The Dead Run (9 page)

 

CHAPTER 13

G
alvan pursued without a thought, a weapon, or a plan. Behind, he could hear the shouts and footfalls of the others, growing louder and closer as his own strength flowed out through those open, seeping wounds. Ahead, he could see nothing but Gutierrez's dust, the big man putting more distance between them every second.

Galvan stumbled over a loose rock, pitched forward, ate dirt, cursed himself. By the time he looked up, his quarry was half a football field away.

“Get back here, you son of a bitch!” Galvan roared from his knees in sheer frustration.

To his amazement, Gutierrez pulled up short just as the words hit the air. Over the strenuous objections of his body, Galvan leapt up, threw on a burst of speed.

Gutierrez remained motionless; he seemed to be staring at something. Galvan traced his sight line, squinted in disbelief, and shifted into overdrive.

A few yards up a bluff to the enforcer's left, the ground was roiling like water coming to a boil. Galvan's only thought was that some burrowing animal must have been tunneling past. But unless the biggest, most cock-diesel prairie dog in the history of the world was remodeling his goddamn kitchen, that explanation didn't hold much water.

Then, from the churning soil, sprouted a hand.

Manicured.

Hot pink.

Why Galvan was still running toward this fucking insanity, he didn't know. But his legs pumped on.

Now there were two hands. Two forearms. And then, like a swimmer boosting herself out of the water and onto the cement ledge of a swimming pool, a girl swung up out of the ground. She brushed the dirt crumbs from her halter top, stood, adjusted her miniskirt, and sauntered toward the frozen Gutierrez as if the desert were a neon-piped stage and he some drooling dupe seated below it with a hard-on and a fistful of dollar bills.

She looked good, but she looked sixteen: breasts full and high and new, hips newer, that walk the newest of all—the gait of a woman just figuring out her body, trying on seduction. Cribbing from movies and older sisters, experimenting with powers she couldn't control and didn't yet understand.

Galvan flashed on that pool table, that spike heel. On that stone slab, that poor girl's eyes as they flared for the final time.

On his daughter, who for all he knew had gone and gotten grown too soon while he'd been off rotting in hell.

Then the fact that he'd just watched a motherfucking girl climb out of the motherfucking ground reasserted itself, and Galvan snapped back to the present. He was no more than ten yards off now, crouched low behind a jutting slab of rock. The girl, or whatever she was, stood before Gutierrez, a coy smile painted on her lips. The enforcer bent his massive head to drink her in, moving in slow motion or perhaps in shock, the box still tucked against his side.

She reached for his cheek with a lithe, graceful arm, caressed it lightly, then strolled a languid circle around him—a dance, practically, fingers trailing across the big man's chest and arms.

Gutierrez stood as still and straight as the stripper's pole she'd made of him. Galvan could see the sweat trembling on his lip, even from here.

She finished her circuit, stood back, and gave him a long, smoldering look.

All of a sudden, Galvan understood something: appearances to the contrary, it wasn't the girl who was on display. It was Gutierrez. She was taking
his
measure, sizing
him
up. Searching for something. The realization filled Galvan with a dread he couldn't begin to understand.

Before he could make any sense of it, two more girls were approaching—from where, Galvan didn't know, hadn't seen, but both of them were just as young and bold and luscious as the first, a peroxide blonde and a brunette. They walked up to Gutierrez like they'd known him all their lives.

The blonde went up on tiptoes, whispered something in his ear. A slow grin spread across his face, and Gutierrez tossed aside the shotgun and the machete and let her ease him down onto the ground. He stretched out on his back, left arm cradling his head and the right clutching the box.

The blonde knelt beside him and began massaging the enforcer's chest. Her friend knelt on his other side and did the same. The girl Galvan had watched emerge from the ground straddled Gutierrez, ground her ass against his crotch for a three-count, then crossed her arms in front of her, grasped the hem of her shirt, and lifted it above her head.

