Cowboy Angels

by Paul McAuley

  Well, Tom could spin fantasies of changing history all he liked. Stone would travel with him back into the Real, but he had his own ideas about chasing down the people at the heart of GYPSY. It wouldn’t matter if Tom refused to give up their names, because Stone already had a way in. The woman who had developed the time key, or whatever it really was, the woman whose doppels Tom had assassinated. Dr Eileen Barrie.

  Still, as he brooded about what he needed to do and how best to do it, Stone couldn’t help remembering the way his hand had cramped around the time key as it opened up like a malignant flower, its seemingly infinite depth and its baleful stars . . .

  They reached the state line late in the afternoon. The road surface changed and a sign informed them that they were entering the Republic of Texas. Linda took the wheel for a spell. A few miles on, Stone saw chickens pecking amongst the thin grass by the side of the road. As the station wagon slowed to a crawl, he saw chickens on the road, a scatter of broken crates, a pickup slewed nose-down in a ditch. A chicken flew at the windshield in a panicky whir, bumped against it, fell away. Chickens strutted away on either side as the station wagon nosed through them. Chickens perched on fence posts. They were scrawny, bedraggled, and mostly white, with scaly legs and red-rimmed eyes and yellow beaks.

  ‘Stop a moment,’ Stone told Linda. ‘I’ll go check it out.’

  ‘Keep moving,’ Tom said. ‘This isn’t anything to do with us.’

  ‘Someone might be hurt,’ Linda said, and eased the station wagon to a halt.

  Stone stepped out into a thin cold wind. The pickup was tilted into the ditch like a sleepy animal. As he walked toward it, a lanky kid in a sheepskin jacket stood up, dusting the seat of his jeans. Chickens stuck their heads through the slats of crates in the pickup’s loadbed. An old man slumped in the driver’s seat, white hair combed back from a creased brown face that rested at an angle on the steering wheel as if peeking up at the sky.

  ‘He’s dead, mister,’ the kid said. He glanced at Linda, who had climbed out of the station wagon and stood watching them, her red hair blown back by the cold wind that blew from nowhere to nowhere, and added, ‘Reckon he had himself a heart attack. Can you believe my rotten luck?’

  ‘You found him like this?’

  ‘Mister, I was sitting right beside him when it happened. I was hitching and he gave me a ride. We were talking, this and that, and he all of a sudden started rubbing his left arm. He said it hurt something awful, and then he just laid his head on the steering wheel and died. I tried to grab the wheel, but I was pulling against his weight, and that’s how we ended up in the ditch.’ The kid squinted off into the distance. ‘Some folks stopped half an hour ago. They said they’d report it to the cops, said I should stay here. I guess the cops’ll give me a ride into the next town when they’re done here.’

  ‘Sounds like a plan.’

  ‘I guess,’ the kid said, and kicked at a chicken that had strayed close. It fluttered into the ditch with an indignant squawk. A chicken stood on the roof of the pickup’s cab, square above the dead man at the wheel. ‘I thought I’d save money by hitching home. You believe my luck?’

  When Stone climbed into the station wagon Tom said, ‘Satisfied your curiosity?’

  ‘I had this odd human impulse to help,’ Stone said.

  Linda drove slowly through a thinning tide of chickens.

  ‘You always did have a soft heart,’ Tom said. ‘It’ll get you into trouble one of these days.’

  ‘You know that for a fact?’

  ‘Nothing’s certain. If I didn’t believe that, I’d just lay down and give myself up to fate.’

  The land rose in a long sweep. Sparse trees hunched low in the wind, clumps of prickly pear and thorn scrub, scruffy pasture fenced by barbed wire. They drove through a small town in the wake of a thunderstorm, forlorn windowlights scattered either side of a wide street shining like cold steel under the black sky.

  Five or six miles beyond, they pulled in at a two-pump gas station whose raked wooden canopy was crowned by a large sign that claimed this was the last gas for eighty miles. Stone used the restroom at the back of the cinder-block building, then walked past a tow truck and an old car with sun-faded paint and split whitewalls to a cottonwood tree that stood at the edge of a ditch flooded with fast-flowing brown water. Beyond, open country stretched to the horizon.

