When Clara had been ripped from the thicket and carried across the night sky, Bowie had emerged from the woods and approached Ace. Bowie, the legendary tour guide, wasn’t even fit for prey, wasn’t good enough to serve as monster meat. A clean death would be a happy ending.
“They took my baby,” Ace said.
“Shoot me, you ugly son of a bitch.”
Ace lifted the Colt almost as an afterthought, the action of an absentminded mass murderer and serial killer. “I thought they was going to eat her.”
Bowie was calm. It would probably hurt like the Devil’s hot sauce for a split second, but the peace that followed would more than make amends. “A bullet, please.”
“God sent His angels, and they took her. Not me.”
“Maybe God left you here for a purpose. Maybe God needs you to kill me. Listen to Him.”
Ace actually cocked his head and put a hand to his ear, in what would have been considered a display of overacting if a movie camera had been rolling. “I don’t hear nothing. He used to talk to me, but now I don’t hear nothing.”
The clouds had thinned a little and the rain had stopped. The moonlight spread across the night sky in melodramatic purple wadding. The barrel of the pistol glinted, and its dark round eye looked into Bowie’s heart.
“He led me down by the still waters and left me there.” Ace glanced above, exposing the stubbly knot of his Adam’s apple.
“The waters don’t seem all that still to me,” Bowie said. “Class VI plus.”
“They took my baby. God took my baby.”
Ace, who had taken half-a-dozen lives without showing a shred of regret, and who had just lost his lover to an unknown and possibly supernatural species, harbored no room for self-reflection. It confirmed what Bowie had always heard about the most successful killers: They were sociopathic, lacking morality, possessing loose wires and corroded contacts where the higher-order brain housed its sense of right and wrong.
So, one more wouldn’t hurt, right? God wouldn’t hold it against his special little agent. If God were truly fair and merciful, Ace Goodall would even get an additional reward for eradicating one more cockroach in the Great Big Bug Motel. Maybe an extra string on the harp, or a golden-cross tattoo on one wing.
“Maybe God knows something we don’t,” Bowie said, stepping toward Ace, goading him.
Ace nodded as if Bowie had served up a sage’s helping of spiritual smoke. “Him that has the plan.”
“Right.”
Bowie was three feet away now, instinctively flinching in anticipation of the. 32-caliber bullet. But Ace let him come, until Bowie wrapped his hand around the pistol’s barrel and pulled it from Ace’s limp fingers.
Shit. What now?
“We got to save her,” Ace said.
“She’s probably dead by now.”
Ace dropped to his knees and grabbed his head, squeezing it between his hands like a rotten melon he was trying to smash.
“She ain’t dead,” he shouted, voice breaking and rising to an unsettling, keening pitch that roared back and forth across the gorge, so loud even the lapping, churning river couldn’t suppress it. Then he flopped forward in a quivering seizure, limbs twitching, fingers clawing at the coarse sand of the riverbank. The schizophrenic killer vomited a staccato rant of strange syllables.
Bowie could only stare transfixed, the Colt Python as heavy as a dead snake in his hand, as Ace spoke in tongues.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Nice.
In the temperate bowels of the cave, Raintree had perched the penlight on a rock shelf. Here, the cave angled down and the walls were worn smooth, as if the channel had once carried water. The rock contained striations of crystal that caught and reflected the battery-powered light. Other layers in the granite revealed sandstone, a crumbling, chalk-white rock, and even a vein of coal. But Raintree wasn’t here for a geology class. He’d already taken that one in college, the easy three-hour credit known around campus as “Rocks for Jocks.”
He’d gone at least a hundred yards, at one point squeezing through a narrow crevice that had filled him with claustrophobia. But now he was alone to seek the Spirit Guide.
Raintree thought the inner search should be conducted in the forest, at the primal moment of first light, when the nocturnal creatures shut their eyes and gave way to the day shift. But that was cheating. Many species of animals could be found in the forest, and it would be difficult to know which one was the chosen spirit. Raintree’s vision quest would follow a hard path, so that when the good medicine came, he would know it for what it was.
But first things first.
He rummaged in the medicine bag and came out with three vials. The oxycodone was half gone, but he still had a good palmful left. Enough to put a damper on his central nervous system, though probably not enough to kill him.
He had four amphetamines left, Black Beauties, strong enough to make his dark hair stand on end. The third vial contained diazepam, better known under the trade name Valium. About a dozen of those were left if he really needed sleep and tranquility.
Under perfect conditions, he would time his medication so he would ease between moods. Oxy in the morning to numb the edges, then a Black Beauty for a midday pick-me-up, then Valium to blend the afternoon into a smooth concoction. From there, the choices were nearly limitless. Well, actually, they were quite limited, but the choice between a balls-tingling, eyelid-quivering speed buzz and a thick-tongued ride down the Oxy Highway seemed like a no-lose opportunity.
But this was a special circumstance. The painkillers kept his muscles from screaming at their overtaxed state, and the Valium allowed his mind to entertain images of the Raven Mockers without succumbing to a fit of fear. He’d held off on the speed, figuring he’d need it in the morning to make it to the top of Attacoa, the stone chimney the white settlers called Babel Tower. But there was one special ingredient that spiced the stew of his vision quest.
He pinched down into the medicine bag and came up with a piece of tinfoil. Some Southwestern tribes had used peyote, belladonna, jimson weed, tobacco, or hemp blossoms in their spiritual ceremonies.
Raintree figured the Cherokee vision quest needed a serious upgrade. He pulled out the one-thousand-microgram dose of Mr. Natural LSD, concocted in a Berkeley lab by a bald, bearded professor. The acid manufacturer had been a client in one of Raintree’s fitness gyms, and when the man had pulled a muscle doing dead lifts, Raintree offered him half an oxycodone tablet. The man traded for four, giving up an eighth of an ounce of sensimilla bud in return. A lasting and mutually rewarding friendship was born, with Raintree having a dozen doctors writing pill prescriptions and the professor cranking out an alphabet soup of illegal substances.
A tiny, sane part of Raintree’s mind, the one where the pills hadn’t shorted out the circuits, knew this was no time for an acid trip. But it was shouted down by the other part, the seeking part, the unhappy and selfish part. The part that had wanted this trip in the first place.
He wished the cave harbored an underground spring, because the speed, the climb, and the assault had made him thirsty. But the cave, at least this far down into the mountain, was only moist, where water seeped between layers of stone and didn’t collect enough for drinking.
He unwrapped the foil and raised the dose of acid to his mouth. He paused, wondering what sort of ritual was required. A tribal chant, an improvised parody of old ghost dances, or maybe a paean to the buffalo spirit.
The Cherokee, who lived in houses and had a written language at the time of their forced removal from the Southern Appalachians, would have been better off as savages. All the written word had done was allow contracts between the tribe and the U.S. government. Those promises were as broken as their spirits on a thousand-mile walk where disease, famine, and exhaustion took them by the hundreds. No wonder many of the Cherokee had abandoned their Great Spirit, left it behind in the territory now owned by the White Man. They deserved each other.