Gutierrez raised both hands to palm her breasts, leaving the box unguarded by his side. Instantly—whip-fast—the girl on his right seized hold of it, spun away, jumped to her feet. The other two looked up, as if sensing it, and all three smiled.

Then they attacked.

Gutierrez managed a single yelp of shock and agony as the girl on top of him dove forward and sank her teeth into his neck. The one beside him buried her face in his thigh. A moment later she threw back her chin, grinning around a bloody chunk of flesh.

Gutierrez howled and writhed, out-without-a-fight the last place he was going. He freed an arm and roundhoused the chick on top of him; her head snapped sideways and scarlet sprayed the ground. The big man pressed his advantage, bucking his frame against the ground until he knocked her loose and then rolling the other way.

They were back on him before he could stand, one at each side of his neck while the brunette struggled with the box a pace away, trying to pry it open, oblivious to the life-and-death clash raging in front of her.

Galvan watched, aghast, as both girls sank their teeth into the big man. He yowled, clamped an arm around each one, and struggled to his feet, then spun around—once, twice, trying to shake them off, failing, the blood running down his sides in wide rivulets now—and finally, he managed to throw the blonde, send all hundred and five pounds of her pinwheeling through the air.

She crashed into the brunette, and both of them went down, a jumble of hair and limbs. The box flew with them, came down a few yards from where Galvan hid.

Without thinking, he dove for it—headfirst, arms stretched straight out in front of him.

Fuckin' Pete Rose, over here.

He landed short, but the momentum sent Galvan skidding across the hard-packed, rocky earth until he could wrap his arms around his prize.

The goddamn thing was beating double time inside, seemed like.

Galvan definitely had the girls' attention now. The one who'd been snacking on Gutierrez abandoned him, and the enforcer dropped like a sack of rocks, the effects of massive blood loss kicking in the instant the adrenaline stopped pumping.

All three sashayed toward Galvan, their movements as synchronized as runway models'.

Fashion Week in hell.

He scrambled to his feet and let them come
.

If I get out of this,
he caught himself thinking,
I'm gonna start going to church again.

Ah
,
who am I bullshitting? No, I'm not.

They arrayed themselves before him, close enough to touch. Every muscle in Galvan's body was itching to get this started—throw the first punch, knock one of them out, shave down his odds. But something held him back.

You don't hit girls, Jess.

No tingling fingertips this time. No premonitions of a fight on the horizon, gathering like a storm.

Girls? If these are girls, I'm Pancho fuckin' Villa.

A cold shudder passed through him. What had Britannica said that was?

Death.

Galvan wondered if he was sensing his own, or theirs.

The future, or the past.

They were circling him now, just like they'd done to Gutierrez. Sensing. Sizing. Judging.

A righteous man . . .

“What are you?” Galvan whispered, his mind racing. He placed a hand atop the box, spread his fingers across the hot metal, felt the thump inside. “
He
did this to you, didn't he? You're . . . like her. He took your . . .”

The brunette opened her mouth and hissed at him, catlike, the sound savage and loud. Galvan clammed up.

The merry-go-round kept spinning. He met their eyes, each girl's in turn, held them as long as he could.

Nobody'd eaten him yet. That was a plus.

The other guys had to be close by now. His protectors. So much for that concept.

The blonde was passing in front of him, for the second time. Galvan lifted his free hand, tapped it to his chin.

“You, uh, you got a little Gutierrez on your face, there, sweetheart.”

No response. Tough crowd. Galvan glanced over at the big man. Black smoke seeped slowly from his body.

Rest in pieces, Gutierrez.

All at once, the girls stopped circling and stepped back.

Galvan waited. His body tensed for action, but a part of him knew none was coming.

He'd been tested. And he'd passed.

As slowly and silently as they'd arrived, the girls drifted away, each in her own direction.

Back to their graves, Galvan thought. How many were there, out here? How many innocent girls, made into monsters because Cucuy had tried and failed?

Galvan heard footfalls behind him and spun in time to see Payaso and Britannica emerge from their hiding places. They stared at him, eyes wide and faces slack.

