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The town of Vanishing Lake was very small and very quiet. Crude log-cabin A-frames were the main architectural flavor. A hardware store, market, and gas station were lined up on both sides of the main street. There was a wharf, with rental boats, and next to it was a small bait shop and restaurant with a sign out front that read:

BUCKET A' BAIT

COFFEE SHOP

As Lucky and Hollywood Mike moved slowly down the center of town, several people came out of the hardware store to look at the two unwelcome apparitions. Lucky's feet were back in the plastic bags; Mike was doubled over, holding his ribs.

"Let's try over there," Lucky said, pointing to the coffee shop. "Lemme do the hee-haw. We need ta get money fer a bottle."

They went around to the back, where they could smell breakfast being cooked in the kitchen.

"Hey… hello in there," Lucky said, and banged his hand on the screen. In a minute, a very pretty blond woman came to the door. She was wearing an off-the-shoulder blouse and jeans. An order book was shoved in her waistband, a stubby pencil behind her ear.

"Yes," she said.

"Uh. Mama… good morning," Lucky smiled, beginning his panhandler shuffle. "Me and Mike are real hungry. Bein' it's Sunday mornin', and bein' as Sunday is a Christian time a' charity an' giving, we were wonderin' if we could work for some food? Or, better still, a little money for necessities? Shampoo, a razor, and the like. Anything ya could spare would be appreciated, ma'am." He smiled wider, showing the broken tooth and split lip.

"I'll ask Barry-he runs the place. The raccoons got into the trash, so maybe you could clean that up. Wait a minute, I'll go ask," she said, disappearing. She reappeared a few seconds later with four large sugar doughnuts. She handed them to Lucky and Mike. "Wait over there," she said, pointing to a bench under a pine tree.

"Thanks. I'm Lucky, he's Mike."

"I'm Stacy," the pretty woman said.

Chapter 8

HOBO PRIEST

Eve was seduced by the serpent and bore by him a son. So that first seed revealed in Genesis was the seed of the devil," Reverend Kincaid shouted to the congregation. "That son was Cain, who eventually slew his own brother, Abel."

It was ten o'clock on Sunday morning, and Reverend Fannon Kincaid stood before a makeshift altar in a lean-to chapel constructed from materials scrounged or stolen from houses all up and down the Southern Pacific Railroad track. A huge green nylon tarp was stretched overhead to create a ceiling for the chapel, which was located in the hills above Vanishing Lake not two miles from the prison. The morning sun shone through the nylon and cast an eerie green hue on the worshipers. They sat on logs and boxes or on the hard ground. They looked up at Fannon Kincaid in wonder. Even in these meager surroundings, he seemed larger than life. He towered above his flock.

"So what does this tell us about the second creation?" Fannon thundered, pausing as if to wait for the answer, but, of course, no one dared interrupt. "Tells us Cain was not the son of Adam; Cain was the seed of the devil. Adam was the first and only true white man created by the Lord God. Later Adam gave the second seed to Eve, and they begot Seth, and with him came the glorious beginning of the white godly civilization."

His voice thundered off the back wall of the chapel, which was a piece of plywood leaning up against some grocery store siding.

There were forty worshipers in the congregation: scruffy, unwashed men, and a few tired females with snarled hair. All of them looked homeless. All of them were bending forward slightly to catch every bit of Fannon's holy wisdom; all except for Dexter DeMille, who sat between his two uniformed M. P. guards, wearing pressed Dockers slacks and a pink Ralph Lauren shirt.

"Now, there are those who will say this is heresy. These heathens ask, 'Where in the scriptures does it tell of a second creation?' "

Fannon Kincaid looked out at his flock. His silver-white hair seemed to shimmer in the backlight that came through window holes cut in the makeshift chapel. "For that, we have to turn to the forty-eighth and forty-ninth chapters of Genesis, the prophecies of Jacob for his twelve sons, and look at how the Tribes of Israel were founded and came down to eventually rule the nations of Europe."

The two M. P. S who had brought Dexter DeMille to this Sunday service were Bobby Faragut and Lewis Potter. They were both from the rural South and had been assigned to Vanishing Lake Prison. Dexter thought they were dumb white trash in uniform. Bobby and Lewis had discovered this church while wandering in the hills doing some hunting. Dexter overheard them at the prison one afternoon, talking about the strange hobo priest who lived up here with a band of misfits. After talking to Bobby and Lewis, Dexter thought that Fannon Kincaid might be just what he was looking for. He had petitioned Fort Detrick for the right to attend church services. He had been told okay, but that he had to go under guard. Dexter accepted this condition and had left that Sunday to attend the hobo church with the very M. P. S who had originally told him about it.

"Okay," Fannon thundered. "Let's go to the begats." He glanced down at his Bible for a moment, then looked up, reciting, more or less, from memory. " 'And Israel said thy issue begettest and shall be thine and shall be called after the name of their brethren and I shall bless them. And when Joseph saw that his father had laid his right hand upon the head of Ephar-im, it displeased him and Joseph raised up his father's right hand and tried to put it on Manas-seh's head. This is my first born, Joseph said. Put thy hand on his head first. I know it, my son, Israel replied, but truly his younger brother shall be greater. His seed shall become a multitude of nations! And Israel set Ephar-im before Manas-seh.' " Fannon paused to look at his congregation. "Y'all listening to that? Lemme say it again, 'cause it's real damn important. Israel set Ephar-im before Manas-seh. Joseph's father, Israel, chose one race to be supreme over the other. And that was the White Christian race." The congregation nodded and murmured at this holy wisdom.

What a crock of shit, Dexter thought. He turned his gaze to the congregation of misfits and lost souls. They wore ragtag clothing and weathered complexions. Most had tattoos on their biceps that read "F. T. R. A." One thing about the congregation was horribly out of place: They were all armed to the teeth. The men were carrying every imaginable kind of firearm. The hardware dangled from their belts as they worshiped. Live ammunition hung across their chests in army surplus webbed bandoliers.

"Our Father who art in heaven," they whispered, as Fannon led them, "hallowed be thy name…"

Dexter bowed his head, reciting with them. He didn't know how he would use this collection of throwaway people, but he knew they offered his best possibility of escape. Since the murder of Troy Lee Williams and Sylvester Swift, he'd suspected he was on a very short clock. Admiral Zoll was not above disposing of him once he was satisfied that Dexter had delivered an operational strain of Pale Horse Prion. What had happened to Max Richardson was a testament to Zoll's brutality. Reverend Kincaid could probably get him out of the Black Hills of Texas. Dexter assumed Kincaid had four-wheel-drive vehicles that could climb over the hills and avoid the roadblocks that would instantly be thrown up if he tried to escape.

After the service, they drank lemonade in a three-sided yellow tent with an open flap. Fannon Kincaid sat in an old discarded upholstered chair, his hands out on his knees like the last Pharaoh of Egypt. Dexter sat on a wooden crate, and his two M. P. guards squatted in the dirt near him.

"I never heard of the two-seed theory of creation," Dexter said. "I found that uplifting, very edifying."

"Fd figure a mo-lec-u-lar biologist like yerself would more likely hold with Darwin. Man like you can't possibly believe all that shit I was spoutin'."