“You were walking along so slow, Tom,” she persisted. “What were you thinking about?”
He kicked a dried-up horse potato with the toe of his boot and drawled, “Oh, about that time you nearly twisted Franklin Hank’s wiener off.”
Her delighted laughter do-re-mi’d down the scale. Everything about Marie was musical. “I love it when you talk dirty, cowboy.”
“You sure didn’t love it when Franklin Hank talked dirty.”
“There’s a difference. He’s a dirty old man.”
“He’s not much older than me.”
“Oh, don’t play stupid, Abernathy. There’s ten-year-olds who are dirty old men. They’re born, not made. Frank Flinn’s a dirty old man, and no natural woman can abide him. He’s dirty even when he’s clean. Even his eyes are dirty. And that slimy old voice. Flinn could ask a woman to go to church with him and end up slapped.”
They walked along awhile longer, jumping rapidly from subject to subject because Marie was taking the flock a couple miles north to graze in Rattlesnake Canyon and they wouldn’t get to chat again for a week or so.
With all the weirdos acting up lately, Tom wished she wouldn’t go out on the range by herself, but he knew better than to say so. Instead, he told her about the ribbons two of his horses won last week in the barrel races in Victorville, and then they shot a little shit about the new expanded stunt show that had been drawing the tourists to Madland on the weekends. By the time the ditch ran out, they’d also covered self-proclaimed prophet James Robert Sinclair, who insisted that the apocalypse was now, the latest UFO sightings, most of them by Janet Wister’s Space Friends club, and Franklin Hank’s aborted attempt to seduce Frannie Holder, Tom’s horse trainer. (Rumor had it, she’d stuck her riding crop where the sun didn’t shine, but he doubted it since Frank Hank would like that sort of thing.)
“Well, here’s where I head for the hills.” Marie swung herself up into Rex’s saddle. “Time to get the flock out of here,” she added, smirking. She whistled and, when the dogs came running, she raised her arm and pointed toward the hills. “Dorsey, Bill, turn!”
The collies barked once, in unison, then took off, beginning to shift the direction of the flock.
“Amazing,” Tom said. “I bet you could train crows if you had a mind to.”
“Thanks, but I can’t take the credit. The boys are smart.” She smiled gently, watching them work. “Guess I’ll see you in a week or so, Tom.”
He shivered despite the warm spring sunshine. Devil just walked on my grave. “You be careful up there, Marie. Don’t let any snakes in your bedroll.”
“Don’t worry. I’m leaving Franklin Hank down here with you.” She turned the horse, ready to follow the flock.
“Marie?”
“Yeah?”
“Those sheep you lost last month . . . You really think a mountain lion got them?”
“I haven’t found a better explanation.” She paused. “Why?”
“Watch out, okay?”
“Aren’t you an old worrywart today? Sure, I’ll watch out for the kitty. But I’ll be fine. The boys sleep right beside me and the rifle’s on my pack, see?”
“The Space Friends think space aliens carved ’em up, so you better watch out for little blue men, too.”
“Little blue men are better than no men at all.” She gave him an indecipherable look. “See you later, cowboy.”
“See you, Marie.”
He stood there in the middle of Thunder Road, watching until she and her sheep were nothing more than specks against the jagged red hills. He shivered, despite the warmth, the hairs prickling up on the back of his neck again. “You be careful, girl,” he whispered, and started walking again.
His worrying worried him as much as anything. Tom took great pride and satisfaction in his tranquil nature, as well as in the fact that his laconic cowboy act wasn’t much of an act at all: It had become a way of life. “You’ll never amount to anything, son, if you don’t get out there and compete,” his dad had often told him. His father, who had graduated at the head of his class from Harvard, had gone on to become one of the most respected cardiologists in the country. For a man like that, to be stuck with a son who dropped out of college, had no interest in medicine or, worse yet, football, who wanted nothing more than to own a horse and be a cowboy, had to have been the ultimate trial.
