“Okay,” Paul said. The sign indicating the Northstar ski resort area swept by in a blur. Paul stomped down again, the car swerved right, then left, then straightened itself on the road.
Wish flicked the radio on. A static howl filled the car.
Paul flicked it off. “Are you nuts?” he said. “I’m doing sixty on a dark wet road in the middle of a blizzard!”
“I just thought we’d see if there was a weather report on,” Wish said reasonably. “Anyway, we have nothing to worry about. There he is.”
Sure enough, there he was.
“Ooh,” Wish said, as the hail stopped suddenly and a beautiful starry night materialized like magic. “I just got my first good look. It’s a 1960s Arlen Ness chopper, customized in the seventies, I’d say. That’s a California streetdigger or lowliner, if you’re in the market. No wonder it’s noisy.”
This time, Paul jumped hard on the motorcycle’s tail and didn’t let go.
Once Cody Stinson’s motorcycle reached King’s Beach, he slowed down, scrupulously following the speed limit. They followed him through King’s Beach to Tahoe City, expecting him to stop, but he never did.
“The scenic route around the west shore,” Wish said. “He’s heading around the lake the hard way.”
“He’s nuts. He must have a death wish to take 89. A road designed by Lucifer,” Paul murmured, following as close as he could up and down the narrow, curving roadway above Emerald Bay, invisible a thousand feet below in the predawn. “He’s going all the way back to South Lake Tahoe.”
Stinson passed through the Y intersection at the bottom of the lake, riding along the boulevard.
“Where could he be going?” Wish asked.
“No idea.” By now, Paul had been without sleep for a good twenty hours. His mind simmered grayly, like overdone pot roast. “What I know is, Nina wants us to find him and get the police on him, so that’s what we’ll do the minute he stops for more than ten seconds.”
“Uh oh,” Wish said, straightening up. Wish, a local, knew the streets better than Paul. Paul knew only that they had made a turn up the highway toward the bright lights of the casino district, wherein sat Caesars, wherein was his bed, a warm place he liked. What he did not know was what subtle confluence of geography in the small town that constituted South Lake Tahoe had prompted Wish to utter those portentous words, “Uh oh.”
“So?” he asked as they turned off Lake Tahoe Boulevard toward Regan Beach.
“I thought Nina said this place was really, really private. Somewhere nobody knows about.”
“What place?” Paul asked, turning to follow Cody down a small, dark, empty street on the left.
“I mean, he’s definitely not the type I would expect to know,” Wish said, voice heavy with disapproval.
“Know what?” Paul said.
“Maybe a girlfriend told him or something.”
“Told him what?”
“About the shelter.”
There wasn’t any way to head Cody Stinson off before he got to the women’s shelter, so Paul continued to follow.
“He must know I’m right behind him.”
“If he does,” Wish said, “he doesn’t care.”
This seemed accurate. Cody stopped the chopper dead on a side street near the shelter, setting off on foot.
Paul and Wish did likewise, ditching the Mustang at the corner of Berkeley and Alameda. Paul, who hated mobile phones for completely unoriginal reasons, had bowed to necessity and bought one. He flipped it open and turned it on. The phone began its start-up routines.
Hurrying up the street, he heard himself huffing. Every time he came up here, he had to make the adjustment to the impossibly high altitude. He was tired of feeling red-faced, dried out, and oxygen-deprived. He wanted Nina to land in Carmel with him, in the richly oxygenated air at sea level. He wanted her to evacuate from her mountains, her frenzy of trouble, her daily trials, and move into a place where there was the placid calm of ocean and good healthy light.
The women’s shelter came into sight, Cody Stinson making headway up the steps.
“What’s he going to do?” Wish asked, astonished. “Just knock?”
He did knock. Nobody answered. He wasn’t brandishing a handgun, at least.
Paul punched 911 with great deliberation. “If some lamebrain woman has it in mind to answer the door,” Paul said, “we take him out.”
“Did you bring a gun?”
“No, I did not bring a gun,” Paul said. He had, in fact, left his gun behind in the glove compartment. It was the mistake of an amateur, and it made him worry about his edge and lack of sharpness, but by now four in the morning was creeping up, and Paul did not feel at his best. He knew he could take this guy if necessary. He had thirty pounds on him, height, superior physical training, and a will to succeed, he reminded himself.
“How do we take him out, then?” Wish whispered.
“Any way we can,” Paul answered.
Cody, at the door to the shelter, had started yelling. “Please, somebody let me in,” he called pathetically, pounding loudly. “It’s so cold out here.”
“Where are these people?” Paul said, giving attention to his inattentive phone. “Why don’t they answer?”
“ 911,” a bright voice piped.
He gave brief details, starting right in with the fact that Cody Stinson was a wanted man.
“We’ll be there asap,” the lady said, asap all one word.
“They’ll be here asap,” he told Wish.
But by now, Cody Stinson, impatient with the lack of response, had decided to take matters into his own hands. He wandered back out into the yard in front of the shelter, picked up a loose limb, held it high in one hand, and broke the front window. “What does it take to get you women’s attention, anyway?” he yelled.
A woman holding a rifle appeared in the window. Andrea Reilly.
“The police have been called,” she yelled. “If you don’t leave, you’ll be arrested and charged. Leave now.”
“I’m not here to cause anybody any trouble,” Cody Stinson whined. “I just want to talk. Are Brandy and Angel here by any chance? I heard they might be.”
Paul made his move. He ran up swiftly and quietly behind Stinson and pulled him down. Stinson didn’t resist or say a word as Paul straddled him and searched his pockets. Wish came over and said, “We got him, buddy!” and Paul heard the welcome siren of the South Lake Tahoe police at his back.
“Drop the gun!” the police ordered Andrea. “You there, freeze,” they advised Paul. He froze, the full weight of his body pressing down on Cody Stinson.
15
A FTER SOME PALAVER, the police arrested Cody and escorted him away, deaf to his protests. “I wasn’t doin’ nothin’! Hey, I got a right to come here, same as anyone else! Big deal about the freaking window! I said I’d pay for it!”
Back in his hotel room at Caesars, Paul left a message for Nina at the office, deciding not to wake her. He and Wish caught six hours of precious sleep, Paul on the bed, and Wish all over the easy chair. Then they got back into the car. After all the time they had spent driving recently, the Mustang felt about as comfortable as a camel. They wended their way six thousand feet lower in altitude to the city of Fresno, where the Vangs had recently moved, arriving just after the morning rush-hour traffic.
After the Gold Rush, not much had happened in Fresno for about a hundred and fifty years, except that tracts of ranch houses sprouted in place of orchards these days and strip malls lined the once-lazy country roads. Over the years immigrants from many lands had adopted Fresno. They found the pickings good in the agricultural central valley of California and didn’t mind the long series of hundred-degree days from August to October. They came mostly from Mexico and Central and South America, as always; they came from Bosnia and the Ukraine; and they came from the villages of Asia, the brave and the desperate, to stoke California’s goliath agricultural engine.