The Best Bad Dream (18 page)

And now, yes, there it was. A vision taking shape right in the middle of his head, exactly where the third eye was supposed to be.

He could see it forming but it was still kind of misty and ill-shaped.

Try harder to try less, Phil thought.

Or is it try less to try harder?

Whatever, he could see it now ... a vision, starting to really shape up. He kind of half expected the vision to be something like Sensei Lar was talking about: the big open flower of reality! It had to be that!

Only now the mist was clearing and he could really see the thing . . . oh, yeah, now he could
really
see it, and it wasn't a rose or any kind of flower. It was . . . oh, shit. . . fucking Thelma Jackson.

It was her, in all her tattered glory. The sixty-eight-year-old woman who had started a movement against Phil and the entire Evergreen community. Yes, the woman who had signed up fifty, then sixty, then over a hundred and fifty old people who lived at Evergreen. People who followed her into battle against Phil and the Evergreen lifestyle. Yes, Thelma, the evil bitch, who had attacked Phil for not taking care of the rooms, for not maintaining the light fixtures, for hiring sadistic ex-criminals to be on staff at the cheesy dump. (Ex-criminals were so much cheaper.)

Thelma, who said the food was shitty, that the doctors were tenth-rate, and that the on-site grocery store was the biggest rip-off of all time. Thelma Jackson who went to the papers and television and made the goddamned state inspectors come down on Evergreen like killer mosquitoes, probing and prodding and asking questions that Phil couldn't answer.

That bitch cost him millions of dollars in fixes, not to mention the deep embarrassment of being known as a slumlord, the sworn enemy of old folks not only in Ohio but all over the United States of America.

And Thelma Jackson had received some kind of good citizen's medal, while Phil got loads of shit dumped on his head.

And now he had to see her in his supposedly crystal, mystic vision.

His head reeled and he felt his breath come hard as he opened his eyes.

Next to him Annie, of the cute nose and double-pert breasts, smiled, opened her eyes, and said, “ I saw myself a thousand years ago. I was an Indian princess in Bombay!”

“That's great,” Phil said. “That's just fucking great.”

“What did you see, Phil?” Annie asked, smiling in her innocent way.

“I saw ... I saw a great desert,” Phil said. “And coming across it was this . . . this woman in a white caftan, and she beckoned to me. She really did. At first I couldn't see her face at all, but then she got closer and closer and I saw her. And she was . . . she was you, Annie. She really was. It was as though you had something wonderful to teach me.”

Christ, Phil thought, what total, weak bullshit. She'd see right through that. For sure.

But no, Annie was smiling. A three-hundred-watt smile now. Man, she ate it right up.

“Did you really see me, Phil?” she asked, beaming.

“I sure did,” Phil said. “ I felt it when I walked in here today, but I wasn't really one-hundred percent sure until I had my vision. What is it you want to teach me, sweetheart?”

She reached over and touched his hand. Her skin was warm, nurturing.

“I can't tell you now, Phil. But I want to see you, so much. I felt the same kind of thing when you walked in. Can I call you a little later? I have a surprise for you!”

“You bet you can,” Phil said. He quickly gave her his cell phone number.

Phil was so excited he was nearly out of his skin.

“Don't worry, sweetheart,” he said. “I'll be waiting for your call.”

Chapter Twenty-two

Jack and Oscar took a walk on the square and sat on a bench in the park. The shooter had escaped and they had looked for Tommy for an hour but found only his cycle tracks. Tracks that disappeared into the desert.

“He's probably out of the state by now.”

“Yeah,” Jack said, “but we really need to find out what he was talking about. He told me about this ceremony tomorrow night. The winter solstice. I think he was talking about somebody using Jennifer as a human sacrifice.”

“Jesus. He never gave any clue where it was going to be held?”

“Yeah, he did. ‘Under,’ he said. Underground, somewhere.”

“What else?”

“Well, he mentioned the Anasazi Indians. The ancient tribe from New Mexico. And something else. The Nombee?”

“Jesus,” Oscar said. “It's not Nombee . . . it's gotta be the Namba . . . the Tupinamba.”

