The Skinwalker Conspiracies - 02 (10 page)

“He could have triggered a nuclear war.”

“Well, he didn’t, but here’s a newsflash for you kid,”
Oswald answered.
“He was dead already and didn’t much care.”

I wondered what the guy behind the JFK movie would’ve thought of that. The history lesson was interesting, but I wanted to hear more about the Governor. “Alright, you said you couldn’t beat this guy. Why? Who is he? You implied that he was one of the Conquistadors. Every Skinwalker I’ve ever run into has been weak, other than being able to use a body. None of them can come close to doing what you can do.”

Oswald shook his head and said,
“Every ‘walker’ has their little tricks. Trust me; I’ve killed plenty of them. This one, he knows things other Skinwalkers would gladly kill for. He’s been a ghost for close to five hundred years. His name is Hernando De Soto.”

I only knew of two things that fit the name De Soto, and since we weren’t talking about cars, I said, “He was the one who beat the Aztecs, right?”

Oswald gave me a look that made me rethink what my “B” in history really meant. Okay, just maybe I did need to know more about this Governor.

“No, wrong Hernando – that was Cortez. Hernando De Soto did some work for Cortez, but he was pretty low on the totem pole. His big break came down in Peru where he was working for another guy named Pizarro. Then he went back to Spain with a bunch of gold, got married, and met the Queen of Spain. She gave him a couple of fancy titles and he decided to get a bunch of thugs and go searching for gold all through the American southeast.”
Oswald had a way of making it sound like a mafia operation. Depending on the point of view, he wasn’t that far from the truth.

“Not a lot of gold to be found there,” I said looking out at the last of the rainstorm clearing up. Sudden storms in Texas aren’t surprising, although the weather guessers would be pretty surprised to learn that this one was caused by a ghost.

“Yeah, all he found was a bunch of ticked off Indians. He eventually died somewhere along the Mississippi river and history considers him a huge failure. After he died, he cozied up to some Indian spirits and learned everything he could from them. When he got all their secrets, he betrayed them and destroyed his teachers. Now, history has come full circle and it’s time for me to destroy him.”

“So what can he do that other Skinwalkers can’t?” I was a little worried about how Oswald kept going back and forth on De Soto. Part of the time he sounded like an admirer and in the next breath, he was adamant about destroying him. Frankly, Oswald wasn’t all that right in the head, even for a ghost. His “all ghosts could become Skinwalkers therefore they must all be destroyed” act didn’t help his case.

“He’s strong. When I forced him out of his last body, I thought I had him. He looked weak like any other ‘walker,’ but then it was just like flipping a light switch … bam! He was more powerful than I was. We fought and I had to flee, but at least I left him without his body.”

“What did you do?”

“It was near New Orleans, a little over fifteen years ago. I ambushed him when he was driving a car out on the highway. The car wrecked and killed the flesh he was wearing. At least, it made him go looking for a new body.”

I noted that my new “friend” obviously had no qualms about killing a living person. Of course, other alarm bells were going off in my head. “You said he had to go get a new body about fifteen years ago? Where do you think he is now?”

“The few leads I’ve come across say he’s out west. I go out that way every few months, but I’ve never been able to find him and if I stay away from Dallas too long, the ghosts start showing up here and I can’t let that happen.”

Even though my knowledge of history might not have been as good as advertised, I could still do basic math. Oswald destroyed a powerful Skinwalker’s host body fifteen years ago. That’s right around the time that David Michael Ross Sr., up and left his family to go live in the southwest. I later learned he’d been kidnapped by a Skinwalker in the employ of Roger Taney and sold on the “Body Market” in Philly. There were just too many coincidences, for it not to be the answer. Hernando De Soto was probably “driving” around in my Dad’s body and if I wanted to stop him, I needed to team up with this homicidal lunatic.

Nice advice about gathering allies, Virginia … thanks a bunch!

“Well, what do you think? I need all the sense you can talk into me, right about now.” I said to Brother Silas while changing into a clean shirt. Oswald left me to go gather energy and recover from our fight. I wasn’t so lucky. I had to fight the traffic snarl around Dallas to get back to Silas’ relatives. I didn’t know if it was a sign, but I was flipping the channels on the Caddy’s radio when I hit a classic rock station. Procol Harum’s
Conquistador
was halfway through.

Oh, did I mention that I looked like a drowned rat that’d gotten his ass kicked right before getting struck by lightning? My clothes were ripped, I had a scraped knee and my leg reinforced with a metal rod throbbed enough to make me wonder if I’d grown a second heart down there. Fortunately, my friend’s cousin, Marcus, and his wife, Sheri, accepted the story that I was caught outside in that nasty thunderstorm that just popped up on the other side of town, but that didn’t stop them from looking at me funny. I guess I was living up to the troubled youth label. Hell, when I looked in the mirror at my reflection it wasn’t a pretty sight.

Truth be told, I probably should have gone to the hospital and gotten checked over. But my heart rhythm was normal as I loaded a replacement nitro pill in the holder. I also had no real desire to go back out into traffic and spend more time in a hospital. Too much of my life had already been spent being poked, prodded, and analyzed by those white coat wearing ego maniacs. All I needed was a good night’s rest. Yeah, they might have their pieces of paper, but I could talk to ghosts! That wins in my book. Maybe it was my exhaustion and superficial injuries talking, but doctors, in general, were starting to climb up my list of professions that I hated.

The old preacher was looking at me. Other than ghosts, I’m the only other thing he could see. It was pretty disconcerting, but I was used to it. Silas sighed and scratched the coarse white stubble on his neck.

