Authors: Patrick Lee
Her face was just visible in profile, where she lay. She was pretty. Her chin was tiny, and she had a little button nose. It crossed his mind to wonder what she’d done to deserve this, but only for a second. It wasn’t his job to wonder about things.
Dryden felt strange doing what the kid had asked. He would have felt stranger not doing it.
He had the dead men’s Taurus backed up close to the wrecked Tahoe, the trunk lid open. The bodies of the two attackers were already stuffed inside, along with their wallets and phones. The phones were identical to those he’d found on the earlier pair of gunmen, and had the same redaction software blotting out the numbers in the call logs. As before, neither man had made a call or sent a text in the past hour—which was good. It meant they had not phoned their superiors and passed along Dryden’s address after tailing Curtis there. It meant Claire’s enemies still had no idea who Dryden was.
Also as before, the gunmen carried cash and no IDs. Dryden took the money and wiped down the wallets and left them with the corpses.
Crossing back to the Taurus for Curtis’s body, Dryden could see the glint of traffic on the nearby two-lane—tiny reflections off chrome and glass, stabbing through the concealing trees.
But no vehicle turned off that road to approach along the gravel route. No random tourist or Forest Service vehicle, the arrival of which would lead to a 9-1-1 call and a police presence within minutes.
He had the strangest sense of assurance that it wouldn’t happen. He kept thinking of the kid’s last words.
I already know you’ll manage it. ’Cause they’re not here right now killing you.
Dryden opened the driver’s-side door—it groaned at first, lightly jammed by the warping of the vehicle’s structure—and pulled Curtis’s body out onto the ground. He dragged it to the Taurus’s crowded trunk, lifted, and forced it inside, then went through the kid’s pockets and found nothing. No phone and no wallet.
The wallet was in the Tahoe, where Curtis had left it when he went into the restaurant.
There was no ID in the wallet, and no credit card or registration either. Nothing with Curtis’s name on it. Just cash—ninety-six dollars. Dryden took it, feeling only marginally like a thief. No point leaving it.
He opened the Tahoe’s back door on the driver’s side. On the floor sat a black messenger bag, stuffed full of something bulky and square-edged. Dryden opened it and saw five white plastic binders, the kind that held three-hole-punched paper. You could buy them at any office store. At a glance he saw that each binder held a thick stack of pages, maybe a couple hundred each.
The information Curtis had stolen from the people who’d attacked Bayliss. The stuff from the secure server, which he’d printed and organized in the past three days while lying low.
In addition to the five binders, there was a slim stack of pages by itself, fifteen or twenty sheets stapled at the top corner.
I even wrote a letter to go with it. It’s everything I know.
Staring into the bag, Dryden pictured a kind of thread connecting himself to Claire, wherever she was. A delicate strand drawn wire-taut, its tiny fibers straining and snapping, but the line itself still holding.
Whatever chance he had to find her lay in those pages.
Another kind of assurance suddenly came to him—far less comforting than the belief that no stray vehicle would come barreling down the gravel road.
The second assurance was that Claire’s captors would not kill her anytime soon.
If they had no other way to find out who he was—the unknown man who had the machine they wanted—then interrogating Claire would be their only recourse. As long as she didn’t tell them anything, they would keep her alive and under questioning. If anything, they would have her on suicide watch.
The notion brought him no relief; it brought only the hope that he could still get to her. That the fuse had length yet to burn.
He closed the messenger bag and took it to his Explorer. He set it on the passenger-side floor, beside the hard plastic case with the machine inside it.
Then he opened the Explorer’s back end and grabbed the emergency kit he kept there. Among the items inside were three road flares and a towing rope.
* * *
It took only a minute to secure the rope from the Explorer’s hitch to the Taurus’s frame, at the front end.
He spent another minute giving the entire scene one last look. He had already kicked dirt and dust over the blood drops the bodies had left when he’d dragged them, and scuffed the ground further to erase the drag marks themselves. Not a perfect solution, but good enough.
