Strange Country (33 page)

Still sticking close to the wall, she approached the front porch. Something moved in the field below her, not much more than a shadow, but Hallie could see a shape like an arm and the barrel of a rifle. She aimed and fired, not expecting to hit anything, more to make the shooter understand that she was ready and that she was armed. There was a sound like a hard fall and a muffled curse. The shadow disappeared. In the aftershocks, Hallie heard something on the far side of the house, moving quickly through the knee-high prairie grass. She threw caution to the wind and ran. She couldn’t see anything, but she could follow the sound. It was loud, sounded panicked, like someone had gotten more than they’d bargained for and just wanted to get out any way they could.

They weren’t getting away. Not if Hallie had anything to say about it.

The sound of a car engine starting up brought her to a halt nearly a quarter mile from the ranch house, the length of her driveway and hundreds of yards east.

“Maker,” Hallie called. “Maker!”

She had no way to call it, had never asked if there were a way, because she’d figured Maker had had eternity to follow orders. It hadn’t asked her to be its master or for anything. And it seemed wrong, not the fact that she wasn’t sure whether Maker would follow a command from her—though she did wonder that. More that it was important in some way she hadn’t bothered to analyze too deeply that Maker make its own way in the world, that it stick around because it wanted to stick around, not because she commanded it.

“Maker.” One more try.

“Here.”

“Can you follow that car? Can you find it?” The taillights disappeared once, then twice, then stayed visible for a long stretch. Maybe Hallie could get back to her truck and on the road and catch up before they disappeared completely, wouldn’t be stuck at an intersection, staring long and hard in all directions, looking for some small indication that there was one car, the one particular car she desperately wanted, out there in the big open with her. But maybe Maker …

“Maybe,” Maker said.

“Can you try?”

It disappeared without saying anything. Hallie wasn’t sure if that was a yes or a “don’t bother me with your petty human concerns” or whether Maker even understood what she was asking, but as soon as it disappeared, she straightened, not quite aware until that moment that she’d still been tightly coiled, anticipating attack. She shook off the tension in her shoulders and headed back to the house, the moon still rising, rendering long dark shadows like coiling tendrils, floating across the landscape.

She trotted quickly inside, turned on the light over the stove, but only after she’d pulled the narrow café curtain across the window on the kitchen door and the shade on the window.

Why her? Why had someone tried to kill her? More accurately, why had the person who killed Prue and likely Laddie tried to kill her? Because she’d known the two of them? If that were the case, they’d have to kill pretty nearly everyone in Taylor County.

She reached for her cell phone. Her right hand was shaking, from adrenaline she figured, or maybe just the cold. She wasn’t afraid. And that, at least, felt familiar, felt like coming home, because it was exhausting being afraid. She thanked Beth and the unmakers and maybe even Death a little for that, though they hadn’t intended it, getting her to a point beyond. There were things it was worth being afraid of or for; she understood that now. Someone who hunted in the dark without ever seeing their victims face-to-face was not one of them.

She dialed Boyd’s number.

He didn’t answer. She left him a message: “Call me as soon as you can.”

She put the shotgun on the kitchen table, blew on her hands—so cold, they felt like the skin would flay itself at the slightest touch.

Was there one killer? Two? A gang of some kind? Not that she had any idea what any gang ever would want in Taylor County. She’d figured whoever it was wanted the stones because it all seemed to involve the stones, but why? Laddie hadn’t thought it was much of a deal. Maybe Laddie’s stone was worth more to someone else than it had been to Laddie.

Hallie wasn’t going to say none of it made sense. It made sense. To someone. She just had to figure out what kind of sense and to whom.

She went out to the front hall closet and dug out a pair of insulated leather gloves and a dark gray wool ball cap that Brett had given her for some reason she couldn’t remember anymore. She went back to the kitchen, pulled off her coat, put a Carhartt vest on then the coat again, stuffed the cap in a pocket, put on the gloves, picked up the shotgun, and stuffed the box of shells she’d left on the kitchen table in another pocket. Before she went outside, she went back into the office, opened the bottommost desk drawer, and pulled out a shell box with just twenty shells. They looked exactly like the shotgun shells she’d just put in her pocket, but they weren’t. These were shells she’d loaded herself, with cast iron for the shot, dead man’s blood—by which she meant her own blood—on the wadding, and a sacrament recited over each of them.

