Next (29 page)

CH070

A
lex took
her son to an In-N-Out drive-in, and they had burgers and fries and strawberry shakes. It was now dark outside. She thought of calling Lynn again, but Lynn had sounded harried. She decided not to.

She paid for the burgers in cash. Then they drove to a Walston’s drugstore, one of those block-long places that had everything. She bought Jamie some underwear and a change of clothes; she did the same for herself. She bought a couple of toothbrushes and toothpaste.

She was heading toward the checkout when she saw the guns for sale, over by the cameras and watches. She went to look. Over the years, she had gone to shooting ranges with her father. She could handle a gun. She told Jamie to go look at the toy aisle, and she went to the gun rack.

“Help you?” It was a wimpy guy with a mustache.

“I’d like to see that Mossberg double-action.” She nodded to the wall.

“That’s our model 590, twelve-gauge, perfect for home defense. Got a special price this week only.”

She hefted it. “Okay, I’ll take it.”

“I’ll need an ID, and a deposit to hold it.”

“No,” she said, “I mean, I’ll buy it now.”

“Sorry, ma’am, ten-day waiting period in California.”

She handed the gun back. “I’ll think it over,” she said.

She returned to Jamie, bought the Spider-Man toy he was playing with, and walked out to the parking lot.

A man was standing at the back of her car, bending over the license plate. Writing the number down. He was an older guy, in some kind of uniform. He looked like a security guard from the store.

She thought:
Run. Leave now.

But that didn’t make sense; she needed a car. It was time to think fast. She told Jamie to get in the car, and she walked to the back. “You know he’s a damn liar,” she said.

“Who’s that?” the guard said.

“My ex-husband. He pretends like this car is his, but it isn’t. He’s just harassing me. I got a court order to stop him, and I got a big judgment against the security guard at Wal-Mart.”

“How’s that?” he said.

“Don’t act dumb,” she said. “I know you got a call from him. He pretends to be an attorney, he pretends to be a bail bondsman, or a court agent, and he wants you to check if my car is in the lot. He says it’s some pending legal matter.”

“Well, yes—”

“He’s lying, and you’re now liable. Did he tell you I was an attorney?”

“No, he just—”

“Well, I am. And you’re an accessory to his breaking the court order. That makes you liable to damages. Invasion of privacy and harassment.” She took a pad from her purse. “Now your name is…” She squinted at the name tag, began to write.

“I don’t want any trouble, ma’am—”

“Then give me that sheet of paper you wrote my license on, and back off,” she said. “And when my husband calls again, you damn well tell him you never set eyes on me, or I’ll see you in court, and I promise you, you’ll be lucky if all you lose is your job.”

He nodded, gave her the paper. His hands were shaking. She got in the car and drove off.

As she pulled out of the parking lot, she thought,
Maybe it will work.
Then again, maybe not. Mostly she was stunned by how fast this bounty hunter had located her.

He no doubt had followed her own car north for a couple of hours, and then realized that she had switched cars with her assistant. He and his cohorts knew her assistant’s name, and they got her car registration. So now they knew the car Alex was driving.

Then Alex had used her credit card, and within minutes, the bounty hunter had known about it and fixed her position at a motel in San Juan Capistrano. Realizing that she’d need supplies, the hunter had probably called every convenience store within a five-mile radius of the motel, and gave a story to the security people. Be on the lookout for a white Toyota, license so-and-so.

And this guy found her.

Right away.

Unless she missed her bet, the bounty hunter was on his way to Capistrano right now. If he was driving, he would be there in three hours. But if he had access to a helicopter, he might be here already.

Already.

“Mom, can I watch TV when we go back to the motel?”

“Sure, honey.”

But, of course, they weren’t going back to the motel.

She parked
around the corner from the motel. From her position, she could see the lobby, and the kid inside. He was talking on the phone, looking around as he did so.

She turned on her regular cell phone, and dialed the motel.

The kid put the other line on hold, and picked up.

“Best Western.”

“Yes, this is Mrs. Colson. I checked in earlier.”

“Yes, Mrs. Colson.”

It seemed to excite him. He looked around in all directions now, frantic.

“You put me in room 204.”

“Yes…”

“I think there’s someone in my room.”

“Mrs. Colson, I can’t imagine—”

“I want you to come here and open the door for me.”

“If it’s anybody, it’s probably the maid—”

“I think it’s a man.”

“Oh no, it couldn’t be—”

“Come here and open the door. Or do I have to call the police?”

“No, I’m sure…I’ll be right there.”

“Thank you.”

He switched to the other line, spoke quickly, and then left the lobby, running down toward the rooms at the back.

Alex got out of her car and sprinted across the street to the lobby. She moved in quickly, stepped behind the counter, picked up the shotgun, and walked out again. It was a sawed-off twelve-gauge Remington. Not her first choice, but it would do for now. She’d get shells later.

She got back in the car. “What’s the gun for?” Jamie said.

