Cowboy Angels (38 page)

They abandoned the pickup in Amarillo, washed up and breakfasted on huevos rancheros in a Mexican greasy spoon, stole a green four-door Oldsmobile from the employees’ section of a supermarket parking lot, and headed west along the I-40, passing through the Pecos into New Mexico, and taking the I-25 south toward Las Cruces. The sky shimmered blue and cloudless above bluffs of red rock and slumped fans of rubble where little grew but ocotillo and catclaw. The muddy Rio Grande snaked close to the road, bent away again.

Stone was jittery with anticipation and lack of sleep. His bruises and burns had kept him awake most of the night, and the miasma of a dream still clung to him. He’d been walking down a road that cut through vague, dark countryside and someone had been walking behind him. He could feel the warmth of her presence like sunshine on his back, but knew that if he looked around she would no longer be there. And so he kept walking through the darkness until he reached a crossroads, and turned to ask which way he should go, and found that he was alone.

A dry wind was blowing through Las Cruces. Dust from Mexico hazed the air above the low buildings and left the taste of iron in Stone’s mouth. Tom Waverly purchased a road map, bottles of water, and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s at a general store with bars across its window and gang signs spray-painted on its walls. They ate tacos at a roadside stand hung with
ristras
of red chillies, then found a gun shop, a small place with an old-fashioned glass counter and the heads of antelope, mule deer and a single mountain lion arrayed on its whitewashed adobe walls. They bought a twelve-gauge Winchester pump-action shotgun and boxes of double-ought buckshot shells and ammunition for their pistols, .38 hollowpoints and .45 ACP hardball loads. The clerk told them that they would need a licence if they were going after antelope and Tom gave the guy a shit-eating grin and said that they were planning to shoot rock doves.

‘You’d be better off with number four birdshot,’ the clerk said. ‘That double-ought will shred a bird.’

‘We plan to kill ’em, not eat ’em,’ Tom said.

Back in the hot, stuffy car, he unfolded the map and started to show Linda where the gate was.

‘I know,’ she said. She was tired and tense, and had been quiet for most of the day. ‘Mr Stone told me all about it. There’s a turnoff twenty-one point eight miles west of Alamogordo, marked by a mailbox painted red. A track leads to a cabin, and the gate is set amongst rocks about a mile to the south.’

‘The duty caretaker is one of GYPSY’s people,’ Tom said, folding up the map. ‘We’ll have to deal with him.’

Stone said, ‘There may be more than one guy. By now, they must know we killed one of theirs.’

‘I guess there’s only one way to find out,’ Tom said. ‘Let’s hit the road. We’ve got some ground to cover. The gate opens at exactly six p.m., stays open for just ten minutes. If we miss it, we’ll have to spend a whole day hiding out in the desert before it opens again, and meanwhile our friends will be doing their best to hunt us down.’

They drove through a pass in stark mountains to the desert plain spread beyond. The sun burned white through a haze of dust. Sheets of dust blew across the road and laid a fine mantle on the windshield. Broken glass glinted along the margin of the two-lane blacktop, mile after mile. They passed a military base with decommissioned missiles aimed at the sky either side of the gate in its chain-link fence, drove through the little desert settlement of Point of Sands. When a bullet-riddled marker for Alamogordo appeared, Tom told his daughter to pull off the road. He jumped out as soon as the car had stopped and raised the hood.

‘Linda will make like a damsel in distress. When the local law comes by to help her out, we take their cruiser. Then we ride up to that cabin, and when the bad guys come out to see what the local law wants, we’ll draw down on them and let them know what’s what.’

Stone squinted in the hot whip of the wind. ‘Suppose the local cops don’t come by?’

‘Then we’ll go find them,’ Tom said, and took a swig from his bottle of Jack Daniel’s. ‘But trust me, we won’t need to.’

‘Because it’s supposed to happen? Because this is what’s predestined ?’

‘Don’t be sarcastic, Mr Stone,’ Linda said. ‘It doesn’t suit you.’

