Strum Again? Book Three of the Songkiller Saga (7 page)

Willie held out his arms to the others to
stop and crept to the lip of the arroyo. His lips formed a silent
"shit" as he saw the three men with assault rifles, guns and a
machete among them looting the prostrate bodies of two other men
and a woman. A baby with a bloody head lay in the crook of the arm
of the women.

Willie swept his arm backward, signaling the
others to retreat. He'd hit the bull's-eye in his prediction of the
odds. Six unarmed adults weren't apt to do a hell of a lot better
than five.

Anna Mae looked as if she were about to
protest when he rejoined them, but he shook his head and started
away at a trot that encouraged the others, so that, fortunately,
they were out of range when the first shots were fired after
them.

CHAPTER 4

Dally Morales was in a mean mood. He hated
training tinhorns, and besides, he had gotten another rejection
slip in the morning's mail. Obviously he'd gotten another New York
editor who didn't know his cinch from his Stetson. Said the piece
was too dissonant for him! Dissonance, hell! Dally thought. Sucker
wouldn't know an internal rhyme if it walked up and bit him in the
assonance.

Dally had learned quite a bit about all that
poetic stuff from Swede Swensen, a former logger poet who had hired
on about five years ago when the last of the big-time timber
companies bit the dust. What with that and a night-school course at
the extension college the boss had arranged for the benefit of the
hands and their families just inside the property line up toward
Del Rio, Dally had gotten the hang of cowboy-poetizing. He'd kept
the textbook, though, and it was more thumbed through than a
mail-order catalog.

Now he had a college boy from Houston to
break in as well as three other fellas. The other three at least
were experienced ranch hands, though one of them was bad for
punning, and the Japanese fellow who went by the handle of Nobby
(short phonetic for Watanabe), and who was the most seasoned cow
hand, did not, in Daily's opinion, quite have the hang of being a
cowboy poet—he kept trying to do cowboy haiku and had presented as
an example of his work:

"Steamin' shit

Upon the land

I pluck rapier cactus spines

From my ass."

Kinda missed the point, as the punner
said, havin' cowboy poetry that didn't rhyme
all the damn way
at the ends of the
lines.

But Dally rounded up the whole crew and
herded 'em out to the Jeeps, taking along plenty of jerky and
cheese and crackers, as well as a six-pack of Evian water (the
water at the ranch was so hard it would coat your teeth after one
swallow.

They set out on the trail, along the fences,
visiting every water trough and line shack on the spread.

He showed them how many miles it took to
feed a steer, how far they had to walk for water. He showed them
the pens and the trucks and the shacks. He showed them where
wetbacks crossed the Rio Grande and the holes from which
cactusnappers had stolen fine specimens of aloe vera and other
choice dry-climate greenery, the candelleria, the saguaro.

Darkness was falling as they swept around
the scrub back to the road and the ranch. The sound of gunfire
split the air like a bad headache, riding heavy on the heat
waves.

Dally hadn't shown his protégés any rope
tricks or much about shooting yet, but he soon had the
opportunity.

Just ahead of them three men with guns and
machetes were piling into a Jeep, and while Dally and the trainees
watched, the Jeep peeled off after a larger group of men and women
who were fleeing on foot.

Dally handed the wheel over to the Japanese,
took a loop in his riata, and swung, casting his loop over the back
bumper of the other Jeep so that it towed them behind it. While the
gun-toting trio were figuring out what was going on, Dally took his
hunting rifle from the console between the seats and shot first one
then the other assault rifle clean out of the hands of the men
wielding them. Shots spit in all directions, and the six fugitives
fled before the Jeeps bit the dust.

Spencer Guttenberg and the third trainee
followed Dally to retrieve the automatic rifles where they lay on
the dirt outside the Jeep. While Dally was bending over the fender
to loosen his riata, the man with the machete took a hack at him,
but the Japanese separated the hand from the machete with a karate
chop he'd learned at a very young age from old Bruce Lee
movies.

