Chapter Three

 

 

Highway 94, Colorado Springs, Colorado

 

“Am I dead?” Joe Tanner asked Sully.

Sully laughed and sprawled back in the whiteness that surrounded them.

“Naw, you’re not dead, Joe. You’ve been in a car wreck. Just like mine, remember? And if you don’t get the hell out of the car, they’re going to come back and finish you off. Just like they did to me.”

“Wait a minute,” Joe said. “What is this place? Is this heaven?” He looked around, seeing more clearly. The clouds were white and pristine but there was sky of sorts above them, a clear pale sky with lines of clouds touched with every hue of the rainbow. Joe used to look at thunderclouds as a child and imagine flying up into heaven on their very tops. This was like that, only better. More beautiful. He felt absolutely wonderful. Every inch of his body tingled with energy. Sully, in front of him, floated in the clouds.

“Are those wings?” he asked in dumb wonder. Sully laughed again and stretched one wing out to her side. It was enormous, covered with feathers deep and strong, and colored a delicate and perfect pink.

“Cool, huh?” she said. “I’ll tell you, being dead is pretty great. Dying wasn’t so hot, but heaven is fantastic.”

“This is heaven?” Joe asked. Sully was dead, he knew that. Harriet Sullivan had died in a car crash over five years ago. He’d been engaged to marry her when she died. Three years later, when he’d met Eileen Reed, he was still grieving at Sully’s sudden and senseless death. Only when he fell in love with Eileen was he able to finally accept Sully’s death and move on.

“Not heaven, Joe,” Sully said. “You’re not dead. And I’m just an image, like these nifty clouds. This is just a – a communication place, a way for people near death to see and talk to creatures like me.”

Sully had never been a very attractive woman, really, but he’d loved her for her spirit and her mind and her smile. Now she looked the same but not the same. Every inch of her was perfected somehow, beautiful beyond description. She wasn’t the Sully he’d known, the Sully who had faded in his mind like an old color photograph. Suddenly he realized what she’d just said.

“I’m near death?”

“Damn near,” Sully said grimly. “But we have some time to talk. Just a little. Usually we don’t do this sort of thing, you know.”

“We?” Joe asked in a weak voice. He looked down at himself. Yes, he was still dressed in his jeans and T-shirt, the same ones he’d worn to work that morning. He checked his right finger, where he wore a silver band that Eileen had given him. A promise ring, she called it.

“The ring’s still there,” Sully said. She was dressed in something light and fluttery, white and rose-colored like her wings. “Eileen is your life now, Joe, and you’re going to need her help to get yourself out of this one. They’ve targeted you just like they targeted me. Even if you get out of the wreck tonight you’re going to have to figure out a way to stop them.”

“Who are they?”

“Remember the unsolved murders at Schriever Air Force Base?”

“Yes,” Joe said, then felt a rush of fear and anger through his body. “Your car wreck wasn’t an accident? You were killed?”

“I was killed,” Sully said, and shrugged. Her wings rose, a poem of light and structure, and Joe was caught in their beauty. They were so perfect. Joe was taken by a desire to touch those wings, to feel them alive and warm and beating like a heartbeat.

“Pay attention,” Sully said. “You’re not going to die like me. Not if I can help it.”

“Yes,” Joe said. “Could you – fold those away?”

“Oh, of course,” Sully said, and folded her wings behind her. “Better?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, then, listen up. They came back to the wreck and I was still alive. I wanted to live, Joe, then, as badly as you do. As badly as Eileen does. I was struggling to get out and they came up and when I asked for help the fat one took my chin and the back of my head and snapped my spine.” Sully pursed her lips and shook her head. “It took me ten more minutes to die, and the worst part was that I couldn’t say goodbye to you. It’s long over now, Joe, don’t cry.”

“I’m not crying,” Joe said, and wiped his face with the bottom edge of his T-shirt.

“Anyway, here I am, and I’ve got lots of work to do so I’m going to have to be quick.”

“Work?”

“What, you think heaven is just sitting on clouds playing harps?” Sully grinned. “In medieval times people worked themselves to exhaustion every day without a rest. So their vision of heaven was a place of eternal rest. Harps and so forth. We modern types, that would be hell to us, a place without anything to do. Heaven is perfect, absolute perfection, you see? So I have the perfect work for me.”

“What do you mean?” Joe asked. He wanted to stay with her. He wanted to stay and listen to her talk, forever. She looked at him, squinted at him, and shook her head. “Joe, you’re smarter than you look, I forget that. You can’t stay here much longer or you won’t want to leave. Listen. You’re less than twenty yards from the auto junkyard at the bottom of the hill. Remember?”

