And then they were back in the car, heading north.
Empty spaces gave way to suburban sprawl. Houses, all haze in the contrast of glaring light and deep shadow, whizzed by. There was perhaps slightly more Kine out than would have been expected for a summer night - but the lingering heat no doubt kept many up; and those who had fled the scorching rays by day had to come out at night...
Suburban sprawl (a shifting mirage of old and new, rich and poor, commercial and residential) gave way to the brash lights of the city's heart. Tall buildings; shop fronts; empty offices with their lights set to minimal. Here and there, a flat screen pressed to a window, blindly running some advertisement or newscast.
West, across the bridge (the thrum and rumble of metal and concrete over water) and then north through West Sacramento: a jumble of residential and commercial lots mixed together under the glowing weight of a ziggurat and hemmed in by the river.
The Safehouse was near the river, close to the confluence of the American and Sacramento Rivers. There was a mucky, murky, park whose landscape had been remodelled by the rise and fall of the waters running through Sacramento's urban heart. This part of the neighbourhood looked poor and felt poor. The buildings were old, cracked, damaged. Empty lots yawned threatening and unnatural in the packed space.
The Safehouse itself was a battered old house in a block of old buildings. A few of the other houses were still lit (a bedroom glowing dimly behind rouged curtains; an even dimmer glow from a downstairs window where someone has left a TV on in a darkened room; an abandoned light on a desolate porch). The Safehouse is dark. As they cruise the neighbourhood they discover the Safehouse as an overgrown backyard that ends at empty lot made treacherous by the remains of walls.