Ghostwalkers (7 page)

“And Saint believed all that?”

Looks Away shrugged at Grey's question. “Hard to say with him. I rather think he's playing along until he finds out what they really want. He is not a deeply trusting soul, bless his heart. And although he is no one's idea of an ‘agreeable' or even affable soul, he is forward thinking. If letting go of the past moves science forward, then he will move with the tide.”

“So he went?” asked Grey.

“Indeed he did, and according to his last few telegrams, his demonstrations were quite a success. That's when things started to go wrong, however. Instead of coming directly back here, Dr. Saint made several stops to gather special materials for his work. His last stop was supposed to be Salt Lake City, to collect canisters of smoke from the ghost rock factories. However that's where I lost track of him. I don't even know for sure that he reached Salt Lake. There's been no word.”

“You think he was ambushed?”

“If he had any trace of ordinary manners or habits I could venture a guess, but he's an odd duck. He's gone off on his own several times before, often with no advance warning and little explanation once he returns.”

“Which means you don't know whether to sit and wait or plant flowers on an empty grave.”

“Just so. I wish I'd accompanied him, if only to keep track of him. He could drive an angel to hard liquor. On the other hand, I haven't been bored. He left me behind to continue the work in Paradise Falls and to try and locate new sources of ghost rock ore that was rich in chalcanthite.

“Some weeks ago,” Looks Away explained, “while he was out digging in the hills, the laboratory was raided. Most of the equipment was undisturbed, hidden behind very strong locks. But the thieves made off with many of Saint's blueprints and nearly all of his canisters of compressed ghost rock gas. They also took a journal in which were recorded the locations of several of Dr. Saint's remote testing sites. My employer had small caches of supplies scattered throughout this end of the country and did much of his research in spots where he mined for ghost rock, or where he felt he could field-test his devices without attracting attention. Some of them have pretty dramatic effects. I began systematically going from one to the other and found two sites undisturbed, two empty, and two others booby-trapped.”

“Someone's trying to kill you?” asked Grey.

“Me or Saint. Hard to say. It's even possible all of this was an elaborate plan to get me out of Paradise Falls.”

“Why?”

“That's a different discussion. What concerns me is their methods. When they broke into Dr. Saint's laboratory, they killed the two men we'd engaged as guards. Slit their throats.”

“Those men were friends of mine,” continued Looks Away gravely. “All I could do was try to catch whomever was responsible, and they led me on a merry chase I can assure you. It would make a ripping yarn filled with traps, double-crosses, and all manner of devious villainy.”

“So the explosion wasn't a trap set by Saint?” said Grey, jerking a thumb toward the shattered rocks.

“I … don't know for sure. My guess is that it was another trap set for me by my enemy, but it could just as easily have been something set by Doctor Saint. He's generally a humanitarian—after a fashion—but he does not like having his research tampered with. So, yes, it could have been his booby-trap.”

“Nice. He could have blown you all the way back to London.”

“Well, he wouldn't have expected me to come out here, would he? He does know about the theft of his journal. And it's not like this cache was something anyone could stumble upon.”

Grey's reply was a sour grunt. He found that he didn't much like this Doctor Saint. And he was pretty sure calling the scientist a “
humanitarian
” was a bit of a stretch.

“Why was the posse after you? You get some other girl pregnant?”

“Hilarious, but no. Doctor Saint has rivals and some of them are quite vicious. Not at all above hiring a group of gunmen to end the life of one renegade Sioux. Especially one who has been hunting the men who committed the murders at the laboratory. I daresay I was making a nuisance of myself, buzzing around the edges of this and someone decided to swat me.” He slapped his palm flat on his thigh.

Grey listened with great interest, but he watched the Sioux's face for any telltale signs of deceit or evasiveness. Nothing showed, however. That didn't mean that the man was telling the truth, the whole truth, part of the truth, or a pack of lies. Grey had played poker and faro at too many tables not to know that some fellows could keep darn near everything off their face. Even so, he had a sense that what he was hearing was at least partly true.

