The Disappearance

One

The desert stretched out before them, a tan plain dotted by occasional brown brush and bordered at the far edges by small mountains painted purple by the rising sun. Aside from Reyn, who was driving, Gary was the only one in the car still awake, and he shifted slightly in the middle of the backseat, both to relieve some of the pressure that Joan’s elbow was putting on his midsection and to move away from Brian’s leg, which was pressing uncomfortably close. From the passenger seat in front, Stacy stirred, letting out a muffled sound that was half snore, half snort.

“That’s why I love her,” Reyn whispered back.

Gary smiled.

They’d been driving since midnight, when Brian had gotten off work at Del Taco, and were now out of California and well into Nevada. If Brian had been awake, he would have insisted they stick to their planned itinerary and stop off in Vegas for a few hours, but luckily for the rest of them he had been out like a light since San Bernardino, and they had decided on the spur of the moment, in the middle of the darkness, in the middle of the desert, to skip Las Vegas and had turned onto a state highway at Baker.

They were on their way to Burning Man, the tribal gathering held each summer in the Black Rock Desert. Gary knew next to nothing about the festival, only that it had something to do with a big effigy that got set on fire each year like the straw figure in The Wicker Man. Stacy had been before, and it was she who’d initially suggested they make this trek. They’d had fun at Coachella together, she’d said. This would be even better.

Indeed, they had all gone to Coachella together—all of them except Joan—and while that had been fun and there’d been no problems, it had also been only a two-hour drive from UCLA, with Palm Springs, Indio and a host of sprawling, newly developed desert cities in the immediate surrounding area.

This was totally different.

For one thing, Burning Man was ten hours away, out in the middle of nowhere and lasted a week. For another, it was not a well-planned commercial endeavor but a hippieish “event” where participants were supposed to create a temporary community dedicated to “art, self-expression and self-reliance.”

Two days at Coachella had been fine, but Gary wasn’t sure the five of them could spend a week together without ending up at one another’s throats, and he was glad that their respective work schedules had precluded them from attending all save these climactic three days. Unfortunately, it was also Labor Day weekend, which meant that they were going to be stuck in endless lines of traffic when they tried to return to Southern California.

Joan stirred awake, opening her eyes and smiling at him. She kissed his cheek and wrapped an arm around his midsection. Even here in the car, hair tangled and face groggy, she looked absolutely beautiful, and as always, he was astounded by the fact that she was going out with him. Although he’d seen her around campus before—and noticed her—they had met only last semester in a music appreciation class they had together. He could not remember now how or why they had started talking. He seemed to recall that either she had asked him for a pencil or he had asked her for one, but the memory of that first meeting was vague and hazy. He’d been dating someone else at the time—Meg Wells, a hyperefficient advertising major whose life was so well organized that even the specifics of her leisure activities were accounted for on her PDA—but he’d found himself thinking more and more about Joan, looking for her in the crowd outside the music building before class, going out of his way to walk with her after class, although nothing had happened between them. It wasn’t until earlier this summer, after Meg had landed a summer internship at a high-powered advertising agency and abruptly dumped him, that Gary had run into Joan at a party and had gathered up enough courage to ask her out on an official date. It turned out that she was just as interested in him as he was in her—and had been all the past semester—and they moved seamlessly from casual acquaintances to friends to… more than friends. Boyfriend and girlfriend, he would have said, but she didn’t like those terms. Lover was out, too, as was the perennially unpopular significant other.

Whatever they were, they were together, and he was humbled by the fact that he was with someone so clearly out of his league.

There was another snort from the front seat.

Stacy and Reyn, on the other hand, were a perfect match.

Bright white light burst through the passenger windows as the sun surmounted whatever obstacle on the eastern horizon had kept its rays from shining on the highway. There was a chorus of groans and complaints as Stacy and Brian were jolted awake.

“About time,” Gary told them.

“Where are we?” Stacy wanted to know.

“Past the nuclear test range,” Reyn said.

“Are you serious?” Brian asked.

“Yeah. There was a fence about twenty miles long.”

“I don’t like that.” Brian glanced back out the rear windshield. “Can we go home another way?”

“People drive past here all the time.”

“Yeah, and look at the incidence of cancer in this country.”

“It’s not coming from the Nevada desert,” Reyn said patiently.

“I don’t want to take chances,” Brian said. “You can gamble with your sperm count, but I didn’t sign up for that.”

They stopped for a late lunch at an Arby’s in the small town of Fallon and reached the two-lane road leading into the Black Rock Desert by midafternoon. The traffic was bumper to bumper, and it took them more than an hour to get to a spot where they could drive off the road and onto the playa.

The festival had been going on for five days now, and what Stacy called “Black Rock City” had sprouted from the flat ground like a recycled shantytown in a postapocalyptic world. They could see brightly painted retro shacks and white futuristic domes spread out before them, an assortment of curious flags flying from makeshift towers. People were milling about, gathered in groups, walking alone, working on sculptures, playing instruments, lecturing, listening, dancing. Smoke rose from various bonfires, though the temperature was well over one hundred degrees. A stick-figure effigy atop a high wooden platform—the Burning Man himself—overlooked it all.

“Seems cool,” Reyn said unconvincingly.

“Find a place to set up camp,” Stacy told him.

They drove around the outskirts of the activity until they found a section of open space between what appeared to be an oversized Lego building (MEREDITH’S CANDY HOUSE, according to a hand-painted sign) and a black, graffiti-covered block of wood, bigger than their car, whose torn sheet of a flag announced JOE STRUMMER LIVES! Reyn pulled to a stop, and they all got out. It felt good to be able to stretch, and Gary jogged in place for a moment while Joan performed a few quick jumping jacks beside him. The air was heavy and hot, and smelled of smoke and garbage, paint and pot.

Reyn opened the trunk. They’d brought a big ice chest filled with food and drink, as well as three sacks of snacks from Trader Joe’s. Gary and Joan had packed a tent for the two of them to share, as had Reyn and Stacy, but Brian had only his sleeping bag. “I’m staying on the ground,” he said. “Under the stars. I don’t want some advanced polymer coming between me and Mother Nature. That’s against everything Burning Man stands for.” He grinned. “Unless, of course, I meet a comely young lass who asks me to share her domicile for the evening.”

Brian unrolled his sleeping bag on the dirt directly in front of the car, then sat on top of it, listening to his iPod while the two couples each put up their respective tents. Gary and Joan’s was the simpler of the two, and they were set up and ready to go before Reyn and Stacy had finished arguing over where to pound in their stakes. Gary walked over to the open trunk and grabbed a bag of spiced pita chips. “Why don’t you put everything in the backseat?” Reyn said. “It’s cooler.”

“What about the ice chest? Should I—?”

“Just put it on the seat. If any of us wants anything, we can open the door and get it.” Two bearded, shirtless guys about their age ran by, squirting each other with Super Soakers. “Besides, I don’t want anyone else stealing our stuff.”

Gary moved the ice chest and snack sacks to the backseat of the car; then he, Joan and Brian ate chips while Reyn and Stacy finished putting up their tent.

“I guess we’re done,” Reyn said, stepping away from the tent to look at it.

Brian held up the empty pita chip bag. “We are, too.”

“So, what’s the plan?” Gary asked.

They all looked at Stacy. She was the one who’d been here before, who’d convinced them to come in the first place, and if there was any sort of program, schedule or timetable, she would know.

“Why don’t we just… explore?” she suggested. She waved her hand toward the motley collection of structures in front of them. “Within Black Rock City there are many villages, and they all have their own artwork, manifestos and music. That’s the best thing about being here.”

“Aren’t we going to be in trouble because we’re not building something?” Joan asked.

Gary smiled. “We could dig a latrine.”

Stacy sighed. “That’s the spirit.”

A gray-dreadlocked man in a loincloth danced by, blue zodiac symbols painted on his hairy chest and arms. Behind the Joe Strummer cube, in front of a tie-dyed Bedouin tent, a group of young women in colorful gauzy dresses stood in a circle with their eyes closed, holding hands and chanting.

Brian rubbed his hands in a parody of greed. “Just point me toward the E.”

Reyn and Stacy laughed.

Gary looked meaningfully over at Joan. The two of them were the weekend’s sober chaperones, the in-place equivalent of designated drivers. Although Gary liked an occasional beer, he was deathly afraid of drugs, and Joan came from a strict religious background and did not even drink. So it was their responsibility to make sure the rest of them did not overindulge or get involved in potentially dangerous activities.

“Oh,” Brian said in a tone of exaggerated simplicity. “I almost forgot. I have my own.” He reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a wrinkled plastic sandwich bag filled with pills. “Ta-da!”

Gary’s heart lurched in his chest. “Where did you get that?” he demanded.

“Don’t worry about it, Mr. Clean.”

“What if we’d gotten pulled over? What if a cop found that on you? We’d all be in jail right now!”

Brian grinned. “This will all be gone by Sunday. The car will be totally clean on the way back.”

Gary was furious. “You stupid asshole!”

“I’ll punish him,” Reyn promised. “I’ll make sure we drive past that test range on the way home.”

“Hey, I wasn’t joking about that!”

“It’s my car,” Reyn reminded him.

“Then I’ll catch a ride with someone else.”

“Let him,” Gary said. He reached for Joan’s hand and turned away, pulling her with him as the two of them headed through the crowd toward some of the villages and artwork. The festival had an overall theme, as it did each year, but he’d forgotten it and could not tell what it was from the installations around them. Behind a long white wall, onto which were tacked photographs of isolated smiles, he heard the sounds of acoustic guitar and flute. Joan pulled him in that direction, and he allowed himself to be led. “Can you believe that asshole? Carrying drugs?”

“You knew this was going to happen,” Joan pointed out. “What did you think they were going to do when they got here?”

“I didn’t think there’d be drugs in the car with me.”

“Just because they’re into that doesn’t mean that you have to be. As I understand it, that’s what Burning Man is all about: letting everyone celebrate in their own way.”

“You’re very nonjudgmental,” he said.

She performed a small curtsy. “It’s one of my most attractive qualities.”

Smiling, Gary kissed her. “You’re good for me,” he said.

They walked around the side of the wall and saw a bald woman and a long-haired man seated in folding chairs atop a provisional stage. The woman was playing flute, the man guitar, and they were performing for a group of twenty-odd people sitting cross-legged on the bare dirt. Gary and Joan moved to the back of the crowd and stood there, listening. But the duo did only two more songs before vacating the stage for an angry poet who started shouting his work into a child’s Mr. Microphone toy.

Gary and Joan wandered away.

“So, did you tell your parents you were coming here?” Gary asked.

Joan looked shocked. “Of course not!” There was a pause. “You?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Sort of. I mean, my parents aren’t the hippest people on the planet, and I don’t think they’d ever heard of Burning Man before, so I didn’t tell them details about it. But they know I’m here.”

“I’m jealous,” she said. “I wish I had that sort of relationship with my parents.”

“You’re jealous of my relationship with my parents?” He shook his head. “Your envy is sadly misplaced, young lady.”

The sun was getting low, but the air was still hot, and they went through an intricate maze made out of palm fronds before taking refuge beneath a giant umbrella spraying mist on those below it. Finally they made their way back to their own camp. The ice chest was out of the trunk and on the ground, and over it Reyn had fashioned a type of awning to provide shade, raiding the box of black trash bags they’d brought and clamping the ends of three bags between the tops of the car’s passenger doors while affixing the other ends to some sticks he’d found and stuck in the ground. Reyn’s little hibachi was set up next to the tents, and Stacy was cooking hot dogs over charcoal. She grinned. “Want a wiener?” she asked.

“Already have one,” Gary told her.

“I can vouch for that,” Joan added.

The others laughed. Stacy used a fork to pick up the hot dogs that were finished grilling. She piled them on a plate, then put on two more for Gary and Joan.

Brian looked apologetic. “Sorry, man. I should’ve told you I was carrying. I just didn’t think about it. Honest.”

Gary nodded. “It’s all right.”

“I guess I assumed you knew.”

“It’s okay,” Gary assured him.

Brian dropped his voice. “Then do you think you can get him not to drive back by that radiated area?” He touched his crotch. “I don’t want my guys here contaminated. And I’m sure you don’t, either. We have to think about the future, bro. We’re not going to be twenty-one forever.”

Gary clapped a hand on his back. “I’ll see what I can do.”

That night there were fireworks. A rave started up in one of the villages and gradually spread outward through Black Rock City, the pulsing music growing louder as additional speakers were improvisationally added. Brian was blissed out and disappeared somewhere in the strobe-accented darkness, while Reyn and Stacy slithered together to slow music that only they could hear. Gary danced with Joan, completely sober. For the first time, he thought he understood Burning Man, and though he wasn’t on the same wavelength as most of these people, he still felt part of it all.

The next day, they took Stacy’s advice and just wandered around, exploring. In one village, Gary actually finger painted for the first time since grammar school, the distinctive smell of the thick paint bringing on a wave of nostalgia that left him feeling almost giddy. A Mad Max–looking Winnebago was tricked out as a lunch wagon, its occupants giving out free veggie burgers, and all five of them ate until they were full before setting off once again across the playa.

That night, the Man was burned, set ablaze to cheers and dancing and revelry. They could have gone over with most of the crowd to where it was actually happening, but they could see the event fine from where they were, and the truth was that all of the heat and walking had pretty much worn them out. Joan drank water, the rest of them beer, and they remained in their camp, enjoying the sight and the sounds and one another’s company.

It was shortly after the Man fell that Gary noticed something was wrong.

Very wrong.

He was sitting in place, unmoving, but everything seemed off balance, as though he were on the deck of a seriously yawing ship. He reached for Joan’s hand, and it felt hairy, like the hand of an ape. As he turned his head to look at her, Gary was suddenly struck with a headache so severe that it felt as though a nail had been jammed through the back of his skull. He cried out in pain and grabbed the sides of his head.

As quickly as it had arrived, the headache was gone.

The lurching, off-balance feeling remained, however, and Gary tried to stand but found that he couldn’t; his legs would not listen to his brain. He’d been drugged. He was sure of it, though he did not know how or by whom. An instinct of self-preservation was telling him to get over to the car and crawl into the backseat, to remain somewhere safe until this wore off, but no matter how hard he tried, he could not get his legs to work.

“Joan,” he said, but he didn’t really say it. No sound came out of his mouth. He wanted to make sure she was okay, wanted to help her if she wasn’t, wanted her to help him if she was. For all he knew, she’d been drugged as well. But his muscles remained rigid, frozen, and he sat there, unable to move.

Whatever this was, he didn’t think it was ecstasy. Ecstasy was supposed to make you mellow and relaxed, to heighten the sensual component of everything. This was…

This was rough.

With a tremendous effort of will, he managed to turn to the side.

Joan was no longer Joan. She was a button-eyed, life-sized rag doll lying unmoving amid the bloody bodies of his slaughtered friends. Two bansheelike shapes emerged from the fog enveloping the outskirts of the scene and picked up the huge doll. Her arms and legs flopped limply as the cloaked and hooded figures lifted her over Brian. His neck had been slit, and both his eyes and his mouth were wide open. Next to Brian, the bodies of Reyn and Stacy were little more than pulped meat.

Gary tried to scream, but only a tiny puff of air was expelled from his mouth. The air became visible, a round, vibrating sphere. It darkened, lengthened, grew wings, then turned and attacked him, a chubby vampiric bat with sharp fangs and cold pinprick eyes. He tried to scream again, and the bat flew into his mouth, forcing its way down his throat, the rubbery winged body disgustingly tactile.

Though he was gagging and choking, he saw through teary eyes that Joan was no longer a rag doll but a little girl, and she was crying and struggling, trying to get away from her mysterious kidnappers. In the background, in the fog, the Burning Man was walking, its limbs, body and head ablaze as it moved in herky-jerky, stop-motion animation away from the carnage that was Black Rock City.

Then all was white.

Then all was black.

Awakening was hard and painful, like being pushed through lava into sunlight after spending weeks in a cold, dark cave. His head felt as though his skull was too small and was pressing in on his brain, and every muscle in his body was throbbing. He was flat on the ground, in the dirt, and he rose to a sitting position. The first thing he noticed was that the sun was high in the western sky. It was noon or just after, although he had no idea what day it was. The next thing he noticed was that Burning Man was winding down. The Joe Strummer cube was gone, as was the temporary structure behind it, and though he could hear the sounds of people moving about, there were a lot fewer of them than there had been before.

Brian was already awake. “What. The. Fuck. Was. That?”

If pressed, Gary would have guessed that Brian was the one who had dosed him. His friend was a good guy and usually respectful of boundaries, but it wasn’t too much of a stretch to assume that his judgment might have been impaired under the influence. Obviously, though, Brian had undergone the same sort of trial he had and, as he looked around, Gary saw that his other friends were similarly affected. Reyn was on the ground and moaning, listing slightly from side to side. Stacy was still out like a light.

But where was Joan?

He crawled over to their tent and looked inside. Her sleeping bag was gone, he saw. As was her little knapsack of personal effects. Frowning, he stood, lurching to his feet and holding out his arms to keep from wobbling too much. A great deal of the city had already been broken down, and the rest of it was in the process of being taken apart. The ethos of Burning Man was that the community would be temporary, a piece of performance art, vanishing after its vibrant week in the sun as though it had never existed. Already most of the people were gone, and by tonight the playa would appear as empty and untouched as it had been before their arrival.

Gary’s head hurt, and his sense of balance was still shaky, but he staggered over to the car and looked inside. No Joan. He walked around the car, using the door handles, trunk and hood as guides, but there was still no sign of her.

“Joan!” he called. His voice wasn’t up to full strength, but it was still strong enough to be heard in and around the immediate area. He coughed, tried again. “Joan!”

The only answer was from Brian. “She’s around,” he said. “Somewhere.”

Gary didn’t believe that. Something was not right. He could sense it, and a feeling of panic grew within him as he scanned the desert nearby and saw no sign of her. If she had been drugged as the rest of them had, she should have still been here. If she had not been drugged, she would have gone to get help. But she seemed to have disappeared. He recalled his vision or hallucination or whatever it was, where he’d seen two hooded figures carrying off the rag doll that Joan had become, and he was suddenly certain that there was truth in it. Beneath the delusional trappings, an essential core of reality remained, and he was convinced now that she had been abducted.

Reyn was up and awake, and Stacy was stirring to life.

He didn’t like that, either, the fact that they were all coming out of drug-induced stupors at approximately the same time. It suggested a plot, a plan, a premeditated effort to render them unconscious for a specific period of time so that certain actions could be taken during their absence, and he hurried as fast as his acclimatizing legs would carry him to the nearest still-occupied site, where he learned that it was Monday. They had been out for more than a day.

Frantically he searched one disbanding village after another, joined shortly afterward by his recovering friends. No one they encountered had seen Joan or noticed anything unusual, but then, they hadn’t been paying much attention, either. That was what happened when something such as this occurred in such a setting: the natural chaos of the crowd made it virtually impossible for individual events to be noticed.

Gary held out a slim, baseless hope that Joan had wandered away, that in some drugged trance of her own she had ended up sleeping it off in someone else’s camp. But as the light in the sky shifted from bright white to a more subdued yellow and they found themselves covering the same ground they had trod earlier, that already faint hope dimmed and died. Discouraged, he led the other three back to the car.

He had to face the facts.

Joan was gone.

Two

The playa seemed practically deserted, and the orange of the slowly setting sun was intensified by intersecting clouds of dust kicked up by departing vehicles. The three others faced Gary. It was his girlfriend who had disappeared, and he was the de facto leader on this, the one to make the decisions. Beneath the fear and worry, he could see in his friends’ eyes that they were glad they were not the ones to whom this had happened, and while he didn’t blame them for that and would have felt the same if he were in their shoes, part of him resented it.

“So, what do we do?” Reyn asked.

“Don’t you have to wait forty-eight hours or something before you can report someone missing?” Brian sat on the hood of the car, legs crossed. “I know you’re not supposed to get your information from movies, but…” He trailed off.

Gary looked back toward the center of what had been Black Rock City. There’d been a minor police presence here all week, and though he didn’t know where the cops were from or what their ordinary jurisdiction might be, he figured that they were the ones to whom any crime should be reported. “Let’s find the police,” he said.

“You mean one of those rent-a-cops?” Brian asked doubtfully.

“I think they’re real,” Reyn disagreed.

“Whoever they are, I’m pretty sure they’re gone,” Stacy said. “I didn’t see any of them while we were looking around out there.”

Shut up! Gary wanted to scream. Shut up! Joan was missing and all his friends could do was bicker about the legitimacy of Burning Man’s security force. But he knew that wasn’t fair. His friends were only trying to help. It was just that every second of delay, each minute they spent not doing something, was time that Joan remained missing. He grimaced as a spasm of pain shot through his lower back and straightened, pressing a hand against his spine. Every muscle in his body was tense. He had a headache, and his neck felt as though it had been used as a punching bag; it hurt no matter which way he turned.

Without further discussion, Gary took out his cell phone, turned it on and dialed 911. But whatever temporary towers had brought this area service for the past week had been dismantled or were gone, and no matter which direction he faced, he got no signal. “Shit!” he yelled—so loudly that Stacy, standing next to him, jumped. He was angry enough to have thrown down the phone, the way characters do in movies, but he wasn’t stupid, and instead he tried again, with the same result.

He put the phone back into his pocket. His friends were now trying the same thing themselves, although it quickly became obvious that none of their phones was getting a signal, either.

Gary scanned the dusty and nearly empty plain for any sign of police, but Stacy was right: it appeared as though they’d left. He stood there for several seconds, looking at Brian, Reyn and Stacy, and wondering what to do next.

“Did anyone see anything?” Gary asked for the umpteenth time. The other three shook their heads. “Doesn’t it seem suspicious that she disappeared while we were all knocked out?”

Stacy nodded vigorously. “I was thinking that, too. Maybe someone saw us all passed out here, some psycho, and he just… grabbed Joan, kidnapped her.” She shivered. “It could have been any of us.”

“Maybe they were planning to get the rest of us, too, only we started waking up!” Brian jumped off the hood of the car, gesturing excitedly. “That means they might not be that far away! They might not have much of a head start!”

“Hold on a minute,” Reyn said. “Think about this logically. What would be the point? Anyone who kidnapped someone would be committing a crime, a felony.” He glanced at Gary. “No offense, but if someone wanted to rape her, they could’ve just done it right here; they wouldn’t’ve had to drag her off somewhere. Besides, it would take more than one person to pick Joan up and carry her away, and there aren’t bands of white slavers trolling hippie festivals for victims.”

“And yet,” Brian said, “she’s gone.”

“You think she just wandered off?” Stacy asked Reyn.

“What I think is that none of us knows anything.”

They were all talking too much, and this time Gary did shout. “Shut up!” The three immediately closed their mouths, swiveling toward him. Gary took a deep breath. He didn’t know about the others, but his own body still felt strangely heavy, and he was pretty sure he was not yet thinking clearly. His friends might have a higher tolerance level for drugs, but he doubted that they were working at peak mental capacity, either. “We need to get to a place where there’s a signal so we can call the police. Or else go to the nearest town. But someone has to stay here in case Joan comes back.”

“No way,” Stacy said, shaking her head. “Not out here in the middle of nowhere. It’ll be dark before you get back.”

“I’ll hang out,” Brian offered. “I can always find some way to amuse myself.”

“Nothing illegal,” Stacy warned him. “We’ll be returning with cops.”

“No one’s staying here,” Reyn said. He looked over at Gary. “Sorry, but we can’t risk losing anyone else. Joan disappeared while there were still a lot of people around. It would be stupid for us to leave anyone behind now that nearly everyone’s gone.”

“Then the rest of you go,” Gary insisted. “I’ll wait.”

“No, you won’t. You’re her boyfriend. You’re the one who has to file the report. You know more about her than the rest of us; you can answer their questions.”

But Gary wasn’t sure he could answer their questions. There was so much about Joan that he didn’t know. He loved her—he did know that—but they had been going out only a short time, and most of their conversations had naturally revolved around the present and the future rather than the past. There were huge gaps in her history that he couldn’t fill, and the type of knowledge he had about Joan wasn’t really the sort of hard information that the police would require.

Her parents could answer everything, but he realized that he did not know their names, their phone number or even the city in which they lived. He had the impression that they lived far away, in another state, but Joan had never really told him much about them other than the fact that they were very religious.

Could he get that information through the school? Probably not. There were always privacy issues, and for all the university knew, he was some crazed stalker with whom she had just broken up.

Was he supposed to inform the school that she was missing?

He had no idea.

Gary felt overwhelmed. His first impulse was to call his dad and ask what he should do, but his parents lived all the way across the country, in Ohio, and he didn’t want to alarm them. Besides, they couldn’t really help right now. As terrifying as the thought was, as out of his depth as he felt, he was on his own.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

On the road that led to the highway, and then on the highway itself, Gary sat unmoving in the passenger seat while Reyn drove, his mind spinning, going over everything that had happened, trying to recall whether anyone at Burning Man had been watching them, or looking at them suspiciously, or had paid extra-close attention to Joan. He was still unable to figure out how or when they had been drugged, and the motives for all of it remained a complete and utter mystery.

He did not notice the name of the town they finally reached, but the second they pulled into the parking lot of the police station, Gary was out of the car and dashing toward the building. It was nearly night now, and the sky in the east was a threatening bluish black. All he could think about was the fact that Joan was out there somewhere and it was getting dark. Running footsteps sounded behind him, and he was only a few feet from the door when a strong hand grabbed his shoulder, fingers digging into his flesh.

“Stop!” Reyn’s voice in his ear was low but insistent.

Gary pulled the hand off his shoulder. “What are you doing?”

“Listen to me,” Reyn said. “You can’t go into that police station.”

“What the hell—”

“What if they don’t believe you? Huh? I know you’re just going to tell them what happened, but your girlfriend’s missing, and you probably have more than a trace of some heavy and illegal narcotic in your bloodstream. Automatically, you’re going to be suspect number one. They may lock you up now and ask questions later.”

Gary looked into his friend’s eyes. He hadn’t thought of that. None of them had until now.

“Along with us.”

“Then what do you think we should do?”

Reyn took a deep breath. “I think we should drive back to Los Angeles.”

“We can’t leave!” Gary yelled. “Joan’s missing! She’s out there somewhere!”

“Keep your voice down! What are we supposed to do? Let Barney Fife lock us up? Go back to our camp in case she shows up again? Hole up in a motel room here in Buttfuck, Nevada, wait for the drugs to leach out of our systems and then try to explain to the police why we decided to wait two days to tell them your girlfriend disappeared?”

“You go back,” Gary said. “I’ll take my chances.”

“For all we know, she’s sleeping peacefully in her bed in California right now.”

Brian and Stacy had walked up. “Reyn’s right,” Stacy said, putting a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. “She could have gotten a ride back. She could be in her room sleeping it off.”

“Maybe she’s the one who drugged us,” Brian offered. “Maybe she’s a—”

“Shut up,” Reyn said. “You’re just being an asshole.”

Gary took out his phone, called Joan’s cell. There were five rings, no answer; then her recording came on, asking him to leave a message. The sound of her voice, so familiar and yet now so far away, made him catch his breath. His eyes were suddenly watery. “Call me. Now,” Gary said, not trusting himself to say more. He terminated the connection, then punched in the number of her dorm room. It, too, rang and rang, with neither Joan nor her roommate, Kara, answering.

He ended the call, clearing his throat. “So, what do we do?”

“We go home,” Reyn said. “Maybe she’ll be there by then, maybe not. If not, we say that we thought she’d gotten a ride from someone else, like Stacy said, and we didn’t realize she was missing until we returned.”

Gary was already shaking his head. “But that’s wasting time! What if she was kidnapped? What if one hour makes all the difference? I can’t chance that.”

“What good are you going to be to her behind bars?” Reyn demanded. He gestured toward the station, a small building that looked more like a minor post office than the headquarters of a police department. “And do you really think the men on this force are the ones best equipped to find her?”

“We get our asses back to California and call some real cops,” Brian suggested. “They’ll find her.”

“But the crime scene’s six hundred miles away from Los Angeles!”

“If it is a crime scene,” Reyn said, “and hopefully it isn’t, they’ll probably come out here themselves with all of their high-tech equipment. If not, they’ll call these local yokels, who’ll go out and dig through the dirt and report back what they find. Worst-case scenario? You have two police departments on the case.”

“No,” Gary said, shaking his head.

“I don’t like this, either,” Reyn told him. “But we don’t have much choice.”

“I’m going in there.”

“You can’t!”

Stacy seemed to understand. “Let him go,” she told Reyn.

He wasn’t waiting for their approval or permission; he was already walking toward the building’s entrance. “Wait for me at that Dairy Queen down the street,” he said, pointing. “If I’m not there in a half hour, take off without me. I’m not going to mention you guys or bring you into it; it’s just me and Joan.”

“We’ll wait an hour,” Stacy said. “Then we’ll… I don’t know, call a lawyer.”

“A bail bondsman,” Brian suggested.

“We’ll think of something,” she promised. “Go.” He did. From the corner of his eye, he could see Reyn shaking his head and lecturing Stacy as they hurried back to the car. Then Gary was in the station, approaching the uniformed woman at the front desk and asking to talk to someone about reporting a missing person.

He was out of the station in less than twenty minutes. Brian had been right. There was a forty-eight-hour waiting period. Joan might have disappeared, but until she was missing for two days, the cops wouldn’t so much as glance out the window to look for her. Gary did tell the sergeant who had volunteered to interview him that he and his friends had been drugged, but the older man didn’t seem to care. There was no effort made to draw blood or test him, and the cop’s attitude was one of bored disdain. It was as if this sort of thing happened all the time and he was tired of dealing with it.