Jack looked at him in shock.

“How the hell do you know that?”

“I studied Latin American culture at UCLA, partner. I was thinking about being a diplomat at one time. I was hoping I might get a
post in Brazil. I even went down there on a student exchange deal one semester. I found out all about the Tupinamba. They were a very well-organized tribe in the rain forest. Mostly were naked and self-sufficient. But there were a lot of wars with other tribes. Eventually most of them were wiped out.”

“That's fascinating, but what the hell does it have to do with Jennifer's kidnapping?”

Oscar stood up and began to pace.

“I don't know. I wish I hadn't spent so much of my time in college comparing brews. I know more about freaking beer than what I studied. But there was something ... I know it. C'mon, amigo. We got to do some research.”

In Oscar's room they did a Google search on “Tupinamba.” Within seconds they had thousands of sites. The first few said basically the same things that Oscar had remembered.

Then they came to another site. Oscar pounded the desk.

“Look at this.”

The link said: “Tupinamba prisoners.”

Oscar began to read aloud.

The Tupinamba seemed to be one of the most enlightened tribes. If they took a prisoner, they gave him a house, food, and a woman to sleep with, and, basically, treated him like an honored guest. For years this is all anyone knew of them. They seemed civilized compared to the other tribes. But anthropologist Mark A. Reynolds of the University of California, Berkeley, found evidence that there was one more step in the prisoner's incarceration. After being wined and dined and treated like a prince, he was,
on an appointed day, tied to a stake, burned alive, and eaten by the Tupinamba tribal members.

“Holy shit,” Jack said. “And the Anasazi?”

“I don't know about them. I always thought they were peaceful. There was something about them that I read once, though. They believed they had discovered the secret to eternal life. Some kind of black magic.”

Oscar quickly Googled that, too, and found a connection to the Tupinamba. Within seconds they were reading about how recent scholarship had destroyed the ancient myth of the Anasazi as ancient, peace-loving Indians.

“Listen to this. ‘The Anasazi Indians of New Mexico and Arizona believed they had found the secret of eternal life.’” Oscar scrolled down the page. “Jesus, look here! ‘By eating the flesh of their victims they took part in what they called sacred cannibalism. They took their enemies’ spirit and youth. They believed that through this ritual they could return to their own youth and live forever.’”

The two men looked at each other in shock.

“That's madness,” Oscar said. “Who would believe such a thing now?”

Jack shook his head. “ I'll tell you who. People who are going to die. Old people looking for the answer to the most terrifying question in the world: Why must I die? And it's been there all along, staring us right in the face. Christ, they even have a department at Blue Wolf called Ancient Ways, run by that woman Sally Amoros.”

“But you said that no one would care that they didn't have the answer to aging.”

“Exactly,” Jack said. “ No one would. Everyone knows it's a sham, a mere cosmetic procedure, a kind of make-believe weekend in which
older people pretend they can become young again. No one would kill anyone for telling people that it was all bullshit. But what if they really could reverse the clock? What if they had found something that worked, or half worked anyway? That's got to be it, Oscar. Think of Tommy, his skin . . . half old, half. . . something else. Maybe he was in the middle of changing. He told me there are many levels. You see?”

“Many levels? So maybe it's like if you pay so much you get to turn the clock back ten years? But if you pay more you get the full treatment? You get to become really young?”

“It must be something like that. They must be using young people's body parts as replacements for older ones. And somehow cannibalism has to be a part of what they do. And now I see something else. Why was Kim Walker so anxious to get me to go back to the Jackalope? To make me think that this whole thing was about girls being sent into prostitution.”

“A wild-goose chase?”

“Exactly. And the pig. They must have some kind of animal testing lab somewhere around here, too. They were using Ole Big as a test animal and Zollie was trying to save him, but they had already operated on him. That's why his intestines were gone. It's wild but it all adds up.”

“That means it isn't Lucky,” Oscar said. “He couldn't come up with any of this.”

“That's right,” Jack said, “but he could use his bikers to grab the people for somebody who then did the operations.”

“Alex Williams and Blue Wolf,” Oscar said. “ But Lucky and Alex hate one another.”

