Whirlwind (8 page)

soundlessly when the right-side tires bit into the earth off the blacktop.

The car shuddered.

He froze—turn into the skid? turn out of the skid?—and watched in horror as the low shrubs and deep ditch charged him and veered away at the last minute, putting him back on the road.

Sweat masked his face.

His bladder demanded immediate relief.

His left hand shook so much he thrust it between his knees and squeezed until it calmed.

"My God," he whispered. "Jesus, man, Jesus."

Twenty-five, he swore to himself; he didn't care if it took until dawn, he wouldn't go faster than twenty-five all the way home.

He wasn't sober, but he sure as hell wasn't as drunk as he had been.

The speedometer reached fifty.

He saw the needle, saw it climb again slowly, and decided it would be all right. Sixty, no more; he'd be home quicker, and that was okay because he was a menace to himself out here.

A hard swallow, a deep breath, his right hand flicking the radio off because what he didn't need now was interference with his concentration. Just watch the road, pay no attention to anything that—

He saw it again.

Just a suggestion of movement running with him on the other side of the ditch. Which was impossible.

He was doing sixty-five, for God's sake, there wasn't anything except another car that could go that fast.

He squinted a stare, broke it off when the car began to drift, and licked his lips.

There wasn't anything over there.

Good God, there couldn't be anything over there. It was the headlights, that's all, running along a row of juniper maybe, or some pinon, rock, something like that. His eyes caught the strobelike reflection, and the scotch turned it into something that paced him.

That's all it was.

He wished the moon were a little brighter.

Forget the new canvases, he decided a half-mile later; the hell with it, he was done. He had enough money, the house was paid for, what the hell more could he want?

The car jumped sideways when something slammed into the passenger door.

He yelled, and watched his hands blur around the wheel, watched the road blur black to gray and black again, screamed when the car was struck a second time, and looked over to see what drunken idiot was trying to run him off the road.

There was nothing there.

When he looked back, it was too late.

The highway was gone.

All he could do was cross his arms in front of his face, close his eyes, and scream.

There was no fire, no explosion.

Mike Ostrand hung upside down in his seat-belt, listening to the engine tick, listening to the wind blow through the open window.

Listening to the hiss he thought was the tires spinning to a halt.

A few seconds later, he blacked out when some-thing reached through the window and touched his arm.

La Mosca Inn sat between the Rio Grande and a high adobe wall that fronted the road. Eight units extended left and right from a central two-story building that housed the office, a large flagstone waiting room cooled by a small sparking foun-tain, and a restaurant large enough to seat one hundred without elbows and voices clashing. Spanish tile on the roof, shade provided by cottonwood and mountain ash, and a single huge Russian olive in the center of the court-yard.

Scully sat on a wood bench that ringed the mas-sive tree, facing the arched entrance whose elabo-rate iron gates were closed each night at, the

proprietor told her, precisely midnight. She let her eyes close, and touched a finger to her fore-head, to trap a droplet of sweat that had broken from her hairline.

"Feeling better?" a voice rasped beside her.

"Not really."

The day had gone wrong from minute one: she'd overslept and had to race to the airport, only to learn that the flight had been delayed. For an hour. Then two. Once airborne, she had planned to set up her laptop computer, so she and Mulder could go over what details of the case they had.

It didn't happen.

Roller-coaster turbulence rode them all the way to Dallas, making reading the computer screen a nauseating experience; she spent most of the time trying, and failing, to doze. Then a series of thun-derstorms ringing the Texas city forced them to swerve wide into a holding pattern until the squall line had passed. Another hour lost, and so was their connecting flight.

"Cursed," Mulder had said at one point. "This whole thing is cursed."

By the time they landed in Albuquerque, she was ready to believe in curses; by the time Red Garson had sped them in his Jeep out of the city, north to Bernalillo, she was ready to spend the rest of her life walking.

The man beside her shifted to get her attention.

She opened her eyes and smiled at him wanly.

Red was as Mulder had told her, a tall, lean, middle-aged man whose lined face and hands spoke of time spent in the mountains and the desert. She had no idea where he'd gotten his nickname, because his blond hair was pale, his blue eyes dark; part of his left ear was missing, bitten off, he told her, in a fight with a man who had a strong aversion to spending the rest of his life in federal prison.

Hardly a stereotypical FBI agent.

When he smiled, only his lips moved; he never showed his teeth.

He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "You think he's fallen asleep?"

"I doubt it."

A pickup chugged past the Inn, backfired twice, and left a curl of black smoke behind.

"Dana?"

She nodded to show him she was listening.

"Why does he call you Scully all the time? I mean, you do have a first name."

"Because he can” she answered simply, with-out sarcasm, and didn't bother to explain. Just as it would be hard to explain why Mulder was, without question, the best friend she had. It was more than just being partners, being able to rely on each other when one of them was in danger, or when one of them needed a boost when a case seemed to be going bad; and it was more than simply their contrasting styles, which, perversely to some, complemented each other perfectly.

What it was, she sometimes thought was an indefinable instinct, a silent signal that let her know that whatever else changed, whatever else happened, Mulder would always be there when he had to be. One way or another.

At that moment she heard a footfall and grinned. "Here he comes."

