The Thirteenth Skull Page 3

  Doctor Jon McBride, Professor of Archeology at the University of Wyoming, lay sprawled and three days dead in front of her. His face was in the dirt and weeds that grew against the neglected back of the chicken coop. The khaki of his shirt and the denim of his jeans were swollen tight. His corpse was starting to rot and the gases were bloating him. Eileen looked closely, beyond the bloating and the smell, and saw that he was originally a powerfully built, athletic man. His hair was gray and wiry, long and tied in a ponytail, and the skin at the back of his neck was seamed with a thousand fine wrinkles. The soles of his boots lay up, well worn. They were less elderly than the leather below; he was a man who had his boots resoled rather than buy a new pair. Eileen could see one hand. It was outstretched and the nails were dark at the edges. Blood? Paint?

  She could see no gunshot wound, no knife wounds. Of course there was the front of his body, but she wouldn’t touch the scene. She’d leave that to Richard King, her old high school classmate. She grimaced and raised the digital camera she’d borrowed from her mother. Richard had to have changed enormously since high school. Richard had been such a loser back then. How had he become a sheriff?

  She took a dozens of shots, carefully walking around the body and shooting from all angles. Perhaps because she was being careful to leave no tracks, she saw the ant trail. It was tiny and she might have missed it, but she was being meticulously careful. She didn’t want Richard to have any excuse to get upset with her. Could he still be pissed off about prom night at the park?

  The ant trail. What about the ant trail? There were several trails leading to the body, and the flies were already making good inroads into the exposed skin of Dr. McBride’s ankles, hands and head. In a few days the body was going to be boiling with maggots. But this ant trail led away from the body, not to it.

  She followed the trail, placing her feet carefully and silently. She’d long ago blocked out the smell from the body but it was still a relief to take a few steps away. The trail led to a small dried pool of blood covered in a carpet of dead ants. The ants had stuck and died in the blood. Flies buzzed past her head on their way to the body. Their sleepy buzzing sounded in Eileen’s ears and thrummed in her head.

  The second dried splatters of blood, a few steps beyond the first, gave her what she needed. Dr. McBride hadn’t been at the ranch at all. He’d been heading for the ranch. Eileen stood up from the third dried splash of blood and looked down McBride’s back trail. She hadn’t been to the buffalo jump yet, but she knew where it was. She had a favorite tree down at the bottom of the bluff, a cottonwood so tall and thick it was a Tolkien forest all by itself. When she was eleven she spent hours in the tree with her collection of Barbie dolls and her Lord of the Rings books. By her seventeenth birthday it was gone, blown down in a fall thunderstorm. The cottonwood tree was the site of the buffalo jump.

  McBride was heading for the ranch from the buffalo jump when he died. Eileen looked at the blood and back at the body, almost entirely hidden in the summer grass. She wanted to turn the body over. She wanted to so badly she could taste it, like a bitten lemon in her mouth. What had killed him?

  Chapter Three

  Highway 94, Colorado Springs, Colorado

  “Am I dead?” Joe Tanner asked Sully.

  Sully laughed and sprawled back in the whiteness that surrounded them.

  “Naw, you’re not dead, Joe. You’ve been in a car wreck. Just like mine, remember? And if you don’t get the hell out of the car, they’re going to come back and finish you off. Just like they did to me.”

  “Wait a minute,” Joe said. “What is this place? Is this heaven?” He looked around, seeing more clearly. The clouds were white and pristine but there was sky of sorts above them, a clear pale sky with lines of clouds touched with every hue of the rainbow. Joe used to look at thunderclouds as a child and imagine flying up into heaven on their very tops. This was like that, only better. More beautiful. He felt absolutely wonderful. Every inch of his body tingled with energy. Sully, in front of him, floated in the clouds.

  “Are those wings?” he asked in dumb wonder. Sully laughed again and stretched one wing out to her side. It was enormous, covered with feathers deep and strong, and colored a delicate and perfect pink.

  “Cool, huh?” she said. “I’ll tell you, being dead is pretty great. Dying wasn’t so hot, but heaven is fantastic.”

