Desperation (25 page)

No thanks,
Steve thought.

He had no more than started to open the door between the littery reception area and the outside when it was snatched prankishly out of his hands. Dust was blowing past in ribbons. The mountains to the west had been completely obliterated by moving membranes of darkening gold—sand and alkali grit flying in the day's last ten minutes or so of light—but he could see the first stars glowing clearly overhead. The wind was at near gale force now. A rusty old barrel with the words
ZOOM CHEMTRONICS DISPOSE OF PROPERLY
stencilled on it rolled across the parking lot, past the Ryder truck, and across the road. Into the desert it went. The
tink-tink-tink
of the lanyard-clip against the flagpole was feverish now, and something to their left thumped twice, hard, a sound like silencer-muffled pistol shots. Cynthia jerked against him. Steve turned toward the sound and saw a big blue Dumpster. As he looked, the wind half-lifted its lid, then dropped it. There was another muffled thump.

“There's your gunshots,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the wind.

“Well . . . it didn't sound
just
like that.”

A concatenation of coyote-howls rose in the night, some from the west, flying to them on the wind and grit, some from the north. The sound reminded Steve of old newsclips he'd seen of Beatlemania, girls screaming their heads off for the moptops from Liverpool. He and Cynthia looked at each other. “Come on,” he said. “The truck. Right now.”

They hurried to it, arms around each other and the wind at their backs. When they were in the cab again, Cynthia locked her door, bopping the button down decisively with the heel of her hand. Steve did the same, then started the engine. Its steady rumble and the glow from the dashboard when he pulled the headlight knob comforted him. He turned to Cynthia.

“All right, where do we go to report this? Austin's out. It's too far west and in the direction this shit is coming from. We'd end up by the side of the road, hoping we could start the damn engine again once the storm passed. That leaves Ely, which is a two-hour drive—longer, if the storm overtakes us—or downtown Desperation, which is maybe less than a mile.”

“Ely,” she said at once. “The people who did this could be up there in town, and I doubt if a couple of local cops or even county mounties could match up to guys who could do what we saw in there.”

“The people who did it could also be back on Route 50,” he said. “Remember the RV, and the boss's bike.”

“But we
did
see traffic,” she said, then jumped as something else fell over nearby. It sounded big and metallic. “Christ, Steve, can't we
please
just get the fuck out of here?”

He wanted to as badly as she did, but he shook his head. “Not until we figure this out. It's important. Fourteen dead people, and that doesn't count the boss or the people from the RV.”

“The Carver family.”

“This is gonna be big when it comes out—nationwide. If we go back to Ely and if it turns out there were two cops with phones and radios less than a mile up the road, and if the people who did this get away because we took too long blowing the whistle . . . well, our decision is going to be questioned.
Harshly.
”

The dashlights made her face look green and sick. “Are you saying they'd think
we
had something to do with it?”

“I don't know, but I'll tell you this: You're not the Duchess of Windsor and I'm not the Duke of Earl. We're a couple of roadbums, is what we are. How much ID do you have? A driver's license?”

“I never took the test. Moved around too much.”

“Social Security?”

“Well, I lost the
card
someplace, I think I left it behind when I split from the guy who fucked up my ear, but I remember the
number.
”

“What have you got for actual paperwork?”

“My discount card from Tower Records and Video,” she snapped. “Two punches left and I get a free CD. I'm shooting for
Out Come the Wolves.
Seems fitting, given the soundtrack in these parts. Satisfied?”

“Yeah,” he said, and began to laugh. She stared at him for a moment, cheeks green, shadows rippling across her brow, eyes dark, and he felt sure she was going to launch herself at him and see how much of his skin she could pull off. Then she began to laugh, too, a helpless screamy sound he didn't care for much. “Come here a second,” he said, and held out his hand.

“Don't you get funny with me, I'm warning you,” she said, but she scooted across the seat and into the circle of his arm with no hesitation. He could feel her shoulder trembling against his. She was going to be cold in that tank-top if they had to get out of the truck. The temperature fell off the table in this part of the world once the sun went down.

“You really want to go into town, Lubbock?”

“What I want is to be in Disneyland eating a Sno-Kone, but I think we ought to go up there and take a look. If things are normal . . . if they
feel
normal . . . okay, we'll try reporting it there. But if we see anything that looks the slightest bit wrong, we head for Ely on the double.”

