When Link returned to the mall that afternoon, there was a patrol car idling in front of the main entrance, where an officer was talking to a saleswoman, along with four boys as they fidgeted on their skateboards. Link asked what had happened. At first, he was alarmed that the cop addressed him so courteously, believing it must be a bad sign. But then he remembered his own uniform—the monkey suit, the clean-shaven face, and the tie around his throat—and he marveled at the effect. From his tone, the officer seemed to have already spent a long time piecing together a story. A girl had leapt into the fountain and made a scene, high on something, until her friends calmed her down and carried her out of the mall. He didn’t believe it to be much more significant than that.
When Link asked how he knew they were her friends, the officer said that numerous witnesses had seen them together in the food court.
Calmly, Link told the cop that the girl had been abducted. The police needed to get a description of the car and put out an APB.
The officer stared at him for a while with his mouth open, but then radioed to another unit in the parking garage, from where a muffled voice responded that the attendant hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary. The teenage boys had agreed with Link, claiming that she was trying to get away from “some stalker dude,” but, as they skateboarded in circles and hit each other, they seemed the least credible witnesses in the mall.
“If you’re not going to deal with this,” Link said to the officer, “then get back on the radio and find somebody who will.”
“Sir? We’re looking into that possibility. We’re talking to everyone who saw anything. Did you know this girl?”
Link didn’t answer, and it was amazing how long the cop went without losing his patience. He was a young kid himself, with his hat off and a touch of sunburn under his crew cut, and he had slow, trusting eyes that craved procedure. Link finally shook his head and walked away, accelerating through the glass doors.
He was light-headed and his fingertips were tingling, but he avoided drawing any conclusions. If this was a disaster, he couldn’t look at it yet. The air inside the mall was artificially cool and crisp, like another climate, and all around him the steel railings and shining glass looked as sterile as a hospital. He turned into a clothing store, where a few shoppers roamed amid the aisles, and he rushed to the front counter. Taking the phone from beside the cash register, he tried to call Lydia’s cell, then began dialing Kirby’s number, knowing but refusing to formulate the thought. When the salesgirl came to protest, he simply put his finger to his lips and said, “My wife just had a baby.”
The phone rang through until a strange voice answered. While looking up past the track lights and a steel staircase to a window striped with clouds, Link knew they had found Kirby, and the thought filled him with such anger and disgust he felt as if he’d just emerged from a long, violent blackout. He steadied himself against the counter and watched the salesgirl mouth the word, “Congratulations.”
The man on the line told him to start drinking again. His voice was crushed and airless, as if he were speaking between coughs. Jonah asked, “You’re not going to say anything about your friend, huh? You figure I’m just the answering service.”
The salesgirl gestured that it was okay for him to continue, then drifted away toward a customer. Link waited and said, “You’re going to pay worse than you know, motherfucker. Now just tell me where my daughter’s at.”
“The old biker,” said the voice. “I’ve heard a lot of stories about you.”
There were a few shoppers milling around the counter, so Link picked up the phone and moved a few paces away, as far as the cord would reach. He stopped beside a ladder that rested against a high wall of shelved jeans. “You’re the guy I want, right?” the voice asked. “Is this you?”
“Yeah, I’m the guy. Nice work.” The reception was spotty, and Link could hear rushing air and other murmuring voices. He thought he heard Lydia call him from the background.
“I want to talk to her,” said Link. “Put her on the phone.”
“No, I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
Never before had Link experienced the kind of hatred he felt for this voice on the phone, not in prison, not in the hospital, not for murders or betrayals: His mouth went dry and his eyeballs stung; his palms dampened and his skin bristled. The intensity of the feeling muddied his thoughts, and for a while he could only listen to the kid’s strained breathing.
The salesgirl was folding sweatshirts behind Link, so he moved forward, putting his head down into a cubicle of jeans, and whispered, “I’m going to say it real straight to you here, kid. You’re a businessman. You’re a smart guy. I think you’re going to know a good deal when you hear one.”
“Oh, Jesus,” he said, exasperated. “Here comes the pitch.”
“I’m going to make you a trade. You come back and get me, and you let her go. Just listen, don’t hang up. I’m going to tell you why this is the right thing to do—from your standpoint.”
“Enlighten me.”