  “This is heaven?” Joe asked. Sully was dead, he knew that. Harriet Sullivan had died in a car crash over five years ago. He’d been engaged to marry her when she died. Three years later, when he’d met Eileen Reed, he was still grieving at Sully’s sudden and senseless death. Only when he fell in love with Eileen was he able to finally accept Sully’s death and move on.

  “Not heaven, Joe,” Sully said. “You’re not dead. And I’m just an image, like these nifty clouds. This is just a – a communication place, a way for people near death to see and talk to creatures like me.”

  Sully had never been a very attractive woman, really, but he’d loved her for her spirit and her mind and her smile. Now she looked the same but not the same. Every inch of her was perfected somehow, beautiful beyond description. She wasn’t the Sully he’d known, the Sully who had faded in his mind like an old color photograph. Suddenly he realized what she’d just said.

  “I’m near death?”

  “Damn near,” Sully said grimly. “But we have some time to talk. Just a little. Usually we don’t do this sort of thing, you know.”

  “We?” Joe asked in a weak voice. He looked down at himself. Yes, he was still dressed in his jeans and T-shirt, the same ones he’d worn to work that morning. He checked his right finger, where he wore a silver band that Eileen had given him. A promise ring, she called it.

  “The ring’s still there,” Sully said. She was dressed in something light and fluttery, white and rose-colored like her wings. “Eileen is your life now, Joe, and you’re going to need her help to get yourself out of this one. They’ve targeted you just like they targeted me. Even if you get out of the wreck tonight you’re going to have to figure out a way to stop them.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Remember the unsolved murders at Schriever Air Force Base?”

  “Yes,” Joe said, then felt a rush of fear and anger through his body. “Your car wreck wasn’t an accident? You were killed?”

  “I was killed,” Sully said, and shrugged. Her wings rose, a poem of light and structure, and Joe was caught in their beauty. They were so perfect. Joe was taken by a desire to touch those wings, to feel them alive and warm and beating like a heartbeat.

  “Pay attention,” Sully said. “You’re not going to die like me. Not if I can help it.”

  “Yes,” Joe said. “Could you – fold those away?”

  “Oh, of course,” Sully said, and folded her wings behind her. “Better?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, then, listen up. They came back to the wreck and I was still alive. I wanted to live, Joe, then, as badly as you do. As badly as Eileen does. I was struggling to get out and they came up and when I asked for help the fat one took my chin and the back of my head and snapped my spine.” Sully pursed her lips and shook her head. “It took me ten more minutes to die, and the worst part was that I couldn’t say goodbye to you. It’s long over now, Joe, don’t cry.”

  “I’m not crying,” Joe said, and wiped his face with the bottom edge of his T-shirt.

  “Anyway, here I am, and I’ve got lots of work to do so I’m going to have to be quick.”

  “Work?”

  “What, you think heaven is just sitting on clouds playing harps?” Sully grinned. “In medieval times people worked themselves to exhaustion every day without a rest. So their vision of heaven was a place of eternal rest. Harps and so forth. We modern types, that would be hell to us, a place without anything to do. Heaven is perfect, absolute perfection, you see? So I have the perfect work for me.”

  “What do you mean?” Joe asked. He wanted to stay with her. He wanted
to stay and listen to her talk, forever. She looked at him, squinted at him, and shook her head. “Joe, you’re smarter than you look, I forget that. You can’t stay here much longer or you won’t want to leave. Listen. You’re less than twenty yards from the auto junkyard at the bottom of the hill. Remember?”

  “I remember,” Joe said. “But—”

  “Shut up,” Sully said. Her head rose and she looked around her for the first time. Her smile disappeared and she looked wary. “You have to get out of the wreck. Get to the junkyard and you’ll find the owner’s house about a half mile down the road. You can call the police from there. They’ll be back to look for you and if they find you they’ll snap your neck just like mine. Understand?”

  “I understand,” Joe said. Sully’s unease had transmitted itself to him. The hair on the back of his neck was standing in stiff bristles. His arms brushed up in gooseflesh. But wasn’t this a dream? How could he have goose bumps in a dream?

