THE HIPPY IN the GMC truck slept prone across the front seat. I opened the door to the stale, sweet scent of marijuana smoke. “Come on, get up. Get out.”
The FBI cell phone in my pocket rang. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I reached in and shook the guy. “Come on, get out.”
The guy stirred, got up, and looked around with bloodshot eyes. “What the hell . . . what’s goin’ down?”
“Get out. Please get out now or I’ll have to drag you out and I don’t wanna do that.”
“Keep your wigwam on, chief, I’m movin’, I’m movin’.”
“I’m sorry. Look, here’s the money I promised you.” I handed him the two hundreds, moved him out of the way, and got in.
“Hey,” he said. “You gonna gimme a ride over to the shop so I can get my wheels?”
I didn’t have the time. I waved, got in, and took off. The forty or so miles to Chino might take an hour to an hour and a half with traffic on the freeways. I had to get there to get this extraordinary weight lifted off me.
The phone rang again. I answered it.
“Bruno, it’s me, Dan.”
“I know.”
“It’s out. The video, it’s out.”
“I know.”
“Come on back, it’s too dangerous now. You can’t go.”
“I have to tell Sonja in person. I have to tell her face-to-face.”
“No you don’t. You don’t owe those people anything. Those men on the freeway were all adults. They made their choices, the wrong choices. You did exactly what I or any other cop would have done under the circumstances. Only we probably wouldn’t have survived, not up against three of them like that. That was a hell of a thing to watch, Bruno. That cop, she wouldn’t be alive if you hadn’t interceded.”
I whispered into the phone what Bobby Ray had said: “Cops would’ve played by the rules. No one else would’ve tossed Bosco out in traffic like that.” I hung up the phone and drove on, my mind working my hands and foot, directing the truck while I wallowed in the dark emotion of it all. Back in the lizard part of my brain, I knew this move, going to see Sonja, to be idiotic. That video would be all over the media. In just minutes after it first hit, it would go worldwide. My God, now the whole world would know what I’d done.
Including all the Visigoths.
Including Bobby Ray.
And worse, far worse, Sonja would know. She’d also know that I’d known all along and had not told her.
She’d have already seen it on the news or on her computer or phone. She’d have already seen her son flipped out into traffic. Seen that horrible look on his face the moment before—the visual of her son . . .
The summer sun sat low in the sky by the time I turned onto Pipeline and then into the parking lot of Joey’s Barbeque. The early dinner crowd already started to fill the parking lot. I recognized the large truck backed into the parking slot at the end of the building. The truck I first saw out in front of Bobby Ray’s motorcycle shop, the truck that towed the trailer I rode in, unconscious on the floor, alongside Bobby Ray’s motorcycle. The truck with the Good Sam Club sticker on the bumper.
Sonja sat behind the wheel of the rig minus the fifth wheel trailer. The mere sight of her made me sick with sorrow and bitter regret over Sebastian, the kid I’d tossed out into traffic.
I pulled up alongside in the black GMC and rolled down the automatic window on the passenger side. “Sonja, I’m so sorry about Sebastian and—”
“Not now, not here. Follow me.” She took off before I could say anything more. I backed up and followed her out onto Pipeline, headed west the way I’d just come in, toward the general direction of LA.
She had looked haggard, her gray hair in disarray, dark half-moons under her eyes . . . and she looked older. She looked twenty years older. She’d somehow turned into an old crone, years before her time, and more so since I’d seen her last in the hospital.
I drove along behind her and tried to imagine how our conversation would go and couldn’t envision it from any angle. Not those terrible words coming out of my mouth.
I needed to hear Marie’s voice, hear her confident, soothing words. She’d know what to say and how to say it. I dialed the FBI phone. It went right to Marie’s voice mail. I hung up, and before I could hit redial to try again, it rang.
I answered it.
“Bruno,” Dan said, “where are you?”
I knew right then, based on nothing more than the tone of his voice.
“Marie? Where’s Marie?” All the poor-me crap, all that sorrow bullshit, went right out the window. Anger rose up and cleared my head, made me think straight like I should’ve been thinking all along. Made me see the terrible mistakes I made in the heat of emotion.
Hot anger replaced all else.
“We don’t know,” Dan said.
I spoke through clenched teeth. “What happened?”
“We don’t know. Special Agent Mike Donavan picked her and the child up and was headed to a safe house, and that’s the last we heard from them. We’ve got everybody on, and I mean everybody. We’ll find them, I promise you. Where are you? We’re going to come to you.”
I held the phone to my shoulder and took out the gun from my back waistband. I pulled the magazine; two rounds left. That’s all I needed.
I said, “You know where I am. You’re tracking this phone.”
“Bruno, wait for us. I know you’re angry, I can tell by your voice, and you have every right to be, but there’s more at stake here. Think about this, please.”
“There’s no more time for talking or waiting. There’s nothing more important than my Marie.” I clicked off. Dan would have an airship headed our way along with a string of FBI vehicles. He wouldn’t trust it to the locals, not something as important as this. I had maybe twenty minutes max. The FBI had a different agenda that they would push no matter what. They wanted the drone and the missiles, the military onboard software. I rolled the window down to toss the phone out just as Sonja turned off the main street onto a side road and into a light industrial area loaded with single-story manufacturing buildings. We’d driven somewhere deep into the west side of Pomona.
What I saw on that street changed the whole game.