The Tail of the Arabian, Knight, page 7
He patted her shoulder once, and she gave him a quick, grateful smile filled with apprehension.
With his hands fisted in helplessness, he couldn’t stop himself from looking back, watching the red vehicle pace them fifty yards away. The man in black seemed to sense something and was waiting, and Linc checked the barren roadside for signs of impending disaster—a rickety bridge they’d have to cross, a construction site that would slow them down—and why the hell hadn’t he fired again?
Because, you jackass, an accident looks better.
The Cadillac sputtered.
“Hell,” he muttered.
Annabelle punched at the steering wheel and whimpered her frustration as the car slowed in spite of her foot punching at the pedal. A desperate look to him, and he thought she was going to cry.
Then the truck rammed them again, and they were out of control.
The car shuddered violently under the impact, and he knew instantly from the sound of the engine and the protesting tires what was going to happen.
There was nothing he could do. Nothing at all.
With a hand on the door then, and the other on the dashboard, he braced himself while they slewed wildly back and forth over the blacktop, Annabelle struggling to find the direction of the skid while panicked about the location of the accelerator and brake. It took longer than he expected, but they were soon careening along the left shoulder, bouncing over rocks, depressions, and flattening sagebrush and yucca. A storm of dust whipped over the hood and darkened the windshield, slipped into his eyes, and made him throw up an arm to protect his face.
The car had slowed considerably, but not nearly enough.
A moment then when he thought he was nestled back in the airplane, soaring peacefully out of Dallas, quietly, not a care in the world; another when he felt his stomach lodge permanently in his throat. And when the car hit, he heard Annabelle scream once, heard himself swear as he was thrown over the windshield, the hood, and a struggling piñon tree less than a yard high.
He landed on his back, twisted and rolled with the direction as far as his momentum could take him, which was down a pock-walled arroyo where he finally came up against a large clot of dirt that shattered on impact.
His first thought was: Wonderful, I’m still alive.
His breath was gone. He wheezed as he lay there, staring at a sky too bright to look at, spitting dust and dry grass from his mouth, and waiting for the fire in his shoulders and right leg to subside. He felt as though razors and dull blades were being tested on his skin, yet there was no immediate sensation of blood or broken bone.
Once the roaring left his ears, he heard nothing but his own lungs creaking back into shape, and he saw nothing until he raised his head and looked straight into the barrel of a reconditioned Colt .45.
“You ain’t dead,” the man in black said gleefully. “Guess I’ll have to fix that.”
Lincoln pushed himself painfully onto his elbows, shifting to keep the sun behind the man’s head. Dust sifted down the arroyo’s steep pitted slope, and from a spot to his right he could hear the groaning of metal as the convertible cooled down. He could not hear Annabelle.
The man in black smiled by pulling back his lips to expose his teeth; nothing else moved on his pale scarred face.
“Worried about the girl?”
He nodded, not knowing if he could speak without squeaking.
“Hell of a bump on her head, that’s all.”
“No thanks to you,” he said at last.
The man laughed, a gasping sound that made Linc look away; it sounded too much like too many death rattles he’d heard.
The Colt’s hammer was thumbed back.
Linc shifted again, grimacing at the complaining his back was doing. “You mind telling me who you work for, at least?”
The man in black chuckled. “No you don’t, Blackthorne. You ain’t gonna get me talking so you can figure a way out of this. I’m too smart for that. Time is not something I have a lot of right now, so you can just lie back there like a good little tailor and take your medicine like a man.”
“That’s sort of a mixed metaphor, isn’t it?”
The man closed one eye to think about it, and Linc lashed out with his left foot to crack his heel against the man’s knee. As he did, he rolled over, and when the gun went off, he wasn’t where he was supposed to be. Then he was on his feet and running, head down, directly into the man’s stomach. The revolver’s butt slammed onto his spine before they both fell, and he grunted, snapping up the heel of his hand into the man’s bony chin, while the other fist caught him flush on the cheek and whipped his head back against the dirt wall.
Like climbing a ladder of grease-covered snakes, he scrambled until they were wrestling face-to-face, kicking the air, groping blindly for each other’s throats, doing more damage to the riverbed than to each other. The gun was gone, and Linc made no attempt to locate it; the moment he lost his concentration he knew he was dead.
The man in black tried to bring a knee into Linc’s groin, and caught his hip instead; Linc tried butting his eyes or his nose; the man clamped his hands on either side of Linc’s head and squeezed until Linc felt himself tottering on the threshold of unconsciousness; he grabbed the wrists and pulled them apart, rocked onto his back and brought his knees into the man’s stomach; the man in black bared his teeth and aimed for Linc’s neck; Linc pushed and released his grip, and the man tumbled backward, twisting neatly into a perfect somersault that brought him upright, right next to the gun.
Oh, great, Linc thought, and jumped to a crouch, flexed the muscles of his right forearm and watched in dismay as his knife sprang from its sheath, missed his closing fingers and buried itself blade down almost ten feet away.
