The tire tracks continued through the tunnel into another open stretch of the Santa Rosita, where I switched off the flashlight, relieved to rely on ambient light. The channel curved to the right, out of sight, leading east-southeast away from Highway 1, rising at a steeper grade than before.
Although houses still stippled the surrounding hills, we were nearing the edge of town.
I knew where we were going. I had known for some time but was disturbed by the prospect. If Orson was on the right trail and if Jimmy Wing’s abductor was driving the vehicle that had left these tracks, then the kidnapper had fled with the boy into Fort Wyvern, the abandoned military base that was the source of many of Moonlight Bay’s current problems.
Wyvern, which covers 134,456 acres—far more territory than our town—is surrounded by a high chain-link fence supported by steel posts sunk in concrete caissons, topped with helixes of razor wire. This barrier bisected the river, and as I rounded the curve in the channel, I saw a dark-colored Chevrolet Suburban parked in front of it, at the end of the tracks we had been following.
The truck was about sixty feet away, but I was reasonably sure no one was in it. Nevertheless, I intended to approach it with caution.
Orson’s low growl indicated a wariness of his own.
Turning to the terrain we had crossed, I could see no sign of the creeping gargoyle that I had glimpsed on the east side of Highway 1. Nonetheless, I felt as though I were being watched.
I concealed my bike on the ground, behind a snarl of driftwood that had gotten its teeth into a few dead tumbleweeds.
After tucking the flashlight under my belt, at the small of my back, I drew the Glock from my holster. It is a safe-action pistol with only internal safety devices: no little levers that need thumbing to ready the gun for use.
This weapon has saved my life more than once, yet although it’s a reassurance to me, I am not entirely comfortable with it. I suspect I’ll never be able to handle it with complete ease. The weight and design of the piece have nothing to do with my aversion to the feel of it; this is a superb handgun. As a boy roaming the town at night, however, I was subjected to some memorable verbal and physical abuse from bullies—mostly kids but also some adults old enough to know better—and although their harassment motivated me to learn how to defend myself and taught me never to let an injustice pass without a firm response, these experiences also instilled in me a loathing of violence as an easy solution. To protect myself and those I love, I will use lethal force when I must, but I’ll never enjoy it.
With Orson at my side, I approached the Suburban. No driver or passenger waited inside. The hood was still warm with engine heat; the truck had been parked here only minutes.
Footprints led from the driver’s door around to the front door on the passenger’s side. From there, they continued toward the nearby fence. They appeared to be similar—if not identical—to the prints in the planting bed under Jimmy Wing’s bedroom window.
The silver-coin moon was rolling slowly toward the dark purse of the western horizon, but its glow remained bright enough to allow me to read the license plate on the back of the vehicle. I quickly memorized the number.
I found where a bolt cutter had been used to breach the chain-link fence. Evidently, this was accomplished some time ago, before the most recent rain, because the water-smoothed silt was not heavily disturbed, as it would have been by someone doing all that work.
Several culverts also link Moonlight Bay to Wyvern. Usually, when I explore the former army base, I enter by one of those more discreet passages, where I have used my own bolt cutter.
On this river-spanning fence—as elsewhere along the entire perimeter and throughout the sprawling grounds of Wyvern—a sign with red and black lettering warned that although this facility had been shut down at the recommendation of the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission, as a consequence of the end of the Cold War, trespassers would nevertheless be prosecuted, fined, and possibly imprisoned under a list of relevant federal statutes so long that it occupied the bottom third of the notice. The tone of the warning was stern, uncompromising, but I wasn’t deterred by it. Politicians also promise us peace, perpetual prosperity, meaning, and justice. If their promises are ever fulfilled, perhaps then I’ll have more respect for their threats.
Here, at the fence, the kidnapper’s tracks were not the only marks in the riverbed. The gloom prevented me from positively identifying the new impressions.
I risked using the flashlight. Hooding it with one hand, I flicked it on for only a second or two, which was long enough for me to figure out what had happened here.
Although the breach in the fence apparently had been made well ahead of time, in preparation for the crime, the kidnapper had not left a gaping hole. He’d created a less obvious pass-through, and tonight he had needed only to pull the loosely hanging flap of chain-link out of his way. To free both hands for this task, he had put down his captive, ensuring against an escape attempt either by paralyzing Jimmy with vicious threats or by tethering the boy.
