South of Nowhere

1.

Three vehicles had the bad luck to be atop the Hinowah levee when it gave way.

At the front was a late-model Chevrolet Camaro, nicknamed Big Blue by the woman driving it, Fiona Lavelle.

She was twenty-six years old and had recently left a teaching job and was using the newly allotted time to devote herself to her passion: writing a fantasy novel.

Traveling from Reno to Fresno, for a spa getaway, she had taken this more demanding but picturesque route through the mountains.

In jeans and red crop top under a gray sweatshirt, Lavelle gripped the wheel firmly, her car countering the lashing wind. The vehicle's engine was big, but the body light.

The highway, Route 13, was two-lane asphalt except for the hundred-yard stretch on the dirt levee, where it was surfaced with cinders, gravel and-today-mud.

Guardrails, she thought, mentally putting sardonic quotation marks around the words. They looked like they wouldn't stop a bike, let alone a muscle car like hers.

A sign on her right, where lights and the outline of the town of Hinowah were visible a hundred feet below, said SLOW UNPAVED ROAD.

As if one needed the warning.

On the left, where the river raged: No FISHING from Levee.

Odd capitalization.

As the car progressed, bits of stone clicked as the tires tossed them into the undercarriage even at this slow speed. It was an odd counterpoint to the powerful drumbeat of the rain on Big Blue's roof.

"Well," she gasped, as a wave splashed from the river into the air and spattered the windshield.

The Never Summer was relentless, racing downstream, south, a speeding train, nearly even with the top of the levee. The rain had been torrential for the past hour. The velocity of the river had to be twice hers, which was about twenty miles an hour or so. On the opposite bank was a steep cliff, craggy and dotted with small caves.

She noted an old graffitied heart, in red. In the center: LM + DP. 4EVER . . .

What are you doing? she thought. Concentrate on the road!

A flash of light appeared in her rearview mirror. The headlights of a vehicle behind her.

Was the driver irritated at her slow pace? She was in a sports car, for heaven's sake. The underbelly was inches away from the messy ground.

Be patient, she thought to him, automatically assigning a gender.

Unfair, she reflected.

And then noticed that she was wrong altogether. He wasn't flashing the lights at her. The pickup had hit a pothole and the beams dropped and rose.

"Sorry." She actually whispered the word aloud.

As she approached the end of the levee, where the slick but dependable asphalt resumed, she began to relax.

The clock on the dashboard read 6:14 a.m.


The second vehicle on the levee was an F-150, piloted by Louis Bell, the self-described “best drywall man” in the town of Hinowah, California, if not all of Olechu County. He was listening to Taylor Swift and admiring the bright blue Camaro in front of him. Some Cams came with 600 horses. Man, to hit the Hawk’s Canyon straightaway behind the wheel of that beautiful machine . . .

Take your time, he thought to the driver. Driving over this crap in a car like that?

Take. Your. Time. . . .

The fifty-year-old, moderately and not irrevocably rotund, was smoking and would remove the Marlboro long enough to sing along with an off-key but robust voice. He would also occasionally glance up at the low clouds as if that would give him some indication of when the downpour would let up.

What a storm! This part of the state-east central-had been in the grip of a drought for the better part of two years. Not good for the number one producer of fruits and vegetables in the country. Would this cure it? He didn't think so. He'd heard that downpours made only a small dent in solving the problem, as the water tended to vanish into places where it wasn't particularly helpful.

On the seat beside him was a McDonald's bag containing three basic Egg McMuffins. He never went for the fancy things. Simple was better. Normally he had four but was trying to cut down, and was exercising his willpower, resolving not to start on the first until he hit the city limits of Fort Pleasant, the Olechu County seat, about fifteen miles ahead.

Though maybe he would celebrate getting off this damn mud slick ten stories above Hinowah and eat half a sandwich. As if having to wrestle the wheel in the muck counted as exercise.

Ah, the games we play . . .

