“Okay. But what’s—?”
“Great. I’ll email you the rendezvous point. Nine thirty it is.”
He slapped the roof of the Honda and began walking away. Cole wondered what sort of weirdness he’d just committed to, but Sharpe had already reached the shoulder and was headed in the opposite direction from the way they’d come.
Cole eased the car onto the pavement. Checking the mirror, he saw Sharpe raise a hand in farewell without turning around. As he accelerated, Sharpe grew smaller in the mirror. He looked like a hitchhiker on a lonely road, a drifter with no destination.
He looked like trouble.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Moving day.
At dusk they drove east, joining a caravan of headlights streaming across the Bay Bridge. Cole gazed down through the trusswork at container ships, gliding beneath them like sparkling cakes on inky water flecked by whitecaps. He was riding with Barb in her Prius, the radio tuned to NPR. Steve followed closely in his Honda, a two-car convoy. A team, however fractious.
Cole was reminded of how he used to feel heading out on a deployment — excited, a little daunted, but comforted by the shared sense of mission, the knowledge that everyone around him was going through exactly the same thing. He missed that. It wasn’t that he enjoyed going off to war, or leaving his family behind. But there was something to be said for the isolation of a foreign posting, the hermetic life among fellow warriors who were cleared to hear your stories, your operational secrets, just as you were cleared to hear theirs. You ate and slept with the same problems, obsessions, and insecurities.
The Predator assignment at Creech had lacked all that. You came and went from drone warfare the way you would with any other job, commuting home to ball games and cookouts, to bill paying and homework questions, the nightly debate about what to watch on TV. A quiet dinner with Carol was always a nice break in the routine — sex, even better — as long as she wasn’t preoccupied with the children, or chores, or talking on her cell to her family in Saginaw. Not that you could ever say much about your job even when she had time to listen. Events at Creech stayed locked up, bubbling inside your brain until it was time to return, back to that pixelated world where ghostly characters lived on silent screens, awaiting the verdict of your fingertips.
“You okay?”
It was Barb. She’d turned off the radio and they were across the bridge, less than an hour from their destination.
“Just thinking about the job. The old one.”
“Flying drones?”
“We never called ’em that. Preds. UAVs. Whatever.”
“Some of the stuff I’ve read makes it sound pretty terrible.”
Was it? The job itself? Or was it the back-and-forth that he’d hated more? Entry and reentry, with never enough time for proper decompression. A mental case of the bends that had eventually doubled him over in pain. And with no real flying, which would have at least offered some release. No flying at all. Just a seat in a trailer, rump to vinyl to floor.
Still. The job had its charms, he could still recall them, even in his current detachment. Having had more than a year to think about it he now realized that, yes, there were parts of it that he’d liked, that had even been a little addictive.
“Not always,” he said.
“No? How so?”
“It was important. It wasn’t fun, and it sure as hell was no thrill a minute. But you were up there seeing shit that nobody else saw.”
“Godlike?”
He smiled.
“A little. But it’s more complicated than that.”
She drove on, waiting for more. If it had been Keira, he probably would have continued. But this felt more like an interview than a conversation, so he stared at the road and held his silence. To their right, a strip mall. To their left, a marsh. A vee formation of geese passed overhead.
“Speed trap,” he said, spotting a patrol car parked on the grassy median dead ahead. A state trooper stood by the car, aiming his radar gun. Yet another camera, relentless.
“Shit.” Barb slowed down, glancing nervously at the speedometer. “I was only doing sixty, we should be okay. Maybe he’ll ticket that rube in the monster pickup that blew by us a second ago.”
“Saw him. Reminded me of my dad.”
She didn’t answer that. Her dad probably never drove a pickup. A few seconds later she turned the radio back on, but the public station had faded. She pressed search and landed on hip-hop, then country-western, then a glitzy pop star screeching her lungs out. She turned it off.
A horn tooted. It was Steve, pulling up on their left. He made an eating motion with his right hand and mouthed the words, “I’m hungry.”
“Damn, Steve, just call me on the cell, you Luddite.”
But she played along, tucking in behind as Steve zoomed ahead, then signaled for a turnoff at the next interchange. They looped back across an overpass to an old-style restaurant next to a motor hotel, with a long counter like in a diner, and a menu to match — meat loaf, crab cakes, club sandwiches, fried chicken. They dug in, seated three in a row along the counter, which wasn’t conducive to talking. Cole overstuffed himself on grease and a milkshake, and within minutes of pulling back onto the highway he sank drowsily into his seat and nodded off.
He didn’t awaken until the tires were bouncing off the pavement onto a narrow gravel lane. Steve was still in front, the Honda throwing a dust cloud into the beams of their headlights. Cedars hugged the lane from either side, brushing the doors like a car wash. Steve’s brake lights flashed.
“This must be the gate,” Barb said. “Not even closed, much less locked.”
“Maybe she wanted us to be able to get in.”
“Still.” They rolled through. “Doesn’t even look like there is a lock.”
“That’s what hardware stores are for.”
“If she’s even been to one. You like her, don’t you? I can tell by the way you always defend her.”
“I don’t know about always. Don’t you like her?”
“Sure. But you know what I mean. You should be careful. Her track record with men is not the greatest. Certain men have been known to die for her sins.”
So there it was again.
“What’s the story behind that?”
“It’s a long one. Maybe she should be the one to tell you.”
“Then maybe you and Steve should stop bringing it up.”
“Point taken. But there you go again.”
He was glad she couldn’t see him blush in the dark.
They emerged from the cedars into open country. The moon was up, and even at night the view was impressive. Fields stretched off into the distance on either side. Long rows of corn stubble, no houses in sight. Out toward the horizon were lines of bare trees. Dead ahead, a forest and another field, with the roofline of a large house and a couple of outbuildings looming against a distant sparkle of water. Lights were on in a few of the windows, but it was still quite a way off. The driveway seemed to roll on forever. They’d already gone half a mile and didn’t seem a whole lot closer.
“Oh. My. God. Look at this place,” Barb said. The glow of the dashboard light gave her eyes a fierceness Cole had never noticed by day. “Now this is money. Big money.”
“Looks like land to me.”
“Same thing down here, especially if it’s waterfront. Cheney and Rumsfeld both have places near here, you know.”
“That ought to keep the goblins away.”
“Or attract a whole new breed of ’em.”
“Whoa! Speaking of goblins—”
A huge owl flapped across the driveway just ahead, caught momentarily in their beams as it pursued a mouse or mole, or maybe they’d startled it from its perch.