Dark Rivers of the Heart (29 page)

Or the “unknown” was a lie, and the name “Spencer Grant” was just another false identity, perhaps the first of many, that this phantom had manufactured for himself.

At the time of Grant’s enlistment, with his mother already dead and his father unknown, he had given his next of kin as “Ethel Marie and George Daniel Porth, grandparents.” They had to be his mother’s parents, since Porth was also her maiden name.

Roy noticed that the address for Ethel and George Porth—in San Francisco—had been the same as Grant’s current address at the time that he’d enlisted. Apparently the grandparents had taken him in, subsequent to the death of his mother, whenever that had been.

If anyone knew the true story of Grant’s provenance and the source of his scar, it would be Ethel and George Porth. Assuming that they actually existed and were not just names on a form that a recruitment officer had failed to verify twelve years ago.

Roy asked for a printout of the pertinent portion of Grant’s service file. Even with what seemed to be a good lead in the Porths, Roy wasn’t confident of learning anything in San Francisco that would give more substance to this elusive phantom whom he’d first glimpsed less than forty-eight hours ago in the rainy night in Santa Monica.

Having erased himself entirely from all utility-company records, from property tax rolls, and even from the Internal Revenue Service files—why had Grant allowed his name to remain in the DMV, Social Security Administration, LAPD, and military files? He had tampered with those records to the extent of replacing his true address with a series of phony addresses, but he could have entirely eliminated them. He had the knowledge and the skill to do so. Therefore, he must have maintained a presence in some data banks for a purpose.

Roy felt that somehow he was playing into Grant’s hands even by trying to track him down.

Frustrated, he turned his attention once more to the two most affecting of the forty photographs. The woman, the boy, and the barn in the background. The man in the shadows.

On all sides of the Explorer lay sand as white as powdered bones, ash-gray volcanic rock, and slopes of shale shattered by millions of years of heat, cold, and quaking earth. The few plants were crisp and bristly. Except for the dust and vegetation stirred by the wind, the only movement was the creeping and slithering of scorpions, spiders, scarabs, poisonous snakes, and the other cold-blooded or bloodless creatures that thrived in that arid wasteland.

Silvery quills and nibs of lightning flashed continually, and fast-moving thunderheads as black as ink wrote a promise of rain across the sky. The bellies of the clouds hung heavy. With great crashes of thunder, the storm struggled to create itself.

Captured between the dead earth and tumultuous heavens, Spencer paralleled the distant interstate highway as much as possible. He detoured only when the contours of the land required compromise.

Rocky sat with head bowed, gazing at his paws rather than at the stormy day. His flanks quivered as currents of fear flowed through him like electricity through a closed circuit.

On another day, in a different place and in a different storm, Spencer would have kept up a steady line of patter to soothe the dog. Now, however, he was in a mood that darkened with the sky, and he was able to focus only on his own turmoil.

For the woman, he had walked away from his life, such as it was. He had left behind the quiet comfort of the cabin, the beauty of the eucalyptus grove, the peace of the canyon—and most likely he would never be able to return to that. He had made a target of himself and had put his precious anonymity in jeopardy.

He regretted none of that—because he still had the hope of gaining a real life with some kind of meaning and purpose. Although he had wanted to help the woman, he had also wanted to help himself.

But the stakes suddenly had been raised. Death and disclosure were not the only risks he was going to have to take if he continued to involve himself in Valerie Keene’s problems. Sooner or later, he was going to have to kill someone. They would give him no choice.

After escaping the assault on the bungalow in Santa Monica on Wednesday night, he had avoided thinking about the most disturbing implications of the SWAT team’s extreme violence. Now he recalled the gunfire directed at imagined targets inside the dark house and the rounds fired at him as he had scaled the property wall.

That was not merely the response of a few edgy law-enforcement officers intimidated by their quarry. It was a criminally excessive use of force, evidence of an agency out of control and arrogantly confident that it wasn’t accountable for any atrocities it committed.

A short while ago, he had encountered equivalent arrogance in the reckless behavior of the men who harried him out of Las Vegas.

He thought about Louis Lee in that elegant office under China Dream. The restaurateur had said that governments, when big enough, often ceased to play by the codes of justice under which they were established.

All governments, even democracies, maintained control by the threat of violence and imprisonment. When that threat was divorced from the rule of law, however, even if with the best of intentions, there was a fearfully thin line between a federal agent and a thug.

If Spencer located Valerie and learned why she was on the run, helping her would not be simply a matter of dipping into his cash reserves and finding the best attorney to represent her. Naively, that had been his nebulous plan, on those few occasions when he had bothered to think about what he might do if he tracked her down.

But the ruthlessness of these enemies ruled out a solution in any court of law.

Faced with the choice of violence or flight, he would always choose to flee and risk a bullet in the back—at least when no life but his own was at stake. When he eventually took responsibility for this woman’s life, however, he could not expect her to turn her own back on a gun; sooner or later he would have to meet the violence of those men with violence of his own.

Brooding about that, Spencer drove south between the too-solid desert and the amorphous sky. The distant highway was only barely visible to the east, and no clear path lay before him.

Out of the west came rain in blinding cataracts of rare ferocity for the Mojave, a towering gray tide behind which the desert began to disappear.

Spencer could smell the rain even though it hadn’t reached them yet. It was a cold, wet, ozone-tainted scent, refreshing at first but then strange and profoundly chilling.

“It’s not that I’m worried about being able to kill someone if it comes to that,” he told the huddled dog.

