Only to Die Again, Page 2

  Close to the off-ramp stood a shabby diner and a Sunoco station. Only the latter was open for business, casting a milky pool of light over the scrubland around it.

  Dryden took the exit at 1.58 a.m. He rolled into the darkened lot of the diner and parked. Except for the attendant inside the station, there was no sign of life anywhere.

  Dryden watched the road and the freeway, and waited.

  Claire Dunham.

  What could she be caught up in?

  Dryden had met her ten years before, back in the life he mostly tried to forget these days. Claire had been a technician, an expert with the electronic hardware Dryden and his people had used all over the world, and in many cases she’d been right there in harm’s way with him and the others.

  Lots of those who had known her – men, especially – had found her nearly impossible to read. They assumed she was cold, indifferent to others. Dryden had assumed it, too, early on, but he’d understood later that he was wrong about that. The truth was that Claire Dunham’s unreadability was a two-way street. She could make no sense of people, a fact she must have come to terms with long ago, probably way back in childhood, and at some point she’d stopped trying. Probably anyone would have, in her shoes. But she wasn’t cold. Once a stray dog had wandered into the visiting officers’ quarters at Bagram Airfield, and Claire had taken to it. The thing had looked like a burlap sack full of wrenches, its fur matted and its ribs showing. Dryden had expected it to die, despite Claire’s efforts – not just feeding it, but tracking down meds for three or four different afflictions the thing was riddled with – but he’d been wrong about that, too: The dog had lived another eight years, mostly lying around by the pool at Claire’s place up in San Jose, soaking up the sun.

  A mile or more west of the freeway interchange, headlights crested a rise, coming in fast.

  Dryden killed his engine and got out. He could hear the hiss of tires and the whine of a powerful vehicle running in high gear. A moment later it passed into the halo of light from the Sunoco, and Dryden recognized the outline of Claire Dunham’s Land Rover. It braked hard and came to a stop in the road close by. Claire leaned over and shoved the passenger door open and gestured fast for Dryden to get in.

  Dryden had hardly done so when Claire gunned it again; within seconds they were beyond the overpass and into the darkness, following the two-lane out into the empty desert east of I-15. Claire pushed the engine to 95 miles per hour.

  She didn’t look good. In the light from the instrument panel, her face gleamed with sweat, though the A/C was blasting. Her eyes – large and green, normally expressing nothing but calm – kept going to the digital clock on the console, which now showed 2.01.

  Dryden could think of only a handful of times he’d ever seen her look rattled before, and those had always been awkward social situations. To see her off-balance like this bordered on unthinkable.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Dryden asked.

  Claire ran a hand over her forehead, wiped it on her shirt, and gripped the wheel again.

  ‘I couldn’t explain it right now. You’ll know pretty soon.’ Her eyes went to the clock once more. ‘Fuck.’

  ‘Why don’t you give it a try?’

  Instead of answering, Claire reached into the backseat and hauled a black duffel bag forward into her lap. It was already open. She reached in and withdrew a Beretta 9mm and held it out to Dryden.

  ‘Loaded, one in the chamber,’ she said.

  Dryden took the weapon, checked that its safety was on, and rested it on his thigh. He glanced over and saw that Claire had a Beretta of her own already holstered in a shoulder harness.

  She reached into the duffel again and took out something larger than a pistol. It was a squat black instrument the size of a lunchbox, with a minitripod folded up beneath it. Dryden recognized the thing at once; he and Claire had used them often, back in their old lives. It was a laser microphone. Its beam could measure sound vibrations on a pane of glass – you pointed it at the outside of a window, and you could hear noises from inside the building.

  It was no surprise Claire owned one; she had gone into the private security business after the two of them had left the military, eight years before. She was well sought after these days, working for tech firms in Silicon Valley, securing company sites and even the homes of executives. As Dryden understood it, corporations also sometimes hired her to snoop on employees they didn’t trust, and very often their mistrust turned out to be well placed.

