He sighed. Maybe he should start writing again. At least give it a shot. Before he dried up completely. He did have several unfinished short stories and the first forty pages of a novel sitting in the bottom right hand drawer of his desk at home.
"Hey!" Brad poked his shoulder and Gordon looked up. "What's the matter?"
Gordon shook his head. "Fuckin' rain," he said.
Brad grinned hugely and grabbed a can of Pepsi from the ice chest between them, loudly popping it open. "I always liked rain myself.
Goddamn heat's what I can't stand. Makes me sweat, makes my balls itch, makes my skin break out, drives me crazy."
Gordon pulled himself away from the window and grabbed his own can of Pepsi. He smiled sarcastically. "That's why you moved to Arizona."
"Northern Arizona," Brad corrected.
"Well why didn't you move to Oregon or Washington if you like rain so much? It rains all the time there."
With the back of his hand, Brad wiped away a thin stream of cola that was dribbling down his beard. "I like the seasons here," he said. "I
like the scenery." He laughed loudly. "And this is where Connie's old man wanted to set me up in business."
Gordon laughed too. He knew Brad and Connie did not exactly get along.
As Brad often pointed out, theirs had been a marriage of convenience, and he had been only a few steps in front of the shotgun. Still, it hadn't worked out that badly. Connie's father had been granted the Pepsi distribution franchise for the entire Rim area, fully a third of Northern Arizona. He was already rich, having made a killing in the feed and grain market somewhere in Idaho, and he had offered Brad both the franchise and a loan to start the business if he would only marry his daughter. Now Brad was almost as well off as his father-in-law, and he could afford to treat Connie the way he did.
"Slut's probably spreading her legs for every man in town," he was fond of saying. Gordon knew Connie and knew what Connie looked like, and he didn't think so, but he himself said nothing.
The truck wandered over the double yellow line as they came barreling down the last hill before town, and a Volkswagen traveling in the opposite direction beeped its horn at them. "Fuck you!" Brad yelled, raising his middle finger.
"I don't think he heard you," Gordon pointed out. "Your window's closed."
"I don't care."
Gordon smiled. "And you were going over the line."
Brad snorted. "I don't give a shit. It's the principle of the thing."
They passed a Speed Limit 35 sign almost hidden by bushes and Brad slammed on the brakes. More often than not, Jim Weldon or one of his stooges would be hiding in the dirt pull off just beyond the sign, waiting for speeders. It was a speed trap, the limit dropping suddenly from 55 to 35 that way, but it was a well-known speed trap and all the locals were aware of it. Only flatlanders and out-of-staters ever got caught. Brad glanced at the pull off as they passed by. "What do you know," he said. "No cops today." He automatically sped up to 45 and looked over at Gordon. "Listen, do you have to get home right away, or do you have time to stop for gas? Tank's empty and I'd like to get 'er filled up tonight."
"No problem," Gordon said. "I get paid by the hour."
"I'll make it quick."
They drove through Gray's Meadow and pulled into Char Clifton's station on the edge of town. Clifton himself came out as the truck ran over the rubber-coated cable that rang the bell inside the garage. The old man walked slowly, shuffling toward them as they both hopped out of the cab. He looked from Brad to Gordon. "How's it goin '?" he asked, wiping his greasy hands on an equally greasy rag.
"Not bad," Gordon replied.
The station owner spat a wad of chaw that landed just to the left of the truck's right front tire. He squinted up at Gordon as if thinking.
He spat again. "Heard the news?" he asked finally.
Gordon looked at Brad, who was inserting the unleaded gas nozzle into the tank, and shook his head. "What news?"
Clifton grinned, exposing tobacco-yellowed teeth. "You know Father Selway?" he asked. "Out at the Episcopal church?"
"Yeah." Gordon did not go to church, but he knew Father Selway .
Everyone did.
"Skipped town," Clifton said simply. "Him and his whole family. Left behind about five thousand dollars in debts."
"Bullshit!" Brad yelled.