Bell's thoughts dipped to the job he was on his way to, plaster boarding one of the multigazillion-dollar houses in a new development west of the city. How the hell people could afford them, well, that was beyond him. Maybe some of the new companies moving here from the Bay Area and Sacramento. Then his attention faltered and he was drawn to the rushing water. The Never Summer was showing some balls today. Normally it was a modest stream pacing along a rocky bottom, some feet below the road he was presently on. You could hike along the bed all the way to Fort Pleasant and never dampen a toe.

Tense from the driving, Bell stretched and momentarily laid his right arm across the passenger seatback.

Thinking of a few years ago, him and Nancy, then his bride of six months, parked in this same set of wheels, watching the sunset behind Gold Claim Hills. She'd nestled against him, and his arm, on the seat, dropped to her shoulders and he pulled her close. They'd kissed. She said, "You know one thing I never heard of?"

"What's that?"

"Making a baby in a pickup truck."

He hadn't heard of that either. But they both decided it was a topic that deserved more consideration.

The recollection-and the smile it engendered-occurred at precisely 6:14.


The third vehicle on the levee road was a white Chevrolet Suburban, driven by George Garvey, who was glancing at the water cascading out of the bed of the pickup truck in front of him. It never occurred-as he’d never owned one-that pickups would need drainage. A day like this, they would fill up fast with what was probably a ton of water.

He mentioned this to his wife, Sonja, who looked up from her knitting.

"Hm."

George was owner and operator of a small business that his great-great-grandfather had created and had remained in the family, nonstop, for more than a hundred years. He was the front man and manager; Sonja ran the business office. As between the two, she was the silent type.

George's eyes strayed from the flooded pickup truck to the dark gray sky, the clouds speeding west to east. Scudding, he thought, was the word. They'd had the option of taking interstates and four lanes from Sonja's mom and dad to the 5 and then south. But a family conference had resulted in the decision to take this, a more picturesque, route. He negotiated with Google Maps and after some minutes-during which the algorithm seemed to ask, "Are you sure?"-they got these directions.

His wife said, "That town we passed, ten miles or so. Hibbing. Wasn't there another one? That somebody famous came from?"

"Somebody?" George asked as if it were an insult that she didn't know instantly. "Bob Dylan."

"Right." Back to knitting and purling.

George called to the most musical of the Garveys, "Kim. Who's Bob Dylan?"

"Who?" asked seventeen-year-old Kimberly. The blonde more cute than exotic, to Garvey's immense relief, was examining a chipped nail. Neither she nor her friends could keep all ten tips in pristine polish for more than a few hours.

George-who had been a folk singer years ago-said, "The best songwriter who ever lived."

"Not than Drake or Taylor." Maybe a question, maybe a statement.

"Hands down better than them."

"What does that mean?" Kim asked with teenage exasperation.

"Yes, better than them."

No response.

Beside her, skinny eleven-year-old Travis was lost in his phone, linked in via Airbuds. The jeans and hoodie kid was capable of playing a game and texting simultaneously on a screen the size of a deck of cards.

And, while spelling and syntax were sometimes off, those errors were intentional; he never mistyped.

He noted Sonja's gaze now turn from the rustic town of Hinowah, below them to the right, to the river. "Never Summer. Funny name." She grew quiet. "Honey?"

"What?"

Whispering, "I don't like the looks of that."

He too took in the torrent once more.

"I think the level's gone up just in the last few minutes. It could start coming over the top, it looks like."

"Wish they'd hurry up." George nodded toward the pickup truck and the blue sports car in front of it.

He smelled the sweet scent of fingernail polish.

Kimberly, the far more energetic-and fidgety-of the children, glanced up. "I'm bored. When're we going to get home?"

"About one or two."

A huge exhalation. "It's like only six-fourteen."

And George Garvey marveled at the teenage skill to make a sigh sound like a veritable groan of pain.


The world changed in an instant.

At exactly quarter past six, the battle between the Never Summer and the Hinowah levee was decided in the river's favor.

The top two or three feet of the embankment vanished, as if sliced by a huge knife.

