31
Jon Stone
The Explorer dropped south out of Indio down through Coachella and into the desert. It stayed in the right- hand lane, never varied its speed from the normal flow of traffic, and did nothing out of the ordinary. Jon found this suspicious.
Stone dropped so far back he cruised along with the Zeiss binos between his legs. Every few minutes he took a quick peek to make sure the Explorer was where it was supposed to be, and, yep, there it was.
They passed Thermal, California, which has the coolest name ever for a desert town, and Jon thought they might be rolling all the way down to Mexico, but not far past the Thermal airport, the Explorer turned east.
Jon tightened it up easy enough, his big black Rover having a supercharged mill, and followed the Explorer along the top of the Salton Sea into a small residential neighborhood surrounded by farms. He called Pike.
“Looks like we’re going to another house. I’m in a little town called Mecca, at the north end of the Salton.”
Pike didn’t respond, which was pretty much like Pike.
“You get any movement up there?”
“No.”
“The geep come back?”
“No.”
No. One word answers. Typical Joe Pike non-conversation.
“Okay. I’ll keep you advised.”
“Jon.”
“Yeah?”
“I three-sixtied the house.”
This meant Pike had circled the house, checking it out. Jon knew this also meant Pike was worried. Pike was the best recon man Stone had ever known, but circling a house surrounded by nothing but sand and dirt was asking to be seen. Pike would know this, too, and understood the risk.
“The shades aren’t just pulled. They’re tacked in place. The house is locked down.”
“You hear anything?”
“No.”
“AC running?”
“Yes.”
“You want to go in, I’ll come back. We’ll bust that fucker wide open.”
“No. Stay on the Explorer.”
“Rog.”
Stone dropped farther back when the Explorer’s blinker came on. He had to be even more careful now in the confined residential streets. His eighty-thousand-dollar Rover stood out in the shabby area like a gleaming black diamond, not that this bothered him. It was another challenge, and Stone loved challenges. They made life interesting.
He checked his GPS, and saw the surrounding neighborhood laid out in a rectangular grid. Easy-peasy.
Three blocks ahead, the Explorer turned right. Stone gave it two heartbeats to let them disappear, then pulled a hard right and stood on the supercharged mill. The Rover bucked like an F18 catapulting off a carrier. When he reached the first cross street, Stone jumped on the brakes, nosed forward, and saw the Explorer crossing the parallel intersection three blocks away.
Stone leapfrogged the Explorer another three blocks, but the Explorer didn’t appear at the fourth intersection. Jon banked left to the Explorer’s street, then left again, then smiled.
“Dead man, you bitch.”
Right side, four houses away, the Explorer nosed into an open garage. Another vehicle was in the garage, but Jon couldn’t tell the make or model. He waited until the garage door closed, then cruised past the house.
The Explorer disappeared into a faded pink house with a red composition roof. Stone drove past, turned around, then backed into a spot across the street and three houses down. He parked between a Dodge pickup and a Toyota Cruiser, hoping the truck and the SUV would help the Rover blend in.
Jon studied the house, and paid particular attention to the windows. The shades were down and tight as at the Indio house, and no sound or sign of movement came from the property. The attic vents under the gables were framed to look like small doors, and one was ajar as if it was off its hinges. Unlike the earlier house with its barren yard, this house had two ragged oaks in the front yard, a broken line of cedars along the side, a white basketball backboard mounted on the roof above the garage. The backboard was peeling and the net was long gone.
Stone was wondering how long it had been since someone sank a ball through the hoop when the garage door jerked to life, revealing the dark green Explorer and a black Escalade. Jon slumped behind the wheel.
The Escalade backed out and drove away directly in front of the Rover. Jon glimpsed the driver and saw a shape in the passenger seat, but the passenger was only a shadow.
Stone was torn between following the Escalade and staying with the Explorer, but decided to stay. You danced with the girl you brought to the party.
Stone crawled into the back seat and unzipped a green nylon duffel. He dug through it until he found a hard plastic Pelican case, and considered its contents.
Jon’s security work often required him to use various bugs and monitoring devices to acquire intelligence. Jon was thinking about taking a look inside the house. He would do this by drilling a hole two-point-five millimeters in diameter through the wall, and inserting a camera and microphone on a wire the size of a #2 pencil lead.
Jon was deciding which drill bit to use when the garage door once more opened, and he closed the case.
Jon was watching the Explorer back out of the garage when he noticed the clutter people accumulate in their garages was missing. No boxes, bicycles, lawn equipment, or Christmas decorations crowded the walls or hung from the rafters. Jon dialed back through his memory file, and realized the garage at the Indio house was also free of clutter.
The Explorer led him north past the Thermal airport into Coachella. Jon thought they were returning to the Indio house, but they turned west through La Quinta and Indian Wells, then south into the desert.
Jon checked his GPS, and saw the highway would track away from the desert communities and into the deep nowhere of the Anza-Borrego Desert, west of the Salton Sea. Traffic thinned, so he dropped farther back until he needed the binos to see the Explorer. They held fast to a steady seventy miles per hour for almost twenty minutes before their brake lights flared. Jon immediately slowed, and glanced at the GPS, expecting to see a road, but saw nothing. He changed from the map to a satellite view, and zoomed the image until he saw a thin filament angled away from the highway. This would be an unpaved county or ranch road.
The Explorer turned off the highway, and immediately kicked up a plume of dust Jon saw without the binos.
He said, “Shit.”
Jon let the gap between them widen. He wasn’t worried about losing the Explorer because its dust trail was so obvious, but following it would be a problem. If he could see the Explorer, the Explorer could see him.
When he reached the turn, he pulled off the highway, and compared the receding dust trail with the image on his GPS. The few unpaved roads showed as thin gray lines that ran for miles before intersecting another thin line. The Explorer was now on a road that angled away from the highway and would soon join another road that paralleled the highway for miles. This second road then crossed a third road that swept back to the highway. Jon smiled when he saw this, kicked the Rover back onto the highway, and pressed hard on the gas.
Four-point-six miles later, at one hundred nine miles per hour, Jon turned off the highway onto the third road, far ahead of the Explorer. The dust was well behind him, and angling away. Jon checked his GPS again, and trailed after them slowly. He followed them into the desert for two-point-three miles until their plume vanished, which meant they had stopped.
Jon stopped the Rover, and searched the tip of the fading plume with his binos until he spotted a glint in the wavery heat. He returned to the nylon bag for a 60x Zeiss spotting scope mounted to a small tripod. The Zeiss had