"I don't believe it," Gordon said.
"It's a fact."
"What did they do? Just pack up their stuff and go?"
Clifton's eyes shone, and Gordon could tell that he was enjoying this.
"That's the weird part. They didn't take nothing at all. All their furniture, clothes, everything is still in the house. The front door of the place is still open, even. Only thing gone is their car."
Gordon shook his head. "Then how do you know they just didn't go off somewhere for a while? Maybe there was a family emergency or something and they had to take off immediately."
"There wasn't."
"How do you know something didn't happen to them?"
"Drive by the church," Clifton said.
"What?"
"Drive by the church."
Brad pulled the nozzle from the gas tank, hung it back on the pump and screwed on the gas cap. He walked over to where Gordon and the station owner were standing. "Why?" he said.
Clifton chuckled. "You'll see."
Brad paid the old man and they got back into the truck. They pulled onto the highway. "You in a hurry to get back or do you want to check out the church?" Brad asked.
"Let's check it out."
They drove into the main part of town, past the Circle K, past the Valley National Bank. They turned right just past the Randall Market. The bumpy and barely paved road curved through a small stand of trees before straightening out near the hospital. A mile or so farther and they reached the Episcopal church. Brad stopped the truck.
GOD DAMN YOU ALL
The words jumped out--a harsh and jagged red against the placid tan of the brick building. The letters were fully three feet high, covering the north wall of the church, the paint dripping in horror-show icicles. The church's two tall stained-glass windows had been smashed, and multicolored bits of glass littered the gravel parking lot.
GOD DAMN YOUR SOULS
TO HELL PIG FUCKERS
Gordon felt his pulse accelerate as he looked through the windshield at the desecration. The small peach-fuzz hairs on the back of his neck bristled. His eyes focused on the small shards of colored glass glinting in the sunlight. He had never been an avid churchgoer, but this.. ..
GOD DAMN YOU ALL
He looked again at the message, his eyes following the dripping red paint that obscured the letters on the lower portion of the wall. And he realized suddenly that it was not paint.
"Goat's blood," Carl Chmura confirmed, sticking his head through the doorway of the sheriff's office. "The lab just called."
Jim Weldon stopped massaging his tired temples and looked up. "All right, Carl. Thanks." He slowly stood up, grabbing his hat from the rack next to the desk and putting it on. "Wait a minute," he said.
"Carl? Call some of the local farmers and ranchers. Check up as far as Turner Draw if you have to. See if any of them have any goats missing."
Carl nodded. "Gotcha."
"Oh, and try Selway's number one more time. Let's give him another chance. I'm going out to the church to see if there's anything we missed. I'll stop by the hospital on my way back and find out if any of the patients saw anything." He grabbed his holster from its hanger on the wall and buckled it on. "Call me if you find something out."
"Will do."
Jim looked around the office, his eyes searching the room as if there was something he had forgotten. He absently patted his pockets. He knew there was something that had slipped his mind, but he couldn't for the life of him remember what it was. He shook his head. This case was really rattling him. Nothing like this had ever happened in his town before--nothing like this had ever happene
d in any town he'd ever heard of--and he wasn't quite sure what to do. He was just playing everything by ear. He'd already contacted Tim Larson, and Tim was going to clean up the blood and the rest of the mess. And he'd called some glass workers in Flagstaff who were supposed to come up next week with some new fitted windows. But there was still something he was forgetting.
He sighed heavily and followed his deputy out the door into the hall.
He opened the small alarmed gate that separated the back of the building from the front and walked past the front desk toward the sliding double-glass doors that led out to the parking lot.
"Wait a minute! Sheriff!" Rita, sitting by the switchboard, waved him down. "I have the diocese on the line. You wanted to talk to them?"
That was it.
"Yeah. Thanks," he said. He turned back down the hall. "Switch it to my office. I'll take it in there." He walked into his office and picked up the phone, punching the blinking square light of line three.
"Hello. Sheriff Weldon here."
