Nightwalker

by Heather Graham

Page 28

 

  “I guess you got it right,” Ringo said, “Tanner Green was watching your girl, and Miss Sparhawk saw him. Confusing? I spent some time up in the penthouse first, watching Emil Landon. ”

  “And?”

  “I watched him stare at a stack of papers. I watched Hugo Blythe sit outside his office, reading magazines. Then I decided your girl needed my maybe-not-so-helpful presence more and left. That’s when I saw her and Tanner Green watching each other. No sign of Rudy Yorba. And Miss Sparhawk looked like she was managing just fine. Does that mean you can introduce us now?”

  “You’re sure?” Dillon asked, ignoring Ringo’s question. “She saw him and she wasn’t freaked out?”

  “She was fine,” Ringo said with assurance. “She’s got a backbone. She just had to get over the it’s-really-a-ghost thing. ”

  “How can you be so certain?”

  Ringo gave him a dry stare, then sighed. “I’ve been watching people for over a hundred years now. How’s that for a reason?”

  “Yeah, okay. You probably know what you’re talking about. ”

  Ringo sniffed. “So when do we let her know about me? The time will come when I might be able to help on this thing, you know. ”

  “Soon, okay?”

  “All right. So how was the…. ” Ringo paused and shuddered. “The morgue? Hell, when I died, they just threw me into a hole in the ground. ”

  “In Indigo?” Dillon said.

  “Hell, yes, in Indigo,” Ringo agreed.

  “Well, it’s time. Let’s go,” Dillon told him, and Ringo rose and followed him to the car, along with the ever-present jingling of his spurs.

  Tanner Green didn’t stay for the entire show, and Jessy actually forgot about the ghost for a while because there were so many children and parents who lingered that day. She signed autographs and posed for a seemingly endless succession of pictures.

  After saying goodbye to a pretty, young woman who had accompanied two five-year-olds, she looked up and realized she was the only one left on set.

  She got up and headed backstage, and was just approaching the curtain that separated the set from the dressing rooms when she heard a sudden whooshing sound. She turned just in time to see one of the giant sails, rigged to fall apart when a fake cannon boomed, swinging toward her. She let out a yelp and fell flat on the floor, rolling away more quickly than she would have thought possible.

  She heard the mast crash as it fell, which it did during every performance, but all the players were safely on the deck of the ship when it happened.

  She scrambled to her feet and shouted up into the rigging, “Hey! Idiot! I’m still here! Quit messing with the set until I’m in the clear. ”

  There was no answer, though she thought she heard a scrambling in the rigging, and her heart started to pound. Had she heard human footsteps…?

  Or a ghost?

  She walked back to the women’s dressing room to find April just slipping into her dress.

  “What took you so long?” the other woman asked. “Good show today, huh?”

  “Yeah—until the sail just almost fell on me,” Jessy said.

  “You’re kidding!” April said. “Better tell the stage manager. ”

  “I will, thanks. ”

  “Okay, I’m outta here, then. Hey, where’s tall, dark and to-die-for today?”

  “He had to work,” Jessy said.

  April grinned. “Bummer. Well, you take care, sweetie. See you tomorrow. ”

  Before changing, Jessy found the stage manager, Ron Pearl, and told him what had happened. He was perplexed and concerned, though she had a feeling he was more worried about the legal repercussions of someone getting hurt than how she herself was actually feeling. But he swore he would find out what had happened, so she left him to it and headed back to the dressing room.

  She was alone there as she cleaned her face and changed into her street clothes, and though she felt edgy, her senses heightened, as far as she could tell there were no ghosts in sight.

  As soon as she was dressed, she called Sandra, who was delighted with the idea of meeting her for dinner on the Strip.

  It wasn’t until Jessy had left the casino and was waiting out front for Sandra to show up that she once again had the sense of someone watching her, raising goose pimples on her flesh.

  She paused, looking around. There were people everywhere, some just strolling along sightseeing, others hurrying toward some unknown destination. Some were alone and quiet, while others talked and laughed as they passed in groups. And some of them were weaving as if they were already drunk.

  None of them was Tanner Green or Rudy Yorba.

  Despite her inability to spot anyone, she was sure she was being followed. The thing of it was, she didn’t think her shadow was a ghost.

  She was being stalked.

  By someone who was very much alive.

  10

  Indigo.

  It was a ghost town now, and Dillon parked in the dust alongside what passed for a road, then got out and leaned against the hood, looking around. He knew without even glancing over that Ringo was next to him, just checking out the place, the same as he was doing.