There would sure as hell be no useful forensic evidence found in the wrecked Tahoe. For good measure he wiped his fingerprints from the door handles, and held the road flares without the pads of his fingers touching them. He popped off the igniter caps and struck the flares alight one after another. He lobbed two of them into the vehicle—one up front, one into the rear seats—and set the third against the front tire on the driver’s side, its white-hot flame directly against the rubber.
By the time he’d sprinted to the Explorer, climbed in, and put it in drive, there were already black tendrils of smoke coming through the Tahoe’s open windows, where the upholstery had begun to burn.
* * *
Ten minutes later and two thousand feet higher in the hills, he stopped. He was no longer on a gravel road, but a mostly overgrown two-track that punched like a ragged tunnel through the evergreens. On the left side of the path, the land pitched upward at forty-five degrees. On the other side it dropped away just as steeply, toward a brush-choked pond thirty feet below. During summers when he was a teenager, Dryden had been up here lots of times with friends, usually at night. The pond was more than sixty feet deep in the middle, its sides like a funnel angling down into the murk. He’d heard rumors that there were old logging trucks down at the bottom, but he’d never heard of anyone going in with scuba gear to find out for sure.
He unhooked the tow rope and stowed it and pointed the Taurus at the edge of the dropoff. He put the car in neutral and shoved it over the lip. It bounced and jostled its way down the slope, crashed through the shrubs lining the pond, and hit the water with an explosion of mud and foam. Giant ripples rolled outward, crisscrossed, settled. For thirty seconds the car looked like it wanted to float. It bobbed with its front end pulled under by the engine’s weight, and drifted out away from the shore. Then physics asserted itself. The passenger compartment flooded and the car pitched farther forward, its back end tilting up, and within another minute the whole thing had gone under. Dryden studied the gap in the brush at the water’s edge, where the car had punched through. Most of the plants had simply bent and were springing back now. The scrub-covered earth showed no tire tracks. Someone standing here five minutes from now wouldn’t suspect a thing.
From far away through the trees, in the direction of town, came the sound of sirens. Police and fire units responding to the burning Tahoe, the origin of which would forever be a mystery to them.
Dryden got back in the Explorer and pulled away.
He returned to the paved two-lane by a different route than he’d taken to the pond, avoiding the Tahoe.
He drove back into El Sedero and pulled into the broad parking lot of a strip mall three blocks in from the shore. He took a spot at the periphery, far from the packed rows closer in.
He hauled the messenger bag up onto the passenger seat and opened it, and took out the five binders and the stapled letter.
Everything I know.
It was 8:45 in the morning.
At 8:46, Marnie Calvert stood at one of the floor-to-ceiling windows of the computer lab in the Wilshire Federal Building. From twenty-three stories up, the window faced south over the 405 freeway. Marnie leaned lightly on the glass with the knuckles of one hand. Far below, a bright red sports car merged onto the freeway from Wilshire. She watched it slip away into the morning haze toward Marina del Rey.
Twenty minutes earlier she’d been in her office, pacing, her mind doing 60. Then her computer had dinged with an incoming e-mail, a positive match on the fingerprint search she’d sent in hours before.
The mystery man who’d saved the girls at the trailer had exactly one blemish on his record: an arrest for assault when he was eighteen years old, the charge dropped almost immediately on grounds of self-defense. He’d flown pretty straight since then: army service immediately following high school, including time with the Rangers and then 1st SFOD-Delta. Then, apparently, he’d vanished into another dimension for six years, because his military record simply went blank for that stretch of time. Not even redacted. Just nonexistent. From age twenty-four to thirty, there was no Sam Dryden.
The paperwork picked up again with his honorable discharge at thirty. Within the next year there was a marriage license and a birth certificate—in that order, but just barely. Then came two death certificates, the wife and the daughter, and reference tags pointing to police reports about the traffic accident that had taken their lives.
