“But I’m down with the rest idea,” he said. “Little shut-eye will do us both good.”
When someone knocked on the door—tentatively, as if in consideration of the hour, not demanding, the way cops knocked—Sam’s gaze swept past the glowing numbers on the clock: 2:11. Just once, he wanted to sleep all night.
Dean was already sitting up, his .45—freshly cleaned and loaded—in his fist. “Got you covered,” he whispered.
Sam went to the door, dressed only in boxer shorts, and pulled it open a couple of inches. The motel had a bar lock that kept it from opening any farther.
“Sam?”
It was Heather Panolli, with light from the fixture by the door turning her blond hair into a halo. “Heather? You shouldn’t be out alone so late. It’s not safe—”
“I know, I’m sorry. My dad doesn’t always go to sleep that early, and I had to wait until I was sure before I snuck out.”
Sam closed the door long enough to release the bar lock, then opened it again, suddenly very conscious of his near nudity.
“Told you,” Dean said when she entered. He had insisted, before bed, that the only reason Heather had stayed in the room during her dad’s story, which she’d clearly heard many times, was because she was sweet on Sam. “She’s into you, Sammy,” was the way he’d put it, smirking all the while.
“What are you doing here?” Sam asked her now, grabbing a pair of jeans off the floor and pulling them on.
“I had to—my dad,” she stammered. “He’s told that story so many times, he thinks it’s the truth.”
“It’s not?”
Sam sat on his pillows and invited her to take the end of the bed, the only clear seating area in the room now. She unzipped a heavy down coat and shrugged it off her shoulders. She still had on the same sweater and jeans, but with leather boots that had what looked like rabbit fur trim. “Well, it is, I mean, as far as it goes. It just doesn’t go far enough.”
“What do you mean, Heather?”
“I’ve heard him tell other people. My mom, when she was around, and close friends. Usually after he’s had a couple of drinks, to be honest. But there’s more to the story, stuff he didn’t tell you tonight. I could tell you were interested for a good reason—you said you’re trying to stop the killing, and I believe you. So I thought you should hear the rest of it, in case it’s important.”
“So spill it,” Dean said.
Heather swallowed hard and looked at her boots as if they had just been placed on her feet by an alien being. “It’s…when he talks about those days, he makes it sound like they were all peace, love, and brotherhood, right? Listening to music, reading science fiction, protesting the war and weaving baskets.”
“You saying they weren’t?” Dean asked. Sam wondered where the basket weaving had come from.
Still looking everywhere except at them, Heather sucked in a deep breath. “Some of the people living in that house with Dad weren’t the peaceful type,” she said. “Maybe they liked the same music or whatever, but from the stories he tells privately, there were a couple of guys—one in particular, who later got involved in bank robbery—who were mostly there for the easy sex and cheap rent. At least one of them had a gun in the house.”
She paused. She had pulled her legs in close to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. Sam wanted to encourage her to go on, but he didn’t want to spook her, so he waited. At last she gathered her courage. “When he looked out that window and saw the Indian with the bow and arrow, the first thing he did was run to that other guy’s room. The guy was one of the people who were out of town, but everyone knew where he kept his gun. Dad grabbed it and ran back to the window. He fired at the same time the Indian did, he says. The arrow hit his friend Janet, but he hit the Indian. Dad’s father had always been a hunter, and he’d been hunting and shooting plenty of times before the whole nonviolence thing happened.”
“So he shot the Indian and didn’t want to tell anyone? Why not?”
“I guess because of what happened next. He said when his bullet hit, the Indian fell down. Then he…I know this sounds crazy, so you can see why he doesn’t like to talk about it—not that the whole story’s not pretty crazy, right? The Indian faded in and out, like Dad could see him and then he couldn’t, a couple of times. But then he got up, and it was like he hadn’t been hurt at all. He walked away, or just faded away, Dad says he’s still not sure about that part. At the same time, his arrow vanished. So then Dad’s friend was in the yard with a hole in her and no explanation, and Dad had fired a pistol into the yard. He didn’t think he was crazy—he thinks something was going on that he still can’t explain, and it was connected to the murders that happen every forty years. But he swears he didn’t shoot her, he shot the disappearing Indian.”
“Only it’d be hard to sell that story to the cops,” Dean said.
“That’s right. I guess they weren’t all up on the CSI stuff like they are these days, right? Maybe if they had tested him they could have found that he had shot a gun, but he put it away and didn’t mention it, and told the story the way you heard it. The sheriffs didn’t like it, he says, but there were so many other killings around town that they had to just accept it the way he said.”
“And he still tells it that way now,” Sam said.
“No statute of limitations for murder,” Dean pointed out. “If they wanted to charge him with shooting her, they might be able to make a case.”
Heather chewed on her bottom lip, her eyes finally meeting Sam’s. “You won’t tell anyone, will you? I don’t want to get him in trouble, I just wanted you to know what you’re really dealing with.”
“No, of course not,” Sam said. “Dean and I, we’re pretty used to dealing with strange, inexplicable events. In our world the disappearing Indian is a lot more likely than someone like your dad having a psychotic episode and shooting a friend.”
“Sounds like you live in a strange world.”