“At least that's what they want us to believe,” Jack said. “ Maybe that fight they had in the Red Sombrero was staged. And now that I think about it, that woman I saw in the hospital, Mary Jo. She said
they promised her she'd be young again. Not
feel
young again but really
be
young. She even showed me a picture of herself as a girl. Said they'd make her look like that again.”

Oscar shook his head.

“Okay, I don't say I buy it all, but just theoretically what does all this have to do with them kidnapping Michelle Wu?”

Jack looked hard at Oscar, and smiled.

“What did you just say?”

“ Oh, right, I said Michelle Wu but I meant Jennifer. Just a slip of the tongue, amigo.”

“No,” Jack said. “You just might be a genius, Oscar.”

“What do you . . . You mean that they may have kidnapped . . .”

“Yes, whoever did this might have kidnapped Jennifer Wu by mistake. Maybe Michelle found out about their secret, and maybe she tried to deal herself in.”

“That sounds like our girl,” Oscar said.

“Doesn't it?”

“So maybe Lucky sent his boys out to grab her and they picked up her sister by mistake.”

“Then her sister knows nothing at all about any of this.”

“Maybe. Or maybe they're both involved. Anyway, once they took Jennifer they couldn't very well give her back. She's got to die. We've got to get to Michelle fast. Find out what she really knows.”

“Hell,” Oscar said, “they could pick her up, too.”

Jack dialed Michelle's cell phone number. The phone rang but there was no answer.

“Come on, Osc. Let's get back to the hotel and see if she's waiting for us there.”

As they headed out Jack felt a sinking sensation in his heart. This time he had really risked something of himself with her. This time
he had been really convinced that she was going to try and change her ways.

Instead, if their speculations were right, she had played him for a bigger sucker than ever.

It was probably her own machinations that had got her sister kidnapped. And the reason that she had gotten Jack involved instead of calling the local cops? Easy. She knew she could manipulate his feelings for her so that she could stay out of jail.

And if there
was
a formula for turning back the clock, and somehow Alex Williams had stumbled upon it, it was a sure bet that Michelle wanted it for herself.

That was how she really was, Jack had to remind himself. In spite of their lovemaking up in his room, in spite of the way she looked at him and her lost little girl routine ... in spite of all that, Michelle was a predator.

And anyone, even those she loved, who got in her way became her prey.

Chapter Twenty-three

Things were going downhill for Kevin. First he got a D on a quiz about George Orwell's
1984.
Then he got reamed out by his coach for not scooping loose balls at practice.

He knew he was falling apart but he just didn't care. All he could think about was Vicki Hastings. He was already thinking of getting into her car with her and touching her soft white panties and sticking his finger inside of her, the way she moaned and moved . . .

God, it was so fantastic. There was nothing else like it. Who could study, or read about how the world was going to be taken over by “doublethink,” when soon he would be in her house, fucking her in the bed, on the floor, and on the dining room table.

He was obsessed. He was completely obsessed and wanted her all the time.

But tonight was the worst. She had told him that her husband was bored with her and, worse, that he had smacked her in the face with the back of his hand and called her a “dumb cunt.”

Kevin couldn't believe it. He held Vicki close to him in bed as she cried and said, “You're all I have. I'm so afraid of him.”

Kevin was deeply shocked. James was beating down on Vicki? That was totally insane.

Kevin propped himself up in bed and said, dead serious, “ If he ever hits you again, you tell me and I'll kick his ass all the way down the block and then light him on fire.” He'd heard an actor say that line in a gangster movie once. Robert Mitchum maybe. He thought it was cool. Very cool.

But now he wasn't trying to be cool. He really meant it.

She reached down, held his cock, and kissed his mouth.

“My hero,” she said.

“I mean it,” Kevin said. “ I mean it. If he ever hurts you I will kill him.”

“Oh, Kevin,” she said, and went down on him.

Kevin fondled her breasts as she sucked him, and he felt his mind slip away.

He really would, he thought just then. If fucking James ever hit her again, he would definitely kill the son of a bitch.

Chapter Twenty-four