Phantom Banjo (27 page)

"That how you got interested in the music
then?" Brose was asking. "Through Sam?"

She nodded slowly. "That and the squaw
dances. I used to love those when I was a girl. But, yeah. I
listened to everything Sam did, even sang a little myself for
while, got to know some of the people on the circuit. I booked a
few acts into clubs, even ran a club of my own in Baltimore for a
while."

"I had my job, and then too, my folks were
sitting on a little oil when it was found in Oklahoma."

"So you grew up rich, did you?"

"Richer than most of the people I've worked
with, anyway, though that's pretty relative. We weren't
Rockefellers. But I believed in the American way. Musta been all of
that white blood mixed in on my mama's side that confused me. Just
because we lived in a nice house and I went to college and the
Nazarene Church and nobody talked politics at home, I thought they
must have meant somebody else when they talked about the Indians
that had fought for their lives and their land in the old days.
Well, that piece of land back there? They can have it. I wonder how
they found out. I even had Sylvia use her machine for the flier and
I got my mailing list a long time ago when I was at one of the
festivals that was folding that year. I mailed the fliers out from
Virginia."

"Those sneaky types got to do something to
keep their jobs, same as the rest of us. I don't imagine they
stopped watching you very long. If they were curious about any of
us, it was probably pretty convenient for them, you have to admit.
Maybe they didn't think of having you do it, but they found out
about it somehow or other and sicced the cops on us. You couldn't
have known you'd be playing into their hands. Besides, even they
couldn't have come up with the lightning."

"Damn," she said.

CHAPTER 13

Gussie was at the wheel toward sundown, about
a mile from the Kentucky-Tennessee border, when the first hailstone
struck her station wagon's windshield with such force that the
ranger jerked awake and reached for his sidearm.

"Relax," Gussie told him. "It's just a little
weather."

The ranger had shifted position, from having
his legs stuck out in front of him with the ankles of his boots
crossed, his arms folded tightly across his chest, and his eyes
staring straight ahead, he switched to the equally tense pose of
leaning toward the window and shifting his glance from the
passenger window to the windshield every few seconds to watch
stones the size of quarters bounce off the glass and disappear.
"Maybe so," he said to Gussie, "but I'm responsible for y'all now
that Willie's in my custody. Tell me the truth now, ma'am. You seem
to know him pretty good. What's Willie messed up in? Some kind of
mob or top-secret science stuff?"

"Who? Willie? Far as I know, nobody has ever
accused him of harboring thoughts more scientific than how to
analyze the workings of a firearm."

"Might he not have pissed off the mob or some
gun-running spy outfit someplace? I just can't see where that Mosby
fellow's death is enough to get the feds, the Maryland troopers,
and those bad actors who showed up at Ms. Gunn's place all on his
tail. And all this other stuff—the accident. Maybe it's coincidence
but it sure looks to me like somebody wants him dead. I intend to
see nothing like that happens before due process of the law says
so."

"You think he'll get a fair trial, do you?
After what you saw?"

"Hell, he's not even accused of anything yet,
except horse-thieving, and his boss got the horse back, I hear. No,
we just are investigatin' Mr. Mosby's untimely demise and wanted to
ask MacKai about it. He'll be treated fairly in Texas—it's not like
Maryland and that's for damn sure."

He sounded earnest enough but Gussie didn't
know him well enough to tell.

The hail smacked like bullets against the
windshield and piled up in drifts that weighed down the wiper
blades. The tires crunched and bounced over invisible stones. The
noise of the storm all but drowned out the banjo, which lay beside
Willie and softly plinked out "Razors in the Air," which was on one
of the Kingston Trio albums Lettie had damn near played the grooves
out of when she was a kid.

"It doesn't make any difference," Gussie told
him. "You hear that banjo back there? You ever heard of any banjo
playing all by itself like that?"

"No, but I imagine there's technology would
explain it. We can dismantle it once we get Willie in custody."

