No Immunity by Susan Dunlap Page B

only doctor for miles. The keeper of the safe house had to have had medical emergencies before this one. The only reason for the safe-house keeper not to know Jeff Tremaine was if that keeper was Jeff himself. She smiled. That would fit the principled man.
    And his wife, how would she feel about that? Kiernan nodded thoughtfully: Jeff would be the type not to tell her—on principle, of course.
    She shifted restlessly in the backseat, and watched as Potter reached for the radio knob, then seemed to remember that there were no other stations from which a deputy might choose. She eyed him. “Do you have any water?” she asked, going for the most innocuous question in the desert.
    “Yeah, but I can’t give you the bottle back there. You’re just going to have to dribble it down the wire mesh. You can hardly get enough that way to know you’ve drunk.” The guy was positively garrulous.
    “Let me try. Jeez, I keep thinking of that poor woman who died. You know what her throat looked like?”
    He was tempted, she could tell. He wouldn’t have seen the body. As soon as Jeff called him, the sheriff would have shoved it back in the freezer and locked the door. By now the dead woman would be the main topic in every bar and cafe in Gattozzi. A lurid detail or two would buy Potter drinks all night. As he poured water from a plastic bottle into a paper cup on the dashboard cupholder, she said, “Poor woman. I guess she was the type who’d go to Dr. Tremaine.” She held the paper cup between her fingers on the driver’s side of the mesh. The water spilled down her shirt, but she managed to drink half of it and realized that she was actually thirsty after all.
    Potter cleared his throat. “Dr. Tremaine—”
    His radio growled.
    “Potter here.”
    “Potter, how soon’ll you be back here?”
    “Half an hour. Maybe less.”
    “Okay. I’m waiting. Ten four.”
    “Ten four.”
    Kiernan kicked the seat back ahead, but Potter was too absorbed with replacing the radio to notice. Her moment was gone. She ran the two words—Dr. Tremaine—back in her mind, but Potter was like a cold engine groaning and sputtering in a way that revealed nothing of the purr it would give off minutes later. Had Potter been about to disparage Dr. Tremaine? Or not?
    Coming up on the right was the Doll’s House. She considered demanding a bathroom stop but vetoed the idea. Even if she could shake Potter, where could she escape to ?
    Ten miles on, they passed a patch-paved road leading to the right. Spikes of gold from the setting sun touched the ground and were gone, supplanted by darker grays. In another mile she noted a macadam road paralleling the first. “What’s back there, Potter?”
    “Just—” He cut off the word as if suddenly recalling his personal no-fraternization rule. “It’s … nothing.”
    “Two paved roads leading to nothing?” She waited a moment, then goaded, “The sheriff trusts you to talk about where roads go, doesn’t he? Triple A can do that.”
    The back of his neck flushed. “It’s one of those military places. State’s chock-full of them. Half the state’s off-limits.”
    “What’s this one?”
    “Navy.”
    “Navy? Here?”
    “Yeah, Great Admiralty of the Sands. That’s just our name for it, not the official one,” he added quickly.
    “Uh-huh. But what do they do there?”
    “I don’t know.”
    There was a sullen stubbornness to his voice, and she knew more questions would be useless. But she couldn’t resist a final try. “I’ll just ask Sheriff Fox. I’ll tell him you pointed them out to me.”
    “Hey, don’t do—” He caught himself, swallowed, and said in a more controlled voice, “Don’t think you can trick Sheriff Fox. He’s real sharp. He’s way ahead of those criminals who think they’re so smart.”
    “Oh yeah?” Keep talking.
    “Yeah.” He shot a glance out the right window and smiled. “Won’t hurt to tell you—everyone knows. There was this high-profile guy,