Rigo rose, angling to see the screen.
“You look unwell, Deputy. Are you all right?”
Concern in the words. Suspicion in the tone.
I slid down the sofa, away from him, and snatched the duffel off the floor. “Something’s come up. I need to go.”
“How unfortunate. I had hoped we could continue with our conversation.”
“We will. Later.” I stood up and walked toward the door. “Stay as long as you’d like.”
He came along, first blowing out the candles.
Striding over the lawn I tapped the red pinhead to explode out the map, a set of coordinates hovering in the heart of the Altamont wind farm. The shortest route, thirty-one point eight miles, had a projected drive time of fifty-eight minutes.
I slung the duffel into the passenger seat and got into the car and waited with my hand on the ignition while Rigo got into his. I didn’t want him following me.
The sedan didn’t move. He was making notes, maybe. Waiting for me to leave.
I sat another twenty seconds, twenty seconds I did not have.
The sedan’s headlights came on. It drove away.
I let him reach the end of the block, then reversed squealing into the street.
I thought he might circle back after me, but the sedan’s brake lights shrank in the rearview. He was a homicide detective, like most of his ilk considered himself an intellectual, not some high-speed-pursuit hotshot. He’d come for me in due time.
I blew through the intersection and whipped onto 580, pressed centrifugally to the door. At the top of the ramp I came to a dead stop. It was 6:27, the peak of rush hour. Fires and outages had taken a few cars off the road, but any slack was offset by closures, short tempers, and wretched driving conditions.
My brother was scheduled to die at 6:53. GPS estimated a 7:24 arrival.
I forced in front of a semi and began bullying toward the interior shoulder.
“Call Luke,” I barked.
Voicemail.
“Text Luke.”
A robotic lady inquired sweetly what I’d like to say.
“I’m coming as fast as I can. There’s traffic. Please wait.”
She parroted my words. Was I ready to send? Yes, I yelled, ready, send, send. I was pushing from one lane to the next, perpendicular to traffic, raising honks and soundless screams of indignation, the Most Hated Man in the East Bay.
“Call Delilah Nwodo.”
“…Clay?”
“They texted me.”
“Who did?”
“Whoever has Luke. They’re going to kill him if I’m not there in twenty-five minutes. They sent a location for the meet. I’m forwarding it to you. When can you have a team?”
“Whoa, whoa, hang on. Where are you?”
“In the car. Be quiet on approach, they’re expecting me alone.”
“Clay. Wait a second.”
“I need to make some calls. Get back to me as soon as you have an ETA.”
“Wait wait wait wait wait. How do you know it’s them?”
“They have his phone. They sent a picture of him. He’s messed up, Delilah.”
“Clay. Listen to me. I hear you’re in a bad way, but you need to think. I’m sorry to have to say it but Luke could be gone.”
“I know that.”
“They’re playing you. Think about it like it’s someone else.”
“It’s not someone else.”
“Pull over and we’ll figure this out together.”
I’d reached the shoulder. “Send the team.”
I disconnected and pressed my foot to the floor.
Immediately she was calling me back. I ignored it, accelerating to forty miles per hour, fifty, sixty. I called Gabe Zaragoza, a former coroner now at the ACSO Special Response Unit, and left a rushed voicemail. Nwodo called again. Too soon for her to have done anything. She meant to talk me down. I sent her the picture of Luke’s ruined face and ran the needle up to eighty-five. Every pebble or crevice rammed a fist through the chassis. The engine sobbed. My car had a hundred thirty-four thousand miles on it. I maintained it, but this was a lot to ask.
“Half a mile ahead,” the nice robot said, “stop-and-go traffic.”
A Day-Glo orange work zone ran at me.
I braked and was thrown forward. The steering wheel bit into my rib cage. The orange resolved to a cautionary sign and cones. Beyond them, the shoulder was open, no break in the road and no work crew. I edged around and sped up.
“Call work.”
Deputy Lisa Shupfer answered: “What’s up, buttercup?”
I’d known her for ten years. Like Lindsey Bagoyo and Kat Davenport and Brad Moffett and everyone in an Alameda County Coroner’s uniform, she was my colleague and my friend.
I told her to contact Dublin station; coordinate with Delilah Nwodo at OPD. “She’ll fill you in.”
Shupfer said, “Okay.”