Gary emerged from the station feeling angry and frustrated. The sergeant had filled out a form and asked some perfunctory questions so that, on the off chance that Joan didn’t show up and remained missing after forty-eight hours, they could get a head start on the case. But the policeman made it clear that he had no doubt she would surface within the next twelve hours. “Trust me,” he said. “We deal with this every year.” Every time you freaks stage your festival, he didn’t add, though he was obviously thinking it.

Walking out of the building, Gary realized once again how little he actually knew about his girlfriend. Aside from her name and a physical description, he’d been able to give them nothing, and at least three-fourths of their questions had remained unanswered. Most of them were facts that he should know, that he wanted to know, but that he just hadn’t gotten around to learning. Things like her parents’ names, the names of any siblings, her permanent address, her birthplace. There’d been no hurry because he’d assumed that there’d be time to learn all that. He hadn’t known… .

He was acting as though she was dead, and he forced himself to push those thoughts from his mind. Right now, she was only missing and, like his friends said, there were alternate possibilities; kidnapping was not the only explanation for her disappearance. And even if it was what had happened, the kidnappers might be hoping for a ransom because maybe her parents were rich, and maybe—

Maybe she’d been raped and murdered and was lying in a ditch.

No. He couldn’t think that way.

Gary walked slowly across the small parking lot, empty save for two police cars and an old pickup truck.

The night was dark, and the town had no streetlights. The sky looked as it had when they were camping out at Burning Man: massive and infinite, larger, deeper and darker than it ever was in California or Ohio. Gary walked down the cracked and gravelly sidewalk to the Dairy Queen, whose backlit sign was like a white beacon on the highway. Reyn was right, he decided. They needed to go back to Los Angeles. It felt disloyal to even consider such a thought because he knew she might still be somewhere out in the Nevada desert, but the truth was that he’d done all he could here.

He wished he knew more biographical details. The Los Angeles police were going to ask him the same sorts of questions that these cops had. Maybe more, since he would be filing an official missing persons complaint.

Kara.

Yes.

Her roommate, Kara. Though it hurt him to admit it, she might know more facts about Joan than he did. Gary tried to call the dorm again as he walked, secretly hoping that Joan might answer the phone, although he tried to fool himself into thinking he was not thinking that. But once more, it rang without answer, and when the operator’s your-party-is-not-answering recording came on, he hung up.

He strode across the Dairy Queen’s unpaved parking lot, gravel crunching loudly beneath his sneakers. Reyn, Stacy and Brian were seated at an outside table, eating chili fries and hamburgers by the blue light of a bug zapper.

“What happened?” Reyn asked, hurrying up to meet him.

Gary shook his head. “Brian was right. Forty-eight-hour waiting period. I told them everything and they wrote it down, but…” He shrugged.

He’d reached the table. Stacy held out the box of chili fries, offering him some, but the food smelled bad and looked worse, and he shook his head.

“So what do you want to do?” Reyn asked.

“Go back,” he said tiredly. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe she’s there. If not, I’ll tell the LA police.”

“Have some food,” Stacy suggested. “It’s a long trip.”

“I’ll get it.” He walked up to the restaurant’s window and ordered a hot dog and an extra-large Coke. He probably wouldn’t need the caffeine to stay awake, but it couldn’t hurt. The food arrived moments later. He ate quickly—they all did—and then they got in the car and took off.

They drove all night, taking turns, arriving back in Westwood by midmorning. School had been in session only for the past week, and things had not yet settled down to normal. UCLA was teeming with students who were going to classes, dropping classes, petitioning to get into classes or just hanging out. The crosswalks of the streets flanking the university were so crowded that in the right-turn lane only one vehicle could get through per green light.

Parking was a bitch, as usual. Someone had stolen Reyn’s designated spot by the dorms, but after fifteen minutes of circling around the student lot on the north side of campus, they were lucky enough to spot a red Jeep pulling out. Stacy, who was driving, swerved around a waiting Prius and nabbed the spot. The Prius driver honked at them, yelled something out his open window, but Stacy merely flipped him off as she pulled into the space. “Rich asshole,” she said.

They got out of the car. None of them had bathed for four days, and being first drugged and then sleep-deprived had done little to enhance their appearance. Gary glanced down at himself. The dust of the Black Rock Desert still clung to his clothes, and he made an effort to brush off his shirt and pants in order to look slightly more presentable. He looked over at his friends. Brian’s long hair was often tangled and disheveled, his clothes typically wrinkled and worn many times before their perfunctory washings, so the difference with him was much less pronounced, but Reyn’s short hair was oddly clumped and his clothes were stained, a far cry from his usual fastidiousness. Stacy, too, looked dirty and disheveled.

Sartorial etiquette was the least of their problems, however. Joan was missing, and they needed to find her or report her disappearance. Gary took out his cell phone and tried once again to call first Joan’s cell, then her dorm room. There was no answer from either.

It worried him that he could not get ahold of Kara, but her absence was easily explained. While the fall semester was still young, Gary already knew her schedule almost as well as he knew Joan’s, since he and Joan needed to be aware of the hours Kara would be in and out of the dorm room. This was Tuesday, which meant that she was in class until twelve. After that, she usually ate lunch somewhere on campus or in the village, then hung around or went to the library until her next class at one thirty, finally returning to the room around three.

Of course, that only explained why she wasn’t there now.

Why hadn’t she answered the phone last night?

He told himself that she was a heavy sleeper or she hadn’t wanted to be disturbed. On the off chance that she was skipping class and simply not answering her phone, he decided to check out the dorm to see whether she was there. She wasn’t, and when Teri Lim, who had the room next door and was one of Joan’s and Kara’s friends, saw Gary in the hall, she told him that she hadn’t seen Kara this morning or, now that she thought about it, yesterday. Teri looked at the four of them oddly, as did the other students who wound around them and passed by, but Gary explained that they’d just this moment come back from the Burning Man festival and hadn’t had time to change. Reluctant to go into too much detail about what had happened—Teri was an acquaintance at best—he told her that they’d “lost” Joan and that they’d been hoping to find her back here.

“I could ask around,” Teri offered, “see if anyone has seen her. Or Kara.”

“That’d be great,” he said, smiling, though smiling was the last thing he felt like doing.

“I’ll be back.”

Joan had given him an extra key for her room. It was something that was not strictly allowed, so he waited until Teri was gone and the corridor clear before quickly putting the key in the lock, opening the door and ushering Reyn, Stacy and Brian inside.

He immediately closed the door behind them.

Right away, something seemed wrong. On Kara’s desk, her computer was on, Brad Pitt’s face smiling out from her screen saver, and the door of her closet as well as the drawers of her dresser were open. Kara’s bed was unmade, and her entire half of the room was in disarray, as though she had left in a hurry.

Did Kara have something to do with Joan’s disappearance?

Or was Kara a victim, too?

Either way, Gary thought, her absence was a bad sign.

In contrast to Kara’s disordered living space, Joan’s half of the room was characteristically neat and tidy. While he doubted that there were any clues to be discovered here, he poked around anyway, scanning the items on the top of her dresser and small desk. There were two crumpled yellow Post-its lying on the floor at the foot of Joan’s narrow bedstead, and when he picked them up and smoothed them out, he saw that both contained short messages written in pencil. He read the first one. “Friday 11 p.m. A man called. No name. Said he’d call back.” Gary felt uneasy. What man would call Joan at eleven o’clock at night, trying to determine her whereabouts? And why wouldn’t he leave his name? Gary read the second note. “Saturday, 6 a.m. Man called back. Asked where you were.”

Who could it have been? A friend? A relative? A co-worker? An ex?

Brian had been reading over his shoulder. “You think Kara gave it up? Told some sicko where she was?”

The same thought had occurred to Gary, though he hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it, but hearing the idea expressed aloud gave it a concreteness that chilled him to the bone. He could only shake his head no, hoping he was right.

“What is it?” Stacy asked. “Did you find something?”

“A strange guy was calling and looking for Joan,” Brian said.

“We need to tell her parents,” Reyn said, looking at the notes. “They need to know she’s missing. Besides, maybe they can help.”

“Maybe she went to visit them,” Stacy suggested hopefully. “Maybe she got spooked and ran home.”

Gary shook his head. “I don’t think so. Joan isn’t that close to her parents. And I don’t even know where they live or how to get ahold of them.”

“We could look through her address book, if she has one.” Brian started toward Joan’s desk.

Gary saw movement out of the corner of his eye. Teri had opened the door and stepped into the room. He’d assumed that the door locked automatically after closing.

“No one’s seen either of them,” Teri reported. “And by the way, Joan loves her parents. They’re very close. Brady Bunch close. She calls them almost every day. They live up near San Luis Obispo in a little town called Cayucos. I went up there with her and Kara for a weekend this summer.”

Joan was close to her parents?

And they lived here in California?

Gary felt the first faint stirrings of… not distrust, exactly. Uneasiness? That was more accurate. He thought about the few references she’d made to what had seemed a very strict and restrictive upbringing. Had she deliberately misled him, or had he just put the wrong spin on what he’d heard?

“Do you have their number?” he asked.

Teri nodded. “Joan gave it to me in case of an emergency. Hold on a sec.” She dashed out the door, and Gary’s eyes met Reyn’s, although his friend’s expression was unreadable. Stacy was admonishing Brian not to look through Joan’s desk. Teri returned bearing a torn scrap of paper on which she’d written an address and phone number.

It was just like Joan to give a neighbor her parents’ number, Gary thought. Unfailingly prepared, she was always ready for any eventuality. For the first time since he’d awakened in the desert to find her gone, the emotional reality of her absence hit him, and he felt a sharp pang of loss as he took the paper from Teri. What was he doing here? He needed to call the police. Time was wasting.

Still, he dialed the number of Joan’s parents.

Teri was backing out of the room. “I have to go. I have a psych class. Tell me what happens.”

Gary nodded as he held the phone to his ear. Stacy walked with Teri to the door, the two of them talking in low tones.

He waited. Three rings. Six rings. Twelve rings. A robotic woman’s voice came on the line and said, “Your party is not answering. Please hang up and dial again later.”

Gary closed his cell phone, shaking his head. He had a bad feeling about this. For about the hundredth time, he tried calling Joan’s cell, but now there was no ringing, no busy signal, only a flat, cold silence that sounded like—

Death.

“I’m calling the police,” he announced. “It hasn’t been forty-eight hours yet, but it’s been more than twenty-four. They should be able to do something.”

Reyn nodded his approval.

Brian had been examining the contents that were on top of Joan’s desk. “What’s this?” he asked, picking up a rolled piece of paper slightly larger than a pencil. It looked like a scroll and was stretched between two small sticks.

Gary shook his head. “I don’t know. I never saw it before.”

“I don’t think you should be going through her stuff,” Stacy said. “It’s not right. She wouldn’t want you to.”

Ignoring her, Brian had already unrolled the scroll and was reading it aloud:

Brian looked up, frowning. “The Outsiders? What the hell does that mean?”

Gary didn’t know, but his heart was pounding. The prayer was disturbing in a way he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He took the scroll from Brian and read the words himself. Joan had told him that her parents were religious and that she’d been brought up rather strictly, but while she refused to drink alcohol, did not take drugs and still exhibited the inhibited demeanor of someone who’d been raised in a repressive environment, she’d given him the impression that she had broken away from all that. He’d assumed that, like himself, she was not religious.

Did she actually say this prayer to herself each night?

The Outsiders.

His uneasiness grew.

Was the prayer to be taken literally? he wondered. Could there be a group or gang called The Outsiders who were harassing or threatening her? Perhaps that was who was behind this. Maybe she’d been a target all along and had known it. Maybe the prayer had been her way of trying to stave off just this sort of kidnapping.

But she hadn’t written the prayer. It was printed on the scroll. She had gotten it from somewhere else.

Her parents?

He needed to call the police. He’d tell them what had happened at Burning Man, give them her parents’ address and phone number, tell them about Kara, give them the prayer scroll, explain that he’d already reported Joan’s disappearance to police in Nevada… .

Brian was opening a desk drawer.

“Stay out of there!” Stacy said sharply.

Gary dialed 911. He was relieved to be able to pass off responsibility to the cops, though he felt guilty that he felt that way.

His call was answered before he heard a single ring: “Nine-one-one. Please describe your emergency.”

“My girlfriend’s disappeared. We think she’s been kidnapped. We were drugged and—”

“Slow down, sir. Start from the beginning.”

Gary knew he was babbling, and he was so nervous that his hand was shaking. “My girlfriend’s name is Joan Daniels,” he said slowly. “I think she’s been kidnapped.” Following the prompts of the dispatcher, he described what had happened, answering all questions put to him and keeping his voice as reasonable and matter-of-fact as possible. Finally, he gave Joan’s dorm, floor and room number.

“We’re sending someone over right now,” the dispatcher said. “Please stay where you are until the officers arrive.”

Three

Although Joan was not Gary’s first girlfriend, she was the first one for whom he had fallen so hard. Back in high school, he’d been shy and awkward, and while it was conventional widsom that all teens were shy and awkward when it came to the opposite sex, Gary had been so to a much greater degree than other kids. He wasn’t quite sure why that was. He’d always had quite a few friends, and his parents were ordinary, well-adjusted people. But for some reason, he had not been able to make that normal transition into the world of teenage romance.

His first real date, which hadn’t been until his senior year, had been with Tammy Fieger, whose older brother, Craig, had voluntarily committed himself to a mental institution when she was a freshman. The truth was that Craig had been depressed after their parents’ divorce, had had no one to turn to, and had sought help in the only way he knew how. He had stayed in Parkview for less than a month and had been out and back to normal ever since, though he’d transferred to another school, but to the kids at Fairfield High, he was insane, and there was a high probability that his sister shared those genes, which was why no one else had ever asked her out. Even if she wasn’t crazy, she had a crazy brother, and that alone was reason enough to avoid her. Who needed that kind of complication?

But Tammy had been nice, he had felt sorry for her, and in the sparsely attended English elective they’d shared, he’d chosen to sit next to her, feeling bad that the other students had bunched together away from her on the opposite side of the room. Her social skills, if possible, were even worse than his own, but that was one of the attractions. There was no pressure on him to be cool or suave, and their mutual awkwardness was actually kind of comfortable. He found it easy to talk to her, and soon they were spending time together outside of class. His friends had liked her, too, and had been very nonjudgmental. Tammy had quickly become an integral part of his life.

So they’d dated, they’d gone to Homecoming and Winter Formal, they’d even had sex; but theirs was no great romance, and well before the end of the year, they’d had a sober discussion about their plans, their hopes, their futures, and had mutually decided to break up. He’d spent the rest of the school year alone and was the only one of his friends who hadn’t gone to the prom.

Coming to California had been liberating.

He’d actually had no intention of leaving Ohio and had already been accepted to Ohio State University. But in a weird confluence of circumstances, his Pell grant had come through, he’d received one thousand dollars from an arts foundation that had liked the essay he’d submitted and awarded it first place in their contest, and the company for which his dad worked had offered him a fifteen-thousand-dollar scholarship. He had not actually applied for the scholarship and still suspected his dad’s hand (though with a straight face his father consistently denied any involvement), but whatever the reason for the windfall, Gary was grateful. He would have simply taken the money, banked it and gone on to Ohio State as planned, but the scholarship’s stipulation was that the funds could be used only for tuition—use it or lose it— and on a whim, he sent out applications to colleges and universities all over the United States. It was late in the season, and many schools hadn’t replied, but by some miracle he’d been accepted to UCLA, where, thanks to his good grades and high SAT scores, he was offered additional financial aid to cover the gap between tuition and the amount of money he had available. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and after discussing the situation with his parents, he decided to lock in his acceptance.

The three of them flew out in June, after graduation, to scope the place out.

Gary’s conception of Southern California had been formed by movies, music and television, but he was surprised and happy to discover that that conception was pretty close to accurate. They’d left Ohio on a muggy gray day and had landed in Los Angeles out of a bright blue sky. Temperate sea breezes swayed the fronds of palm trees that lined the streets, and while there were dirty industrial buildings beneath the edge of the raised freeway as they headed north toward UCLA, the overall impression was one of a clean, new city where good-looking people lived pleasant, untroubled lives.

Gary liked California immediately, and so did his parents. The guided tour of the campus only served to cement their positive impression of the state, and they’d flown back to Ohio two days later feeling exhilarated. Gary knew he would miss his friends when he moved out west, but the trade-offs were worth it. Besides, he’d be back for holidays. And they could always come out and visit.

At the end of August, he drove out to California by himself. He’d spent nearly half of the essay money on brakes and bearings for his crappy Celica, but it was money well spent because he made it to the coast without incident.

In California, he had fashioned a new persona. What was the use of moving someplace where no one knew you if you couldn’t reinvent yourself? So rather than the awkward, slightly nerdy guy he’d been back in Ohio, he became someone different, someone cooler. Although it was impossible for him to change who he really was, he could alter his backstory, jettison some of the baggage he carried, and the Gary Russell who emerged, while fundamentally the same, was more outgoing, more socially self-confident, and that translated into surprising success with the opposite sex.

As a freshman, he’d gone out with several different girls, though toward the end of the second semester, he’d ended up exclusively dating a communications major named Cassie, who introduced him to the campus film society, which hosted weekly screenings of cult movies and foreign films. That was how he’d met Reyn, the club president. Both hard-core David Lynch fans, the two of them had become fast friends, the friendship easily outlasting his brief romance with Cassie.

Reyn was a native Angeleno, and through him Gary became acquainted with entirely new aspects of Southern California. Rather than everything being centered on the school, he was introduced to a much broader swath of life: festivals, flea markets, parks, the beach, and a multitude of fun things to do for free or on the cheap. That summer, instead of going home to spend a couple of months with his parents and his old friends, Gary got a job working with Reyn at Universal Studios, although Reyn, back for his third year, was a tram driver, while Gary was a souvenir stand salesclerk who occasionally doubled for Count Dracula when the man who usually wandered around the park playing the character was out sick or off duty. While he did return to see his parents for a week near the end of August, he felt oddly out of place hanging out with his old friends at their old haunts, and he realized that over the past year Ohio had become not his home but the place he was from. California was now his home.

And life was good. His classes were challenging but fun, he’d scraped enough money together through grants and scholarships to pay tuition for the next year, and he had a work-study job on campus to pay for room and board. Socially, things had settled down, and while he wasn’t any more popular than he had been back in Ohio, he was happier. This was where he was meant to be.

That was about the time Reyn started going out with Stacy, then a student at LA City College, whom he’d met at Universal Studios. Stacy was a journalism major who wrote movie reviews for her school paper and occasionally freelanced for an indie film Web site, so the two of them had a lot in common. And that fall, Gary met Brian when the two of them were assigned to be lab partners in a chemistry class. Brian was from the Bay Area, not San Francisco proper but a suburb, and he’d transferred to UCLA to get a name-school diploma after finishing his general ed requirements at a community college. Long-haired and slackerish, he reminded Gary of Tom Weiss, one of his old high school buddies, and while in many ways the two of them were polar opposites, they meshed somehow and started hanging out.

He continued to date various young women he met in various classes but hooked up with Meg at one of the film society’s screenings. It was an oddball pairing of the dark satire How to Get Ahead in Advertising with the sunny musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and afterward Meg had participated in one of Reyn’s panel discussions. He was never quite sure how their relationship had become as serious as it had, but it progressed quickly from casual to exclusive, and soon afterward Gary found himself living with the unspoken assumption that they were to be permanently a couple. He liked Meg, they never fought, but theirs was not a romantic romance. Though he couldn’t put his finger on it, something seemed missing, something wasn’t there, and he was secretly grateful when she abruptly dumped him.

Joan was different.

Gary wasn’t one of those rubes who’d been brainwashed by books and movies to believe that there was only One True Love for each individual. But the fact remained that what he felt for Joan was deeper and truer than anything he’d felt before. A day into their relationship, he felt closer to her than he had to Meg after a year. Not only was she stunningly attractive, but she was a genuinely nice person. Their relationship was new, and in a lot of ways they were still getting to know each other, but as far as he was concerned, the two of them were amazingly in sync. Their tastes on a lot of things did not coincide, and their interests did not always match, but their attitudes did. Their approaches to life were very similar, and that went a long way toward paving over any minor differences they had.

He loved her.

And she loved him.

All the pieces of his life were falling into place, and while he knew there were bound to be some setbacks and minor inconveniences in the future, he’d seen no storm clouds on the horizon. As far as he was concerned, looking ahead, it was going to be clear sailing from here on in.

How wrong he had been.

Four

When the police arrived at Joan and Kara’s dorm room, Gary was standing next to the window looking out at the side of the adjoining building. Brian was sitting in Kara’s desk chair, and Reyn and Stacy were seated on Kara’s bed. They had opened the door, and though a number of curious students had peeked in as they passed by, none of them had come inside or asked what was going on. It wasn’t until the policemen showed up that the four of them had to explain what they were doing there.

There were two officers, and they knocked on the doorframe, identifying themselves as LAPD before entering. One, a heavyset guy in his mid-fifties wearing street clothes, handed out a business card and introduced himself as Detective Williams. The other, younger man, wearing a uniform, did not introduce himself but typed nonstop into a small handheld computer.

“I’m the one who called,” Gary said, stepping forward. “I’m Gary Russell.”

“What relation are you to the missing woman?” the detective asked.

“Uh… boyfriend,” Gary said.

The detective turned toward Stacy.

“Friend,” she announced.

Reyn and Brian nodded. “Friend,” they both said.

“And her name is Joan Daniel?”

“Daniels,” Gary corrected. “With an s.”

“Told you,” the younger cop said without looking up.

“That’s her stuff there.” Gary motioned toward Joan’s side of the room. “We looked around a little bit when we first came in, but we’ve stayed away since. In case there are clues or evidence or anything.”

“Tell me what happened.”

He explained about their weekend trip to Burning Man, leaving out the story of Brian’s smuggled contraband, and described how they had been drugged and then awakened from unconsciousness to find Joan gone. After he told Williams how he’d reported her disappearance to the local Nevada police before returning to check whether she had come back to her dorm room, the detective asked, “How do you think this drug was administered to each of you?”

Gary looked over at Reyn, who gave him a bemused Jim Halpert shrug. There had to have been something they’d all eaten or drunk, something they had in common, but he could not figure out what that might be. Perhaps there’d been a spray of some sort, something airborne, an aerosol mist that they had all breathed. Whatever it was, it had been very localized. The campers to either side of them had been gone when they’d come to, which probably meant that they had not been affected.

“I don’t know,” Gary admitted.

“Excuse me.” The other officer looked up at Williams from his handheld device. “There’s no Joan Daniels listed on the UCLA student database.”

“What?” Gary exclaimed. He leaned over and tried to peer at whatever was on the cop’s screen but could see nothing. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Joan is a student at UCLA and she is missing,” Reyn said calmly. “You must have accessed the wrong list.”

“It’s a listing of all students currently attending this university. And there is no Joan Daniels on it.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Stacy said.

“I’ve checked it twice. She is not signed up for any classes; she is not registered.”

“Then we have a problem,” Detective Williams said, turning toward Gary.

“Yes, we do,” Gary agreed.

“Yes, we do.”

“Because my girlfriend is missing, and it looks like you don’t believe she even exists.”

The older man’s face was set and serious. “I don’t know what kind of prank you’re pulling here, but it’s a crime to file a false report.”

“He’s not lying!” Stacy said.

The detective looked around. “Maybe all of you are in on this.”

“No,” Brian said, speaking out for the first time. “She really is his girlfriend and she really did disappear. But…” He took a deep breath. “Maybe she isn’t who she said she was. Maybe she was conning us and wasn’t really a student.” He ignored the glares of his friends. “I mean, none of us really knew her for that long—”

“She was in my music appreciation class last semester,” Gary said angrily. “You can check with the instructor, Dr. Katz.”

“Besides,” Reyn pointed out. “We’re standing in her room. This is her stuff, her computer, her desk, her bed.”

“Her roommate might be missing, too,” Gary said. “No one’s seen her for two days. Her name’s Kara… .” He suddenly realized that he didn’t know Kara’s last name. He glanced around the room. Her things were here. Her name had to be printed somewhere.

He felt frustrated, and even as his eyes searched the room, he was still trying to figure out how Joan’s name could have disappeared from the school’s records. The detective on the computer had to have made a mistake, he decided. It was the only explanation.

“Look through their desks,” Gary suggested. “There have to be letters there, forms, papers, things with their names.”

“Yeah,” Reyn said. “Whether or not you think she was a student, she’s still missing. Maybe Kara, too.”

“And it’s your job to find them!” Stacy glared at the policemen.

“I don’t think you realize—” Williams began.

“She could be dead!” It hurt him to say it, and speaking the thought aloud somehow gave it more credence. Gary’s mind was racing. He wished he had a photo of Joan, but he didn’t. The relationship was too new, and they hadn’t taken any pictures together.

Her Facebook page!

“She has a Facebook page,” Gary said with relief. “And a MySpace page. You can find out all about her. You can see what she looks like.”

Williams looked over at the other policeman, who shook his head. “Dedicated equipment. I can’t access that.”

“Then use her computer. Or Kara’s.”

“No. If there has been a crime committed, those may be evidence.”

“Fuck!” Gary said, kicking the foot of Kara’s bed.

The detective stared at him for a moment, then sighed. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you’re not intentionally misleading us. I don’t know who this young woman is, but we will continue to investigate. None of you are allowed back in this room, though. Do you hear me? This dorm is off-limits. I’ll need contact information from each of you: names, addresses, phone numbers. I want to see driver’s licenses and student ID cards. If everything checks out, if you’re right and Ms. Daniels is missing, we’ll keep you updated. If you’re lying, I’ll haul all of your asses in and charge you. Do I make myself clear?”

Gary nodded. Already he felt better. At least the cops were going to look into the situation. And once they did, they would find out the truth and start looking for her. And Kara.

But would it be too late?

He tried not to think of that.

Ten minutes later, all four of them had shown ID, submitted to questioning, provided information and been kicked out of Joan and Kara’s room. At the last minute, Gary had remembered the phone number for her parents and had shared that with the police, although he kept the original scrap of paper.

They retreated down the hall under the curious eyes of other dorm residents.

“What the hell do we do now?” Reyn asked when they’d exited the building. They stood on the sidewalk as students strode around them, past them.

Brian shrugged. “There’s nothing we can do.”

Gary’s fists clenched.

Brian backed up, palms outstretched. “I’m just saying—”

“Shut up,” Reyn told him.

In Gary’s mind, he saw Joan alone in a dark, dirty room, naked, bruised and beaten. He saw Kara dead in the desert, collateral damage. “We have to do something ,” he said, but he couldn’t think of what. His head seemed heavy, his brain numb and dumb.

Stacy nudged him. “You have to get some sleep,” she told him. “You haven’t slept for—”

“I slept in the car.”

“Yeah, for about ten minutes.”

“We all need some sleep,” Brian said. He yawned, as if to prove his point. “I definitely need to crash.”

Reyn put a hand on Gary’s shoulder. “It’s true.You won’t be much help to her if you don’t get some sleep.”

He was right. They were all right, though Gary didn’t want to admit it. He was tired, and likely not thinking clearly, and probably the best thing he could do was catch up on his rest before doing anything. But he imagined Joan bound and gagged, tied to a chair, tortured by unseen assailants.

The Outsiders.

He not only had no idea where she was; he didn’t know what was happening to her—and that was the most maddening, frustrating part. Was she being treated well? Was she being gang-raped? Was she dead?

The latter two possibilities seemed the most likely. She had not been allowed to contact him, and there’d been no demand for a ransom. He could think of no reason for her captors to keep her safe and unharmed if they weren’t after money.

It was the thought of sexual assault that really upset him, the image that burned in his mind like a white-hot needle, and he was both enraged and deeply disturbed by the idea that hostile strangers—

Outsiders

—were forcibly abusing her while the police sat around and tried to figure out whether or not she even existed.

He wondered if he should take an official leave of absence from school. There was no way he would be able to sit in class, to shuffle from course to course, from mythology to math, while Joan’s whereabouts remained unknown. If this dragged on for more than a few days, he wouldn’t be able to catch up on all the reading and work in his classes, and the whole semester would be a waste. He’d probably jeopardize his grants and scholarships, too, since to receive the money he was required to maintain a certain grade-point average. Of course, he was also required to keep a full twenty-one-unit schedule each semester to keep the money, so either way he was screwed.

Gary glanced around at his friends. “I am tired,” he acknowledged. “But I don’t think I can sleep. Is anybody going to their classes today?”

Reyn and Stacy shook their heads.

“I’m on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule,” Brian said. “I’m taking a siesta.”

“So what’s the plan?” Reyn asked.

“I don’t know.” Gary sighed.

“Sleep on it,” Stacy suggested. “We all will. Maybe we’ll come up with something.”

“Those cops…”

“I know,” she said. “But they’re just doing their job. Once they figure things out—”

“If they figure things out.”

“Even if they do,” Brian said, “they still might not find her.”

“Shut up,” Reyn told him.

“I’m just saying.”

Gary’s head hurt. “I’m going back to my place,” he told them. It suddenly occurred to him that the phone in his dorm room had an answering machine. He didn’t want to get his hopes up, but it was possible that she had called and left a message. “I’ll call you guys later,” he said, heading toward his own building.

“If we think of something, we’ll let you know!” Reyn called after him.

Gary waved, hurrying away, and seconds later he was sprinting toward his dormitory. It was stupid, but in those few moments he had somehow convinced himself that there would be a message waiting for him.

