Tailed (14 page)

“Wilco?” Angie leaned down and gave the hound a hug. “I found him wandering around the parking lot, lost.”

“Angie…” I began an earnest protest.

“Garth, I couldn't leave the poor thing wandering around.”

Wilco rolled his eyes at her, and then smiled fiendishly at me.

My mouth moved, but no words came. Everyone stood there looking at me as if they were farmhands and parents hovering over Dorothy after the tornado. Would that this Midwest Munchkinland was only in my dreams.

“The Tupelca came to me and explained the whole thing.” Angie waved at my kidnappers like they were contestants in a game show. “We have to drive to New Mexico.”

chapter 18

A
ngie did finally explain it to me as Timmy the Linebacker drove us west through the night toward Denver, the panel truck rolling and rumbling beneath us. The others—Flat Nose Norman, Droopy Brutus, and Otto—slept restlessly across the floor in the back of the panel truck, their overnight bags doubling as pillows. It was gloomy back there, mostly empty except for a few cardboard wardrobe boxes.

As I'd already surmised, the Tupelca hadn't dropped by our abode to rent taxidermy for the second time in one week, rather to seek me out. And when they pressed Angie for some information on my whereabouts, she managed to pry from them what was up: the upshot being that my life was in danger and that they needed to try to protect me. She became alarmed: was she sure I was going to Virginia? They told her the next victim was in Omaha, Nebraska, and that if I were going there, I'd be heading right into the waiting arms of the killer. Their apparent panic at this prospect made her seriously worried in as much as she knew I was going to Omaha, Nebraska. And if these guys weren't for real, she reasoned, how would they have known about Nebraska?

Flat Nose Norman then told her the whole story of why the murders were happening, and the effect was compelling enough that she picked up the phone to call the FBI.

But the Tupelca pleaded with her not to do so. The FBI agents could be the ones trying to kill me. They reasoned that the FBI hadn't been able to protect any of the others, so why me? Surely it was plain they knew the murderer was connected to me but that I didn't fit the profile—so why didn't they have me someplace safe and guarded? Either they were using me as bait or they were thinking of pinning the murders on me. So why should Angie put her trust in the FBI?

And she knew that I was now a suspect, which made the FBI's motives even more suspect.

It was in this state of mind and state of panic that they all agreed to go to Omaha, and of course if she was going, Otto insisted on going. They were Otto's clients, after all, and he had to look after their interests. She already had the two tickets to Chicago, and the other three managed to get seats on standby.

When I'd spoken with her that afternoon on Otto's cell phone, I never imagined she was at Omaha's Eppley Airfield.

As to what the Tupelca had to do with all this, it was a long story that kept us up for half a tank of gas. First I regaled Angie with my half of the story because she just couldn't wait. She knew all about my grandfather being a founding member of the Order of the White Geckos and how that fez fellowship folded. But she knew more backstory than I did.

“It seems that the Order of the White Geckos was founded when the original five were camping on a hill during a javelina hunt in New Mexico. The area is known to have been inhabited by an aboriginal people known as the Tupelca. Each hunter had a dream one night, the same dream, about five white geckos.”

“The same dream?”

“Yup. They thought that was strange, too, and mentioned it to their hunting guide, who told them that there were hieroglyphs in the area depicting five white geckos in a circle, like a chain, that had been left by the ancient people called the Tupelca. And that's when the hunters decided there was something special about the five of them, like the five geckos, and that they should form a brotherhood of good fellowship and hunting.”

“Just like that? They suddenly just thought this would be a good idea?”

Angie shrugged. “I said the same thing when Norman told me the story, but I guess it was kind of a fad in those days to form brotherhoods. I'm told that a lot of lodges started from seemingly odd beginnings. Did you know the Cooties were formed by soldiers from World War I because the bugs that bit them caused them to scratch, which often resulted in them ducking under the Germans' machine gun fire?”

I paused, blinking incredulously. “OK, go on.”

“And some orders were formed to make fun of other orders, but then turned serious.”

