The Outsider

1

Jack Hoskins crossed into Texas around 2 AM on July 26th, and checked into a fleapit called the Indian Motel just as the day’s first light was showing in the east. He paid the sleepy-eyed clerk for a week, using his MasterCard—the only one that wasn’t maxed out—and asked for a room at the far end of the ramshackle building.

The room smelled of used booze and old cigarette smoke. The coverlet was threadbare, and the case of the pillow on the swaybacked bed was yellow with age, sweat, or both. He sat down in the room’s only chair and ran quickly and without much interest through the text messages and voicemails on his phone (these latter had ceased around 4 AM, when the mailbox reached its capacity). All from the station, many from Chief Geller himself. There had been a double murder on the West Side. With both Ralph Anderson and Betsy Riggins out of service, he was the only detective on duty, where was he, he was needed on the scene immediately, blah-blah-blah.

He lay down on the bed, first on his back, but that hurt the sunburn too much. He turned onto his side, the springs squalling a protest under his considerable weight. I’ll weigh less if the cancer takes hold, he thought. Ma was nothing but a skeleton wrapped in skin by the end. A skeleton that screamed.

“Not going to happen,” he told the empty room. “I just need some goddam sleep. This is going to work out.”

Four hours would be enough. Five, if he was lucky. But his brain wouldn’t turn off; it was like an engine racing in neutral. Cody, the little dope-pushing rat at the Hi station, had had the little white pills, all right, and he’d also had a good supply of coke, which he claimed was almost pure. From the way Jack felt now, lying on this crappy excuse for a bed (he didn’t even consider getting into it, God knew what might be crawling around on the sheets), the claim had been true. A few short snorts were all he’d had, in the hours after midnight when it seemed like the drive would never end, and now he felt like he might never sleep again—felt, in fact, as if he could shingle a roof and then run five miles. Yet eventually sleep did come, although it was thin and haunted by dreams of his mother.

When he woke up it was after noon, and the room was stinking hot in spite of the poor excuse for an air conditioner. He went into the bathroom, peed, and tried to look at the nape of his throbbing neck. He couldn’t, and maybe that was for the best. He went back into the room and sat on the bed to put on his shoes, but he could only find one of them. He groped for the other, and it was pushed into his hand.

“Jack.”

He froze, his arms pebbling with gooseflesh and the short hairs on the back of his neck lifting. The man who had been in his shower back in Flint City was now under his bed, just like the monsters he had feared as a little boy.

“Listen to me, Jack. I’m going to tell you exactly what you need to do.”

When the voice finally ceased giving him instructions, Jack realized the pain in his neck (sort of funny, that’s what he’d always called the old ball and chain) was gone. Well… almost. And what he was supposed to do seemed straightforward, if kind of drastic. Which was all right, because he was pretty sure he could get away with it, and stopping Anderson’s clock would be an absolute pleasure. Anderson was the chief meddler, after all; old Mr. No Opinion had brought this on himself. It was too bad about the others, but they weren’t on Jack. It was Anderson who had dragged them along.

“Tough titty said the kitty,” he murmured.

Once his shoes were on, Jack got down on his knees and looked beneath the bed. There was plenty of dust under there, and some of it looked disturbed, but there was nothing else. Which was good. Which was a relief. That his visitor had been there, Jack had no doubt, and he had no doubt about what had been tattooed on the fingers that had pushed the shoe into his hand: CANT.

With the sunburn pain down to a low mutter and his head relatively clear, he thought he could eat something. Steak and eggs, maybe. He had a piece of work ahead of him, and he had to keep his energy up. Man did not live by blow and pep-pills alone. Without food, he might faint in the hot sun, and then he would burn.

Speaking of sun, it hit him like a punch in the face when he went out, and his neck gave a warning throb. He realized with dismay that he was out of sunblock and had forgotten his aloe cream. It was possible they sold something like that in the café attached to the motel, along with the rest of the rickrack they always kept by the cash register in places like this: tee-shirts and ball caps and country CDs and Navajo souvenirs made in Cambodia. They had to sell a few of the necessities along with that crap, because the nearest town was—

He came to a dead halt, one hand reaching for the café’s door, peering through the dusty glass. They were in there. Anderson and his merry band of assholes, including the skinny woman with the gray bangs. There was also an old bag in a wheelchair and a muscular man with short black hair and a goatee. The old bag started laughing about something, then she started coughing. Jack could hear it even outside, like a damn backhoe in low gear. The man with the goatee whacked her on the back a few times, and then they were all laughing.

You’ll be laughing on the other side of your damn faces when I get done with you, Jack thought, but actually it was good that they were laughing. Otherwise they might have spotted him.

He turned away, trying to understand what he had seen. Not the bunch of them hee-hawing, he didn’t care about that, but when Goatee Man reached to thump Wheelchair Woman on the back, Jack had seen tats on his fingers. The glass was dusty and the blue ink was faded, but he knew what they said: CANT. How the man had gotten from under his bed and into the diner so fast was a mystery that Jack Hoskins didn’t care to contemplate. He had a job to do, that was enough, and getting rid of the cancer that was growing in his skin was only half of it. Getting rid of Ralph Anderson was the other half, and it would be a pleasure.

Old Mr. No Opinion.

2

Plainville Airfield sat in scrubland on the outskirts of the tired little city it served. There was a single runway, which Ralph thought horribly short. The pilot applied full braking as soon as the wheels touched down, and unsecured objects went flying. They came to a stop on a yellow line at the end of the narrow strip of tar, no more than thirty feet from a gully filled with weeds, stagnant water, and Shiner cans.

“Welcome to nowhere in particular,” Alec remarked as the King Air lumbered toward a prefab terminal building that looked as if it might blow away in the next high wind. There was a road-dusty Dodge van waiting for them. Ralph recognized it as the wheelchair-accessible Companion model even before he saw the handicap plate. Claude Bolton, tall and muscular in faded jeans, blue work shirt, battered cowboy boots, and a Texas Rangers gimme cap, stood beside it.

Ralph was first off the plane, and he extended a hand. After a second of hesitation, Claude shook it. Ralph found it impossible not to look at the faded letters on the man’s fingers: CANT.

“Thank you for making this easy,” Ralph said. “You didn’t have to, and I appreciate it.” He introduced the others.

Holly shook his hand last, and said, “Those tattoos on your fingers… are they about drinking?”

Right, Ralph thought. That’s one piece of the puzzle I forgot to take out of the box.

“Yes’m, that’s right.” Bolton spoke like someone teaching a well-learned and well-loved lesson. “The big paradox is what they call it in AA meetings down here. I first heard about it in prison. You must drink, but you can’t drink.”

“I feel that way about cigarettes,” Holly said.

Bolton grinned, and Ralph thought how odd it was that the least socially adept person in their little party was the one who had put Bolton at ease. Not that Bolton had seemed really worried; more on watch. “Yes ma’am, cigarettes is a hard one. How you doing with it?”

“Haven’t had one in almost a year,” Holly said, “but I take it a day at a time. Can’t and must. I like that.”

Had she actually known all along what the finger tattoos meant? Ralph couldn’t tell.

“Only way to break the can’t-must paradox is with the help of a higher power, so I got me one. And I keep my sobriety medallion handy. What I was taught is that if you get wantin a drink, stick that medallion in your mouth. If it melts, you can take one.”

Holly smiled—the radiant one Ralph was coming to like so well.

The side door of the van opened, and a rusty ramp squalled out. A large lady with an extravagant corona of white hair rolled down it in a wheelchair. She had a short green oxygen bottle in her lap with a plastic tube leading from it to the cannula in her nose. “Claude! Why are you standin around with these people in the heat? If we’re gonna roll, we should roll. It’s getting on for noon.”

“This is my mother,” Claude said. “Ma, this is Detective Anderson, who questioned me on the thing I told you about. These other ones are new to me.”

Howie, Alec, and Yune introduced themselves to the old lady. Holly came last. “It’s very nice to meet you, Mrs. Bolton.”

Lovie laughed. “Well, we’ll see how you feel about that when you get to know me.”

“I’d better go see about our rental,” Howie said. “I think it’s that one parked by the door.” He pointed at a mid-size dark blue SUV.

“I’ll lead the way in the van,” Claude said. “You won’t have any problem followin along; not much in the way of traffic on the Marysville road.”

“Why don’t you ride with us, honey?” Lovie Bolton asked Holly. “Keep a old lady company.”

Ralph expected Holly to refuse, but she agreed at once. “Just give me a minute.”

