Dubois pushed a button on the console, and the map of the world faded from the wall. An actual satellite view of Oregon, Idaho, California, and Nevada appeared in its place. Seen from orbit, the boundaries of those four states would have been difficult to define, so borders were overlaid in orange lines.
Western and southern Oregon, southern Idaho, northern through central California, and all of Nevada were concealed below a dense layer of clouds.
“This here’s a direct satellite feed. There’s just a three-minute delay for transmission and then conversion of the digital code back into images again,” said Dubois.
Along eastern Nevada and eastern Idaho, soft pulses of light rippled through the clouds. Roy knew that he was seeing lightning from above the storm. It was strangely beautiful.
“Right now, the only storm activity is out on the eastern edge of the front. ’Cept for an isolated patch of spit-thin rain here and there, things are pretty quiet all the way back to the ass-end of Oregon. But we can’t just do a look-down for the sonofabitch, not even with infrared. It’d be like trying to see the bottom of a soup bowl through clam chowder.”
“How long until clear skies?” Roy asked.
“There’s a kick-ass wind at higher altitudes, pushing the front east-southeast, so we should have a clear look at the whole Mojave and surrounding territory before dawn.”
A surveillance subject, sitting in bright sunshine and reading a newspaper, could be filmed from a satellite with sufficiently high resolution that the headlines on his paper would be legible. However, in clear weather, in an unpopulated wasteland that boasted no animals as large as a man, locating and identifying a moving object as large as a Ford Explorer would not be easy, because the territory to be examined was so vast. Nevertheless, it could be done.
Roy said, “He could leave the desert for one highway or another, put the pedal to the metal, and be long gone by morning.”
“Damn few paved roads in this part of the state. We got lookout teams in every direction, on every serious highway and sorry strip of blacktop. Interstate Fifteen, Federal Highway Ninety-five, Federal Highway Ninety-three. Plus State Routes One-forty-six, One-fifty-six, One-fifty-eight, One-sixty, One-sixty-eight, and One-sixty-nine. Lookin’ for a green Ford Explorer with some body damage fore and aft. Lookin’ for a man with a dog in
“Unless he already got off the desert and back onto a highway before you put your men in place.”
“We moved quick. Anyway, in a storm as bad as that one, goin’ overland, he made piss-poor time. Fact is, he’s damn lucky if he didn’t bog down somewhere, four-wheel drive or no four-wheel drive. We’ll nail the sonofabitch tomorrow.”
“I hope you’re right,” Roy said.
“I’d bet my pecker on it.”
“And they say Las Vegas locals aren’t big gamblers.”
“How’s he tied up with the woman anyway?”
“I wish I knew,” Roy said, watching as lightning flowered softly under the clouds on the leading edge of the storm front. “What about this tape of the conversation between Grant and the old woman?”
“You want to hear that?”
“Yes.”
“It starts from when he first says the name Hannah Rainey.”
“Let’s give it a listen,” Roy said, turning away from the wall display.
All the way down the hall, into the elevator, and down to the deepest subterranean level of the building, Dubois talked about the best places to get good chili in Vegas, as though he had reason to believe that Roy cared. “There’s this joint on Paradise Road, the chili’s so hot some folks been known to spontaneously combust from eatin’ it,
The elevator reached the subbasement.
“We’re talkin’ chili that makes you sweat from your fingernails, makes your belly button pop out like a meat thermometer.”
The doors slid open.
Roy stepped into a windowless concrete room.
Along the far wall were scores of recording machines.
In the middle of the room, rising from a computer workstation, was the most stunningly gorgeous woman Roy had ever seen, blond and green-eyed, so beautiful that she took his breath away, so beautiful that she set his heart to racing and sent his blood pressure soaring high into the stroke-risk zone, so achingly beautiful that no words could adequately describe her — nor could any music ever written be sweet enough to celebrate her — so beautiful and so incomparable that he couldn’t breathe or speak, so radiant that she blinded him to the dreariness of that bunker and left him surrounded by her magnificent light.
The flood had disappeared over the cliff like bathwater down a tub drain. The arroyo was now merely an enormous ditch.
To a considerable depth, the soil was mostly sand, extremely porous, so the rain had not puddled on it. The downpour had filtered quickly into a deep aquifer. The surface had dried out and firmed up almost as rapidly as the empty channel had previously turned into a racing, spumous river.
Nevertheless, before she had risked taking the Range Rover into the channel, although the machine was as surefooted as a tank, she had walked the route from the eroded arroyo wall to the Explorer and checked the condition of the ground. Satisfied that the bed of the ghost river wasn’t muddy or soft and that it would provide sufficient traction, she had driven the Rover into that declivity and had backed between the two columns of rock to the suspended Explorer.
Even now, after rescuing the dog and putting him in the back of the Rover, and after disentangling Grant from his safety harness, she was amazed by the precarious position in which the Explorer had come to rest. She was tempted to lean past the unconscious man and look through the gaping hole where the side window had been, but even if she could have seen much in the darkness, she knew that she wouldn’t enjoy the view.
The flood tide had lifted the truck more than ten feet above the floor of the arroyo before wedging it in that pincer of stone, on the brink of the cliff. Now that the river had vanished beneath it, the Explorer hung up there, its four wheels in midair, as though gripped in a pair of tweezers that belonged to a giant.
When she’d first seen it, she’d stood in childlike wonder, mouth open and eyes wide. She was no less astonished than she would have been if she’d seen a flying saucer and its unearthly crew.
She’d been certain that Grant had been swept out of the truck and carried to his death. Or that he was dead inside.
To get up to his truck, she’d had to back her Rover under it, putting the rear wheels uncomfortably close to the edge of the cliff. Then she had stood on the roof, which brought her head just to the bottom of the Explorer’s front passenger door. She had reached up to the handle and, in spite of the awkward angle, had managed to open the door.
Water poured out, but the dog was what startled her. Whimpering and miserable, huddled on the passenger seat, he had peered down at her with a mixture of alarm and yearning.
She didn’t want him jumping onto the Rover. He might slip on that smooth surface and fracture a leg, or tumble and break his neck.
Although the pooch hadn’t looked as if he would perform any canine stunts, she had warned him to stay where he was. She climbed down from the Rover, drove it forward five yards, turned it around to direct the headlights on the ground under the Explorer, got out again, and coaxed the dog to jump to the sandy riverbed.
He needed a
Finally, she remembered how Theda Davidowitz had often talked to Sparkle, and she tried the same approach with this dog: “Come on, sweetums, come to mama, come on. Little sweetums, little pretty-eyed snookie-wookums.”
In the truck above, the pooch pricked one ear and regarded her with acute interest.
