Shadowfires

time to adjust the bodies to fit our scenario.”
    What the hell am I going to do? Peake wondered as he piloted the
sedan north along the lake, looking for a red-and-white iron
rooster.
On another road, State Route 138, Rachael had
left Lake Arrowhead behind. She was approaching Silverwood Lake,
where the scenery of the high San Bernardinos was even more
breathtaking-though she had no eye for scenery in her current state
of mind.
    From Silverwood, 138 led out of the mountains and almost due west
until it connected with Interstate 15. There, she intended to stop
for gasoline, then follow 15 north and east, all the way across the
desert to Las Vegas. That was a drive of more than two hundred miles
over some of the most starkly beautiful and utterly desolate land on
the continent, and even under the best of circumstances, it could be
a lonely journey.
    Benny, she thought, I wish you were here.
    She passed a lightning-blasted tree that reached toward the sky
with dead black limbs.
    The white clouds that had recently appeared were getting thicker.
A few of them were not white.
In the empty garage, Ben saw a two-inch-by-
four-inch patch of boot-tread pattern imprinted on the concrete floor
in some oily fluid that glistened in the beams of intruding sunlight.
He knelt and put his nose to the spot. He was certain that the vague
smell of beef gravy was not an imaginary scent.
    The tread mark must have been here when he and Rachael returned to
the car with the Wildcard pages, but he had not noticed it.
    He got up and moved farther into the garage, studying the floor
closely, and in only a few seconds he saw a small moist brown glob
about half the size of a pea. He touched his finger to it, brought
the finger to his nose. Peanut butter. Carried here on the sole or
heel of one of Eric Leben's boots while Ben and Rachael were in the living room, busily stuffing the Wildcard file into the garbage bag.
    Returning here with Rachael and the file, Ben had been in a hurry
because it had seemed to him that the most important thing was to get
her out of the cabin and off the mountain before either Eric or the
authorities showed up. So he had not looked down and had not noticed
the tread mark or the peanut butter. And, of course, he'd seen no reason to search for signs of Eric in places he had searched only minutes earlier. He could not have anticipated this cleverness from a man with devastating brain injuries-a walking dead man who, if he followed at all in the pattern of the lab mice, should be somewhat disoriented, deranged, mentally and emotionally unstable. Therefore, Ben could not blame himself; no, he had done the right thing when he had sent Rachael off in the Mercedes, thinking he was sending her away all by herself, never realizing that she was not alone in the car. How could he have realized? It was the only thing he could have done. It was not at all his fault, this unforeseeable development was not his fault, not his fault-but he cursed himself vehemently.
    Waiting in the kitchen with the ax, listening to them plan their
next moves as they stood in the garage, Eric must have realized that
he had a chance of getting Rachael alone, and evidently that prospect
appealed to him so much that he was willing to forgo a whack at Ben.
He'd hidden beside the refrigerator until they were in the living room, then crept into the garage, took the keys from the ignition, quietly opened the trunk, returned the keys to the ignition, climbed into the trunk, and pulled the lid shut behind himself.
    If Rachael had a flat tire and opened the trunk…
    Or if, on some quiet stretch of desert highway, Eric decided to
kick the back seat of the car off its mountings and climb through
from the trunk…
    His heart pounding so hard that it shook him, Ben raced out of the
garage toward the rental Ford in front of the cabin.
Jerry Peake spotted the red-and-white iron
rooster mounted atop one mailbox of ten. He turned into a narrow
branch road that led up a steep slope past widely separated driveways
and past houses mostly hidden in the forest that encroached from both
sides.
    Sharp had finished screwing silencers on both thirty-eights. Now
he took two fully loaded spare magazines from the attaché case, kept
one for himself, and put the other beside the pistol that he had
provided for Peake. “I'm glad you're with me on this one, Jerry.”
    Peake had not actually said that he was with Sharp on this one,
and in fact he