Disembodied Bones (37 page)

Leonie felt disappointment deep within her.
He’d been standing in front of her, so close she could have reached
out and pushed him away with a pinkie, but all she’d seen was a
slashing smile discolored by the Indiglo blue light of her watch.
Then there wasn’t any disappointment. There wasn’t anything at
all.

-

One thin, one bold,

One sick, one cold.

The earth we span,

To prey upon man.

Who are we?

We are the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

Saturday, July 27th

I’m the beginning of eternity

And the end of time and space;

I’m the beginning of every end

And the end of every place.

What am I?

We’re looking for something forgotten.

Something forgotten.

Or some
one
forgotten?

Leonie was inside the barn, slipping past a
locked door with the ease of someone who was a committed burglar.
Gideon had committed the odd felony when he was younger and didn’t
think twice about her entering the old barn. Inside was nothing but
corroding farming equipment crowned by an army of arachnids
spinning intricate webs.

However, each of Gideon’s youthful offences
had dealt expressly with hacking. When he had needed information to
process his progression into the field, he went looking for it,
without regard to law or personal property. Large computer
companies were fair game, as were companies with specialized
technology. There were a few incidences that involved burglary and
computer crime as a way of demonstrating a company’s weak security
measures, which he would duly report to the proper officials after
the fact. As a consequence, he became adept at skills he wouldn’t
be bragging about to his mother anytime soon.

When the sheriff’s deputies had thoroughly
searched him at the department, they had discovered the lock picks
with pleased conceit. Lock picks were against the law to own unless
you happened to be a law enforcement official authorized to have a
set or a bona fide locksmith, of which Gideon was neither. He
didn’t need to be a mind reader to realize that they were thinking.
Only criminals would have a set of those. I.e., he’s a
criminal.

Maybe so. But not the one they think I
am.

Stuck in a cell with one other man who seemed
determined to sleep until the clock had gone full circle, Gideon
could only pace in the small area. Five feet wide. Eight feet deep.
Small metal toilet bolted to the cement floor with a similar metal
sink behind it. Two bunks. The guy with the tattoos was snoring on
the top bunk, where he had been since Gideon had been locked in the
cell, and there he had remained, alternating snoring with sleepy
whispers to a woman named Trudy. Trudy, according to his
sleep-induced moans, was one hot babe.

If Gideon ignored Elliot, whose name was on
one of the beefy arms hanging off the top bunk, and was the only
non-female, non-Harley name incorporated on that arm, then he could
only stare at the grated barrier. This wasn’t the jail of Hollywood
with rows of parallel black iron bars preventing escape. No, it had
a painted white, grill-like metal material, through which both
prisoners and guards could survey each other.

Gideon had craned his neck to see the lock.
But other than using some kind of grinder to make a new set of lock
picks out of something he could scrounge out of the cell, which
seemed sparse on that count, there didn’t seem to be an overt way
out of the jail. Unless, of course, Scott Haskell suddenly started
to believe that Gideon Lily was innocent and opened the cell doors
wide with an encouraging set of words. Fat chance.

Instead Gideon focused on what Leonie was
doing. Unconsciously sighing, an image of her appeared in his mind.
Talk about caught in a trap of his own making. He’d moved here,
because Buffalo Creek had an effect on him. It had drawn him to it,
as soon as he drew nearer. Likewise, the area had a growing faction
of hackers. They were carving out their own conclave and Gideon
wanted a part of it. He hadn’t realized what it was that had called
to him, but he was beginning to suspect that it didn’t have
anything to do with the other hackers at all.

It was
her
. He’d dreamed of Leonie for
years. When the first time came that he saw her at a deli in
Buffalo Creek he had been struck dumb. He had frozen up and thought
he was having a waking dream, only barely resisting the urge to
reach up and rub at his eyes to clear his vision. She hadn’t
changed much from the petite adolescent she’d been. Her features
were the same, except with the scar that she didn’t hide. She
smiled at people and seemed happy. While Gideon hadn’t known what
to think, the coincidence seemed incredible. A few hundred miles
from Shreveport and he happened to run into her, in the town he’d
moved to only months before.