“I know twice as much as Lydia does. I know all about your business—and I know exactly who to talk to over your head. I know the houses from Culver City to Valencia, man, and I figure you skimmed—what?—about a hundred or two off every load. I won’t go to the cops, buddy; I’ll go to the shot callers. I’ll get in touch with the cell heads, L.A. and Orange County; and if I have to, I can talk to the AFO directly. I’m not a big man here, but I did a lot of time and made some friends over the years, and I got people who can get me through the door. They’ll be real interested in solving this problem.”
There was a windy pause on the line, until finally he said, “Don’t threaten me with something like that, old man. I know my situation better than you do. Besides, we just killed your daughter about fifteen minutes ago. She’s already dead.”
“No, you didn’t,” said Link. “If you did, then it’s easy: We’re both dead men. I got no fear of dying, kid, and I hope you’re the same. You better hope you can trust those idiots around you, because they’re going to have to stay loyal for years. And while you run out of money, there’ll be a good bounty on your head. And let me tell you something: You might stay alive for a month or so, but wherever you go on earth, these people are going to find you. I’ll find you. I’ll offer my services for free. You can do it like that, or you come back and get me. Clean up the mess now, while you still can.”
“You know what? I’m amazed. After everything your daughter hoped about you, you really are just another stupid biker. Do you honestly think I’d fall for this shit?”
“It’s a simple trade. You tell me where you want me to be. I’ll meet you anyplace out there in the desert—so long as we can make a deal. Then you take me and you let her go. You set up the meeting place, you control the situation. How could I do anything but follow my word?”
“And why would you trust me? I could just kill both of you.”
“I don’t trust you, but I’ll tell you why you’re not going to do that. Because this is personal with Lydia. You don’t want to kill her; you want to hurt her. You want her to suffer for what she did. I know you, man. I know all about you. You want her to see what you see. You want that kid to get it—and it sounds like that’s all you ever wanted from the beginning. And you know what? Killing her won’t do a damn thing. You’ll be angrier afterward; you’ll feel worse than before. No, you make her watch me go down. Whatever you meant for her, you go ahead and do it to me. Mark my words—she walks away and she’s no danger to you. She’ll remember, and that’s how the professionals do it. They let one person get away, so they can build the legend. You make her carry this for the rest of her life. Watching her father die. You know what that’s like, kid. Right?”
“What the fuck are you talking about now?”
“Like I said, I know who to talk to.”
Through the crackling reception, Link could hear Jonah talking to someone else in the car, then he said into the receiver, “If I gave you a meeting place—it would be just you. If you tried to bring anybody, or do anything unexpected . . .”
“Of course.”
The manager was approaching Link across the store, trying to get him off the phone. The salesgirl interrupted, and Link could hear her excitement as she retold the story about his wife in delivery. Link glimpsed the manager’s face, however, and saw that he was far more skeptical. He stopped beside a table of military fatigues and said, “Sir, we don’t allow this phone to be used by customers under any circumstances. . . .”
Jonah said, “Give me a number where I can call you back. We’re going to find a place to meet.”
Link looked down at the phone, then at the manager, and asked, “What’s the number here? It’s an emergency.”
“Sir, this is not a public phone. There’s a pay phone by the restrooms.”
“Is it a boy or a girl?” asked the salesgirl, drifting away down an aisle.
“A girl,” said Link. He pulled out a wad of cash from his pocket, a few hundreds along with a mess of tens and twenties, and he stuffed them into the shirt pocket of the manager, who looked down, flabbergasted. “I don’t have any cigars,” said Link. “So buy yourself a pack of Cubans. Now what’s the fucking number?”
The Impala and the white rental car drove past the sand dunes and headed northeast along a dimming horizon, following a highway so desolate that there were soon no longer any ranch fences to block the migrating tumbleweed. Lydia sat upright now, her wrists duct-taped together and her hands in a praying formation, staring out the window with a detached, exhausted feeling, as if she were watching television without sound. She had been crying for close to an hour, intermittently pleading or cursing, until she had overheard the conversation between Jonah and her father and fortified herself with the idea of an extra hour or two of waiting. That time seemed to stretch out for miles, and she found herself fixated almost hypnotically on shadows and formations of clouds.
