The Tail of the Arabian, Knight, page 6
The room was not large, most of it taken up by long churchlike pews filled with those waiting to depart and those waiting for those arriving—most of them unquestionably of either Indian or Mexican descent, the rest Anglo tourists in cowboy hats, boots, and jeans, or locals in cowboy hats, boots, and jeans.
On the right were two airline counters and a lunchstand, on the left a crowded gift shop that, as far as he could tell, sold only mugs, T-shirts, and Indian jewelry. Voices were loud, not all of them speaking English, and he wanted to stop someone and ask if he was really in New Mexico’s largest city and not a border town where they frisked you and your horse before giving you passage.
He never had the chance.
A woman stepped up to him, threw her arms around his neck, and whispered in his ear: “I have a knife. Don’t scream or I’ll take off your scalp.”
SEVEN
After what had happened in the airplane, and with little time left to make his escape, Lincoln had little tolerance left for any delays. He looked down at the woman still clinging to his neck and said, “Do you mind?”
She frowned, leaned her head back and stared at him, blinking. “I said I had a knife.”
“I heard you the first time.”
“But that’s supposed to be the password. Aren’t you Lincoln Blackthorne?”
“I am,” he said in a whisper, and with a furtive glance behind him at the chattering, waving passengers trailing out of the jetway. An old woman beamed at him, the quintessential grandmother enjoying the tender reunion, and he smiled back, nodding as if to say, it’s been a long time, ma’am, and we got a lotta catchin’ up t’do. Then carefully, so as not to attract the attention of the old woman, or the potbellied representative of airport security who might think he was being a little disrespectful to the local female population, he disengaged her arms and walked her hurriedly through the crowd to the escalators on the far side of the room. “And you must be Annabelle Bannon.”
“Right! But why didn’t you answer me? Didn’t Loraleen give you the password?” She held up a hand to forestall response. “No, never mind. Obviously, she didn’t. The little creep. She’s always doing that, you know. All her life she’s been a real pain in— Hey, buddy, watch where you’re going!” she snapped at a young man who skipped away from the well-aimed point of her boot, clearing the escalator’s entrance and allowing them to descend.
Annabelle remained in front, and Lincoln watched her as she complained about how they had to traipse halfway across the state just to get their luggage, which wouldn’t be there anyway, so what’s the big hurry.
She was his height, perhaps an inch shorter, with short black hair brushed back over her ears. Her figure was slight in shirt and jeans, and he could not see an extraneous ounce of fat on her anywhere. Her face and hands were deeply tanned, her eyes when he saw them as dark as her hair, and her mouth though wide showed no teeth when she smiled.
“Why the big rush?” she asked in annoyance when he took her arm at the elbow and rushed them along the tiled corridor. “I told you the bags wouldn’t be there, didn’t I? They work on it, you know. They take lessons on how to unload planes with their teeth and their toes. I think they have a record book somewhere they’re trying to get into, if you know what I mean.”
“I’m anxious for the tour, and I have my bag right here,” he said, and looked over his shoulder.
She caught the look, followed it down the hall, and broke into a trot. “Okay,” and he knew instantly that she had read his mind.
In less than two minutes they were outside, and he was holding his chest and gasping. “Good lord, I thought New Mexico was comfortable in June.”
He had been told not to worry about the heat; no matter how high the temperature, it was only dry desert air and more or less bearable despite the time of year. What he hadn’t been told about, and which Annabelle told him now with what he thought was rather undue glee, was the city’s elevation—five thousand air-thinning feet above sea level, which added greatly to the heat and sapped him instantly. His sinuses felt as though they’d packed up and gone back East, his skin was ready to peel off in layers, and when he took a deep breath, he didn’t feel a thing.
“Comfortable? For who?” she said, pulling him across the parking lot to a large white Cadillac convertible at least twenty years old. “Roadrunners and coyotes like it, I guess, and a few idiots who come here on their pensions because they think it’s healthier than Chicago.”
She flung the satchel into the back seat, looked at his panicked expression with a frown, and vaulted over the door, waving him to join her because she wasn’t waiting for clearance from the tower. Before he was fully seated, she was weaving expertly through the lanes to the pay booth, threw a dollar at the attendant, and barely missed clipping off the barrier.
He checked behind; no one was following. He looked front, and decided he’d rather get back on the plane.
Annabelle was jockeying with the rest of the city’s equally heedless drivers for the single best position on the highway where driving was fast and easy, and concentration was at its lowest. She said nothing, just pointed east toward the looming mountains, and once on the six-lane interstate that cut through the town, she pushed down the accelerator as far as it would go.
“Who is he?” she asked with mild interest as she jerked a thumb over her shoulder.
“I don’t know his name.”
“Does he want to kill us?”
“Could be,” he said, checking again. “He tried once. So did a buddy of his.”
“Does Uncle Farren know about this?”
“To tell you the truth, I don’t know,” he said over the rush of the wind. “About the first guy, yes. About this other one, I’m not sure.”
She dodged a police car with its red lights spinning, a van with a surfboard strapped to the top, and a battered station wagon from the university. “He probably doesn’t. All he thinks about are those damned fool horses of his.”
