The Sleeping Doll (4 page)

“Give me your wallet.” The hijacker wore shorts, a windbreaker and an Oakland A’s cap. His face was streaked with soot and part of his beard was burned off. He was middle–aged but thin and strong. He had weird light blue eyes.

“Whatever you want, mister. Just don’t hurt me. I’ve got a family.”

“Wal–
let?
”

It took stocky Billy a few moments to pry the billfold out of his tight shorts. “Here!”

The man flipped through it. “Now, William Gilmore, of three–four–three–five Rio Grande Avenue, Marina, California, father of these two fine children, if the photo gallery’s up to date.”

Dread unraveled inside him.

“And husband of this lovely wife. Look at those curls. Natural, I’ll bet any money. Hey, keep your eyes on the road. Swerved a bit there. And keep going where I told you.” Then the hijacker said, “Hand me your cell phone.”

His voice was calm. Calm is good. It means he’s not going to do anything sudden or stupid.

Billy heard the man punch in a number.

“’Lo. It’s me. Write this down.” He repeated Billy’s address. “He’s got a wife and two kids. Wife’s real pretty. You’ll like the hair.”

Billy whispered, “Who’s that you’re calling? Please, mister … Please. Take the truck, take anything. I’ll give you as much time as you want to get away. An hour. Two hours. Just don’t —”

“Shhhh.” The man continued his phone conversation. “If I don’t show up, that’ll mean I didn’t make it through the roadblocks because William here wasn’t convincing enough. You go visit his family. They’re all yours.”

“No!” Billy twisted around and lunged for the phone.

The gun muzzle touched his face. “Keep driving, son. Not a good time to run off the road.” The hijacker snapped the phone shut and put it into his own pocket.

“William … You go by Bill?”

“Billy mostly, sir.”

“So, Billy, here’s the situation. I escaped from that jail back there.”

“Yessir. That’s fine with me.”

The man laughed. “Well, thank you. Now you heard me on the phone. You know what I want you to do. You get me through any roadblocks, I’ll let you go and no harm’ll come to your family.”

Face fever hot, belly churning with fear, Billy wiped his round cheeks.

“You’re no threat to me. Everybody knows my name and what I look like. I’m Daniel Pell and my picture’ll be all over the noon news. So I don’t have any reason to hurt you, long as you do what I say. Now, summon up some calm. You’ve got to stay focused. If the police stop you I want a cheerful and curious deliveryman, frowning and asking about what happened back in town. All that smoke, all that mess. My, my. You get the idea?”

“Please, I’ll do anything —”

“Billy, I know you were listening to me. I don’t need you to do
anything.
I need you to do what I asked. That’s all. What could be simpler?”

A to B to X
…

Dance realized that Pell could commandeer the truck to get past the roadblocks and called the Worldwide Express Salinas operations director, who confirmed that the driver on that route had missed all remaining scheduled deliveries. Dance got the tag number of his truck and relayed it to the MCSO.

They returned to Sandy Sandoval’s office, coordinating the efforts to find the vehicle. Unfortunately, there were twenty–five Worldwide trucks in the area, so Dance told the director to order the other drivers to pull over immediately at the nearest gas station. The truck that kept moving would contain Daniel Pell.

This was taking some time, though. The director had to call them on their cell phones, since a radio broadcast would alert Pell that they knew about his means of escape.

A figure walked slowly through the doorway. Dance turned to see Michael O’Neil, the senior MCSO chief deputy she’d called earlier. She nodded at him with a smile, greatly relieved he was here. There was no better law enforcer in the world with whom to share this tough burden.

O’Neil had been with the MCSO for years. He’d started as a rookie deputy and worked his way up, becoming a solid, methodical investigator with a stunning arrest — and more important,
conviction
— record. He was now a chief deputy and detective with the Enforcement Operations Bureau of the MCSO’s Investigations Division.

