WE NEED TO BE ready for anything,” Agent Halliday said. “I don’t want any surprises.”
“What the hell’s he going to do?” Agent Cook said. “His arms and legs will be chained. With seven armed men watching him.”
He had left me out of the equation, the eighth man along for the ride, but I wasn’t going to say anything about it. One hour had passed since the jailhouse interview. One hour of me replaying everything Livermore had said to me, trying to make it all add up into some kind of sense. But it still wasn’t coming together.
I shouldn’t be here, I said to myself. I should be back home in Paradise, plowing snow.
But if there really is a woman out there somewhere . . .
We were all in the FBI sedan, with me in the backseat again. Cook was driving, Halliday was riding shotgun. We’d been up for almost thirty hours straight by now. I could see it weighing heavy on Halliday as he turned to look at me.
“Alex,” he said, “I want you to be ready for an audible.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re the X factor here,” he said. “These other men don’t know you.”
You don’t know me, either, I thought. But I let it go. If I were in their shoes, I’d be just as mystified by this stranger from Michigan, who didn’t seem to know anything about Livermore, even though he could sit there and recite my batting average.
But still, what would the plan be? Cook was right—with Livermore’s hands cuffed and chained to his belt . . . In their wildest imagination, how did they think one stranger could change that equation?
“Everything’s covered,” Cook said to his partner. “He’ll be tied up like a Christmas turkey.”
Halliday shook his head and looked out the passenger’s-side window as the city of Phoenix passed by. I could feel the nervous energy coming off of him in waves, even if his partner didn’t share it. I knew the feeling, despite every reason not to, because I had it myself. Something about this whole setup didn’t feel right to me, and the feeling got stronger with each passing mile.
“Where are we going?” I finally said. “Unless that’s classified information . . .”
“Little mining town called Bagdad,” Halliday said. “Up in Yavapai County, about two and a half hours away. DPS is going to run the first vehicle, then Livermore will be in a prison van behind that, with two guards. We’ll follow behind.”
“Who’s DPS?”
“Department of Public Safety. That’s the state police here.”
I nodded and sat back in my seat. We seemed to be alone on the road, but I knew the other vehicles were probably up ahead somewhere.
“There’s only one road up here,” Halliday said a few minutes later. “US 93. That’s got everybody a little nervous.”
“Livermore’s a loner,” Cook said. “Can you really see him with a crew of men up here waiting to ambush us?”
“No,” Halliday said. “I can’t see that.”
It looked like he wanted to say more, but he kept it to himself.
“There they are,” Cook said as the prison van came into view. Ahead of that, I saw the state police car with its lights flashing. We settled in at the tail end of the parade just as we were leaving Phoenix, heading through Glendale, Surprise, and Sun City West. Heading northwest, out into the great nothingness of central Arizona. The road itself was a straight line drawn on a flat plain, with railroad tracks to the right and telephone wires to the left. Beyond those, as far as I could see in any direction, it was nothing but brown earth covered by a thin layer of green and gray vegetation. Low mountains in the far distance and a bright blue sky above us. The view didn’t change for an hour.
By the end of the second hour, the vegetation was growing thicker, the mountains coming closer with each passing mile. We were in a valley between the Poachie Range to the west and the Santa Marias to the east. There were great piles of red rocks on either side of the road. A voice broke through on the radio.
“Lead to Halliday and Cook. Are we sure this road is secure?”
Halliday looked over at his partner for a moment, then picked up the mic and keyed it.
“We had an advance team sweep through here a few minutes ago,” he said, looking out the window. “Nothing up there but rocks.”
But as he put the mic back, I could see him staring out the window, like we’d suddenly been transported to Afghanistan. Even Agent Cook, the man who’d been playing it cool all the way up here, hunched forward at the wheel to look out at the road.
All because of one man riding in that van ahead of us, I thought, sitting between two guards and tied up, as Agent Cook had said, like a Christmas turkey.
A few minutes later, just as we got to the turnoff for Bagdad, the same voice broke over the radio.
“Stopping ahead. Pull in behind us.”
