The Best Bad Dream (13 page)

“No . . . I am not sure,” she said. “But maybe . . .”

“You know,” he said, “you're pretty good, kid. I gotta hand it to you. You send me away from here, back to the Sons of Satan.”

Her face hardened.

She'd run her young-and-helpless routine for him and he'd bought it wholesale. He'd gotten sentimental over a young whore. He wasn't the first or the last guy to make that mistake. But it pissed him off anyway.

Jack grabbed her arm and twisted it behind her back.

She emitted a little bark of pain.

“Now, you tell me. Have you seen this girl? And if so, where the fuck is she?”

She turned toward him, her face twisted into a snarl. The innocent kid who had been so abused by the world was gone, replaced by a braying hyena.

“If I scream the guards will come and beat your gringo ass to death.”

“If you scream I'll cut your fucking head off before they get here.”

Jack reached into his boot and took out his hunting knife. She looked down at it and began to tremble in fear.

“Okay,” she said, “I don't know for sure, but in the back beyond the houses there is a barn. And in there they have the Acts Speciales . . .”

“Like what?”

“Girls with animals. Horses, dogs . . . for people bored with regular sex. Sometimes they put girls in there for a while. Then the girls, they disappear. But you dint hear this from me.”

“Have you ever seen my sister back there? Answer me.”

“No, but that means nada, senor. They bring in new girls every day in a black van. None of us who works in the front ever sees them. They take them off the street and they bring them in a back entrance. And the girls are blindfolded. Then they take them to the cellar.”

“The cellar? In which building?”

“There is a white building behind the barn. They store stuff for the bar and
restaurante
there. The girls in Acts Speciales live beneath it. Outside, to the left.”

“Today? Did you see the van come up today?”

“Yes, I think it was the one. But I only see it drive in. I dint see your sister.”

“I want to see the place, right now. You're going to take me there.”

“No! They catch us, they kill us!”

“You don't take me I'm going to cut you up right here.”

She looked at him, and spat on the floor. But then she got up, put on her top, and led him to the door.

They walked around the fountain as they headed toward the end of the Jackalope's land. Jack looked around for Oscar but he was nowhere in sight. He tried his number on his cell phone but there was no reply.

What should he do? Find which room his partner was in, and maybe call attention to the fact that he was wandering around a part of the ranch that was off limits? Or just go in?

What the hell? If she was in there, he'd get her out and hook up with Oscar when he was done.

They walked into darkness for maybe fifty yards. Then Jack saw it, near the chain-link fence in the back, a low white building that looked like a bunker. It had blacked-out windows.

“The entrance is around the side, I think,” Maria said. “I never been in there.”

She stiffened as she spoke and Jack had to prod her with the knife to keep her going.

They came to the side of the building. There was no guard there but there was a metal door with a large padlock on it.

“Down there?” Jack asked.

“
Si.
They keep them here, sometimes for days, until they decide whether to use them in the show or get rid of them.”

“And if they don't want them, then what?”

“I don't know, senor. Maybe they send them to another bar in Arizona, maybe to Texas. Or maybe they feed them to . . . the beast.”

Her voice was high and she looked terrified.

Jack reached into his pocket and took out his handy little burglar's tools: a pen and a straight pin. He took the pen's shirt clip off and bent the end so that it was straight up. Then he put it in the bottom of the lock. After turning it twice he knew that he had to turn it right to open the lock. But first he had to work on the pins. There would be five or six of them in a lock this large. Keeping the pen clip taut against the bottom of the lock, he inserted the straight pin and slowly found the first tumbler, which he pushed straight up. He heard a small click inside and then proceeded to do the same thing to the other four pins.

Within seconds he had pushed all four pins up inside the lock. Then he turned the pen clip all the way to the right and the lock sprung open.

“Come on,” he said to Maria, “we're going in there together.”

“No way. You leave me out here.”

“So you can run and tell the Jackalope security boys? I don't think so.”

