“My best blessing now that Miriam’s gone. So I have to pretend maybe I’ll give up the road, which I won’t.”

“You know I have such a blessing, too.”

“Do I know? Since I found out, I can’t sleep for worry. You never mentioned when we had our little drive together.”

“You didn’t know who I was then. My kid is suddenly in a very bad jam. I can’t get him …” Speaking about her helplessness brought a tightness to her chest, a knot of emotion that made it hard to speak for a moment. “I can’t get him out of this jam alone.”

“The way you talk, a person would think I’m a stranger. You can’t just tell me what I should do?”

“It’s going to be damn dangerous. I have no right—”

“Are we mishpokhe or what?”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“What it means is, it means family.”

“That’s very sweet. But in fact we aren’t family.”

“I know my own family, bubeleh—who is and who’s not. Didn’t you call me Grandpa one day in Texas? And didn’t I tell that nice policeman you were my granddaughter? So then it’s settled. Tell me what, when, where.”

Under that serene blue sky, on the tumultuous surface of the earth, as long as there were Bernies and Luthers, there was hope.

Jane said, “You and Miriam traveled sometimes in a motor home.”

“We took most trips by car, some in a Fleetwood Southwind. It’s a different country one way from the other, but always beautiful.”

“You could still drive a motor home?”

“Can I walk, can I talk, can I twiddle my thumbs? I could drive you coast to coast without a bump.”

“What size was that Fleetwood of yours?”

“Thirty-two feet, but I can do longer. Gas is better than diesel. A diesel pusher—engine in back—will be a lot heavier and harder to turn. Where are we going?”

“Tell you tomorrow. Let’s meet in Indio, near Palm Springs.” She gave him the address. “Can you be there tomorrow afternoon?”

“Indio’s five hours from here. I could be there and back and there again, with time to stop for a nosh. You got a motor home?”

“I’ll have one. From Enrique, the guy we visited in Nogales that time. Meanwhile, have someone take a photo of you, a head shot.” She gave him the email address that she’d given to Luther.

“Don’t you worry,” Bernie said. “Whatever we need to do, we’ll do it twice.”

“There’s no way I can ever thank you enough, Bernie.”

“So before you hang up, say the word for me.”

“What word?”

“What we are and always will be.”

Her voice caught again in her throat. “Mishpokhe.”

“Pretty good. You should let that kh rattle against the roof of your mouth a little better, but not bad for a first try, bubeleh.”

17

GOTTFREY NEVER SLEEPS MORE THAN A FEW HOURS. He doesn’t know why he needs any sleep. Sleep is a requirement of the body, and his body isn’t real. A disembodied mind should function without sleep.

But he isn’t the author of this drama, isn’t responsible for the conflicting details that suggest a careless playwright.

He is only along for the ride.

After a late breakfast in the Holiday Inn coffee shop, he walks two blocks to the Best Western, where Rupert Baldwin is staying.

The sky over Worstead is wooly and gray. The air pools in stillness; but a predawn breeze earlier smoothed a layer of pale dust along the gutter, in and out of which wander paw prints laid down by a dog or by the coyote that he saw the previous night.

At the Best Western, when Gottfrey knocks on the door to Room 16, Rupert calls out, “It’s not locked.”

In the same Hush Puppies and rumpled corduroy suit and beige shirt and bolo tie that he was wearing for the operation at Hawk Ranch, Rupert sits at a small table with two chairs. Through reading glasses, he squints at one of two laptops that are open and in use.

The bedspread has not been turned back, though it is slightly rumpled, as if Rupert had rested sleeplessly atop it for a short while before getting on with the search for Ancel and Clare Hawk.

Closing the door behind him, Gottfrey says, “Couldn’t sleep?”

“Didn’t need to.”

Intrigued, Gottfrey asks, “Do you ever?”

Without looking up, Rupert asks, “Do I ever what?”

“Need to sleep.”

“Not when I have Hershey’s Special Dark and can wash down some crank with Red Bull.” He taps a can of the high-caffeine energy drink, beside which is a bag of miniature dark-chocolate candy bars.

