Tony sat in the passenger seat, reading with the aid of a mini-light that plugged into the cigarette lighter, and occasionally glancing into the right rearview mirror. "Don't you ever sleep?" Laika asked. It was long after midnight, and Tony had driven for most of the day.
"When I hit the sack," he said, "and not before. When I know I'm safe and sound—or when I know I'm as close to it as I can get and I don't have any choice, I sleep."
"Lightly, I'll wager."
"Yeah," Tony said quietly, thinking about the two times that sleeping lightly had saved his life, once in Beirut, another time in Montevideo. When much of your career was wet work, you had to learn to sleep little and lightly, or else you would sleep hard and long, and not wake up.
"Oh hell, look at that," said Laika, braking the car slowly. Tony saw a sign up ahead: ROAD CLOSED—DETOUR. An arrow pointed north. Laika swung onto the dirt road as directed and drove down it a few hundred yards until it came out onto a two-lane blacktop. Another detour sign with an arrow pointing up for straight ahead was prominently posted.
"Wonder how many miles this'll take us out of our way?" she said. "God, I remember one time my folks and I took a vacation out here when I was little. Triple A had routed us fairly far north of here, and there was a detour. We went over what had to be Arizona's highest mountain on a dirt road with no guard rails, didn't see another car for thirty miles. My dad had to replace the shocks in the next town. Needless to say, he was not pleased with Triple A."
"This doesn't look as bad as that," Tony said. "I'll drive, if you want me to. You've been going for four hours straight."
Laika agreed and pulled the car off the road. Tony got out and Laika slid over, but Tony murmured, "Excuse me a minute," and stepped away from the car and into the darkness to urinate. He listened for a moment, but heard only the car's engine humming softly. When he returned to the car, he got in, turned off the headlights, and switched off the engine. "You gotta get out a minute," he told Laika.
"I don't
have
to go," she said, and he heard the humor in her tone.
"Not for that," he told her. "For the silence . . . and the stars. Come on, look at this." He got out and Laika did the same.
They let their eyes adjust to the darkness, and he heard Laika whisper, "Wow."
"You betcha," Tony agreed. He had never seen the stars so bright. There was no moon, and the sky seemed a pall of black velvet with pinpricks in it and a bright light shining through from behind. A glowing haze swept across the roof of blackness. "The Milky Way," he said. "Ever see it so bright? Not a town anywhere near, and there hasn't been a car in miles. And listen . . ."
There was only the desert breeze. No sounds of cars or planes or trains or distant cities. Just wind in the sand, blowing over the rocks. Tony felt as much at peace in that instant as he ever had.
And then a fist of light struck his eyes, and Joseph called from the open back door of the car. "Is this a private party, or can anyone stand in the sand and let Gila monsters and scorpions crawl up their legs?"
"Thank you, Joseph," said Laika dryly. "You know how to make a moment perfect."
"Oh,
I
see—communing with nature. Sorry to wreck the mood, but I thought our goal was Winslow, not the middle of the desert . . . unless this
is
Winslow. After all, I have no idea how desolate these little Arizona towns are."
"All right, we're coming," Laika said, walking back to the car.
"Well, take your time," Joseph said, getting out and stretching. "I need to irrigate the sands a bit. . . ."
When they were all back in the car, Tony pulled onto the road again. Three miles away, there was another detour sign, this one pointing left. "Must be the road west again," he said, "and we'll turn south before too long."
But he found to his dismay that the road was dirt, and began to wind its way through high canyons whose tops they could not see from the car. "Why the hell," Laika muttered, "didn't Skye's itinerary mention this little hell-drive?"
"It's all right," Tony said. "I've driven on worse."
"I'd feel a lot better," Laika went on, "if we saw another car out here." She peered ahead. "Or even some fresh tracks."
"Those tracks are fresh,
kemo sabe
," Tony said. "I can see at least one set that hasn't blown away."
"Great," Laika said. "That makes me feel a whole lot better."
They rattled along for another few miles, dropping in and out of canyons and slipping on loose stones as Tony accelerated up the hills. They had just come around a bend in the road when Tony pumped the brakes. There was something ahead that didn't fit into the landscape, something whose whiteness gleamed in the beams of the headlights.
The drive had been so eerie and disquieting that the first thought Tony had was that it was a ghost, some desert phantom standing by the side of the trail long after midnight, and he shivered in spite of the fact that he knew it had to be real and solid. The white form defined itself as he approached, and he saw that it was a woman standing there, wearing a white T-shirt and khakis, waving to them.
"My God, who's that?" Laika asked, and he was glad she saw the woman too. "The ghostly hitchhiker?"
Tony continued to slow. "Pull over for her?"
In response, Laika opened the specially designed glove box and Tony saw the Glock inside. "Just slow down for now. Joseph, you awake?"
"Yes, indeed," came the voice from the back. Tony also heard the click of the console in the center of the backseat and knew that Joseph was ready with a weapon as well, in case the girl was the bait in some sort of trap. Perhaps, Tony thought, the detour had been a fake. He pressed his elbow against his side and felt his own pistol nestled snugly under his jacket.
He slowed the car further, until they were only ten yards away from the girl. Her long though striking face was relieved but wary at the same time, and Tony saw a patch of red on the white T-shirt, just over the girl's left breast. A large black backpack with a sleeping bag strapped to it was sitting in the dirt at her feet.
"Pull over, Tony," said Laika, "but everybody be ready." She rolled down her window, and Tony stopped the car several feet away from the girl and watched the mirrors. "You stuck out here?" Laika asked her.
