After she and her grandfather exchanged meaningful looks and said, “Magnetism,” in unison, Bridget glanced at me. Judging by the way she rolled her eyes and sighed with exasperation, she understood that at the moment I was two ingredients short of being a s’more.
I turned my attention to her grandfather. “Magnetism makes sense to you?”
“Perfect sense.”
“It doesn’t make sense to me.”
“It will,” he said.
“What were you doing here? Why would you be in a place like this, the middle of nowhere?”
“We came here to hide for a few days,” Sparky said. “Till we could figure things out. But they found us.”
“Figure out what things?”
“Later, Quinn. Now we better scoot. When the backup they called for gets here, I suspect there’ll be so damn many, you couldn’t run them all down even if they lined up like tenpins for you.”
Bridget said, “Your Toyota is maybe totaled.”
“Yeah. And there’s a dead guy squashed in the grille.”
Sparky said, “You’ll come with us. You can drive. We have a lot to discuss.”
“I’ll get my suitcase.” I started to go around to the front of the barn, then stopped and turned back to them. “Hey, if you have a phone, that’s how they found you.”
“We’re wise to that,” Bridget said. “We only have an anonymous disposable cell. And the Buick’s too old to have GPS.”
“License plates,” I said. “Nearly every police car and a lot of other government vehicles are fitted with three-hundred-sixty-degree plate scanners. They transmit to the National Security Agency’s Utah Data Center in real time. Where were you coming from?”
“Flagstaff,” she said.
“Oh, sure, you’d have been scanned a few times along the way. Then maybe they tapped archived satellite video and found where you went from the last time you were captured by a scan.”
They regarded me with something like awe, impressed with my street smarts, as if I’d been raised by gangbangers instead of nuns.
“I’ll strip the plate off my car, which I took from a Porsche in a parking garage, and we’ll swap it for yours. It’s not a long-term solution, but it’ll buy us some time.”
They returned to the barn with me, to retrieve their luggage, supplies, and blankets from the hayloft, where they had intended to hide for a few days while they figured things out.
The Toyota had no windshield, one flat tire, and the tired look of machinery that no longer understands its purpose. It was leaking radiator fluid. When I got behind the wheel, the dead agent pinned between the car and the wall appeared to be shouting accusations.
The urge to vomit did not return. I didn’t know what these men had intended to do to Bridget, but I was not so naive as to believe that their every action would have been according to the provisions in a neatly typed warrant. Furthermore, I’d seen enough movies about the Mafia to know that guys who were tied up and stuffed into car trunks, like Grandpa Sparky, were either going to be crushed and compacted along with the vehicle in a scrap-metal salvage yard or driven to a construction site, shot, dumped in a deep hole, and buried under many yards of concrete, becoming part of an office building foundation. I hadn’t already become desensitized to violence, but for sure I was coming to terms with the true dark nature of this world much faster than I would have while writing about our state’s colorful past for Arizona! magazine.
The car didn’t start. Then it did—coughing, shuddering. I reversed, and the dead guy slid to the barn floor, out of sight. I needed just a few minutes to unscrew the Porsche’s plate.
When I carried my luggage behind the barn, Bridget was closing an open suitcase that lay in the trunk of the Buick.
Sparky stood near her, inserting a pistol into a holster on his right hip.
I heard myself say, “You’ve got a gun,” as if this would be news to him.
“I should’ve been wearing it when those bastards took us by surprise. I thought we were safe here.” He pulled on a sport coat. “I’ve had things too soft for too long. I should’ve remembered—no one is ever safe anywhere.”
With the Porsche plate on the Buick, as I drove away from the Sweetwater Flying F Ranch with Bridget riding shotgun and Sparky in the back seat, the sun broke like a bloody yolk on the sharp horizon and the purple of twilight was preceded by the red sky at night that is supposedly every sailor’s delight.