Tailed (18 page)

I didn't need a vuka to know what she was thinking.

She was thinking what I was thinking.

chapter 22

B
ack on the road, we continued south, the dark silhouette of the mountains to the west crowned with a halo of a ruby sun. The east was purple melting to black on the horizon. We were now really leaving the plains and getting into desert terrain. Tumbleweeds, adobe, cactus—the whole nine yards, just like on a tortilla package. I'd never really been to the desert before. Had always wanted to go. Just not that night.

I made a point of sitting in the back of the van with Angie and Otto. Norman was driving, Timmy riding shotgun with Wilco in his lap. The only Javelina with us was Brutus, and he'd drifted off to sleep on his side facing the wall on the floor, opposite us.

Angie was back working on her Sudoku puzzles. Otto was sewing a sleeve of his Soviet suit jacket. Torn during the truck plaza fiasco. Otto always had things like needle and thread on him. Forever Ensign Fixit.

I'd finally managed to read the
America Today
newspaper, which on page four had a lengthy article about the big game hunters' deaths. The papers had grasped the serial killing angle, and my name wasn't even mentioned. When I finished the article, I put the paper aside, and my brow furrowed. “Uh-oh.”

“Garth, what are you thinking?” Angie whispered, her lips brushing my ear.

“Why didn't I think of this before?” I held out my hand and ticked off my musings finger by finger. “Titan was killed by a ram's head. Sprunty? A black bear. Bronte? Elk. Draco? Mule deer. I know personally, from my appraisals, that the ram, bear, and elk were all old mounts.”

“Old?”

“Uh huh. Like from the first decades of the century. And those animals are all indigenous to the Southwest.”

“You mean…”

“New Mexico.”

“Well, we know that as part of the ritual to release the vuka, the victim has to be killed with the same piece of taxidermy that—”

“The pronghorn.”

She just cocked her head in confusion.

“My pronghorn. The one I rented to these guys. It's from my grandfather's collection.”

“Oh my gosh! But, Garth, it's not here.”

She followed my gaze and put a hand over her mouth to stifle a gasp. I was looking at the dry-cleaning boxes.

“Psst!”
I crooked a beckoning finger at Otto.

He crept over on all fours, and then we all looked at Brutus, who was still asleep and facing the wall.

“What is in the box?” I whispered to Otto, pointing at the dry-cleaning boxes.

“Box?” He looked at it. “Mebe Otto to examine, eh?”

I gave him a thumbs-up, and he responded with an oversized wink.

“Garv, Otto thinkink, mebe our clients, they not lookink, yes?”

“Maybe, Otto.”

His head drooped, and he gnashed his teeth with self-reproach.

“I very sorry, Garv. I not make good to brink clients, eh? In future I must better to beezness think.”

“It's OK, Otto, you couldn't know. You did what you thought would help.”

“Yes, but clients my responsibility.”

“Not now, Otto. Back in New York when you're renting taxidermy…”

“But you tell to me, Otto, I very much need a help at you, to take beezness, make clients, yes?”

“OK, I did say something like that.”

He looked offended. “You not mean?”

I rolled my eyes. “Yes, I meant that you should take care of the clients, of course, but—”

“But what? My responsibility, I take. Eh? But maybe Otto make caution.” Otto tiptoed forward to the open cab door. Delving deep into a pocket he came up with some rusty wire. Gently, he wound one end around a bolt on the divider, close to the floor. He stretched the wire tight across the door and fastened it to a bolt there.

After giving us another exaggerated wink, he crept over to the dry-cleaning box I'd pointed out.

I kept one eye on the front where Norman and Timmy were, the other on Otto as he drove his whole arm into the first waist-high box. I could see he had hold of something, and as he lifted it, foam peanuts clung to his arm. Angie crept over and brushed them back into the box. A growing mound of white peanuts rose with whatever he had hold of, and the two of them shoveled the packing material back down as the object rose. I couldn't stand the suspense, and went over to help. In the dim light of the panel truck, I could see that Otto had hold of a horn. An antelope horn.

We exchanged glances of fear.

I looked deeper into the gloomy box and saw an eye.

