A Festival of Murder (17 page)

“My
father used to own a fishing store up near Yosemite. Fishin’ Tail is what he
called it. Had all sorts of things for sale and rent, camping supplies—you name
it. It was terrible.”

Nicholas
frowned at the back of the taller man’s head. “Terrible?”

“Here
he was with this huge store and tens of thousands of dollars in merchandise and
no one to sell it all to because of a government grant that was meant to help
bolster the economy. National Park Service built a new road that took tourists
on a more scenic drive up to the park and in the process destroyed my father’s
economy. Dried it up just like an obsolete fishing hole. Within three months,
he was in the red and hounded by creditors. I always thought I’d be forced to
take over the store one day—dreaded it, to be honest. It was a money pit and
here my father was going to saddle me with all that debt. But when I was off
doing my first tour in Iraq, he burned the place down.”

“He
burned the place down? You mean like an accident, or—?” Nicholas was afraid to
complete the question.

Horace
threw him a grin from over his shoulder. “You can say it, Trilby. You want to
know if my father did it for the insurance money, don’t you?”

“The
thought never crossed my mind.”

“Uh
huh. Well, to answer the question that never crossed your mind, yeah, he did
it. Got away with it, too. Nice settlement and all.”

Nicholas
didn’t know what to say. “Congratulations on defrauding the insurance company”
seemed a bit facetious. Especially said to a man who’d been in the military and
possessed lethal skills.

Horace
paused beside a display of stacked cans of corn. With a surprisingly delicate
touch considering his large hands, he adjusted a can that jutted out and was
marring the precise line of the triangle.

“The
only problem was,” Horace went on, “a reporter got suspicious and began
investigating the fire and what led up to it. He was looking for his first big
story, and he dug his teeth into it.” Horace’s shoulders hunched up, and
Nicholas found himself glad he was behind the big man and not within easy reach
of an angry punch. “He figured out what my father did and wrote up an expose.
Insurance investigators and the police got wind of it, and the rest is history.
My father went to prison for fraud.” He turned burning eyes on Nicholas. “He
died of a heart attack while he was in there. I never did find that bastard.”

“Your
dad?”

“I’m
talking about the reporter.” Nicholas thought Horace would have spat on the
floor if said floor wasn’t within his own store. “I stopped trusting the whole
lot of them after that.”

A
thought occurred to Nicholas. “What was his name? The reporter.”

“Jeremiah
Wilcox.” Horace’s mouth moved as if he were trying to clear the taste of the
name from it. “It’s stitched onto my brain. I’ll never forget it.”

Disappointed,
but not altogether surprised since it would have been too neat of a coincidence
if Rocky had been the same reporter, Nicholas said, “What happened to him?”

“Wilcox
won some sort of award for investigative journalism and then he skipped town.
Slept with an editor’s wife is what I heard. As soon as I catch up with him, I’m
going to shove that plaque right up his—well, you get the picture.” Horace
glanced at the customers but none appeared to be paying him and Nicholas any
attention as they navigated the aisles. “Rocky Johnson was cut from the same
cloth as Wilcox. As soon as that SOB showed up here, I had my eye on him. I
knew he was bad news. Him dying in an accident just saved someone the trouble,
if you know what I mean.”

A
chill moved across Nicholas’s skin. “Surely, you wouldn’t have condoned someone
killing him though?” As soon as he spoke the question, he realized how
ridiculous it was asking it of a former mercenary. He nearly added,
for free
,
but thought better of it.

“A
lot of guys deserve it. Not saying Johnson did,” Horace added with a quick
glance at Nicholas, “but if you go through life doing people wrong and making a
lot of enemies, well, sometimes you have to reap what you sow. You believe
that, don’t you, Trilby? An eye for an eye and all that?”

Struggling
not to quail before the baleful eye Horace turned on him, Nicholas replied, “Truer
words were never spoken from the Bible. I get all my best quotes from there.”

“Come
on, we’re here.”