On the alkali flats, the two cars turned off the highway and drove over the crusty desert toward dark mountains in the distance. For what must have been twenty minutes, the rental car bounced and rocked over the rough ground, faintly uphill across the badlands, over cracked and sloping earth that looked like a hatching eggshell. Twice the car’s wheels got stuck in trenches, but each time Choop was able to free them by reversing and pulling forward again.
They slowed on a stretch of flat ground, the wheels grinding like pestles and stopping. A few hundred yards farther the ascent became steeper, into hills of flaking shale and carved sandstone. The wind was picking up, blowing dust across the windshield and obscuring the horizon with an auburn haze. The Impala idled just a few feet away, with its front fender mangled and its headlight smashed. Jonah tried to call Tito on his cell phone, but there was no longer any reception. He gestured for Tito to roll down his window while he did the same. Leaning out, his sculpted hair swarming out of place, Jonah hollered, “We’re not going to be able to call out here—so let’s figure this out.”
The six men gathered between the cars for a conference, each squinting and grimacing into the stinging wind. Jonah’s white shirt had come untucked, inflating like a sail off his thin shoulders. He had a gun nestled in his belt. The others gathered into a circle around him, close enough to hear his voice over the bigger gusts, but Iván soon wandered away toward the drainage gullies beside the car, watching his feet like a dejected child. Choop stared away at the mountains; Tito stopped listening to sit on the hood of the Impala and pout. Lydia had not seen this sullen behavior before. Rather than confront his brother or Iván, Jonah spoke with still more force to Chase and Cully, who nodded along. They were worn out and frayed and short with each other. It looked as if they had been on a long expedition together, filled with mishaps, and Jonah had the shrill, exasperated quality of an overwhelmed guide.
As they hollered over the wind, Lydia could hear some of the plan. Jonah wanted to draw her father to this spot in the desert, elevated enough that they could watch his approach off the highway. Then they would escort Link and Lydia to another isolated place to assure that he hadn’t planned an ambush. Someone would have to drive a few miles south to where there was still cell phone reception, and relay the directions to him: “Give him the mile marker.”
Next, Jonah wanted someone to wait in the Impala at the highway’s edge in order to make sure that no one came along behind Link.
Lounging on the hood with his eyes closed, Tito yelled that this part of the plan was pure bullshit. Jonah grew so angry that he needed to walk a circle around the cars to calm himself.
Rolling up his sleeves, Jonah paced back to Tito. His voice was buried in the wind, but Tito was speaking loudly enough for Lydia to hear him. “Because we’re going to take him to another spot, right? So if one person is waiting out there, then what are you going to do—tie him to the fucking roof, dude? There’s not going to be enough room in that shit car.”
“I know that, Tito! Jesus. So three of you—you, Iván, and Cully—you ride down to the highway, wait for us—”
“I’m not going with fucking Cully, dude. I’ll shoot his fat fucking head off, I swear to God.”
Cully said, “Fuck you, you whiny little bitch.”
Jonah was so livid that he pulled out his gun, walked a few steps away, and fired twice out into the empty desert.
After pacing listlessly around the desert, kicking rocks, Iván returned to the outskirts of the discussion with Tito. He sighed and rolled his head around as Jonah stomped back, waving the gun at him.
Lydia yelled through her closed window that she had to pee, and Cully made an exaggerated crying face to her.
Iván stood directly beside Lydia’s window now, motionless except for his flapping V-necked shirt. “What are we doing?” he asked, not seeming so much mutinous but defiant in the way of a student who refuses to pay attention. Jonah was now gesturing with the gun, reiterating his plan, emphasizing her father might have bikers waiting to surround them. “So wait down there. Then you follow us back down to the dunes, and we take care of them there.”
Iván shook his head at the ground. His stubbornness had an odd, introverted quality, as if he were too ashamed to face anyone. Something had sickened him deeply over the past few days and he was a different person, all of the swagger gone. “Nah, man,” he said. “I don’t want to be like that.”
It was the most unthreatening Lydia had ever seen Iván. All of the posturing was gone, and he seemed to hang in the air, draped with loose laundry, flapping in a stiff wind. This made it even more astonishing when Jonah lifted his pistol and shot him through the leg. Iván fell down and writhed in the dirt. As if firing were not an act of violence but dismissal, Jonah immediately turned away and began clarifying the instructions to the others. Choop lunged down and began dragging Iván to the Impala, while Chase and Cully quickly backed up Jonah by drawing their guns. Tito was shouting furiously, but he quieted down when Jonah put his gun on him. “Anybody think they’re going to get out of this shit without me, they’re dead fucking wrong. Now do your job, and do as you’re told. Now.”