She beckoned Ralph with her eyes, and he followed her toward the King Air as Claude watched his mother turn her chair and roll back up the ramp. A small plane was taking off, and at first Ralph couldn’t hear what Holly was asking him. He bent closer.

“What do I tell them, Ralph? They’re sure to ask what we’re doing here.”

He considered, then said: “Why don’t you just hit the high spots?”

“They won’t believe me!”

That made him grin. “Holly, I think you handle disbelief pretty well.”

3

Like many ex-cons (at least those that didn’t want to risk going back inside), Claude Bolton drove the Dodge Companion van at exactly five miles an hour under the speed limit. Half an hour into the trip, he turned in at the Indian Motel & Café. He got out and spoke almost apologetically to Howie, who was behind the wheel of the rental. “Hope you don’t mind if we have a bite,” he said. “My ma sometimes has problems if she don’t eat regular, and she didn’t have any time to make sammitches. I was afraid we might miss you.” He lowered his voice, as if confiding a shameful secret. “It’s her blood sugar. When it goes low, she gets fainty.”

“I’m sure we could all use a bite,” Howie said.

“This story the lady told—”

“Why don’t we talk about it when we get to your house, Claude,” Ralph said.

Claude nodded. “Yeah, that might be better.”

The café smelled—not unpleasantly—of grease and beans and frying meat. Neil Diamond was on the jukebox, singing “I Am, I Said” in Spanish. The specials (which weren’t very) were posted behind the counter. Above the kitchen pass-through was a defaced photograph of Donald Trump. His blond hair had been colored black; he had been given a forelock and a mustache. Below it someone had printed Yanqui vete a casa: Yankee go home. At first Ralph was surprised—Texas was a red state, after all, as red as they came—but then he remembered that if whites weren’t the actual minority this near to the border, it was a close-run thing.

They sat at the far end of the room, Alec and Howie at a two-top, the others at a bigger table nearby. Ralph ordered a burger; Holly ordered a salad, which turned out to be mostly wilted iceberg lettuce; Yune and the Boltons went for the full Mexican, which consisted of a taco, a burrito, and an empanada. The waitress banged a pitcher of sweet tea down on the table without being asked.

Lovie Bolton was studying Yune, her eyes bright as a bird’s. “Sablo, you said your name was? That’s a funny one.”

“Yes, not many of us around,” Yune said.

“You come from the other side, or are you natural-born?”

“Natural-born, ma’am,” Yune said. Half of his well-stuffed taco disappeared at a single bite. “Second generation.”

“Well, good for you! Made in the USA! I used to know an Augustin Sablo when I lived way down south, before I was married. He drove a bread truck in Laredo and Nuevo Laredo. When he came by t’house, my sisters and I used to clamor for churro éclairs. No relation to him, I suppose?”

Yune’s olive complexion darkened a bit—not quite a blush—but the look he shot Ralph was amused. “Yes, ma’am, that would have been my papi.”

“Well, ain’t it a small world?” Lovie said, and began to laugh. Her laughter turned to coughing, and her coughing turned to choking. Claude thumped her on the back so hard the cannula flew from her nose and fell into her plate. “Oh, son, lookit that,” she said when she had her breath back. “Now I got snot on my burrito.” She resettled the cannula. “Well, what the hey. It came from inside me, it can go right back. No harm done.” She chomped.

Ralph began to laugh, and the others joined him. Even Howie and Alec joined in, although they had missed most of the interplay. Ralph had a moment to think how laughter drew people together, and was glad Claude had brought his mother along. She was a hot ticket.

“Small world,” she repeated. “Yes it is.” She leaned forward so that her considerable bosom pushed her plate forward. She was still looking at Yune with those bright bird eyes. “You know the story she told us?” She cut her eyes to Holly, who was picking at her salad with a small frown.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You believe it?”

“I don’t know. I…” Yune lowered his voice. “I tend to.”

Lovie nodded and lowered her own voice. “Did you ever see the parade in Nuevo? Processo dos Passos? Maybe when you were a boy?”

“Sí, señora.”

She lowered her voice further. “What about him? The farnicoco? You see him?”

“Sí,” Yune said, and although Lovie Bolton was as white as she could be, Ralph thought Yune had fallen into Spanish without even thinking of it.

She lowered her voice further still. “Give you nightmares?”

Yune hesitated, then said, “Sí. Muchas pesadillas.”

She leaned back, satisfied but grave. She looked at Claude. “You listen to these folks, sonny. You’ve got a big problem, I think.” She winked at Yune, but not as a joke; her face was grave. “Muchos.”

4

As the little caravan pulled back out onto the highway, Ralph asked Yune about the processo dos Passos.

“A parade during Holy Week,” Yune said. “Not exactly approved by the church, but winked at.”

“Farnicoco? That’s the same as Holly’s El Cuco?”

“Worse,” Yune said. He looked grim. “Worse even than the Man with the Sack. Farnicoco is the Hooded Man. He’s Mr. Death.”

5

By the time they got to the Bolton home in Marysville, it was almost three o’clock and the heat was like a hammer. They crowded into the small living room, where the air conditioner—a noisy window-shaker that looked to Ralph old enough for Social Security—did its best to keep up with so many warm bodies. Claude went out to the kitchen and brought back cans of Coke in a Styrofoam cooler. “If you were hoping for beer, you’re out of luck,” he said. “I don’t keep it.”

“This is fine,” Howie said. “I don’t think any of us will be drinking alcohol until we settle this matter to the best of our ability. Tell us about last night.”

Bolton glanced at his mother. She folded her arms and nodded.

“Well,” he said, “the way it turned out, there really wasn’t nothing to it. I went to bed after the late news, like always, and I felt all right then—”

“Bullpucky,” Lovie broke in. “You ain’t been yourself since you got here. Restless…” She looked around at the others. “… off his feed… talking in his sleep—”

“Do you want me to tell it, Ma, or do you?”

She flapped a hand for him to go on and sipped from her can of Coke.

“Well, she’s not wrong,” Bolton admitted, “although I wouldn’t want the guys back at work to know it. Security staff in a place like Gentlemen, Please ain’t supposed to get all spooked, you know. But I have been, kind of. Only nothing like last night. Last night was different. I woke up around two, out of a nasty dream, and got up to lock the doors. I never lock em when I’m here, although I make Ma do it when she’s here alone, after her Home Helpers from Plainville leave at six.”

“What was your dream?” Holly asked. “Can you remember?”

“Somebody under the bed, lying there and looking up. That’s all I can remember.”

She nodded for him to go on.

“Before I locked the front door, I stepped out on the porch to have a look around, and I noticed all the coyotes had stopped howling. Usually they howl like everything, once the moon’s up in the sky.”

“They do unless someone’s around,” Alec said. “Then they stop. Like the crickets.”

“Come to think of it, I couldn’t hear them, either. And Ma’s garden out back is usually full of em. I went back to bed, but couldn’t sleep. I remembered I hadn’t locked the windows and got up to do that. The catches squeak, and that woke Ma up. She asked me what I was doing, and I told her to go on back to sleep. I climbed into bed and almost drifted off myself—by then it had to be going on three—when I remembered I hadn’t locked the window in the bathroom, the one over the tub. I got the idea that someone was climbing in through it, so I got out of bed and ran to see. I know it sounds stupid now, but…”

He looked at them and saw none of them smiling or looking skeptical.

“All right. All right. I guess if you’ve come all the way down here, you probably don’t think it sounds stupid. Anyway, I tripped over Ma’s damn hassock, and that time she did get up. She asked me if someone was trying to get in the house, and I said no, but for her to stay in her room.”

“I didn’t, though,” Lovie said complacently. “I never minded any man except my husband, and he’s been gone a long time.”

“There was no one in the bathroom or trying to get in there through the window, but I had a feeling—I can’t tell you how strong it was—that he was still out there, hiding and waiting for his chance.”

“Not under your bed?” Ralph asked.

“No, I checked under there first thing. Crazy, sure, but…” He paused. “I didn’t go to sleep until daybreak. Ma woke me up and said we had to go to the airport so we could meet you.”

“Let him sleep as long as I could,” Lovie said. “That’s why I never made any sammitches. The bread’s on top of the fridge, and if I try to reach up there, I lose my breath.”

“And how do you feel now?” Holly asked Claude.

He sighed, and when he ran a hand up the side of his face, they could hear the rasp of his beard. “Not right. I stopped believing in the boogeyman right around the same time I stopped believing in Santa Claus, but I feel all upset and paranoid, the way I did when I was on the coke. Is this guy after me? Do you really believe that?”