She looked up at him solemnly. “I'm going to hold you to that.”

“You can.” He put the truck in gear and began to roll slowly toward the road. To the west, the gold glow which had been filtering through the sand was down to an ember. Overhead, more stars were poking through, but they were beginning to shimmy as the flying sand thickened.

“Steve? You don't happen to have a gun, do you?”

He shook his head, thought about going back into the Quonset to look for one, and then put the idea out of his head. He wasn't going back in there, that was all; he just wasn't. “No gun, but I've got a really
big
Swiss Army knife, one with all the bells and whistles. It's even got a magnifying glass.”

“That makes me feel a lot better.”

He thought of asking her about the statue, or if she'd had any funny ideas—
experimental
ideas—and then didn't. Like the thought of going back into the Quonset building again, it was just too creepy. He turned onto the road, one arm still about her shoulders, and started toward town. The sand blew thickly across the wedge of light thrown by his high beams, twisting into lank shadows that persistently reminded him of hanged men dangling from hooks.

5

The body of his sister
was gone from the foot of the stairs, and that was something. David stood looking out through the double doors for a moment. Daylight was fading, and although the sky overhead was still clear—a darkening indigo—the light was dying down here at ground-level in a choke of dust. Across the street, an overhead sign reading
DESPERATION COFFEE SHOP AND VIDEO STOP
swung back and forth in the wind. Sitting beneath it, and looking attentively across at him, were two more coyotes. Sitting between them, tatty feathers flapping in the wind like the feathers on some old woman's church-and-Bingo hat, was a large bald-looking bird David recognized as a buzzard. Sitting right between the coyotes.

“That's impossible,” he whispered, and maybe it was, but he was seeing it, just the same.

He dressed quickly, looking at a door to his left as he did. Printed on the frosted-glass pane were the words
DESPERATION TOWN OFFICE
, along with the hours—nine to four. He tied his sneakers and then opened the door, ready to turn and run if he sensed anything dangerous . . . if he sensed anything moving, really.

But where would I run? Where
is
there to run?

The room beyond the door was gloomy and silent. He groped to his left, expecting something or someone to reach out of the darkness and grab his hand, but nothing did. He found a switchplate, then the switch itself. He flipped it, blinked as his eyes adjusted to the old-fashioned hanging globes, then stepped forward. Straight ahead was a long counter with several barred windows like tellers' stations in an old-fashioned bank. One was marked
TAX CLERK
, another
HUNTING PERMITS
, another
MINES AND ASSAY
. The last one, smaller, bore a sign reading
MSHA
and
FEDERAL LAND-USE REGS
. Spray-painted on the wall behind the clerks' area in big red letters was this:
IN THESE SILENCES SOMETHING MAY RISE
.

I guess something did, too,
David thought, turning his head to check the other side of the room.
Something not very—

He never finished the thought. His eyes widened, and his hands went to his mouth to stifle a shriek. For a moment the world went gray, and he believed he might faint. To stop it happening he took his hands away from his mouth and squeezed them against his temples instead, renewing the pain there. Then he let them drop to his sides, looking with wide eyes and a hurt, quivering mouth at what was on the wall to the right of the door. There were coathooks. A Stetson with a snakeskin band hung on the one nearest the windows. Two women hung on the next two, one shot, the other gutted. This second woman had long red hair and a mouth that was open in a silent frozen scream. To her left was a man in khaki, his head down, his holster empty. Pearson, maybe, the other deputy. Next to him was a man in jeans and a blood-spattered workshirt. Last in line was Pie. She had been hung up by the back of her MotoKops shirt. Cassie Styles was on it, standing in front of her Dream Floater van with her arms folded and a big grin on her face. Cassie had always been Pie's favorite MotoKop. Pie's head lolled over her broken neck and her sneakers dangled limply down.

Her hands. He kept looking at her hands. Small and pink, the fingers slightly open.

I can't touch her, I can't go near her!

But he could. He
had
to, unless he planned to leave her there with Entragian's other victims. And after all, what else was a big brother for, especially one who wasn't quite big enough to stop the boogeyman from doing such an unspeakable thing in the first place?