  Claire snapped the tripod’s legs into position with one hand, getting the machine ready. At that moment the pavement gave way to gravel, and the Land Rover, doing just under 100 miles per hour, rattled and slewed violently. Stretches of chatterbumps came and went, making the whole vehicle shudder like a washing machine with a brick in it.

  ‘Goddammit,’ Claire hissed.

  They came over a shallow ripple in the landscape, and Dryden saw a single point of light far ahead in the dark. A bare bulb over somebody’s porch, he guessed, maybe a mile ahead.

  ‘There,’ Claire said. Her eyes were locked on the distant light. She eased off the gas, slowing to 70 and then 50. The Land Rover’s engine scream fell away to a low growl, and Dryden understood: Claire didn’t want their approach to be heard.

  Taking a hand off the wheel again, she opened a compartment on the side of the laser mic. Inside were half a dozen wireless earpieces; she gave one to Dryden, then took another for herself and fixed it to her ear. Dryden did the same.

  The porch light was half a mile away now. Dryden could just make out the shape of the building it was attached to, low-slung and boxy. A mobile home. A red compact car sat in front of it.

  Claire kept the Land Rover at 50 until they were three hundred yards out, then killed the headlights. Any closer and the lights’ glow might have been visible from inside the trailer, even if there were curtains over the windows.

  With the beams off, the desert became ink black. It was impossible to see even the road. Claire cursed softly, took her foot off the gas, and rolled to a stop. She didn’t bother shutting off the engine; she just dumped it into park and was out the door half a second later, stepping around it and setting the microphone on the hood. Dryden got out on his own side. Already he could see the red laser dot jittering back and forth in the trailer’s distant yard, as Claire steered it.

  She leaned over and sighted down the length of the instrument and brought the beam to rest on a window near the trailer’s north end. She steadied it and let go, then drew her sidearm and advanced toward the trailer at just shy of a full run. Dryden followed. Their footfalls were almost silent. They had learned long ago how to move quietly and quickly on desert ground.

  Through his earpiece, Dryden began to hear noises from inside the trailer. Strange noises. A kind of softened clicking sound – it made him think of a cat’s claw tearing at upholstery, catching and slipping, again and again.

  Then the noise stopped.

  For the next few seconds there was no sound at all.

  He and Claire were two hundred fifty yards from the trailer now. The bare porch bulb cast a weak yellow light, sixty watts if that. It left the terrain pitch black between the two of them and the trailer’s dooryard.

  All at once, over the earpiece, Dryden heard something unmistakable: the digital click of an iPhone being switched on. To his left, he saw Claire react to it, picking up her speed.

  Three tones came over the earpiece in rapid succession, the first one high-pitched, the next two lower and identical to each other.

  Someone in the trailer had just dialed 9-1-1.

  Two hundred yards to go.

  The ringing of the outgoing call was just perceptible. It trilled once, and then a tinny voice answered on the other end. Dryden couldn’t make out the words, though he could guess them well enough.

  Then came another voice, almost whispering, but much easier to discern. A young girl’s voice, inside the trailer. ‘Can you trace this?’

  The 9-1-
1 operator started to respond, but the girl cut her off.

  ‘I’m on a cell phone. Can you trace where I am?’

  A quick spill of words from the dispatcher. One of them sounded like danger.

  This time the girl made no reply.

  The dispatcher spoke again, but still there was no answer from inside the mobile home. Seconds passed.

  Then the girl said, ‘My name is Leah Swain. I’m here with three other –’

  She broke off, exhaling hard, the sound full of fear.

  Dryden thought he heard one last syllable from the dispatcher, and then the girl began screaming, high and terrified.

  ‘We didn’t call anyone! We didn’t call anyone! I promise, it’s okay! We didn’t call anyone!’

  For a moment it sounded like the girl was somehow talking and screaming at the same time. Then Dryden realized what he was actually hearing: There was another girl inside the trailer. Maybe several.

  Even as he registered that fact, a man began shouting over the girls. ‘What did you do? What the fuck did you do?’

