Ghost Dancer

by John Case

  The Diamondbacks were at bat.

  In a corner of the bar, a poker game was in progress. An old woman—her scalp visible beneath her thin red hair—pulled listlessly at one of the slots near the door. Burke bellied up to the bar, where a weedy man in a camouflage jumpsuit lifted his chin with a questioning look, as he dried a glass.

  “Beer,” Burke said.

  “Sierra Nevada’s on draft. Coors Light, Bud, Bud Light—”

  “Sierra Nevada would be grand.” He was so tired that he didn’t really want to get into it. What he wanted was to go to bed. So he was halfway into his second beer before he got up the gumption to ask the question.

  “You know a guy named Jack Wilson…lives around here?”

  The bartender eyed him warily. “Who wants to know?”

  Burke was about to answer, when one of the poker players looked up and laughed. “What do you care who wants to know, Denny? It’s not like the guy’s a friend of yours.”

  “Maybe not, but what do you care if I care?” the bartender asked. “Play the fuckin’ game.”

  “Yeah! Play the fuckin’ game,” one of the other players said.

  “You in or not?” asked a third.

  Burke didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  The bartender put a glass of beer in front of him, and raised an eyebrow. “So?”

  Burke took a sip. “Jesus, that’s good.” After a moment, he added, “Mike Burke.”

  “Denny.” The bartender polished another glass.

  Burke sighed. “Wilson’s foster mother is sick.”

  “No shit,” the bartender replied, his voice thick with skepticism.

  “No,” Burke said. “Really, she’s in a trailer, over in Fallon. The only address she had for him is a P.O. box. I said I’d try to find him, but…”

  “She ain’t been up here?”

  Burke shook his head. “No. But he hasn’t been up here all that long himself.”

  The bartender thought about this for a moment. “About three, four months is all,” he said.

  “Building a plan-e-tar-i-um,” one of the poker players remarked.

  “He’s not building a planetarium,” the bartender corrected, “he’s just building a place for a telescope.”

  “Big difference,” the poker player declared. “He’s still stargazin’.”

  The bartender ignored everyone, his eyes on the television.

  Burke wanted to get to the point, but he sensed that if he tried to rush it, he wouldn’t get anything out of these men.

  “I’ll bet he’s stargazin’ right now,” said one of the players at the card table. “You got your solstice tomorrow. Longest day of the year.”

  “That concerns the sun,” the bartender told him.

  “Uhhh, Denny?” the poker player said. “The sun’s a star?!” The other players at the table laughed.

  The bartender turned to Burke. “This foster mother,” he said, “she doesn’t have his telephone number?”

  A shout rose up from around the card table. “H-whoaa! The Bat was bluffin’! The Bat was bluffin’ your ass!”

  The lady at the slot machine came over to the bar and pushed her glass toward Denny. She had the wistful eyes of a child, and a weather-beaten face. She was forty or sixty, Burke couldn’t be sure. The bartender mixed her a 7 & 7, then turned to Burke and pointed west.

  “It’s about sixty miles,” he said. “Nice place. National forest all around him.” He drew a tiny map on the back of a coaster, keeping up a running commentary as he made it. “There’s a blue trailer on your right, all beat to shit. Got some of them pink flamingo statues in the front. You see that, you hang a left, and it’s about fifteen miles from there. You’ll see the sign over the fence. B-Lazy-B. Can’t miss it.”

  “Bullshit!” someone exclaimed.

  The bartender smiled. “Well, yeah, I guess you could miss it, but…” He handed the coaster to Burke. “What are you drivin’?”

  Burke shrugged, and laughed to himself. “I forget. It’s a rental.”

  “Off-road?”

  “No.”

  The bartender leaned back. “But it’s an SUV, right?”

  “No. It’s just…a sedan.”

  An incredulous wince. “Well, that’s gonna be exciting.”

  The slot machine gushed, and a siren went off. A waterfall of coins crashed to the floor. The woman just stared.

  “You want one for the road?” the bartender asked.

  Before Burke could answer, one of the poker players corrected him. “You mean one for the goat track!”

