Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

He tries to feel bad about Peaches and O-Bop, but he can’t. Them two ushered too many people into the next world, and you had to know it was always gonna end that way for them.

Like it’s gonna end for me.

He feels bad about Mickey, though.

But the news also means that Scachi is tracking them down.

She has a rough night-she can’t sleep, and she doesn’t want to see what’s on the inside of her eyes. He gets that-he owns a lot of the same pictures. Only maybe I’m more hardened to them, he thinks.

So he lies behind her and holds her and tells her Irish stories he remembers from when he was a kid. Well, he sort of remembers them, and he makes up what he don’t, which isn’t too hard because you just got to talk about fairies and leprechauns and shit like that.

Fairy tales and fables.

She finally nods off about four in the morning and he sleeps, too, with his hand gripped on the. 22 under the pillow.

She wakes up hungry.

No shit, Callan thinks, and they walk across the highway to the restaurant and she orders a cheese omelet with link sausages on the side and rye toast with lots of butter.

The waitress asks, “You want American cheese, cheddar or Jack?”

“Yes.”

She eats like the condemned.

The woman sucks down that omelet as if it’s her last meal, as if they’re waiting outside to walk her that last mile, down to Old Sparky. Callan suppresses a smile as he watches her wield her fork like it’s a weapon-those link sausages don’t have a chance-and he doesn’t tell her about the small smear of butter at the corner of her mouth.

“Didn’t like it?” he asks.

“It was wonderful.”

“Get another one.”

“No!”

“Cinnamon roll?”

“Okay.”

“They were baked fresh this morning,” the waitress says as she sets down the huge pastry and two forks. Nora goes outside and comes back with The San Diego Union-Tribune and scans the personal ads.

“Kim, from her Sister. Family Emergency. Looking for You Everywhere. Urgent You Contact.” With a phone number. Typical Keller, she thinks, covering all the bases just in case, as is the case, I’m a free agent on the run of my own free will. So Arthur wants me to come in.

I’m not coming, Arthur. Not just yet.

If you want me, you’ll have to find me.

He’s trying.

Art’s troops are out in force. At airports, train stations, bus stations, shipping ports. They check passenger manifests, reservations, passport control. Hobbs’ guys check immigration records in France, England and Brazil. They know they’re on a fool’s errand, but by the end of the week one thing seems certain: Nora Hayden hasn’t left the country-at least not on her own passport. Nor has she used any of her credit cards or her cell phone, tried to get a job, been stopped for a traffic offense or put her Social Security number down to rent an apartment.

Art puts the heat on Haley Saxon and has her threatened with everything from violating the Mann Act and running a disorderly house to being an accessory to attempted murder. So he believes her when she swears she hasn’t heard from Nora and will call him the instant she does.

Neither his listening posts on the border nor Hobbs’ across it pick up a trail. Not her talking, not anyone talking about her.

Art drags an accident reconstruction guy out to measure the depth of Callan’s motorcycle tracks, and the guy does some mojo with the dirt and tells Art that there were definitely two people on that bike and that he hopes the passenger was holding on tight because it was moving fast.

Callan couldn’t have taken her all that far, Art reasons. He couldn’t have taken a prisoner on a plane, a train or a bus, and there are so many places a prisoner could get off the back of a bike-at a gas station, a red light, a junction.

So Art narrows the search to within one gas tank’s radius of the junction of the dirt road and I-8. Look for a Harley-Davidson Electra Glide.

He finds it.

A Border Patrol helicopter flying over Anza-Borrego looking for mojados spots the scorch mark and lands to investigate it. The report comes to Art right away-his guys are monitoring all the BP radio traffic, so he has a guy out there two hours later in the company of a Harley dealer who has a meth-possession rap hanging over him. Dude looks at the charred remains of the hog and almost tearfully confirms that it’s the same model they’re looking for.

“Why would anyone do something like this?” he moans.

You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes-shit, you don’t even have to be Larry Holmes-to see that a car followed the bike in there, someone got out of the car and then everyone took off in the car again and went back onto the highway.

So the reconstructionist goes out again. Measures the depth of the tire tracks and the width between tires, takes a cast of the tire marks, plays in the dirt for a while and tells Art that he’s looking for a smaller-size, two-door sedan with an automatic transmission and old Firestones on it.

“Something else,” a Border Patrol guy tells him. “The passenger door doesn’t work.”

“How the hell do you know that?” Art asks. Border Patrol agents are experts at “cutting sign,” that is, reading tracks. Especially in the desert.

“The footprints outside the passenger door,” the agent tells him. “She stepped backward to let the door open.”

“How do you know it’s a she?” his man asks.

“These marks are from a woman’s shoes,” the agent says. “The same woman was driving the car. She got out the driver’s side, walked over to where the guy was standing, stood and watched. See how the heel is heavier where she stood for a few minutes? Then she walked around to the passenger side and he walked around to the driver’s side and let her in.”

“Can you tell what kind of shoes the woman was wearing?”

“Me? No,” the agent says. “But I’ll bet you’ve got guys who can.”

Yes, he does, and the guy’s on a chopper heading out there within half an hour. He takes a cast of the shoe and takes it back to the lab. Four hours later he calls Art with the results.

It’s her.

She’s with Callan.

Apparently of her own free will.

Which boggles Art’s mind. What are we looking at here, he wonders, an advanced case of Stockholm syndrome, or something else? And while the good news is that she’s alive, at least as of a couple of days ago, the bad news is that Callan has broken through the radius of containment. He was in a car headed east with a “prisoner” who at least appears to be cooperative, so now he could be anywhere.

And Nora with him.

“Let me take it from here,” Sal Scachi says to Art. “I know the guy. I can deal with him if I find him.”

“The guy killed three of his old partners and kidnapped a woman, and you can deal with him?” Art asks him.

“We go back,” Scachi says.

Art reluctantly agrees. It makes sense-Scachi does have a prior relationship with Callan, and Art can’t pursue this much further without drawing attention. And he needs Nora back. They all do; they can’t make the deal with Adan Barrera without her.

Their days have settled into a pleasant routine.

Nora and Callan get up early and have breakfast, sometimes at home, sometimes at the place across the highway. He usually goes the high-cholesterol route, and she usually has unadorned oatmeal and dry toast because the place doesn’t serve fruit for breakfast except at Sunday brunch. They don’t talk much during breakfast; neither of them is a big talker early in the morning. Instead of conversing, they swap sections of the newspaper.

After breakfast they usually take a drive. They know it’s not the smartest thing to do-the smart thing would be to park that car behind the cottage and leave it there-but they’re still in their fatalistic mind-set and they like taking the drives. He’s found a lake seven miles north on Highway 79-a beautiful drive through oak-studded grasslands and rolling hills, big ranches on the west side of the road, the Kumeyaay reservation on the other. Then the hills give way to a broad, flat plain of grazing land with hills in the background to the south (the Palomar Observatory sits like a giant golf ball on top of the highest summit) and a big lake in the middle.