“ ‘Crank’? You’re using methamphetamine?”

“Not often. Only since this case. I hate this slut. I want her dead sooner than now. I want her in-laws injected and licking my boots, and then I want them dead.”

“There’s another one,” Gottfrey says. “A conflicting detail. You never wear boots.”

Rupert finally looks up from the laptop, frowning, his stare as sharp as the prongs of a meat fork. “Something wrong with you?”

Gottfrey shrugs. “Things should’ve gone better last night.”

“Better? Hell, it couldn’t have gone worse.” Rupert returns his attention to the laptop. “When all the Hawks are dead, including her brat, I’m going to surprise that shitkicker Juan Saba, cut off his package, and feed it to his wife before I blow her brains out.”

“You sure are passionate about this. Dedicated to the mission.”

“In case you haven’t thought it through, it’s us or them. And it’s damn well not going to be me. One rogue bitch Bureau agent and her bumpkin in-laws can’t get the better of us. We’re an ass-kicking head-busting machine, never been anything like us.”

Stepping behind Rupert, Gottfrey considers the laptop screen. An analytic program is assessing and enhancing an image taken from orbit. Changes occur with such speed that he can’t understand what is before him. “Find anything? Where maybe they went on horseback?”

“I back-doored our satellites—government, commercial—couldn’t get shit on this part of Texas after sunset yesterday.”

“What about China?”

China is all about weaponizing space and orbital surveillance, so NSA has seeded a rootkit in their military’s computer network. A hacker like Rupert can dive in and float through the Chinese system at such a low level they don’t know anybody’s swimming there.

“I finally found some relevant Chicom video,” Rupert confirms.

Although it is as dark as Satan’s colon on those plains at night, the Chinese are even more interested in what America does in the dark than in the day. They fear the U.S. has mobile missile platforms that are shifted around at night. The Chicoms have highly sensitive look-down capability in infrared, and Rupert is working with a segment of streamed video that he cloned from their archives.

“In that meadowland, after a cool day when the ground didn’t soak up heat, there’s not much background infrared to filter out.”

“But there’s wildlife,” Gottfrey says.

“Most too small to matter, except deer. And deer travel in small families, usually more than two. It’s largely federal land not licensed for grazing, so we don’t have to sort out a lot of cattle.”

Pointing to the constantly melting and solidifying image on the screen, Gottfrey says, “What am I going to see when this clarifies?”

“Horses are big—fifteen or sixteen hundred pounds for Clare Hawk’s mare, two thousand for Ancel’s stallion. They put out strong heat signatures, especially carrying riders and exerting themselves. I’ve processed this once, just now giving it a final cleanup.”

When a scene resolves and freezes, it isn’t like the raw image captured by satellite. It’s been analyzed and enhanced—translated—to make sense to the human eye. The straight-down angle on the meadowland is rendered in shades of gray, faint whorling-feathering patterns that represent the effect of a fitful breeze in the grass. Here and there, faint reddish hazes represent ground-source heat, and scattered small hot-red points might be the issue of wildlife.

The most prominent features in the image are two ruby-red heat signatures brighter and larger than the others.

As Rupert works the keyboard, the static image evolves into a video stream. The red signifiers move through the gray featherings toward a bisecting band without pattern near which are clustered reddish geometric shapes representing six or eight buildings.

“By the time the Chicom satellite passed over here, the Hawks had already gone almost twenty miles from their ranch.”

“How do you know those aren’t a couple deer?”

“A female deer tends to follow a male, behind and a little off to one side. And deer won’t travel as directly as this. They wander. These are horses under the guidance of riders.”

“But we can’t know this is Clare and Ancel Hawk.”

“The satellite captured them at two-ten A.M. There’s not likely to be a pair of other riders out at that hour.”

“What’re those buildings?”

“Another ranch. The band of gray without pattern is the state route that passes through Worstead before it gets to this place.”

When the video ends, Egon Gottfrey says, “That’s all you have?”