They walked in slowly and saw a storeroom floor covered with boxes of all kinds. To the left of the boxes was another door, this one also padlocked, leading to the basement.

He looked around the room and saw some rope and a pile of old rags. Within a few minutes he had Maria bound and gagged, and he left her tied to a radiator.

Then he started working on the lock to the cellar door. Seconds later the door opened and he slowly swung it open. He had his Glock in his hand.

On the left was a wall switch, but when Jack flicked it with his forefinger it failed to turn on the lights.

He reached back into his jacket pocket, pulled out a small pocket flashlight, and started down the steps, pistol in his right hand, flashlight in his left.

He lit up the steps in front of him and saw a filthy dirt floor and smelled the odor of rotting flesh.

When he got to the basement floor he looked around the room and saw rotting old magazines, piles of them sitting on a blond wood table. Over in the corner were an ancient television set and a flower vase with a couple of dead sunflowers drooping out of it.

Was this the living room for some poor girl who had been chosen to be the queen of the Acts Speciales? Jack felt such a deep hatred for the Jackalope and all the rot that it stood for that he half hoped someone would come out of the back, someone he could shoot full of holes.

But there was no one. Not yet, anyway.

He walked down the dark hallway. Slowly, carefully, he worked his way through three rooms, but all of them were empty. Finally there was one last door, and just before he opened it he thought he heard something. Crying? Yes, crying. A high-pitched voice crying . . . sobbing now, long, wrenching sobs. Was it Jennifer?

He readied his gun, opened the door, and then kicked it open, hard.

The dim light from the hallway barely lit up the room but there was enough to see a moldy old bed with something lying under a filthy sheet. Jack shone his flashlight on the sheet and saw that it was not really dirt he was looking at, but something greenish blue, something that shimmered, and then he saw what it was: a thousand
filthy roaches that had been feasting on whatever the hell was under the sheet. The light made them scatter, and they scurried away from him in a mad race to the cracks in the walls.

What the hell was in the bed?

The stench was overwhelming . . . a rotting corpse? He moved toward it, barely able to breathe.

Then he became aware of a closet door opening on the other side of the room. He swung his light toward it, expecting someone to walk out, but there was no one there.

Jack turned his attention back to the foul-smelling bed. He reached down and slowly pulled back the filthy sheet.

What he saw was unbearable. It was a corpse all right, but not of a man. It was a hideous dead pig, its snout blown off by what looked like a shotgun blast. The roaches had gotten into its eyeballs and were streaming out of what was left of them. He looked closer and saw that the dead hog was covered with a kind of light green dust.

Jack gasped and stepped backward.

“Christ,” he said. “Jesus.”

But there was something else. He shone his flashlight on the animal's body and saw what seemed to be surgical cuts in its side and under its belly. He forced himself to look again and then held his breath as he stuck his hand into the wound. Bile came up in his throat as he felt around. There was blood and gore everywhere but he could tell that the intestines and liver were gone.

Someone had operated on the hog. He pulled his hand out, barely able to stand, and wiped it off on the bedsheet. What the hell was going on? Was this some kind of really weird fetish at the Jackalope? Not only watch a whore screw a burro, but kill and operate on (and screw!) your own pig?

Big fun at the Jackalope tonight. Have hot sex . . . with . . . with Ole Big?

Jack now realized that this wasn't just any hog, but Ole Big himself. He recognized the cloudlike markings and the odd hump in the hog's back.

Who the hell did this? And why?

While Jack was pondering this, he heard something. Out in the hallway. The sound of footsteps.

He quickly ducked behind the open door, pressing his body flat against the wall.

Heavy, loud footsteps were coming toward the room.

The footsteps came close, closer . . . and then a man walked through the door. Jack leaped out from his hiding spot and pushed him hard in the back. There was a cry of terror as the big man fell onto the bed, on top of the body of the dead hog.

He turned and looked up at Jack, who shone his flashlight into his face. It was Zollie, lying there on Ole Big. His shirt was also covered with an odd green dust. Like fairy dust, Jack thought. Fairy dust on an idiot giant and his pet hog.

