Whirlwind

by Charles L. Grant

  Strangled with either an unfinished belt or rawhide strap, their bodies stripped to the waist, and a razor taken to their chests.

  One slice each.

  None had been raped.

  Beth Neuhouse groaned and plucked at her blouse. “God, doesn’t the air conditioning work in here? How can you work like this? It’s like a sauna.”

  Fox Mulder shrugged unconcern, then pushed a hand back through his hair.

  He checked each black-and-white in turn, his gaze flicking over them increasingly rapidly, as though he were reading.

  “Well?” Bournell asked. “You got a magic trick for us? You got a rabbit we can chase?”

  Mulder held up a hand to hush him, then slid the pictures from their folders and laid them out in a line. A moment later he switched the second and fourth.

  “Mulder,” Neuhouse said, “we haven’t got all day. Either you’ve got something or you don’t. Don’t play games, okay?

  Mulder straightened, and almost smiled. “Beth, get me a sheet of paper, please?” His left hand gestured vaguely toward the other room.

  It was his tone that moved her more than the request. Those who had worked with him before had heard it at least once. One of the older agents had said it was like the first bay of a hound that had finally found the scent; you didn’t argue with it, you just followed.

  And you made sure your gun was loaded.

  Bournell frowned. “What? I don’t see it.”

  Mulder pushed the photographs closer together and pointed. “It’s there. I think.” Sudden doubt made him hesitate. “I’m—”

  “Here.” Neuhouse thrust a blank sheet into his hand. She stared at the bodies then, and her voice quieted. “I’ve been looking at those women for over a month, Mulder. I’m seeing them in my sleep.”

  He knew exactly what she meant.

  In many ways, the black-and-whites were as bad as looking at the bodies themselves. Although the color was gone, violent death wasn’t. The only thing missing was the smell, and it wouldn’t take much effort to bring that up, too.

  “So what do we have?” Bournell asked.

  “I’m not positive. It’s kind of crazy.”

  Neuhouse laughed quietly. “Well, this is the place for it, right?”

  Mulder smiled. No offense had been meant, and he hadn’t taken any. He knew his reputation in the Bureau, and it no longer bothered him. He was a flake, a maverick, a little around the bend on the other side of the river. He worked as much from logic and reason as anyone else, but there were times when he didn’t have to take every single step along the way.

  There were times when abrupt intuitive leaps put him ahead of the game.

  Sometimes that was far enough to have it called magic.

  Or, more often than not, spooky.

  He put up with it because that reputation came in handy once in a while.

  “Come on, Houdini,” Bournell complained. “I’m frying in here.”

  Beth aimed a semiplayful slap at his arm. “Will you shut up and let the man think?”

  “What think? All he has to do is—”

  “Here,” Mulder said, slapping the paper onto the shelf, indecision gone. He grabbed a pen from his shirt pocket. “Look at this.”

  The others leaned over his shoulders as he pointed to the first picture, but she wasn’t the first victim. “The cut runs from just over her right breast to just under the left. In the next, it’s the reverse.”

  “So?” Bournell said.

  Mulder pointed again. “It could be the killer leans over and just cuts her.” He straightened suddenly, and the others jumped back when his left hand demonstrated an angry, senseless slashing. “It could be, but I don’t think so. Not this time.” He pointed at the third woman. “This is clearly most of a letter, right?”

  “R, maybe, if you combine it with the next one over,” Neuhouse answered, glancing at her partner, daring him to contradict. “I know that much.”

  “Damn sloppy, then,” Bournell said.

  “For God’s sake, Stan, he’s slashing her! What the hell do you expect?”

  Mulder copied the slash marks onto the paper, turned, and held it up.

  They stared at it, puzzled, then stared at him—Bournell in confusion, Neuhouse with a disbelief that had her lips poised for a laugh.

  “He’s writing his name,” Mulder told them. “He’s letting you know who he is.” He exhaled loudly. “One piece at a time.”

  The luncheonette was two blocks from FBI headquarters, a narrow corner shop with a long Formica counter and a half-dozen window booths, most of the decor done in pale blues and white. The windows had been tinted to cut the sun’s glare, but it still threatened Mulder with a drumming headache whenever he glanced out at the traffic.

  Once done with the sparring duo, he had grabbed his tie and jacket and fled, stomach growling unmercifully, his head threatening to expand far beyond its limits. Even now he could hear them arguing, with each other and with him, telling him, and each other, that he was out of his freaking mind. Killers did not write their names on victims’ bodies; at least, they sure didn’t do it in classical Greek.

  And when they finally, reluctantly, accepted it, they demanded to know who the killer was and why he did it.

  Mulder didn’t have any answers, and he told them that more than once.

  When it had finally sunk in, they had stormed out as loudly as they’d stormed in, and he had stared at the door for nearly a full minute before deciding he’d better get out now, before the echoes of their bickering gave him a splitting headache.

  The trouble was, stomach or not, the nattering and the heat had combined to kill his appetite. The burger and fries looked greasy enough to be delicious, but he couldn’t bring himself to pick anything up, even for a taste. Dumb, perhaps, but still, he couldn’t do it.

