The Crooked Staircase Read online

  “I’ve got no taste for it at all,” he objected. “But I sure am obsessed with staying alive.”

  11

  Waiting for the heater to bake the chill out of her bones, Jane Hawk sat behind the wheel of her Ford Explorer Sport, staring at a nightscape distorted by rain shimmering down the windshield. Through that fluid lens, the streetlamps appeared to quiver, receding like great scaffold-mounted torches along some shadowy road that led to Death and onward to Damnation.

  She had purchased her current vehicle from an all-cash black-market dealer who worked out of a series of barns on a former horse ranch near Nogales, Arizona. The Explorer Sport had been stolen in the United States and reworked in Mexico, where among other improvements it had been given a purpose-built 825-horsepower 502 Chevy engine.

  If you had to go on the run, hunted by law-enforcement and national-security agencies at the federal, state, and local level, it paid to have been an FBI agent who had learned how various criminal enterprises operated and where to find them.

  At Jane’s request, the navigation system had been stripped from the Explorer. If those searching for her got a lead on the vehicle, a GPS would give them her location with such specificity, mile by mile, that they could take her as elegantly as a bird of prey snatching a field mouse from a meadow. To avoid carrying other locaters, she had no smartphone and no computer.

  The hot air streaming from the dashboard vents warmed her but failed to alleviate the deeper chill, which wasn’t physical. It had gripped her when Sara Holdsteck regarded her with fervent admiration if not even reverence.

  Jane didn’t want to be anybody’s hero. She had undertaken this fight for two selfish reasons: to restore her husband’s reputation, because Nick had not committed suicide as the evidence indicated; and to save the life of her only child, five-year-old Travis, who’d been threatened when her investigation of Nick’s death led to the discovery of a conspiracy in some of the highest offices of government and industry. The roots of that cabal spread day by day through a nation of people unaware of their extreme peril.

  She had accepted that she might die during this endeavor. Even if she exposed and destroyed the conspiracy, she’d almost certainly afterward be murdered as a matter of revenge. Her enemies were people of great power and wealth, unaccustomed to defeat, and they would not endure it with grace. Travis was hidden away with friends, where he wasn’t likely to be found; were she to be killed, he would be raised with love and proper guidance.

  Her chances of survival, slim as they were, depended on staying tightly focused, on keeping her purpose narrow and her motivation personal, proceeding with confidence tempered by humility. Although the future of freedom hung in the balance, she was no Joan of Arc and didn’t want to be weighed down by a grand obligation like the one that had inspired the Maid of Orleans, at the insistence of adoring crowds, to put on armor and pick up a sword. Charismatic crusaders of that kind were doomed even in triumph, destroyed by exalted ambition if not by pride. And what Jane’s enemies could do to her, if they brought her down, would be far worse than being burned alive at the stake.

  She turned on the windshield wipers and drove away from the curb. A difficult task awaited her, and time was running out.

  12

  The dreary rain like a forewarning of despair to come, the claustrophobic closed-coffin darkness of the night, the half-seen python-muscled river in its serpentine flow to the right of them like some pagan god of fate whose forward slithery rush compelled them to follow, heedless of all consequences…

  Tanuja Shukla made no claim to psychic powers. The future was as unknown to her as to anyone. But as they neared the southern end of the canyon, where the surging cataracts would flood between the piers of a bridge and under the county road, the exhilaration of their apparent escape gave way to a vague presentiment of disaster.

  Sanjay’s strategy seemed to have worked. The imprudent speed with which he’d driven headlong into the gloom had brought them a few rocky moments when the ground under the Hyundai had become briefly treacherous, when they were startled by massive entanglements of tumbleweed and other loose brush, as big as the SUV itself, that blew down from higher ground and against the vehicle with a skreak and clatter as of some beast born of myth and mist. But for several minutes now, the headlights of the Range Rover had not cleaved the night and rain behind them. Their pursuers evidently had turned away from the river to follow a false trail or had fallen so far behind that turnings in the land concealed them.

