“Cops?” asked Johansen. The two agents exchanged glances.
“This place is alarmed to the hilt and bugged, too. I thought you were legit, otherwise I wouldn’t have let you in,” she squawked.
Vasquez ground her teeth and they both struggled through the junk to the door. Outside, they blinked in the sunlight. She imagined that Nog rarely came out by day.
Johansen pointed out to the parking lot where a squad car was pulling up, lights off. “This will cost us two hours, I’d say.”
“Davis is a small town,” said Vasquez, “I’d guess three.”
… 57 Hours and Counting…
Spurlock awakened groggily. He owned no alarm clock, and birdsongs had no effect upon him. It was the sun that had finally ended his slumber. Beaming in the cracks of his cardboard fan-fold sun visor, it tickled his face with tiny hot streaks and assaulted his optic nerves behind his closed eyelids.
“Oh shit,” he sighed. He heard a movement in the back. The kid. It had to be the kid. He heaved himself around.
“What are you up to, you little rat-bastard?” he asked the gloomy interior of the van. It was about ten, he figured, and the van was getting hot already. He tried to climb out of his ripped-vinyl seat. He failed on the first attempt, betrayed by a nerveless left leg.
He collapsed back into his seat and cursed while massaging the prickling leg back to life. He craned his neck around and thought to see movement back there.
“You’d better not be out of your cage,” he chuckled, shaking his head, “or they’ll be hell to pay, little bastard.”
After that, there was silence behind him. He finally got up and managed to limp into the back. The kid was still there, locked in his cage. His eyes were big and round with fear, which caused Spurlock to grunt in approval. But something appeared odd about his gag. He opened the top of the cage and reached down to grab the kid by the neck. Checking the gag, he found it had been damaged, and now only hung there by a thread.
“Oh, now you’ve done it, boy!” he roared. “This is gonna be good!”
He resecured the gag, this time cruelly tight. He reached in and lifted the kid by his neck, but the little shit struggled and wriggled free, dropping to the bottom of the cage. Spurlock growled and took hold of his hair.
Outside came the sound of an engine, then the crunch of tires on gravel. Spurlock froze. A door crumped. Someone approached the van.
He scrambled back to the driver’s seat and looked into the side mirror. A California Highway Patrolman approached. Spurlock could see the black and white parked behind him. He could hear its engine idling.
Immediately, his mind went to the cheap. 22 he kept under his seat. He pulled it out and slipped it under his right leg. It looked like a black squirt-gun. It wasn’t much; the barrel was so short that he couldn’t hit a beer can with it at five feet. Still, he knew a quick spray of bullets at close range would drop anyone.
The patrolman came up to his window slowly, taking his time. Spurlock thought about faking sleep, but rejected the idea. Just as the patrolman came even with his window, he reached over and dug around in his glove compartment box for his registration. He had once saw one of those cop shows in which of the smug pigs explained he always suspected trouble when a driver wasn’t moving. Most people, he explained, were digging about for their license, proof of insurance and car registration when they were pulled over. Those who were waiting to blast you didn’t bother.
“You’ll probably be wanting my ID, sir,” he said over his shoulder. “I know my papers are somewhere in here.”
The cop didn’t say anything, he just frowned and ran his eyes around the interior of the van. Spurlock could feel those eyes, burrowing into his back. There was no way to miss the curtains. He knew all too well how a cop’s mind worked. What was behind them? Drugs? Smuggled parrots from Brazil? A cage full of kids? Any pig would be dying to know. He hoped desperately that this fucker didn’t have to die to find out.
“Got it right here, sir,” he said, passing a handful of paper out the window. He prayed the cop hadn’t bothered to type his license number into his computer yet. His record would do nothing to improve the pig’s mood.
The cop eyed the papers dubiously. “Is the van broken down?”
“No sir,” said Spurlock, shaking his head emphatically. “I was just about to get on my way up to Redding. I’ve been driving all night up from L.A., sir and I stopped to take a nap.”
The cop continued to stare at the papers and didn’t appear to have heard him. Perhaps a half-minute passed. Spurlock smiled on the outside, but inside he was a screaming wreck. Why did this fucking cop have to find me? Why doesn’t the little rat-bastard kid just kick the wall already and get it over with? Just one kick, and it’s all over. The cop’s dead, I’m probably dead, the kid is definitely dead and it’s all over with. WHY DOESN’T ONE OF THESE TWO ASSHOLES DO SOMETHING?
“Looks good,” said the pig, giving a tiny smile that looked more like he was relieving himself rather than actually pleased. “I just saw you parked over here my last two or three passes down this stretch. Even though you’re off the highway system, abandoned cars always get my attention. Wouldn’t want your property stripped. We get a lot of that around South Sac.”
Air whistled out of Spurlock’s locked lungs. “Yes sir, thanks for the thought, officer.”He reached out for his papers.
The cop looked up and made as if to hand over the papers, but halted. For the first time, their eyes met. The cop was balding, tall and slim with broad shoulders. His face was long and looked fortyish. He wore a neat brown mustache that look as though he trimmed it with tweezers.
Then Spurlock saw it in his eyes: alarm bells had been triggered. Some fucking pig-instinct had just been tripped, and the cop smelled something, something he didn’t like.
“I would like to take a look in the back, if you don’t mind,” he said.
Spurlock forced a smile. That was it, then. His face felt dead and rubbery. There was nothing he could do now. He would climb out, hopefully behind him, then pull the. 22 and spray every bullet he had into him. He realized numbly that it would be his first Murder One. He had often wondered when it would come.
“It’s locked, sir, I’ll just have to open it for you,” he said. He reached down to the door latch and popped it open. The cop back up a step automatically.
“Don’t forget your keys,” said the cop.
“Huh? Oh, right,” Spurlock said, giving a little nervous laugh. He turned back to grab the keys dangling in the ignition. Squirt-squirt-squirt, he thought, that’s all there was to it. He knew he would have to do it right away, without hesitating or hoping to get out of it. He turned back with the keys and sure enough, the cop had his back turned. He was talking into the radio mike that he kept clipped to his shoulder.
The little steel squirt gun was so tiny Spurlock could hide it neatly in his palm. He did so now as he closed the van door behind him. The cop was walking away, and Spurlock felt a moment of panic; he wanted to be at point-blank range.
Suddenly, the cop stopped speaking into his radio and turned back to Spurlock. “I’ve got an assistance call,” he said, “drive safe.”
And it was over, just like that. He trotted back to his black-and-white and drove off. Spurlock was left rubbing his fingers nervously along the barrel of his little black squirt gun.
“I’ve got to get rid of this kid,” he said to no one.
… 55 Hours and Counting…
Ray spotted Magic in a crowded cafe. He signaled her quietly, asking for a private conversation. Magic hesitated, then touched the mouse and the connection was made. The two of them conversed not in a physical environment, but rather in a chatroom. Nocarrier was a social networking site full of chatrooms, blogs and message boards, now slowed down by the choked internet, but still active. The name of the site caused many to smile when they read it. An inside joke, NoCarrier was the error message one used to get all too often when your personal computer tried to connect across the phone system to another computer and failed. He had found the boards that specialized in university socializing, figuring that Nog had recommended the site for this reason. Someone at the university had to know something.