She’d made these shells, which she shoved in the breast pocket of her coat, three days after she got out of the hospital after defeating Hollowell. She told herself she’d never need them, told herself all that was done and she had the hex ring besides. But nothing was ever completely done. And it always paid to be prepared.

She checked her phone on the way out the door—20 percent charged. It would have to do.

32

Hallie waited in the cold for a good half hour before Maker reappeared. She stamped her feet and blew on her hands in spite of the insulated gloves. She cursed the hex ring, which, by its nature, meant Maker couldn’t just come in the house and tell her what it found. The only way she’d know when it returned, was to wait outside.

“Done.”

She heard its voice before she saw it, a dark shape on a dark night.

“Do you know? Where they went? Can you show me?”

For answer, Maker jumped through the passenger door of Hallie’s truck, then looked out at her out the window.

All right. Maybe they were getting somewhere. Finally.

Hallie tried once more to call Boyd before she left. Still no answer. Damn him, anyway, what was he up to? She left a second message, then turned the phone off to preserve the charge. For the first time, basically, ever, she wished she had a car charger. She figured she’d call him one more time when she got wherever they were going—had to be somewhere within a twenty-minute drive or so. She’d even try to wait for him. If she
could
wait for him. Because sometimes things happened fast; sometimes waiting wasn’t possible.

She put the truck in gear, let it roll forward, then smoothly pressed her foot on the gas, adding to the truck’s momentum. “Who is it?” she asked Maker, who was already curled up on the seat with its nose touching its tail. “What do they want?”

Maker lifted its head and looked at her. Or at least she thought it was looking at her. It was dark in the truck and hard to tell. “Don’t know people,” it said. “Don’t know.”

“Well, where are they?”

“I’ll show you.”

Which probably meant it couldn’t tell her in a way she’d understand, and Hallie was surprised that it could show her. Addresses wouldn’t mean much to a harbinger of death. Still, it clearly had some way to find the people Death sent it to. It had a way to navigate in the world, even if Hallie didn’t know what that way was.

“Turn,” Maker said.

“Right or left?”

Maker arched its nose toward Hallie, meaning, she presumed—turn left. It was a slow, deliberate gesture, as if all new truths were contained within the gesture itself and it wasn’t necessary, not now and not a year from now, to personally witness such truths. All anyone had to do—so Maker seemed to be saying, was what needed doing. Everything else took care of itself.

The tough thing with Maker, of course, was that sometimes it just looked like doing nothing.

It was a long, silent twenty minutes, Hallie driving and watching Maker out of the corner of her eye. They were in the middle of what was, even to Hallie’s jaded eyes, the middle of nowhere.

She’d also been watching her rearview mirror pretty steadily as they drove and occasionally turning off onto narrow dirt roads just to see, because it seemed logical and even likely that whoever had shot at her just an hour ago outside her own house wasn’t going to just give up and go home. Even though Maker had presumably followed them back to their home or lair or whatever, Hallie found it hard to accept that they hadn’t just gathered more weapons and circled back. Because that’s what she would have done.

She didn’t see anyone behind or in front of her, but that didn’t mean someone wasn’t there. Her taillights would be easy to see—clear night and cold—and she would have a hard time seeing anyone following her if they were willing to drive without headlights. There wasn’t enough traffic for that to be truly dangerous, though there would be some danger just in driving with the lights out—Hallie sure wasn’t going to do it. But she wasn’t going to sit home and wait either. The killer was in a hurry. That seemed obvious to Hallie. She was in a hurry too.

She’d forgotten about Laddie’s stone stuffed into her coat pocket, but as she drove, she could feel it, warm against her hip even through the layers of coat and jeans and long underwear.

She made one last turn at Maker’s cryptic directions and slowed.

Damn.

She knew this place.

She parked on the side of the road.

“Here?” she asked Maker.

“Up there,” it said.

