Psychlone (2 page)

“What?” Henry asked, fascinated by the animal.

“Move. Try and scare it."

Fowler waved his hand. The lynx didn't react. He took a step forward; still no motion. Henry chuckled and said, “Bold little bastard."

“Walk right up to it,” Jordan encouraged.

“Not me,” Fowler said. “It may claw our shins off. Maybe it's rabid."

“Summer's the season for rabies, not winter,” Jordan said. “It isn't rabid."

They both jumped up and down and waved their arms. The animal could have been stuffed for all the reaction it showed, but there was a sense of vitality in the tension of the legs and the glitter of its eyes that assured them it was alive.

“Either of you have the guts to go right on over?” Jordan asked. Henry glanced at Fowler. They grinned nervously, shaking their heads. “Dad, it is acting a little weird."

“Fine,” Jordan said. He pushed between them and walked up the drive to the cat. Fowler expected the animal to puff up, scowl and run. But the elder Taggart stood beside it, and still its gaze was fixed on the cabin. “Come on out,” he said. “First lesson."

They walked cautiously across the gravel. Henry bent down beside the animal. “Must be dead,” he said. “Or paralyzed. Too sick to move."

“Touch him,” Jordan said. “Not just Henry. You, too, Larry."

Fowler put his hand beside Henry's on the cat's fur. He withdrew it suddenly.

“Goddamn thing's frozen,” Henry said. “Stiff as a board."

“Minimum temperature last night, twenty-nine degrees Fahrenheit,” Jordan said. “At least, that's what your graph shows. Couldn't freeze a wild animal like this cat, not when it's moving or holed away in its den. Animals have ways to stay warm."

As they watched, frost started to form on the cat's fur. The eyes clouded over with rime. Henry looked at his fingers and held his hand out to Fowler. The tips were covered with white.

“What is it?” Fowler asked.

Henry rubbed his palm against the fingers. White flecks drifted down. “Skin, I think,” he said. “Cat just froze a layer to powder."

Kevin Land was forty-seven years old and had lived in Lorobu, New Mexico, most of his life. Half of that time, he guessed, he had been drunk. He was aware how disgusting he was. His clothes were dirty, his face unshaven, his eyes waxy yellow. He spent most of his time indoors, in the cheap shack that Jim Townsend rented to him for twenty dollars a month. The rest of his money went for booze and the tiny amount of food he judged was necessary to keep him alive. He was sick most of the time with something or other. He was never sure what, but probably it had to do with his liver. He had nightmares of taking out his own liver and whipping it as it lay on the ripped easy chair. “Take that, you son of a bitch,” he would shout melodramatically in the dreams. As a teenager he had read a book about Greek gods—he had read quite a few books as a kid—and now he looked upon himself as Prometheus, and booze was his eagle, eating his liver each day.

All because he had brought fire down to earth. He couldn't remember doing it, but he must have. It fit the story.

Kevin Land was in his shack when the wind started to rise. It came from a clear, cold late-morning sky. He heard it dimly and worried when it began to shake the shack.

“Life and death,” he muttered, pulling the blanket up over his head. “Matter of."

Jim Townsend was eating a lunch of turkey and dressing left over from Thanksgiving, two days before. He was carving the last of the bird and handing it around to his wife and younger son. The meat was like gold. He was out of work. Barrett's service station, where he had been a mechanic for thirteen years, had closed down after John Barrett died of a stroke. Barrett's son had sold the property to another oil company and, preparatory to rebuilding the office and garage and installing a whole new crew from out of town, the oil company had fired Townsend. His family's only income now was from the six pieces of property they owned around town. It had always been Townsend's wish to rent the properties to needy people at bare minimum rates, as long as he was making a good living and his family got along comfortably. Soon that would have to change.

Lorobu serviced several mines operating in the area, and every winter did a spotty business with tourists. But mining operations had been halted recently because of conservationist lobbies in Washington and Sacramento, and the local businesses reported sharply reduced tourist spending for the past year. Lorobu was not in an up period, Townsend knew, and the properties weren't going to rent for much more than he was charging now.

It was a bleak prospect. He worried most when he looked at his wife. Georgette, who was still bright and perky and loyal after twenty-five years of marriage. His younger son, Tim, was eleven and doing well in school. The boy seemed interested in working with his hands—he was a whiz at plastic model kits—but Townsend didn't want him to follow in his father's footsteps. Tim was too bright and capable to spend the rest of his life repairing cars. Their older son, Rick, had married a Mormon girl and moved to Salt Lake City. They seldom heard from him. That hurt Georgette, but she didn't blame the Mormons as much as Jim did. Their middle child, a girl, had been killed in a motorcycle accident two years before. Townsend knew she had been reckless. He had loved her most of all, but his memories of her seemed to stop at her twelfth birthday.

He cut the turkey leg and apportioned it between his plate and Tim's.

“It's blowing harder, Dad,” Tim said. Townsend broke his reverie and looked out the window at the scrub lot next to their house. The dry weeds were rustling and the tree beside Norman Blake's workshed was twisting this way and that, like a dancer warming up.

Michael Barrett had just finished making love to his girl friend, twenty-year-old Cynthia Furness, who was a hellion in bed but sometimes a pain outside of it. She was a Jesus freak. Michael never could put the two sides of her together and had finally given up, telling her one night, philosophically, “I guess it's just like being hungry. When you're hungry, you eat, Jesus or no, and when you're horny you screw.” Cynthia wouldn't be very pretty in ten or fifteen years—she was already a touch too plump—so he had no plans for marrying her. She probably thought he did. He probably should, they'd been getting it on together long enough. But Michael had been feeling very well off since his father had died, leaving thirty-five years of savings—over fifty thousand dollars. He was sure marriage didn't fit into his plans. He wanted to move to Los Angeles and get into real estate.

Cynthia lay on the other side of the bed, breathing hard, hair disarrayed, eyes closed and mouth open. Very sensual, Michael thought; he might screw her again if he had the strength. But for the moment he was dog-weary and contented. He put his arm around her and pulled her close.

She made an animal sound deep in her throat and snuggled closer to him. She was a funny girl. She thought his Right Guard smelled sexy. She liked the way he kept his hair fluffy-clean. And last Christmas, she had given him a white leather-bound Red Letter Edition King James Bible. She had plans for him. The rising wind made her feel very cozy, lying next to him. The house heater clicked on.

Norman Blake was Lorobu's sheriff. He was on the highway between Montoya and Lorobu when the wind came up. His car swerved and he brought it back in line, swearing, looking up through the windshield at the pristine sky. His radio crackled and went dead. His neck hairs stood up and he pulled the car to the side of the empty highway.

“What the fuck is going on?” he asked himself. He tried the radio several times, but it was gone. The wind and the radio at the same time. Blake wasn't much on meteorology, but he thought maybe it had something to do with the sun. Was that eleven-year cycle kicking up again?

He cautiously swung back onto the road, balancing his wheel against the wind, and continued on to Lorobu.

In the evening, the wind died and the temperature plummeted to forty-five degrees. Blake ate his dinner at the Lorobu Inn, maintaining his loyalty to the owner, even though the food was better at the new Holiday Inn on the east side of town. When he left the restaurant and walked to his car, his neck hairs tingled again and he scrunched his head closer to his shoulders, as if to avoid a blow. The town was dead quiet. He looked up at the still, starbright night sky and lowered his eyebrows, squinting to see something indefinite.

Then he shook his head, opened the car door, and got in. He sat at the wheel for several minutes, ostensibly to let his food digest before he put in his last few hours cruising the small business district. But something was on his mind.

He couldn't shake the picture from his head. Thirty-five years ago, when he was twenty-one years old, he had served in the Navy on the small island of Tinian in the Marianas. He was seeing Tinian now as he closed his eyes, and almost feeling the warm heat. What was so important about Tinian that it should come back to haunt him? He saw a pilot waving at him from the window of a bomber. That must have been before they sealed off the runway, because after that he couldn't have gotten within a thousand yards of any planes. He couldn't remember the pilot, but the face was very clear.

He backed the car out of the parking lot and drove slowly through what he affectionately called “downtown” Lorobu. It was six-thirty and everything was closed and locked, security lights on, streetlights okay, none shot out by the young hooligans who occasionally drove through. When Blake had been a kid, he had taken out his aggressions shooting at jackrabbits, not streetlights. But then, he hadn't had his first car until he was seventeen, just a year before he enlisted.

