It strayed now to the final year at Sewanee, and for a moment or two I was kneeling in the organ loft of All Saints Chapel, staring blindly at the kaleidoscope-fracture of light streaming through the rose window and wondering if I was really cut out for the ministry.
Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison…
I realized belatedly that I had spoken aloud, and the sound of my own voice, amplified but peculiarly deadened in that constricted area, brought me back to the present and told me that the world in which I found myself was the trunk of an automobile, and the sometimes painful jostling was because the automobile was in motion.
“Sapped,” I said, speaking aloud again without having decided to do so and marveling—in some isolated part of the brain separate from external time and reality—that I seemed to have so little control over the matter. “Sapped down and cuffed and dumped into a car trunk like a bundle of tire tools. What an idiot!”
I heard myself laughing and it was frightening, because it took a while to be sure that it was me and because it was the kind of sound that usually comes from behind the doors of the locked wards and because it all seemed to be getting farther and farther away…
“Okay, sleeping beauty. It’s wake-up time!”
Light streamed into the world and my eye hurt and I turned my head away from it, but the pain was fleeting and after a moment I was able to look up at an oblique angle, and the first thing I saw was Vollie Manion.
It brought a surprising sense of relief. That was how it had been possible to ambush me, wait behind the door and strike me down as I came into the motel room. Vollie. I had never been able to feel his wa, never had any warning about anything he was going to do.
He was standing over me now, dimensions somehow distorted—perhaps by the angle at which I was viewing him—and there was something else different about him, too, something that did not fit. But I was given no chance to analyze. He reached into the trunk, lifted me out with a kind of appalling ease, and set me on my feet.
I fell down.
“Get up, Preacher,” he said in a voice empty of passion, “or I’ll kick your ribs right through your lung.”
I looked down at him and knew at once what had changed. It was the eyes. They were different, wider and rounder, and they seemed to be laughing, a cold and soulless mirth that had no joy in it and no remorse and no sense of life at all. I rolled obediently onto my face and gathered my legs under me and managed to stagger to my feet, feeling a trifle foolish and apologetic at having made such a production of it.
“See there! I knowed you could do it.”
He looked me up and down. “How we doin’, there, old-timer,” he said, reverting to the Gomer Pyle impression he’d done for me at our first meeting. “Little shaky on the pins, are we? Kindly twitchy? Well, now, I know what’ll do wonders for that. Sho! Y’all just turn around here a minute and let me get them cuffs off.”
My sense of relief was humiliating.
My mind was still filled with oatmeal, and somehow it had just skipped over the fact that my hands were manacled behind my back. That was why I’d had so much trouble getting up. I turned slowly, moving like a man twice my age. It was the dream again, the one where you are the only one in slow motion, and I could see the little man who is the real me running up and down on the sidelines in some unimaginably remote place, watching all this and wringing his hands and screaming for me to come to life and get moving before they let the lions loose.
But as soon as my back was toward the deputy, I had something else to think about.
Dana was about twenty feet away, sitting on the ground with her arms handcuffed around a cottonwood tree.
The cut on her mouth seemed to have stopped bleeding, but there was a deep bruise on her right cheek and chin, and her nose was swollen. The eyes she turned toward me contained no hope at all.
Even after I was on my feet again, my movements were too slow to suit him, and Vollie let me know about it in a forthright and direct manner, planting a foot in the middle of my back to send me sprawling beside the tree next to Dana. I tried to roll with the direction of the fall, but the tenderness behind my ear turned out to be more than the minor blackjack-lump I’d hoped. Contact with the solid earth triggered new lightning bolts at the edges of creation and brought a sudden darkening and constriction of my already limited field of vision.
“Hug the tree, Preacher.”
I extended my arms around the bole, and he replaced the cuffs with that same joyless twitch of a smile he had shown me before.
I took a deep breath.
First things first.
Something was wrong with the world: It kept having earthquakes that only I was aware of, twitching and bucking at unexpected moments. I settled myself against the bark and concentrated on getting it to stop.
Vollie didn’t seem to care what I did. He walked back to the car—a nondescript Volvo I had never seen before—and reached into the trunk cavity I had lately occupied.
I kept an eye on him while working in the back of my mind to stop the earth tremors, and in that way discovered the identity of the resilient mass I had been wedged against during the ride to this place.
It was a man I had never seen before and, watching closely, was sure I would never see again.
Vollie had manhandled the torso and head upright and aside to get at something he wanted in the bottom of the trunk, and the body reacted in that sack-of-clothes way that always means the same thing.
I wondered who he might have been and how he had come to such a pass…and abruptly recalled Frank Ybarra’s mention of having borrowed an accomplished urban tracker from the Albuquerque police to keep an eye on his suspect deputy. Evidently Vollie was better at spotting a tail than his boss had thought.
Vollie finally managed to wrestle the corpse aside and uttered a grunt of effort as he tugged a pick and shovel free and leaned them against the car’s back bumper. Then he released the torso and swore as it jammed against the side of the trunk lid instead of falling back into its initial position.
I looked over my left shoulder at Dana. She was almost outside my field of vision.
