Ghostwalkers (12 page)

“
Paradise Falls?
” Grey mused quietly.

“I know,” said Looks Away. “The running joke is that Paradise Fell.”

“Not a very funny joke.”

“No, it isn't.” Perched on the corner of the sign was a bird that Grey at first thought was a buzzard, but as they passed he did a double take and gaped at it. The creature had wings and feathers, but beyond that it bore little resemblance to any bird Grey had ever seen. Not outside of a nightmare at least. The body was bare in patches and instead of the pale flesh of a normal bird, this thing had the mottled and knobbly hide of something more akin to a reptile. The wings were leathery and dark, and there were claws at the end of each that gripped the sign as surely as did its taloned feet. The creature's beak was long and tapered, and it cocked its head to stare at the two horsemen with a black and bottomless eye.

“Christ,” whispered Grey, “what the
hell
is that thing?”

Looks Away followed his gaze and shuddered. “Be damned if I know,” he said. “The locals claim that after the quake great flocks of them flew out of caverns that had previously been trapped in the hearts of mountains.”

“It looks like it flew up from hell itself.”

“Yes,” agreed the Sioux. Grey hadn't meant it as a joke, and Looks Away did not appear to take it as such. They kept a wary eye on the bird as they passed beneath. The sun was in the east and it threw the misshapen bird's shadow across their path. Both horses, unguided, stepped nervously around that shadow.

That made the flesh on the back of Grey's neck prickle.

The Sioux nodded to the people who had come to windows or porch rails to look at them. “They're simple people, but good ones.”

The remark surprised Grey. “You care?”

Looks Away shrugged. “I do. I've lived among them for months and I know most of them. Granted, few make rewarding conversational partners, but they are honest folk who have had a run of bad luck that was both unearned and unlooked for.”

“The quake?”

“That was the start of the bad luck, but it didn't end there. When the land fell into the sea it changed the course of the water. That road we took had been a strong freshwater stream. Pure snowmelt from the mountains. The Paradise River, and it ran to the edge of a drop. That waterfall is what gave the town its name. There used to be thousands of square miles of arable land. Now there are rocks, scorpions, and ugly mesas where nothing grows that you'd care to eat.”

“How the hell do they survive?”

The Sioux gave him a rueful smile. “Who says they're surviving, old chap?”

Grey opened his mouth to reply, but a scream suddenly tore through the air.

A woman's scream.

And almost immediately it was punctuated by the hollow crack of a gunshot.

 

Chapter Twenty-Two

They wheeled in their saddles and looked off down a side street. There, at the very end of town, were several figures engaged in a furious struggle by an old stone well.

“Shite!” cried Looks Away as he instantly spurred his horse into a full gallop.

Grey hesitated for a heartbeat longer. This was not his town and not his fight.

Except …

The fight looked too uneven for his tastes. A tall, thin stick-figure of a wildly bearded Mexican man in a monk's brown robe, and a woman with curly blond hair were struggling with six hard-looking men.

“Well … balls,” he growled, and kicked Picky into a run. Even his horse seemed outraged and barreled down the street at incredible speed.

Grey watched in astonishment as Looks Away vaulted from his saddle and flung himself at one of the biggest of the six men. They crashed against the side of the well, spun and fell out of sight. In almost the same moment, one of the men—presumably the one who'd fired the gun—slashed the monk across the face with the pistol. Another man had the woman in a fierce bear hug and held her, kicking and screaming, off the ground. The other men were closing in on her, laughing and pawing at her.

As Picky devoured the distance between Grey and the fight, the woman lashed out with a foot and caught one of the men on the point of the chin. He backpedaled and hit one of his companions. They both staggered. Then she used the same foot to kick backward and upward. The man holding her let loose with a high whistling shriek and hunched forward, his thighs slapping together about a tenth of a second too late.

Then Grey was among them.

He used Picky's muscular shoulder to crash into the back of the sixth man and the force of that impact picked him off the ground and flung him into the side of the well. He bent double and very nearly went in, saving himself at the last second by clawing at the stone lip.