“Goodness gracious!” Angie gasped.

“
Mat boga!”

My vision swam, my heart seemed to have stopped. The van swayed and my balance failed me. I staggered and thumped against the wall.

My bump was felt up front, and Timmy's face appeared in the cab doorway. His eyes went wide when he saw Angie and Otto standing over the box holding my pronghorn. Then his eyes met mine—it was clear we both knew the pretense was up. “Brutus!”

As the van swerved to the side of the road, Brutus awoke and rolled toward us.

Arms outstretched, Otto flew through the air at Brutus. I grabbed Angie and turned toward the back doors. The main thing was to get the hell out of there, to put as much distance between me and that pronghorn as possible.

Timmy heaved himself through the cab doorway and promptly tripped on Otto's wire, falling hard to the floor.

I shoved open the back doors just as the van jolted to a stop. Angie and I stumbled out into the chasm of dark desert night.

“Otto, run!” I shouted. I saw him struggling with Brutus, whose outstretched arm held a small revolver.

“To run, Garv! Otto take care of clients!”

Then I saw Timmy's bulk stumble forward and bury Otto. Wilco was barking, from somewhere.

I stopped, panting, looking at the little numb-skull's arms and legs wriggling around under Timmy like a monkey under a hippo.

I'd left Otto once before, at the truck plaza, largely because he hadn't listened to me and had brought all that mayhem upon us himself. But this was different. This was another in a series of fearless acts to protect me and Angie.

“To run, Garv!” came his muffled voice, as if calling from the bathroom. “Otto to take care of clients, come to you soon.”

I wasn't convinced. But at the same time, I felt Angie hanging on my sleeve. Sorry, Otto, she was my priority. And there was no sense in all of us getting nabbed. I grabbed Angie's hand, turned from the van, and ran into the dark desert.

I couldn't see a thing, could only feel Angie's fingers in mine and the pavement under my feet as we raced down the highway away from the van.

Oddly, the thing suddenly on my mind was snakes. One always hears about snakes at night on roads in the desert. Supposedly they seek out the warmth of the macadam, but I wasn't enough of a herpatologist to know how true that was. My guess at that time was that if the scaly beasts were about, they'd be as likely to be on the warm macadam as anywhere else, so I veered off the pavement into the scrub. I could see the silhouette of the mountains against the sky, so we headed in that direction, the smell of sagebrush filling my sinuses as low shrubs scraped my pant legs.

I glanced back toward the van on the road, hearing shouts. The barking had stopped. I ran faster and could feel Angie struggling to keep up. Running is my best defensive move—it has saved my bacon a couple times—and I flew like the wind.

The shrubs gave way to a clear stretch, and I could just make out a path or road angling off toward the right. This wasn't the highway, but another road, the pavement broken and crumbling under my sneakers. I searched in vain to see if this led to a house, but there were no lights ahead. There was something else, though, and it turned out to be a chain-link fence and gate across the road.

“Garth, what about Otto?”

We came to a stop at the gate. It had a heavy chain and rusty padlock securing it.

“He can take care of himself,” I gasped, hoping that was true this time. I squinted at a sign on the gate:
NO TRESPASSING. PRIVATE PROPERTY
. “Besides, it's me they want to kill, not him.”

I pulled on the gate and it gave enough for us to slide through.

“C'mon.”

I slipped through and then helped Angie. That's when Wilco trotted through with us.

“Good dog.” Angie patted him on the head.

“Just what we needed.” I sighed. “If there's a gate, it must mean there's something down this road.”

“What about snakes?”

“They'll have to get out of our way.” By now, the van was just a dot of light back by the highway. I clasped Angie's hand, and we jogged down the road. I'm a sprinter, and not accustomed to marathon flights for my life. I was getting pretty winded, and Angie more so.

The shape of a small dark building crouched ahead, and we stopped again when we reached it.

“Looks…like a tollbooth.” Angie leaned against it. “What…what would a tollbooth be doing here?”

I pointed to a sign next to the gate. “Parking, four dollars.”

“Parking?” She looked from the sign to me. I looked at Wilco, who wagged his tail lazily. I think he thought this was fun.

