The radio muttered a little Willie Nelson.
He wiped his eyes with one hand and checked the rearview mirror. Nothing back there but black.
Nothing ahead but more black.
The speedometer topped seventy.
If he were lucky, if he were really lucky, he'd be home by two and asleep by two-ten, assuming he made it as far as the bedroom. Two-five if he couldn't get past the couch.
He laughed, more like a giggle, and rolled down the window when he felt a yawn coming. Drunk or not, he knew enough to understand that cold air blasting the side of his face was infinitely preferable to dozing off and ending up nose-down in a ditch, his head through the windshield.
The air smelled good.
The engine's grumble was steady.
"And so am I," he declared to the road. "Steady as a rock and twice as hard."
Another laugh, another belch.
It had been a good night. No, it had been a great night. Those pinheads in Santa Fe, thinking they knew ahead of the rest of the world what the next artsy trend would be, had decided he was it. Living collages, they called it; the desert genius, they called him.
"My God!" he yelled, half in joy, half in derision.
After a dozen years trying to sell paintings even he couldn't abide, he'd sliced a small cactus in half, glued it to a canvas, added a few tiny bird bones and a couple of beads, called it something or other, and as a lark, brought it north.
They loved it.
They fucking loved it.
He had meant it as a thumbed nose at their pretensions, and they had fallen over themselves trying to buy it.
The wind twisted through the car, tangling his long blond hair, tugging at it, threatening a headache.
Five years later, twenty-five carefully assembled when he was roaring drunk canvases later, his bank account was fat, his home was new, his car was turned in every year, and the women were lined up six to the dozen, just waiting for his living desert fingers to work their magic on them.
It almost made him sick.
It didn't make him stupid.
Trends were little more than fads, and he knew full well that the next season might be his last. Which was why he needed to hole up for a while, work through an even dozen more projects, and get himself out before he ended up like the others — flat broke and saying, "I used to be someone, you know, really, I was," while they cadged another beer from a stranger in a strange bar.
The speedometer topped eighty.
The headache began.
Acid bubbled in his stomach.
The back of his hand scrubbed across his face, and when his vision cleared, he saw something to the right, just beyond the edge of the light.
He frowned as he stared at it, then yelped as the car followed his stare and angled for the shoulder. The correction was too sharp, and he swung off toward the wide empty median, swung back again, hit the accelerator instead of the brakes, and yelled soundlessly when the right-side tires bit into the earth off the blacktop.
The car shuddered.
He froze — turn into the skid? turn out of the skid? — and watched in horror as the low shrubs and deep ditch charged him and veered away at the last minute, putting him back on the road.
Sweat masked his face.
His bladder demanded immediate relief.
His left hand shook so much he thrust it between his knees and squeezed until it calmed.
"My God," he whispered. "Jesus, man, Jesus."
Twenty-five, he swore to himself; he didn't care if it took until dawn, he wouldn't go faster than twenty-five all the way home.
He wasn't sober, but he sure as hell wasn't as drunk as he had been.
The speedometer reached fifty.
He saw the needle, saw it climb again slowly, and decided it would be all right. Sixty, no more; he'd be home quicker, and that was okay because he was a menace to himself out here.
A hard swallow, a deep breath, his right hand flicking the radio off because what he didn't need now was interference with his concentration. Just watch the road, pay no attention to anything that—
He saw it again.
Just a suggestion of movement running with him on the other side of the ditch. Which was impossible. He was doing sixty-five, for God's sake, there wasn't anything except another car that could go that fast.
He squinted a stare, broke it off when the car began to drift, and licked his lips.
There wasn't anything over there.
Good God, there couldn't be anything over there. It was the headlights, that's all, running along a row of juniper maybe, or some pinon, rock, something like that. His eyes caught the strobelike reflection, and the scotch turned it into something that paced him.
That's all it was.
He wished the moon were a little brighter.
Forget the new canvases, he decided a half-mile later; the hell with it, he was done. He had enough money, the house was paid for, what the hell more could he want?
The car jumped sideways when something slammed into the passenger door.
He yelled, and watched his hands blur around the wheel, watched the road blur black to gray and black again, screamed when the car was struck a second time, and looked over to see what drunken idiot was trying to run him off the road.
There was nothing there.
When he looked back, it was too late.
The highway was gone.
All he could do was cross his arms in front of his face, close his eyes, and scream.
There was no fire, no explosion.
Mike Ostrand hung upside down in his seat-belt, listening to the engine tick, listening to the wind blow through the open window.
Listening to the hiss he thought was the tires spinning to a halt.
A few seconds later, he blacked out when something reached through the window and touched his arm.
EIGHT
La Mosca Inn sat between the Rio Grande and a high adobe wall that fronted the road. Eight units extended left and right from a central two-story building that housed the office, a large flagstone waiting room cooled by a small sparking fountain, and a restaurant large enough to seat one hundred without elbows and voices clashing. Spanish tile on the roof, shade provided by cottonwood and mountain ash, and a single huge Russian olive in the center of the courtyard.
Scully sat on a wood bench that ringed the massive tree, facing the arched entrance whose elaborate iron gates were closed each night at, the proprietor told her, precisely midnight. She let her eyes close, and touched a finger to her forehead, to trap a droplet of sweat that had broken from her hairline.
"Feeling better?" a voice rasped beside her.
"Not really."
The day had gone wrong from minute one: she'd overslept and had to race to the airport, only to learn that the flight had been delayed. For an hour. Then two. Once airborne, she had planned to set up her laptop computer, so she and Mulder could go over what details of the case they had.
It didn't happen.
Roller-coaster turbulence rode them all the way to Dallas, making reading the computer screen a nauseating experience; she spent most of the time trying, and failing, to doze. Then a series of thunderstorms ringing the Texas city forced them to swerve wide into a holding pattern until the squall line had passed. Another hour lost, and so was their connecting flight.
"Cursed," Mulder had said at one point. "This whole thing is cursed."
By the time they landed in Albuquerque, she was ready to believe in curses; by the time Red Garson had sped them in his Jeep out of the city, north to Bernalillo, she was ready to spend the rest of her life walking.
The man beside her shifted to get her attention.
She opened her eyes and smiled at him wanly.
Red was as Mulder had told her, a tall, lean, middle-aged man whose lined face and hands spoke of time spent in the mountains and the desert. She had no idea where he'd gotten his nickname, because his blond hair was pale, his blue eyes dark; part of his left ear was missing, bitten off, he told her, in a fight with a man who had a strong aversion to spending the rest of his life in federal prison.