He smiled to himself. His dad, though incapable of understanding him, had always accepted him, more or less, and could actually respect him now. He’d begun referring to Tom as a breeder of champion quarter horses ten years before that held a lick of truth. Possibly his father’s stories planted the idea in Tom’s head, or possibly not, but either way, it was a good excuse to surround himself with horses instead of being content with just one. However it had happened, now Tom had a dozen prizewinners (the horses being far more competitive than Tom himself) and they brought in sizable amounts of money, allowing him to pay their trainer, Ms. Frannie Holder (also far more competitive than he) very well to keep them in top form. With Frannie doing the dirty work, Tom was free to spend much of his time at Madland, where he lassoed and did some fancy shooting in the stunt show, taught city kids about the burros and farm animals in the petting zoo, or simply sat around shooting the bull with Carlo or the stunt show people or anyone who happened to be handy.
He indulged in other pleasures as well. During spring and fall, the main tourist seasons, he often rode down to the campground to tell a few ghost stories around the campfire. And just about every week, he had company over to his big open-beamed ranch house with built-in and central everything. People loved to visit, but whether they came for the company, the air-conditioning, or his ranch manager’s skill with a charbroiler—Davy Styles could barbecue a vulture and make it taste good—Tom didn’t really know or care.
But his favorite thing to do was to ride into the Madelyn Mountains with nothing but his bedroll, guitar, and cooking supplies. Sometimes he’d go into Spirit Canyon, at the east end of Thunder Road, where the hills were so chock-full of mineral deposits that at sunset they glowed with copper greens and ferrous reds and purples. Other times he traveled due north, taking the trail that Marie was on now, over the hills and down into Rattlesnake Canyon, a starkly beautiful, eerily isolated area full of Joshua trees and mesquite. Wherever he landed, he’d build a campfire, then pick bad guitar and croon out of earshot of everything but the coyotes. After that, he’d lie back and count the stars, all by his lonesome.
Marie’s alone out there. The goose bumps stood up once more, and as he glanced north, he hoped she was right in thinking that a mountain lion had been responsible for the attacks. He wasn’t so sure.
For one thing, the kills he’d heard about sounded too neat; carnivores made a mess. If an animal died of natural causes and nothing got at the body but insects and birds, you sometimes got that neatness. There was nothing like dry air and a hill full of ants to cause the clipped and missing organs and incisionlike inroads in the flesh that had the UFO nuts hollering Interstellar Surgeons! and Jim-Bob Sinclair and his flock of faithful crying Satan! just as loud.
And then there were the disappearances. In the last three months, as many locals had vanished without a trace. While it was true that Joe Huxley occasionally took off unannounced for a few weeks or even a month when the prospecting bug bit him, this time he’d been gone since February. His Jeep was still in his carport and there was no sign of him at his claims in the Madelyns or Spirit Canyon.
Then, late in March, Kyla Powers closed up her leather shop one night and disappeared into thin air. Maybe she’d gone to visit her mother, like Cassie Halloway thought, but Kyla wasn’t the sort to shut her business down and leave during tourist season. The latest disappearance, just last week, was the most suspect of all, because Madge Marquay was a full-time teacher at the high school, and Madelyn’s socialite. Her calendar was always filled and she never missed an appointment or a day of work. Until last week. Poor old Henry Marquay was beside himself, an
d Police Chief Moss Baskerville and his sole officer, Al Gonzales, were poking around in earnest now, with the unwanted help of Madge’s friends. Yesterday a small flock of blue-haired Miss Marples had shown up on Tom’s doorstep armed with notepads and pencils, hoping that he might supply some clues.
Flocks of old ladies, flocks of sheep, of UFO nuts, religious fanatics, and even tourists who wanted to see UFOs instead of Wild West shows were all conspiring, it seemed, to upset his peaceful, happy existence.
A plume of dust rose to the east, where Thunder Road narrowed into a twisted rut of a one-lane trail as it entered Spirit Canyon. A second or two later, a vehicle emerged, moving toward him at high speed.
Curious, he paused at the intersection of Thunder Road and Old Madelyn Highway. A moment later, he saw that it was a military jeep, an open CJ-5, and as it slowed to turn south on Old Madelyn, the three uniforms gave him a good once over. The two in front were grunts in cammies; in the rear sat a glowering beetle-browed officer dressed to show off his lettuce. Air Force, most likely.