  “Then you have to get to Eileen. Get to her. That man, the fat man, he’ll come after you. He won’t stop until you’re dead, or he is. He kills people like you, Joe. You’ve been targeted and I don’t want to see you die like me.”

  “I hear you, Sully, but—”

  “No more, Joe,” Sully said. She unfolded her wings. Her beauty was blinding and heartbreaking. “I have to go, and so do you.”

  “Why do you have to go?” Joe cried. “Stay, let me stay.”

  “You’d need a bit of training to stay with me,” Sully said. She rose up in the clouds and there was something in her hand, something ancient and sleek and long, like a spear married to a laser gun. Her wings beat and Joe’s eyes were dazzled by rainbow. “Go, Joe. Live. We’ll meet again. I have work to do.”

  “What work?” Joe called, but she was above him, wings beating. He saw what she was looking at and his heart staggered inside him. There was something coming towards them through the clouds, something loathsome and black and covered with spines and teeth. It was swimming in the clouds, eyes and head above them like an ancient crocodile. It looked something like a dragon but it was something more, something so evil his eyes couldn’t find a way to see it. It reared up and a rotted, slavering mouth opened. Eyes opened, eyes like visions of hell, and it looked at him. It saw him.

  “I fight these, now,” Sully said serenely. Her wings beat sharply in his direction and Joe sank abruptly into the clouds and all breath and light left him then.

  Highway 94, Colorado Springs, Colorado

  Joe hurt all over. He was cold but he was covered with sweat. And his glove compartment was open. How irritating. His insurance papers had spilled out along with ancient gum sticks, crumpled Taco Bell napkins and half a dozen straws still in their paper sleeves. He tried to reach out and snap it closed but his arm wouldn’t work properly. He kept hitting the steering wheel instead, his fingers scrabbling uselessly at the warm plastic.

  There was something he had to remember. Some dream he was having, about Sully. The wings…

  There was no transition of consciousness. One moment he was trying to snap his glove compartment closed, muzzy-headed and confused, and the next he was all there, cold and aware and remembering everything. Sully. The dragon. He was in his car, and he had been forced off the road, and if he didn’t get out and follow her instructions he was going to end up murdered just like her.

  Something in him cried to stay, let go, so he could go back to the clouds. But stronger was his memory of how Sully had described her own death. His hands fumbled with his seatbelt latch. The man, the fat man, snapped her neck and left her to die, paralyzed, alone. Joe wiped his forehead and his hand came away bloody. The seatbelt latch let go and he fell against the driver’s side door. The car was at an angle in the ditch. The window was black with mud and weeds. He stood up in the car and pushed open the passenger side door. It was heavy, and wanted to fall back on his head as he lurched out. His right arm was coming back to life, sending shooting pains from his fingers all the way to the root of his shoulder.

  The night came alive around him as he crouched on the side of his crumpled Honda Civic. He could hear thousands of crickets reeping in the grasses and further away the deep sound of frogs. The stars were thick above his head in the summer darkness. The smell of fuel and burnt rubber and oil and a sharp stink of blood filled his nose. His nose was bleeding too, he noticed.

  Don’t leave a blood trail, Sully whispered in his head. Joe nodded and wiped at his nose a few times until he could see he wasn’t bleeding too badly. The forehead gash was right above his hairline. His hair was matted and sticky with blood but it, too, seemed to be clotting up pretty good. So then, no blood trail.

  Joe took a deep breath and stood up, remembering with razor clarity the look of Sully’s lance. He wished he had it now. With that thing, whatever it was, he had the feeling he could hold off an entire army.

  The road stretched on the other side of the ditch, clear and empty and blameless. Joe drove this highway every day, and had for years. He was near the bottom of Junkyard Hill, and although he still had no memory of his accident, he could see the tire tracks and the gouges in the grasses that led to his Honda. The gouges were as good as a trail of smoking flares. They would find him immediately when they came back. He had to get out of there.

