Rescue From Planet Pleasure (3 page)

“What if it’s another hit?”

“Then they’re fucked. Felix, keep your goddamn head down.”

I flattened myself below the slope, fangs and nerves primed, hand on the grip of my revolver, just in case.

A throaty engine cruised to a halt. A window scrolled down. Jolie mumbled. A door lock clicked. The door opened and closed. The car growled and pulled away.

Irritation raked through me. Had she left me? No sooner had I thought that, the car’s tires chirped to a stop. The car idled for a moment, then whined in reverse and halted beside my grassy blind. The horn honked.

I raised my head. A silver Porsche Panamera Turbo S with Texas plates rumbled next to the shoulder, Jolie at the wheel.

“Bring our stuff,” she hollered.

I scooped up our things and rushed to the car.

Jolie wiped blood from the corners of her mouth. The owner of the car, a big meaty guy, was sprawled across the rear seat like a slab of prime rib, medium rare. The fang marks on his neck were fading. I tossed our gear in the back next to the unconscious Texan.

I settled into the front seat and raised my window. Refrigerated air whooshed from the vents. “Much better.”

Jolie took in the interior, the sweeping lines of brushed steel, exotic woods, and cream-colored leather. “How much do you think this go-kart cost?”

“A hundred and fifty grand. Maybe one seventy-five.”

“How fast does it go?”

“This is the top of the Panamera line. I’m sure it will move along.”

Jolie eased the Porsche onto the highway. “Ever hear the expression ‘drive it like you stole it’?”

“Can’t say that I have.”

“Then let me demonstrate.” She grinned and floored the accelerator.

***

Chapter Four

We were thirty minutes along a miserable stretch of dirt road, the last leg of our trip to Fajada Butte. Shadows from a late afternoon sun slanted across the landscape, making the features of Chaco Canyon pop in dramatic relief. We’d taken the highway south from Farmington, New Mexico, then a one-lane service route that looped northwest, and now followed this washboard trail that was beating our Porsche Panamera to scrap iron. With every scrape and bone-jarring bump, pieces rattled loose from the car and tumbled into the dust behind us.

We’d made great time on the highway, the Porsche and its turbocharged 550 horsepower engine howled along at one hundred thirty miles per hour. Time from Durango through Farmington to the last turnoff: one hour, twenty minutes.

Though I had plenty of questions about our mission, we hadn’t talked much because Jolie had driven with NASCAR focus as we zigzagged through traffic.

That was then. Now we crept along at fifteen miles per hour, our maximum possible speed as we bottomed out the shocks on countless potholes along the narrow, corrugated path. Dense, weedy shrubs clawed the Porsche’s paint job. Rocks seemed to leap up from the ground and smash against the frame, as if the native spirits took glee at pummeling this masterpiece of white man engineering into junk.

Jeeps and pickups chattered past the opposite way, the passengers giving us the stink eye for trashing this expensive automobile.

Ordinarily, subjecting any machine to such abuse would’ve made me groan in shame. But this wasn’t my car, and if the owner of this Porsche didn’t have insurance, then boo hoo for him. Besides, served him right for stopping for a hitchhiker like Jolie. He remained on the back seat, asleep, kept unconscious by our grazing on his blood and the enzymes we had pumped into him.

Jolie’s face was a placid mask behind her sunglasses even as she fought to control a steering wheel that vibrated like a paint shaker. When I’d met her years ago in Key West, she and Carmen were cruising on choppers, wearing denim cutoffs and cowboy boots, looking hotter than the neon colors of their bikini tops. Jolie was definitely a good-time girl who complemented Carmen’s brassy outlandishness.

Jolie enjoyed a public brawl almost as much as a bout of casual sex. She was older than me by two centuries, maybe three. I wasn’t sure because all women, even the undead, are circumspect about revealing their true age. The Araneum put her sinister talents to use as an enforcer. She was more than an exceptional specimen of womankind and a powerful female vampire; she was a weapon.

We were going to need all of those talents to rescue Carmen from the aliens, however that was to happen, and then in our fight against Phaedra.

Jolie took her foot off the gas, and the Porsche coasted to a bumpy stop. “Warning light came on.”

“Which one?”