Of course there wasn’t—he arrived at his room, drenched in sweat, to find his answering machine sitting there, its message light off, not blinking.

He sat down heavily on the bed and cried. He didn’t know where that came from. Worry, stress, tiredness, all of it probably factored in, but he couldn’t help himself, and tears rolled down his cheeks, sobs shaking his frame as he faced the fact, really faced the fact, that Joan might be dead. He closed his eyes against the emotion and found that he didn’t want to open them again.

He lay down, not bothering to take off his clothes or kick off his shoes, and within seconds he fell asleep.

And dreamed.

In the dream, UCLA looked like Burning Man. Instead of the usual brick buildings with their pseudo–Ivy League ambience, the campus was made up of temporary structures fabricated with found objects and recycled materials. He and Joan were seated on a blanket, on some grass, eating a picnic breakfast of dry Apple Jacks. Barefoot students in ragged clothes were running by them, each carrying a log or tree branch. They were running toward the south edge of campus, where a wall was being constructed with the wood, and Gary understood that UCLA was not a university but a fort, and the wall was being built to keep the Outsiders from gaining entry. He told Joan to wait where she was and ran forward to help with the wall, but halfway there, he saw a portion of it collapse and a horde of Outsiders break through. They were cloaked, bansheelike figures whose faces could not be seen within the darkness of their cowls. Turning, he tried to run back to Joan, to protect her, but the Outsiders sprinted past him, and by the time he reached the picnic blanket, she had been whisked away and was gone.

Five

It was after nine thirty when Teri Lim finally left geology. The class actually ended at nine fifteen, but she’d wanted to ask the instructor a few questions about the syllabus. She’d waited until all of the other students who were staying after had asked their own questions because… well, because Dr. Prem was cute. The ring on his finger said he was married, though, and his no-nonsense responses forestalled any flirting and made her feel foolish. She asked her questions meekly, nodded at the answers, then walked out of the class and out of the building, sucking in the cool night air, hoping it would reduce the heat on her embarrassed face.

The campus was quiet and nearly empty. UCLA’s nightlife was headquartered at Westwood Village, next door, and the university itself seemed to shut down after classes ended. From far away came the faint, raucous sounds of frat parties, mingled with the even more distant sounds of city traffic, the two together creating a soft, indistinct background noise that made the stillness around her seem even deeper, this section of the university feel even more remote and cut off from the rest of the world.

Teri looked behind her, hoping to see other students coming out of Physical Sciences, hoping to see her professor. But everyone else had exited through the main entrance that led to the well-lit parking lot in front of the building, and she remained alone on the dark, winding walkway that was a shortcut to her dorm. To her right, on a bench beneath the dim, hazy light of an old lamppost, a couple was making out, and she let out a sigh of relief, grateful she was not the only one here. Seconds later, however, she was past the bench and walking between two pine trees whose shadowed indentations resembled malevolent beings with pointed heads. The trunks of both trees were more than thick enough for someone to hide behind.

She sped up. Noises from the outside world seemed to have faded away or been swallowed up by the silence, and the only sound she heard was the tap-tap-tap of her own shoes on the sidewalk. There were goose bumps on her arms, and not from the temperature. It was hard to see, and she kept her eyes on the ground, not wanting to trip over a rock or branch or crack in the cement. The walkway curved, then straightened, opening out onto a flat expanse of concrete. She looked up.

A man was standing at the bottom of the steps in front of Royce Hall.

Facing her.

Teri quickened her pace. His form was little more than a silhouette, but something about the man seemed off, though for several seconds she couldn’t figure out exactly what it was. She finally decided that it was the disquieting way he just stood there, unmoving, in what seemed a strangely formal, almost militaristic stance: arms at his sides, back straight, legs slightly apart.

She was stupid to have taken this shortcut across campus unaccompanied. Especially with Joan and Kara missing. She should have walked with everyone else out to the parking lot and caught a ride back. Or called from one of the campus security phones for an escort. But she was used to being on campus at odd hours in odd places—and by herself—so she hadn’t really thought about the danger of walking alone at night.

No. That wasn’t precisely true. She’d been nervous from the beginning tonight, ever since leaving the Physical Sciences building, and while she didn’t believe in omens or premonitions or nebulous warnings from irrational sources, she thought now that she should have paid closer attention to her gut.

The man took a few precise steps forward, moving from the shadows into the yellowish illumination of one of the walkway lights, and Teri realized what else made her uneasy: she had seen him before. She did not know where, did not know when, but he definitely seemed familiar to her. He was dressed in simple, earthy, homemade-looking clothes that would best be described as peasant garb, and his dark hair was medium-length and parted in the middle, making it appear as though his forehead was topped by a peaked roof.

There was something wrong with him, she saw as he drew closer. He walked in a stilted manner, not as an affectation and not because he was trained to do so, but because he had to: there was something the matter with his legs. It was not just his legs, though. His arms, too, seemed strange, his entire body slightly malformed. She was even more frightened than she had been before, and she clutched her books tightly, her stride growing longer as she attempted to hurry past.

“I need to talk to you,” he said.

Teri ran.

The man had some kind of accent, but her panicked mind could not quite place it, and at that moment his speech patterns were the least of her concerns. She kept her eyes on the ground, still afraid of tripping and falling. Her dorm was quite a ways off in another direction, and down another empty path, but she was close to the edge of campus here, and she dashed toward the street, grateful for the presence of life and lights and people.

She didn’t scream for help—for all she knew she was in no danger whatsoever and everything was all in her head—but she wanted to get as far away from that man as quickly as possible—

Where had she seen him before?

—and be surrounded by the safety of strangers. Even if he did mean her harm, he would not be able to do anything in the middle of a crowd of people.

And there was a crowd. The sidewalk bordering the school was teeming with students out for coffee or a movie, a trip to a bookstore or a late dinner. Groups of young men and women were walking together, talking, laughing. Teri pushed her way into the midst of them, feeling protected and secure as she passed a couple with their arms around each other, a gaggle of men arguing about politics. She looked over her shoulder, back toward the darkness of the campus, stepped off the curb—

And a car slammed into her, throwing her several feet into the air.

She landed hard on the pavement, on her back. There were screams all around her, but she could not tell who they were coming from because she could not move her eyes to see. She could not move anything at all. She could hear a muffled liquid sound in her head, like the burbling of a fountain, and she knew that was the noise of blood gushing out of her, but she could feel nothing. There was no pain at all in any part of her body. That was a bad sign. Bad.

Even as she thought this, she grew weaker. The act of thinking seemed to take all of her concentration and energy, and keeping her eyes open became a task more difficult than lifting hundred-pound weights. She was slipping away; she knew it, she felt it, and there was nothing she could do about it.

The last thing she saw before her eyes closed for the last time was the man in peasant garb standing over her, looking down, nodding.

Smiling.

Six

Gary awoke feeling anxious, frightened, sad and totally wrung out. Whether what he’d experienced was a legitimate nightmare or had been generated by the residue of whatever drug had been administered to them all back at Burning Man, he had no idea. But the emotions produced by the dream were real, and he could not remember ever having felt worse

The phone rang just as he was sitting up. It was Reyn, and he seemed alert, wide awake, as though he’d been up for a while. He wasted no time with greetings.

“I’m online,” Reyn said. “Joan’s Facebook page is gone.”

“What?”

“MySpace, too.” There was a brief pause. “I don’t want to sound paranoid, but it seems like someone’s trying to erase her, pretend like she doesn’t exist. I mean, first her school records, and now this…”

Gary’s head felt heavy. His brain still wasn’t functioning. “Who?”

“I don’t know. I thought you might have an idea.”

The Outsiders?

Gary glanced at his clock. Six a.m. He’d been asleep for over fifteen hours. Panic welled within him at the thought of all that could have happened during that time. “I’m going to find Joan’s parents,” he told Reyn. “I’ll try to call them again, but if I can’t get through, I’m driving up there. I have their address.”

“Don’t you think the police have already contacted them?”

“The police don’t even think she exists!”

“You’re right. At least her parents can clear that up. And maybe they have some idea of what’s going on. Where do they live again?”

“Cayucos. I checked: It’s about a five-hour drive. I can be back by late afternoon.”

“I’ll go with you,” Reyn offered.

“No,” Gary said.“It’s the second week of school.There’s no reason for you to screw up your classes. I have an excuse. She’s my girlfriend. It might not fly with Neilson—”

“Neilson,” Reyn moaned.

“—but the rest of my instructors seem cool, and I can probably get away with it. At least this once. I think you’d better stay here, though.” Left unsaid was the thought that Reyn should build up some brownie points now because he might need to take some time off later.

Gary doubted that this was going to end quickly.

Or well.

He had to force himself not to imagine what was happening to Joan right now.

“Call me if you learn anything,” Reyn told him. “You have my cell. And call me when you get back no matter what happens. I’ll see what I can find out here. I think I’ll check in with the cops, too. Just in case.”

“Thanks,” Gary said gratefully.

“You’d better get going.”

Cayucos was a picturesque little town on the hilly central coast, halfway between Morro Bay and Hearst Castle. A community so small that Gary was almost past it before he knew it was there, its main street was on a narrow stretch of land between the raised highway and the beach, hidden from view by a line of pine trees bordering the side of the road. It was only an unobtrusive sign near an off-ramp that alerted him to its location, and he pulled into the short left-turn lane, crossed the nonexistent southbound traffic, and headed down a winding, sloping road that led into town.

He passed a couple of oceanfront homes, a gas station, a gift shop. Slowing down at the first cross street, he looked to his right, toward the beach. The road ended less than half a block down, at the foot of a small and refreshingly uncommercialized pier, a narrow wooden platform that ended just past the wave line. Several men were fishing off the side of it. Unlike the piers in Southern California, there was no restaurant at the far end, no shops anywhere along its length. The entire downtown, in fact, was enchantingly quaint and stretched for only a few short blocks. There were a smattering of hotels, a few old buildings from the late 1800s that had been converted into antique stores and bars, a couple of restaurants and that was about it.

Gary continued on, businesses segueing into homes, before finally pulling into the small parking lot of a small library. He had muted the volume of his GPS way back in Los Angeles, tired of hearing the incessant, insistent monotone of its robotic voice giving him directions at every curve and corner, but he turned it back on now and discovered that he had passed the street he needed to take in order to get to Joan’s parents’ house.

Once more, he picked up his cell phone and attempted to call them. He had tried calling three times this morning already: before leaving the dorm, at a McDonald’s in Oxnard, and while on the road, even though he didn’t have an earpiece and knew that if a cop saw him on the phone while driving he would get a ticket. There’d been no answer during any of those attempts, and there was none now. He closed his phone.

He was starving, Gary realized. He hadn’t eaten breakfast, hadn’t had anything at all this morning save a wake-up cup of coffee from the McDonald’s drive-through. He should find Joan’s parents first, though. That was the most important thing. Afterward, he could grab something to eat.

His stomach gurgled noisily, and there was a pain in his midsection so sharp that it made him wince.

Still, it would only take a few minutes to wolf down some food. Then he could meet her mom and dad and not have to worry about embarrassing himself.

If they were there

Yes. If they were there. He hadn’t wanted to think about that, but it was impossible to avoid, and perhaps putting off the meeting a bit longer would help calm his nerves, prepare him. It might also give him a chance to plan out what he was going to say to them if they were there. Because he hadn’t really done that yet. He’d been on the road all morning, thinking of nothing else but Joan and Kara and Burning Man, but he hadn’t decided how he would tell them that their daughter had disappeared. If he was lucky, the police would have already contacted them, but if not, he would be the one to break the news, and he had no clue how to do that.

He drove back two blocks to the center of town. There were no fast food joints here, but adjacent to the sea wall that separated a public parking lot from the beach was a small white shack, with people eating on plastic tables on the sidewalk out front. Gary turned left onto the short dead-end street, pulled in front of the tiny building and got out of the car. The sign above the door identified the little restaurant as RUDELL’S SMOKEHOUSE.

Inside, there was a refrigerated glass case filled with individually packaged smoked fish and meat. There was even an entire smoked chicken. Taped to the top of the counter was an article from a local newspaper explaining how the Smokehouse and its owner had been featured on a Bobby Flay show on the Food Network. The menu was written in ink on a white dry-erase board, and among the list of items was a smoked albacore taco. Gary had no idea what that was, but it sounded interesting. A woman was chopping vegetables in the area behind the menu board while discussing a bluegrass concert with a man who could not be seen. She looked up at Gary. “My brother’ll be right with you,” she said.

The unseen man emerged from what looked to be a closet or small storeroom in the back and offered a friendly greeting. Gary asked him what was in the smoked albacore taco. There were a whole bunch of ingredients, including chopped apple and celery, and while the combination seemed weird, Gary was hungry enough to try anything. He ordered two, as well as a Peach Snapple, and took his food out to one of the tables in front. As it turned out, the taco was delicious. He’d never tasted anything like it, and even before he’d finished the first two, he went back inside and ordered another. They were big and filling, but this might have to last him the rest of the day, and it sure as hell beat stopping at some hamburger chain on the side of the highway on his way home.

Looking out at the waves, he felt guilty. How dare he enjoy the view, how dare he enjoy the meal, while Joan was still missing?

Dead.

No, he didn’t feel that she was dead, and though he had nothing whatsoever to base it on, the notion was close to a certainty in his mind. Wherever she was, whatever had happened to her, she was still alive. As frazzled as he was, that gave him comfort.

He quickly finished his last taco and his bottle of Snapple and tossed his trash into a nearby container before getting back in the car. Joan’s parents’ house was located two streets up from the main drag on a road so narrow and barely paved that it was little more than a dirt alley. All of the houses on the street were of the wooden clapboard variety common to seaside communities, and the Daniels home was a white single-story structure virtually indistinguishable from those to either side of it.

There was no vehicle parked in the short driveway or along the narrow road in front of the house, but that didn’t mean anything. Their car could be inside the garage. He pulled in front of the closed garage door and got out, walking up the flagstone path to the porch. He rang the doorbell. Waited. No one answered, and he rang again. He didn’t hear any chimes and wasn’t sure the bell was working, so he reached out and knocked.

There was movement as the door gave under his fist, and he took a step back, surprised. He hadn’t noticed before because, while the door hadn’t been latched, it had been shut almost all the way, but he saw now that it was not only unlocked, it was open.

This couldn’t be good.

“Hello?” Gary called.There was no answer. He hadn’t expected one, and he looked around to see if anyone else was watching. There were no cars or pedestrians on the street, no people in their yards, but someone could very well be looking at him from a window in one of the houses opposite. He used his foot to push open the door a little more. “Hello?” he called again.

There was no sound from inside, no sign of movement, and on impulse, he pushed the door all the way open. The house was dark, still, and he knew instantly that no one was home. There was an indefinable but unmistakable sense of emptiness that hung in the air of a building that was uninhabited, and Gary felt that now. Although he knew he shouldn’t, he stepped over the threshold and inside. His mind was racing through scenarios: they had been kidnapped and were being held hostage; they had been kidnapped and killed, their bodies dumped somewhere; they had fled, escaping before their attackers arrived; they had been slaughtered, their bodies left here in the house. Every one of these possibilities ended with him being arrested because the police simply could not believe the coincidence of him reporting both the disappearance of his girlfriend in Nevada and the disappearance/death of her parents in central California.

He’d better make sure he left no fingerprints.

Pushing the door closed with his elbow, so no one from outside could see him, he stepped carefully into the living room. The furniture was oddly mismatched, as though it had all been donated by different families or cobbled together from various local garage sales. There were a few nice pieces, quite obviously recently purchased, but the remainder were worn and used, old and ugly. This was not at all the sort of home that he had imagined Joan growing up in, and its appearance surprised him. From the way she’d spoken, he’d also expected to see a lot of religious articles—pictures of Jesus, pillows embroidered with psalms, framed biblical passages, perhaps—but there was not even a Bible to be seen.

He walked over to a cheap bookcase, situated next to an old television sitting atop a metal stand. There were photos on the shelves, family photos, and he saw Joan dressed in a high school graduation gown, Joan standing by the pier with a friend, Joan in a prom dress, Joan at Hearst Castle, Joan in front of Morro Rock. There appeared to be no pictures of her as a baby, though, or as a young child, and that seemed unusual. Parents usually went crazy with the camera when their kids were infants and toddlers, tapering off after that, but her mom and dad looked to have been just the opposite.

In one photo, she stood between two people who must have been her parents: a man and a woman. The woman was odd-looking, awkwardly built, as though something was wrong with her bones. Her shoulders stuck up too far and looked pointy, while her thin arms hung at strange angles by her sides. Her legs in a dress were bony and too long, and they served to accentuate the peculiarity of her form. Rickets was the word that occurred to him, although he was not exactly sure what rickets was and had no idea whether it applied here. The man was an ordinary-looking guy who reminded Gary of one of his father’s friends.

In the back of his mind, he wondered if Joan’s mother’s condition was hereditary, if it was possible that Joan might end up with the same condition. But that concern was minor now. The only thing that mattered was that Joan be found. He picked up a picture of her, intending to take it back with him to show Detective Williams, a recent photo that featured a close-up of her face. He saw the irony in giving a stolen photograph to the police, but it might help him prove that Joan existed and that she was missing. Although his first impulse was to leave a note to let Joan’s parents know who had taken the picture and why, he did not think her mom and dad would be returning anytime soon, and he did not want to leave any clues in the house indicating that he had been here.

If Williams asked him where he’d gotten the photo, he would just say that it had been in his room and he’d forgotten that he had it.

Forgotten?

That sounded suspicious, too.

It didn’t matter. He would think of something.

Clutching the framed picture, he continued on, moving from the living room to a hallway and the two bedrooms and single bathroom beyond. There were no signs of a struggle in any of the rooms, and all of the furniture and belongings appeared undisturbed. The only thing amiss, the only thing out of place, was in the kitchen: an empty overturned wastepaper basket. Next to it, on the white linoleum floor, was an irregular red spot about the size of a quarter. Gary stared at the spot, noting how it shone in the light that entered through the window above the sink, as though it were wet. It might not have been blood, and there might be a perfectly rational explanation for it, but at that moment he could think of nothing else it could possibly be.

And then Gary saw the dog.

He stopped in place, his heart slamming in his chest. The animal was dead, its body lying half in and half out of a little pet entrance built into the bottom of the bigger door that led into the backyard. A shaggy gray poodle, the dog was lying on its side, its open black eyes staring lifelessly into the kitchen, the white rubber of the doggy door sitting atop its distended stomach like a guillotine blade about to slice it in half. There was blood dripping from the dog’s mouth, but it looked darker and drier than the spot next to the overturned wastepaper basket.

Gary looked quickly around the kitchen, glancing through the window over the sink to the yard outside. He could think of a whole host of possibilities here, none of them good. He went back over every step he’d taken, trying to make sure he hadn’t touched anything, hadn’t left behind any fingerprints. He thought of the closets in the bedrooms, the queen-sized bed in the master bedroom, the full-sized bed in what had been Joan’s room. Someone could be hiding in the closets right now. Bodies could be shoved under the beds.

He was scared and knew he should get out immediately, but he had driven all morning to get here and couldn’t take off without checking first to make sure Joan’s parents—or Joan—weren’t dead or dying somewhere here in the house. He needed a weapon, though, something he could use to protect himself should someone try to attack him. Pulling down his sleeve so the shirt material would cover his hand and prevent him from leaving any fingerprints, he reached out and opened the top drawer. Silverware was stacked in little compartmentalized sections: spoons, forks, butter knives, steak knives. He closed the drawer, opening the one beneath it. As he’d hoped, it was full of larger kitchen utensils, and he withdrew the biggest knife he could find, a carving knife.

He closed the drawer and pulled down his shirt sleeve. He needed the full use of his hands and fingers, just in case. Besides, fingerprints didn’t matter here; he wasn’t going to put the knife back. It was coming with him. Since he might need the use of both hands, he put the picture frame down on the counter next to the sink, intending to come back for it once all was clear.

Clutching the knife tightly and holding it in front of him, Gary walked out of the kitchen, around the corner of the living room, through the hall and into the master bedroom. As before, all was still. But whereas that had been comforting just a few minutes ago, it now seemed ominous, and he stopped, listening, trying to detect breathing or rustling or any sound whatsoever. Hearing nothing, he stepped forward carefully, prepared for an ambush from any direction.

The closet had one of those sliding mirrored doors from the sixties or seventies, and in it he saw not only a reverse representation of the bedroom, but a reflection of himself holding the knife and advancing. The image was disturbing, and he shifted his eyes to the right, focusing his attention on the reflection of the bed behind him, keeping his eyes on the skirt that covered the open space beneath the box springs, watching for any sort of movement.

Reaching the closet, he grabbed the narrow handle on the far left side of the door and prepared to quickly slide it open, knife at the ready in his right hand. He met his own eyes in the mirror, saw fear there, then pulled the door to the right and cried, “Get out right now!”

There was no one in the closet.

He knew it immediately, but he swept the hanging clothes aside just to make sure.

The closet was empty.

He was glad, but the tension within him still had not dissipated, and he closed the door and turned around, approaching the bed with trepidation. He saw in his mind the oddly shaped woman from the photograph, sliced up and shoved beneath the bed, her bony arms and legs twisted grotesquely around the slaughtered body of her husband. Crouching down, he used the knife to lift up the bed’s skirt. At the last second, he thought that he might see Joan under there—but the space was empty. Gary stood on shaky legs, breathing deeply.

He checked the rest of the house. The other rooms were empty as well. He felt relieved, but he was right back where he’d started. Where were Joan’s parents? He thought of the notes Kara had left back in the dorm room about an unidentified man calling for Joan. He and his friends had told Williams about the notes, had even shown them to him, but the detective hadn’t seemed very interested at the time. Gary wondered if the police had bothered to check Joan’s and Kara’s phone records, to track down the caller.

Or maybe that sort of thing only happened in movies.

An idea occurred to him, and he returned to the living room, where he recalled seeing a telephone on a small end table next to the couch. Beside the phone, as he’d hoped, was an address book. He opened it quickly and flipped through the pages. There seemed to be names and phone numbers but no addresses. Out of curiosity, he looked under J for Joan but found nothing. He looked under D for Joan Daniels and found only a single word—Daughter—along with Joan’s cell phone and dorm room numbers.

That was weird.

Gary closed the address book. He’d take it with him and call the listed numbers. Someone might be able to provide him with information. Returning to the kitchen, he picked up the picture frame and headed toward the front door. He wondered if there wasn’t something in the garage that he should investigate—

Dead bodies in the car?

—but there was no entrance to the garage from the house, and he didn’t dare draw attention to himself by opening the garage door from the outside. Besides, it was probably locked. Once again pulling his sleeve over his hand so as not to leave fingerprints, Gary turned the knob and opened the front door.

Standing in front of the house, next to his car, was a young boy of around seven or eight. The kid had been kicking the car’s left rear tire, but he looked up as Gary stepped outside and closed the door behind him. Gary was acutely aware of how suspicious he looked, with his sleeve pulled over his right hand, the knife in his left hand and the address book and picture frame held under each arm. He tried to smile at the boy in an open, friendly manner. “Hi,” he said.

“Mom!” The kid took off running. “Mom!”

Shit! Gary hurriedly opened the car door, threw everything on the passenger seat, got in and backed out of the driveway, swinging the car around so it was headed in the opposite direction from the one the boy had taken. This was the last thing he needed. He kept his speed low so as not to draw attention to himself, but he made a beeline for the highway, and once he was out of town, he pressed down on the gas pedal and pushed it up to the limit of sixty-five.

There was a single small rain cloud above him, and a smattering of drops appeared on the windshield. It was already difficult to see through the glass, which was flecked with black spots of unknown origin and yellow blobs of butterfly blood from the trip over, and the droplets of rain made it worse. He turned on the wipers, but they only smeared the glass, turning the highway, cars and surrounding landscape into little more than an impressionist blur. He leaned forward as he drove, squinting through the multicolored streaks. In Morro Bay, a few miles down the coast, he stopped at an Arco station and filled up for the trip back, using a squeegee soaking in a water bucket between the pumps to clean off his windshield. He half expected to hear the sound of sirens as police, alerted by the boy, came speeding after him, but nothing like that happened, and moments later he was back on the road.

Fifteen minutes farther on, just outside San Luis Obispo, a patrol car did pull next to him on the highway. Afraid to glance over, afraid of what he might see, Gary kept his eyes on the road ahead, held his hands at ten and two, and maintained a speed just below the limit. Another police car pulled up on the other side of him, and for a brief, harrowing moment, he was sandwiched between them, certain the two policemen had done this on purpose as part of some tactic to force him to the side of the road.

But then the cop on the left sped away, the one on the right pulled off at the next exit, and he was on his own once again, free and safe. He drove the rest of the way back being extra careful to obey all traffic laws, afraid that if he were pulled over and his plates run, the police might connect him to the break-in at Joan’s parents’ house. And the dead dog. And maybe the Danielses’ disappearance.

Or deaths.

He hit early commuter traffic outside Thousand Oaks, and it took him longer to get back than he’d expected. Gary thought of calling Reyn several times while stuck in a line of cars on the 101 freeway but was afraid a cop would see and cite him. It was after six when he finally reached UCLA and his mercifully empty parking space. He walked slowly into the dorm and up to his floor, intending to call Reyn as soon as he went to the bathroom and got something to drink. Feeling exhausted, he pulled the key ring from his pocket, found his room key and unlocked the door.

The place had been ransacked.

Gary stood in the doorway, too stunned to move. Before him, the contents of his desk, dresser and closet lay strewn about the floor: books, notebooks, papers, pens, pencils, towels, clothes, CDs and DVDs all thrown together in the center of the room. The drawers from his desk and dresser had been pulled out and thrown into the bathroom. Even the bedspread and sheet had been yanked off his now-bare mattress and tossed against a wall.

Gary turned and went quickly to the next room over, banging on his neighbors’ door. Two flighty freshmen lived there, Matt and Greg, although only Matt was in. “Someone broke into my room,” Gary said breathlessly when the other student opened his door.

“It wasn’t me!” Matt said, holding up his hands.

“I didn’t think it was you,” Gary assured him. “I just wanted to know if you’d heard or seen anything.”

“No, man, nothing. And I’ve been here most of the day, chillin’. I would know if something happened.”

“Something did happen.”

“I don’t know anything about it.”

Gary nodded and hurried back next door. He noticed upon second look that, strangely enough, nothing seemed to have been stolen. His laptop and iPod were both still there—on the floor but still there—and if someone had wanted to take something those would have been the natural choices. Instead, it looked as though some crazy person had come in, indiscriminately thrown around the contents of the room and left.

How could Matt not have heard what was going on in here?

For the first time, he wished he had a roommate. Until now, he’d considered himself lucky that he was not forced to share his dorm room with someone else. Sure, his place was a lot smaller than all of the others on his floor, a single-windowed efficiency that appeared to have been constructed to fill the little bit of extra space between the last full-sized room and the stairwell. But it was worth it to have the privacy. If he’d had a roommate, though, maybe this wouldn’t have happened. Or maybe the perpetrator would have been spotted.

No, he thought upon reflection. It probably would have happened while his roommate was out as well.

Surveying the damage, he wondered once again who could have done this.

The Outsiders?

He didn’t know who the Outsiders were or why he kept going back to them in his mind, but just the thought of Joan’s weird little prayer scroll made him uneasy.

Maybe she isn’t who she said she was.

Brian’s words to the detective came back to him, and while Gary didn’t want to give them any credence, he looked at the chaos before him and couldn’t help wondering if there wasn’t some truth there. If Joan was somehow involved with the type of people who would do something like this… He left the thought unfinished.

Should he inform the police?

Of course, he told himself. But instead he phoned Reyn, telling him first about the ransacked room, then about his trip to Joan’s parents’ house. “So what should I do? Call Williams?”

“I don’t know.” Reyn spoke cautiously. “I called the police this afternoon. Checked on the status of the case.”

“And?” Gary prompted.

“You know, I can’t find any trace of Joan online. She’s not even on my friends list anymore. She’s… nowhere.” There was a long pause. “The police still aren’t sure Joan is real. But Kara is definitely missing. And I have the feeling that we—you in particular—are ‘persons of interest.’ ”

“What did they say?”

“It’s what they didn’t say. I talked to Detective Williams. He asked me a lot of questions, didn’t give me many answers, and while he put on this nice-guy, I’m-on-your-side kind of act and was a lot friendlier than he was in Joan’s room, it definitely seemed like he was fishing. I got the feeling he was purposely keeping information from me, trying to lead me into a trap.”

Gary’s heart was pounding. “You think he knows what happened to Joan?”

“No. But Kara? Maybe. Something was sure as hell going on.”

Gary glanced around his room. “So do you think I should call him about the break-in here? Or at least let the campus police know?”

“It’s your call. But my suggestion would be to not tell them, to keep it quiet.”

“But they might find fingerprints, fingerprints they could track down. And this would show that both Joan and I have been targeted.”

“Or they’ll find no fingerprints. They’ll assume you did this yourself to deflect suspicion. And the fact that nothing’s been broken or stolen…”

“I see your point.”

“You’re in a no-win situation.”

Gary stared at his scattered belongings. “There might be a clue here, though.”

“Like I said, it’s your call.”

Gary took a deep breath. “Maybe I’ll ask about the status of the case, feel him out, see how it goes, then decide.”

“You know what?” Reyn said. “It’s no longer your call. I’m making the decision for you. Don’t do it. They’re suspicious already, and if you call up asking about it…” His voice trailed off.

