China Lake

by Meg Gardiner

  I said, ‘‘Glory won’t be able to explain the bullet hole in the ceiling. Chenille’s going to figure it out.’’

  ‘‘You worried about us, or her?’’

  I pushed ahead. ‘‘Jesse.’’

  He shot me a look. ‘‘Glory was in the crowd that kidnapped him, I’d give you even money.’’ We reached the saddle in the crest of the hill and surged over it. He said, ‘‘I know I was rough with her. But she has no remorse, and the only way you get people like her to play ball is to threaten them with absolute, immediate pain.’’ We accelerated, half sliding down the grade. He said, ‘‘What’d she mean, this guy can’t go anywhere in his condition?’’

  ‘‘He’s disabled. He can’t walk.’’

  He wobbled, almost losing his balance. "You’re kidding."

  ‘‘I wish I were.’’

  When we reached my car I was blowing hard and drenched in sweat but exhilarated, in fact wild with relief and the urge to hurry, to get to Jesse before something intervened. As we drove back to Garrett’s Jeep, he told me how to find Copper Creek. I listened, and he touched my arm.

  ‘‘Here’s the problem. I can’t go with you. I’m on duty in half an hour. You’ll have to call the police.’’

  ‘‘I’ll never get a signal for my phone out here.’’

  ‘‘I’ll call when I get back to town. Just wait for the cops.’’

  ‘‘No, Jesse might be hurt. And Glory said there are no guards.’’

  ‘‘You believe her?’’

  ‘‘I have to.’’ That was adrenaline talking, or maybe faith; maybe they’re the same.

  We reached his Jeep. Garrett put his hand on my shoulder.

  He said, ‘‘I can tell by your enthusiasm for finding this guy that we aren’t going to have a second date.’’

  His voice sounded winning. He looked intrepid, and gracious—the good loser. I felt a pang about rejecting him after he had put himself in danger for my family.

  I touched his cheek and kissed him quickly. ‘‘Thank you.’’

  Then I was racing away down the highway toward Copper Creek.

  The men were waiting for Brian in an interrogation room at the jail. Detective McCracken he recognized, the redheaded cop with the Brahma bull chest. Two others had to be FBI, he thought. They looked the way he’d expect Bureau agents to look: intelligent, wearing blue suits and broomsticks up their butts. A fourth guy, casually dressed, sitting on a table by the window, was with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, the NCIS. Brian was on his own. He hadn’t called his criminal lawyer, hadn’t wanted to wait for him. He should have.

  The NCIS agent turned on a television set. It started playing the CCTV tape of Brian talking to Paxton and Tabitha.

  The FBI agent, DeKalb, said, ‘‘Have a nice chat with your wife?’’

  It went downhill from there. The tape was low-quality video, so they couldn’t discern the terror in Tabitha’s eyes, and it had no sound, so they couldn’t hear the conversation. But they could lip-read Tabitha mouthing, Do it.

  DeKalb kept rewinding the tape to show it again and again. ‘‘Do what?’’

  Brian told them that Paxton wanted to ransom Luke in exchange for weapons. He told them he was willing to arrange it. They could set up a sting.

  They didn’t believe him. They didn’t think Paxton was about to provide evidence that would lead to his release. He was a murderer. He wasn’t going anywhere, and he certainly wasn’t going to be permitted to handle navy weaponry. The FBI agents stalked around him, smelling of aftershave and suspicion. McCracken sat wheezing, his arms crossed on his gut. The NCIS agent loitered in the back of the room, a cop, he thought, who probably spent his days investigating procurement fraud, a pencil pusher. But he was the one who gave Brian a clue to what was going on.

  ‘‘What did the Remnant want, the name of another contact on base?’’

  Thieves from the base were selling weapons to the Remnant; that was certain. But the feds apparently couldn’t prove it and didn’t know who the insiders were. So they were trying to stick him with the blame.

  ‘‘Come on,’’ said the NCIS agent. ‘‘Your wife is involved with these people.’’

  The man put a piece of gum in his mouth, staring at him. He wore a look Brian recognized: the look of a drudge who resented pilots. The room suddenly smelled sour.

  ‘‘I can understand,’’ the agent said. ‘‘Here you are, a fighter god, but the government pays you dick, and every night you go home to a crappy little tract house. Meanwhile all those weapons are sitting on base, millions of dollars’ worth of firearms and munitions. It has to be tempting.’’

