Point Loma was dark against the sky as McMichael headed up North Harbor Drive. The evening was crisp already, the last of sunset just a fading pale stripe in the western sky. A stiff breeze rocked the yachts at Spanish Landing.
The Hansen driveway gate was open. When he pulled in he saw Patricia's red Mercedes parked in a flood of white light coming from the garage. It was tucked up close to the open door, the rental trailer still attached. In the rearview he saw the gate roll closed.
They can't be described.
Patricia was leaning against the car door, hunched against the chill in a leather jacket, a wool watch cap pulled down to cover her ears. She looked away as he cut the lights and parked behind her.
He got out and shut his door quietly.
"Thanks for coming," she said. She was wearing black gloves and her face looked flushed and somehow eager.
"You're welcome. What is it, Pat?"
She shook her head and pushed away from the car. As he walked into the fluorescent light of the garage McMichael noted the box springs and mattress leaning up against one wall, two tireless bicycles hanging along another, a workbench, the Peg-Board wall hung with various tools. There was a lawnmower, a leaf blower, a chainsaw and a boat trailer. And four towers of boxes stacked and leaning, apparently on their way to the trailer. A cobweb swayed in the breeze. A lamp had been set up on an old chest of drawers, the naked bulb glowing over a big stainless steel tub.
McMichael stepped to it and looked down.
"I had to put a sheet over them," she said.
He reached down to lift it and heard the terrible crack of impact. Felt it. Then another. The sheet turned red. So did the metal tub, into which he felt himself falling, the sides reeling up past him as it swallowed him into the shiny red tunnel.
The last thing he heard was Patricia's voice.
"Do it again."
McMichael opened his eyes to two of everything: glove boxes, dashboard vents, outside temperature readouts of 51 degrees, tach and speed dials, two overlapping circles of steering wheels held at ten and two o'clock by four gloved hands. His head felt open on top, an air-dried pain over a throbbing ache inside. It felt wet and sticky. He couldn't raise it straight back, just to the left a little as his twin visions multiplied and diminished.
He looked down at his hands, bloody and cinched at the wrists by a plastic tie. He noted that his knees were spread but his feet were held together by something heavy and tight. With significant anguish he turned his head down to see his bloody shirt, then let it loll to the left again.
"Welcome back, McMichael."
The voice was high-pitched and anxious. He cocked an eye to confirm Patricia as the speaker and driver.
"How's the head?" asked someone behind him.
From some suspecting cranny of his brain McMichael processed the sound, managed to connect it to one he'd heard before. Gar. McMichael felt something hard and inhuman jab into his head from behind, three times.
"More where that came from, so don't get any giant ideas," said Garland. "Watch the goddamned road, Pat."
McMichael lolled his head to the right, felt the stickiness of blood on his neck, saw the market where Sally Rainwater had bought firewood. He let his eyes fall to the sideview mirror, wondering if Hector was by some miracle behind them. But all he could see was the flank of the vehicle he was riding in and the lights shooting back along it. By pressing the inside of his upper left arm against his side he confirmed that his weapon was gone. With the inside of his right elbow against his other side he knew his phone was gone, too.
He coughed, felt the top of his head open to the stars. He swallowed a mouthful of shaved metal and gave one experimental, cutting tug on his wrist ties.
"Too bad you drew the case," said Patricia. "I knew the chances were one in four, but I could never win a hand at blackjack either."
McMichael squinted at the buildings along Rosecrans. Triplicate now. His head felt volcanic, but he was oddly outside himself, too, detached and objective, like he was watching himself go through this. He tried to focus his vision out beyond the rearview, but all he got was blur.
"We're all going for a sail," Patricia said brightly. "In case you were wondering. Aboard Christina and this little skiff Gar never registered. But the skiff is going to blow up accidentally with only you on it. Which, on the plus side, is why Gar hasn't already shot you."
McMichael tried to digest the details of his own death, but they seemed distant and inapplicable. "Why kill Pete?" he managed.
"Tom, that's a long and very personal story. I wasn't appreciated."
Garland chuckled from the back.
"And Tom, you know nothing in the world pisses me off like not being appreciated."
"Rainwater?"
"Born to fall and very convenient. You were a minus and she was a plus and you canceled each other out. I'm good at math, remember? Gar, he's good at sneaking in and out of places, leaving things for cops to find."
"He doesn't need the details," said Garland.
"I was just showing off," said Patricia. "But my hands are shaking I'm so nervous."
"Watch the road, goddamn it."
"Don't yell, Gar."
"Watch the road, Patricia."
"I see the road."
"Good. Pat's the micromanager," said Garland, stabbing at McMichael's head again. "I'm the big-picture guy. You want an executive summary, McMikey? Here goes. The old man tried to cut us out, so he could cut the nurse in. But we were the ones putting up with his endless shit, year after year. His petty little games, his foul mouth, his whores and his tantrums. What was his wedding present to us? He threatened to disinherit Pat if we went through with it. Pat managed to talk him out of it. Stuff like that builds up, man, it fucking builds up. Pretty soon, it blows."
"It takes you over," said Patricia.
McMichael let his head loll right again, tried to pick up some sign of Hector. He'd left his destination on Hector's machine. But Hector was keyed to meeting Garland Hansen's plane at the airport. McMichael figured that by the time things went froggy at Lindbergh Field, he'd be ten fathoms down. When Patricia changed lanes he saw a white Crown Victoria two cars back, but the picture changed when she straightened out.
"Bland and the TJ thing?" His voice was little more than a whisper.
"Blandon the TJ thing?" asked Patricia. "Gar must have hit you harder than I thought."
"What the hell are you talking about?" Garland asked, rapping the back of McMichael's head with something hard. "Blandon who?"