Chest hitching, greenish-white curds of soap drying to scales on his skin, he put his hands together again and raised them in front of his face. He closed his eyes. His voice, when it came out, was trembling so badly he hardly recognized it as his own. “God, I know that my sister is with you, and that this is just what she left behind. Please help me do what I have to for her.” He opened his eyes again and looked at her. “I love you, Pie. I'm sorry for all the times I yelled at you or pulled your braids too hard.”

That last was too much. He knelt on the floor and put his hands on top of his bowed head and held them there, gasping and trying not to pass out. His tears cut trails in the green goo on his face. What hurt most was the knowledge that the door which had swung shut between them would never be opened, at least not in this world. He would never see Pie go out on a date or shoot a basket from downtown two seconds before the buzzer. She would never again ask him to spot her while she stood on her head or want to know if the light in the refrigerator stayed on even when the door was closed. He understood now why people in the Bible rent their clothes.

When he had control of himself, he dragged one of the chairs which stood against the wall over to where she was. He looked at her hands, her pink palms, and his mind wavered again. He forced it steady—just finding he could do that, if he had to, was a welcome surprise. That wavering toward grief returned more insistently as he stood on the chair and observed the waxy, unnatural pallor of her face and the purplish cast of her lips. Cautiously, he let some of the grief in. He sensed it would be better for him if he did. This was his first dead person, but it was also
Pie,
and he did not want to be scared of her or grossed out by her. So it was better to feel sorry, and he did. He did.

Hurry, David.

He wasn't sure if that was his voice or the other's, but this time it didn't matter. The voice was right. Pie was dead, but his father and the others upstairs weren't. And then there was his mother. That was the worst thing, in a way even worse than what had happened to Pie, because he didn't
know.
The crazy cop had taken his mother somewhere, and he might be doing anything to her.
Anything.

I won't think about that. I won't let myself.

He thought instead of all the hours Pie had spent in front of the TV with Melissa Sweetheart in her lap, watching
KrayZee Toons.
Professor KrayZee had yielded his place of honor in her heart to the MotoKops (especially Cassie Styles and the handsome Colonel Henry) over the last year or so, but the old Prof still seemed like the right answer to David. He only remembered one of Prof. KrayZee's little songs, and he sang it now as he slipped his arms around the dead girl and lifted her free of the hook:
“This old man . . . he played one . . .”

Her head fell against his shoulder. It was amazingly heavy—how had she ever held it up all day long, as little as she was?

“He played knick-knack on my thumb . . .”

He turned, stepped clumsily down from the chair, staggered but did not fall, and took Pie over to the windows. He smoothed her shirt down in the back as he went. It had torn, but only a little. He laid her down, one hand under her neck to keep from bumping her head on the floor. It was the way Mom had showed him when Pie had been just a baby and he had asked to hold her. Had he sung to her then? He couldn't remember. He supposed he might have.

“With a knick-knack paddy whack, give a dog a bone . . .”

Ugly dark-green drapes hung at the sides of the windows, which were narrow nine-foot floor-to-ceiling jobs. David tugged one down.

“Krazy Prof goes rolling home . . .”

He laid the drape out beside his sister's body, singing the stupid little song over again. He wished he could give her Melissa Sweetheart to keep her company, but 'Lissa was back by the Wayfarer. He lifted Pie onto the drape and folded the bottom half over her. It came all the way up to her neck and she looked better to him now, a
lot.
As if she were at home, sleeping in bed.

“With a knick-knack paddy whack, give a dog a bone,”
he sang again,
“Krazy Prof went rolling home.”
He kissed her forehead. “I love you, Pie,” he said, and he drew the top of the drape over her.

He remained beside her for a moment with his hands clasped tightly between his thighs, trying to get control of his emotions again. When he felt steadier, he got to his feet. The wind was howling, daylight was almost gone, and the sound of the dust against the windowpanes was like the light tapping of many fingers. He could hear a harsh, monotonous squeaking sound—
reek-reek-reek
—as something turned in the wind, and he jumped when something else out there in the growing darkness fell over with a bang.

He turned from the window and went hesitantly around the counter. There were no more bodies, but papers had been spilled behind the window marked
TAX CLERK
, and there were spots of dried blood on some of them. The Tax Clerk's high-backed, long-legged chair had been knocked over.

