“To make things hard for us. That picture makes it impossible to drive the truck on the open road. Every Highway Patrol officer in California is on the lookout.” He hit the table with his fist in frustration. “Fuck it, I can’t let them stop me this easily!”
“What if we drive at night?”
He had thought of that. He shook his head. “Still too risky. There are cops on the road at night.”
“I have to go check on Dusty,” Melanie said. She was close to tears. “Oh, Priest, he’s so sick — we won’t have to leave the valley, will we? I’m scared. I’ll never find another place where we can be happy, I know it.”
Priest hugged her to give her courage. “I’m not beaten yet, not by a long shot. What else does the article say?”
She picked up the paper. “There was a demonstration outside the Federal Building in San Francisco.” She smiled through her tears. “A group of people who say the Hammer of Eden are right, the FBI should leave us alone, and Governor Robson should stop building power plants.”
Priest was pleased. “Well, what do you know. There are still a few Californians who can think straight!” Then he became solemn again. “But that doesn’t help me figure out how to drive the truck without getting pulled over by the first cop who sees it.”
“I’m going to Dusty,” she said.
Priest went with her. In her cabin, Dusty lay on the bed, eyes streaming, face red, panting for breath. Flower sat beside him, reading aloud from a book with a picture of a giant peach on the cover. Priest touched his daughter’s hair. She looked up at him and smiled without pausing in her reading.
Melanie got a glass of water and gave Dusty a pill. Priest felt sorry for Dusty, but he could not help remembering that the boy’s illness was a lucky break for the commune. Melanie was caught in a trap. She believed she had to live where the air was pure, but she could not get a job outside the city. The commune was the only answer. If she had to leave here, she might find another, similar commune to take her in — but she might not, and anyway, she was too exhausted and discouraged to hit the road again.
And there was more to it than that, he thought. Deep inside her was a terrible rage. He did not know the source of it, but it was strong enough to make her yearn to shake the earth and burn cities and cause people to run screaming from their homes. Most of the time it was hidden beneath the facade of a sexy but disorganized young woman. But sometimes, when her will was thwarted and she felt frustrated and powerless, the anger showed.
He left them and headed for Star’s cabin, worrying over the problem of the truck. Star might have some ideas. Maybe there was a way they could disguise the seismic vibrator so that it looked like some other kind of vehicle, a Coke truck or a crane or something.
He stepped into the cabin. Star was putting a Band-Aid on Ringo’s knee, something she had to do about once a day. Priest smiled at his ten-year-old son and said: “What did you do this time, cowboy?” Then he noticed Bones.
He was lying on the bed, fully clothed but fast asleep — or more likely passed out. There was an empty bottle of Silver River Valley chardonnay on the rough wooden table. Bones’s mouth was open, and he was snoring softly.
Ringo began to tell Priest a long story about trying to cross the stream by swinging from a tree, but Priest hardly listened. The sight of Bones had given him inspiration, and his mind was working feverishly.
When Ringo’s grazed knee had been attended to, and the boy ran out, Priest told Star about the problem of the seismic vibrator. Then he told her the solution.
Priest, Star, and Oaktree helped Bones pull the big tarpaulin off the carnival ride. The vehicle stood revealed in its glorious, gaudy colors: a green dragon breathing red-and-yellow fire over three screaming girls in a spinning seat, and the gaudy lettering that, Bones had told Priest, said “The Dragon’s Mouth.”
Priest spoke to Oaktree. “We drive this vehicle up the track a way and park it next to the seismic vibrator. Then we take off these painted panels and fix them to our truck, covering the machinery. The cops are looking for a seismic vibrator, not a carnival ride.”
Oaktree, who was carrying his toolbox, looked closely at the panels, examining the way they were fixed. “No problem,” he said after a minute. “I can do it in a day, with one or two people helping me.”
“And can you put the panels back afterward, so that Bones’s ride will look the same?”
“Good as new,” Oaktree promised.
Priest looked at Bones. The great snag with this scheme was that Bones had to be in on it. In the old days Priest would have trusted Bones with his life. He was a Rice Eater, after all. Perhaps he could not be relied upon to show up for his own wedding, but he could keep a secret. However, since Bones had become a junkie, all bets were off. Heroin lobotomized people. A junkie would steal his mother’s wedding ring.
But Priest had to take the risk. He was desperate. He had promised an earthquake four days from now, and he had to carry out his threat. Otherwise all was lost.
Bones agreed readily to the plan. Priest had half expected him to demand payment. However, he had been living free at the commune for four days, so it was too late for him to put his relationship with Priest on a commercial footing. Besides, as a communard Bones knew that the greatest imaginable sin was to value things in money terms.
Bones would be more subtle. In a day or two he would ask Priest for cash to go score some smack. Priest would cross that bridge when he came to it.
“Let’s get to it,” he said.
Oaktree and Star climbed into the cab of the carnival ride with Bones. Melanie and Priest took the ’Cuda for the mile-long ride to where the seismic vibrator was hidden.
Priest wondered what else the FBI knew. They had figured out that the earthquake had been triggered using a seismic vibrator. Had they progressed any further? He turned on the car radio, hoping for a bulletin. He got Connie Francis singing “Breakin’ in a Brand New Broken Heart,” an oldie even by his standards.
The ’Cuda bumped along the muddy track through the forest behind Bones’s truck. Bones handled the big rig confidently, Priest observed, even though he had only just been roused from a drunken sleep. There was a moment when Priest felt sure the carnival ride was going to get stuck in a mudslide, but it pulled through without stopping.
The news came on just as they drew near the hiding place of the seismic vibrator. Priest turned up the volume.
What he heard turned him pale with shock.
“Federal agents investigating the Hammer of Eden terrorist group have issued a photographic likeness of a suspect,” the newsreader said. “He has been named as Richard or Ricky Granger, aged forty-eight, formerly of Los Angeles.”
Priest said: “Jesus
“Granger is also wanted for a murder in Shiloh, Texas, nine days ago.”
“What?” No one knew he had killed Mario, not even Star.
The Rice Eaters were desperately keen to cause an earthquake that might kill hundreds, but all the same they would be appalled to know he had battered a man to death with a wrench. People were inconsistent.
“That’s not true,” Priest said to Melanie. “I didn’t kill anyone.”
Melanie was staring at him. “Is that your real name?” she said. “Ricky Granger?”
He had forgotten that she did not know. “Yeah,” he said. He racked his brains to think who knew his real name. He had not used it for twenty-five years, except in Shiloh. Suddenly he remembered that he had gone to the sheriff’s office in Silver City, to get Flower out of jail, and his heart stopped for a moment; then he recalled that the deputy had assumed he had the same name as Star and called him Mr. Higgins. Thank God.
Melanie said: “How did they get a photo of you?”
“Not a photo,” he said. “A
“I know what you mean,” she said. “Only they use a computer program now.”
“There’s a computer program for every goddamn thing,” Priest muttered. He was now very glad he had changed his appearance before taking the job in Shiloh. It had been worth the time it took to grow a beard, the bother of pinning up his hair every day, and the nuisance of having to wear a hat all the time. With luck, the photographic likeness would not remotely resemble the way he looked now.
