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Luck.

In her stuntwoman days, Shaun had jumped from cars at least ten times, but she’d had a lot of help—wires and such—and most of it was illusion. But she knew to tuck her shoulder in, curl into a ball, and roll. Easier said than done, but the trees and bushes on the edge had caught her fall. She’d kept rolling until she hit something hard and it all went black.

Shaun had been out for hours. Her bloody face had stuck to the rock she’d run into.

Take stock.
She moved each leg. Moved each arm. Moved her neck. She was OK. Felt her face and head with her fingers. There were lacerations on her forehead, her cheeks, her lips, her eyelids. A copious scalp wound. Her leg felt as if it had been slashed in two by a razor blade—she guessed it had caught the edge of the guardrail. Heat radiated from the bone, feverish. Possibly there were internal injuries. She felt like glass had broken inside, somewhere in her pelvic region, but ignored it.

Her boy.

It took her two hours to get down to the truck, and it would take her half a day to get back up. She slid down the hill on her cheeks. Turned over and crawled through the dirt and dry, cutting grass. She staggered to her feet, then crawled again.

There had been no police cars. No sirens. No rescue workers. No helicopters. The truck had come to rest against a big juniper. It looked like part of the juniper’s shadow.

Her boy was in there.

Her boy.

He’d been incinerated.

She didn’t recognize the thing strapped into the passenger side. It was mostly soot. If she touched it, it would crumble and flake off on her hands. Tendons in the arms curled up like a boxer’s; there was some red gleam of muscle and the smell of cooked meat.

“My boy,” she whispered. Her voice was harsh; her vocal cords could barely grab purchase.

She reached in to touch what was left of his face. Jellied eyes stared out at her, resentful. “You should have listened to me,” she said. “I tried to look after you.”

She’d told him not to go after Conroy. But he was a boy. Boys were risk-takers. They died.

But this was her son.

And now she couldn’t take him with her anymore. She pressed her fingertip into his chin, the grinning bone, the finger skating through something that might have been soot or might have been flesh. The residue clung to her index finger. Part of her son. Part of him. She streaked it on her lacerated forehead and on her cheeks like war paint. She inhaled him.

Shaun couldn’t take the rest of him with her, so she started back up the slope.

M
AX CONCENTRATED ON
the one single word, “move,” while he waited for the hallucinations, the paranoia, the blind
fear
to take hold. He would lose all sense of time and space. Of
self
. He knew he would lose touch with reality, but more than that, he would lose touch with his core, the thing that made him Max Conroy. He would be reduced to a thin, terrified voice crying in the wilderness.

Max expected this. He kept chanting the word “move” to himself, all the while gearing himself up. Be prepared, he thought. Just try to remember the word “move.”

But nothing happened.

He continued to be Max.

And pretty soon, his thoughts branched out from the word “move.” He began to think, to plan. How would he get out of this situation, what could he do? He thought about the script Darren had given him to read, his one or two lines. The girl, the mother, the car. And a strange thing happened. He was becoming
stronger
, not weaker.

Max lay in the tank, touching nothing. No sensation on his skin, no sense of smell, no taste, nothing to hear, no one to reach out to. But he felt a presence. Realized with surprise who it was. The deputy-turned-detective. Her calm eyes, her
proximity
. Bide your time, she seemed to say. The idea that he was not alone, that she was somehow here with him, perhaps even looking for him, bolstered his courage. Plan for every contingency, she told him. Be ready. He held onto that—an inner flame that glowed inside him, like a bright green fire.

Be ready.

Chapter Forty-Five

D
AVE
F
INLEY SLID
into the seat of the Cadillac CTS-V sports coupe, careful to stare straight ahead. A profile was easier to fake than a full-on shot. The paps were kept out by the barred fence surrounding the healing center. He couldn’t hear their cameras clicking, but he could see the long telephotos pushed through the bars. Plenty of other people had snapped photos of him today—everybody had a cell phone—but he knew from experience how people accepted him at face value. No one had ever questioned that Dave was Max when they went on their little adventures. Not in all the years they had switched places.

A couple of paps followed—one on a motorcycle and two in cars.

Dave was good at evasive driving and knew all the tricks. He and Max had ditched a lot of paparazzi in their time.

Once he’d shed the paps, he drove down into the Verde Valley.

He was supposed to take Argos Road, a two-lane that headed out into the wilderness to the west. But as he drove, he thought,
Maybe I should just take the Cadillac and keep on going
.

What was he thinking when he told Gordon he’d have no problem shooting Max? He would be happy if
they
did it, but no way would he get himself into the middle of that.
He’d
never killed anybody.

Dave checked his watch. He was supposed to drive out to the property (there actually was a place for sale way out there in the boondocks, although he would not stop) and then, later today, meet up with them at the outlet mall soundstage and they would go from there.

That was before they had asked him to kill Max.

Did
that
ever come out of left field.

But hadn’t he pictured himself shooting Max a dozen times? Confronting Max over that time in the canyon with Karen, and watching Max beg for his life?

He felt the familiar rage build again. How they’d betrayed him, thinking he’d gone off ahead down the canyon. And yes, he had gone on ahead, but decided to go back for them. And that was when he saw them:

His wife and his best friend.

He should have confronted them then. But he didn’t. Instead, he’d swallowed his anger.

His resentment only grew. Good ol’ Dave, Max’s best buddy since they were kids. What a joke.

Dave had always known,
if
he were ever to go through with it, he’d hire a hit man.