The six people in front of them lifted
their heads when they realized they weren't dead, and a big
mocha-colored man said from between white teeth, "Goddamn, we was
saved once by La Llorona.
Tell
me you guys ain't the ghost-fuckin'-riders in the
sky."

The youngest of the rescuers tilted his
spectacles in a gesture that was worthy of Clint Eastwood and said,
"No, sir. But you might call us poetic justice."

* * *

Gussie figured out when she didn't lose the
blue truck in El Paso that she was definitely being tailed. She
tried everything she knew to shake him, because by now she had
abandoned any idea that he was friendly. She was hungry and thirsty
and wanted to go to the bathroom. The candy bar she'd picked up in
Roswell was just supposed to tide her over until lunch. She thought
about stopping someplace and going in where there were a lot of
people, but she didn't like to leave the protection of the car. She
could not call the police for help. Experience had already shown
that the law cared nothing about helping her or people like her,
though some completely strange officer who didn't know who she was
might plunge in and save her momentarily—always assuming that it
was not a policeman in the car behind her. But more and more she
knew it wasn't. She caught a glimpse of the face in the rearview
mirror from time to time. Like the musicians, she had shared a body
with a person long dead, had been ensorcelled and had danced with
the dead, and from this she had gained a sense of pitch where life
and death were concerned. The person behind her was among the
living okay, only not exactly. The five-hundred-year-old ghosts
she'd known in Scotland were more alive than the driver of that
truck.

So she kept driving, though the tank was
nearing empty and her bladder was full, her mouth dry, her heart
pounding, and her palms sweating. Darkness fell, and she recognized
the double rectangle of the blue truck's lights just behind, about
four cars back. More and more, though, as they drove out of the
city and dipped down into the country at the heel of the boot
formed by the map of Texas, the blue truck was right behind her,
trying to gain on her. Now she cursed herself for a damn fool for
not trying to attract a cop. She sped up in hopes of getting a
speeding ticket. The blue truck sped up too, of course, and pulled
alongside, just like in the movies, and side-swiped her. Her
brand-new van.

"Bastard!" she shouted, and waved her fist
at him, but all she could see were his headlights as he fell back,
sprang forward, and crashed into her again. Well, at least this was
Texas instead of California. Not much chance he was going to send
her flying over a steep mountain pass in the middle of the desert.
She just kept driving, even though according to the fuel indicator
she had to be running on fumes.

And then, as he pulled up to ram her again,
the van sputtered, bucked, and died. The truck made an impact and
Gussie locked the driver's side door, and as she leaned over to
lock the passenger's door, she saw headlights coming from a side
road and changed her mind and slid over to the passenger's side,
banged open the door, and jumped out, running for the lights.

Now why was the goddamn thing backing up?
Gussie wondered, as she ran for the lights. When she tripped, she
realized that she was not on a side road at all, but out in the
open. The door of the blue truck was open, light spilling from it
glinting off a blade in the hand of a smooth-faced man in a tractor
cap. She caught only a glimpse. He hadn't realized yet that she was
out of the truck, but it wouldn't take another second. She felt
that if she could just get to those lights, even if they weren't
car lights, surely there'd be other people, surely she could get
help.

She didn't look back, and the roar of her
own breath in her ears and the thud of her feet, the thump of her
heart, let her hear little else for what seemed like hours. And
then she heard an engine start and distinctly heard wheels behind
her.

Go to ground. She had to go to ground. Run.
Hide. Hunker down and blend in with the darkness. She veered left,
so that she wasn't running in a straight path, and from the corner
of her eye saw the truck's high beams splitting the dry desert
ground and scrub brush. The truck had left the road and was bumping
across the uneven ground, lights bouncing up to pierce the indigo
sky, then dropping back onto cracked and open ground.

Gussie's legs were lead, her heart an anchor
in her chest when she needed to be light enough to just blow away.
Oh, lord, why had she gotten out of the van? She could have held
him off awhile at least.