Behind the counter area was an open safe (David saw more stacks of paper but no money, and nothing that looked disturbed). To the right was a small cluster of desks. To the left were two closed doors, both with gold lettering on them. The one marked
FIRE CHIEF
didn't interest him, but the other one, the office of the Town Safety Officer, did. Jim Reed, that was his name.

“Town Safety Officer. What you'd call Chief of Police in a bigger burg,” David murmured, and went over to the door. It was unlocked. He felt along the wall again, located the light-switch, and flicked it. The first thing he saw when the lights came on was the huge caribou's head on the wall to the left of the desk. The second was the man behind the desk. He was tilted back in his office chair. Except for the ballpoint pens sticking out of his eyes and the desk-plaque protruding from his mouth, he might have been sleeping there, that was how relaxed his posture was. His hands had been laced together across his ample belly. He was wearing a khaki shirt and an across-the-chest belt like Entragian's.

Outside, something else fell over and coyotes howled in unison like a doowop group from hell. David jumped, then glanced over his shoulder to make sure Entragian wasn't sneaking up on him. He wasn't. David looked back at the Town Safety Officer. He knew what he had to do, and he thought if he could touch Pie, he could probably touch this stranger.

First, however, he picked up the phone. He expected it to be dead and it was. He hit the cut-off buttons a time or two anyway, saying “Hello? Hello?”

Room service, send me up a room,
he thought, and shivered as he put the handset back in the cradle. He went around the desk and stood next to the cop with the pens in his eyes. The dead man's name-plaque—
JAMES REED, TOWN SAFETY OFFICER
—was still on his desk, so the one in his mouth was something else.
OPS HERE
was printed on the part sticking out between his teeth.

David could smell something familiar—not aftershave or cologne. He looked at the dead man's folded hands, saw the deep cracks in the skin, and understood. It was hand lotion he smelled, either the same stuff his mother used or something similar. Jim Reed must have finished rubbing some into his hands not long before he was killed.

David tried to look into Reed's lap and couldn't. The man was too fat and pulled in too close to his desk for David to be able to see what he needed to see. There was a small black hole in the center of the chairback—that he could see just fine. Reed had been shot; the thing with the pens had been done (David hoped) after he was already dead.

Get going. Hurry.

He started to pull the chair back, then shouted with surprise and jumped out of the way when it over-balanced almost at his touch and spilled Jim Reed's dead weight onto the floor. The corpse uttered a great dead belch when it hit. The plaque in its mouth flew out like a missile leaving its silo. It landed upside down, but David could read it with no trouble just the same:
THE BUCK STOPS HERE.

Heart pounding harder than ever, he dropped to one knee beside the body. Reed's uniform pants were unbuttoned and unzipped, exposing some decidedly non-reg underdrawers (vast, silk, peach-colored), but David barely noticed these. He was looking for something else, and he sighed with relief when he saw it. On one well-padded hip was Reed's service revolver. On the other was a keychain clipped to a belt-loop. Biting his lower lip, somehow sure that the dead cop was going to reach out

(oh shit the mummy's after us)

and grab him, David struggled to free the keys from the belt-loop. At first the clip wouldn't open for him, but he was finally able to get it loose. He picked through the keys quickly, praying to find what he needed . . . and did. A square one that almost didn't look like a key at all. A black magnetic strip ran down its length. The key to the holding cells upstairs.

He hoped.

David put the keyring in his pocket, glanced curiously at Reed's open pants again, then unsnapped the strap over the cop's gun. He pulled it out, holding it in both hands, feeling its extraordinary weight and sense of inheld violence. A revolver, not an automatic with the bullets buried away in the handle. David turned the muzzle toward himself, careful to keep his fingers outside the trigger-guard, so he could look at the cylinder. There were bullet-heads in every hole he could see, so that was probably all right. The first chamber might be empty—in the movies cops sometimes did that to keep from shooting themselves by accident—but he reckoned that wouldn't matter if he pulled the trigger at least twice, and fast.

He turned the gun around again and inspected it from the butt forward, looking for a safety-catch. He didn't see one, and very gingerly pulled back on the trigger a little. When he saw the hammer start to rise out of its hood, he let off the pressure in a hurry. He didn't want to fire the gun down here. He didn't know how smart coyotes were, but he guessed that if they were smart about anything, it would probably be about guns.