Whisper Death (18 page)

“Thanks, Ollie. Appreciate it.”

“Hold on. One more thing. Remember you called the widow of that Amos character, guy who got himself ventilated on Crawford's doorstep?”

“She claimed to be his widow. But she wasn't.”

“Damn right she wasn't. Drowned off Myrtle Beach four years ago.”

Thanks to the air-conditioned garage and air-conditioned Mercedes, McGuire avoided the oppressive desert heat until he stopped on Palm Canyon Drive at a gas bar to fill up and sip a coffee. Emerging from the car was like walking directly into an invisible wall of heat. The sky was clear, clear enough for the sun to radiate like a furnace on the land; the air was alive and yet still, barely quivering, a cat about to pounce.

He returned to the controlled atmosphere of the Mercedes while the attendant filled it with gas. As he drank his coffee he pondered all he had learned, wondering how much more of the puzzle he would assemble today.

Ollie was right. The Beretta was little enough protection. But it made him feel more secure. And he could use all the security he could get.

And Glynnis Vargas was everything she had claimed to be: the not-so-aloof and lonely widow of a man who had once been her world. McGuire felt a well of compassion for her rise within him. He wanted to see her again. Wanted to see her beauty become enhanced with the halo of her laugh.

Leaving Palm Springs, he followed the interstate highway west to San Bernardino, turning north to Barstow and beyond, through open desert. Three hours later he was in Baker, a collection of tired gas stations, restaurants and mobile homes clustered alongside the highway, where a gasoline attendant openly admired the Mercedes and directed him to the rolling two-lane highway leading west to Shoshone.

Away from the heavy Las Vegas-bound traffic on the interstate, the desert asserted itself by reducing all that was man-made to minuscule size. The blacktop secondary road became a taut thread on the horizon ahead of him. Mountains and mesas soared in the distance, rising from the table-top flatness of the desert like massive life forms, migrating too slowly for the eye to measure their motion. Fissures wove their way down the sides of distant hills, giving the land the look of a skin shed by some enormous animal. Along the shoulder of the highway, battered and tilting mailboxes marked dusty lanes trailing away to mobile homes looking lonesome, abandoned and forlorn in the distance.

You have to be crazy, McGuire told himself, nudging the car's speed a notch or two higher, to live out here alone. Only insane people would choose to live in a place so solitary and intimidating.

Shoshone proclaimed itself “The Gateway to Death Valley” in faded paint on a bleached wooden sign. Just beyond, near the intersection where the highway divided to send traffic west into Death Valley or east to Nevada, McGuire slowed the car at another sign. “Tecopa Canyon,” it announced at the exit to a dirt road whose shoulders were thick and brown with dead weeds.

Maybe later, he told himself. If the two Secret Service men were there now, he had no intention of meeting them.

The road to Nevada rose out of the valley onto an expansive plain, and soon even the battered mailboxes fastened to rotting posts had disappeared. He had entered a land where nothing rose higher than sagebrush except for the mountains and mesas which seemed to grow and blacken the sky as McGuire approached them. It was an alien landscape within the boundaries of his own country, and to a man who had learned about life and death on narrow concrete streets and shady residential lanes, it was both an endless marvel and vaguely disturbing.

He breathed more easily when the highway leading north out of Las Vegas came into view. Half an hour later he entered Beatty, a ramshackle mining town with the flavour of a pioneer settlement: unpaved roads running helter-skelter over barren hills, and parked highway rigs rumbling in the oversized parking lots of sad casinos and even sadder motels. A massive mine structure, like a rusting mountain, was set against the northern hills several miles away, its chimney scarring the sky with soot.

He found the road to Rhyolite and turned west again, down into the northern flatlands bordering Death Valley.

He saw the gate he was looking for, its deep crimson reminding him of nothing so much as dried blood. It was set several feet back from the road at the end of a short bridge traversing a ditch. McGuire pulled into the lane, stepped from the car and inspected the latch, secured with a heavy brass padlock. Beyond the gate a rutted track led north where, several hundred yards from the road, it dipped into a steep-walled gully and rose again on the other side. Perhaps another half-mile further, at the end of the lane, a tattered trailer home was sunk in the sand like a corpse. A pick-up truck sat near its front entrance. There were no other signs of life. Not even the air moved.