  A siren screamed; a police car raced down the center of the crowded street.

  In the booth ahead of him, two couples chattered about baseball while at the same time they damned the heat wave that had been sitting on Washington for nearly two weeks.

  On his right, on the last counter stool, an old man in a worn cardigan and golf cap listened to a portable radio, a talk show whose callers wanted to know what the local government was going to do about the looming water shortage and constant brownouts. A handful were old enough to still want to blame the Russians.

  Mulder sighed and rubbed his eyes.

  In calmer times, it was nice to know his expertise was appreciated; in times like these, exacerbated by the prolonged heat, he wished the world would leave him the hell alone.

  He picked up a french fry and stared at it glumly.

  The radio announced a film festival on one of the cable channels. Old films from the forties and fifties. Not at all guaranteed to be good, just fun.

  He grunted, and popped the fry into his mouth. All right, he thought; I can hole up at home with Bogart for a while.

  He smiled to himself.

  The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea. In fact, he thought as he picked up the burger, it sounded like exactly what he needed.

  He was finished before he realized he had eaten a single bite. A good sign.

  He grinned more broadly when a woman slipped into the booth and stared in disgust at his plate.

  “You know,” his partner said, “your arteries must be a scientific wonder.”

  He reached for the last fry, and Dana Scully slapped the back of his hand.

  “Take a break and listen. We’re wanted.”

  She was near his age and shorter, her face slightly rounded, light auburn hair settling softly on her shoulders. More than once, the object of one of their manhunts had thought her too feminine to be an obstacle. Not a single one of them had held that thought for very long.

  Mulder wiped his mouth with a napkin, the grin easing to a tentative smile. “Wanted?”

  “Skinner,” she told him. “First thing in the morning. No excuses.”

 
The smile held, but there was something new in his eyes. Anticipation, and a faint glimmer of excitement.

  Assistant Director Skinner asking for them now, while they were both in the midst of cases still pending, generally meant only one thing.

  Somewhere out there was an X-File, waiting.

  “Maybe,” she said, as if reading his mind. She snatched the last fry and bit it in half. An eyebrow lifted. “Or maybe you’re just in trouble again.”

  THREE

  Twilight promised the desert, and the city at the base of the Sandia Mountains, a pleasantly cool evening. The heat had already begun to dissipate, and a wandering breeze raised wobbly dust devils along the interstate that stretched from Albuquerque to Santa Fe. Snakes sought their dens. A roadrunner streaked through a small corral, delighting a group of children who didn’t want to leave their riding lessons. A hawk danced with the thermals.

  On the low bank of the Rio Grande, beneath a stretch of heavy-crowned cottonwoods, Paulie Deven snapped pebbles and stones at the shallow water, cursing each time he hit the dried mud instead.

  He hated New Mexico.

  The Rio Grande was supposed to be this wide awesome river, deep, with rapids and cliffs, all that good stuff.

  But not here. Here, he could almost spit across it, and most of the time it hardly held any water. You could forget about the cliffs, and rapids were out of the question.

  He threw another stone.

  Behind him, he could hear muffled music coming from the trailer his parents had rented from the developer until their new house was finished. That was supposed to have been three months ago, when they had arrived from Chicago. But some kind of permits were wrong, and then there was some kind of strike, and…and…He snarled and threw another rock, so hard he felt a twinge in his shoulder.

  He thought he was going to live in the West. Maybe not the Old West, but it was supposed to be the West.

  What his folks had done was simply trade one damn city for another. Except that he had belonged back in Chicago; back there the kids didn’t get on his case because of the way he looked and sounded.

  A light fall of pebbles startled him, but he didn’t look around. It was probably his pain-in-the-ass sister, sliding down the slope to tell him Mom and Dad wanted him back in the trailer now, before some wild animal dragged him into the desert and ate him for breakfast.

  Right.

  Like there was anything out there big enough to eat something built like a football player.

  “Paulie?”

  He glanced over his left shoulder. “You blind, or what?”

  Patty sneered and plopped down beside him. She was a year younger than his seventeen, her glasses thick, her brain thicker, her hair in two clumsy braids that thumped against her chest. He wasn’t exactly stupid, but he sure felt that way whenever she was around.

  She pulled her legs up and hugged her knees. “Not much of a river, is it?”

  “Good eyes.”

  “They’re fighting again.”

  Big surprise.

  Ever since they had moved into the trailer, they had been fighting—about the house, about the move, about his Dad being close to losing his job, about practically anything they could. A damn war had practically started when he’d taken some of his savings and bought himself an Indian pendant on a beaded string. His father called him a goddamn faggot hippie, his mother defended him, and Paulie had finally slammed outside before his temper forced him to start swinging.

  Patty rested her chin on her knees and stared at the sluggish water. Then she turned her head. “Paulie, are you going to run away?”

  He couldn’t believe it. “What?”

  She shrugged, looked back at the river. “The way you’ve been acting, I thought…I don’t know…I thought maybe you were going to try to get back to Chicago.”

  “I wish.” He threw another rock; it hit the mud on the far side. “You ever think about it?”

  “All the time.”

