“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Nope.”
The men moved off to secure the shed and the equipment shack. Dalton stopped in the doorway to raise a hand and wave to Nicky Baum, who very likely had his crosshairs centered on Dalton’s forehead right now. Thinking about trigger pull, resistance factors, and every harsh thing he had ever said to Nicky Baum, he turned away and stepped back through the open door into Moot Gibson’s home.
He had been expecting one of those serial-killer nest scenes, a squalid ruin with the look of a crack house, the walls covered with newspaper clippings, scrawled obscenities, filth-strewn floors, all the outward signs of Moot Gibson’s slow descent into savagery and madness. Instead, after he had moved through the place again and opened up all the steel shutters, he found himself in a crisp, clean, sparsely furnished four-room home that looked as if it had been decorated by Shakers; simple wooden walls, a spotless hardwood floor with a few colorful Navajo rugs here and there, a few pieces of simple pine furniture; in the dining room, a long trestle table gleaming in the half-light from the setting sun.
In the kitchen, a galley fit for a wooden sailboat, with a row of copper pots — graduated and gleaming — hanging over a center island, a small icebox in the corner, and by the sink a stack of neatly folded dishcloths and a fresh square of Sunlight soap.
In the bedroom, a single hard cot dressed barracks-style with a taut white sheet folded down over two soft Navajo blankets, and under the bed three pairs of black combat boots, each one polished to a dazzling shine and the laces squared away. On the far side of the room, a tall dresser made of rosewood, as polished as every other wooden surface in the home, and on top of the dresser a standing mirror shaped like a gothic window, two bottles of Old Spice cologne, and next to the mirror what looked like a framed piece of ancient antelope or deer hide, butternut brown, into which had been burned — branded — the same familiar drawing that he suspected he would find in this place:
He reached out and took the picture down — it was surprisingly heavy, the hide being quite thick — holding it in his hand and feeling himself at the edge of a revelation. He turned the picture over and was in no way surprised to find a message taped to the back, a phrase he had first heard seventeen days ago in Venice, coming from the lips of a dead man’s ghost standing in the curtains that led out onto a balcony with a view of Saint Mark’s Basin:
To get the answer,
you must survive the question.
He did a thorough search, which delivered up no insight other than that Moot Gibson ate only organic grain and home-tilled vegetables, that he had standing subscriptions to Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, National Review, The Economist, Soldier of Fortune, Jane’s Defense Review, and Utne Reader, that his taste in fiction ran to K. C. Constantine’s Mario Balzac books, and that he had $21,533.71 in the bank after a withdrawal of $500 at an ATM in a store called Picketwire Guns and Archery Supplies, according to scraps of ATM receipts he found in the half-burned trash outside the back door.
The trash also contained a tangle of knotted wooden twine and a bowl-shaped half of a hollowed-out gourd, on the surface of which had been painted a string of indecipherable pictographs: a sun, what looked like a daisy, little crosses. The figures had been executed with far more care than the drawings he had found in his global pursuit of Moot Gibson, but they shared the basic iconography of a crescent, a flower, and a cross. The underside of the gourd was coated with a thick black substance. He put the gourd to his nose and recoiled — the sudden flashing picture of the sunlit room in Venice and the spinning terra-cotta cylinder filled his mind and sent a bolt of terror through him.
He stuffed the gourd and the ATM receipts into a leather sack hanging on a chair in Moot’s bedroom, picked up the framed drawing, and left the house at far more than just a walk, with the muscles across his back tightening painfully and what felt like a hundred yards of gleaming hardwood floor to cross before he reached the shattered smoldering rectangle of the blown-open door.
He stepped out into the soft light of evening and found Delroy Suarez and Willard Fremont in the front yard, crouching solicitously over the trembling form of a large black-and-tan dog with a low blade-shaped head and teeth like a T. rex.
The dog was panting heavily in between tentative sips of water taken from Fremont’s cupped palm and she watched Dalton coming with one white-rimmed eye.
“Micah, I’d like you to meet Irene. Irene, this is Micah.”
Dalton knelt down and after a guarded look at Suarez and Fremont, held out the finger he was least unwilling to lose to this slit-eyed, wolfish bitch.
She rolled her eyes, whimpered at him, and then sniffed at his knuckles. Her muzzle was hot and her breath was foul. She smelled of what she had been eating, possibly her kennelmates, but in her manner there was only an intense sense of gratitude and a readiness to please.
Suarez, standing up and walking Dalton a few yards away, nodded toward the dusty black Dodge pickup sitting in the front yard, and said, “I checked that truck out. There was a can of Sterno sitting under the engine hood. Flamed out a while ago, but it would have been burning around the time Nicky checked the satellite shots.”
“I found another Sterno can in the fireplace. It was still hot. How long does a can of Sterno burn?”
Suarez shook his head. “Never used it. But a big one like the one under the hood, set on low, might burn for a couple of days.”
They both watched Fremont stroking the dog, who had now stopped quivering and was smiling up at him, both of them happy to see each other. They looked like old retired pirates at a reunion.
“What do you think?” Dalton asked, after a silence.
“Think? I think we’ve been outthunk,” said Suarez.
“Looks like. Willard,” he said, “say good bye to the dog. We gotta go.”
Fremont was standing up, his mouth open and formulating the first appeal on behalf of the dog (Dalton could see it coming) but Dalton was already on the com set.
“Nicky, you there?”
Fremont was walking toward them now, his face set and his manner determined. “Look, Micah, we can’t just leave—”
“Nicky, come in.”
“—her here to starve. She’s a good old—”
“Nicky…”
“—dog and she’ll be no—”
There was a hum, a definite humming burr, and a solid silvery flash. A heavy rifle round struck Fremont in midstride with a sound like a sledgehammer hitting a side of frozen beef.
The round blew him literally in half: his lower torso, legs still obscenely working, traveled another pace toward them while his midsection blew out to the left, an eruption of flesh and bone, guts, his belt buckle, three inches of spinal cord striking the wall of the house. The expression on his face as he died was shocked, indignant.
Then the sound of the shot, the deep reverberating boom of a .50-caliber rifle, came rolling across the desert from Baum’s position two hundred yards to the west.
Suarez and Dalton went for the house, Dalton a few feet in the lead, Suarez right behind him. Dalton heard Delroy Suarez clearly say “shit” just before something wet and hot and solid struck the back of Dalton’s neck.
Another crack of distant thunder.
The Remington clattered through the door as he crossed the threshold, tripping him up. He fell forward and rolled as another silvery humming blur cracked the air a foot over his head and the kitchen table in the back room exploded in a spray of splinters before the round punched out through the kitchen wall.