Great, he thought again, scooped up a handful of dirt and flung it into the man’s eyes, spun around and ran, not forgetting to snatch up the knife and curse it and Palmer soundly while he slipped it back into place.
This time, instead of trying to take the man again, he headed down the twisting arroyo which wound away from the road in such serpentine convolutions that there were never more than ten or fifteen feet between outcroppings, thus keeping him out of the Colt’s direct sights. He had no idea where he was going, but the sound of pursuit was sufficient to prevent him trying to climb out of the dead river—the earth was too loose, brown and clay red, and when he thought about using as steps the many holes he saw there, he changed his mind when he spotted the dim form of a snake just inside one of the openings.
There were a lot of things he hadn’t been told about this place he’d been sent to; if he found something else, he was going to scream.
The riverbed forked, and he picked a direction blindly; it forked again a few minutes later, and he wasted no time tossing a coin.
The man in black fired once, there was no echo, and no dirt was kicked up.
It was a deliberate prod; Linc knew the tactic, and still he ran—through sharp-edged grass, through brittle shrubs that tore at his jeans as he passed, around the bones of a small animal, around the bones of something larger.
He ran, and he sweated, and before long the weight of his legs and the shallow working of his lungs pulled him into a crouch that caused him to stumble, set hazy spirals of faint red in front of his eyes and made his head ache.
He slowed.
He turned as he moved to chance a look behind him, almost smiling when he saw nothing back there but what lay ahead.
He tripped over a rock and couldn’t get his hands out fast enough to break his fall. He landed clumsily on his right shoulder, skidded a foot or two on his cheek before toppling onto his back, and was tempted to let himself drift off—to hide the pain, to escape the heat, to be unconscious when the man in black caught up with him and did it at last.
He lay there for several minutes.
Nothing happened.
A gallant gesture, he thought as he struggled to his hands and knees; the man did his best, but he came up short, unprepared for the altitude and the terrain.
He stood and tilted his head, opened his mouth, and gulped for air; hands gripped his waist, and he turned slowly to face the direction he’d just left.
A fly explored his face, and large red ants marched over his boots until he crushed them with a mirthless smile.
A large bird glided in wide circles overhead, too high for him to make out details, too low for comfort if it was something like a vulture.
He waited for another five minutes before he realized there was no one there, and no one was coming. It was too soon to celebrate, and he was too sore to click his heels, but he allowed himself a satisfied smile and a deep breath before deciding he’d best start back for Annabelle or, at the least, to find the road. And after that a long, sinfully long shower, something cool to drink, and then he was going to beat the hell out of someone unless someone explained to him what the hell was going on.
Wary of treading on scorpions, rattlers, or anything else that might attack without asking questions first, he found a clear section of wall and dragged himself out of the arroyo. And knew with a glance why the man in black had chosen not to follow.
There were mountains behind him, larger mountains far ahead, and other than that he couldn’t see a thing save for New Mexico’s high desert.
“Why that sonofabitch,” he said. “He lost me.”
Literally.
Always keeping the riverbed in sight, he walked several paces in all directions, trying to find a hint of a highway or a sign of habitation. But there was nothing out there. No smoke, no road noise, not even a bird singing.
He was disgusted with himself—for being herded away from safety as though he were some fool amateur, for not jumping the man in black instead of running away, for not doing something to mark his escape route so he could follow it back. All that was rudimentary, and he hadn’t done a thing.
Kicking angrily at the ground, he stalked to a low piñon tree with a multitude of twisted thin trunks that held a rich crown of still green leaves. At least it would give him shade, and after a moment’s thought he climbed into it, as high as he could in the futile hope he might be able to see something important.
He was fifteen feet up, and saw nothing at all.
On the way down, however, he did.
A rattlesnake waited at the base of the tree, coiled, head high, and its rattles loud and angry.
NINE
It was the largest snake Lincoln had seen without leaving the country, and the way he felt now, it could well have been the largest he’d ever seen in his life. On television they didn’t look nearly so thick around the middle, nor did their eyes resemble such hard, malevolent gemstones, nor were those rattles so infernally loud. It was, he admitted, a strikingly beautiful creature in its own evil way, and at any other time he would have been grateful for the opportunity to study it more closely.
However, there were problems.
First, despite the relatively cool shade the tree offered him, the early-afternoon sun was growing stronger, which in turn made him thirsty, which reminded him that he hadn’t had a thing to eat or drink since leaving Dallas a hundred years ago. At the suggestion, his stomach began to grumble, and his throat and tongue felt coated with an inch of grating dust. He supposed he could chew on the piñon needles, but he might as well be in Peru for all he knew about the dangers of the local flora, and with the snake down below that was a risk he wasn’t willing to take.
Second, he could always jump down on the other side and hope the rattler was only making noises, defending its territory and unhappy about his intrusion. With him gone and the potential danger over, it might well slither off to wherever snakes slither off to and carry on with its life.
On the other hand, it might not.
It might decide to come after him, and he had no idea how fast those things could travel. The way he felt now, if it moved any faster than a dead man’s crawl, he’d be bitten before he’d taken five steps.
