It was a house. Mazzucco had never seen the movie Allen had spoken of, but based on the size of the house, he assumed it must have played a central role. It was one of the finished buildings. From a distance, it looked just like a real dwelling. It seemed to have weathered the years better than the rest of the town. It was a wide structure topped out by a gently sloping roof with a dormer window in the center. Along the front was a long porch. Once Mazzucco’s eyes had been drawn to the house, he held his position for a minute or two, watching it for signs of . . . what, exactly? There was no movement around the building, but straining his eyes to look at the patch of dirt track along the front, Mazzucco thought he could make out depressions in the soft ground. A vehicle had been parked there recently.
He’d switched his phone to silent on the way up the track. If the Samaritan was here, the last thing he wanted was a ringing phone giving him away. He examined it now and found a text message from Allen. She’d been delayed but was on her way again. The last sentence of the message read:
Bringing a friend along.
Mazzucco knew exactly what that meant, but standing on the edge of the abandoned set, he couldn’t honestly say that he was sorry Blake would be joining them: when it came to a situation like this, three was definitely better than two. Or one. But it didn’t change the fact that he needed to confirm whether there was someone being held in the barn or the house.
He rose to his feet and started to descend the road that led down into the set. After a moment’s consideration, he opted not to walk down the main street. Too many windows, even if what lay behind most of them was an inch of plywood. Instead, he walked along the strip of ground between the back of one side of the street and the barn. As he drew level with the barn door, he noticed more tracks on the dirt outside. He stopped and glanced around him. The air was still. From this side, the row of stores manifested as a blank wall buttressed by long beams of wood. He turned his attention back to the barn. Though the wood siding was rotted and holed in places, the double doors were firmly closed.
Mazzucco approached them quickly and looked closer. They weren’t shut tight. One of the doors was warped, as though it had once been locked or barred but had been prized open. There was a gap between the two more than big enough to get his hand into. He did, and pulled the door. It swung open, the bottom edge scraping off the dirt floor. Mazzucco raised his gun, covering the opening.
It was dark inside. There were no windows, and what light there was came from the section where the ceiling had collapsed. The space was about fifty feet square and was mostly empty but for some rotted hay bales stacked at one end. Mazzucco assumed they’d been just for show and had been abandoned at the end of the shoot like everything else. Likewise, he thought the lack of natural lighting was a deliberate choice by those long-ago set designers. As Mazzucco’s eyes gradually adjusted to the dimness, he saw that there were two vehicles inside, parked over on the opposite side from where the remains of the daylight came in via the hole in the ceiling. They looked alien in their surroundings, because they were both relatively clean and relatively new. The nearest vehicle was familiar: the green Dodge they’d seen a few hours before.
The other one was a pickup truck, also green in color, though a darker shade. A California license plate. As Mazzucco approached it, he saw that there was a towing rig with a rolled cable at the rear. Perfect for offering a helping hand to a stranded driver. This had to be it: the Samaritan’s truck.
Mazzucco kept his gun trained on the windows of the pickup as he got within a couple feet of it. He couldn’t see any sign of anyone inside, but that didn’t mean there was no one there. As his hand reached out for the handle, he froze as he saw what was on the front seat. A digital SLR camera and a canvas shoulder bag. He stood there for a second, wondering what it was that struck him about the equipment, and then it came to him along with a dull, sick feeling in his gut.
He reached his left hand into his jacket and pulled out the sketch he’d taken from Blake the other day. The two versions of a face he’d penciled on the back of a menu. Something about the face had seemed familiar. It was why he’d held on to it. He straightened out the piece of paper with one hand, and all of a sudden, the haze cleared and he realized who it was in the picture. It wasn’t an exact likeness. In fact, it looked like the halfway point between the kid in the photograph and someone else. Someone close to home. It seemed glaringly obvious now.
He was about to reach for his phone to call Allen when he heard the noise.