"Mr. Weldon? This is Bishop Sinclair. I am returning your call."
"Hello Bishop." Jim's mind quickly ran down his list of options. He could chat casually with the bishop, easing into the news. He could come right out with it, plunge right in. He could pull a Jack Webb, take the official line. He decided to plunge right in. "Has Father Selwaybeen in contact with you at all today?"
"No he hasn't."
"Then you don't know what's happened up here?"
The bishop's voice sounded wary. "No. What happened?"
"The Episcopal church has been vandalized. Some person or persons unknown smashed all the windows, tore up the landscape --"
"The Episcopal church?"
"That's not all of it." Jim paused for a second, not quite sure how to proceed. "You see, Bishop, someone painted . . . curses all over the front of the building."
"Curses?"
"In goat's blood."
There was a long silence on the other end of the line. "I got a call from Tim Larson this morning," Jim continued. "Tim's the janitor out at the church. Anyway, he told me that the church'd been hit, told me to get over there as soon as I could. I--"
"What kind of curses?" the bishop asked.
"You sure you want to hear this?"
"I'm sure I've heard such words before, Mr. Weldon. I've probably used them myself."
"There were three lines. The top line said, "God damn you all." The next line said, "God damn your souls," and the bottom line said, "To hell pig fuckers "God damn you all. God damn your souls to hell pig fuckers It covered the whole front of the building." The bishop said nothing.
Jim cleared his throat. "That's why I was calling you. You see, we don't really know what happened here, and we were wondering if Father Selwayhad contacted you at all."
The bishop's voice was quiet. "No he hasn't. But he should have. What did he say to you about it? Does he have any idea as to who might have done such a thing?"
Jim cleared his throat again. "Well, that's the thing, Bishop. We don't know where Father Selway is."
"You don't know where he is?"
"No. Tim tried to call him first, before he called me, to tell him what had happened, but no one answered the phone. Then when I went out to the house around a half hour later, no one was there. The whole family was gone. The front door of the house was open, but the place was empty. A team's out there now, investigating the house, but it doesn't appear that anything happened to the family. The Selways’ car is gone, and we have reason to suspect that they might have used the car to drive somewhere."
The bishop's voice grew suddenly cold, stern. "What exactly are you trying to say, Mr. Weldon?"
"Nothing, Bishop. Like I said, we don't know what happened. At this point, we'd just like to talk to Father Selway and see if he knows anything about this."
"What are you implying?" His voice was a monotone, but there was a threat in that monotone, a suggestion of rigid enforceable authority.
Jim closed his eyes, beginning to feel a tinge of frustration. There was nothing he hated worse than civilians who tried to throw their weight around, who tried to tell him how to do his job, but he kept his voice even, modulated, official. "I'm not implying anything at all.
It's just that--"
"Don't you think something might have happened to the Selway family?
They might have been kidnapped."
"We're investigating all possibilities, Bishop. But to be honest, at this stage of the investigation Selway looks more like a suspect than a victim. We found his fingerprints all over the church."
"Of course his fingerprints are all over the church. It's his church."
"Bloody fingerprints?"
He could almost feel the bishop's anger through the silence of the line.
"Bishop?"
"Yes?"
Jim cringed at the coldness of the voice. "We just want to talk to Selway right now. That's all. If any charges are to be filed in this matter they will have to be filed by the church."
"You are right there, Mr. Weldon."
Jim looked at his watch. "Look, I'm supposed to be over at the church in a few minutes. Do you think you could give me a call if Father Selway gets in touch with you in any way? Or if you hear anything at all?"
"Of course." There was a half-moment of frozen silence. "And Sheriff?"
"Yes?"
"I will be sending a temporary parish priest to assume Father Selway's duties until such time as this affair is cleared up. I will also be sending someone out to look at the damage. Could you please let the parishioners know that services will be continued?"
"Will do. And I'll call you if anything--"
There was a click as the receiver went dead.
