed and her face flushed red and I didn’t know what that meant. It was Cath’s bedtime, she said. I smiled to let her know it was okay, but I could see she was troubled. She told Delauney to stay a while if he wanted. But I felt troubled suddenly too, angry that she was going. I wished he’d kept his mouth shut.
“I gotta go, too,” I said, standing up. “Early start in the morning.”
“No problem, Henry,” Delauney said. “Thanks for all your help.”
I turned to Sophie. “It was good to meet you,” I said, shaking her hand, using formality just to feel the touch of her skin. There was no harm in it. “Enjoy your stay. You too, Cath — keep that eagle eye on your folks.”
Sophie frowned, as if puzzled at something I’d said. I left the bar and set off out into the quiet darkness. It was less than a mile back to the empty bungalow but it seemed like the longest walk I ever took.
Before I came to Death Valley I lived out on the Coast. I was a deputy in the San Luis Obispo ’s Sheriff Department. I was good at the job and had ambitions to make Sheriff one day. There was a woman I’d been seeing and I’d begun to think maybe she was the one. But things didn’t turn out the way I’d planned. Something happened I hadn’t counted on, one of those situations nobody could foresee. There was no time to think and what I did I did instinctively. IAD ruled that it had been self-defence but I knew as well as anyone that the kid never had a gun. After the investigation things began to fall apart at work and my girlfriend began to cool on me. A week after she left I quit the department and spent eighteen months drifting round the Midwest, feeling sorry for myself and listening to songs about regret. Living in Death Valley cured me of that. Like Robert Frost said, whatever road you’re on is the one you chose and the one you didn’t take is no longer an option. I came here, worked as a volunteer, then, after six months, got a ranger’s post and, in time, I saw there was no going back.
Some people find that hard to accept. This morning I got a call to check out a vehicle parked up at Quackenbush Mine. There was a dog in the back seat of the truck, a German Shepherd. Her tongue lolled out her open mouth and she managed a feeble wag of her tail against the seat when she saw me. The window was cracked open a half-inch but even so it must have been over 130 degrees inside. It took me twenty minutes to find the driver, coming down from Goldbelt Spring. He was a heavy-set guy, in shorts and vest, a 49ers cap hiding his close-cropped skull. Had a woman and two kids with him, a boy and a girl about ten or eleven.
“Is that your truck down there at the mine, sir?” I asked him.
“The Cherokee, yeah.”
“Your dog is dying in there.”
“Aw shit,” he groaned, lurching down the slope. “I knew this would fucking happen.”
They always say they knew what would happen. Which, instead of justifying what they did, only compounds the situation. He bleated on about how he didn’t want to keep the dog on a leash and how his wife kept on about you had to because that was the rule and so, in truth, it wasn’t his fault, he was just thinking about the dog. I led him back down to his vehicle, got him to open it up and lift the dog out onto the ground. Her eyes were glazed, her body still.
“She’s still alive,” the guy said. “I can feel her heart.”
“Step back out of the way,” I told him. I unholstered my gun, stuck the barrel against the dog’s chest and squeezed the trigger.
The woman screamed.
“Jesus Christ,” the guy said. “Jesus fucking Christ — you killed her!”
“No,” I said. “You did that.” I stood up and checked the vehicle over to see if there was anything else I could cite the son of a bitch for apart from animal cruelty. I gave him the ticket and drove off, leaving him to bury the dog in the dirt.
Heading south on the Saline Valley Road, I heard Rydell’s voice crackling over the Motorola, requesting assistance at an incident in Hidden Valley. I responded and told him where I was.
“It’s a vehicle come off the road, two people injured,” he said. “Quick as you can, Henry. Hannafin’s already on her way down from Grapevine.”
I spun the Expedition around, throwing up a cloud of dust as I accelerated north along the dirt road. My heart was racing like it knew what I was going to find but the truth was I had no real idea what to expect up there.
When I saw the truck turned on its side ten yards off the road, the feeling of anticipation disappeared, leaving me vaguely disappointed. Five kids were seated in a semicircle a few yards away from the vehicle. One of them, a fair-haired kid about eighteen, got up and came over to me. “I think Shelley broke a leg,” he said, nodding towards the others. “And Karl’s maybe busted an arm.”
“You the driver?”
He hesitated before nodding.
“You been drinking? Smoking some weed?”
“No way, man, nothing like that. Just took the bend too fast, I guess.”
All of them were cut and bruised but only the two he’d named were badly injured. Shelley looked like she was in a lot of pain. I was splinting her leg when Hannafin arrived and went to work on the others. When we had them patched up, we put Karl and Shelley in Hannafin’s vehicle and two others in mine. The driver made to get in front beside me but I shook my head. “Take this,” I said, handing him a two-litre bottle of water.
“What for?” He looked bewildered “Oh man, you saying I have to wait here?”
“There’s a wrecker on its way from Furnace Creek. Should be here in three hours.”
The journey to Grapevine took the best part of an hour. The two in the back remained silent for most of that time, either too dazed to talk or wary of saying something that would incriminate their buddy. Or maybe they sensed my own unease, a feeling of disquiet that had been bothering me all day. I’d been expecting some kind of revelation but all I had was the feeling that I’d been asking myself the wrong questions.
There was an ambulance waiting at Grapevine Station to take the two injured kids to the Emergency Room in Amargosa Valley. The other two said they’d wait at Grapevine for the tow truck to show up with their vehicle and driver. In the station office, Hannafin made fresh coffee while I stared out the window towards the mountains bordering Ubehebe Crater. She said something I didn’t catch and I didn’t ask her what it was.
“Is it any different today,” she said, “from how it was last week?”
“They’re the same,” I said, though I knew she wasn’t talking about the mountains.
She handed me a mug of steaming coffee. “You been keeping to yourself lately.”
I felt weary and disinclined to have the conversation she wanted.
“What’s bothering you, Henry?”
I sipped the coffee, trying put my thoughts in some kind of order.
“It’s good to see you’ve lost none of your charm and conversational skills.”
I forced a smile. “I’m sorry, Rae,” I said. “Got things on my mind, is all.”
“Anything I can help with?”
I liked Rae, liked her a lot, but that’s all it was. I wasn’t looking for any kind of relationship. I was never much good at explaining such things — feelings, or their absence. “Just some stuff I have to deal with,” I said. “Nothing that matters too much.”