Ransom River (30 page)

Ahead, the road curved and spoked into a V. A column of eucalyptus trees lined the shoulder. Seth accelerated into the curve and signaled, planning to veer left at the fork.

“Something bad is going down. I need to get there,” he said.

His voice was stretched tighter than baling wire. He was already gone, into a headspace where he felt secure when everybody else felt like screaming. He had something to aim for, something he could help with, when Rory had become a hopeless cause. In the failing light, his face was pale and planed with injury.

He held the wheel hard and angled around the curve. The trees picket-fenced on the right, like figures in a strip of film that was coming off the reel. Seth signaled and crossed the yellow centerline, angling for the fork in the road.

The other pickup was black, and fifty yards ahead, and headed straight at them. No lights.

“Seth.”

Rory pressed herself back in the seat and jammed her foot to the floor as if she had a brake pedal. But she didn’t.

Seth spun the wheel. He threw it hard to the left and tried to get out of
the other truck’s way. The eucalyptus trees swung past. Then the black truck was there.

The impact was loud and brutal.

The black pickup T-boned the passenger side of Seth’s truck. The frame buckled. The windshield squealed and cracked. The window by Rory’s face shattered. The grille of the black pickup bore straight at her, crushed the side of Seth’s truck, sent her flying.

They skidded sideways, pinned to the black pickup, as if skewered there. It felt like being borne along by a freight train. The black truck kept coming, filling her with noise, with heat, the metal and energy crushing everything as it came on. The cab of Seth’s truck crumpled to half its size.

They skidded, tilting, until the other truck’s front wheels locked and flattened and dug into the road. Crushed together, they swerved off the asphalt and hit a tree. They stopped ugly, with a heavy metallic crunch.

Rory seemed to be floating. She was on her back, staring through strange twisted branches of metal at the sky. She saw stars. She blinked and her eyes felt stabbed with pain. A horn blared, long, loud, helplessly.

The stars seemed overcome with a violent yellow light. A bus had stopped next to them. Its headlights were shining in her face. She realized she was lying faceup on the dashboard of Seth’s truck.

She realized she was hurt.

Her eyes were tearing, but every time she blinked, the pain sharpened. She raised a hand and saw blood.

She turned her head. Glass crunched beneath her.

“Rory.”

She stopped moving for a second and took inventory. “Rory, hold still.” A swell of pain began at her feet and rolled upward through her.

“Rory, babe, hold on.”

Seth was talking to her. She heard other voices. A man, two men, maybe from the black pickup, or the bus. Moving around outside.

More glass crunching. With a wrenching squeal, hands pulled the entire
windshield out of the frame in one shattered piece of safety glass. The truck rocked beneath her. Seth appeared, kneeling on the pickup’s hood.

“Rory, babe. Can you talk?”

She moved her hand, and the sharp sensation, stinging, got her arms too.

“Aw, Jesus, hold still—it’s glass spall.” His hand hovered in front of her face.

The other voice: “Can we help?”

“Call an ambulance,” Seth said. “First aid kit’s in the back. Hurry.”

He scrambled around, crouching on the hood, trying to position himself so he could see her, could do something.

“Hold on,” he said. He brushed glass from her face with trembling fingers. “Hold on.”

She saw his face. He was bleeding too. His voice was bleeding. The sky, however, had turned blue. It had bled out.

R
ory pushed off from the wall of the maintenance shed. On the park’s baseball diamond, players cheered a home run. She walked to Seth’s new Tundra and got in and closed the door. She buckled her seat belt. Seth climbed behind the wheel and fired up the engine. He studiously avoided looking at her.

“Seth…”

“Later. After. We don’t have time for explanations right now.”

It was an out, and a defense mechanism. But she nodded.
Later.
He pulled out of the park and headed back toward the center of town.

“I need to go to Amber’s,” she said. “Something’s going on.”

“You want to go alone?”

“No way.”

“I’m not sure she’ll talk to you if I’m hanging around.”

“Then you can take me home to pick up my car and follow me over there. You can wait outside. Up the street, out of sight.”

He drove cautiously along a residential street toward the freeway. Autumn leaves shivered in the breeze.

“Look for Boone. And look for a newer silver SUV,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“Late-model silver SUV. It was at the stoplight behind the wrecker.” Seth swung onto the on-ramp and raced onto the freeway. “Boone isn’t the only one tailing you.”

The view out the tinted windows of the SUV was busy and wrong. Traffic, stores, suburban sprawl. Supermarkets and a mall and not one single view of the black Toyota Tundra pickup with the ex-cop and the girl.

The driver looked around. “Where’d she go?”

“You lost her.”

“No.”

“She’s gone,” the passenger said. “And why was the wrecker following her?”

The engine of the SUV rumbled. The air-conditioning was blowing, though the day outside was cool.

“Did they make you?” the passenger said.

The driver shook his head. He hoped not. They’d been anonymous so far and wanted to keep it that way.

“This is getting out of control,” he said.