“Can you hear me?” I said in a voice I hoped was too soft for Vollie to hear.
For a moment there was no response, but then her head nodded. Slowly.
I fought my way around to take a closer look. Her mouth opened and closed and opened again like a goldfish’s, but no sound emerged. I noticed bruises on her neck and shook my head with enough violence to fire off the lightnings again.
“Don’t try to talk,” I said.
Her movements subsided and her gaze drifted back to the ground and her eyelids sagged. I looked at Vollie Manion. He was armed and he was in good condition and he was in control of this situation.
And I decided then and there that he was dead.
“Okay, there, Preacher. That’s enough sleeping on the job. Time for work!”
Some time had passed, but I didn’t know how much. The sun seemed a little brighter. I turned my head slowly to look up at the deputy. He smiled in that new cold and feral way and fumbled with a key ring affixed to the retracting clip on his belt.
His image was no longer distorted and the world was still around me. No visual temblors. I had been doing mental sorting games with my toes and fingers and legs and arms, and I was in control of them once more. But I took care not to display the slightest agility or coordination as I got to my feet, keeping my gaze on the ground and my shoulders weary. Not much of a hole card to go on with. But all I was going to get, and all a competent player ought to need. I heaved myself more or less erect and let everything sag a bit to one side. But Manion didn’t try to help. He kept his distance.
“Trouble with you city boys,” he said, rattling the pick and shovel he’d retrieved from the car trunk, “is you don’t never get enough exercise. So I thought of a fun thing we could do…sort of a limbering-up thing? Get the blood flowing, like they used to have me do in the army.”
&
nbsp; He dropped the tools to the ground and stepped away, drawing the service revolver from its holster and holding it loosely in his right hand.
“Pick ’em up,” he said.
I bent, and made a point of losing my balance, falling to one knee as I followed his orders.
The shovel, I decided, would be about right for what I had in mind. It was the long-handled kind, with a sharp leaf-shaped blade.
“What I want you to do now,” Vollie was saying, “is to dig me a trench. You ever do that kind of work before? Sho not…I forget. You a man of the cloth, and they don’t never get no palm calluses, now, do they? Well, what I want is, I want you to take that pick and break up the ground, and then I want you to dig a trench there, two feet wide and, oh, six, seven feet long. Big enough for two.”
The last words seemed to amuse him mightily, touching off another fit of that chilling, joyless laughter.
I dropped the shovel beside me on the ground, swung the pick clumsily aloft, and sank it into the solid red clay at my feet.
“They’ll be looking for us by now,” I said, standing in the beginning of the trench and laying aside the shovel for a moment to get out of my coat. “Ybarra will be after you. The Spences and Marilyn Prescott will be wondering what became of Dana and me.”
Vollie Manion just grinned at him.
“And they’ll get curious about him, too,” I said, nodding in the direction of the car trunk.
He went on grinning.
The deputy was leaning lazily against another of the trees in the little grove where he had brought us, the pistol swinging easily at his side. If I’d had the shovel in my hand right then, he’d have been in range. But I didn’t and he wasn’t and he knew it.
“Killing us isn’t going to get you off the hook,” I said. “Ybarra knows you murdered Prescott. He can’t prove it yet, but he knows, and that’s why the man in the trunk was following you.”
That got his interest a bit; he hadn’t expected me to know the identity of my recent bunkmate. But it didn’t seem to dent his confidence.
“You’re wrong about that, Preacher,” he said, the death’s-head grin now a permanent fixture. “Killing you and the girl—when I’m done with her—is going to take me off the hook real good, thanks to that neat little bag of money you was carrying.”
I stepped back into the hole and picked up the shovel, and I don’t think my movements were any shakier or less certain than I had been making them ever since he unlocked the handcuffs, but he had shaken me all the same. What with one thing and another, I had forgotten all about the attaché case and its contents. The legal papers would be no use to him, though their disappearance would cause no end of trouble back in Farewell. But there was more than a million in cash, and even at present-day prices a million can buy a lot of running space for a man who knows how to use it.
“Turned in your rent-a-car,” he said, swinging the revolver carelessly by its trigger guard. “Took the keys back to the motel desk when no one was out front. They’ll use the credit card receipt you signed and check the mileage and sign you off and never know a thing.”
I put down the shovel and used the pick to break up another square of sod, staggering a little with the weight. He watched me without notable interest.
“What’ll happen,” he said, “is they’ll figure you and the girl took the money and lit a shuck for Vegas. I mean, why not? You bein’ a gambler-man and her being a hooker.”
My good eye went toward Dana and I saw her shoulders stiffen when she heard the word. She did not look up, but I filed away the information that she was at least alert and reactive. It could be important.
“Reckon you knew that, didn’t you?” Vollie said, enjoying himself. “About her being a hustlin’ broad and all? Sho, you’d never know, lookin’ at her, would you? But I seen the telex record ol’ Frank Ybarra got back from the Vegas PD when he messaged them. Workin’ at a legitimate job nowadays, there in Vegas, but had a license for more’n a year out to the Ranch, that fancy whorehouse town they got over there, before that. Musta been a doozy. You ever go there, Preacher? I did once’t. Didn’t see her, but whooo-ee!”
