Cowboy Angels (39 page)

Stone squeezed down his nerves, found the still, cold place in his head that allowed him to sit calmly, watching through the dusty windshield as two men came out of the shack. One hung back by the door while the other, a muscular young guy in desert camo combat pants and a cut-off T-shirt, ambled toward the cruiser, his thumbs stuck in his beltloops. Tom Waverly cranked down the window and the man looked in at him with a kind of amiable arrogance and asked if there was a problem.

Tom jerked a thumb at Stone and said, ‘Know this fellow?’

The man stooped to peer at Stone and Tom rammed his pistol into the soft flesh under his chin and shot him. A bloody fog burst from the top of his head and he collapsed backward. The man in the doorway of the shack reached behind himself and pulled out a pistol. Tom shot at him and missed, and Linda sat up and stuck the shotgun through the back window and fired both barrels, the noise incredibly loud inside the cruiser, and the man was knocked on his back. The plank wall on either side of the doorway was gouged and splintered by shot.

Stone pushed out of the cruiser and ran to where the second man lay twitching on the dirt. He clutched his chest with both hands, blood welling up over his fingers. Blood bubbled from his mouth and there were holes ripped in his throat and face. Stone kicked his pistol away and stepped over him and checked the shack’s single room, pointing his own pistol left and right, high and low. His heart was beating strongly in his chest and he felt as if he was at the centre of a humming calm. Everything - cards abandoned on the table, disordered bunk beds, dust motes floating in sunlight that burned through a window - stood out with extraordinary particularity.

Tom came up behind him, breathless, grinning like a maniac. He’d taken off the Stetson and his grey hair hung around his face. The bottle of Jack Daniel’s was clutched in one fist, his pistol in the other. He stooped over the man, lifted his head by the hair and asked him who had sent him, who he’d reported to. But the man was dead. Tom went through his pockets and found a walkie-talkie. He switched it on and held it by his ear, listening to the voice that whispered from it, smiling at Stone.

‘This guy is worried about his friends. He heard the shots, isn’t sure what happened,’ Tom said, and mashed the walkie-talkie’s
speak
button. ‘Here’s some breaking news, pal. You’re in deep shit. Your friends are dead, and pretty soon we’re coming up there for you.’

Stone said, ‘Where is he? Up by the gate?’

‘You bet. Don’t you worry, partner, this is all going
exactly
to plan.’

Tom walked back to the police cruiser and hugged Linda and told her that she’d done the right thing, he wanted her to know that he was proud of her.

She pulled away from him and said, ‘You didn’t have to shoot him.’

‘Yes, I did. I couldn’t risk overpowering him because his friend would have started shooting at us. It’s hard, but there it is.’

‘Tell me one thing, and don’t lie. You knew the deputy would come and check me out. Did you know that we’d have to kill these men, too?’

‘I hoped it wouldn’t come to it. I swear to God. But as soon as they both walked out, I knew there wasn’t any other way.’

‘Are we going to make it through?’

‘Of course we are. If you’re up to it, I’d like you to walk up to that ridge,’ Tom said, ‘and keep watch on the road. A bunch of cops will be coming along any moment now, and I need to know when they show.’

‘You were told about that, too, I suppose.’

Tom shook his head. ‘I’m about to tell them where to find us. Walk up there and keep watch, okay?’

Linda stared at him, a muscle jumping in her jaw. Then she snatched the bottle of Jack Daniel’s from his hand and took a long drink. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, handed the bottle back to her father, pulled the shotgun from the back seat of the cruiser, and walked off.

Stone watched her go. He felt as if he had just seen something fine and precious smashed to pieces.

Tom lifted the radio handset from its cradle under the cruiser’s dashboard and told the dispatcher there was trouble out at the Anderson place. ‘The property just past mile twenty, you know it?’ he said. ‘We have two men down, looks like there’s gonna be a third before too long. No, ma’am, your deputy is hogtied a ways down the road. I’m one of the bad guys who stole his cruiser and shot those poor men dead. If you want to bring me to justice, you should send your best men out here.’

‘Was that necessary?’ Stone said.

‘You’ve been in plenty of bad situations. You know it was.’

‘I don’t mean the theatrics. I mean was it necessary to involve your daughter?’

