“I’m with you,” Sam said. “He can’t be far.”
Together, they raced out the door.
36
The black Hummer was gone.
Kensi and Deeks ran down the driveway, and found it at the bottom, stopped where the way had been blocked by Kensi’s and Sam’s vehicles. They approached it cautiously, guns ready. The windows were so dark that Shogren could be hiding inside and they wouldn’t be able to see him from here.
Kensi took the left side, Deeks the right, and they reached the rear door at the same time. Nothing. Deeks peered inside, saw Kensi through the glass doing the same. No Shogren. They moved as one up to the next row of seats, then to the front.
Empty.
They met again in front of the vehicle. “You know,” Deeks said as they walked to the automotive blockade they’d set up, “I never really understood why they called those ‘Hummers.’ I mean, it’s a stretch from ‘high-mobility, multipurpose wheeled vehicle’ to ‘Humvee’ in the first place. But having made that stretch, why not leave it there. ‘Hummer’ has a certain sexual connotation to it, that—”
“You just answered your own question. The sexual connotation is probably precisely why they went with that name.” She changed the subject abruptly, as Deeks had noticed she often did when the subject was one he’d raised. “You think he’s on foot?”
“Unless he had a getaway vehicle of some—oh, hey.” A man sat on the pavement, and when he looked up at them, Deeks recognized him as Hugh Peabody. His glasses were broken, his nose and mouth bloody. What looked like a woman’s purse lay on the ground beside him.
“Mr. Peabody?” Kensi said, rushing toward him. “What are you doing here? What happened? Are you okay?”
“You’re pelting, Kensileena,” Deeks said.
“I’m pelting?”
“Maybe one question at a time, that’s all I’m saying.”
She helped Hugh to his feet. “Who did this to you?”
“It was that little wretch Hal Shogren,” the man said.
“Not so little anymore,” Deeks observed.
“What are you doing here?”
“We were almost at the place you said to meet you, Agent Blye, but then you took off. Betsy said to follow you, in case the photographs she found could help you. And in case you’d found out any more about Susan. I’ve never driven so fast in my life.”
“What happened?”
“We caught a glimpse of you going inside. Betsy said we oughtn’t bother you, but that we should wait until you came out so she could give you the pictures. We were just sitting in the car when Hal came screaming down the driveway in that black monster. He stopped when he saw how you’d parked, then saw us sitting across the street. He came over, yanked open my door, punched me right in the face, and threw me down on the street. Then he tossed a big bag in the back seat, got in beside it, pointed that big gun of his at Betsy, and told her to get behind the wheel and drive. Then she did the damnedest thing.”
“What was that?” Kensi asked.
“Hal told her to pitch her cellphone, or something like that, so she threw her whole purse at me and drove away.”
“She threw her purse at you?”
“Weird,” Deeks said. “Most women never want to be away from their purse.”
“And she doesn’t even have a cellphone,” Hugh added. Slowly, a smile spread across his face. “Unless…”
He opened her purse and rummaged inside for a few seconds, then came up with a fistful of photographic prints. “The pictures,” he said. He handed them over.
“She thinks on her feet,” Deeks said, impressed. “I love that in a woman. Or, you know, anybody.”
“She’s always been one smart cookie,” Hugh said. “Smarter than me by a country mile. What’s he going to do to her, Miss Blye? I don’t know what I’d do without her.”
“Don’t worry, Mr. Peabody,” Kensi said. “We’ll get her back. We won’t rest for an instant until we do.”
Deeks got the car’s license plate number from the man—he couldn’t remember it, but Betsy Peabody had it written on a tag attached to her keychain—and called in a BOLO alert. Within minutes, every law enforcement officer in Los Angeles County would be on the lookout for the vehicle and Shogren and Betsy.
And, of course, the warning that Shogren should be considered armed and extremely dangerous.
He was just finishing that when Sam and Callen came down the driveway. Callen was carrying the tablet in a black bag, and Sam had a money bag over his shoulder. “What’s up, Deeks?” Sam asked.
“Shogren’s gone. He’s got a car and a hostage.”
“A hostage? Who? How?”
“Who’s that old guy with Kensi?” Callen asked.
“Pelting. It’s the nation’s singular shame,” Deeks said.
“What?”
“Never mind. That’s Hugh Peabody. Julianne Mercer’s father. The hostage is Betsy, his wife. Julianne’s mother. Except Julianne is really Susan Peabody.”
“Was, anyway,” Callen said.
“Is, was. I’m not picking sides here, but I’ll just say, a lot of folks don’t believe anyone’s ever really gone. She might have shuffled off this mortal coil, but she’s still Susan somewhere. She is to her parents, anyway.”
“Too deep for me,” Sam said. “You call in a BOLO?”
“Every cop in the land will be on the lookout,” Deeks answered. “And the old man delivered some photographs his wife turned up, of the Shogren family’s cabin in the Hollywood Hills.”
“Those might come in handy,” Sam said.
“Or the cabin might have burned to the ground by now,” Callen added.
“Or that. Still, it’s a place to start. Wonder if Owen’s still up there?”
“Last I heard,” Deeks said. “By which I mean, about three minutes ago, when I talked to Nell about the BOLO.”
