The Echelon Vendetta (48 page)

He pulled out the fax sheet and held it up to the beam.

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While he was staring down at the fax, Horsecoat pushed himself

off the bank and came over to look. “Where’d you get that?” Dalton ignored the question. “What else did you find in this

truck?” “A big bag, full of papers. And some broken bits of pottery.” “Where is this stuff now?” “The papers were all rotted. I tried to thaw them out, but they

just turned into mush. What I could read was all numbers—groups

of numbers—so I just took them out to the trash and dumped them.” “Where?” “Big dump site back of Comanche Station. Covered over years

ago. Gone. Long gone. Sorry.” “There’s a big peak, in the Front Range. You can just see it from here. Way off in the southwest, but it stands out. What’s it called?”

“That’s Culebra. Fourteen thousand feet above sea level. Maybe more. Biggest peak in southeastern Colorado. We Comanches call this Culebra country. Snake country. Who did this drawing?”

“Moot Gibson.” “He drew that?” “Yes.” “When?” “About three months ago.” “That’s Peyote, you know, in the center. But Pinto would never

have let him draw something like that.” “Why not?” “You never name the roadman.” “The roadman? The priest?” “Yes. His real name is a secret. A sacred secret.” “Is Pinto’s name here?” Horsecoat tapped the sheet. “Yeah. Here . . . and here.” He

touched the word “hidden” and the word “struggle.”

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“That’s his name,” he said, speaking in a whisper.

“Pinto? His given name is Daniel Escondido.”

“ ‘Lucha’ was the name he took when he was sixteen. Like you say, his original name was Daniel. He named himself Lucha.
Lucha
is Spanish for the struggle. For the fight. And Escondido means—”

“Hidden.”

“Yes. That’s his clan name. They got it from the Mexicans, for killing so many of them and then just slipping away into the grass.”

“What does this word mean? ‘Deadead’?”

“I guess that’s for Pinto.”

“Deadead means Pinto?”

“No. It means DEA Dead. It’s for those three federal agents who disappeared. Why they sent Pinto to jail. The DEA agents. Pinto liked to say that when they came down here they were DEA and when he left them they were DOA. He strung them up to a big old cottonwood over there by the Huerfano. Naked. Even the woman. Sliced off their eyelids and let the sun roast them. The woman lasted the longest, only because Pinto gave her water. Pinto used her a lot, so Bill Knife says, while she was hanging there, because it made him feel happy to hear her crying like that, her begging not to die, offering him whatever she could think of, praying for mercy. She did stuff to him, took him every which way, at the end Pinto says she told him she really loved him and would never ever tell the cops on him, but she died anyway. Pinto loves to hear people do that, asking for mercy, crying, saying they’ll fuck him, suck him, do whatever he wants, whiny, pitiful, sorry shit like that. Pinto says he likes to breathe in the souls coming out of people while they’re dying, says he can taste them on his tongue, breathe them in like sage smoke. It makes him smile. We used to go look at their bones when we were kids, but Bill Knife scared us off, told us never to go back there again, that it was a dead place, full of angry unhappy spirits.”

The look on Dalton’s face must have been more revealing than

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he intended, because Horsecoat shrugged his thin shoulders, raised

his hands: “I know. I know. That’s what Pinto does.”

Dalton folded the paper up. “Let’s go.”

“Where we going?”

“Back to Moot’s grave. To wait for Pinto.”

“Man, we can’t do that. I can’t be there.”

“Why not? You said he’d come for you?”

“Yeah. He’ll come for both of us.”

“You’re part of his church. He won’t hurt you.”

Horsecoat shook his head. “You don’t know him. Pinto’s crazy. If he thinks I talked to you like I did, he’ll kill me too. Bill Knife says Pinto has maggots in his head. I can’t be here, man. Really. I can’t be here.”

“Then go.”

Horsecoat looked around the arroyo, and then back at Dalton.

“I can leave?”

“Yes.”

“Can I have the Ruger? Just in case Pinto doesn’t believe me?”

Dalton racked the slide, clearing the magazine, and handed the weapon over. Horsecoat clutched it to his chest, as if it were a talisman that could really save him from something like Pinto. He knew that handing the kid a gun was an insane thing to do. Dalton didn’t really care. He was half-mad already. He was the walking dead, and in the land of the half-mad, the walking dead is king. Besides, if the pistol gave Horsecoat the courage to go find Pinto, then it was worth the risk.

“How do you know I won’t just go tell Pinto where you are?”

“I think that’s what you should do. Maybe he’ll let you live. You go out there and find him and tell him I’m here waiting.”

“And you’re just gonna sit there? Let him come for you?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’re a dead man.”

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“Yes. I’m a dead man. You tell Pinto that a dead man wants to see him. Tell him I’m waiting for him. Now go.”

Horsecoat stared at him for a time, and then turned and ran, vanishing into the sweetgrass. Dalton heard the hissing of his passage through the dry grass, the thud of his running boots. After a while this faded to nothing and then there was only the faint ticking of the truck’s engine cooling and the deep slow beating of his own heart.

FULL NIGHT;
Dalton alone by the rock mound.

Irene lying asleep a few yards away, her side heaving, twitching in a dog’s dream, her paws jerking as if she were chasing prey. The pickup truck engine had cooled enough to stop ticking long ago. The cold wind had increased, slicing down out of the Rockies, out of Culebra Peak, the jagged knifelike crest of the mountain cutting a black slice out of a sky filled with stars, filled with the wide, slowly undulating pink curtain of the Milky Way. The sweetgrass was hissing and tossing in the wind and a silvery light lay on the land. The air was sharper, colder, carrying the promise of snow.