He looked from face to face. It was Holly who answered him. “I do,” she said.

6

They were silent for a bit, thinking. Then Lovie spoke up. “El Cuco, you called him,” she said to Holly.

“Yes.”

The old woman nodded, tapping her arthritis-swollen fingers on her oxygen bottle. “When I was a little girl, the Mex kids called him Cucuy and the Anglos called him Kookie, or Chookie, or just the Chook. I even had a pitcher book about that sucker.”

“I bet I had the same one,” Yune said. “My abuela gave it to me. A giant with one big red ear?”

“Sí, mi amigo.” Lovie took out her cigarettes and lit one. She chuffed out smoke, coughed, and went on. “In the story, there were three sisters. The youngest one cooked and cleaned and did all the other chores. The two older girls were lazy and made fun of her. El Cucuy came. The house was locked, but he looked like their papi, so they let him in. He took the bad sisters to teach them a lesson. He left the good one who worked so hard for the daddy who was raising the girls on his own. Do you remember?”

“Sure,” Yune said. “You don’t forget the stories you hear when you’re just a kid. That storybook version of El Cucuy was supposed to be a good guy, but all I remember is how scared I was when he dragged the girls up the mountain to his cave. Las niñas lloraban y le rogaban que las soltara. The little girls cried and begged him to let them go.”

“Yes,” Lovie said. “And in the end, he did and those bad girls changed their ways. That’s the storybook version. But the real cucuy don’t let the children go, no matter how much they cry and beg. You all know that, don’t you? You’ve seen his work.”

“So you believe it, too,” Howie said.

Lovie shrugged. “Like they say, quien sabe? Did I ever believe in el chupacabra? What the old los indios call the goat-sucker?” She snorted. “No more than I believe in bigfoot. But there are strange things, just the same. Once—it was on Good Friday, at Blessed Sacrament on Galveston Street—I saw a statue of the Virgin Mary cry tears of blood. We all saw it. Later, Father Joaquim said it was just wet rust from under the eaves running down her face, but we all knew better. Father did, too. You could see it in his eyes.” She swung her gaze back to Holly. “You said you’d seen things yourself.”

“Yes,” Holly said quietly. “I believe there’s something. It may not be the traditional El Cuco, but is it the thing the legends are based on? I think so.”

“The boy and those girls you told about, he drank their blood and ate their flesh? This outsider?”

“He might have,” Alec said. “Based on the crime scenes, it’s possible.”

“And now he’s me,” Bolton said. “That’s what you think. All he needed was some of my blood. Did he drink it?”

No one answered him, but Ralph could actually see the thing that looked like Terry Maitland doing just that. He could see it with dreadful clarity. That was how far this insanity had gotten into his head.

“Was that him here last night, skulking around?”

“Maybe not physically here,” Holly said, “and he may not be you just yet. He might still be becoming you.”

“Maybe he was checking the place out,” Yune said.

Maybe he was trying to find out about us, Ralph thought. And if he was, he did. Claude knew we were coming.

“So what is going to happen now?” Lovie demanded. “Is he gonna kill another kid or two in Plainville or in Austin, and try to get my boy blamed for it?”

“I don’t think so,” Holly said. “I doubt if he’s strong enough yet. It was months between Heath Holmes and Terry Maitland. And he’s been… active.”

“There’s something else, too,” Yune said. “A practical aspect. This part of the country’s gotten hot for him. If he’s smart—and he must be, to have survived this long—he’ll want to move on.”

That felt right. Ralph could see Holly’s outsider putting his Claude Bolton face and muscular Claude Bolton body on a bus or a train in Austin and heading into the golden west. Las Vegas, maybe. Or Los Angeles. Where there might be another accidental encounter with a man (or even a woman—who knew), and a little more blood spilled. Another link in the chain.

The opening bars of Selena’s “Baila Esta Cumbia” came from Yune’s breast pocket. He looked startled.

Claude grinned. “Oh yeah. We got coverage even out here. Twenty-first century, man.”

Yune took out his phone, looked at the screen, and said, “Montgomery County PD. I better answer this. Excuse me.”

Holly looked startled, even alarmed, as he took the call and walked out on the porch with “Hello, this is Lieutenant Sablo” trailing after him. Holly excused herself as well, and followed him.

Howie said, “Maybe it’s about—”

Ralph shook his head without knowing why. At least not on the surface of his mind.

“Where’s Montgomery County?” Claude asked.

“Arizona,” Ralph said, before either Howie or Alec could reply. “Another matter. Nothing to do with this.”

“What exactly are we going to do about this?” Lovie asked. “Do you have any idea how to catch this fella? My son is all I got, you know.”

Holly came back in. She went to Lovie, bent, whispered in her ear. When Claude leaned over to eavesdrop, Lovie made a shooing gesture. “Go on in the kitchen, son, and bring back those chocolate pinwheel cookies, if they ain’t melted in the heat.”

Claude, obviously trained to mind, went out to the kitchen. Holly continued to whisper, and Lovie’s eyes widened. She nodded. Claude came back with the bag of cookies at the same time Yune came in from the porch, stowing his phone back in his pocket.

“That was—” he began, then stopped. Holly had turned slightly, so her back was to Claude. She raised a finger to her lips and shook her head.

“That was nothing,” he said. “They picked up a guy, but not the one we’ve been looking for.”

Claude put the cookies (which did look sadly melted in their cellophane bag) on the table and glanced around suspiciously. “I don’t think that’s what you started to say. What’s going on here?”

Ralph thought that was a good question. Outside on the rural route, a pickup truck trundled by, the lockbox in the bed reflecting bright spears of sun that made him wince.

“Son,” Lovie said, “I want you to get in your car and drive to Tippit and get us some chicken dinners at Highway Heaven. That’s a pretty good place. We’ll feed these folks, then they can go back t’other way and spend the night at the Indian. It ain’t much, but it’s a roof.”

“Tippit’s forty miles!” Claude protested. “Dinners for seven people will cost a fortune, and be dead cold when I get back!”

“I’ll heat everything up on the stove,” she said calmly, “and those dinners’ll be good as new. Go on, now.”

Ralph liked the way Claude put his hands on his hips and looked at her with humor and exasperation. “You’re tryin to get rid of me!”

“That’s it,” she agreed, butting her cigarette in a tin ashtray heaped with dead soldiers. “Because if Miss Holly here is right, what you know, he knows. Maybe that don’t matter, maybe all the cats are out of the bag, but maybe it does. So you be a good son and go get those dinners.”

Howie took out his wallet. “Allow me to pay, Claude.”

“That’s all right,” Claude said, a trifle sullenly. “I can pay. I ain’t broke.”

Howie smiled his big lawyer’s smile. “But I insist!”

Claude took the money and tucked it into the wallet chained to his belt. He looked around at his guests, still trying to be sullen, but then he laughed. “My ma usually gets what she wants,” he said. “I guess you figured that out by now.”

7

The Boltons’ byroad, Rural Star Route 2, eventually led to an actual highway: 190 out of Austin. Before it got that far, a dirt road—four lanes wide but now falling into disrepair—branched off to the right. It was marked by a billboard which was also falling into disrepair. It depicted a happy family descending a spiral staircase. They were holding up gas lanterns that showed their expressions of awe as they peered at the stalactites suspended high above them. The come-on line below the family read VISIT THE MARYSVILLE HOLE, ONE OF NATURE’S GREATEST WONDERS. Claude knew what it said from the old days, when he’d been a restless teenager stuck in Marysville, but in these new days all you could read was VISIT THE MARYSV and ATEST WONDERS. A wide strip, reading CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE (itself faded), had been pasted over the rest.

A feeling of lightheadedness came over him as he drove by what local kids called (with knowing sniggers) the Road to the Hole, but it passed when he kicked the AC up a notch. Although he had protested, he was actually glad to be out of the house. That sense of being watched had faded away. He turned on the radio, tuned to Outlaw Country, got Waylon Jennings (the best!), and began to sing along.

Chicken dinners from Highway Heaven was maybe not such a bad idea. He could have a whole order of onion rings to himself, eating them on the way home while they were still hot and greasy.

8

Jack waited in his room at the Indian Motel, peering out between the drawn drapes, until he saw a van with a handicap plate pulling out onto the road. That had to be the old bag’s ride. A blue SUV followed it, undoubtedly full of the meddlers down from Flint City.