  Yet as Sanjay drove out of the mouth of the canyon, up a slope of gravel, onto the county road, and turned right onto the bridge, Tanuja braced herself for a crisis. It arrived at once in the form of a big Chevrolet crew-cab pickup jacked on outsized tires.

  They were headed west, and the truck came from that direction. They had every reason to expect that it would cruise past them, driven by someone as innocent as they were. Instead, it angled to a stop on the bridge approach. The back doors on both sides were flung open, and men jumped out into the rain.

  There was no turning back into the canyon. Nor could they do a 360, because less than two miles to the east lay the dead end and the house that they had so recently fled.

  If Sanjay had slowed in the face of this emerging threat, they would have been lost. But even as the pickup skidded to a stop and the doors began to open, he accelerated. The Santa Fe Sport shot forward, and for one mad instant, Tanuja thought her brother meant to ram the Chevy head-on.

  The man who jumped down from the starboard side of the truck held a shotgun in his right hand. He looked surprised to see their Hyundai rocketing toward him, his face pale and wide eyes glittering with reflections of their headlights. He wasn’t fast enough to bring up the shotgun in a two-hand grip and wasn’t smart enough to fling himself out of harm’s way. The Hyundai clipped the open door, and the door checked the gunman hard, knocking him off his feet and backward as they careened past.

  “Holy shit!” Tanuja declared on impact.

  The Chevy blocked too much of the roadway, and Sanjay could not get past it on the pavement. He steered down a graveled slope, the angle of descent seeming even more severe than it was because they had lost one headlight in the collision, the single remaining beam lending a cockeyed aspect to all that lay before them. He fought the steering wheel as the back end of the Hyundai slid clockwise. With the vehicle horizontal to the shoulder of the highway above them, at a scary slant that encouraged Tanuja to brace herself in expectation of a roll, Sanjay drove west across the face of the incline, well past the pickup, perhaps out of shotgun range, before angling uphill and returning to the blacktop.

  Tanuja looked at the starboard mirror as her brother glanced at the rearview. Speaking over each other, she said, “Here they come, here they come!” as he said, “We can outrun a freaking crew-cab pickup!”

  “They’re just letting that guy lie there on the road,” she said. “Maybe he’s dead.”

  “He’s not dead,” Sanjay said.

  “The door hit him hard.”

  “Not that hard.”

  “I don’t care if he’s dead. He was going to shoot us.”

  “Who are these crazy bastards?”

  “Rakshasa,” Tanuja said, referring to a race of demons from Hindu mythology, an element of fantasy she had used in a novelette.

  “Hoods, goons, torpedoes,” Sanjay said, “but working for who, doing what, why us?”

  “And how the hell did they know where we’d come out of the canyon?”

  Bullets of rain fragmented off the windshield as the Santa Fe Sport topped ninety miles per hour and, even with all-wheel drive, seemed to risk hydroplaning off the rain-swept blacktop.

  They were still in a rural area, but the road undulated and curved through a miles-long downgrade toward the densely populated lowlands of Orange County. The crew-cab pickup had ceased falling farther behind but wasn’t
gaining, either, when in the distance a pulsing light quickened out of the dark and mist, the source hidden beyond the far fall of the highway, at first as eerie as an alien close encounter à la Spielberg: white and red, red and blue, white and red….

  “Hey, cops!” Sanjay said. “We’re okay, Tanny. It’s the cops.”

  “Lincoln Crossley’s the cops, a sheriff’s deputy, same thing,” said Tanuja, and she remembered Linc temporarily rendered sightless by insecticide and firing his gun blindly even though he’d been as likely to hit his two companions as to kill either her or Sanjay. She groaned as a patrol car topped the distant rise, the lightbar on its roof flaring brighter. The siren could now be heard even over the roar of rain and engine. “We are so screwed.”