  Everyone laughed.

  Burke, too.

  CHAPTER 49

  Burke rolled the trip counter in the dash to zero, and took it slow.

  He had to. The road was so washboarded that twenty-five miles an hour amounted to reckless driving. He could taste the grit in his mouth, and he was thirsty. But there was nothing he could do about it. He’d forgotten to bring any water—not good planning if you think Armageddon is just around the corner. Or, more accurately, up ahead and to the left.

  Somewhere around the thirtieth mile on the trip counter, he began to yawn. It was the beer, he told himself, a self-indulgent mistake. He turned on the radio. All he could get was a country-and-western station out of Boise. He turned it up, but it didn’t help. A couple of times, he almost nodded off, but was jolted awake by a pothole. He rolled down the windows.

  The effect was instantaneous. The freezing desert air hit him in the face like a bucket of ice water. Falling asleep was no longer a danger. What with the noise, the dust, and the cold, he was uncomfortable enough to stay awake without having to work at it. And the stars were amazing. Distinct and glittering, with the Milky Way draped across the night like a bridal veil.

  He rolled up the windows, thinking he’d rather die in a crash than freeze to death. At least, it would be quicker.

  Three hours later, he was hunched over the steering wheel, using his windshield wipers against the dust and bug spatter. He was looking for the blue trailer with the pink flamingos, and he was worried. Wilson’s ranch was so isolated that surprise was out of the question. He’d see the headlights from a long way off, and even if Burke were to kill the lights (without somehow killing himself), the noise was inescapable. The car sounded like an avalanche of rebar tumbling down a mountainside.

  If he saw the ranch soon enough, he could leave the car and walk in. But “soon enough” was a big question mark in the wide-open spaces he was driving through. And if Mandy was right about this solstice thing, Wilson wouldn’t be asleep at all. He’d be getting ready to dance.

  He’d fire the transmitter at first light, Burke thought. And that would be the end of it.

  Though, who knew what Wilson was planning to do. If he wanted, he could probably vaporize half the country, à la Tunguska. Just clear-cut the place, from sea to shining sea. But he won’t do that, Burke told himself. Wilson was about the Ghost Dance, and the Ghost Dance was all about the land. Loving the land. So it wouldn’t be Tunguska on a grander scale. It would probably be a reprise of Culpeper, but bigger. If Wilson could permanently disable the electrical and electronic infrastructure of the country, it would be a disaster of geological dimensions. Nearly every economy in the world would crash, and millions would die. People everywhere were dependent on modern technology for everything from food and water to transportation, medicine, and lighting. It would be the end, if not of the world then of the last five hundred years of progress. It would be 1491, all over again.

  The idea was so outrageous that Burke didn’t want to take it seriously. It kept spinning away, like the radio signal out of Reno. The body count in San Francisco had “stabilized” at 342. Police were looking for…

  A new signal overrode the old. Repent.

  Ten minutes later, a clusterfuck of pink flamingos materialized in the headlights in front of a darkened blue trailer, about fifty feet from the road. As Burke drove past, he saw that someone had sprayed the trailer with the
words, “Bad Dog!” written large.

  Two miles farther along, Burke turned left as he’d been told to do, and immediately, the road got worse. The washboards were now so tall and deep and insistent that it seemed to Burke that the car’s undercarriage wouldn’t be able to take it. Then the road rose up, and the car began to climb the side of a mountain—a feature the bartender had sketched as an inverted V.

  His ears popped as he maneuvered through a series of hairpin turns, his headlights strafing the mountainside on his right, then shining off into the abyss on his left. Suddenly, a jackrabbit sprang into the car’s path and, reflexively, Burke slammed on the brakes.

  Big mistake.

  The car began to surf, riding the washboards, even as its rear wheels fishtailed out of control, spraying gravel. The sedan was moving on its own now, sliding over the road as if it were made of ice. Its relationship to the steering wheel and brakes was suddenly theoretical. In the end, the only thing that stopped the slide was the mountainside itself. The car slammed into a runoff beside the road. The chassis shrieked. There was a thud, a crunch, and the sideview mirror was airborne. Then the car came to a sudden and complete stop, one headlight shining toward the stars, the other in smithereens at the base of a wall of red rock.