Nicholas
followed with some reluctance to the storeroom where Horace had been working
earlier. Nicholas squeezed inside. Squeezed, because the narrow room was packed
floor to ceiling with cardboard boxes plastered with various shipping labels.
He peered closer at one and was surprised to see that it was marked “Volatile
Substances: Chemicals.” A different opened box held nothing but what appeared
to be open-ended cardboard tubes. A plastic gallon-size zippered bag contained
bundles of coiled red and white string. It was labeled with a sticker that read
“silver chrysanthemum fuse.”

“You’re
not building a bomb, are you?”

Horace
grunted as he rummaged behind a stack of boxes that teetered precariously above
his head. “I could if I wanted to. You’d be surprised how easy it is to buy the
components off the Internet. Any yokel can be a terrorist nowadays. It’s a
travesty, is what it is.”

Nicholas
leaned forward, hastily checking the labels on the boxes stacked like the Tower
of Pisa to make sure none were marked as explosives. One was labeled “smokers”
but that was as ominous as they got.

“Then
what
are
you doing with all of this, Horace?”

“Stockpiling.”

“For
what?”

“For
anything. You weren’t a Boy Scout, were you, Trilby?”

“I
was busy with other pursuits.”

“Like
what?”

Nicholas
didn’t want to admit he’d been very much into etymology as a child—butterfly
collecting—so he said only, “I was a collector.”

Horace
laughed and shoved more boxes around. “Stamps or bugs? I bet you were picked
last for teams and none of the girls would talk to you.”

Nicholas
squirmed. Nothing much had changed for him thirty years later.

“You
can never be too careful nowadays,” Horace went on. “It’s just a matter of time
before something big happens, and when it does you need to be prepared for it.
You need to be able to defend yourself. That’s every man’s God-given right.”

“So
you’ve armed yourself in preparation for social anarchy. Very thoughtful of
you.” Though Nicholas didn’t think Horace had put much thought into it at all.
Who would want to overrun a bunch of geeks and losers hiding out in the
Rockies?

“I’m
surprised you haven’t done it, too,” Horace remarked, casting a look back at
him from over one shoulder.

“Me?
What would I need to defend myself against?”

“The
aliens.”

“The
aliens.” The lump in Nicholas’s throat was difficult to swallow down. “You’re
talking about an invasion by aliens. Thousands of, no, most likely hundreds of
thousands of green-skinned, bug-eyed—” Nicholas rubbed at his breastbone. “Heartburn,”
he murmured, praying it wasn’t, in fact, an impending heart attack. “Very bad
heartburn.”

“You
know something about their plans that the rest of us don’t?”

Horace
stopped what he was doing to wait him out. Nicholas had forgotten that even
Horace held a fascination with the green-blooded invaders.

“I
don’t know anything, Horace. I wish I did. Or maybe . . . maybe
I don’t.” It was difficult deciding which the bigger horror was—knowing the
aliens were returning or merely fearing it. He studied Horace’s stockpile with
a keener eye, his personal safety now at stake. “If they did come back, would
this be enough to stop them?”

“That’s
the million-dollar question, isn’t it? What kinds of weapons do they have? Did
you see any while you were up there with them?”

Thank
goodness that if he had he didn’t remember. “I’m going by what I’ve seen in the
movies. They generally seem armed with lasers and impenetrable force fields. Do
you have anything in here that will block lasers?”

Horace
smirked somewhere in his beard. “You and I share the same wavelength, Trilby. I
always guessed that about you but now you’ve just confirmed it.”

Empathizing
with an assassin who approved of insurance fraud hardly seemed a compliment
worth remarking on. Nicholas gave only a vague smile.

With
his broad, meaty hands, Horace ripped open a box bound with a strip of brown
masking tape. “All this came in Thursday. Christmas coming early. Just as well
since the storm locked us up tighter than Fort Bragg. Gives me time to unpack
and catalog it all.”

“Thursday,”
Nicholas repeated thoughtfully. Charles had said deliveries hadn’t been able to
make it up Ascension Road since Tuesday. Why had Charles lied?