“Mike,” he said. “This man ain’t no Colonel Strong Vincent. Everything you’ve told me so far shows how disturbed Oswald is. Is his help worth having to watch your back?”

“You think I should turn him down? We can always head for Amarillo and see if Eckels is there, but if this De Soto really is the guy driving around in my dad’s body, I might need him.”

“Back in ‘Nam, we had this crazy Filipino kid in our unit. His name was … hell, I must be getting old if I can’t remember his real name. It don’t matter. Either way, we called him ‘Pit Viper’ after the snakes you could find in the Philippines. He was real small, just a gnat’s hair over the size you could enlist. Looked like a strong breeze could knock him over and a rainstorm could drown him. Tell you what though … that boy could clean out a tunnel like nobody’s business. He liked killin’ a bit too much. The lieutenant spotted it and was going to send Viper to get checked out by one of those head doctors you’re always going on about.”

“What happened?” I had a feeling that whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

“He caught wind of it and snapped, shot two of the guys in the unit and went running toward the jungle, straight through a minefield. Didn’t get very far.”

“What about the two guys he shot?”

Silas paused. “One died from his injuries and the other just had a flesh wound on his leg. He recovered from that one, but was later blinded and sent home. The moral of that story is, Oswald might be someone you’d want going into a tunnel, but what’re you gonna do when there ain’t no tunnels around?”

I was about to answer when my friend’s cell rang. He reached into his jacket and pulled it out. “Hello. Oh yes, Karen. No, Michael is fine. He just had a run in with a very powerful spirit. I’ll put him on.”

“Hey Mom,” I said. “How are things?”

“Mike,” she said in a panicked voice. “I got home and the ghosts left notes saying that you were in trouble. What happened?”

You could go on the internet and look up haunted places in Maryland and find museums and battlefields. One thing you won’t find is a nondescript one level house constructed in the early seventies in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Anywhere from two to as many as ten ghosts are in it at any given time. The Ross family residence is an “outpost” for Strong Vincent’s modest empire which runs from Rockville west to the Antietam battlefield and then north to Gettysburg – a substantial chunk of real estate that I helped him take by force. In return, he has his ghosts guard my mom and watching over her house.

We had a bunch of those magnetic letters on the fridge, just like most parents with kids do at one point or another. It was the easiest way for the ghosts to communicate with her by moving the letters around.

“I’m okay,” I replied, wanting to avoid going into all the details. This obviously meant that Amos had made it back to his anchor in Gettysburg and sounded the alarm. “Turns out the ghost I had a misunderstanding with was Lee Harvey Oswald.”

To put it mildly, Karen Ross was more than a little skeptical of my talents and associates. “Yeah right, Mike.”

“No, it’s the truth.”

“Really?”

“Yup.”

“Okay then, did he really do it?”

“Sort of, he was possessed at the time,” I answered. Mom had seen what I was like in the brief minutes that Don Hodges had possessed me.

“Still doesn’t excuse him for killing the president,” she said after a pause. There’s that old question that people in Mom’s generation always ask about where they were when JFK was shot. She’d only been a toddler, but it obviously left some scars. It made me wonder if someday I’d be talking to one of my kids about September Eleventh and they wouldn’t really be able to understand. That was assuming I could find someone and eventually have kids.

“I’ll tell you the story behind it sometime. There’s a good chance I’m going to have to go San Antonio for a few days.”

“Ghost business?” I noted the caution in her tone.

“Yeah, at the Alamo.”

“Do I need to say be careful? I still don’t think there’s any point in being out there.” I’d been too busy crawling away from Taney’s museum to see it collapse, but she had a perfect view from the “getaway car.” I opted not to tell her about my near heart attack earlier. It would only add to her concerns.

“Don’t worry. I’ve got Silas here to keep me safe.”

She asked me a few more questions, while I toyed with the idea of telling her I had a lead on Dad. Whatever hurtful memories were still around from the Kennedy assassination paled in comparison to the time when her husband cleaned out the bank account and ran off to start anew right after Grandpa Warren died.

One could say that Mom didn’t really approve of my little spin around the southwest. She and Dad were having problems long before any Skinwalker showed up and I had no illusions that there would ever be any kind of reconciliation.

Eventually, the conversation wore down and Mom’s fears were diminished by use of clever omission on my part. I got updates on how “Grandma” Meg was doing and a little on how Mom’s relationship with the assistant manager at Pizza Hut was going. Finally, I left word with her for Amos to rejoin us in either San Antonio or Amarillo, assuming he could catch a ride on a bus or a train. Other than ‘walkers, ghosts don’t really fly all that well – most preferred ground or ocean travel.

Two days later, I led Brother Silas around Dealey Plaza. Ultimately, it was the only place to meet up with Oswald – the scene of the crime. While we walked along the perimeter of the reflecting pool, I was lost in reflections of my own.

I’d spent my time studying up on Oswald, William Travis, and the Alamo. My pair of brass divining rods didn’t pick up anything near the Texas School Book Depository. Oswald’s anchor was nowhere to be found. Nothing felt out of sorts when Brother Silas and I took the tour of the museum either. The only other obvious suspects were his wedding ring, which was last left in his wife’s care and was rumored to be in some attorney’s safe in Austin, the rifle he shot Kennedy with, the pistol he killed Tippet with, and, my personal favorite, the missing first tombstone from his grave. Both the rifle and the revolver were at an undisclosed location, under lock and key, in the National Archives all the way back in College Park, Maryland.