“Daddy?”
Will Innis set the legal pad aside and made room for Devlin to climb into his lap. His daughter was small for eleven, felt like the shell of a child in his arms.
“What are you doing out here?” she asked and in her scratchy voice he could hear the remnants of her last respiratory infection like gravel in her lungs.
“Working up a closing for my trial in the morning.”
“Is your client the bad guy again?”
Will smiled. “You and your mother. I’m not really supposed to think of it that way, sweetheart.”
“What’d he do?” His little girl’s face had turned ruddy in the sunset and the fading light brought out threads of platinum in her otherwise midnight hair.
“He allegedly—”
“What’s that mean?”
“Allegedly?”
“Yeah.”
“Means it’s not been proven. He’s suspected of selling drugs.”
“Like what I take?”
“No, your drugs are good. They help you. He was selling, allegedly selling, bad drugs to people.”
“Why are they bad?”
“Because they make you lose control.”
“Why do people take them?”
“They like how it makes them feel.”
“How does it make them feel?”
He kissed her forehead and looked at his watch. “It’s after eight, Devi. Let’s go bang on those lungs.”
She sighed but she didn’t argue. She never tried to get out of it.
He stood up cradling his daughter and walked over to the redwood railing.
They stared into the wilderness that bordered Oasis Hills, their subdivision. The houses on No-Water Lane had the Sonoran Desert for a backyard.
“Look,” he said. “See them?” A half mile away, specks filed out of an arroyo and trotted across the desert toward a shadeless forest of giant saguaro cacti that looked vaguely sinister profiled against the horizon.
“What are they?” she asked.
“Coyotes. What do you bet they start yapping when the sun goes down?”
After supper, he read to Devlin from A Wrinkle in Time. They’d been working their way through the penultimate chapter, “Aunt Beast,” but Devlin was exhausted and drifted off before Will had finished the second page.
He closed the book and set it on the carpet and turned out the light. Cool desert air flowed in through an open window. A sprinkler whispered in the next door neighbor’s yard. Devlin yawned, made a cooing sound that reminded him of rocking her to sleep as a newborn. Her eyes fluttered and she said very softly, “Mom?”
“She’s working late at the clinic, sweetheart.”
“When’s she coming back?”
Back inside the Cherokee, Rachael sat behind the steering wheel, mascara trailing down her cheeks like sable tears. She wrung out her long black hair and massaged the headache building between her temples. Her purse lay in the passenger floorboard. She dragged it into her lap and shoved her hand inside, rummaging for the cell phone. She found it, tried her husband’s number, but there was no service in the storm.
Rachael looked into the back of the Cherokee at the spare. She had no way of contacting AAA and passing cars would be few and far between on this remote highway at this hour of the night. I’ll just wait and try Will again when the storm has passed.
Squeezing the steering wheel, she stared through the windshield into the stormy darkness, somewhere north of the border in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Middle of nowhere.
There was a brilliant streak of lightning. In the split second illumination she saw a black Escalade parked a hundred yards up the shoulder.
Thunder rattled the windows. Five seconds elapsed. When the sky exploded again, Rachael felt a strange, unnerving pull to look through the driver side window.