“That’s not what Phillip Weeks told me,” she said.
She pushed the Jeep’s door open, switched hands on her pistol, and used her right hand to fish the rifle out of the Jeep.
“Phillip Weeks is a crazy, drug-addled boy,” Drake shouted. “His old man has fed him opiates since he was ten years old. Nobody’s going to believe a doper like him.”
She looked at him and said, “You’ve almost got me convinced. You might walk.”
“Might, bullshit. I’ve got the best attorneys in California. You’re going to be lucky to have your job when they’re finished with you. The best thing you could do right now is forget all this.”
She looked down at the rifle.
Large-caliber bolt action, like the gun that had killed Cain. She pulled the bolt back an inch, then shut it, seeing the brassy flash of the cartridge going back into the chamber.
“You know, you killed the wrong guy down in the river. The guy who saw the girl in the RV. He’s still back there.”
In a split second Drake reached behind his back and pulled out a pistol.
She fired.
He went down, his handgun flying from his grasp.
The rush in her ears was overpowering, the anger flooding through her veins nearly blinding her. Without thinking, she turned and using one hand, brought the rifle up and fired a single shot through the windshield of her Jeep.
Glass shattered.
“What are you—” Drake began, sputtering as he watched, white-faced, bleeding. “No. Wait. I didn’t do anything.”
She wiped down the stock and trigger with the bottom of her shirt.
“Wait,” Drake said as the sound of sirens cut through the night. “Those kids. They were better off with me. They wanted to do it. I gave them a place to live and food and made them movie stars. They lived like kings and queens.”
Rage swelled.
Blackness pulled at her vision.
Her finger curled over the trigger of her service weapon.
“For Christ’s sake.” Drake scrambled for his gun.
She shot him twice in the chest.
• • •
VIRGIL SHOUTED DOWN AT THE Feds, “He’s gone up the gravel road, away from the county road.”
The SWAT team, in the light of the fires, started jogging up the road toward Weeks’s cabin.
“He’s not there anymore,” Johnson muttered.
He and Johnson crashed through the brush on the bluff, waded the shallow river, and ran down the road to the dude ranch, where everybody staying at the ranch, Katy, her siblings, and her parents, were all standing on the edge of the golf course, looking at the fire in the sky.
Jim Waller called to them as they passed, “Is that the Drake place? What’s going on up there?”
They didn’t bother to answer, but piled into Johnson’s Cadillac and headed out to the highway.
“Gotta be a right turn,” Johnson said.
A mile up the road, they found Pescoli sitting next to the right front wheel of her Jeep. She was holding a tissue next to her eye, showing a little blood. Up the road, they could see Drake, spread-eagled in the headlights of his Jeep.