We made the turn and saw the other two vehicles pulled over to the side of the road. Cook stopped behind them and got out. The two state troopers from the lead car were standing behind the prison van, next to the van driver, and now Cook joined the conference and they stood around talking about something for a few minutes, before Cook finally gave me a wave to get out.
Halliday got out with me. It was coming up on noon now, the morning sun warming up the day, well into the eighties. I held up a hand against the glare. As I came closer to the party, I could feel the two troopers watching me carefully, measuring everything about me.
Halliday told me to wait a few yards away while he went to confer with the others. Every single man kept looking back at me until Halliday shook his head and came back to give me the news:
“They want you in the van.”
“You’re kidding me, right?”
“As of now, it’s not our show anymore. The state guys, the jail guys, they all want you to be safe as we get close.”
“Safe,” I said, “as in locked up like a criminal.”
This is the “audible” he was talking about, I thought. But before he could say anything else, I left him there and approached the rest of the party.
“Go ahead,” I said. “Put me in the van if that’s what you need to do.”
“Those are the orders,” the van driver said.
When he opened the back door, I could see Livermore through the wire mesh. He was sitting on one of the side benches, with the same two guards who had stood behind him in the interview room early this morning. His own personal attachment.
“Got some company,” the van driver said as he unlocked the inner door.
The two troopers stepped up to me then. First they asked for my cell phone, promising to give it back when this whole thing was over. I took it out and handed it to them. Then they asked me to put my hands on the side of the van before going inside.
“This gets better and better,” I said, but it was clear we’d all just stand out there in the sun until I let them frisk me.
It’s not enough they drag me all the way out here and treat me like a goddamned suspect every step of the way . . .
“For all we know,” one of the officers said, “you could be working with this guy.”
“Doing what?” I said. “What the hell could I do?”
The officer didn’t say another word. He waited for me to assume the position, and then he gave me a thorough pat-down. He nodded to the van driver, and I was allowed the courtesy of climbing up into the van.
When I sat down across from Livermore, he looked at me and smiled. He was in the same jailhouse orange, with the same cuffs, chains, and shackles.
“This is an unexpected pleasure,” he said.
“Just shut up,” one of the guards said. They were both unarmed. Standard protocol. You didn’t want any weapon inside the van that could be taken away and used against you.
The van started moving again. I could hear the voice of the van driver through the metal partition as he communicated with the rest of the convoy. Livermore kept watching me, that same smile on his face. I stared right back at him. I wasn’t about to look away.
“We’ll take a right turn soon,” Livermore said without taking his eyes away from mine.
The van driver relayed this to the other vehicles. A few minutes later, we came to a brief stop, then we made a slow turn and started going downward. There were no windows to see out of, but I could tell from the rough ride that we were on a dirt road.
“Where the hell are we going?” I heard the van driver say into his radio.
Halliday’s voice came back. “Keep going. Nice and slow.”
Livermore kept watching me. “The Japanese have a saying,” he said. “Ame futte chi katamaru. Literally, it means, ‘After the rain, the earth hardens.’”
“I told you to shut up,” the guard said.
“What it really means,” Livermore said, “is that you and I are both going to find out just how hardened you really are.”
“We’re in the goddamned desert,” I said. “I don’t think it’s going to rain today.”
“Alex . . .” he said, and then he paused before saying the five words that would become burned into my mind. “You think this ends today?”
The guard to Livermore’s left leaned forward and looked at both of us. “Everybody,” he said, “shut the fuck up right now.”
Livermore stopped talking, but he kept smiling at me, and the vague feeling I’d had all morning started to take on its own color and shape. This man is running the whole show, I said to myself. Even though he’s locked up tight, guarded by seven men . . .
Livermore is calling every shot.
The van came to a stop. A few seconds later, the back door opened. I was told to get out first. As I did, I saw that all three vehicles were parked where the road ended in a cul-de-sac, and a few yards beyond that there was an old mining shed that looked like it had been left for decades and forgotten about. More red rock was piled high all around us. The sun was almost directly overhead now. It beat down on us in that dead-end bowl, as the dust from the vehicles’ braking hung in the air.
