Pyramid Lake (38 page)

My side hurt from the fall over the pit bull owner’s fence. Raising my shirt to check the injury, I saw a fist-sized bruise starting to spread across my ribs. The skin wasn’t broken, though, so I let the shirt fall to cover it again, and put it out of my mind.

Losing myself in the empty wilderness of northern Nevada was not my plan. A mile ahead, a gravel berm crossed the dry creek. Sitting on dirt fill, it rose ten feet above the broken ground.

Easing the Mustang diagonally up the slope, I drove onto the wide berm and my tires thudded across steel rails and cross ties.

Two pairs of tracks were set into the flat gravel bed of the berm. They were separated from each other by a nine-foot gap—barely enough space for trains to pass. Crossing the first pair of rails, I turned the steering wheel and nosed the Mustang into the gap between the tracks.

Although my improvised roadway would take me past the hillier, rockier terrain ahead, it left me no room to avoid a train on either track. I wasn’t too concerned about playing chicken with a locomotive, though, because I could see far enough ahead and behind me. Also, I had checked the online schedule to make sure no trains were due.

And I wasn’t worried about the unscheduled black trains, either.

They only ran at night.

• • •

The tires bumped along the tie plates on either side, rattling my teeth and hurting my bruised ribs. There wasn’t much I could do about the pain in my side, but I put in my rubber mouth guard. I accelerated, speeding up until I found a sweet spot where the vibrations were closer to the resonant frequency of the Mustang’s suspension. That smoothed out the ride a little.

My phone buzzed again in my pocket, and I remembered that I had already missed one call. Steering one-handed, I raised the phone and glanced at it. It was Jen, and she had also been the one trying to reach me earlier.

Bracing myself, I raised the phone to my ear, afraid of what my ex-wife might have to tell me: new developments at Amy’s school, more bad news—anything that might hurt my daughter or Jen herself.

I spat the mouth guard onto the seat beside me. “Is everything okay?”

“You sound funny,” she said. “What’s that thumping noise?”

Raising my voice over the thudding of the tires, I tried in vain to mask the vibration in my voice. “Nothing.”

“Trevor, are you driving on
train tracks
right now?”

“No.” I looked at the parallel tracks that ran along both sides of my car and converged on the horizon ahead. “Don’t be silly. Of course not.”

“So what’s that sound, then?”

“Too complicated to explain right now. Listen, Jen, how is Amy?”

“She’s good. I took a few days off work because of what’s been going on at her school, so I could keep her home. We’ve been spending lots of mother-daughter time, and…” Jen’s voice softened. “Trevor, I never got the chance to say thank you. I mean it. I don’t know how you found Dr. Frank, but he was wonderful.”

A bitter plug hardened in my throat.

Oblivious to the awful truth about our daughter—the truth I had hidden from her—Jen went on. “I was thinking about what you said, about how inexact a science psychiatry is, especially when dealing with a child as precocious as Amy. I asked around and really scared myself. The way these kids get labeled by psychiatrists seems pretty much hit-or-miss. But once they decide there’s something wrong, it can be almost impossible to undo.”

She took a deep breath.

“I did some digging, talked to some parents, and I heard horror stories. If you don’t agree with what the teachers and psychiatrists say your child needs, the school district
can take you to court,
Trevor. Parents who fight them can even lose custody of their own kid! I mean, I had
no
idea… But Amy and I are so,
so
grateful for whatever you did to find the right specialist for her. She… I…” Jen cleared her throat. Her voice turned raw. “I promised myself I wouldn’t say anything to you, but... It’s so hard on me. I couldn’t sleep at all last night. This person you’re with—do you… How serious is it?”

I wanted to close my eyes, but couldn’t. “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s different.”

“I’m sorry…” Jen blew her nose. “I’m being unfair again. It’s just that I’ve spent the last four years wondering every day if I made a big mistake, if I hurt our daughter and ruined all our lives for no good reason.”

Her breathing sped up.

“I know I have no right to say this, Trevor. But don’t… Please don’t give up on your family yet.” Her voice cracked. “Don’t give up on
me
.”

