Chico.
He’d come from the town of Chico.
Which was an overnight drive – about seven hours in the family station wagon – to the Los Angeles playground he’d been left at as a four-year-old. He thought about waking up in his clothes, not his pajamas.
Shep looked over at him inquisitively.
Digging in the glove box, Mike found a map buried beneath a raft of cassette tapes and fought it open across the dash. ‘The house I grew up in. It’s about fifty miles from here.’
‘Which way?’
‘Southeast. On the 99.’
Shep wheeled sharply left, Mike nearly banging his head against the window. When he looked up, he saw the freeway sign fly past on the ramp entrance. Within the hour he’d be standing on the front porch of his childhood home. It didn’t seem possible.
A throb at his temples reminded him that he’d stopped breathing. He caught a glimpse of himself in the sun visor’s mirror. His different-colored eyes – one brown, one amber – peered back from a face that had gone pale. A few deep inhales brought back a bit of color to his cheeks.
He found a red pen in the glove box and circled the towns that had popped up in name since Dodge and William had fastened onto his trail. Sacramento, home to Rick Graham’s State Terrorism Threat Assessment Center. Redding, William Burrell’s last-known address. Red Bluff, Kiki Dupleshney’s stomping grounds. Chico, former home of Mike’s parents. All within a 150-mile span of Northern California.
Shep kept driving and kept silent, and Mike loved him for it. He pushed aside the map and flipped deeper into the file. That old Polaroid of his father, the sun-faded face so much like his own. And endless data on Mike and his friends and acquaintances, much of the same information he’d found in the folder he’d taken from the smashed-up van.
The bottom page featured a single typed note. No letterhead, no signature, no watermark.
Parent names: John and Danielle Trenley. Your cover: Dana Gage, the grown daughter of the Trenleys’ former next-door neighbors. You are the Trenleys’ will executor. You have significant assets to assign but can do so only once you’ve corroborated Michael Wingate’s heritage and family history. If he is our target, he should prove emotional and unpredictable on the subject of his parents. He was abandoned by them at the age of four.
Do not try to contact us.
We will find you.
Mike was gripping the page too tightly, his thumb leaving an indentation. He relaxed his hand and read the note a second time.
The language seemed too crisp to have been written by William or Dodge. Mike pegged it for a document generated by Rick Graham out of his impressively titled state agency. As for “Trenley”, Hank had turned up nothing for a John or a Danielle by that name. Had Graham given Kiki a fake name to foil any prospective searches?
Shep had said something.
Mike said, ‘What?’
‘You were supposed to ring Danville ten minutes ago.’
Mike placed the call. Hank answered in the midst of a coughing fit.
‘You okay?’ Mike asked.
‘Pain meds have me shitting like a rabbit, but at least I’m not a terrorist on the lam.’
Mike gave him the broad strokes. He glossed over leaving Kat behind, trying to make it a fact like all the others. Nonetheless Hank offered a quiet, ‘Jesus.’
‘They still have an eye on you?’ Mike asked.
‘I checked the office phone yesterday, and it showed an extra voltage draw on the line. They probably have something up at the junction box. Which is noteworthy.’
‘Why?’ A highway-patrol car passed, going in the opposite direction, and Mike twisted to watch until it faded from sight.
‘Because if it was legit,’ Hank was saying, ‘they’d tap the line from the phone company’s switch or use electronic intercept, both of which are undetectable. So Graham’s doing this without a warrant. If you can produce some evidence – I mean concrete evidence of corruption in his investigation of you, or his link to William and Dodge-’
‘We’re working on it. And along those lines, we got the plate number of the truck Dodge and William drove when they hired Kiki Dupleshney. Can you run it for me?’
‘Course. I’ll see if I can access the databases through a colleague’s log-in so it won’t be traceable. Plate number?’
Mike read it off.
Hank said, ‘What’s your callback number? Don’t worry, I’ll use a pay phone.’
Mike gave it to Hank, who recited it back twice, committing it to memory.
‘Listen, Mike, with the medical costs and making my… arrangements, I’m running a bit low. And you can’t exactly mail me a check.’
‘Hank, I’m sorry.’ Mike tapped his head in reproach. ‘I have cash. Plenty. I’ve just been totally-’
‘Of course. Don’t worry.’
Mike opened the bag at his feet and surveyed the money. ‘Is twenty grand enough?’
‘Too much.’
‘Not even close,’ Mike said.
‘I was thinking of slipping out of town away from watchful eyes anyway. And… well, all roads lead north, don’t they?’
The windshield threw back the road guide’s reflection, the red circles Mike had drawn standing out like a cluster of hives. He couldn’t deny that he sensed it, too, a narrowing, as if the last thirty-one years were a funnel to this one square inch of map. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I guess they do.’
‘I’ll head your way, and we can settle up in person. Hell, maybe I can even be of service.’ Hank gave a wry chuckle. ‘A last hurrah. I’ll call you when I’ve sourced that license plate. I have to figure out how to go about it covertly, so it could take a little time.’
A sign flew past. CHICO – 47 MILES.
‘It’s fine,’ Mike said. ‘I’m gonna need the time.’
The walkway rolled out before Mike like a concrete arrow leading to the front door. Standing at the curb, hands shoved in his pockets, cool wind biting at his ankles, his neck, he confronted the house.
His house.
Much had changed, but he recognized the porch and the asphalt roof shingles and the fanlike spread of the driveway. The louvered shutters, he realized, he’d inadvertently duplicated on the dream homes of Green Valley. The memory of this place pulled up through the murk, an anchor rising, dredging with it more details from the depths. He knew that the gnarled pine in the side yard smelled like Christmas when it rained, that the back patio dipped on the left side, that the gutter over the window there on the east corner used to drip patterns onto his pane. He recalled the large volcanic rocks that had once dotted the front walk, how he’d tried to tip one over once to catch a lizard, and when he’d held up his palms afterward, they were covered with blood. His mother in the kitchen brandishing a magazine at a circling blowfly – Let’s wave him out of here, honey. This little guy’s a bad omen. He half expected to see his father sitting on the front step, sleeves cuffed, smoking a flaking cigar. If he was alive, what would he look like now?
Inside, a young family was pulled up to a kitchen table, the scene glowing out at the dark street like something festive. Mike could see that there were no more yellow tiles sage incense and the mother clearing the dinner plates was smiling and joking her skin, tan even in winter, scented faintly of cinnamon. A minivan was parked in the driveway You like our new station wagon, champ? They have wood paneling, see, but it’s not real wood. Run your fingers there and he turned his face into the teeth of the breeze, eyes drifting across the Gages’ house mint trim Doberman bit the Sears repairman and taking in the old lady rocking on the porch swing, patient and lined like time itself. He looked down the length of the planned-community street to a fenced lake – yes, there was a lake he slips on a mossy rock and his father’s hand clamps down on his shoulder, firm and steady, saving him from a wet spill and it carried the odor of algae, giving the breeze its wet weight. The other way a hill fringed with dense stands of trees was crested by a yellow sign, rusted and battered with age. The sign proclaimed DEER X-ING, that broad black X hooking something buried in Mike’s thoughts and reeling it squirming to the deck Hey, Joe, you know any street names start with the letter X? How ’bout Fuckin’ Xanadu?