Despite
his little speech beside the fireplace last night, Nicholas didn’t like the
direction his thoughts and suspicions were taking him. Who would he point his
finger at next? The twins?

“Looky
what I have in here.”

Nicholas
obligingly leaned forward, though all he could see inside the newly opened box
was a pool of Styrofoam packing peanuts. He waited as Horace thrust both hands
in the sea of foam up to the elbows and swept them around until he grunted in
apparent success. He yanked up his arms like he’d grabbed a trout, only his
prize seemed dubious to Nicholas.

“You
wanted to show me a motorcycle helmet?”

“This
isn’t a motorcycle helmet. It’s for protection. Protection from up
there
.”

Nicholas
accepted the smooth silver helmet with the same enthusiasm he would a
screaming, squirming baby. Or a trout. “I don’t understand. Is this for riding
in a spaceship? Because if it is, you can keep it. I am never going back there,
Horace. Never.”

Horace
huffed and climbed to his feet with a snap-crackle of his knee joints. “Those
aliens sucked you through the roof of your cabin, right? That means they’ve got
technology. That helmet you’ve got right there is anti-technology.”

Nicholas
was fairly certain that he himself was anti-technology, but he asked warily, “Which
means what?”

“It’s
covered with aluminum. It’ll bounce alien brain waves right off your shiny
skull and zap ’em back in their oversize gourds. They’ll think twice about
trying to read your mind after that happens a time or two.”

Realizing
he held an updated version of a tinfoil hat in his hands, Nicholas didn’t dare
show his disappointment.

Horace
sensed it regardless. “I know what you’re thinking, Trilby. This will work. It’s
been proven.”

Nicholas
wasn’t about to open that bucket of worms.

“It’s
just that I had no idea they’d been attempting to read my mind.” Now that the
possibility was being discussed, however, he was beginning to find it likely. “Do
you think that’s why they released me?”

“That’s
exactly why they did it. There’s no reason to let you go, otherwise. You
compromise them.” Horace’s face hardened and he pointed a finger at Nicholas. “But
you’re not a danger to them if you’ve been brainwashed and turned into a tool
for them. They want access to your thoughts so they can learn about the rest of
us.”

“Why
not just launch a full-scale attack? Seems like a lot of effort to use me like
this.” Nicholas gulped hard. He hadn’t liked saying that.

“You
think in an alien invasion their whole armada just pops up on your doorsteps,
lasers blazing? Hell, no. Standard invasion tactics: they send scouts first.
Reconnoiter the area. Take stock of the terrain and the enemy’s capabilities.
That’s who plucked you out of your bed, Trilby. But once you were in their ship
I bet they had R&D poke around in your brain, rearrange some things so they
could plant their listening devices. Now they’re monitoring the rest of us
through you and deciding how well they’d fare against us if they decided to go
whole hog and launch the main body of their forces.”

Fingers
digging into the metal helmet, Nicholas murmured, “Rearranging things, did you
say? In my brain?”

“That’s
why you’ll need that helmet from now on. I know it won’t be easy to wear it
around Main Street, but nothing stops you from wearing it when you’re at home.
Better than having aliens eavesdropping on you twenty-four-seven.”

It
was an effort to recall why he’d come to Horace’s store when all Nicholas could
think about were aliens bent over listening devices which allowed them to tune
into his brain. But he was here for something more pressing, at least for the
moment.

“I
have to trust in your experience in these matters,” he said carefully. “What
with all of your military experience . . .”

Horace
chuckled. “Yeah, I know a thing or two. Mostly about terrorists, but aliens are
just as bad as any jihadists you’ll find out in the desert. I know this helmet
isn’t ideal. You can’t let the terrorists change our way of living and that
goes ditto for the green buggers in the sky. But sometimes you have to do what
you have to do to avoid the greater evil. When you’re trying to save yourself,
nothing is out of bounds. I learned that the hard way out in Helmand.”