by Harvey Click
If he was going to die he wanted to do it in a way that would make him feel proud when he met his ancestors, and whatever time he had left to live he wanted to live the same way he would die, like a man worthy of the great ancestors who had come before him. He would not live as a coward or die as one.
But he had lied when he told the others his spirit guide had shown him nothing. For a long time he had seen nothing, as if he was standing in a dark room, and then a light had come on and he was staring into a mirror. But instead of seeing his own face he had seen a nest of snakes staring back at him.
He knew this wasn’t a glimpse of the future and wasn’t anything useful for the battle they faced. It was a glimpse of the present. Snakes were clever, deadly, and cold-blooded, and his spirit guide was trying to show him what he had become. He knew his spirit guide never lied, and he was disturbed to think all these years of fighting and living outside of the law had made him clever, deadly, and cold-blooded, and he decided if he survived this fight he would try to find a more peaceful way to live.
When a band of gray appeared above the mountains to the east, he went to the Santa Fe and took a carton of eggs and two packages of bacon from the ice chest in the back. By the time the ice in the chest had melted the night air had been chilly enough to keep the food cool. He set an iron rack over the fire and filled a kettle with water from the well and put it on the rack and he filled three skillets with strips of bacon and set them beside the kettle.
The sound and smell of the bacon sizzling woke the others, and while they got up and stretched and headed one by one to the outhouse Joe forked the bacon into a steel bowl and broke the eggs into the hot grease in the skillets.
He knew that somehow or another he’d become the leader of this little cadre. It wasn’t something he wanted, but he knew when that sort of responsibility fell on you there was nothing to do but carry it.
Anyway it beat sitting around on his ass doing nothing.
After they ate he told Lucky, Shane and Amy to make some targets and practice with knives and swords and arrows. They could use Lucky’s and Nyx’s bows, but his own bow was for him alone. To avoid noise there’d be no shooting out here until it came time to sight in their rifles. Meanwhile he and Nyx would drive out and have a look at the church.
Shane gave Joe his roadmap with the three circles drawn on it. Nyx pulled up another map on her smartphone, and as soon as they were on the road she set her GPS to guide them.
She was good with things like that, computers and all sorts of devices that Joe knew nothing about. Though she could behave like a rabid hellcat she had many useful skills and could fight with the best of them, and Joe had come to respect her a good deal. Despite her sharp tongue, when they were alone she showed him in many ways that she respected him as well. Fortunately she was a hellcat in bed too.
The worst thing about Nyx was that she talked too damn much. But she wasn’t talking now. When she wasn’t looking at her smartphone she stared out the window, keeping her thoughts to herself. When she kept her mouth shut like this, Joe liked her quite a bit.
The area on the map had two country roads running through it. It took them about forty-five minutes to get to one of the roads, and there was nothing to see on it except flat empty desert. They had to drive another twenty minutes to get to the other narrow gravel road. It was bumpy and Joe drove slowly while Nyx peered out the open window with her binoculars.
“There’s something up there on the right, way off the road,” she said. “Some buildings.”
“Put the binoculars down,” Joe said. “Take some pictures when we go past but don’t let ‘em see you doing it.”
He drove slowly but not too slowly. He wanted to look like an ordinary yokel with his wife out for a Sunday drive. He slowed down just a tad more when they came to a long dusty lane running off the road to the right. The huge no-trespassing sign looked like it meant business and would probably discourage anybody but the very bold or the very drunk.
A hundred yards or more down the lane sat the four long adobe buildings and the big circular building in the middle of them. He didn’t see anyone walking about on the grounds. There were a few tall trees, maybe with harpies perched in them looking at his car. Nyx slipped her phone just above the bottom of her passenger window and snapped some pictures as they drove by.
“Can your gizmo tell you how far away we are from our campground as the crow flies?” he asked when they were a little way down the road.
