The machine was still vibrating.
She stared at the mass of switches and dials. She had just shot the one person who knew how to turn the thing off. Panic swept over her. She fought it down.
There was.
She reached over the inert body of Ricky Granger and turned it.
Suddenly there was quiet.
She glanced along the street. Outside the Perpetua Diaries warehouse, the helicopter was on fire.
She opened the door of the truck, fighting to stay conscious. She knew there was something she ought to do, something important, before she went to help Michael, but she could not think what it was. She gave up trying to remember and climbed out of the truck.
A distant police siren came closer, and she saw a patrol car approaching. She waved it down. “FBI,” she said weakly. “Take me to that chopper.” She opened the door and fell into the car.
The cop drove the four hundred yards to the warehouse and pulled up a safe distance from the burning aircraft. Judy got out. She could not see anyone inside the helicopter. “Michael!” she yelled. “Where are you?”
“Over here!” He was behind the busted doors of the warehouse, bending over the pilot. Judy ran to him. “This guy needs help,” Michael said. He looked at her face. “Jesus, so do you!”
“I’m all right,” she said. “Help is on the way.” She pulled out her cell phone and called the command post. She got Raja. He said: “Judy, what’s happening?”
“You tell me, for Christ’s sake!”
“The vibrator stopped.”
“I know, I stopped it. Any tremors?”
“No. Nothing at all.”
Judy slumped with relief. She had stopped the machine in time. There would be no earthquake.
She leaned against the wall. She felt faint. She struggled to stay upright.
She felt no triumph, no sense of victory. Perhaps that would come later, with Raja and Carl and the others, in Everton’s bar. For now she was drained empty.
Another patrol car pulled up, and an officer got out. “Lieutenant Forbes,” he said. “What the hell went on here? Where’s the perpetrator?”
Judy pointed along the street to the seismic vibrator. “He’s in the front of that truck,” she said. “Dead.”
“We’ll take a look.” The lieutenant got back in his car and tore off down the street.
Michael had disappeared. Looking for him, Judy stepped inside the warehouse.
She saw him sitting on the concrete floor in a pool of blood. But he was unhurt. In his arms he held Melanie. Her face was even paler than usual, and her skimpy T-shirt was soaked with blood from a grisly wound in her chest.
Michael’s face was contorted with grief.
Judy went to him and knelt beside him. She felt for a pulse in Melanie’s neck. There was none.
“I’m sorry, Michael,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
He swallowed. “Poor Dusty,” he said.
Judy touched his face. “It will be all right,” she said.
A few moments later Lieutenant Forbes reappeared. “Pardon me, ma’am,” he said politely. “Did you say there was a dead man in that truck?”
“Yes,” she said. “I shot him.”
“Well,” the cop said, “he ain’t there now.”
22
Star was jailed for ten years.
At first, prison was torture. The regimented existence was hell for someone whose whole life had been about freedom. Then a pretty wardress called Jane fell in love with her and brought her makeup and books and marijuana, and things began to look up.
Flower was placed with foster parents, a Methodist minister and his wife. They were kindhearted people who could not begin to understand where Flower was coming from. She missed her parents, did poorly at school, and got in more trouble with the police. Then, a couple of years later, she found her grandma. Veronica Nightingale had been thirteen when she gave birth to Priest, so she was only in her mid-sixties when Flower found her. She was running a store in Los Angeles selling sex toys, lingerie, and porno videos. She had an apartment in Beverly Hills and drove a red sports car, and she told Flower stories about her daddy when he was a little boy. Flower ran away from the minister and his wife and moved in with her grandma.
Oaktree disappeared. Judy knew there had been a fourth person in the ’Cuda at Felicitas, and she had been able to piece together his role in the affair. She even got a full set of fingerprints from his woodwork shop at the commune. But no one knew where he had gone. However, his prints showed up a couple of years later, on a stolen car that had been used in an armed robbery in Seattle. The police did not suspect him, because he had a solid alibi, but Judy was automatically notified. When she reviewed the file with the U.S. attorney — her old friend Don Riley, now married to an insurance saleswoman — they realized they had only a weak case against Oaktree for his part in the Hammer of Eden, and they decided to let him be.
Milton Lestrange died of cancer. Brian Kincaid retired. Marvin Hayes resigned and became security director for a supermarket chain.
Michael Quercus became moderately famous. Because he was nice looking and good at explaining seismology, TV shows always called him first when they wanted a quote about earthquakes. His business prospered.
Judy was promoted to supervisor. She moved in with Michael and Dusty. When Michael’s business started to make real money, they bought a house together and decided to have a baby. A month later she was pregnant, so they got married. Bo cried at the wedding.
Judy figured out how Granger had got away.
The wound to his face was nasty but not serious. The bullet to his shoulder had nicked a vein, and the sudden loss of blood caused him to lose consciousness. Judy should have checked his pulse before going to help Michael, but she was weakened by her injuries and confused because of loss of blood, and she failed to follow routine.
Granger’s slumped position caused his blood pressure to rise again, and he came around a few seconds after she left. He crawled around the corner to Third Street, where he was lucky enough to find a car waiting at a stoplight. He got in, pointed his gun at the driver, and demanded to be taken to the city. En route he used Melanie’s mobile to call Paul Beale, the wine bottler who was a criminal associate of Granger’s from the old days. Beale had given him the address of a crooked doctor.
Granger made the driver drop him at a corner in a grungy neighborhood. (The traumatized citizen drove home, called the local police precinct house, got a busy signal, and did not get around to reporting the incident until the next day.) The doctor, a disbarred surgeon who was a morphine addict, patched Granger up. Granger stayed at the doctor’s apartment overnight, then left.
Judy never found out where he went after that.