‘You still don’t believe me,’ Tom said. ‘I don’t mind, because I know that in a few hours you’ll be singing a different tune. You’ll be begging me to help your woman.’

‘Susan is dead, you son of a bitch. Nothing can help her now.’

Stone knew that he shouldn’t have let the jibe get to him, but he was tired, he was worried that he still hadn’t figured out Tom’s game, and he knew that he couldn’t expect any help from Linda, who was clearly taking her father’s side. He had to step hard on the impulse to put his pistol in Tom’s face and have it out there and then; if he was going to get back to the Real, he had to pretend to go along with his old friend’s plan, even it was dangerously cockeyed and probably hid some devious stratagem which almost certainly hinged on using him as a patsy.

Tom must have read Stone’s intention in his gaze or his body language. He smiled and said, ‘You think you can take me, Adam?’

‘Is it going to come to that?’

Linda said, ‘It looks like someone’s heading this way. You two old men are going to have to work off your excess testosterone some other time.’

Stone looked around, saw in the far distance a glittering dot bobbing in the glassy heat shimmering off the road.

‘We aren’t done with this,’ he said.

‘Maybe not, but we’re getting close.’

Stone and Tom Waverly hid inside a circle of creosote bushes and watched the glimmering dot resolve into a battered pickup. It pulled up beside the green Oldsmobile and its driver, a lean young man with a high-crowned straw hat set square on his thickly greased black hair, got out and talked with Linda. Both of them looked under the raised hood; Linda shook her head as if refusing some offer; the driver touched the brim of his hat with thumb and forefinger and got back in his pickup and drove off toward Alamogordo.

‘Won’t be long now,’ Tom said.

He unbuckled his belt, pulled half of it out of the loops of his jeans, and began to strop the blade of his knife against it. The shotgun lay beside him, a plastic bag knotted over its muzzle so that sand wouldn’t get in the barrels.

Linda sat on a ridge of dirt by the car. Stone saw a greasy flash of sunlight on plastic when she took a swig from a bottle of water. He took a long drink from his own bottle and said, ‘Even if we manage to get hold of a cop’s car, do you really think driving up to the gate in it will give us an edge?’

‘The people guarding the gate may be working for GYPSY, but they’re also Company people,’ Tom said, intent on his work with the knife. ‘And it’s still standard operating procedure to keep on the right side of the local law in uncontacted sheaves. We can ride right up to the place in a cop car, and get the jump on them before they realise who we really are.’

‘Then what? What’s supposed to happen when we go through the gate and get back to the Real?’

‘You mentioned predestination just now. Do you believe in it? Do you think we’re no more than robots, acting out parts already written for us?’

‘Of course not. If we didn’t have free will, if we didn’t make choices that mattered, choices that really changed things one way or the other, there would only be one sheaf.’

‘Exactly.’ Tom raised his knife and studied the edge of its blade. ‘It’s because our choices can make a difference that nothing about the future is certain. And if the future isn’t fixed, neither is the past. If you could travel back in time, you could change things around. You could fix all your mistakes.’

‘That’s a fantasy, Tom.’

Tom slipped the knife into its sheaf and buckled his belt. ‘I plan to blow GYPSY wide open and bring the people in charge of it to justice. I plan to make sure that I don’t get a fatal dose of radiation, and don’t set off to kill those doppels of Eileen Barrie. And if I’m successful, you’ll stay on your farm in that backwater sheaf, Adam, and never get involved in any of this.’

‘The problem is that I
am
involved,’ Stone said.

‘You’re involved because good old TW Two knows that I need your help to change things. He sacrificed himself, Adam, so that I would have the chance to live through this. I aim to make sure that he didn’t die in vain.’

‘According to you, we wouldn’t be here unless, sometime in the near future, you get a fatal dose of radiation, travel back in time and tell your own past self what to do, go on to murder Eileen Barrie’s doppels, and end up in Pottersville. So if we change things, there’ll be no TW Two, he won’t travel into his past and tell you what to do, and none of this will have happened.’