He was surprised. “You don’t like horses?”
She gave him a withering look that shut him up, and he crouched lower into the white leather seat, hoping the hot wind spilling over the windshield wouldn’t blast away every hair from his head.
“Y’know, I think I’m going to kill Loraleen for that stupid password trick,” she said after five minutes of silence. “Do you know I must have hugged at least fifteen guys in that place? I kid you not—fifteen of them. I could have made a fortune, actually, if I was that kind of woman and not very choosy. You can smoke if you want to.”
He declined, and looked the other way as she fumbled in her shirt pocket for a cigarette and decided to forego the convenience of the car’s lighter for the one in her jeans, which required her to lift half out of her seat in order to free it so she could use it.
“Nice place,” he said finally, swallowing his terror and looking around. “Sort of spread out like Los Angeles.”
“Yeah. Nice, if you like anthills.”
The city swept past them faster than he would like—low stucco houses buried beneath high-crowned trees and hidden behind walls painted to look like adobe, sprawling shopping centers here and there, hotels with their names garish in red neon, step-back and boxy condominiums and apartment complexes that crawled toward the slopes of the Sandias, which themselves seemed to rise straight up from the desert floor—jagged, patched with greens and browns, split by canyons no self-respecting burro would want to call home. At the top he could see a handful of television towers, what might have been an observation deck, and a lone hang glider swooping low over it all with the grace of an eagle.
Every so often he saw what looked like large ditches sided in concrete splitting developments, neighborhoods, once even a small business office complex. When he asked, she told him they were once arroyos, and when it rained in the mountains they still carried water. Not for long, however; flash flooding only, and more than once a child playing there had been caught and drowned by the rushing water. When he commented on the clouds still hovering over the peaks, and on those billowing white and grey several miles up in an apparent effort to surround the city, she laughed and slapped the steering wheel.
“They’re like men,” she said with a sardonic grin. “They promise, but they seldom deliver.”
“How wonderful for you.” He looked again at a concrete-sided arroyo. “And I suppose you have earthquakes on weekends, just for fun.”
“Sure,” she said blithely. “Not big, but they’re here. Like men, they make you shake a little, but that’s all.”
“Don’t you like men, either?” he said, thinking this was going to be one wonderful trip.
“Sure,” she said, and looked him over carefully, slowly, so slowly that he had to point at the road to redirect her attention. “I like them. I just don’t trust them very much.”
“Present company included?”
“We’ll see,” she said. “We’ll see.”
“Nice,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it,” she told him. “I don’t trust women, either. They like men too much.”
“Is there anybody you do like?”
“I’m working on it,” she said, and her lips almost parted in the ghost of a grin.
The interstate angled smoothly to the right, where the Sandias stopped just long enough for it to pass through.
The city fell behind them as they passed between the walls of what she told him was Tijeras Canyon, with sagebrush, low pine, and other desert shrubs poking through the ground where it wasn’t split by dry riverbeds that hadn’t seen a drop of water since Coronado and his army tramped through on their way to El Dorado; and what few streams were still full had their erratic courses marked by dense concentrations of trees and grass that almost glowed so startlingly intense was their green against the drab hillsides. There were a few pockets of homes, what looked to be a ghost town it seemed so uninviting, and a larger community whose name flashed by so fast he couldn’t catch it when they left the highway for a two-lane road.
“Where are we going?” he asked when they finally slowed down to something more like sixty than ninety.
“My place—the ranch, that is—is between here and Santa Fe,” she said. “We could have gone the other way, around the other side of the mountains on the interstate, but this way is shorter.”
Slower still as they left the Sandias behind them and another range, even higher, climbed into view ahead.
“Did … have you talked with your uncle?” he asked as he pushed himself into the corner of the seat, the better to see her reaction, and to watch the road behind.
They were, for the time being, alone, the sun climbing toward noon and not a cloud left in the sky save for those few clinging stubbornly to the mountaintops. A dim flash of lightning; a distant rumbling of thunder.
They were alone, and the silence of it, the expanse of it with not another soul in sight, began to work on his nerves. Though he lived in a small town and groused constantly about its growing, he was still used to the proximity of people. This, on the other hand, was something he had seldom experienced—virtually complete desolation, in the middle of the twentieth century, and he didn’t like it one bit. He knew that if he didn’t keep talking, he’d soon be seeing murderous shadows where no shadows existed.
He asked her again about talking with Farren.
She nodded. “He called me just after you left. In what I gather was something of an event back there in Jersey.”
An image of the huffing, charging Clydesdale came to mind, and he nodded. “It was your sister’s idea, actually. I’m a bit more conservative. To say the least, it was an unusual departure.” Another image of the man in black in his lightless car, and the impulse to smile faded. “So what did he say?”
“He told me everything.”
From the tone of her voice, he knew he was in trouble. “And?”
“He’s nuts.”
“He believes it, Annabelle.”
She shook her head, her expression somewhat surprisingly both sad and bitter. “If you told a fat man he was going to die in six months unless he ate nothing but refried beans and stale burritos, he’d believe it.”
“I believe him.”
