Quicksilver(63)

“Makes sense,” Sparky said.

“You should stay here to look after Panthea,” Bridget said.

“No, no. I can look out for myself,” the seer insisted.

Bridget shook her head. “Three of us going down there in the dead of night, we’re liable to unnerve Mr. Beebs.”

“First, it’s not the dead of night,” her grandfather said. “It’s not even ten o’clock. Second, just the two of you going down there, you’re more likely to end up in a stew pot.”

Bridget was having none of it. “It’s best for you to stay here behind the wheel, the engine running, just in case we have to make a quick exit. We can’t risk having this vehicle taken from us until we have another.”

At first answering her argument with silence, Sparky finally said, “What’s this about? Why don’t you want me going down there?”

He didn’t know she’d had a presentiment that one of us would die or that she was afraid it would be him because he would become too protective of her.

“All right, Grandpa, it’s just this. You look tough and ready to kick ass. You look like what you once were, full of righteous authority, a cop’s cop, a soldier’s soldier, and the very something that we don’t talk about. You look like all of that, and sometimes, with someone fragile like Hakeem Kaspar, you scare them when scaring them isn’t what we need to do.”

Astonished, Sparky said, “I scared Hakeem?”

In fact, he hadn’t scared Hakeem, but his granddaughter had alighted on an argument that Sparky found potentially convincing. She pressed it hard. “Oh, you scared him silly, Grandpa. Didn’t he, Quinn?”

“Silly,” I agreed.

“So if we go down there to see Mr. Beebs and he turns out to be a pitiful eccentric and a fragile soul like Hakeem, which I suspect he might be, judging by this sign of his, he’ll take one look at you and freak out. He’ll be certain you’re FBI or something worse, that you’re there to entrap him, and then we’ll never make a deal. But if I go down there with just Quinn, it’ll be a whole different story. My Quinn can handle himself—you know he can—but he looks like a big goof, a whiffet, about as threatening as Mary Poppins, which is just the kind of backup I need for this.”

I thought Sparky might come to my defense and insist that I looked at least as threatening as Tinker Bell, but he said, “Okay, yeah, I get your point.”

He passed rolls of hundred-dollar bills to us. I distributed five in my jacket pockets, and Bridget tucked five away in hers.

My moon goddess and I got out of the car, and I met her at Wallace Eugene Beebs’s sign.

As Sparky came around to occupy the driver’s seat, Panthea put down her window and said, “I’m pretty sure neither of you will die tonight.”

Although I knew she was capable of jujitsuing me into a human pretzel, she looked like such a tiny person there in the back seat, heartbreakingly vulnerable, as is everyone ever born. “Stay alert,” I urged. “Be careful.”

“I’m not saying that one of you won’t be grievously injured or seriously wounded,” Panthea explained, “but it’s most unlikely that you’ll die here tonight.”

“Thanks for the clarification,” I said.

Sparky got into the Explorer and pulled the door shut, and Panthea put her window up.

Bridget and I turned and stepped off the highway, into the autonomous zone, where the laws of the United States did not apply.





|?27?|

Bridget and I stayed off the unpaved track, proceeding overland approximately fifteen yards parallel to it, in case there might be sensors or a guard to alert Wallace Beebs that we were approaching. The terrain gave us little to use as cover; but we were wearing dark clothes, and the moon was half wrapped in ragged clouds.

“Mary Poppins?” I whispered.

“You can be my governess any day,” Bridget said, “and I’ll do exactly what you tell me. Thanks for backing me up on that bit about scaring Hakeem.”

After the downpour, I expected the ground to be muddy, but for the most part it wasn’t. I supposed this territory was essentially a sandbox, and water quickly drained through.

Now that the night was clearing, I wondered if seething swarms of spring insects would erupt into the air, as advertised, followed by a pandemonium of bats feeding in flight. Having been delayed by bad weather, maybe they would just say to hell with it and wait until tomorrow night.

As anticipated, the flats led to a long slope and a glen that lay about a hundred feet below. The floor of the vale wasn’t a realm of gravel stone and mesquite and sagebrush, as I had expected, but in part an oasis with palms and other trees, which must mean that an aquifer provided ample water effortlessly obtained.

Porch lamps and soft light spilling from windows suggested a prefab log house that looked no less out of place in this territory than would have an igloo. It wasn’t a weekend-getaway cabin but a sizable residence, perhaps as much as three thousand square feet. Like Hakeem Kaspar, Wallace Beebs evidently produced electricity with a sound-shielded propane-powered generator.

Moonlight shaped another structure about fifty yards from the first, although that one didn’t appear to be a house. As large as the residence, its lines simpler, at the moment without lights, it might have been a barn or a storage building, and it, too, was shaded by trees.