  A cold wet wind blew in his face. It was the first time he’d been alone all day. It occurred to him that he could wade or jump the ditch, find a place to hide until night fell, circle back to the town, and make his own way to White Sands. The notion was there and gone, leaving an unsettling sense that he was at the creaking centre of the world’s pivot, that each and every footfall could create a new universe.

  Stone walked back to the road. Linda was rooting in the ice chest by the office door and Tom was leaning against the flank of the station wagon, asking the old guy pumping gas if there was a good place to stay up ahead, when the windshield starred and a side window blew out. Stone heard the whoop of a spent slug going end over end and dropped to a crouch; then a tyre exploded.

  Tom was kneeling behind the station wagon now, holding his pistol up by his face. The old guy started toward the office and pirouetted ungracefully and collapsed as the faint crack of the shot that had killed him shivered across the empty landscape. Linda was sprawled flat on her belly by the ice chest. A shot knocked jagged shards from the window behind her and she rolled through the open door.

  Stone did a fast crawl on elbows and knees to where Tom knelt.

  ‘I saw a pickup heading off down a track on the far side of the road,’ Tom said. ‘He must have parked up and walked back and found a position. Sounds like it’s about two or three hundred yards away, and a little to the north and east.’

  ‘Just the one guy?’

  ‘I think he saw a chance to hit us and fucked up. Now he’ll have to try to keep us pinned down until his friends arrive. You can bet he isn’t the only one looking for us.’

  There was about thirty feet of open ground between the cover of the station wagon and the office. The old man lay there with blood puddling under his head.

  Tom shouted to Linda, asked if she was okay.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Keep your head down, honey. I’ll deal with this.’ Tom shucked off his denim jacket, took out the padded envelope that contained the time key, draped the jacket over the nozzle of the gas hose the old guy had dropped when he’d bolted for the office, and pushed it out beyond the station wagon’s bumper. A few seconds later a round smacked into it and he dropped it and shook his hand, saying, ‘He’s a testy son of a bitch, ain’t he?’

  ‘He’s definitely shooting to kill.’

  A car went by on the road, oblivious to the drama.

  ‘He thought he could ambush us and take the time key all by himself, which means he’s either inexperienced or a fool,’ Tom said. ‘What’s in back? Can we get out that way?’

  ‘We’d have to wade a ditch, and then there’s nothing but open country. He may be a fool, but he picked a good spot for an ambush.’

  ‘We can’t sit here. Want to give me some covering fire?’

  ‘I’ve got a better idea. Give me that hose.’

  A round smacked into the side of the station wagon when Stone opened the door. He crouched as low as he could and wet down the front seat, the wind suddenly full of the sweet reek of gasoline.

  ‘I see your plan,’ Tom said. ‘But how are we going to get out of here?’

  ‘There’s a tow truck in back,’ Stone said. ‘Or we could always take the shooter’s pickup.’

  He flooded the concrete apron under and around the station wagon, the gasoline flowing thin and quick and silvery, spreading past the body of the old man. Then he and Tom crawled backward on their bellies, and Tom took out a book of matches and scratched one into flame and set fire to the matchbook and tossed it under the station wagon. The gasoline ignited with a solid thump and then the station wagon
and the two pumps were standing in a sea of bright flames that licked up higher than the top of the canopy.

  Stone and Tom scrambled to their feet and ran to the office, keeping low behind the wall of flame. As Stone dived through the door a round struck the ice chest and made its lid jump. A moment later, the station wagon’s gas tank cracked open and a fireball rolled up into the darkening sky.

  Tom was crouched beside Linda on broken glass to one side of the shot-out window. He grinned at Stone and said, ‘Pretty good for a couple of old men.’

  Stone drew his pistol. ‘If it’s just one guy waiting for reinforcements, I’m willing to go after him. But I’ll need you to furnish some kind of distraction.’