“I remember,” Joe said. “But—”

“Shut up,” Sully said. Her head rose and she looked around her for the first time. Her smile disappeared and she looked wary. “You have to get out of the wreck. Get to the junkyard and you’ll find the owner’s house about a half mile down the road. You can call the police from there. They’ll be back to look for you and if they find you they’ll snap your neck just like mine. Understand?”

“I understand,” Joe said. Sully’s unease had transmitted itself to him. The hair on the back of his neck was standing in stiff bristles. His arms brushed up in gooseflesh. But wasn’t this a dream? How could he have goose bumps in a dream?

“Then you have to get to Eileen. Get to her. That man, the fat man, he’ll come after you. He won’t stop until you’re dead, or he is. He kills people like you, Joe. You’ve been targeted and I don’t want to see you die like me.”

“I hear you, Sully, but—”

“No more, Joe,” Sully said. She unfolded her wings. Her beauty was blinding and heartbreaking. “I have to go, and so do you.”

“Why do you have to go?” Joe cried. “Stay, let me stay.”

“You’d need a bit of training to stay with me,” Sully said. She rose up in the clouds and there was something in her hand, something ancient and sleek and long, like a spear married to a laser gun. Her wings beat and Joe’s eyes were dazzled by rainbow. “Go, Joe. Live. We’ll meet again. I have work to do.”

“What work?” Joe called, but she was above him, wings beating. He saw what she was looking at and his heart staggered inside him. There was something coming towards them through the clouds, something loathsome and black and covered with spines and teeth. It was swimming in the clouds, eyes and head above them like an ancient crocodile. It looked something like a dragon but it was something more, something so evil his eyes couldn’t find a way to see it. It reared up and a rotted, slavering mouth opened. Eyes opened, eyes like visions of hell, and it looked at him. It saw him.

“I fight these, now,” Sully said serenely. Her wings beat sharply in his direction and Joe sank abruptly into the clouds and all breath and light left him then.

 

Highway 94, Colorado Springs, Colorado

 

Joe hurt all over. He was cold but he was covered with sweat. And his glove compartment was open. How irritating. His insurance papers had spilled out along with ancient gum sticks, crumpled Taco Bell napkins and half a dozen straws still in their paper sleeves. He tried to reach out and snap it closed but his arm wouldn’t work properly. He kept hitting the steering wheel instead, his fingers scrabbling uselessly at the warm plastic.

There was something he had to remember. Some dream he was having, about Sully. The wings…

There was no transition of consciousness. One moment he was trying to snap his glove compartment closed, muzzy-headed and confused, and the next he was all there, cold and aware and remembering everything. Sully. The dragon. He was in his car, and he had been forced off the road, and if he didn’t get out and follow her instructions he was going to end up murdered just like her.

Something in him cried to stay, let go, so he could go back to the clouds. But stronger was his memory of how Sully had described her own death. His hands fumbled with his seatbelt latch. The man, the fat man, snapped her neck and left her to die, paralyzed, alone. Joe wiped his forehead and his hand came away bloody. The seatbelt latch let go and he fell against the driver’s side door. The car was at an angle in the ditch. The window was black with mud and weeds. He stood up in the car and pushed open the passenger side door. It was heavy, and wanted to fall back on his head as he lurched out. His right arm was coming back to life, sending shooting pains from his fingers all the way to the root of his shoulder.

The night came alive around him as he crouched on the side of his crumpled Honda Civic. He could hear thousands of crickets reeping in the grasses and further away the deep sound of frogs. The stars were thick above his head in the summer darkness. The smell of fuel and burnt rubber and oil and a sharp stink of blood filled his nose. His nose was bleeding too, he noticed.

Don’t leave a blood trail, Sully whispered in his head. Joe nodded and wiped at his nose a few times until he could see he wasn’t bleeding too badly. The forehead gash was right above his hairline. His hair was matted and sticky with blood but it, too, seemed to be clotting up pretty good. So then, no blood trail.

Joe took a deep breath and stood up, remembering with razor clarity the look of Sully’s lance. He wished he had it now. With that thing, whatever it was, he had the feeling he could hold off an entire army.

The road stretched on the other side of the ditch, clear and empty and blameless. Joe drove this highway every day, and had for years. He was near the bottom of Junkyard Hill, and although he still had no memory of his accident, he could see the tire tracks and the gouges in the grasses that led to his Honda. The gouges were as good as a trail of smoking flares. They would find him immediately when they came back. He had to get out of there.

