Heavy, oppressive, profound silence.
He sensed that he was teetering precariously on the edge of a horrible revelation. He had made a mistake. A deadly mistake. One that he could not correct. But what was it? What mistake? Where had he gone wrong? He looked hard at the discarded ax, desperately seeking understanding.
Then his breath caught in his throat.
“My God,” he whispered. “Rachael.”
lake arrowhead—3 miles.
Peake got behind a slow-moving camper in a no-passing zone, but Sharp did not seem bothered by the delay because he was busy seeking Peake's agreement to the double murder of Shadway and Mrs. Leben.
“Of course, Jerry, if you have the slightest qualms at all about participating, then you leave it to me. Naturally, I expect you to back me up in a pinch — that's part of your job, after all — but if we can disarm Shadway and the woman without trouble, then I'll handle the terminations myself.”
I'll still be an accessory to murder, Peake thought.
But he said, “Well, sir, I don't want to let you down.”
“I'm glad to hear you say that, Jerry. I would be disappointed if you didn't have the right stuff. I mean, I was so sure of your commitment and courage when I decided to bring you along on this assignment. And I can't stress strongly enough how grateful your country and the agency will be for your wholehearted cooperation.”
You psycho creep, you lying sack of shit, Peake thought.
But he said, “Sir, I don't want to do anything that would be opposed to the best interests of my country — or that would leave a black mark of any kind on my agency record.”
Sharp smiled, reading total capitulation in that statement.
Ben moved slowly around the kitchen, peering closely at the floor, where traces of broth from the discarded soup and stew cans glistened on the tile. He and Rachael had taken care to step over and around the spills when they had gone through the kitchen, and Ben had not previously noticed any of Eric's footprints in the mess, which was something he was certain he would have seen.
Now he found what had not been there earlier: almost a full footprint in a patch of thick gravy from the Dinty Moore can, and a heelprint in a gob of peanut butter. A man's boots, large ones, by the look of the tread.
Two more prints shone dully on the tile near the refrigerator, where Eric had tracked the gravy and peanut butter when he had gone over there to put down the ax and, of course, to hide. To hide. Jesus. When Ben and Rachael had entered the kitchen from the garage and had stepped into the living room to gather up the scattered pages of the Wildcard file, Eric had been crouched at the far side of the refrigerator, hiding.
Heart racing, Ben turned away from the prints and hurried to the door that connected with the garage.
lake arrowhead.
They had arrived.
The slow-moving camper pulled into the parking lot of a sporting-goods store, getting out of their way, and Peake accelerated.
Having consulted the directions that The Stone had written on a slip of paper, Sharp said, “You're headed the right way. Just follow the state route north around the lake. In four miles or so, look for a branch road on the right, with a cluster of ten mailboxes, one of them with a big red-and-white iron rooster on top of it.”
As Peake drove, he saw Sharp lift a black attache case onto his lap and open it. Inside were two thirty-eight pistols. He put one on the seat between them.
Peake said, “What's that?”
“Your gun for this operation.”
“I've got my service revolver.”
“It's not hunting season. Can't have a lot of noisy gunfire, Jerry. That might bring neighbors poking around or even alert some sheriff's deputy who just happens to be in the area.” Sharp withdrew a silencer from the attache case and began to screw it onto his own pistol. “You can't use a silencer on a revolver, and we sure don't want anybody interrupting us until it's over and we've had plenty of time to adjust the bodies to fit our scenario.”
What the hell am I going to do? Peake wondered as he piloted the sedan north along the lake, looking for a red-and-white iron rooster.
On another road, State Route 138, Rachael had left Lake Arrowhead behind. She was approaching Silverwood Lake, where the scenery of the high San Bernardinos was even more breathtaking — though she had no eye for scenery in her current state of mind.
From Silverwood, 138 led out of the mountains and almost due west until it connected with Interstate 15. There, she intended to stop for gasoline, then follow 15 north and east, all the way across the desert to Las Vegas. That was a drive of more than two hundred miles over some of the most starkly beautiful and utterly desolate land on the continent, and even under the best of circumstances, it could be a lonely journey.
Benny, she thought, I wish you were here.
She passed a lightning-blasted tree that reached toward the sky with dead black limbs.
The white clouds that had recently appeared were getting thicker. A few of them were not white.
In the empty garage, Ben saw a two-inch-by-four-inch patch of boot-tread pattern imprinted on the concrete floor in some oily fluid that glistened in the beams of intruding sunlight. He knelt and put his nose to the spot. He was certain that the vague smell of beef gravy was not an imaginary scent.
The tread mark must have been here when he and Rachael returned to the car with the Wildcard pages, but he had not noticed it.
He got up and moved farther into the garage, studying the floor closely, and in only a few seconds he saw a small moist brown glob about half the size of a pea. He touched his finger to it, brought the finger to his nose. Peanut butter. Carried here on the sole or heel of one of Eric Leben's boots while Ben and Rachael were in the living room, busily stuffing the Wildcard file into the garbage bag.
Returning here with Rachael and the file, Ben had been in a hurry because it had seemed to him that the most important thing was to get her out of the cabin and off the mountain before either Eric or the authorities showed up. So he had not looked down and had not noticed the tread mark or the peanut butter. And, of course, he'd seen no reason to search for signs of Eric in places he had searched only minutes earlier. He could not have anticipated this cleverness from a man with devastating brain injuries — a walking dead man who, if he followed at all in the pattern of the lab mice, should be somewhat disoriented, deranged, mentally and emotionally unstable. Therefore, Ben could not blame himself; no, he had done the right thing when he had sent Rachael off in the Mercedes, thinking he was sending her away all by herself, never realizing that she was not alone in the car. How could he have realized? It was the
Waiting in the kitchen with the ax, listening to them plan their next moves as they stood in the garage, Eric must have realized that he had a chance of getting Rachael alone, and evidently that prospect appealed to him so much that he was willing to forgo a whack at Ben. He'd hidden beside the refrigerator until they were in the living room, then crept into the garage, took the keys from the ignition, quietly opened the trunk, returned the keys to the ignition, climbed into the trunk, and pulled the lid shut behind himself.
If Rachael had a flat tire and opened the trunk…
Or if, on some quiet stretch of desert highway, Eric decided to kick the back seat of the car off its mountings and climb through from the trunk…
His heart pounding so hard that it shook him, Ben raced out of the garage toward the rental Ford in front of the cabin.
Jerry Peake spotted the red-and-white iron rooster mounted atop one mailbox of ten. He turned into a narrow branch road that led up a steep slope past widely separated driveways and past houses mostly hidden in the forest that encroached from both sides.
Sharp had finished screwing silencers on both thirty-eights. Now he took two fully loaded spare magazines