It had been easier just to go along with Jerry and Gordon’s plan, once he knew what they were doing. Let them take the risks. And then, this morning, when they’d met in Jerry’s suite—

They told him that not only did they expect him to shoot Max, they wanted him to shoot an unarmed woman and her kid!

The woman he’d solicited at the Safeway.

Their killer, the crazy woman Shaun, turned out to be a no-show.

And they expected
him
to do it? To shoot a woman and a child?

Dave knew when something was doomed to fail. As much as he’d like to see Max dead, he wanted someone else to do it.

Plus, he had his doubts he could even do it. Drill Max with two shots to the heart with a .22?

Crazy. You had to be a stone-cold killer to do that. Even an expert marksman would be affected by executing a guy. It was bound to affect his aim.

Jerry’d told him why they wanted Max to be shot in the chest with a .22. They wanted him to look good. “If somebody got into the morgue and got pictures of him, at least the wounds would be small and neat.”

Small and neat.

Jerry was in his own little world. The asshole spent too much of his time coming up with crazy schemes.

It wasn’t going to work. Not when you dragged a woman and a kid into it. How do you keep a lid on
that
?

As much as Dave hated his so-called best friend, he’d have to put his money on Max.

At least he could save the woman and her daughter. He’d called earlier to tell her what time she should be at the outlet mall, giving clear directions to go to the back of the largest store in the middle of the mall. She didn’t answer her phone this time either. He waited for the tone and left a message, telling her the shoot was off and they didn’t need her after all.

He hoped she got the message.

Dave turned onto the main drag in Cottonwood, where he’d parked his truck and cargo trailer behind a Pep Boys store. He left the Cadillac in the parking lot of the Pep Boys, careful to wipe down the steering wheel, dash, car door handles, seats, and everything else he’d touched. He left the window rolled down and the keys in the ignition. With luck, somebody would steal the thing.

Chapter Forty-Six

T
ESS DIDN’T GET
on the road until midafternoon, driving up I-17 in the direction of the Desert Oasis Healing Center. She’d had a lot to do, what with two crime scenes in Bajada County and Pat being shorthanded. Fortunately, they’d had some help from DPS, which had enlarged its investigation beyond the accident on the I-17 access road.

Earlier today, Tess had caught the local news on TV. The story had shifted from Max Conroy sightings to a warning to watch out for a woman who had been involved in a car accident with a Bajada County sheriff’s detective the day before. Tess had sat down with a police artist earlier today. The woman’s face was indelible in Tess’s mind, and that transferred to the artist’s likeness of her. The resemblance was chilling.

The woman was a person of interest in six deaths. She was considered armed and dangerous, and citizens were cautioned not to approach her under any circumstances.

Tess was halfway through the two-hour drive to Jerome when she spotted a vehicle flashing past on the freeway coming from the other direction, a truck pulling a cargo trailer—the kind you’d haul motorcycles with. She saw it for only a moment, but knew immediately who it belonged to. The logos on the trailer and on the truck door were identical to the logo above the door of a fabricated metal shop in LA: Luna Vintage Motorcycles. Tess had seen the sign in the
People
article on Max Conroy. Max and his best friend from boyhood, Dave Finley, had posed before the building. Max wore a white undershirt, and Dave wore a black one. Their arms had been crossed—just a couple of toughs. The photo had been taken at an angle so they seemed to tower over the viewer in grainy black and white. Max was shorter and leaner than Dave. Dave’s face was fuller and he wore sideburns. They could almost be twins. They could definitely be brothers.

The truck and trailer hurtled down the freeway in the opposite direction. The same sign: Luna Vintage Motorcycles. A Ouija board sun on one side and a Ouija board moon on the other, and underneath the name of the shop, the word “good-bye.” Silver letters on black.

Was Max in that truck?

Tess turned off at the next exit and got back on the freeway going the other direction. She roared up on him, toggled her wigwag lights, and hit the siren.

Chapter Forty-Seven

M
AX KEPT THAT
burning green fire in his mind and in his heart until he was fished out of the isolation tank. For a moment, as he hit the air, terror gripped him. It was a nightmarish feeling. He felt lost. Familiar, after his days in the isolation tank the last time. Everything was gray, unrelentingly uniform, opaque—except for the freak show of horror puppets that had jumped out at him suddenly—birds of prey screeching in to pick him up in their talons; holes opening up in the earth; dogs eating him alive. He knew they weren’t real, so he tried, mentally, to stave them off. He lay on his back, immobile. The sharp burst of adrenaline left him weak, his extremities cold. He was aware of being shoved onto something and tried to figure out what it was. It jerked him forward, and then he knew what it was: a golf cart. From there, he was carried like a duffel and dumped on some kind of soft surface, laid out on his back and strapped in. Whatever he was strapped onto jiggled. It seemed to collapse under him, and he was shoved across an expanse—maybe a floor, maybe something else, his head and upper body leading the way.

He still couldn’t hear—he must still be in earmuffs—and he was blindfolded. Still insulated in the cocoon, except he was moving.

Fear kited up inside. He tried to speak. Maybe he was speaking.

Hold onto the green fire, he thought. Hold onto the deputy-turned-detective with the calm eyes.

Bide your time.

If I can
, he thought,
if I ever get the chance—they’re not gonna know what hit them.

Chapter Forty-Eight

B
Y THE TIME
Shaun made it back up to the road, the sun was low in the sky. She took stock of her surroundings. It would be a long walk into town.

Shaun heard the car coming before she saw it. She flagged down an older green sedan. Just the one man. Good.

Her appearance clearly shocked him.

“There’s been an accident,” she said.

The man got out of the car, shoving his keys into his pocket. He followed her around the guardrail and looked down.