The bedside lamp was on. He squinted against its glare.
Dacy.
She was fully dressed, her hair a wild tangle, her face dark with controlled fury. One clear look at her and he was completely awake.
“What is it?” he said. “What’s wrong?”
“Anna’s ranch,” she said. “It’s burning. Some son of a bitch set the whole damn place on fire.”
20
Dacy drove the Jeep at better than sixty over the washboard road, its front end bobbing, hurling darts of yellow-white through the darkness with each bone rattling bump. Messenger sprawled next to her, his feet braced, holding on to both seat support and dash. In the rear, Lonnie sat hunched and jut-necked like a pointing hound. The boy hadn’t said a word before they left the ranch, had barely acknowledged Messenger’s presence. He wondered again now, as he had when they piled into the Jeep, if Lonnie knew or suspected his mother had spent part of the night in the trailer with the new hired hand. And if he did know or suspect, what he thought about it.
Ahead and to the north, the sky above the low hills radiated a smoky orange glow. The smoke rose in thickening billows; he could smell it, harsh and wood-flavored, on the fitful night breeze. The whole damn place, Dacy had said, and that was how it looked from down here. No way a blaze of that size could have kindled and spread naturally on a clear night like this. (It had been after 1:00 A.M. when she woke him; he’d checked the time as he pulled on his clothing.) Deliberately set... but who would torch a ghost ranch in the middle of the night? For what reason?
They were nearing the intersection with the rutted track that led to Anna’s property. Above both the track and the valley road ahead, clear in the light from moon and stars, was a hanging residue of fine, talcum-pale dust. One or more cars had come down the track not long ago, going fast enough to raise dust clouds as high and thick as the ones in the Jeep’s wake, and then headed off toward town. Or to John T.’s ranch? Across the desert flats he could see the Roebuck property’s night-lights — half a dozen spread out on tall poles. But just those lights, no others. Everybody there must still be asleep and unaware of the fire. Or pretending to be unaware of it.
Dacy braked to make the turn in front of the storage shed. The Jeep skidded, yawed, and for a sickening instant Messenger thought they would slide over into a roll. But she knew what she was doing; she spun the wheel to control the skid, and the tires caught, churning, and the Jeep’s nose wobbled and then straightened out. The engine whined as she geared down for the climb to higher ground. The track’s stone-studded and cratered surface forced her to hold their speed down; even so, she drove fast enough for juts of rock to scrape the undercarriage, dislodged fragments to explode against metal with pops like gunshots. Fast enough, too, to lift him up off the seat and whiplash his neck, even braced as he was, when a front tire slammed through a deep pothole.
The fireglow and the roiling smoke grew and spread in front of them. The wind carried the faint crackle of flames to his ears; and when the Jeep surged bouncing through the shallow canyon, started up the curving rise beyond, the wind laid the fire’s heat across his skin. They were sixty or seventy yards from the closed gate before the high-licking flames appeared. In their reflection he saw the vehicle drawn off onto the hard-pan to one side.
Station wagon. Newish and light-colored.
John T.’s wagon?
Dacy brought them to a slewing stop. Messenger stumbled getting out; Lonnie caught his arm, kept him from falling, but the look the boy threw his way was unreadable. He leaned both hands against the gate, staring down into the hollow below.
Everything made of wood was sheeted with fire — ranch house, barn, chicken coop, pump shed, remains of corral and windmill. Burning tumbleweeds rolled crazily across the yard, as if the wind were playing some kind of fiery game of bowls. Clumps of sage and greasewood burned here and there on the flats, ignited by sparks and cinders. The heat beat against Messenger’s face in pulsing waves.
He said to Darcy, “Nothing we can do.”
“Didn’t figure there would be.”
“Okay by me,” Lonnie said. It was the first he’d spoken and his voice held an odd, flat inflection. “Let it all burn to the ground.”
“Why?” Messenger asked him. “It won’t make the past any easier to forget.”
“Might. What my uncle did—”
“Your uncle? What did he do?”
Lonnie shook his head.
Dacy said, “Never mind that,” and Messenger saw that her gaze had shifted to the station wagon. “By God, if he’s the firebug he’ll pay for it one way or another.”
“John T.?”
“That’s his wagon.”
“Why would he want to do this? And in the middle of the night?”
“Who the hell knows? He doesn’t need a good reason for half of what he does.”
She stalked angrily to the station wagon, Messenger and Lonnie following. She yanked the driver’s door open, bent to look inside — and then jerked as if she’d been struck and froze in place. In the firelight the sudden play of emotions across her face was plainly visible. The one that alarmed him was a wincing revulsion.
“Sweet Jesus,” she said softly. Then, louder, “Lonnie, you stay where you are. Stay there — I mean it!”
Tensely Messenger moved up beside her. One clear look into the wagon and his stomach kicked, his gorge rose; he gagged, locked throat and jaw muscles as he backed away. His eyes were on Dacy, but the image of the wagon’s interior remained in sharper focus, as if it had been burned against the backs of his retinas.
Dead man lying in a twisted sprawl across the front seat. Black blood glistening where his face had been. Spatters of blood and brain matter and bone fragments gleaming on cushions, dashboard, window glass...
“What’s the matter?” Lonnie’s voice, raised above the roar of the fire. But he’d obeyed Dacy; he was poised ten paces shy of the station wagon. “He in there?”
“Dead. Shot.”
“Shot? Somebody shot John T.?”
Blew his face away, the same as his brother. I wanted to make something happen but not this. Christ, not this!
“Get the flashlight out of the Jeep. Hurry.”
Again Lonnie did as he was told. When he came back she went to meet him, and said something Messenger couldn’t make out, then returned to the wagon and shone the light inside. Not long, just a few seconds. Then she switched it off and retreated to where Messenger stood and said in a thin, strained voice, “Well, he didn’t shoot himself. No sign of the gun.”
“Shotgun?”
“No. Large-caliber handgun, close range. One round, I think, but I couldn’t tell for sure.”
“Whoever did it was up here in another car. We didn’t miss it by more than a few minutes.”
“I know, I saw the dust, too.”
Lonnie said sharply, “Somebody’s coming.”
Messenger hadn’t heard anything, and still didn’t for another few seconds. Then he picked up the faint race-and-whine of a car or truck engine laboring along the track.
Dacy was already moving at a half-run to the Jeep. By the time he joined her she had her rifle — a .25 bold-action Weatherby magnum, he’d been told — free of the clamps that held it behind the front seats. She jacked a cartridge into the chamber and stood with the weapon at port arms, watching downhill. None of them said anything as they waited. The silence had a charged quality made more acute by the thrumming crackle of the fire at their backs.
It was three or four minutes before headlights flicked erratically over the bare canyon walls below. The beams steadied; the vehicle took shape behind them. Pickup. It rattled uphill, and when it slid to a stop behind the Jeep, Messenger recognized it: Tom Spears’s dirty green Ford. Spears was driving, and Joe Hanratty was with him.