Grey leaped from the saddle, grabbed the hair of the shrieking man holding the woman, and jerked him backward with such force that the man was bent nearly in half the wrong way. His hands snapped open, sending the woman staggering forward. Grey snapped the handful of hair like a whip and the man flopped onto the ground. He immediately tried to sit up and got as far as the short, hard kick Grey fired at his face. The man flopped back, bleeding and unconscious.

Pain exploded in Grey's kidney and he reeled, but he turned as he did so, crouching and bringing up his arms to block a second punch. It was the bruiser who'd pistol-whipped the monk. He'd rammed the barrel of his Colt into Grey's back and was raising the gun now to point it at the intruder's face.

Grey rushed him low and hard, ducking beneath the gun arm and hooking a muscular arm around the man's waist. He drove forward, plucking the man off the ground and running him three steps into the rocky well. The man let out a huge “
Oooomph!”

Grey let him sag down and spun just in time to see the first man the woman had kicked snake an arm around her throat. He had lost his pistol after the kick, but he plucked a skinning knife from a belt sheath and touched the edge of the blade to her cheek.

He was fast.

Grey was faster.

He caught the man's wrist before the blade could do more than dent the woman's skin, then he stepped back and sideways, pulling the arm with him. Grey had received some schooling in the manly arts, but he'd learned more from gutter fights and trench wars. He knew what hurt and how to make it hurt. He jerked the man's arm straight and punched him full-fisted just above the elbow. A bent elbow, Grey knew, was as strong as a knotted tree limb. A straight elbow was as fragile as a breadstick if you knew where to hit. He did.

There was a sharp
snap
and the elbow suddenly bent the wrong way.

The knife fell from twitching fingers and the man let loose a howl that would have broken glass if there was any around.

The woman, clearly not content with the man having a broken arm, spun toward him, kneed him in the crotch, drove a thumb into the socket of his throat, boxed his ears and broke his nose with a very professional short punch.

He went down.

And she spat on him as he fell.

Grey liked that. He grinned.

A fragment of a second later the grin was knocked off his face by a hard punch that caught him on the point of the jaw and spun him halfway around. He staggered back, continued the turn and then stepped inside the follow-up punch. It was the man Picky had crashed into. Not tall, but far bulkier than Grey had first thought. Arms and shoulders like a circus gorilla. He swung big lefts and rights that would have darkened the world if a second one had landed fair.

Grey brought his elbows up and used his own fists to protect his ears. As he plowed forward he let the man ruin his own arms by punching elbows and shoulders; then as he got close enough he leaned in and hit the man in the face and throat, left-right, left-right, and followed it all with an overhand right that put the man down on his face.

Then Grey stepped back and drew his pistol. He thumbed the hammer to half cock and the sound was as sharp and eloquent as if he'd fired the weapon.

“Stop!” cried a voice. “For the love of Jesus and the saints, please stop this!”

Grey turned to see the bearded monk, his cheek torn and bleeding from the pistol-whipping, his nose askew, eyes filled with the tears of pain, standing between him and the thugs. He stood with palms out, pleading with him. With everyone.

The moment froze into a bloody tableau.

The group of men lay or knelt or leaned in postures of exhausted defeat, their clothes dusty, faces streaked with bright blood. Looks Away climbed to his feet on the far side of the well, and the man he'd been fighting with crawled away from him with blood dripping from his nose and slack lips. The woman stood panting, fists balled, blond curls blowing free from her pins, blue eyes blazing with cold fury.

“Please…,” begged the monk. “I beg you.”

Grey glanced at Looks Away, who gave him a small nod. The woman looked too furious to speak, but even she gave him a nod. And in that moment Grey's heart froze in his chest.

The woman.

Dear God,
he thought. She was a stranger to him, and yet there was something so intensely and deeply familiar about her and a name came to his lips.

“
Annabelle,”
he murmured.

The woman frowned. “My name is Jenny Pearl.”

