Strum Again? Book Three of the Songkiller Saga (6 page)

He recited the last in as deep a Texas drawl
as the boss and grinned at him.

The boss threw his hat at him and said,
"Okay. I don't know who told you about the likin' I've took to
singin' cowboys and cowboy poets since Willie MacKai took off, but
you go take your bedroll and guitar out to the bunkhouse with the
rest of 'em, and Dally Morales will take you on the grand guided
tour."

"Much obliged, sir," said Guttenberg,
hitching up his spectacles, slinging his bedroll over his shoulder,
and picking up his guitar case by the binder's twine that held it
together. He walked from the office with such a bowlegged swagger
he almost fell off his boots. He had played his part shrewdly. He'd
heard about all the cowboy poets hiring on here at this spread and
figured by now that most of them, who had got their start in
cowboyin', might need a dude to break in who didn't know squat
about brandin' cows or bustin' horses but who could sure as hell
clean up their syntax and scansion.

* * *

"It's about twenty miles to the road where
Gus is supposed to meet us," Willie told the others. "Now, that's
not all that far by car or horseback, and I don't imagine it's all
that bad a jog on a paved path for a couple of us, but this ain't
no paved path. You don't run far around here if you know what's
good for you. Heat stroke happens, even to seasoned hands, even to
Mexicans if they don't use good sense. There's rattlers too, and
you don't want to jog right into one. So we'll stay together and
take it easy."

"Does this make us wetbacks?" Dan asked
jokingly.

"Yeah, I guess it does. And we're likely to
meet some of the other kind too. Used to be they were all just
working people looking for better pay so they can take care of
their families. But when I was working here, that kind of wetbacks
were getting scared off by the other kind—the kind who come up
carrying fancy sports bags and high-powered weapons and good
running shoes. Drug runners, gunrunners, other kinds of smugglers
and worse."

He didn't say what was worse, and nobody
wanted to ask. Recent experience had made them all leery of what
Gussie would have called "borrowing trouble." There was no need to
borrow it. They found their own share soon enough.

* * *

The Doom and Destruction Devil usually dealt
in large-scale belligerency—small wars, police actions,
low-intensity conflicts, invasions—but his department did contain
more personalized services, and it was these the Chairdevil decided
to deploy when the first line of offense failed.

"Time for minions again, Threedee," Chair
told him, having asked him to remain while the others went to
supervise their worldwide divisions.

"I have a lot going on just now, Chair,"
Threedee said. "I don't think I have a war-mad politician,
ganglord, or anybody of that caliber to spare."

"How about your serial killers?" he asked.
"Any of them in the Albuquerque area?"

"Well, nobody right now of your Speck or
Bundy caliber, but I have a few crazies and some talented amateurs
who eliminate a few individuals on a regular basis—Indians,
Mexicans, blacks, prostitutes, sometimes coeds, sometimes
homosexuals, often little old ladies. These people aren't
professional, you understand, but they do love their work."

"How about in the vicinity of the MacKai
party?"

"Piece of cake. Got a group coming into
position right now on another job. Shouldn't even have to redeploy
them. I think your MacKai party is probably going to stumble over
them in the middle of another operation."

"Fine. Then get your New Mexico people on
the job and pop down to supervise the business in Texas, will
you?"

"Boss, I've got a million irons in the fire.
How about the business in Africa? How about that Chinese-Mongolian
deal I've been working on for years? And I'm afraid that if I don't
keep stirring the Middle Eastern situation, a peace accord may
break out at any time."

"This will only take a minute. Attention to
detail is important, Threedee. You should know that by now. Now get
on the horn to Albuquerque."

Threedee picked up a special handset,
punched a button, and spoke into it. "Now hear this. This is your
voices speaking, aka the master, aka the devil who makes you do it.
Be it known to you that little old women driving brown minivans are
an abomination in my sight and should be slaughtered like sheep.
This kind of sow frequents Highway Sixty-six, heading east. She
will be laughing at your stupidity if you let her live as far as
the Texas border. Find her and scourge the earth of her presence.
That is all."