Military types were nothing new to Madelyn: You had Edwards Air Force Base to the west, China Lake and the defunct Fort Irwin due north, and Twenty-Nine Palms to the southeast, among others, and if it wasn’t convoys tooling down Interstate 15, it was jets booming overhead. And every now and then you got soldiers in jeeps sniffing around the hills and canyons behind Madelyn. Tom wondered if they were there for the UFOs, the mutilations, or just to instill a little more paranoia in the locals.
He dismissed the uniforms when he noticed something out of place. It lay on the ground across rutted Old Madelyn Highway, not far from Fort Madelyn, the park’s newly restored Union outpost. “What the hell?” he asked aloud, squinting at the mound. It was probably just a big white garbage bag tossed by some thoughtless tourist, but he thought it looked a little like an animal. He crossed the road in five long-legged strides.
“Sweet Jesus.” It really was an animal, a white goat, and it lay with its limbs broken and twisted, its head flattened and mushy-looking in the lengthening afternoon shadows cast by the fort walls. “Damn,” he whispered as he kneeled and saw the silver choke chain around its neck. It was one of Cassie Halloway’s pets. “Damn. Why the hell did I have to be the one to find this?”
Standing again, he saw an unnatural number of stones and rocks scattered around the corpse. One sharp chunk of quartzite was half-buried in the animal’s belly. Sadly he shook his head, sick to his stomach. That a human being could do something so cruel to an animal was beyond his comprehension. This was worse than the mutilations: This poor creature had suffered horribly.
Purposefully he trudged back to Old Madelyn Highway, turned south, and walked the hundred yards or so to Cassie Halloway’s place. As he approached the driveway, he saw something that tied his gut into an even tighter knot: The numerals “666” had been painted in red across the side of her aluminum mailbox. Gingerly he touched the paint. Dry. It had to have been there awhile, but he hadn’t noticed it on the way up. Checking, he saw that the numbers were only painted on the north side of the box. No one coming up from town would notice it.
Wondering how long the numbers had been there, he walked down the dirt driveway to Cassie’s neat yellow bungalow. As he ascended the steps onto the shady front porch, he could hear Popeye cartoons playing inside. He knocked. “Cassie? It’s Tom.”
He heard feet running, then the front door flew open. Giggling, little Eve Halloway grabbed one of his fingers and pulled him inside. “Mama, Tom’s here!” she squealed, tugging him down onto the couch in front of the television.
“Be right there, Tom,” Cassie called from somewhere deeper in the house.
“Mama’s in the bathroom,” Eve told him.
“My Lord,” Tom said quickly, “that Popeye’s one strong fella, isn’t he? Wish I could tie a bull’s horns in knots like that.”
A wispy, deceptively frail-looking child, Eve stared at him with those astoundingly huge dark gray eyes of hers. The six-year-old bore little resemblance to her redheaded mama, and since Cassie wouldn’t reveal the father’s identity, some of the more rabid Space Friends were convinced that a space alien was her other parent, what with those big eyes and all. Tom, however, was 98 percent sure that police chief Moss Baskerville, who not only had steel-colored eyes, but quite a bit of blond left on his big graying head, was her daddy. Especially since that’s what Eve called him. Moss and Cassie had been keeping company for a decade, and you could find him here just about as often as at his little house in New Madelyn, but for some reason, you weren’t supposed to mention it.
“Mama got a new tattoo,” Eve announced, plunking down beside him.
“Did she now?”
Eve nodded soberly. “Uh-huh. Know what it is?”
“Let’s see.” Tom removed his hat and scratched his head. “A big old elephant?”
“Huh-uh.”
“Oh, well then, I guess it’s a can of spinach.”
Hands on her hips, Eve suppressed a giggle. “No, silly. It’s sixes.”
“Sixes?” he asked, a fresh set of goose bumps rising.
“Hey, Tom!” Cassie entered, dressed in jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt that showed off her pictures. She patted the pink towel turbaned around her hair. “Sorry to keep you waiting. We were putting the finishing touches on the backgrounds for the new play today, and I had a little run-in with a can of paint.”
