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If Danny’s kidnappers had caher floors of the hotel, the better to keep a lookout, I needed to approach froet as close to the property as possible before co out in the open

How the nameless woman knew that I would be able to follow them, how she knew that I would be compelled to follohy she wanted me to follow, I couldn’t explain with certainty Reason, however, led me to the inescapable suspicion that Danny had shared with her the secret of ift

Her cryptic conversation on the phone, her taunting, seeht confiro, he had lost his mother to cancer As his closest friend, I had been a coust

He was not a man with many friends His physical limitations, his appearance, and his acerbic wit liivingabout the events of August, I had not coenerously as I should have done

For consolation, he had his adoptive father But Dr Jessup had been grieving, too, and being a ht solace in his work

Loneliness comes in two basic varieties When it results froainst the world When the world instead rejects us, loneliness is an open door, unused

Soh that door when Danny was at his most vulnerable She had a smoky, silken voice

TWENTY-TWO

IN A BELLY CRAWL, OUT OF THE DRY WASH, ONTO FLAT land, leaving the hills behind, I squirave me cover My objective was a wall that separated the desert frorounds of the resort

Jackrabbits and a variety of rodents shelter froetation Where rabbits and rats went, snakes would follow, feeding

Fortunately snakes are shy; not as shy as church h To warn the out of the wash and into the sage, and as I eneral, produced enough noise to annoy all wildlife into relocating

Assuh in the hotel, and considering that I was still a few hundred yards from that structure, what noise Iin this direction, they would be scanning for e would not draw special notice; the breeze out of the north had stiffened, shuddering all the scrub and weeds Tumbleweed tu avoided the bite of snake, the sting of scorpion, the nip of spider, I reached the edge of the resort grounds I got to ainst the wall

I was covered in pale dust and in a powdery white substance acquired froe leaves

The unfortunate consequence of psychic erous circumstances but also into dirty places I’ radually curved northeast On this side, exposed concrete block had been painted white; on the farther side, where paying custoh barrier had been plastered and painted pink

Following the quake and the fire, tribal officials postedwould-be trespassers of the dangers of the daht contain The Mojave sun had faded those warnings, but they rerounds of the resort, were irregularly planted clusters of palm trees Because they were not native to the Mojave and hadn’t been watered after the quake wrecked the landscape-irrigation system, they were dead

So as if liy and brown Nevertheless, I found a cluster that screened a portion of the wall froot a handhold, clambered up, over, and dropped into a drift of debris from the palh thrashing and elbow-knocking to prove beyond doubt that I couldn’t have descended from apes I crouched behind the thick pal pool crafted to imitate a natural rock for fell from the falls The drained pool was half full of windblown debris

If Danny’s captors were keeping a watch, they would most likely focus their attention to the west, the direction froht also bethe road that linked the resort and the interstate in the north

The three of theuard four sides of the hotel Furthero off alone to a separate post At ilance encoet fro seen

They would havea bullet If they had wanted to kill me, I would not have been Tasered at the Jessup house; I would have been shot in the face

Later, perhaps, they would be pleased to killelse Miracles Aet inside, scout the terrain, find out where they were holding Danny Once I understood the situation, if I could not spring hiardless of the fact that in this case my intuition equated police involvement with certain death

I broke from the cover of the trees and raced across artificial-stone decking where once well-oiled sunbathers had drowsed on padded lounge chairs, prepping themselves for melanoma

Instead of tropical rum drinks, an open-air tiki-style poolside bar offered fors These were produced by feathered presences that I could not see, but that I heard The flock roosted on the crisscrossing lengths of imitation bamboo that supported the densely thatched roof of plastic palm fronds, and as I hurried past, they flapped and shrilled to warn me off

By the time I rounded the pool and reached the back entrance to the hotel, I’d had a chance to draw a lesson from the unseen birds Broken, burned, abandoned, orn, sand-scoured, even if more structurally sound than not, the Panale star in the Michelin Guide; but it ht have become the home to various desert fauna that found the place round

In addition to the threat posed by the mystery woman and her two murderous male friends, I would need to be alert for predators that had no lass doors at the back of the hotel, shattered in the quake, had been replaced with sheets of plywood to deny easy access to the morbidly curious Stapled to these panels were plastic sleeves holding notices of the vigorous civil actions that would be taken against anyone caught on the premises

The screws that held one of the sheets of plywood in place had been re by the sand and scraps of weeds that had drifted over the panel, it had not been taken down as recently as the past twenty-four hours, but weeks or o

For two years or so after the destruction of the resort, the tribe had paid for a roving security patrol 24/7 As the suits and counter-suits proliferated and the likelihood grew that the property ht be surrendered to creditors--much to the creditors’ horror--the patrols had becoer made sense to incur

With the hotel open beforeitself into a wind atand Danny at risk, I nevertheless hesitated to cross the threshold I aile as Danny Jessup, neither physically nor e point

I delayed not because of the people or the other living iven pause, instead, by the thought of the lingering dead who ht still haunt its soot-stained spaces