She took the next left and arrived at a fenced group of buildings with a small sign on a split-rail fence that read, Goats for sale. There were no goats in sight, nor any people. After she watched a small, empty corral for ten minutes without seeing anybody move, she went back, once again, to Ocotillo.
For the next twenty minutes, she took every possible turnoff from Ocotillo Road, no matter how sparse and unpromising, and found a small bird sanctuary, an Ashram (which she recognized because it had a sign that said, ‘Ashram,’) and rugs flapping on a line outside an apparent weaver’s studio in what looked like an old barn.
All three of those establishments, and everything else she found, was interspersed with dead campsites next to the abandoned tailings of moribund mines. None of these amounted to much more than shallow holes hand-dug into the sides of sharp cutbanks – this community must have grown up around the rumor of some ore deposit that didn’t prove out. The mining sites looked older than all of the cheapjack buildings that had been thrown up around them, and the whole neighborhood was clinging – and slouching and leaning – in hilly terrain strewn with rocks of all sizes.
‘OK, technology gods, you win this round,’ Sarah told her dashboard. She went back to Ocotillo, parked on the skimpy shoulder, and punched Amanda’s address into her GPS. When she hit GO, the purple arrows sprang to life, directing her to continue driving southwest into the desert.
The road curved left when the arrow did, and presently she was facing east, looking at the Rincon mountains, though still on Ocotillo which had turned ninety degrees. The device began to indicate a left turn in a fourth of a mile, then five hundred feet. When it told her to turn, she turned, saying softly, ‘So this is how you get into the middle.’
She was on a narrow dirt track now, barely wide enough for her car, driving five miles an hour and occasionally muttering, ‘Hope I don’t meet a lot of traffic.’ Lily Belle Mine Road, it called itself. The road, such as it was, traveled eastward from the entry point, but soon began to turn gradually left again.
Besides constantly turning, it was never level, but climbed up and down a couple of little hills and then up a steep hill, only to drop sharply down again. And down, and down, until she was asking herself how hard it was going to be to get out of here, and answered herself by climbing out in a tooth-gritting pedal-to-metal roar, clinging to the narrow track that filled the air around her with so much dust she had to pause and let some of it settle before she could drive on.
The hill she was stopped on afforded a view, so she got out to look around. As the air cleared, she was somewhat shaken to see that during the climb out she had driven past a mine shaft only twenty feet off the road. The opening was covered by a metal grate and surrounded by metal posts and chain-link fencing that carried hand-lettered wooden signs, Lily Belle Mine, Keep Out. All she could see through the grate was dark space, going down.
She watched her GPS carefully after that, and was happy to see that it was delivering good news – undaunted by rough terrain in its two-dimensional world, it was saying she was only three-quarters of a mile from Amanda’s house. Which was fine while it lasted, but soon afterward the distance from her destination began to increase. She continued on Lily Belle Mine Road and soon was a mile and a half from Amanda’s house. The road had curved all the way around a circle and was back at the entry point.
‘This is crazy,’ she muttered. She pulled out and parked on Ocotillo again, headed back toward town this time and dug her Tucson area map out of her day pack. When she had it folded into a convenient square she looked at all sides of this cluster of streets. The base of the area was Silverbell Road; it was bounded on the right side and the top by Ocotillo. On the left side was the obscure little street that Ollie had pointed out to her called Gould Road. Gould petered out, according to the map, before it quite intersected with Ocotillo.
‘OK, lady, let’s go around.’ She was talking to the GPS now. Its gender established by a feminine voice, it had become a gal-pal in this adventure. She drove quickly back to Silverbell, turned right there and followed it to the inconspicuous sign for Gould Road. Ms GPS wanted to turn right there, and again a few turn-offs later, where a sign read Crazy Mule Road. In a cleared space just past the turn, a half dozen mailboxes were nailed to a peeled log.
‘Oh, baby,’ Sarah told her new friend as she set the brake, ‘I think we’re cooking now.’