I covered the next eleven miles in eight minutes. Gridlock streaked past. The GPS kept doing double takes, unable to comprehend how I was making such superb time in the face of bumper-to-bumper traffic. It warned me of snarls and slowdowns then hastened to revise my ETA as I rocketed by. The shoulder contracted dramatically, forcing me to ride the yellow line till I got too close and scraped the center divider. My side mirror ripped off and I shot the gap toward encroaching darkness, night and false night fusing to bring forth a horrifying sight: a seam of flame limning the far eastern horizon, as though the new day had dawned early and full of wrath; as though the points of the compass had been reversed.
I accelerated.
The seam widened, smearing its halo against a cyclorama of turgid gray-brown smoke, yawning like the mouth of a forge to feast on the line of cars offering themselves in sacrifice, exurbanites plodding toward planned communities on evacuation standby. Tonight they would toss in their beds, coughing, hearts clenched, giving up on sleep and getting up to check their go-bags for medications, photo albums, jewelry.
Was it worth it—their tiny slice of the promised land?
California was an abuser. Every year it strangled you, every year you forgave.
Nwodo called. This time I answered. “Tell me you’ve got a team in place.”
“Nobody can get there in under an hour. Your people are saying the same.”
“I’ll stall as long as I can.”
“Absolutely not. You do not engage. Under no circumstances.”
“I’m sorry, Delilah.”
“Clay. Pull over, stop the car, and wait.”
“I can keep apologizing, if it’ll help.”
She said, “Can I ask what it is you think you’re going to do when you get there?”
“Figure it out.”
My tires whistled.
“Hold shit down,” Nwodo said. “I’ll do my best.”
“Thank you. For everything.”
“Don’t talk like that,” she said.
Then she said, “Good luck.”
It was 6:42. “Luke Edison” had not replied to my text begging for a grace period. I sent another: On my way.
The nice robot bade me take the exit for South Vasco Road. I wedged into the stalled fast lane and began bushwhacking toward the off-ramp.
“Call my wife.”
“…hey there,” Amy said brightly. “How are you?”
My mouth felt gummy.
“Clay? Did I lose you?”
“I’m here.”
A red-faced man in a Subaru brandished his middle finger at me and leaned on the horn.
“On the road again,” Amy said. She sang: “I can’t wait to get on the road again.”
She was singing because she was still a little annoyed at me. Working not to be. I’d never met a better person.
I wanted to tell her that: You are the best person I know.
I said, “How was your day?”
“We’re about to sit down to dinner. Can I call you when we’re done?”
No, let’s talk now, let’s not wait.
“What’s for dinner?” I said.
“One guess.”
“Mac and cheese.”
“Pizza,” she said.
I laughed. She did, too. “I’m pretty sure Charlotte has scurvy,” she said.
We laughed more together.
“Did you get your errands done?” she asked.
“I did. I’m sorry we fought this morning.”
“That wasn’t a fight. That was a discussion.”
“Right, that’s what I thought, too.”
I felt her smile from hundreds of miles away.
“Talk soon,” she said.
“Amy? I love you.”
Silence.
She had to know something was wrong.
One of my moods, maybe, kicked up by being alone.
She said, “I love you, too.”
I barreled down the ramp, south and then east, through a hodgepodge of industrial parks and housing developments. Across Greenville Road blocky corporate campuses yielded to sad ranches where rawboned cattle gnawed stubble. Pumpjacks prayed. The boulevard devolved to a twisting country lane, and I pitched up into shorn hills, dwarfed by a tsunami of smoke that bore down like a murderous leer.
I thought about what would happen if I died. That I was putting myself in harm’s way not for a stranger but for Luke was no consolation. In a certain sense it was worse: Amy and I had a framework for death in the line of duty.
I’d voided the contract. Set it ablaze.
I swerved on the turnouts, rising toward the saddleback over asphalt that rippled like burnt skin, each crest the last, each layer of smoke peeling back to reveal another. A sawhorse got in my way, ROAD CLOSED NO ENTRY CAL FIRE—I obliterated it. Tried Nwodo. Tried Shupfer. Both calls fizzled. Luke would die in three minutes. I was fifteen minutes away.
“Call Cesar Rigo.”
Scratchy ringing.
“…Deputy. I did not expect to hear from you again so soon.”
“My brother didn’t kill Rory Vandervelde,” I said. “He was kidnapped by the men who did. They’re using him as bait for me. I’m going to meet them now. I need backup.”
“Surely you must agree that additional evidence is called for.”
He was breaking up, words crackling like crushed bone.
