Certain that she would need it soon, Jane Hawk had two days earlier scouted for a place to conduct a serious intervention that might set right—and extract information from—someone who had fallen in with this bloody-minded crowd and had become enchanted by their cruelty. She required privacy and proof against interruption and a chamber from which sounds of distress would not escape to draw the interest of others.
Here California’s golden past and a possibly dark future wove together in present-day blight and disorder. Several square blocks of once-busy manufacturing facilities were now for the most part empty. Chain-link fences stood torqued and sagging and appliqued with colorful debris—scraps and streamers of plastic wrapping, torn and yellowed newspapers moldering into bellied forms suspended from the links like wasps’ nests, threadbare rags encrusted with filth as if they once had wound around the slow-rotting form of a mummified pharaoh, used condoms and broken hypodermic needles. The parking lots, back in the day busy with three shifts of workers, now lay cracked and potholed and desolate, snarled and brittle weeds of strange appearance growing out of stress cracks like the hair of some land-bound kraken or other legendary beast that slept beneath the blacktop until its time should come to rise and ruin.
The building she had chosen hulked dark in the bright morning, two acres of concrete block and corrugated-metal siding rusted and streaked with bird dung. About forty feet high. Three-quarters of the way up the walls, a row of yard-square windows turned a blind stare to the morning sun, the glass clouded with the phlegm of time.
The property gate appeared to be secured to the gatepost with chain and padlock. Two days earlier, however, she had severed the shackle of the lock with a bolt cutter.
Leaving Randall Larkin sedated, his exhalations fluttering the cloth over his face, Jane removed the chain and rolled aside the barrier. She drove inside, got out of the Mercedes, closed the gate.
She wheeled around to the back of the factory, where the car couldn’t be seen from the street. Because power-company service had not been maintained, she wasn’t able to drive inside through the truck-size roll-up.
Twenty yards away, beyond the chain-link, lay what Southern Californians called a river: a wide concrete channel designed for flood control. Most of the year it was a dry course, but now the flow ran deep from recent rains—fast, turbulent, treacherous.
When she got out of the car, the sluicing noise of water raging downhill sounded, in her current frame of mind, like an apocalyptic flushing, as if all the filth of the earth—but also all innocence caught up with it—was rushing into a last drain at the end of time.
She took a flashlight from her handbag and let herself into the building through a man-size door beside the roll-up.
The main room lay cavernous, wall-to-wall and soaring to the roof. Courtesy of the dirt-filmed high windows, more light traced the rafters, joists, and collar beams than found its way to the floor, though no corner high or low was more than dimly shown.
Whatever bankrupted or otherwise dissolved enterprise had once busied itself here, its defeated owners had departed in contempt of anyone who might next occupy the place—though, as it turned out, no one had. All manner of trash had been left behind: a double score of empty barrels, some on their sides and some upright; broken wooden crates; odd shapes of particleboard; tangled masses of wire like sculptures of tumbleweed; empty soda cans and shattered beer bottles and drifts of paperwork.
On her previous visit, Jane had moved two of the barrels to the center of the room. They served as a table base on which she had placed a slab of slightly warped particleboard. A Coleman lantern and can of fuel stood on the table, both of which she’d bought at a sporting-goods store.
She placed the flashlight beside the lamp.
From her handbag, she took a pair of black silk gloves with decorative silver stitching, purchased as part of a disguise that she had worn the previous week, and she slipped her hands into them.
Once lit, the bag-style wick of the lantern swelled with a ghostly white glow that fanned out to all sides for perhaps fifteen feet, a small sphere of light in the vast darkness of the factory.
Also on the table stood four bottles of water and four plastic bowls used to serve dogs.
She had cleared the immediate area of trash. All that remained in it, other than the table, were two folding aluminum patio chairs with blue webbing for the seats and backrests. She had bought them at a thrift shop that carried used furniture.
Beside the door by which she had entered stood a wheeled flatbed cart, five feet long and three wide, which she had also gotten at the thrift shop. She rolled it outside to the car.
When she opened the front passenger door, Randall Larkin muttered wordlessly under his face cloth and almost slid out of the car. She pushed him upright, and with heavy-duty plastic zip-ties taken from her purse, she cuffed his wrists and then his ankles.
She got her hands under his arms and dragged him out of the Mercedes and wrestled him onto the cart, with his feet extending over the bottom braceboard.
The cotton handkerchief had slipped off his face. She replaced it and spritzed it lightly with chloroform.
She pushed the cart to the factory door and paused to withdraw the soapstone cameo from a pocket of her jeans. In the hard morning light, she considered the soft features of the carved portrait on the fragment of a broken locket. Beyond the fence, the river spoke in a multitude of liquid tongues, splashed and babbled and chortled and hissed, but after a moment she didn’t hear it. Nor did she quite see the cameo, veiled as it was by the face of her child that came into focus in her mind’s eye, sweet Travis, the image of his father, the vessel into which she had poured all her hopes.
After a minute or two, she pocketed the cameo. She rolled the cart and the lolling attorney into the factory. She closed the door behind them.