With a warble of a siren, a county ambulance pulled up and parked in front of the office. Two techs, large white men, appeared in the doorway and nodded. They spotted Billy and walked to him, to assess damage and mobility.

“Is it broke, my jaw?” Billy asked.

One tech lifted off the icy and bloody towel. “Got to take X-rays first and then only a doctor can tell you after he looks over the film. But yeah, it’s broke. Totally fucking broke. You can walk?”

“I’ll walk. Is anybody out there?”

“How do you mean?”

Dance glanced out the window. “It’s clear.”

She and the others stepped outside and helped the scrawny driver into the ambulance. He reached out and took Dance’s hand in both of his. His eyes were moist and not, Dance believed, from the pain. “You saved my life, Officer Dance. More ways than just one. God bless you.” Then he frowned. “But you watch yourself now. Those people, those animals, they wanted to kill you just as much as me. And you didn’t do a lick wrong.”

“Feel better, Billy.”

Dance found her shield, dusted it off and slipped it into her pocket. She then returned to the roadhouse. She’d tell Bob Holly what she’d discovered but keep the news from Charles Overby until she’d done some more canvassing.

She needed as much ammunition as she could garner.

As she approached the gathered press and spectators outside the club she glanced toward a pretty woman TV reporter, in a precise suit, interviewing a Monterey County firefighter, a solid, sunburned man with a tight crew cut and massive arms. She’d seen him at several other fire and mass-disaster scenes over the past year or so.

The reporter said to the camera, “I’m talking here with Brad C. Dannon, a Monterey County fireman. Brad, you were the first on the scene last night at Solitude Creek?”

“Just happened I wasn’t too far away when we got the call, that’s right.”

“So you saw a scene of panic? Could you describe it?”

“Panic, yeah. Everybody. Trying to get out, just throwing themselves against the door, like animals. I’ve been a firefighter for five years and I’ve never—”

Chapter 11

S ​een anything like this.”

“Five years, really, Brad? Now tell me, it looks like the doors, the fire doors, were unlocked but they were all blocked by a truck that had parked there. A tractor trailer. We can see…there.”

Antioch March lifted his eyes from his present gaze—the pillowcase of fine-weave cotton, six inches from his face—and glanced at the TV screen, across the bedroom here in the sumptuous Cedar Hills Inn in Pebble Beach. The camera from the crew outside the Solitude Creek roadhouse panned to Henderson Jobbing and Warehouse, which was all of ten miles from where March now lay.

A mouth beside his ear: “Yes, yes!” A moist whisper.

On TV, the anchor, blond as toffee, came back into high-definition view. “Brad, a number of victims and relatives of victims are accusing the driver of the truck of negligently blocking the doors, accusing him of parking there to go to the bathroom, or maybe even sneaking in to see the show last night. Do you think that’s a possibility?”