It didn’t matter anymore.
“I told you I didn’t have it,” he wept. “Why did you have to do this?”
“Perhaps you’ll understand,” Navarro replied, coolly. “In another lifetime.”
Three words that Corliss would never forget.
He roared as he leapt to his feet and launched himself at Navarro.
He never made it, never even laid a finger on the Mexican.
The bullets had stopped him.
Twenty-three of him.
He didn’t remember much else about that night.
He’d spent days in a coma. Weeks in intensive care. Months in a hospital. Years in rehabilitation. Three months into his ordeal, he’d been told that his wife had taken her own life. Which hadn’t surprised him. He’d seen how Wendy’s death had affected her, how she couldn’t live with the memory of that night. And now she was gone, too.
They were both gone.
But Navarro was still out there. Roaming the land, carefree, no doubt causing more horrors, inflicting more pain and suffering wherever he went.
A monster on the loose.
At first, Corliss couldn’t understand why he’d survived. He couldn’t understand why he hadn’t died from the hailstorm that had ripped through his body. After leaving the hospital, he’d considered ending his own life and joining his girls in the hereafter. He’d thought about it a lot. He’d come close to doing it a few times. Then, one day, he understood.
He understood that he’d been spared for a reason.
He realized he was still alive to do what had to be done.
To put the monster down.
To make sure his evil was extinguished.
To make sure he paid.
And right now, it seemed like there was a chance that the monster was finally out in the open. Not just out in the open, but here. In America. In California.
Within range.
Corliss’s arm slid down to rest on the couch, the empty tumbler slipping out of his fingers and rolling into the cushions. And as he drifted off to sleep, he held onto one thought: that if the monster were ever caught, that he’d be the one to slit his throat and watch him die, one slow breath at a time.
49
On the smooth timber deck of the stucco-and-terracotta-tile pool house, the monster was busy scouring the deep folds of his consciousness for some answers of his own.
The day hadn’t gone well.
He was now one man down. His target was nowhere in sight. And he couldn’t see a clear way forward that would bring him what he was after.
He needed a more enlightened view.
An epiphany.
The blind Peruvian’s brew would see to that. It always did.
He needed to find Reilly, but that wasn’t going to be easy. He couldn’t have his men tail him as he left the only location he was sure to go to, the local offices of the FBI. Not after the fiasco of the last attempt. Not after the bikers had been eliminated. The enemy was on high alert. They’d be looking out for anything suspicious. And the last thing Navarro needed right now was to lose more men.
Guerra and his techie snoops wouldn’t be useful either. Reilly’s phone, like that of any FBI agent, had sophisticated anti-hacking software installed on it. There was no way to track him through it. And his woman’s phone was also no longer an option. That door had been slammed shut at the museum.
He sat there, naked, cross-legged, and completely still, as he dived and soared through breathtaking landscapes and rapid-fire sequences of imagery, some he recognized, others he didn’t, the real blending with the surreal as his synapses burst into unexplored territory and linked up through previously unmapped connections.
And then it came to him. The simple realization that his answer was well within his grasp.
In fact, it lay within the walls of his gated villa.
A living, breathing answer that was calling out to him, beckoning for his attention.
The sorcerer’s face broadened into a peaceful smile, and he shut his eyes.
Tomorrow, he knew, would be a far better day.
WEDNESDAY
50
I didn’t get much sleep. My mind had been churning away all night, scheming and plotting, stress-testing different routes forward—anything to escape thinking about Tess and where I stood with her. I hadn’t come up with anything even remotely foolproof, but some were less harebrained than others. All the paths I had explored, though, had one thing in common: They were all centered around me setting myself up as bait to flush out our Mexican aggressors.
As you can imagine, I wasn’t exactly jumping up and down with glee.
By nine, I was showered, dressed, and walking into Villaverde’s office to go over our options. Munro arrived at roughly the same time. I knew Villaverde wouldn’t be thrilled about my thinking. I wasn’t looking forward to putting myself out there as a lure for a bunch of psychos who took pleasure in snipping off people’s privates, but I couldn’t think of anything else that might work. Unless Villaverde or Munro had a brilliant alternative to put on the table, I was pretty much committed to putting my plan in motion.
Maybe it was a half-assed way of trying to make up for what I’d done. I don’t know. All I knew was, I wanted the bastards gone and I wanted to know that Tess and Alex wouldn’t have anything more to worry about.
We started off by going through a round-up of whatever updates had come in concerning the previous days’ events. There was nothing in them that led to a eureka moment. The guy Jules had taken out at Balboa Park had nothing on him that would help ID him, and his prints didn’t get a hit either. The SUV they’d abandoned there was a dead end, too. So far, all we knew was that it had been stolen a couple of days ago. Detectives were on their way to interview its owner as a matter of procedure, but I knew it would prove to be a waste of time.
The follow-up reports on the multiple homicide at the Eagles’ clubhouse the day before didn’t give us anything to jump about either, although I’d had an idea about that.
“One thing worth doing,” I told them. “The guy Pennebaker told us about, the one Navarro went to work on. Pennebaker said one minute he was fine, then he just dropped to the ground like he’d been hit with a tranquilizer dart. Only he was still awake, just paralyzed.”
“What are you thinking?” Munro asked.