Dalton was leaning back on the mound, the rough river stones still giving off some of the day’s heat, his range jacket zipped tight, his collar up, holding the Colt in his left hand and feeling the slender shaft of a disposable hypodermic needle in his right. The needle was filled with Narcan. Maybe it would help. Maybe not. He was hungry and afraid and thinking about Florian’s in Venice, about the light on Saint Mark’s Basin, the taste of cold champagne on a hot afternoon. He did not expect to live through the night, but he found he could not leave. The world needed Pinto dead, and the work had come to him. Irene sat up and sniffed at the wind, whimpering. Dalton stood up and looked to the west, the breeze ruffling his collar as he faced into the wind. He saw a dark eddy in the waving grass.

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He cocked the Colt.

He smelled eucalyptus and a nameless spice on the wind.

The world changed.

The sky grew very bright and he could feel the electric hum of the Milky Way on the back of his hands as it shimmered in the night sky. All the tall grasses around him turned into golden snakes, writhing and coiling. There were strange voices in their hissing, a song he could not quite understand, although the meaning seemed to float just beneath the surface of his mind, and he felt that if he concentrated on the song, the meaning would suddenly be revealed, and that revelation would be shattering, would open his soul to God and make him perfect.

Under the singing of the snakes he heard the clicking of the beetles busy in Moot Gibson’s grave. Irene was beside him now, quivering, as a tall broad shape, surrounded by a corona of emerald green light, rose up out of the long grass on the far side of Moot Gibson’s tomb. All the golden snakes faded away into silence, into a perfect stillness, so complete that Dalton could hear his own heart beating, a ragged fitful drumming.

“You’re the man from Venice,” said the figure across the grave, the deep voice low but carrying, a whisper full of menace and power.

“I am. You killed Porter Naumann.”

Pinto shook his head and green flies buzzed up in a great cloud around him. He spoke out of the swarm, in the buzzing voice of a hive. “Peyote killed him. He could not survive the question.”

“And the rest?”

“Rabbits are for eating. Who cares about them? Why should we talk? You have nothing to tell me. You have been given the breath of Peyote. I scattered it on the wind, while you sat there and dreamed about Italy. I could tell you to shoot yourself now, with that Colt in your hand, and you would do it. I could tell you to strangle that she-dog and you would do it. I told your friend to tear his face off and

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he ran away to do it. In a while I will tell you go to sleep and when you wake up I will have found something interesting to do with you.”

Now Pinto’s voice was no longer the voice of a swarm. It had changed into a deep drone, like a huge organ. He felt Pinto’s spirit walking around in the bridges and streets of his skull, his boots echoing off the bone the way they had echoed off the cobblestones in the streets of Venice. His mouth was stuffed with cold wet clay, as if he were lying beside Moot Gibson already, and there were shining green beetles feeding in his brain.

Dalton slid a careful hand into his jacket pocket, closed it around the disposable hypodermic needle.

“Where’s your spirit friend?” Pinto asked. “The green man.”

Dalton searched for his voice, found it at last, a dry croak. “He’s gone away.”

“Too bad. He was with you in Venice.”

“He saved me from your spider.”

“You liked the spider? Here, a gift—”

He threw something across the rock mound, something green and on fire, spinning legs of green fire. It landed with a thump on the ground at Dalton’s feet—a huge green spider.

Dalton squeezed his fist tight around the needle in his pocket, drove the tip deep into the palm, pressing the plunger. The Narcan rushed into his system, flooding it, driving everything before it.

Dalton stepped forward and crushed the green spider into the earth with the sole of his boot, feeling it pop under his sole.

Irene ran up the rock mound and launched herself at Pinto. Pinto slashed at her with a knife—Dalton saw the blood drops spray sideways across the sky, a constellation of rubies.

He lifted the Colt up. The gun kicked back. The muzzle flared, an expanding corona of fire that blazed like Andromeda.

Two.

Three.

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Four.

Five.

Six rounds off, the big Colt leaping in his hands, his shoulders jerking back. Then the hammer, clacking and clacking and clacking on the empty chambers. Dalton stood there for a timeless period, blinking, his retinas still imprinted with the flaring galaxy of the muzzle blast, and then he stepped up onto the top of Moot Gibson’s grave and looked down at the sweetgrass on the far side.

There was nothing there.

In the starlight Dalton could see a swath of crushed grasses, leading away into the open plains. He stepped off the mound and knelt down beside Irene. Her mouth was open and she was panting rapidly. He touched her ribs. Her heartbeat was faint but steady. The wound along her side gaped, and pink ribs showed. Dalton used his belt to wrap her chest, pinching the wound shut.

He patted her, stood up, took a ragged breath, and passed into the long grass with a hiss and a rustle, following Pinto’s path. In the distance he could hear the sound of someone racing through the grass, and when he looked into the middle distance he could see a black shape, stumbling now.

He reloaded the Colt.

Kept walking.

Far overhead a crow soared, a black flutter against the star field. Down on the starlit grass plain beneath the crow’s wings, the crow saw two dark figures moved through the waving grass, one man stumbling and staggering, the other man following, moving easily, coming on.

The crow wheeled higher and flew off toward Culebra.

AFTER A LONG TIME
Pinto reached a stand of cottonwoods by an arroyo where the Little Apishapa used to run. By now Pinto’s boots

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were full of blood and they squelched as he staggered forward toward the stand of trees, their bare branches pale in the starlight.

Pinto reached the clearing and fell forward against the trunk, wrapping himself around it, his bloody hands leaving black smears on the rough bark. He let his body slide to the ground, twisted; the pain in his belly was ferocious, like a wolf ripping at his guts.