“Well?” he demanded. “No comments from the peanut gallery?” He strode over to where Gutierrez lay and picked up the machete. “Don't everybody talk at once, now.”

Britannica muttered something into his chest.

“What's that you say, Padre?” Galvan stalked back and forth between the body and the rock. The shotgun was nowhere to be found.

“The Virgin Army,” Britannica repeated. “The legend of the Virgin Army. It's true.”

Payaso rocked back on his heels. “Shit, those bitches were hot, carnal. I don't care if they are dead. I'd donkey-fuck the shit outta any one of 'em.”

Galvan made a ninety-degree turn, walked straight over, and punched Payaso in the face. Just hard enough to knock him to the ground.

Payaso had the good sense to stay there. “I'm just saying,” he mumbled.

“Where's the goddamn shotgun?” Galvan yelled. “And where the fuck is Billy Crystal Meth?”

Payaso cracked up. “Oh, shit, Billy Crystal Meth. You just thought of that? That's actually funny. Full of fuckin' surprises, Galvan.” He shook his head and stood back up.

“Gum disappeared,” Britannica said. “Right after Gutierrez took off.”

They were all quiet for a moment. Contemplating their fellow protector's fate, Galvan assumed. And the power that had turned a loyal man into a traitor so damn fast.

“Well, shit,” he said when the silence had stretched thin. “No gun and no Gum. That's a trade-off I can live with.”

Galvan tucked the box more firmly beneath his arm, tucked the machete into his belt, and set his sights on the horizon, still shimmering with heat.

“Come on. We got some walking to do.”

 

CHAPTER 14

F
or the third time in as many minutes, Nichols glanced up from his contemplation of the scrub brush to see Cantwell lift her phone to the sky, squint up at it, then drop her arm dejectedly to her side.

“Fuckin' Statue of Liberty, over here,” he grunted. “There's no reception, doc. This is the boonies. Accept it.” He jabbed a finger at the dusty ground. “Eyes on the prize. You're the one who wanted to ‘investigate.' So. See anything suspicious?”

She flicked a look at him, like ash from the tip of a cigarette, then slid the phone into her jacket pocket. Shrugged the jacket off her shoulders, baring tanned, toned arms; slung it over her shoulder; and stalked toward him. Nichols stood up straighter, despite himself. No question about it: even with sweat plastering her hair against her face, Ruth Cantwell was what the young bucks on the force would have called a dime piece.

Nichols thought about how a dime couldn't make a phone call and smirked to himself. Then he thought about how long it had been since a call had cost a dime—how long since people had used pay phones, period—and the smirk straightened itself out.

Goddamn, he was old.

“So what's your story, doc?” he asked before the thought could wrap its tendrils any tighter. “Who'd you piss off to end up in South Texas?”

Cantwell raised her eyebrows and shook her head at the ground. “Who didn't I.”

Nichols waited, but she was done.

“Where you from back east?”

She raised her eyes, gave him a twitch of a smile.

“That obvious, huh?”

He shoved his hands into his pockets. “Is it an insult or a compliment if I say yes?”

“A compliment. No offense.”

“None taken.”

She walked a couple of paces toward him and shaded her eyes with her hand. “Born and raised in Connecticut. Got my MD from Yale, then stayed on to do research. I was all about lab work, clinical studies—finding the magic drug cocktail that slows down Alzheimer's, that kind of thing.”

She sighed and daubed the moisture off her forehead with the inside of her wrist. “Then my sister Adrienne left college to live on a commune. My parents freaked out. They're both professors. Law and biology. I told them hey, give her a break, let her take some time and find herself. Good for her, you know, not turning out to be a career-obsessed type-A like the rest of us.” Cantwell blinked a couple of times and Nichols winced, knowing this was headed someplace dark.

She sighed again, bigger than before, and then the words came tumbling out, as if she wanted to get it over with as fast as possible.