"My God, man. You admit you hear the banjo,
you saw lightning strike the stage just as Brose was winning that
fool contest, you saw how strange that policeman was acting—even
those other cops, once they snapped out of it, realized how
peculiar they'd all been behaving. Can't you admit there might be
something a little unusual going on here? You've probably heard
what Willie said about it all when he tried to talk about it at the
campfire. It fits, wouldn't you say?"

"No, ma'am, with all due respect, I wouldn't.
Of course, I didn't get there till early the second morning so I
missed hearing MacKai talk at the campfire, but he's given me the
gist of it. And while it's fine and dandy for you artistic types if
you want to believe in magical mumbo jumbo, I'll have to tell you
honestly that I don't hold much with that. Somebody's playing some
little tricks somewhere and the interpretation you all are put-tin'
on this is just that—interpretation. Now, I am inclined to think
old Willie is being framed by somebody for something and I'm
probably gonna be hard-put to protect him against that if whatever
it is has as much influence in Texas, as you seem to think, as it
does in Maryland. But I—goddamn, lady, watch out! You nearly run
off the road."

"Sorry," Gussie said. She'd been trying to
pull over and park for the duration of the storm but her lights
caught nothing but darkness and hailstones and she couldn't tell
where she was. Where the shoulder of the road should have been she
saw nothing but a plunge into darkness with hailstones pelting down
into it. She was shaking a little as she edged the tires back onto
the road.

The road seemed deserted. Since the
McDonald's in St. Louis she'd been playing leapfrog with Brose's
truck and the van carrying the Randolphs and Jim Hawkins. But there
were no taillights ahead of her and her rearview mirror was black
and featureless, as if the road were rolling up behind them as they
drove over it.

Then suddenly there was a humming noise and
the interior of the car was bathed with white light, brightening
and focusing into two headlamps like disembodied will-o'-the-wisps
looming ever larger in one side of the mirror. For a moment, the
lights flooded the front seat with blinding brilliance, then
blinked out to be replaced by rumbling wall, a push of air, a
shower of stones and rain crashing against the hood of the car.
Then as the stones and water cascaded down the windshield, a
Christmas display of red and white lights shone blearily through
the water, some of them blinking, some just shining, but all of
them outlining the back end of an eighteen-wheeler.

Gussie shifted into third gear again, then
fourth, and followed confidently in the truck's wake. "I hope he's
a-goin' our way," she said, " 'cause I'm gonna follow him until
this storm is over."

"Sounds like a plan," the ranger agreed, and
took the tractor cap he'd bought at the last truck stop from the
dash and pulled it down over his eyes.

The banjo bumped along in the back, twanging
almost fearfully in a minor key, seemingly unable to make up its
mind between "Roll on, Buddy" and "Hard Travelin'.

Brose hadn't worried when the fog rolled up
between Gussie's old station wagon and his truck. He figured the
road was miles long and overhead the full moon and a sky full of
stars lit the way so he didn't even need to use his high beams.
They'd meet up when the cloud lifted. But after an hour and a half,
as Faron Randolph's van drew up in the adjacent lane, Brose rolled
down the window and signaled to Faron's wife to roll down hers. "I
think we lost 'em," he yelled into the wind.

Faron's wife looked over at him and then back
at Brose and nodded, then pointed straight ahead. Her voice blew
back to them as the van surged forward. "Fol—" he thought it said.
Or maybe it was "Fog."

* * *

Mile after mile, Gussie followed the lights.
The snores of the passengers, the rumble of the wheels, the
familiar tick of the station wagon's engine, the wind and rain
rushing around the car, the growl of the eighteen-wheeler, and the
banjo's plaintive twang of "Dark as a Dungeon" all faded from her
mind and into the background. She was aware of nothing but the
pattern formed by the blinking lights on the rear of the truck.

The pattern wasn't always the same. Sometimes
it was one right after another on the top row, reversed on the
bottom row, sometimes it was every other one, sometimes just the
red ones, at others just the white. She focused on them and
followed, at first intentionally. She didn't notice when the
hailstorm stopped and no one else remained awake in the car to tell
her, or to ask her why she continued slavishly to tailgate the
truck. When the truck stopped for fuel, she slid from her seat and
filled the car's tank, paid up, and climbed back in the car still
watching the flashing lights on the back of the rig.

