No Immunity

gust of wind sent the truck half off the road. Kiernan braced her elbows against her chest and held steady.
    Jeff had called her here. Connie had gotten her out. And Fox? No question why the locals were edgy around Fox. But what had encouraged the man to this desolate area? There was beauty here, all right, and the wild openness appealed to Kiernan. But Fox was not the kind of guy to choose a small town like Gattozzi. Fox, Jeff Tremaine, Connie, and the dead woman—what had drawn them together?
    The road shifted back and forth, never cutting through a hummock if there was the possibility of a wide loop around it. Connie’s lights were blinked by the land. If she had a homestead ahead, no building was visible. There was no turning back, no possible place to turn. It was like driving into a sock. She crested a summit. Wind broadsided the truck. She wedged her hands harder on the wheel— would a little regular auto maintenance have killed Jesse?
    Irrationally she had expected something at the summit—what? The Top of the Mark, with maybe a revolving bar?—but the road was the mirror image of what she’d just traversed, now headed down. Trees clumped closer to the road, the surface smoothed out, and as if she realized Kiernan had hit the good road, Connie shot ahead.
    Feeling back in her own element for the first time today, Kiernan pressed on the gas pedal. The old truck lurched forward, gasping for a moment until the wheels caught up with the engine.
    A clearing materialized before her. She couldn’t tell where the road was. She needed to slow down, but she couldn’t chance losing Connie. The truck lurched to the right. She yanked the wheel. Too late. The hood was going down. She smashed the brake pedal to the floor as the wheels spun. Then the truck stopped dead.
    Kiernan sat, still gripping the wheel. In front of her was a hole that hadn’t existed a minute earlier. Bracing her feet against the floorboard against the angle of the cab, she peered down the line of the headlights into the ground. Was it ten feet deep? Fifteen? Twenty? She turned off the headlights and peered into the dark. The hole had to be forty feet wide. It wasn’t a sinkhole, the kind that erode at a gentlemanly pace. This had to be an abandoned mine. The roof had caved in leaving a huge underground hole. The truck’s front wheels were poised on the edge.

CHAPTER 32

    Cecil McGuire wanted to pinch himself. The whole thing was like one of those dreams you can’t get out of. He’d never had the college dream his educated friends laughed about, but chasers, he’d had plenty of them at night, like the one where he went to meet a new client and opened his door and found himself in an alley that smelled of shit, with rats big as rottweilers, and he kept running around the alley trying to find the door he came in, but all he could see was plain brick wall a million feet high. This case, following the baby dick Tchernak, was getting like j that. When Adcock told him they were headed north on 93, it was like the door out of the alley. Action, instead of this pussyfooting around here. And now, Tchernak ignores the freeway like he’s a city bus or something and here he is pulling into Grady Hummacher’s driveway again.
    Was the guy such a novice he was knocking off for the night? Did he think this was a nine-to-fiver, with maybe an hour off in the afternoon to go to the dentist?
    More to the point—the Weasel groaned—did this mean he was in for another night slumped behind the ‘Cuda’s steering wheel? Tourists pictured Vegas as sun and sand and air-conditioning and tropical strolls between the casinos and maybe a moonlight swim in the palm-rimmed pool. Here in November he’d have been better off sitting over a subway grate.
    Inside Hummacher’s house the living-room lights were on. Tchernak was probably settling in with a beer from Hummacher’s fridge and the late movie on the tube.
    The Weasel shifted. He could use a beer, a movie, a burger, a leak. He eased out of the car, not letting the door close completely so that there’d be no sound. Tchernak was watching out for him. Keeping the car and the house door in sight, McGuire slipped into the bushes and took his leak.
    As he zipped up, he made a decision. The phone was three blocks away, but what the hell, he knew where the baby dick was supposed to be going. He slid into his car and started the engine. The blue BMW across the street, was it the same one? He hesitated, then drove