Wide Open (19 page)

But they both knew that wasn’t the case.

“I don’t—”

He cut her off. “Where?”

She looked at him for a long minute before she answered. She wanted him to know that she was choosing to answer him, not caving to a demand. “Out where Dell died. I can’t tell you exactly where. I’d have to show you.”

His jaw was clenched so tight, she was surprised she couldn’t hear his teeth grinding. She was tired, too, and hungry, and what the hell was his problem, anyway?

They got back in the car, and Boyd pulled onto the road, turning back the way they’d come, then taking the next hard surface road north.

“So, what? Do you think I killed them?” Hallie finally said.

Boyd started, visibly, slowed the Jeep a fraction, and made an effort to ease the grip of his white-knuckled hands on the wheel. He took a breath. “No,” he said.

Hallie waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. “Do you want to know how I know?” she asked.

“No.”

Just that.

No.

You son of a bitch,
she thought. Because she’d been going to tell him. She’d been going to tell him about ghosts, about what the ghosts were telling her, about Uku-Weber, about what she’d found out at Bolluyt’s—all of it.

Instead, she studied him as they hurtled down the road back toward Jasper and scarred Ponderosa pines. There was a reason he was acting like this, like he wanted her as far away from him as possible. And if there was a reason—

“What is your problem?” she asked him.

“What?” He didn’t look at her.

“Maybe it’s because you haven’t had anything to eat all day,” she said. “Maybe you’ve got a headache. Or your stomach hurts. Because you’re not a woman, so you can’t be—”

“I don’t have a problem,” he said.

“Oh, yeah, you do,” Hallie told him. “Though I understand that part of the problem is that you don’t want to tell me what the problem is.”

He looked at her then, as he turned onto the Seven Mile Creek Road. She could have sworn he almost smiled. Then it was gone, like a cloud passed over the sun.

He didn’t speak again as he drove down the old dirt road and parked just about exactly where he parked the last time they’d been here.

As soon as Hallie got out of the car, the ghosts were with her—Dell and Sarah Hale, the unidentified one from the first body, and a new one.

Which she’d been expecting, but still … shit. This one looked familiar, too. She hoped to hell they weren’t people she’d known at one time. Though the odds were, they would be.

It was one o’clock in the afternoon, and the day was overcast and gloomy. There was a breeze, alternately winter-sharp and rain-heavy, out of the west. In the field in front of her, the hip-high grass had been flattened to knee height by the heavy rains on Sunday. Hallie could see a bundle of barbed wire just off the lane she hadn’t noticed the last time she was there. She had no way, with the sun hidden by low clouds, to spot the glint of metal that had attracted her attention before. She figured it didn’t matter: the ghosts would show her the way.

And they did.

She was braced for it this time, but it still hurt when they rushed at her, batting their insubstantial hands at her.

See me see me pain blood fear why me whywhywhywhywhy

Shit.

She came back to herself to find Boyd holding her up, her right hand gripping his shirt like an anchor. The feel of his shirt in her hand was soft and cool. For a brief moment, she wanted to bury herself in it, wanted to grab him and hold him, wanted to fuck him in the back of his Jeep right here, right now. Not because she wanted him—god knew, she didn’t
want
him, she didn’t want anyone—but she wanted to need something, to get something she needed, to feel something that wasn’t dying or dead or in pain. He was warm, too, always so warm, like an antidote to ghosts. She let go the handful of shirt she’d grabbed, then paused to smooth the crease her fist had made, realized she was doing it, and stopped.

She pushed him away.

“She’s down here,” she said, and led him down near the creek by another cottonwood tree, which seemed like it ought to be significant, though she really didn’t care. The police would start to say
serial killer,
would say,
Look, he buries them by old creeks underneath cottonwood trees.
Profile that. Because Hallie knew that wasn’t the important thing, though she wasn’t yet completely certain what the important thing was.

She stopped and marked the spot with her boot. “Right here,” she said.

Boyd looked at the ground.

“C’mon,” he finally said, “I’ll take you back to town.”

He started across the field, but stopped about twenty yards in when he realized she wasn’t following him.

