Quicksilver(14)

“License plates,” I said. “Nearly every police car and a lot of other government vehicles are fitted with three-hundred-sixty-degree plate scanners. They transmit to the National Security Agency’s Utah Data Center in real time. Where were you coming from?”

“Flagstaff,” she said.

“Oh, sure, you’d have been scanned a few times along the way. Then maybe they tapped archived satellite video and found where you went from the last time you were captured by a scan.”

They regarded me with something like awe, impressed with my street smarts, as if I’d been raised by gangbangers instead of nuns.

“I’ll strip the plate off my car, which I took from a Porsche in a parking garage, and we’ll swap it for yours. It’s not a long-term solution, but it’ll buy us some time.”

They returned to the barn with me, to retrieve their luggage, supplies, and blankets from the hayloft, where they had intended to hide for a few days while they figured things out.

The Toyota had no windshield, one flat tire, and the tired look of machinery that no longer understands its purpose. It was leaking radiator fluid. When I got behind the wheel, the dead agent pinned between the car and the wall appeared to be shouting accusations.

The urge to vomit did not return. I didn’t know what these men had intended to do to Bridget, but I was not so naive as to believe that their every action would have been according to the provisions in a neatly typed warrant. Furthermore, I’d seen enough movies about the Mafia to know that guys who were tied up and stuffed into car trunks, like Grandpa Sparky, were either going to be crushed and compacted along with the vehicle in a scrap-metal salvage yard or driven to a construction site, shot, dumped in a deep hole, and buried under many yards of concrete, becoming part of an office building foundation. I hadn’t already become desensitized to violence, but for sure I was coming to terms with the true dark nature of this world much faster than I would have while writing about our state’s colorful past for Arizona! magazine.

The car didn’t start. Then it did—coughing, shuddering. I reversed, and the dead guy slid to the barn floor, out of sight. I needed just a few minutes to unscrew the Porsche’s plate.

When I carried my luggage behind the barn, Bridget was closing an open suitcase that lay in the trunk of the Buick.

Sparky stood near her, inserting a pistol into a holster on his right hip.

I heard myself say, “You’ve got a gun,” as if this would be news to him.

“I should’ve been wearing it when those bastards took us by surprise. I thought we were safe here.” He pulled on a sport coat. “I’ve had things too soft for too long. I should’ve remembered—no one is ever safe anywhere.”

With the Porsche plate on the Buick, as I drove away from the Sweetwater Flying F Ranch with Bridget riding shotgun and Sparky in the back seat, the sun broke like a bloody yolk on the sharp horizon and the purple of twilight was preceded by the red sky at night that is supposedly every sailor’s delight.

In less than six hours, I’d gone from being just another hungry customer of Beane’s Diner to a fugitive hunted by the closest thing the US has to a secret police. Most likely I would soon be charged with two murders that were actually acts of self-defense committed while in the grip of a strange magnetism that compelled me to rescue a young woman and her grandfather, whom I hadn’t known existed until I drove more than seventy miles and crashed through a barn door to free them. When I brought that story before a court, at trial, I’d probably be the first person burned at the stake in centuries.





|?7?|

Rumor had it that the ISA employed more agents and support staff than the FBI, although that could have been wild social media speculation. Regardless of the truth, they suffered no shortage of manpower, and the nearest large city where they maintained an office was surely Phoenix. The called-for backup was probably on its way to the Flying F Ranch both by ground transport and helicopter.

Because the elderly Buick was conspicuous, south of Wickenburg we departed federal highway US 60—which the ISA would follow coming out of Phoenix—and we headed east on State Route 74. Eventually, to get around the city, we would weave through a few suburbs—Scottsdale, Tempe—on a series of surface streets and connect with Interstate 10 heading southbound to Tucson.

I told them I had been abandoned at birth, raised by nuns, and had a plan that involved driving to Peptoe to research my origins.

Before I could explain further, Sparky said, “We’re short of a plan ourselves, and we seem to be in this together, so your plan is now our plan, if you don’t mind.”

I considered Bridget long enough that the Buick drifted onto the shoulder of the highway, requiring me to recover with a sudden hard pull of the wheel. “Yeah. That’s good. That’s great. We’re in this together, whatever the heck ‘this’ is.”

Bridget and Sparky wanted to know when the ISA came after me and how I escaped, so I told them about my day, beginning with the unfinished three-cheese hamburger and ending with the barn door that proved to be a mere curtain of dry rot.

Then I said, “When did you end up in their sights?”

“The day before yesterday,” Sparky said from the back seat. “We had a nice little house on five acres of pine forest in Flagstaff.”

Bridget said, “Deer used to come look in our windows. They were so sweet.”