St Kilda Consulting 04 - Blue Smoke and Murder

the highway and was trying to more or less match the speed of the Cadillac on the desert floor. It was tricky. The opposition had Jill running back and forth and around like a hamster on a bent wheel.
    The only good news was that she was a Western driver—eighty miles per hour unless she hit a straightaway, then up to ninety.
    Talk about going nowhere fast. Zach shook his head and told himself to be patient.
    The Escalade sat beside the front door of the gas station. Through the binoculars, he followed Jill as she came out of the station and stood beside the car, sat phone in one hand, BlackBerry in her belly bag. He could hear her end of any conversation.
    “Now what,” she said impatiently into her sat phone.
    Silence.
    “Yes, I’m filling up on gas at a price that makes the paintings look cheap.”
    More silence while she listened.
    “Again? I’m getting tired of that stretch of highway. Yeah, yeah. Whatever.”
    Zach wondered when and where the opposition was going to stop playing games. The sun was already sliding down the sky, heading toward the western horizon and the dark velvet twilight of a summer desert evening.
    His sat/cell vibrated. He hit the connect button, read the caller ID, and said, “Nothing new.”
    Faroe wasn’t any happier than he was. “They’ve had enough chance to vet Jill and everyone else on the highway. Are they waiting for dark?”
    “Wouldn’t you?”
    “Craptastic.”
    “I’ll take that as a yes,” Zach said. “The good news is that it will make it easier for her to escape, if it comes to that.”
    “The bad news is that in the dark, you’ll have to tighten up the chase units. Actually, that’s good. We’ve switched chase vehicles four times. Won’t need to worry as much about being made after dark.”
    “This has to be hard on Jill’s nerves,” Zach said.
    “Worry about your own. She’s solid. Steele is already making noises about signing her up as an op.”
    “Is that good or bad?” Zach shot back.
    “Not our choice, is it?”
    Faroe broke the connection.
    Zach wanted to put his fist through the thin aluminum skin of the airplane. Instead he took a few slow breaths and turned hot impatience into the cold stillness of a predator. He wouldn’t be any good for Jill if he was on the breaking edge of frustration.
    Quick playing jerk-around, you bastard. It’s time to party.

77
    INDIAN SPRINGS, NEVADA
SEPTEMBER 17
6:16 P.M.
    J ill leaned against the car and let the gas feed in through the battered metal nozzle. The long, straight highway just beyond the gas station cut across an alluvial fan that spread gracefully down the mountains to the desert floor. Just the sight of the dry ridges and shadowed ravines of the mountains loosened her tension. She knew that the desert was frightening to some people, boring to others. To her the desert was clean, spare, whispering of endless space for the mind and soul to run free.
    She itched to paint the land almost as much as she itched to touch Zach again. She didn’t know if that was good or bad. She only knew it was as real as the metal towers marching away over the dry land, their arms holding lines that hummed with power.
    The highway itself was an intrusion, but not as much as the heavy lines draped from steel towers. She looked through them, beyond them, to the majestic wild, lonely landscape that Thomas Dunstan—or her grandmother—had captured so indelibly.
    To the right of the Cadillac, a knot of cottonwoods swept the wind with restless leaves. Their fluttering green announced the presence of water in a dry land. The cottonwoods had been herewhen the Indian Springs canvas had been painted. The trees were still there, still restless, still shouting of cool water in a dry, relentless wilderness.
    Jill let her glance roam the landscape, seeing with the eyes of her grandmother. Take away the power lines, and the area had changed very little since Indian Springs had been painted. The gas station had evolved from a ramshackle frame building with two antique pumps into a sand-and sun-blasted metal structure with four pumps out front, but the trees and the fault line of little springs running along the base of the mountains looked the same.
    Where are you, Zach?
    Ten thousand feet overhead.
    Somewhere.
    Out of reach.
    What’s the big deal? I’ve spent a lot of my life alone.
    But death threats took a little more time to get used to.
    Shaking off the edgy feeling, Jill went into the station, used the bathroom,