Whirlwind (15 page)

Mulder looked first to Scully before saying, "Leon Ciola."

The sheriff's jaw sagged. "Damn, Mulder, you're good." He drummed his fingers against his cheek thoughtfully, then reached for his phone. 'There's somebody you should meet.

He'll be able to tell you what you want know about who you need to know about. Lanaya. I already told you about him. Believe it or not, he still lives on the res."

"What about Ciola?"

Sparrow held up a finger as the connection was made, winced as he made arrangements with the dealer to meet
at
the Inn after dinner that evening, winced again and rubbed his ear as he hung up. "Storm coming," he explained. "Static'll deafen you sometimes."

Thank God, Mulder thought; at least it'll get cooler.

"Ciola," he reminded Sparrow.

"Bastard. Pure and simple bastard. Got sent up for murder, got a lawyer who found a hole and squeezed the son of a bitch through it. There's not much I can do but keep an eye out, and hope he doesn't lose his temper again."

It didn't take special intuition to figure out the man not only hated Ciola, he was afraid of him.

"You thinking he's involved with this?"

"You have to admit, he's a likely candidate."

"Nope, don't think so."

Mulder was surprised, and let the sheriff know it.

"Not his style," Sparrow explained. "He's all intimidation and reputation. The man he killed, it was over quick and dirty. These people . . . that took patience."

"But not much time. Sheriff," Scully said. "The Deven boy, remember?"

He granted her that reluctantly, but insisted it couldn't have been Ciola. "There's a reason for those people, Agent Scully. We just ain't found it yet. With Leon, there doesn't have to be one."

"Heat of the moment," Mulder suggested.

"Got it in one."

Scully seemed doubtful, but didn't argue.

The sheriff accepted her silence without com-ment, looked around the station, then carefully locked the plastic bags into an attaché case he pulled from a bottom drawer. "Better get going. I want to get back before the storm." He walked to the back and radioed one of his men, telling him where he'd be and for how long; he called a central dispatcher with the same infor-mation, for intercepting any calls; he spat his gum into a wastebasket, opened a wardrobe on the far wall, and took down a clean, blocked hat.

When he saw Mulder staring, he pointed to the hat on the desk. "That's my comfort hat, had it for years." He flicked the brim on the one he had on. "This is my showing-up-in-the-city hat. Pretty dumb, ain't it."

Scully laughed, and Mulder could only nod as Sparrow walked with them to their car.

"Check it out, folks," he said, pointing over the trailer. "Be inside when it happens."

Mulder looked, and couldn't believe that clouds that massive, and that high, could assem-ble so quickly. Shaped like anvils, boiling at the edges, they had already buried most of the west-ern blue.

"My God, Scully, we're going to drown."

He drove back to the motel as fast as he dared, which still wasn't fast enough for the others on the road. They passed him on the left, on the right, and would have driven over him if the car had been low enough.

"Calm down," Scully said when the engine died. "We've still got some work to do while we wait for Lanaya."

The bone pile stirred as the wind brushed over it, dust in tan clouds passing through ribs and eye sockets, through a gaping hole in one of the skulls.

A scorpion scuttled across the curled horn of a ram.

In the center, using the pelvic bone of a stallion for a temporary stool, a man stirred the loose earth with the point of a knife. Designs were fash-ioned, and erased; words were written, and van-ished. He glanced up only once, to check the storm's approach, returning to his work only when he saw the lightning, and didn't hear the thunder.

It would move fast. He would move faster.

Donna Falkner slammed into her house, slammed the door shut behind her, flung a suitcase across the living room, and began to scream her outrage. She kicked at the nearest wall, picked up the desk chair and hurled it down the hall; she grabbed the couch cushions and tried to rip them open with her nails, tossed them aside, and dropped to the floor, sobbing.

It wasn't fair.

It wasn't goddamn fair.

All she had to do was get on the goddamn plane, and she was out of here. Gone. Lost in another city, where they never heard of Indians except on TV, never bothered with Southwest crafts except in fancy boutiques that overpriced everything from a wallet to a brooch. Gone. New name, new hair, new everything.

Gone.

Now the FBI wanted her, and
he
wanted her, and there was nothing she could do about it but sit around and wait.

She punched the floor.

She screamed again, cheeks florid, teeth bared.

The sunlight began to dim, and the thorns of the rosebushes began to scratch lightly against the windows.

Suddenly she couldn't breathe, made a dou-ble fist with her hands, and pressed it against her chest.

Harder. Gulping for air. Rocking on her buttocks until she thought she would faint. Tears streaming down her cheeks, dripping off her chin, coating her lips with the taste of salt.

When the attack passed, she let herself fall backward slowly, seeing nothing but tiny cracks in the plaster ceiling, forming them into images that made her weep again.

The telephone rang.

She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands and sat up. She had no intention of answering it. Let it ring. If it was those agents who had come to see her, they could just come over on their own. The hell with them. The hell with them all.