  “We aren’t screwed,” Sanjay disagreed.

  “We are so screwed.”

  “What do you know? You write hopeful fantasy, magic realism, whatever. I’m the noir guy, and I say we’re not screwed.”

  “Chodu,” she said.

  “We are not chodu.”

  “We are so chodu,” she insisted as the siren swelled louder.

  13

  The storm relented from a downpour to a fitful drizzle by the time Jane parked around the corner and almost two blocks from her destination in the city of Orange. She walked from there, carrying a zippered tote bag.

  If the authorities ever made a connection between her and the metallic-gray Explorer, a vehicle description would be put on the National Crime Information Center website, with an alert to every law-enforcement agency in the nation. Thereafter, she would be in constant jeopardy while driving it. She would need two or three days to get new license plates and a DMV registration from her current source for forged documents in Reseda, north of Los Angeles; it might be safer to abandon the SUV than to use it during the interim between an NCIC listing and the receipt of new plates and documents.

  Better, instead, to be discreet, to park out of any line of sight from the place she intended to visit. The guy she needed to see wasn’t part of the conspiracy against which she’d set herself. She didn’t expect him to betray her. But like snakes molting out of their old skins, people so often shed her expectations of them that she had learned to be ready for anything.

  The building was as she remembered it: flanked by parking lots, presenting an imposing two-story Southern Classic Revival face of white-painted brick with raised portico, balustrade, and tapered columns. At nine o’clock, cars stood in both parking lots.

  Avoiding the front entrance, she went around the west side of the establishment, where the grand façade gave way to the stucco so prevalent in Southern California that it suggested the primary goals of local architecture must be impermanence and ease of eventual demolition. At the back of the property was a wide detached garage with four roll-ups. Between the structures lay a motor courtyard.

  The main building featured an ordinary back entrance, but also a pair of sliding doors behind which lay a freight elevator that was accessible only with a code entered in a keypad. She tried the door at the stoop and found that she didn’t need her lock-release gun.

  She stepped into a vestibule. A door directly ahead of her would open to a ground-floor hallway, where there would be people whom she didn’t want to encounter. She tried the door on the left. Stairs led to the second floor.

  Behind the door on the right were stairs to the basement. She descended quickly.

  She came into a long corridor. A series of flush-set eighteen-inch-diameter frosted-glass lenses shed a cold white light with a faint blue tint. The white walls were of a smooth, glossy laminate. Shiny gray vinyl served as flooring and baseboard, curving up to meet the walls. The space had a science-fiction-y feel, as if she’d entered a time tunnel or an interstellar vessel.

  The freight elevator access to this level was on her right.

  She opened the door across the hall from the elevator, switched on the lights, saw a dead man, and went into that room.

  14

  As in a vivid but incomprehensible nightmare, the relentless pursuers came from behind them like a demonic posse with a death warrant, and police raced head-on toward them, the modulated siren shrilling. The land was still lonely and forbidding on both sides of the highway. The rain abruptly diminished as though a long drumroll had ended and the pending event to which it called attention would now occur.

  Sanjay respected the police and prided himself on remaining calm in difficult situations, but twenty-five years of experience had not prepared him for a night when known reality dropped out from under him as if it had been a trapdoor. Although it wasn’t like him to rely on intuition rather than reason, he sensed that the insanity would only escalate from here.

  “Hold on,” he warned Tanuja as, in the headlights, wet pavement glistened toward a crossroads. He pumped the brakes, made a hard right turn onto the new two-lane, nearly spun out, oriented the Hyundai, and accelerated.

  “What are we doing?” his sister asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I’ll know it when I see it.”

  “Will I know it when you see it?”

  “Someplace we can get off the road, out of sight.”

  The blacktop wove through low hills and vales of ancient live oaks immense and spreading, dark and dripping. Numerous curves, in conjunction with the trees, repeatedly screened their SUV from those in pursuit of them.