"Sure am," the girl answered, in a soft contralto. "Think you could give me a ride?" Tony glanced at her and saw a cut above her forehead, probably the source of the blood on the shirt.
"Where are you headed?"
"Anywhere. I'm just doing the area, but I could use a place that's got a motel and a restaurant."
Laika gestured to the girl's forehead. "What happened?"
Her face soured. "Oh, I hitched a ride with a truck driver . . . didn't work out too well. He got a little . . . aggressive, and I grabbed my backpack and jumped out, while he was still moving. That's when I got this." She touched her forehead, and Tony could see the blood had dried. "He stopped and came looking for me, but it was dark, and I ducked into some brush."
Laika nodded, and Tony sensed some sympathy from the team leader. Laika had had her own problems with an abusive man, James, her ex-boyfriend, who had gone down in a shower of bullets when he had tracked them to the prisoner's hiding place in New York. "Climb in the back," she said. "We're heading for Winslow."
"Oh, that's great," the girl said, snatching up her backpack and running to the door Joseph had opened for her. "There's a bunch of motels there."
By the glow of the dome light, Tony could see that she was young, probably in her early twenties, and she was prettier than he had first thought. Her hair was chestnut brown, and her face and arms were deeply tanned. Even in the dim light, Tony could see that her eyes were a sky blue. Her face was a long oval, with a small nose and a wide mouth that didn't seem as if they should go together, but did nonetheless, and very nicely, too, he thought.
He smiled over the back of the seat at her, and she smiled back, then pulled the door shut, dropping them into darkness again. Tony started driving.
"I was really lucky you guys were coming by. I haven't seen a car since I jumped out. I'm Miriam . . . Miriam Dominick."
"Glad to meet you, Miriam," said Joseph. "I'm Kevin, this is Florence, and our loyal driver is Vincent." The names were their National Science Foundation covers. "Wow, that's some heavy backpack," he said as he hoisted it onto the back ledge. "Collecting arrowheads?"
She laughed. "No, that's my camera equipment. I'm photographing the country, as much of it as I can possibly see—the towns, the desert, the canyons, just whatever catches my eye, defines the place for me."
"You a professional?" Tony said.
"I've sold a few things, but I can't support myself yet. I'd like to, though. This trip is kind of a crack at it, get a few hundred rolls shot and see what happens."
"There's always
Arizona Highways
," Joseph said.
"One of the toughest to get into," Miriam said. "I've looked at it all my life."
Suddenly they were all jarred by the uneven boards of a bridge that crossed a gully. "My God," Joseph said, his voice vibrating, "what the hell is that?" Then they were over the bridge, and he laughed. "I can't believe some of the—"
But Miriam interrupted him. "Stop the car," she said in a low, tense voice. "Please stop . . . right now. . . ."
Tony took a quick look at Laika and saw her dark face in the dashboard lights look at him for a moment, then nod sharply. He hit the brakes, and the car slid to a stop in the dirt. Laika turned to the girl. "All right, why?"
The girl sat there, her head down, eyes closed, a grimace on her face as though she were in pain. Then a strange sound came from ahead, a low rumble, followed by a clatter, the sound of falling rocks. It lasted for several seconds, then died away.
Tony looked at the road ahead and saw, just beyond the headlights' reach, brown dust floating toward them. Then he looked back at Miriam.
She looked up suddenly, her eyes opened, her mouth took in a breath like an emerging swimmer gasping for air, and then she let the breath out slowly and looked at Laika almost apologetically. "I knew something was coming, but I didn't know what."
"Pull ahead," Laika told Tony, and he obeyed, driving slowly toward the dust, stopping when it became too thick to see. It took several minutes to settle, and during that time they got out of the car, Miriam with them, and started walking into the dust with flashlights.
There were rocks all across the road, most of them smaller than a foot in diameter, but a few were larger, and a half dozen were boulders six feet across or more. The rocks had fallen from a steep cliff to their right, and some of the larger stones were on the extreme left of the road, at the edge of an embankment. Tony's light showed a steep dropoff, and from the looks of the crushed vegetation, some of the larger rocks had gone over the side and down into a canyon below. It was all too obvious that if they hadn't stopped when Miriam had told them to, they might have been caught in the avalanche, and either been crushed or pushed over the side.
"G
ood call," Joseph said flatly, shining his light down over the embankment.
Laika looked at Miriam as though she were hiding something. "How did you know?" she asked. "Why did you stop us?"
The girl gave a self-effacing smile and shook her head. "I don't know how I knew," she said. "I just did. It happens now and then. I just . . .
know
things,
see
things. I mean. . . ." She struggled to explain it. "I didn't know about the rocks, but I just knew there was something dangerous up here, that we had to stop, that if we stopped we'd be all right." She laughed nervously. "And we are."
"Yeah," said Laika, giving Joseph a sidelong look. It was, Tony thought, probably due to their recent experiences together that Joseph didn't look more scornfully at Miriam than he did. It was quite remarkable how seeing inexplicable things could change even the most devout skeptic, a category into which Joseph had comfortably fit until recently. "Think we can start clearing the road enough to get through?" Laika asked Joseph, shining her light upward.
"Probably," Joseph said. "Slides like this don't happen very often. All the loose stuff's probably down by now."
So they set to work, picking up and tossing the rocks over the side, pushing the larger ones until there was enough room for Tony to maneuver the car around them. In a few miles they joined a blacktop road again where a detour sign pointed left. "More like it," Tony said, and felt the tension flow from him as the tires traveled smoothly over the road.