“We do.”
“I don’t think I’d like it there.”
“I’d be surprised if you did,” Sam said. “It takes a lot of getting used to. And even then it can be pretty unpleasant.”
She regarded them for a long few moments, not like she was into Sam, as Dean had speculated, but like she was curious about people who weren’t like any she had ever met. When her gaze moved away from them, it roamed across the room, taking in the equipment and the weapons and the clippings taped to the wall. “I should probably be getting home,” she said.
“Yeah. Let’s go, Dean.”
“Go where?”
“We’re not letting her drive home alone. We’re following you back, Heather. If Dean doesn’t want to come then I’ll go by myself.”
“Oh, all right,” Dean grumbled, finally throwing back the blankets covering him. “But maybe she should turn the other way while I get dressed. Wouldn’t want to ruin her for other men.”
SEVENTEEN
Heather had driven to the motel in a red compact pickup truck that she said she used when she commuted on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays to college in Flagstaff. “Told you she’s into you,” Dean said as they followed along behind her through the dark and empty streets.
“She’s not into me,” Sam protested.
“She totally is. She couldn’t stop looking at you.”
“Are you high? She couldn’t bring herself to look at either one of us most of the time. Then all she could look at was our stuff. She must have thought we were whack jobs.”
Dean snorted a laugh. “I can think of about three nasty responses to that, but I’m not even going to bother.”
“You sure?” Sam asked. “Seems a little late in life for you to develop manners. Or good taste.”
“It’s not that. It’s just that sometimes you leave yourself so wide open, it’s like shooting monkeys in a barrel. It’s so easy it’s no fun.”
“I think it’s fish,” Sam said.
Dean looked away from the road and the headlights a
head long enough to shoot his brother a puzzled glance. “Fish? The hell…?”
“Shooting fish in a barrel.”
“What fun is a barrel full of fish?”
Sam didn’t answer. Dean liked to throw his own logic back in his face, and being able to shut his brother up was its own reward.
Anyway, he had something else preying on his mind.
“Can you see in the rearview without looking like a freak?” Dean asked.
Sam tried, but couldn’t.
“Take my word for it, then. There’s a pair of headlights back there that I’d swear has been there since we left the motel.”
“Someone’s following us?”
“That’s what it looks like.”
“I didn’t think our spirits drove.”
“Maybe they’re in league with humans. Or doing the bidding of humans.”
“Or humans are doing their bidding. Makes as much sense as anything else we’ve come up with,” Sam admitted.
“Think I should try to lose ’em?”
“But that’ll mean losing Heather,” Sam said. “The whole point of this—”
“Yeah, I know,” Dean said. “It just bothers me.”
He drove on, dividing his attention between Heather’s truck and the lights behind them. They stayed consistently a couple of blocks back. When Dean slowed, letting Heather get farther ahead, the vehicle behind them slowed.
When they were about half a mile from Heather’s place, the car Dean had thought was following them made a left turn onto a side road. “Huh,” he said. “So much for that.”
“For what?”
“They peeled off.”
“They’re not following us after all?”
“Maybe not. I guess a town this small, there are only so many roads someone can be on, and we just happened to be taking the same ones they needed.”
“Whatever,” Sam said. “We’re here.”
Heather turned into the gated driveway. After she sat there for a couple of seconds, the gates swung open for her. Dean and Sam sat on the road outside until they closed again and she was on her way to the house. Dean started to put the Impala into gear when Sam said, “Let’s give her a minute.”
“She’s home,” Dean said.
“Let’s just wait till she’s inside.”
Dean shrugged. They already knew that people weren’t actually any safer in their homes than outside, but maybe Sam was into her.
Like she was into him.
Across Cedar Wells, the attacks began in earnest.
Dennis Gladstone was sound asleep in his bed, dreaming of three women who were very friendly and very blond, when a smell in his room, a pungent mix of stale earth and sour air, woke him. He sat up and switched on a bedside light. The smell came from what looked like a cowboy. Air sucking in and out of a ragged lung wound made a wet whistling noise. Before Dennis could say anything to the intruder, the cowboy drew a gun and fired it once, piercing Dennis’s lung.
Maria Lima hadn’t been able to sleep. She’d finally given up and gone downstairs so she wouldn’t risk waking up her husband or their baby girl. She sat on the living room couch with a pillow across her lap, watching a late movie with the sound turned low. Seemingly from nowhere—since the couch was pushed against the wall—hands reached around from behind her and closed on her throat, cutting off her air supply. She struggled, but the hands couldn’t be pried away. Before she lost consciousness, she saw—and then didn’t see, and then did, and then didn’t again—a woman wearing a nightdress that looked like something pioneer women might have worn. The nightdress left her neck exposed, and Maria could see dark bruises ringing the woman’s throat. Then she couldn’t see anything at all.
Larry Gottschalk worked nights at the Stop-N-Gas on the eastern fringe of town. The only people who ever drove up after midnight were drunk, and they were usually coming in so they could stock up on more booze to continue their buzz. A couple of times people had been so drunk that they parked at the gas pumps, came inside and bought a twelve-pack or a box of wine, and then drove away again, all without remembering that they actually did need gas. Larry took a perverse pleasure in seeing them stumbling back twenty or thirty minutes later carrying empty gas cans.