The mailboxes all had names on them. None read ‘Amanda Petty’. But then Amanda got her mail at Mail Boxes, didn’t she? Sarah let the brake off and rolled slowly downhill on a better road than any she had seen before in this area, a proper two-lane road with gravel. A row of power poles followed the road down, carrying utilities to half a dozen small adobe houses on a terraced slope.
It was very quiet in this mini-village – the residents must all be at work in town, and the highway was too far away to hear. There was one old Ford pickup parked by the lowest house in the row. Fifty feet beyond it the road forked and became two narrow tracks. The tracks diverged into a little vale with a tangle of bushes and cactus between them. The GPS wanted to take the right-hand option so Sarah did, and in a few feet found a sign that read, Jenny Mine Road.
‘How about that?’ she said softly, pleased with herself.
The track wandered through thick brush and cactus to a clearing, where it dead-ended at a small stucco house with a fenced backyard. Outside the yard, an old barn and a dilapidated utility shed were separated by a stack of firewood. The power line had followed this track, she noticed, and all three buildings were wired. By the front door, dark-stained wooden numbers read 255.
There was a small hand-spaded garden inside the yard, with a row of corn just headed out, and the tops of some carrots and potatoes showing in neat rows. The whole rectangle was guarded by a border of marigolds. Looks like she could give me gardening lessons, Sarah thought. She imagined Amanda Petty’s intent expression as she knelt by her garden plot, carefully dropping tiny carrot seeds into a shallow trench.
She pulled her phone out of its pocket, punched in Ollie’s number, and sent him a text. After twenty-five wrong turns tried Gould Road then Crazy Mule & found 255 Jenny Mine Road, ta-da!
The answer came back in a few seconds. Good show, Sherlock.
She grinned at it, then sat looking past the garden at the outbuildings behind the house. I would like to have a look in that barn. But she didn’t have a search warrant. Could I get one? Probably not over the phone, with the flimsy justification she could offer – being the steno at the senior living place that got attacked recently didn’t amount to probable cause to suspect Amanda of anything.
She decided to take a picture anyway, in case some new piece of evidence came along. When she got out of the car, the air felt much hotter than in the car, but as she moved around, the dappled shade began to seem moderate compared to the highway.
The sky had been mostly clear all morning, with scattered clouds left over from the night’s rain. But as she stepped out of the car a scrap of cloud moved across the sun. She watched it darken her surroundings and decided to wait until it moved on to try a photo. She dropped the phone into the back pocket of her jeans and strolled along the road a few steps past the car, exploring.
The area beyond the house was wild. Through a tangle of underbrush, she could see a sturdy fence of metal poles and chain-link fencing. She stepped closer and saw a metal gate, padlocked, with a commercially printed metal sign clipped firmly at all four corners that read, Jenny Mine. No Trespassing.
Well, I’m not, I’m staying on the road. Which ends here, by the way.
Everything beyond Amanda’s house appeared to be no man’s land, thickly overgrown and impenetrable. Just a few feet beyond where the road ended the ground dropped off sharply into a wild gully.
The sun came out from under its cloud then and the day grew hotter. Sarah moved back toward her car, ready to take her picture and go. The quiet house and garden had changed her feeling about Amanda. No wonder the woma
n was aloof and defensive, if she feared a stalker might find this peaceful retreat.
Well, I haven’t touched anything, I’m only looking, she justified to herself as she walked back to her car. I’ll just take my picture and go. She was looking up at the clouds again, judging the light, when a sharp metallic sound made her turn.
The old barn had a garage door on the gable end nearest the road and it was rising. Somebody had thrown a switch inside and stood now, his hand still on the power box, watching the door slide up. Behind him was a gray Dodge pickup with a missing license plate.
‘Bogey.’ She managed to keep her voice level, but she felt blood surge behind her ears. ‘I didn’t expect to find you here.’
‘Sarah,’ he said. A manic grin slowly lit up his face, turning him into someone she hadn’t seen before. ‘I wasn’t exactly looking for you either.’ He turned and picked something off the worktable to his left, folded it under his arm and stepped out into the light. ‘What are you doing out here in the boonies?’