McGuire stepped from the car, the gun in his hand, and began to pace in front of the gate like a caged animal. Wait, the caller had said. Wait for what? For whom? He flicked the safety catch of the Beretta back and forth several times, feeling the inner workings merge and detach themselves again and again under the prodding of his thumb, enjoying the smooth lubricated gliding of the parts, almost sexual.

Wait? No, he refused to wait. He was armed, he was in control, he was angry. That was all it took. All it ever took.

It was cooler in the high desert, but still warm enough for McGuire to shed his lightweight jacket and lock it in the car. Then he clambered over the gate and followed the ruts of the laneway, the afternoon sun high on his left shoulder, the gun in his hand, perspiration trickling down his spine.

Within a few moments he was descending the steep incline into the gully. Keeping his head low, he crossed a wooden bridge where thick sagebrush followed the line of the dry creek bed.

As he emerged from the gully he could see the trailer home, a half-mile distant, more clearly. A rusting television aerial mounted on the roof leaned drunkenly in the air. A sun-bleached wooden shed sat next to the melancholy remains of a garden, its pitiful plants dwarfed and brown.

Somewhere in the air above and behind him, the rotor of a helicopter flapped in the distance.

McGuire kept walking, measuring his pace, moving from side to side on the road to avoid providing an easy target to anyone in the house.

The helicopter continued to approach out of the sun.

A hundred yards from the trailer he turned to face the sun and froze at the sight of the black, descending shadow. Crouching, he searched the lane from side to side for cover as a bullhorn mounted on the helicopter scratched the air with a familiar, authoritative voice.

“Throw your weapon away or you will be shot,” the voice directed. Not a threat, but a clear, matter-of-fact statement. “Do it now.”

McGuire turned again as the helicopter's rate of descent increased and its ugly silhouette swooped low over his head like a massive bird of prey.

He tossed the Beretta in the dirt and stood to watch the craft land midway between him and the tattered trailer home.

Almost before the helicopter's skids touched the ground, the side door swung open and four men in black riot gear burst out, their automatic weapons raised at McGuire. They spread quickly into a semi-circle with practised efficiency, saying nothing, their eyes concealed behind mirrored visors. Then, fixed in position like sculptures, they remained in attack formation as two men in civilian suits exited the craft, whose rotor continued to spin lazily in the desert air.

Baldy and Goggles walked toward McGuire, avoiding his eyes, scanning the horizon through their sunglasses. Baldy spoke briefly to two of the assault troopers who nodded curtly and scrambled to the other side of the helicopter, their weapons trained on the trailer home, which now appeared more forlorn than ever.

“You're even more stupid than we thought, McGuire.” Goggles picked the Beretta from the dirt and examined it with contempt. He popped the cartridge magazine expertly from the gun's grip and tossed the bullets away before handing the gun to one of the soldiers. “What are you doing here?”

“I was invited,” McGuire replied.

“By whom?”

“Beats me. That's what I came to find out.”

Baldy circled McGuire, his eyes searching the landscape. “Who told you about the cave in Shoshone?” he asked.

Careful, McGuire told himself. Hold back whatever you can. Information is a weapon. The only one left. “Same guy,” he answered.

The reaction was brief and fleeting, but unmistakeable: the eyes of the two Secret Service men met in a flash of recognition and insight.

“Get lost, McGuire,” Baldy said. He and his partner began striding in the direction of the trailer home. “You turn around, you walk to the car and you haul your ass out of here.” He paused next to one of the assault-team members whose weapon was still aimed at McGuire. “If you don't go directly to your car, now, this man, on my order, will put a full cartridge of shells in your body without a second thought.”

The soldier didn't flinch; the muzzle of his weapon never strayed from McGuire's direction.

“
Now!
” Baldy barked.

McGuire turned to walk back to his car, conscious of the soldier's weapon levelled at him. He wondered if Baldy would give the order to shoot with a curt nod of his head or a wave of his hand.

He walked, unsteadily at first, then more confidently as the voices of the men faded behind him, followed by angry shouts and the clatter of a door being kicked in.

Then nothing.

