There was a gun shop in Quigley. I stopped, bought ammunition for the handguns, and a shotgun and a box of shells. I also checked the map, found I had turned the wrong way. Stone-bridge was about eighty miles behind us, to the west. At the moment, that was just fine with me. We both needed some rest.
“These are for you,” I said, handing Harper the shotgun and box of shells as I got back into the car. “We’ll stop at the first motel we come to, eat our sandwiches, and rest up. I’ll also show you how to use that thing at close range. If we play this right, there’s a chance you may never see a lobox again, but in an emergency, that shotgun will be a lot more effective than a handgun.”
She nodded, took the shotgun, and clasped it tightly across her laps. “When are you going there, Robby?”
“Tonight. I’d like to go there now, but I’m tired, and it’s just too risky trying to do anything during the day. I figure I’ll go in looking for Garth when they’re putting on tonight’s show—if there is going to be a show. By now, there are going to be a lot of nervous people in that operation, and they may be closing up shop fast. But I don’t think they’ll just go away without the two loboxes, and I have a strong hunch those animals are still on the prowl, hunting for us.”
“Maybe you should go to the state police, Robby.”
“I’ve given it a lot of thought. That option could lead to a lot of sticky complications. For one thing, what—and how much—can we tell them? And would they believe it? I don’t want to risk having you arrested and charged with the murder of those two charmers back there.”
“But those men were taking us out to be killed, Robby.”
“Sure, but we can’t prove it. There’s no guarantee they’ll believe us. I could be charged along with you, or held as a material witness.”
“Robby, I’m more than willing to risk facing charges if it means your brother will be safe.”
“There’s no guarantee of that at all. If I get entangled with the law around here, Garth could be dead by the time I get untangled. Also, Zelezian almost certainly is being sponsored—protected—by some heavy-duty agency in Washington or very powerful individuals. It’s possible local law enforcement people wouldn’t be allowed to move on the circus until it was too late. I don’t know if that’s true, but I don’t want to take the chance. There are just too many questions, too many uncertainties. It’s why I have to go myself and hope that I get lucky. If it doesn’t work out, and they nab me again, then you’ll still be free to exercise the option of calling the troopers.”
“Robby, they may be looking to nab you now, to trap you the same way they trapped Garth. And if they do, they may just kill you out of hand. Even if they do go ahead and put on a show tonight just to keep up appearances, they’re certainly going to be on guard, watching for you.”
She was probably right. “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not.”
“Not only will they be looking for you, Robby, but you’ll be going right back into the loboxes’ sensory range.”
“We don’t know where they are, Harper. In any case, I don’t feel I have any other choices.”
“Okay,” she said evenly. She paused, staring at the shotgun, then continued, “How did I do last night, Robby?”
“You did real good.”
“Then there’ll be no argument about my going to the circus with you tonight.”
“Harper,” I said with a sigh, “if I were to tell you that having you with me would be a distraction because I’d be worried about you, you’d call me a sexist, and then remind me that it was you who saved our asses last night. Right?”
“That’s very good reasoning,” she said, and smiled. “So thank you for not being a sexist, and thank you for not forcing me to remind you that it was me who saved our asses last night.”
“I need you some place safe, Harper, so that you’ll be able to call the police if I don’t come back.”
“In some motel nearly a hundred miles away? I want to be there, Robby. This time I promise I will wait in the car, but at least I’ll be close by, close enough to actually hear or see—maybe—if anything goes wrong. You know I’m right. We’re in this together. I’ll be useless a hundred miles away, and you know it. I just might mean the difference between you and Garth living or dying.”
“Harper, the loboxes … As you pointed out, we will be going back into their sensory range.”
She wrapped her hands around the shotgun, hefted it. “I won’t pee in my pants next time, Robby. If a lobox comes after me again, I’m going to have me a lobox rug. Let me watch your back. I really will feel safer if I’m with you.”
I reached across the seat, took her hand, and squeezed it hard. “Thank you, Harper,” I said simply. I didn’t know what else to say. The fact of the matter was that she was right, and I was grateful to her for her resolve and courage.
