Jack crawled into the shade of an overhanging rock (first checking for snakes, scorpions, or other wildlife) and had a drink of water, swallowing a couple of pep-pills with it. He added a toot from the four-gram bottle Cody had sold him (no freebies when it came to Colombian marching powder). Now it was just a stakeout, like dozens he’d been on during his career as a cop. He waited, dozing intermittently with the Winchester laid across his lap but always alert enough to detect movement, until the sun was low in the sky. Then he got to his feet, wincing at the stiffness in his muscles.
“Not coming,” he said. “At least not today.”
No, the man with the finger tattoos agreed. (Or Jack imagined he agreed.) But you’ll be back here tomorrow, won’t you?
Indeed he would. For a week, if that was what it took. A month, even.
He headed back down, moving carefully; the last thing he needed after hours in the hot sun was a busted ankle. He stowed his rifle in the lockbox, drank some more water from the bottle he’d left in the truck’s cab (it was now tepid going on hot) and drove back to the highway, this time turning toward Tippit, where he might be able to buy some supplies: sunblock for sure. And vodka. Not too much, he had a responsibility to fulfil, but maybe enough so he could lie down on his crappy swaybacked bed without thinking about how that shoe had been pushed into his hand. Jesus, why had he ever gone out to that fucking barn in Canning Township?
He passed Claude Bolton’s car going back the other way. Neither noticed the other.
9
“All right,” Lovie Bolton said when Claude was down the road and out of sight. “What’s this all about? What is it you didn’t want my boy to hear?”
Yune ignored her for the moment, turning to the others. “The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office sent a couple of deputies out to look at the places Holly photographed. They found a pile of bloody clothes in that abandoned factory with the swastika spray-painted on the side. One of the items was an orderly’s jacket with a tag reading PROPERTY OF HMU sewn into it.”
“Heisman Memory Unit,” Howie said. “When they analyze the blood on the clothes, what do you want to bet it turns out to be from one or both of the Howard girls?”
“Plus any fingerprints they find will belong to Heath Holmes,” Alec added. “They may be blurry, if he’d started his change.”
“Or not,” Holly said. “We don’t know how long the change takes, or even if it’s the same every time.”
“The sheriff up there has questions,” Yune said. “I put him off. Considering what we might be dealing with, I hope I can put him off forever.”
“You folks need to stop talking amongst yourselves and fill me in,” Lovie said. “Please. I’m worried about my boy. He’s as innocent as those other two men, and they are both dead.”
“I understand your concern,” Ralph said. “One minute. Holly, when you were filling the Boltons in on the ride from the airport, did you tell them about the graveyards? You didn’t, did you?”
“No. Just hit the high spots, you said. So that’s what I did.”
“Oh, hold it,” Lovie said. “Just hold the phone. There was a movie I saw when I was a girl in Laredo, one of those wrestling women movies—”
“Mexican Wrestling Women Meet the Monster,” Howie said. “We saw it. Ms. Gibney brought a copy. Not Academy Award material, but interesting, just the same.”
“That was one of the ones Rosita Muñoz was in,” Lovie said. “The cholita luchadora. We all wanted to be her, me and my friends. I even dressed up like her one Halloween. My mother made my costume. That movie about the cuco was a scary one. There was a professor . . . or a scientist . . . I don’t remember which, but El Cuco took his face, and when the luchadoras finally tracked him down, he was living in a crypt or a vault in the local graveyard. Isn’t that how the story went?”
“Yes,” Holly said, “because that’s part of the legend, at least the Spanish version of it. The cuco sleeps with the dead. Like vampires are supposed to do.”
“If this thing actually exists,” Alec said, “it is a vampire, at least sort of. It needs blood to make the next link in the chain. To perpetuate itself.”
Once again Ralph thought, Do you people hear yourselves? He liked Holly Gibney a lot, but he also wished he’d never met her. Thanks to her there was a war going on in his head, and he wished mightily for a truce.
Holly turned to Lovie. “That empty factory where the Ohio police found the bloody clothes is close to the graveyard where Heath Holmes and his parents are buried. More clothes were found in a barn not far from an old graveyard where some of Terry Maitland’s ancestors are buried. So here’s the question: Is there a graveyard close to here?”
Lovie considered. They waited. At last she said, “There’s a boneyard in Plainville, but nothing in Marysville. Hell, we don’t even have a church. There used to be one, Our Lady of Forgiveness, but it burned down twenty years ago.”
“Shit,” Howie muttered.
“How about a family plot?” Holly asked. “Sometimes people bury on their property, don’t they?”
“Well, I don’t know about other folks,” the old lady said, “but we never had one. My momma and daddy are buried back in Laredo, and their momma and daddy, too. Way back it’d be Indiana, which is where my people migrated down from after the Civil War.”
“What about your husband?” Howie asked.
“George? All his people were from Austin, and that’s where he’s buried, right next to his parents. I used to take the bus once in a while to visit him, usually on his birthday, took flowers and all, but since I got this goddam COPD, I haven’t been.”
“Well, I guess that’s that,” Yune said.
Lovie seemed not to hear. “I could sing, you know, back when I still had my wind. And I played guitar. I came to Austin from Laredo after high school, because of the music. Nashville South, they call it. I got a job in the paper factory on Brazos Street while I was waitin for my big break at the Carousel or the Broken Spoke or wherever. Makin envelopes. I never did get my big break, but I married the foreman. That was George. Never regretted it until he retired.”
“I think we’re drifting off the subject,” Howie said.
“Let her talk,” Ralph said. He had that little tingle, the feel of something coming. Still over the horizon, but yes, coming. “Go on, Mrs. Bolton.”
She looked doubtfully at Howie, but when Holly nodded and smiled, Lovie smiled back, lit another cigarette, and went on.
“Well, after he got his thirty in and had his pension, George moved us out here to the back of beyond. Claude was just twelve—we had him late, long after we decided God wasn’t going to give us no children. Claude never liked Marysville, missed the bright lights and his worthless friends—bad company was always my boy’s downfall—and I didn’t care for it much either at first, although I have come to enjoy the peace of it. When you get old, peace is about all you want. You folks might not believe that now, but you’ll find out. And that idea of a family plot ain’t such a bad one, now I think of it. I could do worse than going into the ground out back, but I s’pose Claude will end up dragging my meat and bones to Austin, so I can lay with my husband, like I did in life. Won’t be long now, neither.”