Nyx typed something into her phone and said, “Not far enough. Thirty-one, thirty-two miles maybe.”
“Then somebody’s gonna have to keep guard every night,” he said. “But we should be doing that anyway. I want to drive around on the roads near our camp and see if we got any neighbors nearby. Can you pull up a map of that area?”
She did. “There’s only four roads out there,” she said. “They make like a big rectangle, about two miles by four miles square.”
He pulled over and looked at her screen. “Our campground’s on this road,” she said, pointing at the east line of the rectangle. “This north road here’s the one we drive on to get to our road, so you already seen there’s no houses on it.”
“I want to drive down that west road and the south road and see what’s out there,” he said.
On the east side of the west road they saw a large two-story stucco house with an old barn and some sheds behind it. Joe slowed to a crawl so Nyx could lean over him and take some pictures out of his window.
“I don’t think anybody’s living there,” she said after they were past. “The windows are dark.”
“They’re too dark,” Joe said. “Looked to me like they’re boarded up on the inside. Didn’t you see the tracks?”
“What tracks?”
“Tire tracks in the driveway,” he said. “Lots of them and some of them recent too. They all go back behind those sheds. Somebody’s been hiding their cars behind the sheds or maybe inside them. So we got neighbors living back here behind us just two miles away, and they don’t want anybody to know they’re living there. I bet that whole rectangle on the map was a small ranch at one time and the house back there was the hacienda. Probably the land got too dry for grazing cows. This whole rectangle was probably all one piece of property, including the land we’re renting.”
“Maybe it still is,” Nyx said.
“That’s what I’m thinking. I’m thinking maybe Lucky rented our campground from whoever’s hiding out in that hacienda with the windows all boarded up.”
When they got back to the camp Joe called them all together and asked Lucky how he’d found the property.
“Just lucky,” Lucky said. “I was sitting in a saloon in Silver Stone trying to gather information when a nice young fellow named Sam asked if he could join me.”
“Who is this guy?” Joe asked.
“I don’t know. He’s a Navajo, didn’t talk much, but he seemed friendly and easy going, and he was nice enough to buy me a couple drinks. I don’t remember him saying anything about the religious cult, but after everybody else got up from the table he said he had some land to rent if I was interested. He said his mother had died and he didn’t know what to do with the house.”
“So just like that he said he had land to rent, just right out of the blue?” Joe asked.
“No, not right out of the blue. Earlier I’d been asking if anyone knew where I could find some quiet place to rent outside of town. I said I was a landscape painter, so the more remote the better. Like I said, it was just a bit of luck that Sam happened to be around.”
“It might be a funny kind of luck,” Joe said, and he told them about the old hacienda.
“So what do we do?” Shane asked. “Do we stay here or move?”
“I think Joe’s being paranoid,” Nyx said. “It’s just an old deserted house with some tire tracks in the driveway. Probably some kids are driving out there and having sex behind the barn.”
“I know how to read people,” Lucky said. �
�I believe Sam was on the level. He was a nice young man, not some kind of cult kook. If one of you can find a safer piece of land to rent, then I’ll pack up my things and move, but otherwise I’m happy here.”
“I’m not sure what I think,” Amy said. “I’ll leave it up to the rest of you.”
“Maybe Joe’s being paranoid or maybe not,” Shane said. “But do we have enough money to rent another place?”
“Not me,” Joe said.
They were all looking at him and he knew it was his decision to make. He’d been their leader now for less than twenty-four hours and he was already getting tired of it. Probably Nyx was right about the tire tracks, probably just kids going behind the barn to have sex, and probably the owner had boarded up the windows on the inside so nobody could break in.
“We’ll stay here for now and see what we can find out,” he said. “But we need to keep guard dusk till dawn. We’ll have two guards at a time doing five-hour shifts, one watching the back and one watching the front. From now on we carry guns and swords at all times at the camp and we sleep with them right beside us. We need to buy some whistles like the ones we had at Neoma’s camp.”
