Charles L. Grant - X-Files 02 - Whirlwind
2024-12-24
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This is for Kathryn Ptacek.
For lots of reasons, but in particular, this time,
because I've mangled her New Mexico homeland
before, and she still hasn't shot me.
ACHNOWLEDGMENTS
My gratitude and fond appreciation to the poor folks who had to listen, advise, and humor me over the
past few months:
Caitlin Blasdell, who, for reasons known only to herselt, puts up with all my calls, and has never once told
me to stop bugging her and get back to work;
Steve Nesheirn, MD., for the wonderfully grue-some details, and for all the possibilities therein;
Wendy Webb, R.N., M.Ed., for taking those details and actually making them fun;
Geoffrey Marsh, for graciously allowing me to bor-row the Konochine Indians for my own disgusting
use;
The Jersey Conspiracy, as always, this time provid-ing me with more dead bodies than I could possibly
use this time around, and one drunk;
And Robert E. Vardeman, who never stops reminding me why it's nice to have good friends in far
places.
The sun was white and hot, and the wind blew ceaselessly.
Annie Hatch stood alone on her ranch house porch, one hand absently rubbing her stomach as she
tried to decide what to do. The late-morning sun made her squint, the temperature already riding near
ninety.
But the wind that coasted across the high desert made her wish, for the first time in a long time, that she
were back in California.
It hissed softly through the brush, and whis-pered softly in her ear.
Of course, she thought; you could also just be a doddering old fool. A quick smile, a quicker sigh, and
she inhaled
slowly, deeply, taking in the heat, and the pinon, and, so faintly she might have been imagining it, a sweet
touch of juniper.
Wind or not, voices or not, this was, all in all, far better than Hollywood.
That was where she and Burt had made their money, so many years ago it might have been a dream;
here was where they had finally made their lives, no dream at all.
A breath of melancholy fluttered her eyelids closed for a moment. It wasn't easy being a widow, even
after fifteen years. There were still too many times when she thought she heard him clumping back from
the stable behind the house, or whistling as he fiddled with the generator, or blowing gently on the back
of her neck.
The wind did that to her, too.
"Enough," she muttered, and strode impatiently to the end of the porch, leaned over the waist-high,
rough-hewn rail, and looked down the side of the adobe house to the stable. She whistled twice, high,
sharp, and loud, and giggled silently when she heard Nando curse, not very subtly let-ting her know he
hadn't finished saddling Diamond yet, was she trying to get him trampled?
A second later he appeared in the open door-way, hands on his wide hips, glaring at her from under
his time-beaten Stetson.
She waved gaily; he gestured sharply in disgust and vanished again.
"That's cruel," a soft voice said behind her.
She laughed as she turned. "He loves it Sil, and you know it."
Silvia Quintodo looked at her skeptically for as long as she could. Then she grinned broadly, shaking
her head as if at a child too angelic to be punished. She was a round woman, face and fig-ure, with
straight black hair forever caught in a single braid that hung down her back. Her skin was almost copper,
her large eyes the color of a starlit night. Today, as always, she wore a loose, plain white dress that
reached to mid-shin, and russet deerskin boots.
"You're staring," she scolded lightly.
Annie blinked.- "I am? I'm sorry. My mind was wandering." She stared at the weathered floor-boards.
"I guess I'm just feeling my age today, dear."
Silvia rolled her eyes—oh, please, not again—and returned inside to prepare an early lunch.
Annie thanked her silently for not feeding the self-pity.
In truth, she knew she wasn't so bad for an old lady of sixty-one. Her face was narrow, accentuat-ing
green eyes and dark, not quite thick, lips; the lines there were more from the sun than her age. Her hair
was white, but softly so, cropped short and brushed straight back over her ears. Practical, but still lovely.
And her slender figure was such that, even after all these years, she was still able to
turn more than a few heads whenever she drove into the city or up to Santa Fe.
It was good for her ego.
Oh brother, she thought; it's worse than I thought.
What it was, was one of those days that crept up on her now and then—when she missed Burt so
much it burned. There was never any particu-lar reason for it, no specific thing that jogged her memory.