“Take your pick.”

I stared through the dusty windshield at the hills around distant Chaco Canyon. Long way to walk. I got out, hoping I could jury-rig what had busted and coax a few more miles out of the Porsche.

The bodywork appeared to have been whipped with chains by a car-hating sadist. Everything below the beltline had been gnawed to tatters. Nothing remained of the left outside mirror. The right hung from its stub like a loose eyeball. Remnants of the front fascia were jammed inside both forward wheel wells. Tumbleweeds and a prickly pear clung to where the front bumper had been.

Something puddled beneath the engine, and I crouched to look. Oil streamed from the belly pan and pooled on the dirt.

“What do you think?” Jolie shouted from her side. “Can you fix it?”

My diagnosis in three words. “No. Goddamn. Way.”

I straightened and looked about to take stock of where we were. Sagebrush and clumps of grass dotted the low hills surrounding us. To the north, Fajada Butte was still too far away to pick out from the rugged cliffs of Chaco Canyon. I checked the GPS on my cell phone.

Jolie yelled, “What’s our location?”

The phone had no signal, and I tucked it back into my pocket. “Someplace between nowhere and lost.”

I spied a tower to the left, a hundred meters off the road and along a gentle rise. The tower looked about thirty-feet high and was painted beige to blend in with the desert. At first I wished it was a cellular phone mast, hoping that modern technology was finally creeping into this part of New Mexico. But the tower lacked the standard pillow-shaped cell-phone antennae, and I had gotten no signal.

Scanning the horizon, I spotted another one to the north, a spike against the rugged backdrop and possibly another one farther out. Hard to tell at this distance.

I lifted my sunglasses for a better peek but it didn’t help.

Looking south, I saw another tower. And way south, another shimmering in the haze. And farther still, one more. I should’ve spotted them from the road, but I hadn’t been paying attention to anything except feeling the potholes sucker punch my kidneys.

The towers should’ve followed the meandering chicken-scratch path—the most convenient way to haul and erect them. And they weren’t in a straight line. The towers seemed planted in an arc. Facing northwest. Centered on … Fajada Butte.

Where Coyote wanted to meet.

Jolie climbed out the driver’s door. She buckled back into her motorcycle boots and walked toward me.

I asked, “What do you know about Fajada Butte?”

A hand up to shade her face, Jolie swiveled at the hips to study the towers. “It’s a big fucking rock sticking out of the desert. Plus a Navajo spiritual center. An Anasazi Stonehenge. A New-Age psychic vortex. UFO landing platform. No surprise that weird things are supposed to happen there. My turn for a question. Is it me or is there something strange about these towers?”

“Definitely strange. For a couple of reasons. One, they’re oriented toward Fajada Butte. Two, they’re here.” I started hiking to the closest tower, Jolie at my heels.

The tower jutted from a rocky, sandy slope. A flat rectangular box sat on top of the tower. Each side of the box was about two-feet square and angled slightly to the inside of the arc.

Up close, I could see the tower was a metal post roughly a foot in diameter with small lift rings welded up its side. I kicked dirt from the base and exposed a concrete footing. These towers were here to stay.

I circled the tower and discovered a postcard-sized placard attached at eye level. The placard listed a serial number, followed by what I figured were technical specs, and this: Property of Cress Tech International.

“The plot thickens.”

“What do you mean?” Jolie read the placard over my shoulder.

“Remember Hilton Head?”

“How could I forget?”

That was where we had lost Carmen to the aliens. The hotel complex on the island disguised a safe room for Clayborn. “The alien facility on Hilton Head was built and operated by Cress Tech International.” I pointed to what was written on the placard. “The same people who erected these.”

Jolie backtracked from the tower. “Fuck me.”

“Hold that thought.” I also stepped back and kept my eyes fixed to the box mounted on the tower. The box had a transparent prism on top.

My kundalini noir tingled and not in a good way.

“Now what?” Jolie had been watching me, sunglasses raised to read my aura. I’m sure it sparked with plenty of dismay.

“I know what that box is. A psychotronic diviner.”

“How is that different from the projector those bastards had on the truck?”

“This one only detects psychic energy transmissions. The Araneum gave me a copy that I had used to home in on Phaedra back before I turned her.”