“Commune turned out to be a cult. Drugs, charismatic sociopath with a messiah complex, sexual abuse, suicide pacts—textbook shit. Long story short, Nichols, we didn't do enough, and we lost her.”

Nichols had the urge to hug her, to envelop Cantwell in whatever meager comfort his arms could provide. But the moment was over. The doctor's face was closing up again, and he knew it would just embarrass her.

“I'm so sorry,” he managed instead. “I don't know what to say.”

“There's nothing
to
say. After Adrienne's death, I left research and went into practice. Set up shop where I could afford to, and where I thought I could do some good. If there's one thing Texas does not lack . . .”

Cantwell trailed off, and her eyes widened. “There—that's the place Melinda was so scared of. Gotta be.”

Nichols pivoted and saw a low building on the compound's outskirts. The grass, cut low and uniform across most of the grounds, grew high and wild around it.

Before he could reply, Cantwell was trudging toward it, determined now, the distance between them growing with each stride of her long legs. Nichols followed, looking left and right, taking in the empty swing set shimmering in the heat, the bare clotheslines threaded between rusted poles.

Suddenly, Cantwell broke into a run. Instinct kicked in, and Nichols ratcheted up his pace. When he reached her, the doctor was squatting before a paneless window, peering into a dark basement.

“How's that for suspicious?” she demanded.

“Shitty, unless you suspect a baseball game. There's no glass on the ground. This window was broken from the outside. And covered with that.” He indicated a yellow sheet of newspaper, lying on the ground. But even as he said it, Nichols felt his detective mind whir into gear, his eyes pick out a trampled path across the field. He pictured a chagrined kid, chugging over to examine the damage done by a curveball that hadn't curved, meeting the hitter's bat right on the letters and arcing through the clear low sky.

Then he saw a second path.

It hugged the building.

Now
that
was interesting.

He sized it up, stepped into it. Cantwell rose, noticed, fell in wordlessly behind.

Nichols inched along, playing the scenario out in his mind: Sherry Richards imprisoned in the basement, spotting an already-broken window, hauling herself up through it.

Fail. Not even the dumbest rent-a-thug left his victim alone and ambulatory in a room with a broken window.

Next theory. Sherry Richards rescued by a mysterious glass-shattering savior and spirited away to safety.

Possible.

Sherry Richards sitting in a movie theater right now, enjoying a box of fucking Junior Mints and a state-of-the-art air conditioner, pissed off at her batshit-crazy mom and in no mood to go back to the shithole she called home.

Bingo.

They turned the corner and Cantwell darted in front of him, past an outcropping of slate and into the open field. She stopped and bent, then turned and thrust an open palm at him. Laid atop it was a pink elastic thingy, the kind girls used to tie back their hair.

Nichols felt his heartbeat jump into a higher register. “Give it here,” he said in a sharp whisper, stepping closer. “And keep moving. Aimlessly. Act like you're giving up.”

“But this—”

He snatched it from her, brought it to his nose, inhaled.

Chlorine. And not a swimming pool for miles.

He jammed it deep into his pocket. Some company for Cantwell's business card.

“It's hers, isn't it?” the doctor asked, crossing her arms. As if, suddenly, she hoped it wasn't.

“If it is, they're watching us right now. Which is why we're gonna make a big show of throwing in the towel and slinking off with our tails between our legs. You understand?”

She did. Three minutes later, they were back in Cantwell's car, making a highly visible departure. Nichols considered knocking on Seth's door again, offering him a hat-in-hand apology for the trouble, the insinuations, but he didn't have a hat and he couldn't trust Ruth to mind her manners. He settled for a couple of tossed-off, too-loud remarks as he jacked open the Audi's passenger door,
I told you this was gonna be a dead end
and the like.

He'd never been much of a liar, but then again, things generally turned out pretty shitty when he told the truth, so maybe it was time to turn a new leaf over.

Three minutes after that, they'd posted up on the shoulder of the road, the compound's entrance a hundred yards behind them, framed in the rearview mirror.

