Whirlwind

by Charles L. Grant

  He brought the palm closer to his eyes.

  The links were longer than he would have expected, and not as delicately thin as they first appeared. Neither were they the same length.

  She took the chain back, grasping each end between thumb and forefinger. Tugged once. “Strong. You couldn’t yank this off someone’s neck without sawing halfway through it.”

  “Konochine.”

  She gave him a maybe tilt of her head, and headed back to the car to fetch a plastic evidence bag from her purse.

  “Bring a couple,” he called after her, and glanced at his watch.

  Sparrow still hadn’t returned; Mulder finally lost the rest of his patience. He marched over to the trailer, yanked open the door, and stepped in. The sheriff was seated behind one of three desks in the room, his feet up, his hat off, a flask at his lips.

  He looked startled when he saw Mulder, but he didn’t move until he had finished his drink. “It’s hot out there,” he said.

  “It’s going to get hotter,” Mulder told him, not bothering to suppress his anger. “Give me the glass, then get one of your people ready to take some evidence to Garson’s technicians. I’ll call him myself to tell him what to look for.”

  Sparrow glared as he set the flask onto the desk. “I don’t believe I heard the magic word, Agent Mulder.”

  Mulder just looked at him, and “FBI” was all he said.

  FOURTEEN

  He couldn’t see Scully when he returned to the lot, slapping the magnifying glass hard against his leg. He was angry and disappointed, not nearly as much at the sheriff as at himself. Losing control like that, pulling rank, wasn’t his style. Working with local law was something he had learned to do years ago, knowing that their assistance was just as vital to investigations as his own federal agents. What he had just done was a violation not only of policy, but his own code.

  “Scully?”

  It was dumb.

  “Hey, Scully!”

  It was stupid.

  “Over here, Mulder.”

  But boy, did it feel good.

  He found her standing next to what used to be a sleek Jaguar. Now most of its windows were shattered, the windshield web-cracked, the racing-green paint pocked and scored from front to back, and the roof crushed as though someone had dropped a flatcar on it.

  “Our drunk driver?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I think so. Look at this.”

  He went around to the side, and saw the same pattern of scouring she had uncovered on the van, only this time it was wider.

  “Invisible car,” he said.

  She lifted a questioning hand. “I give up, Mulder. What’s going on?” A closer look at his face. “Never mind. I think I’d rather know what happened in there.”

  There was no chance to answer. The trailer door slammed gunshot loud, and Sparrow stomped toward them. The way his hand chopped the air, Mulder figured he was having one hell of an argument with himself. By the time he reached them, the argument was over.

  He stood with one hand resting on the handle of his holstered gun, while the other folded a stick of gum into his mouth. Then he pulled off his sunglasses by pinching them at the bridge and sliding.

  “I’ll take the evidence in myself.” It wasn’t an order, it wasn’t a demand. It was an offer of truce.

  “That’s fine with me, sir,” Mulder said, accepting the offer.

  “Chuck.” The sheriff chewed rapidly.

  Mulder grinned. “I don’t think so.”

  “Me neither. My mother hated it. She always said it wasn’t the name of anything but chopped meat.” He pushed the sunglasses back on. “So, FBI, what’s so important you got to rush it into the city?”

  While Scully explained about the partial necklace chain, Mulder went back to the van and, with the magnifying glass and the tip of a blade on his Swiss army knife, pried loose samples of debris caught in the deep gouges on the door. He did the same to the car, sealed his findings in the bags, and handed them over.

  Uneasy, but more at ease, they walked back to the office, grateful for the cool respite. Scully tagged and numbered the bags. Mulder called Garson’s office, told them what to expect and what he wanted done.

  “That shouldn’t take very long,” the secretary said confidently.

  “Have you found Agent Garson yet?”

  “No sir, I sure haven’t.”

  He gave her his number and instructed her to have Garson call as soon as he came in. When he asked whether Donna Falkner had been intercepted, he was told that she had been, by one of the other agents. Apparently she hadn’t been very happy, certainly not when she was brought back to the Silver Avenue office, where she currently was giving a statement.

  “A statement? About what?”

  “I wouldn’t know, sir. I’m only the secretary. They only tell me what I need to know.”

  Sure, he thought; and all the rest is magic.

  He perched on the edge of the nearest empty desk and wiped his brow with a sleeve.

  Sparrow was back in his chair. “You reckon it’s the Konochine somehow? I figured that, what with you talking to Donna and all.”

  “I don’t see how it can’t be, now. There are too many connections.”

  “A lead, anyway,” Scully added.

  “Oh boy.” The sheriff reached for his flask, changed his mind, and propped his feet up instead. “Trouble is, there’s a couple hundred of them. It can’t be all—” Suddenly he snapped upright, boots stamping the floor. “Son of a bitch!”

  Mulder looked first to Scully before saying, “Leon Ciola.”

  The sheriff’s jaw sagged. “Damn, Mulder, you’re good.” He drummed his fingers against his cheek thoughtfully, then reached for his phone. “There’s somebody you should meet. He’ll be able to tell you what you want know about who you need to know about. Lanaya. I already told you about him. Believe it or not, he still lives on the res.”