‘We’re all in this together,’ Tom said, as he took off the uniform tunic. ‘The law should be here in ten or fifteen minutes. It’s five-forty now, and the gate opens at six. We’re cutting it close, but I reckon we’ll do it.’

‘If you really are Tom Waverly, something really bad must have happened to you. Because the Tom Waverly I knew would never have used his daughter like that.’

‘I didn’t see you stepping in to help.’

‘I didn’t know you were planning to shoot those two. And don’t tell me you had to. You knew you were going to do it all along.’

‘I guess it’s knowing what will happen to me if I fail that makes me a hard-ass,’ Tom said. He pulled on his denim jacket and walked past Stone and shaded his eyes, looking across the desert panorama. ‘They test missiles out there, the kind that carry nuclear warheads. A little further north is the spot where they exploded the first atom bomb in this sheaf, the prototype of the two bombs they dropped on Japan to end their version of World War Two. Funny, isn’t it, how history can work out so differently in different sheaves, yet some things always stay the same? The equivalent of the CIG in this sheaf, the CIA, has its headquarters at Langley, just like the Company. Hell, its officers even call it the Company.’

‘I know. I lived here once upon a time.’

‘We stole the idea of memorialising our dead with a Wall of Honor from them, did you know that? Ideas go back and forth, histories bleed into each other through the gates, grow more and more alike. Maybe one day every history will collapse into every other history, and we’ll end up with just one sheaf.’

‘I’m not in the mood for barroom philosophy, Tom.’

‘Do you think that meta-sheaf would feature the best of every history, or the worst? Think about it, ’ Tom said, and walked a little way up the slope and used the walkie-talkie, goading the man at the gate, telling he’d better get ready, he’d soon have to make a hard decision.

Linda stood some way off, cradling the shotgun as she stared toward the road. Stone decided that it would be better to leave her alone and squatted in shade cast by the cruiser, brushing flies from his face. The windmill made an arthritic creak as it turned in the erratic wind. A hollow feeling grew in his chest as the time at which the gate would open drew closer.

At last, Linda turned to her father and called out. ‘Here they come!’

Stone got to his feet and saw two cruisers chasing each other along the road, light bars flashing. They were two or three miles off, coming on fast. Tom Waverly took a drink of Jack Daniel’s and tossed the bottle to one side and said it was time they dealt with the guy who stood between them and the gate.

They climbed into the pickup truck and Tom drove it up the stony slope toward a line of tall rocks that in the light of the setting sun glowed blood-red against the pale sky like a palisade hammered into the earth by aboriginal giants. There was a notch between two of them, a track wandering into its vee of deep shadow. Tom steered the pickup off-road, jolting through scrub, pulling up to one side of the notch.

Downslope, the two cruisers were wallowing up the track toward the shack, a cloud of dust boiling behind them.

Tom Waverly used the walkie-talkie again. ‘Take a look downhill, why don’t you? I bet you can see that the local cops have come to check things out. You’re in big trouble, pal. My advice is you pull out before they get hold of you.’ He paused while the walkie-talkie squawked, then said, ‘Maybe you can kill ’em all, but then what? You gonna be able to wait around here until the gate opens tomorrow? You’ll have to make a run for it, and we’re waiting right outside. As soon as you put your head out we’ll shoot it off.’

Deputies were moving around the shack. Stone saw two of them run to one of the cruisers, saw it dig out in a cloud of dust and accelerate up the slope toward them. ‘We’ve got about a minute here,’ he said.

Tom Waverly checked his watch, said into the walkie-talkie, ‘The gate just now opened, didn’t it? Here’s your choice. You can go through, or you can stay and hope to convince the local law of your innocence. But if you choose to stay here, you should know we’re gonna surrender to the cops and tell them everything we know.’

Stone saw two quick flashes in the darkness beyond the gap in the rocks, heard the hard noise of the shots echoing off the rocks. Tom stepped from the cover of the pickup and fired his pistol toward the gap, yelling, ‘You want some? Get some! Get some right here!’

He fired until the pistol’s clip was empty, ducked behind the pickup again. A few hundred yards downslope, the cruiser swerved to a halt and the two deputies scrambled out on either side, crouching behind the notional cover of its splayed doors.