Choop lifted Iván into the backseat of the Impala with tenderness, then returned to his job, undaunted, nodding at Jonah’s order to drive the rental car. Cully took Iván’s gun, duct-taped his hands and ankles, then joined the rest in the idling white car, while Chase hollered from outside that he would make sure Tito didn’t try anything stupid. Somehow, after this series of tantrums, they seemed to regain their focus. All of the bitterness between them terrified Lydia, as if even in the worst situations a person still longed for someone clearly in charge.
Tito gunned the engine of the Impala and fishtailed downhill with spinning tires, an automotive display of anger. The car shrank against the murky horizon until it was no more than a moving cloud of dust.
The remaining three waited with Lydia in the rental car to stay out of the gritty wind. Under the visor mirror, Jonah tried to fish out a piece of sand in his eye. The car was silent except for the whistling of air through the unsealed windows. Lydia rested her head against the glass and gave a slight humming sound.
“Don’t you start in on me now,” said Jonah. “I got even less patience for you.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
There was a long silence. Beside her, Cully had taken off his shoes to pour out a few small rocks, and the car filled up with the rank smell of his feet. Lydia asked, “Does the radio work?”
“No, the radio doesn’t work.”
“Maybe AM radio works.”
“We’re not listening to the radio.”
After another long silence, Lydia asked, “What are you going to do to my dad?”
Jonah twisted around to look at her, and she saw that some of the discolored gauze and bandages on his neck had accumulated more grit and dust from outside, like air filters. As if he had been rehearsing the line in his head, he told her, “You did this to yourself, Lydia. I didn’t make this happen to you. You need to understand that.”
Cully had been going through Lydia’s purse to occupy himself, and he began unwrapping pieces of gum. She asked if she could have a piece, and he said, “Open your mouth.”
“Jonah—tell him to give me a piece. I haven’t eaten anything all day.”
“I’m going to give it to you, bitch—just open your mouth.”
She opened her lips and Cully tried to pitch the square of bubble gum into her mouth, laughing as it bounced off her chin and onto the floor. “Wait, wait—let me go again.”
“Not now. It’s got shit all over it.”
Cully brushed off the fuzz from the floor mat, then began taking aim again. “Come on. Open.”
“No.”
“Then you don’t get any.”
“Just fucking give it to her, Cully! Jesus Christ.”
She opened her mouth faintly, and Cully slapped the gum between her teeth, palming her face for a moment. His hand smelled like wet cardboard. She called him an asshole and he made a fake whimpering sound.
For ten minutes on the dashboard clock, the car was silent except for Lydia’s chewing; but soon Cully began whispering to her, trying to slide the barrel of the gun between her crossed legs. Jonah watched in his mirror and didn’t seem to care, and this made Lydia’s eyes well up with frustration. Jonah grew angry at the sight of more tears, and he said, “Why don’t you accept some fucking responsibility for once in your life. You want to see this?” He peeled back the bandages on his neck to reveal a messy patchwork of sutures and grafted skin, a seam as deep as Frankenstein’s. “You did that. As far as I’m concerned, whatever happens now is fair game.”
Choop pointed to something in the distance, and each of them stared ahead at a moving smudge of sand and dust, looking like a wind devil traversing the scrub.
“Fuck, he’s early,” said Jonah.
They each stepped out of the car and Lydia was ordered down onto her knees. Cully held his gun against the back of her head, hitting her with the barrel.
The wind had grown so strong that portions of the earth seemed to be shedding into the air. The last thin topsoil formed a spindrift along the ground. Already the light was obscure, the sun falling and turning red in the mineral haze.
When her father was visible as a speck in the distance, casting a wake of sand and debris, she could already hear the engine, sounding like an angrier and deeper wind approaching. Then the bike slowly became visible, a dim shape in the murky air, and her father was soon distinct, with a tie waving like a streamer behind him.
He stopped the bike about two hundred yards downhill, idling.
“What is this motherfucker doing?” asked Cully.