  Burke took a deep breath, and looked out the window, where the jackrabbit was contemplating with satisfaction his destruction of a once serviceable Nissan Sentra. Burke didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but was leaning toward the latter. At least I wasn’t going downhill, he told himself. If he had been, the skid would have taken him over the edge.

  He tried the ignition.

  Again and again. But there was no way it was going to start, and even if it did, Burke doubted he’d be able to get the car out of the ditch. Not without a tow truck. And even then, it wouldn’t be drivable.

  He leaned in through the driver’s window, and squinted at the trip counter: 51.2. That meant he had about nine miles to go before he got to the ranch. About.

  Not that he had any choice. Reaching into the car, he grabbed his new “cell phone,” and started walking.

  It was harder than he’d expected, because he couldn’t really see. The road itself was easy enough to distinguish because it was paler than the abyss to his left and the rocks to his right. But whenever he tried to pick up the pace, he stumbled over rocks or stepped into a pothole. Twice, he went sprawling, and turned his ankle badly enough that it hurt like hell. He was thirsty, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it. A cloud of gnats hung in the air around him. They didn’t bite, but they got in his eyes, forcing him to stop and knuckle one out every few minutes.

  After an hour of this, he began to cramp up.

  It seemed like forever since he’d left the saloon in Juniper, but when he looked at his watch, he saw that he’d been gone only about five hours. During that time, he’d thought a lot about what he was doing, and why. His obsession with finding Wilson, he decided, wasn’t really about saving Tommy Aherne’s business. That was just an excuse, and even Tommy didn’t believe it. Eventually, the courts would resolve the matter, and that would be the end of it. No, Burke’s interest in Wilson was deeper, and darker than that. It was…what? The good guy’s version of “suicide by cop.” Burke’s pursuit of Wilson was suicide by terrorist, and it amounted to the same thing.

  He hadn’t wanted to live anymore. Not without Kate. Or so he’d thought. But somewhere along the line, this had begun to change. Slowly, and then all at once. He didn’t know when it had happened. There wasn’t a moment when everything changed. These stars…

  So all of a sudden, he needed a plan about what to do when he got to the ranch. Because getting himself killed had suddenly lost its attraction. Trudging over the uneven ground, he thought about it long and hard; and slowly, a plan began to form. And it was pure genius: first, he’d get inside. And then he’d knock Wilson out.

  It was five fifteen a.m. when he reached the entrance to the ranch, which announced itself with a sign on a lodgepole over the driveway. The sign read “B-Lazy-B.” Cute, Burke thought.

  About half a mile up the drive, a smattering of landscape lights glowed in the darkness. Over to the east, or what he guessed was the east, the sky was beginning to fade from black. One by one, the stars were winking out.

  Burke crunched up the drive, alarmed by the noise his footsteps made. It wasn’t really bright enough to see very well, but the house was something, a sprawling stone-and-timber affair set in a little mountain meadow. A rustic mansion that reminded Burke of something you’d see at an upscale ski resort. Jackson Hole, maybe, or Telluride.

  Flagstone steps curved through a grove of pine trees to the front door. Burke avoided them, and went around to the back, where another door opened onto the kitchen. He felt like a burglar, and worried that the snare drum in his chest would give him away. He tried the door, and it opened easily. They’re in bed, he decided. Which didn’t make sense, unless Burke was wrong about the solstice, or unless Wilson had changed his mind.

  He stood in the kitchen with the phony cell phone in his hand, and waited for his eyes to adjust to the absence of stars. In the silence, he imagined the faint sound of music, as if there were a radio, way off in the woods. Then he moved quietly through the house, room by room, praying that Wilson didn’t have a dog. Would a stun gun even work on a dog? Was fur a conductor?