  ‘Use the tow truck?’

  ‘That’s what I’m thinking. Start it up, put it in drive, let it roll forward.’

  ‘And you break out in the opposite direction.’

  ‘I can follow the ditch and then circle around.’

  ‘How are you going to spot him?’

  ‘You might want to let off a few shots in his general direction. It’s growing dark. I should be able to spot his muzzle flash.’

  ‘If you two old men want to know where he is,’ Linda said, ‘why don’t you ask me?’

  While Stone and her father had been pinned down she’d found a pair of binoculars in the office desk and had glassed the landscape, spotting movement behind rocks and brush about three hundred yards northeast of the road. Stone took a quick peek, saw where she meant, and said, ‘It’s definitely doable.’

  ‘Just like old times,’ Tom said.

  ‘No kidding.’

  ‘I hope your stupid machismo doesn’t get you killed,’ Linda said.

  ‘We can’t sit here,’ Stone said. ‘The storage tank could blow at any moment, and the sniper’s friends must be on their way.’

  ‘Not to mention the local law,’ Tom told Linda. ‘Don’t worry, honey. This is what we used to do for a living.’

  They ducked through the rear of the office into a small untidy room with an unmade bed, a sagging armchair and a strong smell of the old man, went through the back door. Stone crabbed along the margin of the ditch, keeping low. When he heard the sound of an engine turning over, he glanced back at the gas station. The station wagon was on fire from stem to stern and the canopy and its sign were burning too, tossing flames and smoke into the darkening sky. Behind the cinder-block building, the tow truck ponderously rolled away into the open ground beyond. There was the faint crack of a shot, then another. Stone jumped up and raced through scrub, his bruised legs stiff as posts, crossed the road in four long strides, vaulted the barbed wire fence, and threw himself flat amongst tufts of grass, his pulse pounding in his head, his breath raw in his throat.

  Just like old times. Absolutely goddamn right.

  Pasture stretched to the low horizon where the little town’s spread of lights shimmered. Lone trees crouched here and there. Stone moved forward in little rushes, pausing behind patches of scrub or sprawling in cold dirt, working toward the clump of rocks and brush that Linda had pointed out.

  He was about a hundred yards away when he heard two shots from the direction of the gas station, then two more. He ran flat out, circling around the rocks, and a man sprang up not twenty feet away, raising a rifle to his shoulder, snapping off a shot that parted the air close to Stone’s head. Stone braced and aimed and fired two quick shots. The man dropped and Stone charged forward, crashing through the brush with his pistol extended.

  The man had fallen against a rock, slumped sideways with his head tipped back and his legs sprawled in front of him. His shirt and the waistband of his khaki pants were wet with blood. One hand curled in his lap and the other was outflung as if reaching for the rifle that lay a yard away. He wasn’t much older than Linda, staring sightlessly as Stone stepped toward him and touched the side of his neck, finding blood there but no pulse.

  ‘Pretty good shooting, for an old man,’ Tom Waverly said, when he and Linda reached the sniper’s position. ‘Any idea who he is?’

  Stone showed him the gleanings from the dead man’s pockets: a pack of cigarettes and a disposable lighter, a roll of bills, a New Mexico driver’s licence with a name and an address that were almost certainly false, and a set of car keys.

  Tom weighed the keys in the palm of his hand. ‘Where’s his ride?’ ‘All we have to do is follow the track,’ Linda said, and pointed north.

  The pickup sat in a dip in the ground a little way down the track. It had Texas plates and a crew cabin and was brand-new, with that new-car smell and less than five hundred miles on the odometer.

  ‘He didn’t follow us from New York,’ Tom said. ‘They must have figured where we’re headed and strung themselves out along the likely routes.’

  ‘It isn’t hard to figure out where we’re going,’ Stone said. ‘There are only two gates in this sheaf; all they have to do is wait for us to turn up at one or the other. Was he working for GYPSY, or is someone else looking for you?’

  ‘It’s all under control, Adam.’

