Bone Music (Burning Girl #1)(92)

32

They should have made him wait outside the trailer, Charlotte realizes now.

Then, once she and Marty took the measure of both packages and realized how completely strange the contents of the bigger one were, they could have sent Luke on his way without letting him into the next level of this.

But they didn’t, so he’s up to date on everything. And now she feels stuck with him.

He’s standing with her on Altamira’s windswept beach, the whitecaps making frenzied love to Bayard Rock just offshore. Thanks to the mountains behind them, it feels like they’re much farther away from Marty’s trailer than they actually are.

Cell phone service out here’s lousy, but apparently it’s good enough for Marty’s text message to reach Luke’s phone.

“Clear as a bell,” Luke reports.

“That’s just . . .”

“Impossible?” he asks.

She nods, but she feels like a fool for saying so. In this strange new world, how can she know what is or isn’t possible? How can she know the first thing about a pair of contact lenses capable of transmitting crystal clear images of everything she sees?

They looked innocent enough at first. But the note with them felt threatening.

WEAR THEM WHILE YOU WORK.

Also in the box, an eight-inch tablet that didn’t bear the logo of any tech company she was familiar with; when they powered it on, an entry blank appeared in the middle of a black square. The passkey came inside a felt pouch; a digital counter containing seven digits. Every thirty seconds, the last number changed; every minute, the second. The third number took a minute and a half to change, and by the time they figured that out, they were all in agreement that every number in the sequence probably changed after a specific interval of time, so if you lost the passkey, there was no accessing the website that captured the contacts’ transmission.

She has no idea how the transmission’s getting from the contacts to the website, but she doubts it’s something easily intercepted like Bluetooth or a cell connection. For all she knows, the damn things have a direct connection to a satellite. They’d been so dazzled by the tech, they’d almost forgotten about the second package, the one with the plastic bag full of Zypraxon.

“Let’s head north,” Luke suggests now.

A few minutes later they’ve climbed the perilous stone steps back to PCH and are headed up the coast in Luke’s cruiser. She’s got his cell phone in her lap so he can drive, and the texts from Marty keep coming. Little comments on everything he’s seeing through her eyes while he sits in his trailer with the tablet. At least he’s a good driver . . . You’re coming up on one of my favorite trees . . . Looked like he got pretty close to that Camry. Is he distracted? . . . Ugh. A RAV4. Hate those. They look like a toddler’s shoe with tires on it.

They’re thirty minutes up the coast now.

“Any drop?” Luke finally asks.

“Nope.”

“Damn,” Luke whispers, “so they’re definitely watching, too.”

“I think that’s the whole point.”

“I need to head back, make a pass through town before I bring you to Marty’s so Mona thinks I’m on patrol.”

There’s a question lurking in the way he said bring you back to Marty’s. Should she answer it? Is she ready to decide whether she should let him back in? Maybe there’s a better way. Make him earn it.

“So what’s your assessment?” she asks.

“Of what?”

“Of these,” she says, pointing to her eyes, and the impossible, undetectable technology they contain. “Of what they’re doing with the resort.”

Luke furrows his brow, chews his bottom lip, signs he’s considering his answer carefully because he knows this is an audition. “You said when Dylan called you the other day he didn’t seem to know what you guys did at that bar, right?”

“Correct,” she answers. “Or he didn’t mention it, at least.”

“And why wouldn’t he, if he was trying to frighten you? I mean, he had no qualms about giving you my name and telling you stuff about that field we were in.”

“So you’re saying he didn’t know about me and those two wannabe rapists.”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“OK. So what do you think that means?”

“Whatever his plans for you out in the desert, he wasn’t prepared to put eyes on you right away. It took him a day to get the kind of surveillance in place that would scare the crap out of you. Scare you out of sending my brother after him anyway.”

A little dig there, she thinks, but I’ll forgive him if he keeps coming up with strong theories.

“Keep going,” she says.

“I think whoever he’s working with, he had to go to them at the last minute because his initial plan didn’t go the way he wanted it to. Or maybe he was forced to go to them sooner than he wanted to.”

“OK.”

“And that’s interesting.”

“How so?”

“Because both possibilities suggest Graydon wasn’t in on his original plan. Which might also mean they’re not all that happy about what he’s doing. Which might also mean the relationship between the two of them has . . . weaknesses.”