When she stood, she swayed; when she walked down the short hall toward the bathroom, she staggered. When she reached the bathroom, she looked at her reflection, gagged . . . and giggled.

Touched the tip of her reflection's nose with a fin-ger and told it there was nothing to worry about,

nothing she couldn't handle.

What she would do was, if they wouldn't let her fly, then fuck it, she would drive. By the time they realized she was gone, she would be . . . gone.

She giggled again.

Gone, but not forgotten.

Gone, and goddamn rich.

Wash up, she ordered; wash up, change your clothes, get the damn money, and be ... gone.

What the hell are you so worried about?

She didn't know.

Suddenly, she didn't know.

She hurried into the spare room, squinted through the small window, and figured by the sky she had maybe an hour before the storm arrived. If it arrived. They had a bad habit of being all show and no action sometimes. Not that it mattered. Only a fool would tempt clouds like that on an open road.

Another giggle.

Screw 'em.

Now that she wasn't flying, she could load the Cherokee to the gills, take a little inventory to pad the mattress. The not-so-perfect plan, but better than nothing. Nothing would mean sitting around, waiting for things to happen.

She grabbed a carton and headed for the door.

Sand stirred, lifting sluggishly from the ground as if drawn by a weak magnet.

Nearby, a dead leaf quivered.

A twig shifted, rolled an inch, and stopped.

The sand settled a few seconds later.

Nothing moved.

The shower was wonderful.

After crawling around the van and automobile in the sun all that time, Scully was drenched with sweat, caked and streaked with dust, and ready to scream. In spite of the silver chain, in spite of what Mulder had dug from the vehicles' sides, they hadn't accomplished very much.

What frustrated her was a combination of the case itself, which seemed to be going nowhere fast and the certain knowledge that she had already seen the break point and had missed it Something small.

Something so obvious she had overlooked it. The purloined letter in New Mexico.

The storm didn't help.

The clouds, frightening black and impossibly huge, were still out there, still in the middle dis-tance. If they moved, she couldn't tell. They sat there, not small enough to be lurking, and too large to even be called looming. There was noth-ing ahead of them but a steady, hot wind.

They were also tired. The mix of altitude and heat had sapped them without their realizing it. When they reached the motel, it was a mutual decision to clean up and rest for an hour, then meet again to see what they could come up with before their meeting with Nick Lanaya.

So she used the shower to make her comfort-able again, to drain the afternoon's tension from her shoulders and limbs, and to let her mind roam, seeking pathways and the places where they might possibly join into something concrete she could follow, something hopeful.

When it didn't happen immediately, she was mildly annoyed, but she didn't mind. It would come eventually; of that she was confident.

She took her time dressing, sat on the edge of her bed, and gazed at the window, scowling at the tension she could feel building again. She rolled her shoulders, massaged them one at a time, to get rid of it; it didn't work. She stretched until her joints threatened to pop or separate, deliberately groaning aloud; it didn't work.

Maybe it was just anticipation of the storm.

The clouds must have moved closer while she had been in the bathroom. The sunlight held con-siderably less glare, a hint of false twilight filter-ing into the front courtyard. By that part of the bench tree she could see, the wind had died down as well.

It seemed that the outside had decided to do nothing but wait until the storm made up its mind whether to strike or not.

"Damn," she whispered.

No wonder she was still tense. That was exactly what she was doing. Waiting, not acting. Some son of a bitch had butchered three innocent peo-ple, and all she could do was sit here like a lump and wait for the damn rain.

She snapped to her feet, grabbed her shoulder bag, decided the hell with the hat, and hurried outside.

No one in the courtyard and, when she couldn't help looking, no one standing at the gate.

The image of Ciola's face so close to her own made her pause and shudder. Those scars, and those dead eyes . . . she shuddered again and knocked hard on Mulder's door, one heel tap-ping impatiently.

When he answered, naked to the waist and drying his hair with a towel, she said, "Get decent, Mulder.

We're going out again."

The sand stirred. The leaf quivered.

"You're the one who made the connections," Scully said as he pulled on a shirt. "So why wait?"

"Scully, we haven't been here twenty-four hours."

"That doesn't answer my question: Why wait?"

He couldn't think of a good answer, and didn't especially want to, not when she practically sparked with energy like this. It was best, always best, to go along for the ride. Besides, she was right. With too many signs pointing to the Konochine, it only made sense to pay an official visit to the reservation. The only problem was, he thought they ought to have a guide, someone who knew who they should talk to, preferably someone who knew the language.

"The sheriff."

"He's in Albuquerque, remember?"

"Falkner."

"They rode her out on a rail."

She tapped a fingernail on the table. "Lanaya would be perfect, but we don't know how to get in touch with him."

They tried the phone book, but no luck; they tried the sheriff's dispatcher, and had the same result. A call to Falkner brought no answer; Scully

let the phone ring twenty times before hanging up in disgust.