Landis did feel a mite sleepy. He was just going back to his desk, thinking about a catnap, when he saw a truck come up the main drag in one hell of a hurry. He recognized it from the morning before, when they'd been standing around on the sidelines in Thermopylae, although he'd seen it countless times before. Big black Ford F-350 with a rollbar with shielded hi-beam lights on it, belonged to Zane Storch, acting owner of Sgt. Storch's Quartermaster Supply and son of the original Sgt. Storch, who was weaving baskets in Stockton or Mendocino, or somewhere. The man the G-men said was not to be arrested, although his store was chockful of guns and explosives.
The truck braked hard and skidded a bit as it came off the road and stopped in the gravel just out front. The door opened and a big man climbed out and approached the door.
"Well, I'll be," Landis murmured. "I think we're fixin' to find out what's going on around here, at last. Hey, Sheriff, come out here!" he yelled.
"What is it? I'm busy, goddamit! Why don't you get out on the road, you goldbricking bastards?"
"Sheriff! Get out here! It's Storch! He's here!"
The Sheriff threw open his door and charged out into the front office. He'd been waxing his mustache, and was only halfway through. One end curled up into a spiral that would've shamed Salvador Dali, while the other still dangled limply down past his jawline: half Wyatt Earp, half Fu Manchu. Twombley wasn't a vain man, but he had a thing about his grandiose handlebar mustache, which Landis, in his early days on the job, thought looked like the Sheriff's nose had trapped and half-inhaled a great big gray bat. "Been tryin' to get the FBI office in LA for most of an hour. Goddammed long-distance lines're all out—Shit, it is him."
Twombley joined Landis at the front desk, the two of them looking less like law enforcement and more like the manager and bellhop of a really, really lonely motel, about to get their first customer in a long time.
Storch was dressed up in that brown desert camo gear that everybody wore in Desert Storm, the kind the soldiers called chocolate-chip suits, and he carried a duffel bag slung over one shoulder. He reached for the door and stepped in and just stood there, not saying anything, not moving, just looking at them like they knew well enough what this was all about.
"Mornin', Mr. Storch," Sheriff Twombley said, tweedling the limp end of his mustache, his tone a little hesitant for Landis's taste. He didn't exactly worship the Sheriff or anything, but he certainly didn't like to hear his boss and the head lawman in Death Valley go all quavery in the presence of this man, who may be the key or the cause of all their troubles. Landis's hands couldn't seem to decide where they wanted to go.
They'd all known this fella for years, seen him pass through town, pick up supplies—hell, they'd bought things from him themselves more than a few times. He had a reputation as a hermit, a bit twitchy because of Gulf War Syndrome, which may or may not have been a real illness, but he was a decorated soldier who'd fought in the Gulf War, for chrissakes, he wasn't a troublemaker, and he sure wasn't some militia nut. But he still said nothing, just stood there.
"You come to tell us what the hell's been going on, Storch?" Twombley said, his voice striking sparks now. "We sure are hungry for some answers…"
Storch's grim expression gave way to a smile and his eyes rolled in an
Oh, have I got a story to tell you
gesture. And that's when Storch's duffel bag fell away and they were looking down the barrel of a Heckler-Koch MP5 assault rifle. Landis recognized it from
Soldier Of Fortune
as the weapon of choice of special forces groups the world over, because of its light, short design, ideal for close quarters wetwork. A real nice gun, Landis thought, his eyes glued to it, real nice, but why Storch'd be showing to them like this—
"Didn't I tell you what would happen if you tried to call?" Storch asked, and Landis thought his voice sounded wrong; not strange in and of itself, but not Storch's voice, either.
Sheriff Twombley reacted as if the words were dry ice down his back. "You're not—naw, you're not—"
The Sheriff was going for his own gun, but certified master marksman though he was, he couldn't reach it from where he was standing. It hung on the back of his chair in his office, because the belt chafed him. His trembling, empty hand came back up and covered his heart and just hung there, and Landis watched as the gun pinned the hand to his chest, watched as it drilled his boss full of more holes than the Panamint Range had in it. Jim Twombley took flight, moving faster in death than he ever had in his life, slamming into Landis's desk and sprawling across it.