  Next to Dryden in the dark, Claire swore and broke into a full sprint. Dryden matched her. Though Claire had told him nothing about the people in the trailer, the key points of the situation were as clearly defined as razorwire tips.

  The man’s screaming became almost indiscernible over the girls’ cries, but the phrase kill you stuck out more than once. The man’s shrieks sounded more animal than human. That was the last thought that crossed Dryden’s mind before the ground dropped out from under him.

  His feet had been pounding the desert surface, and suddenly one of them came down on empty space. He pitched forward and threw his arms ahead of him, aware of Claire doing the same thing to his left. For a sickening half second he imagined there was nothing beneath him but a hundred-foot drop, and then one knee smashed hard against a metal edge and pain exploded through his leg. His hands landed amid trash bags and scattered pieces of plastic – broken casings of machinery and who knew what else. He heard Claire crash down into similar debris, five feet away, already fighting to climb up the other side of the trench they’d fallen in – an arroyo strewn with garbage.

  Dryden moved his leg and found it wasn’t injured. He’d banged the kneecap badly, but nothing was broken.

  In the trailer, the man’s screams continued. ‘– gonna fucking kill you, do you understand that?’

  Dryden was still holding the Beretta Claire had given him. With his free hand he pushed himself upright and scrambled toward the far side of the arroyo –

  And found himself yanked to a halt by his other leg.

  The calf of his jeans was hung up on something. Some jagged metal corner that’d pierced the fabric and now held like a barbed hook.

  Five feet away, Claire was struggling to move, too. Dryden could hear something like rusted bedsprings warping and straining under her exertion, the whole mass shifting amid clutter as she fought to free herself.

  Inside the trailer, the man’s voice had taken on a lunatic chanting quality – ‘Kill you … kill you …’ – as if he were speaking only to himself now. There came a wooden banging noise over the audio: cabinet doors being flung open, it sounded like, one after the next. Cans and boxes being shoved aside in a mad search for something.

  Dryden yanked his trapped leg toward himself with all his force, meaning to rip the fabric free. It was no good; the trash simply shifted beneath him, giving him no purchase from which to pull.

  ‘Kill you … kill you … HERE!’

  The slamming of the cabinet doors ceased, along with the voice. All that followed was the sound of the girls screaming.

  Dryden jammed the pistol into his waistband and groped in the darkness for any solid handhold. One elbow thumped lightly against a metal surface, the sound of the impact blunt and reverberant. A washer or dryer, half-sunk into the dirt wall of the arroyo. He wrapped both his hands around an edge of the appliance, as if it were the lip of a cliff he meant to scale. He wrenched his body upward and felt the jean fabric tear and give way. Both legs came up fast; he drew them up to his chest, braced his feet where his hands had been, and exploded from the crouch like a runner out of the blocks. Half a second later he was on the surface again, landing on all fours, coming up and sprinting as fast as his body could move.

  One hundred yards to the trailer.

  Seventy-five.

  Fifty.

  ‘Want to see what you get?’ the man inside screamed. ‘This is what you fucking get!’

  Dryden drew the Beretta and covered the last fifty yards in an adrenalized surge that felt more like flying than running.

  There was a low wooden porch in front of the trailer’s door – two steps and a shallow platform. The door was hinged to swing outward, but it was also rusted and damn near falling off its frame. Dryden vaulted onto the porch without slowing and hit the door with his shoulder; the cheap frame buckled and the door burst inward, and just like that he was inside, the details of the space coming at him all at once.

  A big steel cage with four young girls in it, screaming and holding on to each other.

  A skeletal man with long gray hair and a long gray beard, holding a bottle of lighter fluid and picking at the cap with his fingertips. Trying to open it.

  The man jerked around at the crash of the door. His face seemed caught between expressions – rage and surprise. As the guy’s voice had done over the earpiece, that face gave Dryden the impression of something not quite human. Some predatory thing, instinctive and feral.

  The man’s eyes darted away from Dryden, to the filthy countertop that separated the living room from the kitchen. Amid the clutter there, five feet away, lay a twelve-inch hunting knife.