  That amazed him. Patty was the brain, the one with the level head, the one who never let anything get to her, ever. He hated to admit it, but he had lost count of the number of times she had saved his ass just by talking their folks into forgetting they were mad. Running away, running back home, was his kind of no-brain plan, not hers.

  The sun died.

  Night slipped from the cottonwoods.

  A few stray lights from the trailer, from the handful of others on the other lots and the homes on the far side, were caught in fragments in the river, just enough to let him know it was still there.

  Suddenly he didn’t like the idea of being alone. “You’re not going to do it, are you?”

  She giggled. “You nuts? Leave this paradise?” She giggled again. “Sorry, Paulie, but I’ve got two years till graduation. I’m not going to screw it up, no matter what.” She turned her head again; all he saw was her eyes. “But then, I swear to God, I’m going to blow this town so goddamn fast, you won’t even remember what I look like.”

  He grinned. “That won’t be hard.”

  “And the horse you rode in on, brother.”

  “I hate horses, too. Their manure smells like shit.”

  A second passed in silence before they exploded into laughter, covering their mouths, half-closing their eyes, rocking on their buttocks until Patty got the hiccups, and Paulie took great pleasure in thumping her back until she punched his arm away.

  “I’m serious,” she insisted, her face flushed. “I’m not kidding.

  “Yeah, well.” He watched the black water, rubbed a finger under his nose. “So am I.”

  Angry voices rose briefly above the music.

  A door slammed somewhere else, and a pickup’s engine gunned to launch the squealing of tires.

  Off to their left, beyond the last tree, something began to hiss.

  Paulie heard it first and frowned as he looked upriver, trying to see through the dark. “Pat?”

  “Huh?”

  “Do snakes come out at night?”

  “What are you talking about? What snakes?”

  He reached over and grabbed her arm to hush her up.

  Hissing, slow and steady, almost too soft to hear.

  “No,” she whispered, a slight tremor in her voice. “At least, I don’t think so. It’s too cool, you know? They like it hot, or something.”

  Maybe she was right, but it sure sounded like snakes to him. A whole bunch of them, over there where none of the lights reached, about a hundred feet away.

  Patty touched his hand, to get him to release her and to tell him she heard it, too. Whatever it was.

  They couldn’t see a thing.

  Overhead, the breeze coasted through the leaves, and he looked up sharply, holding his breath until he realized what it was.

  That was another thing he hated about this stupid place: it made too many sounds he couldn’t identify, especially after sunset.

  Every one of them gave him the creeps.

  The hissing moved.

  Except now it sounded like rapid, hoarse whispering, and Paulie shifted up to one knee, straining to make out something, anything, that would give him a clue as to who was out there and what they were doing.

  Patty crawled up behind him, a hand resting on his back. “Let’s get out of here, Paulie, huh?”

  He shook his head obstinately. It was bad enough he was here because his folks had had some shit-for-brains idea about starting over, when they already had a perfectly good business back up North. He definitely wasn’t going to let the buttheads here frighten him off.

  City boy.

  They called him “city boy” at school, their lips curled, their voices sneering, unimpressed by his size or the glares that he gave them.

  Yeah, sure. Like this wasn’t a city, right? Like they didn’t have traffic jams, right? Like people didn’t shoot and stab and stomp each other here like they did in Chicago, right?

  The dark moved.

  The hissing moved.

  “Paulie?”


  He swayed to his feet, trying not to make too much noise. His hands wiped across his jeans and curled into fists. Now they had made him angry.

  “Paulie, come on.”

  “Go back up,” he ordered without turning around.

  Something had definitely moved out there, probably a bunch of wiseass kids trying to creep toward him. He took a sideways step up the uneven bank; his foot nudged a short length of dead branch. Without taking his eyes off the dark, he reached down and picked it up.

  “Paulie.”

  “Go up!” he snapped, louder than he’d intended. “Damnit, Patty.”

  Staring so hard made him dizzy. It was like trying to pin down the edges of a black fog.

  His free hand rubbed his eyes quickly and hard, but nothing changed.

  There just wasn’t enough light.

  This, he thought, is really dumb. Get your ass outta here before something happens.

  An arm snaked over his shoulder, and he bit so hard on a yelp that he choked.

  Patty’s hand opened to show him the dim gleam of a gold cigarette lighter. He took it and half-turned, his expression demanding to know when she’d started smoking. He realized the ridiculous timing when she flashed him a not now, stupid grin and jerked her chin to turn him back around.

  His own smile had no humor.

  He shifted the branch club until it felt properly balanced. Then he took a bold step forward and squared his shoulders. “Listen, assholes, you want to get lost, you want to get hurt, your choice.”

  No one answered.

  Only the hissing.

  He held the lighter up and sparked it, squinting against the reach of the flame’s faint yellow glow until his vision adjusted. There were shadows now that slid away and slid toward him as he raised the light over his head and moved his arm from side to side. The trees moved; the leaves turned gray; the bank took on contours that didn’t exist.

  “Hey!”

  Another step.

  “Hey!”

  Another.

  The breeze touched the back of his neck and twisted the flame to make the shadows writhe.