Gary quickly thought it through. “And if they happen to ask where I was all day and find out that I wasn’t at my classes, and I can’t account for my whereabouts unless I tell them the truth—which is that I went up to visit Joan’s parents, who happen to be missing and have a dead dog stuck in their pet door halfway into their kitchen…”

Reyn gave a humorless chuckle. “You know how, in movies, characters can’t go to the police when a crime occurs because some ludicrous plot twist makes it seem like they’re guilty? And so the characters try to solve the crime and end up getting in even deeper shit?”

“That’s us.”

“That’s us,” Reyn agreed.

Gary was silent for a moment. “I’m tired,” he said finally. “I’m going to clean this place up. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Do you have any classes in the morning?”

“None I can’t miss.”

“Okay. I’ll talk to you then.” Gary hung up the phone and looked around, wondering where he should start. He didn’t want to do this—there were other things he could be doing, should be doing—but he had no choice. Bending down, he picked up his laptop and put it back on his desk. He gathered up an armload of shirts.

Right now, he thought, the police were probably trying to build a case against him for Kara’s disappearance.

The other students in his dorm were studying or partying, hanging out or hooking up.

And Joan was still missing.

Seven

It was their first and only trip to the beach.

Reyn and Stacy were supposed to have come with them, but unbeknownst to Joan, Gary had called Reyn and asked him to find some legitimate-sounding way to cancel. He and Joan had been dating for only two weeks, and it was the perfect opportunity for him to spend a day alone with her. Reyn and Stacy had been happy to oblige, going instead to the farmers market and the Grove, leaving Gary free to take Joan to the beach by himself.

The first surprise was that she wore a bathing suit. After hearing about her upbringing, he’d assumed she’d be too uptight to be seen in anything that showed off her figure—he’d had her pegged as an oversized T-shirt girl—but she arrived at his dorm wearing shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, and, once on the sand, stripped down to her suit. It wasn’t a string bikini or anything, just a simple peach one-piece, but it showed skin, and Gary was embarrassingly aroused just watching her pull down her shorts.

He spread out the blanket, purposely looking away, and crouched down, sorting through the contents of the ice chest until his arousal was no longer quite so conspicuous. He thought they’d just sit on the blanket, walk along the sand, sunbathe, read, drink, eat, talk, but she actually wanted to go in the water. He’d never swum in the ocean before and was a little wary of the waves, which from this angle looked pretty big and intimidating. But there were kids in the water, and moms, as well as the expected surfers and swimmers, and he and Joan stepped up to the wet sand at the shoreline, holding hands. The water was cold as it swept over their toes and feet, and they both instantly jumped backward, laughing. Gradually, however, one step and one wave at a time, they became used to the icy temperature, and, still holding hands, they ventured farther out into the surf, first ankle high, then knee high.

One wave, larger than the rest, broke closer to shore, almost upon them, and water rolled over their midsections, splashing as high as their chins. As the wave receded, Gary saw that Joan’s bathing suit had become see-through. It had been close to flesh-colored already, and now that it was wet, it looked as though it wasn’t there at all, the light, thin material revealing dark nipples and a black triangle of pubic hair. Even from this close, she appeared to be completely naked.

Joan did not seem to notice, but he knew that when she did she would be mortified. So he left her in the water, rushed back to their blanket, grabbed a towel and held it out to her as she confusedly walked out onto the sand. It wasn’t until she saw where he was looking and glanced down at herself that she saw what had happened. Immediately, she snatched the towel from his hands and wrapped it around herself, face reddening as her eyes scanned the beach to see if anyone else had noticed. No one had, and they walked back to the blanket without speaking.

Gary wondered if she wanted to go after that, but although she remained wrapped up, she made no mention of leaving. In fact, she acted as though it hadn’t happened at all, and while he tried to think of something to say that would break the tension, she casually asked him to hand her a can of Diet Dr Pepper. It wasn’t until later, after her bathing suit had dried and she’d taken off the towel, after they had strolled along the shore looking for shells, as they were eating their lunch of sandwiches and chips, that she said, “I didn’t know that would happen.”

It was apropos of nothing—they’d been talking about the sandwiches—but he knew immediately what she was referring to, and he nodded silently, not trusting himself to say anything. Thinking of the way her nipples had looked, and her pubic triangle, he was forced to lean forward and as surreptitiously as possible press down on his crotch with his elbow.

“I guess I should stick to black bathing suits.”

Although he didn’t know it at the time, he learned later that she’d been not just embarrassed and self-conscious but worried when he had seen her through the translucent material. She’d been afraid that he’d be turned off by her, that her body was not attractive enough, and it was only his rather blatant effort to press down on and hide his erection that let her know he found her physically desirable.

That night, in her room, they made love for the first time, and Gary knew, if he hadn’t before, that Joan was the one; that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her; that he would love her until the day he died.

Eight

Gary was putting away the last of his books when Reyn came over with Brian. Feeling more than a little paranoid, he’d locked his door, and he jumped when the loud knock sounded behind him. “It’s us!” Brian called. “Open up!” Gary hurried to oblige, and his friends entered, looking around.

“Not as bad as I thought,” Reyn offered.

“Yeah?” Gary whipped out his cell phone. “I took some pictures.” He flashed through several shots of the room that showed clearly the extent of the damage.

“Holy shit,” Reyn said. “Did they take anything?”

“Not that I can find.”

“Maybe it was just a warning.”

“Or they didn’t find what they were looking for.”

“I don’t think these people give warnings.” Brian was carrying a newspaper, the Daily Bruin, which he handed to Gary. Reyn grew silent, as if he knew what was coming. “Check this out,” Brian said. “I got it on my way to class this morning.” He pointed at the top headline: SOPHOMORE KILLED IN ACCIDENT. Next to it was a photo of a sheet-covered body lying on the ground in front of a car. “That’s the chick who gave you Joan’s parents’ phone number. The neighbor.”

Gary glanced at the article. It was indeed Teri Lim who had been killed. Witnesses at the scene reported that she had come running out from the campus path and dashed into the street, where she was struck by a black Jeep that immediately sped away. No one got a look at the Jeep’s license plates; one student who saw the accident claimed that the vehicle didn’t have any plates. Several witnesses told the police that a strange-looking older man in incongruously rustic clothes had arrived just as the accident occurred and that he had hovered over the victim, showing an unusual interest in her condition, before leaving, unseen, immediately prior to the arrival of the authorities.

Teri had died at the scene from internal injuries and the paramedics who arrived were unable to revive her.

Gary looked up from the paper, feeling chilled. This was far too coincidental. He thought about the oddly dressed man who had supposedly watched Teri die and then disappeared into the crowd.

An Outsider?

It seemed likely, and he told his friends what he was thinking.

Reyn nodded. “Makes sense.”

“The fuck it does.” Brian pushed a long tangle of hair away from the front of his face. “You think Joan’s church has some sort of standardized prayer asking for protection from a… a gang that’s hunting their people down?”

It didn’t seem logical when spelled out so bluntly, but Gary said, “Yeah. Maybe.”

“It might have nothing to do with that prayer,” Reyn conceded. “Or ‘Outsiders.’ But I’m willing to bet that that weird guy who was lurking around when Teri got killed has something to do with Kara and Joan being missing.”

“Then maybe he’s after us, too,” Brian said.

“I don’t think so. We were vulnerable there at Burning Man, but nothing happened to us.”

“Nothing?” Brian snorted. “Someone drugged us, man. And maybe they screwed up the dosage. Did you ever think of that? Maybe we weren’t supposed to wake up, but they miscalculated and just zonked us out for a while instead of killing us.”

“Maybe,” Reyn said skeptically.

“But you don’t think so?”

“We could’ve been picked off several times since then. Like Teri. Anyone following us would have had ample opportunity to off us. But no one has.”

“That’s true,” Gary agreed. He looked around his tidied room. “But they are fucking with us.” He took a deep breath. “And they have Joan.”

“And probably Kara,” Reyn added.

Gary nodded.

“You know,” Brian said, “my brother’s ex-girlfriend’s brother is a police dispatcher in Santa Mara.”

“Your brother’s… ex-girlfriend’s… brother,” Gary repeated slowly.

“I know how that sounds,” Brian said. “But it wasn’t a bad breakup, and Alyssa always liked me. I even met her brother a couple of times, and he seemed cool. I think he’d do us a solid if I asked.”

“And what exactly are you going to ask?”

“Here’s the thing. When he’s at work and it’s slow, he runs license plates. He’s not supposed to, but he does. He sees a hot babe pass him on the freeway? He writes down her plates, then looks her up. Finds out her name, who she is, where she lives. He does it with cars and trucks he sees in movies, too, or on TV. Sees a cool car chase, writes down the plates. Usually they’re owned by rental car companies or movie studios, but one time he ran a plate and it was actually registered to Bruce Willis. Anyway, he can do it backward, too. He can run a name and get address and license information. I figure I’ll have him plug in Joan’s name and see what comes up. We might get another address or a next-of-kin or even an alias. At the very least, we’ll prove she exists, and we can give that to the cops.” He smiled. “Anonymously, of course. I don’t want to get Dan in trouble.”

“Dan. Your brother’s ex’s brother.”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t think the cops have already tried that?” Reyn asked. “I mean, if your distant acquaintance the dispatcher can do this, you don’t think the detectives assigned to this case could figure out to try the same thing?”

Brian threw up his hands. “What the fuck. I was just trying to help.”

“It’s a good idea,” Gary said cautiously. He glanced at Reyn. “And I’m not sure they would try this. My guess is they informed Kara’s parents that she’s missing, and now the parents are going crazy, pressuring the police for results, and they’re trying to find her and probably connect me to it. So I doubt they’re doing their best to find out about Joan. Who they don’t even believe exists.”

“You may have a point,” Reyn conceded.

Brian had his phone out. “Calls are being made even as you speak.” He quickly used an app to look up the number of the Santa Mara Police Department, and Gary and Reyn listened in as he talked his way through to Dan. After making sure that the call wasn’t being recorded or monitored, Brian spun a bullshit story about an amazing one-night stand who’d given him her name but no other information. “I need to know more about her,” he said. “I need an address, a phone number, some way to reach her.”

There was a short pause; then Brian grinned and gave the thumbs-up sign. “Joan Daniels,” he said. “Her name is Joan Daniels.”

Seconds later, he was thanking Dan and saying good-bye. Pressing some keys on his phone, he peered for a moment at the tiny screen before looking up. “There are six Joan Danielses registered in Los Angeles County, one in Ventura County and three in Orange County. None of them are the right age, though. The youngest is thirty. You think Joan could be thirty and passing herself off as—”

“No!” Gary and Reyn said together.

For the first time in what seemed a long time, Gary smiled. It felt good but weird, wrong, and the smile vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

“Maybe it’s not her real name,” Reyn suggested.

He knew Joan. And the idea seemed ludicrous. But it was also the most benign possibility under the circumstances, and Gary found himself clinging to it.

Brian immediately burst his bubble. “My guess is that whoever wiped out her school records wiped out her DMV records, too. I don’t know who we’re dealing with here, but they seem like some serious dudes. With major firepower behind them.”

Gary imagined some sort of shadowy government agency, a black ops organization, and wondered why such a group would be interested in Joan.

Who is she?

The plots of a dozen recent thrillers flashed through his mind.

“Maybe it’s a case of mistaken identity,” Reyn suggested.

Gary ran a frustrated hand through his hair. “Jesus Christ!” He wanted to lash out, wanted to hit something, wanted to scream. How could this be happening to him? How could it be happening at all?

Reyn looked at his watch, which caused Gary to glance over at his own clock on the dresser and check the time. It was nearly nine.

“We’re not going to get anything done tonight,” Reyn said. “I suggest we all get some sleep. Tomorrow could be a very long day.”

Why? Gary felt like saying. Do you think we’re going to find Joan? And Kara? Is everything going to be solved and put right? But he simply nodded tiredly and saw his friends out, locking the door behind them and once more looking around his room, seeing it as it had been when he’d arrived back from Cayucos, his belongings strewn about and thrown onto the floor. He shivered, feeling cold, and on impulse he decided to call his parents. It was nearly midnight in Ohio and they were no doubt sound asleep, but he wanted to talk to them. He wasn’t going to tell them everything, but he needed to let them know what was going on.

In case something happened to him.

He was glad when his dad answered the phone. His father was much easier to talk to than his mother. He’d made the call too late at night to pretend he was just ringing them for a casual chat, so Gary told his dad that his girlfriend had disappeared on a trip with friends to the Burning Man festival. He soft-pedaled the drugging and didn’t mention Teri or his ransacked room, but he did tell his dad about Kara being missing as well.

He wasn’t sure what he wanted from his father. Advice? Suggestions about what he should do? Deep down, he probably wanted his dad to take over the situation, to fix things, to tell him everything was going to be okay and resolve all problems, the way he had when Gary was a child. But he wasn’t a child, and his dad was on the other side of the continent. The most he could realistically hope for were some encouraging words. He was momentarily tempted to tell his father everything, particularly when his dad asked sharply, “What are the police doing?”

But instead he said vaguely, “They’re working on it.”

“Do you want us to come out there?” his dad asked.

Yes! was his honest reaction, but plane tickets were expensive, his father couldn’t really afford to miss work, and, in truth, there wasn’t a lot that his parents could actually do once they got out here, so he lied and said, “No.”

“What’s going on? What is it?” In the background, Gary could hear his mother’s panicked reaction to his father’s side of the conversation, and he quickly told his dad, “Don’t make it sound too scary. Keep it light.”

“I always do,” his dad said calmly, and proceeded to explain what was going on, downplaying the seriousness of what Gary had told him, making it sound as though Joan could simply have had some family emergency that caused her to leave school without informing Gary.

Seconds later, his mom took the phone, and Gary repeated the same thing his dad had just said. Hearing the same story from both of them calmed her down, and after a few pointed questions designed to ferret out any duplicity, she seemed satisfied that nothing was too amiss. She started asking him about school and things in general, and for the next eight or nine minutes he chatted with his mother as though everything that had happened since the trip to Burning Man had not occurred.

After she passed the phone back, his dad waited a moment until she was not only off the line but out of earshot and said, “Someone called last night asking for you.”

Gary’s pulse was racing. “Who?”

“I don’t know. But there was something weird about him. He didn’t give his name or the name of a company or organization he might’ve worked for, but after I said you weren’t here, he started asking questions about you. Personal questions. Like how old you were and where you were born. I didn’t tell him anything. I just hung up on him.” There was a significant pause. “Do you think this could be related to your… situation?”

Gary could tell from his dad’s tone of voice that he thought it was. Gary did, too, but he said, “I’ve been getting a lot of those calls lately. They’re just surveys. I sign up for these contests, and sometimes they’re just scams to get you to join a gym or something. I think they sell my name and phone number to other companies.”

There was skepticism in his father’s “Oh,” but his dad didn’t push it. They talked for a few moments more, and then Gary said it must be getting late and he should go. His dad agreed but before hanging up told Gary, “Be careful. And if you need anything, call.” Which told him that his father had seen right through his efforts to minimize the seriousness of the situation.

That made him feel good.

Gary hung up the phone. After arriving back at his room and discovering the chaos within, he had placed the address book he’d taken from Joan’s parents’ house on his desk, forgetting about it in the ensuing confusion. He’d spotted it again while talking to his dad, and he picked it up now, opening its cover and looking carefully at each entry, turning the pages slowly. There were very few names or numbers listed, and most of those had the same local Cayucos area code. He would call those numbers, just in case, but he doubted the people behind them would be of much help or interest to him.

As he’d discovered back at her parents’ house, Joan’s dorm and cell numbers were listed next to the single word Daughter. That was strange. But stranger still was what lay two pages away, under the letter F.

Friend 1, Friend 2, Friend 3, Friend 4…

There were seven altogether. No names. Only the designation Friend, along with an identifying digit. Each had an accompanying phone number, and none of the area codes was the same. None was any he recognized, either. He continued looking through the rest of the book, but all of the remaining pages were blank.

Gary turned back to the list of friends, thought for a moment, then picked up his phone and called the first number on the page.

There was only one ring before someone answered. “Hello?” The voice on the other end of the line was female and sounded more like someone his parents’ age than his.

“Hello,” he said. “My name is Gary Russell, and I’m, uh, Joan Daniels’s boyfriend.”

“How did you get this number?” the woman demanded.

“I—”

The line went dead. He tried calling back, but the line was busy, and after ten minutes and at least five times that many tries, he finally decided that the woman had taken her phone off the hook.

But why?

She’d sounded scared, he thought now. The surface belligerence had initially struck him as anger, but, reflecting upon it, there’d been fear there as well. And he was pretty sure it had been the mention of Joan’s name that had triggered such a response.

He stared down at the page. He was going further and further afield with these tangents. The likelihood that one of the people listed as Friend in her parents’ address book had driven out to Burning Man and kidnapped Joan was slim, to say the least.

But there was a connection. Like the lines of a spiderweb, all of these threads crisscrossed and wove together, and somewhere in the middle of them was Joan. Although he had no factual basis for such a belief, Gary was convinced that if he followed every lead he came across, he would eventually discover who had taken Joan and why.

He started to dial the number of the next friend on the list—and stopped. What if the next person hung up on him the same way the woman had? He didn’t want to frighten off the people who might be able to help him, and he didn’t want to set off any alarm bells among the Danielses’ circle of acquaintances.

He looked at the list of numbers, looked at the phone, thought for a minute.

And called Reyn.

Nine

They met in the student union, the only ones there save for a gaggle of drunk, giggling sorority types passing through on their way to yet another party, and a handful of dozing, geeky young men with textbooks on their laps who’d obviously planned to pull all-nighters but had fallen asleep in their chairs. Stacy was there, too, with Reyn, and the expression on her face did more to frighten Gary than even his ransacked room. He realized that it had been three days since Joan had disappeared.

She could have been raped hundreds of times since then.

She could be dead.

He tried to focus on the most positive possibility: that she was being treated well, held for a specific purpose and kept safe from harm until that purpose was realized, but as time passed with no word, it was getting harder and harder to buy into such a scenario.

Brian arrived seconds later, wearing Levi’s and a pajama top, his long hair even more wild and unruly than usual. It seemed obvious that he’d been asleep before being awakened by Reyn’s call.

They all had a rough idea of what had happened, but Gary showed them the address book and spelled out the specifics. Before he was even finished speaking, Brian was taking his BlackBerry from the front pocket of his jeans. “What’s that number?” he asked. “I’ll check the area code.”

Gary told him, and Brian started typing. He looked up from the device. “Lancaster.”

“Where’s—” Gary started to ask.

Reyn answered. “It’s just north of here, maybe an hour or two away. Out in the desert.”

“Let’s check the area codes of the other numbers,” Brian suggested. “See where they are.”

One by one, he used his BlackBerry to look up the location of the other six area codes. One was in Maine, two in New York, one in Colorado, one in Illinois and one in Alaska.

“I guess we’re not going to be visiting any of them,” Reyn said.

“Do you think you can find an address for the one in Lancaster?” Gary asked.

Brian grinned. “I’ll call our buddy Dan.”

“Is he still working?”

“We’ll find out.”

He was, and though Brian gave another bullshit explanation of why they needed an address to go with the phone number, Dan bought it and provided the information without question.

Stacy shook her head. “Between this guy and those detectives, I’m rapidly losing faith in our law enforcement agencies.”

Brian was slowly repeating aloud everything he was being told, while Gary wrote it all down. He’d had a pen in his pocket but no paper, so he used the back page of the Danielses’ address book to copy the information. “Joe Smith,” he said after he’d finished, and shook his head.

Reyn smiled. “You don’t think that’s his real name?”

Brian was thanking Dan and saying good-bye. He terminated the call and looked down at the address. “Let’s go,” he said.

Stacy looked at him. “You don’t want to go back and change first? Maybe get out of your pajamas?”

“Nah. I’m good.”

She rolled her eyes. “Suit yourself.”

“My car,” Reyn announced. “I don’t trust those death traps the rest of you drive.”

Stacy put a light hand on his shoulder. “Maybe you should get some coffee first.”

“I’m fine,” he told her.

She shot Gary an imploring look, and he nodded. “Let’s all get some coffee,” he said.

There was a pot on a table near the study area, with a stack of white Styrofoam cups next to it, and though ordinarily Gary wouldn’t go near that thing—he’d seen those YouTube videos of psychotic assholes spitting and pissing into punch bowls and coffeepots—he didn’t want to waste time going to a Starbucks or even a Mc-Donald’s. He just wanted to get some quick caffeine and be off.

Ten minutes later, they were heading west on Wilshire toward the 405 freeway. Even at this hour, the 405 was crowded, and it wasn’t until they were past Newhall that traffic finally thinned out. They were all wide awake, and though everyone except Brian had had coffee, Gary didn’t think it was the caffeine that was keeping them alert. He himself was running on pure adrenaline, as he had been since Monday, and though he’d probably crash at some point, right now he felt as though he could go for another week without sleeping.

They passed Vasquez Rocks, jaggedly black against the purple star-filled sky, and the Universal tour guide in Reyn prompted him to point out the fault-raised cliffs and mention that they had been used in numerous science fiction movies and TV shows over the years, including two separate Star Trek films and an episode of the original series. No one was really interested, no one was really paying attention, but the sound of his voice reciting entertainment industry facts was soothing somehow, and it comforted Gary to know that Reyn was along.

There was a loud, sustained honk from behind, and he turned to see a white Dodge pickup riding their tail. Suddenly, it swerved into the right-hand lane and sped past them, going well over the speed limit, twin American flags attached by plastic rods to both the driver’s and the front passenger windows fluttering crazily.

“If that guy loves America so much,” Stacy said drily, “why doesn’t he obey its traffic laws?”

“Yeah, and what’s with those flags?” Brian wondered aloud. “We’re all Americans here. Is he trying to let us know that he’s more American than we are?”

Gary couldn’t follow the conversation and didn’t want to. He was thinking of Joan, wondering what she was doing right at this second. Sleeping, hopefully.

The truck disappeared into the darkness.

According to the clock on the dash, it was one minute after midnight when they passed the green sign announcing LANCASTER CITY LIMITS. Reyn’s car didn’t have a GPS, but Brian had used his BlackBerry to find the location of “Joe Smith’s” address, and he acted as navigator from the backseat, telling Reyn which exit to take and which streets to turn down.

The house for which they were looking was a newer tract home in an unfinished neighborhood that appeared to have been a victim of the recession. Completed dwellings sat next to partially completed frames of houses and flat, empty desert lots. Lights were on in the “Smith” residence, as though the owners were still up at this hour, but the garage door was wide open and there was no vehicle in either the driveway or the garage.

“What do you think?” Reyn asked, pulling up to the curb.

“I think they bailed,” Brian said.

Gary unfastened his seat belt. “Let’s check it out.” They knocked on the front door, rang the bell, but when no one answered, they walked into the open garage, calling out, “Mr. Smith? Mrs. Smith?” The garage was dark, but illumination from a nearby streetlamp allowed them to see that it was empty.

There was no house next door, and the only one on the opposite side of the street that had been finished was dark and had a Realtor’s sign hanging from a post on the front lawn. Yellow light seeped around the edges of a door in the wall that separated the garage from the house, and, knowing there was no one watching, Gary tried the door’s handle. It turned, the door swung outward and, after calling out, “Mr. Smith? Mrs. Smith?” again, he walked inside.

His friends followed.

Stacy closed the door behind them as they moved quickly through the house together. Once they’d determined that it was empty, they split up, Gary staying in the living room, Brian going into one bedroom, Reyn into another one and Stacy heading into the kitchen. Breaking into houses was getting to be a habit, and Gary wanted to be in and out as quickly as possible.

The residents had left in a hurry, taking nothing with them. Or very little. Calling out to each other from their respective rooms, Gary and his friends found that nothing seemingly was out of place. All of the furniture was carefully arranged; kitchen cupboards, refrigerator and freezer were well stocked with food; toothbrushes and combs were on the counter in the bathroom. Bedroom dresser drawers were shut and filled with clothes.

Gary found no address book this time, and, after searching through the living room, he walked into the kitchen, passing by the adjacent laundry alcove where Stacy was opening up the doors of the washer and dryer. Stepping up to the back door, he looked carefully around for any signs of a struggle—

Blood

—but there was nothing obviously amiss. No dead animals. No wet red spots. He opened the door and passed into a covered patio that overlooked what appeared in the darkness to be a lush lawn.

“Holy shit!” Brian shouted from somewhere inside. “I found something!”

It took only seconds to reach the master bedroom where Brian was standing inside an open walk-in closet lit by recessed fluorescent ceiling lights. They all reached the bedroom at once, and before anyone could ask what Brian had found, he pointed to a dark wood cabinet about five feet high that was sitting against the back wall of the closet. The cabinet, Gary saw, was divided into rows of small compartments, and little rolled-up scrolls had been placed in each. Extra scrolls sat atop the case, and Gary picked up the closest of these, unspooling it. Like the one they’d found in Joan’s room, it, too, was a prayer of some sort, and it, too, referenced the Outsiders. Only this prayer involved the acquisition of wealth. He read it aloud:

“Sounds familiar,” Reyn said, eyebrows raised.

Brian was grinning. “Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Protect us from those greedy Outsiders. Oh, and by the way, give us lots of money, land and possessions. In fact, give us everything we ask for. Jesus!”

Gary rolled up the scroll and put it back on top of the cabinet. On impulse, he grabbed another, this from one of the small cubbyholes that made up the body of the wooden case. He unrolled it and read:

Reyn shook his head. “Well, that’s cheerful.”

“Are the Outsiders the good guys or the bad guys here?” Stacy wondered aloud.

Brian grinned. “It’s hard to tell the players without a scorecard.”

The idea that Joan was involved with the people behind these prayers made Gary uneasy. He knew from what little she’d said that her parents were ultrareligious and very strict, that she’d had a difficult childhood, but the more he learned, the less sense he could make of everything. If she’d broken away from that, why did she have that prayer scroll? And her parents’ home didn’t look like the house of religious fanatics. In fact, all of the displayed photos of a happy teenage Joan made them seem like loving, devoted parents. None of it added up.

And the prayers themselves freaked him out. He didn’t know what about them disturbed him so, but the fact that they were printed on little scrolls, that they each seemed to reference these mysterious Outsiders, that the stilted language sounded so alien, that even the typestyle of the words on those tiny rolled parchments appeared unfamiliar, all conspired to produce within him a feeling of dread.

The others had picked up scrolls and started reading the prayers on them.

It was Stacy who spoke first. “What do we do about this?” she asked, rolling a scroll back up and carefully putting it back where she had found it.

They were all looking at him, and Gary shook his head. He had no idea. They couldn’t go to the police with anything they found here, because it would have been obtained illegally. They would be implicating themselves by telling what they knew. He glanced down at the scroll in his hand. What did it mean, anyway? These people and Joan were connected, but how deeply and whether or not it had any bearing on her disappearance was anyone’s guess.

Although the fact that the Smiths had taken off in the night, leaving their belongings behind, simply because he had called them and mentioned Joan’s name, led him to believe that they knew a hell of a lot more than he did about what was going on.

“I have an idea,” Brian said. “We’ll report the family missing—anonymously, of course—and the police will come and investigate.”

Reyn shook his head. “And how will they connect this to Joan, especially when these people left of their own volition, and Joan was drugged and abducted, and the only thing linking the two are some prayer scrolls?”

“That detective has her scroll. He could make the connection.”

“But how would the Lancaster police know to contact him?”

“We tell them,” Brian said. “Again, anonymously.”

Reyn rolled his eyes. “Sure. That’s a great idea.”

The closet was starting to feel stuffy, although whether that was an actual physical sensation or just a mental projection, Gary didn’t know. He put the scroll he was holding back in the cabinet space from which he’d taken it and walked back into the bedroom.

“Are you all right?” Stacy asked.

He nodded, not wanting to speak, though he felt as far from all right as he could possibly be. Brian and Reyn were still sorting through scrolls; Stacy was pulling back the clothes hanging in the closet, trying to see if there was anything behind them. They needed to get out of here soon. As remote as this house might seem, they still could get caught, and he started thinking up excuses, reasons to explain why they were here. If anyone asked, he’d probably say that they’d been invited, that they were simply visiting their friends, the Smiths, who, fortunately for them, were not around to contradict that story.

It occurred to him that their fingerprints were all over this house, but since none of them had their fingerprints on file anywhere—yet—that probably wouldn’t make any difference.

Thinking of the police made him wonder if Williams had attempted to call or leave a message. He pulled out his phone and quickly checked his in-box. There was a single message, left earlier this evening, and he replayed the voice mail, putting the phone to his ear.

“Gary! I’m—”

He nearly dropped the phone. It was Joan! She was screaming and out of breath, frightened and frantic. The message cut off almost as soon as it had begun, as though someone had caught her just as she’d started talking, yanked the phone from her hand and immediately hung up. He closed his eyes. Horror, worry, relief, anger and fear swirled within him, each vying for supremacy but none gaining a toehold as the competing emotions alternated like the spinning compartments of a roulette wheel.

Gary! I’m—

He imagined her planning for days, carefully working the knots on the ropes that bound her until she was finally free, picking exactly the right moment to make a dash for the one connected phone in the otherwise abandoned building in which she was being held, dialing, calling—

—and then being caught.

Had she been beaten after the phone had been wrenched from her hand?

He glanced down at the small screen of his cell phone, hoping to see the number from which the call had been made, but it was blocked and the only thing displayed was the simple scary word Unknown.

Gary played the message again, listening carefully. He was crying, though he didn’t realize it at first, didn’t notice until he tried to play the message yet again and discovered that his vision was too blurry to see the keys on his phone. He was trying to determine whether there was any identifiable background noise, whether he could hear something behind Joan’s aborted plea that would give him any indication of her whereabouts.