‘Just verifying an address,’ she said. ‘I thought, isn’t this where Amanda Petty lives?’ She was looking past him at the pickup.
‘Beats me,’ he said. ‘Who’s Amanda Petty?’
‘The steno at the senior living place where we first worked together. Don’t you remember?’ There was something seriously wrong with this conversation; he had never spoken to her in this way. Why was he grinning at her as if they shared some guilty secret?
He stepped out of the underbrush and across the little hump that formed an edge to the road she was on. He was suddenly close beside her – too close, so she stepped away.
‘Bogey, what are you doing?’ As she spoke, he swung both arms high to drop the bag he was carrying over her head.
She saw it coming and kicked as she ducked. They were both a little off, so her kick missed his groin but landed a solid crack to his right kneecap. She felt the jolt all through her body and saw that the shock knocked him down.
He didn’t succeed at bagging her either. The bag slid off into the cactus, but the edge of his fist landed a painful blow to the side of her head. It stunned her and blurred her eyesight for a few seconds. She could hear him cursing somewhere below her.
When her vision cleared she saw him, curled in a fetal position at the edge of the road, cursing and cradling his right knee. His left foot was lying directly under her so she stomped on it, hard. The solid old ranch boot cracked his ankle and she judged from his awful scream that he would not be walking on it anytime soon. She turned toward her car then, took a step toward it and was reaching for the door handle when he roared, lunged, grabbed her rear leg and pulled her down into the underbrush with him.
They rolled over each other, grunting and yelling in pain, picking up cactus spines as they tumbled. She tried for a chokehold but never made it, scratched his face and drew blood but didn’t hurt him enough to get free. That was her best chance – she had all but crippled him, he couldn’t catch her if she ran. But his arms were so strong, she couldn’t break his hold.
But then she did, suddenly. Because he had let her go – why? Then she felt him push her away – away from him, and over the edge, into the ravine.
As she went over the edge and fell, she heard him laugh. ‘There you go, bitch!’ he yelled. ‘Have fun down there!’
She didn’t fall very far – the ravine was perhaps twenty feet deep, but it was full of bushes. She lodged in a thorny tangle and lay panting, scratched and bleeding. She hurt all over, and urgently wanted to scream, sneeze and vomit. She forced herself to be silent, so he wouldn’t know exactly where she was.
Or whether she was conscious, she hoped. She heard him above her, panting and cursing as he dragged himself away from the edge of the ravine. Grunting and swearing, he tried to stand, twice, each time falling back to earth howling in pain.
After he rested a few minutes he began making small noises she couldn’t at first identify. Then she realized he was talking very softly on his phone. He said a name she couldn’t quite hear and began to give orders. He must have heard objections because he stopped and swore, louder, made vile threats, listened a minute and said, ‘OK then,’ and went back to his string of orders. She couldn’t understand all of them but was pretty sure she heard ‘gasoline can’ and ‘shovel’.
When he was finished phoning, he dragged himself back toward the road, swearing and blubbering, a little in pain but quieter than before. She heard him make it to her car, pull himself up and get in with a great deal of moaning, and start the motor. He didn’t drive away. He just wanted the A/C, she told herself, and then thought, So do I. It was very hot in the prickly underbrush and she had a raging thirst.
Then she remembered. He’s got my Glock too.
Tears flooded her eyes then and she only just managed to stay silent, shuddering, clenching her fists and curling her toes. Then slowly, pushing aside the pain and fear, her brain got back to work. And what it said was, He’s got my car but I’ve got my phone.
FIFTEEN
Tuesday–Sunday
It took nerve to move – she wasn’t sure the bush she was caught in would hold her. Or how far she’d fall if it didn’t. How deep is this ravine?
But she couldn’t stay where she was – she could see light from where she was so she might be visible to anyone looking in. Bogey had her gun now, and he had proved he could cover the distance from here to the car if he chose. So there was nothing to keep him from killing her, and he had shown his willingness to do that, hadn’t he?