“Seriously,” she said, “what’s your problem?”

“I don’t want you involved in this,” he said.

“Oh, I’m involved,” she said, joining him in the field because she wasn’t going to yell across twenty yards of prairie. “I’m already pretty damned involved.”

“This is now an official investigation, and I can’t have you interfering,” he said stiffly.

He was lying. Not about it being an official investigation, which it almost certainly was or would be, but about why he wanted her out of it.

The ghost she was pretty sure was the one whose burial site she’d just identified, had been pushing at her elbow as they walked, leaning in when Hallie went straight and relenting when she veered to her right—lean, right, straight, right—directing her. Her boot chinked softly against something in the grass, and she bent down and picked it up, looking at it quick before she slid it into her pocket and pretended she was adjusting her bootlace.

Not metal. Glass. A watch crystal, maybe?

She stood. “The thing is,” she said conversationally as she started across the field with him, “I’m not actually in Afghanistan now. I don’t take orders from you.”

Silence. Hallie could hear the wind rise, could almost hear the ghosts themselves as they floated behind her.

“I know,” he finally said, his voice so brittle, she was surprised the words didn’t shatter on the ground.

21

She and Boyd drove back to Prairie City in almost complete silence. He dropped her at Big Dog’s to pick up her truck and went on to the sheriff’s office to get people and equipment before heading back out to Seven Mile Creek Road. What he was going to say about the body, about how he knew where it was, Hallie had no idea.

He looked at her when they stopped, tilted his head as if he was going to say something, but didn’t. Just said, “Take care,” in a voice so low, she almost didn’t hear it.

“Yeah,” Hallie said under her breath. Just, “Yeah.”

After Boyd drove away, she went looking for Jake Javinovich, but he was gone over to Templeton for parts.

She climbed into her pickup and sat there for a few minutes, studying the piece of glass she’d found in the field earlier.

It was smooth, machined. And it was definitely a watch crystal—or, that’s what it looked like to Hallie, at least. It wasn’t round but actually hexagonal, not exactly diamond-shaped but with that feel. And it felt old, too, heavy, well-made glass. There was something familiar about it, as if Hallie had seen a watch with just that shape glass, though she supposed there were lots of them out there.

There were three ghosts in the car with her now—Dell, Sarah Hale, and the one from back at the Seven Mile. She still looked familiar to Hallie—shoulder-length hair, a dress with some sort of small print, a narrow belt and low-heeled shoes, dangly earrings and a silver bracelet cuff. Wherever Hallie had seen her before, she’d been laughing. She remembered straight white teeth and laugh lines at her eyes. But she wasn’t laughing now.

Hallie shivered, started the truck, and cranked up the heat. She drove west through the middle of Prairie City. It was quiet even for early afternoon, which was usually quiet, though there were cars outside all three bars and the hardware store. Hallie wasn’t much for sitting in bars in the daytime, but right now she wished she were doing exactly that, sitting in a booth with her back against the wall. People coming up to her and talking while she drank beer and smiled at them, while she had no cares in the world.

She drove straight to Uku-Weber and parked in the middle of the parking lot. There were only about a dozen other cars in the lot. Hallie, whose experience of the world was mostly ranches, small-town business, and the army, had no idea if this was normal or not. She stared at the building for a long minute. Because this was it, whatever was going on, whatever—whoever—had killed Dell and Sarah Hale and Mystery Ghosts Numbers Three and Four had something to do with lightning bolts, with fake weather machines, with Pete and Martin and Uku-Weber.

She made a quick phone call, then rummaged in the glove box for a pocketknife. She shoved it in her pocket as she got out of the truck. She stood there for a minute, looking at the parking lot and the building and the wide open prairie behind it; then she took the prybar from the back of the pickup truck and walked up the front walk, past the steel and stone fountain where she’d first seen Sarah Hale’s ghost, and between the four main pillars.

She thought about following the sidewalk around the side of the building, looking for a side entrance, a way to enter the building quietly. But she’d end up in the atrium anyway, so if she was going in, she might as well go in through the front.

