Highway to Hell (6 page)

“And everyone obeys the summons?” My gran only wishes she had that kind of matriarchal power. It's hard just getting my dad's brother into town for Christmas.

“Yeah. Even my uncle comes down from Houston. His presence is required until after lunch on Sunday.”

“From Houston?” Lisa asked. “That's got to be six hours away.”

“He's got a private plane. There's an airstrip out by the house.” At our stares, he added defensively, “What? We need it for the helicopter, too.”

I blinked. “I guess it
only feels
like we've gone back in time.”

“Well, since Abuelita doesn't leave the property, the world has to come to her.” He went to the door, pausing to toss out a casual invitation. “Why don't y'all come out to the ranch on Monday, keep from going stir-crazy.”

“Great,” said Lisa, my ex-goth, neo-alchemist friend. At least she sounded droll about it. “It'll be loads of fun.”

With a grin, Zeke let himself out. I stared at Lisa. “What kind of pod person are you? D&D Lisa … on a ranch?”

“What?” Falling onto the bed, she dropped her arm over her face. “Do you really want to test how long until I go all Jack Nicholson in
The Shining?”

“Did you get a chance to ask him what Teresa thinks killed the cow if it wasn't a coyote?”

“It didn't come up in the conversation.”

I flung a pillow at her, but it bounced off her shoulder and flopped limply to the floor. “What's the matter with you? Don't you want to find out what's going on?”

She threw her own pillow at me, with much better aim. “What do you suggest? ‘By the way, my friend the psychic girl detective thinks you have a supernatural mystery on your ranch.’ You can't just drop that bomb on someone right after you meet them.”

“You might also throw in what a complete
witch
you can be.” I stacked the library books—
The Wild Horse Desert: South Texas History
on top of
Handbook of North American Desert Fauna—
with more force than necessary. “I really don't under-stand why you're being such a skeptic. You were there. You saw those taillights disappear into thin air. And what happened when I touched the cow blood. Come on, Lisa.”

Sitting up, she swung her legs off the bed and leaned toward me. Hands braced on her knees, she asked pointedly, “So what, exactly, do you think it is?”

I had no answer, so I redirected the conversation, pointing to the desert fauna handbook. “I couldn't find any track that looked like the one by the road.”

She shook her head in faux sympathy. “Deductive reasoning is so inefficient.”

I sighed. “Too bad there's isn't a
Field Guide to Supernatural Creatures.
”

“Now, that would be a really useful book.” She fell back onto her mattress and covered her face with a pillow. “I'm going to take a nap. Wake me up when it's time for dinner.”

That put a cap on the discussion. Lisa's skepticism was both irritating and surprising. I supposed it went along with what she'd said in the car, about wanting a week of being normal. And she hadn't said she didn't believe me that there was something weird here, just that there wasn't really a way
to bring up the weirdness to Zeke, who seemed to be firmly— maybe even stubbornly—rooted in normalcy.

It didn't help that I didn't have any specific suspicions. All I could do was figure out what we
weren't
dealing with. And as Lisa had pointed out, deductive reasoning was definitely the long way around to a point.

T
he Duck Inn looked different after dark. It was crowded, for one thing. On the jukebox, a gravel-voiced man twanged about lovin' and leavin'. Patrons lined the bar and occupied the tables, and neon beer signs made auras of color in the haze of cigarette smoke.

The song ended as Lisa and I came in, right on cue. We stood in silence broken only by the click of the pool balls and the scrape of a fork on a plate. All that was missing was the sound of crickets and a spotlight on our entrance.

The stasis didn't last long. The next song started and the pool game resumed. People went back to eating and chatting
over their beer. Lisa and I exchanged glances, then wove through the crowd. It was a bustling night at the only watering hole in town.

Teresa, once again behind the bar, pushed a couple of grease-stained menus at us. “What'll you have, girls?”

The menu was short, and geared toward the carnivore. “I'll have the chicken.” I wasn't going anywhere near the beef.

Lisa perused the list a little longer. “Do you have anything without meat in it?”

Teresa gave her a scary biology teacher look. “You want just some vegetables? They don't have any meat in them.”

“You don't cook them with bacon?” I'd been in South Texas long enough to get a feel for the cuisine.

“Well, yeah. But just for flavor.”

