Alvarez crawled under Nyland’s truck and magnetically attached a GPS transponder and battery pack, then added plastic ties before wiring the battery pack to the transponder. He slid back out, dusted off his clothes, and Marquez gave Roberts the signal. She headed upstairs to the pool hall, ordered a beer at the wood-paneled bar, and hung out with a couple of biker types. Her long legs, tight jeans, and brown hair falling loosely on her shoulders drew them, and she shot eight ball and cutthroat and laid her money on the felt bumper to compete with a guy wearing a leather vest over tattooed skin, nothing else. A strand of turquoise beads circled his thick neck like a dog collar. She watched Nyland from the corner of her eye, and when her phone rang she waved it at the bikers, told them to shut up, said it was her old man and nobody make any noise because she was supposed to be at home making his dinner. They laughed as she moved to the windows and talked with Marquez.
“Sophie is all over him. I mean, it’s weird after what we saw earlier. They’re at a pool table in the corner by themselves. Somebody should set Petroni straight.”
“I think he knows it’s over.” Petroni had worse problems to deal with. He’d missed a meeting with internal affairs this afternoon and hadn’t returned Bell’s phone calls.
“I can tell you this,” Roberts said, “if they’re a couple that broke up you wouldn’t know it, watching him slip his hands down the back of her pants.”
“You’ve got a close eye on them.”
“It’s hard to miss.”
Roberts ordered another bottle of Sierra Pale and shot three games with the bikers, letting one of them guide her through a more tricky shot as he leaned over her. When Nyland and Sophie got ready to leave, she left the bikers hanging and went down the stairs ahead of Nyland.
Sophie left her truck in town and rode with Nyland, who drove home to his trailer. Now the GPS showed his truck was stationary, parked out in the meadow, and Marquez doubted much more would happen tonight. Still, he drove out there, taking Alvarez with him, hiking through the trees across the ridge and then down to the rock outcrop. Nyland’s trailer door was open. Light spilled onto the iron stairs, and they heard or felt a bass pulse of music. Then someone pulled the door shut and one of the lights went out.
The trailer was just a dull yellow glow now. And both he and Alvarez were tired. It was cold and late. It felt like the wind was trying to pick up, and he wasn’t sure why he’d wanted to drive out here, maybe just to confirm Sophie was staying here, Sophie was with Nyland again. What would Petroni think if he was sitting here?
“Time to take off?” Alvarez asked.
“Pretty close.”
Then they heard a scream, a sound that at first he thought was mountain lion, a sound like a child in pain. Marquez turned and scanned the dark slope behind them. It had seemed to come from somewhere up the slope.
“That wasn’t a cat,” Alvarez said.
“No, it wasn’t, but maybe it’s the wind picking up and two trees rubbing together in a funny way.”
“Didn’t seem like that either.”
“The wind has come up.”
“Yeah, and I’m freezing, but that was weird.”
Now they heard it again, though different, farther away, lasting longer. Marquez thought he heard voices, people crying out, arguing, Below, the trailer door opened and a hound bayed as Sophie and Nyland came down into the meadow, lurching, laughing, staggering onto the road, drunker than when they’d gotten home. He wondered now if the odd sound might have been a distortion of the music Nyland played in his trailer, some trick of acoustics that had allowed fragments of sound to carry.
“That last almost sounded like voices,” Alvarez said. “As though they were afraid and talking fast.”
“Yeah.
Sophie carried blankets, and she and Nyland walked down the road running through the meadow. They stopped at the first of the abandoned foundations, spread the blanket on the moonlit concrete, and passed a bottle. Tiny fragments of their voices carried on the wind. They draped a blanket over their legs.
“Not my kind of picnic,” Alvarez said. “Way too cold.”
Then Nyland stood and moved out onto the slab. He took a stance and aimed. They heard the sharp hard pops and saw the muzzle flashes.
“Aiming toward the old sales office,” Marquez said, and a faint sound of glass breaking carried on the wind. They heard Nyland’s whoop. “I took a look at the building last time I was here. There were a couple of windows on that face that weren’t broken yet.”
“Job’s done now.”
Nyland went back to Sophie, and the bottle got passed again.
“Get drunk and shoot up something,” Alvarez said. “Nothing has changed in a hundred years.” He cleared his throat, voice much quieter now. “I swear those were voices we heard. That wasn’t any music they were playing in the trailer.”
Sophie stood, and Marquez saw that she had the gun. She pulled her clothes off with her free hand and held the gun on Nyland as he stripped and then lay on his back on the blanket.
“You seeing this, Lieutenant?”
“It’s a game.”
Sophie had a two-handed grip aimed at Nyland’s head, and Marquez heard Alvarez mutter, “Yeah, my girlfriend and I play this one all the time.”
The gray-white concrete slab was like a stage, and on the slope they became voyeurs as she straddled him, taking him with one hand and guiding him inside her, holding the gun to his head as she moved slowly with him in her, her free hand pushing down on his chest, her back arched, hair spread on her shoulders, breasts pale.
“Looks like they’re still friends,” Marquez said.
“She had Petroni fooled.”
Petroni had himself fooled.
“Where’s Petroni living now?” Alvarez asked. “He’s not waiting at home for her, is he?”
“I don’t know, but we’re done here.”
They hiked back up to the ridge and drove back to the safehouse.
Alvarez went inside, and Marquez sat in the truck listening to music, a local station, old rock and roll songs, a lot of them thirty years or more old, songs written for times that had vanished. Lately, he’d been listening to some group he liked called Magnetic Fields, but he wondered if he would ever connect with modern music in the same way he had when he was young. He wondered if his beliefs about what he could get done running an undercover team were overblown and foolish. He lowered his window and reclined the seat, tried to make sense of the events of the past few days. He left the music on low, listening to the Doors’ “LA Woman,” and thought about Kendall’s story of why he’d left LAPD and how vehemently Petroni contradicted it, how personal that was for Petroni. The way Petroni was on me for a while.
He thought of Brandt, the informant Kendall had let him talk to. Was there any chance Petroni was on the take? Of all things, that was hardest to imagine. With his eyes closed he thought of Sophie making love with Nyland and Sophie at the Creekview with Petroni. She was more than a woman alone, she was lost.
He fell asleep in the truck and slept the remaining hours of the night, waking with his cheeks numb from cold and his neck stiff.
The night’s dreams still lingered in him, and he looked at the house, lights out, team asleep. He could go in and make coffee, boil an egg, toast bread, and read the newspapers. Instead, he started the truck, backed out, and drove up an empty Main Street past the Liar’s Bench, Placerville Hardware, the antique shops, and on toward the east side. He parked and went into the Waffle House; he wanted the light and other people. Maybe Petroni would show up. He read the newspapers and made notes to himself.
Later, after he’d paid and was back outside, he called Petroni’s cell phone.
“This is Sophie,” a woman’s voice said. “Billy’s asleep.”
“This is the friend who helped at the bar that night, the Creekview. I need to talk to him.” When had she driven there? “He’s really tired. Can you call back later?”
“Sure, and if I don’t reach him, will you tell him I called?”
Marquez drove up the highway to the Pollock Pines address where Petroni had been house-sitting with Sophie. The old orange Honda was out on the street with a layer of frost on it. Sophie’s Ford pickup was there, her windshield clear of frost, heat still rising from the engine. He thought about parking and knocking on the door but didn’t. Later he would wish he had.