  “What about Ciola?”

  Sparrow held up a finger as the connection was made, winced as he made arrangements with the dealer to meet at the Inn after dinner that evening, winced again and rubbed his ear as he hung up. “Storm coming,” he explained. “Static’ll deafen you sometimes.”

  Thank God, Mulder thought; at least it’ll get cooler.

  “Ciola,” he reminded Sparrow.

  “Bastard. Pure and simple bastard. Got sent up for murder, got a lawyer who found a hole and squeezed the son of a bitch through it. There’s not much I can do but keep an eye out, and hope he doesn’t lose his temper again.”

  It didn’t take special intuition to figure out the man not only hated Ciola, he was afraid of him.

  “You thinking he’s involved with this?”

  “You have to admit, he’s a likely candidate.”

  “Nope, don’t think so.”

  Mulder was surprised, and let the sheriff know it.

  “Not his style,” Sparrow explained. “He’s all intimidation and reputation. The man he killed, it was over quick and dirty. These people…that took patience.”

  “But not much time, Sheriff,” Scully said. “The Deven boy, remember?”

  He granted her that reluctantly, but insisted it couldn’t have been Ciola. “There’s a reason for those people, Agent Scully. We just ain’t found it yet. With Leon, there doesn’t have to be one.”

  “Heat of the moment,” Mulder suggested.

  “Got it in one.”

  Scully seemed doubtful, but didn’t argue.

  The sheriff accepted her silence without comment, looked around the station, then carefully locked the plastic bags into an attache case he pulled from a bottom drawer. “Better get going. I want to get back before the storm.” He walked to the back and radioed one of his men, telling him where he’d be and for how long; he called a central dispatcher with the same information, for intercepting any calls; he spat his gum into a wastebasket, opened a wardrobe on the far wall, and took down a clean, blocked hat.

  When he saw Mul
der staring, he pointed to the hat on the desk. “That’s my comfort hat, had it for years.” He flicked the brim on the one he had on. “This is my showing-up-in-the-city hat. Pretty dumb, ain’t it.”

  Scully laughed, and Mulder could only nod as Sparrow walked with them to their car.

  “Check it out, folks,” he said, pointing over the trailer. “Be inside when it happens.”

  Mulder looked, and couldn’t believe that clouds that massive, and that high, could assemble so quickly. Shaped like anvils, boiling at the edges, they had already buried most of the western blue.

  “My God, Scully, we’re going to drown.”

  He drove back to the motel as fast as he dared, which still wasn’t fast enough for the others on the road. They passed him on the left, on the right, and would have driven over him if the car had been low enough.

  “Calm down,” Scully said when the engine died. “We’ve still got some work to do while we wait for Lanaya.”

  The bone pile stirred as the wind brushed over it, dust in tan clouds passing through ribs and eye sockets, through a gaping hole in one of the skulls.

  A scorpion scuttled across the curled horn of a ram.

  In the center, using the pelvic bone of a stallion for a temporary stool, a man stirred the loose earth with the point of a knife. Designs were fashioned, and erased; words were written, and vanished. He glanced up only once, to check the storm’s approach, returning to his work only when he saw the lightning, and didn’t hear the thunder.

  It would move fast.

  He would move faster.

  Donna Falkner slammed into her house, slammed the door shut behind her, flung a suitcase across the living room, and began to scream her outrage. She kicked at the nearest wall, picked up the desk chair and hurled it down the hall; she grabbed the couch cushions and tried to rip them open with her nails, tossed them aside, and dropped to the floor, sobbing.

  It wasn’t fair.

  It wasn’t goddamn fair.

  All she had to do was get on the goddamn plane, and she was out of here. Gone. Lost in another city, where they never heard of Indians except on TV, never bothered with Southwest crafts except in fancy boutiques that overpriced everything from a wallet to a brooch. Gone. New name, new hair, new everything.

  Gone.

  Now the FBI wanted her, and he wanted her, and there was nothing she could do about it but sit around and wait.

  She punched the floor.

  She screamed again, cheeks florid, teeth bared.

  The sunlight began to dim, and the thorns of the rosebushes began to scratch lightly against the windows.

  Suddenly she couldn’t breathe, made a double fist with her hands, and pressed it against her chest. Harder. Gulping for air. Rocking on her buttocks until she thought she would faint. Tears streaming down her cheeks, dripping off her chin, coating her lips with the taste of salt.

  When the attack passed, she let herself fall backward slowly, seeing nothing but tiny cracks in the plaster ceiling, forming them into images that made her weep again.

  The telephone rang.

  She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands and sat up. She had no intention of answering it. Let it ring. If it was those agents who had come to see her, they could just come over on their own. The hell with them. The hell with them all.

  When she stood, she swayed; when she walked down the short hall toward the bathroom, she staggered. When she reached the bathroom, she looked at her reflection, gagged…and giggled. Touched the tip of her reflection’s nose with a finger and told it there was nothing to worry about, nothing she couldn’t handle.

  What she would do was, if they wouldn’t let her fly, then fuck it, she would drive. By the time they realized she was gone, she would be…gone.

