But hadn’t he confessed to her—just a little, and started her flow? Opened up about his innermost opinions? If she only knew the half of it.
‘I know you’re a good man,’ she said. ‘But being so hopeless…I can’t feel that way. It’s just the way the world treats us. We’re being tested.’
His nerves were starting to jangle. He needed to move on or the grief would slam back and he’d find the brick wall that he had built between him and his lost faces crumbling. ‘Then maybe it’s all taken care of in the end,’ he offered.
Charlene’s eyes filled with tears.
‘It is so wrong to have to wait for my husband, and feel…so hungry to have a man. Just a man to hug me, wrap his arms around me. I have never been desperate, not like this. Never. And my boy needs a father. I need his father.’ Her face hardened. ‘I have never done this before.’
Yes, you have, he thought.
‘When is it all going to come right again?’ she asked.
‘Soon,’ Jim Thorpe said. He wrapped one hand around her fingers on the juice glass and gave them a gentle squeeze.
Charlene frowned at him, don’t tease. ‘I just want my husband home. I want to feel normal, be right with my kids and my family.’
‘Of course.’ He stood beside the booth and opened his wallet. ‘Breakfast is on me.’
‘No,’ Charlene said primly. ‘We’re not poor.’ She laid a twenty next to his. Then she put down another ten and gave him back the twenty he had put down. Bravely, she said, ‘Your money’s no good here.’
‘You sure?’
‘I’m sure, Mr. Jim Thorpe. Or is it James?’
He smiled.
‘Such a lovely smile,’ she said. Her eyes turned quick and efficient, darting around the tables, squinting through the bright windows. ‘You leave first.’ Even in El Centro she was worried that people who knew her might see her with another man.
‘Thanks for breakfast,’ he said.
‘Thanks for having a patient ear,’ she said.
As he walked out into the glare she passed him in a tidy hurry. No one could have guessed what they had been doing on thin hotel sheets just a few hours before. He admired that sort of efficiency. Women were good at such things.
He was not. The bricks were falling. There was no mental wall thick enough to block what he had lost. He stood on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets, waiting, shivering despite the heat. He wasn’t looking forward to telling Tommy. Tommy did not need to know about the patrolman. His selfimportant partner was tippy at the best of times. That was how Tommy described himself: tippy, but enthusiastic—when he wasn’t Dipsy-Down, as he called it.
Unpredictable—but for the moment, still essential.
The tall man watched Charlene pull the green Ford van out of the Coco’s parking lot. She rolled down the window and looked both ways but deliberately did not see him as she drove by.
Five minutes later, Tommy roared up in his battered, creamcolored El Camino. He reached over and pulled the door lock with fat dexterous fingers. He was small and skinny but for his face and his fingers; these belonged to a larger man. The effect was grotesque but Tommy no longer seemed to care how people reacted.
‘No luggage?’ he asked, his plump face showing an early flush of dismay. ‘No truck. No printers. God, Sam, what happened?’
Sam opened the door and climbed in, sitting on the ripped seat. ‘Let’s drive,’ he said.
‘What happened to the big truck?’
‘There’s been a change in our strategy,’ Sam said.
‘Sam, I don’t like being disappointed,’ Tommy fluted. ‘We need those printers. I can’t do everything we want without those printers. I don’t like failure.’
Sam was dangerously close to chucking it all. ‘To the winery, Jeeves,’ he said with a flourish.
‘You’re in fine spirits. You got laid last night, didn’t you, Sam? That’s why you’re trying to be funny.’ Sometimes, Tommy’s bursts of intuition made him seem psychic—hard to get used to in such a man-child.
‘We’re okay, really. We’ll be fine. We’ll get more printers.’
‘Before you got here and got laid, something went wrong. Don’t tell me,’ Tommy insisted, his face clouded like a baby about to burst into tears. ‘I don’t want to hear it. Really, I don’t. I couldn’t take it.’
‘We’ll be fine,’ Sam said.
‘Did you leave fingerprints?’ Tommy asked.
Sam raised his right hand. His fingers were shiny with clear silicone caulk.
‘There’s something else,’ Tommy said, his tiny eyes shifting and wild. ‘I turned on the radio. I heard it on the way to pick you up.’ He pushed the radio knob. The big news was the death of the bank robber and abortion clinic bomber called the Patriarch and the ongoing search of his farm hideaway in Washington state. ‘Is that our guy?’ Tommy asked. ‘Sam, is that our guy? Is that our second factory?’
Sam did not have a quick story to soothe Tommy—or himself. He stared at the radio, then out the window.
Tommy said, ‘Oh my. Oh my. Sam, oh my.’
‘All right, Tommy. Pull over and I’ll drive for a while.’
Tommy’s nose was dripping and he was shaking badly. He had entered the land of Dipsy-Down and it was all he could do to stop the car without getting them both killed.
Griff stripped off his shirt and body armor and handed it to the FBI evidence team. They whisked it to their van to offload the data and video contained in the vest. All of the police vehicles, at Griff’s request, stayed on the edge of the clearing, about a hundred yards from the house and the barn.
He walked back toward the house with Rebecca Rose at his side. They stared at the barn. Griff’s nostrils flexed and his upper lip twitched as if he were about to sneeze. The breeze was cool against his naked upper torso. He slipped an Underarmor T-shirt over his head. Jacob Levine joined them and handed Griff his own purple vest. Griff declined. Even chilly, he refused to go that far.
‘Becky,’ he said, ‘Chambers kept looking at the barn.’
‘Yeah,’ Rebecca said.
‘I think you might want to get back with the others.’
‘I will if you will,’ Rebecca said.
‘Don’t be an asshole,’ Griff said. ‘I’ve done this kind of stuff for decades.’
Rebecca shook her head. ‘I’ll need to see what’s in the house and the barn ASAP. Then we’ll know what to do next.’
Levine held his ground, too. ‘Have you heard?’ he asked them.
‘Heard about what?’
‘The bus never made it to town. It stopped and the families loaded into three cars. They diverted at a side road and threw off the tracking vehicles. Some of them may be headed east to Idaho.’
Griff rubbed his upper lip, first checking to make sure there was no blood on his finger. ‘He knew about us all along. He saw us cut down the tree.’
‘Makes