“Just in case,” she said. She drove off, turning onto Camino Real. Through her rearview mirror, she saw the kid coming back into the lobby, looking puzzled.

“I want to watch TV,” Jamie said.

“Not tonight,” she said. “Tonight we are going to have an adventure.”

“What kind of adventure?”

“You’ll see.”

She drove east, away from the lights, and into the darkness of the mountains.

CH071

S
tan Milgram
was lost in endless darkness. The road ahead was a strip of light, but on each side he could see no signs of life at all, nothing except pitch-black desert landscape stretching away into the distance. To the north he could just detect the ridge of the mountains, a faint line of black against black. But nothing else—no lights, no towns, no houses, nothing.

It had been that way for an hour.

Where the hell was he?

From the backseat, the bird gave a piercing shriek. Stan jumped; the sound made his eardrums ache. If you ever plan to motor west, he thought, don’t take a damn bird on the highway, that’s the best. He’d put cloth over the cage hours ago, but the cloth didn’t shut the bird up anymore. From St. Louis down through Missouri, and on to Gallup, New Mexico. All the way the bird would not shut up. Stan checked into a Gallup motel, and at around midnight the bird began to scream, earsplitting shrieks.

There was nothing to do but check out—with all the other motel guests yelling at him—and start driving again. The bird was silent, once they were driving. But he pulled off the road for a few hours during the day to sleep, and later, when he stopped at Flagstaff, Arizona, the bird began to scream again. It started before he even checked into the motel.

He kept driving. Winona, Kingman, Barstow, heading for San Bernardino—San Berdoo, his aunt called it—and all he could think
was this trip would be over soon. Please, God. Let it be over before he killed the bird.

But Stan was exhausted, and after driving more than two thousand miles, he had become strangely disoriented. Either he had missed the San Berdoo turnoff or…or he wasn’t sure.

He was lost.

And the bird still shrieked. “Your heart sweats, your body shakes, another kiss is what it takes…”

He pulled the car over. He opened the door to the backseat. He took the cloth off. “Gerard,” he said. “Why are you doing this?”

“You can’t sleep, you can’t eat—”

“Gerard, stop it. Why?”

“I’m afraid.”

“Why?”

“It’s too far from home.” The bird blinked, looked at the darkness outside. “What fresh hell is this?”

“This is the desert.”

“It’s freezing.”

“The desert is cold at night.”

“Why are we here?”

“I’m taking you to your new home.” Stan stared at the bird. “If I leave your cloth off, will you be quiet?”

“Yes.”

“No talking at all?”

“Yes.”

“You promise?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. I need it quiet so I can find out where we are.”

“I don’t know why, I love you like I do, after all the changes—”

“Try and help me, Gerard. Please.” Stan went around and got in the driver’s seat. He pulled out onto the road and started driving. The bird was quiet. The miles rolled by. Then he saw a sign for a town called Earp, three miles ahead.

“Mellow greetings, ukie dukie,” Gerard said.

Stan sighed.

He drove forward into the night.

“You remind me of a man,” Gerard said.

“You promised,” Stan said.

“No, you are supposed to say, ‘What man?’”

“Gerard, shut up.”

“You remind me of a man,” Gerard said.

“What man?”

“The man with the power.”

“What power?”

“The power of hoodoo.”

“Hoodoo?” Stan said.

“You do.”

“Do what?”

“Remind me of a man.”

“What man?” Stan said. And then he caught himself. “Gerard,
shut up
or I will put you outside
right now.
”

“Ooh, aren’t you the twisted bunny.”

Stan glanced at his watch.

One more hour, he thought. One more hour, and that bird was out.

CH072

E
llis sat down
across from his brother Aaron, in Aaron’s office at the law firm. The office window looked south over the city, down toward the Empire State Building. It was a hazy day, but the view was still spectacular, powerful.

“Okay,” Ellis said, “I talked to that guy in California, Josh Winkler.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He says he never gave anything to Mom.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Says what he sent was water.”

“Well, that’s what you would expect him to say.”

“Aaron,” Ellis said, “they gave her water. Winkler said that he was not going to transport anything across state lines. His mother wanted it done, so he sent water, to test the placebo effect.”

“And you believe him,” Aaron said, shaking his head.

“I think he has documentation.”

“Of course he does,” Aaron said.

“Sign-outs, lab reports, other documentation maintained by his company.”

“Falsified,” Aaron said.

“That documentation is required by the FDA. Falsifying it is a federal offense.”

“So is giving gene therapy to friends.” Aaron pulled out a sheaf of papers. “Do you know the history of gene therapy? It’s a horror story,
Ellie. Starting back in the late 1980s, the biotech guys went off half-cocked and killed people right and left. At least six hundred people we know about have been killed. And plenty more we don’t know about. You know why we don’t know?”

“No, why?”

“Because they claimed—get this—that the deaths couldn’t be reported, because they were proprietary information. Killing their patients was a trade secret.”

“Did they really say that?”