He turned around, knowing what he would see. Behind him stretched the fence that surrounded an enormous auto junkyard. Joe had been there once last summer with his friend ’Berto, scouting for side mirrors for ’Berto’s ’67 Mustang. The junkyard owner was an enormous tattooed man who looked like a Hell’s Angel except when he donned his Santa Claus outfit each Christmas and made hundreds of children happy at the mall. Joe couldn’t remember his name. Tom? Todd? T-something. Joe stepped carefully through the grass and climbed the fence, a chain-link affair with slats of green plastic woven through the links. T-guy didn’t bother with razor wire or barbed wire on top. He built the fence so people wouldn’t have to look at the junkyard as they drove by; he was required to have the fence as a zoning requirement of the county.

As Joe dropped to the ground in the junkyard his eye was caught by a twinkle down the dark highway. Suddenly he had no breath. They were coming back to make sure he was dead. He checked the ground beneath him. Dry. He would leave no tracks. Silently he ran down an alley where the buildings were stacks of wrecked cars. He knew where the T-guy’s trailer was but he had to see these men. He had to. His head throbbed and the pain in his right arm stabbed at him. They had done this to him.

The car lights swept quickly down the highway. The lights went out as the car purred quietly to a stop next to the tire tracks. Joe peered through the slats of the fence well down the road from his car, but close enough to see.

A man got out of the car. He was huge, tall and fat enough to make the car rock back up on its springs when he stood up. His face was moon-like, unreadable in the darkness.

“The fat man,” Joe breathed silently. He never wanted to kill anyone before this. His bloody fingers clenched into fists. This man had killed Sully.

Fat man looked around, hitching at his pants. Another man got out and ran lightly around the car. He was smaller than Fat man but still substantial, a plank next to a pallet of lumber. Fat man nodded at Plank man and he leaped into the ditch. Joe heard a faint plonk as Plank landed on his Honda.

Plank said something to Fat man. Joe couldn’t understand the words. The language wasn’t German or Spanish, but it certainly wasn’t English. Fat man said something back, incredulous. The smaller man said something back.

Fat man stood and looked at the junkyard with narrowed eyes. Joe took a deep breath and stayed absolutely still. Behind him was a maze of uncrushed cars, a buffet of car parts that he and ’Berto had wandered through the summer before. There was a rattling sound from the highway and Joe’s mouth filled with a taste like old pennies as he realized Plank was in the junkyard. He’d climbed the fence, swarmed over it, and he was looking for Joe.

Joe had taken two steps towards Plank before Eileen’s voice spoke in his head. Pick your battles, she said. Sully spoke up, then, too. Stay alive, she said. Joe wondered irritably if they’d taken up residence permanently inside his skull. Hopefully they wouldn’t start talking to each other about his performance in bed. He crouched low and scuttled into the maze of junkers, keeping his body low and making no noise.

It was amazingly difficult to keep down and keep going. He wanted to stand up and find out where Plank was, or Fat man. He didn’t think Fat man was capable of climbing the fence but maybe he’d found a way in. Picked the lock of the gate, perhaps, or cut the chain that closed the gate. For the first time Joe wondered who the fat man was, who had sent him. He remembered Sully telling him that the fat man was after him. He knew why, but how had the fat man known about what he’d done?

Six months ago Joe had come up with a unique computer solution to a very sticky problem in his field. He programmed computers for war games in Colorado Springs, Colorado. These war games were fought by the highest levels of military soldiers and defense analysts. He’d loved his job since he landed it seven years ago. War gaming was like the best of Dungeons and Dragons crossed with video games, and Joe had been a gaming fanatic since before he’d reached his teens. He watched Star Trek reruns, he lived in his parents’ basement in high school and filled it with computer equipment, and in just about every way fulfilled the computer geek profile. Becoming a war gamer was the ultimate job to him and he loved it.

When another programmer was murdered during a war game Joe was too upset to register the impact of Eileen Reed, the homicide detective who’d interviewed him. His girlfriend Sully’s accidental death – a murder, he amended now – was still so fixed in his mind he couldn’t focus on the grave, quiet woman who asked him about the murdered gamer.Later he saw Detective Eileen Reed, fell in love with her as hard as a man could fall, and still couldn’t understand what this beautiful strong creature saw that attracted her to him. He was just Joe Tanner, a man with a Star Trek uniform in his parents’ basement closet, and he played video games for a living with such passion that he sometimes forgot to eat.