  The guy’s attention came back to Dryden, the eyes narrowing in fast calculation. Dryden didn’t wait for him to finish it. He centered the guy up and put two shots through his forehead. The man spasmed and fell back, collapsing at the base of the wall.

  The bottle of lighter fluid landed beside him.

  Still sealed.

  Near silence fell over the room. The girls had stopped screaming. They were only staring now, eyes huge, their breath hitching.

  Running footsteps outside. Claire landed on the porch, crossed the threshold, and came to a stop just behind Dryden. The girls’ eyes went back and forth between the two of them.

  All four were just kids, somewhere between eight and twelve years old. They wore simple T-shirts and sweatpants. They had long hair brushed straight, and trimmed nails, and clean skin.

  Groomed pets, Dryden thought, and felt like emptying the rest of the Beretta into the dead man’s face.

  He saw an iPhone lying on the floor inside the cage, and a long strip of quarter-round molding just sticking out through the bars. A single nail remained at one end of the molding – the end that lay outside the cage. Dryden considered the nail and the phone, and thought of the cat’s-claw-on-upholstery sound he’d heard before the 9-1-1 call: the sound of the nail catching on the carpeting, as the girls dragged the phone toward them from wherever it’d been. They had made the call the moment they had the phone in hand.

  ‘We need to go,’ Claire said.

  Dryden turned to her. Claire’s anxiety was gone – most of it, anyway. Dryden pictured her during the last minutes of the drive, constantly checking the clock, keenly aware that time was running out.

  ‘How the hell could you have known?’ Dryden asked.

  ‘Later,’ Claire said. ‘It’s time to leave.’

  Dryden made no move. He looked from Claire to the girls, and then to the phone on the ground, trying to make any of it fit.

  ‘I’ll explain,’ Claire said. ‘I’ll show you. But not now.’

  Dryden continued staring at her. It was the first time tonight that he’d seen her in bright light. Though the immediate tension was gone, in other ways she looked far worse than Dryden had realized earlier. She had dark hollows beneath her eyes, and her skin was pale. She hadn’t lost any weight – sh
e was the same lean-framed five foot eight she’d always been – yet she seemed diminished in some way. She looked physically exhausted, far more than a long drive and a short sprint could account for.

  ‘I’ll explain,’ Claire said again. She made as if to leave, then seemed to catch herself. She turned and scanned the carpet to Dryden’s right, stooped and picked up the two spent shell casings from the Beretta. She pocketed them and moved past Dryden, out onto the wooden porch.

  Dryden turned his attention back to the cage. Steel bars welded roughly together. A crude door, made of the same bars, latched with a heavy padlock.

  The whole situation still landing on him, one miserable piece after another.

  The four girls stared out through the bars, their eyes still wet from crying.

  From outside, Claire said, ‘They’ll be fine when the cops get here. We won’t. Come on.’

  Dryden hesitated a moment longer, then turned and stepped through the doorway. Claire was already running for the gravel road and the Land Rover. From far away in the night, in the direction of the freeway, came the keening of a police siren. Dryden stepped off the porch and sprinted after Claire.

  Chapter Four

  The smell hit Marnie Calvert even before she got out of the car. The vents sucked it in from outside: a mix of alkaline dust and aviation fuel exhaust. A helicopter had just touched down close by; she’d watched it descend as she covered the last half mile of the drive.

  She killed the engine and shoved open the door and stood up into the desert night.

  There were already ten or twelve vehicles at the crime scene. State Police, San Bernardino County sheriff’s cruisers, three ambulances out of Palmdale. Most of the units were idling, their flashers strobing and their headlights aimed inward on a focal point: a decrepit old trailer with a red Ford Fiesta parked in front of it, all by itself next to a gravel road in the middle of the Mojave.

  Outside the car, the kicked-up dust was thicker, but it was already drifting away into the scrublands. The desert was black and empty and baking hot – four in the morning, early August.