Better, instead, to be discreet, to park out of any line of sight from the place she intended to visit. The guy she needed to see wasn’t part of the conspiracy against which she’d set herself. She didn’t expect him to betray her. But like snakes molting out of their old skins, people so often shed her expectations of them that she had learned to be ready for anything.
The building was as she remembered it: flanked by parking lots, presenting an imposing two-story Southern Classic Revival face of white-painted brick with raised portico, balustrade, and tapered columns. At nine o’clock, cars stood in both parking lots.
Avoiding the front entrance, she went around the west side of the establishment, where the grand fa?ade gave way to the stucco so prevalent in Southern California that it suggested the primary goals of local architecture must be impermanence and ease of eventual demolition. At the back of the property was a wide detached garage with four roll-ups. Between the structures lay a motor courtyard.
The main building featured an ordinary back entrance, but also a pair of sliding doors behind which lay a freight elevator that was accessible only with a code entered in a keypad. She tried the door at the stoop and found that she didn’t need her lock-release gun.
She stepped into a vestibule. A door directly ahead of her would open to a ground-floor hallway, where there would be people whom she didn’t want to encounter. She tried the door on the left. Stairs led to the second floor.
Behind the door on the right were stairs to the basement. She descended quickly.
She came into a long corridor. A series of flush-set eighteen-inch-diameter frosted-glass lenses shed a cold white light with a faint blue tint. The white walls were of a smooth, glossy laminate. Shiny gray vinyl served as flooring and baseboard, curving up to meet the walls. The space had a science-fiction-y feel, as if she’d entered a time tunnel or an interstellar vessel.
The freight elevator access to this level was on her right.
She opened the door across the hall from the elevator, switched on the lights, saw a dead man, and went into that room.
14
As in a vivid but incomprehensible nightmare, the relentless pursuers came from behind them like a demonic posse with a death warrant, and police raced head-on toward them, the modulated siren shrilling. The land was still lonely and forbidding on both sides of the highway. The rain abruptly diminished as though a long drumroll had ended and the pending event to which it called attention would now occur.
Sanjay respected the police and prided himself on remaining calm in difficult situations, but twenty-five years of experience had not prepared him for a night when known reality dropped out from under him as if it had been a trapdoor. Although it wasn’t like him to rely on intuition rather than reason, he sensed that the insanity would only escalate from here.
“Hold on,” he warned Tanuja as, in the headlights, wet pavement glistened toward a crossroads. He pumped the brakes, made a hard right turn onto the new two-lane, nearly spun out, oriented the Hyundai, and accelerated.
“What are we doing?” his sister asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Where are we going?”
“I’ll know it when I see it.”
“Will I know it when you see it?”
“Someplace we can get off the road, out of sight.”
The blacktop wove through low hills and vales of ancient live oaks immense and spreading, dark and dripping. Numerous curves, in conjunction with the trees, repeatedly screened their SUV from those in pursuit of them.
Although Sanjay knew this back road well, he couldn’t think of a bolt-hole anywhere along its course. He was a guy who could focus as tightly as a laser, but he was first to admit he was a poor multitasker. He saw no need to chew gum and play basketball at the same time. He didn’t even like basketball. He could pilot the Santa Fe Sport at high speed along wet pavement, through treacherous curves, with confidence, monitoring pursuers in the rearview and side mirrors, but an answer to the question Where next? eluded him.
As always, Tanuja was a critical component in the two-piece puzzle that was the Shukla twins. She said, “We’re coming up on Honeydale Stables. That’s the place.”
“That’s the place,” he agreed.
And here came the turnoff to their right, a single-lane driveway of cracked and potholed blacktop lined with oaks, bisecting a once-rich meadow gone to weeds, flanked by ranch fencing collapsed in places by the work of termites, rot, and dry rot.
Sanjay hung a right, killed the headlights. He let their speed fall without using the brakes, and avoided revealing their position with a red flush of taillights in case their pursuers might be closer than he believed they were.
After about thirty yards, the private lane descended, and they were beyond view of the highway behind them, coasting into a valley that lay in a moonless, starless murk. The dilapidated fencing and colonnade of oaks guided them in the gloom, and the wild grass to both sides was not as dark as the pavement.
They passed near the ruins of the once-great house in which the owners had perished in a fire three years earlier: a rubble of broken masonry and infallen timbers. Two stone fireplaces with chimneys stood largely unscathed, oddly threatening in the night, like shrines to a primitive god that had slaughtered his own idolaters.
Wind had been at work on the night of the fire. Flames jumped to the extensive stables, and more than half were destroyed. The owners’ breeding horses and the horses of others who’d paid to board their mounts at Honeydale were saved by the ranch manager, but the business died with its owners. After a contentious battle between heirs, the estate was eventually settled, but though the property had been on the market for a year, it hadn’t yet sold.
Sanjay drove behind one of the intact stables and parked and switched off the engine. “When they realize they’ve lost us, they won’t backtrack to look. They’ll figure we’re long gone.”
Tanuja rolled down her window. The rain had stopped. The wind had died. Cool night air brought with it a faint scent of char that the recent downpour had stirred from a half-collapsed stable nearby, but she heard neither a siren in the distance nor the growl of engines.
“Who’ll believe us, Sanjay?”
“Not the sheriff. Something’s corrupt there.”
Referring to their parents, Tanuja said, “That’s why dear Baap and Mai left India, so much corruption there, why they brought us here so long ago. I still miss them every day.”
Sanjay agreed. “I always will.”
The world lay in eclipse under the shrouded sky, and a palpable night tide seemed to pour through the open window, pooling thickly in the Hyundai. Sanjay felt strangely as if he were breathing both air and darkness, but exhaling only air.
“Maybe the sheriff isn’t rotten,” Tanuja said, “just some of his deputies.”
“Or maybe he is rotten.”
“Most cities in the county have their own police.”
“But we don’t live in one of those cities.”
“Well, we have to go to somebody.”
Although Sanjay had not started the SUV, although neither he nor his sister had touched any control, the computer screen in the dashboard brightened, startling them. The navigation system became active. A map appeared. It featured a thick serpentine line labeled with the route number of the county road they had recently departed. Leading off the thick line, a thinner one wasn’t labeled, although it could be nothing but the private driveway leading to Honeydale Stables. On the map, a red indicator blinked at the end of the driveway and to one side of it, where the Hyundai currently stood.
“What’s happening?” Tanuja asked.