The Boys from Santa Cruz

4

“Braxton is a little over a hundred miles southeast of here, in Lake County,” says the desk clerk. “I jotted down the directions for you. If you’d like a map, I could print you-Mr. Daniel? Is everything okay, Mr. Daniel?”

“What? Oh, everything’s just fine.” Except for the smirking, leathery-faced imp perched like a pet monkey on the clerk’s shoulder, making washing motions with its clever little paws. “You were saying?”

“Do you need me to print you out a map to Braxton Hot Springs?”

“That won’t be necessary.”

“Here you go, then. And if you could sign here?”

“Sure thing.” Asmador closes his eyes long enough to access his eidetic recall, and visualizes the signature on the late Peter Daniel’s Mastercard before forging it on the receipt.

The route, all state highways save for a fifteen-mile stretch of U.S. 101, is straightforward enough; the driving is anything but. The hardest part isn’t so much staying on the road as it is ignoring the distractions-the blazing fields, the writhing trees, the mocking demons. For now that his system has managed to cleanse itself after three chemical restraint-free weeks, as Dr. Hillovi predicted, Asmador’s two worlds are beginning to merge at a disconcerting pace.

But Asmador perseveres. By tucking in behind another car and copying its movements, he learns to tell the difference between the things you have to brake for-cows, stop signs, and railroad crossings-and the things you don’t, the things the other cars drive through-capering demons, smoking geysers, and heaps of offal.

A few hours after leaving Fort Bragg, Asmador spots the turnoff for Braxton Springs Road. A blacktop driveway winds for another two and a half miles, to an unpaved lot with seven parked vehicles and no attendant. Asmador jockeys the dark green Cherokee into an empty space between an old hippie bus and a white…Hot damn! Could it be? Yes, it could. Out of all the vehicles in either of his worlds, Asmador has stumbled upon the same Buick he tailed and lost in San Francisco a few days ago. Epstein’s Buick.

Scarcely able to believe his eyes or his luck, Asmador has to get out and run his hands wonderingly over the smooth metal curves of the car to convince himself it’s real. But it is-and the hood is still warm.