Keep yr headlights off until ur a few blocks away. I just knocked yr car tracker offline and yr tail’s so far away they prolly don’t have eyes on you.

She obeys, wondering if there’s ever going to be a moment in the near future when she’s not being bossed around by a bunch of men with personality disorders.

35

“What happened to no babysitting?” Donald Clements suddenly asks.

For the past few minutes, Cole’s been describing Lacey Shannon’s visit to the sheriff’s station, while Donald, in his dining room at his home in North Carolina, stares vacantly at his laptop computer. He’s been resting one elbow on the table next to him. This in turn allows him to rest his stout chin on his bear paw of a fist. Every few minutes the video connection gets a little fuzzy, so it’s not as easy to read his expression as Cole hoped. The man could either be bored or quietly intrigued; there’s no telling. One thing’s for sure: he didn’t think this call merited anything more formal than a plain white T-shirt.

Cole was hoping they’d speed through this quickly. Like businessmen. Even if the cultural gap between them is wide.

Cole is West Coast Ivy League–educated and an unapologetic bone smoker. Donald Clements hails from a family of coal miners, loves a version of Jesus Cole can’t quite get with, and was the only member of his family who became fascinated with how the long tunnels his father, uncles, and cousins shuffled down to work each day were actually built. Cole keeps himself cleanly shaven, sometimes exfoliating twice a day; Donald’s silver mustache looks like a single solid metal plate across his long upper lip.

Still, money makes strange bedfellows. Money and the desire to build things. Quickly.

“Babysitting?” Cole asks.

“Yeah. This feels like babysitting.”

“I don’t remember a discussion of babysitting. Why don’t you refresh my memory?”

“You and I, I thought we agreed, we weren’t going to ask each other a lot of questions about how to make this work.”

“Questions like what?” Cole asks.

“Like why you needed a tunnel of this size in the middle of nowhere.”

“Nowhere? My resort isn’t nowhere. Haven’t you seen the renderings? It’s going to be wonderful!”

“You could have just widened the mountain road.”

“Mountain roads make me carsick.”

“It raises questions, is all. Questions I’m not asking.”

“Because you know I can pay my bills.”

“You’re not the only one who pays my bills. The state of California chips in here and there, and I’m sure the deals you made to put that in place are . . . complicated. Point is, the thing’s like a bridge to nowhere, and it’s not exactly going to make my company front page news, but I’ve put everything I have on it. For you.”

“I wasn’t aware you wanted your company to be front page news. You keep a pretty low profile in general.”

“I do my work, and I do what it takes to keep doing my work.”

Donald’s bushy eyebrows form a single white line as he frowns. He leans forward. Cole’s not sure if he’s doing it to flex his thick bicep or if he just wants Cole to get a better look at the expressionistic painting of a bull rider hanging on the wall behind him.

The motel room has no desk, so Cole’s sitting on the foot of the bed, Scott Durham just out of view. Fred Packard’s outside guarding the motel room door. They’ve already made sure the room next to them is empty.

Donald says, “You wanted speed. Clearly, you were under some kind of pressure. Do it fast, and you can do it in a way that’s personally profitable. Those were your exact words.”

“Not exactly, but close.”

“Either way, I took that to mean no babysitting. Now you’re butting in to my son’s private life. What’s that about?”

There’s no arguing with the guy, because he’s right.

If the gossip about him is true, Cole figures Donald Clements would probably just build some secret side tunnels between Altamira’s valley and the Pacific, mainly for the transportation of goods he didn’t want to show up on anyone’s account ledgers. If the goods ever turned out to involve human cargo, Cole made a promise to himself he’d put a stop to it. But Clements doesn’t have a rep as a human trafficker. Just a guy who’s richer than someone in his profession should be and has deep misgivings about things like tax filings.

“With respect, your son’s private life stopped being private when his girlfriend walked into the local police station and made a claim,” Cole says.

“A false claim,” he says.

“Do we know that for sure?”

“You’re accusing my son of beating up his girlfriend?”

“Did you know about any of this before I called? Maybe you should ask him.”

“Parenting advice. OK. That’s interesting.”

“Try business partner, pointing out a potential exposure.”

“My son doesn’t hit women. I didn’t raise him that way.”

“If he didn’t, he made her angry enough to lie. To the police.”

“You don’t have kids, right? You didn’t, like, adopt any or anything.” The word adopt comes out of Donald like something between a hiccup and a low belch.