  ‘‘Maybe that’s how it looks to a desk jockey like you.’’

  DeKalb said, ‘‘The way I see it, Tabitha brought the Remnant to you, and you realized what excellent customers they’d be. They were flush with cash and eager to buy big. And you could deal with them directly, instead of selling the goods through a fence. You could keep all the profits.’’

  Brian said nothing.

  DeKalb said, ‘‘Rewind the tape. Show him again.’’

  Brian said, ‘‘Why don’t you pull your head out of your rectum? Let me bait a trap. You can spring it.’’

  DeKalb handed him a business card. ‘‘When you’re ready to come clean, give me a call.’’

  And not one word from any of them about rescuing Luke. Any hopes he had, any vestiges of trust in these men, seeped steadily away.

  It was up to him. He was going to have to get Luke back himself.

  The road was dust, an aisle through gray-green sage-brush, twenty miles at sixty-five mph with my arms dog-weary on the steering wheel. Beneath an aching blue sky the landscape unfurled, heat weighing on it like a flatiron. This kind of heat could knock you facedown in the sand, hyperthermic and near death, before you knew what had hit you. Jesse, I feared, would be in bad shape.

  Again I tried my cell phone. No signal. No civilization either, not a barbed-wire fence or a plume of dust from other vehicles. The Remnant had picked this hideout well. The sand whitened to gleaming gypsum, and I knew I was closing in. I saw rounded red rocks off to the left, a pair of them pointing at the sky. Looking like a pair of double-Ds, Garrett had said. I braked. And I found it: a rutted path leading up a gully toward rocky hills. This was Copper Creek. Rolling down the window, I leaned out and looked at the ground.

  Tire tracks.

  The edges were well defined, the tread pattern readable—they were recent. I turned up the path. The car strained and slid, climbing gradually into a canyon, lurching over rocks until finally, afraid that I might break an axle, I stopped. I got out, and the heat spanked me.

  Ahead, the canyon narrowed to a crevasse. Its vaulting stone walls formed a corridor, a wind-sculpted passageway that ebbed into ochre shadow and curved out of sight. I approached the entrance and crouched down. In the sand were more tire tracks, with a narrower wheelbase and fat treads. An ATV: all-terrain vehicle.

  The tracks ran both ways, into the crevasse and out. I couldn’t tell which was newer. But it didn’t matter; I had to risk it. Grabbing a water bottle and a first-aid kit from the car, I started off.

  As soon as I entered the crevasse I was in shade. The cooler air was a reprieve, but only briefly. The trail ran uphill on soft grit, and after ten minutes my legs felt dead from fighting the sand. Things became basic: breath, sweat, muscle and bone; red and gold stone walls, a chicane of stark beauty. I was exhausted, and almost a mile from the car, and still hadn’t found anything. The tire tracks were soft humps in the sand. Who knew? They’d probably been made by high school kids out boondocking.

  Then the crevasse snaked and abruptly ended. The rocks met in a solid wall rising fifty feet, and in the rock wall was a metal door. Rust speckled its rivets. Dead center on it was a bright yellow radiation-hazard symbol. I pushed it open.

  I found myself in a cave, deep in darkness. Getting my flashlight from my backpack, I saw a second door five feet ahead. It was ma
ssive, thick, a blast door. Throwing my whole weight against it, I shouldered it open a few inches. Dim electric light piddled through the crack. I raised the flashlight like a truncheon, ready to crack it down on a hostile head, and I listened. I heard nothing from the other side.

  Shoving again, straining, I forced the door farther open. I whispered, ‘‘Jesse?’’

  I slid through the doorway into a rock chamber dully lit with hanging lightbulbs. Against one wall stood a metal desk with a ham radio set on it. Against the other wall, stacks of canned food towered toward the ceiling. Beyond it . . .

  ‘‘Ev.’’

  I ran toward the sound of his voice, tears smudging my vision even before I pushed past the food stocks and saw the camp stove and the dented bunkbeds with the stained mattresses, and Jesse pushing himself up on one elbow, his face stunned, wearing the look of a child who’s just seen his first magic trick.

  He said, ‘‘You’d better not be a hallucination.’’

  I fell on him, wrapping him in my arms, burying my face against his neck. His warmth, his voice, even the salty sweat on his skin, were miraculous.

  He said, ‘‘See, you just can’t stay mad at me.’’

