The heated air was thick with sage spice and the creosote odor of greasewood; it ignited a burning sensation in his lungs. Breathing shallowly, he climbed over the gate and made his way down the track, his shoes creating little scraping sounds on the hard earth. Halfway down something startled him by jumping out from behind a yucca tree and darting away through the desert scrub. Jackrabbit. He saw it stop, its great ears lifting and falling like semaphores, then run again and vanish.
The ranch yard was littered with tumbleweeds and wind-gathered debris; he crossed it slowly toward the house. Board and batten, with a roof of weathered shingles, a narrow porch across the front, a tangled growth of prickly pear at one end. If it had ever been painted, the last vestiges of the paint had long ago eroded away. All of the glass in the front windows had been broken out. The front door hung lopsidedly inward on one hinge; one of its panels was splintered, as though it had been rammed or kicked in. The entire facing wall was riddled with holes, but it wasn’t until he was within a few yards of the porch that he recognized them as bullet holes. Somebody — more than one somebody — had fired dozens of rounds at the house, handgun or rifle or both. As if trying to kill it.
The bullet holes, the eerie stillness, the lifelessness of the place opened an odd hollow feeling inside him. Sweat ran down into his left eye, smearing his vision; he wiped it away. The sun was like a weight on the top of his bare head, the back of his neck. He wished he’d had the sense to stop at one of the stores in town and buy a hat of some kind. He wasn’t dressed at all right for this country. Stranger in a strange land.
The boards creaked when he stepped onto the porch; the rusted hinges creaked when he pushed the door farther inward so he could pass through. The living room was empty of furniture, the bare-wood floor littered with dust and drifted sand, broken glass, rodent droppings, and dead insects. A quick look into each of the other four rooms told him the house had been completely stripped. All that was left were a few shelves, a broken chemical toilet, and an ancient claw-foot tub in the bathroom. Vandals? John T. Roebuck? Dacy Burgess?
Outside again, he heard the faint, faraway throb of a car engine on the valley road. Except for his footfalls as he walked around to the rear, it was the only sound. White noise that enhanced rather than disturbed the stillness.
The well was a circle of native stone set between two of the trees. A hand-operated pump had been used in place of a windlass; but the pump had been torn loose and battered with something like a sledgehammer until it was a mangled lump of metal. Scattered around it were bits of stone and mortar that had been beaten off the well itself. He moved a few steps closer. A fitted wooden cover still sat in place over the well opening.
His stomach began a faint kicking. The cause was not what had been done to the well but what he’d been told about the murder of Tess Roebuck and its aftermath. Heinous, Hoxie had called it. God, yes. Heinous and inexplicable.
He turned away, went across the rear yard. The low-roofed structure had been a chicken house; dried droppings and feathers lay strewn over the hardpan inside the wire enclosure. He passed the privylike shed. Its door had been pulled off and tossed aside; inside he could see a raised platform, a jut of bolts and tangle of wires. Generator, probably. They’d had electricity, and the power lines that serviced John T. Roebuck’s ranch didn’t extend out this far into the wilderness. The generator had been taken away along with everything else.
He tried to visualize what it had been like living here, in conditions that were only a step or two removed from the primitive. Tried to fit Ms. Lonesome into these surroundings; to envision her happy, laughing, mothering and playing games with a faceless child of eight. He couldn’t manage that either. She was a stranger, dammit. All you knew was the shell of a woman, a walking piece of clay. She could have been a monster and you know it. Good people don’t have a monopoly on loneliness.
He approached the barn. It and what was left of the corral fence were aged-silvered, tumbledown. The barn’s wide double doors sagged open; bullet holes studded them too, just a few, like afterthoughts. Beyond he could see more holes pocking the galvanized surface of the water tank. And the windmill... it looked to have been dragged down with ropes attached to the back of a car or truck; an end-frayed length of hemp trailed from a section of the windmill’s frame. Outrage at the killings. Mindless attacks on inanimate objects that had had nothing to do with the taking of two human lives. Teenagers, maybe. It was somehow worse to think that adults had been responsible.
Messenger paused at the barn’s entrance. Dark inside, a thick gloom that stank of dried manure and rotting leather and Christ knew what else. Better not go in. Snakes... the desert was full of rattlers, and this was just the kind of place where they nested. Nothing to see anyway. Coming here had been a mistake, an exercise in morbid curiosity—
Something smacked into the barn wall, head high, a couple of feet to the right of where he stood.
He swung around that way as sound broke suddenly through the hush, a flat cracking like a distant roll of thunder. But the sky was clear—
Singing buzz, and dust spurted from a spot on the ground near his right shoe. The cracking noise came again, echo-rolling this time. He stiffened, bewildered, just starting to comprehend what was happening.
Another buzz, another spurt of dust even closer, another flat crack. It burst in on him then, full understanding that carried with it an adrenaline surge of fear and astonishment.
Rifle shots.
Somebody’s shooting at me!
8
The only place for him to go was into the barn.
He twisted around, got his feet tangled together, stumbled, and went down on all fours, jamming his left knee. His shoulders hunched; he could feel the skin bristling along his back. But there were no more shots as he scrambled inside, to safety around one of the sagging doors.
He flattened himself on bare, lumpy earth near the front wall. He was slick with sweat; he smelled himself along with the sour stink of the barn’s interior. His breathing had a labored, stuttering quality. He opened his mouth wide, made himself take in air in shallow inhalations so he wouldn’t begin to hyperventilate.
His mind was a clutter of disconnected thoughts. One of them: Seventeen years he’d lived in San Francisco, with all its urban threats and terrors, and he’d never once been attacked, mugged, burglarized, or bothered by anyone more dangerous than an aggressive panhandler. Now, all the way out in the Nevada desert, abandoned ranch in the middle of nowhere... somebody with a rifle, for God’s sake, shooting so close to him he’d heard and felt the bullets’ passage. It was as if it were happening to somebody else. As if part of him were standing off and watching some other poor schmuck hugging the floor of a barn. Stage set, scene in a John Wayne or Randolph Scott Western...
An awareness crowded in: Outside, it was quiet again.
With an effort, he forced his thoughts into a semblance of order. He couldn’t just lie there and wait for whoever it was to come in after him. Move — that was the first thing. He put his hands under his chest and pushed up, then over on to one hip. The shadows were thick, clotted in corners and among the rafters, but enough smoky-looking light penetrated through gaps in the walls and roof to let him see how the barn was laid out. Stalls along the far wall, an enclosed feed bin. Hayloft above, with an opening into it but no ladder for access. No windows, no other doors. Trapped here. And nothing he could see to use as a weapon; the barn had been stripped of machinery and tools and anything else it might have once held.