She saw a bush right in front of her and
thought she'd drop down behind it, so maybe if the pickup's
headlamps didn't shine directly on her he wouldn't find her. The
space was vast. On the other hand, nobody else was around except
whoever was behind those green lights—please God don't let them
belong to some lonely aircraft beacon or radio tower—and the night
was long. She could hide for a little while, but sooner or later
she'd have to run again.

The brush was full of thorns and stickers,
naturally, and tore at her face and arms as she bent down.
Fortunately, she hadn't yet had time to change out of her sweats
and running shoes into more comfortable shorts and sandals, but she
was sweating gallons and was sure her pursuer could hear her breath
over the engine of his truck.

There it was, a dark blue truck driving
through a field on a dark blue night, headlights bobbing up and
down, "Don't mind me, I'm just some kids out spoonin'. Don't mind
me I'm just some drunk good old boys out tastin' a little freedom,
drinkin' a little beer, raisin' a little innocent cain." Like
hell.

She closed her eyes and clenched her fists.
Childlike: "you can't see me. I'm not here." Why couldn't she have
brought the basket bag with her cuticle scissors or Swiss army
knife or even just the heavy bag itself to use for a shield, to hit
him with?

She'd forgotten the money. A big wad
of it was in her bra, more in the basket bag, more under the
floorboards. At least I got a little mad money this time, Mama, she
thought to herself and felt like giggling. Clean underwear probably
wouldn't matter a hell of a lot if he caught her with that big old
knife of his. Oh, lord. He
can't
see me. I'm
not
here.

And then she felt a little warmth, and light
pierced her closed eyelids. Oh, shit. He'd found her. For a moment
she thought, Don't open your eyes or the light will bounce off them
and the shine will give you away. But the roar of the engine was
still distant, somewhere to the right of her, and she risked
slitting her eyelids ever so slightly.

The light wasn't shining directly into her
eyes, but it restored the brown gold color to the bush in front of
her, though it washed it a little with pale green, as it did the
pink of her sweatsuit. All around the little circle in which she
squatted the ground looked black. The light poured down from a
green globe bobbing over her head like a goddamn "follow the
bouncing ball." Over across the field were two more lights, still
paired like headlights, but this third one was directly over her.
It bobbed away and bounced back toward her, bobbed away and bounced
back, just like Lassie had done on TV when Timmie was lying hurt
somewhere and Lassie wanted the father to follow and come to the
rescue.

The light wasn't bobbing in the direction of
the truck, so, still hunkered down, she followed it. As long as it
was away from that truck, one direction was as good as another.

* * *

Buddy Lamprey stopped at the Marfa cafe for
his usual donut and coffee and a little flirtation with the
waitress Janey Lynn, with whom he had gone to high school. She'd
been one of the brightest girls there, and Buddy had had a crush on
her, but in their senior year she married some college boy from
Lubbock, and three kids later she was back home taking care of both
the kids and her widowed daddy here in Marfa. He had to hand it to
her, though. She wasn't singin' the blues. She seemed happy to be
home and she was a damn good waitress. She could have made good
tips at some fancy place—hell, he thought, she could have made good
money as a civil engineer or a geologist or something, she had
always been at the top of her science classes—but Marfa didn't have
anyplace fancier than the cafe. It was, as Janey Lynn liked to say,
the creme de la nondairy creamer of northern Presidio County.

And he, of course, was, except for the
Bears, the law west of the Pecos—one of ten law-enforcement
officers serving the entire county. The crime was mostly drunk or
domestic or both, and there wasn't much of anywhere to run once you
blocked one of about two roads. The distances were long and lonely,
though. He enjoyed his coffee and Janey Lynn's company when she
wasn't too busy. They'd jaw a little and swap science fiction
books, and she'd always give him a report on the famous Marfa
lights.

"They're out tonight, Buddy," she hollered
from the kitchen. "The usual three, green and real active tonight,
from what I hear."