I tightened my jaw, unable to speak, the track blurring in front of my eyes as I steered the car, listening to Jen’s ragged breathing coming through the phone. It sounded the way it always had after we made love, when she was lying with her head on my chest and her arms wrapped around me like she would never let me go, listening to my heart as I held her, secure in the knowledge that everything would always be all right between us and that our baby was safe, asleep in her crib in the next room.

Slowing until the diminished sound of the tires made it easier to hear my ex-wife, I drove on in silence. Listening to her inhale and exhale, I felt as if someone had split me open and had both hands inside my chest and abdomen, crushing and twisting and knotting my insides. I knew that Jen could hear my breathing, too. Neither of us could put what we were feeling into words.

I cared about Cassie a lot. I would do anything to help her. She was my friend. But I didn’t love her. Letting things get physical between us had been a huge mistake.

Because I still loved the person on the other end of the phone right now. Despite four years of separation, despite the agony of not knowing what I had done to tear us apart, I still loved my wife.

I held the handset against my ear, listening to Jen breathe, clinging to the fragile, staticky connection between us as the miles thumped by. I couldn’t say the things I wanted to—I couldn’t tell her to take me back. I had tried in the past, so many times. Pleaded. Begged. Finally, I had stopped asking. Not because I’d given up on my family—that would
never
happen. I stopped asking only because I realized how much it hurt Jen each time I did.

“What’s Amy doing right now?” I asked, my voice unrecognizable to me.

“Missing you,” Jen said, and she blew her nose again. “I know it’s short notice, but she needs her father so much. Is there any way you can… It’s the middle of the week, but if you want, I can even bring her to the airport tonight.”

Straightening in my seat, I felt the awful icy, crusty weight of Bennett’s half-head again, chilling my palms. I pictured McNulty’s battered, steam-broiled purple face. I didn’t want my daughter within a hundred miles of Pyramid Lake.

Not now.

“Amy gave up asking,” Jen said. “She just packs her little rolling travel bag and leaves it by the door, and every time I walk past it I die a little inside. But if you’re busy with work, we can always—”

“When’s the next flight?” I asked. “I can be at the airport in an hour to pick her up.”

• • •

Bumping west along the train tracks, passing through gently rolling hills, I stared straight ahead, with the phone resting on the seat, next to my leg. The little depot town of Herlong, on the California side, was coming up soon. The southbound road that joined US 395 wouldn’t be far. I would pick up 395 at Herlong, and loop back into Nevada, getting into Reno with plenty of time to spare.

The sky deepened from amber to burnt sienna, and I watched the sun disappear beneath the horizon ahead. Solitary piñon pines painted long, ominous shadows that stretched toward me like fingers reaching across the squat clumps of greasewood on either side of the tracks.

My ribs ached with a nasty pressure that was harder to ignore than the pain itself. By now I had already crossed from Nevada into California. I put my mouth guard back in and bit down, thinking about the mess that lay behind me: Homeland Security’s ultrasecret rendition camp, the murders of McNulty and Bennett, Cassie’s school and how it had been used to betray her. And Frankenstein, racing to find a cure for my daughter even while his own future hung in limbo.

The faint scattering of lights that was Herlong appeared ahead.

As the desert around me faded into night I sensed that I was crossing a threshold. I couldn’t help feeling that I was passing a point of no return now, moving into a darkness from which there was no coming back.

T
he storage facility where Blake rented a unit was tucked away on the outskirts of Reno. I parked the Mustang around the corner, under the pinkish glare of arc sodium streetlights, and got out. I scanned the vacant street, seeing almost no traffic, either vehicle or pedestrian.

The two long, parallel storage buildings faced each other across a central alley, each with its row of orange-painted roll-up garage doors accessing the individual storage bays. Blake’s unit, according to the payment receipt e-mails I had found on his hard drive, was number 22. I spotted it at the far end of the alley, where a concrete wall shielded it from street view. Perfect.

I had two hours until Amy’s flight arrived at Reno-Tahoe International, and I planned to put that time to good use. Walking back to my car, I opened the trunk and pulled out the things I had bought at a nearby janitorial supply. Looping a short length of thick hose over my shoulder, I grabbed each of the two five-gallon drums by the handles and hauled it out.