She felt the ghosts—Dell and Sarah and the Seven Mile Ghost—drop away behind her, felt the gritty blast of air as she entered the building—ghost-proofing, she thought, because what else would it be? But why?

As she entered, she shoved the prybar up under her arm and dug the pocketknife out of her pocket.

“Can I help you?” the receptionist called across the open space.

Hallie shook her head. “Nope,” she said. “This’ll just take a minute.” She made a quick slice across her left index finger, waited a moment for the several drops of blood to gather, then let it drip onto the floor.

“Excuse me,” the receptionist said. “I don’t think—”

The blood hit the floor. There was a brief …
something,
like ozone in the air right before a lightning strike, then a brilliant flash as every line in the room—lightning bolt on the floor, symbols on the window strips—lit up like fire.

“You need to leave,” the receptionist said.

“Yeah,” Hallie said, because she had what she’d come for. “Thanks.”

Pete Bolluyt was waiting for her in the parking lot. “Get lost, did you?” he asked.

“Nope.” Hallie kept walking.

“This is private property,” he said.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “It is. I was looking for Martin. Is he around?” She tilted her head and studied him. He looked angry, tight like an overwound steel spring. The fingers on his right hand twitched against his belt buckle.

Pete squinted, like it pained him to even look at her. A drop of rain hit Hallie square on her forehead, followed by a windblown flurry of drops. The sky above them was still clear.

“You need to mind your own goddamned business,” Pete said. He stepped toward her. Hallie raised the prybar.

She smiled, though it wasn’t funny and she didn’t feel like laughing. When she spoke it was slow and deliberate, each word like a punch. “What happened to Dell?”

Pete’s right hand clenched into a fist. “You’re a fool,” he said. His expression was flat—blank—like he wasn’t going to hear it, like nothing involving Dell had ever touched him or ever would. Hallie’s heart thumped sharply in her chest because this? This was what dangerous looked like.

There was a deep rumble, like thunder, and another burst of rain swept across the parking lot on the wind. She could hear the low sound of a siren, but the way sound carried on the plains, it could be coming from clear back in Prairie City. She took a sharp breath. No going back now. “Maybe I am a fool, Pete. But I’ve been having a real interesting day,” she said. “You want to know what I found?”

Pete cocked his head to the side and said, “Oh, hell, Hallie—I don’t care.” Which wasn’t the reaction she’d expected. She gripped the prybar tighter and backed up two steps. If she had to, she could run, was pretty sure she was faster than he was, could outdistance him on the open prairie, but she didn’t want to, had never liked running.

Pete advanced, a grin on his face now, as if he’d been waiting a long time for this. Hallie didn’t wait—waiting got you killed—she swung the prybar and hit him hard in the ribs.

An
oof,
a low curse. He stumbled backwards, but recovered quicker than Hallie’d expected. “Little bitch,” he muttered.

She thought he’d come after her right then and braced herself for it, but he stopped, straightened, one hand across his abdomen. He shook his head and grinned, like a wolf or something infinitely creepier. “That was kind of a cheap shot,” he said slyly. He licked his lips. “Good thing I’m such a bastard, I guess, isn’t it?”

Hallie heard the ratchet of a shotgun slide and turned her head to see the man who’d been with Pete at the Bobtail, the one who’d sliced her with his knife, gliding out of the shadows at the side of the building.

Goddamnit.

“You going to shoot me, Pete?” she said. Bitter and angry because there was nothing she could do about it. She’d left herself open.

“Sooner or later, sweetheart,” he said. “Sooner or later.” He let that hang there for a minute. Hallie didn’t look at the other man or his shotgun, kept her eyes focused on Pete, assumed Pete had chosen him for his competence with a shotgun, and she wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of looking.

Pete cocked his head to the right. The rain was steady now, and both of them were pretty well soaked. The clouds were still scattered and broken; Hallie could see the sun, but she was wet all the same.

“I’m going to stop this, Pete,” Hallie said, not bragging, because she wasn’t in the position to do that, but because it needed to be said, needed to be laid out plain. Because she
was
going to stop it. Even if she still had to figure out how.