Carrying the tote, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, auburn hair curling from under her baseball cap, Jane walked south, away from the vacant house and from the Hannafin place, into the shrouded and expectant morning.
The storm continued to withhold its rain, but now it breathed away the stillness. The sharp edges of quivering palm fronds shaved whispers from one another; they would rattle noisily if the breeze became a wind.
When she passed a drain grate, she dropped the disposable phone between its bars and hesitated only long enough to hear the cell plop in the fragrant dead-rat darkness.
She walked a block and a half and turned east at the corner. Her black Ford Escape was parked under the weeping, lacy branchlets of pepper trees.
The car had been stolen in the U.S.; significantly souped-up in Nogales, Mexico; given a new engine number; repainted; and consigned to an unlicensed auto-sales operation across the border in Nogales, Arizona. The car dealer operated out of a series of unmarked barns on a former horse ranch, and he didn’t accept checks or credit cards. Or make loans. She paid with some serious cash she’d taken away from some bad people in New Mexico.
The vehicle’s GPS, with its identifying transponder, had been stripped out, so the Escape couldn’t be tracked by satellite.
For now she was done with the San Gabriel Valley, although not with Lawrence Hannafin. He wouldn’t get a significant part of her attention, not when she had much bigger fish to gut. But he was one of Them, a member of the confederacy of sociopaths that D. J. Michael and the late Bertold Shenneck, weavers of the web, had woven, and she would make him pay sooner rather than later.
She drove west into the San Fernando Valley, which showed more signs of wear and weariness than did the San Gabriel. The decline was not evident in every town, and often the deterioration had a threadbare, genteel character. But in places it was stark, a smear of rot and desperation by which to diagnose the corruption that was hollowing out the country.
In an area that had thus far escaped blight, she stopped at a deli and ordered takeout for lunch, relying not just on a new hairstyle and prop glasses to avoid being recognized, but also on an attitude that no one would associate with a fugitive. She didn’t keep her head down, didn’t pull the bill of her cap to her eyebrows, didn’t avoid eye contact, but instead smiled brightly at everyone, chatted up the guy taking her order, and stooped to have an amusing conversation with a cute little girl who was waiting with her mother to pick up their order. Jane wasn’t a Texan, but Nick had been born and raised there, and she’d been around his parents often enough to be able to imitate their drawl, which was nothing like her voice as people had heard it on the bits of FBI video being run on the news.
As she sat in her car to eat, lightning blistered the sky three times in quick succession, trees and buildings and passing traffic seeming to shudder along the strobed street, followed by a crack like the mantle of the earth split by the violent upthrow of some catastrophic force. Rain fell with tropical intensity. The world blurred beyond the Ford’s windows, and Jane welcomed the privacy.