He’d resisted offers to go into lucrative corporate security or to join bigger law–enforcement ops like the CBI or FBI. He wouldn’t take a job that required relocation or extensive travel. O’Neil’s home was the Monterey Peninsula and he had no desire to be anywhere else. His parents still lived there — in the ocean–view house he and his siblings had grown up in. (His father was suffering from senility; his mother was considering selling the house and moving the man into a nursing facility. O’Neil had a plan to buy the homestead just to keep it in the family.)

With his love of the bay, fishing and his boat, Michael O’Neil could be the unwavering, unobtrusive hero in a John Steinbeck novel, like Doc in
Cannery Row.
In fact, the detective, an avid book collector, owned first editions of everything Steinbeck had written. (His favorite was
Travels with Charley,
a nonfiction account of the writer’s trip around America with his Standard Poodle, and O’Neil intended to duplicate the journey at some point in his life.)

Last Friday, Dance and O’Neil had jointly collared a thirty–year–old known as Ese, head of a particularly unpleasant Chicano gang operating out of Salinas. They’d marked the occasion by sharing a bottle of Piper Sonoma sparkling wine on the deck of a tourist–infested Fisherman’s Wharf restaurant.

Now it seemed as if the celebration had occurred decades ago. If at all.

The MCSO uniform was typical khaki, but O’Neil often dressed soft, and today he was in a navy suit, with a tieless dark shirt, charcoal gray, matching about half the hair on his head. The brown eyes, beneath low lids, moved slowly as they examined the map of the area. His physique was columnar and his arms thick, from genes and from playing tug of war with muscular seafood in Monterey Bay when time and the weather allowed him to get out his boat.

O’Neil nodded a greeting to TJ and Sandoval.

“Any word on Juan?” Dance asked.

“Hanging in there.” He and Millar worked together frequently and went fishing once a month or so. Dance knew that on the drive here he’d been in constant touch with the doctors and Millar’s family.

The California Bureau of Investigation has no central dispatch unit to contact radio patrol cars, emergency vehicles or boats, so O’Neil arranged for the Sheriff’s Office central communications operation to relay the information about the missing Worldwide Express truck to its own deputies and the Highway Patrol. He told them that within a few minutes the escapee’s truck would be the only one not stopped at a gas station.

O’Neil took a call and nodded, walking to the map. He tucked the phone between ear and shoulder, picked up a pack of self–adhesive notes featuring butterflies and began sticking them up.

More roadblocks, Dance realized.

He hung up. “They’re on Sixty–Eight, One–Eighty–Three, the One–oh–One … We’ve got the back roads to Hollister covered, and Soledad and Greenfield. But if he gets into the Pastures of Heaven, it’ll be tough to spot a truck, even with a chopper — and right now fog’s a problem.”

The “Pastures of Heaven” was the name given by John Steinbeck in a book of the same title to a rich, orchard–filled valley off Highway 68. Much of the area around Salinas was flat, low farmland, but you didn’t have to go far to get into trees. And nearby too was the rugged Castle Rock area, whose cliffs, bluffs and trees would be excellent hiding places.

Sandoval said, “If Pell’s partner didn’t drive the getaway wheels, where is
he?
”

TJ offered, “Rendezvous point somewhere?”

“Or staying around,” Dance said, nodding out the window.

“What?” the prosecutor asked. “Why’d he do that?”

“To find out how we’re running the case, what we know. What we
don’t
know.”

“That sounds a little … elaborate, don’t you think?”

TJ laughed, pointing toward the smoldering cars. “I’d say that’s a pretty good word for this whole shebang.”

O’Neil suggested, “Or maybe he wants to slow us up.”

Dance said, “That makes sense too. Pell and his partner don’t know we’re on to the truck. For all they know we still think he’s in the area. The partner could make it look like Pell’s nearby. Maybe take a shot at somebody up the street, maybe even set off another device.”

“Shit. Another firebomb?” Sandoval grimaced.