A breeze began to rise, shivering the sagebrush and mesquite plants. McGuire heard only the sound of his own footsteps on the dusty road and the mechanical flick-flick of the helicopter's main rotor turning at idle speed.

Halfway to the gully, he looked back at the trailer home. The soldier was still in firing position, his weapon pointed at McGuire. Not much chance of him hitting me at this distance, McGuire assured himself, but he turned and continued walking to the gully.

Runoffs from rare but violent desert storms had carved the gully through the desert landscape over untold years. The bed of the ravine was carpeted with small stones carried from distant hills by sudden floods. Sagebrush plants, their roots able to tap moisture more easily in the gully than on the desert flatland, were greener and healthier here. Still, there was no moisture to be seen as McGuire walked down the side of the gully and across the weathered surface of the low wooden bridge traversing the dry creek bed. He was almost over the bridge and bracing himself to climb the steep slope of the far bank when the wind whispered a familiar name.

“Mozart!”

McGuire continued his pace, determined to reach his car and leave the open landscape that intimidated him in ways the threats of the Secret Service men had not.

“Mozart!”

He paused at the far end of the bridge.

“Down here!” An insistent call from somewhere near his feet.

McGuire kneeled, squinting through cracks between the wooden planks of the bridge.

Four wide eyes shone back at him from beneath the structure. Two were darting here and there behind rimless glasses. The others—round, unblinking and shimmering with gold—seemed to float in a black pool.

“Get down, Mozart,” the voice hissed. “Out of sight before you're out of mind!” A cackle rose from beneath the bridge. “Kill time and time will kill you.”

McGuire stepped down to the dry creek bed from the edge of the bridge and peered into the shadows at a small, white-haired man crouched against the bank of the gully, giggling and pushing his glasses up to the bridge of his nose. He wore tattered khaki shorts, a khaki bush jacket with bulging pockets and ankle-high leather boots with no socks. Gathered in one arm, a large black cat stared back, its malevolent eyes never wavering from McGuire.

“Make haste, McGuire,” the man said, his head turning as though on a swivel, left and right, up and down. “Seek the shelter—”

In an instant, the shadows beneath the bridge died in a sudden harsh, reflected light, an inhuman blue brilliance that dominated the sun. McGuire looked up at a purple sky visible between the walls of the gully. The wind ceased; the cat in the man's arms cried out in fear. For one long, extended second all was silent, all was unreal.

When the noise of the explosion arrived, first like the crack of a whip inside McGuire's ear, then like timpani thunder rising in a crescendo, it was almost reassuring. At least the noise was real and familiar, as real and familiar as the earth that shook beneath him and dislodged rocks that tumbled down the sides of the gully. But he would never forget the sudden silent light that preceded it, the burst of fire that had melted shadows.

McGuire flung himself beneath the bridge as debris began to fall around him from the sky. The white-haired man cackled hysterically, restraining the cat which struggled, panic-stricken, in his arms.

“Jesus!” McGuire muttered.

“And Moses, Meshach and Abednego, too,” the man laughed.

“What the hell was that?” McGuire asked.

“The lights of hell, Mozart,” the man replied, staring up through the cracks of the bridge at a sky that was once again blue. A sudden wind rose, whistling threats above their heads. “For a heartbeat of time, you were standing in the lights of hell.”

“Who are you?” McGuire demanded. Small pebbles fell and danced on the wooden bridge above his head. The sound of the blast continued to rumble back from distant hills.

“Sam,” the man replied, extending one bony hand, the other clutching the wide-eyed cat to his chest. “Little Sam Littleton. That was my doorway you were about to darken. And this,” he said, nodding at the cat, “is Lafaro. Much more companionable than his namesake, I must add.”

McGuire refused the hand. “What happened just now?” he asked.

Like the turning of a card, a new expression appeared on Littleton's face: sober, reflective, concerned. “Theory became action, Mozart,” he said sadly. “Einstein's theory. Nuclear action. But limited to a midget. Battlefield size.” He began to crawl from beneath the bridge. “Behold the ultimate magic mushroom,” he said, looking beyond the rim of the gully to a sand-coloured cloud still boiling and rising into the air on a column of death.