That was the year he had met Molly. Back then, she had been young and gangly, not very striking, but after coming home in ‘45 and getting married, she had filled out and become positively beautiful—"my own Miss America,” he had called her. Such foresight, he thought, would have made him rich if he had applied it to stocks and bonds.

They'd moved to Lorobu in 1950 and he had worked in the sheriff's office ever since.

It had been a good job, a good life. It still was, although Molly had become more than pleasingly plump after hitting forty. She was no beauty now, but she had kept her sense of humor. That was more important anyway, he told himself. He was going on seventeen stone himself.

“Seventeen stone,” he murmured, turning the corner onto Kelso street. “Damned Crabber is going to make a limey of me yet.” Fenton Crabber owned the Alamogordo Bar and Grill, where Blake went on weekends for a couple of beers and a game of darts. Crabber had been in the RAF, and they liked to lie about their war records.

Barrett's service station, dark now, stood on the corner of Kelso and Gila Lane. He got out of his car at the curb and walked up to the office to peer inside, making sure no vandals had broken in. The window glass was okay everywhere. Even the pumps were intact. He wondered when the Standard Oil people were going to come in and claim their land. Damned shame, Barrett dying and leaving everything to Michael. Michael wasn't a bad boy, but he had big dreams, and Blake knew instinctively he wasn't smart enough to follow through. He would spend it all on women and dumb business schemes and come back to Lorobu someday, poor, maybe a rummy like Kevin Land.

As if in answer to the thought, he saw Land coming down Gila Lane, walking steadily and in a straight line. Blake took a last look at the station and strolled across the service lanes to see how Land was doing.

“Hey, Kevin!” he called. Land turned and goggled at Blake. “How's things?” Blake asked, approaching quickly, then slowing as he saw the expression on the man's face.

“Carrying the fire,” Land said.

“What?"

Land pointed to his right hand, hidden in the pocket of his dirt-mottled jacket.

“Sure,” Blake said. Land was drunk as usual. “Getting late, Kevin. You'd better get home soon.” Blake was still trying to find out who sold Land liquor. There were only three liquor stores in town, and he knew all the owners personally. One of them was probably feeling obliged to do Land a favor and keep him stewed. When Blake found out who, he would read the riot act to him—or her, if it was Miss Louise—and maybe Land would have a chance to dry out.

Land turned stiffly and continued walking.

Blake's car radio crackled back to life as he was crossing Main on the last part of his route. Jason Franz, the senior deputy, told Blake there had been a complaint from Park's Hardware and Sundries.

“Had a hard time getting you,” Franz said.

“Radio was on the blink. Must have been jolted back. What happened?” Park's store was at the end of his route.

“Clerk there—I think it was Beverly—says Kevin Land just walked in and tore up her paperback stand. She's leaving it alone for you to look at."

“Bloody hell,” Blake said. “I just passed Land. I'll pick him up and go have a look."

“First time,” Franz said, and signed off. Indeed, Blake thought. Land had never pulled a stunt like that before. He was a damned decent fellow for a drunk. Probably would have been a bright guy if the booze hadn't grabbed him.

The car spun around on the empty street and Blake backtracked, stopping near Barrett's station to remember which direction Land had gone off in. Down Gila Lane, not swerving, if he was truly drunk. To deviate would be disastrous. That was how some drunks thought. When they drove—those who did drive, the idiots—they would swerve a bit, and then, to compensate and show they weren't filled to the gills, they'd change lanes, sometimes right into another car. There had been a messy accident on 60 near Vaughn like that just yesterday.

The breeze was starting again, mild this time, when he spotted Land standing where Gila Lane ended at a road block and scrub country. He aimed the car headlights on the man's back and stopped twenty paces from him. Being cautious, even with old customers, was why he had never been wounded on duty. “Kevin,” he said, stepping from the car. Land turned and faced him, quick on his feet, not even lurching.

“What's up, fellow?” Blake asked. “Feeling rough tonight? Beverly at the Park store says you damaged some merchandise."