When they were out of sight, Jack went up to the café, where he ate a meal and then inspected the items for sale. There was no aloe cream, and no sunblock, either, so he bought two bottles of water and a couple of outrageously overpriced bandannas. They wouldn’t be much protection from the hot Texas sun, but better than nothing. He got in his truck and drove southwest, in the direction the meddlers had gone, until he came to the billboard and the road leading to the Marysville Hole. Here he turned in.

About four miles up, he came to a weather-worn little cabin standing in the middle of the road. It must have been a ticket booth when the Hole was a going concern, he supposed. The paint, once bright red, was now the faded pink of blood diluted in water. On the front was a sign reading ATTRACTION CLOSED, TURN BACK HERE. The road had been chained off beyond the ticket booth. Jack went around the chain, jouncing along the dirt hardpan, crunching tumbleweeds, swerving around sagebrush. The truck took a final bounce and then he was back on the road… if you could call it that. On this side of the chain it was your basic mess of weed-choked potholes and washouts that had never been filled in. His Ram—high-sprung and equipped with four-wheel drive—took the washouts easily, spitting dirt and stones from beneath its oversized tires.

Two slow miles and ten minutes later, he came to an acre or so of empty parking lot, the yellow lines of the spaces faded to ghosts, the asphalt cracked and heaved into plates. To the left, backed up against a steep brush-covered hill, was an abandoned gift shop with a fallen sign he had to read upside down: SOUVENIRS AND AUTHENTIC INDIAN CRAFTS. Straight ahead was the ruin of a wide cement walk leading to an opening in the hill. Well, once upon a time it had been an opening; now it was boarded over and plastered with signs reading KEEP OUT, NO TRESPASSING, PRIVATE PROPERTY, and COUNTY SHERIFF PATROLS THIS AREA.

Right, Jack thought. They maybe take a swing-through once every February 29th.

Another crumbling road led away from the parking lot, past the gift shop. It went up one side of a slope and down the other. It took him first to a bunch of decrepit tourist cabins (also boarded up) and then on to some kind of service shed, where company vehicles and equipment had probably once been stored. There were more KEEP OUT signs on this, plus a cheery one that read WATCH FOR RATTLESNAKES.

Jack parked his truck in the scant shade of this building. Before getting out, he tied one of the bandannas over his head (giving him a weird resemblance to the man Ralph had seen at the courthouse on the day Terry Maitland was shot). The other he fluffed around his neck to keep that fucking burn from getting worse. He keyed open the lockbox in the truckbed and reverently lifted out the gun case that contained his pride and joy: a Winchester .300 bolt-action, the same gun Chris Kyle had used to shoot all those ragheads (Jack had seen American Sniper eight times). With the Leupold VX-1 riflescope, he could hit a target at two thousand yards. Well, four out of six tries on a good day, and with no wind, and he didn’t expect to be shooting at anywhere near that distance when the time came. If it came.

He spotted a few forgotten tools lying in the weeds, and appropriated a rusty pitchfork in case of rattlers. Behind the building, a path led up the back of the hill in which the entrance to the Hole was located. This side was rockier, not really a hill at all but an eroded bluff. There were a few beercans along the way, and several rocks had been tagged with things like SPANKY 11 and DOODAD WAS HERE.

Halfway up, another path split off, apparently circling back to the defunct gift shop and the parking lot. Here was a weather-worn, bullet-pocked wooden sign showing an Indian chief in full headdress. Below him was an arrow, the accompanying message so faded it was barely legible: BEST PICTOGRAPHS THIS WAY. More recently, some wit had drawn a Magic Marker word balloon coming from the big chief’s mouth. It read CAROLYN ALLEN SUCKS MY REDSKIN COCK.

This path was broader, but Jack had not come here to admire Native American art, so he continued upward. The climb was not particularly dangerous, but Jack’s exercise over the last few years had mostly consisted of bending his elbow in various bars. By the time he was three-quarters of the way up, he was short of breath. His shirt and both bandannas were dark with sweat. He set the gun case and pitchfork down, then bent and gripped his knees until the dark specks dancing in front of his eyes disappeared and his heart rate returned to something like normal. He had come here to avoid a terrible death from the sort of ravenous, skin-eating cancer that had taken his mother. Dying of a myocardial infarction while trying to do that would be a bitter joke.

He started to straighten up, then paused, squinting. In the shade beneath an overhanging ledge, safe from the worst of the elements, there was more graffiti. But if these had been left by kids, they were long dead, and for many hundreds of years. One showed stick men with stick spears surrounding what might have been an antelope—something with horns, anyway. In another, stick men were standing in front of what looked like a tepee. In a third—almost too faded to make out—a stick man was standing over the prone body of another stick man, his spear raised in triumph.

Pictographs, Jack thought, and not even the best ones, according to the big chief back there. Kindergarten kids could do better, but they’ll be here long after I’m gone. Especially if the cancer gets me.

The idea made him angry. He picked up a chunk of sharp rock and hammered at the pictographs until they were obliterated.

There, he thought. There, you dead fuckers. You’re gone and I win.

It occurred to him that he might be going crazy… or had already gone. He pushed that away and resumed his climb. When he reached the top of the bluff, he found he had a fine view of the parking lot, the gift shop, and the boarded-up entrance to the Marysville Hole. His visitor with the tats on his fingers wasn’t sure the meddlers would come here, but if they did, Jack was to handle them. Which he could do with the Winchester, he had no doubt of that. If they didn’t come—if they just returned to Flint City after talking to the man they’d come to talk to—Jack’s work would be done. Either way, the visitor assured him, Jack would be as good as new. No cancer.

What if he’s lying? What if he can give it, but not take it away? Or what if it’s not really there at all? What if he’s not there? What if you’re just crazy?

These thoughts he also pushed away. He opened the gun case, took out the Winchester, and mounted the sight. It put the parking lot and the entrance to the cave right in front of him. If they came, they would be as big as the ticket booth he’d gone around.

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.”

She coughed, looked at her cigarette with distaste, and buried it with the others in the overfilled ashtray, where it smoldered balefully.

“You know why we happened to end up in Marysville? George had the idea he was going to raise alpacas. After they died, which didn’t take long, it was going to be goldendoodles. If you don’t know, goldendoodles are a cross between golden retrievers and poodles. You think eeva-lution ever approved of a mix like that? I goddam doubt it. His brother put the notion in his head. No greater fool than Roger Bolton ever walked the earth, but George thought their fortunes was made. Roger moved down here with his family and the two of em went partners. Anyway, the goldendoodle pups died, just like the alpacas. George and me were a little tight for money after that, but we had enough to get by. Roger, though, he poured his whole savings into that damn fool scheme. So he looked around for work and…”

She stopped, an expression of amazement dawning on her face.

“What about Roger?” Ralph asked.

“Damn,” Lovie Bolton said. “I’m old, but that’s no excuse. It was right in front of my face.”

Ralph leaned forward and took one of her hands. “What are you talking about, Lovie?” Going to her first name, as he always eventually did in the interrogation room.

“Roger Bolton and his two sons—Claude’s cousins—are buried not four miles from here, along with four other men. Or maybe ’twas five. And those children, of course, them twins.” She shook her head slowly back and forth. “I was so mad when Claude got six months in Gatesville for stealing. And ashamed. That’s when he started using drugs, you know. But I saw later it was God’s mercy. Because if he’d been here, he would have been with them. Not his dad, by then George had already had two heart attacks and couldn’t go, but Claude… yes, he would have been with them.”

“Where?” Alec asked. He was leaning forward now, staring intently.

“The Marysville Hole,” she said. “That’s where those men died, and that’s where they remain.”

10

She told them it had been like the part in Tom Sawyer when Tom and Becky get lost in the cave, only Tom and Becky eventually got out. The Jamieson twins, just eleven years old, never did. Nor did those who tried to rescue them. The Marysville Hole took them all.

“That’s where your brother-in-law got work after the dog business failed?” Ralph asked.

She nodded. “He’d done some explorin there—not in the public part, but on the Ahiga side—so when he applied, they hired him on as a guide quick as winkin. Him and the other guides used to take tourists down in groups of a dozen or so. It’s the biggest cave in all of Texas, but the most popular part, what folks really wanted to see, was the main chamber. It was quite a place, all right. Like a cathedral. They called it the Chamber of Sound, because of the what-do-you-call-em, acoustics. One of the guides would stand at the bottom, four or five hundred feet down, and whisper the Pledge of Allegiance, and the people at the top would hear every word. Echoes seemed to go on forever. Also, the walls were covered with Indian drawings, I forget the word for em—”

“Pictographs,” Yune said.