When the guards finally led out Livermore, he stood there blinking in the sunlight. The whole thing should have looked ridiculous to me—the two state guys with their tactical vests and their shotguns, the three guards from the jail and the two agents from the FBI. All to watch over this one man in orange with his hands cuffed to his belt.
But no matter how chained-up Livermore looked . . . no matter how many men were surrounding him . . . no matter how many guns . . .
“Where is the air support?” Livermore said as if reading my mind. “You only have eight men here. Surely you need a helicopter . . .”
“Where’s the woman?” Halliday said. “In that shed?”
“Down this trail,” Livermore said. “She’s not far.”
“This is not believable,” Halliday said to him. “You drove her all the way down this dead-end road and then what, you made her walk down the trail with you?”
“She was tied up, Agent Halliday. I carried her.”
“How far can you carry an adult woman, Livermore?”
Livermore looked at him with that little half smile. I’m sure Halliday hated it by now, maybe even as much as I did.
“I’m stronger than you think,” he said.
Agent Cook came up close to him. “Just show us where you took her, you sick fuck.”
“That’s why we’re here.”
He led us toward the shed. As we got closer, a narrow trail appeared, leading through a break in the red rock.
I took Halliday aside. It was time to say something to the one man who I knew would listen to me.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” I said. “I think you do, too.”
“What do you think’s going to happen?”
“I don’t know,” I said, looking down the narrow path. “But you’re doing everything according to his playbook. He got you to fly me all the way across the country. Now he’s got all of us stumbling around out here in the middle of the desert . . .”
“So what do you want us to do? Just leave her out here?”
“There’s nobody here to find,” I said. “Think about it. What’s he getting out of this? Did you take the death penalty off the table? Promise him he wouldn’t go into general population?”
“I don’t know what’s driving him. Maybe he’s just that fucking crazy, Alex. But if there’s any chance she’s out here . . .”
He looked over at Livermore. This one man in orange, his legs so hobbled he could barely walk.
“What if this was your daughter?” Halliday said. “Or your wife?”
I knew there was no answer that would satisfy him. That was the ultimate trump card. Then Halliday took out his semiautomatic, as if that alone would be enough to convince me I had nothing to worry about.
“Let’s go find out,” he said.
I shook my head and followed him. The path squeezed through the break in the rocks, then opened up just enough to give us all a little more room to breathe. But the ground still rose on either side of the trail, more naked rock with that same scrubby green and gray vegetation, the great saguaro cactuses all lined up on the very tops of the ridges, like they were spectators looking down at us.
Or waving their arms to warn us.
We walked in silence for several minutes, making our way over the rough ground. Besides the shackles, Livermore was wearing his standard jailhouse shoes with no laces and struggling even harder than the rest of us to find his footing on the trail.
The sun was beating down on us, and I was already getting thirsty. One of the state men had a backpack, and he stopped to pass out bottles of water. I drained half of mine at once.
“Are you going to let me die of thirst?” Livermore said.
It made me remember everything he had said about what the thirst was doing to that woman’s body.
“You’ll get water after she does,” the officer said. Then he closed up his pack and we were on our way again. The sun got hotter, and my head started to hurt again. But we kept moving forward, as the trail started rising and winding its way between taller hills with more cactuses looking down on us.
“You did not come this far,” Halliday said. “Not in the dark.”
“She’s here,” Livermore said, raising his head into the air as if he could smell her. “A hundred yards away.”
Halliday hesitated. I could tell he was thinking hard about it. Finally, he nodded, and the line of men continued around a bend in the trail, until we found ourselves at the entrance to a small side canyon, the walls rising straight up on both sides, thirty feet high.
“She’s in this canyon,” Livermore said. “There’s a small shelter at the end. Go ahead and look.”
“You first,” the van driver said, pushing Livermore ahead of him. “Move.”
We followed them, each man looking up at the walls that seemed to close in on top of us. The two FBI agents were at the end of the line with me between them.
I didn’t have a gun. That was the difference. I didn’t have that simple, deadly arrogance I’d seen so many times before, the belief that a gun in your hand is enough to control everything around you.