Landis himself was still just watching, still just looking at the fancy German assault rifle, because this couldn't be real, he was still asleep beneath a shelf of neatly alphabetized Louis L'Amour paperbacks, and any minute that damnable alarm clock was going to awaken him into a world where Sheriff Jim Twombley was alive and unperforated, a world without earthquakes and fires and hinky suicides and shadowy federal conspiracies and crazed, homicidal veterans. He hoped so, he hoped so with all his might, because he could see the gun looking him in the eye now, see the starburst muzzle-flash like a little Big Bang, a flashy period at the end of his incomplete life sentence, could see the bullets emerging from it like hornets, on their very short trip to his heart.
Deputy Kenny Landis closed his eyes. He didn't wake up.
9
Driving back to Hansen's, Storch saw something that somehow freaked him out more than anything else that had happened that day. He was doing ninety, riding the tidal surges of the road like a ship at sea, the humps of tarmac merging with rolling waves of quicksilver fata morgana. Every so often he rose to a crest on the highway and glimpsed another truck, an RV or a semi coming towards him before he slipped into a trough. At the next crest, the stranger was a little larger, then still larger until it roared past.
Storch must have been running out of sync with the truck that was coming from the direction of Furnace Creek, because he didn't see it until he was charging down to meet it at the bottom of a trough and it filled his windshield, riding the center line at over one twenty. It was a black Ford F-350 just like his, and for a split second, he thought he was driving into a mirage, a trick of the heat haze making a mirror of an updraft under the punishing midday Death Valley sun.
Then its horn sounded, and Storch heeled the truck over into a controlled skid that went awry when he saw what looked like himself driving the other Ford. His truck slid off the road and bit into the washboard sand of the shoulder. The truck juddered and jolted but stayed more or less parallel to the road. His hands fought for control as he risked another look over his shoulder at the shrinking truck's license plate. It was his.
He stood on the brakes and jumped back onto the road, started to whip the truck around in a one-eighty. He was just crossing the center line when a police cruiser crested the hump above him fast enough to catch air off of it. Sparks flew off its chassis as it touched down one hundred feet away and bore down on him. His gas foot seemed to be stuck, the truck seeming to coast into the path of the oncoming cruiser as if that was the whole plan. The deputy's jaw dropped as he took in the twin trucks, one speeding away, one heeled across the highway in his path. Storch jammed his foot down on the gas and bolted across the road onto the opposite shoulder and into a stand of yucca bushes as the police cruiser flew past, then a Highway Patrol car, then another, then two more.
Faces turned to look at the towering pillar of dust that enveloped Storch's truck. For all they knew, he was a dust devil, and they went on after his…doppelganger? He gave Furnace Creek a wide berth on the way back to Hansen's.
Storch found no one waiting to welcome him back when he returned to Hansen's mineshaft. An iron gate covered the mouth of the cave, all heavy bars and reinforced pistons. Knowing he could blow it up if it came to that was no comfort. Hansen had some sort of change of heart, either because of the corpse or because of something that happened during his absence, something involving the very high profile flight of a fugitive matching his description from Furnace Creek. The day hadn't yet gotten so weird that Storch doubted that he was who his driver's license said he was, but he knew he'd have his work cut out for him trying to convince anyone else. He knew he had only Hansen's natural paranoia working in his favor. When he thought about it, he couldn't think of anything Hansen wouldn't be likely to believe.
A crackling voice from just inside the cave relieved him of the fear.
"You've been busy."
"I'm having the weirdest day of my life back-to-back with the second weirdest, Hiram. Don't test me."
"Twombley was a yellow-bellied old tool, but he wasn't an especially bad man."
"What? What the fuck are you talking about? What am I supposed to've done now?"
"You really want to know?"
"Just spill it."
"I was listening to the radio. The news says you went postal and killed Pop Sickle and burned down your own store, then shot Sheriff Twombley and Kenny Landis in Furnace Creek, then fled."
"They catch me?"
