End Time (30 page)

“That's been happening a lot lately, the emergency broadcast thing,” Cheryl said without raising the issue of the altered word. “Have you noticed?”

“Should I have?” Bhakti replied.

She stared at the road ahead, another long mild curve. Should he have? Should she have? She shrugged. “I guess not. It just seems weird.”

The programming cut back to the weather, the announcer giving some color comment on the local forecast in one of those fine upbeat male voices that oozed bonhomie:
This is the Big P on KEZB 90.7 in Beaver, Utah. Well, you know what I know—we seem to have had a freak snowstorm this morning, starting out in Bonneville, over to Dugway, then downtown Salt Lake. Too early, you say? Not if you're looking for comet dust in Beaver land. Throw in a Chinee princess with the lunch special and you get eggroll. But the Big P says you stay right here on KEZB, the Eeee-Zeee Beaver, leave it to Beaver; music during the day and inspiration at night.…

Cheryl frowned. What a steaming cup of mental mush. Bhakti didn't seem to have heard “Chinee princess.” Cheryl thought better of pointing it out. Leave it to Beaver.

*   *   *

The Road Island Diner was a streamlined stainless-steel railroad car with an art deco entranceway embedded with a large lit-up clock. A place Buck Rogers wouldn't mind bringing Wilma Deering as long as they could park their airship. Cheryl scoped it out on Bhakti's laptop: Operating for years under different names and owners in and around the Northeast, the diner was a classic. But with the decline of the New England economy, this bit of Americana had been sold again and found a home where the buffalo roam in Oakley, Utah, a little north of Salt Lake. And where seldom was heard a discouraging word—

Except for today.

Apparently there'd been some kind of ruckus at the establishment.

A few patches of snow remained on the pavement and in the shade beside some parked cars. Lots of confused tire tracks. The first thing Cheryl and Bhakti noticed was a spidery crack in the front door glass about the size of a pie plate, and a smear that looked like lemon meringue. Inside, the place was open for business—barely. Still getting over the night before.

A few customers sat at the counter, and didn't look up from their flapjacks when the newcomers came in from outside. A waitress with a tag that read
MAGDALEN
looked up from the heat lamps at the kitchen pass-through slot and said, “Anywhere's okay. Be right with you.”

Cheryl found a booth along the front windows but far at one end that gave her a view of the place. Her buddy would have to sit with his back to the action, but that didn't seem to bother him. A busboy was messing around behind the counter with a broom and a pan. He swept the floor, and the dry clack of broken china clattered harshly; then hefted a large plastic bucket full of busted crockery and lugged it somewhere out of sight. That's when Cheryl noticed another thing: splashes of coffee and orange soda against the walls, and something unspeakable on the ceiling. As if a family of wild baboons who didn't know how to eat in public had trashed the place.

Magdalen the waitress picked up another order at the warming shelf, passed it off smartly to a couple at the counter, and made her way to their booth, her order book and pen in hand before she got there. “Know what you want? Or would you like a menu?”

Cheryl didn't need a menu. “Can I have two over easy, sausage patty, no potatoes?” And Bhakti fell into gorp mode, politely asking, “Do you have cottage cheese and canned peaches?” Magdalen nodded yup to both.

“Did something happen here?” Cheryl asked. Magdalen finished scribbling their order. She glanced around to see if she was needed elsewhere in the joint. Nope. An exhale of disgust.

“A rough crowd last night. Broke some dishes, threw a lot of food around. Nothing you could really put your finger on—just bad seed. Prone to accidents—know what I mean? They came on the wings of the storm. Then paid and left.”

“Didn't you call the cops?” Bhakti shifted around in his seat to get a better look at the place.

“For what? A mess of dishes and a little cracked glass? They paid. Overpaid. And we cleaned up the worst of it before closing. But I see we missed a spot or two. The whole crew could be in three different states by now.” She shook her head in disgust. “Skinhead biker buttwads, pardon my French. Generally we're okay with our two-stroke friends, but these clowns were yerks. Anything to drink?”

After Magdalen left with their order, Bhakti leaned across the table to whisper a question. “What's a yerk?”

Cheryl snorted, then mastered herself. “A twitchy glue-sniffing jack-off?”