  It might have been a movie set. The facades of the buildings were faded but still mostly intact, facing the barren and godforsaken stretch of road that had once lived up to the name of Main Street. Sand and dust coated everything with a film that only added to the surreal effect. The road itself remained dirt, as it had always been. Time and the elements had left it a rutted mess.

  The remains of the sidewalks that fronted the buildings were wooden, the boards, cracked and broken, at least where they weren’t missing altogether. Peeling, faded paint still proclaimed the names of various buildings: Leif’s Livery, Miners’ Bank of Nevada, even—decipherable despite the missing letters—Martin’s Harness, N w and Repa red. A freestanding house advertised itself as the office of Dr. Benjamin Sully, M. D.

  “There’s the jail,” Ringo pointed out, and Dillon looked over and made out the words Sheriff’s Office, Town of Indigo, Nevada.

  Dillon had been to Indigo twice before. The second time was after his grandfather had died and Ringo had come to stay. Dillon had learned his story and come here to see the town through Ringo’s eyes. He’d been here once before that because his ancestor John Wolf, a legend to his tribe, had associations with the town. John Wolf had given his own life so that a white girl, a Paiute adoptee, could live, in the process protecting the tribe’s claim to the land beneath the town, as well as a nearby claim. Though the claim hadn’t yielded the riches the tribe had dreamed of, this was still Indian land. A man named Varny—a con artist with a nasty streak—had ruled the town until he and John had shot each other in the same gunfight that had killed Ringo. With Varny’s death, the brothels and bars he ran closed, and that—combined with the fact that the rest of the claim hadn’t yielded the hoped-for gold—had completed the demise of Indigo. Roads and the railroad had gone elsewhere, and the town had become nothing more than a proud but ultimately worthless symbol of one man’s victory over injustice.

  Ringo had attached himself to Dillon because he was a descendant of John Wolf, and he had admired John during their brief acquaintance. The white girl, Mariah, had been Dillon’s many-times great-grand-mother. Mariah had been pregnant with John’s child when he’d died. Ensuing years of inter-racial marriage had created his own mix of white and Indian blood.

  Indigo didn’t look any different now than since he’d been here the first time, much less since the last. A few years back, some Hollywood execs had paid the tribe to rent out the town for a movie. But the desert reclaimed its own quickly, and whatever minor improvements they made had been wiped away quickly.

  “Indigo,” Ringo said, shaking his head. “Do you think that Jessy heard right? Why in hell was that Tanner Green’s dying word?”

  “I don’t know. Has to mean someth
ing,” Dillon said. He looked at Ringo curiously. “Do you remember yours? Did you have a dying word?”

  “If I did, I’m sure they were something like ‘Fuck you, sucker,’” Ringo told him wryly. “It was all too fast, though. I don’t remember. ”

  “What the hell could Tanner Green have to do with Indigo?” Dillon wondered aloud.

  “Nothing to do but start looking around,” Ringo said with a shrug.

  “Think those movie people changed the place much?” Dillon asked.

  “Looks to me like they put all the dust back exactly where it had been,” Ringo told him.

  Dillon laughed and said, “I’ll take the bank. ”

  “All right, I’ll start with the livery,” Ringo said, then paused, shaking his head as he pointed farther down the street. “There she is—the old Crystal Canary. Some of the gals they had there could actually sing. There was one pretty little thing…Oh, well. That was a long time ago. Okay, you take the left side, I’ll take the right. ” Then he stood still for a moment, looking around.

  “What?” Dillon asked him.

  “We can meet in the saloon. ” Ringo pointed to the building in question, where one of the swinging doors now hung lopsidedly from a single hinge.

  “When the sun goes down, the rays reach right into the saloon. That was when it happened. Right when the sunset began. ”

  “Good. We can go check it out in a few hours. ”

  “Why?” Ringo asked.

  “Why? Because we’re here—for some reason,” Dillon told him. He found himself remembering his discussion with Timothy Sparhawk. Was this what he’d meant when he said they were all coming together again? It made no sense. Ringo had been here, and so had John Wolf, but what did any of that have to do with Tanner Green?

  He didn’t know.

  Ringo, spurs clinking, walked off toward the livery stables.

  Dillon started with the bank.

  His eyes had to adjust to the sudden shadow when he stepped through the doorway—an easy maneuver, since the door itself was gone. He almost stepped through a hole in the floor left by a broken floorboard, but he saw it at the last minute and avoided it.