‘Time travel doesn’t only create a new history; it also creates a new sheaf. If things work out, we’ll end up in a different sheaf living through an entirely different history where none of the unpleasant stuff has to happen.’ Tom smiled and shook his head. ‘Will you listen to us? Two old-school snake-eating cowboy angels arguing about metaphysics. How did it ever come to this?’

‘I guess you’re the one with all the answers.’

‘I guess I am.’

They sat quietly for a few minutes. At last, Tom looked up and cupped a hand to one ear. ‘Hear that? Pretty good response time, don’t you think?’

Stone crouched beside him in the creosote bushes and watched as a police cruiser drove out of the haze of blowing dust and shimmering air and pulled off the road in front of the Oldsmobile. A solidly-built Sheriff’s deputy climbed out, set a Stetson on his head, and exchanged a few words with Linda before taking a look at the Oldsmobile’s engine. When Stone and Tom stepped onto the road, pistols drawn, the deputy studied them from beneath the brim of his Stetson, sizing them up calmly, telling them that they’d just entered a world of trouble unless they put up the guns right away.

Tom said, ‘There won’t be any unpleasantness as long as you do what I say. We clear on that?’

The deputy looked at him, then turned his head and spat on the road.

Tom told him to take out his revolver and toss it into the creosote bushes, then said that they were going to take a walk off to the side of the road.

‘You don’t have to worry about me, mister,’ the deputy said. ‘I’m not about to try anything dumb.’

‘We aren’t going to do anything dumb either,’ Stone said, as much for Tom’s benefit as the deputy’s, and followed the two men into the brush.

Fifty yards in, Tom told the deputy to take off his tunic. ‘The hat too.’

‘Cost me forty-five dollars,’ the deputy said as he handed it over. ‘Take good care of it.’

‘Sit down and put your hands to the back of your head,’ Tom said.

He cuffed the deputy and told him to keep his head down or he was liable to get it blown off. Back on the road, he pulled the keys from the Oldsmobile’s ignition and threw them into the bushes, then shrugged off his jacket, put on the deputy’s khaki tunic, and swept up his hair and set the Stetson on his head.

Stone said, ‘The guy will walk out into the road as soon as we’re gone, and flag down the first vehicle that comes along.’

‘You’re probably right,’ Tom said, smiling his sly smile. He checked his watch, took a swig from the bottle of Jack Daniel’s. ‘You ride shotgun, Adam. Put on your jacket and tie and try to look like the hard-ass government agent you used to be. In this tunic and shit-kicker hat, I reckon I stand a good chance of being mistaken for a local law enforcement officer who found you wandering in the desert.’

‘You think the bad guys will buy a story as lame as that?’

‘It’ll give us about thirty seconds. All the time in the world to do what needs to be done.’ Tom took another swallow of whiskey and said to Linda, ‘This could get messy. Are you ready for that?’

She gave a tight nod, straight up and down, and said, ‘Are you sure the people guarding the gate work for GYPSY?’

‘I give you my word. They stand between us and where we need to go and what we need to do, so we have to deal with them.’

‘If we’re going to do it, let’s do it properly,’ Stone said. ‘Lose the whiskey, Tom. You don’t need Dutch courage.’

‘You don’t know what I need,’ Tom said. ‘Take the shotgun and lay down in the back seat of this fine law-enforcement automobile, honey,’ he told Linda. ‘We have to get moving.’

 

Tom drove at high speed toward Alamogordo and after a few miles swung the cruiser past a red-painted mailbox, scarcely slowing. The rear end of the heavy vehicle shimmied, raising a cloud of dust; then Tom had it under control and they were roaring along a track that climbed a long slope of scrub and stony sand.

The caretaker’s shack was built of weathered grey planking, with a slanting tin roof weighted with rocks. A fantail windmill turned atop a wooden tower. The cruiser skidded to a halt on the rutted dirt in front, next to a brand-new pickup truck that still had the dealer’s sticker in its rear window. Tom took out his pistol and worked the slide, then sounded the horn. Telling Stone, ‘Leave the first move to me.’