As inconspicuous as two people in a fifty-thousand-dollar cherry-red sports car could be.

“So now what?” she asked, drumming her manicure against the leather steering wheel. “We just wait?”

“We see who comes and goes. If they're mixed up in something—”

“ ‘If'? Are you fucking kidding me?”

Nichols made a show of sighing. “—then trust me, it won't be quiet for long.”

“He's literally covered in blood, Sheriff.”

Nichols slid back against the seat until they were face-to-face. “No, he's not. What you mean is that he's
figuratively
covered in blood.
Figurative
is the exact opposite of
literal
. You're using the single most incorrect word in the entire English language.”

Silence. He could feel her stewing beside him.

“I see my mistake now,” she said slowly, as if it were just dawning on her. “See, I thought you were the police. I didn't realize you were just the
grammar
police.”

The comeback was a touch late, but it was right on time. Nichols couldn't help but laugh. Cantwell kept a straight face, so as not to undermine her position, but he could tell she was patting herself on the back inside.

“Look,” he said after a beat, “I'm not saying you're wrong, okay? I'm saying we know nothing. Sherry could be miles away by now, or they could have grabbed her before she got twenty feet. Stashed her someplace we'd never find, poking around.”

He raised an eyebrow at Cantwell—a top-five move in Nichols's professional repertoire. “Or maybe some eight-year-old's ponytail came loose last month during a game of freeze tag.”

Cantwell continued to look straight ahead. “The man's a monster, Nichols. And I mean that literally.” She slumped lower in her seat. “According to Melinda, he's got these . . .”

“These what?”

“These powers.” She rubbed her eyes with a thumb and forefinger. “I'm not saying it's true. Just that he's got his ‘flock' convinced. Melinda told me point-blank that she'd seen him read minds. And heal diseases.”

“Pretty easy to read minds if you've already filled them with horseshit.”

“Seth's big thing is that a new world is about to be born—through him, naturally. Some Aztec god is gonna anoint him with powers or something.”

“Yeah, you mentioned. And the Virgin Army is connected to that how?”

“I don't know that it is, in terms of the theology. I think he's trafficking girls into Mexico to fund his organization, plain and simple. Some of them turn up dead, and then the legends start. People can't face a gruesome reality, so they make up an even more gruesome story.”

Nichols stroked his chin. Coulda sworn he'd shaved today, but the stubble said otherwise. “I dunno, doc, maybe there's more to it than that. If this guy really believes he's some Aztec priest”—he gestured emptily, feeling out of his league—“I dunno, sacrificial virgins seems like the same general field of . . . stuff. Those guys were always throwing girls into volcanoes and whatnot, right?”

Cantwell pulled her hair back, then let it fall loose over her shoulders. “Your knowledge of anthropology is stunning, Sheriff.”

Nichols smiled. The doctor was on a roll. “Well, I—”

A savage rumble of engines brought him up short. They turned in time to see a swarm of Harley-Davidsons burning up the highway: twelve or fifteen of them, chrome pipes throwing sun back at the sky, exhaust streams wobbling the air.

One bike broke away from the pack and made a sweeping left turn, through Seth's ramshackle gates. The rider was a massive slab of a man, clad in an old-school chin-strap helmet and a black leather vest, his beefy sunbaked arms like an extension of the hog's high handlebars.

Cantwell squinted to make out the red, white, and blue rocker emblazoned on the back of his cut, as the other bikes followed the leader and a cloud of dust bloomed from the unpaved road.

“True Natives. Why does that ring a bell?”

Nichols's face was grim. “You probably read about 'em in the paper. They call themselves a border-patrol group, but they're really just a glorified bunch of outlaws. Leader's a local scumbag by the name of Kurt Knowles—low-level drug mule turned American patriot. Likes to talk tough about shooting immigrants on sight, but he's never done shit. That looked like him leading the pack.”

Nichols moved his hand until it rested atop his service revolver. “What they're doing here, I have no idea. But I don't like it one bit.”