Free Signal by Patrick Lee Page A

to the hood and then the asphalt, and drew the Beretta from his waistband.
    But he saw at once there would be no need for it.
    The man in the passenger seat wasn’t coming around. He was seizing. His shoulders jerked forward and back; his head hung to one side, a pencil-thick line of blood coming from his nose and one ear.
    Dryden thought of the punch he had hit the man with, seconds after freeing himself and locking up the brakes.
    He had thrown the punch too hard. Had centered the impact too much on the temple. In that moment, he had been in no frame of mind for restraint. His only thought had been to immobilize both men as quickly as possible.
    Careless. Too many years past his training—even a couple of years back, he would’ve reined in his emotions better than that.
    All at once the seizure stopped. Dryden was pretty sure he knew why. He tracked around to the open driver’s-side door, leaned in, and pressed a finger to the man’s carotid artery pulse point. For a second or two he thought he felt something, weak and fluttering. Then nothing.
    He withdrew his hand. Stared at the dead man in front, and the dead man in back, and then at the darkness and the three roads leading into it.
    Three choices. A shell game.
    He slid behind the wheel again, slammed the door, and shoved the selector into drive. He turned hard right and floored it, skidding and then accelerating west on the crossroad—the best bet of the three, though not by much.
    For the next four minutes he kept the vehicle’s speed above 100 miles per hour. He passed another crossroad but didn’t stop. A mile farther on, he passed another. He crested a rise and at last saw a pair of taillights far ahead, like cat’s eyes in the near-dark. He overtook the vehicle within sixty seconds: an old pickup with a gray-haired man at the wheel. Nothing ahead of it but wide open miles of nothing.
    He kept the needle over 100 for another five miles. Until long after the math had become undeniable. He denied it anyway and kept going, mile upon mile.
    Nothing. Just empty road and empty land. Nothing else to see.
    Dryden let off the gas. He coasted to a stop on the shoulder. He rolled the window down and sat gripping the wheel, his palms slick and his breath coming in fast surges. He could hear the low, rhythmic chorus of insect noises in the desert scrub.
    And beneath that, another sound: the hiss of static from the passenger footwell.

 
    CHAPTER TEN
    It was twenty minutes later. Dryden was parked at an overlook in the foothills; he had come to it by way of a two-track that probably hadn’t seen traffic in weeks.
    The overlook faced east across the desert, into the sunrise. Ten miles out on the plain, Highway 395 gleamed dully in the light. There had been a steady procession of emergency vehicles moving north on it, the whole time Dryden had been watching. Farther up in that direction, he could see them clustered at the place where he and Claire had been attacked.
    He opened his door and got out. He went around to the passenger side, opened both doors there, and dragged the dead men into the weeds. He went through their clothes and found three wallets—one of them his own. In the other two he found a combined two hundred thirty-one dollars in cash, and no IDs. He pocketed the money, wiped his prints from the wallets, and tossed them after their owners.
    Each dead man had a phone on him, the models identical and cheap. Throwaways, for sure, though they’d been modified with some add-on software. When Dryden pulled up the recent call logs, all the phone numbers were simply lines of asterisks. Only the time stamps remained visible. Neither man had made or received a call in more than an hour—long before the attack on Claire and himself.
    Dryden pulled the phones’ batteries, wiped his prints as he’d done with the wallets, and left the phones with the dead men. He got back behind the wheel but left the engine off. He sat staring at the distant crime scene,