Jolie lowered her shades. She spread her arms to encompass the tower array. “So this was built to detect psychic energy?”

“I’m guessing more.” I stared at the diviner and paged through my memory for details. “Here’s what I remember. The Roswell UFO had been taken to Rocky Flats for study. The Araneum built a psychotronic diviner from plans sketched by a Doctor Milan Blavatsky, one of the Rocky Flats scientists assigned to reverse engineer the alien technology.”

“The government knows about psychic energy?”

“For decades, I’m sure. Mostly to experiment with one crackpot scheme after another. Remote viewing. Mind reading.”

“But these work?” Jolie jabbed at the psychotronic diviner. “Right?”

“They do.”

“Can they detect us?”

“Not unless they found a way to improve them. And even if they did, their surveillance would be cluttered with signals. Everything with an aura transmits psychic energy. Me. You. The rabbits. The birds. Even plants. What the diviners detect are bursts of concentrated psychic energy.”

“Felix, the closer we get to Fajada Butte, the clearer the answers are supposed to get. But look at what we have in this crazy-ass bitch of a mystery.” Jolie counted on her fingers. “Psychic energy. That murderous wench, Phaedra. Vampire assassins. A super-secret government contractor.”

“And Carmen in outer space.”

“Yeah, that.” Visibly exasperated, she brandished one hand, all five fingers extended. “Is there anything else?”

“
Chale
locita
, don’t forget me.” The voice surprised us from behind.

Talons and fangs extending, Jolie and I whipped about.

“Hey,
vatos
. ’Bout time you showed up.” It was Coyote.

***

Chapter Five

Imagine a scrawny, mangy coyote. Imagine the tricky, thieving look in its eyes. Now turn that coyote into a human form.

That’s Coyote.

The last time I saw him, back in Los Angeles, he had cleaned up his act—literally. With a haircut and a shave, a tailored dress shirt with pearl snaps, pressed jeans, Mexican cowboy boots. No surprise the reason for that transformation was an ex-porn star with J-cup breasts.

Now he appeared as I remembered him best, dressed like he’d stolen clothes from the Salvation Army and then scrambled through a barbed wire fence. A stained and tattered denim jacket over a threadbare plaid shirt, a pair of jeans even more ragged than his jacket, dirty cross trainers with his toes pushing through the sides. I’d have to ask him what had happened to his girlfriend with the big hooters.

A wispy mustache darkened his upper lip and a spot above his chin. Nubby hairs poked from his jaw. He adjusted a frayed baseball cap so that it sat farther back on his head. His complexion resembled the leather in the pocket of an old catcher’s mitt.

I removed my sunglasses and studied his aura. The glowing orange sheath bubbled serenely like the liquid in a lava lamp.

Coyote was over five hundred years old. The bastard son of a Jewish conquistador (on the lam in the New World from the Inquisition) and Doña Marina a.k.a. La Malinche—the indigenous maiden who became Hernán Cortés’ interpreter, advisor, and concubine—Coyote considered himself the very first Mexican.

His dark, almost black, eyes reflected a wariness and cunning from being on the lookout for centuries, always suspect and so hunted like his animal namesake.

“So you’re Coyote?” Jolie asked.

“All day and tomorrow,
chiquita.
”

She tilted her head. “Where the fuck did you come from?”

“I knew you’d be here.” He walked between us toward the tower.

Jolie stepped close behind him. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“There are more important things to know.” He began stamping his foot around the base of the tower.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

He rapped a knuckle against the steel pole and it echoed hollow. “These things have a sigmoidoscope inside.”

Sigmoidoscope?
I was surprised he could pronounce all the syllables. “You mean like for a colonoscopy?”

Coyote halted and stared at me, the shine in his eyes dulling with confusion. Blobs in his aura formed into question marks. His ability to manipulate his aura was one of his many tricks.

“Felix means an up-your-butt examination,” Jolie explained.

The creases around Coyote’s eyes deepened when he grinned. “A butt check?” He thumped the tower again. “With one of these? You’re a funny guy,
ese
. Kind of freaky but that’s your business.” The question marks turned into exclamation points then dissolved back into random blobs.