  ‘All I have to do is trust you, is that it?’

  ‘Don’t sull up on me. If we’re gonna get through this, we need some of that old team spirit.’

  ‘When where you ever part of a team?’

  Linda was looking toward the distant flicker of the burning gas station. ‘I think I heard a siren,’ she said. ‘We should get going.’

  ‘We have to get rid of his body,’ Stone said. ‘We don’t want the local cops finding out he’s the exact double of someone.’

  Linda drove the pickup back down the track, and Stone and Tom Waverly lifted the dead man between them and laid him in the loadbed. Blue lights small as stars prickled near the pyre of the gas station. The two men climbed inside the pickup and Linda swung it around and drove off across the dark land toward the last of the sunset.

  14

  After night overtook them, they drove by the scant light of a sickle moon, headlights off, bumping slowly over rocky ground as they picked a way through gaps in rolling ridges and followed the flat land between. When they reached a dry river bed that ran between stands of small juniper trees, Stone got out and walked beside the pickup, guiding it down the rough slope. It took them an hour to dig a shallow pit, loosening sand and gravel with the handle of the pickup’s jack and scooping it out with their hands. They buried the man with his rifle and covered the mound with flat rocks and Linda said a few words over the grave while Stone and Tom Waverly stood with their heads bowed. They shared water from a plastic bottle lodged in the well of the driver’s door, slept as best they could in the crew cabin, and set off again in the grey light before dawn, soon striking a ranch road that led south to a paved highway.

  They abandoned the pickup in Amarillo, washed up and breakfasted on huevos rancheros in a Mexican greasy spoon, stole a green four-door Oldsmobile from the employees’ section of a supermarket parking lot, and headed west along the I-40, passing through the Pecos into New Mexico, and taking the I-25 south toward Las Cruces. The sky shimmered blue and cloudless above bluffs of red rock and slumped fans of rubble where little grew but ocotillo and catclaw. The muddy Rio Grande snaked close to the road, bent away again.

  Stone was jittery with anticipation and lack of sleep. His bruises and burns had kept him awake most of the night, and the miasma of a dream still clung to him. He’d been walking down a road that cut through vague, dark countryside and someone had been walking behind him. He could feel the warmth of her presence like sunshine on his back, but knew that if he looked around she would no longer be there. And so he kept walking through the darkness until he reached a crossroads, and turned to ask which way he should go, and found that he was alone.

  A dry wind was blowing through Las Cruces. Dust from Mexico hazed the air above the low buildings and left the taste of iron in Stone’s mouth. Tom Waverly purchased a road map, bottles of water, and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s at a general store with bars across its window and gang signs spray-pa
inted on its walls. They ate tacos at a roadside stand hung with ristras of red chillies, then found a gun shop, a small place with an old-fashioned glass counter and the heads of antelope, mule deer and a single mountain lion arrayed on its whitewashed adobe walls. They bought a twelve-gauge Winchester pump-action shotgun and boxes of double-ought buckshot shells and ammunition for their pistols, .38 hollowpoints and .45 ACP hardball loads. The clerk told them that they would need a licence if they were going after antelope and Tom gave the guy a shit-eating grin and said that they were planning to shoot rock doves.

  ‘You’d be better off with number four birdshot,’ the clerk said. ‘That double-ought will shred a bird.’

  ‘We plan to kill ’em, not eat ’em,’ Tom said.

  Back in the hot, stuffy car, he unfolded the map and started to show Linda where the gate was.

  ‘I know,’ she said. She was tired and tense, and had been quiet for most of the day. ‘Mr Stone told me all about it. There’s a turnoff twenty-one point eight miles west of Alamogordo, marked by a mailbox painted red. A track leads to a cabin, and the gate is set amongst rocks about a mile to the south.’

  ‘The duty caretaker is one of GYPSY’s people,’ Tom said, folding up the map. ‘We’ll have to deal with him.’

  Stone said, ‘There may be more than one guy. By now, they must know we killed one of theirs.’