“Not about that, about this tribe, the Tupelca tribe.”

“That's just it, they weren't an Indian tribe.”

“But you said…”

“I looked them up on the Web and printed out a bunch of stuff for the flight. The Tupelca are an anthropological riddle. They were thought to be some of the first inhabitants of North America, but nobody seems to agree on where they came from or how. Some scientists argue that they came by sea from the Pacific and Asia, while others think that they crossed from Siberia on an ice bridge—even though there is no archeological record of settlements in Alaska or Canada. Still others think their cave paintings are a lot like those in France. And still others, such as psychics and uncredentialed researchers, contend that the Tupelca were humanoid extraterrestrial castaways. Nobody knows how they arrived there, or where they went. All of a sudden—
pft!
—they vanished.”

“
Pft?
Is that the sound they made when they vanished?
Pft?
”

At a loss for words in the face of my flippancy, Angie just squinted and stuck her tongue out at me. I could tell she was really worked up about all this, the way she gets when she's focused on one of her double-sided jigsaw puzzles.

“But enough about little green Frenchmen from Mars.” I rolled my hand in the air. “Let's get to the part about who's trying to kill me. And why?”

“They told me that Coyotes are a stealth dwelling of the Tupelca. They're the ones trying to kill you.”

“Right. My captors mentioned that.”

“Here's the thing. Supposedly the Tupelca were great hunters, and their spirits absorbed those of the animals they killed. They had powers, and the native tribes in surrounding areas feared these strangers. So the natives banded together and wiped them out in a great war. All except five remaining Tupelca, who somehow—through magic or something—put their spirits into jars and buried them in a hill in New Mexico.”

“Let me guess. This was the same hill…”

“Right, where the five hunters slept and had their dream. That's the moment the five spirits jumped into them. That's where their spirits hid, until they passed it to their sons, and then to their sons waiting for the stars to align and the white geckos to appear. That's now, and one of these vuka spirits is in you. And not only that.” Angie took a deep breath, getting winded from her story. “They left a sign for any of their people who might follow, to rescue their spirits. The sign was geckos that turn white, which do so…”

“Every hundred years. Which is now.”

“Uh huh. And some—get this—think that the appearance of the white geckos every hundred years signals an alignment of the stars so they can go home to their planet. If all five spirits come together into one man, they can call for a ride home.”

“Like calling a car service to Planet X?”

She froze. “You really are smart sometimes, Garth.”

“Gee, thanks.” I rolled my eyes. “So these lamps with the genies in them…”

“Well, the Coyotes want to use the spirits to return to their planet and become immortal. To free the spirits, they need to gather them from the grandsons of the original five members by ritualistically killing them with animals killed by their grandfathers near the mound. It was killing animals near the mound that opened the grandfathers to receive the spirits. Same works in reverse. If you are killed by the animal that moved the spirit into your grandfather, the spirit will leap from you into whoever does the killing—in this case the Coyotes' leader, the serial killer. As long as it's at the time of the white gecko.”

“Ah, so this is one of those cults where people divest themselves of all their worldly possessions and wait for a saucer to take them to an idyllic life in the clouds.” I gestured at Norman and Brutus snoring on the floor across from us. “So what's this to these three? What do they care if these Coyotes go back to Zontar? I mean, not the nicest way of doing it, killing people with their taxidermy and stealing their vuka…”

“These Tupelca from the Javelina Dwelling found this out from a defector from the Coyotes, and want to take you to New Mexico, to that mound, and put your vuka back in the jar where it came from for the next hundred years, to keep it safe, to keep the Coyotes from going back to their planet.”

“I appreciate that, I really do. I'd rather
not
die just now. But so what if they go back to their planet?” Was I the idiot who just said the words “back to their planet”?

“They're afraid the Tupelca will come back from their planet in huge numbers, to avenge the massacre of their people and—”

“I knew it. I knew it. Someone has to explain to me why the aliens are always coming here and trying to wipe us out, or enslave us, or eat us. If they're so smart and advanced, with spaceships that can travel parsecs in seconds and all that, can't they have machines make pastrami sandwiches out of thin air like on
Star Trek
? I mean, even we've figured out how to make doors open automatically—
shift
—like on the
Enterprise
. Messing with us is like me arbitrarily declaring war on pill bugs.”