“Looks like more buildings up ahead. Whatever this is, it's abandoned.”

Walking at a good clip across the weed-sprouted parking lot, we approached an archway, beyond which were some unusual curved, tall, and angular shapes that didn't make sense to me.

“What is this place?”

“Garth, look.” Angie pointed up at the arch. Across the top were letters that looked like they were supposed to be carved from stone.

“Disneyland?”

“Dinoland,” she corrected. “It looks like a theme park.”

I shuddered. Last time I was at an amusement park my life had been in danger. A terrible sense of déjà vu gripped me yet again.

“Let's go somewhere else.” I grimaced, searching the darkness in the opposite direction.

“There is no other way except back to the highway. Besides, I need to rest. We need to hide.”

Wilco trotted ahead past the ticket booths and we followed. This time, Angie had me by the hand, leading me.

“I don't like the looks of this, Angie.”

“Holy moly! Dinosaurs.”

“My love, could you just once just say something like ‘holy shit'? If you've ever considered crude expletives, this would be the time. I promise not to be shocked.”

She sniffed, ignoring my comment and gazing up and around at the looming shadows of things from the distant past.

We stood in a plaza, a dry fountain in the center, surrounded by life-sized statues of the Mesozoic classics. My nerves were not settled by being among replica monsters. A thirty-foot-tall brachiosaurus was dead ahead, big as a construction site crane. A triceratops to the left was facing a tyrannosaurus, ready for battle. There were parasaurolophuses clustered together to the right, flanked by the ever-popular stegosaurus. Other prehistoric leviathans, both four-footed and bipedal, were beyond, but my fourth-grade fascination with dinosaurs was sufficiently distant that I couldn't tell you what animals they were. It was like we'd stumbled into
The Valley of Gwangi,
only at night—I guessed I could pass for James Franciscus in the dark.

Under and surrounding these monuments to extinction were little concession stands, no doubt once rife with T-shirts, corn dogs, and Orange Whip.

There were no rides, praise be, in this defunct theme park. This had the look of a tourist trap just for those who wanted to drop in and have their picture taken with their favorite thyroidal lizard, spring for a fossilized trilobite or two, pile back into the Vista Cruiser, and blast off to El Paso or Tucson.

Hot on the heels of our revelation about my pronghorn, it was extremely eerie standing among these freeze-frame terrors in an abandoned tourist attraction. There was something portentous about it all, like this place was trying to tell me something, to direct me. Dinosaurs: ancient monsters fossilized in the earth. Like the vuka? Like the Tupelca, extinct? And yet here they were, but only in representational form. Like those three mild-mannered killers in the van? At the same time I kept drawing parallels to things I remembered from back when I studied the classics in college. I was on a voyage, more or less finding myself shipwrecked in odd places. Situations from which I had to escape. All this gave me a sense that the ancients were right there, watching, possibly manipulating the situation.

Of course it was possible that the only thing watching me was Wilco, who currently sat in the dirt giving me sidelong glances.

“Angie, I know I'm supposed to be your protector…”

“You keep assuming that role, Garth.” She clasped onto my upper arm. “I'm pretty good at taking care of myself, and you at times.”

“I know you are. Which is why I feel I can tell you that I am scared. Really scared. I'm beginning to believe this stuff. I feel like there is something inside me, and it's been causing all these things to happen.”

Angie gripped me harder. “I can't say I know how you feel, being a target, people trying to kill you and all these wild stories…”

“That's just it. I'm wondering if this vuka thing has been what's caused everything.” I sat on the edge of the fountain. “Pipsqueak, the white crow…this thing inside me has made me psychic or something, given me a connection with objects and people containing hypernatural powers.”

“I'm scared, too, Garth.” She sat next to me. “But you know what? When we're together, even though I'm scared, I find myself being able to do things, survive things, that I never thought possible. I get strength from you.”

“Well, I guess that's what it's all about. Being partners.” I put my arm around her. “We work as a team, draw strength from each other. At the same time, I keep putting you in danger. I don't know what I'd do if you got killed. Lord knows I've very nearly gotten Otto killed, I don't know how many times. I feel bad for leaving him behind again—hope he's OK.”