On Tuesdays, they did Mexican, so as Declan took the first shower, Gannon put on the eggs and set out the tortillas and salsa and hot sauce on the table. After he clacked down the plates, he made a fresh pot of coffee and poured himself a cup and took it with him into the living room.
Of their bus.
It actually wasn’t as bad as it sounded. It was a slick shiny black rock-star-style bus with tinted windows and an interior like a Manhattan penthouse. It had all the amenities: stainless-steel appliances, a washer and dryer, a steam shower. It even had a new Chevy Colorado pickup truck hitched to the back of it that they used to do their monthly grocery run.
“All the comforts of home,” Gannon mumbled as he pulled up the window blinds and looked out at his little slice of the middle of nowhere.
The elevated promontory their rock-star bus was perched upon afforded a clear view of a long curving dried arroyo that was used as a drive up into the desert canyon mine site. The high hills on both sides of the canyon were colored in muted tans with patches of green where the slopes were lightly bearded with shrubs and firs and spruce.
Gannon came forward to the window and tilted his head up at the highest eastern ridgeline. In the month and a half they’d been there, he’d seen several animals. Desert rabbits, bobcats, mule deer, even a bighorn sheep once.
There was a hunting hawk up there in the bright blue morning summer sky now. He watched it turning and turning and turning over the textured hills.
“Yeah, what else is new?” Gannon said as he finally sat on the couch beneath the bunk bed with his coffee to ponder his crazy situation for the millionth time.
Though the off-the-grid Utah desert lifestyle had its high points, his recent entry into it with his son wasn’t solely for recreational purposes.
Not long ago, he had run afoul of some people.
It had started out innocently enough. He’d been fishing down in the Caribbean and found a bag of money and diamonds in a crashed corporate jet. Thinking it was dope money, by the age-old law of finders keepers, he’d decided to keep it.
As it turned out, he probably should have thought again. Because wouldn’t you know it, instead of dopers, the money belonged to a bunch of corrupt-to-the-bone top-secret-clearance FBI counterintelligence people in the midst of committing a multitude of high crimes and treason.
Due to this unfortunate turn of events, there had been some problems. Problems involving the kind of automatic gunfire, violence and death Gannon had thought he’d put behind him when he’d left the navy SEALs and the NYPD.
Everything he had done was solely in self-defense, and he would have gladly tried to explain it to an honest judge and jury in an open court of law.
But that was actually sort of the problem.
Since the incident had involved a cabal of corruption at the tippity-top of the federal government food chain, it seemed like the whole bloody body-strewn incident had somehow been kept out of the papers and swept very deeply under the rug.
He’d had his old NYPD partner, Stick, discreetly look into it for him to see what was up. But there was nothing. Nothing in the computers. There was no open FBI investigation on him, no FBI warrant out for his arrest.
Or at least no formal official legal warrant, Gannon thought.
Call him crazy, but since he’d banged heads with the psycho killer lunatic wing of the shadow government, his thinking was they could still be out gunning for payback unofficially.
The fact that he was still in possession of the very large bag of corrupt loot that he’d salvaged from their crashed FBI Gulfstream 550 only seemed to add to this depressing theory.
Or maybe not, he thought for the thousandth time. Maybe no one was looking for him. Maybe it had all blown over and all the corrupt bozos involved who’d come out of it alive were happy to let bygones be bygones.
Then Gannon suddenly remembered the look on the face of the assistant deputy FBI director that he’d impaled with a scaffolding fence pole out in front of the Chilean embassy in London, England.
Or then again, he thought.
Gannon sighed as he heard his son start to sing in the shower.
It was true that the bus confines were tight for two people, he thought as he finally savored a sip of French roast.
But compared with a pine box or a prison cell, he decided with a nod, it wasn’t too bad after all.