Which was the third thing—he was hurting worse than ever. His leg was acting up again, and when he prodded calf and shin, he bit back a gasp; the muscle was badly strained, and it could very well be torn. And half sitting, half standing here in this impossible tree was not doing the rest of him much good either. Cramps were going to be a definite threat, and one slip would put him right in the rattler’s lap.
And, he thought, thinking of a fourth thing which he certainly didn’t need to think of, even if he was able to get away, where would he go? He was still lost, and he imagined that where there was one desert predator there was probably another.
It occurred to him then that sitting here in the tree wasn’t the worst thing that could happen. And if he stuck around until nightfall, there was a good chance he might be able to spot the glow of headlamps on the road, thus giving him a direction, and something a lot safer to walk on than the desert floor.
“So,” he said to the snake, who was still coiled but noiseless, “what’s your name?”
The rattles started again.
He grinned, then yelped and yanked himself higher when the snake struck upward, narrowly missing his heel.
“Lord,” he whispered.
The snake coiled again, and rattled. Its tongue flicked out ceaselessly, testing the air.
A bee hovered in front of his face, and he nearly laughed aloud at the mundane menace.
That hawk or buzzard or whatever it was was still up there, still circling, dipping, circling again.
The snake had quieted, but it hadn’t moved.
He examined the tree’s bark, studied a needle, closed one eye and looked at the sky, closed the other and tried to devise experiments to test his depth perception. Then he looked down and knew his luck was holding—the snake wasn’t alone. Now there were two, and as he watched them swarming over each other, a third one crawled up, much smaller, with fewer rattles on its tail, and just as mean-looking as either of its brothers.
Then the thin branch he was leaning against snapped under the continuous pressure of his weight.
He yelled and flailed as he fell, barely managing to grab hold before he hit ground, less than two feet between him and the three snakes, who were all coiled now and rattling so hard he could hear nothing else. He was within easy striking range of even the smallest, and as he tried to haul himself back up, he felt a thud against his boot, a second soon following, and a third, and he held his breath, waiting for the pain, for the paralysis to make him lose his grip and fall.
And when nothing happened, he brought his left foot slowly up to brace it against the trunk. A look, and he saw a row of faint indentations where their fangs had tried to puncture the thick heel, and a glinting strand of milky liquid where the remains of their venom still dripped.
He closed his eyes and swallowed.
He opened them again when someone said, “Don’t move.”
And closed them a second time when a shotgun went off.
When he didn’t immediately die and wasn’t shredded with pellets, he looked under his arm and saw a man standing alone, a few feet to his left. He was tall and slender, his straight black hair parted in the center and just touching his shoulders. A beaded sweatband split his dark forehead, his shirt and trousers were loose to allow the circulation of air, and on his feet was a pair of raw leather boots laced up to a fringe just below his knees. A shotgun was cradled in his arms, and he was reloading without taking his gaze from the remains of the rattlesnakes now scattered over twenty feet of desert ground.
“You going to stay up there all day?”
Lincoln did not think his arms would work, and he was surprised to find himself on the ground again, gingerly stepping over the bloody snakes to shake the man’s hand.
“I’m—”
“Yeah,” said the man. “And I’m Peter Wolf.”
Linc wanted to say something more, but a roiling cloud of dizziness interrupted him, and the next thing he knew he was lying on his back, something folded under his head and a tin cup pressed to his lips.
“Slow,” the man told him. “Just a sip. You’ll give yourself cramps otherwise.”
There wasn’t a brandy in the world that tasted as good as this water, and he followed instructions until he was able to sit up without his stomach charging for his mouth. Then he filled his palms and splashed the liquid over his head and neck.
“I was going to say thanks.”
Wolf hunkered down in front of him, the shotgun across his thighs. “No need. You had trouble.”
Lincoln blinked away the fuzziness of his vision and saw that his first impression was correct—the stranger was an Indian.
“How’d you find me?”
Wolf pointed to a dusty motorcycle parked a hundred yards away, alongside the arroyo. “I heard the snakes, saw you playing Tarzan, and figured you for a tourist. They do that, you know. They park by the road, take a few steps off, and get totally lost. Happens all the time. They watch too many westerns.”
He grinned, and accepted another drink. “I wasn’t exactly strolling. There was an accident.”
“Big old Caddy?”
“Right.” But caution kept the humor from his smile. “Me and my girl.”
“Oh, you’re Annabelle’s guy?”
“You know her?”
“You could say that,” he said with a smile. “I’m her mother’s widower. She may have spoken of me. Annabelle, that is. Her mother isn’t saying much of anything these days.”
Linc lifted a hand for a moment’s silence, lowered his head, and stared at his boots. This was Annabelle Bannon’s stepfather, he’d been told of the accident, knew the woman must be hurt, and he hadn’t yet asked what had happened.
“What happened?”
Serves you right, he thought glumly. “Somebody ran us off the road.”
“You all right?”
“Now I am, yes, but don’t you think we ought to go back and see about Annabelle?”
Wolf shook his head, and took a drink from the canteen.
