“Yes, ma’am. Anyway, you don’t need a fry-cook. You said you’re always on the road, you eat at restaurants all the time.”
“I’ll buy some restaurants here and there, so whenever we’re near one, we’ll stop and you can cook for me.”
“You’re not serious.”
“It makes perfect sense to me.”
“Good grief, how much money do you have?”
“Oh, gobs and gobs of it. Don’t you worry.” She reached across the console to pat me on the shoulder. “My delightful fry-cook.”
I don’t know why I couldn’t let go of it, but I said, “You’re not even doing ninety now.”
“One hundred and four miles an hour, child.”
I leaned to my left to look more directly at the speedometer. “Wow. It sure doesn’t feel like we’re going that fast. I guess that’s one of the pluses of a Mercedes.”
“It’s partly Mercedes, but also the aftermarket work that went into it. This baby is souped.”
We rocketed past a guy in a Ferrari, probably on his way to Vegas. I think he was wearing a poofy cap, though it wasn’t green and black.
“Hundred and ten,” Mrs. Fischer said, “and smooth as butter.”
“It really is souped,” I acknowledged.
“Radically souped. There’s this nice man in Arizona, everybody calls him One-Ear Bob, though his name’s Larry. He’s such a big handsome bruiser, you hardly notice the ear thing, except you tend to tilt your head to one side when you’re talking to him. His front business is a combination real-estate brokerage, insurance agency, souvenir shop, and roadside cafe. But he makes his real money in secret, in the buildings far at the back end of his property, where he can do anything you want done to a vehicle and then some.”
“Why secret?”
In a dramatic but unnecessary whisper, she said, “Because a lot of what One-Ear Bob does to cars breaks the law.”
“What law?”
“Oh, all kinds of laws, sweetie. Idiot safety laws, bone-headed environmental laws that actually contribute to pollution, the laws of physics, you name it.”
“Arizona, huh? Wouldn’t be Lonely Possum, Arizona, would it?”
Suddenly coy, she said, “Might be, might not.”
“What happened there sixty years ago on that oven-hot night?”
“Never you mind. Now let me tend to my driving. With all this conversation, my speed’s fallen to a hundred.”
From the console between the front seats, I fetched a box of 9-mm ammunition about which Mrs. Fischer had told me earlier. I had emptied the magazine of the pistol while resisting my assailant on the roof of the building in Elsewhere. Now I pressed ten rounds into it and locked it into the butt of the weapon.
Mile by mile, the desert grew more stark, a vastness of sand and rock, mesquite and sage and withered bunchgrass, with here and there low shapes of rock that looked like the serrated backs and long, flat heads of Jurassic-era crocodiles immense in size, petrified now and half buried in the earth.
The low clouds were gray in the east, darker overhead, nearly black in the west. Ahead of us, a wedge of birds flew high across the interstate, winging southeast.
Pico Mundo, my hometown, lay more than a hundred miles in that direction. Perhaps I might soon be led back there. If patterns exist in our seemingly patternless lives—and they do—then the law of harmony insists that the most harmonious of all patterns, circles within circles, will most often assert itself. If my end was coming, it might find me in those familiar streets that I loved and through which I had been haunted for so much of my life. But we were racing away from Pico Mundo at the moment, and I sensed that the case of the man who would burn children was not the one that would lead me home.
I put ten rounds of ammunition in each front pocket of my jeans. For one who dislikes guns as thoroughly as I do, I strangely find myself resorting to them more frequently as I make steady progress on my circular journey from loss to acceptance of loss, from failure to possible redemption.
A sign announced the interstate exits to Barstow, a community of military installations, railyards, warehouses, outlet stores, and chain motels. Although I intuited that I would find my quarry much deeper in the Mojave than this place, I suddenly said, “Here. Exit here. He’s done something in Barstow. Something terrible.”
By the grace of Mrs. Fischer’s expert driving and One-Ear Bob’s improvements to the vehicle, we decelerated as efficiently as if we had reverse rocket thrusters, crossed three lanes in an exquisite arc that brought us to the foot of the exit ramp, and swept into Barstow, home of the Mojave River Valley Museum.
We had come now to one of those times in my life when humor was no longer an armor, when any joke would have been an abomination, the slightest smile a transgression.
“The children,” I said. “The two girls and the boy. They lived here.”
“You mean live here,” Mrs. Fischer corrected.
Taken by a sudden chill, I said, “No, I don’t believe I do.”
