She produced a sharp cry of pain, her blood mixing with the alpha’s saliva, smearing its teeth and gums with red-laced foam.
Kuhl saw the open cell phone drop from her hand and go clattering to the floor as the great canine held her arm in its bite. He came around the counter, slid the phone out of her reach with his booted toe, and reached down for it.
It was an UpLink, he noted aridly.
Kuhl examined its backlit main display screen and determined there was no active connection. Then he pressed the mouse key and went through its menu selections until he found the call history feature. The Gordian daughter’s recently dialed phone numbers appeared in the order the calls had been placed. Satisfied that the last she had made was not a 911, he highlighted the number and pressed SEND to determine who the recipient might have been.
An answering machine picked up after two rings, its greeting in the Gordian child’s voice — her home phone. Kuhl disconnected. Most likely the purpose of her call had been to remotely check incoming messages, but he wanted to assure himself she had not left a message intended to alert anyone who might discover it as to precisely what had occurred here.
When they learned, it would be at his will.
Poised over his captive behind the shop counter, Kuhl turned his MP5 down at her, peripherally aware his men had gathered in the small back room to his right. Sorge and Arek sat at wait behind him.
“Give me your remote play-back code,” he told her.
Silent in her pain, her eyes bright with defiance, she glared at him over the barrel of the submachine gun. Blood dripped from her arm over the alpha’s clamped, bristling jaws.
There was, Kuhl realized, much of the father in her.
He pushed his weapon closer to her face, decided to make a threat of what already had been done.
“The code,” he said. “Give it to me, or I will order the woman and infant in the house downhill killed.”
She kept looking up at Kuhl, her eyes boring into his own.
“I do not bluff,” he said.
A flicker of hesitation on her features. A blink. Then her silence broke.
“Six-four-eight-two,” she said.
Kuhl recalled the home phone number, interrupted her recorded greeting with the code. There were no incoming messages stored in the machine.
Good, he thought. His assumption had been correct. She hadn’t had time for hasty warnings.
Kuhl hit the END button again, moved the scroll bar down to the next listed number, and then dialed it as an added precaution. He listened to a prerecorded announcement for the business hours of a sporting goods shop. Yet another prosaic call.
Good and better.
“The people down at the house,” the Gordian daughter said in a croaking voice. Her arm still locked in the alpha’s mouth. “I don’t know what you want from me… but promise you won’t hurt them.”
Kuhl said nothing. He motioned to his men.
They closed in around her, rifles leveled.
“Wait, please.” A single tear spilled from the corner of her eye and tracked down her cheek. “My dog… at least let me take a look at the dog… I can’t just leave her—”
Kuhl interrupted her with a shake of his head.
“No, my caged robin,” he said. His face set. “No promises, no negotiation.”
TEN
It was nine o’clock when Rob Howell finally saw the wood-burned sign marking his hidden drive in front of him. As he sloshed his Camaro toward the foot of the drive, Rob glanced up at the utility pole near the PG&E routing station across the road and didn’t see any downed or sagging phone wires, but knew he couldn’t draw any conclusions from that alone. A service outage could have occurred elsewhere in the grid, or resulted from a loose contact that would be discernible only on close inspection.
What couldn’t have been more evident was that the area had been under heavy showers for a while. The concrete circle around the station where utility workers would sometimes park had been set off the road at a slight incline, and Rob didn’t remember ever noticing a significant rain buildup on its surface. But a deep sheet of water had covered and overflowed the empty apron, gurgling down its lip to swell the drainage culvert at the margin of the blacktop.
Rob’s quick glance at the station evoked a twinge of residual annoyance at the two power-company vehicles that had sped past him in the opposite direction about five miles back, soon after he’d turned onto Pescadero Creek road at the Highway 84 junction. A van and a wagon, he recalled that he’d seen them hurrying toward him on the deluged road, slowed his car, and expected their drivers to do the same out of common sense — if not simple courtesy. Instead they’d continued along at a full tear and splashed his windshield with a blinding curtain of water that threw him into a brief swerve. Rob had been astounded by their recklessness, and was certain he’d have landed in a ditch if his experienced driver’s reflexes had been a whit slower.
But there were other things to occupy his mind right now. Pulling into the driveway, Rob glimpsed Julia’s Honda Passport straight ahead outside the rescue center, then saw his doddering old Ford pickup over to the left next to his house. These seemed sure signs that both Julia and his wife were around. The big question, then, was where?
Rob drove the thirty feet or so toward the house, coasted left onto the dirt-and-gravel track branching toward it, and suddenly heard the dogs barking like crazy out back in their pen.
A sense of foreboding crept over him. There was no way Cynth would leave them in the pen under any circumstance, not in this torrent. What they were doing outside? And what in the world could possibly be causing them to make so much noise?
As he ducked out of the Camaro to the front door, keys in hand, Rob had time to note almost unconsciously that nobody had come to the window upon hearing him pull up.
Oblivious to the accordion folder on its stand beside him, Rob paused in the doorway to wipe the soles of his shoes on the entry mat, an act of habitual normalcy in a life from which every trace of the normal was about to depart. He would never recall anything else from the time he swung off the road until after the police arrived. He would not even remember mustering the presence of mind to call them on his cell phone… this hole punched in his memory by shock and horror the only mercy availed him that day, and perhaps all that kept him sane in the countless tormented days and nights to come.
For Rob Howell, the chasm between before and after would open with that automatic, momentary pause.
So absurd and yet so natural.
Wiping his shoe bottoms on the mat.
“Cynth?” he called from inside the door.
No answer.
“Cynth? You home?”
Still no answer.
Rob moved farther through the house, saw the kitchen light was on, and found his gaze suddenly drawn to a puddle of wetness on the small section of floor visible through its entry from his angle in the middle of the hallway. Something was spilled there on the floor. Something red. Splashed across the floor tiles, tendriled out into the thin puttied spaces between them. A gleaming puddle of red on Cynth’s precious new kitchen tiles, which Rob had painstakingly laid himself not three months earlier as a fifth anniversary present to her.
His heart thumped.
“Cynth?”
Not a sound except for the greys barking outside.
Dread perched on his shoulders like some cruel taloned bird, Rob rushed into the kitchen, looked down near the feet of the table, and began screaming wildly into the silence of the house, his legs melting away underneath him, the world blurring out in a gush of tears, screaming, screaming, his wails of horror and grief rising from the bottom of his lungs until they shredded off into hoarse, hysterical sobs.