“So bacon is just a condiment?” I asked.

She leveled a scalpel-like stare at me, and I meekly thanked her for taking our order and retreated. All the booths were full, which left us no place but a table in the middle of the room.

Lisa settled into the chair across from me. “And you say
I'm
antagonistic?”

“I'm a slave to my wit.” I tried not to stare at the people trying to pretend they weren't staring at us. “Do you think everyone in town is here?”

“Where else are they going to go on a Saturday night?”

Most of the crowd blended together, with a work-hardened, sun-browned uniformity that blurred the lines of ethnicity. I recognized a group of older men, retirement age, who'd been at the same table that morning, drinking coffee. One of
them nodded at me, raising his mug in greeting. I gave a little smile in return, encouraged by the friendly gesture.

At the bar, Teresa seemed to be in conference with two men. One was a lanky guy in a cowboy hat, who gestured lazily with a bottle of Budweiser as he talked. The other guy had his back to us, but I could tell he was younger because his shirt was untucked. It seemed to be a generational thing.

I didn't have to guess the subject of their discussion, because all three of them kept darting glances toward our table.

Leaning sideways, I whispered to Lisa out of the side of my mouth. “Keep an eye on the door in case we have to make a run for it.”

She sipped her iced tea, looking almost relaxed. “Does it
feel
like we'll have to make a run for it?”

I realized that my deflector shields were at maximum— that was how I visualized my mental defenses. When I pictured them powering down a bit, I realized that, for all the attention we were getting, none of it was threatening. In fact, not all the buzz in the room was centered on us.

The scrape of a chair drew my attention back to the immediate, normal five-senses situation. The younger man from the bar stood by our table, a friendly expression on his tanned face.

“Evening, ladies. How is Dulcina treating you?”

Lisa raised a brow. “Better than the highway did.”

The guy chuckled. “So I heard. Word gets around.” If my smoke-bleary eyes didn't deceive me, he was kind of cute. Not young-Lou-Diamond-Phillips gorgeous like Zeke, but sort of guy-next-door good-looking. Behind him, I could see
Teresa and Budweiser Man watching avidly, like his bizarro-world wingmen. “Can I buy you a beer and make amends for your lousy introduction to Velasquez County?”

While I debated a few things—our underageness, his obvious but as-yet-unknown ulterior motive—Lisa just said, “Sure.”

I shot her an incredulous look as Young Guy went back to the bar. “What?” she said. “He obviously wants to ask us something, so we may as well grease the wheels. Or else eat dinner while being stared at like tropical fish in a pediatric waiting room.”

This was so sensible, I couldn't even come up with a wisecrack. It explained why there were no IDs or questions involved in the handover of beer. Junior was obviously the designated representative of the Duck Inn–quisition.

He returned with three bottles under his arm and a plate of food in each hand. “Here you go, ladies.”

The food was either really good or I was really hungry. Maybe a mix of both. As we dug in, the guy spun one of the chairs around and straddled it in the same motion. “I'm Dave, by the way.”

“Maggie,” I said between bites. “This is Lisa.”

“Hey! Like Bart Simpson's sisters.”

Lisa rolled her eyes so hard, her whole head turned with the gesture. “Wow. We've never heard that before.”

Dave missed her irony, intent on his mission. “Been hearing a lot of rumors about your accident,” he said.

Here we go. I could sense people shifting in their seats to better catch our reply. Behind the counter, Teresa stood with her arms akimbo, alert for holes in our story. Budweiser Man
had swiveled his stool so he could lean his elbow on the bar, the heel of his cowboy boot hooked on one rung.

“So, how'd you manage that?” asked Bud Man from his perch. He had a serious case of hat head, the kind that only comes from wearing a hat while you sweat. Indicating one of the Old Guys at the coffee drinkers' table, he continued. “Carl over there hit a cow with his truck, and it smashed the whole front end. Nowhere to take it but the junkyard.”

Carl nodded, and said something unintelligible into his coffee mug.

I glanced at Lisa, and she yielded the floor to me with a gesture. What a pal. “Maybe because the cow was already, um, dead. We just …” I pantomimed the Jeep sailing over the carcass like a water-skier on a ramp.

Dave leaned in, elbows on the table. “Could you tell what killed it?”