I’d definitely had just about enough of dread and circuses, but this was a command performance. It was show time—both for World Circus and for me.
If the Zelezians were worried about anything—dead gunmen, missing multimillion-dollar assassin-beasts, or their cranky intended victims on the loose—it wasn’t evident in the setup or atmosphere on the county fairgrounds outside the town of Stonebridge; lights blazed on the midway, where all the rides and games were in progress, and music blared from inside the Big Top, where the show had just begun. It could mean that they weren’t at all concerned about what Harper and I might tell the authorities—or anything else we might do—and that tended to make me even more nervous.
As it was, I was soaked with sweat, although it was a relatively dry, cool night; walking around knowing that at any second horrible, clawed death may leap out from the shadows to rip out your throat and bowels can have that effect on a man.
We’d left the ruined Plymouth in an alley beside a supermarket and rented a station wagon, which was now parked, with Harper and her loaded shotgun inside it, at the edge of one of the three parking fields where there was enough radiated light for her to be able to see anything and anybody that might approach. With the Colt in my suit jacket pocket and the .45 automatic in my right hand, I was working my way through lines of parked cars and pickup trucks toward a roped-off area behind the Big Top. There I knew I would find the penning enclosures as well as the parking field containing the trailers and the enormous Mack semis that hauled the circus around the country.
There was a man in a gray suit standing in the moonlight near the roped-off area. He was holding a walkie-talkie near his mouth, and there was a pronounced bulge in his suit jacket, near his left armpit. He was definitely not a circus roustabout, and I strongly doubted that he was a plainclothes state trooper. Rather, the man’s presence suggested to me that the Zelezians had appealed to their government or corporate sponsor for a little additional help in case of any emergency I might try to cause. As I watched, the man spoke into the walkie-talkie, in English, and there was a crackling response.
In the section of the field just beyond the gunman in the gray suit, a dozen semitrailers were parked in rows of four, virtually nose-to-nose, with one row flush to the rear of the Big Top. That was where I wanted to go. I had been kept inside an old circus wagon, but there were no more of those in evidence. Garth was too big and obstreperous to try to keep in any mobile home, so I figured they might have him locked up in an animal cage inside one of the semis. In any case, the rows of parked tracks seemed the logical place to start looking. He would, at least, be in a position to return a signal.
If he was conscious.
Trying not to think of what might be slinking toward me in the darkness of the parking lot, I angled to my right, away from the gunman in the suit. I stopped fifty yards away and waited for him to look in the opposite direction, then darted out from behind a car, ran across a narrow dirt track, and ducked under a rope into a dark area near where the semis were parked. I crouched down in the night, forcing myself to take deep breaths and try to relax as I looked around me in the darkness and wiped sweat away fr
om my eyes.
I had to hope Garth hadn’t been drugged into unconsciousness; I had to hope he could respond to a signal. I could only start worrying about how to get him out after I found out where he was.
It was time to get off the ground, where I was vulnerable to a lobox attack from all sides. I hustled on over to the trucks, climbed up on the running board of the first one in the first line, clambered up onto the roof of the cab. Then I put the .45 in my other suit jacket pocket, jumped up, and caught the edge of the roof of the box with my fingers. I hauled myself up and over the edge onto the corrugated steel roof, then lay down in the darkness and again forced myself to take a series of deep breaths, seeking release from the terror that had gripped me from the moment I had left the relative safety of the station wagon. I kept reminding myself that I was safe from the loboxes, at least for the time being. The suited gunman was still pacing back and forth on the dirt track, speaking into his walkie-talkie, which meant that I hadn’t been seen. I was still in business.
I began to feel better.
I was even beginning to feel just a tad of optimism.
I worked my way across the length of the box on the first semi, softly tapping out a Morse SOS code on the metal with the barrel of the automatic as I went along. When I reached the rear of the box, I eased myself over the edge and dropped to the hood of the tractor parked behind it. I hauled myself up to the roof of the box of that truck, again started tapping out the SOS code as I worked my way down its length.