“Call Delilah Nwodo. She’ll vouch. She’s getting a team but I don’t know how long it’ll take. The end point is east of Livermore. I’m sending a map. Freeway’s fucked. I rode the shoulder. Just get here. Please.”
The map started to transmit.
The progress bar stopped halfway.
“Rigo,” I yelled. “Can you hear me?”
Electronic hash.
High along the ridgeline a row of wind turbines cycled their giant arms through torrents of smoke. My phone gave up trying to send the map and displayed a red exclamation mark. Sharp turn ahead, twenty miles per hour, I took it at fifty, gravel sprayed the guardrail, I righted the wheel just in time to avoid flying off the edge of the world and spit through a cleft in the bedrock, the road pared back to nothing, I hugged the cliffside while below me a gash opened in the earth, a steep terraced ravine, miles long, boiling with smoke. Wind savaged the slopes, harrying thousands more turbines stitched to the dirt like the souls of the damned, flailing in desperation, trapped between here and nowhere by a moat of fire.
The clock ticked to 6:53. My brother was dead.
The land sealed up behind, the grade plummeted, and I ran a gauntlet of electrical stanchions and high-voltage lines that delivered me out of the hills and to the verge of a vast, smoke-shrouded plain.
I was still descending, but gradually. Some accident of topography had stifled the wind and caused the accumulation of smoke, a woolen malignancy that bellied low, smothering the moon and the stars and muting the fires’ distant glow. I touched down in the depression. Smoke mobbed the car. I slapped shut the vents but could smell it streaming in. It wormed relentlessly into my sinuses, my eyes ran. Visibility halved and halved again. I wove over the rumble strips, navigating as much by the phone as by sight. The map had me passing through ranchland, but I saw no sign of life, nothing but curtains of smoke and barbed wire and the margins of dry grass. Stanchions came marching from every direction. A skeleton army with only its feet visible, converging on a single point: a mammoth power substation, four miles out.
The pinhead lay just past it, at the corner of Millar Ranch Road.
It was 6:59. My brother had been dead for six minutes.
I tore past a deserted employee lot. The substation loomed. Behind concrete walls towers and transformers bristled in smoke. I rounded onto the final stretch, chasing the smoke which whirled teasingly up and away. The intersection assumed shape. I braced for a bullet. For Luke’s broken body in the road.
I skidded to a stop.
The pinhead was right here.
I saw nothing. Nobody.
Smoke licked the blacktop.
I checked my phone: 7:02.
No reception.
Before losing contact with the network, the map application had loaded the destination and portions of the surrounding area. I brought up the satellite image and matched its features as best I could to the shadows on the other side of the glass: naked hills to the north, country road snaking eastward toward the county line, substation at my back.
Millar Ranch Road stuck out like a thorn, lancing southeast for half a mile to end at a group of structures with holes in their roofs. The Millar Ranch. A ranch no longer. More profitable to lease the land to the power company. Stanchions sprouted like freakish outliers in fields of chest-high weeds.
I put on my vest and loaded the SIG Sauer.
Took my knife and my flashlight and my mask and got out with the engine running.
The stench was instant and acrid and intense. It pooled like oil in my lungs. I began to cough uncontrollably. The sound died inches from my face, as though I were shouting underwater. Dozens of incoming power lines ran overhead. I couldn’t see them through the haze but I could hear sizzling. All the hair on my body was standing on end.
I blinked out tears, coughed out gunk, squinted. The greenish pall of the substation floodlights seeped over the fields and gasped out to nothingness. Along Millar Ranch Road, trash was strewn on the roadside. Particles swirled in the flashlight beam. A plywood sign read DEAD END. A shopping bag with knotted handles hung from an orphaned fence post.
Smoke crowded in like a silent enemy.
I aimed the flashlight at the bag. It was from Target, its red logo a puncture wound.
Something inside was pulling it taut.
I inched up.
My name was written on the ash-flecked plastic.
It could contain an explosive. It could go off if I opened the bag. If I got close enough.
Just because I couldn’t see them didn’t mean they couldn’t see me.
I didn’t think they’d settle for killing me remotely. They wanted the pleasure of direct violence.
I lifted the bag off the post and untied the handles. Inside was a green-and-black five-channel walkie-talkie, set to channel one.
I looked back the way I’d come, wishing for a battalion of emergency vehicles.
It was 7:05. My brother had been dead for twelve minutes.
I switched on the walkie-talkie and held the CALL button. “I’m here.”