“That’s it. You got a Coleman gas lamp when you went in, so you could look at em, or up at the stalactites hangin down from the ceiling. There was an iron spiral staircase that went all the way to the bottom, four hundred steps or more, around and around and around. It’s still there, I shouldn’t wonder, although I wouldn’t trust it these days. It’s damp down there, and iron rusts. Only time I took them stairs, it made me dizzy as hell, and I wasn’t even lookin up at the stalactites, like most of em. You want to believe I took the elevator back to the top. Goin down is one thing, but only a pure-d fool climbs up four hundred steps if she don’t have to.

“The bottom was two, maybe three hundred yards across. There were colored lights set up to show off all the mineral streaks in the rocks, there was a snack bar, and there were six or eight passageways to explore. They had names. Can’t recall all of them, but there was the Navajo Art Gallery—where there were more pictographs—and the Devil’s Slide, and Snake’s Belly, where you had to bend over and even crawl in places. Can you imagine?”

“Yes,” Holly said. “Oough.”

“Those were the main ones. There were even more leadin off from them, but they were closed off, because the Hole isn’t just one cave but dozens of em, goin down and down, some never explored.”

“Easy to get lost,” Alec said.

“You bet. Now here’s what happened. There were two or three openins leadin away from the Snake’s Belly passageway that weren’t boarded over or barred up, because they were considered too small to bother with.”

“Only they weren’t too small for the twins,” Ralph guessed.

“That’s the nail, sir, and you hit it on the head. Carl and Calvin Jamieson. Couple of pint-sizers lookin for trouble, and they sure found it. They were with the party that went into Snake’s Belly, right behind their ma and pa at the end of the line, but not with em when they came out. The parents… well, I don’t have to tell you how they took on, do I? My brother-in-law wasn’t the one leadin the group the Jamieson family was a part of, but he was in the search party that went after em. Headed it up would be my guess, although I have no way of knowin.”

“His sons were also part of it?” Howie asked. “Claude’s cousins?”

“Yessir. The boys worked part-time at the Hole themselves, and came on the run as soon as they heard. Lots of folks came, because the news spread like wildfire. At first it looked like it wasn’t going to be no problem. They could hear the boys callin from all the openins leadin off from the Snake’s Belly, and they knew exactly which one they went into, because when one of the guides shone his flashlight, they could see a little plastic Chief Ahiga Mr. Jamieson bought one of the boys in the gift shop. Musta fallen out of his pocket while he was crawlin. As I say, they could hear em yellin, but couldn’t none of the grown-ups fit in that hole. Couldn’t even reach the toy. They hollered for the boys to come to the sound of their voices, and if there wasn’t room to turn around to just back up. They shone their lights in and waved em around, and at first it sounded like the kids were gettin closer, but then their voices started to fade, and faded some more, until finally they were gone. You ask me, they were never close to begin with.”

“Tricky acoustics,” Yune said.

“Sí, señor. So then Roger said they should go around to the Ahiga side, which he knew pretty well from his explorin, what they call spee-lunkin. Once they got there, they heard those boys again, clear as day, cryin and yellin, so they got rope and lights from the equipment buildin and went in to fetch em out. Seemed like the right thing, but it was the end of em, instead.”

“What happened?” Yune asked. “Do you know? Does anybody?”

“Well, like I told you, that place is a goddam maze. They left one man behind to pay out rope and tie on more in case they needed it. That was Ev Brinkley. He left town shortly after. Went to Austin. Brokenhearted, he was… but at least alive, and able to walk in the sunlight. Those others…” Lovie sighed. “No more sunlight for them.”

Ralph thought about that—the horror of it—and saw what he felt on the faces of the others.

“Ev was down to his last hundred feet of free-rope when he heard somethin he said sounded like a cherry-bomb a kid set off in a tawlit bowl with the lid shut. What musta happened is some goddam fool fired a pistol, hopin to lead the boys to the rescue party, and there was a cave-in. It wasn’t Roger done that, I’d bet a thousand dollars it wasn’t. Old Rog was a fool about many things, especially those dogs, but never fool enough to fire a gun in a cave, where the ricochet could go anywhere.”

“Or where the sound could bring down a piece of ceiling,” Alec said. “It must have been like firing a shotgun to start an avalanche up in the high country.”

“So they were crushed,” Ralph said.

Lovie sighed and resettled her cannula, which had come askew. “Nawp. Might’ve been better if they were. At least it woulda been quick. But people in the big cavern—the Chamber of Sound—could hear em callin for help, just like those lost lads. By then there were sixty or seventy men and women out there, eager to do whatever they could. My George had to be there—his brother and his nephews were among those trapped, after all—and finally I gave up on keepin him home. I went with him, to make sure he didn’t try to do some damn fool thing like tryin to pitch in. That would’ve killed him for sure.”

“And when this accident happened,” Ralph said, “Claude was in the reformatory?”

“Gatesville Trainin School is what I believe they called it, but yes, a reformatory’s what it was.”

Holly had produced a yellow legal pad from her carry-bag, and was bent over it, taking notes.

“By the time I got to the Hole with George, it was dark. The parkin lot’s a good size, but it was damn near full. They’d set up big lights on posts, and with all the trucks and people scurryin around, it was like they were makin a Hollywood movie. They went in through the Ahiga entrance carryin ten-cell flashlights, wearin hardhats and puffy coats like flak jackets. They followed the rope to the cave-in. A long way, some of it through standin water. The rockfall was pretty bad. Took em all that night and half the next morning to clear it enough to get past. By then, people in the big cave couldn’t hear the lost ones callin no more.”

“Your brother-in-law’s bunch wasn’t waiting for rescue on the other side, I take it,” Yune said.

“No, they were gone. Roger or one of the others might have thought he knew a way back to the big cave, or they might’ve been afraid more of the ceiling was gonna cave in. No way to tell. But they left a trail, at least to start with; marks on the walls and litter on the floor, coins and screws of paper. One man even left his bowling card from the Tippit Lanes. One more punch and he’d’ve got himself a free string. That was in the paper.”

“Like Hansel and Gretel, leaving breadcrumbs behind,” Alec mused.

“Then everything just stopped,” Lovie said. “Right in the middle of a gallery. The marks, the dropped coins, the balls of paper. Just stopped.”

Like the footprints in Bill Samuels’s story, Ralph thought.

“The second rescue party kept goin for awhile, callin and wavin their flashlights, but no one called back. The fella who wrote it up for the Austin paper interviewed a bunch of those guys from the second rescue party later on, and they all said the same thing—there were just too many paths to choose from, all of em goin down, some leadin to dead ends and some to chimneys as dark as wells. They weren’t supposed to holler for fear of starting another cave-in, but then one of them yelled anyway, and sure enough, a piece of the roof come down. That’s when they decided they better get the hell out.”

“Surely they didn’t abandon the search after one try,” Howie said.

“No, course not.” She fished another Coke out of the cooler, cracked it, and swallowed half at a go. “Not used to talkin s’much, and I’m parched.” She checked her oxygen bottle. “Almost out of this stuff, too, but there’s another one in the bathroom there, with the rest of my goddam medical supplies, if someone wants to fetch it.”

Alec Pelley took charge of this task, and Ralph was relieved when the woman didn’t attempt to light up as he swapped them out. Once the oxygen was flowing again, she resumed her story.

“There was a dozen search parties went in there over the years, right up until the ground-shaker in ’07. After that it was considered too dangerous. It was only a three or four on the Richter, but caves are fragile, you know. The Chamber of Sound stood up to it pretty well, although a bunch of the stalactites fell off the ceilin. Some of the other passages, though, collapsed. I know the one they called the Art Gallery did. Since the shaker, Marysville Hole has been closed. The main entrance is stopped up, and I believe Ahiga is, too.”

For a moment no one spoke. Ralph didn’t know about the others, but he was thinking of what it must have been like to die a slow death deep underground, in the dark. He didn’t want to think about it and couldn’t help it.

Lovie said, “You know what Roger said to me once? Couldn’t have been six months before he died. He said the Marysville Hole might go all the way down to hell. And that makes it a place where this outsider of yours would feel right at home, don’t you think?”

“Not a word about this when Claude comes back,” Holly said.

“Oh, he knows,” Lovie said. “Those were his people. He didn’t care for his cousins much—they were older and used to bullyrag him something awful—but they were still his people.”

Holly smiled, but not the radiant one; it didn’t touch her eyes. “I’m sure he does, but he doesn’t know we know. And that’s the way it has to stay.”