It just happened. Like today. And the only cure was to take Diamond and a canteen and ride into the
desert.
Maybe, if she were brave enough, all the way to the Mesa.
Sure, she thought; and tomorrow I'll wake up and find Burt beside me in bed.
A snort behind her made her jump.
She whirled just as Diamond thrust his head over the rail, his nose catching her stomach and shoving
her back a step.
"Hey!" she said with a scolding laugh. "Knock it off, you big jerk."
He was already in bridle and saddle, a short black horse with a rough diamond blaze between his
eyes. Nando stood beside him, grinning, one hand on the animal's rump, his stained brown hat pushed
back on his head.
"Serves you right," he told her smugly. He could have been Silvia's twin, not her husband, save for the
ragged streaks of gray in his hair.
and the fact that his broad blunt nose had been broken too many times for him to be rightly called
handsome. Those who didn't know him figured him for an ex-boxer or an ex-Marine, not the foreman of
a ranch that wasn't much of a ranch anymore.
Annie made a show of ignoring him and his rebuke. She adjusted her straw Western hat, fixed the
strap under her chin, and swung her legs eas-ily over the rail. Without pause or hesitation, she grabbed
the horn and swung lightly into the sad-dle. Only then did she look down at him. "Not bad for an old
lady, huh?"
"The day you get old, Senora," he answered solemnly, "is the day I stop shoveling horse shit for a
living and start selling bad turquoise to the tourists up Santa Fe."
Diamond shook his mane impatiently.
A warm gust made them turn their heads, but not before she saw the expression on his face.
When he looked back, he was somber. "It talks."
"I wouldn't know."
He shook his head slowly, not quite sadly. "You know. You always know."
She grabbed the reins angrily. "I know nothing of the sort, Nando." She was prepared to cluck
Diamond away when Nando tapped her leg. "Now what?"
He reached behind him and pulled out a can-
teen. Grinning again: "No rain, no water." He tucked it into the silver-studded saddlebag.
She thanked him with a brusque nod and guided Diamond across the side lawn to a break in the
double split-rail fence she had painted white the year before. Once through, she followed it around to the
front, checking the grass inside to see where it was dying.
Everywhere, she realized; everywhere.
Despite the extraordinarily expensive, undoubt-edly wasteful belowground system her late hus-band
had installed himself and had connected to one of the score of deep wells on the ranch, the grass seldom
survived intact all the way through the summer. Still, she thought as the ranch drifted away behind her,
wasteful or not, it was better than nothing.
At least it had color.
At least it had life.
"All right," she snapped to the shadow that rode beside her. "All right, that's enough, Annie, that's
enough."
Her right hand held the reins lightly; her left hand rested on her thigh, and it trembled.
She ignored it, concentrating instead on the rolling land ahead, automatically checking for wind or
flash-flood damage to the narrow wood bridges Burt and Nando had built across the sev-eral arroyos
meandering across the four thousand acres, glancing to her right every so often at the
high heat-brown hill that blocked the sun each morning. Like the exposed knobby root of an ancient,
distant tree, it flanked the recently paved road that led east to the interstate and west to the Mesa.
To the reservation.
She couldn't see it from here.
The hill crossed the road a half-mile ahead, still high, still marked with thorned shrubs and tufts of grass
sharp enough to slice through a palm, still studded with large brown rocks and partially buried boulders.
Like a wall to keep the rest of the world out.
Or to keep the Konochine in.
For some, however, it wasn't high enough or strong enough.
They left to see what the world outside looked like, to discover what the world had to offer besides life
on a reservation.
For her, it was Burt, and a brief but lucrative career in Hollywood; for others, unfortunately, it was
prejudice and pain, and ultimately, a grave too far from home.
Diamond shied suddenly, forcing her to pay attention, to glance quickly at the ground for signs of
rattlesnakes. They'd be out now—the sun was high and warm enough—coiled deceptively still on
whatever rocks they could find.
She saw none, and frowned her puzzlement when the horse began to prance, telling her he
wasn't thrilled about approaching the ranch side of the hill
That's when she saw the buzzards.