  Although Sanjay knew this back road well, he couldn’t think of a bolt-hole anywhere along its course. He was a guy who could focus as tightly as a laser, but he was first to admit he was a poor multitasker. He saw no need to chew gum and play basketball at the same time. He didn’t even like basketball. He could pilot the Santa Fe Sport at high speed along wet pavement, through treacherous curves, with confidence, monitoring pursuers in the rearview and side mirrors, but an answer to the question Where next? eluded him.

  As always, Tanuja was a critical component in the two-piece puzzle that was the Shukla twins. She said, “We’re coming up on Honeydale Stables. That’s the place.”

  “That’s the place,” he agreed.

  And here came the turnoff to their right, a single-lane driveway of cracked and potholed blacktop lined with oaks, bisecting a once-rich meadow gone to weeds, flanked by ranch fencing collapsed in places by the work of termites, rot, and dry rot.

  Sanjay hung a right, killed the headlights. He let their speed fall without using the brakes, and avoided revealing their position with a red flush of taillights in case their pursuers might be closer than he believed they were.

  After about thirty yards, the private lane descended, and they were beyond view of the highway behind them, coasting into a valley that lay in a moonless, starless murk. The dilapidated fencing and colonnade of oaks guided them in the gloom, and the wild grass to both sides was not as dark as the pavement.

  They passed near the ruins of the once-great house in which the owners had perished in a fire three years earlier: a rubble of broken masonry and infallen timbers. Two stone fireplaces with chimneys stood largely unscathed, oddly threatening in the night, like shrines to a primitive god that had slaughtered his own idolaters.

  Wind had been at work on the night of the fire. Flames jumped to the extensive stables, and more than half were destroyed. The owners’ breeding horses and the horses of others who’d paid to board their mounts at Honeydale were saved by the ranch manager, but the business died with its owners. After a contentious battle between heirs, the estate was eventually settled, but though the property had been on the market for a year, it hadn’t yet sold.

  Sanjay drove behind one of the intact stables and parked and switched off the engine. “When they realize they’ve lost us, they won’t backtrack to look. They’ll figure we’re long gone.”

  Tanuja rolled down her window. The rain had stopped. The wind had
died. Cool night air brought with it a faint scent of char that the recent downpour had stirred from a half-collapsed stable nearby, but she heard neither a siren in the distance nor the growl of engines.

  “Who’ll believe us, Sanjay?”

  “Not the sheriff. Something’s corrupt there.”

  Referring to their parents, Tanuja said, “That’s why dear Baap and Mai left India, so much corruption there, why they brought us here so long ago. I still miss them every day.”

  Sanjay agreed. “I always will.”

  The world lay in eclipse under the shrouded sky, and a palpable night tide seemed to pour through the open window, pooling thickly in the Hyundai. Sanjay felt strangely as if he were breathing both air and darkness, but exhaling only air.

  “Maybe the sheriff isn’t rotten,” Tanuja said, “just some of his deputies.”

  “Or maybe he is rotten.”

  “Most cities in the county have their own police.”

  “But we don’t live in one of those cities.”

  “Well, we have to go to somebody.”

  Although Sanjay had not started the SUV, although neither he nor his sister had touched any control, the computer screen in the dashboard brightened, startling them. The navigation system became active. A map appeared. It featured a thick serpentine line labeled with the route number of the county road they had recently departed. Leading off the thick line, a thinner one wasn’t labeled, although it could be nothing but the private driveway leading to Honeydale Stables. On the map, a red indicator blinked at the end of the driveway and to one side of it, where the Hyundai currently stood.

  “What’s happening?” Tanuja asked.

  Sanjay threw open the driver’s door and got out. He took a few steps forward to stand by the front bumper, listening to a stillness disturbed only by the arrhythmic ticking of the cooling engine, the dripping rainwater from saturated trees, and the occasional haunting question of an owl.