11

Lovie, now looking tired going on exhausted, said the kitchen was too small for seven people to eat in comfortably, so they’d have to take their meal out back, in what she called the gaze-bo. She told them (proudly) that Claude had built it for her himself, with a kit he got at the Home Depot.

“It might be a little hot at first, but a breeze usually sets in this time of day, and it’s screened against the bugs.”

Holly suggested that the old lady should take a lie-down, and let the company set up for supper outside.

“But you won’t know where anything is!”

“Don’t worry about that,” Holly said. “Finding things is what I do for a living, you know. And these gentlemen will help out, I’m sure.”

Lovie gave in and wheeled along to her bedroom, where they heard her grunting effortfully, followed by the squall of bedsprings.

Ralph stepped out on the front porch to call Jeannie, who answered on the first ring. “E.T. phone home,” she said cheerfully.

“Everything quiet there?”

“Except for the TV. Officers Ramage and Yates have been watching NASCAR. I only surmise bets were made, but know for sure they ate all the brownies.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Oh, and Betsy Riggins came by to show off her new baby. I’d never say this to her, but he looks quite a bit like Winston Churchill.”

“Uh-huh. Listen, I think either Troy or Tom should stay the night.”

“I was thinking both. In with me. We can cuddle. Perhaps even canoodle.”

“What a good idea. Be sure to take some pictures.” A car was approaching; Claude Bolton, back from Tippit with their chicken dinners. “Don’t forget to lock up and set the burglar alarm.”

“The locks and alarm didn’t help the other night.”

“Humor me and do it anyway.” The man who looked exactly like his wife’s nighttime visitor was at that moment getting out of his car, and seeing him gave Ralph a queer feeling of double vision.

“All right. Have you found anything out?”

“Hard to tell.” This was skirting the truth; Ralph thought they had found out a great deal, none of it good. “I’ll try to call you later on, but right now I have to go.”

“Okay. Stay safe.”

“I will. Love you.”

“Love you, too. And I mean it: stay safe.”

He went down the porch steps to help Claude with half a dozen plastic bags from Highway Heaven.

“Food’s cold, just like I said. But does she listen? Never did, never will.”

“We’ll be fine.”

“Reheated chicken’s always tough. I got the mashed potatoes, because reheated French fries, forget it.”

They started toward the house. Claude stopped at the foot of the porch steps.

“Did you guys have a good talk with my ma?”

“We did,” Ralph said, wondering exactly how to handle this. As it turned out, Claude handled it for him.

“Don’t tell me. That guy might be able to read my mind.”

“So you believe in him?” Ralph was honestly curious.

“I believe that gal believes. That Holly. And I believe there might have been someone around last night. So whatever you talked about, I don’t want to hear.”

“Maybe that’s for the best. But Claude? I think one of us should stay here with you and your mother tonight. I was thinking Lieutenant Sablo could do that.”

“You expecting trouble? Because I don’t feel anything just now except hungry.”

“Not trouble, exactly,” Ralph said. “I was just thinking that if something bad happened around here, and if there happened to be a witness who said the person who did it looked a lot like Claude Bolton, you might like to have a cop handy who could testify that you never left your momma’s house.”

Claude considered. “That might not be such a bad idea. Only we don’t have a guest room, or anything. The couch makes into a bed, but sometimes Ma gets up when she can’t get back to sleep and goes out to the living room to watch TV. She likes those worthless preachers that are always yelling for love-offerins.” He brightened. “But there’s a spare mattress out in the back entry, and it’s gonna be a warm night. I guess he could camp out.”

“In the gaze-bo?”

Claude grinned. “Right! I built that sucker myself.”

12

Holly put the chicken under the broiler for five minutes, and it crisped up nicely. The seven of them ate in the gazebo—there was a ramp for Lovie’s wheelchair—and the conversation was both pleasant and lively. Claude turned out to be quite the raconteur, telling tales about his colorful career as a “security official” at Gentlemen, Please. The stories were funny, but neither mean nor off-color, and no one laughed harder at them than Claude’s mother. She laughed herself into another coughing fit when Howie told the story of how one of his clients, in an effort to prove he was mentally unfit to stand trial, had taken his pants off in court and waved them at the judge.

The reason for their trip to Marysville was never touched upon.

Lovie’s lie-down before dinner had been a short one, and when the meal was done, she announced that she was going back to bed. “Not many dishes with take-out,” she said, “and what there is I can warsh in the morning. I can do it right from my chair, you know, although I have to be careful of the goddam oxygen tank.” She turned to Yune. “You sure you’re gonna be all right out here, Officer Sablo? What if someone comes stirrin around, like last night?”

“I’m fully armed, ma’am,” Yune said, “and this is a very nice place out here.”

“Well… you come on in anytime. Wind might kick up strong after midnight. Back door’ll be locked, but the key’s under that olla de barro.” She pointed at the old clay pot, then crossed her hands above her admirable bosom and did a little bow. “You are fine folks, and I thank you for coming here and trying to do right by my boy.” With that, she rolled away. The six of them sat a little longer.

“That’s a good woman,” Alec said.

“Yes,” Holly said. “She is.”

Claude lit a Tiparillo. “Cops on my side,” he said. “That’s a new experience. I like it.”

Holly said, “Is there a Walmart in Plainville, Mr. Bolton? I need to do some shopping, and I love Walmarts.”

“Nope, and a good thing, because Ma does, too, and I’d never get her out of it. Closest thing to it we got in these parts is the Home Depot in Tippit.”

“That should do,” she said, and stood up. “We’ll clean those dishes so Lovie doesn’t have to in the morning, and then we’ll be on our way. We’ll be back tomorrow to pick up Lieutenant Sablo, then leave for home. I think we’ve done all we can do here. Do you agree, Ralph?”

Her eyes told him what to say, and he said it. “Sure.”

“Mr. Gold? Mr. Pelley?”

“I think we’re fine,” Howie said.

Alec went along. “Pretty well done here.”

13

Although they returned to the house only fifteen minutes or so after Lovie had taken her leave, they could already hear rough snores coming from her bedroom. Yune filled the sink with suds, rolled up his sleeves, and began to wash the few things they had used. Ralph dried; Holly put away. The evening light was still strong, and Claude was out back with Howie and Alec, touring the property and looking for any signs of the previous night’s intruder… if there had been one.

“I’d’ve been all right even if I’d left my sidearm home,” Yune said. “I had to go through Mrs. Bolton’s bedroom to get into her bathroom where she keeps her oxygen, and she’s well gunned up. Got a Ruger American ten-plus-one on the dresser, extra clip right beside it, and a Remington twelve-gauge leaning in the corner, right next to her Electrolux. Don’t know what old Claudie’s got, but I’m sure he’s got something.”

“Isn’t he a convicted felon?” Holly asked.

“He is,” Ralph agreed, “but this is Texas. And he seems rehabilitated to me.”

“Yes,” she said. “He does, doesn’t he?”

“I think so, too,” Yune said. “Seems like he’s turned his life around. I’ve seen it before when people get into AA or NA. When it works, it’s like a miracle. Still, this outsider couldn’t have picked a better face to hide behind, wouldn’t you say? Given his history of drug sales and service, not to mention a gang background with Satan’s Seven, who’d believe him if he said he was being framed for something?”

“No one believed Terry Maitland,” Ralph said heavily, “and Terry was immaculate.”

14

It was dusk when they got to the Home Depot, and after nine o’clock when they arrived back at the Indian Motel (observed by Jack Hoskins, once more peering through the drapes in his room and rubbing obsessively at the back of his neck).

They carried their purchases into Ralph’s room and laid them out on the bed: five short-barreled UV flashlights (with extra batteries) and five yellow hardhats.

Howie picked up one of the flashlights and winced at the bright purple glare. “This thing will really pick up his trail? His spoor?”

“It will if it’s there,” Holly said.

“Huh.” Howie dropped the flashlight back on the bed, put on one of the hardhats, and went to the mirror over the dresser to inspect himself. “I look ridiculous,” he said.

No one disagreed.

“We’re really going to do this? Try to, at least? That’s not a rhetorical question, by the way. It’s me trying to get my head around it as an actual fact.”

“I think we’d have a hard job convincing the Texas Highway Patrol to pitch in,” Alec said mildly. “What exactly would we tell them? That we think there’s a monster hiding in the Marysville Hole?”

“If we don’t do it,” Holly said, “he’ll kill more children. It’s how he lives.”

Howie turned to her, almost accusingly. “How are we going to get in? The old lady said it’s buttoned up tighter than a nun’s underwear. And even if we do, where’s the rope? Doesn’t Home Depot sell rope? They must sell rope.”

