The first line declared in large letters, WALLACE EUGENE BEEBS AUTONOMOUS ZONE.
In smaller letters, the second and third lines informed the reader as to the meaning of “autonomous zone”： THE LAWS OF THE UNITED STATES DO NOT APPLY HERE.
The fourth through sixth lines were more ambiguous than what came before them: LOVERS OF FREEDOM SEEKING THEIR UNIQUE BLISS ARE WELCOME TO INQUIRE AS TO AVAILABILITY.
The sign stood beside a rutted dirt lane that crossed a field and appeared to slope into the desert equivalent of a glen. If a residence lay at the end of that track, we could not see it from the highway.
Considering that we hadn’t passed one structure or encountered a single other vehicle on this two-lane artery between the Twilight Zone and Transylvania, I wondered how long it had been since a lover of freedom had knocked on Wallace Eugene Beebs’s door, seeking bliss.
“This looks like the place,” Bridget said.
“What place?” I asked.
“The place where we might be able to trade this Explorer for another set of wheels.”
“You think there’s a used-car lot down there?”
“All we need from Beebs is one vehicle on which he’s willing to make a deal. What do you think, Panthea?”
“I don’t get any vibes, bad or good. But I don’t much like the idea of autonomous zones.”
“If it were anywhere else,” Bridget said, “you could pretty much conclude there must be at least a few violent crazies down there. But intuition tells me . . . out here in the middle of nowhere, Mr. Beebs is just another Sonoran Desert eccentric, as harmless as Hakeem Kaspar. What do you think, Quinn?”
I didn’t like the idea of autonomous zones, either. However, when I thought about needing another vehicle that the ISA didn’t know about, I felt psychic magnetism pulling me toward that glen.
I said, “What’s the worst that could happen—that maybe this Beebs dude turns out to be a cannibal, and a trapdoor on his front stoop drops us into a cellar, and in the cellar there’s a stew pot and the sucked-clean bones of fifty freedom lovers who inquired about the availability of their unique bliss? I’m up for that.”
Bridget pinched my cheek. “You’re so totally my kind of guy.”
“Well, in fact it could be something worse than a cannibal,” Panthea said. “Not that I’ve foreseen anything bad. I’m just sayin’。”
Sparky said, “So how much money might you need, sweetheart?”
Bridget thought for a moment. “Let’s try to get it done for less than fifty thousand.”
The duffel bag that contained the remaining hundred and ninety thousand dollars of drug-gang money was on the floor under Sparky’s feet. At the motel in Tucson, when Bridget and I had been off to coffee and cakes with Butch and Cressida Hammer, Sparky had finished counting the loot and had packaged it in five-thousand-dollar rolls held together with rubber bands.
As he began to withdraw ten of those rolls from the bag, he said, “Okay, let’s go.”
“I’m not driving down there,” Bridget said. “I don’t think that would be wise. We need to do a little reconnaissance on foot, be sure just how autonomous this autonomous zone is, how many citizens of Beebs’s America there might be.”
“Makes sense,” Sparky said.
“You should stay here to look after Panthea,” Bridget said.
“No, no. I can look out for myself,” the seer insisted.
Bridget shook her head. “Three of us going down there in the dead of night, we’re liable to unnerve Mr. Beebs.”
“First, it’s not the dead of night,” her grandfather said. “It’s not even ten o’clock. Second, just the two of you going down there, you’re more likely to end up in a stew pot.”
Bridget was having none of it. “It’s best for you to stay here behind the wheel, the engine running, just in case we have to make a quick exit. We can’t risk having this vehicle taken from us until we have another.”
At first answering her argument with silence, Sparky finally said, “What’s this about? Why don’t you want me going down there?”
He didn’t know she’d had a presentiment that one of us would die or that she was afraid it would be him because he would become too protective of her.
“All right, Grandpa, it’s just this. You look tough and ready to kick ass. You look like what you once were, full of righteous authority, a cop’s cop, a soldier’s soldier, and the very something that we don’t talk about. You look like all of that, and sometimes, with someone fragile like Hakeem Kaspar, you scare them when scaring them isn’t what we need to do.”