Her father stepped off the bike with his hands in the air, his clothes gusting.
“Let’s go!” shouted Cully.
“Hold on,” said Jonah. “He’s just showing us he’s not carrying.”
Her father took off his jacket and waved it beneath him like a matador, then he draped it over the handlebars.
“Okay, keep going!” shouted Jonah, gesturing at his own clothes.
The jacket nearly blew away, so Link wadded it up and secured it under the kickstand. Then he loosened his tie and carefully unbuttoned his white shirt, knotting the sleeves around the handhold. He took off his tie and threaded it through the spokes. He stood up again and turned around, stripped to his undershirt, pulling out the pockets of his suit pants to show that they were empty.
“The shoes!” shouted Jonah, lifting his own and slapping them.
Link waved that he understood. He stooped down beside the bike, taking a long time to untie one of the laces, then he placed his shoes and socks against the back tire.
He walked gingerly ahead now on bare feet, hands in the air, until he was close enough that Lydia could see his heavy breathing. Jonah said, “Keep the gun on Lydia—he might still have something.”
Lydia could see her father’s eyes now. He was just a few feet down the road when Choop met him and frisked his pants. Lydia could read nothing on his face—no fear or plans or anger. He seemed to be in a trance.
Choop nodded that he was okay, and Jonah called down, “Let’s hurry up and get them both in the car. We’re going someplace else, old man. Bet you didn’t think of that.”
They cramped together into the backseat with Lydia flattened against the window. Cully managed to squeeze into the back alongside them, keeping his gun tight on Link. Jonah sat in the front seat, guarding Lydia; Choop drove slowly ahead down the dirt path, his gun resting on the dashboard.
As Choop steered along the drainage route between rocks and brush, Jonah began to fiddle with his cell phone. Cully peeled a strip of duct tape with his teeth while he still held the gun in one hand. Lydia had expected her father to put up a fight before getting into this cramped car, but he offered his wrists for Cully to bind, as stoic as a prisoner after last rites. As the car stopped, he put his lips against the crown of Lydia’s head and whispered, “Hey, kid.”
Strung with his remaining clothes, the chopper stood in the middle of the only clean pathway onto the smooth expanse of desert. Choop stepped out of the car to move it. Jonah’s gun was in his lap, his head down beside the dashboard as he fussed with the antenna of his phone, all the while mumbling, “Whatever shit you try, old man—I figured it out already.”
The seat belt reminder rang steadily.
Lydia saw what she thought was a gesture to her, a flicker of his index finger, pointing to the ground. He nudged his elbow into her side.
Lydia’s mind was working as quickly as it would in an accident. She understood. In the corner of her eye she saw Choop grab the handlebars and lift the kickstand off the bundled jacket. She threw herself down against the passenger seat. Choop’s motion pulled a trip wire, which detonated one of Preacher’s claymores into a sudden splash of dirt and blood against the windshield, hurtling debris from the motorcycle like shrapnel around the car. The blast was so sudden that Cully and Jonah were thrown into a moment of confusion. The windows shattered; the air bags deployed with a gunshot sound, and the engine shut down. The burning remnants of the bike’s fuel tank caught fire and cast tumbling sparks across the desert.
From her curled position, Lydia could tell that Jonah had been struck hard by the passenger-side air bag. Her father had gone straight for Cully’s gun, and both men were holding it now, wrestling to keep it aimed away. At the same time, Link kicked the passenger seat just above Lydia’s head, collapsing it forward. As the gun discharged, deafening Lydia, Jonah panicked and scrambled out of the car.
But her father stayed calm, almost robotic, maneuvering the pistol as Cully repeatedly hit the trigger, cutting through the remaining windows like cracked ice, puncturing the visor, the roof, and the headrests. So loud and so close, each shot seemed less like a noise than a blow to the ears. Her father dropped his leg over her, as if to shield her from the random barrage. While with one hand he pinned the gun against the edge of the driver’s seat, he reeled something up from the back of his throat and slashed it across Cully’s face: a razor, buried in an eraser, tied to a wisdom tooth by a string. It was a brutal prison trick that forced Cully to drop the gun and grab his bleeding eye.
But Cully realized his mistake, and, as the gun fell to the floor mat, they both grappled for it, until a shot fired and the ceiling was sprayed red.
