Shiver

33

A Bell Jet Ranger helicopter, painted with the blue and white color scheme of the LAPD, swooped down on Van Nuys Airport less than three minutes after Delgado arrived. He was running toward it even before the skids touched the tarmac. Ducking under the overhead rotor, he climbed into the backseat behind the two Air Support Unit officers-pilot and observer-in the cockpit.

“Take me north!” he shouted over the engine roar. “To the Mojave!”

The pilot pulled up on the collective-pitch lever. Engine noise increased as the throttle opened. The airport shrank to a dark irregular stain, then glided away as the pilot’s feet worked the yaw pedals to steer the chopper north.

“Follow the 405 to the 5,” Delgado ordered. “Give me all the speed you’ve got.”

“Yes, sir.”

Delgado looked out the side window, staring down at the wide white streak of the San Diego Freeway five hundred feet below. On either side of the freeway, the rooftops of shops and apartment buildings glided by, some darkened briefly by the copter’s oblong shadow. Parking lots, open jewel cases at this height, glittered with shiny treasures that were cars. Lawns and public parks gleamed bright and fuzzy, squares of green velvet.

The chopper took less than ten minutes to reach city limits, where the Valley ended and the high desert began. Delgado spent the duration of the trip considering where best to look for Franklin Rood. The man might have gone anywhere, of course. Might have traveled fifty miles into the desert. Might still be driving, perhaps headed for Bakersfield or San Francisco-or the Canadian border, for that matter.

But Delgado didn’t think so. If his assumptions were correct. Rood was going to a place already known to him, the place where he kept his trophies. Some secluded hideaway, close enough to be convenient, most likely on one of the back roads that snaked through the desert like trails traced by a restless finger in the dust.

He saw such a road running parallel to Route 5 and decided to try it first.

“Fly over that route,” he said, leaning into the cockpit and pointing. “At a lower altitude.”

The pilot pulled the lever down, decreasing the pitch angle of the main rotor blades. The pale pink Mojave expanded as the helicopter began its descent.

Delgado accepted a pair of binoculars from the observer, then scanned the roadside, looking for a white car that resembled a Ford Falcon. He saw one old junker that intrigued him for a moment, but when the copter obligingly dipped still nearer to the ground, he shook his head.

Several other roads, some of them little better than dirt paths, branched off from the one they were following. At Delgado’s order, the pilot showed him each in detail. The roads hugged the scalloped rims of canyons or meandered into the desert and dead-ended amid the cholla and bitterroot. Delgado saw nothing that looked like the car he sought.

“Let’s try the Sierra Highway,” he said. It was the next logical place to look.

There was little to see along the highway itself except a few isolated ranches and what appeared to be large sheds or cheap repair shops with metal roofs. The few vehicles parked here and there were all wrong.

Again Delgado tried the back roads. Scanning the first one that branched off the highway, he saw a horse ranch, a scatter of picnic tables at a campsite, and a young boy who gazed up at the helicopter, waving his arm in broad sweeps.

The chopper returned to the Sierra Highway and continued north. A second side road crawled into view like the dry tributary of a dead river. The pilot took it without the need for an order. Delgado peered down. He saw a graveyard of abandoned automobiles, a desolate ranch, and, not far ahead, the silvery shimmer of a trailer.

Near the trailer was a car. White. Not new.

Suddenly the back of his neck was warm.

“Lower,” he said. The word came out so softly as to be nearly inaudible. He had to repeat it to make himself heard.

The copter descended.

“Don’t hover. Pass by.” He didn’t want to make too much noise. Just in case.

The copter swept past the car. It was a Falcon. Delgado was sure of that.

But was it Franklin Rood’s Falcon? He would have to read the license plate.

The observer glanced at him. “What now. Detective?”

“Set us down on the road about fifty yards from the trailer.” Delgado touched the grip of his Beretta, simply to reassure himself that it was there. “I’m taking a closer look.”