The individual with the best view of what happened to the travelers was Louis Bell, in the middle of the procession. Ahead of him, the driver of the Camaro apparently saw the collapse coming. She gunned the engine-the wheels sent up rooster tails as she made an effort to launch the car the ten feet or so to the asphalt, where the levee ended and the highway proper began again.

He didn't see if she made it, and he couldn't afford to wait to find out. He dropped into low gear-to get purchase in the dissolving muck beneath him-and floored the engine. The truck bounded forward, though only a few feet, before it slowed and began to sink as the river simply washed away the ground beneath the tires. The truck listed toward the furious waves.

Behind him, the Suburban containing what he believed was a family of four, took the brunt of the disaster. He observed the vehicle rock sideways, back and forth, and then roll upside down over the edge.

His truck listing harder, he waited for a fate similar to theirs. He tried the handles on either side, but the water and muck held the doors firmly in place.

Louis Bell found himself curiously calm as he considered options.

There weren't many. In fact, he saw only one question: Was it better to dive into the river and be battered to death on the rocks lining the Never Summer? Or drown inside the cab of his truck?

Bell debated merely a few seconds before rolling down the window and gazing, as if hypnotized, at the icy tide that flooded over him.

2.

Colter Shaw had his enemies.

In his profession of rewards-seeking, he avoided bond enforcement-tracking down bail jumpers-but over the years he had found more than a few men and women who emphatically did not want to be found.

Nearly all rewards involving criminals were offered for "information leading to their arrest or capture," with the first word of that phrase always emphasized. The last thing the authorities wanted was private cops engaging in tactical work and bringing the bad guys in, zip-tied. But whether Shaw simply offered up "information" on the whereabouts of a fugitive or physically took him down himself (he'd been a championship college wrestler), the opponents were not pleased.

And they often held grudges. Some of the more sociopathic ones had actually sent him graphic descriptions of what they intended to do when they were out of prison. One had illustrated the torture, and the drawings were surprisingly good.

The incarcerated also had friends and family who roamed the land freely, often with nothing better to do than track down the man who had sent Papa or Mama, or a sibling, to jail.

So Colter Shaw had created an early warning system of sorts. People he knew-personally or professionally-would be in touch when someone suspicious inquired about him.

Which was why he was presently in his late father's office in the mountain house of his youth, working his way through five thousand sheets of the man's notes and correspondence.

He was searching for a reference to a particular individual, and having zero luck.

The lean, six-foot Shaw was dressed for the outdoors, in black jeans, 5.11 tactical boots, and two T's under a sweatshirt for insulation. It was nearly summer but this June was in March mode, drizzling, cold and windy. None of this would have stopped him from hiking the hundreds of acres that made up the Shaw Compound in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, an activity that was to have been on his agenda today.

But instead, he was chasing paper.

And coming up with nothing.

He tested the coffee. It had lost its last hint of warmth, and he set the mug aside. He'd get more-a pot was in the kitchen-but not until he hit an arbitrary milestone of another half inch of documents.

Stretching, he slumped in a chair in whose back was carved the face of a brown bear-a grizzly. Young Colter had been fascinated with the bas-relief in his youth and had once done a rubbing of it, like people do on the gravestones of the famous dead. The result, on gray newsprint, was presently hanging, framed, on a wall in his home on the East Coast.

He now looked around the room where he'd spent many, many hours with his eccentric father, as Ashton imparted endless rules about survival. Shaw recognized dozens of the objects and books that had absorbed his youthful attention, like the chairback: maps, Native American weapons, lacquered boxes, books on politics and philosophy, paintings, one of his sister's model locomotives, a bowie knife that his older brother and their father had forged.

Some good memories and some tough ones.

Then, it was time to tuck the past away. And return to the hunt for the threat-if indeed a threat existed.

The early warning message had been ambiguous. It was from a political science professor at the Bay Area university where his father had taught, in Berkeley, though not the famed Cal. The professor had been a student of Ashton's and was well aware of the cranky man's mission back then-and the enemies he'd made. The text the man sent read: