Highway to Hell (26 page)

“Exactly. And Justin—he doesn't talk about his history. But if Henry knows something about Justin, and I flash on that, then I'll feel underhanded.”

“Yeah, but I know you're curious.”

“Of course I am. But I want
him
to tell me.” I capped the lens and turned off the camera. “Besides. What if I found out something I didn't want to know?”

“Like what?”

“Like he isn't serious about me.”

Lisa fell over on the bench, covering her eyes with her arm. “Oh my God, Maggie. If that guy was any more serious about you, he'd have your name tattooed on his butt.” She lifted her arm. “He doesn't, does he?”

“No! Well, not that I know of.” I laughed, in spite of everything: romantic uncertainty, chupacabra demons, witches, and saints. “Can you picture Justin with a tattoo?”

“No.” She grinned broadly. “Zeke has one.”

I gaped, shocked in spite of myself. “On his butt?”

“Here.” She pointed to her bicep. “Jeez, Mags. I'm not that slutty.”

Justin appeared on the trail. “Are you girls going to sit there giggling all day? We're burning daylight.”

“Just a sec,” I yelled back. Lisa started laughing again, and I nudged her off the bench with my foot. “Shape up. We've got work to do.”

She rolled to her feet, dusted herself off, and we started back to the car. “Don't worry about Henry, Mags. He's probably as threatened by you as you are by him.”

“Yeah. Worried I'll corrupt his friend.”

“Worried you'll come between them.” She made an exaggerated thinking face. “Or maybe he's hoping he can talk Justin into joining the priesthood, too. Do you think they get a recruitment bonus, like stockbrokers?”

“Jeez, Lisa.” I checked the sky for thunderbolts.

“Well, if he does, at least the outfit is kind of hot.”

“Can we talk more about my problem and less about how you're going to Hell?”

She shrugged, lowering her voice as we neared the guys, who were waiting impatiently by the car. “Look at it this way. Henry may represent a normal, demon-free life. But you have plenty of things to offer that he can't.”

“Like what?”

She shot me a pitying look. “Duh, Mags. If you have to ask …”

T
he Escort hit a pothole in the gravel road, hard enough that Lisa and I bounced out of our backseats.

Henry rubbed his head and squinted at Justin. “I'm not sure this is what the rental company had in mind when they said unlimited mileage.”

Justin adjusted his grip on the steering wheel. “Almost there.”

The road ended at a barn and corral that had seen better days. It was a hodgepodge of wood and corrugated metal. Most structures on the ranch seemed to be more about function than beauty.

Justin set the emergency brake and turned off the engine. “Everybody remember where we parked.”

Lisa climbed out and scanned the empty pasture. “It's strange not seeing any cows.”

By the corral was a windmill, squeaking as it turned in the faint breeze. The rusty blades ran a pump, which filled an aluminum stock tank; the water was green with algae and surrounded by mud and a lot of what you'd expect would be left by loitering livestock.

“The clouds are getting really thick.” I swatted a mosquito intrepid enough to venture out, now that the sun wasn't blazing down.

“We'd better get moving.” Justin pulled the map and a compass out of the cargo pocket of his khakis, which was both nerdy and completely awesome. “West is that way.”

“Yeah,” said Henry. “I could have figured that from the big ball of fire in the sky.”

Justin shot him a look. “It's behind the clouds, and I want to be accurate.”

“You carry around a compass?” Lisa asked.

“Doesn't everyone?”

“I do.” There was one hanging from a clip on my backpack. Flashlight, Swiss Army knife, first-aid kit, a bag of unprocessed sea salt …

“You sure you want to carry all that, Maggie?” Justin eyed my backpack with misgivings.

“It's got my stuff in it.” I resettled it on my back, nodding to his map and compass. “You like to know where you're going. I like to be prepared for anything.”

Lisa slapped her arm. “I don't suppose you have any mosquito repellant in there.”

I pointed over my shoulder. “Exterior pocket. Right side.”

Henry laughed and Justin shook his head. “Suit yourself.”

“I walk all over campus with this thing. How much harder can this be?”

As soon as I said it, I wanted to bite my tongue. Why is it that you can never hear the ring of famous last words until they're already out of your mouth?

It turns out that walking overland, even on the mostly flat and visually unchallenging terrain of the coastal plain,
was
harder than sprinting between classes on a paved campus.

For one thing, while the dog days of summer can be barking hot in Avalon, it didn't compare to the sauna heat of a March afternoon in South Texas. Especially as the clouds collected overhead like steam on the lid of a pot.

With the sun in hiding, the mosquitoes became a fierce, bloodsucking army. They made guerilla runs through the aura of Off, undeterred by T-shirts or jeans. I slapped at a quarter-sized insect on my leg and got a palm smeared with blood and bug parts.

The long grass caught at my sneakers and the short clumps made for uneven walking; I had to keep my eyes on the ground and my Spidey sense tuned to the direction we were going. The backpack seemed to be increasing in weight with every step. My legs ached, my skin was slimy with sunscreen and bug spray, and I didn't think I'd ever smelled worse.

“How far do you think we've gone?” I asked.

“Maybe half a mile,” said Justin. God. I was in sad shape.

The others had to keep pace with me, and no one else seemed to have broken more than a token hot-day sweat. I
comforted myself with the thought that their legs were all a lot longer.

Lisa called from behind me. “Does your freakometer give you any idea how much farther?”

“‘Freakometer’?” asked Henry, who wasn't up on the Maggie vocabulary.

“She thinks
clairvoyance
or
ESP
sounds silly,” Lisa explained.

“And freakometer
doesn't?”

“Hey, Henry.” I was anxious to change the subject from me and my weirdness. “What did you guys do to almost get kicked out of college your freshman year? Justin won't tell me.”

My boyfriend walked backward so he could glare a warning at his buddy. “He doesn't want to talk about that.”

Henry laughed. “It's kind of a funny story.”

“No,” said Justin firmly. “It's not.”

“It wasn't in college, though. It was high school.” He ignored his friend's death stare. “Because the whole reason we volunteered to work on the haunted house was to get near what's-her-name, the one with the pom-poms, and her sister.”

Justin thought about it, maybe a little too long for my liking. “You're right. It was high school.”

“Wait a minute,” I said between gasps for air. “What about the pom-poms?”

“The pom-poms aren't important,” said Henry. “We went to a parochial boys' school. We grabbed any excuse to be around any girls at all. We weren't picky.”

“Which was how Henry convinced me to work on the
Halloween festival at the church in town,” Justin said, contributing his version of events. “We were supposed to work up a labyrinth—like a haunted house, but instead of Dracula and the
Saw
puppet-head guy, they wanted vignettes of the lives of the saints.”

“Oh, yeah,” muttered Lisa. “That'll definitely bring the kids swarming.”

“It was supposed to be for
little
kids,” said Henry. “Only Justin was so distracted by this girl—”

“Don't blame that on me.”

“Okay,” Henry admitted.
“We
were so distracted by actual female-type people that weren't nuns, we missed that part of the instructions.”

Lisa snickered, and Justin's glare made her cackle harder. “It's nice to know you're human, Galahad.”

“Anyway,” said Henry, “the girls were in drama club at the public high school, and Justin and I figure the way to impress them is to get all these books about special effects and pick the most exciting scenes from the saints' lives. Which, unfortunately, was usually their martyrdom.”

Justin's voice was dry. “You'd be surprised how many saints met a truly gruesome—and, it turns out, traumatizing to small children—death.”

Henry's laugh was gravel-deep and contagious. “There were all these little kids peeing in their pants and screaming for their mamas. We even heard that a woman went into labor, but that turned out to be just a rumor.”

“I thought
Brother Mathias
was going to go into labor,” said Justin, “with a whole litter of kittens.”

Henry's laughter faded, but not the humor behind it.

“Anyway. The vestry of the church vowed to never do a fund-raising event with the school again. Which was what really had Brother Matt's girdle in a twist.”

Watching them laugh together, I realized that I couldn't compete with their friendship, and I didn't want to. Justin needed someone to keep him from being too serious. For years that had been Henry, and now it was me, and that didn't have to be mutually exclusive.

It would be better, however, if Henry didn't think I was nuts for seeing things that he didn't believe were there.

Or smelling them. I halted so abruptly, Lisa crashed into me.

“Hey. Brake signals next time.”

“Do you guys smell that?” I sniffed the air, and the others did the same. We must have looked hysterical to the gophers and jackrabbits.

“Sulfur?” asked Henry. “Isn't that a little … clichéd?”

I exchanged a glance with Lisa, who rolled her eyes. “You would be surprised,” she said.

“It's hydrogen sulfide,” I corrected. “Zeke said it's a by-product of oil and gas production.”

“Coming from there, maybe?” Lisa pointed to a complicated arrangement of pipes and wheels and valves sticking up out of the ground. It was taller than Henry, and painted bright yellow. Hard to miss.

“Maggie …” Justin said my name in a tone of significant enquiry. “Didn't you say you smelled the sulfur—hydrogen sulfide, I mean—by the cows you found yesterday?”

“Yeah. And we were near a pump jack last night.” I looked at him, realization dawning. “I haven't been factoring the
smell into the appearances, because I just thought it was the oil wells.”

“But it could be the oil wells
are
the factor.”

We were finishing each other's thoughts, a good sign that we were on the right track. I sped up, even with the weight of my backpack. The others kept pace across ground that grew rougher as we went.

“Look at these cracks in the dirt,” said Henry. “Is this from the drought?”

I stepped across one that was almost six inches wide. “Do you think this was what the records were talking about? Cracks opening up big enough to swallow cows whole?”

“None of these are that big,” he said.

“But they
are
big.” I stopped as we reached the wellhead. It wasn't a moving pump, but one of the metal tree-looking things, with spools and valves and fittings all over it. That meant that the pressure of the oil and gas in the reservoir underground was higher than the air pressure above. Without the wellhead to control the flow … What had Zeke said? There might be a seep or a gusher.

Spreading from the base of the upright pipe was a bog of dark, thick mud and a meandering puddle of water. About twenty feet by three feet, it wasn't that impressive, but the smell was powerful. Not just the rotten-egg odor, but a tarlike stink of creosote.

“Is it a spring?” Justin nodded to the iridescent sheen on the puddle. “That doesn't look like water.”

“It's an oil seep.” Henry crouched beside the shallow pool. “That would explain the smell. We had them in California. Like the La Brea Tar Pits.”

He held his hand over the liquid and a bright red warning light flashed in my brain. “Don't touch that!”

Jerking back, he looked at me in confused alarm. “What?”

“I don't know. I saw this in my dream.” My heart tripped double-time in fear, but also in realization. “This is it. It's not the water. It's the oil.” I smacked my forehead, killing another mosquito. “I'm such an idiot! It was so
obvious.
”

“You always say that,” said Lisa. “Because even a moron can see things in retrospect.”

“Shut up a sec.” I slipped off my backpack and dumped it into Justin's hands. “Hold this.”

I dug through the stuff in the outer compartment and found the pamphlet that Hector had given me. The clouds had gotten so dark that I had to take off my sunglasses to read. “There was something in here. A passing reference …”

“To what?” asked Lisa, as she and Henry watched.

“Here: ‘… the profits the Velasquez ranch saw from the demand for oil and gas, both found in rich reservoirs trapped under the geologic
salt dome
under the Texas coast.’ ” I looked up to see if they were suitably impressed.

Lisa stared at the oily puddle with a grim frown. “So, you're saying the demon is trapped in the oil reservoir.”

“Salt dome?” Henry asked. “Why the emphasis?”