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‘Did you call the cops?’ he asked flatly.
‘No, there was no phone. I was in there just-’
‘Is there anyone else here?’ he interrupted.
‘No, just me, but I think that others were killed here because-’
The small man held up a hand to silence her. ‘I have one question for you, ma’am?’
‘What?’ Janey frowned.
‘What the fuck did you do to Mr Dyer?’
Janey took a moment to realise the man standing before her was one of the men from the bus. She felt her bladder weaken. The man’s eyes were locked on her, cold and still, as he pulled the long knife from the waistband of his trousers.
‘You should accept you will die here today - it is your destiny. But, first, you will serve as a crude bargaining chip.’
44
As Leighton drove cautiously into the yard at the front of a farmhouse, he saw the police car abandoned to one side of the building. Despite his expectations, he found that Mike Bernal’s wife was alive and standing on the porch of the house. Behind her, however, was an elderly man holding what looked like a blade against the shining skin of her neck.
Leighton, his face ashen, stopped the car, and stepped carefully out of the jeep. Vicki remained slumped, semi-conscious, in the passenger seat.
‘Well, it looks like the nasty little cunt got herself a sugar daddy,’ the elderly man called.
‘What do you want?’ Leighton asked, his voice strained and weary. ‘Whatever it is, we can deal, and you can let the woman go.’
‘Oh, you poor fool.’ The man laughed. ‘I’ll leave here, with both women and that jeep.’
‘There’s a perfectly good police car right there.’ Leighton nodded to the cruiser. ‘It’d be faster.’
‘And easily tracked from the air, too. No, an inconspicuous old jeep will suffice. Now, open the driver door, then step back in front of the vehicle!’
Leighton, without any other options, did as he was told, returning to stand dead centre in front of the car.
‘Now, place your hands on your head and kneel down. If I see you move, I will give this bitch a cheap fucking nose job.’
Locking his fingers on his head, Leighton knelt in the dust.
The elderly man pushed Janey out in front of him, and they moved around Leighton and towards the jeep. As Janey neared the vehicle, Leighton mouthed a silent prayer she wouldn’t recognise it. If she did, no vestige of it showed in her face. He knew he had to keep the attention on himself.
‘They’ll find you,’ Leighton called. ‘Then, it all be over. We know how the bus operated.’
‘You deluded imbecile.’ The man smiled, and turned from the car to Leighton. ‘You think this was just about some fucking bus?’ He then looked wistfully to the distance and gri
Keeping the blade held before him, the man climbed into the jeep beside Janey and Vicki. Turning the key, he started the engine, rolled down the window and leaned out of it.
‘Now, before I go,’ he called to Leighton, ‘I want you to see something very special. You ever see one bullet pass through two skulls?’
‘Please …’ Leighton began, but he didn’t need to complete the sentence, because he saw Mike Bernal rise up from the back of the truck and fire his pistol through the rear windshield into the back of the man’s head. A red spider web appeared in the windscreen, and Janey let out a long scream.
In the chaotic moments that followed, six police cars raced into the farmyard shrouded in a cloud of dust, while overhead, a police helicopter droned in demented circles. The arriving SWAT team shouted various instructions, as they formed a wide circle around Leighton, who remained kneeling in the dust. Within a few seconds, a range of carbines and assault rifles were fixed on him. Janey and Vicki were helped out of the jeep to awaiting cars, while Mike Bernal was forced to lie face-down in the dirt behind the jeep.
From somewhere in the distance, the banshee wail of approaching ambulances began swelling to a crescendo. Gretsch, who was wearing full tactical dress, jumped clumsily out of a police vehicle, and crouched by the side of a cruiser, then glanced nervously at Leighton.
‘Hey, Chief,’ Leighton called breathlessly across the yard to his former boss. ‘Looks like there was a bus full of killers after all.’
Later on, it would be denied both privately and publicly by the Oceanside P.D., but eventually, a formal competency inquiry would find it was Captain Gretsch who saw Leighton rub his bleeding shoulder, and intentionally shouted, ‘He’s going for a gun!’
This mistake ended not only Leighton’s life but Gretsch’s career.
The three loud shots hit Leighton Jones in the chest, and he fell backwards in a fine mist of blood.
As he lay gasping for breath in the hot dust, Leighton saw what he would consider two of the most important things in the whole world. The first was Vicki, being lifted by stretcher to safety, with a clear hemisphere of an oxygen mask fastened to her face. She was alive, and she was safe. That was enough. Peering at her, Leighton felt his life slipping away, like the fading remnants of a dream, and his fingers twitched upon the dry ground. He smiled a little, and let his head roll back to face the heavens, where the final image his closing eyes saw was the small, swooping circles of an expectant Merlin hawk, dancing expectantly in the sky above him.
45
The Eternal Hills Memorial Park looked pretty in the morning sunshine. It was located seven miles to the north of Oceanside, with a view of the distant waves.
As she laid the flowers on the ground so she could lock the door of her parked car, Vicki noticed the air felt similar to the day she and Leighton had first travelled together, up to Barstow. This thought came with a surge of emotion which threatened to knock her to the ground.
Steadying herself, she took a deep breath, and leaned against the warm metal of the car for a moment. The doctor had placed her bandaged arm in a neoprene sling, and told her not drive for several weeks, but she had ignored him. She had simply pulled the throbbing arm out of the sling while driving, leaving the impotent support around her neck like a burst bicycle tyre. The other options were taking a cab, which she couldn’t afford, or taking an intercity bus - something she would never do again.
Turning around, she surveyed the serene beauty of the cemetery - lush, green grass beneath a perfect sky. Somewhere in the distance, a sprinkler stuttered to life. Vicki glanced at the paper map of the cemetery for a moment, then picked up the bouquet of flowers, and made her way slowly to the graveside.
Following the map, she found herself standing at a shaded spot beneath an apple blossom tree. It was only September, but some of the curled blossoms had already began to float gently down to rest upon the neatly cut grass.
The simple, polished headstone before her was white - clean and honest like the man whose name it bore.
Vicki knelt down before the grave, thinking the company had done a good job of matching the two engravings, despite being separated by so many years.
She didn’t look around to see if anyone might overhear her.
‘Your dad didn’t believe he was a good man,’ she said softly, ‘but we know better than that, don’t we?’ As she spoke, Vicki wiped the hot tears dripping from her nose. ‘He told me once he always wanted to bring these for you.’