The second set of tracks was considerably smaller than the first. And shoeless. These were the prints of a child who had been snatched barefoot from his bed.
In my mind’s eye, I saw Lilly’s anguished face. Her husband, Benjamin Wing, a power-company lineman, had been electrocuted almost three years ago in a work-related accident. He’d been a big, merry-eyed guy, half Cherokee, so full of life that it had seemed as if he would never run short of it, and his death had stunned everyone. As strong as Lilly was, she might be broken if she had to suffer this second and even more terrible loss so soon after the first.
Although she and I had long ago ceased to be lovers, I still loved her as a friend. I prayed that I’d be able to bring her son back to her, smiling and unharmed, and see the anguish vanish from her face.
Orson’s whine was filled with worry. He was quivering, eager to give pursuit.
After tucking the small flashlight under my belt once more, I peeled up the flap of fence. A soft twang of protest sang through the steel links.
I promised, “Frankfurters for the brave of heart,” and Orson shot through the gap.
3
As I followed the dog into the forbidden zone, the ragged edge of one of the cut fence links snared my cap and pulled it from my head. I snatched it off the ground, dusted it against my jeans, and put it on again.
This navy-blue, billed cap has been in my possession about eight months. I found it in a strange concrete chamber, three stories underground, deep in the abandoned warrens of Fort Wyvern.
Above the visor, embroidered in red, were the words Mystery Train. I had no idea to whom the cap once belonged, and I didn’t know the meaning of the ruby-red needlework.
This simple headgear had little intrinsic value, but of all my material possessions, it was in some ways the most precious. I had no proof that it was related to my mother’s work as a scientist, to any project of which she was a part—at Fort Wyvern or elsewhere—but I remained convinced that it was. Though I already knew some of Wyvern’s terrible secrets, I also believed that if I were able to discover the meaning of the embroidered words, more astonishing truths would be revealed. I had vested a lot of faith in this cap. When I wasn’t wearing it, I kept it close, because it reminded me of my mother and, therefore, comforted me.
Except for the cleared area immediately beyond the breach in the chain-link, driftwood and tumbleweed and trash were piled against the sifting fence. Otherwise, the bed of the Santa Rosita was as well made on the Wyvern side as it was on the other.
Again the only footprints were those of the kidnapper. He had resumed carrying the boy from this point.
Orson raced along the trail, and I ran close behind him. Soon we came to another access road that sloped up the north wall of the river, and Orson ascended without hesitation.
I was breathing harder than the dog when I reached the top of the levee, even though, in canine years, fur face was pretty much my age.
How fortunate I’ve been to live long enough to recognize the subtle but undeniable fading of my youthful stamina and spryness. To hell with those poets who celebrate the beauty and the purity of dying young, all powers intact. In spite of xeroderma pigmentosum, I’d be grateful to survive to relish the sweet decrepitude of my eightieth year, or even the delicious weakness of one whose birthday cake is ablaze with a hundred dangerous candles. We are the most alive and the closest to the meaning of our existence when we are most vulnerable, when experience has humbled us and has cured the arrogance which, like a form of deafness, prevents us from hearing the lessons that this world teaches.
As the moon hid its face behind a veil of clouds, I looked both directions along the north bank of the Santa Rosita. Jimmy and his abductor were not in sight.
Nor did I see a hunched gargoyle moving on the riverbed below or along either side of the channel. Whatever it had been, the figure from the highway embankment was not interested in me.
Without hesitation, Orson trotted toward a group of massive warehouses fifty yards from the levee. These dark structures appeared mysterious in spite of their mundane purpose and in spite of the fact that I was somewhat familiar with them.
Although enormous, these are not the only warehouses on the base, and although they would cover a few square blocks in any city, they represent an insignificant percentage of the buildings within these fenced grounds. At its peak of activity, Fort Wyvern was staffed by 36,400 active-duty personnel. Nearly thirteen thousand dependents and more than four thousand civilian personnel were also associated with the facility. On-base housing alone consisted of three thousand single-family cottages and bungalows, all of which remain standing, though in disrepair.
In a moment we were among the warehouses, and Orson’s nose guided him swiftly through a maze of serviceways to the largest structure in the cluster. Like most of the surrounding buildings, this one was rectangular, with thirty-foot-high corrugated-steel walls rising from a concrete foundation to a curved metal roof. At one end was a roll-up door big enough to admit cargo-laden trucks; it was closed, but beside it, a man-size door stood wide open.