Partly.

He wondered what this strange English Indian was leaving out. The Sioux returned to his narrative.

“I believe I've been getting close to proving who is responsible,” said Looks Away as he sipped the dregs of his second cup. “This was no ordinary theft, I'm sure of it. This was well organized and well financed. Someone important wanted that science and now they have it. I was following a lead and came here to Nevada. Someone swore they saw a blue explosion out here in the desert. Naturally I thought that my enemy's people had raided this cache.”

“What exactly was out here?”

Looks Away spread his hands. “This was something Doctor Saint made before I came to work with him. It's not much, just a small bunker built into a natural declivity in the sandstone. He enlarged it and built a small testing laboratory. A one-man station. It was all he needed to test the Lazarus weapons without prying eyes. Doctor Saint hid it very well, and even though I had no key, I know his methods. He always creates a hidden lever that is invisible to the naked eye. The man is as devious as he is brilliant…”

“You found it, though?”

“I used some of my grandfather's tricks for finding the hinges. It was a clever trap set to trap a clever man.”

Grey remembered Looks Away spitting on the ground and nodded. “Let's say, for the sake of argument, that Saint didn't set this trap himself. Is your bad guy smart enough to set this kind of trap? He'd have to know a lot about how this ghost rock stuff works.”

“Oh yes,” said Looks Away. “And the more I think about it the more I think it was a trap set specifically for me. Particularly if my enemy was, in fact, able to effectively interrogate the guards before he killed them. He had to know that I would keep hunting, so he lured me here with false clues.”

“Lured you specifically?”

“Not to blow my own horn, but yes, I daresay he did. It was a trap that brought me to an isolated spot and one that required geological knowledge and Sioux tracking skills to find. The posse was a nice diversion. Oh yes,” said Looks Away, “that trap was very much designed to kill me. My enemy is very, very clever.”

“Do you have a name for this clever son of a bitch?” asked Grey.

“Not one I can prove,” said Looks Away cautiously. “Merely one I've come to view as the only person with both means and sufficient guile.”

“Who?”

He finished his coffee, sloshed the last drops into the fire, and listened to them hiss.

“Aleksander Deray,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Grey. “Pretty much figured. What are you going to do about it? From what you told me, this Deray character sounds like a bad enemy to have. Lots of money, lots of guns working for him, and like most folks he probably doesn't cotton too well to nosy redskins.”

Looks Away shrugged. “What can I do? I can give up, head to the Sioux nation and try to make peace with my family.”

“Could you?”

“Dear me, no. I'd probably find myself buried up to my chin in an anthill. If I was lucky.”

“Maybe you shouldn't have done that much damage to your cousin's privates.”

“Water, as they say, under the bridge.”

“Or—?”

“Or, I could go back to California, get the evidence I need, build a case and turn it over to the proper authorities.”

Grey looked at him. “
Proper authorities?
In the Maze? Who in the great green hell are the
proper authorities
in that godforsaken place?”

“Have you ever been there?”

“No, but I heard tales. Ever since the Great Quake, there isn't all that much of California left, and what is left is no place for proper people to live. Lots of bad people doing bad things and what little law's out there is owned by someone else. No, son, I don't think you're going to get any help from the authorities.”

“Correct. Which is why it'll just be the three of us,” said Looks Away.

“You and who else?”

Looks Away gave him a smile that was every bit as cold, lifeless, and murderous as he'd seen on the dead faces of Riley and Big Curley. The Sioux held up his .44 American. “Messieurs Smith and Wesson and your humble servant.”

The fire between them popped and hissed.

Grey Torrance said, “You know … I was thinking about heading west to see if there's any kind of trouble I can get into.”

“Are you indeed?” asked the Sioux, cocking an eyebrow.

“Yes I damn well am.”

They grinned at each other while above them the wheel of night ground on toward the coming dawn.