“We shouldn’t need any,” she said quietly. “If he’s in there—and I’m almost sure he is—he won’t have gone deep. For one thing, he’d be afraid of getting lost himself, or of being caught in a cave-in. For another, I think he’s weak. He should be in the hibernation part of his cycle, but instead he’s been exerting himself.”

“By projecting?” Ralph asked. “That’s what you believe.”

“Yes. What Grace Maitland saw, what your wife saw… I believe those were projections. I think a small part of his physical self was there, that’s why there were traces in your living room, why he could move the chair and turn on the stove light, but not even enough to leave impressions on the new carpet. Doing that has to tire him out. I think he might have shown up wholly in the flesh only a single time, at the courthouse on the day Terry Maitland was shot. Because he was hungry, and knew there would be a lot to eat.”

“He was there in the flesh but didn’t show up on any of the TV videotape?” Howie asked. “Like a vampire who doesn’t cast a reflection in mirrors?”

He spoke as if expecting her to deny this, but she didn’t. “Exactly.”

“Then you think he’s supernatural. A supernatural being.”

“I don’t know what he is.”

Howie took off the hardhat and tossed it onto the bed. “Guesswork. That’s all you’ve got.”

Holly looked wounded by this, and at a loss for how to reply. Nor did she seem to realize what Ralph saw, and was sure Alec saw, as well: Howard Gold was frightened. If this thing went sideways, there was no judge to whom he could object. He could not ask for a mistrial.

Ralph said, “It’s still hard for me to accept all this stuff about El Cuco or shape-shifters, but there was an outsider, that I do accept now. Because of the Ohio connection, and because Terry Maitland simply couldn’t have been in two places at the same time.”

“The outsider screwed up there,” Alec said. “He didn’t know Terry was going to be at that convention in Cap City. Most of his chosen scapegoats would be like Heath Holmes, with alibis like cheesecloth.”

“That doesn’t follow,” Ralph said.

Alec raised his eyebrows.

“If he got Terry’s… I don’t know how to say it. Memories, sure, but not just memories. A sort of…”

“A sort of terrain map of his consciousness,” Holly said quietly.

“Okay, call it that,” Ralph said. “I can accept that there’s stuff he could have missed, the way speed readers miss stuff while they’re zipping along, but that convention would have been a big deal to Terry.”

“Then why would the cuco still—” Alec began.

“Maybe he had to.” Holly had picked up one of the UV flashlights and was shining it on the wall, where it picked up a ghostly handprint from some previous resident. It was a thing Ralph could have done without seeing. “Maybe he was too hungry to wait for a better time.”

“Or maybe he didn’t care,” Ralph said. “Serials often get to that point, usually just before they get caught. Bundy, Speck, Gacy… eventually they all started to believe they were a law unto themselves. Godlike. They got arrogant and overreached. And this outsider didn’t overreach by all that much, did he? Think about it. We were going to arraign Terry and see him put on trial for the murder of Frank Peterson in spite of everything we knew. We were sure his alibi had to be bogus, no matter how strong it was.”

And part of me still wants to believe that. The alternative turns everything I thought I understood about the world I live in upside down.

He felt feverish and a little sick to his stomach. How could a normal man in the twenty-first century accept a shape-shifting monster? If you believed in Holly Gibney’s outsider, her El Cuco, then everything was on the table. No end to the universe.

“He’s not arrogant anymore,” Holly said quietly. “He’s used to staying in one place for months after he kills and while he makes his change. He only moves on when that change is complete, or nearly complete. That’s what I believe, based on what I’ve read and what I learned in Ohio. But his usual pattern has been disrupted. He had to run from Flint City once that boy discovered he’d been staying in that barn. He knew the police would come. So he came down here early, to be near Claude Bolton, and he found a perfect home.”

“The Marysville Hole,” Alec said.

Holly nodded. “But he doesn’t know we know. That’s our advantage. Claude knows his uncle and cousins are buried there, yes. What Claude doesn’t know is how the outsider hibernates in or near places of the dead, preferably those associated with the bloodline of the person he’s changing into or out of. I’m sure it works that way. It must.”

Because you want it to, Ralph thought. Yet he couldn’t find any holes in her logic. If, that was, you accepted the basic postulate of a supernatural being that had to follow certain rules, possibly out of tradition, possibly out of some unknown imperative none of them would ever be able to understand.

“Can we be sure Lovie won’t tell him?” Alec asked.

“I think so,” Ralph said. “She’ll keep quiet for his own good.”

Howie took one of the flashlights and shone it at the rattling air conditioner, this time picking up a litter of spectrally glowing fingerprints. He snapped it off and said, “What if he has a helper? Tell me that. Count Dracula had that guy Renfield. Dr. Frankenstein had a hunchback guy, Igor—”

Holly said, “That’s a popular misconception. In the original Frankenstein movie, the doctor’s assistant was actually named Fritz, played by Dwight Frye. Later, Bela Lugosi—”

“I stand corrected,” Howie said, “but the question remains: What if our outsider has an accomplice? Somebody with orders to keep tabs on us? Doesn’t that make sense? Even if the outsider doesn’t know we found out about the Marysville Hole, he knows we’re too close for comfort.”

“I see your point, Howie,” Alec said, “but serials are usually loners, and the ones who stay free the longest are drifters. There are exceptions, but I don’t think our guy is one of them. He hopped down to Flint City from Dayton. If you backtrailed him from Ohio, you might find murdered children in Tampa, Florida, or Portland, Maine. There’s an African proverb: he travels fastest who travels alone. And practically speaking, who could he hire for a job like that?”

“A nut,” Howie said.

“Okay,” Ralph said, “but from where? Did he just stop by Nuts R Us and pick one up?”

“Fine,” Howie said. “He’s on his own, just cowering in the Marysville Hole and waiting for us to come and get him. Drag him into the sun or put a stake in his heart or both.”

“In Stoker’s novel,” Holly said, “they cut off Dracula’s head when they caught him, and stuffed his mouth full of garlic.”

Howie tossed the flashlight on the bed and threw up his hands. “Also fine. We’ll stop by Shopwell and buy some garlic. Also a meat cleaver, since we neglected to buy a hacksaw while we were in Home Depot.”

Ralph said, “I think a bullet in the head should do the trick nicely.”

They considered this in silence for a moment, and then Howie said he was going to bed. “But before I do, I’d like to know what the plan is for tomorrow.”

Ralph waited for Holly to enlighten Howie on this point, but she looked at Ralph, instead. He was startled and moved by the hollows under her eyes and the lines that had appeared at the corners of her mouth. Ralph himself was tired, he supposed they all were, but Holly Gibney was exhausted, at this point running on nothing but nerves. And given her tightly wrapped persona, he guessed that for her that would be like running on thorns. Or broken glass.

“Nothing before nine o’clock,” Ralph said. “We all need at least eight hours of sleep, more if we can get it. Then we pack up, check out, go to the Boltons’, and pick up Yune. From there to the Marysville Hole.”

“Wrong direction, if we want Claude to think we’re flying home,” Alec said. “He’ll wonder why we aren’t headed back to Plainville.”

“Okay, we tell Claude and Lovie we have to go to Tippit first because… mmm, I don’t know, we have some more shopping to do at Home Depot?”

“Pretty thin,” Howie said.

Alec asked, “Who was the state cop who came out to talk to Claude? Do you remember?”

Ralph didn’t offhand, but he had kept case-notes on his iPad. Routine was routine, even when chasing the boogeyman. “His name was Owen Sipe. Corporal Owen Sipe.”

“Okay. You tell Claude and his momma—which is the same thing as telling the outsider, if he really can get inside Claude’s head—that you got a call from Corporal Sipe saying that a man roughly matching Claude’s description is wanted in Tippit for questioning in a robbery or a car theft or maybe a home invasion. Yune can verify that Claude was at home all night—”

“Not if he was out sleeping in the gaze-bo,” Ralph said.

“You’re telling me he wouldn’t have heard Claude start his car? That thing needed a new muffler two years ago.”

Ralph smiled. “Point taken.”

“Okay, so you say we’re going to Tippit to check it out, and if it leads nowhere, we’re going to fly back to Flint City. Sound okay?”

“Sounds fine,” Ralph said. “Just let’s be damn sure Claude doesn’t see the flashlights and hardhats.”