After which Sam Dryden’s document trail went almost blank again, though not by way of secrecy this time. Rather, his life seemed to dial itself down to the lowest burner setting. He worked, but only a little: private security stuff here and there, putting his background to use. He didn’t generate much income, but then again he didn’t need to. He had inherited a significant chunk of money from his parents, back during his time in the service. But for those years after he lost his wife and child, he didn’t spend much of the money. His credit card records showed him paying his bills and his property taxes and buying groceries. He didn’t do much else. For the better part of five years, there was no sign that he’d traveled or purchased much more than basic essentials. To the extent that paper records could show a man’s world shrinking down to a solitary confinement cell, Sam Dryden’s seemed to do so.
Then something had changed—not quite two years ago, toward the end of 2013. There was no indication of what had triggered it, but all at once Sam Dryden seemed to begin living his life again. There were airline tickets—flights to places like Honolulu and Vail and Grand Cayman. There were weeklong hotel stays at those places, and boat rentals, and payments for all the things people did on vacations just for the hell of it. The plane tickets were always for two, and the other ticket was always for a woman: someone named Riley Walker for the first seven or eight months, then a few others in succession. Dating. Living. Taking in the world. Something or someone had come along and jolted Sam Dryden out of his exile.
He was working again, too. Buying and fixing and then selling houses, from the look of his financials. Pretty damn nice houses, if the prices and locations were any sign.
And apparently, maybe just for kicks, he had now taken up the hobby of preventing horrifying tragedies no human could have predicted.
“How the hell did you know to be there?” Marnie whispered.
She watched a light business jet take off out of Santa Monica Municipal Airport, a few miles to the south and west. Watched it climb and bank out over the Pacific, a white speck and then nothing.
“You wanted to see me?”
Marnie turned. Don Sumner stood in the doorway of his office, where he’d been on the phone for the past three minutes.
Marnie nodded and crossed to the door. Sumner stepped back and let her through.
Sumner was fifty and going gray at the temples. One wall of his office was lined with deep shelves, on which were arrayed detailed models of mid-twentieth-century automobiles. There was a ’64 Mustang, a ’51 Bel Air, a ’42 Packard Super Eight. Even some kind of Studebaker from the ’30s. Sumner had built the models from kits, then airbrushed them and done all kinds of intricate detail work; some of the cars were actually made to look weathered and worn. Marnie had studied the collection up close before, and had concluded that Sumner could have been a special effects guy for one of the movie studios, back before CGI had become the norm.
“Have a seat,” he said, dropping into his own chair. “What do you need?”
“Help on this Mojave thing.”
There was no need to specify which Mojave thing she was talking about. The story was already in heavy circulation locally, and was beginning to get traction on CNN and Fox. It had all the right ingredients: a miracle rescue, a very nasty, very dead bad guy, and two mysterious saviors who had appeared out of thin air and vanished back into it. The networks would feed on it for days—maybe longer if the two rescuers remained unknown.
“What do you have?” Sumner asked. He nodded at the printout in Marnie’s hand: Dryden’s info.
She unfolded the thin stack of pages and slid them across the desk. “This is a match from a set of prints I found at the scene. When I ran the search, I didn’t tell anyone where the prints came from. As of now, this guy has no official connection to the case. Outside of you and me, there’s nobody who can leak his name. I’d like to keep it that way until I know more.”
Marnie ran through the details of how she’d found the prints while Sumner’s eyes tracked down over the material, his eyebrows edging up once or twice.
“Prints on a washing machine,” he said. “Maybe he owned the thing. Maybe it broke down and he decided to dump it out in the desert.”
“Two hours’ drive from his address?”
“Maybe he was that pissed off at it. Wanted to make sure it didn’t find its way home like in that movie
The Incredible Journey.
”
“I think it was two dogs and a cat in the movie. Anyway, the scuff marks I found with the prints were new. Dryden was there last night.”
Sumner exhaled and slid the printout back across his desk. “So what is he? A vigilante?”
“Even if he is,” Marnie said, “how did he know enough to show up at that exact moment? Those girls snagged a cell phone off the coffee table and called 9-1-1. That was the trigger for the whole thing. How could Dryden or anyone else have known that would happen?”