 

Chapter Twelve

Dawn found them miles away from the corpses and the blasted heap of rocks.

Thomas Looks Away sat astride a chestnut mare that had once belonged to Big Curley. Since he had no way of knowing what the horse's name had been, Looks Away renamed her Queen Victoria, but by mid-morning that name became unwieldy so he shortened it to Queenie.

Grey gave Picky a thorough going-over to reassure himself that she hadn't been injured by the madness of last night, and aside from a few scrapes and scratches she was fine. Three of the posse's horses had survived the blast, and they trailed behind, laden with all of the supplies, weapons, and water the men could find.

The chill of the night burned off with disheartening rapidity and the sun began to bake the landscape in earnest. The Joshua and juniper trees were spaced too far apart to offer any hope of shade. The horses moved forward, heads down, in a plodding walk that seldom veered from an arrow-straight line except to go around a knot of creosote bushes or avoid a barrel cactus. A clutch of vultures were hunkered down around a dead bighorn sheep, and once a sidewinder whipsawed through the dry grass.

Grey had lived in a variety of climates all over the country, from the deep snows and biting cold of a Missouri winter to a swampy Florida summer, where the only thing that could move through the humidity were mosquitoes. But this desert was how he imagined the landscape of Hell must be. Nothing out here was friendly, nothing offered either comfort or ease, and everything seemed to want to kill everything else. They passed a tarantula locked in mortal combat with a scorpion, and perched above them on a rock was a horned lizard waiting to eat the winner.

The pace was monotonous, and after a while Grey drifted into a doze. But his dreams were haunted and strange.

In those dreams he walked naked across this desert, and no matter how many days or weeks passed, the horizon never got any closer. When he paused to weep or pick at the sun blisters on his skin, he'd hear a sound and turn to see a whole company of ghosts following behind. They were all broken and dismembered. Fresh wounds gaped on their skin and they left behind them a trail of bloody footprints that vanished into the far, far distance.

These were the same ghosts that had followed him for years, but now their company had grown. Riley Jones and Big Curley led the grotesque parade. Their eyes were as black as polished coal; their reaching hands as pale and mottled as mushrooms.

“Grey…,” they murmured. All of them, a chorus of spectral voices that sounded almost like empty wind drifting across the hot sands. “Grey … come with us. Come join us.”

“No!” screamed his dreaming self. “You're dead. You can't be here.”

“Come with us,” they cried. “Stop running. You can stop running now. It's peaceful here. It's quiet and cool. You don't need to be afraid.”

The words were meant to soothe, to lull, but they were spoken by shattered mouths filled with jagged stumps of teeth. Pale tongues writhed like fat worms in those mouths, and it all conspired to tell the lie behind the soft words.

“No,” said Grey again, but each time he said it the power in his voice faded, faded …

They kept calling him.

“You're not real!” he whispered. “You're dead. For God's sake stop following me. I'm sorry. God knows, I'm sorry. Leave me alone.”

“Never.”

“For the love of God, leave me in peace!”

Their voices faded as his panic pushed him up through the waters of sleep. As he broke the surface and came awake with a start, he could hear the last echoes of their ghostly chorus.

“There is no peace,” they said. “Not for you. Never for you…”

 

Chapter Thirteen

Looks Away snapped awake and cut a suspicious glance at Grey.

“Did you say something?”

Their horses were still moving forward with the implacable plodding gait that kept them all from dying, out in the relentless sun. Both men had slept.

Grey cleared his throat. “No. I was just studying the terrain.”

“Studying the terrain,” echoed Looks Away. “With your eyes closed?”

“How would you know? You've been snoring for the last three miles.”

“Sioux never fall asleep in the saddle,” said Looks Away, offended. “I was contemplating our problem and formulating various plans.”

“Sure,” said Grey. “While snoring.”

“Haven't you ever heard of Zen meditation? That was a mantra.”

“I don't know what that is, but it sounded like snoring.”