“We need to stop this. Need to step things up. She should be sucking her thumb and writing journal entries about her terrible ordeal, not out driving around with Mr. Macho. This is not normal.”

“Talking to an ex-detective is very abnormal.”

“If she thinks he can keep her out of county lockup, she’s stupid.”

“I know. Figure she’ll be arrested in the morning. She won’t keep quiet. She’ll talk. She’ll tell the department everything she’s figured out.”

They looked at each other. With every minute the girl was loose, she could figure out more and more pieces of the thing. And she looked pretty close to obsessed about doing that. Once she put it together, it was game over.

“We’re running out of time. We have to move the schedule up.”

“That’s a risk.”

“This entire thing’s a risk,” the passenger said. “We have to take the chance of exposure. Otherwise the rewards might go up in smoke. We gotta move.”

The driver got on the phone.

A
mber Mackenzie’s house could have been a set for the old TV western that had filmed in Ransom River.
Rustic
described it charitably. In the hills at the edge of town, high above eroded gullies, it was a dismal home, with patchy grass and bare dirt along the foundation, where flowers should have bloomed. Behind it rose rocky ranges and the blue-green peaks of the national forest. Rory crested the hill and coasted down the road to the driveway. The lawn was strewn with Barbies and Big Wheels.

She parked her Subaru and walked to the door. A garden hose snaked carelessly across the broken sidewalk. She heard Seth’s truck rumble to a stop a hundred yards back, just beyond the top of the hill, and reverse around a corner so he could get out and watch the house past scrawny bottlebrush trees and a neighbor’s Winnebago.

Rory knocked. Inside, a television softly buzzed.

The door opened. Amber stood surprised, her splinted hands at her sides.

“Aurora. My word.” She pushed open the screen. Her frantic red hair hung over her shoulders. “Come in, honey.”

The house was stuffy. Though it was autumn, a fan was blowing in the living room. Five children sat on the carpet, huddled in a semicircle around the television. SpongeBob was loudly educating them about subaquatic life.

Amber led Rory into the kitchen, just off the front door. “What’s going on?”

Rory nodded at the kids. “Can you talk?”

“I’m keeping an eye on them.”

Amber pointed. A mirror hung on the hallway wall, catching the toddlers’ reflection.

She crossed her arms. “If you’re worried I told your parents Seth’s in town, don’t be.”

“That’s not it.” Though the thought of how her father would react to seeing Seth made Rory blanch. “I’ll deal with Seth. Don’t concern yourself with that.”

Amber scratched an arm. The kitchen counter was clean but cluttered. There were loaves of Wonder Bread and juice boxes and four children’s lunch boxes lined up next to a pack of Virginia Slims and Amber’s lime green pill container. Through the container’s transparent lid Rory saw pills organized in tiny compartments labeled M–Sun. The pills looked like a mix of M&M’S and jelly beans.

“What’s your worry, then?” Amber said.

“I want to know what’s going on.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Why have you been so eager to talk to me?”

Amber flipped her hair over her shoulder. It was almost coquettish. “The courthouse siege is big news. I’m no different from the rest of the folks in town. And honey, face it, I’ve got an inside track.”

“Open curiosity, that’s it? Okay, here I am. What do you want to know?”

Amber smiled uneasily. After a moment she turned and opened the fridge.

“Iced tea?”

“No, thanks. Take your shot, Amber. Ask me whatever it is you’re dying to know.”

Amber took out a pitcher and shuffled to the cupboard for a glass. She poured and reached back into the cupboard for a box of pills. She popped one from a silver bubble pack and washed it down with tea. It was OxyContin.

Rory glanced at the hallway mirror. The kids in the living room were
mostly goggle-eyed and glazed in front of the TV. One little boy was playing with a Hot Wheels car. The little girl with the sweet brown curls, who had been in Riss’s car outside the courtroom earlier, climbed to her feet and looked around.

“Rory, I think you’ve gotten the wrong idea,” Amber said. “I don’t know who’s been putting notions in your head, but this is nothing more than an aunt’s concern and natural human curiosity.”

The OxyContin remained on the counter. Rory wondered if Amber had a license to operate a day-care center, or whether she got around that by claiming to be a neighborly figure who helped out with part-time babysitting.

Rory picked up the OxyContin box, put the bubble pack back inside, and set it on an upper shelf in the cupboard. She put the lime green pill organizer beside it and closed the cabinet door tightly.

“I’ve got an idea about what’s going on,” she said, “and I’m not the only one.”

Amber’s face had gone crimson. “I’m disabled. I have chronic pain. It makes it impossible for me to hold down a normal job.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Everything’s always been so easy for you, Miss Bright Bulb. Well, not everybody has life served up to them on a silver platter.” She held up her hands. “This comes from trying to hold my family together, keep a roof over my kids’ heads, put food on the table. What would you know about any of that?”

Rory thought of the shotgun shack in Zimbabwe, and little Grace, and the sticks Grace’s mother collected for her cooking fire before men with tire irons kicked down the door.