He nodded with pleasurable memory.
Dana’s head was up now, the eyes alive again. But she was looking at me, not at Vollie, whose back was toward her. I gave her a covert smile—and a wink of the false eye—when that side of my head was turned away from him. I wasn’t sure she saw it, but it was the best I could do.
“The way it’ll go down,” he said when he was sure he’d sucked the last drop of entertainment from the last word, “is that they’ll get to wondering in a while where you two have gone, but they’ll just check the police over yonder and they’ll say they haven’t seen you, and they’ll go to checking at Reno and Tahoe and maybe at that little town—what do they call it? Best Licks! Sho…they’ll phone someone in Best Licks to see if you there, but that’s all there’ll be. For a while.”
I thought about it, and he was wrong. The bank messenger would know something was wrong when I didn’t hand Dee Tee’s money back to him on schedule, and he would call Dee Tee and Dee Tee would tell Ybarra…and the search would begin in earnest right then.
But it would still be too late.
“The Albuquerque police will want to know what happened to their man,” I said, hefting another spadeful of dirt. “They’ll come looking.”
“And they’ll find him,” Vollie said. “Right where he is now. Dead, in the trunk of his own car. Parked at the Albuquerque airport.”
It was a good, workable plan—given the information at his disposal and the million in cash—and even with the early start the others would have, I decided he would have a good chance of being out of reach before they got things sorted out.
Somehow or other, I had to distract him long enough to make just one all-out move.
“No good, Mr. Deputy,” I said, leaning into the shovel and grunting with the apparent effort. “Too many killings. First Prescott. Then Bobby Don. Then the rented cop from Albuquerque. Then us. That’s four. Five, if your friend Boo—Commencement, you said his name was—if he dies, too. They’ll call it mass murder and it will get a lot of TV news time and newspaper ink, and there won’t be any place on earth far enough or lonely enough to hide you.”
The thought seemed to sober him for a moment, and he spat on the ground before him and his gaze locked into the middle distance.
“Had to kill Prescott,” he said. “Tunk him on the head and put him in that whirlybird. Didn’t know I could fly one of those things, did you, Preacher? Learned in the army; they cross-train the door gunners in case of trouble. Flew him to that field where I’d left my car and set the collective and away he went.”
The memory seemed to restore his good humor, and he turned another one of those arctic grins in my direction.
“Had to kill him for the same reason I got to kill you. For my daddy…I knew from the first why my daddy couldn’t tell anybody I was his’n,” the deputy said. “It was my ma. Dirt, she was. Not a bad woman and not mean. But common as New Mexico mud. Never did know how she got close enough to a man like J. J. Barlow to have me…but I knowed it was him from the first time I could read. When I saw his name on the checks that come every month for my board and keep.”
I stopped work to look at him.
“The checks,” I said. “That’s how you knew J. J. Barlow was your father?”
“Sure thing. Why for would he send the money if it wasn’t for that? And they kept coming even after Ma died. I knew one day he’d come around, see that I was like him and not like her, and own me. He would’ve, too, if he hadn’t got all busy with the gawdam football player the way he did. So when Prescott got in Daddy’s way—I knew about that land deal he was into, used to follow him around without him knowing—I got him. And then there was you…”
The hole was getting deep, and I was standing in it. Too deep to make the kind of play I needed to make. But the other end of the trench was too far from Vollie and his
gun. Somehow or other I had to get out of there and stand in range with the shovel still in my hand and the gun not pointed directly at me.
I risked a glance at Dana.
She was still looking at me, not at Vollie, and I reached out to try to touch her wa. It was open, but in pain. The return echo showed me terror and rage and despair that were almost an overload for the senses. I tried to tell her what I wanted, but knew it was no use. That kind of communication takes years. A lifetime. And we’d had only a day…
“What about me?” I said.
Vollie’s eyes refocused, turning in my direction, but the grin persisted.
“You killed my daddy,” he said. “Killed him just as much as if you took a gun to his head. I got no reason to stay behind in Farewell, now he’s gone. But I couldn’t leave without putting things square. A man owes that to his daddy…”
It was time.
I wiped my forehead with an arm and hefted the shovel as if to move to the other end of the trench, stepping casually up to ground level to do it, and spat dryly into the broken earth.
“Bullshit,” I said.
The pistol firmed in the deputy’s hand, pointing at my belly, and I guessed the caliber at .44 or .45, more than enough to knock me down if it hit me there. But it was the last chance I would ever get.
“J. J. Barlow your daddy?” I said, shaping the tone for maximum insult. “Not in this world!”
Dana was fully alert now.
There was probably no chance at all that she’d received the message I’d been trying to send. But she knew I couldn’t let him kill us without some kind of return effort, and if she understood that, she might see that this was the time and that her position—behind Vollie, where he would have to move something more than his head to see what was going on—was perhaps our sole remaining asset.
“Barlow was a sucker,” I taunted. “A born loser! Him your daddy? Hell, boy, that crippled pussy couldn’t have sired a ten-pound turd.”
The Preacher Page 29