“Does it matter?” asked Lisa, her brows arched.

Bud Man took a swig of his beer. “Here's our pickle. Zeke Velasquez says it's got to be a coyote, maybe a pack of 'em. Teresa swears it's gotta be something else, but she wasn't there. You actually saw it—the cow, I mean—so we want to hear what you say.”

Behind him, Teresa folded her arms under her ample bosom, her expression daring me to side with Mr. Zeke.

“What else could it be?” I tried to keep the question ingenuous. Here was my chance to find out what these folks thought attacked the cow.

“Maybe you saw something in the fields,” said Dave, watching my face avidly. “Maybe some eyes looking at you?”

“Eyes?” I didn't remember seeing any, but the idea
struck a bad chord of memory. Glancing at Lisa, I saw that her face was carefully impassive. No one was bothering to grill
her.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Like, reflecting the light?”

“Maybe,” said Dave. I could tell he was trying to elicit a specific answer with his mysterious—and annoying-ambivalence.

“Like for instance,” said Bud Man, in a refreshingly normal tone, “coyote eyes are yellow when they reflect the light. Nothing hinky there.”

Dave twisted around to glare at him. “Don't lead the witness. I'm trying to let her come up with her own description.”

The cowboy at the bar laughed into his beer bottle. “This isn't
Law and Order
, David. You ease up on those poor girls.”

It was too dark to be sure, but I thought Dave's ears reddened. When he turned back to Lisa and me, he looked sheepish. “Sorry about that. Anything you remember about last night would be helpful.”

“Helpful in what?” I glanced at the bar full of attentive listeners. There was something about their grimly expectant faces, something about the argument between Teresa and Zeke that morning, as if it was an ongoing conversation. I couldn't remember anyone mentioning any dead cows besides the one on the road, but intuition didn't have far to leap. “This isn't the first animal that's died?”

The beat of silence confirmed my guess, and somehow made the situation more solemn.

Bud Man spoke first. “We're in a drought. You're going to lose animals when it gets this dry. Goats. Chickens. Calves usually go first.”

“Drought didn't kill my best herding dog,” said Carl from the Old Guys' table. “Or Teresa's goats.”

Teresa unfolded her arms slowly, with a sense of drama. “All with their throats ripped out.”

I swallowed the memory of the blood, the phantom taste of it too recent. “So, what
do
you think it is?”

“El chupacabra.”

She whispered the name, whether for effect or in fear. The half-voiced word breathed across the bar to my waiting ear, lifting the hair on the back of my neck.

“El
what?”
asked Lisa, her tone breaking the spell.

Bud Man groaned, a not-this-again sound of annoyance. “Teresa, you're crazy. It's not the chupacabra. That's a load of horse shit.”

She reached across the bar and grabbed his bottle. “You don't have to drink in my bar if you think I'm crazy.”

He grabbed it back, sloshing beer on the counter. “Yes, I do. It's the only place in a hundred miles.”

“Dave believes me,” Teresa muttered. “He saw what happened to my goats.”

“What is
el chupacabra?”
I asked. The word tickled a memory in my mental file cabinet of useless information.

“It means ‘the goat sucker,’ ” said Dave. “It kills livestock, drinks their blood.”

“And you think this goat sucker killed the cow and left it on the road?” I tested the weirdometer in my head, the way you nudge a tooth with your tongue to test if it's loose. No bells went off, but it was hard to think seriously about something with such a ridiculous name.

Especially when Lisa asked, “Wouldn't that make it a cow sucker, then?”

Teresa scowled at her levity.
“El chupacabra
kills whatever it can get,” she explained. “With the drought, cows are weak, easier to catch.”

The memory clicked. “Hang on. I remember this from an article on the Internet.”

“Oh, well then, it must be true.” Lisa's tone was drolly dismissive.

I ignored her. “It's like an urban legend. But in the story, someone found a dead animal they couldn't identify.”

“You have got to be kidding me.” Lisa pushed back her plate and put her elbows on the table. “This is a real animal?”

“Yes,” said Teresa and Dave.

“No,” said Bud Man at the same time.

“It
is
,” Teresa insisted.

My gaze traveled across the three of them, over to the Old Guys' table, then to the audience in the booths. “So, what is this chupacabra thing supposed to look like?”