Down the Darkest Road

61

Like flies to carrion, the local media had already begun to arrive on Old Mission Road outside the gates of the home Lauren and her daughter had been taken from.

Mendez had set up a roadblock of two cruisers and four deputies to keep the media well back from the scene.

They were losing daylight. The sun had slipped over the far side of the western ridges, turning them purple and casting the valley into a light that was neither day nor night. In Santa Barbara, tourists would be sitting on the wharf, watching it float like an orange balloon above the Pacific horizon.

The county chopper had gone up to start a grid search above the hills to the west of town. They had already turned on the spotlight, but Mendez knew those hills as well as anyone, and he knew they would be fighting a futile battle as the shadows filled the steep canyons.

For the first time since he and Hicks and Tanner had arrived at the house, he was still, leaning back against the car, trying to quiet his mind and find a useful thought as Dixon addressed the media out on the road.

Tanner came and stood beside him. She looked as worried and grim as he felt.

“I hope she shot that asshole somewhere it hurts,” she muttered.

“I hope he dies from it.”

“We let her down,” she said, her voice cracking a little. “Goddamnit.”

“If she could have held out for us just a little longer,” Mendez said, fully aware he was talking about Lauren Lawton in the past tense.

Tanner shook her head. “She needed to do it. She never wanted it to be up to us. She needed to force his hand. We were just the excuse she needed to give herself permission to do it.”

Leah had never driven a car so fast in her life. Her mother’s BMW was too big for her and too strong for her and too powerful. It made Leah think of the first time she had snuck a ride on one of Daddy’s horses when she had only ever ridden a pony. She had been so scared. She was ten times as scared now. A million times more scared.

“Mommy,” she said loudly, glancing at her mother slumped in the passenger’s seat. “Mommy!! Mommy, talk to me!”

The steering wheel jerked in her hand and she shrieked and put her eyes back on the twisty road, turning the wheel the last second before running the car up on the rocks on the steep side.

Her mother was so pale she almost glowed in the darkening light of the car.

“Mommy, please don’t die,” Leah chanted. “Please don’t die. Please don’t die. Please don’t die.”

As if it would matter. As if chanting without stopping would make it so. She cursed herself for a stupid child.

Her mother’s left hand reached over toward her. The first sign of life Leah had seen in her in what seemed like hours.

It felt like forever because Leah didn’t know where they were. She had only known enough to point the car downhill and keep going. The rough path had joined with a narrow paved road. The narrow paved road finally came to a stop sign and a wider paved road.

And then she could see lights in the distance, and a place on the side of the road with chain saw totem poles and a gas pump, and a sign that read Canyon Café.