Garson looked startled, looked around and saw him walking along one of the stone paths that wound through the courtyard garden. She had to admit he looked strange without his suit. Over his shoulder he carried a denim jacket, not for appearance but to hide the holster he wore on his left hip.

He also looked as frazzled as she felt.

"It's hot," he said, dropping onto the bench beside her.

"It's July, Mulder," Garson reminded him. "It's New Mexico. What did you expect?"

"Heat I can get at home. An oven I already have in my apartment." He scratched through his hair and shook his head as though trying to force himself awake.

"It isn't for everybody” Garson admitted, adding without saying so that "everybody" must be crazy if they didn't instantly fall in love with this part of the country. "And remember, you're a mile farther up than you were in Washington.

Thinner air. Take it easy for a while, understand? You go shooting off in fourteen directions at once, you're going to drop."

Mulder grunted, then stood again. "Hey, look." He headed for the gate.

"Mulder," Scully called. "We haven't time—"

He turned, grinning, and pointed to a small dust devil spinning lazily in the road. "We used to get these things at home. Leaves, you know?" He moved closer; it was no higher than his shin.

"We'd try to get inside." His foot inched toward the dervish's base and appar-ently broke some unseen barrier. The dust devil fell apart, and Mulder toed the place where it had been.

Scully, who was already feeling the effects of the altitude, let the silence settle for a few seconds before she said, "Mulder, come over here, I think we'd better not waste any more time." She checked her watch; it was just after four. "I suppose it’s too late to catch Dr. Rios. What about.. . Patty? Patty Deven. Is she well enough to talk to us?"

Garson stabbed a thumb at her as Mulder rejoined them. "She always like this?"

"We have three people murdered. Red. The alti-tude didn't kill them."

The man nodded, accepting the point and the rebuke without taking offense. "The Devens live about a mile down the road. They're fixing to head back to Chicago as soon
as
this is cleared up.

I'll take you over, but I'm telling you now that you won't be welcome."

He was right.

Scully caught the instant: hostility as soon as Kurt Deven opened the trailer door and saw who it was.

When Garson introduced his companions, the man scowled and told them to wait. Then he closed the door. Hard.

Mulder nodded toward the riverline of cotton-wood sixty or seventy yards away, "Down there?"

"Yep. The bank slopes sharp right about where you're looking. It happened a little ways to the right,"

Scully shaded her eyes against the low-hanging sun and tried to see it at night, with little but moon and stars for illumination. The trailer wouldn't help; it was too far away, and except for the skeleton of an unfinished house beside it, there were no other homes in the immediate area, even though she saw flagged wooden stakes in the ground, marking other lots soon to be devel-oped. The nearest trailer was a good sixty yards away.

The door opened.

The two men stepped aside as a woman stepped down onto the cinder-block steps. She was short and slight, with straight blonde hair that needed a brushing, and a lost, empty look in her eyes. When she spoke, rage and grief made her hoarse:

"She doesn't want to talk to you again, Mr. Garson."

Red told her softly he understood, and apolo-gized for the intrusion. "But I have these folks here, Mrs.

Deven. All the way from Washington." He cleared his throat, glanced at the open door-way. "They're experts in this kind of crime. If any-one can catch the—"

"Nobody has," she snapped. "Ifs been two weeks, and nobody has."

Scully lifted a hand to draw her attention. "Mrs. Deven?"

The woman took her time: "What?"

Scully kept her voice gentle. "Mrs. Deven, I won't lie to you. I won't pretend to know how you feel for your loss, or how your daughter feels. But Agent Mulder and I have done this more times than I ever want to tell you. And if nothing else, I can promise you that we don't quit. We're not perfect, but we do not quit."

Mary Deven's hands pressed lightly to her stomach, eyes narrowed. "Are you promising me you'll catch him?"

"No," Mulder answered, just as gently, just as firmly. "We're only promising you that we won't quit.

And if you don't want us to bother you, or your family, you won't have to worry."

Mrs. Deven stared at the trees, blinking rapidly,

then not at all. "Just don't take her down there," she said, barely above a whisper. "You take her down there, I'll lose her."

Scully agreed readily, and said nothing when Mulder asked Garson to show him the scene. After all this time, there wouldn't be anything left of real value—Garson and his men and the local police would have raked it over thoroughly, Mulder, however, had a knack for finding things in barren places, a knack she didn't pretend to understand as well as she wanted to.

"Agent Scully?"

Wan, painfully thin, Patty Deven was the mir-ror image of her mother, right down to the haunted look.

A fading bruise spread across her right cheek and temple. Her eyes were too large behind her glasses.

They sat on two lawn chairs. There was no shade, and no offer of a drink.

After a long silence, with the girl staring at the knot of fingers in her lap, Sculy leaned forward and said, "What did you see, Patty?" Nothing more.

Mulder stood on the bare ground, checked the branches above him, glanced at the shallow river below.

"Here?"

"Just about," Garson said.

But "here" was nothing. The ground was too hard for tracks, and with no direct line of sight to the trailer, there was nothing much to work on. He asked Garson to stand approximately where Patty had been, and scowled.

Dark night, thirty or forty feet away, she wouldn't have been able to see much of anything.

Hashes of movement that accompanied her brother's attack and screams.

She saw a ghost because there was nothing true to focus on.

He hunkered down and ran a palm over the ground. "Have you had rain?"