“Could I make this shit up? And then they bill Medicare for the cost of the experiment that killed the patient. They kill, we pay. And if the universities get caught, they claim they don’t have to give informed consent to subjects because they are nonprofit institutions. Duke, Penn, University of Minnesota—big places have been caught. Academics think they’re above the law. Six hundred deaths!”

Ellis said, “I don’t see what this has to do—”

“You know how gene therapy kills people? All sorts of ways. They don’t know what’s going to happen. They insert genes into people, and it turns on cancer genes, and the people die of cancer. Or they have huge allergic reactions and die. These goofballs don’t know what the hell they are doing. They’re reckless and they don’t follow the rules. And we,” he said, “are going to smack their asses down.”

Ellis squirmed in his chair. “But what if Winkler is telling the truth? What if we are wrong?”

“We didn’t break the rules,” Aaron said. “They did. Now Mom’s got Alzheimer’s, and they’re in deep, deep shit.”

CH073

W
hen Brad Gordon
started the bar fight at the Lucky Lucy Saloon on Pearl Street in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, he hadn’t intended to end up in the hospital. The two guys in the tight-fitting plaid shirts with the pointy pearl-button pockets looked like pussies to him, and he figured he could take them easily. There was no way to know they were brothers, not lovers, and they didn’t take kindly to his remarks about them.

And there was no way to know that the smaller one taught karate at Wyoming State and had won some kind of championship at a Bruce Lee tournament for martial arts in Hong Kong.

Kickboxing with metal-tipped cowboy boots. Brad lasted all of thirty seconds. And a lot of his teeth were loose. He had been lying in this fucking infirmary for three hours, while they tried to push the teeth back in place. There was one periodontist they kept calling, but he wasn’t answering, possibly because (as the intern explained) he was off hunting for the weekend—he liked elk. Tasty eating.

Elk! Brad’s fucking mouth was killing him.

So they left him there with icepacks on his face and his jaw shot full of Novocain, and somehow he fell asleep, and the next morning, the swelling had gone down enough that he could talk on the phone, so he called his attorney, Willy Johnson, in Los Angeles, holding the business card between his bruised thumb and forefinger.

The receptionist was cheerful: “Johnson, Baker, and Halloran.”

“Willy Johnson, please.”

“Hold on, please.” The phone clicked, but he wasn’t put on hold, and then he heard the woman say, “Faber, Ellis, and Condon.”

Brad looked again at the card in his hand. The address was an office building in Encino. He knew what that place was. It was a building where solo attorneys could rent a tiny office and share a receptionist who was trained to answer the phone as if she was working at a big law firm, so clients would not suspect their attorneys were on their own. That building housed only the most unsuccessful sort of attorney. The ones who handled small-time drug dealers. Or who had done jail time themselves.

“Excuse me…” he said, into the phone.

“Sorry sir, I am trying to find Mr. Johnson for you.” She cupped her hand over the phone. “Anybody seen Willy Johnson?”

And he heard a muffled voice yell back, “Willy Johnson is a dick!”

Sitting there at the entrance to the emergency room, weak and in pain, his jaw aching like hell, Brad did not feel good about what he was hearing. “Did you find Mr. Johnson?”

“One moment sir, we’re looking…”

He hung up.

He felt like crying.

He went out
to get breakfast, but it hurt too much to eat, and people in the coffee shop looked at him oddly. He saw his reflection in the glass and realized his whole jaw was blue and puffy. Still it was better than last night. He wasn’t worried about anything except this attorney Johnson. All his initial suspicions about the man were confirmed. Why had they met at a restaurant, instead of his law firm? Because Johnson didn’t belong to a law firm.

There was nothing to do but call his uncle Jack.

“John B. Watson Investment Group.”

“Mr. Watson, please.”

They put him through to the secretary, who put him through to his uncle.

“Hey, Uncle Jack.”

“Where the fuck are you?” Watson said. He sounded distinctly unfriendly.

“I’m in Wyoming.”

“Staying out of trouble, I hope.”

“Actually, my attorney sent me here,” he said, “and that’s why I am calling you. I’m a little worried, I mean this guy—”

“Look,” Watson said, “you’re up on a molestation charge, and you’ve got a molestation expert to handle your case. You don’t have to like him. Personally I hear he’s a prick.”

“Well—”

“But he wins cases. Do what he says. Why are you talking funny?”

“Nothing…”

“I’m busy, Brad. And you were told never to call.”

Click
.

Brad was feeling worse
than ever. Back at his motel room, the guy at the desk said someone from the police had come looking for him. Something about a hate crime. Brad decided it was time to leave beautiful Jackson Hole.

He went to his room to pack, watching some true-crime show where the police caught a dangerous fugitive by pretending to put him on television. They staged a fake TV interview setup, and as soon as the guy relaxed, they slapped cuffs on him. And now the guy was on death row.

Police were getting tricky. Brad hastily finished packing, paid his bill, and hurried out to his car.