  He turned around, knowing what he would see. Behind him stretched the fence that surrounded an enormous auto junkyard. Joe had been there once last summer with his friend ’Berto, scouting for side mirrors for ’Berto’s ’67 Mustang. The junkyard owner was an enormous tattooed man who looked like a Hell’s Angel except when he donned his Santa Claus outfit each Christmas and made hundreds of children happy at the mall. Joe couldn’t remember his name. Tom? Todd? T-something. Joe stepped carefully through the grass and climbed the fence, a chain-link affair with slats of green plastic woven through the links. T-guy didn’t bother with razor wire or barbed wire on top. He built the fence so people wouldn’t have to look at the junkyard as they drove by; he was required to have the fence as a zoning requirement of the county.

  As Joe dropped to the ground in the junkyard his eye was caught by a twinkle down the dark highway. Suddenly he had no breath. They were coming back to make sure he was dead. He checked the ground beneath him. Dry. He would leave no tracks. Silently he ran down an alley where the buildings were stacks of wrecked cars. He knew where the T-guy’s trailer was but he had to see these men. He had to. His head throbbed and the pain in his right arm stabbed at him. They had done this to him.

  The car lights swept quickly down the highway. The lights went out as the car purred quietly to a stop next to the tire tracks. Joe peered through the slats of the fence well down the road from his car, but close enough to see.

  A man got out of the car. He was huge, tall and fat enough to make the car rock back up on its springs when he stood up. His face was moon-like, unreadable in the darkness.

  “The fat man,” Joe breathed silently. He never wanted to kill anyone before this. His bloody fingers clenched into fists. This man had killed Sully.

  Fat man looked around, hitching at his pants. Another man got out and ran lightly around the car. He was smaller than Fat man but still substantial, a plank next to a pallet of lumber. Fat man nodded at Plank man and he leaped into the ditch. Joe heard a faint plonk as Plank landed on his Honda.

  Plank said something to Fat man. Joe couldn’t understand the words. The language wasn’t German or Spanish, but it certainly wasn’t English. Fat man said something back, incredulous. The smaller man said something back.

  Fat man stood and looked at the junkyard with narrowed eyes. Joe took a deep breath and stayed absolutely still. Behind him was a maze of uncrushed cars, a buffet of car parts that he and ’Berto had wandered through the summer before. There was a rattling sound from the highway and Joe’s mouth filled with a taste like old pennies as he realized Plank was in the junkyard. He’d climbed the fence, swarmed over it, and he was looking for Joe.

  Joe had taken two ste
ps towards Plank before Eileen’s voice spoke in his head. Pick your battles, she said. Sully spoke up, then, too. Stay alive, she said. Joe wondered irritably if they’d taken up residence permanently inside his skull. Hopefully they wouldn’t start talking to each other about his performance in bed. He crouched low and scuttled into the maze of junkers, keeping his body low and making no noise.

  It was amazingly difficult to keep down and keep going. He wanted to stand up and find out where Plank was, or Fat man. He didn’t think Fat man was capable of climbing the fence but maybe he’d found a way in. Picked the lock of the gate, perhaps, or cut the chain that closed the gate. For the first time Joe wondered who the fat man was, who had sent him. He remembered Sully telling him that the fat man was after him. He knew why, but how had the fat man known about what he’d done?

  Six months ago Joe had come up with a unique computer solution to a very sticky problem in his field. He programmed computers for war games in Colorado Springs, Colorado. These war games were fought by the highest levels of military soldiers and defense analysts. He’d loved his job since he landed it seven years ago. War gaming was like the best of Dungeons and Dragons crossed with video games, and Joe had been a gaming fanatic since before he’d reached his teens. He watched Star Trek reruns, he lived in his parents’ basement in high school and filled it with computer equipment, and in just about every way fulfilled the computer geek profile. Becoming a war gamer was the ultimate job to him and he loved it.

  When another programmer was murdered during a war game Joe was too upset to register the impact of Eileen Reed, the homicide detective who’d interviewed him. His girlfriend Sully’s accidental death – a murder, he amended now – was still so fixed in his mind he couldn’t focus on the grave, quiet woman who asked him about the murdered gamer.Later he saw Detective Eileen Reed, fell in love with her as hard as a man could fall, and still couldn’t understand what this beautiful strong creature saw that attracted her to him. He was just Joe Tanner, a man with a Star Trek uniform in his parents’ basement closet, and he played video games for a living with such passion that he sometimes forgot to eat.