“I’ll try to find some,” Shane said. “I need to drive somewhere a good distance away so I can see if Agent Bradford has left any messages. Out here I keep my cellphone shut off, at least the one Bradford knows about.”
“Why’s that?” Joe asked.
“Since the FBI has the number, I think maybe they can track my location if it’s turned on.”
“Is that true?” Joe asked.
“Sure as shit,” Nyx said. “Your phone’s got a GPS. Once those bastards know your number they can hack it and know when you’re taking a dump.”
“You better take my car,” Lucky said. “The Lost Society probably knows your license number, not to mention the FBI.”
***
Shane drove back to Tesoro and found a gun store open on Sundays, a likely place to find police whistles. He turned on his cellphone in the store lot. There were four messages from his friend Jim Blaine, all asking him to call, three messages from Agent Bradford, also asking him to call, and two more messages from someone claiming to be Mike Nielsen, FBI, who wanted him to do the same thing.
He called Bradford, who said, “I’ve been pulled off the case. I’m back in D.C. right now.”
“Why?”
“They haven’t told me, but in the last report I filed out there I mentioned the Lost Society.”
“Does that mean someone in the FBI’s being paid?” Shane asked.
“You tell me,” Bradford said. “Is someone being paid or are some people actually members? The better question is, how high up does this go? Is it my boss or my boss’s boss or someone way at the top of the DOJ?”
“You think they might be listening to your phone right now?” Shane asked.
“I expect they are, but it really doesn’t matter now. They already got me by the balls. I don’t know where you’re hiding out and I don’t want to know, and you probably don’t want my replacement to know either. He’s already out there in Silver Stone, Agent Mike Nielsen. I don’t think he’s on the same page we’re on, not the same page at all.
“As for your daughter, I’m pretty sure she was kidnapped by something called the Church of Love and Serenity. They’ve got a compound out there in that area you drew on the map, but I guarantee you, you don’t want to go up against them. Love and Serenity—LS, if you follow my meaning. There’s a new interim sheriff in Silver Stone named Jack Roamer, and he seems to me like an honest man, but of course I can’t vouch for that. But it doesn’t really matter. There’s nothing Sheriff Roamer can do about this church even if he wants to, and there’s nothing you can do either.”
“Who’s the leader?” Shane asked.
“He calls himself Jeshua Godson but his real name is James Hobson. I don’t know much else real about him. Let’s just say the files on the Church of Love and Serenity have been whitewashed so white that you’d think they were Jesus Christ and the Red Cross combined with some bleach added. So that’s all I know. I don’t have any idea what you can do about your daughter. Be careful out there and watch your back.”
Bradford hung up, and Shane turned his phone off. He bought five police whistles at the gun store and drove to a small grocery store, where he bought some food, cleaning supplies and a one-gallon can of insecticide. He was paying the cashier when a young man walked in and stood near the check-out lane staring at him.
Shane looked up and sucked in his breath. The boy was about seven feet tall and stocky. He had glossy black eyes and thick black hair that hung in tangles down past his shoulders. It was impossible to tell his age; despite his height and the brutal cast of his face, something about his features made him look like a feral child of ten or twelve. It was also impossible to tell his race because his skin was slate gray.
He stared at Shane impassively for several seconds. Then he smiled, and Shane sucked in his breath again. The boy’s teeth were long and jagged like a dog’s.
When Shane got to the car he saw that his hands were shaking. It wasn’t until he’d driven half a mile away that he realized why he was so disturbed.
He wasn’t altogether certain the boy was human.
***
“Don’t waste your time investigating this cult,” Agent Mike Nielsen said. “Everything we’re seeing tells us Amy Malone shot her brother and her neighbor and set her own house on fire, probably thinking she could burn up the evidence. She then drove off with her baby and called 911 with a bogus story.”
