“ Dr. Eisenhower, wake up.”
“ I wasn’t asleep.” Izzy had been resting with her head back, watching a cloudless sky and shadowy pines flying by, as Lila steered them through the night, driving faster than Izzy had ever driven.
“ We’ll be in Susanville shortly, ten miles. I want to stop by your son’s and talk to your daughter-in-law for a few minutes.”
“ I’d rather not.”
“ We need to,” Lila said. “I’d like to know who took the girls.”
“ My son and I don’t talk.” The last thing Izzy wanted to do was to show up at Johnny’s in the middle of the night.
“ Why not?”
“ It’s complicated.” But was it really? Sure she and Roxanne didn’t get along. The woman hated her actually, but over the years Izzy could’ve worked it out. But she hadn’t. After she’d won Amy in the custody battle, she’d shut her son and his witch of a wife out of her life.
“ I’m sorry to hear that.” Lila turned to Izzy, flashed her a quick smile, then put her eyes back on the road. “Really, I’m sorry, Dr. Eisenhower, but I need to get some kind of idea what we’re up against. I need to know who took your granddaughter, because Manny has people he can call on, dangerous people. He’s done it already, sent some black op types after me in that helicopter. If Black wouldn’t have been there, I wouldn’t be here now.”
“ Damn.” Izzy felt cornered and she didn’t like it. “Why can’t you call me Izzy?” she snapped.
“ Testy.” Lila slowed as they approached Highway 44. She stopped, made the left, turning toward Susanville.
“ Well?”
“ I don’t know. I think it’s because I respect you.”
“ Really?” Izzy knew she shouldn’t have snapped at her. But just the thought of seeing Johnny and Roxanne made her feel ill.
“ Yeah,” Lila said, “and that makes you the first person I’ve ever respected.” She laughed. “But I’ll try, Dr. Eisenhower, if it’ll make you feel better.”
“ I don’t know what I’m going to say.”
“ You’re not going to say anything.”
“ What?”
“ You look like your granddaughter, remember? And she’s just been kidnapped from them. So you can’t go showing up out of nowhere looking like her, with those big brown eyes. You’re going to stay in the car, out of sight.”
“ What are you going to say to them?”
“ I’ll keep it simple. I’m a friend of Amy’s. I have a message for her from you. I’ll be in and out in nothing flat.”
Fifteen minutes later Izzy slouched in the passenger seat, while Lila talked to Johnny and Roxanne, who were lit up under a porch light. It was dark and cold, but they hadn’t invited her in.
Johnny had gained weight. So had Roxanne. Izzy smiled, despite the situation. Johnny had always had a thing for thin girls, had always told her he’d never wind up with an overweight, fatty, fatty two by four and that’s exactly what he’d wound up with. Maybe there is a god, after all.
Or maybe Johnny had changed. Maybe he wasn’t as shallow as she’d remembered. Maybe he’d learned there was more to people than what was on the outside.
On the porch, Roxanne was gesturing, talking with her hands as well as her mouth. Johnny was silent. That was typical. In every relationship he’d been in that Izzy could remember, he’d been sort of a whipping boy. Pussy whipped, that was the term. He lacked self-confidence. She didn’t know why, but it was true and it made her feel guilty, like she’d failed.
Izzy couldn’t take her eyes off him. He was her son and she’d failed him. How come she hadn’t realized that years ago? She wished she could get out of the car, talk to him, make it right.
They went in the house, Lila came back to the car.
“ Good news, I think,” Lila said as she was buckling up.
“ How so?”
“ There were four of them.” Lila started the car, backed out of the driveway, headed back the way they’d come toward the center of town and the road to Reno. “One of them flashed a badge. He was a Reno cop and from his description it could only have been Peeps Friday. He’s one of Manny’s cop friends. Actually, the man fawns over Manny and Manny likes fawners. The others were part Manny’s private security force, Gerald, his number one and Weedy and Lugar. Weedy’s a schemer. Lugar’s a giant. All three are dangerous men, who Manny hired away from Blackwater, one of those security firms the government uses in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
“ You got them to tell you a lot,” Izzy said.
“ There’s more,” Lila said. “After they put the girls in their car, Weedy came back to the house, tied up your daughter-in-law and left that note for your son. You know the rest. But what’s interesting is that up until that point, they were acting like they were taking the girls in for questioning because they were looking for information about you. I guess they were acting that way because they wanted the girls to cooperate.”
“ And why is this good news?”
“ Because, and I’m guessing here, but I think I’m right, if Manny sent his own people here, that means he hasn’t called in any more of his black op friends. He’s figured out his mistake, has made some excuse to whoever he called up to send that helicopter after me and he’s called off the dogs.”
“ Why would he do that?”
“ Because, Izzy, see, I can call you that,” Lila made a left and was back on the highway, headed toward Reno, “because he doesn’t want anyone else to know about you. He wants to be young again and he’s figured out if your secret gets out, it might not happen because the government would take an active interest and once they got their hands on you, they’d be the ones eliminating anyone who knew what your blood can do, instead of Manny Wayne. Heck, he’d probably be the first person they eliminated.”
“ They’re never going to leave me alone, are they?”
“ No, Izzy, they’re not.” Lila stopped at the light by the McDonald’s on the east side of town. “Are you tired? Can you drive a bit?”
“ I’m wide awake. I don’t seem to get very tired, so yeah, I can drive.”
“ Good, because I’m bushed.” Lila turned into the Micky D’s parking lot and they traded places. Back on the road again, she said, “Wake me when we get to Reno.”
“ You can sleep?”
“ When you do what I do, you have to have a hunter’s nerves. You have to be able to grab sleep whenever you can. I’ve trained myself to be able to turn off in an instant and I’m doing that right now. See you in Reno.” She closed her eyes and true to her word, she’d turned off.
Izzy didn’t feel she could zip through the night at the breakneck speed Lila had been doing, because in her experience deer were often out on this road after dark, deer and the police. The stretch between Susanville and Reno was a favorite prowling ground for the California Highway Patrol and the last thing she needed was to be stopped and asked for her license, because she sure as heck looked nothing like the picture on it.
An hour and half later, where the two lane highway turned into four at Hallelujah Junction, just before the state line, Lila woke up.
“ How we doing?”
“ Fine. We’re low on gas. I thought I’d stop at Bordertown.”
“ Good. I’ll take over there.” And at the Bordertown casino, which bordered on the state line, they filled up at the casino’s pumps and Lila took the wheel.
“ You have a plan?” Izzy said, once they were back on the road.
“ Short of killing the dogs, killing Manny and Tucker, killing their bodyguards and killing anybody else who might be up there, besides your granddaughter and her friend, no.”
“ So you were serious?”
“ What, when I said we were going to have to kill them all? ’Fraid so.”
“ Can we do that? And even if we can, should we?”
“ Now’s not the time to ask those kind of questions.”
