“Well… could the parietal spot have a direct connection with the frost somehow?”
“What — you think the boy might be responsible for the changes in air temperature?”
“Could he?”
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, you’re the one who raised the question.”
“I don’t know,” Dombey said again.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Zachariah said. “No sense at all. If you keep coming up with weird suggestions like that, I’ll have to run a maintenance check on you, Carl.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
The oil-and-gravel trail led deep into the forest. It was remarkably free of ruts and chuckholes for most of its length, although the Explorer scraped bottom a few times when the track took sudden, sharp dips.
The trees hung low, lower, lower still, until, at last, the ice-crusted evergreen boughs frequently scraped across the roof of the Explorer with a sound like fingernails being drawn down a blackboard.
They passed a few signs that told them the lane they were using was kept open for the exclusive benefit of federal and state wildlife officers and researchers. Only authorized vehicles were permitted, the signs warned.
“Could this secret installation be disguised as a wildlife research center?” Elliot wondered.
“No,” she said. “According to the map, that’s nine miles into the forest on this track. Danny’s instructions are to take a turn north, off this lane, after about five miles.”
“We’ve gone almost five miles since we left the county road,” Elliot said.
Branches scraped across the roof, and powdery snow cascaded over the windshield, onto the hood.
As the windshield wipers cast the snow aside, Tina leaned forward, squinting along the headlight beams. “Hold it! I think this is what we’re looking for.”
He was driving at only ten miles an hour, but she gave him so little warning that he passed the turnoff. He stopped, put the Explorer in reverse, and backed up twenty feet, until the headlights were shining on the trail that she had spotted.
“It hasn’t been plowed,” he said.
“But look at all the tire marks.”
“A lot of traffic’s been through here recently.”
“This is it,” Tina said confidently. “This is where Danny wants us to go.”
“It’s a damned good thing we have four-wheel drive.”
He steered off the plowed lane, onto the snowy trail. The Explorer, equipped with heavy chains on its big winter-tread tires, bit into the snow and chewed its way forward without hesitation.
The new track ran a hundred yards before rising and turning sharply to the right, around the blunt face of a ridge. When they came out of this curve, the trees fell back from the verge, and open sky lay above for the first time since they had departed the county blacktop.
Twilight was gone; night was in command.
Snow began to fall more heavily — yet ahead of them, not a single flake lay in their way. Bizarrely, the unplowed trail had led them to a paved road; steam rose from it, and sections of the pavement were even dry.
“Heat coils embedded in the surface,” Elliot said.
“Here in the middle of nowhere.”
Stopping the Explorer, he picked up the pistol from the seat between them, and he flicked off both safeties. He had loaded the depleted magazine earlier; now he jacked a bullet into the chamber. When he put the gun on the seat again, it was ready to be used.
“We can still turn back,” Tina said.
“Is that what you want to do?”
“No.”
“Neither do I.”
A hundred and fifty yards farther, they reached another sharp turn. The road descended into a gully, swung hard to the left this time, and then headed up again.
Twenty yards beyond the bend, the way was barred by a steel gate. On each side of the gate, a nine-foot-high fence, angled outward at the top and strung with wickedly sharp coils of razor wire, stretched out of sight into the forest. The top of the gate was also wrapped with razor wire.
A large sign stood to the right of the roadway, supported on two redwood posts:
PRIVATE PROPERTY
ADMISSION BY KEY CARD ONLY
TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED
“They make it sound like someone’s hunting lodge,” Tina said.
“Intentionally, I’m sure. Now what? You don’t happen to have a key card, do you?”
“Danny will help,” she said. “That’s what the dream was all about.”
“How long do we wait here?”
“Not long,” she said as the gate swung inward.
“I’ll be damned.”
The heated road stretched out of sight in the darkness.
“We’re coming, Danny,” Tina said quietly.
“What if someone else opened the gate?” Elliot asked. “What if Danny didn’t have anything to do with it? They might just be letting us in so they can trap us inside.”
“It was Danny.”
“You’re so sure.”
“Yes.”
He sighed and drove through the gate, which swung shut behind the Explorer.
The road began to climb in earnest, hugging the slopes. It was overhung by huge rock formations and by wind-sculpted cowls of snow. The single lane widened to two lanes in places and switchbacked up the ridges, through more densely packed strands of larger trees. The Explorer labored ever higher into the mountains.
The second gate was one and a half miles past the first, on a short length of straightaway, just over the brow of a hill. It was not merely a gate, but a checkpoint. A guard shack stood to the right of the road, from which the gate was controlled.
Elliot picked up the gun as he brought the Explorer to a full stop at the barrier.
They were no more than six or eight feet from the lighted shack, close enough to see the guard’s face as he scowled at them through the large window.
“He’s trying to figure out who the devil we are,” Elliot said. “He’s never seen us or the Explorer, and this isn’t the sort of place where there’s a lot of new or unexpected traffic.”
Inside the hut, the guard plucked a telephone handset from the wall.
“Damn!” Elliot said. “I’ll have to go for him.”
As Elliot started to open his door, Tina saw something that made her grab his arm. “Wait! The phone doesn’t work.”
The guard slammed the receiver down. He got to his feet, took a coat from the back of his chair, slipped into it, zippered up, and came out of the shack. He was carrying a submachine gun.
From elsewhere in the night, Danny opened the gate.
The guard stopped halfway to the Explorer and turned toward the gate when he saw it moving, unable to believe his eyes.
Elliot rammed his foot down hard on the accelerator, and the Explorer shot forward.
The guard swung the submachine gun into firing position as they swept past him.
Tina raised her hands in an involuntary and totally useless attempt to ward off the bullets.
But there were no bullets.
No torn metal. No shattered glass. No blood or pain.
They didn’t even hear gunfire.
The Explorer roared across the straightaway and careened up the slope beyond, through the tendrils of steam that rose from the black pavement.
Still no gunfire.
As they swung into another curve, Elliot wrestled with the wheel, and Tina was acutely aware that a great dark void lay beyond the shoulder of the road. Elliot held the vehicle on the pavement as they rounded the bend, and then they were out of the guard’s line of fire. For two hundred yards ahead, until the road curved once more, nothing threatening was in sight.