On the roof of the box of the third semi, I hit pay dirt. I was halfway down, tapping out my signal, when I heard Garth’s voice.
“Mongo?! That damn well better be you, brother! I need rescuing!”
I rested my head against the cold metal and breathed a sigh of relief. My brother didn’t sound drugged, only angry. I tapped again.
“Mongo?! Is that you, you little flicker? I want you to know that I’m seriously pissed at you! And Mary’s pissed at you, too!”
His words filled me with a new fear. It had never occurred to me that Mary might have come along with Garth and been captured too. If she had, it would present a host of new problems.
My knowledge of Morse was limited at best, and I didn’t know if Garth knew any of it at all. I screwed my eyes shut, trying to recall the pages of dots and dashes from my Cub Scout manual.
Tappety-tap. M-A-R-Y H-E-R-E.
“No! Just me!”
W-A-I-T.
“Mongo, when I find out what you’ve gotten yourself into this time, I’m likely to tear your fucking head off!”
S-H-U-T U-P W-A-I-T.
I crawled on my belly back toward the front edge of the box, where there was an air vent, gently tapping all the way so that Garth could follow my progress. I could only hope that Garth had all of the interior of the box to move around in. When I was near the edge I paused to look around, but I didn’t see any guards or roustabouts. I leaned over the edge, put my mouth close to the air vent.
“Garth? Can you hear me?”
“Yeah.” His voice sounded as if it was directly below me, which meant that he had not been locked in a cage inside a cage. Good. “Sorry about all that yelling I did. It was just my way of letting you know I was happy to hear from you. It’s getting a little stuffy in here.”
“Yeah, I know. You’re forgiven.”
“When I didn’t hear from you again for two days after our last phone conversation, I knew you’d gone and stuck that big nose of yours into Arlen Zelezian’s business—just like I’d warned you not to. Christ, I was afraid you were dead.”
“Not yet.”
“But you’re working on it, right?”
“That isn’t exactly the way I’d put it.”
“What the hell’s going on, Mongo?”
“You know about the loboxes?”
“What are loboxes? I don’t know anything, except that you and your girlfriend are in deep shit. The police are looking for the two of you.”
“Yeah, that figures.”
“I take it they’ve missing something, but I could never make out just what it is. I only heard bits and pieces of conversation.”
“They’re missing something, all right: two things. Look, have you got any lights in there?”
“No. This truck’s filled with spare equipment, from what I can make out. I almost broke my neck following you over here.”
“Okay, you’ve got double doors that swing out at the rear of the box and in the middle, on your left as you’re facing toward the cab—the way you’re facing now. They’re padlocked. I’m going to try to shoot the lock off the doors at the rear, because I have more cover there. The trucks are parked nose-to-ass, but there should be enough room there for you to squeeze out. The shot is going to attract some attention, so be prepared to move fast. I’ve got a friend waiting for us in a car, but we may have to shoot our way out through the parking lots. You ready?”
“And then some.”
“Here I come.”
I crawled back to the rear of the box, taking care not to let myself be silhouetted against the sky, lowered myself to the hood of the tractor parked just behind. The padlock on the double doors of the trailer box ahead was just about at waist level. I straddled the hood ornament, took the automatic out of my pocket.
“Hey, Mongo? You out there?”
I gently tapped the door in response, then aimed the gun with both hands at the padlock and waited. The gray-suited gunman and his colleagues were going to come running at the sound of the shot, and I needed something to at least partially mask the report. Inside the Big Top, the band was striking up the Triumphal March from Aida, signaling Luther’s entrance on Mabel. The music was building up in a crescendo that would end in a blare of trumpets, a drumroll, and a cymbal crash. It might just be enough. I aimed the gun, waited for the right moment.
There was no sound of warning, no characteristic roar; as I began to squeeze the trigger, I caught a flash of tawny color and blurred movement out of the corner of my right eye. I yelled in sheer terror and went flat on my back, throwing my arms across my face and throat, in the process losing my grip on the gun, which clattered across the hood, fell to the ground on the other side. I felt the breeze generated by the lobox’s flight through the air just over my body, felt a sharp tug as its claws caught the lapels of my suit jacket, shredding them.
