The Power Of The Dog (101 page)

“Where are we going?” Nora asks. She doesn’t really care; she’s just curious.

Which is a good thing, because he answers, “I don’t know.”

He doesn’t, either. He doesn’t have anything in mind except to drive. Enjoy the scenery, enjoy being with her. They climb back up the same road they came down, into the mountains, to the little town of Julian.

They drive right through—they don’t want to be around other people—and then the road starts heading down again as the terrain slopes toward the coastal plain to the west, and the land flattens into broad fields and apple orchards and horse ranches and then they go down a long hill, from which they can see a beautiful valley below.

In the middle of the valley there’s a crossroads with one highway going north and another going west. There are a few buildings scattered around the junction—a post office, a market, a diner, a bakery, an (unlikely) art gallery on the north side, an old general store and a few white cottages on the south side, and beyond that there’s nothing on any side. Just the road cutting through the broad grassland with cattle grazing on it, and she says, “This is beautiful.”

He pulls off on the gravel driveway beside the cabins. Goes into the old general store, which now sells books and gardening stuff, and comes out a few minutes later with a key. “We got one for a month,” he says. “Unless you hate it. Then we can get our money back and go someplace else.”

It has a small front room with an old sofa and a couple of chairs and a table, and a small kitchen with a gas stove and an old refrigerator and a sink with wooden cupboards above it. A single door leads to the tiny bedroom, which has an even tinier bathroom—shower, no bath—in back.

We’re not going to lose each other in this place, she thinks.

He’s still standing tentatively in the front doorway.

“It’s fine with me,” she says. “How about you?”

“It’s good, it’s fine.” He lets the door shut behind him. “We’re the Kellys, by the way. I’m Tom, you’re Jean.”

“I’m Jean Kelly?”

“I didn’t think of that.”

After she showers and gets dressed they drive the four miles back up the hill to Julian to shop for clothes. The one main street is flanked mostly by little restaurants selling the apple pie that is the local specialty, but there are a few boutiques, where she buys a couple of casual dresses and a sweater. But they buy most of their clothes at the hardware store, which sells denim shirts, jeans, socks and underwear.

Down the street Nora finds a bookstore that sells used paperbacks, and she buys copies of Anna Karenina, Middlemarch, The Eustace Diamonds and a couple of Nora Roberts romances—guilty pleasures.

Then they drive back down to the market across the highway from their cottage and buy groceries—bread, milk, coffee, tea, Raisin Bran (his favorite), Grape-Nuts (hers), bacon, eggs, sourdough bread, a couple of steaks, some chicken, potatoes, rice, asparagus, green beans, tomatoes, grapefruit, brown rice, an apple pie, some red wine and some beer—and sundries—paper towels, dish detergent, toilet paper, deodorant, toothpaste and toothbrushes, soap, shampoo, a razor and blades, shaving cream, a hair-color kit and a pair of scissors.

They’ve agreed to take some precautions—not to run, but not to be needlessly foolhardy, either. So the Harley had to go, and so does her shoulder-length hair, because while Callan’s looks are pretty ordinary, hers aren’t, and the first thing their pursuers will ask people is if they’ve noticed a strikingly beautiful blond woman.

“I’m not so beautiful anymore,” she tells him.

“Yeah you are.”

So back at the cottage she cuts her hair.

Short.

Looks in the mirror when she’s finished and says, “Joan of Arc.”

“I like it.”

“Liar.”

But when she looks in the mirror she kind of likes it, too. Even more so after she dyes it red. Well, she thinks, it’ll be easier to take care of anyway. So here I am, short, short red hair, a denim shirt and jeans. Who’d have thought it?

“Your turn,” she says, snapping the scissors.

“Get outta here.”

“It needs cutting anyway,” she says. “You got that ’70s look going on. Come on, just let me trim it.”

“No.”

“Chicken.”

“That’s me.”

“Guys have paid a lot of money to have me do this.”

“Cut their hair? You’re kiddin’.”

“Hey, it’s a big world out there, Tommy.”

“Your hands are shaking.”

“Then you’d better hold still.”

He lets her cut it. Sits perfectly still on the chair, looking at her image and his as she stands behind him and snips away, brown locks of his hair falling first on his shoulders and then on the floor. She finishes and they look at themselves in the mirror.

“I don’t recognize us,” she says. “Do you?”

No, he thinks, I don’t.

That evening he makes chicken broth for her and steak and potatoes for himself and they sit down at the table and eat and watch television and when the news comes on about a meth lab blowing up and bodies found he don’t say nothin’ to her about it because it’s clear she don’t know.

He tries to feel bad about Peaches and O-Bop, but he can’t. Them two ushered too many people into the next world, and you had to know it was always gonna end that way for them.

Like it’s gonna end for me.

He feels bad about Mickey, though.

But the news also means that Scachi is tracking them down.