"Nope. You lost them just short of the state line, near Funeral. Area police, highway patrol and the FBI are putting together the biggest manhunt in the state since Andrew Cunannan."
"Nothing about the raid on my store. Nothing about the feds."
"It was all you, Zane. You're a fugitive nobody wants taken alive."
"What did the news say about China Lake?"
"What, the Naval Weapons dump? Not a thing. Why d'you ask?"
"Nothing, I guess. You gonna let me in, or what?"
A buzz of electricity so faint that Storch hadn't noticed it until it cut out, and a bolt shot with a clack that echoed down the mineshaft. The gate swung open.
Storch followed the blinking lights to Hansen's lounge/waiting room and collapsed on a sprung couch in the center of the cavern. Hansen sat at a bar of lacquered bamboo and white leather, sipping a mint julep. Storch hunched over and clamped his hands over his head so tightly he thought he could hear the sutures of his skull grinding against each other.
"You didn't kill the Sheriff."
"Nope."
"You didn't kill anybody."
"I didn't say that. I just said I didn't go to Furnace Creek, and I sure as shit didn't kill Jim Twombley."
"They were pretty sure about it."
"I just saw somebody in a truck just like mine leaving Furnace Creek on the 395 with state troopers in hot pursuit."
"Then it seems to me you're in a world of shit, Lee Harvey."
"Why in hell would anybody take so much trouble to frame me for this? Why don't they just kill me?"
"Same reason somebody burned your store, I suppose. Get you running. Maybe see where you run to."
"That's so fucking stupid."
"There's more."
"There's always more. What?"
"There was an earthquake out towards Convict Lake just before dawn. Your faultline yawned and ate a big chunk of your rest stop. Place you found the girl isn't there, anymore. Scared yet?"
Storch sat looking off into space until his eyes began to burn because he hadn't blinked. "It's not so much being wanted, or having no life left that scares me. What gets me is that I still can't accept any of this shit, because it means I'm trapped in my dad's fucked up vision of the world. I'm going insane, Hiram. I'm losing my fucking mind, just like my dad."
"You're not losing anything that's worth holding on to. Only your expectations that one day will be like the next, and that you can skate by doing the bare minimum to stay afloat. You've been in a war. Shit, you've fought in secret wars, the ones nobody will ever know even happened. You know how fast the terrain changes."
"But the war made sense." He thought about the Headache. What he could remember about the war, he didn't like to think about. He didn't want to talk about the war anymore.
"This is a war, too. And the only reason you haven't seen it on the TV, or heard about it from Harley or me before now is that it's too important for the world to know about. Only those who are fit for the struggle can take up the cause, and they have to find out in their own way."
"Maybe my father might not have been such a nut after all." The statement was half a question, Storch letting out a whiff of the uncertainty he'd buried so deep so long ago he didn't know the sound of his own voice when he heard it.
"Zane, the world isn't what you thought it was yesterday, but your father was still crazier than a shithouse rat."
Almost an hour passed in silence, Storch poured into a mildewy beanbag, trying to map out the alien terrain of his new life, Hansen puttering around him, dusting and reordering. Storch looked around the cavern without seeing, not wanting to close his eyes, because he was starting to see the faces of the people he killed this morning—sociopathic scumbags killed in self-defense, but still they haunted him.
How many people have you killed in your life, Zane?
Seven confirmed kills in the Gulf War, eighteen in other black ops that the world would never know about. None of those men—soldiers defending their homelands and families—had ever troubled his sleep. Why did he still hear Gina shrieking at him when he closed his eyes?
But like, you get used to it—
Because he hadn't taken a life in nearly a decade, and because all those other deaths were on Uncle Sam's head, not his. Sgt. Storch had had
plausible deniability
, he was
only following orders
. Right or wrong, those four dead skin traders were
his
kills, killed by what amounted to one part restlessness and two parts stupid dumb luck. He was not an instrument of Hammurabi's Code or the great karmic cycle or any of that, he was a spooked, terrified man whose world was falling apart. The only difference between him and any other man who snapped when his world fell apart was he could efficiently execute people. Storch found himself watching Hansen for far too long before he snapped to and asked, "What about the girl?"