“Then what are you—”

“An earthquake detector
chingadera
.” He returned to stamping around the tower.

“A seismograph?”

Coyote rolled his eyes at Jolie. “Now he gets it. That’s what I said.” He chuckled and whispered to himself. “Butt check.
Que pendejadas
.”

Now I was confused. Jolie shrugged and gave me a WTF look.

Coyote started down the slope toward the Porsche. Jolie and I trotted after him.

“Are those towers earthquake detectors?” She sounded disappointed.

“No
chica
. They are exactly what you think they are.”

Jolie shot me a second WTF look.

“Get used to it,” I said.

Coyote reached the Porsche. He stuck his head through the driver’s window. He sniffed and bent lower. Jolie and I watched him inhale deeply as if he was taking in the aroma of a fragrant flower. Pleasure sparked through his aura. He straightened and turned to Jolie. “This is where you sat.”

She crossed her arms and tapped one foot. Her aura crackled with the same annoyance that matched her tight frown. The low angle of the afternoon sun cut into my eyes and I put my sunglasses back on.

Coyote craned his neck to check out the owner of the Porsche, still unconscious in the backseat. Coyote licked his lips. “Shame to waste all that blood. Oh well.”

He crossed his arms and blinked
I-Dream-of-Jeannie
style. The trunk popped open. He chuckled. “And they say you can’t learn nothing from the television.”

Jolie and I were so rushed to get to Fajada Butte that we hadn’t examined the trunk. It contained matching Gucci luggage in masculine black leather with gold trim—two suitcases and a wheeled carry-on.

A briefcase that I had gone through before sat on the front seat. Didn’t contain much of interest. Business papers. A laptop with porn.

Coyote unzipped the carry-on and told Jolie and me to search the suitcases.

I ran my hand through suits and trousers. “What are we looking for?”

He stuffed socks inside his jacket. “Whatever looks worth keeping.”

“The driver has a nice watch.…”

Coyote already had the gold Rolex on his wrist. And wore the Texan’s Ray-Bans.

Jolie held up a box of Trojans and rattled a prescription bottle of Cialis. “The guy wears a wedding ring. What makes me think he wasn’t on the way to see his wife?”

“These?” I showed her a pair of banana hammocks—one in red satin and the other in gold lamé.

She winced and shut her eyes. “I’m getting a visual of that Texan that I don’t need.”

Coyote snatched the underwear from my hand. “No time for fooling around.” He shoved both man panties into his pocket. Now I was getting a visual I didn’t need.

“Now we go.” Coyote left the car and proceeded up the hill for a moment before stopping to address me. “Hey, you owe me money.”

I didn’t but so what as far as Coyote was concerned. Hint that you might spring him a few bills and he’d turn that offer into an ironclad debt. I handed him the $320 I had lifted from the Texan’s wallet.

“I was expecting more but thanks anyway,
ese
. I know you’re good for the rest.” He folded the bills and slipped them down the front of his pants. He patted where he’d just stashed the money. “Give the old lady a reason to go treasure hunting.”

“More like salvage diving,” Jolie quipped. She put her pistol holsters and jacket on.

I stuffed whatever of mine I could fit into the pockets of my jacket—some makeup, contacts, spare ammo. The rest—including Jolie’s fancy-ass motorcycle helmet—we left in the car.

Jolie and I hustled to catch up with Coyote.

She asked, “Where are we going?”

“Away from here.”

She turned to me. “Is he always this talkative?”

“He’s a real chatterbox today.” I threw a regretful glance back to the forlorn Porsche. What remained of its sleek lines was covered in dust and scratches, the high-performance wheels mired in the sand, and the trunk gaped open with clothes and luggage spilling out. The poor car looked like I felt after a bad weekend.

Jolie’s initial dose of amnesia enzymes had wiped clean the driver’s memory from the moment before he met her, and the pleasure enzymes we had pumped into him during our feeding had kept his mind blank of everything but pleasant dreams.

“What about the driver?” Jolie asked.

Coyote waved off her concern. “Somebody will come by tomorrow morning. They’ll take care of him.
Gabachos
get lost around here all the time.”

