The FBI — and the soldiers, if there are any — will be conducting a sweep south to north, the direction in which Gabby and Curtis and Old Yeller now flee. They’ll be highly trained in search-and-secure procedures, and most if not all of them will be equipped with night-vision goggles.
Peripherally, to his left, Curtis becomes aware of a faint pearly radiance close to the earth. Alarmed, he glances west and sees what appears to be a low skim of mist blanketing the ground, but then he realizes he’s looking out across the salt flats not from a higher perspective, as before, but from the zero elevation of the valley floor. The illusory mist is in fact the natural phosphorescence of the barren plain, the ghost of the long-dead sea.
The hard whack of chopper blades abruptly softens, accompanied by a wheezy whistle of decelerating rotation. The aircraft is on the ground.
They’re coming. They’ll be efficient and fast.
Hurrying north, Curtis is worried, but not primarily about the men in the helicopter or those in the two SUVs that are probably even now descending the valley wall. Worse enemies have arrived.
The intervening buildings foil thermal-reading and motion-detection gear. They also somewhat, but not entirely, screen the telltale energy signature that only Curtis emits.
Because of the natural fluorescence of the nearby salt fields, the night isn’t as black as it was just moments ago. Curtis can see Gabby ahead, and the dog’s white flags.
The caretaker doesn’t run in the usual sense of the word, but progresses in the herky-jerky fashion that his presumed grandfather displayed when, in those movie moments of high jeopardy, he had said, Dang, we better skedaddle. This Gabby moves fast in a skedaddle, but he keeps stopping to look back, waving his gun, as if he expects to discover a villain of one kind or another looming point-blank over him every time he turns.
Curtis wants to scream Move-move-move, but Gabby is probably an ornery cuss who always does things his way and who won’t react well to instruction.
Though the search squads must be pouring out of the helicopter, there’s no light to the south, where they landed. They’re conducting a natural-conditions exploration, because they believe that their high-tech gear makes darkness their friend.
In addition to the buildings, commotion screens Curtis, too, makes it more difficult for the hunters to read his special energy signature, and there’s going to be plenty of commotion coming in mere seconds.
In fact, it starts with screaming. The shrieks of a grown man reduced by terror to the condition of a small child.
Gabby hitches to a halt again and squints back along the route they followed, his pistol jabbing this and that way as he seeks a threat.
Clutching the caretaker by the arm, Curtis urges him onward.
Towards the south end of town, two men are screaming. Now three or even four. How suddenly the horror struck, and how rapidly it escalates.
“Criminy! What’s that?” Gabby wonders, his voice quaking.
Curtis tugs at him, and the caretaker starts to move again, but then the screams are punctuated by the rattle and crack of automatic-weapons fire.
“The fools blastin’ at each other’?”
“Go, go, go,” Curtis demands, guided now by panic that overrides all sense of diplomacy, trying to muscle the old man into motion once more.
Men being torn apart, men being gutted, men being eaten alive would scream no more chillingly than this.
In skittles and lurches, the caretaker heads north again, Curtis at his side rather than behind him, the dog preceding them, as if, by some psychic perception, she knows where to find the barn-what-ain’t-a-barn.
With only half the town behind them, as they arrive at another passageway between buildings, a strange light flares to their right, out in the street, framed for their view by a tunnel of plank walls. Sapphire and scintillant, as brief as fireworks, it twice pulses, the way that a luminous jellyfish propels itself through the sea. Out of the subsequent gloom, while a negative image of the pyrotechnic burst still blossoms like a black flower in Curtis’s vision, a smoldering dark mass hurtles from the street into the passage, tumbling end-over-end toward them.
Spry but graceless in the manner of a marionette jerked backward on its control strings, all bony shoulders and sharp elbows and knobby knees, Gabby springs out of the way with surprising alacrity. Curtis jukes, and the dog bolts for cover.
With shot-out-of-a-cannon velocity, a stone-dead man caroms off the flanking buildings, extremities noisily flailing the palisades of the narrow passageway, as though he’s the apparition in a high-speed seance, rapping out a dire warning from the Other Side. He bursts into the open and explodes past Curtis. A lightning-struck scarecrow, spat out by a raging tornado, could not have been cast off with any greater force than this, and the carcass finally comes to rest in the tattered, bristling, yet boneless posture of a cast-down cornfield guardian. The steaming stink of him, however, is indescribably worse than a scarecrow’s wet straw, moldering clothes, and moth-infested flour-sack face.
On the victim’s sprung chest, scorched and wrinkled but still readable, a large white F and a large white I bracket the missing, blown-out B.
Ornery cuss or not, arthritic or not, the grizzled caretaker recognizes big trouble when he sees it, and he finds in himself the comparatively more youthful energy and nimbleness that his famous elder had shown in earlier films like Bells of Rosarita and The Arizona Kid. He sets out spang for the barn, as if challenging the dog to a race, and Curtis hurries after him, playing the sidekick’s sidekick.
Screams, anxious shouts, and gunfire echo among the buildings, and then comes an eerie sound — priong, priong, priong, priong — such as the stiff steel tines of a garden rake might produce if they could be plucked as easily as the strings of a fiddle.
One Curtis Hammond lies dead in Colorado, and another now runs headlong toward a grave of his own.
Chapter 31
Buttons gleamed, badges flashed, buckles shone on the khaki uniforms of the cops milling outside the front door of Cielo Vista Care Home.
Martin Vasquez, general manager of this facility, stood apart from the police, beside one of the columns that supported the loggia trellis. Called from bed at a bleak hour, he had nonetheless taken time, as an expression of respect, to dress in a dark suit.
In his forties, Vasquez had the smooth face and the guileless eyes of a pious young novitiate. As he watched Noah Farrel approach, he looked as though he would have gladly traded this night’s duty for vows of poverty and celibacy. “I’m so sorry, so sick about this. If you’ll come to my office, I’ll try to make sense of it for you, as much as can be made.”
Noah had been a cop for only three years, but he’d been present at four homicide scenes in that time. The expressions on the faces and in the eyes of these attending officers matched the look that he had once turned upon the grieving relatives in those cases. Sympathy formed part of it, but also a simmering suspicion that persisted even after a perpetrator was identified. In certain types of homicides, a family member is more likely to be involved than a stranger, and regardless of what the facts of the case appear to be, it’s always wise to consider who might gain financially or be freed of an onerous responsibility by the death in question.
Paying for Laura’s care had been not a burden, but the purpose of his existence. Even if these men believed him, however, he would till see the keen edge of suspicion sheathed in their sympathy.
One of the cops stepped forward as Noah followed Vasquez to the front door. “Mr. Farrel, I’ve got to ask you if you’re carrying.”