But tonight the bell on the door rang and he looked up from the scandal rag in which he’d been reading about Paris Hilton’s latest escapade, which would have humiliated anyone with common sense or a feeling of self-worth, and standing in the doorway was someone who was either a cavalry soldier from the time of the Indian Wars or someone who played one in a movie. If the latter, it was a gory movie with realistic makeup effects, because a chunk of the soldier’s lower jaw was missing. He had skin halfway down his cheek, and then there was just exposed bone and upper teeth, and then nothing. Larry felt the frozen burrito he’d microwaved for dinner lurch in his stomach.
Maybe even stranger, the soldier carried what looked like an Indian spear, with feathers and hair dangling from it.
“Dude, you need a hospital—” Larry started to say.
The soldier raised the spear and hurled it. Larry tried to dodge but he had hooked his ankle around the crossbar of the stool he sat on, and when he moved suddenly, the stool tipped over and pinned his ankle there just long enough. He could tell the spear would hit him in the face, in the jaw, but he couldn’t do anything to prevent it.
Gibson Brower, who went by the name Gib, was out in his garage installing a winch on his 1947 Jeep Willys. He liked working in the garage late at night with the door wide open, even in winter, with a space heater and a radio going and a work light hanging down. He found it peaceful. He never had to worry about neighbors dropping by or phone calls. He lived far enough from town that nobody would complain if power tools or engines made noise.
He was flat on his back, underneath the front end, when he heard a fluttering noise. He pulled his head out from under the Jeep, thinking that an owl must have flown into the garage. But when he spotted it, flapping around the ceiling, it was not an owl, but a red-tailed hawk. He couldn’t remember ever having seen one of those about at night, and certainly had never heard of one going into a noisy, occupied garage.
“Get out of here!” he shouted. He pushed himself to a sitting position, intending to get up and wave it out the door. But it dropped at him before he had time, talons and sharp bill extended. The talons bit into the flesh of his neck and chest and the bill poked through his eyelid into his left eye, and as hard as he tried to grab it and hurl it away, he couldn’t budge it before the strength ran out of him completely.
And so it went.
Jim Beckett was overwhelmed. Grief and shock and fury warred within him, and he tried to push them all back, to focus on the job at hand, but with each passing moment, each panicked call to 911, the job grew more and more impossible. Police work required a degree of detachment that he could no longer achieve. When Susannah, the dispatcher, handed him a piece of paper detailing the call from Ward Burrows, in which he said that his son Kyle had been attacked by unknown intruders and his skull split open, Jim buried his face in his hands and tried to fight back tears.
“I’m calling DPS,” he said. “Hell, I’ll call the President if I have to. We need help here.”
The moment he admitted it, he was filled with regret that he had not done so earlier. Maybe lives could have been saved if he hadn’t been so proud, or so concerned for the county’s economic bottom line. He wasn’t the mayor or a county supervisor, he was a cop, responsible for people’s safety above all else. He had made the wrong decision and his neighbors had paid for it—were continuing to pay—with their lives.
Susannah just gazed at him for a moment. Her face looked like he felt—tired and heartsick, with dark bags under her eyes and frown lines etched, seemingly permanently, across her forehead and around her mouth. “Good luck,” she said. The words fell out into the air, but they rang flat, without hope.
Beckett had looked at the phone number so many times in the past thirty hours
or so that he had it committed to memory. He reached around a foam cup containing his millionth coffee of the day, its aroma bitter from sitting too long, hoisted the receiver to his ear—it felt like it weighed fifty pounds—and punched the buttons. Instead of ringing, though, he heard the phone company’s standard “Don’t bother trying” tone, and then a message telling him that his call could not be completed.
In case he had misdialed, he tried again, but with the same results. Thinking exhaustion might be playing tricks with him, he looked up the number again and discovered that he had indeed been dialing it correctly. He tried once more, fully aware of the definition of insanity as repeating the same action while expecting a different result. He didn’t really expect anything different, though, because that would require too big a departure from the way the rest of his week had gone. His pessimism proved not unfounded. The same tone and message came again.
He tried another number and got the same thing. He flipped through his business card file and found the mobile phone number of a DPS detective he’d met at a state law enforcement function. Same thing. As a test, he went online and found the phone number for a pizza parlor in Phoenix and dialed that. Same thing.
“Can anyone get a long distance call through?” he shouted to no one in particular.
“I did about an hour ago,” someone called back. “Haven’t tried since then.”
“Try,” Beckett said. “I want to know if it’s just my phone, or if I’m cursed, or what.”
He heard phones being dialed throughout the station. Then he heard receivers clacking back into their holders. “No luck,” someone said.
“Same here.”
“Ditto.”
This was just great. Having finally decided that he needed help, he couldn’t make a phone call out of town. He decided to try another approach, and sent an e-mail to the DPS. Within seconds it bounced back as undeliverable. He tried a couple of test e-mails to other people, friends and family, and they did the same. Finally he sent one to himself, knowing that he was online and able to receive. Undeliverable.
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