She was proud of the Langtry Theater. It not only paid for the Halloways’ modest needs, but in transforming the shabby building at the northern edge of Madland into a saloon-style vaudeville playhouse five years ago, she had transformed herself from itinerant go-go dancer to respectable businesswoman. “I was starting to think I’d never get that stuff out of my hair.”
“Mama’s hair was purple!” Eve giggled.
“How did you—” began Tom.
“Walked under a ladder. Guess that old superstition has some merit after all.” She grinned. “So, Tom, did Evie tell you I got a new tattoo?”
“She said it’s a battleship,” Tom said somberly.
“Did not! He’s fibbing, Mama!”
Tom stood up. “There’s no foolin’ that girl.”
All of Cassie’s tattoos were basically the same. The first dated back to the late sixties and was, true to the times, a set of three psychedelic paisleys above her left breast, sort of like the ones Goldie Hawn had on the old “Laugh-In” show. Cass didn’t actually start collecting them until she came to Madland nearly twenty years ago and met Gus Gilliam, retired biker turned tattoo artist. Gus had a copy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art book, a real talent with the needles, and he soon convinced Cassie to let him balance out the psychedelic paisleys with a new trio on her right breast. He did them Grandma Moses-style, with tiny American primitive pictures of the seasons within the teardrop shapes. Cassie was hooked. He went on to do a set of Renoirs, Brueghels, and Remingtons before he died.
Fortunately, Gus Junior had inherited his father’s gift and his interest, and he took up where his dad left off. Cassie’s back, torso, upper arms, and thighs were now a living tribute to the masters. Gus Junior had been on an impressionist kick lately, and Tom wasn’t much for them. He favored the Remingtons.
Cassie turned her left arm to expose the inner flesh just above the wrist. “Aren’t they gorgeous?”
“They sure are.” These were done in a new style and were the first art to appear south of Cassie’s elbow.
“They’re art nouveau, Aubrey Beardsley,” Cassie told him. “Gus outdid himself, don’t you think?”
“The colors remind me of Carlo’s little Tiffany lamp.”
She nodded, pleased. “Same era.”
“Look at the detail on that dragonfly wing,” he marveled.
“See the little fairy dancing on the flower? Isn’t she lovely?”
“She sure is.” He hesitated. “Cassie . . .”
“What’s on your mind, Tom?” Cassie lowered her arm.
“Need to
talk to you about something,” he said reluctantly.
“There’s coffee on in the kitchen.”
“Sounds good.”
As they settled at the dinette table, Eve skipped in. “What’re you doing?”
“Honey,” began Cassie, “why don’t you go outside and—”
She silenced as Tom shook his head no. Watching him, she said, “Go watch some more cartoons while Tom and I talk.”
“I want to talk too.”
“No, Eve.”
“But I want—”
“Okay,” Tom interrupted. “We’re gonna be swapping some recipes. You got some recipes on you?”
“Yuck!” Evie disappeared back into the other room and the TV’s volume increased slightly.
Suddenly there was a cracking noise and everything gave a little jerk.
“Earthquake,” Eve trilled over the television’s chatter. The house creaked and settled in agreement.
Looking at each other, Tom and Cassie waited for another, but it didn’t come.
“Been a lot of those little shakers lately,” Cassie said.
“Yeah. Hope it means the land’s keeping itself settled, not working up to a big one.”
“Damned scientists can’t make up their minds. So, Tom, what do you want to talk about?”
“Well, I was just thinking about something Eve said,” Tom began. “She called your paisleys ‘sixes.’”
“Always has, ever since she learned her numbers. From a distance, they do kind of look like sixes, don’t they?”
Tom nodded. “And they’re in sets of three.”
“Sure. Keeps ’em symmetrical.”
“Cassie, somebody painted three sixes on your mailbox.”
“What?”
“You know. Six-six-six, like the devil sign. In red. When I saw ’em, they put me in mind of that satanic cult that was around here a couple years back. Six-six-six. They carved the numbers in that gravestone on Boot Hill, then killed a bunch of black chickens—”
Thunder Road Page 2