“Well, rant if you must, sugar. I don't know if they're aliens or not. All I know is that's what this is about. The Coyotes are trying to get all five spirits into one being during the time of the white gecko, and the Javelinas are trying to stop them.”

“And these are the men who will save the world from an alien invasion?” I gestured at the snoring Norman and Brutus sprawled across from us. “Suburban warriors?”

She gave me a shove. “Joke if you want, but someone is trying to kill you because they
think
you have one of their vukas. Doesn't matter whether it's true or not.”

“Would it be indelicate to ask how my vuka is going to get from me into this jar? I'm picturing myself squatting over a genie lamp in the high desert.”

“Gross. There's some kind of ceremony. Garth, this is serious. You need to take it seriously.”

“No, my sweet, this is idiotic. You don't really believe all this?”

“I keep telling you, dopey, it doesn't matter what I believe.
They
believe it. Enough to try to kill you if they think you have the vuka spirit.” Angie rested her head on my shoulder.

“So who's the Coyote leader that's going to absorb all these spirits?”

“Someone they call
El Viajero
—that means ‘The Traveler.' He's the one who came upon the original charter for the Order of the Five White Geckos that explained all this.”

“That nut J. C. Fowler mentioned that name when he was babbling to me at the Space Needle.”

I stewed a few moments. I had little doubt that this story was cooked up much in the same way that Shirley MacLaine knows what condiment a thirty-five-thousand-year-old Cro-Magnon warrior named Ramtha liked on his hot dog. Some ding-a-ling channeled this complicated little history, and like those guru hucksters with their doomsday cults, they roped in a bunch of impressionable knuckleheads. Three of them were right there in the van with us.

“J. C. Fowler?” Angie lifted her head off my shoulder in surprise. “Is he that archeologist guy from the seventies?”

“Wow, that was fast. How'd you remember him?”

“Crossword the other day. Six across, begins with ‘F,'
archeologist who digs it
.”

“Uh huh. Well, it seems he knew my dad, and Gabby, and told them and me he was a nice Javelina. When I spoke to Stella on the phone she said he was my uncle.”

“Your mother would have told you, wouldn't she?”

I tried not to give her a sardonic eye. “That's right, you've never met Gabby. But get this: Fowler claims to be Nicholas's father.”

Angie gasped, partly from surprise, and partially—I think—from pleasure. Her mouth hung open and her beautiful blue eyes were bright and wide. She gets a kick out of weird stuff like that, part of her puzzle personality.

I nodded. “That's what he said. And when I needled Nicholas about it, he confessed that he hadn't been able to find any record of his birth—that's the reason he took the name Pahlinic all those years ago. Found it in the phone book.”

“Wow.” Hands to her face, she sank back into my side, deep in thought. “Wonder if it's true. Now, you mentioned a Dr. Lanston. The lead FBI investigator. A woman?”

“Air Force.”

“Air Force? What have they…”

“I don't know…but when I escaped Hell she was on the phone with someone who said they were sending someone from something called Gibraltar to help find me.”

“I didn't see her when they brought me in for questioning, just Bricazzi and Stucco. Is she cute?”

“Cute?” I eyed Angie warily. “Yes, cute like Charlie McCarthy. You don't really think I have a wandering eye, do you?”

“You've been away a lot.” She assumed a grumpy demeanor, arms folded, bottom lip out. “I worry sometimes.”

I reflected back on Amber. I was this far from telling her about that, to bolster her confidence in me, but thought better of it. I know I don't like hearing about guys hitting on Angie. If a relationship was a car, something like that can be the little
tick, tick, tick
sound you hear from the rear axle. Could be nothing, just one of your suspension bushings squeaking. Or your wheels might be about ready to fall off.

“Babe, that's the last thing you need to worry about. We've got a vuka to flush.”