"They believe that crap?" Chair asked
wonderingly.

"Some people are so eager to come to us,
they'll believe anything as long as it tells them to do what they
want to already, boss."

* * *

James Francis Farnham heard the call and was
for the first time in two years (following a conviction and
imprisonment for the robbery, beating, rape, and mutilation of two
elderly sisters) able to answer. He had been a model prisoner,
everybody agreed, in the prison facility where he had been living
and working with other men. He had no problem with other men,
guards or prisoners. Other men did not remind him of his
grandmother, who had raised him and deprived him of all of the
things he was entitled to, of his mother, who deserted him to work
at a job where she did not earn enough to buy those things, or of
his ex-wife. He had seen to it that she, at least, wouldn't screw
anybody else around. He had never known his father and so had no
particular grudge against men.

He couldn't easily get a gun without waiting
so long that the trail would get cold, but a gun was not his weapon
of choice anyway, and you didn't need a license for a hunting bow
or a butcher knife. He stole a car easily enough within a block of
the probation office and cruised out Route 66, while visions of
body parts danced in his head.

Before the old girl reached the Texas
border, the voices had said. Now, what was important about that?
She was running away, that was what. Bitch. Who had she screwed so
that she had to run away now? He'd bring her back from the border
okay. He had just the hardware to do it and enough butcher paper to
conceal the evidence.

He spotted the van at a truck stop outside
Roswell. The voices were wrong. She wasn't heading east. She was
heading southeast. She was trying to confuse him. Lying to the
voices. Trying to throw him off her track.

She climbed back into the van. She looked
just like the voices said. Small, gray-haired, deceptively sweet
looking in her little pink jogging suit. Too bad he'd arrived after
she stopped or he could have taken her there, when she got out to
go to the ladies' room. Never mind. She would no doubt stop again
in Carlsbad, and he'd catch up with her there. Darkness was coming
soon too, and he could always wait for an opportunity to run her
off the road.

* * *

Gussie would never have noticed the dark
blue truck with the camper shell if it hadn't been for the
personalized license plates that said SHONUF. She wondered what
kind of a person put something like that on license plates. Some
kind of a business, maybe? She also noticed that although the truck
had pulled into the truck stop outside Roswell as she emerged from
the station, the driver didn't get out and buy gas but exited right
behind her. A few years ago she wouldn't have made much of that,
but she was more cautious now.

She was still ahead of schedule. Though she
could have driven through Amarillo, where she used to live, to
visit friends, she decided that she would rather swing down through
the Big Bend to see Remie Collins and her husband, Don, who ran a
white-water rafting business through Santa Elena Canyon. They were
old folk-music cronies, and their raft trips were perfect for
musicians or storytellers. The laws and tastes of people changed
often while they were in the city, but stories and old songs around
camp fires went back to cavemen, so deep in racial memory that not
even devils could wipe them out.

Unfortunately, scouting organizations didn't
seem to do camp outs anymore, or that would have been the perfect
place to spread the music. The organizations had sold off most of
the old camps for timber. Nowadays kids raised on slasher movies
that were set in such camps weren't all that eager to go away for
the summer. And the timber made money for other programs, such as
urban scouting centers, where the scouts in the cities could go to
swim, start jogging contests through city parks, or take off for
trips to other cities. "We do have a few units devoted to
survivalist skills," the lady at scouting headquarters in Tacoma
had told Gussie, "but they don't use camps. Timber sales bring in
too much money for us to maintain camps for a few weeks' use when
there are national parks whose facilities cost so little. And
campfires are restricted in most areas now. Forest fires, you
know."

So Gussie figured maybe raft trips chartered
by tired city folks who wanted to float down desert canyons would
be a good alternative venue for telling her tales in a wilderness
setting and later, for reintroducing music.

The blue pickup had dropped back for several
miles, but once more she saw it in her rearview mirror. Maybe she
should stop in Carlsbad. The person in the pickup could be one of
the messengers in the little underground she and the rest of the
network had established. With phones easy to tap, mail easy to
tamper with, and computer networks a cinch to break into, she,
Lettie and Mic, the Curtises, and a few of the others still
remaining from the clumps of small-time folk musicians and fans
from years ago sent news to each other mostly by the
grapevine—messages given to relatives and friends along with
identifying lines and code words that could be answered. Of course,
that could easily be intercepted too, if anyone cared to, but it
wasn't quite the cinch electronic surveillance was. Besides, most
of them sort of enjoyed the intrigue, and more than one wiseass had
asked how long you had to be in the network before you were issued
your secret decoder ring.

But SHONUF was not any code she remembered,
and her memory was excellent. Besides, nobody, not even friends,
knew about the new van yet. The truck had not followed her from Las
Vegas, she was sure. She decided against Carlsbad and honked on
toward El Paso, glad she had picked a minivan with good gas mileage
instead of the larger, less efficient RV or standard-size van. She
wanted to keep within the speed limit to avoid attracting the
attention of the police, so hoped she wasn't also going to have to
find out how fast the sucker was.

* * *

Julianne heard the scream first. They had
been walking slowly, through the hottest part of the day, too busy
sweating to talk, following Willie's instructions and keeping their
eyes on their feet so they didn't step on a snake that hadn't had
time to rattle. Juli's canteen, not the round metallic kind but a
lightweight insulated thermos, sloshed against her hip, half-empty.
She had stopped to extract a handful of trail mix from her
knapsack, so she wasn't as busy as the others with the sound of her
own feet moving. The scream was strangled, broken off. "Shhh," she
said to the others. "Hear it?"

There was another short, chopping noise, a
thunk of some sort, and a groan, a babble of voices.

Willie started sweating a little more than
he had been. "Good thing you heard it, darlin'," he told her.
"Comin' from that way, would you say?" he asked, pointing
northeast.

She nodded.

"Then we'll go this way for a while," he
said, pointing due north. "There's still a line shack around here
someplace."

Another scream, this time long and shrill.
Julianne, who had through the spell of the Wizard Michael Scott
inhabited the bodies of Scottish ballad heroes for most of a year,
shook her head and gave Willie a long considering look. It was not
a look of derision or accusations of cowardice. She knew he was
afraid, and she thought it was a more sensible response than her
own. But how would his dreams be, how would his life be, how could
he fulfill the mission he had to fulfill if he turned away? She
knew the person she had become wouldn't be able to handle it.

Brose touched Willie's arm. "Come on, buddy,
let's have a look-see," he said.

Willie shrugged. "Just tryin' to protect the
rest of y'all. It's fine with me." He told himself he wasn't so
much afraid for his own skin as for the women. Having inhabited, in
spirit anyway, the bodies of countless victimized sweet young
ballad ladies, he probably had a better sense of the odds than they
did. Whoever was screaming was probably beyond help, and whoever
caused the screaming was probably armed, which Willie and his
friends were not.

Anna Mae Gunn was already ahead of them,
striding off in the direction Julianne pointed. When Willie caught
up to her, she gave him a fierce grin and a thumbs-up sign. Once
she would have snarled at him for his initial reluctance, but she'd
spent her ballad time being the sought-after dandy, the choice
ladies' man who was always pursued by crowds of women who wanted
him to be absolutely fearless as well as good in bed. The same kind
of man was resented, and often punished, by men who were threatened
by his attractiveness. Such a man was apt to be on the defensive,
trying to keep his hide in one piece, instead of looking for ways
to dispense with it voluntarily.

Dan caught up in two long lopes with Willie,
Brose, and Anna Mae. Meanwhile Terry walked with Julianne, who, if
she had been a dog, would have had her ears cocked.

The noises were coming from an arroyo,
beside which was parked a Jeep.