Gone (Michael Bennett 6)

He pointed to the juniper-covered hill beside them, toward a stand of trees.

“The nanny and Bennett’s kids are less than a mile up there somewhere,” he said.

Vida got on the radio, and after a minute, another 4x4, an FJ Cruiser, rolled down the steep incline of the mining road from the opposite direction.

“You have a hit?” Estefan said from behind the FJ’s wheel.

“We just heard Bennett and the nanny,” Vida said excitedly. “The software is saying we are within a mile, that they’re up in those trees.”

“Good,” Estefan said. “About two hundred feet back up the road, I saw a tire track going that way.”

Vida smiled. She knew that the play after finding the Bennett safe house empty was to come up here to Northern California and conduct the search herself. Their contacts in town had put them onto an old, half-mad hippie doper who lived somewhere around here. His name was McMurphy, and not only had he given the cartel trouble in the past, but he’d actually been seen talking to the Bennetts at church.

She had tried to contact Perrine several times for running orders, but he wasn’t answering. It was his party, she knew. She could picture him in his tux, presiding over the events.

She felt a tug of envy at not being invited. No matter. In the back of the Rover were twelve air-shipment boxes with dry ice. Twelve little boxes that would be packed with twelve Bennett heads and would be on their way to Real del Monte by morning. Manuel would know soon enough her devotion to him.

Around Vida’s neck, on a gold chain, was the emerald ring Perrine had given her after she’d finally broken him down and they’d made love the last day of his stay. They didn’t use protection, and it was the middle of her cycle. She hadn’t taken a test, but she knew she was pregnant with his baby. It would be a boy, as handsome as his father.

Everyone had said what a charming man he was, but he was far better than just that. In their time together, he had been so kind to her, asked about her daughters, her life. He was like a father to her, or at least what she thought a father might be like, having never actually had one.

She sighed as a full-body tingle glowed all around her. Her, Vida. A simple farm girl. She’d always known she was special. That things would change for the better. And they would be getting better beyond her wildest dreams. For now, inside her, growing, was the Sun Prince.

“Vida!” said Estefan.

“Yes?” she said, shaking off the daydream.

“Shall we drive a little farther in or leave the cars here and walk?”

Vida grabbed her machine pistol and opened the door.

“Let’s walk, but quickly,” she said. “I want out of this shithole before the sun comes up.”

CHAPTER 100

McMURPHY CAME IN AND placed a cup of tea in front of Mary Catherine as she hung up the CB.

“Did you get in contact with Mike?” he asked, plopping down in a camp chair.

“Yes, I did,” Mary Catherine said, taking a sip. “Don’t worry. I didn’t tell him where we are. I wouldn’t want you or your, eh, farm to get into trouble with the law or anyone else, after all you’ve done for us. Actually, I couldn’t have told him if I’d wanted to. I don’t know where we are.”

McMurphy laughed.

“Heck, sometimes even I get lost out here,” the burly sixty-year-old said. “But I figured remote is what the doctor ordered, with those bad old Mexican cowboys after you. This is the safest place I thought to bring you to.”

The McMurphy Mountain Compound was actually pretty incredible. Instead of the run-down shack and marijuana fields she was expecting, his home was a sophisticated and elaborate underground bunker. Built almost directly into the side of a hill, his hobbit hole, as he called it, consisted of twenty old school-bus frames welded together in a long corridor with rooms T-ing off to the right and left.

Convinced of an impending nuclear attack, he’d built the complex in the eighties with some friends. Over a few months, they’d brought up the old buses one by one on a 4x4 flatbed, dug out the hill, welded them all together, and then buried them again.

He told her that when the nuclear winter didn’t materialize, he slowly started to move his already flourishing marijuana farm underground, out of sight from the nosy feds. Most of the rooms were currently being used as hydroponic marijuana grow rooms, but there was also a kitchen, a gun room, a workshop, and several bedrooms stacked with bunk beds, where the kids now slept.

It had heat, ventilation, electricity run off propane, fresh water. Even two neat and clean bathrooms with showers and working toilets.

It wasn’t just the compound that was surprising. McMurphy, despite his frazzled, nutty appearance, had been so nice and gentle with the children. Before he had brought the children in, he had closed and securely locked the doors to all the grow rooms. Like any gracious host, he made sure that everyone was comfortable and well fed. He didn’t have any video games, but he had Monopoly and Scrabble and cards and a dartboard.

He’d shown the children the collections on the mantelpiece of rocks that he had found on his wanderings, pointing out the petrified sea creatures in them,

put there millions of years in the past when the Sierra Madre had been the floor of an ancient sea.