The Thirteenth Skull

by Bonnie Ramthun

  There was a dust cloud, faint and far back. Joe would never have seen it if Ted hadn’t pointed it out. Behind them was a string of cars, summer tourist sedans and recreational vehicles and an occasional truck. Ted passed a slow moving truck pulling a trailer and as he cut back onto the two lane highway Joe realized there wasn’t more than a three second gap before the oncoming traffic swept by. The day, hot and clear and cloudless as all the previous ones, made the road waver like silver water in front of them. Joe realized he was running with sweat. Ted had turned off the air conditioning, to give maximum power to the engine. Joe remembered an episode of Star Trek where Captain Kirk had his crew cut all power except to the shields. The crew had waited, sweaty and frightened, until the Klingons had made the fatal mistake of –

  “I told you Joe was run off the road,” Lucy said crisply. “By a man and his companion. Evidently these two are responsible for the deaths in my missile defense file. Here’s Radar Hill Road.”

  Ted made the turn and accelerated up the hill, passing a truck in a no-pass zone and sending Joe’s heart into his mouth. He turned his mind with difficulty back to the conversation.

  “I thought the missile defense file was classified,” Joe said to Lucy.

  “He’s my husband, Joe,” Lucy said with a shrug. Her face was still pale and strained but she no longer looked as though she was going to throw up. “And of course I’m not supposed to discuss anything with him. But still, there are some parts of my life he knows about.”

  “I guess I see the point,” Joe said. “Eileen knows what I do, too.”

  “The fat man, getting back to business here, may be a very successful hired killer,” Lucy said. “We need to lose him in Rapid City so he doesn’t find his way to the ranch…”

  “He won’t,” Joe said. “Eileen said her parents have a mailbox address in Hulett, remember? That’s all they could find, even if they know about Eileen’s folks.”

  There was a brief silence in the car as Ted negotiated another hair-raising passage, this time of an ancient camper. The last curves of Radar Hill Road were approaching quickly. Joe chewed unhappily on his lip. It was Lucy who finally voiced what they were all thinking.

  “So how did the fat man know about you, Ted?”

  “I was just thinking the same thing,” Ted said. “I told Cindy and Bob that I was going, they’re taking care of Fancy and watering the plants.”

  “Fancy!” Hank said suddenly. “Zilla!” Joe glanced around and saw Hank smiling. He’d obviously decided that traveling sideways didn’t hurt, so he had adapted. Lucy had shifted over so that she was sitting next to him on the back seat. She’d put her seat belt on but she still had her body ready to shield her son’s.

  “That’s right, Fancy the dog. Who else did you tell?”

  “Nobody,” Ted said, puzzled. Then he raised his eyebrows. “Oh, wait. The dress shop called from Colorado Springs. They said they needed to get your measurements again for your bridesmaid’s dress, and I told them—”

  “That you’d have me call them. That you were going to see me,” Lucy said heavily.

  “That must have been the fat man or his plank friend,” Joe said. “They have some way of looking at airline reservations. This means they know that Lucy is Eileen’s matron of honor. They have her name and address. And that means they know that Eileen is my fiancé, and that means—”

  “They’ve been in Eileen’s apartment,” Ted said flatly. “We can’t try to lose them in Rapid City. We’ve got to stay ahead of them.”

  “They’ll just get ahead of us and wait on I-90, if we try to go into Rapid City,” Lucy said. “Or get to Hulett ahead of us and wait for us there.”

  “Eileen said she was going to Hulett today, to talk to some of the locals,” Joe said. His hands were clenched around the seatbelt that crossed his middle. He tried to sound as calm as Lucy and Ted.

  “So it’s a race,” Ted said. “One that I think we can win. Once I open her up on the Interstate there’s nothing that’s going to catch us.”

  “Unless they have a helicopter back up,” Lucy said.

  “In which case, you dump me and run for it,” Joe said.

  “I don’t think so,” Lucy said hotly.

  “I don’t either,” Ted said. “We dump Lucy and Hank, and you and I run for it.”

  Joe saw Lucy open her mouth, eyes flashing. Then she closed her mouth and bowed her head. She patted Hank gently on his tousled curls.