A curve in the road took her attention, and when they were out of it, they were crossing flatland ringed in the distance by the ever-present mountains. He could see that most of the land on both sides was fenced off with barbed wire, and a few head of cattle roamed the dry riverbeds.
“Then you’re as crazy as he is.”
This wasn’t trouble, he amended; this was pure and simple, out-and-out disaster.
“I tried to tell him that this wouldn’t do him any good, but he wouldn’t listen.” Her voice almost broke, and she gripped the wheel more tightly. “He’s nuts. You’re nuts. This whole thing is absolutely crazy.”
“Then why did you pick me up?”
“Well, one reason is that Loraleen got on the line and told me to keep my hands off you because you were her guy. And I never, Mr. Blackthorne, but never do anything Loraleen tells me.”
He sifted through the words for anything he might construe as a compliment, gave up, and wondered how in hell Farren expected him to do anything when not even his own family was willing to lend him a hand.
“What’s the other reason?”
“Me.”
“Ah. Family loyalty?”
“Not a bit of it,” she told him coldly. “Don’t kid yourself, Blackthorne.”
He lay his arm across the back of the seat and drummed thoughtfully. “I’m sorry,” he said, giving up all pretense of politeness. “I thought you were close to your uncle. He certainly gave me that impression.”
Inexplicably, she laughed, so hard that tears sparkled on her cheeks until she shook them angrily away. The convertible swerved dangerously. The road gave them no quarter.
“Well, you’ve been honest with me, so I’ll be honest with you, Lincoln. Can I call you Lincoln? Loraleen told me I should call you Blackie. I have a feeling that’s another one of her stupid password-type jokes.” She smiled, tentatively, groped for another cigarette, and changed her mind. “You’re going to find out anyway, so I might as well tell you now that when Uncle Farren dies, I’ll inherit the farm.”
“I see,” he muttered, seeing it clearly long before she decided to continue.
“So my thinking is, I’ll kill you, Uncle Farren will die, and I’ll be so damned rich I can get out of this godforsaken place.”
He pushed closer to the door. “Kill me?”
“Sure,” she said, and reached across him to pull a revolver from the glove compartment “Shoot you, leave you in the desert, and by tomorrow morning there won’t be anything left of you but a pile of bones.”
“Oh,” he said.
“Right,” she said, and pulled the trigger.
EIGHT
He had tensed to lunge across the seat in what he knew would be a futile attempt to deflect her aim, and barely caught himself when she swung the barrel over her shoulder instead and fired at the red pickup closing on them rapidly. She hadn’t a hope of hitting it, but the shot served its purpose—the truck veered wildly across the road, recovered and dropped back, and Lincoln closed his eyes in relief, not bothering to ask why she’d done it; he knew the answer as soon as the driver, who was hidden by the sun’s glare on his windshield, stuck his left hand out the window and fired back.
“Jealous boyfriend?” he asked hopefully.
Three more shots missed, another took off the side mirror, and a sixth he felt buzz by his ear on its way to shattering the face of the radio.
“Now that,” Annabelle said disgustedly, “is a crime. That was original equipment.”
“So is this,” he said, tapping his chest sincerely, just over his heart.
For an answer she dropped the gun in his lap and concentrated on her driving. The truck, no longer threatened by answering fire, closed the gap with a roar and slammed into their rear bumper. The driver was still invisible, but Linc knew who it was, and knew that it was past time to stop behaving like a gentleman. He aimed carefully at the place where the man’s head would be and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
He pulled the trigger again, and a third time, then stared at it in disgust. “Hey, it’s supposed to have six shots!”
“Well,” she said with an apologetic shrug, “I’m really not too keen on guns. I figure one shot will scare anyone away.”
“Nice,” he said, gripping the padded dashboard as the truck rammed them again.
His head snapped back, and the convertible slewed across the blacktop, over a low rise and down again. There was no oncoming traffic, but neither were there any side roads they could take to attempt an escape across country. When with a shout he asked about the next real turn that might take them back toward the city where they might get hold of a cop, she looked at him oddly and told him that if he was really interested, it was up past the state penitentiary, some forty miles away.
“Hell of a place you have here,” he muttered, peering over the back of his seat.
“No place to go to, why should there be roads?” she said. “And the nearest town now is Golden, a few miles up and mostly shacks, trailers, and an abandoned mine.”
The pickup, its battering-ram technique failing, tried to muscle over to the left and drive them onto the narrow shoulder, but Annabelle blocked him neatly and took off the spiked green heads of a hundred yards of new tumbleweed in the process. By the time they were back on the road, the truck had surged parallel to their right rear tire, and Lincoln finally caught a glimpse of the driver before the Cadillac drew away.
The man in black nodded.
Lincoln nodded back.
The convertible spurted forward, and the engine began to whine, the frame shimmied, and he couldn’t believe there was no one else on the road, no houses or diners to stop at to call the police. They might as well have been on the moon for all the support they were getting.
He looked to Annabelle then and saw the white-knuckled grip she had on the steering wheel, the perspiration that ran freely down the sides of her face. Her hair was already matted to her scalp, and her lips moved as if she were cursing, or praying.