The van driver took the radio from his belt and looked at it. When he turned up the volume, the white noise reverberated through the canyon. “What the fuck,” the man said. “The radios are . . .”
He didn’t finish the thought. Every man in the canyon stopped, and as Livermore turned, he caught my eye and smiled.
The next three seconds filled an eternity. With that one simple act, Livermore had shifted all of the attention to me. Every other man was watching me now, waiting for whatever came next.
“It’s time, Alex!”
Livermore’s words hung in the still air of the canyon as seven different brains raced to process their meaning. I reached my own conclusion just as quickly, but it was too late.
“Wait . . .” I said, already feeling two hands grabbing my shoulders from behind. I had no chance to react as everything tilted, and I felt myself being brought down to the ground. A man’s knee grinding into my back, a classic cop takedown, driving the air from my lungs as everything else in the world came apart at once.
The first explosion shook the walls around us, a sound so loud it was a piercing physical impact against my ears. As I looked up I saw the men going down in front of me, saw blood sprayed against both sides of the canyon. If there were screams, I did not hear them. The second explosion was a wave of heat and concussion. The weight shifted on my back, moving backward, as I started to push myself up, just in time for one more blinding, noiseless flash and a sudden sting in my left knee and across my left biceps. The man who had been standing in front of me seemed to turn in the air in an oddly graceful pirouette, so that I could see how his upper body had been turned into a tangled mass of blood and fabric. He hung there for a moment, a marionette held up by invisible strings. Then he fell to the ground, his lifeless face inches from mine.
Everything was still. Another eternal three seconds until I saw a figure slowly raising himself to a standing position, twenty feet ahead of me.
Livermore.
He shuffled toward me, his ankles still shackled together, until he came to an officer who was still moving on the ground. I saw the shotgun barrel being raised and pointed at Livermore, then Livermore calmly taking the gun away. He had just enough play in the handcuffs attached to his waist to get the index finger of his right hand onto the trigger. He pointed the gun back down at the man, and then there was a flash from the barrel and a dull sound like the dial tone on an old phone as the man’s head was blown apart against the ground.
Livermore came to the next man, looked down at him and, seemingly satisfied with the body’s condition, kept moving until he came to the next man.
You need to get up, I told myself. You need to get out of here.
But I couldn’t move yet. I stayed there, feeling everything spin around me, until another dial tone hit my ears a fraction of a second before I felt the spray of blood on my face.
I’m next. He’s going to do the same thing to me.
When I looked up, he was close to me. His eyes were locked on mine as he stopped three feet in front of me.
This is it. His will be the last face I see.
I looked him in the eye and wondered if I’d even be able to hear the gun go off. There was another flash from the barrel, another dull sound that barely registered in my ears. I let out a breath, waiting for my body to react to the gunshot. For the pain to reach my brain.
It never came.
He stood there looking down at me. Then his lips moved like he was saying something to me, but there was no sound left in the world. Then with a sudden painful pop, my ears cleared, just enough to hear what he was saying.
“I told you,” he said. “This does not end today. Not for us.”
I clawed my way up to my hands and knees and reached for him, but he took one step backward and my head was spinning again. I tried to breathe. When I looked back up, he had already gone down the line of dead men, taking a weapon from each. A shotgun from the other trooper. A sidearm from the van driver. I felt around for something to hit him with. A rock, a stick, anything. It was the only thought I could form in my head.
Stop him. Don’t let him get away.
I reached behind me and felt something warm.
Blood. A body.
I turned and looked. It was Agent Cook. He was lying against the rock wall. His chest was soaked. I saw the blood coming in a steady stream from the hole in his neck.
When Livermore had raised that shotgun . . . When I was waiting to die . . .
He had shot Cook instead.
The agent’s windbreaker was still tied around his waist. I took that off, wadded it up, and pressed it against his wound. But it was already too late. He kept looking at me, and then the light went out behind his eyes.
When I finally gave up, I turned around and saw Livermore at the far end of the canyon. He lingered there for a moment, a dark figure against the bright sunlight that gleamed from the other side.
He nodded to me, one more time.
Then he turned and disappeared.