The rising garage sectional like a mausoleum door setting free those who had been thought dead and entombed, the sudden cataracts of rain against the windshield, the wild night of shaken trees and wet whirling leaves and wind-worked forms of mist galloping out of the west…All of it now became a celebration of life.
Behind the wheel of the Hyundai Santa Fe Sport, Sanjay Shukla was intoxicated by their escape but also harrowed by the recent violence. As he accelerated toward the distant gate that would swing open automatically at his approach, he switched on the headlights.
“Lights off!” Tanuja cried with such conviction that he obeyed without question. “They blocked the driveway with their SUV.”
“So we pop the brake, shift it into neutral, push it aside.”
“But there might be a fourth sonofabitch with it.”
“Shit.” Sanjay wished he’d thought to take the poisoned man’s gun instead of his smartphone.
Simultaneously, he and his sister declared, “The horse gate!”
Sanjay swung the Hyundai off the pavement, left onto the front yard, and rollicked across the uneven lawn, which had been an unmown meadow of tall grass in the days when their father had kept horses.
The equine gate on the south side of the property had been a second construction entrance during the building of the house. It was wide enough for a vehicle. A simple hinged section of fencing gave access to a riding trail that wound through the eastern hills.
In the gloom, the great black limbs of the spreading oaks were unmoved by the storm, but the willowy branchlets whipped the night and cast off beetle-shaped leaves that skittered across the windshield and were flung into flight by the wipers.
The land sloped down, and below them, like the sunken ramparts of some lost city, the faint white boardwork of the ranch fencing welled out of the watery darkness.
Sanjay braked, intending to get out and release the gate, but Tanuja threw open her door—“Got it!”—and plunged into the rain.
As Sanjay watched her ghosting through the murk, Tanuja seemed small, childlike, as though the night was shrinking her, his chotti bhenji, his little big sister. Suddenly, he feared losing her for the first time since they’d escaped the clutches of Ashima and Burt Chatterjee to become emancipated minors by order of the court. For the seven years prior to that, they had been two against the world; and so they appeared to be again, inexplicably.
For fraternal twins, they were remarkably alike, slender but athletic, with glossy black hair and eyes darker still. Both were talented guitarists. Both were unbeatable bridge players at fourteen but grew bored with cards at eighteen, when their writing began to consume them. She would marry one day, and perhaps so would he; and while he’d be happy for her, on the day that they parted he would feel as though he’d been cleaved in half.
The gate swung open, and Tanuja returned to the Hyundai. Sanjay drove into the rugged land where the horse trail promised adventure for the equine gentry to which their parents had once belonged. He turned downhill, toward the county road, lights still off, hoping the thousand voices of wind and water would mask their engine noise, in case a guard remained in the SUV at the main gate.
“They were going to inject me. You, too, if they found you.”
“I saw the syringe. But inject with what?” she asked.
“With nothing good.”
“With this, whatever it is,” she said, revealing two of the sleeves of silvery insulation that contained ampules, which she had evidently snatched off the table while Sanjay was crawling under it.
He said, “It’s crazy, Linc Crossley being with them.”
“It’s just as crazy without him.”
The land sloped gently westward. A narrowing of the horse trail bracketed them with weeds that tapped and scraped at the vehicle, as if with brittle fingers the resurrected residents of an ancient burial ground were protesting this intrusion on sacred soil.
“Could Ashima and Burt be part of this?” Tanuja wondered.
“What would they have to gain?”
“What little they didn’t already steal from us. And revenge.”
“Not after eight years. They’re lucky they avoided prison, and they know it.”
Out of the rain and fog and formless dark, order appeared as two parallel lines. At first pale, perhaps illusory, they acquired reality, crisp edges: the double white line defining the center of the county road.
The slope terminated in the flat expanse of blacktop. Sanjay turned left, away from their house and the SUV that blocked access to it. He braked at once, however, because a Range Rover stood across both lanes, leaving too little room to drive past it either fore or aft. The headlights were not on, but the blinkers silvered the falling rain in front of it and bloodied the rain behind.
Doors opened and two men got out of the vehicle, shadowy figures, solemn and methodical and unhurried, like those who had forced their way into the house.
Sanjay shifted into reverse, backed up at speed, wheeled hard right, fishtailed the Hyundai 180 degrees, braked, shifted into drive, switched on the lights, and fled north, past the SUV blocking their driveway. The road dead-ended in a turnaround, where the fall-off from the pavement was so gentle that there were no guardrails.
“They have all-wheel drive like we do,” Tanuja warned.
“But maybe not nerve enough,” Sanjay said as they crossed the graveled shoulder and angled down a weeded slope, broomstraw and brambles shredding against the undercarriage.
The mist thickened in the realm below, born out of the depths, and in its ascent was shaped by the wind into stampeding forms that flung themselves at the Hyundai and flared around it. Phalanxes of eucalyptuses stood guard against descent, penetrated by the herded fog but seemingly impenetrable to all else.
Having walked the land for years, Sanjay knew the architecture of earth, rock, and flora. To him, this wilderness wasn’t wild, but a palace of elegant chambers and passageways. He steered between jambs of rock, across a canted threshold of stone, onto a slope of rain-jeweled ribbon grass, and toward the trees, as if the wall they presented was as insubstantial as the fog that seethed between them.
“Sanjay, no,” Tanuja warned as he maintained speed.
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
“Jhav!” she cried, an obscenity he had never before heard her use in any language. She braced herself for impact.
At the last moment, he thought he’d angled toward the wrong point in the tree line, but then the unbroken rampart of forest was revealed to be an illusion. The trees to the left were older growth, twenty feet downhill from the younger specimens to the right; the distance differential made them appear the same size and age, and the abrupt drop in the land hid the truth that one long phalanx was in fact two. The Hyundai plunged. Sanjay swung the vehicle hard to the right. It didn’t roll. He drove behind the younger stand of eucalyptus, which was a natural windbreak, three trees deep, rather than a full forest. He continued north along a narrow escarpment, trees to the right, a black void to the left where the land descended—more steeply now—three or four hundred feet to the canyon floor.
They’d had no option other than an off-road escape, but he knew that this escarpment narrowed until it terminated in an out-fold of canyon wall. They needed to go down into less hospitable territory.
Twin luminous globes appeared behind them, haloed in the mist, shimmering witchily in the rain, nothing of their source revealed, like some otherworldly visitation, but of course they were the headlights of the Range Rover.
Sanjay wheeled the Hyundai off the ridge line, into the void.