  Straightening up, I brushed his hair off his forehead. ‘‘Let me look at you.’’

  His mahogany hair was lank, his face flushed, his cobalt eyes sharp with unruly light.

  I put my hand to his forehead. ‘‘You’re burning up.’’

  ‘‘Yeah.’’ He swallowed drily. ‘‘Feelin’ kinda punk.’’

  Alarm spiked in me. ‘‘What symptoms do you have? Coughing? Vomiting?’’ Jesus, what were the signs of botulism?

  He shook his head. ‘‘They haven’t dosed me with anything. I convinced them I have investments maturing next week; they think if they keep me alive I’ll authorize a funds transfer to them. I gave them some shit about random revolving passwords and voice recognition. They believe it, but I don’t know for how long.’’

  ‘‘Thinking on your feet, there, kiddo.’’

  ‘‘Not really.’’ He fought to sit up. ‘‘My leg’s broken.’’

  He pulled up the cuff of his trousers. Beneath a crude splint fashioned from a magazine tied with strips of fabric, his left shin was purple, swollen, and bowed. I stretched my hand toward it. Even without touching it I felt the heat off his skin. My stomach coiled.

  I said, ‘‘They splinted a fracture with a copy of Life magazine.’’

  ‘‘No, I did. They don’t know about it and I didn’t tell them. Don’t want them to think I’m more damaged than they already do.’’ He scanned my face, tried to calm me. ‘‘Don’t worry; it doesn’t hurt.’’

  But it made me dizzy. I was thinking blood clots, septicemia, gangrene. I checked his pulse. To my unpracticed hand it felt fast. I handed him the water bottle and gave him two aspirin from the first-aid kit.

  He drank. ‘‘God, that tastes good.’’

  ‘‘I’m going to get you out of here.’’

  I looked around. Despite its obvious age the fallout shelter was well maintained. It had food, electricity, communications equipment, and even board games, honest to God, stacked on a shelf: Monopoly, Scrabble, Chutes and Ladders. The red scare had stopped being a family activity shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis, yet here was a freeze-dried slice of Cold War dread. Someone still waited for the lithium sunset, and they must have stocked something I could use for a sled or travois to haul Jesse out of there. I started scrounging.

  I said, ‘‘How did they get you?’’

  ‘‘Shiloh and those baton twirlers grabbed me. How insulting is that? Kidnapped by fucking pom-pom girls. I may kill myself.’’

  Joking couldn’t hide the rueful truth behind his words. I said, ‘‘I hear that you gave as good as you got.’’

  ‘‘I rammed Shiloh in the eye with the Club steering wheel lock. She’s a hurting puppy. But the twirlers Maced me, and one grabbed the Club, and she was like Jackie friggin’ Chan with the thing. I think I have her to thank for the leg.’’

  Nothing. I couldn’t find anything big enough, and light enough, to turn into a travois. I went back to him and propped a greasy pillow under his shin.

  ‘‘But there’s payback.’’ He pointed to the magazine wrapped around his leg. ‘‘July 1969. The moon-landing issue. I splinted it with a collector’s item.’’

  I actually laughed.

  His face turned grave, and he said, ‘‘You have to see something. I found Jesus.’’

  I stopped laughing. ‘‘Oh, my God, you have brain damage.’’

  ‘‘He wrestles with Elvis. WWF-style. The King of Kings versus the King.’’

  I felt his forehead again. ‘‘You’re delirious.’’

  Pushing my hand aside, he pointed at the door. ‘‘Close it; take a look.’’

  Wary, I went to the door and muscled it shut. Gawked. A mural was painted on the back. Raw and heaving with color, it depicted hot cars, spaceflight, Christ grappling with Presley, and, looming gloriously above them all, Raquel Welch in her two-piece pelt from One Million Years B.C.

  ‘‘Blast door art,’’ I said.

  It emulated an obscure air force tradition from the bad old days: painting the doors of ICBM launch control centers buried in silos beneath the American prairie, truly an underground art form. Examining it, I saw that a length of rope was hanging from the wheel that locked the door. Then I noticed the rest, the desk chair pulled near the door, the rope burns around Jesse’s wrists.

  I said, ‘‘You tried to escape.’’

  ‘‘They tied my hands, but not well enough. When I got loose I used the rope like a lasso, pulled the door wide enough to squeeze through into the air lock. Then got the front door open.’’