  “Then they pick Hank and I up and all of a sudden your options are even worse,” she said. “No, we’re going to have to stick together on this one.”

  Joe leaned back in his seat and looked up at the canvas top of the Mustang. Here the car showed some age; the canvas was faded to a soft gray above him. He tried to think of a way out but he could not. He could think of a dozen ways to handle this in the movies; a look-alike Mustang, an empty truck with a ramp out the back, a fake storefront in Hulett with a hidden garage in the back… every idea would require as much preparation as a movie set. There was nothing they could do, the four of them, except run as fast as they could.

  “We’ll swing through Hulett and pick up Eileen,” Joe said. “Then we’ll get to the ranch. They won’t be able to find it.”

  “They will, eventually, you know,” Ted said gently.

  “I know,” Joe said grimly. “By that time, we’ll have worked out a plan. We just need some time.”

  “Just a little time,” Lucy said.

  “Then let’s rock and roll,” Ted said. “Here’s the Interstate.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Interstate 90, Rapid City, South Dakota

  “Well, this isn’t going well,” Rene said tightly. They’d switched cars in Rapid City and were now certainly well behind Joe Tanner and his friends. Ken, wisely, said nothing. Rene was in a towering rage. So close, and they’d missed Joe Tanner again. They hadn’t had a chance to get to their weapons, checked nice and legal in their baggage. Guns are perfectly acceptable on airlines as long as they’re declared, unloaded, and safely inside checked baggage. Their unloaded and therefore useless guns sat on the ground in their bags as Rene and Ken had struggled to get to their feet. The humiliation of being dumped off their feet by a paunchy English teacher was just about the worst insult of all. How had he reacted so quickly? He was even quicker than Joe Tanner, who’d fought desperately as they’d forced his car off the road. Ted hadn’t known who they were until Tanner started shouting, and yet he slipped from their grasp with all the liquid grace of an eel.

  “We’ll get them,” Ken said.

  “Yes,” Rene said. He concentrated on driving in the heavy midafternoon traffic.

  At the airport they’d stolen an Oldsmobile with an elderly couple still in it, two people who’d just seen their grandchildren on the plane back to Dallas, Texas. The couple was still alive, against Rene’s wishes. Ken had prevailed, arguing that a stolen car would provoke a cursory search but a murdered set of grandparents would set off a manhunt. Ken had been doing a lot of research into the Black Hills area. He recommended keeping a low profile.

  With no chance of catching Joe Tanner and his companions, they abandoned a high-speed chase. Ken found a substantial sedan in a motel parking lot and with the help of a frightened desk clerk, got the keys to the motel room of the sedan’s owner.

  The sedan, a late model Chrysler, was luxurious enough for Rene’s tastes. They left the grandparents, the Chrysler’s owner, and the desk clerk in the hotel room, bound and gagged and terrified. But alive.

  Rene still didn’t think leaving the people alive was a good idea, but Ken was adamant. A stolen car wouldn’t start a manhunt like a motel room full of dead people would, and they still had to find and kill Joe Tanner and his annoying girlfriend Eileen Reed.

  With the Chrysler and a new, stolen set of plates at a gas station down the road, they made a stop at a supermarket for a portable cooler, food and drinks and ice. The chase was now a steady hunt. They were set for about twenty-fou
r hours. By then the job would have to be done.

  Interstate 90, Spearfish, South Dakota

  “So how did you two meet, anyway?” Joe said. Lucy took a swig of water from Joe’s distilled water bottle. Lucy didn’t feel so much like throwing up, now. Still she couldn’t stop thinking about what would have happened if she’d gotten out of the car. Her seat belt had been unbuckled at the airport. She was ready to get out when Joe started shouting. What if Joe hadn’t seen the fat man, if he’d been rummaging in the glove compartment for some chewing gum, or if he’d been drinking water and hadn’t seen the two killers? Would Hank be alive at this moment? Probably not, Lucy kept thinking sickly. Probably not.

  The highway unreeled in front of them, almost impossibly fast. Ted had the speedometer at a trembling 94 mph, just shy of a very large ticket. On an Interstate where the top speed was supposed to be 75 this wasn’t too extravagant. On the other hand, there were slow moving trailers and recreational vehicles dotting every mile. Ted wove through these like a slalom skier, passing so quickly and deftly that Joe was sprawled out in the front seat, as comfortable as if they were traveling to a picnic lunch.