Bhakti rolled his eyes. Twenty-five years in this country, speaking English since he was six, and he
still
couldn't keep up with the slang. “What about ‘to snog'—I once heard a woman complain that her husband ‘snogged the local skank—'”

“Shush! Shut up,” Cheryl shushed.

“What?”

“Don't look around. No, no, okay, look around slowly. No, wait, they're leaving. Look out the window.”

Cheryl's eyes followed a man and little girl getting up from the counter; he paid off with a big bill and left the change. She and Bhakti must have walked right by them on their way in, neither noticing the other. Bhakti twisted his neck, and what he saw stunned him. Inspector Frederick walked at the side of his Crown Victoria sedan, opening the passenger door for a little girl about age nine or ten. The girl, dressed in bib jeans and sneakers and a red shirt, stared at the diner through the plate glass right into Bhakti's eyes.
Choose and by your choice I will know you.
He heard Senora Malvedos' raspy cigarette voice brushing his ear like the wisp of a breeze.
Or let the girl pick
.

Bhakti's hands gripped the table, his body coiled, ready to bust from the booth.

“I know that little girl. I've seen her. How I found you, found Janet—”

The inspector slammed the car door shut and made his way back to the driver's side. He glanced once at the front of the diner; saw nothing of interest—a band of light had spread across the glass panes. He got behind the wheel. Cheryl was half out of her seat, fumbling with her cash, when a soft, serious voice came at them from the next booth.

“Don't get up. Don't follow. Please, sit back down. I'm not sure you're going to find who you're looking for by chasing those two. Not that way.”

The tone and quality of the man's voice stopped Cheryl dead in her tracks. The voice surprised Bhakti, and he fell back to the corner of his booth seat. A smooth and handsome Lakota face stared at them with hard brown eyes. The tone said,
You want to know what I know. Maybe we can help each other
.

The man came out of his booth and slid neatly onto the seat beside Bhakti, who was scrunched in the corner. Cheryl was skeptical. “Do we know you?”

Billy Shadow smiled back. He took out his Lattimore Aerospace ID and laid it on the table. The eggs and sausage came, the cottage cheese. Bhakti blinked at his plate of mush, then blinked at Cheryl's plate: the perfectly turned eggs, the sausage. He suddenly changed his mind. “I want what she's having.” Magdalen nodded, jotting the order onto their check. Then Bhakti stared hard at the man who had joined them, some sort of memory stirring his brain.

Bhakti nodded at the newcomer. “I know this guy,” Bhakti told Cheryl.

“We work for same Big Chief,” Billy said in mock Injun. “When you didn't show up for work and vanished from the subdivision, Boss Lattimore got worried. I've been hoping to catch up with you. Among others.”

Billy reached over the back of their booth seat and set the green Zero Degree tote in the middle of the table. “If you haven't seen this before you may want to keep an eye on the restroom door.”

The tote flap peeled away. Inside, the plastic evidence bag from the Van Horn sheriff's station, labeled
CHEN HOUSE.
The remains of a burnt ear, dangling an earring.

“We've seen this before,” Bhakti said. “And worse.”

The extra hematite earring taken from Lila's blistered dresser dangled from his fingers. For a moment Billy stared at the earring match. Then nodded too, as if finally realizing,
Sure, girls buy extras, just in case they lose one.
Then Billy's eyes went back to the plastic baggie and he did the strangest thing.

He zipped it open, pulled it over his nose, and inhaled deeply.… Billy's eyes seemed to roll into his head. He began to mutter unintelligible words. Cheryl and Bhakti froze in alarm, afraid the man was about to faint or go spastic. The strange fellow's head slipped toward the table, his lips slurred—but he suddenly snapped out of it.

Billy's eyes cleared, and he stared coolly out the window.

“No, we don't want to follow them. The weasel copper, the fortune-teller girl. Definitely not. They walk a different path, different from ours.”

Outside the diner, Inspector Frederick's sedan backed up and nosed toward the exit of the parking lot. Cheryl had to restrain herself from leaping up, and Bhakti looked like he was ready to crawl over seat backs. Billy Shadow's smooth voice stopped them.