She has a rough night—she can’t sleep, and she doesn’t want to see what’s on the inside of her eyes. He gets that—he owns a lot of the same pictures. Only maybe I’m more hardened to them, he thinks.

So he lies behind her and holds her and tells her Irish stories he remembers from when he was a kid. Well, he sort of remembers them, and he makes up what he don’t, which isn’t too hard because you just got to talk about fairies and leprechauns and shit like that.

Fairy tales and fables.

She finally nods off about four in the morning and he sleeps, too, with his hand gripped on the .22 under the pillow.

She wakes up hungry.

No shit, Callan thinks, and they walk across the highway to the restaurant and she orders a cheese omelet with link sausages on the side and rye toast with lots of butter.

The waitress asks, “You want American cheese, cheddar or Jack?”

“Yes.”

She eats like the condemned.

The woman sucks down that omelet as if it’s her last meal, as if they’re waiting outside to walk her that last mile, down to Old Sparky. Callan suppresses a smile as he watches her wield her fork like it’s a weapon—those link sausages don’t have a chance—and he doesn’t tell her about the small smear of butter at the corner of her mouth.

“Didn’t like it?” he asks.

“It was wonderful.”

“Get another one.”

“No!”

“Cinnamon roll?”

“Okay.”

“They were baked fresh this morning,” the waitress says as she sets down the huge pastry and two forks. Nora goes outside and comes back with The San Diego Union-Tribune and scans the personal ads.

“Kim, from her Sister. Family Emergency. Looking for You Everywhere. Urgent You Contact.” With a phone number. Typical Keller, she thinks, covering all the bases just in case, as is the case, I’m a free agent on the run of my own free will. So Arthur wants me to come in.

I’m not coming, Arthur. Not just yet.

If you want me, you’ll have to find me.

He’s trying.

Art’s troops are out in force. At airports, train stations, bus stations, shipping ports. They check passenger manifests, reservations, passport control. Hobbs’ guys check immigration records in France, England and Brazil. They know they’re on a fool’s errand, but by the end of the week one thing seems certain: Nora Hayden hasn’t left the country—at least not on her own passport. Nor has she used any of her credit cards or her cell phone, tried to get a job, been stopped for a traffic offense or put her Social Security number down to rent an apartment.

Art puts the heat on Haley Saxon and has her threatened with everything from violating the Mann Act and running a disorderly house to being an accessory to attempted murder. So he believes her when she swears she hasn’t heard from Nora and will call him the instant she does.

Neither his listening posts on the border nor Hobbs’ across it pick up a trail. Not her talking, not anyone talking about her.

Art drags an accident reconstruction guy out to measure the depth of Callan’s motorcycle tracks, and the guy does some mojo with the dirt and tells Art that there were definitely two people on that bike and that he hopes the passenger was holding on tight because it was moving fast.

Callan couldn’t have taken her all that far, Art reasons. He couldn’t have taken a prisoner on a plane, a train or a bus, and there are so many places a prisoner could get off the back of a bike—at a gas station, a red light, a junction.

So Art narrows the search to within one gas tank’s radius of the junction of the dirt road and I-8. Look for a Harley-Davidson Electra Glide.

He finds it.

A Border Patrol helicopter flying over Anza-Borrego looking for mojados spots the scorch mark and lands to investigate it. The report comes to Art right away—his guys are monitoring all the BP radio traffic, so he has a guy out there two hours later in the company of a Harley dealer who has a meth-possession rap hanging over him. Dude looks at the charred remains of the hog and almost tearfully confirms that it’s the same model they’re looking for.

“Why would anyone do something like this?” he moans.

You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes—shit, you don’t even have to be Larry Holmes—to see that a car followed the bike in there, someone got out of the car and then everyone took off in the car again and went back onto the highway.

So the reconstructionist goes out again. Measures the depth of the tire tracks and the width between tires, takes a cast of the tire marks, plays in the dirt for a while and tells Art that he’s looking for a smaller-size, two-door sedan with an automatic transmission and old Firestones on it.

“Something else,” a Border Patrol guy tells him. “The passenger door doesn’t work.”

“How the hell do you know that?” Art asks. Border Patrol agents are experts at “cutting sign,” that is, reading tracks. Especially in the desert.

“The footprints outside the passenger door,” the agent tells him. “She stepped backward to let the door open.”

“How do you know it’s a she?” his man asks.

“These marks are from a woman’s shoes,” the agent says. “The same woman was driving the car. She got out the driver’s side, walked over to where the guy was standing, stood and watched. See how the heel is heavier where she stood for a few minutes? Then she walked around to the passenger side and he walked around to the driver’s side and let her in.”

“Can you tell what kind of shoes the woman was wearing?”

“Me? No,” the agent says. “But I’ll bet you’ve got guys who can.”

Yes, he does, and the guy’s on a chopper heading out there within half an hour. He takes a cast of the shoe and takes it back to the lab. Four hours later he calls Art with the results.