“Where’s my car?” she asked in the parking lot.
“Over there. The second row.”
More vehicles drove past, heading in the direction of the observation platform.
When Tori got behind the steering wheel, Page took the passenger seat, assuming they would sit in the parking lot while he did his best to get her to explain why she’d left him. Instead she started the car and steered toward the road. She found a gap in traffic and joined the vehicles going toward the observation platform. She didn’t say a word.
“Please,” Page said, “help me understand.”
“I have breast cancer,” Tori replied.
Page suddenly felt cold. In shock, he managed to ask, “How bad?”
“I’m having surgery this coming Tuesday. In San Antonio.”
“San Antonio?”
“My Santa Fe oncologist set it up. The plan is to rest at my mother’s house, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell her over the phone. I wanted to do it in person.”
Page’s balance tilted dizzily. “Why didn’t you tell me? How long have you known?”
“The biopsy results came back a week ago.”
“You had a biopsy?” Page asked. “I had no idea.”
“In my oncologist’s office. I didn’t need to go to the hospital-she did it with a hypodermic. After you left for the airport on Tuesday, she called to tell me when the surgery was scheduled.”
“So you just packed your bags and left?” Page couldn’t adjust to his bewilderment. “Why didn’t you talk to me about it? You know I’ll give you all the support you need.”
Tori drove slowly, held back by the line of cars. After a few minutes, she spoke again. “My doctor thinks we found the cancer in time. She thinks surgery, combined with radiation, will get rid of it.”
“Under the circumstances, that’s the best news you could have.”
“I didn’t tell you about it because…” Tori drew a breath. “Because I’m tired of feeling alone.”
“Alone?” Page felt something in him plummet. “I don’t understand.”
“We live in the same house, but I’m not sure we live together. When you come home from work, I ask how your shift went, and you recite a list of crimes that you investigated.”
“That’s how my shifts usually go.”
“It’s the way you tell me, cold and flat, as if your shift happened to somebody else and you’re disgusted with the world.”
“Dealing with terrible things day after day has that effect.”
“As often as not, after work you go to a bar and drink with other cops. Do you talk with them about the crimes you investigated?”
“It’s not like group therapy or anything. We just drink a few beers and tell jokes or whatever.”
“Lately you do it after every shift. When you finally get home, we eat something I made in the crockpot. Otherwise the food would burn or get cold because I never know when you’ll actually come through the door. Instead of talking, we eat in front of the television. While you keep watching television, I go to bed and read.”
“But that’s what you like to do,” he protested. “You enjoy reading.”
“I’m not trying to place blame,” Tori said. “Each of us is who we are. On the days you’re not working, you go to the airport. As you told me once, nonpilots think flying a plane is all about feeling free and enjoying the scenery. But you like to fly because there’s so much involved in handling a plane, you can’t think about anything else. You can’t let the emotions of your job distract you while you’re control- ling the aircraft. That’s your defense against the world.
“When I learned about my cancer, I imagined the clamped-down look you’d get when I told you-the look you always get when you have emotions you don’t want to deal with. I decided I couldn’t go on that way. If I had a disease that might kill me, I didn’t want to feel alone any longer. Going to the airport is your escape. Tuesday morning, after my doctor called, I decided to escape in a different way.”
The car became silent.
Needing to distract himself, Page looked toward the sky, where clouds drifted in from the east. He glanced to the right. Beyond a barbed-wire fence, he saw the collapsed, rusted hangars from the military airstrip that had been shut down at the end of World War II. Vehicles were parked along the fence. Ahead, the procession continued, but some of the cars turned into the opposite lane and parked along the other side of the road. A glance toward the side mirror revealed cars stretched out behind the Saturn, some of which were pulling off and parking wherever they found gaps.
Tori broke the silence. “That’s why I grabbed at the memory of the lights. When I sat in that coffee shop outside El Paso and noticed Rostov on the map, the excitement of seeing those lights came back to me. Before I knew it, I couldn’t wait to get here and see them again. It’s been a long time since I felt that kind of emotion.”
“I feel as if I’m being compared to the way your father behaved that night.”
“Not at all. You’re a kind, decent man. My father was impatient and harsh. You’re nothing like that. But I need someone who feels positive.”
Page thought of the five children and the female driver who’d died in the head-on collision. He thought of the driver of the gasoline tanker who’d burned to death. He thought of his friend who’d been shot to death by the man who’d crashed into the gasoline tanker.
He couldn’t free his memory of all the people who’d been shot the previous night.
And now Tori had cancer.
“Feel positive?” He shook his head. “I’m not sure I know how to do that. But I saw the lights, too. That’s got to count for something.”
Tori didn’t respond.
“We’ll watch them together,” Page said, hoping. “I’ll learn from you.”
He heard the distant rumble of helicopters. Ahead, three of them hovered a safe distance apart. The choppers all had large letters on the undersides identifying the television stations to which they belonged. Their nose cameras were aimed at the line of vehicles.
Near the observation platform, a crowd faced barricades and the police officers who guarded them. Someone sold food from a van marked BEST TACOS IN TEXAS. Reporters stood in front of cameras next to news trucks with broadcast dishes on top. Page recognized the reporter he’d seen on the television at the motel office, the one with the rumpled suit.
“Tori, don’t stop,” he warned. “The TV people know a woman shot the killer. Sooner or later, they’ll find out it was you. They’ll never let you alone.”
But she didn’t seem to hear. All she did was stare toward the field where she’d seen the lights.
“They’re ruining it,” she said.
27
As the sun began its descent, the Black Hawk helicopter sped through the sky at 160 miles per hour. Ignoring the muffled vibration of the engines, Col. Warren Raleigh glanced to the left toward where the Davis Mountains stretched along the horizon. A moment later, he peered ahead toward clouds drifting in from the direction of the Gulf of Mexico.
Below, cattle grazed on sparse grassland that seemed to go on forever.
“Big country.” The pilot’s voice came through Raleigh’s headset.
“Some ranchers down there own a half-million acres,” Raleigh said into his microphone. “Lots of privacy.”
At 6 that morning, Raleigh and his team had flown from Glen Burnie Airport near the NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Mary- land. Their aircraft had been a Falcon 2000 owned by INSCOM but registered to a fictitious civilian corporation. It flew them two-thirds of the way across the continent to the Army airbase at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. There they’d picked up equipment that Raleigh had ordered to be ready for them. They’d also added two members to their team. One was human-an Army dog handler. The other was a German shepherd.