But fall in love with him she did, and now they were four months away from their wedding day. And in the past six months Joe had developed a new method for fighting terrorist attacks in gaming, a new way of organizing what was essentially a game board. He was inspired by Eileen Reed, he knew, fed by her intelligence and her own passion for solving problems. They were two sides of a coin, one who liked to solve massive battles and another who solved individual ones.

The reaction to his new programming was gratifying, he thought glumly as he crouched against the side of a crushed minivan and started to shiver in the cold night air. They’d played six war games in the past three months with his new concept and more and more high-level officers showed up. The Gamers counted the importance of the game on the number of stars on the shoulders of the men and women who played. At Joe’s game last week there were twenty-six stars, a record. Someone among all those stars wasn’t playing for the home team. Joe wiped at his forehead and winced. Someone now wanted him dead.

Three cars from the minivan he spotted the T-man’s house. It was a doublewide trailer with a white picket fence and it had a lawn and a flower garden. Joe could smell roses in the darkness. Beyond the trailer he could see a vegetable garden with a patch of corn that looked tall and glossy. The T-man liked to garden.

Outdoor lights suddenly clicked on, bathing the front of the trailer with a brilliant white light. Joe saw a flicker by the dark back door, where the corn grew. He took a shivery breath, wondering what to do.

The choice was taken out of his hands. There was a meaty hand placed on his shoulder and a cold, thin blade touched his throat. Joe stopped breathing, his belly freezing into ice. He thought of Sully and wondered if she was finished fighting the dragon thing yet. Maybe she could come meet him when the killers finished the job.

“What’s going on, kid?” The voice, even at a whisper, was familiar, warm and deep. A Santa Claus voice. It was the T-man.

“Somebody’s trying to kill me,” Joe whispered, trying not to pass out. There were black blots falling in front of his vision, like giant snowflakes. “Accident. They came back to finish me off.”

“You’re friends with ’Berto Espinoza, right?” The whisper came again. The knife blade disappeared from Joe’s throat without fanfare. The huge hand stayed on his shoulder.

“Yeah,” Joe whispered. He swallowed past an incredibly large ball of dry in his throat. “Help me. They’re in your junkyard.”

“Back in the salvage area,” The T-man said calmly. Joe creakily turned his head. The T-man crouched against the same minivan Joe was leaning against, less than a foot away. He was wearing black baggy pants and a soft black jacket. A watch cap covered his head. He wore a black piece of cloth over his mouth and nose, like a cowboy bandana. Under the jacket Joe could see the edge of a striped pajama jacket. The T-man’s feet were bare. His feet were enormous, with long toes that gripped the ground like a monkey. He smelled like old beer and old pot and interrupted sleep. He carried a wireless computer screen in one hand and he positioned it so Joe could see.

The screen was split into six views, all of the junkyard, all crisp black-and-white. In the salvage area where Joe and ’Berto liked to rummage for parts there were two men, one gigantic and the other plank-like, walking silently in the rows with small black guns held at the ready. The Fat man must have cut the gate chain to get in, and that had alerted the T-man.

“Why do they want you dead?” The T-man asked. Joe couldn’t see the top part of his face in the darkness. Had he blacked it out, somehow? And what was he, to be woken in the middle of the night and look like that?

“Sully told me they kill people like me,” Joe said. He felt confused. Had he told the T-man about Sully yet? “I figured out something useful and now they want to kill me. I work out at Schriever—”

“Say no more,” The T-man said with a brisk nod of his not-there face. “I know about Schriever Air Force Base. Don’t really want to know what goes on out there.” He produced a small object from his pocket and pressed a button. It was a cell phone, Joe realized with relief. The T-man must have modified his phone; it showed no light and made no sound.

“Hi, Marie, it’s Todd Whitemore. I’ve got some intruders here at the salvage yard and they look armed to me. Can’t tell. Send some of your big boys, right. Send an ambulance, too, we’ve got a vehicular out here.”

Todd Whitemore powered off the phone and turned to Joe with a flash of teeth.

“The posse will be here in ten, maybe eleven minutes. Let’s see if your boys are equipped.”

“Equipped with what?” Joe asked.

“Police band radio,” Todd said briefly. He looked at the computer screen and nodded. “There they go.”

On the screen Joe could see Fat man and the Plank man conferring urgently. They made their guns disappear and headed rapidly for the now open gates of the junkyard. They were gone before Joe heard sirens.

