No Immunity (21 page)

By now Connie would have realized the headlights following her were gone. She hadn’t circled back to see why.

Kiernan’s breath caught. Had Connie intentionally led her into the hole? Was she willing to kill her? Why?

But there was no time for speculation. She pushed herself up and assessed the truck. The front wheels hung over the crumbling edge of the mine hole. It was a situation meant for a tow truck, a huge one. But even if she could roust one in the middle of the night, she wouldn’t know where to tell it to come. It was a moot point anyway. Her cell phone was in the cab.

She bent down by the rear of the truck and stared at the ground. The right wheel was solid, but under the left there was nothing but loose dirt. Two front wheels nearly into the hole didn’t matter. The truck would have rear-wheel drive. But would someone like Jesse have plunked down extra for limited slip differential? Or would a guy with limited cash figure he’d be lucky enough never to be in a spot like this?

She stood staring down into the mine hole. If the truck went careening down there, it would end upside down, like a broken bottle on the barroom floor. It would be crazy to get back in that truck.

And if she didn’t try? She had done a postmortem once on a hiker who had died of exposure. The clothes she’d cut off him had been way warmer than hers were now. Taking a breath, she climbed onto the side of the truck, moving carefully until she was standing on the tire. Then she eased her foot forward. The toe of her shoe caught at the doorframe. Slowly she moved her hands forward. The truck lurched; she swung her weight back. She froze, trying to feel whether the truck had stopped moving. Gusts of wind smacked her and there was no way to tell whether the movement she felt came from the truck or the wind. No way to know if her next move forward would jerk the already loosened vehicle into the shaft. No way—

She blanked her mind as she had done those days years ago in gymnastics, and moved forward, bracing her feet, reaching for the door handle.

Again she felt the truck shimmy. Too late to go back. She wedged open the door, and when no lurch followed, slid her foot inch by inch along the side of the truck until it was in the door opening.

Then the truck lurched. She froze. It wasn’t the wind this time. The truck was moving. Kiernan forced herself to stay still, to wait till the movement stopped.

The back wheels are on the ground
, she reminded herself. She swung herself carefully forward and into the cab, slipped the gearshift into reverse.

In her mind she saw the engine starting, feeding power to the back wheels evenly, the back wheels taking hold, and the truck rolling gracefully back onto the road.

She turned on the engine and eased up on the clutch. The truck groaned.

“Goddamn you, Jesse, you cheap bastard!”

The truck lurched again. She could hear the shriek of the wheels as they spun backward, the dull groan as they dug into the ground. The truck jolted back hard. The engine stalled.

The last jolt had brought all four wheels onto firm ground.

The fear and panic she had pushed aside engulfed her. She sat, heart pounding against her chest wall, chest wall banging into air that felt like cement. She reached for the handle to roll down the window and cool herself off and almost had the pane lowered before good sense returned. She wasn’t going to die in a desert mine shaft, but on the other hand she was still in the middle of the desert on a road that was leading nowhere. She had almost forgotten about Sheriff Fox and her escape from him at the mortuary. This was still his territory and he’d still be looking for her. In the open, empty land the sound of her engine would reverberate for miles.

Jeff Tremaine had vanished. “Jeff’s in deep enough,” Connie had said. Deep in something connected to the dead woman? Connie wanted her out of town to protect him. Were the stakes high enough for Connie to kill her? She would find that out face-to-face, or die trying.

She turned on the engine and headed in the direction Connie had taken.

“I
T’S LIKE LOOKING FOR
a pebble on the track while you’re sprinting to the finish line,” Reston Adcock grumbled. He could barely hear himself over the noise of the Cessna’s engine. Any other time he’d be so caught up in flying, he’d feel the roar flowing over him like air over a wing. He loved the whole gestalt of soaring over mountains small as the ridges on his knuckles and men too tiny to see, the cool, round feel of the throttle giving way to his hand, the instruments responding to attitude and altitude. Takeoffs posed the most danger, but landings were the real challenge, and that first notch of the flaps was when he really came alive. Oil exploration used to be like that. But now the big challenges were financial. He wasn’t driving through the forests gauging the spot to set the explosives, he was driving to the visa office greasing the palm to get his operatives into the country. He wasn’t watching for poisonous snakes ready to drop from branches, he was looking over his shoulder for spies from Sunoco, BP, Phillips, Nihonco. Now if he flew the Cessna at all, it was likely to be over the flats to Oklahoma City or Houston, as exciting as driving an empty freeway with cruise control.