“He been in contact?”
“Not so far. She said his phone’s still moving around, but they can’t reach him.”
“I hope he’s okay.”
“He’s Owen Granger. He’s not going to let some little thing like an enormous conflagration bother him.”
“Deeks is right,” Callen said. “If anybody knows how to take care of himself, it’s him. We need to focus on Shogren.”
“Yeah,” Sam agreed. “Let’s get this stuff to Ops, and see if we can locate the cabin in the old guy’s photos.”
37
By the time Granger had all three horses loaded into the trailer, the inferno was so close he could see individual embers floating ahead on the flame-generated wind. The horses were understandably nervous. So was he.
He climbed back into the truck’s cab, and saw his useless mobile phone sitting there. Hetty would be furious that he hadn’t checked in, or worried that he’d perished in the fire. More likely, both at once. He glanced over at Stacey’s little ranch house, the exterior mostly covered in native stone, and the lines stretching from it to wooden poles. She probably had a landline in there, he realized. A little late to think about it, but better than after he’d driven away. He shut off the engine and ran to the house.
The front door was locked. He hurried around, found a back door with glass panes. Also locked. From the looks of it, the fire would be here soon, and he’d seen no sign that anyone was on the way to stop it. If the house was doomed, a broken window wouldn’t matter. She had a couple of chairs and a little table outside the back door, on a kind of patio made from rough-edged bricks. Granger snatched up the table and rammed a leg through the pane closest to the doorknob, then used it to clear away the jagged shards clinging to the edge. Tossing it aside, he reached through and turned the knob.
The door opened into a kitchen. The house looked to have been built in the 1950s, and the appliances looked like the original ones. This was Stacey’s getaway, not her fulltime home, so he imagined she didn’t cook here often, and when she did she probably thrived on the challenge the practically prehistoric applia
nces offered.
The phone was on the kitchen wall, beneath a hanging cupboard. It was a Trimline phone, salmon pink, with a coiled cord that probably stretched twenty feet or more. He grabbed the receiver and held it to his ear.
No dial tone. He punched the plunger several times, to no avail. For all he knew, the thing was a period piece she kept around for the sake of irony, and hadn’t been connected in decades. He hung up and went back out. No time left to search the house for another telephone. Anyway, chances were good that even if the phones worked, the lines were down.
He checked the refrigerator, and found four plastic water bottles. The power was out, but they were still relatively cool, and water was water. A quick look in the pantry revealed a half-full box of protein bars and a jar of peanut butter. He grabbed those and the bottles.
He raced back to the truck and keyed the engine. It started right away, but with a ragged stutter and a vibration he didn’t like. He wondered if the thick smoke was interfering with the motor’s air intake. One more thing to worry about. He was already concerned about running out of gas, since he hadn’t driven the old truck enough to know how far it could go on a tank, and filling up out here would be impossible.
The road to Coldwater Canyon was dirt, carved out through thick brush and closely spaced trees—exactly the terrain wildfires loved to burn. It wasn’t maintained by the county, and was pretty rough, but he’d negotiated it with ease on his way in. Coldwater would offer the quickest way down the hill, so he headed out the same way. It was about two miles to the pavement. He took it slower than he had earlier, because of the horse trailer, but he’d be there in a few minutes. Relief was already starting to settle in. Stacey’s beloved mountain hideaway wouldn’t make it, most likely, but the horses were more important to her, and he had fulfilled the obligation where they were concerned.
The dirt road curved toward the south, and here the smoke was so dense, it was like driving through a brown fog mixed with gritty snow. Ash and embers flew by, and Granger took to using the wipers now and then to keep the windshield clear enough to see through. After a quarter mile or so, the road straightened again, heading due west, until it ended at Coldwater. Almost there.
But when he rounded the last bend, he had to hit the brakes.
A burning pine had fallen across the road. Beyond it, the fire was already charging up the hill. There was no getting through here. Even if he could pull off the road and go cross-country, around the tree, he couldn’t drive through those flames without risking his own life and those of the horses. Regardless, the brush was too thick to try that. He couldn’t even pull off the road far enough to turn around.
There was nothing else for it. He had to back up—with the horse trailer attached—for more than a mile. Reversing a trailer was never Granger’s idea of a good time; the fact that he had never pulled this particular trailer until about ten minutes earlier made it worse. He knew the rules, though. He imagined that the top of the steering wheel was the trailer’s front end, and the bottom its rear. Then he had only to steer with one hand on the bottom, in order to make the wheel’s direction correspond to the direction he wanted the trailer to go.
In this instance, the other cardinal rule was the more difficult of the two: Don’t hurry.
Rushing it would likely have one of three consequences. Either he’d jackknife the trailer, or he’d ram it into the truck, or he’d force it off the road and into the heavy brush. Going slow, however, was a challenge when the fire was closing in on him from the front.