His friends gathered around him. He felt a hand on his shoulder, though he wasn’t sure whose it was. Without speaking, he held the phone out so they could hear it and played the message again.

“She’s alive,” Reyn said, and it was the surprise in his voice that cut, that made Gary realize his friend had not believed it until this moment.

“You have to go to the police with this,” Stacy said.

Gary, wiping his eyes, nodded in agreement. “I know.” Even as they spoke, they were heading toward the garage door through which they’d come in, hurrying faster with each step until they were outside and sprinting toward the car. Brian was a few steps behind the rest of them, and, keyed up, Gary turned and yelled, “Come on!” He was surprised by the anger in his voice.

Then they were in the car and speeding through the darkened streets of the nearly empty neighborhood toward Lancaster’s business district and the highway beyond.

No one slept on the way back, but no one spoke, either. They were all lost in their own thoughts, so it came as a jolt of surprise when the car began to slow down and Reyn put on his blinker, glancing quickly in his rearview mirror. “I have to pull over,” he announced.

“What’s wrong?” Stacy asked worriedly.

“I don’t know. It’s overheating for some reason. I have to stop before we stall out.”

“Shit!” Gary yelled, slamming his hand on the back of the driver’s seat.

“Sorry,” Reyn told him.

“So much for your great, reliable car,” Brian said.

“It’s still better than your hunk of junk!”

“Mine made it all the way from the Bay to UCLA. And back again. Four times. And it’s still going strong. It may look—”

“What do we do?” Gary demanded.

Reyn was guiding the car onto the shoulder. “Call Triple A, I guess.”

They were in the middle of nowhere. Gary wasn’t sure exactly where in the desert they’d stopped, but there were no lights, no buildings, no nearby off-ramps. He looked between the two front seats at the temperature gauge on the dashboard. The red needle was pointing directly at the H. Through the windshield, he could see steam escaping from the sides of the hood, vaporous mist eerily backlit by the car’s headlights.

Reyn switched off the engine and took out his cell phone. They could hear only one side of the conversation, but polite civility gave way to annoyance and finally hostility as it became clear that it would be some time before a tow truck was dispatched. He terminated the call angrily. “An hour. And it’s going to cost big bucks. My card only covers a tow of up to five miles. It’s at least another fifty to civilization.” He shook his head. “Maybe there’s a gas station or a garage somewhere between here and there.”

“Let it cool off,” Brian suggested. “Then we’ll check it out. Do you have a flashlight?”

“Yeah,” Reyn said. “In the glove compartment. But I don’t know anything about cars.”

“I do. It could be just a thermostat. We might be able to let it cool down and then take it back slowly. Is there any water in your trunk? Are there any big hills we have to climb?”

“I’m not taking a chance with my engine.”

“Maybe a cop’ll come by,” Stacy said hopefully. “They have to assist stranded motorists, don’t they?”

“What’ll we do with the car?” Reyn asked. “Leave it here?” He shook his head. “I’m waiting for the tow truck.”

“Just give me the flashlight and let me take a look,” Brian said.

“Fine.”

Stacy turned around in her seat toward Gary. “You can call the detective and tell him about the message. You don’t have to talk to him in person.”

Gary shook his head.

“He kind of does,” Reyn said. “He’s under suspicion.”

Outside, Brian was shouting for Reyn to pop open the hood. Reyn reached down under the dashboard, there was a metallic click, and seconds later Brian was lifting the hood, blocking the view out the windshield.

“I’d better see what he’s up to.” Reyn opened the driver’s door, stepped out and walked to the front of the car.

“That call’s a good sign,” Stacy told Gary. “I think they’ll be able to find her.”

Gary nodded. His emotions were still on a roller coaster. Moments before, he, too, had felt optimistic, but right now, stranded by the side of the road, all he could think about was the emptiness of the Smiths’ house and how quickly the family must have evacuated it once they’d received his call. That, and how, right after recapturing Joan, her captors had probably moved her to a new, more hidden location.

Once they’d beaten and restrained her.

And every minute that passed allowed them to get farther away.

He checked the message again, looking at the time when it had been left. What had he been doing then? Putting his room back in order, probably.

Why hadn’t he had his phone on? He would have answered the call. He could have heard her live. He could have spoken to her… .

The hood remained up, but both Brian and Reyn returned to the car. Neither of them was speaking, and it seemed clear that they had had words outside.

Brian shook his head, disgusted. “We’re always ending up in the desert, aren’t we?” he said, then glanced guiltily over at Gary. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

“Let’s just be quiet and wait,” Reyn said.

“Can you at least leave the radio on?” Brian asked.

“No. It’ll run down the battery. I thought you said you knew about cars.”

“Forget I even asked.”

Moments later, bored, they all got out of the car. They walked around, looked up and down the highway for any sign of a tow truck, sat on the trunk, threw rocks into the desert darkness.

A half hour passed. Forty-five minutes. An hour. “That’s it,” Reyn said. “I’ve had enough of this shit.” He called AAA again, angrily berating the person on the other end of the line. When he finally got off the phone, he was livid. “She said they contacted Mojave Towing and that the truck should have been here by now but that it’s been a busy night and it could be up to another hour.”

“Fuck!” Gary screamed into the night as loud as he could. He stomped around the dirt and gravel by the side of the road. His muscles hurt, he was so tense. His head was pounding. All he could think about was Joan, and every scenario he’d imagined in the wake of her aborted phone call involved violence, punishment and pain.

“That sounds cathartic,” Brian said in response to his outburst. “Let me try it. Cunt!”

“You’re an asshole,” Stacy told him. “Asshole!” she screamed.

“Dick!” Reyn yelled.

And then they were all shouting obscenities into the darkness, stopping only when a pickup truck sped by. Brian, Reyn and Stacy were laughing, and even Gary had to admit that it felt good to vent. He was still overcome with discouragement and anxiety, but there must have been something to the idea of primal scream therapy because he felt a little less hopeless than he had before.

“Want to start the car and see if we can make it?” Brian asked when they had stopped laughing and calmed down. “If it was just the thermostat or a temperature gauge, we can probably—”

“No,” Reyn said firmly.

“Suit yourself.”

A while later, the tow truck arrived, slowing as it approached them, yellow lights strobing on the roof of the cab and casting strange shadows on the desert rocks and brush off the side of the road.

According to the white patch sewn into his dark coveralls, the driver’s name was John. He asked what had happened, and Reyn handed over his AAA card and gave a detailed explanation of how the engine had at first felt sluggish; then the temperature light had come on, steam had started to engulf the hood and the car had begun to slow.

The driver nodded. He ran the AAA card through a handheld reader. “This here’s only good for five free miles,” he said. “There ain’t nothing within five miles.”

“I know,” Reyn said. “I’ll pay for the rest.”

“You have a Visa or MasterCard?”

Gary felt a sudden chill. They were alone here on the highway. In the desert. In the dark. What if this guy wasn’t who he said he was? What if he was crazy?

But Reyn seemed to have no qualms. He opened his wallet, took out a credit card and handed it over.

“Where do you want me to tow it?” the man asked.

Gary wondered if there was room for all of them in the truck’s cab. Would some of them have to stay here and wait for another ride? He didn’t like the idea of them splitting up. He didn’t trust this guy.

John.

“Is there any kind of twenty-four-hour garage you can take it to?”

“Our station’s the closest, but at night we only do the towing. Everything else is closed. Even the gas pumps. The garage don’t open for repairs until eight.”

Stacy stepped forward. “Do you think you can take a look at it for us?” she asked, putting on an almost coquettish voice Gary had never heard her use. He glanced over at Reyn, who was looking at Stacy, stone-faced.

“I might be able to check it out when we get there,” John allowed. “Let you know the damage.”

Reyn shot Stacy a look of irritation, then turned to the tow truck driver. “What do you think it might be?”

“Well…” The man walked over to the front of the car. The hood was still open, and he glanced under it for a second, then went and got a halogen light from a box in the back of his truck, hung it off a hole on the hood’s interior and peeked inside the engine compartment. He asked Reyn to start the car, checked a few things, then told him to shut off the engine. He slid under the car on his back, wrench and flashlight in hand, then slid back out a moment later. “Can’t say for sure,” he said, “but it looks to me like it’s your water pump.”

“All right,” Reyn said. “Tow it to your garage.”

The driver told Reyn to leave the keys in the ignition, asked everyone to get out of the way, and manuevered his truck until it was directly in front of the car. He got out, unhooked the tow bar, then pulled a lever that let out the winch cable. It took more than a few minutes, but finally the car was lifted onto the flat back of the truck, blocks shoved under its rear wheels.

“You all can get in,” he said. “It’s time to go.”

There was a narrow backseat behind the driver and passenger, and Gary, Reyn and Brian crawled back there while Stacy sat in front with John.

What if he’s crazy? Gary thought again.

Then they were on the highway and turning around. Reyn kept glancing through the rear window to make sure the car was not falling off the back of the truck. Two exits and fifteen minutes later, they were pulling off the highway and onto a side road toward the glowing orange ball of a 76 station. MOJAVE TOWING AND CAR REPAIR read the sign over the dark garage behind the pumps.

The tow truck stopped. They got out as Reyn’s car was being lowered to the ground.

“I guess you all can wait here until morning,” John said. He gestured toward the building. “Office is open. Not much to do, but we have a black-and-white TV in there. Used to be, we could only get one station, but with that converter box, we get quite a few now. Watch what you want. There’s a vending machine around the corner if you get thirsty, but drinks cost a buck and it only takes quarters.”

“Where are the other cars?” Brian asked.

“What other cars?”

“The Triple A woman told me you were late because it had been a busy night,” Reyn explained. “I guess we thought there’d be other cars.”

John grinned. “Naw. I just told her that when she called back and bitched at me. Truth is, I fell asleep.”

What if he’s crazy?

“So you don’t have to pick up more vehicles?”

“Not yet. Not unless someone calls.”

“Are you the mechanic here?” Reyn asked. “Or just the driver?”

“Mechanic. One of ’em.” He’d finished lowering the car and unhooking the tow bar and chains. He unlocked the garage door behind the car, and with a loud, metallic roar, the door rolled up into the ceiling. The keys were still in Reyn’s car, and the mechanic got in, pulling it into the first bay. There was a pit in the concrete beneath the car, and after getting out, John grabbed some tools and went below.

“Water pump,” he confirmed a few moments later, emerging with grease on his hands. “I had to know. I was curious.”

“Can you fix that?” Reyn asked.

“Yeah, but, like I said, we ain’t open until eight.”

“Well, can you tell me how much it’s going to cost?”

“About a hundred parts, a hundred and fifty or so labor.”

Gary thought he could hear his friend’s sharp intake of breath. He felt guilty, because this probably wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t dragged everyone out here on this wild-goose chase to begin with—or, if it had, it would have occurred somewhere in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, probably in the daytime, and wouldn’t have cost anywhere near as much.

He wondered if he ought to offer to pay part of it but didn’t know how to even broach that subject until Reyn said, “I’m almost maxed out on my Visa. I only have a hundred or so left.”

Gary jumped in. “I’ll get the rest.” He didn’t really have the money, either, but he seldom used his one credit card and had plenty available on his account. He could always just make the minimum payment for several months until he paid this off. Besides, the sooner they got this problem taken care of, the sooner they could get back and go to the police. Whatever it cost, it was worth it.

“We’re not supposed to be here,” Stacy said in that coquettish voice that seemed so completely at odds with who she was. “If we don’t get back by dawn, we’ll be in big trouble. You don’t seem too busy tonight. Do you think you could do us a little favor and just work on it… now? We could pay you a little extra.”

The man smiled at her. “I guess I could.”

“How long do you think it’ll take?” Reyn asked, butting in.

The mechanic shrugged. “An hour, maybe. Two at the most.”

“Thank you,” Stacy said, smiling.

John went into a small storeroom at the far side of the garage.

“What the hell was that about?” Reyn whispered fiercely.

“Oh, knock it off,” Stacy whispered back. “I’m getting us out of here.”

They moved away, outside, around the edge of the building, arguing, but when they returned moments later, everything was fine between them.

Brian had already gone into the office to watch TV, and the rest of them joined him, flipping through channels before settling on a years-old Jerry Springer show about mothers who’d had sex with their sons’ teenage friends. They’d made it halfway through another show about a woman who’d fallen in love with her husband’s sister when John walked in and told them the car was ready to go.

In the end, he didn’t charge them extra, and between Gary’s credit card and Reyn’s, they had enough to take care of it.

Then they were off.

There was a surprising amount of traffic on the highway now, all of it heading toward Los Angeles—the same direction in which they were going. The sky was orange in the east, and it grew lighter and lighter as they followed the slow flow of traffic into the city.

The sun was out and it was morning by the time they pulled off the freeway onto Wilshire Boulevard. Reyn was going to head straight to the police station, but Gary asked him to stop by his dorm first so he could get the photo he’d taken from Joan’s parents’ house. The cops could use it, and he’d decided to say he’d had it in his room and forgotten it was there. If he was asked how he could have forgotten, Gary was going to say that his brain had been so rattled by Joan’s disappearance that he wasn’t thinking clearly. Besides, he saw the photo every day and it was such a commonplace part of his room furnishings that he hadn’t even thought about it.

The important thing was that the police would finally have a picture of Joan, proof that she existed, something they could work with to help them find her.

No one trusted Reyn’s car, even with the new water pump, and despite his protestations, they switched vehicles and took Gary’s Celica to the police station, where they asked the short masculine-looking woman at the front desk if they could talk to Detective Williams. In a flat, intimidating voice, she asked why they wanted to see the detective, and Gary said that they might have some information about a case he was working on. She asked Gary’s name, then picked up the handset of the phone directly in front of her and spoke into it, repeating what she’d been told. “Wait here,” she said, after hanging up. “Someone will be with you shortly.”

Gary was just glad that Williams seemed to be working this early, and he practiced in his head what he was going to say.

A few moments later, the security door to the right of the front desk opened with a buzz, and a uniformed young man about their age emerged to lead them through the station to the detectives’ desks. They went down a long corridor, up a flight of stairs and into a large, open room filled with several desks, some manned, most empty. He stopped in front of Williams’s partner, the guy with the handheld computer. The nameplate on his desk identified him as Det. Joseph Tucker.

Gary turned to the uniformed guide. “We wanted to talk to Detective Williams.”

Tucker smiled harshly. “He’s… indisposed at the moment. You can talk to me. Wondering how much your bail’s going to be set at?”

The young officer was walking away.

“We’re done,” Brian said, grabbing Gary’s arm. “Let’s go.”

Williams emerged from a restroom at the far end of the room, wiping his hands on a paper towel. “What can I do for you ladies and gentlemen?” he asked, walking up. He threw the wet paper towel at Tucker’s head as he was sitting down at an adjacent desk. Tucker ducked, swearing.

Gary handed Williams the photo of Joan, saying that he’d forgotten about it. Then he held out his cell phone, explaining that he’d gotten a call from Joan last evening, though he’d only checked his messages and heard it now. Then he played it.

“Gary! I’m—”

The call was so short, he played it again, just in case the detective hadn’t caught it.

“Gary! I’m—”

“I think someone kidnapped her, I think she escaped and I think she made that call,” he said. “Then I think she was caught again.”

Williams nodded, saying nothing.

Gary couldn’t help it. “Now do you believe me?”

“Not necessarily,” Tucker offered from the next desk over. “Maybe you recruited a friend of yours to send you that message in an effort to convince us that your story was legit.”

“Jesus!”

Williams motioned for the other detective to shut up. “I believe you,” he said. “But we still can’t dig up any proof that a Joan Daniels was ever enrolled in UCLA or lived in that dorm room… .”

“Her records have been erased,” Brian said. “School, DMV, everything.”

Tucker gave him a hard look. “And how do you know that?”

Brian stared back belligerently. “I have my ways.”

“Stand down,” Williams said tiredly.

“Is there any way you can trace this?” Gary asked.

“Short answer? No.”

Gary slammed his hand down on the desk. “She’s being held captive! This is an emergency! Can’t you subpoena the phone company records?”

“Yes, but that could take—”

“Can’t you just ask them?” Stacy suggested. “Explain the situation?”

Williams smiled thinly. “The Bush years are over. Privacy policies are back in effect.”

Gary was filled with a feeling remarkably close to panic. It was an emotional state that was becoming far too familiar, rendering him simultaneously furious, anxious and powerless, and he wanted to beat some sense into the dull, implacable head of the detective sitting before him. He forced himself to take a deep, calming breath, one of those moves that characters in film did all the time but that seemed so attention-grabbing, obvious and melodramatic in real life. “The only clue we have is this partial phone message, this attempt at contact.” He held out his phone. “How can we use it to find her?”

Williams looked at him, glanced over at Tucker, then picked up a pen and a yellow Post-it notepad, handing both to Gary. “Give me your cell phone number, your carrier and the date and time of the message. We’ll see what we can do.”

He acted as though he was doing Gary a big favor. This is your job! Gary wanted to scream at him. This is what you’re supposed to be doing! I shouldn’t have to tell you to do it! But he took the pen and paper, wrote down the information and handed it over.

“Did you ever get ahold of Joan’s parents?” he asked. He knew they hadn’t, but he wanted to introduce the subject, wanted them to discover that her parents were missing, too.

“No,” Williams admitted. “No one’s answered at that number.”

If the police knew her parents had disappeared as well, they would be much more likely to ramp up Joan’s investigation. Gary longed to just come out and tell the detective that they, too, were missing and that there was a dead dog stuck in the pet entrance of their kitchen. But that would involve divulging that he had been to their house, which in the eyes of the cops would probably connect him to their disappearance and would definitely implicate him in the crime of breaking and entering. So he only said, “Don’t you think that’s suspicious?”

“Possibly,” Williams acknowledged.

“Ever think of calling the cops up there?” Brian asked. “Tell them to check it out? I don’t want to overwhelm your little brains, but that just seems like common sense to me.”

Gary almost smiled. As always, he was grateful for his friend’s fearlessness, but he kept an eye on Williams and Tucker. Cops didn’t take too well to open displays of defiance, and he didn’t want Brian arrested on some trumped-up charge of resisting arrest.

Williams met Gary’s gaze, ignoring Brian. “I believe that your girlfriend disappeared, and we’ll do everything we can to find her.”

What kind of wishy-washy promise was that?

At least he could take comfort in the knowledge that she was alive.

But he’d always thought that she was alive, and the desperation he’d heard in her voice on the phone for those few brief seconds made him even more eager than he had been before to rescue her, to get her back.

Williams must have noticed how lame his promise sounded. “Don’t worry,” the detective assured him. “We will find her.”

Gary nodded. “Okay,” he said.

But he didn’t believe it.

Ten

Gary grabbed the textbooks from his desk. It felt disloyal to be going to class, almost as though he was turning his back on Joan, leaving her to rot in whatever hellhole served as her prison, but he had missed most of this week already, and if he wanted to stay in college and retain his scholarship and grant money, he was going to have to keep up with the coursework. Since this wasn’t high school, and there was no one taking attendance, he figured if he could just find out the reading requirements and homework assignments for the next several sessions, he’d be able to get by without actually attending his classes.

In case something else came up.

Which it undoubtedly would.

Besides, there was nothing he or his friends could do right now. They’d reached a dead end in their pathetic amateur investigation, and it was up to the police to carry the ball. This was the perfect time to go back to class. It might even take his mind off everything for a few hours.

Only it didn’t. The day seemed to last forever, the hours dragging, even lunch with Reyn passing by in slow motion. Of course, he was running on three hours of sleep, so his perception of time was undoubtedly skewed, but it all seemed so interminable.

Especially when he thought about what Joan was probably going through.

Gary! I’m—

He explained what was going on to Bergman, Garcia, Choy and Bernard, his European history, sociology, classical mythology and statistics professors, and they were all extremely understanding and accommodating. His Shakespeare instructor, Neilson, as expected, was not. Neilson informed him that he did not appreciate truancy, that he kept track of absences, and that if Gary thought he could skate by doing the bare minimum, he had another think coming. Gary nodded politely, took the beating, then immediately walked over to the admissions office and asked for a drop form. There was no way he’d get a fair shake in that class—particularly if he had to miss even more days—and since it was still the beginning of the semester, it was easy to drop the course. He still needed another three units to maintain his scholarship, however, and after talking to a counselor, he discovered that Renaissance literature fulfilled the same requirement. The class was still open, so he picked up an add form and went over to the English department office to get everything squared away. He met with the instructor, Dr. Davies, was given a syllabus, then headed over to the bookstore to buy his texts for the class.

He had a lot of reading to catch up on—in every subject—and he considered going to the library to study. But he felt more comfortable reading in his own room. The artificial silence of libraries put him on edge, made him feel self-conscious about making even the slightest sound or movement, and it seemed easier to study in a more open, natural environment. He grabbed a Monster Energy drink from the refrigerated display case near the cash register—he needed an extra jolt of caffeine to see him through that statistics book—then carried everything across campus to his dorm. He opened the door to his room—

And three men were waiting for him.

He had time to note that they were wearing odd clothes, almost Amish-like garb, and that one of them had a bald and peculiarly shaped head, and then they were upon him, the one with the weird head grabbing his right arm, another his left, while the third man punched him in the stomach and closed the door. Gary couldn’t cry out or fight back. He was too busy sucking in air and trying to breathe. He was jerked erect, and for several seconds he heard the three men talking in a language that seemed not just foreign but alien. They were wearing homemade shoes, he noticed as he continued to raggedly draw in air. Ugly brown things that sort of resembled moccasins.

Turning his head, he stared at the bald guy, who for some reason seemed unnervingly familiar.

Michael Berryman. The head mutant from Wes Craven’s original The Hills Have Eyes.

That was who he looked like.

The man pulled his arm tighter.

The third man withdrew something from a brown burlap sack that was hanging from his shoulder by a rough rope. A cloth. No, a gag. Gary tried to struggle, but he was in pain and still out of breath, and he wasn’t strong enough to do more than wiggle in his captors’ grasp. The gag was pulled taut and placed over his mouth, then tied around the back of his head. He wondered whether the men were going to execute him or leave him bound here in the room or take him somewhere. The latter seemed the least likely. He didn’t see how his abductors could take him down the halls of the dorm, out of the building and through the campus without attracting suspicion, although he sure hoped they would try. It was his best chance.

Gary wrinkled his nose, wanting to spit. The gag tasted strange, he thought. Like dirt or some type of root. And…

… and…

… and suddenly he felt calm. Not exactly happy but… content. The pain he’d been experiencing, the fear and anger that had filled him, all drifted away, replaced by a comfortable tranquillity. He’d been drugged, he knew, but there was nothing he could do about it, and the knowledge lay useless and dormant beneath layers of blissful inertia that were compelling him to relax, to take it easy.

The gag was removed from his mouth. He knew he should scream and fight back, but he didn’t want to, he couldn’t, and he was led out of his room by the three men, one in front and two behind him. They didn’t have to support him on their shoulders or lead him by the hand as though he were drunk; he went along willingly, docile and compliant but perfectly in control of his body. The four of them walked downstairs like old friends and up the concrete path that led out to the street.

Their car, a generic white midsize vehicle with a Hertz sticker on the back window, was parked in a red zone, and a ticket was pressed against the windshield, held down by one of the wiper blades. In a single movement, the guy who’d punched him pulled out the ticket and threw it into the air, where it fluttered down to the ground. For some reason, Gary thought that was hilarious, and he started laughing. He thought he’d never be able to stop, but then he was pushed gently down into the backseat of the car, and he understood intellectually, if not emotionally, the seriousness of his situation.

The car started moving, heading down the street and away from campus.

These had to be Outsiders. And they obviously thought he was part of Joan’s religion. Whatever feud these two groups had going, he’d ended up right in the middle of it, and now he was probably going to die.

Only…

Only he couldn’t get too worked up about it, didn’t seem to care. The drug made him not merely lethargic but satisfied, and for the first time in his life he could honestly understand the appeal that narcotics held.

They drove.

The three men seldom spoke, but when they did it was in that strange—alien—language, and he could not understand a word of what was said.

He leaned back in the seat, looking at the bald guy with the weird head next to him. He could not seem to stop staring at the man, and this close he saw that not only was the shape of the head irregular, but one eye was bigger than the other and the left side of his mouth was raised up into a sort of permanent smile. The man looked more than a little off, almost retarded, although he definitely didn’t act as if he was.

Gary could see details of the clothes of his abductors as well, and he noted with wonder that the shirts had no buttons but were held closed by small pieces of string tied in curiously dainty bows. The pants were leather, but leather that had not been properly tanned and still looked like cow flesh. Lengths of rope acted as belts.

“Where are you taking me?” he asked. He didn’t actually care, but he was somewhat curious. No one answered, and he forgot about it.

After a while, he slept.

Apparently, they had driven all night, because when he awoke, it was morning and they were traveling through unfamiliar countryside. He saw chaparral-covered hills and steep sandstone cliffs. They were on a narrow two-lane road whose centerline could barely be seen and whose very asphalt had faded into a gray so pale it was almost white. Gary felt far less sanguine than he had when he’d fallen asleep, and he had the sense that he would feel stronger, angrier, more himself as additional time passed. Not wanting to give any hint that that was the case, he remained unmoving and forced himself to keep a slight smile on his face.

The guy with the weird head said some strange word that sounded like “Micah,” and the driver reached next to him on the front seat and handed back a length of cloth.

A gag.

Before Gary could react, the gag was shoved into his mouth, whipped around his head and tied. He tasted dirt, root…

… and then he didn’t care about escaping anymore. He knew he should, but he didn’t, and he stared contentedly out at the scenery as his gag was removed. The men to either side were smiling at him, and he smiled back. Through the window, a town passed by: restaurant, gas station, store, trailer court. They bumped over a railroad track, passed by a dry river lined with trees.

What state were they in? Gary wondered. Were they still in California? He didn’t know. And it didn’t really matter anyway.

Some time later, they pulled onto a narrow dirt road that led through some scrub brush and into a rocky, hilly area. The three men had started talking again, saying words that made no sense, and Gary realized that he was hungry. He couldn’t tell if it was closer to breakfast time or lunch, but right now any food sounded good. He was suddenly famished.

The dirt road had narrowed and was now little wider than a biking trail or a footpath. They wound up a small hill, passed between two sentrylike boulders and started down a long, gentle slope that ended at a ranch house and barn. The well-maintained wooden buildings were in a rough bowl-shaped meadow dotted with scrub oak and juniper. Next to the house and barn was a corral, and behind it all was a pasture of dried tan weeds through which a single horse slowly sauntered.

They pulled to a stop in front of the barn, next to a battered, mud-covered pickup truck and a rusted Jeep on blocks. A middle-aged woman was coming out of the house and walking across the dirt toward them. She, too, was wearing drab, primitive clothing, and she wiped her hands on a plain white apron as she approached. She walked with a pronounced limp, as though one leg was considerably shorter than the other.

“Hello!” the woman said, waving, but the driver shouted at her, something short and harsh in that alien language. The woman responded, her words low, hesitant and sounding like an apology. She looked at the ground.

So they could speak English, Gary thought.

Interesting.

As the limping woman led them toward the door of the house, which had been left wide open, he glanced around at the surrounding countryside. Apart from this ranch, there was no evidence of human habitation as far as the eye could see, and he realized that it would be the perfect area in which to dump his body. They could dig a hole somewhere on this land, toss him in, cover him up and no one would ever be the wiser. He wasn’t worried—if it happened, it happened—but the idea did occur to him, and somewhere beneath the layers of apathy, he realized that that was good, that it was important to maintain an interest, however detached, in what they did to him.

The five of them stepped inside the house. It was simply furnished, just the type of place he would expect a woman who dressed like her to live. There were no rugs or couches or soft furniture of any kind, only crude chairs and tables made from the branches of trees, arranged unartfully in a seemingly haphazard manner on the unpainted plywood floor. There were no electric lights, only kerosene lamps, and like the parking ticket on the windshield, this struck him as hilarious. He started giggling at first, then tried to stop himself, which only made the giggles turn into roaring guffaws.

Then he saw the cabinet in the corner.

And the small spaces within it that were filled with rolled-up scrolls.

He stopped laughing.

The man who’d punched him, the one who appeared to be the leader, shouted some kind of order, and Gary was taken through a doorway into another room and tied to the floor on his back, his legs together and arms spread wide as though he were being crucified. There were shackles on the floor for just this purpose, which made him realize that this was not the first time this had been done, that he was not the first person to whom this had happened. The only piece of furniture in the room was a seat made out of a wooden crate that was pressed against the wall opposite the door.

The shackles didn’t hurt, and it was kind of nice to be lying down, even if the wooden floor was hard and dirty. Gary allowed himself to be restrained, then stared up at the dark, cobwebbed ceiling as his captors left the room, closing the door behind them. Moments later, he could hear them in the other room talking, though their voices were little more than indistinct mumbles.

Soon he smelled food cooking, some type of unfamiliar meat, and a while after that the talking ceased. He assumed they were eating a meal, although no one came in to offer him anything. He was starving—he hadn’t eaten anything since lunch yesterday—and that hunger, that need for food, cut through the blissful haze engulfing him and gave his comfortable serenity a sharper edge.

Edge was good.

He needed to keep it, hone it.

But such thinking tired him, and even as he tried to remember why he should attempt an escape, he was starting to nod off, to doze, the hard floor beneath his back feeling suddenly much more comfortable, the position of his shackled arms and legs seeming more relaxing than confining.

When he awoke, it was still light outside, but the light had shifted, and the muscles in his back told him that he had been asleep for several hours. He heard nothing from the other room, no talking, but through the window, he heard the woman call to someone, “Keep it down! They’re still sleeping in there.”