"--comes up." He slammed down the phone, cursing the bishop. "Asshole," he said aloud. Just who did that old bastard think he was? God? He grabbed a pencil from the desktop and walked out of the office, snapping the pencil in two and dropping the pieces into the sand-filled ashtray in the hall. He nodded to Rita as he passed again through the front office. "Anyone calls, you tell them I'll call them back."
"Okay."
Why did this have to happen in his town? he wondered as he walked out to the parking lot. Why couldn't it have happened in Pay son or Prescott or Camp Verde? He strode toward the new car at the far end of the lot. This wasn't a small town sort of occurrence. This was something that should have happened in New York or Los Angeles, in one of those big cities with weird cults and gangs.
He unlocked the car, got in and fastened his seatbelt. Turning on the ignition, he jammed the transmission into gear and took off, back tires squealing as he peeled out of the parking lot toward the church.
Clay Henry had been a rancher all his life, like his father and grandfather before him. But he had never seen anything like this.
Clay grimaced and spat. He could taste the blood. It hung thick and heavy in the air, dank and fetid in the mid-morning heat, penetrating his nostrils, engulfing his senses. He felt as though he were drowning in it. Before him, in the brown and trampled grass of the field, all six of his goats lay slaughtered, their throats ripped open by some crude instrument. Blood was everywhere: on the ground, on the matted hair of the carcasses, on the feathers of the two clucking chickens that had come out to investigate. He could see individual, congealed drops of blood on the long stalks of meadow grass at his feet. From the yawning hole in the throat of the nearest goat there protruded a twisting ropelike en trail that wound along the red-spattered dirt like a deformed and bloated snake. It looked as though whoever had ripped open the goat's throat had afterward stuck his arm into the bleeding opening and reached all the way down into the dying body to pull out its guts. Lengths of intestine hung out of the other five bodies as well.
A chicken pecked idly at a blood-soaked piece of intestine and Clay kicked it, sending it flying. The chicken screamed wildly, uselessly napping its feathered wings, and ran squawking back to the barn.
Clay ran his tong
ue over his teeth and gums, tasting again the blood, and spat to clear out his mouth. Already the flies had come. There were hundreds of them, seemingly every fly in the county, and they were swarming over every available spot of blood, flying spastically up at each movement that he made and then settling once more onto the carcasses. The field was quiet save for the flies--even the chickens were silent--and Clay felt .. . not exactly fear, but a strange sort of dread. The same feeling he'd had right before his accident, when he knew in those final seconds that the two cars were going to hit and there was nothing he could do about it. The buzzing grew louder in his ears and he looked down at the mutilated animals. He spat again. He knew he'd have to get this mess cleaned up as quickly as possible, before the carcasses started breeding disease and affecting the rest of the animals, but he thought he should call Jim Weldon first. The sheriff would want to know about this.
A strange mechanical coughing sound suddenly grew out of the buzzing, becoming louder, and Clay looked up. Across the field he could see a cloud of dust rising from the dirt road that led to the house. Someone was coming to see him. He squinted, trying to make out who it was, but he couldn't see from this far away. He listened, and he recognized the loud sputtering engine of LorenWilbanks ' truck. What could Loren want? he wondered. He stood for a moment, watching the dust cloud move toward his house, then, holding onto his bad leg with his right hand, started limping back across the field to where the truck had pulled to a stop.
Loren was waiting on the porch steps when Clay rounded the corner of the old barn. The tall gaunt farmer had been absently and nervously juggling two small pebbles in his hands, staring out across the north field at the broken skeleton of a windmill, but he jumped to his feet as he saw Clay approach, throwing the pebbles into the dirt. He picked up his hat as he rose. "Where'n Christ have you been? I been tryin ' to call you all morning."
Clay limped over to the steps and grabbed the wrought iron rail for support. He pulled a red bandana handkerchief from the right front pocket of his overalls and used the handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his forehead. "Someone slaughtered all my goats," he said. "Ripped out their throats."
The Revelation Page 2