“The cop isn't going to find what he's looking for. There's no Lila Chen at the end of his road. Even though he's using the little girl like some kind of compass. But she isn't going to bring him where he wants to go. Or us, either. We want to keep going east.”

Cheryl started getting uppity. “And you know this
why
? You know this
how
?”

“Look.” Billy took a slug of his coffee; he jangled the baggie once and put it back in the freezer tote. “It's a long story. A cat bit me.”

Cheryl sat back in the booth, eyes as big as saucers, flabbergasted at this hooey. Billy's tempered voice came at her:

“
I see things, okay?
A biker outfit called the Stuka Crew came through here last night—the very same baboons who messed up this diner. The Stuka Crew has adopted Lila as their mascot. Their little play toy. Your gal Lila rounds out their bunks, so to speak.”

And Billy told them what he knew. How the Stuka Crew kept Lila like one of those pedophile abductees, locked up for the day in their cycle van and let out only at night when they could all keep an eye on her. The gang itself was seven members who followed a small traveling circus called The Dr. Ponkus Medicine Show.

“The bikers put on daredevil stunts at local fairgrounds,” Billy explained.

The Dr. Ponkus Medicine Show was an outfit fashioned after those nineteenth-century snake-oil hustles that wandered the countryside with acts like The Serpent Lady or The Brilliant Fleas. Cheap carny stuff. Only Dr. Ponkus didn't sell magic elixirs to improve your manhood, and it was mostly legal.

“What's with the name? The Stuka Crew?”

“Y'know, like the dive-bomber in World War Two, that big unpleasantness in Europe last century?”

Dim blank stares came back at him. Billy tried again. “It's the name of their act. The seven bikers are skinhead types. White Aryan Resistance rejects. Four guys who call themselves The Four Horsemen and three women, the She-Wolves of the SS. The guys wear Wehrmacht uniforms and jump a flaming pool on their bikes, while the girls do slaloms around X-shaped mock tank traps made of two-by-fours and shoot paintballs from a sidecar. For their finale one of the bikes drives headlong into a Sherman tank. It's just collapsible, plastic and canvas, but the bike slams in and the thing goes up in smoke and hellfire. You can check their Web site. I did.”

“
And you know this how?”
Cheryl asked again, exasperated.

A slim smile creased Billy's face: a big cat in a ghost town; Grandma Sparrow in a dream. He could hardly explain the Skin Walker thing to himself. “I know because I went down to Van Horn looking for Gunga Din here, found the ear in the baggie in an evidence locker, and because a large cat bit me. I think I was meant to find you, and I think we were meant to go together.”

Bhakti's eggs and sausage came. Cheryl didn't know which was stranger, some Injun with cat-scratch fever or her Punjab companion poking his fork into sausage. She sat back in her seat and pushed her plate away. Tried it out one more time, just to set the record straight:

“Explain again how the hell you know all this? Because you're snorting baggie fumes and a large cat bit you?”

“Who the hell told you to drive to Utah?” Billy demanded right back.

To which Cheryl had no answer. Some black ants on an old menu, the god of the winds slapping it à la carte onto a car's windshield? Don't even go there.
Calling it unlikely was being generous.

Bhakti looked up from his plate with a dab of egg on his very trimmed beard. “Who's this Hocus Pocus guy?”

“Dr. Ponkus. Nobody special. A loose outfit, an old-time carny with a funny name. The whole mud show isn't that far from here. We can catch up with them at their next whistle stop. Notice the ear and the bangle in the baggie? The Stuka Crew wanted to keep Lila Chen compliant. The bandages should be coming off any day now. They didn't use antibiotics, or give her a tetanus shot, but she doesn't seem to be infected. Think you can account for that?”

Bhakti carefully put his knife and fork on his empty plate and wiped egg from his whiskers. He'd seen the contents of the evidence bag before it became “evidence.” The question of how they got here was less important to him than the question of why the Chen girl hadn't died of an infection. For him conjecture lost to science every time.

“Lila Chen isn't dead because she is very healthy,” Bhakti said quietly. “An enhanced immune system. That's the only explanation.”

Billy Shadow quietly nodded his head as if this simple statement hit the root of a problem he'd been wrestling with for a while. “Yeah, exactly. One in a million.”