He took a deep breath and shifted into reverse. Hand at the wheel’s bottom, he started backing up, making the minute adjustments necessary to keep the trailer on the road. There were places where it was wide enough to accommodate two vehicles at a time, but not many of them, and as he neared each one, he gauged and determined that it was still too narrow to turn around. A little at a time, then, he backed the trailer up, all the way back to Stacey’s gate. There, he cranked the wheel hard and backed through the gate, which he hadn’t bothered to close. Then he spun it the other way. The dirt road continued past Stacey’s place. He didn’t know where it went, or if it would dead-end or head straight into the conflagration, but it was the only option left to him.
The only option he would consider, anyway. He could, he supposed, abandon the horses and strike out on foot. Or he could stay put and wait to die.
Neither of those worked for him.
He didn’t know where he was going, or if the road would lead to a way out of the hills.
He hoped it would, though.
And sometimes hope was all a person had left.
38
“What do you think?” Kensi asked. “Can you identify the site?”
“Well, the thing is,” Nell said, “we don’t exactly have a database of random rock formations. I know it seems like sometimes we can work miracles—”
“Because you do.”
“—but what we do isn’t really magic. We’re fortunate enough to work with the latest and greatest technology—sometimes so new it hasn’t even been offered for sale yet, and sometimes it’s stuff developed in-house—but it’s not like we can summon data out of thin air. The data have to go in before they can come out.”
“Have?” Kensi asked.
Nell eyed her quizzically for a moment, then figured out what she was asking, and nodded. “Data is plural,” she said. “Datum is singular. And really, pretty much useless. If you don’t have data, plural—and the more, the merrier, as they say—you really don’t have much of anything.”
“Makes sense, I guess, but—”
“But it doesn’t help you find Hal Shogren and his hostage.”
“I thought you only finished Eric’s sentences.”
“Oh, no,” Nell said. “I’m an equal opportunity sentence-finisher.”
“She really is,” Eric chimed in. “Especially if someone makes her nervous.”
“Do I make you nervous?” Kensi asked.
“Oh, no, not you.” Nell brought her thumb and forefinger together, then opened a gap about a millimeter wide. Then a little more. “Maybe just a tiny bit.”
“But I’m here,” Eric said. “And I make her nervous enough for both of us.”
“I’m not sure I’d call it nervous,” Nell said.
“I could speculate about other adjectives,” Eric said. “But Hetty’s been pushing those sexual harassment rules lately.”
As if manifested by the sound of her name, Hetty appeared in the Ops Center. “For good reason, Mr. Beale,” she said. “For one thing, we’re employees of the federal government, and we need to exemplify the highest possible standards. For another, they’re just the right thing to do. No one should be made to feel uncomfortable or threatened in the workplace. In fact, I wish they were a little more strict.”
“More strict in what way?” Eric asked.
Hetty pursed her lips and touched her chin. “Well, I wouldn’t mind if they prevented men from wearing kilts at all.”
“That would be discrimination,” Eric countered.
“Perhaps. But they do—in spirit, if not explicitly—ban the wearing of kilts commando-style.”
Eric laughed, but he was blushing a little at the same time. Nell, on the other hand, was positively crimson.
Hetty swiveled toward Kensi. “No luck locating your cabin?”
Kensi shrugged. “Like Nell said, there’s no database of random rock formations. And I’m sure those hills are full of them.”
“No doubt. There are no clues to the location other than the formation in the background?”
“Not that we’ve been able to ascertain,” Nell replied.
“The Peabodys thought the Shogren family owned the cabin, rather than rented,” Kensi explained. “But from what they said, that would have been in the mid-nineties. A big batch of land records from that era were lost in a computer glitch—some kind of Windows NT four-point-zero crash, I guess. There are still lawsuits ongoing over who owns what. The Sho
grens are both dead, so they aren’t part of that, but we can’t even find anything showing them as owning any land up there, so either they just rented, or their ownership is lost in that glitch.”
“We’ll keep analyzing the photos, and try to come up with some other angle,” Eric said. “But nothing has presented itself yet.”
“Do we know that Mr. Shogren and Mrs. Peabody went into the hills? The fire is still raging and the area remains under an evacuation order.”
“We don’t know that for sure,” Nell said. “All we have is this.”
As she spoke, she tapped some keys, and an image appeared on the big screen. It was a traffic camera still showing the Peabodys’ Buick, making a right turn from Ventura Boulevard onto Valley Vista. Only Betsy Peabody was visible in the shot, her knuckles white on the wheel. In the background, smoke could be seen.
“That is fairly convincing,” Hetty said.
“That’s what we thought,” Kensi agreed.
“Do whatever you have to,” Hetty instructed. “But find them, and bring that poor woman home to her husband.”
* * *
“You doing okay?” Sam asked.
Kelly Martin had his feet up on the arm of the couch. At least he’d taken his boots off, Sam noted. There was a tall, empty glass on the floor beside him, and a crumpled bag that had once held trail mix by that. Across from him, the TV was tuned to a reality show that seemed to involve people screaming at each other. Many of the words they used were bleeped.
“Couldn’t be better.”
“We’re making progress. We have the tablet back, and only one of the contractors is still on the loose.”
Martin sat up. “Really? Which one?” He read Sam’s face in an instant. “Never mind, don’t tell me. Shogren.”
“Bingo.”
“That guy’s a real piece of work.”
“You got that right.”
Bolthole Page 19
