“There!” Sheridan said. “I see a car.”
Joe looked to his right. Sheridan was pointing far to the south, where two tiny taillights could be seen for a moment as the vehicle passed between to small hills. As the lights receded from left to right a brushy rise blocked them and they blinked out.
Joe grabbed the cell and put the pickup into gear. “We have a visual,” he said to Coon. “A single vehicle headed south on Highway Fifty.”
“Can you see who’s inside?”
“No.”
“Make or model?”
“Too far,” Joe said. “And I’ve got at least two miles of rough road in front of me before I hit the pavement.”
“Stay on them!” It was Portenson, who had apparently snatched the phone from Coon. “Don’t lose them!”
“Hi, Tony,” Joe said.
“Don’t ‘Hi, Tony’ me!” His voice was rapid-fire and angry. Joe could visualize Portenson standing in the dark on the tarmac with his salt-and-pepper hair flying in the prop wash and his scarred lip pulled back in a grimace. He shouted, “Catch up with Stenko and stay on him until we can get the chopper there or divert law enforcement from I-Ninety your way!”
Joe said, “I’ll do my best.”
But he’d lost the taillights. Sheridan had, too, and looked over with a palms-up gesture.
“We can’t see the vehicle right now,” Joe said.
“You
Joe said, “This whole basin is covered with roads, Tony. This is where all the energy development up here is. There are gravel roads everywhere going to oil rigs, wells, gas lines . . . and plenty of old ranch roads.”
“JUST STAY ON HIM!”
Joe wasn’t sure whether Portenson was yelling because of the increased motor noise from the helicopter or because his internal gaskets were blowing. Either way, Joe closed the phone.
“It’s for his own good,” Joe said to Sheridan.
She giggled as he tossed the phone aside and gripped the wheel with both hands. “Hold on,” he said to Sheridan, and gunned it down the hill.
18
BY THE TIME JOE LAUNCHED UP THROUGH A BORROW DITCH onto the stunning calm of the two-lane blacktop, he felt as if his bones had been rattled loose and his internal organs were sloshing around inside of him like loose pickles in a jar. He turned the pickup south on the highway and accelerated. The too-fast push down the butte and across the rutted steppe to the highway had been brutal, although Sheridan had shouted as if she were on a carnival ride.
“I feel like I just got tumble-dried!” Sheridan said, laughing. “That was cool!”
Unfortunately, the rough fast ride had jarred the glove box open and the contents—maps, papers, citation books, spent cartridges, spare handcuffs—had spilled all over the floorboards. As they sped down the highway, wind rushed in through the vents and sent papers flying through the air as if the cab of the vehicle were somehow gravity-free.
Worse: they’d lost sight of Stenko’s car.
The terrain was rolling hills and shallow arroyos, as if the high plains were severely wrinkled. Every time Joe topped a hill, they looked into the distance for red taillights before plunging back down into a low spot. Although there were plenty of static white lights on distant oil wells, there appeared to be no other traffic on the highway.
As they shot past gravel service roads that cut to the right and left of the highway, Joe and Sheridan tried to peer out into the murk for a glimpse of the car. As the minutes went by, Joe knew the odds of finding Stenko’s car were tumbling. There were so many ways for them to get lost at night in terrain like this—taking an unexpected service road, pulling so far ahead that Joe simply couldn’t see a vehicle, or simply pulling off the highway into the shadows of a depression and turning off their lights. If Stenko suspected Joe was chasing him—he could have easily seen Joe’s headlights on top of the rise—he could be making evasive maneuvers.
Joe scanned the night sky for a glimpse of the FBI helicopter and wondered how many minutes away from the Pumpkin Buttes it was . . .
“I just saw car lights!” Sheridan shouted, her face pressed to the passenger-side window. “Back there—we went right past them.”
Joe slowed and craned around, trying to confirm what she’d seen. They’d shot by at least two gravel exits on the right. Stenko could have taken either of them.
“Where?” Joe asked, slamming the truck into reverse.
“Out there,” Sheridan said, opening her window and waving generally to the west. “I saw taillights way out there, I swear . . .”
He nearly backed off the highway from going too fast, but he corrected the wheel and stayed on the pavement. Then he saw something on the second access road—an almost imperceptible roll of dust that lit up in the