Five of them circled low near the two-lane road, and she mouthed a sharp curse as she nudged the
horse in that direction. There weren't many cattle left; she had sold most of them off not long after Burt
had died, and seldom replaced the ones she lost. Every so often, though, one of those remaining found a
way through the barbed wire that marked their pastures. Sometimes they tumbled into an arroyo;
sometimes a rattler got them; sometimes they just couldn't find the water or the food and simply gave up,
laid down, and died.
Closer, and she saw a van parked on the sandy shoulder, on the far side of the fence that ran along the
blacktop. Vague waves of ghostly heat shimmered up from the road, blurring the vehi-cle's outline.
"What do you think?" she asked Diamond. 'Tourists?"
The desert beyond the Sandia Mountains was beautiful in a stark and desolate way, with flashes of
color all the more beautiful because they were so rare. It was also a trap. It wasn't unusual for an
unthinking tourist to pull over because he wanted to walk a little, stretch his legs, check things out. It also
wasn't unusual for the heat, and deceptive distance, to combine to lose him.
One minute, you could see everything; the next, you were alone.
Sometimes he didn't make it back.
Another twenty yards, and Diamond pulled up short.
"Hey," she said. "Come on, don't be stupid,"
He shook his head violently, reaching around to nip at her boot, a sign he wasn't moving another inch.
She glared helplessly at the top of his head, watching his ears twitch in agitation. Forcing him would
serve no purpose. He was as stubborn as she, and most definitely stronger.
"Can you say 'glue'?" she muttered sourly as she swung out of the saddle and ordered him to stay put,
"Idiot."
Dusting her hands on her jeans, she trudged toward the van, scanning the area for whoever it was who
had been stupid enough to leave it.
She hadn't gone a dozen yards when she heard the flies.
Her stomach tightened in anticipation, but she didn't stop. A check of the fence revealed no breaks in
the wire, no toppled posts. The van itself was a dusty dark green, streaked with long-dried mud.
"Hello?" she called, just in case.
The flies sounded like bees.
The wind nudged her from behind.
She stepped around a sprawling juniper, and
her left hand instantly clamped tightly to her stomach.
"Oh God," she whispered. "Dear Jesus."
It wasn't a lost cow.
There were two of them, and they lay face-down, arms and legs spread, unnaturally twisted. Flies
crawled in undulating waves over them, thick and black, drifting into the air and drifting down again. Not
five feet away, a buzzard watched, its wings flexing slowly.
It snapped its beak once.
Annie spun away and bent over, hands on her knees, eyes shut and stomach lurching, her throat
working hard to keep the bile from rising.
She knew the bodies were human.
But only by their shape.
Even with the flies, even with the sun, it was clear they had been skinned.
The sun was white and hot, and there
was no wind. Traffic in the nation's capital moved
sullenly and loudly, while pedestrians, if they moved at all, glowered absently at the ground,
praying that the next building they entered had its air conditioning working. In this prolonged July heat
wave, that wasn't always the case.
Tempers were short to nonexistent, crimes of passion were up, and blame for the extreme dis-comfort
was seldom aimed at the weather.
The office in the basement of the J. Edgar Hoover Building was, according to some, a
working monument to the struggle of order over chaos.
It was long, not quite narrow, and divided in half by the remains of a floor-to-ceiling glass par-tition
from which the door had long since been removed. Posters and notices were tacked and taped to the
walls, and virtually every flat surface was covered by books, folders, or low stacks of paper. The
lighting was dim, but it wasn't gloomy, and as usual, the air conditioning wasn't quite working.
In the back room, two men and a woman stared at a series of red-tabbed folders lying on a waist-high
shelf. Each was open to the stark black-and-white photograph of a naked corpse, each corpse lying in
the center of what appeared to be a tiled bathroom floor.
"I'm telling you, it's driving us nuts," the first man complained mildly. He was tall, solid, and a
close-cropped redhead. His brown suit fit too snugly for real comfort. His tie had been pulled away from
his collar and the collar button undone, the only concessions he made to the barely moving air. He wiped
a hand over a tanned cheek, wiped the palm on his leg. "I mean, I know it’s a signature, but I'll be
damned if I can read it"
"Oh, put your glasses on, Stan," the woman muttered. She was near his height, her rounded face
smooth, almost bland, with thin lips, and
narrow eyes under dark brows. Unlike his clothes, her cream linen suit could have been tailored. "That's
no signature, it’s just slashes, for crying out loud. You're the one who's driving us nuts."
