Halfway up, another path split off, apparently circling back to the defunct gift shop and the parking lot. Here was a weather-worn, bullet-pocked wooden sign showing an Indian chief in full headdress. Below him was an arrow, the accompanying message so faded it was barely legible: BEST PICTOGRAPHS THIS WAY. More recently, some wit had drawn a Magic Marker word balloon coming from the big chief’s mouth. It read CAROLYN ALLEN SUCKS MY REDSKIN COCK.
This path was broader, but Jack had not come here to admire Native American art, so he continued upward. The climb was not particularly dangerous, but Jack’s exercise over the last few years had mostly consisted of bending his elbow in various bars. By the time he was three-quarters of the way up, he was short of breath. His shirt and both bandannas were dark with sweat. He set the gun case and pitchfork down, then bent and gripped his knees until the dark specks dancing in front of his eyes disappeared and his heart rate returned to something like normal. He had come here to avoid a terrible death from the sort of ravenous, skin-eating cancer that had taken his mother. Dying of a myocardial infarction while trying to do that would be a bitter joke.
He started to straighten up, then paused, squinting. In the shade beneath an overhanging ledge, safe from the worst of the elements, there was more graffiti. But if these had been left by kids, they were long dead, and for many hundreds of years. One showed stick men with stick spears surrounding what might have been an antelope—something with horns, anyway. In another, stick men were standing in front of what looked like a tepee. In a third—almost too faded to make out—a stick man was standing over the prone body of another stick man, his spear raised in triumph.
Pictographs, Jack thought, and not even the best ones, according to the big chief back there. Kindergarten kids could do better, but they’ll be here long after I’m gone. Especially if the cancer gets me.
The idea made him angry. He picked up a chunk of sharp rock and hammered at the pictographs until they were obliterated.
There, he thought. There, you dead fuckers. You’re gone and I win.
It occurred to him that he might be going crazy . . . or had already gone. He pushed that away and resumed his climb. When he reached the top of the bluff, he found he had a fine view of the parking lot, the gift shop, and the boarded-up entrance to the Marysville Hole. His visitor with the tats on his fingers wasn’t sure the meddlers would come here, but if they did, Jack was to handle them. Which he could do with the Winchester, he had no doubt of that. If they didn’t come—if they just returned to Flint City after talking to the man they’d come to talk to—Jack’s work would be done. Either way, the visitor assured him, Jack would be as good as new. No cancer.
What if he’s lying? What if he can give it, but not take it away? Or what if it’s not really there at all? What if he’s not there? What if you’re just crazy?
These thoughts he also pushed away. He opened the gun case, took out the Winchester, and mounted the sight. It put the parking lot and the entrance to the cave right in front of him. If they came, they would be as big as the ticket booth he’d gone around.
Jack crawled into the shade of an overhanging rock (first checking for snakes, scorpions, or other wildlife) and had a drink of water, swallowing a couple of pep-pills with it. He added a toot from the four-gram bottle Cody had sold him (no freebies when it came to Colombian marching powder). Now it was just a stakeout, like dozens he’d been on during his career as a cop. He waited, dozing intermittently with the Winchester laid across his lap but always alert enough to detect movement, until the sun was low in the sky. Then he got to his feet, wincing at the stiffness in his muscles.
“Not coming,” he said. “At least not today.”
No, the man with the finger tattoos agreed. (Or Jack imagined he agreed.) But you’ll be back here tomorrow, won’t you?
Indeed he would. For a week, if that was what it took. A month, even.
He headed back down, moving carefully; the last thing he needed after hours in the hot sun was a busted ankle. He stowed his rifle in the lockbox, drank some more water from the bottle he’d left in the truck’s cab (it was now tepid going on hot) and drove back to the highway, this time turning toward Tippit, where he might be able to buy some supplies: sunblock for sure. And vodka. Not too much, he had a responsibility to fulfil, but maybe enough so he could lie down on his crappy swaybacked bed without thinking about how that shoe had been pushed into his hand. Jesus, why had he ever gone out to that fucking barn in Canning Township?
He passed Claude Bolton’s car going back the other way. Neither noticed the other.
9
“All right,” Lovie Bolton said when Claude was down the road and out of sight. “What’s this all about? What is it you didn’t want my boy to hear?”
Yune ignored her for the moment, turning to the others. “The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office sent a couple of deputies out to look at the places Holly photographed. They found a pile of bloody clothes in that abandoned factory with the swastika spray-painted on the side. One of the items was an orderly’s jacket with a tag reading PROPERTY OF HMU sewn into it.”
“Heisman Memory Unit,” Howie said. “When they analyze the blood on the clothes, what do you want to bet it turns out to be from one or both of the Howard girls?”
“Plus any fingerprints they find will belong to Heath Holmes,” Alec added. “They may be blurry, if he’d started his change.”
“Or not,” Holly said. “We don’t know how long the change takes, or even if it’s the same every time.”
“The sheriff up there has questions,” Yune said. “I put him off. Considering what we might be dealing with, I hope I can put him off forever.”
“You folks need to stop talking amongst yourselves and fill me in,” Lovie said. “Please. I’m worried about my boy. He’s as innocent as those other two men, and they are both dead.”
“I understand your concern,” Ralph said. “One minute. Holly, when you were filling the Boltons in on the ride from the airport, did you tell them about the graveyards? You didn’t, did you?”
“No. Just hit the high spots, you said. So that’s what I did.”
“Oh, hold it,” Lovie said. “Just hold the phone. There was a movie I saw when I was a girl in Laredo, one of those wrestling women movies—”
“Mexican Wrestling Women Meet the Monster,” Howie said. “We saw it. Ms. Gibney brought a copy. Not Academy Award material, but interesting, just the same.”
“That was one of the ones Rosita Mu?oz was in,” Lovie said. “The cholita luchadora. We all wanted to be her, me and my friends. I even dressed up like her one Halloween. My mother made my costume. That movie about the cuco was a scary one. There was a professor . . . or a scientist . . . I don’t remember which, but El Cuco took his face, and when the luchadoras finally tracked him down, he was living in a crypt or a vault in the local graveyard. Isn’t that how the story went?”
“Yes,” Holly said, “because that’s part of the legend, at least the Spanish version of it. The cuco sleeps with the dead. Like vampires are supposed to do.”
“If this thing actually exists,” Alec said, “it is a vampire, at least sort of. It needs blood to make the next link in the chain. To perpetuate itself.”
Once again Ralph thought, Do you people hear yourselves? He liked Holly Gibney a lot, but he also wished he’d never met her. Thanks to her there was a war going on in his head, and he wished mightily for a truce.
Holly turned to Lovie. “That empty factory where the Ohio police found the bloody clothes is close to the graveyard where Heath Holmes and his parents are buried. More clothes were found in a barn not far from an old graveyard where some of Terry Maitland’s ancestors are buried. So here’s the question: Is there a graveyard close to here?”
Lovie considered. They waited. At last she said, “There’s a boneyard in Plainville, but nothing in Marysville. Hell, we don’t even have a church. There used to be one, Our Lady of Forgiveness, but it burned down twenty years ago.”
“Shit,” Howie muttered.