Even this flight would have been a no-brainer if it weren’t for Simkin.

He keyed the mike to activate Simkin’s runway lights. As soon as he spotted the two strips of light, he pulled back on power and when his air speed was within flap range, put on the first notch. All thoughts of Simkin were gone now as he focused on the sequence of bringing the plane down on the dim, rough dirt.

But as soon as he had shut down the engine and pushed open the door, it was Simkin who was on his mind. And there he was, running like a bullmastiff toward the plane. Adcock had barely lowered himself to the ground when Simkin clapped a thick arm around his shoulder. Simkin’s breath was coming in huffs. “Come on, we’ve got to move fast. There’s been a problem. Car’s over there.”

Adcock looked around. The strip lights had run their time limit and gone out. There was no light in any direction, and he knew he could spot one miles away. “Problem, how could there be any—”

“Navy. I told you this was their land, right?”

“
Near
their land, you said.”

“Well, see, normally they don’t care. They’ve got close to a million acres here. Don’t need more than a city block for their office and barracks. Not like they can dock a destroyer or a nuclear sub here.”

Simkin was wandering. Adcock had forgotten that infuriating habit of his. The guy lived alone. He could talk to himself all day, as much as he loved hearing the sound of his own voice. If Adcock didn’t cut him off—“So what’s with the navy now?”

“I don’t know, Resty, not exactly. Whatever they do here they keep dead quiet. Maybe it’s testing—weapons, bombs, chemicals, who knows. But lately there’s been a rumor of something in the air—”

“Germ warfare?”

“Oh, no, I don’t mean that. They know there are people downwind over in Utah.”

“That didn’t stop the government in the past.”

“I’m not saying our government’s into chemical warfare,” Simkin raced on. “They’re not testing anything like VX or sarin, the stuff the terrorist tossed in the Tokyo subway. No, I don’t think it’s anything like that.”

Adcock almost smacked into the car, an old tan Ford, before he saw it. Before Simkin could open the driver’s door, he caught his arm. “You’re telling me what the navy’s
not
doing. But they’re into something that’s making them nervous about visitors. What is it?”

Simkin hunched his shoulders over his barrel chest and lowered his chin as if to protect his words. “I don’t know for sure, but whatever they’re tossing up in the air, they’re making damned sure no one gets east of them. I got a friend in Public Health who’s always going on about the navy. He thinks they’re testing vaccines against biological weapons, like anthrax, or worse—if there’s anything worse than anthrax. They say a suitcase of that could wipe out Vegas. Biological and Chemical Agent Detection program, he says. Says they shoot these biological agents that maybe the Arabs will use against our guys the next time we invade Kuwait, shoot ’em up over the desert and then see how long it takes to identify them.”

The operation was top secret, but Adcock had heard crazy talk about it from one of the docs he met at the Carson Club. “Sim,” he said disgustedly, “they shoot up simulants, not the real stuff. We don’t have kamikazes in this country. Who’d they get to collect the real stuff?”

“The guys they tested the vaccines on. That’s the whole point. Come on, Resty, do you think they would trust sending the entire navy, army, air force and marines where they’d be exposed to viruses or germs or whatever when the vaccines they gave the guys were tested only against simulants? All those guys with their billions of dollars’ of materiel? You think they learned zip from Kuwait?”

Adcock said nothing. There was nothing to say to that.

Simkin let a beat pass.
Enjoying his little victory
, Adcock figured. “Like I said, Resty, whatever they’re blasting up into the air, they’re very prickly about anyone getting downwind of it. Guy I had working on my cars last week drove down to the Breadfruit Park Saturday and it was closed. And that’s this side of the testing ground. Upwind.”

“Winds change.”