And then, all at once, the flashing lights
flashed off. Gussie found herself, still in the driver's seat,
still surrounded by sleeping people, still idling behind the
tanker. She was surprised to notice that in spite of the square
pattern the lights had formed, she'd been following a fuel tanker.
An old one. The letters on the back, clear in her headlights now
that the distracting blinking had stopped, must have said Shell at
one time, but the S had been rubbed out so it read "hell Oil."

Once she unfocused her eyes from the tanker's
rear, it was impossible for several minutes to refocus on anything
else. Then, slowly and painfully, she pried her hands from the
steering wheel and saw they had blisters and calluses from gripping
the wheel. The backs of her thighs, her back and butt were as sore
as if they were covered with boils and her neck and shoulders
burned with pain. Her eyes felt as if she'd been using pop bottle
caps for contact lenses.

Behind her loomed a truck bearing what looked
like some kind of pipe, loaded high and extending, illegally and
dangerously, past the roof of the cab, wobbling up and down with
the vibrations of the truck's engine, like a giant's fencing foil
aimed at her back.

Wherever she was, the teamsters in this neck
of the woods needed stricter enforcement at their weigh stations,
she decided. The logging truck on her right side was loaded as high
as the pipe truck in back of her. Styx Lumber, it said on the side
of the cab in neon paint. To the left an automobile graveyard, a
skeletal metal parody of the rigs used to transport new cars,
blocked any possible view of the surrounding country.

Not that there would have been a lot to see.
The trucks blocked out most of the view, but what she could see,
bouncing off their metalwork and reflecting in her mirrors, looked
like feeding time in the forest, with a three-deep line of bright
white animal eyes gleaming in the darkness, winding for miles
behind her and, peering from among the smashed metal of the car
corpses beside her, coming toward her three-deep one lane over.
Ahead of her, from around the tanker, were taillights-red animal
eyes winding forward. Very far forward, they seemed mixed and also
seemed to rise above where she was and below but she only had a
dizzying feeling to rely on, because the huge trucks on all sides
of her blocked so much of her vision, as she supposed they also
blocked anyone else from seeing her car.

* * *

The
Debauchery Devil, still in the guise of Lulubelle Baker, snorted,
for a change, nothing more potent than derision. "You're slipping,
boss. You told us yourself we would have to use minions to go
against the—uh—adversary. And then you barged right in there
against MacKai, banjo and all. What's that you always told us about
delegating authority?"

"I did delegate authority," the Chairdevil
said. "I did not, of course, go myself. I sent a simulacrum and two
individuals whose contracts we hold and in whom I have—had—complete
confidence."

"Isn't it you who always tells us never send
a simulacrum to do a man's work?" the Debauchery Devil asked with
what innocence s/he could muster, which was understandably not a
whole lot.

"Or a man to do a devil's for that matter,"
the Pestilence Devil added. "That pet police captain of yours
didn't even handpick his people."

"It was a spur-of-the-moment-type deal," the
Chairdevil said.

"That is no excuse for shoddy work," said the
Doom and Destruction Devil.

"You should talk. What about Vietnam, what
about Central America, what about Afghanistan and the Middle East?
You've had I don't know how many chances to blow the world to
perdition and you just piddle them away . . ."

"I work in mysterious ways," D&D sniffed.
"I'm a lot more effective at providing long-term services to more
people in more generations over a more extended period my way."

They all ignored that because there was,
after all, some truth in it and if there was anything their kind
disliked, it was truth.

"Hmph," the Chairdevil said. "Well, much as
some of you might like to think I'm losing my touch, I am on top of
it. By the way, “Lulubelle,” your influence on MacKai hasn't been
nearly as great as you led us to believe. Anyone as tight with you
as you claim he is should have jumped at the contract I offered
him."

"He was just being greedy and holding out for
more," the Debauchery Devil said, defending him.