Gary’s ears pricked up. The drug had worn off once again, not a lot but some, and that, combined with the now painful hunger in his belly, made him acutely aware of the need to stay alert. He was hoping to hear more words in English, but either someone had said something or she had caught herself, because the next words out of her mouth were in that alien language.

So his abductors were sleeping here. To Gary, that meant that their ultimate destination was still a long way off, and they were planning to travel by night and sleep by day.

Which meant that they weren’t planning on killing him.

At least not yet.

He desperately had to take a piss, though he’d consumed no water or other liquid in probably twenty-four hours, and at first he thought he’d just go in his pants, maybe take a dump in there for good measure. That would show those bastards. They’d have to clean him up, find him some new pants, and maybe somewhere in the process, his hands or feet would be free enough for him to fight back. But the thought of it was too gross. Maybe they wouldn’t even clean him up and would just make him sit in it. He couldn’t take a chance on that. He’d puke.

At that moment, there was a change in the limited light that entered the room, a slight darkening of the day. Gary moved his head to the right—the only part of his body he could move—and saw the woman peeking through the window, checking on him. “I have to go to the bathroom,” he told her. “I have to pee.”

He figured she would have one of the men escort him to a bathroom or, more likely, an outhouse, but she nodded, went away and a few moments later limped into the room through the door. Without speaking, the woman crouched down next to him, unfastened his belt, unbuttoned his jeans and took out his penis. Pulling it to the right, she pointed the tip into a brown ceramic jar.Against his will, he was aroused by the touch of her fingers, and his organ stiffened into a partial erection. That made it harder to urinate but not impossible, and though it took a while, she held him in place until he was finished and then walked out of the room holding the jar. She’d said nothing the entire time, and while he’d felt mortally embarrassed even in his doped-up state, her face retained a completely neutral expression the entire time. He might as well have been a cow she was milking.

There were stirrings in the other room, and once again the smell of food. Onions with the meat, this time. Potatoes. Tired of waiting for an invitation, Gary yelled, “I’m hungry!”

There was what sounded like a discussion out there, and then the guy with the weird head came in. He didn’t tie on a gag this time, but bent down, held open Gary’s mouth and poured in a thick, syrupy liquid from a metal cup. It had the same earthy taste as the gag, and Gary wanted to spit it out, but he couldn’t move his head, and it felt like he was going to drown. The only thing he could do was swallow it.

Then he felt good, and his shackles were removed, and he was led out through the adjoining room into a kitchen, where he sat with his three abductors and another man he didn’t recognize, while the woman led them in an alien prayer and then served them plates of greasy meat and boiled potatoes. The food was horrible, but he had to eat, and he forced himself to keep the wretched repast down and not throw up.

The sun began to set as they dined, and by the time they finished, it was nearly dusk. Gary was led docilely to his seat in the back of the car as everyone else participated in a conversation he could not understand. He had no idea why they had kidnapped him, but he hoped they were taking him to wherever Joan was, although he didn’t know what it would mean for either himself or Joan if they did.

As before, the man who seemed to be the leader drove the car, while the same two sat on either side of him in the backseat. Out of habit, Gary buckled his seat belt. The rest of them, he noticed, did not. Maybe they’d get in an accident, everyone else would fly through the window; then he’d just unbuckle his seat belt, get into the driver’s seat and speed away.

The thought struck him as funny, and he laughed.

He was still laughing when the car struck a deer and skidded off the side of the road.

They had already traveled up the long slope, past the boulders, and were in the hills, out of sight of the ranch. He had no idea where the deer had come from or why it had leapt in front of the car. All he knew was that there was a jolting impact, the violent sound of metal buckling and glass breaking, and then a massive, heavily antlered deer was on the hood and the car was swerving sideways off the narrow dirt road. The men to either side of him were thrown against him, against the doors, against the seats in front. The driver had somehow managed to keep his hands on the wheel, even as a giant hoof crashed through the windshield to strike the dashboard, but it did him no good. The car still flew down an embankment, smashing into a rock on the way that for a brief second penetrated the rear passenger-side window, split open the bald guy’s head and splattered blood all over Gary.

Then the car was rolling over.

And then Gary was out.

Eleven

Reyn was awakened by Colin Clive maniacally shouting, “It’s alive! It’s alive!”—the obnoxious ringtone that Stacy had loaded onto his cell phone as a joke. He’d been meaning to change the sound but had not gotten around to doing so, and he swore this time that he would finally go through with it and switch to an ordinary old-school bell. He looked at the screen for the identity of the caller.

Brian.

“Hey,” he said, picking up.

“I can’t reach Gary,” he said. “You know where he is?”

Reyn yawned. “No. Why?”

“He’s been deleted. Facebook, MySpace, everything. Just like Joan. I’d be willing to bet his records aren’t in the school’s database anymore, either.”

Reyn was suddenly wide awake. “What?”

“Yeah. And get this: when I call his cell phone, I get a message that his number is no longer in service.”

“Where are you now?”

“I’m going over there to bang on his door.”

“Wait,” Reyn said. “Have you checked any of our Facebook pages?” He saw in his mind a sudden image of Stacy accessing her account… and then watching as the photos and text were eaten away and replaced by dead white space.

“No,” Brian said. “But hold on a sec.” There was a pause. “I’m still there.” Another pause. “You’re there.” Another pause. “Stacy’s there.”

Reyn’s voice was low and sounded more frightened than he wanted it to sound. “We were all listed as friends on Joan’s page.”

“Our pictures were on there, too,” Brian said.

“I’m calling Stacy,” Reyn told him.

“I’m heading over to Gary’s. I’ll call you when I get there.”

Reyn quickly dialed Stacy’s number, and she answered on the first ring. It was early in the morning, but she was already wide awake and exercising. He told her about Gary, and before he’d even finished she said, “What about us? Have we been deleted?”

“No. Brian just checked.”

“Do you think something’s happened to Gary? Do you think it’s the same people who got Joan?”

“That would be my guess,” Reyn said.

He could hear her audible intake of breath.

“Brian’s going over there to check right now.”

“We need to call the police.”

“We’ll wait and see if Brian can find him.”

“Do you think—”

“No,” he said.

“What if we’re all in danger? What if they weren’t just after Joan but are after all of us and she was just the first?”

“We have to assume we are in danger,” he told her.

“I have my art class this morning—”

“Go,” he told her. “That’s probably the safest place to be right now: in a big crowd with other people. The most important thing is to avoid being alone. Stay out in the open when you’re not in class. I’ll meet you in the usual place at the usual time. And I want you to stay with me tonight. In my room. It’s dangerous to be by yourself.”

They talked briefly about their tentative plans for the day, and Stacy promised to leave her cell phone on at all times, even in class. Reyn told her he’d call back as soon as he had any news.

Moments later, Brian called. He sounded out of breath, as though he’d been running. “Gary’s not answering his door. I pounded the shit out of it so hard that one of his neighbors came out, and I asked the guy if he’d seen Gary, but he said not for a while, though he didn’t know how long.” Brian exhaled deeply. “What if he’s dead in there?”

Reyn hadn’t thought of that. “Find someone to open the door. A manager or whoever.”

“Do we tell the cops?” Brian asked.

“Of course!” Reyn was already getting ready to hang up and dial 911.

“What if they think he’s just skipped out on them? Won’t that make him look more suspicious?”

“They’re dumb, but they’re not that dumb.”

“What about that forty-eight-hour thing? They might not even look for him for another two days.”

“I’m calling that detective, I’m telling him what happened, and if he gives me any shit, I’ll tell him to shut up, get off his ass and do his job. That’s what my taxes are paying him for.”

But it didn’t work out that way. Williams was not on duty, Tucker was, and with evident glee the detective said that Gary, that all of them, had been specifically told to remain nearby where they could easily be reached. The implication was that when—or if—Gary showed up again, he would be in trouble.

“You don’t understand,” Reyn said, exasperated. “He has not only disappeared, but any computerized evidence that he exists has been deleted. Just like Joan.”

“His supposed girlfriend.”

“Well, Gary’s not a supposed anything. You saw him; you met him; you know he exists.”

“Yet he’s trying to convince us that he does not. Why do you suppose that is?”

“He’s not doing this!” Gary said. Talking to Tucker was like arguing with a crazy person. “It’s being done to him!”

“I’m sorry,” the detective said politely. “I don’t see it that way.”

“That’s because you’re an asshole!” Reyn hung up the phone. It rang again, seconds later, and he answered immediately, hoping it was Brian. Or Gary.

It was Tucker.

“Listen,” the detective said threateningly, the anger evident in his voice.

“I don’t have to,” Reyn told him. “You’re still an asshole.” He hung up again. Immediately, he called Brian, who had just found a manager whom he’d convinced to unlock Gary’s door so they could take a look. Brian kept his phone on as the door was opened, so Reyn could hear the whole thing.

“The place looks normal,” Brian said. “Nothing’s disturbed, but Gary’s not here.”

“All right,” the manager announced. “Out.”

“Gary’s not here,” Brian repeated, and the words made Reyn’s blood run cold.

Like Stacy, Reyn and Brian went to their classes. None of them heard from Gary all day, and each time Reyn called his friend’s dorm room, he got the answering machine. Gary’s cell phone was still out of service. He did keep calling the police station, and sometime after noon, Detective Williams came on duty. Reyn asked to speak to him and proceeded to describe to the detective what had happened. He left out the little run-in with Tucker, figuring he’d let the asshole explain it himself if he wanted to do so.

Williams definitely seemed concerned, and he asked a lot of questions, making Reyn go over everything twice. Legally, the detective said, Gary would not be considered missing until the day after tomorrow. But he made it clear that, unofficially, he would be looking into Gary’s disappearance immediately.

Reyn felt better.

Stacy met him in the student union after her last class. He still had a philosophy seminar he had to attend, so she came with him and sat in, and afterward they met Brian in front of the library. “Did you see anything—or anyone—suspicious?” Reyn asked.

Brian shook his head. “I kept an eye out all day. Either no one’s watching me, or, if they are, they’re very, very good.”

The three of them ate a desultory early dinner at an off-campus burger joint, their cell phones on and sitting in the center of the table. Afterward they split up. Brian had a roommate, Dror, and Reyn encouraged him to tell Dror the situation, since proximity might make him a target as well. Besides, four fists were better than two, should someone try to attack. Reyn and Stacy went to her dorm to get her clothes for the next day, then returned to his, where they tried in vain to study before giving it up and going online to browse through whatever information they could find that even remotely applied.

They found nothing, however, and after a quick call to Brian and one last attempt to contact Gary, they turned in early, exhausted and emotionally wrung out.

Reyn fell asleep instantly.

He awoke in the morning, and Stacy was gone. Next to him on the bed was an empty space and a bloodstain the size of a basketball in the center of the indentation where she had been. “Stacy!” he screamed. There was a low answering noise from the bathroom, what sounded like a moan, and he yanked off the sheet and ran over to the open doorway. Stacy was naked and lying in the shower stall. The water was on, the spray aimed at her midsection, where blood flowed from a gaping knife wound, mixing with the water and swirling down the drain. She tried to say something when she saw him but was in such terrible pain that her eyes closed and the only sound that issued from her lips was a short guttural groan. Reyn rushed forward to help her and was grabbed from behind. He turned to see Joan, holding a bloody knife in one hand and, in the other, a mask that looked like the blank, featureless face of the Burning Man.

Then he really awoke, and it was still night, and Stacy was lying beside him, snoring loudly. She was alive; she was safe; she was here. It had all been a dream. He closed his eyes, breathing deeply, and tried to fall asleep.

But he couldn’t.

And he remained awake all night, through the long, dead hours that eventually led to morning.

Twelve

Opening his eyes, Gary found himself sitting on the ground, his back against a smooth sandstone boulder. For several seconds, he didn’t know where he was or what had happened. Then he remembered the crash, and he looked around for his kidnappers and their car. He saw neither, and he wondered if they had somehow gotten the vehicle working again and taken off without him. That made no sense, though, and he tried to stand up, figuring he could get a better view from a higher vantage point. He was too weak, however, and his attempt to push himself up resulted in an embarrassing slide back down. He waited a few moments, gathered his strength, then tried it again. This time he managed to get to his feet, though he kept one hand on the boulder to steady himself.

The moon was out, although there were no city lights out here and the night was much darker than it usually seemed. He remained in place, allowing his eyes to adjust, and gradually became aware of the fact that there was a slight reddish glow coming from an area off to the left. Moving carefully, putting one foot deliberately in front of the other, he slowly made his way across the dirt in that direction. The reddish glow, he soon saw, came from the taillights of the car, which were still on, though there was no sound of an engine. The car lay downhill from where he stood, in a kind of gulch, its front end mangled, the metal accordioned. He had apparently gotten out of the vehicle after it had crashed, then somehow walked up here, though he remembered none of it.

Now Gary stared down at the wreckage, feeling dizzy and disoriented. He didn’t know if the three men were alive in there, but he had no desire to walk over and find out. He hoped they were dead, but he couldn’t count on it, and he knew the safest thing to do would be to get out of there as quickly as possible and put some miles between himself and the car while it was still dark. He turned, started to walk off—

—and promptly threw up.

He dropped to his knees, heaving in a way he hadn’t done since he was ten years old and had the flu. It was probably a balance thing, an inner ear thing, and he hoped against hope that it would go away quickly so he could try to make his escape, but he remained on his knees even after the stomach spasms had passed, afraid to make any sudden movements.

Slowly, Gary stood. He couldn’t see it from here, but he knew that he had to be close to the dirt road that had taken them to the ranch house. He looked down at the wreckage again, closing his eyes after a few seconds to ward off the dizziness, then calculated back to where he figured the road should be. Sure enough, there was a flat area past the rocks that, even with only the minimal illumination of moonlight, he could tell was the trail they’d taken to get from the highway to the ranch.

Gary tried to remember how far it was to pavement, but he’d been blissed out on his way in and things like distance and time had not mattered to him and were now impossible to measure. He was not even positive in which direction the highway was, so he reached the dirt road and decided to head left because that felt right. He chose correctly: after ten minutes of walking, the route still wound through rocky hills rather than sloping down to the bowl-shaped meadow that housed the ranch.

With only moonlight to guide him, Gary trudged through the darkened countryside. He had one hellacious headache, and the dizziness had not entirely gone away, but he walked quickly and made good time, and after what felt like an hour or so, he reached the turnoff.

He stopped to rest, feeling tired and discouraged. The road was not as big as he’d expected. He’d assumed they’d been traveling on a major highway, but the route turned out to be a two-lane blacktop that ran straight into darkness in both directions. There were no cars, no lights, no buildings, nothing visible but that unbending track of asphalt cutting through a barren, inhospitable landscape.

Gary’s throat felt dry, rough with the afterburn of vomiting, but that couldn’t be helped; he had no water with him. And though he wanted to remain here and rest awhile longer, he knew that wasn’t a good idea. He needed to keep moving. Even if the men who’d abducted him had been killed, it was more than possible that they were supposed to have been at a certain place by now or that they should have checked in with somebody. For all he knew, the woman and man from that ranch might come speeding out from the dirt road at any second, gunning for him.

He had to get out of here.

Once again, he turned left, for no other reason than that it had worked for him the last time. He kept to the side of the road and, after twenty minutes or so, discovered that what he had taken for the darkness of night was in fact more hills, and that after the road passed through them, it opened onto a flat plain on which he could see, spread out over a wide distance, individual twinkling lights that had to be homes.

He had no wallet, Gary realized. He didn’t know what had happened to it. It had been in his pants when he’d returned to his room after class, but sometime between then and now it had been taken from him.

He patted his front pockets. His keys, too. They’d taken his keys.

So he had no money or ID.

Even if he did run into anyone, he had no way to prove who he was, no way to prove he wasn’t an escaped convict or some loony from a mental hospital. And if he lurched out of the darkness to knock on the doors of the cabins or farmhouses whose lights he could see from the road, the people living there would probably shoot him, thinking he was a crazed criminal.

But he wasn’t going to walk up to any of those homes. This was their country, and for all he knew every single one of those structures housed Outsiders who’d been told of his escape and were on the lookout for him. Logically, of course, that couldn’t be true. But it might as well be. Because even if only one out of a hundred houses was theirs, he was dead meat if that was the one he approached.

What was that old bumper sticker joke? Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not after you? He was being paranoid. And it might be a side effect of whatever they’d used to drug him. But he’d also been abducted from his UCLA dorm by three Amish-looking guys, one of whom looked like a mutant. He had reason to be wary.

He continued on, wondering if one of those lights might be a gas station or a store, wondering if the road curved up ahead and led there. If he could find a pay phone—

Do they even have pay phones anymore?

—he could dial collect and call… call… call… 911? The FBI? Reyn? His parents? He didn’t know—maybe all of them.

By the time the sun was starting to rise, his legs were aching, and Gary sat down on a rock to rest. If a car or truck came up the road, he decided, he would try to flag it down and catch a ride. But no vehicles appeared, and after a half hour or so, he decided to keep going. He could tell that the dawning day was going to be a hot one, and he needed to find some water. His parched throat felt more sandpapery than ever, and he kept swallowing saliva constantly, knowing that if he didn’t, he would cough and gag and probably throw up again.

In the light of morning, he could see the road ahead, and while he’d made his way through most of the plain and had gone nowhere near any of the scattered shacks and cabins whose lights he’d spotted in the darkness, he saw now that there was something shiny on the road ahead, where it started to slope up the side of a low plateau. Maybe it was a car. Maybe it was light reflecting off the windows of a building. Whatever it was, it was man-made, not natural, and he walked forward with renewed hope, able to ignore the throbbing muscles in his legs, the rumbling in his stomach, the sandpaper in his throat.

A plane flew by, high overhead, the first sign of anything human since he’d left the crash site.

As he drew closer, the shine became brighter until it was a silver glare he could not bear to look at. Then something changed—the angle of the road or the angle of the sun—and though he was still a mile or two away, he could see that the object was indeed a building of some sort, its metal or glass reflecting back the rays of the rising sun.

He was drenched with sweat, but he used the bottom of his shirt to wipe his face and kept going.

The building had once been a gas station, he saw as he approached, but now there was only the skeleton of a Shell sign atop the pole next to the road, and what had been the pump island consisted of bent metal braces affixed to a concrete slab. The office and garage were still being used and were open, however, and though there was no sign on the structure, a crudely painted stencil on the side of a tow truck parked parallel to the road read: TOW-TO-TOW TOWING. It made Gary think of that garage in the desert outside of Lancaster where Reyn’s water pump had been replaced—

What if he’s crazy?

—and while he felt more than a little nervous, he walked up to the open garage door and called out, “Anybody here?”

There was movement in the darkness, and a beefy, bearded man emerged, scowling. “Yeah? What d’you want?”

Under ordinary circumstances, Gary would have left then and there, just turned away and continued down the road. But he was hungry, thirsty and in pain, and he asked, “Can I use your phone?”

“Ain’t got one,” the man said, staring flatly at him.

How is that possible? Gary wanted to say. You have a towing business. How do people contact you when they break down if you don’t have a phone?

Something was wrong here, and all of a sudden Gary wanted nothing more than to get away from this spot as quickly as possible. “Okay!” he said, waving. “Thanks!” He turned back toward the road.

“Wait a minute,” the man said, and it was as much order as request. “Is your car out there? Did you break down?”

They were perfectly ordinary questions, totally appropriate under the circumstances, but the big man’s tone and demeanor made them seem threatening, as though he was trying to ferret out information. Why did he want to know? Gary wondered. Was the man trying to determine if anyone else was with him or knew he was out here?

What if he’s crazy?

He pretended as though he hadn’t heard. “Thanks!” he yelled again, turning away, and started walking. He waited for another shouted question or for the sound of running footsteps behind him, but there was nothing. For a brief moment, he thought that he’d misread the situation, that the drugs still in his body had skewed his perceptions and made him read into a perfectly innocent exchange a threat that wasn’t there. But when he turned and looked back, he saw the bearded man still standing in place, scowling, and he forced himself to give another fake, hearty wave and continue on. His heart was pounding.

Moments later, the rough sound of a powerful engine cut through the still air, and Gary knew that the mechanic had started his tow truck. He kept walking, a little faster now, but he was already thinking about how he could run off the road and strike out across the chaparral if necessary. For there was no way he could outrun a truck. He probably couldn’t even outrun the mechanic, not in the shape he was in, and he had just decided to leave the road early when he heard the engine grow loud and felt more than saw the tow truck pull next to him.

“Need a lift?” the man asked, and the belligerence was still in his voice, more obvious now, if anything.

Gary shook his head, kept walking.

“Where’s your car?”

Instead of answering, he stepped off the shoulder of the road and into the brush.

“Hey! I’m talking to you!”

Gary increased his speed, striding purposefully between rocks and bushes, heading away from the tow truck at an angle. His heart lurched as he heard the truck’s door open and shut. A bird flew up from somewhere on his right, startling him.

“Hey!” the driver shouted.

Even as he walked, Gary examined the ground ahead of him for something that could be used as a weapon: a stick, a rock, a broken bottle, anything. It wouldn’t have surprised him if the man had a gun, and he kept expecting to hear the whipcrack sound of a shot seconds before he felt a bullet slam through his back, but nothing came. He hazarded a quick glance behind him.

The man was coming.

He didn’t have a gun, but he was holding a lug wrench, and he looked angry. He moved with the inflexible decisiveness of the casually violent, and the lug wrench in his hand was held up and outward, like a weapon. “I see you, faggot!” he shouted. “I see you!”

Gary started running. The ground here was sandier than it had been closer to the pavement, and it was hard to move quickly. The countryside was more desertic than he’d realized, and he thought that he was probably out of California. In Nevada, maybe. Or Arizona or New Mexico.

He looked to his left. He hadn’t come that far from the garage, and he abruptly changed direction and started heading toward the side of that run-down building. There was no way he’d be able to discover something in the sand that could effectively defend against a lug wrench. He was far more likely to find a tool or weapon he could use in the garage.

He glanced back, praying that the mechanic was still following him, because if the man figured out where he was going, it would be much faster to get back in the truck and then drive back and wait for him to arrive. Gary’s only hope was that the mechanic continued to come after him on foot.

He was coming after him.

And he was gaining.

Gary pushed himself, trying to ignore the pain in his right leg that had graduated from throbbing to stabbing in the last few seconds. His left leg hurt, too, but it was tolerable. With his right leg, though, he was crying out each time it hit the ground, an involuntary sound that seemed to make him move a little faster. It would have given away his position had he been trying to hide, but the mechanic had been focused on him from the second he left the road and could see exactly where he was at all times.

“Stop right there!” the man ordered. “Don’t even think you can get away!”

The garage was close now. He was almost there. But the man behind him was close, too. Gary could hear the grunts of exertion as the mechanic plodded through the sand. The small lead he’d had was gone, and while desperation had kept him competitive, in a moment or two he would be caught, and he expected to feel the blow of the lug wrench against his head before he even made it into the garage to find a weapon of his own. Looking ahead of him on the ground, he saw between himself and the wall of the garage an area awash with black rocks of various sizes. Most of them were embedded in the ground, but a few were loose, and he reached down and grabbed one, turning to heave it at the mechanic.

Under the best of circumstances, Gary had no arm. He expected the rock to go wild, but amazingly it struck the hand holding the lug wrench, and the mechanic cried out, dropping the tool.

Gary wasted no time. He sped ahead, hobbled around the corner of the building, and looked frantically around the open garage for something he could use. His eyes alighted on what appeared to be a sledgehammer hanging from a spot on the wall to his right. He hurried over and grabbed it, turning around just as the bearded man stepped into the garage.

Gary’s heart was thumping crazily. He had never been so scared in his life, and the calmness engendered by the drug he’d been given was long gone. He held up the sledgehammer with both hands, but it was so heavy that it was already wobbling in his grip. There was no way he’d be able to keep this up for any length of time. If he couldn’t bluff his way out of the situation, his only chance was to land a single clear hit. If he could connect, he could do damage. Otherwise, he was dead meat.

He wondered if the mechanic had done this before, if there were bodies buried in the sand nearby.

Judging by the way the man had come after him with absolutely no provocation, Gary could only assume that he was not the mechanic’s first victim.

Gary rested the handle of the sledgehammer on his shoulder, trying not to wince from the pain caused by the sudden pressure, hoping his adversary couldn’t tell that he was doing so because he had to, because he did not have the strength to continue holding the tool aloft. “Let me go,” he said. “Give me the keys to your truck and let me get out of here.”

The big man grinned, hefted his lug wrench. “Faggot,” he said.

What was all this “faggot” stuff? Gary wondered. It seemed to be the only epithet the mechanic knew.

Gary pushed it up a notch. “I’ll smash your fucking legs,” he said. “Then I’ll crush your ugly fucking head.”

That seemed to get to the mechanic. His grin disappeared, and his bushy eyebrows beetled into a frown. He moved a step closer, swinging his weapon. “Try it.”

“Give me the keys,” Gary demanded. He suddenly wondered if the man had the keys. He could not remember the engine of the tow truck shutting off, and he was instantly sure that the keys were in the truck, which was idling several yards down the road.

If he could just get over there…

The mechanic rushed him.

It happened so fact that the sequence of events came to him in a series of images and impressions. The bearded man’s face, grimacing and screaming. The lug wrench, swishing back and forth, cutting the air before it. The heaviness of the sledgehammer as he pulled it from his shoulder and swung it in front of him. The drag from the weight of the sledgehammer painfully tensing the muscles in his arms. The screaming face. The swishing lug wrench.

And then the jolt of impact as his sledgehammer hit the mechanic midbody, instantly dropping him.

The screaming stopped, the lug wrench flew across the garage and hit something metal with an earsplitting clang, and the big man went down, blood spewing as he lurched sideways and slammed into a workbench covered with greasy car parts. Gary didn’t wait to see how badly the mechanic was hurt. He left the sledgehammer and took off, running for the road as fast as his exhausted, injured legs would carry him. By the time he was out of the garage, he could hear the sound of the tow truck’s engine, a low rumble in the stillness of the desert, and he made his way toward it, reaching the vehicle in a matter of minutes.

He’d seen enough movies to know that he should have made sure the mechanic was permanently incapacitated, but fear and panic had made him run, and he turned back, fully expecting to see the man coming after him.

But no one was there and, grateful, Gary climbed into the cab. He prayed that there was enough gas to get him someplace where he could call for help and saw with relief that, according to the gauge, the tank was nearly full. He had never driven a tow truck before, but there was nothing that unfamiliar on the dashboard, and he easily got into gear and started down the road.

He passed a rock shop several miles up ahead, and later a feed store, but he did not stop or even slow down until he reached the outskirts of a real town some forty-five minutes later.

Thirteen

Gary called while Reyn was in his Saturday screenwriting class.

Reyn’s phone was set on vibrate, and he jumped in his seat, startled, as the silent ringer went off. Quickly, he stood and walked out of class, pulling the phone from his pocket as he strode into the corridor. He’d told both Stacy and Brian not to call unless it was an emergency, and as soon as the classroom door closed behind him, he pressed the TALK button and held the phone to his ear with a trembling hand, assuming the worst. “Hello?”

It was a complete and utter shock to hear Gary’s voice. His friend sounded exhausted, and as he listened to the incredible story he had to tell, Reyn understood why. Gary was calling from a sheriff’s office in Larraine, New Mexico. He’d driven there in a stolen tow truck after he’d gotten into a car crash, escaped from the men who’d drugged and captured him, walked for hours through the desert and fought off a psychotic mechanic. It was so overwhelming and unbelievable that Reyn made him repeat it again, slowly and with more details. Gary didn’t want to, but he did, and when he was finished, Reyn said, “Holy shit.”

“The guys who jumped me, the ones who were hiding in my room, they were dressed in these simple, primitive kind of clothes that they’d made themselves, like old-time farmer’s clothes. They sort of looked Amish. So if you see anyone like that around campus, get away from them, call the police.”

“Do you know who they are?” Reyn asked.

“The Outsiders, I guess. But they didn’t talk to me, and when they talked to each other it was in this weird language. Some kind of code, I think. The thing is, they were waiting for me in my room, like I said, but the door hadn’t been jimmied. They’d either picked the lock or they had a key or they found some other way in without force. And they did it in the middle of the day in a crowded dorm with tons of people around. So be careful. Be very careful.”

“There’s news on this end, too,” Reyn said.

“About Joan?”Gary asked quickly.

“No. Nothing on that at all. It’s about you. You’ve been deleted.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Just like with Joan. Someone’s erased your Facebook and MySpace pages. And I have a sneaking suspicion that you’re not enrolled in school anymore.”

“Are you serious?”

“Never more.”

“This is crazy!”

“Yeah.”

Gary sounded anxious. “Listen. You’ve got to go to Admissions and check on this for me. I could lose my grant money. And my scholarships.”

“I don’t think they’ll let me—”

“It’s going to be a day or two before I can get back. By that time, I could be totally disqualified. Check online if you can. My student ID number is 1170. Pretend to be me. I’ll call you back tonight.”

“What if I can’t?”

“We’ll figure something out.”

“Why do you think—” Reyn began.

There was noise in the background, people talking. “I have to go. My time’s up. I’ll talk to you tonight.”

Gary hung up without saying good-bye, and Reyn stood there, cell phone in hand, staring at the closed door of his screenwriting class, not wanting to go back in, thinking how frivolous and trivial it was to sit around discussing the importance of the three-act structure when his friend had been kidnapped and almost killed.

He headed down the corridor toward the outside of the building, speed-dialing Stacy as he walked. She answered on the second ring, just as he was striding through the doorway. “Gary just called me,” he told her. “He’s in New Mexico.”