Only weeks after he had closed on the
Craftsman house, he’d seen Leonie for the first time in years. It
had blown his mind and when he’d been able to move again, he’d fled
the deli like a pack of wild dogs were nipping at his heels. People
turned to stare but Leonie, occupied at the counter paying for subs
and coffee, hadn’t seen him.

Only now Gideon began to deliberate on the
chances of this occurrence.

In the year before Gideon had first viewed
it, seeing it online, as suggested by an email buddy, the Craftsman
house off Highway 287 had been purchased by some anonymous
conglomeration and refurbished by them. Apparently, they had seen
it as a stopgap investment that Gideon hadn’t questioned. He had
begun searching for a specific type house, through the internet and
through realtors in a dozen cities he had looked favorably upon.
With acreage and privacy his main components, cost hadn’t been an
issue. But apparently the conglomeration had wanted to quickly
unload the property, particularly the house, and had made Gideon a
sweet deal. But not only was it sweet but it was unprecedented.
Despite protests from some of his friends, Gideon had leapt on it
as soon as he realized how fortunate he was to have the
opportunity.
An auspicious opportunity or a set-up?

He wasn’t sure if he could have explained it.
That feeling that compelled him, the inexorable tugging at his soul
that had lured him to Buffalo Creek, was enigmatic. It was a Texas
town, like a hundred others. Stone carvings on the nine storied
courthouse leered and laughed at him in turn. Heavy in antiques and
gingerbread, it was nothing undeniable in itself.

But there had been the explanation, in the
deli, walking in front of him with her hips gently swaying, two
weeks after he’d signed the paperwork and thrown open the front
doors.

Leonie Simoneaud. Unmistakable. Beautiful.
Exotic.
The woman who’d saved him from a beast. The one whose
thoughts made him believe for a matter of weeks afterwards that he
was going mad. Until he began doing a bit of research on her and
the family at Twilight Lake, he thought that the thoughts in his
head were subliminal desires that tumbled out of distorted needs
provoked by the wretched trauma of childhood.

Previous relationships never worked for
Gideon; he always found women wanting in ways he couldn’t name, and
one accused him of waiting for some perfect goddess who would
redeem his soul. He found himself wondering if he had been
unconsciously waiting for Leonie to mysteriously reappear in his
life, just as she had done.
A pipe dream, a chimera, a castle in
the air? The woman who had put herself on the line at her own
expense.

And she was trying to do it again
.
Gideon felt her pain when she barked her shins and bit her tongue.
The coppery taste of blood felt as real to him as did the thoughts
in his head.
Is the man who sends riddles to both of us the one
who wants us to think of Monroe Whitechapel? Could he have devised
the sale of the Craftsman house to me, so that I would be closer to
Leonie? But that person couldn’t have known about that weird
connection between us?

I can use the little blue light on my
watch. It won’t be much, but it’ll be better than nothing.
Her
thoughts came through to Gideon like a clear signal from a radio
station.

But someone was there in front of her.
Someone in a uniform was standing so close to her and she hadn’t
heard him approach, but he was there all the same, and Leonie
wasn’t just startled. Fear rushed through her and directly
identified itself to Gideon in a mental shout that threatened to
make his knees buckle.

For an instant, Gideon thought she had been
found out by an astute deputy, but the illusion was dispelled. She
was twisted around; fingers viciously grasped her arms with
bruising force and pushed her into the earth. She struggled
frantically, her thoughts growing wild and frenzied. Her legs
kicked helplessly. Her arms thrashed futilely.

Leonie? Leonie! What is it?

Gideon’s eyes slid shut. Her thoughts were a
convoluted mess that he fought to understand and there was a hint
of something else. Whoever had her pinned to the floor was
whispering something in her ear, something that frightened her even
more. He didn’t understand the words and then there was a sharp
hurt in her shoulder and a fiery feeling that spread like the worst
summer wildfire.

The next thought truly alarmed Gideon.
Gideon. Oh, I messed up.

And then Gideon was standing in the middle of
the cell, and he was screaming the words out. “Leonie! Keep
fighting! Keep fighting!”