I lugged them to the end of the alley and set them alongside Blake’s unit.

Blake wasn’t stupid. He would know that hotels and motels were always quick to cooperate with law enforcement. That was the first place someone searching for a fugitive would look. So he would stay away from hotels, but he would count on having a few days before anyone got around to checking his storage unit.

It would make a great short-term hideout.

As quietly as I could, I wedged the end of the hose under the corner of the door to unit 22. Then I opened the five-gallon container of concentrated bleach.

Holding my breath, I poured half of it through the small round opening in the top of the barrel of ammonia-based toilet cleaner. Almost gagging on the eruption of noxious fumes that tried to escape from the sloshing drum, I closed my eyes and jammed the other end of the rubber hose into the opening.

Stifling a cough, I stood up and stepped onto the top of the drum, grabbed the edge of the roof, and pulled myself up.

Squatting like a gargoyle directly above the door to unit 22, I rubbed my eyes, which were still streaming from their momentary exposure to the chlorine gas—gas that was now filling the enclosed storage unit. I braced myself and got ready.

Growing up around mobile-home meth labs had taught me some useful chemistry. I figured two minutes, tops, before the door opened and Blake stumbled out, choking and puking.

Blinking rapidly to clear my itchy eyes, I counted off the seconds. When I reached 135, I started to get worried. But then the door below me rolled upward with a sudden metallic rattle. I smiled and pulled my shirt up over my nose and mouth, preparing to jump Blake when he came out.

The door stopped halfway.

A burst of acrid gas wafted out and floated past me, enveloping me in the smell of an overtreated indoor swimming pool, but a hundred times worse. I squinted against the fumes, but the square of asphalt in front of the door below remained empty. No one had come out.

Continuing to count, I reached 180 seconds. Three minutes. Uh-oh.

At four minutes, I jumped down and stood in front of the door, trying to see into the darkness beyond the waist-high gap. I couldn’t make out anything.

I didn’t want to end up killing Blake by mistake. But I could picture him lying facedown in a puddle of vomit right now.

Had he tried to raise the door and collapsed, overcome before he could get out?

I needed to stop the flow of chlorine gas, which was still pumping under the half-open door. I hustled toward the drum but stopped before I got close enough to yank the hose. Then I backed away from it fast. Because even from five feet away, I could feel the heat coming off the drum.

Meth-lab chemistry wasn’t an exact science, and I hadn’t measured my ingredients here with any sort of accuracy. Too much bleach, and the mixture would generate not just chlorine gas but also nitrogen trichloride. Nitrogen trichloride was far more toxic than chlorine—and a volatile explosive as well.

But if I had mixed in too much ammonia, that was even worse. A two-part reaction would then produce hydrazine—rocket fuel, basically—and that would react with the other chloramine byproducts, generating so much heat that the mixture would spontaneously explode.

The drum was starting to smoke now. Backing farther away from it, I cursed. Now I had no choice. I had to go in and get Blake out myself, before he choked to death or the whole place burned down around him.

Sucking in a deep breath of the cleaner air outside, I ducked under the door and straightened up in the semidarkness.

Something hard slammed into the back of my skull with stunning force. I gasped and fell to my hands and knees on the concrete, barely able to stop myself from sucking in a lungful of poisonous chlorine gas.

With a metallic rumble, the rolling door came down again, plunging the storage unit into blackness.

Trapping me inside.

H
olding my breath, I rolled to the right, whipping my legs around, trying to kick my attacker’s legs out from under him. I hit only air.

The stinging pain from the blow to my head fired starbursts of light behind my eyelids. In the caustic darkness of the storage unit, I couldn’t see. But the light switch had to be on one side or the other of the door.

I rolled to the left as fast as I could, over and over, until my shoulder hit the wall. Rapid footsteps clomped against the concrete, moving away from me, accompanied by raspy, strained breathing.

I shot to my feet and felt another blow spike into the back of my head in exactly the same spot. Another eruption of fireworks exploded across my vision as small metal things clattered and drizzled unseen onto the concrete floor around me.