“Oh my God! Is he all right?”

Walking toward Stacy’s dorm, Reyn started to describe what had happened. Almost immediately she said, “Meet me out in front of—”

“I’m already here,” he said.

She emerged from the building’s front entrance moments later, hurrying in front of a group of young women who were walking out together. She saw him immediately and ran over. “Tell me everything,” she ordered.

He knew only the broad outlines, so he couldn’t go into much detail, but he repeated what Gary had told him. When he came to Gary’s warning about men dressed in primitive farmer’s clothes, Stacy’s face turned pale. “I think I saw one of those guys.”

Reyn’s heart was pounding. “When?”

“A few days ago. He was hanging around the bookstore. I remember noticing him because of the weird clothes. He was, like, a middle-aged guy. I thought he was an old hippie or something.” She shivered. “But I got a weird vibe off him.”

“Was he watching you? Or… ?”

“Probably. I mean, I didn’t think so at the time, but it makes sense when you think about it now.” She threw her arms around Reyn, hugged him tight. “Maybe I’m next.”

“We’ll make sure you’re not.”

“Maybe he was one of the guys who got Gary. I saw him the day before Gary was—No! I saw him that same day!”

Reyn had to be blunt. “It doesn’t matter. Joan’s gone. Kara’s gone. Teri Lim’s dead. Gary was captured. They’re grabbing everyone. They’re not leaving any witnesses.”

“Witnesses to what?”

“I don’t know.”

She held him tighter. “What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know,” he said again.

Brian was with them, holding a steak knife, as they carefully opened the door to Reyn’s room. No one jumped out, and Reyn snaked his hand around the doorframe and flipped the light switch. The room was instantly illuminated. They saw right away that no attackers lay in wait, but it wasn’t until Reyn had quickly checked the bathroom that they finally relaxed.

Brian dropped the arm with the steak knife and sighed with audible relief.

“We need to get better weapons,” Stacy noted wryly, looking at him.

“I did the best I could on such short notice.”

Reyn was already at his laptop. “Let’s see what we can find out about that town he’s in. Larraine… Anybody ever heard of it or know how to spell it?” None of them did, so he tried a couple of spellings before he got a match. There wasn’t much information available on the town, but he was able to bring up a satellite photo of it, and with the tap of a finger the photo shifted fifty miles east, and he zoomed in on a gas station that must have been the one where Gary had almost been killed.

There were a lot of ranches and cabins scattered about the surrounding countryside, but he didn’t know enough to home in on the one where Gary had been held. A thought occurred to him while he was scanning the image, however, and he got out of the site and started accessing crime logs for Larraine and for the county of De Baca, in which the town was located.

Brian saw what he was doing. “I’ll take over here,” he said, pushing Reyn aside. “I type faster, anyway. You call that detective. Tell him what’s going on.”

“Williams?”

“Yeah.”

Reyn did, and though the detective didn’t have much of a response beyond, “Thank you for sharing that information,” Reyn had the sense that Williams was genuinely startled by Gary’s story. He asked Reyn to have Gary come into the station once he got back.

Reyn hung up the phone and sat on the edge of his bed next to Stacy, watching Brian type furiously on the computer. He wasn’t sure how it had happened, but they’d fallen through the cracks to such an extent that, despite the fact that they were in the very middle of a series of druggings and kidnappings and even deaths, law enforcement was completely peripheral to them. The police were doing very little to help, and although for a brief fraction of a second the four of them appeared to have been suspects in Kara’s disappearance, they were not really being persecuted. Whatever was happening was occurring in a netherworld in which they were completely on their own, the sort of universe usually encountered only in movies, and he wondered for the first time in his life if he should buy a gun for protection.

“Found something,” Brian said excitedly, looking up from the screen.

Both Reyn and Stacy came over to look.

On the monitor was a month-old crime column from the weekly local newspaper, the Larraine Roadrunner. Brian was pointing to an entry in the center of the screen. On August 6, a woman, Paulette Gaffney, had registered a complaint against her ex-husband, Bill Watt. Watt, she claimed, had been stalking her since their divorce, and he had not only broken into her house but had threatened her with physical violence. She said it was his fault that they were now both “outsiders.”

Outsiders.

The word jumped out at them.

Reyn’s neck felt as though it had been tickled by the tip of an icicle.

Watt had been picked up but not arrested, and released on his own recognizance.

“That guy has the same last name as the sheriff,” Brian said, pointing to a boxed list of local government officials on the left side of the page.

“Could be a coincidence.”

“In a town of three thousand? I don’t think so.”

Reyn didn’t, either, and he said aloud, “If the sheriff and his brother are both Outsiders…”

Gary’s circumstances suddenly seemed much more ominous, and he cursed himself for not getting a phone number from his friend. “Quick,” he told Brian. “Can you get me a phone number for the Larraine sheriff’s office?”

Brian pulled up another page and began typing rapidly. “It’s the De Baca Sheriff’s Office in Larraine,” he said. “The number’s (575) 555-3109.”

Reyn picked up the phone on his desk and dialed the number. A woman answered. “Sheriff’s office, Maybelle speaking.”

He tried to keep his voice calm. “I’d like to speak to Gary Russell. He called me from your office about forty-five minutes ago. I think he’s still there.”

“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “Mr. Russell is with the sheriff. May I take a message?”

“I really need to talk to him now.”

“I’m sorry. He and the sheriff went out. I don’t expect them back for some time. Is there a number at which I can reach you?”

He and the sheriff went out.

A big ball of dread sank to the pit of Reyn’s stomach. “No,” he said. “That’s okay. I’ll call back later.”

Fourteen

Gary wanted nothing more than to go to bed. He was willing to sleep on a chair, on the floor, in a cell, pretty much anywhere. At this point he didn’t care. But he forced himself to remain awake and answer the seemingly never-ending series of questions put to him by Sheriff Watt. He had napped for a while on a cot in a back room—the sheriff’s office in Larraine was a lot more casual than the police station in Los Angeles—while Watt and a couple of deputies went back out to Tow-to-Tow Towing. They’d found the mechanic just where Gary had left him, on the concrete floor of the garage, and although he was seriously injured, he was still alive.

They also must have found something else in their search of the building because they did not for a second doubt Gary’s story, and when he asked if he should have a lawyer present during questioning and whether he’d have to stand trial for attacking the mechanic, the sheriff had shaken his head. “No, it’s pretty clear what went on out there. You did what you had to do. I don’t think anyone’s going to question that.”

But they did keep asking questions, and from the tenor of some of them, Gary wondered if they’d found bodies at the garage. Or some other sort of gruesome evidence indicating that the mechanic had done this before.

It was not his run-in with the psycho tow-truck driver that Gary wanted to talk about, however. It was his abduction.

And Joan’s.

He’d told the story several times, stressing the urgency of finding and capturing the group that had drugged and kidnapped Joan and done exactly the same thing to him. The three who had been in the crash with him were probably dead, but if they weren’t, they might be able to explain a lot. At the very least, the sheriff and his deputies could put pressure on their accomplices: the woman and man at the ranch.

Watt assigned a deputy to take a formal report, though to Gary’s eyes the sheriff seemed much more concerned with the mechanic and the events at the garage than anything that had happened prior to that. He could sort of understand the reasoning—the mechanic’s attack on him had occurred within the sheriff’s jurisdiction and quite possibly had not been an isolated incident—but the fact remained that there were three bodies in a wrecked car, either dead or injured, and they’d been involved in a crime just as serious. Which made the sheriff’s lack of interest seem not just strange but inexplicable.

As the deputy typed into his computer, Gary told the story of his abduction and escape yet again.

“Do you remember anything about the car?” the deputy asked. “Make and model? Color? Did you get a license number?”

Gary shook his head, frustrated. “Like I said, they drugged me. I saw the car when I came to, after the accident, but it was dark and far away and all smashed up, and I couldn’t tell what it looked like. Wait,” he said. “I do remember something. The plates were white.” He squinted, trying to see them in his mind. “I think they were… Texas plates.”

“Do you recall any letters or numbers? Any at all?”

“No. But if you’ll just go out there, you can see for yourself.” The emphasis seemed lost on the deputy.

“And the men, you say, were dressed strangely.”

“Yes. I told you. They looked like pioneers or something. They were wearing, like, Little House on the Prairie clothes.”

The deputy looked at the sheriff, who had just come back into the room. Gary thought for a brief second that the two of them had heard something like this before, that his description of the men was somehow familiar to them, but he dismissed that idea when the sheriff said, “Let’s go out and take a look at this, Herb. See what’s what.”

Four men took two vehicles. Gary fell asleep in the back of the sheriff’s car but was awakened as they approached the garage. Yellow caution tape was strung around the building itself and stretched over the entrance next to the road in order to keep cars from driving in. “Where do we go from here?” Watt asked.

“Keep heading straight,” Gary told him.

The car accelerated. “How far?”

“I don’t know exactly. I was walking.”

They sped over the flat land, and Gary was stunned at how far he’d come. Granted, it had taken him most of the night and part of the morning to get from the crash site to the garage, but he was still amazed that it took them as long as it did to get across the plain in the car. Even the hills beyond the plain went farther back than he expected.

“Are we getting close?” the sheriff asked.

“Not yet,” Gary responded.

“Damn. You did walk a long way.”

The road flattened out on higher ground, the landscape here less desertlike, and Gary was so surprised when the turnoff to the dirt road came up that by the time he shouted, “There it is!” they were past it.

The sheriff stopped, turned around, then pulled his cruiser onto the narrow trail that led into the chaparral. Behind them, the deputy’s car did the same.

It had been night when he’d left the crash site, but he was pretty sure he knew where it was, and as they reached the boulder-strewn hills, Gary told the sheriff to slow down. A narrow, winding section of road above a wide and rocky gulch looked familiar, and his careful scrutiny was rewarded when he spotted strewn dirt, scraped rock and crushed bushes. “This is where we went off the road,” he said.

The sheriff parked the vehicle, and they all got out. Gary led the way to the edge, passing the boulder against which he’d found himself resting. He looked down the slope. The deer was there but not the car. And definitely not the bodies.

He looked around, confused. How could it have been moved? And so quickly. The car had been totaled. And as far as he could tell, the only towing service within a fifty-mile radius was Tow-to-Tow.

It didn’t make any sense.

“The car was right there,” he said, pointing. “We were heading back toward the highway and we hit the deer and went off.”

“Well, you say you were drugged.”

“I was, but my head was clear after the accident. Everything had worn off. It was hours later. And I looked over and saw the car. Right there.”

The deputy, Herb, took off his hat and ran a hand through his sweaty hair. “Your head was clear? You told me you were disoriented, that you threw up.”

Yes!

“I did. There,” Gary said, walking over. He pointed to a dried glop of vomit on the dirt, standing proudly next to it.

The deer was there, and the vomit, but apparently that was not enough to corroborate his story, particularly when a wrecked car carrying the bodies of three kidnappers had mysteriously disappeared without a trace.

“We-e-l-l-l,” the sheriff said, drawing out the word as he looked around at the flattened brush and disturbed ground. “It does look like something came through here.”

But Gary knew his credibility had taken a big hit, and though he wanted to explain everything all over again to make sure they understood exactly what had happened, he figured it was smart not to push it. They would just go on to the ranch where he’d been held. Maybe the wrecked car had miraculously been moved, but the ranch would still be there.

It was. And it was just as he’d described it. That had to count for something. Still, he could tell already that Watt and his deputies were thinking that his ordeal had made him disoriented and had caused him to imagine things that weren’t there and had not happened.

The woman with the limp answered the sheriff’s knock with a puzzled expression and a “Yes? May I help you?”

“I’m back,” Gary said fiercely. “And you’re going to pay for what you did!”

Frowning, the woman looked to the sheriff. “What’s going on? I don’t understand. Who is this man?”

“You know damn well who I am,” Gary told her. He turned to the sheriff. “She helped them chain me up in her back room there. She made us all food. Meat and potatoes. They all talked in some kind of code so I wouldn’t know what they were saying.”

“Ma’am,” the sheriff said politely, “according to Mr. Russell here, he was drugged against his will and abducted from his college in California by three men. He alleges that after driving for approximately twelve hours, they arrived here at your property, where he was physically restrained for approximately eight hours, before being once again driven away to an unspecified location. Their vehicle had an accident en route, at which time Mr. Russell claims he escaped.”

“I don’t know what happened to him,” the woman said, “but he was never here before.”

“You people kidnapped my girlfriend, too! Joan Daniels! You kidnapped her and you’re holding her hostage!”

The woman stood stoically.

He realized he sounded crazy, but there was nothing he could say that would make it seem even slightly more believable, and that only made him shout all the louder. He knew, intellectually, that he should be doing exactly the opposite, talking slowly and rationally, explaining things in a logical manner, but exhaustion and frustration made him even more keyed up. He pointed a finger at her, stared directly into her eyes. “You held the jar when I had to take a piss! You held my cock!”

She did not even flinch. She turned toward the sheriff. “I have never seen this person before in my life.”

“She’s lying! Search her house. The front room there has no rugs or couches, just a plywood floor and chairs and tables made out of branches. There’re no lights, only kerosene lamps. And a prayer cabinet, filled with little scrolls. The next room has chains on the floor, shackles. That’s where they kept me!”

“I’m afraid we don’t have a warrant to search the premises,” the sheriff told him. “And I don’t think we have probable cause to obtain a warrant.”

“Just walk around the side of the house! Right there! Peek through the window, and you’ll see the chains they tied me up with!” He started to move in that direction, but the sheriff grabbed his arm and held him tightly.

“Are you sure Mr. Russell was never here?” Watt asked the woman.

She shook her head. “Never.”

“We’re sorry to have bothered you, ma’am.” He turned to his men. “All right. Let’s head back.”

Gary wanted to object, wanted to pull out of the sheriff’s grip, run to the window of the room where he’d been held and yell, “See?” But he knew that was not possible and that any attempt he made would cause problems for him, not for her, and would further erode his credibility. So he said nothing but allowed himself to be led back to the car. Just before he got in, he turned around to look at the woman in the doorway. Neither the sheriff nor any of his deputies were facing that direction, and Gary expected her to give him a small smile, an acknowledgment that she had won and he had lost, but she did not. She stared at him blankly, impassively, then turned away.

Despite his lack of money and identification, despite the wild-goose chase on which he’d led the sheriff and his deputies, the sheriff’s office put him up for the night in a dusty one-story motel with no air-conditioning and an intermittently working ceiling fan—although it was made very clear that this was for one night only.

On top of his worries about Joan and everything else that had happened, he now had to find a way to get out of this town and back to California.

He opened the bag of fast food he’d been given and took out a greasy, soggy hamburger, some cold fries and a watery Coke. Turning on the room’s television to alleviate the silence, he watched part of a local newscast from a city in New Mexico whose name he had never heard before. The studio backdrop behind the desk was flat and fake, and the newscasters themselves were unprofessional and sad looking. The newscast depressed him, and he flipped the channels on the TV. Only four stations came in, and he settled on one that was showing an old rerun of Friends. He just wanted some noise to distract himself from the dreary silence of his room.

He’d considered staying, finding some way to rent a car and returning to the ranch on his own, but he was in hostile territory and time was wasting. The smartest thing he could do was get back to the real world.

He knew where the ranch was.

He could always come back.

Besides, it was clear to him that it was just a way station, a stopover. Joan was not there, and it was even possible that the woman, the man and whoever else lived at the ranch knew nothing of her whereabouts. The important thing was finding Joan. The aiders and abettors could be dealt with later.

Not for the first time, Gary wondered why he had been taken. He could come up with no plausible scenario, and the only thing that made any sense was that the Outsiders were going to use him as leverage against Joan, were going to threaten to torture or kill him unless she did what they wanted her to do or revealed what they wanted her to reveal.

Would they continue coming after him?

He thought of Kara and Teri Lim. Of course they would.

But then, why had they only taken Joan? Why hadn’t they captured or killed the rest of them at Burning Man? Had something changed in the interim?

None of it made any sense.

He called his parents after he finished eating. Gary had never before felt so alone, and more than anything else, he longed to talk to his dad.

He wanted to tell him everything.

He wanted to tell him nothing.

Confiding in his parents would make him feel better and would let him know that someone was behind him, but the entire situation was so outrageous that he wasn’t sure his parents would believe it. And if they did believe it, they would make him get his ass back to Ohio faster than he could say, “Call me Ishmael.”

He didn’t want that.

So he ended up telling his parents that he’d been the victim of identity theft. Some hacker, he said, had deleted seemingly every trace of him from every computer database in the country. “I’m not even sure my birth certificate is still on file,” he said.

“We have to report this,” his dad declared. “We have to contact the credit card companies, the DMV, the credit reporting agencies… .”

“What I’m worried most about right now is my grant and scholarship money. According to UCLA’s computers, I’m not even enrolled in school. And if I’m not enrolled…”

“I’ll take care of that,” his father said. “Don’t worry about it.”

Gary felt as though a smothering blanket had just been pulled from his face. He wasn’t a child anymore, and his dad wasn’t the omniscient savior he’d thought when he was a little boy, but it gave him a feeling of security and reassurance to know that his father would call the necessary authorities, individuals and institutions required to get his credit situation and his school funding straightened out. He doubted that Reyn had been able to make any headway on that issue, but he knew his dad would be able to get things done.

At that point, he almost told his father all. But then his mother came on the other line, having picked up enough of the conversation to have some idea of what was happening. “You need to come home. Now.” There was authority in her voice but also fear, and he knew that if he said the wrong thing, that fear would tip over into panic.

“I’m okay, Mom.”

“Okay? Okay? Your identity’s been stolen! They’re probably charging automobiles on your credit!”

“My limit’s nowhere near that high.”

“That’s not the point! They could be ruining your credit rating forever or opening up new accounts or… or God knows what kind of things they can do!”

“We’re taking care of that,” his dad said calmly.

“I think he should come home. It was a mistake to let him go out there. His girlfriend took off God knows where; his identity’s been stolen. For all we know, she did it.”

“Mom!”

“I’m just saying. You’re two thousand miles away. Something could happen to you, and we’d never know. It’s dangerous.”

You have no idea, he thought.

“We have perfectly good colleges here in Ohio,” she announced.

“I like California, Mom. And UCLA is one of the top schools in the country.”

She appealed to his father. “Robert? I need some support here.”

“He’s fine. What happened is a fluke. We’ll make a few calls, get everything straightened out, and things’ll be back to normal. The important thing is that you keep up with your schoolwork, keep going to class.”

His parents had no idea he was sitting in a dingy motel in a small town in the New Mexican desert, and he quickly wrapped things up and said good-bye, hanging up before he was tempted to tell them all. He promised to call them the following night, but asked them not to try to call him because he had to work tomorrow.

Friends had long since ended, and now a young Bob Saget was hosting a decades-old episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos. The faded picture and the sight of the 1980s clothes and hairstyles made him feel lonely and disheartened, and he changed the channel to Extra , which, although equally dispiriting in content, was at least current.

He sipped the last tepid dregs of his watery Coke and called Reyn. As expected, his friend had not been able to do anything but confirm that Gary was no longer enrolled at UCLA. The attempts he’d made to find out why had all been stymied.

“Don’t worry,” Gary told him. “I have my dad looking into it. And I’ll straighten things out once I get back. I have all my paperwork and everything else, and once I explain what happened, there should be no problem.”

“When are you coming back?” Reyn asked.

“That’s one of the things I’m calling you about.”

There was no bus station in town, but the sheriff had pointed out to him a bench where the Greyhound bus from Clovis to Bernardo stopped each afternoon around one o’clock to pick up any passengers. Gary told this to Reyn, who promised to go online, arrange with Greyhound for a ticket, somehow get him to Albuquerque and then book him on a flight back to Los Angeles.

“I thought your card was maxed out with the water pump.”

“Stacy,” he said.

“No. I can’t—”

“Don’t sweat it. You’ll pay her back, right? Besides, you need to get your ass back here ASAP.”

That was true, but Gary sensed an additional urgency in his friend’s voice. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

“You’re right.”

He waited, but nothing more was forthcoming. “Well?” he prompted.

“The phones might be bugged. I’d rather tell you in person.”

“Then call from your cell. Or go somewhere else—”

“Not here. There.”

“The phones here?” Gary said incredulously, looking around at his drab surroundings.

“Yes.”

The confidence with which the word was spoken made Gary suddenly feel very vulnerable. He’d thought, after everything he’d gone through, that it would be hard to rattle him, but he suddenly realized how exposed and on edge his emotions really were. Already, his mind was racing, trying to figure out who, what, where, when and why. And how had Reyn found out about it?

They said good-bye, awkwardly, stiltedly, and Reyn took down his number and said he would call in the morning with all of the scheduling details for the return trip.

Gary hung up the phone and moved around the motel room self-consciously, wondering if he was being monitored. Reyn had hinted at no such thing, had only been wary of the phone, but Gary’s mind had expanded the paranoia so much that, despite the fact that he was filthy and sweaty and hadn’t bathed for two days, he was afraid to take a shower. Someone might be watching. Hell, naked photos of himself could appear on the Internet and haunt him for the rest of his life.

He used the bathroom only because he absolutely had to.

He went to sleep just after six and dreamed that he was back at UCLA. It was a Monday morning, and he was sitting in his European history classs—where Dr. Bergman was standing behind the lectern wearing brown burlap clothes and moccasins. “To become an Outsider,” he was saying, “one must—”

Gary jumped up from his seat and ran across campus to Reyn’s room.

Where Reyn and Stacy, wearing peasant garb, were rolling up tiny little scrolls. “You’re just in time to help us,” Stacy said cheerfully.

Gary took off, running through the streets of Los Angeles to the airport, noticing as he drew closer that more and more people on the streets were wearing drab, primitive, homemade clothing. He managed to avoid these people, all of whom seemed desperate to talk to him, dashed into the airport terminal, where he was the only person in sight, and was miraculously allowed to buy a ticket for a dollar and immediately board the plane. Seconds after strapping himself in, they landed in Ohio. His parents were waiting for him in the terminal—and they were wearing simple, hand-sewn clothes. “There’s something we need to tell you, son…” his father said.

Gary turned to run away, not wanting to hear it.

And the burly, bearded mechanic was standing there with a bloody lug wrench, grinning.

In the morning, he awoke feeling stressed and still tired. His neck was stiff, and with every movement he was conscious of the fact that he could be under surveillance.

Reyn called while he was having a breakfast of tap water to confirm that bus reservations were in place.

“What about the plane?” Gary asked.

“Well… that turned out to be a problem. Your wallet was stolen, so you don’t have any ID. I could’ve bought a ticket, but they wouldn’t’ve let you on without at least two forms of ID. Same thing for the train. So you’re transferring at Bernardo, transferring again at Albuquerque, but basically, you’re on a bus for nineteen hours. I’ll be meeting you at the downtown bus station in Los Angeles about this time tomorrow.”

“I don’t mean to be ungrateful,” Gary said. “And thanks for everything you’ve done. Really. This is above and beyond. You and Stacy. But the truth is, I’m starving, and I have no money to buy food. I could pass out from hunger somewhere in Arizona.”

Reyn laughed. “Your tickets include meals at the bus stations in Albuquerque and Flagstaff. I know that first leg of the trip’s going to be long, but when you get to Albuquerque, stuff yourself, eat as much as you want. It’s all taken care of.”

Gary used the pen he had gotten from the sheriff’s office to write down the details of the bus transfers, including the numbers and times, on the back of the grease-stained bag that had held his dinner.

He was supposed to check in with the sheriff, and he did so after nine, explaining that he was leaving that afternoon on the bus and heading back to California. The sheriff said that they had his phone number and address on file, and that if anything came up or they needed any additional information, they would contact him. The sheriff, his deputies and his secretary seemed no different than they had yesterday, but Gary wasn’t about to trust anyone in this town. He left as quickly as he could.

The morning crept by. He returned to his motel room to watch TV, but he had to be out of the room by eleven, and the bus didn’t arrive until twelve forty-five. He would’ve liked to eat lunch—he’d had no breakfast other than water, and it was four hours to Albuquerque—but he had no money and didn’t feel comfortable going back to the sheriff’s office and asking if he could borrow some. So he kept moving, walking past the storefronts of Larraine’s small downtown, looking suspiciously at the people who drove or walked by. He sat for a while on a bench in a small park, walked through the stacks of books in the library, but he was at the bus stop by twelve thirty. It was early, but he couldn’t afford to miss the bus, and when it arrived five minutes ahead of schedule, at twelve forty, he was glad that he’d decided to wait there.

As Reyn had told him, all he had to do was tell the driver his name. He was given a ticket in a passbook envelope, and he walked to the rear section of the bus and found a seat next to no one. The seat was comfortable and soft, the back high and supportive, and he settled into it, feeling grateful. Moments later, the driver announced that they were leaving, the doors closed with a pneumatic hiss, and they were off.

Gary looked out the window as the bus passed a hair salon, a thrift store, a hardware store, a church, as the entire town of Larraine passed by. Then he closed his eyes and smiled.

He’d made it.

Fifteen

Reyn was indeed waiting for him at the bus station, as was Stacy. Brian had a class. Both Reyn and Stacy looked tired, but they were happy to see him. Reyn grinned as Gary stepped off the bus and said, “About time,” while Stacy threw her arms around him and gave him a rib-crushing hug.

He hadn’t thought he’d be able to do so, but he’d slept on the trip back. A lot. The stress and trauma of the past few days must have caught up with him because although he’d remained awake for the first leg of the journey, he’d slept for six straight hours between Albuquerque and Flagstaff, and then for almost the entire time between Flagstaff and Los Angeles. Although he didn’t feel rested, he didn’t feel tired, either, and the first thing he asked was whether there’d been any news about Joan. He didn’t expect any, but was still filled with a deep and painful sense of disappointment when he was told that Reyn had checked this morning and the police had nothing to report.

“So why were you afraid to talk on the phone?” Gary asked.

“Your buddy, Sheriff Watt.”

Reyn explained that Brian had discovered that the sheriff’s brother had been stalking his ex-wife, who claimed they were both “outsiders.”

Gary thought about how little interest the sheriff had shown in his kidnapping, and the way he had made no effort to confront the woman at the ranch house. It made sense.

“What I want to know is why he didn’t do anything.” Reyn said. “Why didn’t he turn you back in? Why didn’t you have some sort of accident?”

“Reyn!” Stacy said.

“They’re legitimate questions.”

Gary thought about it. “He wasn’t the only person I talked to. He wasn’t even the first person I talked to. I told my story to the secretary and a deputy before I even got a chance to tell the sheriff. Maybe there were too many people around.”

“He could have arranged something,” Reyn said. “He got his brother off.”

“He still could. He has my name, address, phone number. I had to give him all of my personal information for his report.”

“Anyway, that’s why I didn’t want to say anything on the phone. In case it put you in danger. The sheriff found that motel room for you; maybe he had it bugged.”

Gary was trying to figure out what connection a small-town sheriff could have with an entity powerful and sophisticated enough to delete social networking pages and enrollment records at UCLA.

They had left the bus terminal and were walking through the parking lot toward Reyn’s car.

“The police,” Stacy prodded.

“Oh, yeah,” Reyn said. “Williams wants to see you. I filed a missing persons report. Sort of. I mean, it hadn’t been forty-eight hours yet, so it couldn’t be official. And I had to talk to that asshole Tucker first, who tried to make out like you’d pulled a disappearing act to take the heat off all the crimes you’ve committed.” He smiled. “But Williams took it seriously and promised to look for you. I think he was legit. I told him this morning that you were on your way back, and he wanted you to come in.”

Gary thought for a moment. “I’ll call him, tell him what happened, let him get in touch with old Sheriff Watt if he wants more details.”

“Aren’t you going to tell him about the sheriff?” Stacy asked. “I know it’s probably out of his jurisdiction, but there must be some mechanism where one law enforcement agency can request the investigation of another.”

Gary shook his head. “Williams is all right, but he’s barely on board as it is. I’m not sure he even totally believes us about Joan. Getting him to open an investigation of a small-town sheriff in New Mexico because the sheriff’s brother’s ex-wife mentioned the word ‘outsiders’ in a police report you looked up on the Internet seems a little far-fetched.” He took a deep breath. “Besides, the cops haven’t found Joan, they didn’t find me, and I’m thinking it’s time we went another way.”

Reyn frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

“The police are working on it.”

“Let them keep working on it,” Gary said. “But I’m going to work on it, too.”

They reached Reyn’s car, and before getting in, Gary stood there for a moment, looking around. There was a wide, crowded street in front of the terminal, and buildings crammed close together in both directions. Above the buildings loomed the Hollywood Hills and, beyond, outlined in the white haze of smog, the San Gabriel Mountains. The air smelled of ethnic food and exhaust fumes, and he realized with a sharpness he had never experienced before that this was where he wanted to live, that even after he graduated from college, he intended to make Los Angeles his home.

With Joan.

Yes, Joan had to be a part of it, too, and as he got into the car he was filled with a renewed sense of urgency. The more time passed, the less imperative it would be for the police to try to find her. Other cases would come up, and simple human nature dictated that the longer she remained missing, the less likely it was that they’d believe she could be found. Even his friends would probably lose focus. He couldn’t allow that to happen.

“What about Kara?” Gary asked as Reyn started the engine. “Any news?”

“None that they’re sharing.”

Brian called while they were en route, and Stacy took the phone from Reyn’s pocket to answer. She told him that, yes, Gary was safely back; then she handed the phone to Gary so he could describe his ordeal himself.

“Fuck,” Brian said when he was finished.

“Yeah.”

“It’s worse than Reyn said.”

“I’m glad to be back,” Gary admitted.

“Where are you going now?”

