LUCAS LED OFF, followed by Bob and Rae, with Tremanty trailing. The first mile had both uphill and downhill pitches, nothingsevere, but not quite as easy as Bob had suggested. There were scattered rocks, like in the pictures taken by the Mars rover, and plants that bit. The heat was ferocious, the kind that burned the sweat off your face before you even got damp; it felt like a bad fever. They crossed two vehicle tracks, invisible on the satellite photos, apparently sworn in by three-wheelers. Rae saw a fist-sized spider, which she claimed was a tarantula and “can kill you as fast as a rattler.”
From the back, Tremanty said, “Untrue. In fact, they’re barely poisonous. Theycanbite, but the bite’s not venomous.”
Rae: “Killjoy.”
Lucas: “I think I’ll fuck with one to find out for sure.” He looked at the mountain, licked his lips, and said, “Sooner or later, we’ll have to start climbing. That’s when it’ll get hot.”
A half hour out of the chopper, they passed a low red rock bluff that threw a shadow out onto the desert. Bob pointed at the shadow and said, “Water stop. Two minutes.”
Lucas checked his watch. “If Deese left Las Vegas the minute he got the money and made no stops, and didn’t drive more than five miles an hour over the speed limit, he’ll be getting here about now.”
“Except for the bad road coming in,” Tremanty said. “That’ll slow him down. But we oughta trot this next part.”
—
THE NEXT PITCHwas a slight uphill that continued on for most of a half mile. The footing was good, a layer of sand over a harder crust. They crossed an arroyo, with a deeper sandy floor, saw a motor track closer to the mountain they were skirting and movedonto it. “Looks like it’s going toward the trailer. We’re getting close,” Rae said.
They crossed a rocky hump, still on the track, down into another arroyo, and up a higher hump and around the heel of a bluff, and the trailer was there, four hundred yards away. They backed off, behind a clump of brush, where they could see the trailer without being seen.
“Old Airstream,” Tremanty said, looking at the trailer with his binoculars. “Pretty beat up, like a salvage job.”
A dark sedan was parked outside the side door. Tremanty put the binoculars on the car and said, “Yes! That’s Gloria Harrelson’s Lexus.”
“Told’ja,” Rae said.
Bob said, “If they’re watching, they’ll see us if we try to get closer on the track.”
Lucas: “Why don’t we backtrack, get a drink, and come up behind that ridge.”
He pointed downhill to a ridge that would cover an approach from the south side of the trailer. They wouldn’t be able to get all the way in, but they’d get closer.
—
THEY ALL TOOKlong drinks after fishing the bottles out of Lucas’s backpack, and Lucas took a final look through the binoculars. Not much to see: everything around the trailer was deathly still, although, after a moment, he became aware of a vibration. He slid the glasses sideways, saw the silver oval of a propane tank. There was a surface pipe leading to the trailer. And there was another snaking away from the tank and up the hill and out of sight.
“Okay. There’s a propane tank, probably for heat in the winter, but you feel that vibration? I think he’s got a generator back there, behind the tank. He’d want it away from the trailer so he wouldn’t be breathing the fumes.”
“Does that help us?” Rae asked.
Bob was looking at the trailer through his scope and said, “It could. It’s gotta be running the AC. If we could slide around the trailer, we could kill the generator, and somebody would either have to come out and see what the problem was or die of heatstroke.”
They passed the binoculars around and speculated about the Lexus. Had the gang driven the car to Las Vegas? Were they already back? They’d seen a pickup on the satellite image and it was nowhere to be seen. Neither was the motorbike.
“He had to have taken the truck,” Lucas said. “That’s how he got the bike to Vegas.”
“Then he’s not back yet,” Tremanty said.
—
BOB SAID, “If we get down below that ridge and keep going right, you see that hump? We could low-crawl across there and get behind those bushes or trees, or whatever they are, and get back to the generator without being seen.”
“One of us could,” Lucas said. He looked at Rae. “You.”
“Why me?”
“Because if we drive somebody out of the trailer, we’ll need the sniper out front. I’ll call the shot, Sandro will talk to me about it. And if we get spotted, we’d want the machine gun up high and behind the trailer to pick off runners coming out the back.”
She nodded. “Okay.”