We continued up the rise and past the towers. Jolie and I marched along in graceless un-vampiric steps across the uneven, hardscrabble ground and its checkerboard patches of wickedly thorny plants. As bad as the washboard road had been, at least it was a defined trail through this desert wilderness.

Jolie halted to pick cholla spines out of her pants. “Coyote, how far are we walking?”

“Not far. I got a ride.”

Out here?
But he sounded confident and I wanted to believe him.

We wandered around outcroppings and cactus, down and up dips and reached the crest. Looking across the reverse side, I saw clusters of piñon, scrub oak, and juniper following the edges of a shallow gully.

Coyote slid down a steep narrow wash to the gully floor and into the shadows beneath the trees. Jolie and I followed him, our asses bumping over rocks and broken sticks. Once at the bottom, I noticed that something shifted ahead, rustling branches and tearing shrubs. Coyote continued straight to the source of the noise.

It was a little burro hitched with a frayed sisal rope to the branch of an oak. The small beast placidly chewed buffalo grass and twitched its ears at our approach. The remainder of the rope had been knotted into a bridle and reins.

“This is Rayo.” Coyote stroked the burro’s neck and loosened the rope from the branch.

“Means lightning,” I explained to Jolie.

The burro’s withers were almost at my waist, meaning Rayo was small for a pack animal. Coyote grasped the reins, put an arm around the burro’s neck, and whipped a leg over. He adjusted his posture and sat straight. The toes of his cross trainers almost touched the ground. The burro-Coyote combo looked top heavy but Rayo didn’t seem to mind. He just kept munching the grass and twitching his ears.

I looked to the other trees and didn’t see any more burros. “You said we had a ride.”

“I said
I
had a ride. Attention to detail,
ese.
” Coyote gestured to the shrubs around us. “So unless you two find a couple of burritos of your own, you better keep walking.” He tugged on the reins, pointing Rayo in the direction we had been hiking, and clucked. The little burro lurched into a quick rhythmic gait. Coyote rode with his elbows up and head bobbling on his neck.

Jolie exhaled a deep, regretful sigh. “Our quest to save Carmen from the aliens and stop Phaedra has come to this. Mr. Third World on a donkey.”

We jogged after Coyote. He led us on a path that meandered around and under the trees, where we had to pick our way past low branches, cactus, and spiny weeds.

“Going forward will be easier if we either follow the middle of the gully or the ridgeline.” Jolie said this loud so Coyote couldn’t ignore her pissed-off lilt.

But he acted like he hadn’t heard her. Instead, every few minutes he would check the Texan’s Rolex, which was interesting since I thought he seldom cared if it was morning or afternoon, yesterday or today.

“You late for an appointment?” Jolie asked, still sounding pissed.

“Me?”

“There another vampire on a burro checking his watch?”

Coyote tugged on the reins and halted. He panned the gully. “Not that I can see.” He flicked the reins and Rayo went back to his trot.

We kept on. Coyote’s obsession with checking the time made me read my watch as well. It seemed we’d been hiking over this God forsaken terrain for hours but it had been only forty minutes. A low rhythmic drone echoed toward us. Coyote popped the reins and shouted, “
Vamonos
, Rayo.”

The little burro bolted into the middle of the gully, Coyote’s arms, legs, and head bouncing like they were held together with loose springs. He yelled over his shoulder. “Stay under the trees.”

The drone grew loud and became the sound of rotor blades and turbine engines. Coyote continued into the gully, the burro high-stepping over the sand.

Jolie grabbed my arm and hauled me under a thick growth of branches. She swiveled her head to pinpoint the approaching sound, looking alert and wary as a hunted wolf.

The noise echoed louder and an instant later, a UH-60 Blackhawk zoomed into view high and to our right. The black helicopter swerved when the crew must’ve spotted Coyote and it entered a banking descent over the gully.

Coyote acted oblivious to the approaching aircraft. Its cargo doors were open, and men in tactical uniforms—Kevlar helmets, armored vests, cargo pants bloused into combat boots, ammo pouches and radios and holsters strapped to their legs and torsos—stood on platforms behind the wheels. They carried M4 carbines equipped with grenade launchers. A sensor turret under the nose of the Blackhawk rotated toward Coyote. A red laser shot from the turret and locked onto him.

***