The blood washed across the seats and over the floors; it was in Lydia’s hair, syrupy thick; and, as if she had been submerged entirely in cold water, she didn’t breathe or move—not until she heard her father groan, “Ah, fuck,” scooping blood from his eye sockets. She realized that the bullet had gone straight up through Cully’s chin.
Another series of shots came from outside.
Link opened the door and Cully’s body fell partway out onto the ground, his legs still hooked over the seat.
Jonah was now stalking around the car, firing through the broken windows. Lydia caught a glimpse of him and saw how badly he was cut from the glass of the windshield. Holding his neck, he was bleeding heavily, and Lydia thought that his stitches must have pulled open in the fray. But he was firing wildly as he retreated behind a tall bluff.
Link slashed the razor through the duct tape on Lydia’s hands. He was out of breath. When he tried to climb into the driver’s seat past the deflating bags, he winced and grabbed at his side, falling backward again. So Lydia crawled behind the wheel and restarted the car. The wind was blowing sand and smoke through the broken windshield, and she tried to wipe the blood from her face and eyes where it stuck to her lashes.
Far downhill, she saw the Impala churning toward them. She said, “They’re coming back, Dad—there’s three more in the other car.”
“Turn us around,” he said.
She shifted into reverse and rode them uphill. Cully dragged for a few yards before dropping out the open door and rolling beneath the tires. Lydia said with her voice quivering, “Uh, my God, that is so fucking wrong.”
Jonah emerged out of hiding and fired two shots, one shrieking through the aluminum of the passenger door, sounding like a zipper. As Lydia craned her head around to face the path behind her, she saw her father pulling up his shirt, breathing with jolts in his chest and shoulders. She couldn’t tell if the blood on his shirt was Cully’s or his own. He sagged onto his side and dropped the magazine from the pistol: “What kind of gun is this thing?”
“It’s a Luger or a Ruger or something,” shouted Lydia. “Did he have a full mag?”
“Just about.”
“Then they went shopping,” she said, over the ascendant sound of reverse gear. “That means they’re loaded down there.”
“You got to go to a gun show for shit like this,” he said quietly. “That fucking hollow-tip shit your boyfriend is firing through here—fancy motherfucker. I see why you liked him.”
He examined his stomach above the belt line, where the skin looked scorched with gunpowder. Blood pooled and ran over his pants, and each time he touched the spot with his fist, there was more smeared across his fingers.
“Dad? Don’t even fucking tell me you’re hit.”
“Keep driving.”
She turned around and began accelerating over rough terrain, away from the Impala, which looked in the rearview like a tornado stirring up debris. The car bounced over ruts and trenches and sheared rocks, and at times Lydia could barely keep traction across loose shale.
Her father peered out the back window, grimacing, and said, “Your boyfriend just got in the other car.”
“Stop calling him that!”
Lydia ground uphill on a wind-stripped patch of rough ground, the tires losing grip and the car swiveling, turning diagonally against the slope, until the path flattened out again. The Impala was now gaining on them along a separate route, firing from a distance.
When a shot tore through the frame beside the door, Link said, “What the fuck are they firing back there?”
After bucking over a rough stretch, Lydia found a smoother run toward the mountains and began accelerating across miles of open badlands. She could hear nothing now but the drone of the engine and something stuck under the grille, knocking rhythmically beneath them. The wind blasted into her eyes. She smelled fire and blood and dust. The light faded and became so flat that it was hard to see the dips and gouges in the desert. Headlights didn’t help. It was that hour when the sky becomes the more discernible landscape, from the last lit edges of clouds to the sharp silhouettes of the mountains. Her father was suffering terribly in the backseat, his lips clenched, his arm pressed across his waist. Lydia narrowed her eyes, feeling a painful love for him that now seemed more penetrating than the fear that had bound her all afternoon. “If I could get around these guys, Dad—I’ll get back to the highway—”
“I don’t even know where the highway is,” he said, sounding as if his lungs were full of smoke. “Hey, the bullet went right through me, kid. I just found it in the seat.”
The car glanced violently off a sharp rock, and, with a sound like another gunshot, the left tire blew out. Lydia pushed hard on the accelerator and continued worming forward on the flat, but she soon came to a wide crater, stretching out across the sloped desert. She ripped off the deflated airbag and pounded on the wheel.
