announced a deadline, and timing would be important.
This waiting was unbearable. He thought of getting in and starting the truck, just to make sure everything was okay; but that would be foolish. He was suffering from dumb nerves. The truck would be fine. He would do better to stay away and leave it alone until tomorrow.
He parted another section of the covering and looked at the steel plate that hammered the earth. If Melanie’s scheme worked, the vibration would unleash an earthquake. There was a pure kind of justice about the plan. They would be using the earth’s stored-up energy as a threat to force the governor to take care of the environment. The earth was saving the earth. It felt right to Priest in a way that was almost holy.
Spirit gave a low bark, as if he had heard something. It was probably a rabbit, but Priest nervously replaced the branches he had moved, then headed back.
He made his way through the trees to the track and turned toward the village.
He stopped in the middle of the track and frowned, mystified. On the way here he had stepped over a fallen bough. Now it had been moved to the side. Spirit had not been barking at rabbits. Someone else was about. He had not heard anyone, but sounds were quickly muffled in the dense vegetation. Who was it? Had someone followed him? Had they seen him looking at the seismic vibrator?
As he headed home, Spirit became agitated. When they came within sight of the parking circle, Priest saw why.
There in the muddy clearing, parked beside his ’Cuda, was a police car.
Priest’s heart stopped.
So soon! How could they have tracked him down so soon?
He stared at the cruiser.
It was a white Ford Crown Victoria with a green stripe along the side, a silver six-pointed sheriff’s star on the door, four aerials, and a rack of blue, red, and orange lights on the roof.
The police might not be here for the vibrator. Idle curiosity might have brought a cop wandering down the track: it had never happened before, but it was possible. There were lots of other possible reasons. They could be searching for a tourist who had gone missing. A sheriff’s deputy could be looking for a secret place to meet his neighbor’s wife.
They might not even realize there was a commune here. Perhaps they need never find out. If Priest slipped back into the woods—
Too late. Just as the thought entered his head, a cop stepped around the trunk of a tree.
Spirit barked fiercely.
“Quiet,” Priest said, and the dog fell silent.
The cop was wearing the gray-green uniform of a sheriff’s deputy, with a star over the left breast of the short jacket, a cowboy hat, and a gun on his pants belt.
He saw Priest and waved.
Priest hesitated, then slowly raised his hand and waved back.
Then, reluctantly, he walked up to the car.
He hated cops. Most of them were thieves and bullies and psychopaths. They used their uniform and their position to conceal the fact that they were worse criminals than the people they arrested. But he would force himself to be polite, just as if he were some dumb suburban citizen who imagined the police were there to protect him.
He breathed evenly, relaxed the muscles of his face, smiled, and said: “Howdy.”
The cop was alone. He was young, maybe twenty-five or thirty, with short light brown hair. His body in the uniform was already beefy: in ten years’ time he would have a beer gut.
“Are there any residences near here?” the cop asked.
Priest was tempted to lie, but a moment’s reflection told him it was too risky. The cop only had to walk a quarter of a mile in the right direction to stumble upon the houses, and his suspicions would be aroused if he found he had been lied to. So Priest told the truth. “You’re not far from the Silver River Winery.”
“I never heard of it before.”
That was no accident. In the phone book, its address and number were Paul Beale’s in Napa. None of the communards registered to vote. None of them paid taxes because none had any income. They had always been secretive. Star had a horror of publicity that dated from the time the hippie movement had been destroyed by overexposure in the media. But many of the communards had a reason to hide away. Some had debts, others were wanted by the police. Oaktree had been a deserter, Song had escaped from an uncle who sexually abused her, and Aneth’s husband had beaten her up and swore that if she left him, he would seek her out wherever she might be.
The commune continued to act as a sanctuary, and some of the more recent arrivals were also on the run. The only way anyone could find out about the place was from people such as Paul Beale who had lived here for a while, then returned to the world outside, and they were very cautious about sharing the secret.
There had never been a cop here.
“How come I never heard of the place?” the cop said. “I been a deputy here ten years.”
“It’s pretty small,” Priest said.
“You the owner?”
“No, just a worker.”
“So what do you do here, make wine?”
But this one remained straight-faced. “I’m looking for the parents of a young girl who gives her name as Flower.”
A terrible fear possessed Priest, and he suddenly felt as cold as the grave. “Oh, my God, what’s happened?”
“She’s under arrest.”
“Is she okay?”
“She’s not injured in any way, if that’s what you mean.”
“Thank God. I thought you were going to say she’d been in an accident.” Priest’s brain began to recover from the shock. “How can she be in jail? I thought she was here, asleep in her bed!”
“Obviously not. How are you connected with her?”
“I’m her father.”
“Then you’ll need to come to Silver City.”
“Silver City? How long has she been there?”
“Just overnight. We didn’t want to keep her that long, but for a while she refused to tell us her address. She broke down an hour or so ago.”
Priest’s heart lurched to think of his little girl in custody, trying to keep the secret of the commune until she broke down. Tears came to his eyes.
The cop went on: “Even so, you were god-awful hard to find. In the end I got directions from a bunch of damn gun-toting freaks about five miles down the valley from here.”
Priest nodded. “Los Alamos.”
“Yeah. Had a damn big sign up saying ‘We do not recognize the jurisdiction of the United States government.’ Assholes.”
“I know them,” Priest said. They were right-wing vigilantes who had taken over a big old farmhouse in a lonely spot and now guarded it with high-powered firearms and dreamed of fighting off a Chinese invasion. Unfortunately they were the commune’s nearest neighbors. “Why is Flower in custody? Did she do something wrong?”
“That is the usual reason,” the cop said sarcastically.
“What did she do?”
“She was caught stealing from a store.”