“Damn,” Joe said.

“You need to get to a hospital,” Todd said. Joe watched as the big man took off his watch cap and bandana and pulled his black jacket over his head. He rubbed his face against the soft black material of his jacket. His hair and beard were snow white and tousled and his face, free of the blacking, looked round in the dim light. His pajama jacket was wildly striped. Todd stood up and stripped off his black pants, revealing pajama bottoms as loudly striped as his top. He balled up his black clothing and cap and grinned at Joe.

“You look completely different,” Joe said stupidly. Todd had gone from dangerous commando to rumpled homeowner in pajamas in about five seconds.

“That’s the idea,” Todd said. “Come on inside, when the cops get here they’re going to want a statement. Is your friend Sully somewhere around?”

“She’s dead,” Joe said.

“In the car? Are you sure?” Todd said sharply.

“She’s dead a long time ago,” Joe said, and rubbed at his forehead.

Todd regarded Joe for a moment.

“Let’s get you inside,” he said finally. “You’ve got a hell of a bump on the head. Looks like a cut on your arm too.”

“I better not tell them about Sully,” Joe said as Todd helped him to his feet. The ground seemed too far away, as though he was wearing stilts.

“This way. What’s your name?”

“Joe Tanner,” Joe said. Todd nodded as though he knew the name.

“Best to keep her to yourself,” Todd said. “The police don’t take kindly to apparitions.”

The brightness of the man’s porch light was overwhelming. Joe realized he’d forgotten the T-man’s name again. There were bright flickering lights, silent now, approaching the junkyard entrance. The T-man opened his front door and hauled Joe into a warm dark kitchen. Tiny blue gas jets lit a stove and the air smelled pleasantly of sweet baking; apple pie, maybe, or cobbler.

“Hang on, I’ll be right back,” the T-man said, settling Joe into a kitchen chair. He disappeared down the hall with his commando outfit and his computer in hand. He returned a few seconds later, striped pajamas glimmering in the dark, and flicked on the kitchen lights. Joe hissed and covered his eyes. The light felt like knives.

“Concussion, man,” the T-man said. “You’re going to have to spend the night at the hospital.”

“They’ll kill me there,” Joe said into his cupped hands. “I have to get to Eileen. That’s what Sully said. I have to get to Eileen.”

“You’ll die if you have a bleed in your skull and you’re not at the hospital,” the T-man said. Joe lowered his hands and squinted at the man. In the warm glow of the kitchen lights and with his tattoos covered by his pajamas he looked astonishingly like Santa Claus. Santa in his summer striped p.j.s. “On the other hand, once they give you a scan and you’re clear you can get out. I’ve left AMA a few times in my checkered career. That would be Against Medical Advice, and docs don’t take kindly to it.”

“Who are you?” Joe asked in bewilderment.

“Just a junk man,” the T-man said, and winked. Bright revolving lights lit his face and he turned to the door. “But I think those men meant business. They looked like professionals to me. Is your Eileen out of town?”

“Yeah,” Joe said, “she’s in—”

“Stop,” The T-man said, holding up his hand. “I don’t want to know where she is. Just in case someone comes around asking questions.”

There was a brief double-knock at the door and the T-man turned.

“Come on in, Shelly,” he said with a grin. “Nice to see you again.”

Shelly Hetrick stepped into the kitchen. She was tall and dark and almost as enormous as the T-man. Her hair was in a complex series of braids and her eyes widened as her eyes met Joe’s.

“Joe Tanner,” she said. “Are you all right?”

Joe gave her a weak grin. He knew Shelly. He was beginning to know all the cops in town. One of the advantages to marrying a cop was finding out the people behind all the uniforms and badges. One of the disadvantages was getting a speeding ticket from someone who worked with your future wife.

“I’m doing okay,” he said. “I was run off the road. And then they tried to come after me.”

“He’s concussed, but he’s right,” the T-man said calmly. “Someone cut my front gate chain and two men were looking in the yard for him. They had guns. They took off right after I called you.”

Shelly Hetrick stepped aside to allow the ambulance crew in, two competent looking young paramedics. She frowned and hooked her thumbs in her leather belt.

“You look like hell, Joe,” she said finally. “Let’s get you to the hospital. I’ll get a statement from Todd and then I’ll come right over to the ER.”

Joe looked at Todd who nodded slightly, his face showing nothing. Joe had no intention of being there when Shelly Hetrick came by. He had a strong feeling if he stayed at the hospital more than a few hours no one would be taking a statement from him, ever.