Stan Bournell closed his eyes briefly, as if in prayer. He said nothing.
"It's the bathroom that's important," she con-tinued, her voice bored. It was clear to the second man
that she had been on this route a hundred times. She pulled a tissue from a pocket and dabbed at her
upper lip. "It's easier to clean, it’s too small for the victim to hide in or run around in, and—"
"Beth, Beth," Bournell said wearily, "I know that, okay? I've got eyes. I can see."
The second man stood between them, hands easy on his hips. His jacket was draped over a chair in
the other room with his tie, and the sleeves of his white shirt were rolled back twice. His face was
unlined, and his age could have been anywhere from his late twenties to his mid-thirties, depending on
how generous the estimate was.
Right now, he felt more like fifty.
The bickering had begun the moment the two agents had stormed into the office; the sniping had begun
once the folders had been laid out.
He took a step away from them, closer to the work shelf.
They were both right.
He had read the files several days ago, at his Section Head's request, but he didn't tell the agents that;
their tempers were frayed enough already.
He sniffed, and rubbed a thoughtful finger alongside his nose.
All five victims—or at least, the five the FBI was thus far aware of—had first been attacked in other
rooms of their respective homes. Houses, not apartments; suburbs, not cities. All signs indi-cated little or
no struggle after the initial assault, indicating knowledge of the attacker, or near-total surprise. They had
been chloroformed just enough for immobility, then dragged elsewhere. All were women, all in their early
twenties, and all had been murdered in their bathrooms.
Strangled with either an unfinished belt or rawhide strap, their bodies stripped to the waist, and a razor
taken to their chests.
One slice each.
None had been raped.
Beth Neuhouse groaned and plucked at her blouse. "God, doesn't the air conditioning work in here?
How can you work like this? It's like a sauna."
Fox Mulder shrugged unconcern, then pushed a hand back through his hair.
He checked each black-and-white in turn, his gaze flicking over them increasingly rapidly, as though he
were reading.
"Well?" Bournell asked. "You got a magic trick for us? You got a rabbit we can chase?"
Mulder held up a hand to hush him, then slid the pictures from their folders and laid them out in a line.
A moment later he switched the second and fourth.
"Mulder," Neuhouse said, "we haven't got all day. Either you've got something or you don't. Don't play
games, okay?
Mulder straightened, and almost smiled. "Beth, get me a sheet of paper, please?" His left hand gestured
vaguely toward the other room.
It was his tone that moved her more than the request. Those who had worked with him before had
heard it at least once. One of the older agents had said it was like the first bay of a hound that had finally
found the scent; you didn't argue with it, you just followed.
And you made sure your gun was loaded.
Bournell frowned. "What? I don't see it."
Mulder pushed the photographs closer together and pointed. "Ifs there. I think." Sudden doubt made
him hesitate. "I'm—"
"Here." Neuhouse thrust a blank sheet into his hand. She stared at the bodies then, and her voice
quieted. "I've been looking at those women for over a month, Mulder. I'm seeing them in my sleep."
He knew exactly what she meant.
In many ways, the black-and-whites were as bad as looking at the bodies themselves. Although
the color was gone, violent death wasn't. The only thing missing was the smell, and it wouldn't take much
effort to bring that up, too.
"So what do we have?" Bournell asked.
"I'm not positive. It's kind of crazy."
Neuhouse laughed quietly "Well, this is the place for it, right?"
Mulder smiled. No offense had been meant, and he hadn't taken any. He knew his reputation in the
Bureau, and it no longer bothered him. He was a flake, a maverick, a little around the bend on the other
side of the river. He worked as much from logic and reason as anyone else, but there were times when
he didn't have to take every sin-gle step along the way.
There were times when abrupt intuitive leaps put him ahead of the game.
