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front gate a quarter mile away. It sounded like two cop cars in tandem wailing away, suddenly not a salvation, but another new threat.
    Zelov yanked Iso away from the pot tree. “Cumon, let’s go. We’ll discuss this later. Right, Driving Hawk? We’ll talk about the pot dispensary, Pipe Dreams? We could really use a top scientist like you to help us out with all the tagging and labeling and shit like that.” Zelov pushed a button on a radio attached to his cut. “Toddler Tyke, Toddler Tyke, this is Big Kahuna, do you copy? What’s your location? We need to make like a baby and head out.”
    Lytton felt as though his brain was bleeding. Of course he knew Cropper Illuminati. Everyone in Arizona knew Cropper Illuminati. He had died last year in a strange accident down near the Mexican border. He had been president of the huge Illuminati Trucking empire and owner of a buttload of other businesses in and around Pure and Easy.
    And president of The Bare Bones motorcycle club, the Cutlass’ mortal enemy.
    Iso sneered. “Prez of The Bare Bones. Yeah, you heard right. You’re a spawn of those twisted motherfucking Boners, so we shouldn’t even be doing business with you.”
    Iso didn’t even need to add the rest. It was all like so much water off a duck’s back as Zelov grabbed his sergeant-at-arms and dragged him down the aisle of white buckets toward the front door.
    Lytton barely heard what Zelov was saying. Now he felt like holding onto the marijuana trunk for dear life.
    “You walking hard-on. Don’t you have the sense God gave you? We need Driving Hawk on our side, not going over to the enemy. We need his fucking expertise. He knows all that weatherman shit like climate control, lighting, and airflow…”

CHAPTER THREE
    JUNE
    “I ngrid has pancreatic cancer.”
    For weeks on end now, I had imagined sitting next to Madison and giving her Ingrid’s diagnosis.
    Not once had I expected it to be like this.
    For one, we were sitting in an airplane hangar. Yes, one of those old decrepit airfield hangars with all the broken windowpanes, the no air conditioning, the corroded underground storage tanks leaking jet fuel into the soil.
    Built in the forties on a flat butte on Mescal Mountain, now the hangar was headquarters and corporation yard for Illuminati Trucking—and also, apparently, The Bare Bones biker club. I had forgotten how much I loved the red sedimentary rocks of the Pure and Easy area. Looking now out the window I could see the upthrust plates of hematite-stained strata where erosion had eaten away the softer sandstone underneath, leaving grand, dramatic citadels and towers of rock.
    These were the sorts of hills Madison had slept in as a forgotten kid, and I wondered how she was able to handle the view. However, it wasn’t even the same person who sat next to me now. For one, she had ten years of responsible, practical nursing experience behind her. I could see it in every plane and curve of her face, the maturity, the responsibility.
    I know it sounds corny, but you have to know it was nothing short of a miracle that we’d both made it out of there alive. Madison was poetically calling the old Cottonwood ranch house our “House of Early Sorrows” for all the grief it had caused us. It was a downright fucking miracle that we both hadn’t turned to drugs or prostitution—or worse, turned into a twisted, bitter old witch like our mother. Against all odds we had risen from that muck—and now Madison even had a baby!
    It sounds even cornier to say a baby is a miracle, but Fidelia truly was. She toddled around Ford’s office in her achingly adorable little tennies, at that age where she had the need for speed. She had her father’s lush, black mane of hair, satiny curls tumbling over her shoulders. There was a wedding photo of the two of them on Ford’s desk, and I was surprised how much it wrenched my heart to see his devilishly handsome face again.
    I had never found anyone to love the way Maddy