Seventeen
THE RHINESTONE COWBOY ONCE PROWLED THE streets of Barstow to what end I thought I knew, but he was gone now, his corrupted and magnetic spirit an attractant that issued from some nest deeper in the barrens.
The superstretch limousine looked out of place in this humble desert burg, eliciting interest when we passed other motorists and pedestrians. As we cruised residential neighborhoods according to my whim, Mrs. Fischer made tight corners with ease.
On a street of neatly maintained stucco houses, behind desert-friendly landscapes reliant on succulents and sage, a residence stood in the shade of immense Indian laurels that massed their surface roots around them like tangles of sleeping pythons. As nowhere else in the vicinity, cars and SUVs and pickups—and one police sedan—were clustered at the curb and in the driveway. Carrying baking pans and casseroles, four women of the neighborhood came along the street to the front walk of the house. On the porch, several grim-faced men were engaged in what appeared to be an earnest and quiet discussion dealing with something more serious than sports, and through the windows I could see what seemed to be a solemn gathering of people.
“This is where they lived,” I said, and Mrs. Fischer didn’t need to ask to whom I referred. “The cowboy trucker … I don’t think he was ever at this place. It’s the children, my memory of their faces that has … drawn me here.”
Were I to go inside, seeking information, I would surely become a suspect. I had no authority, no credentials, no reason that I could offer why this stricken family should trust me. If I spoke about my paranormal gifts, I would be considered at best a kook, at worst a charlatan seeking publicity and an easy path to profit. If I inspired suspicion in the police, I might be detained long enough to ensure that I would not find the abducted children in time.
Even lingering in the street a moment too long was inadvisable, and I said, “Ma’am, let’s ease away from here. There’s another place I feel the need to see … if we can find it.”
Two blocks later, as I asked her to turn left, Mrs. Fischer said, “What do you call it, child?”
“Call what?”
“This bloodhound ability of yours.”
For a moment, I considered answers with which I could continue to stonewall her.
She said, “Was it this that helped you save all those lives in the shooting at that Pico Mundo mall—or do you have other talents, as well?”
“You’ve been doing some research when I’ve been out of the car.”
“For the longest time, I resisted the Internet, too busy seeing the world to bother with a computer. But a smartphone makes it easy even for an old gypsy like me.”
“I call it psychic magnetism, ma’am. It’s a way of … finding people.”
“The newspapers said you were a hero. But there were never any details of how you discovered the plot and foiled it.”
“I didn’t talk to the press afterward. My friend Wyatt Porter, he’s chief of police in Pico Mundo, and he has always helped me keep my secrets. Anyway, I didn’t foil any plot like in the movies. People died that day, ma’am.”
“Only a fraction as many as those who would have been killed if you hadn’t stepped up.”
I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, adjusting the shoulder strap on the safety harness, though that wasn’t the cause of my discomfort. “Well, if I hadn’t intervened, someone else would have.”
“Not much reason to think so, considering the kind of world we live in now.”
I suggested that she make a right turn, and we rode in silence for two blocks.
She said, “The mall shooting wasn’t the last thing you took on yourself, was it?”
“No, ma’am. It wasn’t even the first. But I don’t take them on so much as they … they just come to me. There’s no way to avoid any of it.”
She braked at a stop sign and looked at me. There was worry in her wizened face and sorrow in her eyes. “I read about your loss that day.”
“She isn’t lost forever, ma’am. Only until this world finishes with me and I can go where she’s gone.”
“In respect of that loss,” she said, “I’m not going to pry at you anymore, child. I’m curious, of course. Who wouldn’t be? But I have no right.”
I nodded, not in agreement with her but in gratitude, and she drove through the intersection.
“Here’s a thing I think,” she said, then paused as if to make sure that she found the most apt words. “Sometimes in life a thing happens, sometimes it’s a person, and you know that what happens next and for some time, maybe for minutes or hours, will not be common, will not be just life moving on how it usually does. You know that those minutes or hours will be a gift of clarity, that the truth of the world will reveal itself if you care to look. Day after day, everything we see that seems real is only apparition, a ghost reality that we have conjured up in our self-delusion. Then the clarifying thing happens, and what you need to do, what you must do, is not question it, not demand more revelation than what is given, be quiet in the face of it, quiet and grateful that it has been given to you to see this, to be for even a short time aware of the extraordinary layered depths and profound beauty of the world to which we mostly blind ourselves.”