Dance called the security chief and told him there was a possibility the partner was still around and could be a threat.

But, as it turned out, they had no time to speculate about whether or not the partner was nearby. The plan about the Worldwide Express trucks had paid off. A radio call to O’Neil from MCSO dispatch reported that two local police officers had found Daniel Pell and were presently in pursuit.

The uniformed officer who was driving the Salinas Police squad car, a former jarhead back from the war, gripped the wheel of the cruiser as if he were holding on to the rudder of a ten–foot skiff in twelve–foot seas.

His partner — a muscular Latino — gripped the dashboard in one hand and the microphone in the other. “Salinas Police Mobile Seven. We’re still with him. He turned onto a dirt road off Natividad about a mile south of Old Stage.”

“Roger … Central to Seven, be advised, subject is probably armed and dangerous.”

“If he’s armed, of
course
he’s dangerous,” the driver said and lost his sunglasses when the car caught air after a run–in with a massive bump. The two officers could hardly see the road ahead; the Worldwide truck was churning up dust like a sandstorm.

“Central to Seven, we’ve got all available units en route.”

“Roger that.”

Backup was a good idea. The rumors were that Daniel Pell, the crazed cult leader, this era’s Charles Manson, had gunned down a dozen people at the courthouse, had set fire to a bus filled with schoolchildren, had slashed his way through a crowd of prospective jurors, killing four. Or two. Or eight. Whatever the truth, the officers wanted as much help as they could get.

The jarhead muttered, “Where’s he going? There’s nothing up here.”

The road was used mostly for farm equipment and buses transporting migrant workers to and from the fields. It led to no major highways. There was no picking going on today but the road’s purpose, and the fact it probably led to no major highways, could be deduced from its decrepit condition and from the drinking water tanks and the portable toilets on trailers by the roadside.

But Daniel Pell might not know that and would assume this was a road like any other. Rather than one that ended, as this did, abruptly in the middle of an artichoke field. Ahead of them, thirty yards or so, Pell braked fast in panic and the truck began to skid. But there was no way to stop in time. The truck’s front wheels dropped hard into a shallow irrigation ditch, and the rear end lifted off the ground, then slammed back with a huge crash.

The squad car braked to a stop nearby. “This is Seven,” the Latino cop called in. “Pell’s off the road.”

“Roger, is he —”

The officers leapt out of the car with their pistols drawn.

“He’s going to bail, he’s going to bail!”

But nobody exited the truck.

They approached it. The back door had flown open in the crash and they could see nothing but dozens of packages and envelopes littering the floor.

“There he is, look.”

Pell lay stunned, facedown, on the floor of the vehicle.

“Maybe he’s hurt.”

“Who gives a shit?”

The officers ran forward and cuffed and dragged him out of the space where he was wedged

They dropped him on to his back on the ground. “Nice try, buddy, but —”

“Fuck. It’s not him.”

“What?” asked his partner.

“Excuse me, does
that
look like a forty–three–year–old white guy?”

The jarhead bent down to the groggy teenager, a gang teardrop tat on his cheek, and snapped “Who’re you?” in Spanish, a language that every law enforcer in and around Salinas could speak.

The kid avoided their eyes, muttering in English, “I no saying nothing. You can go fuck youself.”

“Oh, man.” The Latino cop glanced into the cab, where the keys were dangling from the dash. He understood: Pell had left the truck on a city street with the engine on, knowing it’d be stolen — oh, in about sixty seconds — so the police would follow it and give Pell a chance to escape in a different direction.

Another thought. Not a good one. He turned to Jarhead. “You don’t think, when we said we had Pell and they called all availables for backup … I mean, you don’t think they pulled ‘em off the roadblocks, do you?”

“No, they wouldn’t do that. That’d be fucking stupid.”

The men looked at each other.

“Christ.” The Latino officer raced to the squad car and grabbed the microphone.