  Wilson’s bedroom—number five, by Burke’s count—was at the far end of the house. The bed was unmade, and a flowered bridal tiara rested, wilting, on a vanity crowded with little bottles of perfume. Beside the tiara was a photograph in a silver frame. Burke studied it in the moonlight.

  It was a picture of Wilson in a tuxedo, with his arm around a blonde in a wedding dress. They were standing together in a gazebo, surrounded by flower arrangements, and Burke saw that she was wearing the tiara he’d found. Outsized gold and silver bows decorated the posts on either side, and a wall of candles burned in front of a stained-glass window. Burke couldn’t tell if they were inside, posing on a kind of movie set, or if they were outdoors. But the affection they felt for each other was unmistakable. They were radiant. Beaming.

  And somewhere else.

  Burke sagged against the window frame. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He’d come all this way, and there was no one home.

  He let himself out, and began to walk back the way he’d come. It was over now. Except…there was that music again, and the sound of laughter. It was a woman’s laugh, he thought, but…where was it coming from? He turned in his tracks, this way and that, but it was gone now, muted by a breeze through the pines.

  Then he saw it—a smudge of light in the treetops. A tall structure with crisscrossed timbers. It looked to be about half a mile away. It was a tower with a room at the top. Like Wardenclyffe.

  On the horizon, the mountains were silhouetted against a pink seam that was just beginning to form. Burke turned toward the tower, and continued walking, certain that Wilson was there with his weapon and his woman.

  As a bird began to sing, he picked up his pace, thinking, Not good, not good. He hurried on, but he was so tired that his progress was slow. Every once in a while he had to stop, hands on hips, his breath coming in ragged heaves. He was at a high altitude and he wasn’t used to it.

  And then he was there, at the base of the tower. He waited a minute until his breath came easier, listening to the muffled voices and music above his head.

  Then he took to the winding staircase, and began to climb. He was doing his best to be quiet, but the steps were metal and he might as well have been banging a drum.

  “Jack?!” It was a woman’s voice, and there was alarm in it.

  Burke paused, and activated the stun gun. Then he resumed climbing, faster now, heading for the little cabin atop the superstructure. Access was through a hole in the floor above his head, a kind of trapdoor that was open. In the darkness on the stairs, it seemed to Burke that he was climbing toward the sun.

  The music was gone
now.

  Two more flights of steps. He paused again to catch his breath, and stared at the door in the floor. The only way to enter the cab at the top was headfirst. If Wilson had a baseball bat, he could swing for the fences, and that would be the end of it.

  Burke weighed his options. He could go up. Or he could go down. He went up, taking the stairs two at a time, arriving finally at the top—out of breath, and with a submachine gun staring him in the face.

  The woman in the photograph was at Wilson’s side, her mouth open, eyes wide with alarm. Behind Wilson, Burke could see what he guessed was the weapon. It looked like a telescope, mounted on a turret. It was aimed at the heavens, through what appeared to be an open skylight. A retractable roof, of sorts.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Wilson asked. “Get in here.” He gestured with the gun.

  Burke came through the trapdoor, moving slowly. Irina backed away.

  He was halfway through when Wilson said, “Hold it.”

  Burke froze.

  “What’s that?” Wilson asked, and stepped on his hand.

  “Cell phone,” Burke said.

  Wilson reached down and took it away. Tossed it onto a chair in the corner. Beckoned Burke to come all the way into the cab. “Who were you calling?”

  Burke thought fast. “Police. They’re on their way.”

  Wilson nodded. “They’ll never get here,” he said. Suddenly, he frowned. “You’re the guy from Ireland.” He laughed, incredulously. “What are you doing here?”

  Burke opened his mouth, but gave up. What was the point?

  Wilson just shook his head. “Irina,” he said, “please sit down. Enjoy your wine.” He gestured to a pair of Adirondack chairs that flanked a small table. On the table were a candelabra, two champagne flutes, and a bucket of ice. A telephone sat on the floor.

  The woman was in a panic, Burke saw. Her eyes flew between the two men. “Is all right?” she asked, her voice trembling.

  “Yeah,” Wilson said with a laugh. “It’s fine. This is Mr. Aherne—”