“I'll get you, you son of a bitch!” the big man yelled.

He made a mighty attempt to rise to his feet but Jack pushed him back down and took out his gun. He was about to arrest Zollie when he heard other men somewhere behind him.

Time to leave.

Jack ran out into the hall and headed up the steps the way he had come. Seconds later, he heard someone coming down the steps. He was too late, and there was no place to hide. He reached for his gun but his flashlight beam landed on Oscar.

“Jack! There you are! I bribed one of the bartenders to tell me where he thought Jennifer might be.”

“You lost your money, pal. She's not back there,” Jack said. “But you wouldn't believe what is.”

They heard what sounded like a large group of men running toward them, talking loudly in Spanish.

“Too many of them,” Jack said. “Time to retreat, Osc.”

They turned to head out the back way but Zollie came running out of the room, saw them, and started to lift his gun. Oscar ran into him, knocking him backward. The voices grew louder behind them and shots rang out.

Jack and Oscar ran across the desert toward the parking lot with Zollie and the guards in pursuit. Jack heard another shot and a bullet whizzed by his head.

They kept running until they got to the gate, ran through, and scrambled into their car.

Jack looked back and saw Zollie at the edge of the parking lot. In his fat hands was a shotgun, which he aimed at them and fired.

They peeled out and turned left, barely avoiding getting their brains splattered all over the access road.

The two agents drove out into the moonlit desert, careening down the highway.

“It was very dark,” Jack said. “I tied Maria up down there. Went down into the basement. Then the guy I told you about, Zollie, came in. On the bed in there was this hog . . . the same hog I saw at Lucky Avila's ranch. Except he was dead and it looked like someone had cut out some of his organs.”

“The big guy, Zollie, did it?”

“I don't think so. The sick fuck loves that animal.”

“Then who?” Oscar asked.

“I don't know for sure,” Jack said. “But I'm starting to get an idea.”

His voice trailed off as he looked up at the lunatic moon.

Chapter Seventeen

After saying good night to Oscar, Jack went back to his own room at La Fonda. He was dazed, exhausted, and more than a little confused. He fell on the bed and drifted off into a twilight dream in which young Mexican girls were morphing into giant hogs. They chased him down back alleys and through the hallways of Blue Wolf. Nurses in white dresses appeared in front of him and then they, too, were suddenly great snorting hogs, racing toward him.

He lashed out at them with his hands and saw his fingers being chomped off. He screamed and fell to the floor as the hogs closed in, their little eyes as determined and mindless as a Muslim militant's.

He woke up with a start, his heart pumping wildly.

What was Ole Big doing in bed at the Jackalope?

Who had operated on him?

Jack got up and walked obsessively back and forth across the room like it was a crime scene. He felt like a criminal himself. He should report this, get the whole agency involved. But that would put Michelle in a compromising position. He couldn't bear to think of her in jail.

There was something finally happening between them. Jack had been to bed with many women over the years, but nothing had ever been this intense.

It was real. Had to be.

He looked out at the square, at the snow blowing.

He had to find Jennifer. Not only for her sake but for Michelle's, and for his own.

Or was that what Michelle wanted him to think?

Was he getting caught in her trap?

But she had saved his life before, and she was here with him now. She loved her sister and wouldn't endanger her.

Michelle was a criminal but she was the most amazing woman he'd ever known.

But what about his son? How could he be involved with a woman like Michelle and look Kevin in the eyes?

Maybe she could get straight. Maybe . . . maybe she wanted to. Maybe this was all part of that.

Maybe when he saved her sister she would get her head straight and see that he loved her and that she had to turn away from the dark side.

And meanwhile, what
about
Kevin?

Jack picked up his cell phone, dialed.

When Jack was away Kevin had a knack for getting himself in trouble. Jack had always assumed that the kid was just sowing his wild oats, but what if Kevin's rebellious behavior was the precursor of some deeper craziness?

The phone rang five times before Wade picked up.