Up the drive. Because “here” was Uku-Weber’s test field. The place they’d set up way back—or at least it seemed like way back, though it had been only a few months—set up so that Martin Weber could demonstrate to his investors the weather control he’d promised them. He’d set up wind turbines and a fake cloud-seeding apparatus. He brought investors out and pretended that it was all scientific, though the cloud-seeding device had been a hollow shell, the whole thing powered by perverted magic and blood sacrifice. Hallie could see the bulk of the cloud seeder right now, still sitting in the open field like a particularly dark hulking shadow.

Uku-Weber.

It never went away.

“At the house?” she asked Maker. Beyond the field, up a drive lined with dying trees, was the sprawling Bolluyt ranch house where Pete Bolluyt had lived before he died. Empty as far as Hallie knew—she hadn’t heard of anyone renting it out, but that also meant, on a property as rural as this one, that anyone could be up there, doing pretty much anything they wanted, and who would know.

“Where they went,” Maker agreed.

Hallie pulled out her phone, turned it on, and called Boyd again. Still no answer. She called Brett, who answered on the first ring.

“I’m trying to reach Boyd,” Hallie said without much preamble. “Can you try him for me?”

“What are you doing?” Brett asked. Her voice held both curiosity and resignation, like she’d given up trying to convince Hallie not to do things. Maybe she’d even given up trying to convince herself not to ignore things, though Hallie doubted it. Brett wanted science to rule the world, which wasn’t a bad wish or even a bad thing. At least until ghosts and blood magic and doors to the underworld started cluttering up your life.

“Tell him I’m at the Bolluyt ranch. Tell him I think I’ve found the shooter.”

“Hallie.”

“I’m not going to do anything stupid, Brett,” Hallie said. “I’ll check things out a little, but otherwise I’ll wait. I can wait.”

“What if the shooter, whoever it is, leaves?”

“Then … I’ll do something else,” she said.

“Yeah,” Brett said dryly. “What’s wrong with your phone?”

“Or what’s wrong with his?”

“Did you call the dispatcher?”

“No.”

Because it hadn’t occurred to her. Because usually, or at least lately, the things she dealt with weren’t things the police could help her with. But this was a person. With a rifle. The sort of thing the police existed to handle.

“If you call Boyd, I’ll call them. Thanks.”

“I’d like to say anytime,” Brett said. “But really I wish you’d stop finding yourself in the middle of dangerous things.”

“Maybe that’ll happen soon,” Hallie said.

The first time Hallie dialed, it flipped over to the answering service. She hung up and called again. A man, someone Hallie didn’t recognize, answered on the last possible ring before it flipped over again. “Yeah?” he said.

“Is this the Taylor County Sheriff’s dispatch?” Hallie asked.

“Just a minute,” the man said. A pause, then, “Okay, can you state the nature of your problem?”

“Is Boyd Davies there?”

“Is he a deputy?”

“Are you new?”

“Not
completely
new, no. Do you have a problem or emergency?”

“Would you”—Hallie spoke slowly and as carefully as she could—“tell either Deputy Boyd Davies or the sheriff that Hallie Michaels called. That I’m at the old Bolluyt ranch. They’ll know where. Tell them that I need one of them—one of
them
—the sheriff or Boyd—not just any available car—out here as soon as possible. No lights. No sirens.”

“No lights. No sirens. So not an emergency, correct?”

“Yes,” Hallie said, her voice growing more clipped. “It’s an emergency. But no lights and no sirens.”

“Righty-o.” The dispatcher disconnected without confirming or asking if she would wait or giving her an idea how long it might take.

Shit.

She’d done what she could. What she had to do now was wait and watch the drive. Despite the fact that she didn’t like to waste time talking when there was action to be taken, Hallie was a believer in backup. That was why you had a squad or a troop or a partner. Because it was important. Because there was no reason to go in alone. Though, sometimes circumstances overtook situations. Then you just had to do the best you could.

She started her truck and moved it to the far end of the field, close to a small grouping of multiflora rose and scrub brush. She turned off the dome light, opened the door, and slipped out. She pulled the shotgun from behind the seat, checked that it was loaded and ready.