The gray wall rushed toward them, faster by the second, and it seemed to be more than mere rain that loomed. It was the future too, and it was all that he feared knowing about the past.

“I’ve done it before. I can do it again if I have to.”

Over the rumble of the Explorer’s engine, he could hear the rain now, like a million pounding hearts.

“And if some sonofabitch deserves killing, I can do him and feel no guilt, no remorse. Sometimes it’s right. It’s justice. I don’t have a problem with that.”

The rain swept over them, billowing like a magician’s scarves, bringing sorcerous change. The pale land darkened dramatically with the first splash. In the peculiar storm light, the desiccated vegetation, more brown than green, suddenly became glossy, verdant; in seconds, withered leaves and grass appeared to swell into plump tropical forms, though it was all illusion.

Switching on the windshield wipers, shifting the Explorer into four-wheel drive, Spencer said, “What worries me…what scares me is…maybe I waste some sonofabitch who deserves it…some piece of walking garbage…and
this
time I like it.”

The downpour could have been no less cataclysmic than that which had launched Noah upon the Flood, and the fierce drumming of rain on the truck was deafening. The storm-cowed dog probably could not hear his master above the roar, yet Spencer used Rocky’s presence as an excuse to acknowledge a truth that he preferred not to hear, speaking aloud because he might lie if he spoke only to himself.

“I never liked it before. Never felt like a hero for doing it. But it didn’t sicken me, either. I didn’t puke or lose any sleep over it. So…what if the next time…or the time after that…?”

Beneath the glowering thunderheads, in the velvet-heavy shrouds of rain, the early afternoon had grown as dark as twilight. Driving out of murk into mystery, he switched on the headlights, surprised to find that both had survived the impact with the amusement-park gate.

Rain fell straight to the earth in such tremendous tonnage that it dissolved and washed away the wind that had previously stirred the desert into sand spouts.

They came to a ten-foot-deep wash with gently sloping walls. In the headlight beams, a stream of silvery water, a foot wide and a few inches deep, glimmered along the center of that depression. Spencer crossed the twenty-foot-wide arroyo to higher ground on the far side.

As the Explorer crested the second bank, a series of massive lightning bolts blazed across the desert, accompanied by crashes of thunder that vibrated through the truck. The rain came down even harder than before, harder than he had ever seen it fall.

Driving with one hand, Spencer stroked Rocky’s head. The dog was too frightened to look up or to lean into the consoling hand.

They went no more than fifty yards from the first arroyo when Spencer saw the earth moving ahead of them. It rolled sinuously, as though swarms of giant serpents were traveling just below the surface of the desert. By the time he braked to a full stop, the headlights revealed a less fanciful but no less frightening explanation: The earth wasn’t moving, but a swift muddy river was churning from west to east along the gently sloping plain, blocking travel to the south.

The depths of this new arroyo were mostly hidden. The racing water was already within a few inches of its banks.

Such torrents couldn’t have risen just since the storm had swept across the plains minutes ago. The runoff was from the mountains, where rain had been falling for a while and where the stony, treeless slopes absorbed little of it. The desert seldom received downpours of that magnitude; but on rare occasions, with breathtaking suddenness, flash floods could inundate even portions of the elevated interstate highway or pour into low-lying areas of the now distant Las Vegas Strip and sweep cars out of casino parking lots.

Spencer couldn’t judge the depth of the water. It might have been two feet or twenty.

Even if only two feet deep, the water was moving so fast, with such power, that he didn’t dare attempt to ford it. The second wash was wider than the first, forty feet across. Before he’d traveled half that distance, the truck would be lifted and carried downriver, rolling and bobbing, as if it were driftwood.

He backed the Explorer away from the churning flow, turned, and retraced his route, arriving at the first arroyo, to the south, more quickly than he expected. In the brief time since he had crossed it, the silvery freshet had become a turbulent river that nearly filled the wash.

Bracketed by impassable cataracts, Spencer was no longer able to parallel the distant north-south interstate.

He considered parking right there, to wait for the storm to pass. When the rain ended, the arroyos would empty as swiftly as they had filled. But he sensed that the situation was more dangerous than it appeared.

He opened the door, stepped into the downpour, and was soaked by the time he walked to the front of the Explorer. The pummeling rain hammered a chill deep into his flesh.

The cold and the wet contributed to his misery less than did the incredible
noise.
The oppressive roar of the storm blocked all other sounds. The rattle of the rain against the desert, the swash and rumble of the river, and the booming thunder combined to make the vast Mojave as confining and claustrophobia-inducing as the interior of a stuntman’s barrel on the brink of Niagara.

He wanted a better view of the surging flux than he’d gotten from inside the truck, but a closer look alarmed him. Moment by moment, water lapped higher on the banks of the wash; soon it would flood across the plain. Sections of the soft arroyo walls collapsed, dissolved into the muddy currents, and were carried away. Even as the violent gush eroded a wider channel, it swelled tremendously in volume, simultaneously rising and growing broader. Spencer turned from the first arroyo and hurried toward the second, to the south of the truck. He reached that other impromptu river sooner than he expected. It was brimming and widening like the first channel. Fifty yards had separated the two arroyos when he’d first driven between them, but that gap had shrunk to thirty.

Thirty yards was still a considerable distance. He found it difficult to believe that those two spates were powerful enough to eat through so much remaining land and ultimately converge.

Then, immediately in front of his shoes, a crack opened in the ground. A long, jagged leer. The earth grinned, and a six-foot-wide slab of riverbank collapsed into the onrushing water.

Spencer stumbled backward, out of immediate danger. The sodden land around him was turning mushy underfoot.