I think so. I don’t understand what his game is, but right now I believe it includes killing me if necessary.
So I’ve got to move. How? Her left hand felt free. She moved it toward her face. When she could see it she found a fair-sized branch to grasp while she slowly, painfully pulled her right arm loose from whatever nest of thorns was holding it. It hurt very much so she told herself to be glad she was alive to feel it. That and gritting her teeth got her right arm untangled.
Next came the sweaty reach into her rear pocket, telling herself, If you drop this phone you’re dead. She could not stop sweating so she held the slick smoothness of her phone close against her body as she worked it through the brambles toward her face.
Now she needed both hands free. Letting go of the strong branch she’d been clinging to with her left hand felt like a crazy gamble. She thought it through, braced her feet against whatever they could find and opened the fingers of her left hand, leaving them close enough to grab again if she started to fall. She lay still a minute, breathing, telling herself I didn’t fall. She began to realize the slope was not as steep as she had thought.
After that she was bolder. Shifting her body an inch at a time, she body-wedged upward and sideways, going for upright.
Don’t move one foot until you have something firm under the other one. Once the ground under a rock crumbled when she put weight on it and she only just kept from crying out in alarm. She managed with a mini-yelp – and the slope she was on didn’t crumble.
When she was almost sitting up, she stopped to breathe for a minute. Then, very carefully, begging her sweaty hands please don’t slip, she moved the phone to her left hand and typed a text with her right: Help, in a hole@255, Bogey bad, has my car & gun, hurry.
Did that say enough? Surely he’d know she wouldn’t joke about something so serious, wouldn’t he? She debated with herself about adding don’t answer, afraid the noise would give her position away. But she had to know if he got the message. And Bogey was in her car with the A/C working, so he couldn’t hear her three dings, could he? He might get out later, but – one thing at a time, she decided, and sent the text to Ollie.
And after three minutes that felt like a week and a half, a text came back: On our way, stay in the hole, bringing the cavalry – O.
Perversely then, the wait got even harder to bear – to hang here in these thorns when her own cool office was so near! Then she glanced at her scratched and bleeding arms and thought how m
any hours of repairs and cleaning she would need before she was fit to occupy her workspace again. And every bite and scratch began to itch and sting.
Her discomfort grew so acute she thought that any action would beat just hanging here in the sweaty thorns. And she was still worried about being visible from above, so she put the phone in the front pocket of her jeans and began, cautiously, to try to move out of the bush she was caught in.
She found she could slither downslope, an inch at a time, without making much noise. The leaf cover got thicker with each move, encouraging her to keep going. Every time she moved, she turned her head both ways to explore her green nest. On her right, after a few moves, she found many empty half-pint gin bottles that a secret drinker must have hurled there in desperation. Nearby, on her left after the next two moves, was a heap of plastic doodads – toothbrushes, throwaway razors – bathroom trash.
Three careful downslides later came a moment of horrified clarity when she recognized that the gentle hissing she was hearing was coming from the nest of baby rattlesnakes she could suddenly see by her right elbow. She pushed herself back upslope faster than she’d come down and lay panting just below her original resting place.
Frantic little thoughts then: Still plenty of cover. As her breathing slowed down: Lucky mama was away from the nest. God, we get grateful for small favors, don’t we? And as the wait stretched out again: Wish I hadn’t been too chicken to stay by those snakes and take a picture.
Then with mixed emotions she realized that a motor had turned at the Crazy Mule sign and was coming down the road toward 255.
Certain she would die of curiosity if she couldn’t poke her head up to look, she told herself she might die of damn foolishness if she did. Might die anyway if these were henchmen of Bogey’s come looking for her. Was she really covered up enough? She burrowed deeper in the leaves.
The motor stopped by her car, doors slammed, and there was talk. Not Ollie and Ray. She shivered. More talk, along the lines of what the hell happened to you, man? Surly answers from Bogey, followed by thumping noises as they unloaded equipment from the vehicle they came in. The last thing they unloaded had a metallic clank.
Sarah's List Page 20
