Soliano yanked on the driver-side door handle. It was locked. He withdrew his pistol from his waistband holster and with the butt-end smashed the window. He unlocked the door and climbed inside. He rooted around, and when he finally swung out of the truck he was unrolling a sheet of paper.
We gathered around.
It was a map — a schematic — and you had to study it a moment before recognizing the razor-thin lines and sharp angles and precise arcs as a water distribution system. At the top of the diagram was a water storage tank. A pipeline ran downhill, to the Inn, to its bones, its framework, its pipes and faucets and inflows and outflows, its sinks and toilets and tubs and showers, its pool, its lawns, its sprinklers, its stream-cut gardens and water-rich palms.
A post-it note stuck to the map said $10 million — water water everywhere.
Water water everywhere. What if he’s already contaminated it?
My mind raced, inventorying. Water in the glass on the lawn table this morning. Hap drank it. I drank it. Was it bottled? Wouldn’t they serve something like Evian at a place like the Inn? But earlier, breakfast in the room, Walter and I drank coffee and they surely didn’t use Evian to brew the coffee. And before that, a quick shower, water on my lips. And then brushing my teeth. My stomach curdled.
The others, too, looked glazed, looking inward, thinking back, reviewing — what’d I have for breakfast, what’d I have to drink, where and when and in what circumstances have I come in contact with the water over the past twelve hours or is twelve long enough? How long do I need to work backward?
What if the water’s not happy?
Soliano recovered first. He was on his cell. “The water main. Shut it off.”
“We have the target,” Soliano told the small crowd he’d assembled. “Proceed on the assumption that it has been hit. If it has not, assume that it will be hit, if not now, then one minute from now.”
“Hit how?” a baby-faced agent asked.
“Radioactive material, either in a cask or loosed. You will divide into teams, each team consisting of my agents and RERT members who will monitor for radioactive traces. You will search every nook and cranny of the Inn and its grounds — most specifically, the water system.” Soliano addressed the baby-faced agent. “Andre, you will coordinate, with the concomitant objective of locating Roy Jardine.”
Andre scowled. “What if he’s poofed?”
“His vehicle is here,” Soliano snapped, “so you will proceed on the assumption that he has not poofed.”
Andre moved.
Soliano said, “Full ninja.”
My chest thumped.
Soliano was on the phone again. “Secure the annex. Every room. No person goes in, no person goes out.”
The teams fissioned. Soliano and Walter and I made up our own team, with the object of doing a room check.
There was no one in sight on the annex walkway but Special Agent Hal Dearing, a sunburned monolith with a peeling nose and a Sig Sauer in hand. Nobody’d come out, he said. Not since the doctor came and Hap Miller left, about an hour ago. Miller, whom Dearing would trust about as far as he could throw him, had said he was going for a walk.
“Going for a walk where?” Soliano said.
Dearing shrugged.
Soliano phoned Andre and told him to put out a BOLO for Hap Miller.
Be On the Lookout — that one I knew. Try a lounge chair somewhere, I thought, or the sauna room. I looked at the lawn, at the table where Hap told me a couple of hours ago that he’s staying put, safe and sound here at the Inn. Only, looks like the Inn is Jardine’s target. I doubted Hap would appreciate the irony. Then again, maybe Hap knows the Inn is the target. Maybe he’s in on it. Maybe that’s why he left.
Soliano brushed past Dearing and opened the door to his room.
I glimpsed, inside, a doctor in hospital scrubs with a saddlebag gut, adjusting the IV that fed into Chickie’s inert arm.
Soliano moved to the next room and banged on the door. “Mr. Ballinger!” He tried the knob. “Milt?” He drew his pistol and broke the window. He looked inside then spun on Dearing.
Dearing’s sunburn radiated. “Didn’t know he wasn’t in there.”
I said, “What about Pria? I gave her my key.”
Walter shot me an incredulous look.
Dearing went purple. “Nobody came out of nowhere.”
I looked around. No Hap, no Milt, no Pria. No Roy. Empty lawn, empty walkways, empty rooftops. Everybody’s poofed.
We took off. Walter went for his room and I stopped at mine. I knocked, then Soliano shouldered me aside. He banged on the door and shouted “open up,” as if Pria had barricaded herself inside, as if Jardine were holding a gun to her head or a glass of water to her lips. Before Soliano could bring out his gun and break my window, Walter opened my door from the inside. He had to have come through the adjoining door that linked our rooms into a two-room suite.
I said, “She’s in the bathroom.”
Walter and Soliano stood aside.
I opened the bathroom door. She was not there but she oh-so-clearly had been there. Even as I shifted to allow them a look, I could not take my eyes from the bathtub with its porcelain scummed almost to the tiled rim.
She’d taken a bath.
Shit.
“Where is she?” Walter asked, eerily calm, as if there were some logical progression from the tub to the place she would naturally go next. To Soliano’s room? All scrubbed for her mom, only to find her mom sedated by the paunchy doctor? And so she went elsewhere.
I hoped for that.
Soliano was on the phone, trying to reach Aunt Ruth.
Walter said, brittle-calm, “She had to have left through my room.”
He led Soliano through the adjoining door. I stayed behind. I figured they’d find the sliding door unlocked that led from Walter’s bedroom out to the tiny veranda that had so impressed Hap, and bordering the veranda they’d find a stone wall that any one of us but Walter could scale on the first try. And on the other side of that wall they’d find the walkway that led away from the main walkway where Dearing stood useless guard. Which was why Dearing in all honesty could say nobody came out of nowhere.
She’d left unseen, but had she left alone?
I braced a hand against the doorjamb. How would Roy Jardine know she was in my room? How would he know who was in what room? And if he did, why not go into Soliano’s room and take care of Chickie, who knows what he does not want told, along with the doctor who is trying to save her life?
Because he’d have to go through Dearing, the monolith with the Sig Sauer.
But still, why go after Pria? Does Roy Jardine know Pria from Adam?
Well, it’s my room and he knows me.
I heard Soliano and Walter stampeding through Walter’s suite and then I heard Walter’s door crash open and slam shut.
I stared at the bathtub. How long had she soaked? I feared I was going to be sick. I moved for the toilet. I had to kick aside the wet towels humped on the floor. The toilet seat was up. There was no paper left on the roll. I changed my mind and went to the sink for a tissue to wipe my face. There were none left. Soiled tissues papered the counter. Her used bandaid clung to the mirror. I turned away. The tub was worse. Gels and shampoos drained their last and made a purple slick along the bottom. The drain was plugged by a nest of black hairs.
She’d used everything. She’d gorged. She’d finally got a room at the Inn.
Pity convulsed me.
I stared into the tub. I could see the path made when the water drained. It had cut a channel through the purple slick. My vision suddenly jumped, to the giant fan Walter and I had hiked after being stranded. I saw again the fan rocks coated in black desert varnish and I felt again the heat they threw off. I felt the relief when Walter and I took shelter in the coolness of the channel that was unvarnished, that had been washed clean by floodwaters. I saw how the unvarnished channel ran down the fan and then snaked out onto the saltpan. My legs cramped, now, like I was wading again across the white floodplain.