  “We met at a wedding,” Ted said. He looked relaxed, but Lucy could see the bunched line of his shoulders. She could also see the lift of his eyebrows and the smile that curved his mouth ever so slightly. He was having a great time. Ted could have been a race car driver, she’d thought before, if he’d been born in to a racing family instead of a criminal one. She’d never shared this thought with him before because that had been a secret between them. Lucy patted Hank on the head and gave him another animal cracker. He was upright again. Once they’d gotten through Rapid City Ted had allowed her to raise his car seat and adjust him so that he was sitting. She knew how to tip his car seat over and protect him. At any second she was prepared to do that.

  “My brother’s wife, Carolyn, her sister was getting married. Larry’s actually my cousin; he’s my aunt’s son. He always wanted a little brother and then I turned up. I taught him how to drive, and now you know how funny that is.”

  “I can stop pretending that I don’t know why you’re such a crazy driver,” Lucy offered, catching a microsecond of Ted’s glance in the rearview mirror. His eyes were crinkled and she felt a rush along her body as sweet as cool water. He wasn’t angry with her. He was all right with her. They were all right. Everything was going to be all right.

  “So Carolyn’s sister is getting married and I got dragged along to the wedding. They knew I was single and Carolyn’s sister had lots of girl friends. The old matchmaker story.”

  “One of the girlfriends was Lucy,” Joe guessed.

  “You got it,” Lucy said. “I didn’t catch the bouquet. I was already off in a corner with Ted, talking about Shakespeare.”

  “Not a word of which I remember,” Ted said. “I was trying not to stumble around in circles and dribble spit down my chin. I was gone, babe, the moment I saw you.”

  “I’d kiss you right now, but I don’t think it’s the right time.”

  “Not at 94 miles per hour, no,” Ted said. “But consider yourself kissed anyway.”

  “Ah, that’s what bothers me,” Joe said. “I always thought about you as being the regular guy, you know, Ted the English teacher. Nothing surprising about Ted. Among all these weird and brilliant people I know, you seemed the only normal one.”

  “Should I say thanks to that?” Ted asked dryly.

  “Why would I marry a dull man, Joe?” Lucy asked in surprise. “I know it seems strange, a cop’s daughter marrying a criminal’s son, but –”

  “Criminal’s chauffeur, if you please,” Ted interrupted. “Joe, everyone is weird and brilliant in their own way and their own time. I figured that one out long ago. Maybe it was my lifestyle when I was growing up. Every seemingly dull person you meet has some incredible moment in their lives, something that happened to them that would make your mouth fall open in astonishment if you knew about it. Everyone does. And if it hasn’t happened to them yet, it will.”

  “Some have fewer dull moments than others,” Joe said. “Still no sign of them?”

  “No sign,” Ted said. “We’re going to come up on Highway 111 in about twenty minutes. If there’s backup of some kind, that’s where it’ll be. Let’s get ready.”

  Lucy was breathing quickly in fright and readiness when Ted took the Mustang off the highway in a long, tearing curve. The tires made a thin, high squealing sound and as he straightened out on the northward highway he shifted abruptly over to the right side of the road. They passed a slow-moving recreational vehicle in a single gulping roar, kicking up a cloud of dust that made Ted say something under his breath that Lucy hoped Hank couldn’t hear. Then they were on the clear highway and away, already at sixty miles per hour and accelerating.

  “Highway 24 in 9 miles,” Ted said. “What’s the road like up ahead?”

  “Twisty,” Lucy said.

  “There’s a lot of curves,” Joe said at the same time.

  “Is there an exit onto Highway 24, or a stop sign?”

  “Stop sign,” they both said again, and grinned at each other.

  “Okay,” Ted said. “What is that, off to the left?”

  Lucy looked and saw a deer browsing in a hollow. Two fawns cropped grass with her, fawns as delicate and lovely as a drawing. She caught a millisecond of a view before they were gone, lost in the backstream of the speeding car.

  “Those are deer,” Joe said. “I’m amazed you spotted them.”