Ahead of them, the ground rapidly descended into shadows, down loose rocks and chipped shale into a deep, barren valley. The slope was far too steep for a car, but it looked as if a person could navigate it, riding downhill on the seat of his pants, a hundred yards or more along an unstable cliffside into the depression, which looked as if it might be the softened remains of an old detonation site. Farther down in the dimness, the crater stretched out and blurred into years of accumulated rockslides, a rough ladder of loose scree to the base of the first coal-colored foothills and the mountains beyond.
The Chevy Impala was coming right for them, throwing up a wake of dust. Its headlights flashed on. Lydia waited in a windless pocket just beneath the barricade of hills.
Her father had also been studying the slope for a few silent moments. Finally he said, “Lydia—listen to me. I’m pretty bad. This is more than a souvenir this time. Get out and start climbing down that hillside. You got a couple minutes and I can hold these guys off you. Then you follow that crevice there, right into the mountains. Head due west, follow the last light. And keep your eyes open—”
“Dad, stop it.”
“Because that’s the Naval Testing Range in there—and there’s going to be bombs and ordnance all over the ground. You go right through, kid, watch every step, and you’re going to come out the other side of this.”
“I’m not listening to you.”
“And when you get out—I want you to figure out a way to get in touch with a guy in Calipatria. His name is Arturo Rios Tehada, prisoner number C-77105. Remember that number. Say it over and over. Come on. C-77105, C-77105.”
“No, Dad,” she said, chewing hard on her gum.
“You tell him what happened and he’ll try to help you. Are you listening to me?”
The car was rising to meet them, now just a dark shape against the lit skies.
“Why are you such a pessimist, Dad?”
“That’s not pessimism. That’s getting you out of here. That’s the most optimistic I ever been in my life. I’m ordering you, Lydia, right now: Get out and—”
“No!”
“I don’t have time to argue with you!”
“Then don’t argue.”
“Lydia, you stubborn fucking brat—get out of the car.”
“Fuck you if you think I’m leaving you here.”
“I’m going to count to motherfucking three, and if your bony ass isn’t sliding down that hill . . .” He winced, the pain of his shouting cutting through him. He held his ribs.
The Impala was right beside them now, and it drifted slowly, like a predator circling a wounded animal.
“I can still hold ’em off,” said Link. “One . . .”
“Dad, I just told you I’m not leaving.”
“Two.”
“Count to a million if you want to. If you think I’m getting out of this car without you—”
“Two and a half!”
“—then you don’t know me. All this time, and you never even knew me.”
He stared at her across the car in the last light. Behind her the Impala gunned its engine. It was battered and filled with tumbleweed in the grille, but it sank lower on the hydraulics, as if ready to prowl slowly ahead. Link was staring into her eyes, and he must have seen something he recognized, because he nodded and handed her the gun. “All right, baby—nice to meet you. Hold them off as long as you can.”
There were rifle barrels now emerging from the windows of the Impala, and Chase, his long hair in silhouette, rose up against the convertible roof to steady his gun. Lydia stared at the butt of Cully’s pistol as her father offered it.
“Fuck that,” she said. “Grab a seat belt.”
She turned the wheel and spun the tires, heading for the ledge, focusing on a path where the eroded rim had already given out in a partial landslide. As soon as Link realized what she was trying to do, he started to laugh, until it became a wincing cough. She hit the edge and the car dropped, accelerating into the fall, jolting downhill on shifting earth and a growing rockslide. Chips of shale and sandstone gave way and bounced all around, and the dirt and dust rose up into a full avalanche around the windows. Finally the angle sharpened and Lydia regained control over the buried wheels, steering and attempting to point downhill on a plummeting trail over twisted roots and dislodging rocks.
“Keep straight,” said Link, holding on, yelling over the hailstorm against the car. “We turn sideways, we’re rolling.”
Lydia blew a bubble and snapped it down. She flew back and forth against the wheel. At one point the car dropped so hard onto its front tires she thought they were about to flip end over end, but she came off the landing, skipping diagonally, and regaining some tiny bit of control by accelerating and turning back into the landslide.
“Don’t brake,” said her father.