  It must have taken him hours. I sat down next to him and took his hand.

  He ran a hand through his hair. His voice was tiring out. ‘‘The thing is, they brought me up here blindfolded in a trailer behind an ATV. So, surprise, I get outside and find myself in Upper Shit Creek, with the thermostat set on shrivel. I came back in, shut the doors so they wouldn’t know I can get out. Went with plan C."

  ‘‘What happened to plan B?’’

  ‘‘Opening the doors was plan B. Calling the cops on the ham radio was plan A. But they’d yanked its guts out. So.’’ He reached under the mattress and pulled out a length of pipe. ‘‘Plan C. I beat the crap out of whoever shows up, before they spray me with Botox.’’

  Violence had never sounded so endearing. I lifted his hand and kissed it.

  He said, ‘‘I was waiting until nightfall, gonna go when it cools off.’’

  ‘‘You’re thirty-five miles from town.’’

  He sobered. ‘‘Good timing, then, you showing up.’’ He looked dazed; he was unaccustomed to good luck. He said, ‘‘You have to see something on the mural. Give me a hand. Help me stand up.’’

  ‘‘You can’t put weight on that fracture.’’

  ‘‘If I lean on your shoulder I can get to the chair just using my good leg.’’ He swung his feet onto the floor, taking care with the splint.

  Arguing would just waste time. ‘‘On three,’’ I said, planting myself in front of him with my hands under his armpits. His arms were hardwood but I did the lifting, and when he balanced against me we hobbled to the door, three-legged. The fever thrummed from him.

  Forget plan D, hiking down the canyon this way. With the sand and rocks he wouldn’t make it fifty yards. I’d have to go back to the car and drive down to the bottom of Copper Creek, meet the police, get them up here to help. Garrett would have called them by now.

  Jesse dropped onto the desk chair and touched the mural, brushing his fingers across a tiny, cobwebby space where the illustration was black-and-white.

  ‘‘That’s new.’’

  On the door I saw drawings within a drawing. Sketched quickly but with a sure hand, they skeined across small white spaces in the mural.

  ‘‘It’s Tabitha’s, isn’t it?’’ he said.r />
  I ran my fingers over it. ‘‘Yes.’’ She had been here, and she had left behind drawings. Why? Because words would have been noticed? I looked closer.

  It was a new iteration of ‘‘HELL-o-ween.’’ Kids in costumes—ghoul, ballerina—on a playground . . . swing set, BigToy, school building in the background. It was the playground at Luke’s school. The skin on the back of my neck rippled.

  Next drawing, kids eating their Halloween candy. These children were in wheelchairs or on crutches, and I thought of Karina Eichner. Final drawing. Kids on the ground, clawing their throats or dead. Candy in their hands.

  The air tasted bitter, and so dry that it excavated my head. ‘‘It’s a warning.’’

  ‘‘The Remnant’s going to poison a bunch of kids.’’

  ‘‘Yes.’’

  ‘‘Why?’’ His voice was raspy. ‘‘As punishment? The Remnant’s own final judgment?’’

  You know how Satanists kill kids every year with Halloween candy, Glory had said. Chenille’s going to turn it around. . . .

  ‘‘As bait.’’

  That was how Chenille planned to get federal agents to swarm Santa Barbara. My head throbbed. I felt a warm trickle and touched my lip. My nose was bleeding.

  I wiped it off. ‘‘I’m going to get help.’’

  ‘‘We have to warn people, get police out to the schools, pull candy from store shelves.’’

  I took his hand. ‘‘It’ll take me a while. Maybe a couple of hours.’’

  His eyes, jagged blue, pinned me. ‘‘I’ll wait.’’

  Anguish hit. I did not want to leave him. ‘‘I’ll be back with the police and paramedics.’’

  ‘‘If I get bored I’ll read my splint.’’ The heat in his eyes focused. He touched my cheek. ‘‘I love you. I get out of here, I want you to marry me.’’

  Boom. Classic Blackburn: Swing a proposal like an ax. Tears swelled and ran hot down my cheeks.

  ‘‘You get out of here,’’ I said, ‘‘we get your fever down and make you lucid.’’

  ‘‘I am lucid.’’

  ‘‘What’s my name?’’

  ‘‘Raquel Welch.’’

  I couldn’t stand the thought of letting go. I leaned down and kissed him hard. ‘‘I love you too.’’