  She giggled again.

  Gone, but not forgotten.

  Gone, and goddamn rich.

  Wash up, she ordered; wash up, change your clothes, get the damn money, and be…gone.

  What the hell are you so worried about?

  She didn’t know.

  Suddenly, she didn’t know.

  She hurried into the spare room, squinted through the small window, and figured by the sky she had maybe an hour before the storm arrived. If it arrived. They had a bad habit of being all show and no action sometimes. Not that it mattered. Only a fool would tempt clouds like that on an open road.

  Another giggle.

  Screw ’em.

  Now that she wasn’t flying, she could load the Cherokee to the gills, take a little inventory to pad the mattress. The not-so-perfect plan, but better than nothing. Nothing would mean sitting around, waiting for things to happen.

  She grabbed a carton and headed for the door.

  Sand stirred, lifting sluggishly from the ground as if drawn by a weak magnet.

  Nearby, a dead leaf quivered.

  A twig shifted, rolled an inch, and stopped.

  The sand settled a few seconds later.

  Nothing moved.

  FIFTEEN

  The shower was wonderful.

  After crawling around the van and automobile in the sun all that time, Scully was drenched with sweat, caked and streaked with dust, and ready to scream. In spite of the silver chain, in spite of what Mulder had dug from the vehicles’ sides, they hadn’t accomplished very much.

  What frustrated her was a combination of the case itself, which seemed to be going nowhere fast, and the certain knowledge that she had already seen the break point and had missed it. Something small. Something so obvious she had overlooked it. The purloined letter in New Mexico.

  The storm didn’t help.

  The clouds, frightening black and impossibly huge, were still out there, still in the middle distance. If they moved, she couldn’t tell. They sat there, not small enough to be lurking, and too large to even be called looming. There was nothing ahead of them but a steady, hot wind.

  They were also tired. The mix of altitude and heat had sapped them without their realizing it. When they reached the motel, it was a mutual decision to clean up and rest for an hour, then meet again to see what they could come up with before their meeting with Nick Lanaya.

  So she used the shower to make her comfortable again, to drain the afternoon’s tension from her shoulders and limbs, and to let her mind roam, seeking pathways and the places where they might possibly join into something concrete she could follow, something hopeful.

  When it didn’t happen immediately, she was mildly annoyed, but she didn’t mind. It would come eventually; of that she was confident.

  She took her time dressing, sat on the edge of her bed, and gazed at the window, scowling at the tension she could feel building again. She rolled her shoulders, massaged them one at a time, to get rid of it; it didn’t work. She stretched until her joints threatened to pop or separate, deliberately groaning aloud; it didn’t work.

  Maybe it was just anticipation of the storm.

  The clouds must have moved closer while she had been in the bathroom. The sunlight held considerably less glare, a hint of false twilight filtering into the front courtyard. By that part of the bench tree she could see, the wind had died down as well.

  It seemed that the outside had decided to do nothing but wait until the storm made up its mind whether to strike or not.

  “Damn,” she whispered.

  No wonder she was still tense. That was exactly what she was doing. Waiting, not acting. Some son of a bitch had butchered three innocent people, and all she could do was sit here like a lump and wait for the damn rain.

  She snapped to her feet, grabbed her shoulder bag, decided the hell with the hat, and hurried outside.

  No one in the courtyard and, when she couldn’t help looking, no one standing at the gate.

  The image of Ciola’s face so close to her own made her pause and shudder. Those scars, and those dead eyes…she shuddered again and knocked hard on Mulder’s door, one heel tapping impatiently. When he answered, naked to the waist and drying his hair with a to
wel, she said, “Get decent, Mulder. We’re going out again.”

  The sand stirred.

  The leaf quivered.

  “You’re the one who made the connections,” Scully said as he pulled on a shirt. “So why wait?”

  “Scully, we haven’t been here twenty-four hours.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question: Why wait?”

  He couldn’t think of a good answer, and didn’t especially want to, not when she practically sparked with energy like this. It was best, always best, to go along for the ride. Besides, she was right. With too many signs pointing to the Konochine, it only made sense to pay an official visit to the reservation. The only problem was, he thought they ought to have a guide, someone who knew who they should talk to, preferably someone who knew the language.

  “The sheriff.”

  “He’s in Albuquerque, remember?”

  “Falkner.”

  “They rode her out on a rail.”

  She tapped a fingernail on the table. “Lanaya would be perfect, but we don’t know how to get in touch with him.”

  They tried the phone book, but no luck; they tried the sheriff’s dispatcher, and had the same result. A call to Falkner brought no answer; Scully let the phone ring twenty times before hanging up in disgust.

  Neither one of them even breathed Leon Ciola’s name.

  He switched on a lamp without thinking. “We could always go out to the ranch,” he suggested, not really too happy with the idea.

  Neither was Scully, from her reaction. At the moment, however, there was no place else to turn. And, he added, reaching for his gun and holster to clip on his belt, it didn’t especially have to be Annie. In fact, it probably shouldn’t be, if what the foreman had told them was true. Quintodo himself would do just as well, assuming he was willing. It wasn’t a raid; they were simply looking for information.