He stopped and listened. There it was again: a muffled banging sound, as though somebody was kicking something. Somebody trying to attract attention. The sound wasn’t coming from inside the barn, but from outside. He couldn’t be sure, but it didn’t sound close enough to be emanating from anywhere on the main street.
Mazzucco turned around and ran back toward the door. The last of the evening sun outside made the dark space on either side of the door even darker. He was two steps away from the threshold when a piece of the darkness on the left side came to life and slammed into him, right across the bridge of the nose.
Mazzucco rocked back on his heels and another blow slammed down on the back of his neck while powerful fingers like steel cable twisted the gun from his grasp. He was twisted around and he felt his knees give way. He dropped to the ground and saw his own shadow and that of someone else cast in the rectangle of light from the door. He started to turn around, and an arm clamped around his upper body. He reached up with both hands to wrestle himself out of the grip when he realized there was a more pressing problem. Specifically, the touch of sharp steel against his bared throat. Mazzucco froze and relaxed his arms.
“I’m a cop,” he said quietly.
“I know,” a voice whispered, as though there were anyone to overhear.
And then there was a jerking motion and a sound like a hose being cut. Mazzucco flashed on Julia back at home, eating dinner alone. Daisy. The last thing he heard was the whisper.
“You shouldn’t have come here.”
Allen had just glanced at the speedometer as she came out of another curve on Mulholland Drive, so she knew she was doing at least fifty when the back tire blew out. As the car lurched toward the side of the road, her eyes widened and her hands whitened around the wheel as she tried desperately to persuade the two-ton hunk of steel to remain on what now seemed a hopelessly narrow strip of asphalt. She tried to yank the wheel left, succeeded only in sending the car into a skid. An oncoming vehicle swerved as she swung out into the opposite lane, missing her by inches. The car pulled out of the skid but now she was lurching toward the edge again.
The Ford slipped and slewed toward the crash barrier at the edge of the drop, and she knew she was about to cut through it like a sledgehammer through balsa wood.
And then the three remaining tires caught some traction on the surface and obeyed the steering wheel at last, altering the car’s suicidal trajectory so that it smashed into the barrier at an angle of forty-five degrees—closer to side-on than straight. Allen felt the metal of the barrier buckle as she rammed into it, but it held. The car screeched along its side against the barrier, a fountain of white-hot sparks erupting against the windows.
Allen’s eyes widened still further as she saw that the barrier came to an end not too far ahead. She yanked the wheel to the left again, but the car stayed its course, its wheels seemingly locked into position.
And then the landscape outside began to slow just in time. The screeching lowered in pitch and the geyser of sparks dwindled as the barrier ran out, and then the view out of the windshield came to rest at an odd angle, as though somebody had tipped the world a little onto its side.
Allen blinked a few times until she realized it was the car that was at a strange angle, not the world. The red setting sun glared into her eyes. The engine was still running, although coughing intermittently. She reached for the keys in the ignition to turn the engine off and the car shifted again, tipping still farther to an angle.
Allen froze and held her breath. She swiveled her eyes to the side as far as they would go, not daring to move her head and risk another lurching motion.
The car was precariously balanced on the edge of the steep slope; the wheels on the driver’s side actually off the ground. The crash barrier had only covered the tight curve of the road, tapering out as the road straightened. It had been just long enough to prevent her from skidding off the edge, but now she was one wrong move away from the car toppling sideways off the edge anyway.
Slowly, ever so slowly, she reached down and used the ball of her thumb to eject her seat belt. She issued an involuntary cry as the belt released and her body listed slightly to the side and something creaked on the precipice-facing side of the car.
She closed her eyes for a second and told herself to calm the hell down. Panicking and rushing was absolutely not the way to get herself out of this situation in one piece. She opened her eyes again. Slowly and deliberately, she turned her head from the drop and focused on the door handle. Just as slowly and just as deliberately, she raised her hand and moved it until it was resting on the door handle. So far, so good. She started to push the handle to the point where it would release the door, trying to do it softly, with two fingers. Soon she realized the mechanism was too stiff for such gentle treatment. She put four fingers against the handle and pushed a little harder. A muffled squeal sang out from somewhere off to her side.
