maybe Ray had a caretaker getting the place ready to sell, because they had your, whatcha call it, earth-moving equipment delivered a week or so back.”
I’d stopped listening. I was less than ten miles away. The rain was drumming the roof of the car and the hood, though it seemed finally to be letting up. The visibility wasn’t great. Ten miles in weather like this could take twenty minutes.
Then a couple of words jumped out at me.
Caretaker.
Moved down to Delray Beach.
That meant the owner didn’t live there.
“This caretaker,” I said. “Has he been there a while?”
“Well, of course, I’d have no way of knowing that. I’ve never met the fella. Foreigner, maybe, but they all are these days, right? Can’t get an American to do manual labor worth a damn. Far as I know he just showed up one day, but we keep to ourselves up here, try to stay out of other people’s business for the most part.”
“Do you have a street address?”
“We don’t really go by numbers so much around here. Ray’s farm is a nice piece of land, more than two hundred acres, but the main house is a wreck, you know? Doesn’t show well, which is why—”
“Where is it?” I cut in sharply.
“It’s on Goddard just past Hubbard Farm Road. You thinking the caretaker had something to do with this?”
“No,” I said quickly.
The last thing I wanted was for the local police chief to show up and start asking questions.
“Because I would be more than happy to take a run over there. Take the four-by-four—that’s a summer road, and it’s surely a swamp by now.”
“No hurry,” I said. “Next couple of days would be fine.”
“You wanna talk to the owner, I can probably rustle up Ray’s number down in Florida, give me a couple minutes.”
“Don’t bother. I know you’ve got your hands full. This is for the database. Routine data entry. It’s what I spend my life doing.”
“Well, it’s important work,” the police chief said kindly. “Somebody’s got to do it. I’m just glad it’s someone who speaks the language.”
I thanked him and I hung up before he could ask anything else.
“Dorothy,” I said fifteen seconds later. “I need directions.”
92.
By the time I drove into Pine Ridge, the rain had slowed to a drizzle. The main highway looked recently built. Its asphalt surface was as smooth as glass, the road crowned, the drainage good. I passed Pine Ridge Quality Auto, which was nothing more than a glorified gas station, and then the Pine Ridge Memorial School, a modern brick structure built in the architectural style best described as Modern High School Ugly. Then a post office. At the first major intersection was a gas station on one side next to a twenty-four-hour convenience store that was dark. At the next light I took a left.
I passed farmhouses and modest split-level ranches built too close to the road. There were unmarked curb cuts, narrow lanes sliced through the woods, most of the roads dirt, a few paved. The only landmarks were mailboxes, most of them big, names painted on, occasionally press-on letters.
About three miles down a narrow tree-choked road I came to a roadblock. Hastily improvised: a couple of wooden sawhorses lined with red reflector discs.
This was Goddard Road. About two miles down this way was the Alderson farm.
If I’d guessed right, it was also where Alexa Marcus was buried in the ground.
And where I might find Dragomir Zhukov.
I nosed the car right up to the sawhorses, clicked the high beams.
The road was rutted, deep mud. Walking the two miles, especially down a road like this, would be tortuously slow, time I couldn’t afford.
I got out, dragged a sawhorse out of the way, got back in the Defender, and plowed ahead.
It was like driving across a marsh. The tires sank deep into the muck, and a curtain of water sprayed into the air. I kept it in third gear and drove at a steady pace. Not too fast, not too slow. You don’t want to be in too low a gear when moving through mud. Drive too slowly and you risk water seeping into the exhaust pipe and flooding the engine.
Gradually the road became a narrow dark lane choked with tall pines and birches. The only illumination came from my headlights, which skimmed over the river of mud.
The car performed like an amphibious vehicle, though, and soon I was halfway there.
Then the tires sank in a few more inches and I was finally stuck.