Gone (Michael Bennett)

noticed how young he was. He was just a cute sixteen- or seventeen-year-old kid.
    “I didn’t mean to startle you,” he said. “I’m Kevin. Kevin Norberg, Mr. Cody’s neighbor. You did wander onto our property, but don’t worry about it. The property lines are tricky. There actually is a shortcut back to Mr. Cody’s ranch, through our farm. I’ll show it to you if you want.”
    Mary Catherine paused for a beat, then took a breath.
    “OK,” she said. “Thanks.”
    She followed the kid off the path. She stared at the gun. It looked like a deer rifle. Was he out hunting? Spike hesitated once as the dirt trail descended through a gap in an outcropping of rocks, but she finally encouraged him to go through.
    When they came out on the other side, Mary Catherine saw what at first she thought was a grove of tightly grown baby evergreen trees. But as she got closer, she could see that the long, neat rows of green weren’t trees at all but plants. Plants about nine feet high, with leaves that had long, thin light-green fingers and purplish buds with a strong, sweet smell, almost fruity.
    It was marijuana, Mary Catherine realized when she took a breath. Acres upon acres of pungent marijuana.
    She remembered then what Brian had told her about the encounter at the food bank. The kids there claiming that marijuana was the area’s largest crop. She looked out at the green sea of pot they were skirting. She knew that California’s Central Valley grew a huge amount of the country’s food, but that wasn’t the only thing the valley was supplying to the nation, apparently.
    Is it actually legal? she wondered . A medical-marijuana farm?
    Kevin, leading the way ahead of her, certainly didn’t act like his family farm had anything to hide. He couldn’t have been calmer if they had been strolling through Central Park. Or was that because of the rifle on his back?
    Mary Catherine decided to keep her questions to herself.
    “You sit that horse well, ma’am,” Kevin said as they walked through the forest of cannabis. “Are you working for Mr. Cody?”
    “No, just, um, visiting,” Mary Catherine said as calmly as she could.
    “From where? Scotland?”
    “Ireland, actually.”
    “Oh,” Kevin said with a nod, blushing a little. “I love the accent.”
    “Thanks,” Mary Catherine said brightly.
    “How you liking your stay so far?”
    “It’s a beautiful country,” Mary Catherine said.
    “You like country,” the kid said, “you’ve hit the jackpot.”
    They came upon a greenhouse. It was swathed in white plastic and had a table inside, covered with Styrofoam cups. Each cup had a little pot plant in it, like it was part of show-and-tell at a hippie kindergarten.
    On the other side of the building, in the distance, there was a white-haired woman in a gardener’s smock, squatting in a ditch. She was attaching some PVC pipes together in the middle of an elaborate irrigation system. She waved, and Kevin waved back.
    “That’s my mom,” Kevin said.
    Mom was also armed, Mary Catherine couldn’t help but note. In a holster on her hip was one humongous, long-barreled silver revolver. It was a .44 Magnum, Mary Catherine realized. She’d never actually seen one outside of a Clint Eastwood movie.
    This really was the Wild West, she thought, feeling a little dizzy.
    After another hundred yards, Kevin let her out through a cattle gate and pointed down the red dirt road.
    “You follow this till you get to the creek, and then you’ll see Mr. Cody’s silo down the hill.”
    “Thanks, Kevin,” Mary Catherine said, riding Spike through the gate. “It was nice meeting you.”
    “You, too, ma’am,” the polite young dope farmer said, with a tip of his hat, as Mary Catherine rode away.

CHAPTER 40
     
    WHITE LIGHT FLASHED IN the pitch black and began fluttering. After a moment, a low and insistent electronic buzzing began sounding off, the measured pulses synched with the flutter of the light.
    Vida Gomez woke in the back upstairs bedroom of the safe house on South Alta Vista Boulevard in La Brea. She sat up and unplugged the charger from the encrypted cartel cell phone as she lifted it from the nightstand.
    For a fraction of a second, she stared at the green Accept and red Reject buttons on the smartphone’s screen. The more accurate choice would be Live or Die , she thought, finally accepting the call with a callused thumb.
    She didn’t say hello. In fact, she didn’t speak once. She just sat in the dark,