Tom jammed a fresh clip into his pistol and thumbed the walkie-talkie. ‘You got six minutes before the gate goes down and you got yourself a siege with us
and
the local law. Yeah? We’ll see about that.’

He tossed the walkie-talkie away and said, ‘He’s going through. Says he’ll be waiting for us on the other side. If only he knew.’

The two deputies were coming up the slope toward them, making broken runs from bush to rock to bush.

Stone said, ‘Where are we going?’

‘Through the mirror,’ Tom said, and pulled the envelope from his denim jacket and took out the pale green oblong of the time key.

Even though the thing wasn’t switched on, Stone took a step backward. Downslope, one of the deputies shouted a warning. Tom and Linda took off, and Stone ran after them. He had a bad moment when they ducked into the notch, thinking that the man guarding the gate could have been bluffing when he’d said he was going through, but the narrow cleft was empty, lit by the silver light of the gate, a circular mirror eight feet across that blocked the far end.

Tom Waverly took out a scrap of paper and handed it to Linda. She read out a string of letters and numbers and he poked at the face of the time key with his forefinger, the tip of his tongue caught between his lips. Stone watched this charade with mounting impatience, but he wasn’t about to step through the gate on his own. The man who’d been guarding it would be waiting on the other side, and besides, he had to see where Tom was going with this.

‘We’ve got about two minutes,’ Linda said.

‘I have to get this right,’ Tom said, and green light suddenly struck up from the time key, turning his face into a jack o’lantern.

Stone felt as if a nail had been hammered into his forehead. A nail driven in right between his eyes, whacking through bone, jolting inch by inch into his brain.

From a great distance, Tom said, ‘Oh man. It really has it in for you.’

The nail went in with hard sharp jolts, no end to it. With each blow, Stone’s pulse pumped blood into his skull like air into a beach ball. His sight went black and he fell to his knees.

Tom pulled him up. They took a step together, and another. Stone saw through fluttering shadows their reflections stumbling toward him in the gate’s mirror. Tom was aiming the time key at the gate with his free hand. A flat rock formed a step in front of the gate. Stone lost his balance as Tom hauled him onto it. He tumbled forward and the black flash of transition drove the nail clean through him.

Half-blind, punch-drunk, Stone managed to stagger halfway down the metal ramp on the other side of the mirror before his feet tangled with each other and he fell to his hands and knees. His pistol skittered away, fresh pain exploded inside his head, and his stomach twisted inside out and he threw up.

Linda and Tom Waverly stepped around him, aiming their weapons at shadows. As Stone coughed and spat and blinked back tears, Tom scooped up his pistol and said, ‘Like it or not, you’re a bona fide time traveller now, Adam. When this is over, I’ll write you out a certificate. You too, honey.’

‘Are you sure it worked?’ Linda said.

‘Take a look at the gate and tell me it didn’t.’

Something appalling was happening to the Turing gate. Instead of simply blinking out, its silver disk was receding down a dimension at right angles to everything else, falling away into a great distance, dwindling into a star, a spark, a speck, a mote . . .

The hammering pain in Stone’s head diminished to no more than an ordinary headache. He managed to get to his feet. It hurt a lot and his stomach performed an ominous backflip, but he managed it. He was standing in front of the black maw of the dead gate, at one end of a low-ceilinged bunker lit by a string of dim bulbs. There were two desks of quiescent electronics and a row of metal lockers, but no sign of the man who had fled through the gate ahead of them. Maybe he’d figured that three on one were bad odds, and had run off, Stone thought. But where were the gate technicians?

Linda was asking him if he was okay.

‘I’ve had better days. Are
you
okay?’

She gave a tight little nod and said, ‘This is
where
we’re supposed to be. What we have to do now is find out if it’s
when
we’re supposed to be.’

‘Three weeks in the past, you better believe it,’ Tom Waverly called out.

He was doing something to the key-operated switch box to one side of the bunker’s big steel door. After a moment, the motor engaged and the door rolled back. Stone followed Linda across the bunker. He had to stop and lean against one of the control desks for a moment, and knocked a coffee mug and a slew of pens and pencils to the floor when he pushed away.