Dark Rivers of the Heart

an unpopulated wasteland that boasted no animals as large as a man, locating and identifying a moving object as large as a Ford Explorer would not be easy, because the territory to be examined was so vast.
        Nevertheless, it could be done.
        Roy said, "He could leave the desert for one highway or another, put the pedal to the metal, and be long gone by morning."
        "Damn few paved roads in this part of the state. We got lookout teams in every direction, on every serious highway and sorry strip of blacktop.
        Interstate Fifteen, Federal Highway Ninety-five, Federal Highway Ninety-three. Plus State Routes One-forty-six, One-fifty-six, One-fifty-eight, One-sixty, One-sixty-eight, and One-sixty-nine.
        Looking' for a green Ford Explorer with some body damage fore and aft.
        Looking' for a man with a dog in any vehicle. Looking' for a man with a big facial scar.
        Hell, we got this whole part of the state locked down tighter than a mosquito's butt."
        "Unless he already got off the desert and back onto a highway before you put your men in place."
        "We moved quick. Anyway, in a storm as bad as that one, going' overland, he made piss-poor time. Fact is, he's damn lucky if he didn't bog down somewhere, four-wheel drive or no four-wheel drive.
        We'll nail the sonofabitch tomorrow."
        "I hope you're right," Roy said.
        "I'd bet my pecker on it."
        "And they say Las Vegas locals aren't big gamblers."
        "How's he tied up with the woman anyway?"
        "I wish I knew," Roy said, watching as lightning flowered softly under the clouds on the leading edge of the storm front. "What about this tape of the conversation between Grant and the old woman?"
        "You want to hear that?"
        "Yes."
        "It starts from when he first says the name Hannah Rainey."
        "Let's give it a listen," Roy said, turning away from the wall display.
        All the way down the hall, into the elevator, and down to the deepest subterranean level of the building, Dubois talked about the best places to get good chili in Vegas, as though he had reason to believe that Roy cared.
        "There's this joint on Paradise Road, the chill's so hot some folks been known to spontaneously combust from eating' it, whoosh, they just go up like torches."
        The lift reached the subbasement.
        "We're talking' chili that makes you sweat from your fingernails, makes your belly button pop out like a meat thermometer."
        The doors slid open.
        Roy stepped into a windowless concrete room.
        Along the far wall were scores of recording machines.
        In the middle of the room, rising from a computer workstation, was the most stunningly gorgeous woman Roy had ever seen, blond and green-eyed, so beautiful that she took his breath away, so beautiful that she set his heart to racing and sent his blood pressure soaring high into the stroke-risk zone, so achingly beautiful that no words could adequately describe her-nor could any music ever written be sweet enough to celebrate her-so beautiful and so incomparable that he couldn't breathe or speak, so radiant that she blinded him to the dreariness of that bunker and left him surrounded by her magnificent light.
        The flood had disappeared over the cliff like bathwater down a tub drain.
        The arroyo was now merely an enormous ditch.
        To a considerable depth, the soil was mostly sand, extremely porous, so the rain had not puddled on it. The downpour had filtered quickly into a deep aquifer. The surface had dried out and firmed up almost as rapidly as the empty channel had previously turned into a racing, spumous river.
        Nevertheless, before she had risked taking the Range Rover into the channel, although the machine was as surefooted as a tank, she had walked the route from the eroded arroyo-wall to the Explorer and checked the condition of the ground. Satisfied that the bed of the ghost river wasn't muddy or soft and that it would provide sufficient traction, she had driven the Rover into that declivity and had backed between the two columns of rock to the suspended Explorer.
        Even now, after rescuing the dog and putting him in the back of the Rover, and after disentangling Grant from his safety harness, she was amazed by the precarious position in which the Explorer had come to rest.
        She was tempted to lean past the unconscious man