If I can’t, I have to make sure he can’t either. Or she. Or whatever in hell it is.
She bent into the car again, wincing at the sour smell (and keeping an eye on the nasty statuette in the footwell, as if it might come to life and leap at her). She yanked the hood release, then walked around to the front of the car. She felt along the top of the grille for the catch, found it, and raised the Caprice’s hood. The engine inside was huge, but she had no trouble spotting the air-cleaner. She leaned over it, grasped the butterfly nut in the center, and applied pressure. Nothing happened.
She hissed with frustration and blinked more sweat out of her eyes. It stung. A little over a year ago, she had read poems as part of a cultural event called “Women Poets Celebrate Their Sense and Sexuality.” She had worn a suit from Donna Karan, and a silk blouse underneath. Her hair had been freshly done, feathered in bangs across her brow. Her long poem, “My Vase,” had been quite the hit of the evening. Of course all that had been before her visit to the historic and beautiful China Pit, home of the unique and fascinating Rattlesnake Number Two mine. She doubted if any of the people who had heard her read “My Vase”-
smooth sided fragrance of stems
rimmed with shadows
curved like the
line of a shoulder
the line of a thigh
-at that event would recognize her now. She no longer recognized herself.
Her right hand, the one she was using on the air- cleaner, itched and throbbed. The fingers slipped. A nail tore painfully, and she gasped. “Please God, help me do this, I wouldn’t know the distributor cap from the camshaft, so it has to be the carburetor. Please help me be strong enough to-”
This time when she applied pressure, the butterfly nut turned.
“Thanks,” she panted. “Oh yeah, thanks very much. You stay close. And take care of David and the others, will you? Don’t let them leave this shithole without me.”
She spun the butterfly nut off and let it fall into the engine. She pulled the air-cleaner off its post and tossed it aside, revealing a carburetor almost as big as … well, almost as big as a vase. Laughing, Mary squatted, got a fistful of China Pit, pushed down a metal flapthingie over one of the carb’s chambers, and stuffed the sand and rock in. She added two more handfuls, filling the throat of the carburetor, strangling it, then stepped back.
“Let’s see you drive that, you bitch,” she panted.
Hurry. Mary, you have to hurry.
She shone the flashlight over the parked equipment. There were two pickup trucks among the bigger, bulkier stuff. She walked across to them and shone the light into the cabs. No keys here, either. But there was a hatchet in with the litter of equipment in the back of the Ford F-150, and she used it to flatten two tires on both trucks. She started to throw the hatchet away, then reconsidered. She shone the light around once more, and this time she saw the gaping vaguely square hole twenty yards or so up from the bottom of the pit.
There. The source of all this trouble.
She didn’t know how she knew that, if it was the voice or God or just some intuition of her own, and she didn’t care. Right now she only cared about one thing: getting the bloody hell out of here.
She snapped off the flash-the moon would give her all the light she needed, at least for awhile-and began to trudge up the road which led out of China Pit.
The Literary Lion stood by the computers set up at one end of the long table, looking across the lab toward the far wall, where over a dozen people had been hung on hooks like experimental subjects in a Nazi deathcamp All pretty much the way Steve and Cynthia had described it, except for one thing: the woman hanging just beneath the words YOU MUST WEAR A HARDHAT, the one whose head was cocked so far over to the right that her cheek lay on her shoulder, looked weirdly like Terry.
You know that’s just your imagination, don ‘t you?
Did he? Well, maybe. But, God! . . . the same red-gold hair.. . the high forehead and slightly crooked nose…
“Never mind her nose,” he said. “You got a crooked nose of your own to worry about. So just get out of here, okay?”
But at first he couldn’t move. He knew what he had to do-cross the room and start going through their pockets, pulling the car-keys-but knowing wasn’t the same as doing. To reach in, to feel the stiff dead skin of their legs under his hand with only the thin pocket material between him and it . .. to handle their stuff.., not just car-keys but pocket-knives and nail-clippers and maybe aspirin-tins- Everything people keep in their pockets is hyphenated he thought. How fascinating. Ticket-stubs, money-clips, change-purses- “Stop,” he whispered. “Just go on and do it.”
The radio blurted static like gunfire. He jumped. No music. It was past midnight, and the local shitkickers had signed off. They would be back with another load of Travis Tritt and Tanya Tucker come sunrise, but with any luck, John Edward Marinville, the man Harper’s had once called the only white male writer in America who matters, would be gone.
If you go, it’s over.
Brushing at his face as though the thought were an annoying fly he could shoo away, Johnny started across the room. He supposed he was deserting them, in a manner of speaking, but be real-they had the means to leave themselves if they wanted to, didn’t they? As for him, he was heading back to a life where folks didn’t spout nonsense languages and rot before your eyes. A life where you could count on people’s last growth-spurts to have taken place by the time they were eighteen. His leather chaps brushed against each other as he approached the corpses. Yes, all right, so for the moment he felt less like a literary lion than one of the ARVN looters he had seen in Quang Tn, looking for gold religious medallions on the corpses, sometimes even separating the buttocks of the dead in hopes of finding a diamond or pearl, but that was a specious comparison.. . and would turn out to be a transitory feeling, he was quite sure.
Looting corpses wasn’t what he was here for at all. Keys-a set that matched one of the cars in the parking lot-was what he was here for and all he was here for. Furthermore- Furthermore the dead girl under YOU MUST WEAR A HARDHAT really did look like Terry. A strawberry-blonde with a bullet-hole in her lab coat. Of course, Terry’s strawberry-blond days were long gone, she was mostly gray now, but- You ‘II wish you stayed when you start smelling Tak on your skin.
“Oh, please,” he said. “Let’s not be puerile.”
He looked to the left, wanting to get his eyes off the dead blonde who looked so much like Terry-Terry back in the days when she had been able to drive him wild just by crossing her legs or flipping her hip at him-and what he saw made him grin hopefully. There was an ATV over there. Parked inside the garage door like it was, he thought there was a better than even chance that the keys would be in the ignition. If they were, he would at least be spared the indignity of going through the pockets of Entragian’s victims-or maybe he had been Josephson when he’d done this, not that it mattered. All he’d have to do would be unhook the ore carrier, run up the garage door, and ride away..
… when you start smelling Tak on your skin.
Maybe he would smell it to start with, but he wouldn’t smell it for long. David Carver might be a prophet, but he was a young prophet, and there were a few things he didn’t seem to realize, direct line to God or no. One was the simple fact that stink washed off. Yes indeed it did. That was one of the few things in life Johnny was entirely sure of.
And the key to the ATV was, praise God, in the ignition.
He leaned in, turned the key to Accessory, and observed there was also more than three quarters of a tank of gas. “All sevens, baby,” he said, arid laughed. “Rolling all sevens now.”
He went to the back of the little Jeep-like vehicle and examined the ore-cart coupling. No problem there, either. Just a glorified cotter pin was all it was. He’d find a hammer. . .
knock it out…
Not even Houdini could have done it, Marinville. It was the old rumdum’s voice this time. Because of the head. And what about the phone? What about the sardines?