All four tires were blown and shredded now, and she was spinning the rims, trying to control the car like a sled in the growing force of earth. But suddenly the ground sank entirely, a whole portion of the slope giving way, and the car tipped onto its side and rolled, crushing the roof against their heads. The collapsing hillside swallowed them, so that instead of tumbling they slid downhill as dirt rushed through the windows until—at last—they came to rest, buried in rocks and dust.
“Dad?”
“I’m here,” he said from the backseat, kicking aside stones.
“Oh my God, that was awesome! Do you believe that? We just took half the mountain down with us.”
“Calm down. We need to dig out of here.”
Within moments, she was digging in the twilight around the overturned car, keeping her eye on the Impala high above them. She could see the deep groove where they had torn down the hillside, a geologic sampling from the shale to the pinkish granite below, and it now looked even more difficult for anyone to follow them in the diminished light and down the shaky aftermath of the landslide. The shadows along the ridge were pacing back and forth like sentries on a high wall.
For a few minutes, Lydia was thrilled with herself for making the plunge, but this feeling evaporated as soon as she began helping her father out the open window. She realized from the tension in his body and the awkwardness of his movements that he was hurt worse than she had thought. He was shivering. Lydia wasn’t strong enough to lift him, only to help him crawl backward onto the silt at the bottom of the ravine.
Someone above fired a shot that sparked off the axle of the overturned car.
Link couldn’t stand, and he resisted her arms, seeming angry at first, until she understood that it was only a sharp reaction to the pain. She took the gun from him and fired back at the ridge. The shadows moved back behind the car. Far above, Jonah was moving with dizzy, injured paces, and she wondered if one of the random shots in the car hadn’t grazed him earlier.
Then Lydia helped her father to his feet, and supported much of his weight as he limped ahead along the softening ground. He had been hit in the stomach, and he couldn’t straighten his legs. Lydia needed to plant her feet and fight with all her weight to keep him upright.
Finally they found a barricade of sticks and logs, piled together from the runoff of some distant storm. Her father was gasping for air, sweating through his clothes. Lydia smelled the wound on him now, sweet and metallic. As she rested him against the thicket, he said, “In about . . . ten minutes,” coughing and grimacing, “it’ll be too dark for them to see us. Then we got to head deeper in. Are they coming down?”
“I don’t know,” she said, peeking out at the cliff. “One or two of them might. I know all four won’t. Jonah looks hurt.”
“Oh, shit,” he said. “I could sure use a fucking drink. What are the odds of me getting another sponsor now?”
Lydia covered her face, sniffed hard, and broke into a deep, emotional laughter. She tried to control herself, and the sound, wailing and stricken, was almost like tears. “You are such an asshole,” she said.
“Well, he was a good man. I don’t give a fuck about heaven, ’cept for guys like that.”
Lydia turned somber now, breathing hard and steady, and she whispered, “I got my cell phone, Dad. As soon as it’s dark, we could get up on top of one of those hills and get you help. I swear to God—”
“Come on, kid. There’s no reception for miles.”
For a long time, Tito stood on the ridge, howling like a wolf and firing off rounds. Lydia glanced around the rocks and saw that the Chevy’s headlights were now on, and the car was backing away from the edge. Maybe Jonah was hurt badly enough that they were pulling away; but she worried that they would regroup and come from another direction. She told her father that they were pulling back, and he said, “They’re driving right into an ambush.”
“Dad?”
“Crazy old buddy of mine, Count, if he timed it right. He was going to call in an accident right there at the mile marker. A Harley smashed into a rental car. That’s practically sacrilegious, but he promised me and I trust him. He just said, Good to have you back, old man.”
They were quiet for a while, listening for sounds along the rocks. Windless and clear, the night turned cold. They heard nothing. The world reduced to a plot of sandy earth and the starlight above. Link was shivering and Lydia tried to warm him by nuzzling close, but it was too painful and he jerked away. At this, Lydia began to cry quietly, mostly from fear. In the darkness she felt him place his hand onto her hair, working through it, his coarse thumb against her forehead. He grabbed her roughly but tenderly by the back of the neck, as if picking up a kitten, and he said, “Hey. Don’t spend one second of your life regretting this, kid. I wasn’t anything but dirt until you came along. You stay alive, you stay tough. Promise. Because I never knew a thing until right now. You saved more than my life, kid. And you better damn well remember that—or you never knew me either.”