Sometimes that was far enough to have it called magic.
Or, more often than not, spooky.
He put up with it because that reputation came in handy once in a while.
"Come on, Houdini," Bournell complained. "I'm frying in here."
Beth aimed a semiplayful slap at his arm. "Will you shut up and let the man think?"
"What think? All he has to do is—"
"Here," Mulder said, slapping the paper onto the shelf, indecision gone. He grabbed a pen from his
shirt pocket. "Look at this."
The others leaned over his shoulders as he pointed to the first picture, but she wasn't the first victim.
"The cut runs from just over her right breast to just under the left. In the next, it's the reverse."
"So?" Bournell said.
Mulder pointed again. 'It could be the killer leans over and just cuts her." He straightened suddenly,
and the others jumped back when his left hand demonstrated an angry, senseless slash-ing. "It could be,
but I don't think so. Not this time." He pointed at the third woman. "This is dearly most of a letter, right?"
"R, maybe, if you combine it with the next one over," Neuhouse answered, glancing at her part-ner,
daring him to contradict. "I know that much."
"Damn sloppy, then," Bournell said.
'For God's sake, Stan, he's slashing her! What the hell do you expect?"
Mulder copied the slash marks onto the paper, turned, and held it up.
They stared at it, puzzled, then stared at him— Bournell in confusion, Neuhouse with a disbelief that
had her lips poised for a laugh.
"He's writing his name," Mulder told them. "He's letting you know who he is." He exhaled loudly. "One
piece at a time."
The luncheonette was two blocks from FBI head-quarters, a narrow corner shop with a long Formica
counter and a half-dozen window booths, most of the decor done in pale blues and white. The windows
had been tinted to cut the sun's glare, but it still threatened Mulder with a drumming headache whenever
he glanced out at the traffic.
Once done with the sparring duo, he had grabbed his tie and jacket and fled, stomach growling
unmercifully, his head threatening to expand far beyond its limits. Even now he could hear them arguing,
with each other and with him, telling him, and each other, that he was out of his freaking mind. Killers did
not write their names on victims' bodies; at least, they sure didn't do it in classical Greek.
And when they finally, reluctantly, accepted it, they demanded to know who the killer was and why he
did it.
Mulder didn't have any answers, and he told them that more than once.
When it had finally sunk in, they had stormed out as loudly as they'd stormed in, and he had stared at
the door for nearly a full minute before deciding he'd better get out now, before the echoes of their
bickering gave him a splitting headache.
The trouble was, stomach or not, the nattering and the heat had combined to kill his appetite.
The burger and fries looked greasy enough to be delicious, but he couldn't bring himself to pick anything
up, even for a taste. Dumb, perhaps, but still, he couldn't do it.
A siren screamed; a police car raced down the center of the crowded street.
In the booth ahead of him, two couples chat-tered about baseball while at the same time they damned
the heat wave that had been sitting on Washington for nearly two weeks.
On his right, on the last counter stool, an old man in a worn cardigan and golf cap listened to a table
radio, a talk show whose callers wanted to know what the local government was going to do about the
looming water shortage and con-stant brownouts. A handful were old enough to still want to blame the
Russians.
Mulder sighed and rubbed his eyes.
In calmer times, it was nice to know his exper-tise was appreciated; in times like these, exacer-bated
by the prolonged heat, he wished the world would leave him the hell alone.
He picked up a french fry and stared at it glumly.
The radio announced a film festival on one of the cable channels. Old firms from the forties and fifties.
Not at all guaranteed to be good, just fun.
He grunted, and popped the fry into his mouth. All right, he thought; I can hole up at home with Bogart
for a while.
He smiled to himself.
The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea. In fact, he thought as he picked up the
burger, it sounded like exactly what he needed.
He was finished before he realized he had eaten a single bite. A good sign.
He grinned more broadly when a woman slipped into the booth and stared in disgust at his plate.
"You know," his partner said, "your arteries must be a scientific wonder."
He reached for the last fry, and Dana Scully slapped the back of his hand.
"Take a break and listen. We're wanted."