Grunts and groans came from the line of cells
around him and even Elliot endless snoring abruptly ceased as he
snorted himself awake. The tattooed man thumped the concrete walls
with one plate-sized hand and brought himself to a half-sitting
position.

With the flat of hands, Gideon slapped the
metal wall that prevented his leaving the little cage he was in and
a low growl of anguish inundated him. Leonie was struggling still,
fighting against the man who was holding her into the dirt. The
taste of it was in her mouth and a tide of darkness was beginning
to rip over her.

“Ker-ist,” said Elliot. “You should just
sleep it off, man.”

Then she was gone. Nothing was left. His mind
was as hushed as a church at midnight.

Gideon was still and silent and a man in the
cellblock loudly praised God for it.

Another man said vehemently, “Goddammit. I’m
gonna rip you a new one if they let you out to exercise with the
rest of these shitholes. Will you shut the fuck up now?”

Gone.
His eyes still shut, he wasn’t
sure if she were dead or alive.
Why else press her face in the
dirt? Why else muffle her while he held her down? Oh, Christ, why
did I let her go?

The answer was simple and persuasive.
Because there’s something there
.

Or maybe it wasn’t something at all. A flood
of goose bumps coursed over Gideon’s body in a skin-prickling tidal
wave that let him know that every part of him from the base of his
skull to the bottoms of his feet were very much alive and active.
Perhaps it was some
one
.

Gideon groaned again and this time he started
yelling for the guard.

Elliot groaned and swore at Gideon’s back.
“The guard’s gonna pound you like a grape at a wine festival,
fella.”

Gideon persisted and ten minutes later, all
of the present inmates of the county jail facility were ready to
cheerfully kill him. But when the guard finally came to see if
Gideon were being strangled, having a heart attack, or ready to
confess to killing twenty-seven hitchhikers in ten southern states,
he found that Gideon was demanding that someone go and make sure
Leonie Simoneaud was all right.

The guard was not amused.

•

Ten minutes after three in the morning found
Scott Haskell dreaming about a black and white tailless cat who was
trying to eat his ankle. It wasn’t a pleasant dream and when the
phone woke him up he was almost relieved. He knocked over his alarm
clock and two books by Joe Lansdale and Bill Crider in the process
of getting to the phone. Then he knocked the phone to the floor and
cursed while he retrieved it.

One of the night crew deputies named Walter
Satchell was on the other end. A young man in his early twenties,
he had been out of the academy for precisely four months and tended
to speak to Scott as if he were the commander in chief of the
military forces. “Sir, there’s a problem with one of the prisoners,
sir.”

Scott swung his legs over the bed and leaned
forward trying to remember who was presently in the jail. Sleepy
awareness came slowly to him. “Gideon Lily?”

“Sir, yes, sir.”

“Walter,” Scott said wearily. “Call me
Sheriff or Scott. I don’t really care.”

“Sir, uh, right.”

“What’s the problem with Mr. Lily? Does he
not care for the accommodations?”

“No, sheriff. The guard called me. He
separated Lily from the other prisoners because he was keeping them
all awake by yelling and screaming. Then when the prisoner wouldn’t
settle down, he called me. At approximately 0245 hours, I went down
to the jail, and Lily informed me that Leonie Simoneaud was in
danger.” Walter recounted the incident precisely the way he would
write it in an official report. “I asked the prisoner how he could
be aware of this and he would not answer, but he merely repeated
himself.”

“Leonie Simoneaud’s in danger?” Scott looked
at the clock. The light blue numbers showed it to be 3:15 AM. “Just
tell Mr. Lily we’ll make sure she’s okay.”

“You’re going to see if she’s all right, sir?
Uh, sheriff?”

“No, I’m going back to sleep,” Scott bit out
roughly. “Listen, kid. Check the logs. Make sure no nine-one-one
calls have come from her house. She’s on our surveillance list.
Call me back if Dacey Rojas calls in about the same topic. But
that’s not likely since she’s still in the hospital. Mr. Lily is
just having a little fun at our expense. Make sure everything is
quiet in the hood, ignore the little bastard, and get on with the
job.”