Previously bold, Orson became hesitant as he approached this entrance. The room past the threshold was even darker than the serviceway around us, which itself was illuminated only by starlight. The dog seemed not entirely to trust his nose to detect a threat in the warehouse, as if the scents on which he relied were filtered beyond detection by the very thickness of the murk inside the place.
Keeping my back to the wall, I sidled along the building to the doorway. I stopped just short of the jamb, with my pistol raised and the muzzle pointed at the sky.
I listened, holding my breath, nearly as silent as the dead—except for the faint gurgle of my stomach, which continued to work on a pre-midnight snack of jack cheese, onion bread, and jalapeño peppers. If anyone waited to ambush me just inside the entrance, he must actually have been dead, because he was even quieter than I was. Whether he was dead or not, his breath was no doubt sweeter than mine.
Though Orson was as difficult to see as a flow of ink across wet black silk, I watched as he stopped short of the entrance. After a hesitation that struck me as being full of puzzlement, he turned away from the door and ventured a few steps across the serviceway toward the next building.
He, too, was silent—no tick of claws on paving, no panting, not even any digestive noises—as though he were only the ghost of a dog. He peered intently back the way we’d come, his eyes dimly revealed by a reflection of starshine; the faint white points of his bared teeth were like the unsettling phosphorescent grin of an apparition.
I didn’t feel that his hesitancy was caused by fear of what lay ahead of us. Instead, he no longer seemed to be certain where the trail led.
I consulted my wristwatch. Each faintly blinking second marked not only the passage of time but the fading of Jimmy Wing’s life force. Almost certainly not taken for ransom, he had been seized to satisfy dark needs, perhaps including savageries that didn’t bear consideration.
I waited, struggling to suppress my vivid imagination, but when Orson finally turned again to the open door of the warehouse without indicating any greater confidence that our quarry was inside, I decided to act. Fortune favors the bold. Of course, so does Death.
With my left hand, I reached for the flashlight tucked against the small of my back. Crouching, I entered the doorway, crossed the threshold, and scuttled quickly to the left. Even as I switched on the flash, I rolled it across the floor, a simple and perhaps foolish ruse to draw gunfire away from me.
No gunfire erupted, and when the flashlight rolled to a stop, the stillness in the warehouse was as deep as the silence of a dead planet with no atmosphere. Somewhat to my surprise, when I tried to breathe, I could.
I retrieved the flashlight. Most of the warehouse was given over to a single room of such length that the beam didn’t penetrate from one end to the other; it even failed to reach halfway across the much narrower width of the building to illuminate either side wall.
As I scythed away the shadows, they regrew immediately after the beam passed, lusher and blacker than ever. At least no looming adversary was revealed.
Looking more doubtful than suspicious, Orson padded into the light and, after a hesitation, seemed to dismiss the warehouse with a sneeze. He headed toward the door.
A muffled clang broke the silence elsewhere in the building. The cold acoustics caused the sound to resonate along the walls of this cavernous chamber, lingering until the initial hard metallic quality softened into an eerie, whispery ringing like the voices of summer insects.
I switched off the flashlight.
In the blinding dark, I felt Orson return to my side, his flank brushing against my leg.
I wanted to move.
I didn’t know where to move.
Jimmy must be near—and still alive, because the kidnapper hadn’t yet reached the dark altar where he would play his ritualistic games and sacrifice the lamb. Jimmy, who was small and frightened and alone. Whose dad was dead like mine. Whose mother would be forever withered by grief if I failed her.
Patience. That is one of the great virtues God tries to teach us by refusing to show Himself in this world. Patience.
Orson and I stood still and vigilant until well after the final echo of the noise faded. Just as the subsequent silence grew long enough to make me wonder if what we’d heard had any significance, a voice arose, deep-toned and angry, as muffled as the clang had been. One voice. Not a conversation. A monologue. Someone talking to himself—or to a small, frightened captive who dared not reply. I couldn’t make out the meaning, but the voice was as hollow and grumbly as that of a troll in a fairy tale.
The speaker was neither approaching nor retreating, and clearly he was not in this chamber with Orson and me. Before I was able to determine the direction from which the growled words came, the troll fell silent.