She was near his age and shorter, her face slightly rounded, light auburn hair settling softly on her
shoulders. More than once, the object of one of their manhunts had thought her too femi-nine to be an
obstacle. Not a single one of them had held that thought for very long.
Mulder wiped his mouth with a napkin, the grin easing to a tentative smile. "Wanted?"
"Skinner," she told him. "First thing in the morning. No excuses."
The smile held, but there was something new in his eyes. Anticipation, and a faint glimmer of
excitement.
Assistant Director Skinner asking for them now, while they were both in the midst of cases still
pending, generally meant only one thing.
Somewhere out there was an X-File, waiting, "Maybe," she said, as if reading his mind. She snatched the
last fry and bit it in half. An eyebrow lifted. "Or maybe you're just in trouble again."
Twilight promised the desert, and the city at the base of the Sandia Mountains, a pleasantly cool evening.
The heat had already begun to dis-sipate, and a wandering breeze raised wob-bly dust devils
along the interstate that stretched from Albuquerque to Santa Fe. Snakes sought their
dens. A roadrunner streaked through a small corral, delighting a group of children who didn't
want to leave their riding lessons, A hawk danced with the thermals.
On the low bank of the Rio Grande, beneath a stretch of heavy-crowned cottonwoods, Paulie Deven
snapped pebbles and stones at the shallow
water, cursing each time he hit the dried mud instead.
He hated New Mexico.
The Rio Grande was supposed to be this wide awesome river, deep, with rapids and cliffs, all that
good stuff.
But not here. Here, he could almost spit across it, and most of the time it hardly held any water. You
could forget about the cliffs, and rapids were out of the question.
He threw another stone.
Behind him, he could hear muffled music com-ing from the trailer his parents had rented from the
developer until their new house was finished. That was supposed to have been three months ago, when
they had arrived from Chicago. But some kind of permits were wrong, and then there was some kind of
strike, and , . . and ... He snarled and threw another rock, so hard he felt a twinge in his shoulder.
He thought he was going to live in the West. Maybe not the Old West, but it was supposed to be the
West.
What his folks had done was simply trade one damn city for another. Except that he had belonged
back in Chicago; back there the kids didn't get on his case because of the way he looked and sounded.
A light fall of pebbles startled him, but he didn't look around. It was probably his pain-in-
the-ass sister, sliding down the slope to tell him Mom and Dad wanted him back in the trailer now,
before some wild animal dragged him into the desert and ate him for breakfast.
Right.
Like there was anything out there big enough to eat something built like a football player.
"Pauhe?"
He glanced over his left shoulder. "You blind, or what?"
Patty sneered and plopped down beside him. She was a year younger than his seventeen, her glasses
thick, her brain thicker, her hair in two clumsy braids that thumped against her chest. He wasn't exactly
stupid, but he sure felt that way whenever she was around.
She pulled her legs up and hugged her knees. "Not much of a river, is it?"
"Good eyes."
"They're fighting again."
Big surprise.
Ever since they had moved into the trailer, they had been fighting:—about the house, about the move,
about his Dad being close to losing his job, about practically anything they could. A damn war had
practically started when he'd taken some of his savings and bought himself an Indian pendant on a
beaded string. His father called him a goddamn faggot hippie, his mother defended him, and Paulie had
finally slammed
outside before his temper forced him to start swinging.
Patty rested her chin on her knees and stared at the sluggish water. Then she turned her head. "Paulie,
are you going to run away?"
He couldn't believe it. "What?"
She shrugged, looked back at the river. 'The way you've been acting, I thought ... I don't know ...
I thought maybe you were going to try to get back to Chicago."
"I wish." He threw another rock; it hit the mud on the far side. "You ever think about it?"
"All the time."
That amazed him. Patty was the brain, the one with the level head, the one who never let any-thing get
to her, ever. He hated to admit it, but he had lost count of the number of times she had saved his ass just
by talking their folks into for-getting they were mad. Running away, running back home, was his kind of
no-brain plan, not hers.
The sun died.
Night slipped from the cottonwoods.
A few stray lights from the trailer, from the handful of others on the other lots and the homes on the far
side, were caught in fragments in the river, just enough to let him know it was still there.