  “I’m trained to spot things,” Ted said, a delighted smile on his face. His eyes remained cool and watchful, flickering between the road and the mirrors. “Those were real deer, huh?”

  “There’s more where that came from,” Lucy said, thinking of Tracy’s flower garden. “Tomorrow morning I’ll show you a whole bunch of them, right outside the window.”

  “Whoa,” Ted said. “I’d like that.” He looked left, then right, and took a hard left turn onto Highway 24, ignoring the stop sign that sat at the intersection of the two highways. For a few minutes there was silence as Ted drove at impossibly fast speeds on the twisting two-lane highway.

  “Do you think I could ride a horse, too? I’ve always wanted to do that, never had a chance to, yet,” Ted asked, as they came down a corkscrew section of road. He had both hands on the wheel but he looked utterly relaxed.

  “Considering the circumstances, I’m not sure we’ll get a horse ride this trip,” Lucy said, smiling at the back of her husband’s head. “But we’ll come back for the wedding this September, and we’ll come up here, I promise. We’ll get a horse ride then, won’t we Joe?”

  “You bet,” Joe said. Lucy could see the muscles in his jaw bunching as he set his teeth. “We’ll party like –”

  “What the hell is that?” Ted said, and Lucy could tell the measure of his speed by the way the Mustang skidded, back end loose and frighteningly out of control, at a single twitch from his hands on the wheel.

  “Don’t do that!” Joe cried, sitting straight up in his seat, face white.

  “Sorry,” Ted said. “But what the hell is that?”

  “Devils Tower,” Lucy said, looking on the horizon and seeing the humped, looming shape of the Tower. She looked away after a second, unable to keep her gaze on the thing.

  “We can’t see it from the ranch,” Joe said. “Lucy and I agreed that we liked it that way.”

  “That’s Devils Tower,” breathed Ted, taking tiny glances away from the road so he could look at the vision on the horizon. “I saw it in that old movie, you know –“

  “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” Joe said. “Yeah, I know.”

  “It’s very big,” Ted said. He took the Mustang down a corkscrew road and sighed when the horizon swallowed the view of the monolith. “I think I’m glad, too, Luce. That’s one big piece of rock.”

  “We’re coming into Hulett,” Joe said, sitting forward in the Mustang. “Get ready to look for Eileen.”

&nbs
p; Hulett, Wyoming

  Eileen was standing on the sidewalk of Hulett’s one main street, talking to Sheriff Richard King, when the Mustang shot by them. They both stopped talking, mouths open, as the Mustang squealed like a pig. The tires left extravagant black skid marks on the highway and the Mustang rocked to a stop in a cloud of gray smoke.

  “Holy shit,” Eileen said. She had spent the day investigating her own personal murder theory, most of it in the one local bar but for the last two hours with Sheriff Richard King.

  The bar was the easy part. The Fawcetts, the bar owners that she’d known as a girl, were long gone, but the new owners knew Paul and Tracy Reed well enough. They were a couple from Minnesota and they thought Wyoming was quite tropical. They spoke in the soft, singing accent of the Minnesotan, and they’d turned the smoky dim little Sportsman’s Bar into a scrubbed clean tavern called the Tower Pub and Grill. Most of their business came with the summer tourist traffic but they kept up a good clientele of locals during the winter months.

  The summer day was hot and cloudless and the Tower Pub’s small grouping of tables was packed.

  “I’d love to talk, but we’re just swamped,” Lisa Olsen told Eileen. She was short and plump, with blonde-gray hair braided in a crown on her head. Her face was pink with the heat and the exertion. Her eyes were china-blue and kind, but she was obviously strained. “We lost a short order cook yesterday so I’m trying to handle tables and the kitchen, too. Maybe later this afternoon?”

  “I waited tables all through college,” Eileen said, holding out her hands. “I’ve been scrubbing dishes at my mom and dad’s business, so how ‘bout I pitch in?”

  Lisa Olsen blinked twice at Eileen, then grinned and shoved her waitress pad and a pen in Eileen’s hands.

  “Bless you, child,” she said. “Give me an hour and when the lunch crew clears out I’ll tell you whatever I can remember.”