“What about Douglas Dipson?” Jack Roamer asked. “He says Candy paid him to drive Mrs. Malone’s car out there to the river.”
“He said that when he was drunk and scared. His story didn’t hold up, and after he sobered up he told us the truth. After committing the murders and calling 911, Amy Malone apparently drove around aimlessly for a while in a psychotic state. She pulled into the driveway of the house where Floyd Boggs and Butch Barrett lived and offered to pay them to drive her to Colorado. Barrett and Boggs were too drunk to drive, but Dipson was there and he agreed to drive her.
“She had her baby with her, but she was raving mad and she kept saying God had told her to kill her brother and now God wanted her to kill her baby. At one point Dipson thought she was going to throw her baby out the window, so he pulled over and tried to get her to calm down, but she jumped out of the car and ran off with her baby. Dipson got out and looked for her and thought maybe she’d jumped in the river. He was afraid he’d be charged with kidnapping her and maybe even killing her, so he abandoned the car. Then, after he had a few drinks to build up his courage, he tried stealing another to get back home.”
Roamer scratched the stubble at the side of his face. It was Sunday and he hadn’t bothered to shave. He’d come into the office just to bring in some of his things, and he hadn’t expected an FBI agent or anyone else to pay him a visit.
“That don’t explain who killed Candy and Hodges and Floyd Boggs,” he said.
“We’ll probably learn that when we find Butch Barrett,” Nielsen said. “Dipson says Barrett and Floyd were arguing over money they thought Candy owed them. Somebody else was involved too, but he doesn’t know who. Probably this unknown party drove Candy out there and a shootout ensued. Whatever happened, it had nothing to do with the missing baby.”
Roamer thought it was one of the stupidest stories he’d ever heard, and he was surprised the fine minds of the FBI weren’t able to concoct something more believable. He decided this was one of those times when it was best to play stupid, and he had a talent for doing that. His dead wife used to be fond of telling him that playing stupid came naturally to him.
He scratched his stubble as if deep in thought and said, “Well then, I reckon the best thing I can do is start huntin’ for Shane Malone. He probably knows something about his wife’s state of mind.”
“He probably does, and that’s probably why he’s disappeared,” Nielsen
said.
Roamer scratched his stubble some more and wondered if Nielsen was a human being or a machine. He was tall and handsome in a Nordic sort of way, but his cold blue eyes didn’t seem to have anything like a soul behind them.
“Well, I reckon you boys will probably find him before I do,” Roamer said. “I’m just a semi-retired small-town sheriff and I lack resources. To be honest with you, my main job is to keep this chair warm until they elect somebody younger. But please keep me up on the news, and I’ll keep my eyes open for Mr. Malone.”
Agent Nielsen gave him a cold machine smile and said, “Yes, we’ll keep you posted.”
Chapter 11
Monday morning after breakfast Amy practiced sword fighting with Lucky. They had no protective clothing, so their moves were slow and choreographed, but Lucky said that was the best way to learn moves, doing them slowly over and over until your muscles knew them as well as your brain. After that they took turns practicing their moves at full speed on an old piece of heavy tarpaulin they’d rolled up and hung from a tree like a punching bag, and they kept doing it until the tarpaulin was nothing but ribbons.
The sword Joe had bought for her was better made than the one she’d taken from Sandoval’s house, but it was longer and heavier, and her arm was so tired she had to sit down on a rock to rest. She wanted to be holding her baby right now instead of preparing for battle, and every minute or two another fierce wave of outrage swept through her. Emily was so much on her mind that she had little room left in her heart to mourn Billy, and that too filled her with indignation.
The sword was in a cheap scabbard on her right side and the .38 Special Taurus revolver Lucky had lent her was in a cheap holster on her left. The bastards had forced her to strap her weapons back on, and she wanted to make them pay in blood. She felt blood thirst rising in her like a tide and she prayed for it to rise higher until it engulfed her and drowned every soft feeling and every weakness.