“Mongo! What’s the matter?! What’s happening out there?!”
What was happening was that the lobox that had been primed to kill me was back on my case, and I really didn’t have time to explain to Garth what that all meant. In fact, I might not have much time left for anything. When I reached for the Colt, I found my suit jacket pocket empty; when I had thrown myself back on the hood, the heavy gun had slipped out, fallen to the ground along with the automatic.
The lobox—which had hurtled across the tractor hood and landed on the ground to my left—leaped to its feet at the same time I did. The beast wheeled on the grass in the narrow alley between parked trucks, bunched its legs under it, and sprang up at me the same time as I sprang for the edge of the roof of the trailer box. My fingers caught the steel edge and I pulled, hauling my legs up just as I heard the snap of jaws below my feet. It was a motivating sound. Terror and adrenaline propelled me up the side of the box, and I rolled over onto the roof as I heard claws scratching at the steel in the spot where my body had been only a moment before.
There was a sharp crack of a gun, and a bullet bit into the steel at the side of the box. I glanced in the direction from which the shot had come, saw a gray-suited gunman running across the field in my direction.
It was just what I needed. Mongo the Fumble-fingered was being given the choice of having his throat torn away or his brains blown out.
Gunman or no, I wasn’t about to hang around to see how many leaps it was going to take the lobox before it managed to get up on the roof; its body was repeatedly banging against the steel, claws desperately scraping at the metal, and each leap seemed to bring
it closer to the roof’s edge. Whatever killed me, human or animal, was going to leave me just as dead, and at the moment I was more worried about the animal than the human. I scrambled to my feet as another bullet whizzed over my head. Keeping as low as possible, I bounded three steps, leaped across the bridge of space separating the truck I was on from the one parked next to it. If I could make it across the roofs of two more rows of trucks, I thought, I just might be able to leap onto the Big Top’s canvas and crawl up to where there was a hole at the top, around the great center pole that was the tent’s main support. I didn’t have the slightest idea what I was going to do when I got there, or what good it was going to do me in the long run, but it seemed an infinitely better spot than the one I was in. My only other alternative was to jump down to the ground, where I estimated I would last about five seconds.
I might last only slightly longer than that where I was, I thought as I leaped through the air again and landed on the next truck. I could hear the lobox’s claws clicking and scraping on the steel behind me. It had gotten up to the roofs, and it was gaining on me. Fast.
One more leap, and I was on the roof of a semi parked right next to the Big Top. I sprang out into the air, arms extended full length, and my fingers caught the hard edge where a support cable ran horizontally along the length of the tent, beneath the canvas. I pulled, feet scraping on the canvas, and managed to haul myself up and over the cable, onto the incline leading up to the top. Immediately, instinctively, I rolled to my left.
The lobox landed right next to me—and would have landed on me if I hadn’t rolled away. The claws of both its front paws punctured the canvas, and I knew I was finished. I was like a novice rock climber in sneakers on an ice sheet trying to escape from an experienced, fully rigged mountaineer; there was no way I could scramble up the steeply inclined canvas fast enough to escape the lobox, which had built-in pitons on all its feet. I flinched, every muscle in my body knotting as I waited for it to pull itself up the rest of the way, get its hind feet under it, and then proceed to use me for a quickly disposable scratching pole. I was close enough to it to see that it had a new dark stripe on its coat, this one running vertically down off its left shoulder, perpendicular to the black stripes running down its back on either side of its spine. But the stripe on its shoulder wasn’t natural; it was dried blood from the gunshot wound I had inflicted on it. Not that wounding it had done me any good; as far as I could tell, getting nicked by the bullet hadn’t slowed the beast down one iota and had probably only served to make it more determined to get me. I stared back into the all-too-human golden eyes; they were only inches from mine, and they seemed alive with an all-too-human glow of triumph.
The Fear in Yesterday's Rings Page 17