“The dorm. My room.”

“I’ll meet you there.”

Brian was sitting on a bench in front of the building when they walked up, and the four of them went into the dorm together. As always, the halls were crowded with talking, laughing, jostling students, and Gary marveled at the fact that those three Outsiders had been able to just walk in, break into his room and kidnap him. Although, amid such chaos, perhaps it shouldn’t have been so surprising.

They reached the third floor.

The door to his room was closed but unlocked, and Gary slowly pushed it open, taking a quick step back, just in case. The room was empty. He quickly checked his belongings, but as far as he could tell, nothing had been stolen, nothing had been moved. His heart was pounding as he stared at the spot where the two men had grabbed and held him while the third punched him in the stomach. They had his keys, he thought. And whether those keys were buried along with their dead bodies somewhere near the ranch in New Mexico, or whether copies had been made and distributed to cells of Outsiders all over the United States, Gary knew that he would never again feel safe in this room. He had to find another place to live and sleep. Starting tonight.

“What are you going to do for money?” Brian asked. “I assume your ATM card was in your wallet, along with all of your cash. And I doubt that you can access your bank account without ID—assuming that they haven’t cleaned out your account already.”

He hadn’t thought of that.

“I can loan you a few bucks until your next paycheck,” Brian said.

Reyn nodded. “Me, too.”

“I’m not sure there’s going to be a next paycheck. It’s a work-study job. If they’ve fucked up my school records, they’ve probably screwed that up for me, too.”

“Could you have your parents wire you some money?” Stacy asked. “I’m not exactly sure how that works, but I think it’s instantaneous.”

“Yeah,” Gary said, nodding. “I’ll talk to them.”

Both of his neighbors, Matt and Greg, suddenly poked their heads inside the room. “Dude!” Greg said. “You’re back! People’ve been lookin’ for you.”

“Yeah,” Matt said. “And one of them was that guy.” He pointed to Reyn.

Reyn rolled his eyes. “Thanks,” he said. “You can leave now.”

“Wait a minute.” Gary walked up to Matt. “Did you say one of them?”

“Yeah. The other guys were these eco-freaks with, like, hemp clothes and shit.”

Gary and Reyn exchanged a glance. “And when,” Gary asked, “did these guys come by?”

“This morning. They were, like, skulking around, trying to be all inconspicuous—”

“Which was pretty hard in those clothes,” Greg interrupted.

“Yeah. But one of them opened your door, and then he saw us looking at him and pretended he was just passing by, and then he was gone.”

Greg nodded in agreement. “We wouldn’t’ve even noticed, but that dude said you were gone”—he pointed to Reyn again—“and so we were kind of watching your place for you. You know, like neighbors do.”

“How many of them were there?” Gary asked.

“Two. One of them was a short dude, in his thirties probably. The other one was younger, but there was something wrong with him. He had, like—”

“Ape arms,” Matt interjected.

“Ape arms. Exactly. He had, like, these big, long arms that hung way down. Like a monkey’s.”

“Did they say anything? Did you hear them talk? Did you notice where they went?”

Both Matt and Greg shook their heads. “No. Why? Who were they?”

“No one,” Gary said. “Thanks, guys. I appreciate it.”

His neighbors looked confused, but they took the hint. “Later,” Matt said, and the two of them headed back to their own room.

Gary closed the door behind them, turned around, and his eye was caught by the red blinking light of the answering machine on his desk. He walked over and pressed the PLAY button. His pulse was racing.

It could be Joan.

Gary! I’m—

But it wasn’t. The message was from his father, who asked him to call back right away. Gary did, and his dad answered immediately, as though he’d been waiting by the phone.

“Good news,” he told Gary. “I explained the situation to both the grant administrators and the people in charge of your scholarship, and they all agreed that these are extraordinary circumstances. So, basically, everything’s been put on hold until you’re once again officially enrolled. But the money’s still yours. So, like I said, talk to your teachers, keep attending your classes, and keep up with the assignments so that once the paperwork’s been sorted out, you’re already in place.”

“Did you call UCLA?”

“That’s a slightly bigger hurdle. Your school’s got quite a bureaucracy there, and there are some forms you have to fill out, and a couple of things you have to provide, including a copy of a police report and credit statement, before you can be reinstated. That’s why I say you need to keep up with your classwork, because this may take a few weeks.”

“I have another problem, Dad.” Gary felt embarrassed. “I have no money. All my money and identification was in my wallet—”

“You didn’t tell me you lost your wallet.”

Gary was caught short. “Uh, yeah,” he said nervously. “I mean, that’s how—”

“You said it was some hacker.”

“It was. But he had my wallet. That’s how he knew who I was.”

His father’s voice was stern and disapproving. “How did you lose it?”

“I don’t know!”

“You don’t know?”

Gary thought fast. “I was at the gym, and someone broke into my locker and took it.”

“So you do know.”

“Yeah.”

“I wasn’t aware that you belonged to a gym.”

“I don’t. It’s for a PE class.”

“I don’t remember seeing a PE class on your schedule.”

Gary was sweating. He didn’t like lying to his father, he wasn’t good at it, and his dad could ferret out falsehoods from a mile away. “Look, I was auditing a swimming class so I could swim. It’s been hot out here. I left my clothes in a locker, and someone got my wallet. Now he’s used that information to steal my identity and ruin my life. Jesus. I think you’re getting a little sidetracked here. The point is: I have no money, and I can’t draw any out of my account because I have no ID.”

His dad was silent for a moment. “Well, you should be able to get money out of your account with your Social Security number and your mother’s maiden name. That’s usually how it works. They wouldn’t let you?”

Now he felt even more embarrassed. “I don’t know. I didn’t try. I just assumed—”

“Never assume,” his dad said.

“Okay.”

“I guess that means you didn’t call the bank, close your account and open a new one.”

“No,” he said. “But I will.”

“You did call your credit card company, like I told you, and had them close your account, right?”

“Yes,” he lied.

“And the DMV?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, call your bank and get things straightened out. If there’s a problem, let me know. In an emergency, I can contact Western Union and wire you some money.” He sighed. “I’m just glad your mother’s not here right now. If she heard this, she’d have you on the first plane back.”

“I know, Dad.”

“I’m not so sure I trust you out there on your own.”

“I’ll be okay.”

“Well, sometimes you just have to learn the hard way. Now I want you to call the bank… .”

There was another five minutes of lecturing; then Gary thanked his dad again and hung up.

“Wow,” Brian said. “What was that about?”

“It’s complicated. I need my dad’s help, but I don’t want to tell him what’s really going on, so I have to kind of… finesse the truth.” He told his friends what his father had said.

“You know,” Brian mused, “this could work to your advantage. You could just take the semester off. It’s not your fault. It’s because of a crime committed against you. You’d probably have no problem. Although it would take an extra semester to graduate.”

Gary had been thinking along the same lines. He was already behind in every class, and he had no plans to resume his normal life until Joan was back here safe and sound. Taking the semester off would ensure that his personal problems didn’t completely derail his academic career.

But he could think about that later. His dad was right. He needed to get a new bank account, credit card and driver’s license. He needed to make sure that no damage was done to his credit and that no exorbitant bills were racked up under his name.

Reyn, Stacy and Brian hovered around Gary’s computer while he called his bank, credit card company and the Department of Motor Vehicles. Both his checking and savings accounts were intact, and he was given a new account number with a secret password. His old Visa card was voided, and a report was automatically filed with all of the credit monitoring agencies, alerting them to the fact that he’d been the victim of identity theft. He was told that a new credit card would be sent out to him immediately. The DMV informed him that he would have to come in to one of their offices, get his photo taken and fill out the form for a new driver’s license, at which time he would be issued a temporary license and ID card.

Gary hung up the phone. “What are you guys doing?” he asked, walking over to where the other three were clustered around his computer.

Brian looked up from the monitor. “Trying to find out what ‘Outsiders’ are.”

“Any luck?”

“Sure. There’s a rock band called the Outsiders, a young adult novel by S. E. Hinton, a line of snowboards…”

“Any luck?” he repeated.

Reyn stood straight, shaking his head. “No.”

“Whoever they are,” Stacy said, “they’re flying well below the radar.”

“I’m thinking they’re based in Texas,” Gary said. “I’m pretty sure the car I was in had Texas plates, and we were already in New Mexico and still heading east.”

“Does that help us?” Stacy asked.

“It could narrow the search.”

It narrowed the search, but it didn’t help, and when Gary asked whether someone could give him a ride to the nearest DMV office, Brian shut off the computer.

“I also need a place to stay,” Gary said. He gestured around the room. “I’m not staying here. And I can’t transfer to another room because once they look me up, they’ll find out that I’m not officially enrolled, and then they’ll kick me out completely.”

“I’d let you crash at my place,” Brian said, “but I don’t think Dror would be too thrilled.”

Gary thought about Brian’s roommate. He wouldn’t be too thrilled staying with Dror, either.

“You can stay with us,” Stacy said.

He looked at Reyn. “Us?”

“She’s staying in my room. It’s too dangerous for her to be on her own.”

Gary shook his head. “No, thank you.”

“We’ll keep it quiet,” Reyn promised.

Stacy hit his shoulder. “Bring a sleeping bag. You can sleep on the floor.” She shot Reyn a look. “And there’s not going to be anything to keep quiet.”

Gary nodded his thanks. “Okay.” He tried to think of what he needed to bring with him besides a sleeping bag. Comb and toothbrush, for sure. A change of clothes.

“It is dangerous,” Brian noted. “I feel like I’m taking my life in my hands every time I walk out the door. I keep expecting to be jumped and taken prisoner.”

“I know,” Stacy said. “Me, too.”

Reyn looked over at Gary. “You must be really paranoid.”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “Kind of. But I think it’s time for us to stop running. We need to take the initiative.”

“What does that mean?” Stacy asked. “Hiring body-guards?”

“Yeah,” Reyn said. “What can we do besides wait for them to strike again?”

Gary faced them. “We can set a trap.”

He’d had a lot of time to think about this while he was on the bus.

The men who’d captured him might have looked like rubes, but either they or the people to whom they answered had to have been monitoring his phone calls, his computer use or both. They’d planned the abduction too perfectly. They had to have had access to inside information.

Joan.

Joan could have told them.

No, she wouldn’t have, and although he believed that completely, he was still very aware of how little he knew about her. He did know her on the deepest level possible, knew who she really was, but the peripherals were obscure, and his knowledge of the details of her life remained frustratingly vague.

Four and a half weeks.

They’d gone out for only four and a half weeks.

It seemed much longer, and the way he felt about her, it was as if they’d been together forever. But he could count their weekends together on one hand, and the actual amount of time they’d spent with each other was in reality very brief.

He recalled his favorite date with her, a trip they’d taken to Disneyland. The amusement park had been crowded, and they’d arrived too late to get on any of the big rides without waiting in a massive line. But she was like a little girl, and though they ended up going on rides like Snow White and Pinocchio, the Enchanted Tiki Room and Casey Jr. Circus Train, she was as delighted as a kid at Christmas. Her enthusiasm was catching, and he was just as excited as she was. They ended up staying at the amusement park until midnight, watching the fireworks and finally going on the major attractions like Space Mountain and Pirates of the Caribbean late in the evening after the families with children had started to go home.

They’d both been bone tired as they took a tram back to the parking structure, and Joan actually fell asleep on the ride over. It was late, and he didn’t feel like driving back to UCLA, so he’d found a nearby motel with a red Vacancy sign, and they’d spent the night in Anaheim, with a view of Disneyland through the window of their room.

The next morning, he’d gone to the lobby and brought back a continental breakfast, and they had stayed in bed until it was time to check out.

Gary felt himself tearing up. She seemed at once so close and yet so far—weren’t those the lyrics of an old song?—and he was suddenly filled with despair, certain that he would never see her again.

Anger kept him going. He had led everyone outside, and they were now walking slowly together across the campus. He hadn’t wanted to remain in his room in case it was bugged, hadn’t felt comfortable staying in any enclosed space, and even now his eyes were on the lookout for anyone dressed oddly or paying too close attention to their movements.

“They deleted my information, which means they had to access it, which means they know my class schedule. They know your names and faces from the photos on Joan’s Facebook and MySpace pages, from mine, too, and they’ve probably gone to your own pages and looked up even more about you.” Gary paused to let this sink in. “But they don’t know that we know, and we can use that against them.”

“How?” Reyn asked.

Brian was already one step ahead. “We construct a fake schedule for Gary or set up a fake meeting, something that will guarantee he’ll be alone at a specific time in a specific place. We talk about it on our phones, e-mail each other about it, and we make it so irresistible to them that they can’t not go.”

Gary nodded. “Then when they show up, we grab them.”

“You’re the bait?” Stacy said, shaking her head. “I don’t like it.”

“You guys’ll be there. I won’t really be alone.”

“She’s right. What if there’s a whole passel of ’em?” Brian asked.

Stacy raised an eyebrow. “ ‘Passel?’ ”

“It seems like an appropriate word under the circumstances.”

“We’ll need help,” Gary said.

“The police?” Stacy suggested.

Brian snorted. “Yeah. They’ve been such a great help so far.”

“I know it’s kind of out-of-the-box thinking,” she said sarcastically, “but since law enforcement agents deal with criminals on a daily basis…” She held up her hands. “I don’t know. It just seems like that might be a good choice.”

“I told Dror,” Brian said, ignoring her, “but I’m not sure he believed all of it. Or any of it. He’s a good dude, though. He’ll be there if we need it.”

“We need it.”

“The film society,” Reyn suggested.“I can get them. Or at least some of them. Ten to twelve people, probably.”

“No offense,” Brian said. “But they’re not exactly the football team. I doubt they’d be much help.”

“The more bodies, the better,” Gary told him. “Although we may not even need them at all. According to Greg and Matt, two Outsiders were sent to look for me. That’s probably what we’ll be dealing with. But there’s an intimidation factor with ten or twelve people that you just don’t have with four.” He nodded slowly, thinking, and as he looked at his friends he allowed himself a small smile. “You know,” he said, “this just might work.”

Afraid to use e-mail and not wanting to say too much over the phone, Reyn had assembled as many members of the film society as he could corral in so short a time by pretending as though this was the first meeting of the semester. They met where they usually did, in a screening room in the Film Studies department, and Gary was happy to see that of the students who’d shown, nearly all of them seemed able-bodied enough to help. Dror was there, too, Brian’s roommate, and Dror was more than able-bodied. A weight lifter, he looked as though he could take on five Outsiders just on his own.

Although Gary didn’t exactly get along with him, he was very glad that Dror had come along.

He looked out over the sparse audience. Over the past few hours, he and Reyn had discussed in detail how to broach the subject. Brian was right; this wasn’t the football team. The members of the film society were more watchers than doers, and there was no reason to believe that they were willing to participate in any sort of physical activity—particularly one that involved genuine risk. Gary had even suggested that they pretend they were making a movie, a Blair Witch–type improvisational film, and trick students into going along with their plan.

But the film club was Reyn’s baby, he was its president, and though he understood the importance of what they were doing, he was not willing to get society members involved without their consent. So he came up with the idea of honestly explaining the situation and comparing it to a similar predicament in a film. Gary, Reyn and Stacy were all fairly well versed in cinematic history, but they still had a difficult time coming up with an appropriate parallel. As Reyn said, they not only had to engage the students on a real, personal level, but they needed to pick a film that would speak to them on a snobbish intellectual basis. They needed something from a director with enough cachet to lure them into action.

They’d finally settled on calling Gary’s dilemma “Hitchcockian.”

“You’re Cary Grant in North by Northwest,” Reyn enthused. “You’re Robert Cummings in Saboteur, wanted by the criminals and the police, with nowhere to turn.”

“And there’s a woman in jeopardy,” Stacy said, putting a hand on Gary’s arm to soften the words.

“Okay,” Gary had agreed.

Now the three of them stood, along with Brian, at the head of this warm, windowless room, turning the real events of his life over the past week and a half into a suspenseful narrative for an audience of movie fans, trivializing the life-and-death stakes of Joan’s situation in an effort to convince people who didn’t necessarily know or care about her into helping them capture an Outsider.

A couple of them did know her, and Gary could see on their faces expressions of shock and horror, along with the determination to do all they could to help. But among the others there were questions. One young woman wearing thick black-framed glasses and a scowl said, “You brought us here under false pretenses. This has nothing whatsoever to do with our mission or with film. I was under the impression we were going to be planning our series for this semester.”

“Fuck off,” Brian told her.

Reyn raised a hand to calm them both down. “Kate,” he said gently. “I know this is a little unorthodox, and you’re right—it’s not something that directly concerns the film society. But it is an emergency, I’m involved with it, and of course when I needed help, the first people I thought of were all of you.” He gestured toward the group before focusing again on her. “Although I completely understand if you don’t want to get involved.”

She sat down without offering a response, but she did not walk out and leave.

“It sounds like it’s going to be dangerous,” worried Max Lezama. Gary knew him slightly. He had the physique of a young Don Knotts and some of the same skittish mannerisms.

“I don’t think so,” Gary said. “Yes, we are going to try and detain one of them for questioning”—he realized that he sounded like a cop—“but that would not be your job. We just need you to stand around and look threatening, maybe block their escape route or kind of herd them in the right direction so we can apprehend them.”

Max nodded his understanding.

“What if it doesn’t work?” another student wondered.

“Why don’t you just call the police?” Kate wanted to know. She was still scowling. Gary thought it was probably her natural expression.

“I hate that chick,” Brian whispered next to him.

“If it doesn’t work… well, we’ll have to come up with something else,” Reyn said. “As for why we don’t call the police, I think we’ve already explained that.” He raised his hands for silence. “I think you all know what we need. There’s no reason to keep debating it. Those who want to help, come up here and talk to Gary. He’ll fill you in on the details. The rest of you? I’ll see you next week for our first regular meeting.” He looked at Kate. “We will be planning our fall film series.”

Kate picked up her books and left. Max and another student, as overweight as Max was underweight, guiltily sneaked out together, but the eight students who remained were ready and willing to help.

“What do you need us to do?” asked Ed Eisenberg, a tall, athletic guy who’d joined the film society last semester and had an aesthete’s taste for Antonioni’s ennui and a lowbrow love of American action flicks.

“I don’t think the Outsiders will do anything in public,” Gary said. “Not after everything that’s happened. And I doubt they’ll strike unless they’re sure it will be successful. So we have to give them the illusion of isolation and make them think I am completely vulnerable. I’m thinking of that memorial path, the one that goes through those pine trees and is nowhere near any buildings.” He looked from Reyn to Stacy to Brian. “I’m going to e-mail each of you and tell you how much I need solitude after my ordeal. I’ll also call each of you during the afternoon, on cell phones and landlines, and tell you how much I like that path and how I like to walk there at night.”

“Do you really think they’ll show up?” Stacy asked.

Gary shrugged. “Who knows? I hope so. If they really want to get to me, this would be the perfect opportunity.”

“There’s one thing I don’t get,” Brian said. “Sheriff Watt. If he’s in on this, why did he let you go? Why didn’t he keep you there and hand you over to those Outsiders instead of sending you back here so they can go through that whole kidnapping thing again?”

“I have no idea,” Gary said.

“It’s a mystery,” Reyn conceded.

“Maybe we’ll find out when we interrogate those guys.” Gary turned to the film society students. “What we need to do now is go out to that path and figure out where everyone’s going to hide and what their role is going to be. We need to have at least one person staked out there all day, in case they come to check the place out themselves. We don’t want them beating us to the punch. Is everybody free right now?”

There were nods all around.

“Then let’s do it.”

As a group, the twelve of them passed through the center of UCLA, heading toward the hilly north end of campus. Gary kept his eyes peeled as they walked, checking sidewalks and stairways, buildings and open areas for anyone wearing primitive, hand-sewn farming clothes. He saw no one suspicious, though he hadn’t expected to, and that was no surprise. What was a surprise was how perfect the memorial path turned out to be for their purposes. He’d remembered it from a walking tour of the campus he’d taken as part of freshman orientation two years ago, but he hadn’t been there since, and while his perception of the place was that it was remote-seeming and removed from the main body of the campus with its crowded walkways and buildings, he hadn’t expected it to so closely fit their needs. Not only was the narrow, winding path lined with trees, but there were bushes and boulders, a carefully constructed imitation of wild nature that offered plenty of hiding spots and multiple vantage points.

And very few lights along the way.

They walked slowly up the wooded trail, scouting locations along its half-mile length. Gary made it clear that he wanted every segment of the path covered, though he let each individual choose a hiding spot that was most comfortable for him or her. Because there were only twelve of them, and because there were parts of the path so curvy that adjacent segments could not be seen ten feet away from each other, it was decided that the long, straight sections at the beginning and end of the trail need not be covered. The entrance was close to the university’s physical plant, which meant that there would probably be other people nearby, and the walkway ended at a parking lot, which would also be pretty public.

It was the middle section they had to worry about, and Gary was very impressed by how quickly everyone found a hiding place. They all turned their cell phones on, making sure to hide the lights, which at night would be very visible, and then they practiced. Several times. Gary walked back and forth along the entire length of the memorial path, clapping his hands at random locations to indicate that an Outsider had accosted him. Each time, someone was there to back him up immediately, and seconds later a horde of people were running up the walkway from both directions to rescue him. It seemed an eminently workable, nearly foolproof plan, and after ten tries, they quit, satisfied.

Gary wanted someone on watch, and Ed took the first shift. He would walk casually back and forth between the parking lot and the physical plant, keeping his eyes open for anyone resembling the description of an Outsider with which he’d been provided. An hour later, Brian would take over, and someone would keep up the patrol until dark, at which time all of them would take their places.

Thanking everyone profusely, Gary left, taking Reyn and Stacy with him to his dorm room to retrieve a few items.

He thought about Joan. He recalled what it had felt like at Burning Man when he had started to go under, and he tried to remember the last words he’d spoken to her before her abduction. But he couldn’t think of what they might have been. In his mind he saw very vividly the temporary structures surrounding their makeshift camp, the Joe Strummer cube and the buildings made of recycled trash. He recalled the hallucination that had not seemed like a hallucination, the rag doll Joan, his slaughtered friends, and the two banshee shapes that had picked up the rag doll and carried it off as, in the foggy background, the Burning Man walked. But he couldn’t remember what he’d said to Joan.

He had never felt farther away from her than he did at this moment.

“Do you really think this will work?” Stacy asked.

He looked over at her and hoped he sounded more confident than he felt. “I think so,” he said. “I hope so.”

Sixteen

Gary walked alone down the tree-lined memorial path, and though he knew Reyn, Brian, Stacy and the others were nearby, watching, waiting, ready to leap out should any of the Outsiders put in an appearance, he still felt nervous.

It was the second night he’d been doing this, and already he was inclined to give it up, to drive nonstop back to the ranch outside Larraine and torture that limping bitch until she told him where Joan was being held or gave him the name of someone who could. He felt helpless, powerless, and everything he did brought home to him the fact that Joan was being held captive. When he slept last night on Reyn’s floor in his sleeping bag in front of the television, he saw Joan lying alone on some concrete floor in the darkness of an abandoned building. When he ate breakfast and lunch, he imagined her gnawing on a hard crust of moldy bread. Even when he went to the bathroom, he pictured her squatting over some filthy, smelly bucket.

He thought about his own time in the ranch house, drugged and shackled to the floor, and knew that she was putting up with far worse.

And had been doing so for more than a week.

The very idea made him frustrated, furious, committed to doing anything it took to get her back.

A cold breeze brushed his cheek.

Yet he was still frightened.

There was a bone-crackle rattling off to his left, and his heart lurched in his chest, though he forced himself to keep walking and pretend he hadn’t heard. Nothing sprang out at him, and he hazarded a casual glance in that direction, seeing nothing in the darkness until the sound came again and he saw, by the diffused illumination of a far-off streetlight, a sparrow hopping through a small pile of dead leaves.

Maybe it would have been better if he’d assigned someone else to do this. Brian, perhaps. He himself had been through too much recently, and his nerves were fried. He’d never been a nervous person, but he was now, and he could not be entirely sure that when crunch time came he wouldn’t panic.

But, no. As scared as he might be, he had to see this through. Joan was his girlfriend, this was his responsibility, and deep down he not only needed to do this; he wanted to do it.

Gary kept walking.

He’d finally gone to the police station this morning to talk to Williams. Despite his skepticism, he’d wanted, he’d hoped, that the detective might have turned up something. But the police still hadn’t looked in on Joan’s parents’ house, and no effort had been made to pressure Sheriff Watt about the ranch where Gary had been held. Williams assured him that they had some “good leads” concerning Kara’s disappearance, but he didn’t believe that, and he’d left the police station feeling more discouraged than he had when he’d walked in.

Gary reached the slow curve in the center of the path where he knew Reyn and Stacy were hidden behind a copse of bushes. For the millionth time, he went over the plan in his mind, looking for loopholes, but once again he couldn’t find any. The plan was a good one. Unfortunately, it only encompassed capturing the Outsiders. He and his friends had not thought much beyond that point, and though he intended to question the person or persons they caught, he did not know what they would do after that. Turn their captives over to the police? Let them go? Neither of those options seemed right, but Gary refused to think about what that meant.

From the parking lot ahead, he heard the sound of a car starting. He still couldn’t see the parking lot, but the volume and clarity of the sound meant that he was close, and he turned around to start his trek back.

And there they were.

There were two of them, and Gary’s heart was pounding so hard it actually hurt. One of them was holding something in his hand. From this distance, it looked like a length of cloth, and Gary immediately recalled the terrible dirt-root taste of the gag that had been used to drug him.

Ape arms.

The other man had extremely long arms, disturbingly long arms—and Gary knew that these were the two who had come to his room looking for him. He had a sudden flashback to the photo of Joan’s mom with her too-long legs and her oddly formed bones.

The men moved toward him.

Why weren’t they stopped before they got this far? he wondered. Why didn’t anyone give the signal to alert the others?

His first terrifying thought was that his sentries had been killed, that Outsiders had murdered one or more of the film society students—

or Reyn or Stacy or Brian

—but as soon as he called out, “Here!” the darkness was filled with the shouts and cries of his cohorts. The noise was intended to confuse and frighten, and it seemed to do its job. The two Outsiders remained unmoving, not advancing, not retreating, but staying in place and looking frantically around as though certain they were about to be attacked but unsure from which direction the attack would come.

Dror arrived first, and not only was he big and fast, but he carried a weapon, a baseball bat that he swung with abandon. Most of the students who came whooping down the path and from behind the trees were carrying makeshift weapons of some sort, nearly all of them bats or knives, and within moments they had surrounded the two Outsiders, who looked lost and frightened.

Gary stepped forward, approaching the two men. They seemed a lot less threatening, a lot less intimidating, encircled by the group of armed students. This was the allure of the gang, of the mob, and it was both dangerous and intoxicating.

The crowd parted before him.

Seconds before, he’d thought that the shabbily dressed men seemed pathetic and sad. But this close, they seemed creepy. He could see that there was something wrong with each of them: Ape Arms’ long limbs were genuinely freakish, a physical deformity, and the shorter man’s face bore a blank, dull expression that made him appear not quite human. Both of them had odd, identical hairstyles.

Gary was very glad he was not alone.

The shorter one was indeed holding a gag, undoubtedly laced with whatever pacifying drug had been administered to him before, and Gary pointed to the cloth. “Drop it,” he ordered.

The man looked at his partner, who said something in that alien language.

The blank-faced man held on to the gag.

Without prompting, Dror stepped forward and quickly yanked the cloth out of the man’s hand. The man tried to strike back, but Dror pushed him into his friend and wielded the bat threateningly.

“Be careful,” Gary said. “That gag’s laced with a drug. It’s the same kind they used on me before. Don’t touch your face or anyone else,” he told Dror. “Make sure you wash your hands before you do.”

Grimacing, Dror dropped the cloth on the ground, wiping his hands on his pants.

Gary turned back to the two Outsiders. “Why are you here?” he asked, moving closer. He had no weapon in his hand, but there was a pocketknife in his front pocket, and he took it out, opening it. “And where is Joan Daniels? What have you done with her?”

The short one started to say something, but Ape Arms cut him off, barking an order in that alien language.

“What do you Outsiders want?” Gary demanded.

“Outsider? I’m not an Outsider!” the short one cried. His voice was high-pitched and strange. “You’re the Outsiders! All of you!”

That didn’t make any sense, and Gary glanced quizzically at Reyn, who shot him a confused look in return. Under the circumstances, it was not surprising to hear their captives lie. Indeed, it was to be expected. But the vehemence of the response held the ring of truth, and the deep anguish on the man’s heretofore dull and inexpressive face made Gary think that his protestation was real. The last thing this man wanted was to be confused with an Outsider.

But if he wasn’t an Outsider, who was he?

And what were the Outsiders?

The man started crying.

“You won’t get anything out of him,” Ape Arms said, speaking finally in English and tapping his forehead. “He’s simple.”

Gary shifted his focus and peered into the long-armed man’s face. The man stared back at him defiantly, and the only thing Gary could think of was the very real possibility that the eyes he was looking into right now had watched Joan as she was being tortured. He was filled with a rage unlike anything he had ever experienced, a fury so white-hot and deep that at that moment he could have murdered this man and felt no qualms.

Gary’s voice when it came out was frighteningly flat and low. “I’m going to ask you some questions,” he said. “And you are going to answer them. If you do not, I will use this knife to sever your windpipe. After you are dead, I will torture your friend until he talks.”

The man sensed the truth behind the words. He tried to look brave, but Gary could tell that he was scared.

Good.

Gary leaned forward. “Now, who are you?” he demanded. “Where do you come from? And what do you want with us?”