15

As eleven o’clock came and went, Ralph was lying on the swaybacked bed in his room, knowing he should turn out the light and not doing it. He had called Jeannie and gabbed with her for almost half an hour, some of it about the case, some of it about Derek, most of it inconsequential shit. After that he tried the TV, thinking one of Lovie Bolton’s late-night preachers might work as a sleeping pill—or at least quiet the constant rat-run of his thoughts—but all he got when he turned it on was a message saying OUR SATELLITE IS CURRENTLY DOWN, THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE.

He was reaching for the lamp when a light knock came at the door. He crossed the room, reached for the knob, thought better of it, and tried the peephole. It turned out to be useless, clogged with dirt or something.

“Who is it?”

“Me,” Holly said. Her voice was as small as her knock.

He opened the door. Her tee-shirt was untucked and the coat of her suit, which she had put on against the late-night chill, hung down comically on one side. Her short gray hair flew in the rising wind. She was holding her iPad. Ralph suddenly realized he was in his boxers, with the buttonless fly no doubt gaping slightly. He remembered something they used to say when they were kids: Who gave you a license to sell hotdogs?

“I woke you up,” she said.

“You didn’t. Come in.”

She hesitated, then stepped into the room and sat in the single chair while he put on his pants.

“You need to get some sleep, Holly. You look very tired.”

“I am. But sometimes it seems as if the more tired I am, the harder it is to go to sleep. Especially if I’m worried and anxious.”

“Tried Ambien?”

“It’s not recommended for people taking antidepressants.”

“I see.”

“I did some research. Sometimes that puts me to sleep. I started by looking up the newspaper stories concerning the tragedy Claude’s mother told us about. There was a lot of coverage, and a lot of background. I thought you might like to hear.”

“Will it help us?”

“I think it will.”

“Then I want to hear.”

He moved to the bed, and Holly perched on the edge of the chair, knees together.

“All right. Lovie kept talking about the Ahiga side, and she said one of the Jamieson twins dropped a plastic Chief Ahiga out of his pocket.” She opened her iPad. “This was taken in 1888.”

The sepia-toned photograph showed a noble-looking Native American man in profile. He was wearing a headdress that flowed halfway down his back.

“For awhile the chief lived with a small contingent of Navajos on the Tigua reservation near El Paso, then married a Caucasian woman and moved first to Austin, where he was treated badly, and then to Marysville, where he was accepted as a member of the community after cutting his hair and professing his Christian faith. His wife had a little money, and they opened the Marysville Trading Post. Which eventually became the Indian Motel and Café.”

“Home sweet home,” Ralph said, looking around at the shabby room.

“Yes. Here is Chief Ahiga in 1926, two years before he died. By then he’d changed his name to Thomas Higgins.” She showed him a second picture.

“Holy shit!” Ralph exclaimed. “I’d say he went native, but this is more like the opposite.”

It was the same noble profile, but now the cheek facing the camera was deeply scored with wrinkles and the headdress was gone. The former Navajo chieftain was wearing rimless spectacles, a white shirt, and a tie.

Holly said, “In addition to running Marysville’s only successful business, it was Chief Ahiga, aka Thomas Higgins, who discovered the Hole and ran the first tours. They were quite popular.”

“But the cave was named for the town instead of for him,” Ralph said. “Which figures. He may have been a Christian and a successful businessman, but he remained a redskin to the community. Still, I guess the locals treated him better than the Christians in Austin. Got to give them some credit for that. Go on.”

She showed him another picture. This one was of a wooden sign with a painted version of Chief Ahiga in his headdress, and a legend beneath reading BEST PICTOGRAPHS THIS WAY. She used her fingers to zoom out, and Ralph could see a path leading through the rocks.

“The cave has the town’s name,” she said, “but at least the chief got something—the Ahiga entrance, much less glamorous than the Chamber of Sound, but with a direct connection to it. Ahiga’s where the staff brought in supplies, and it was a way out in case of an emergency.”

“That’s where the rescue parties went in, hoping to find an alternate route that would take them to the kids?”

“Correct.” She leaned forward, eyes shining. “The main entrance isn’t just boarded up, Ralph, it’s cemented over. They didn’t want to lose any more kids. The Ahiga entrance—the back door—was also boarded up, but none of the articles I read said anything about it being plugged with cement.”

“That doesn’t mean it wasn’t.”

She gave her head an impatient toss. “I know, but if it wasn’t…”

“Then that’s how he got in. The outsider. That’s what you believe.”

“We should go there first, and if there are signs of a break-in…”

“I get it,” he said, “and it sounds like a plan. Good going. You’re a hell of a detective, Holly.”

She thanked him with her eyes lowered, and in the tentative voice of a woman who doesn’t know quite what to do with compliments. “You’re kind to say that.”

“It’s not kindness. You’re better than Betsy Riggins, and much better than the waste of space known as Jack Hoskins. He’ll be retiring soon, and if the job was mine to give, you’d get it.”

Holly shook her head, but she was smiling. “Bail-jumpers, repos, and lost dogs are enough for me. I never want to be part of another murder investigation.”

He stood up. “Time for you to go back to your room and get some shut-eye. If you’re right about any of this, tomorrow’s going to be a John Wayne day.”

“In a minute. I had another reason for coming here. You better sit down.”

16

Even though she was a much stronger person than she had been on the day she’d had the great good fortune to meet Bill Hodges, Holly was not used to telling people they had to change their behavior, or that they were flat-out wrong. That younger woman had been a terrified, scurrying mouse who sometimes thought suicide might be the best solution for her feelings of terror, inadequacy, and free-floating shame. What she felt most of all on the day when Bill had sat down next to her behind a funeral parlor she could not bring herself to enter, was the sense that she had lost something vital; not just a purse or a credit card, but the life she could have led if things had been just a little different, or if God had seen fit to put just a little more of some important chemical in her system.

I think you lost this, Bill had said, without ever actually saying it. Here, better put it back in your pocket.

Now Bill was dead and here was this man, so like Bill in many ways: his intelligence, his occasional flashes of good humor, and most of all, his doggedness. She was sure Bill would have liked him, because Detective Ralph Anderson also believed in chasing the case.

But there were differences, too, and not just that he was thirty years younger than Bill had been when he died. That Ralph had made a terrible mistake in arresting Terry Maitland in public, before he understood the true dimensions of the case, was only one of those differences, and probably not the most important, no matter how it haunted him.

God, help me tell him what I need to tell him, because this is the only chance I’ll have. And let him hear me. Please God, let him hear me.

She said, “Every time you and the others talk about the outsider, it’s conditional.”

“I’m not sure I understand you, Holly.”

“I think you do. ‘If he exists. Supposing he exists. Assuming he exists.’ ”

Ralph was silent.

“I don’t care about the others, but I need you to believe, Ralph. I need you to believe. I do, but I’m not enough.”

“Holly—”

“No,” she said fiercely. “No. Listen to me. I know it’s crazy. But is the idea of El Cuco any more inexplicable than some of the terrible things that happen in the world? Not natural disasters or accidents, I’m talking about the things some people do to others. Wasn’t Ted Bundy just a version of El Cuco, a shape-shifter with one face for the people he knew and another for the women he killed? The last thing those women saw was his other face, his inside face, the face of El Cuco. There are others. They walk among us. You know they do. They’re aliens. Monsters beyond our understanding. Yet you believe in them. You’ve put some of them away, maybe seen them executed.”

He was silent, thinking about this.

“Let me ask you a question,” she said. “Suppose it had been Terry Maitland who killed that child, and tore off his flesh, and put a branch up inside him? Would he be any less inexplicable than the thing that might be hiding in that cave? Would you be able to say, ‘I understand the darkness and evil that was hiding behind the mask of the boys’ athletic coach and good community citizen. I know exactly what made him do it’?”

“No. I’ve arrested men who have done terrible things—and a woman who drowned her baby daughter in the bathtub—and I’ve never understood. Most times they don’t understand themselves.”

“No more than I understood why Brady Hartsfield set out to kill himself at a concert and take a thousand or more innocent children with him. What I’m asking is simple. Believe in this. If only for the next twenty-four hours. Can you do that?”

“Will you be able to get some sleep if I say yes?”

She nodded, her eyes never leaving him.

“Then I believe. For the next twenty-four hours, at least, El Cuco exists. Whether or not he’s in the Marysville Hole remains to be seen, but he exists.”

Holly exhaled and stood up, hair windblown, suit coat hanging down on one side, shirt untucked. Ralph thought she looked both adorable and horribly fragile. “Good. I’m going to bed.”

He saw her to the door and opened it. As she stepped out, he said, “No end to the universe.”

She looked at him solemnly. “That’s right. No end to the fracking thing. Goodnight, Ralph.”