McMichael checked the sideview mirror for the Crown Vic, saw nothing but the lights flickering down the side panel. He had figured by now that they were in some kind of SUV- probably a big Ford, an Excursion or Explosion or whatever they called them. He found the power window control down to his right, and the power door lock, both conveniently illuminated. He thought of Johnny in La Jolla and his father at General and his mother in the ground and Raegan at Libertad and Sally Rainwater in the Santee women's jail. Where was Hector?
"Why Angel?" McMichael heard himself ask.
"I took control of some of Grandma's possessions after she died. You know, it takes a woman to appreciate certain things. But the hooker caught me switching out Grandma's hummingbird for a fake. She said maybe I could take care of her, and Grandpa would never know. So I took care of her. We'd put in too much planning to have a whore mess it up. After her, Pete wasn't that hard. You just do what you have to do. And you? You'll be easy, McMichael. You always were."
He sat with his head bowed, smelling his blood, watching the lights do freakish things on the windshield.
"Like my divorce story?" asked Patricia. "The apartment and the boxes at our place? We're going to rent out the apartment. And tomorrow we move the boxed stuff to Pete's house. Me and Gar are going to kind of squat there, possession being nine-tenths of-"
Suddenly, flashes of red and blue lights shot through the interior. Garland cursed and Patricia's gloved hands tightened on the wheel. McMichael managed to turn his head to the right, very slowly, and from the corner of his eye he saw two Crown Victorias with two gumballs on the top, two faint faces of Hector as he drove the cars under a streetlamp.
"Goddamn it!" yelled Garland.
"You're dead," McMichael muttered.
"Bullshit," said Patricia. She slowed for a red light, then gunned the big vehicle through it as brakes screeched and horns blared from both sides. Chrome and paint flashed past McMichael's eyes. He forced his head around again, to see Hector trapped in the intersection behind them. Ahead, an SDPD cruiser bumped from a parking lot onto the boulevard with full lights and sound. Then another right behind it.
"Can't outrun a radio," said McMichael.
Garland reached past the headrest and whacked the side of McMichael's face, up on the cheekbone. McMichael wrenched right and tried to get a finger onto the lock control but Garland yanked him back, McMichael's head slapping back against the rest.
Patricia gunned it south on Harbor Drive, a high-velocity shot past Spanish Landing and the airport. Two PD cruisers slid into the intersection at Grape but Patricia charged over the curb and onto the sidewalk. A young man, eyes wide in the headlights, pushed a woman and child to the ground and McMichael saw his legs and feet vanish under the hood. No thump. From the corner of his eye he saw a splayed tangle of family as the SUV roared by. Patricia caught greens at Ash and Broadway, but ran a red light at Pacific Coast Highway with the heel of one hand on the horn and- to McMichael's breathless stupefaction- both of her eyes closed. Garland yelled and pulled McMichael back hard by the collar of his jacket. McMichael wheeled left and brought up his cuffed hands, landing flush on Garland's jaw, which got McMichael's head a ferocious jolt back to the rest, Garland yanking him by his hair. Ahead McMichael could see two more PD cars blocking the boulevard, officers with their sidearms braced on the hoods, a cop who looked about twenty years old aiming a riot gun at the windshield as Patricia swerved to the right, crashed into the back end of one unit that moved slowly out of the way as the big SUV screeched under throttle and cops seemed to fall from the sky. She bullied past and free. Green lights at Fifth and Eighth, patrol cars howling into line behind them. McMichael's vision doubled his estimate of catastrophe as Patricia barged along at sixty miles an hour toward Crosby Street.
"Get back on the freeway," yelled Garland. "They can't block it."
"The Five? Where's the Five, Gar?"
"Straight ahead, left on Crosby, babe, you've driven it a million times!"
Patricia made the turn but two SDPD cars were waiting for them and she swerved right on National, then hooked another quick right to miss an oncoming city bus.
"Nooo!" bellowed Garland, but it was too late as the SUV groaned onto the ramp and the great stanchions of the Coronado Bridge rose in the darkness beyond the windshield.
"There's no exits!" shouted Garland. "It's a fucking bridge, Pat."
"Look, a carpool lane!"
McMichael felt the vehicle gently climb, then saw before him the lights that traced the graceful rise and fall of the bridge all the way to Coronado. The water below was black and silver and the navy battleships were black shapes without light. As the SUV climbed out over the dark water McMichael's stomach took a sickening drop.
"Pull over and stop," he said.
"Shut the-" said Garland.
"Pat, you'll kill us all."
She accelerated. The bridge lights came faster and the oncoming headlights blurred. As they topped the span and began the long way down onto the island he saw the flashing lights of the roadblock up ahead. McMichael felt an odd clarity sweep over him. To his left the oncoming traffic suddenly was gone- stopped upstream by the police. Ahead of them two rows of cruisers blocked the road from median to railing, headlights on high and warning lights flashing. To the right was black air and a long fall into the water and McMichael knew what Patricia would do.
"Hold on, men," she said.
Then the deafening sound of metal shearing on concrete. The right side of the SUV caught and buckled under, but its motion was suddenly and horrifically overridden when the back end flipped up and over the rail and fell into the night.
McMichael's world reversed.
He looked through the window at the bridge lights receding above him. He slammed his weight against the door and fumbled for the lock control, pressed the up button. Punched the shoulder strap loose. Yanked the door handle. Shoved off the transmission hump with both feet. Put shoulder and head and arm and soul into it. The door blasted open and flung McMichael into space. The next thing he knew he was upside down, falling through darkness and a dazzling consortium of lights and all he could think to do was tighten himself into a ball and hope that he would hit water and not a battleship and that his major bones wouldn't break and the SUV wouldn't land on top of him. God, he thought: I believe in you.