She gritted her teeth and pushed harder, feeling the handle move back even as the car started to tip in the opposite direction. The mechanism opened with a pop and she continued the forward motion without pause. As the door began to swing up and open, fighting gravity, she felt the equal and opposite reaction of the car beginning to shift over onto its left side, rocking across the fulcrum. She was aware of the wheels lifting farther off of the ground and was surprised to find herself noting with a detached clarity that the tilt had passed the point of no return.
Warped metal screamed as she continued pushing the door open. She braced her foot on the dash and pushed her body forward, out of the door. Her arms and the side of her head slammed off the asphalt as the car rolled away from her, ripping the skin on her legs, the mouth of the doorway trying to drag her down with it like a great white shark devouring its prey. She clawed her hands on the road and tried to dig her fingertips into the surface as the motion of the toppling car gained an inexorable momentum and began to flip up and over. She screamed out as her foot caught on something and she felt herself being pulled backward.
And then her foot slipped out of the shoe and the car fell away in a torrent of noise and breaking glass.
Allen lay facedown on the road, eyes closed, until the smashing and crunching had stopped. She opened her eyes and slowly got to her feet, wincing as she realized her left foot had been sprained as her shoe had been torn off. She hobbled to the edge, looked down the slope, and saw the decimated remains of the Ford a hundred feet below. Suddenly, the pain in her foot became insignificant. Allen limped to the opposite side of the road—the safe side—and puked. She shuffled to the side a little and then sat down feeling marginally better.
It took her a couple of minutes to collect herself and to take stock of her options. She’d narrowly avoided certain death, but there was still a job to be done. The only problem was, how was she going to do it? She still had her gun, but her phone had been lying on the passenger side of the Ford. Even if she was in any shape to make a descent down the slope, the phone would probably be in several pieces right now. No way to call Blake or Mazzucco. No way to cover the remaining miles to the Samaritan’s lair on foot, not with her ankle in this shape. It was getting darker, the setting sun almost gone in the west.
She heard the vehicle before she saw it. The low growl of a diesel engine. A cautious driver taking it slowly on the curves. And then it appeared up ahead. A green pickup truck, a lone driver. Headlights on. Allen stared at the oncoming vehicle for a long moment and then placed her good foot on the road and started waving him down. The pickup angled itself out toward the center of the road and Allen thought he was going to blow by without slowing, but then the driver eased off the gas when he got within thirty yards of her. The pickup passed by her, slowing down. She saw a male driver wearing sunglasses. The pickup’s brake lights blazed again, and it came to a full stop at a wide point in the road. After a second, the driver’s door opened and a man got out.
Allen squinted her eyes to confirm what she was seeing. Mazzucco’s words from Sunday came back to her:
Fucking new mutation
.
The man took a couple of steps forward, a puzzled look on his face, and then he began to smile. “Allen?” Eddie Smith called out, the tone of his voice suggesting that he didn’t believe it either. He began to stride toward her. “What are you—” He stopped as he saw that she was limping, and then he registered her bloodied and scratched arms and the fact she had only one shoe. “Jesus! Are you okay? What happened?”
Allen took a moment to breathe and collect her thoughts. She nodded her head in the direction of the destroyed Ford at the bottom of the slope. “Car trouble.”
Smith crossed the road toward the drop and looked down. He looked back at Allen, then back down at the drop, then back at her.
“
Shit
,” he exclaimed. He turned and walked back toward her, offering his hand for her to lean on. “Come on. You need some help.”
She was shaking as she looked up at him. He was wearing a green baseball cap. The brim cast a shadow over his face in the twilight.
“Yeah, I think I really do.”