“Yeah. My guy said it wasn’t closed the week before. He saw a family going in there to picnic. But now the navy’s all hot to seal it off. Who knows what they got in the air there. Now, maybe they wouldn’t care about us here—we’re more’n five miles west of the park—but we’d be smart not to hang around to find out.”

“Right.” He climbed into the driver’s seat of the Ford truck and waited till Simkin got in beside him. “I’ll drop you off on the highway.”

K
IERNAN SQUINTED THROUGH THE
dirt-glazed glass trying to make out the road from the desert on either side. Desert that could hide another abandoned mine. Her nose was nearly against the windshield. In all directions the land was the same, a waterless nubby broadloom carpet leading to nowhere. The truck strained in first gear, jerking and coughing.
If it were a person
, she thought,
I’d be calling for a priest.

She crested the hill. The headlights shone down the steep decline. The emptiness was immense, the hillside like great Brillo pads packed one against another. By now Connie could have looped back to town on an unseen road and be headed to bed. There could be nothing down this arid hill but scrub pines and sunbaked bones.

Or Connie could be in a cabin somewhere down there, feet up, drink in hand, smug little grin on her face. Kiernan stepped on the gas. Halfway down the hill a dirt road led off to the right and disappeared in the night shadows. She hesitated, checked the gas tank—quarter full—and turned right onto a narrow rutted path.

The engine sputtered and halted momentarily like a snorer waking himself up with the noise and affording himself a moment of silence in which he eased back into raucous sleep. In that silent moment she could hear the wind snapping the tough branches of the scrub pines and feel it battering the truck as she hit a curve.

The edge of the canyon was longer than it had appeared in the dark. The road slashed back and forth, turning suddenly, sharply.

Abruptly a driveway cut right, into a pocket invisible from the road. Now, close, she could make out a high wooden skeleton of a mining building. It and two other crumbling buildings stood around an open area. Even in the dark she could see between the burned-out roof beams of the nearest one.

She looked around for a pit, but there was none. The whole place looked as if it had been deserted for decades.

She cut the engine, got out, and made her way into the compound. Here the wind was not so sharp, but the cold more chilling. The dry, sharp scrabble crackled under her feet. No car was visible, and looking down, she could make out no tire tracks. She rarely carried a gun; she’d seen the devastation bullets caused in too many postmortems. But here, in this deserted spot, a piece in hand would have comforted her.

She moved off the loose scrabble. Sky showed through the burned-out beams of the nearest house.

The second place, probably once a miners’ bunkhouse, was burned as badly. A rusted metal bed frame hung off the porch on three legs.

When she approached the last house, she sighed. Burned to a shell. Could she have been wrong about this mine? Maybe it was not a marvelous semblance of a deserted mine but was in fact a deserted mine.

Something gave under her foot. She looked down, saw nothing, bent down, and fingered a fuzzy, faded green tennis ball. A shot of longing went through her as she imagined Ezra bounding down the beach corralling his ball with his feet in the wet sand.

Leaving the ball on the ground, she stood, turned around very slowly till she made out a dark spot on the far side of the compound. No light shone, but unlike the other burned-out buildings this one was solid. No sky was visible between its beams.

She knocked. “Open up. You know I’m here.”

Connie opened the door. The spiky gray hair that had looked so adventurous in the Gattozzi saloon, was matted back as if from sweaty hands drawn through it again and again. In the flickering light her chiseled features looked sepulchral and her caramel-colored eyes shone. She was holding a pistol.

Kiernan smacked it out of her hand. The gun sailed across the porch. Connie dove toward her, but Kiernan was already halfway to the wall scooping up the gun. It was an old, long-barreled revolver and it felt heavy in her hand. She stood and glared down at Connie. “Stay right there on the ground. I could have died out there in that mine pit!”

“You should have thought about that before you screwed Jeff.” Connie had landed on an elbow, and it was already swelling visibly, but she made no move to coddle it.

“You think
I—
”

“Now I don’t care who Jeff sleeps with. But when he went off to Africa, I wasn’t thirty years old, and it mattered.”

Kiernan took a breath, acutely aware of the cold wind blowing across her back. She stared down at the tough, wiry woman now sitting up, back to the wall. “You’re Jeff’s wife? I don’t remember—”