Grey swallowed hard. It was like forcing down a chunk of broken glass.

Not her,
he told himself.
Annabelle's gone and this is another world
,
another life, another woman.

The face was different, the body was different, but those eyes.

He wanted to turn and run out of the moment.

There was a smudge of bloody dirt on Jenny Pearl's left cheek. And that hit him almost as hard. There had been blood on Annabelle's cheek when he buried her.

God.

“Please,” repeated the monk, intruding into his thoughts and bringing him back from that long-ago grave on a forgotten hillside in Virginia.

Grey took a breath, then nodded, eased the hammer down, and let the gun hang at his side.

“Okay, Padre,” he said. “Okay.”

The monk exhaled a big lungful of air and nodded. “Thank you, my son. God bless and thank you.”

On the ground, one of the men groaned and staggered painfully to his feet. He stood swaying like a drunkard. With a snarl of feral hatred he peeled back the lapel of his coat to show the vest he wore beneath.

Pinned to the vest was a round disk of metal embossed with a star. The words “
Sheriff's Deputy
” were etched into the silver badge.

Grey said, “Oh … shit.”

 

Chapter Twenty-Three

“Drop your weapons and raise your hands,” snarled the deputy as he laid his hand on the butt of his holstered pistol. “All of you sons of bitches are under arrest.”

Grey stiffened. His gun was still at his side. “On what charge?”

“Assaulting an officer,” barked the deputy. “How's that for a start?”

“Not good enough,” said Grey. “Way I saw it six grown men were assaulting a man of the cloth and a helpless woman.”

“I'm not helpless,” snapped Jenny and again those eyes flashed at him, full of life and challenge.

Full of life.

Of
life.

“Point taken. Assaulting a woman,” Grey amended, trying to study that lovely face while keeping an eye on the deputy. “Even if that wasn't illegal in itself, six to one is hardly what I'd call fair.”

The deputy sneered. “We were in the process of making a legal arrest.”

Jenny spat at him. It didn't reach his face, but the effort was impressive. Grey smiled. She was a very pretty woman. Slim, but with an abundance of everything he liked above and below. A face like an angel and, clearly, the temper of Satan himself. Nice. And it was relief to see those qualities, because even though Annabelle had been willful and passionate, she was a gentle flower and not this desert rose. Plus Jenny could clearly handle herself. If it had only been two men, she might have wiped the street with both of them. Grey liked her at once.

“Arrest?” he asked. “Care to tell me what the crime was?”

“None of your goddamn business.”

Grey kept the pistol down at his side, but he thumbed the hammer back to full cock. “I guess I'm making it my business.”

The deputy eyed him, clearly weighing his options. The man had his hand on his gun, and maybe he was a quickdraw artist—they seemed to be springing up all over the place these days—but on the other hand, Grey already had his gun out. And Grey knew that to anyone with wits he did not look like a man unfamiliar with gunplay.

“Please,” urged the monk. “We can be civil about this.”

“Civil?” said the woman. “How can anyone be civil with wild dogs?”

“You watch your mouth, Jenny Pearl,” warned the deputy, his fingers beginning to close around the sandalwood grips of his gun. The other deputies were getting to their feet, dazed and stupid with pain. But there was anger and bloodlust in their eyes.

Thomas Looks Away drew his pistol in a smooth, fluid motion and pointed the barrel at the side of the deputy's head. “Jed Perkins, I believe you were born stupid and you've lost ground since.”

Deputy Perkins froze.

A shadow passed above them and out of the corner of his eye he saw the same ugly bird he'd spied earlier. With a whipsnap of its leathery wings, the creature came to rest on the top of the well's crossbar. It cocked its head again, turning a dark eye on the drama here on the street. The monk touched the wooden cross that he wore on a cord around his neck.

“Now,” continued Looks Away, ignoring the bird and giving Perkins a stern and uncompromising look, “I believe I heard my friend ask you a fair question, son. What exactly were the crimes for which you were attempting to arrest Miss Pearl and Brother Joe?”

Perkins licked his lips.