"Sorry," she said, her voice amplified through a speaker positioned in a smooth hump on the roof, "but this is where we split up."
The driver's door hissed as it descended and locked.
"Major General Younger has detailed me to stay with you, to look after you," he blustered. "It was an order."
"Brevet Major General."
The engine turned over, and the whole car seemed to be animated. It stood there like a tensed muscle, working up strength.
"But…"
"Sorry, Lauderdale. I have my orders, too. This is a solo mission. See you in the movies…"
The voice clicked off, and music came on. An odd choice. "It's My Party, And I'll Cry If I Want To." Not the Leslie Gore version, The Chiffons' cover of the hit.
The Ferrari moved fast, and was gone through the double doors. A Road Runner cartoon trail of dust rose as it streaked over the displaced bridge towards the horizon.
"Who was that masked woman?" asked Grundy.
"I wish to God I knew," said Lauderdale. "I honestly wish to God I knew."
Part Three: Welcome, Arizona
I
"Good morneeng, padre,” said Annindariz, cheerfully, "hair of thee dog that beet you?"
Father Miguel O'Pray, the doors of the Silver Byte Saloon swinging behind him, felt the bartender's greeting like hands clapped over his ears. His head was still fuzzy, his chin sandpapery with salt-and-pepper stubble, his mainly grey hair greased and unruly and his mouth thickly lined with vomit-flavoured paste.
Annindariz grinned, showing off his gold tooth, and held up a green bottle of Shochaiku like the Japanese gaucho on the teevee ad.
O'Pray really didn't want a drink, but he nodded anyway, and the Mexican filled a shot glass.
The priest knocked it back, and it hit his empty stomach like a dum-dum bullet. He held the bar until his guts settled. The Silver Byte was quiet at this hour, just before noon. Last night's hellraisers would be sleeping it off over at Tiger Behr's motel. Old Man Mose was still in his window seat, but he never left. The story was that he had a catheter plumbed in under his blanket and piped directly into the sewer. He never took solid foods. He was open-mouthed and snoring, ignoring the fly crawling on his bald head.
"Another dreenk?"
O'Pray nodded, and Armindariz poured.
"Always glad to oblige thee chorch, padre."
This time, O'Pray picked the glass up carefully, observing the surface tension of the whisky. The meniscus wobbled as his hand trembled slightly.
"Careful not to speell eet, padre. That stoff, eet eats right through the varneesh."
O'Pray swilled the liquor around his mouth—this was Shochaiku's vat-produced cheap firewater, not the Double-Blend good stuff—and defurred his teeth. He swallowed.
He shook his head. It still ached like a bastard, but he'd had plenty of years to get used to that. At the seminary in Albany, an old priest had, in his cups, advanced the notion that you were closer to God if you were either drank or had a hangover.
That, be supposed, gave him twenty-four hours a day to be in communion with the Lord.
"How are theengs down at thee chorch, padre?"
"The church endures, Pedro. The church always endures."
"Eet don' look so good seence thee Bible Belt trashed thee place."
The quality of the pain in O'Pray's head changed minimally, moving from behind his eyes up into his forebrain.
"The church is more than just four walls and an altar, Pedro. It'll take more than a gang of heathen protestants on motorsickles to bring down the church."
"They geeve eet a pretty good try, padre."
"I'll give 'em that. How much for the bottle?"
Armindariz' tooth glinted.
"Thee usual."
O'Pray heaved the plastic gallon container up onto the bar. Water sloshed in it. It was about half-full. The only well within a hundred miles happened to be on St Werburgh's property.
"Water for whisky," O'Pray mused. "I never thought that would be a fair swap."
"Eet's a good theeng you dreenk yours straight, padre."
O'Pray managed a grim laugh. "The well is on consecrated ground, Pedro. That makes it holy water. Use it properly."
"I sure weell, padre."
O'Pray took the bottle by the neck and left the Silver Byte.
II
There was nothing broken inside Stack, except maybe his heart. He only had superficial burns. He shot himself up with morph-plus from the medkit, and requisitioned the dead cykeman's machine. It was a good hog, with pump shotguns slung next to the handlebars for an easy draw. There were plenty of loose shells in the panniers, along with a Swiss Army Nunchaka, some back issues of Guns and Killing and a stash of ju-jujubes. It was unpleasant shaking the former owner's head out of the helmet, but the job was over in a moment. With the pumps exploded and Slim's gas reservoir still burning, he had to siphon juice out of the nearly dry tanks in the auto graveyard. It took five semi-wrecks and several too many mouthfuls of gas to fill up the motorsickle.
He had figured it out. Either the cruiser's system had developed some limited Artificial Intelligence and gone Frankenstein on them, or someone else had locked into the auto control and was using the machine as a catspaw. That was the trouble with smart machines. Sometimes they got too smart.
It didn't really matter. What did was that he had had to leave a Trooper—had had to leave Leona—in a shallow grave back at Slim's Gas 'n' B-B-Q. If he were to take it through channels, he should get to a radio, call in and wait for the back-up to airlift him back to Apache. But the unwritten regs of the Road Cav only gave him one choice. He had to find the cruiser, and whoever was behind its freakout act, and settle the score.
It was a hell of a pain in the ass being this macho all the time, but he had signed up. He was Cav. There were traditions. Nearly a hundred and fifty years' worth of ghosts in blue stood behind him, and he was required to do them honour.
His wrist tracer was supposed to help the cruiser track him down if he was in jeopardy, but it worked the other way too. The steady beep told him he was on the right trail.
He had not eaten anything but N-R-Gee candies for too long, and it was cold at night, but the morph-plus shots kept the pain away, and the highly unauthorised speed-popsies he filched from the cykeman's stash warded off sleep and fatigue. He was going to come out of this an honourable junkie if he didn't watch himself.
Even if he hadn't had the tracer, he could have tracked the cruiser. The machine left a trail of still-burning ve-hickles and still-warm corpses along the roads.
Driving through the night, flames stood out in the IR shield of his helmet, writhing purple against the velvet dark. A whole chapter of The Sons of the Desert were scattered either side of the highway, lased full of holes, cars carved in sections, fezzes flattened.
The dead cykeman had subscribed to the whole biker bit. His in-helmet sound system was stocked with grand opera. Stack had been through most of the Ring Cycle on the cruiser's trail. The music gave him something he could fix on.
The quality of the desert changed as the road rose. The flat expanses of sand and the parched river beds gave way to standing rocks, sugarloaf mountains, towering mesas and squatting buttes. The highway weaved between monolithic clumps of bare rock. This was perfect ambush country. The Maniax might have gone the.way of the Mescalero Apache, but there were plenty more wannabe savages ready to take to the rocks with their longbows or their laser-sighted sniper rifles.