Suddenly he didn't like the idea of being alone. "You're not going to do it, are you?"
She giggled. "You nuts? Leave this paradise?" She giggled again. "Sorry, Paulie, but I've got two years
till graduation. I'm not going to screw it up, no matter what." She turned her head again; all he saw was
her eyes. "But then, I swear to God, I'm going to blow this town so goddamn fast, you won't even
remember what I look like."
He grinned. "That won't be hard."
"And the horse you rode in on, brother."
"I hate horses, too. Their manure smells like shit."
A second passed in silence before they exploded into laughter, covering their mouths,
half-closing their eyes, rocking on their buttocks until Patty got the hiccups, and Paulie took great
pleasure in thumping her back until she punched his arm away.
"I'm serious," she insisted, her face flushed. "I'm not kidding.
"Yeah, well." He watched the black water, rubbed a finger under his nose. "So am I."
Angry voices rose briefly above the music.
A door slammed somewhere else, and a pickup's engine gunned to launch the squealing of tires.
Off to their left, beyond the last tree, something began to hiss.
Paulie heard it first and frowned as he looked upriver, trying to see through the dark. "Pat?"
"Huh?"
"Do snakes come out at night?"
"What are you talking about? What snakes?"
He reached over and grabbed her arm to hush her up.
Hissing, slow and steady, almost too soft to hear.
"No," she whispered, a slight tremor in her voice. "At least, I don't think so. It's too cool, you know?
They like it hot, or something."
Maybe she was right, but it sure sounded like snakes to him. A whole bunch of them, over there where
none of the lights reached, about a hun-dred feet away.
Patty touched his hand, to get him to release her and to tell him she heard it, too. Whatever it was.
They couldn't see a thing.
Overhead, the breeze coasted through the leaves, and he looked up sharply, holding his breath until he
realized what it was.
That was another thing he hated about this stupid place: it made too many sounds he couldn't identify,
especially after sunset.
Every one of them gave him the creeps.
The hissing moved.
Except now it sounded like rapid, hoarse whis-pering, and Paulie shifted up to one knee, strain-ing to
make out something, anything, that would give him a clue as to who was out there and what they were
doing.
Patty crawled up behind him, a hand resting on his back. "Let's get out of here, Paulie, huh?"
He shook his head obstinately. It was bad enough he was here because his folks had had some
shit-for-brains idea about starting over, when they already had a perfectly good business back up North.
He definitely wasn't going to let the buttheads here frighten him off.
City boy.
They called him "city boy" at school, their lips curled, their voices sneering, unimpressed by his size or
the glares that he gave them.
Yeah, sure. Like this wasn't a city, right? Like they didn't have traffic jams, right? Like people didn't
shoot and stab and stomp each other here like they did in Chicago, right?
The dark moved.
The hissing moved.
"Paulie?"
He swayed to his feet, trying not to make too much noise: His hands wiped across his jeans and curled
into fists. Now they had made him angry.
"Paulie, come on."
"Go back up," he ordered without turning around.
Something had definitely moved out there, probably a bunch of wiseass kids trying to creep toward
him. He took a sideways step up the uneven bank; his foot nudged a short length of
dead branch. Without taking his eyes off the dark, he reached down and picked it up.
"Paulie."
"Go up!" he snapped, louder than he'd intended. "Damnit, Patty."
Staring so hard made him dizzy. It was like try-ing to pin down the edges of a black fog.
His free hand rubbed his eyes quickly and hard, but nothing changed.
There just wasn't enough light.
This, he thought, is really dumb. Get your ass outta here before something happens.
An arm snaked over his shoulder, and he bit so hard on a yelp that he choked.
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ThisisforKathrynPtacek.Forlotsofreasons,butinparticular,thistime,becauseI'vemangledherNewMexicohomelandbefore,andshestillhasn'tshotme.ACHNOWLEDGMENTSMygratitudeandfondappreciationtothepoorfolkswhohadtolisten,advise,andhumormeoverthepastfewmonths:CaitlinBlasdell,who,forreasonsknownonlytoherselt,putsu...
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时间：2024-12-24
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