Strum Again? Book Three of the Songkiller Saga (40 page)

"Yes, boss?"

"While Threedee is working on the new
disease that you should have thought of, can't you stir yourself to
start spreading the common cold, at least, or really stretch your
imagination and go for laryngitis and pneumonia?"

"I'll get right on it, boss."

* * *

Willie hitched a ride into San Antonio with
Juanito, discreetly leaving the matter of the illegal aliens to the
current ranch workers, and from there rented a car with what was
left of his expense money.

He stopped in at a convenience store in San
Marcos for munchies and on impulse dialed the operator.

"I want to make a collect call from Willie
MacKai to this number, please," he said to the operator.

After a few seconds the operator replied,
"I'm sorry, sir, that number is no longer in service."

"The hell it's not! I was just there a
couple of months ago."

"I can't help you, sir." The operator, a
young-sounding man, seemed to be gritting his teeth. Willie, who
had been alone so much recently and suddenly felt as if he had no
place to go, relented.

"Look, buddy, I'm sorry if I sound a little
testy, but I had good friends I was supposed to be able to reach at
that number—"

The operator relented slightly too and broke
a few rules. He'd been doing that pretty often lately, with
everything in a state of crisis. "That's okay, sir. I can
understand how you'd be a little upset, what with all the trouble
they've been having up there. It may be just that some of the lines
are still down after the tornadoes, or that repairmen are unable to
reach them to repair them because of the floods they've been
having."

"Is there any way to find out about
that?"

"We have emergency information at this
number. I'll try to transfer you, but if we become disconnected,
the number is—"

* * *

When Torchy popped back into the world, she
popped onto the ranch, but nobody was there but a bunch of
word-drunk cowboy poets just back from their writer's conferences
and a boss who had heard way too much bullshit at the Cattlemen's
Association meeting.

She ascertained this by looking around, and
when Nobby Watanabe spotted her, she managed to look like a very
pretty academic and explained that she was an editor for Bull-Pen
Press and she was looking for her old friend Willie MacKai, who had
told her he might be staying at the ranch off and on.

The cowboys all had varying theories,
which they offered in jest and verse, vying with one another to
impress her, especially after she explained to a very interested
query that Bull-Pen Press was the publisher of
Bull-Pen
, the magazine of contemporary western
literature.

With no banjo and no fairy dust to track
Willie by, she didn't have a clear fix on exactly where to find
him. Even Gussie had left a trail with her storytelling. There were
a lot of mortals out there in the world, and perseverance and
industry were not among the limited number of Torchy's virtues.

The problem was, each of the ranch hands had
a different theory about where Willie was. Her only idea was that
he might have gone back to Tulsa, but her outfit had done their
dirty work so well that she couldn't just call. And meanwhile,
Dally Morales was writing a poem about her, and she wanted to stick
around for a while. Besides, she had a few plans to make for Summer
Solstice. She was sure she'd be able to round up Willie from
someplace, and the ranch was beginning to fit into her plans. While
Dally was waxing poetic about the reflection of her hair in the
stock tank, she was eyeing the horses.

"Is that—" she asked Dally hesitantly, and
he looked up from his scribbling.

"Huh?"

"That horse out there—that elfin gray. I
thought they'd died out—"

"You mean the Appaloosa? Well, ma'am, they
purty nearly did when the Nez Perce had their horses massacred by
the cavalry—there's a real good song about it Willie sang for us
when he was here before. Fellow named Fred Small wrote it. It's
called 'The Heart of the Appaloosa.' I got it wrote down. I could
sing it for you if you like."

"Thanks," she said. "I'll pass."

* * *

The devils did a real number on those poor
people from Tulsa. Everybody came down sick, including the medical
people—even Brose, who occupied himself with the human animal
instead of the other kind for a change.

Julianne and Anna Mae kept singing, though
Gussie succumbed to a sore throat. Anna Mae wore a little medicine
bag around her neck. Now, for you or me maybe the medicine in that
bag might not have been anything much at all. It was just a little
old amethyst rock like they used to sell in metaphysical bookstores
in the late eighties, plus a crow's feather and some other stuff
that mostly it's only Indian people who care about. But the
medicine man who made it for her was none other than old man Atoka,
and she was real attached to it. So now, thanks to the little bag,
she felt strong in body as well as spirit, and she didn't catch
anything any more than Julianne, who, as has been mentioned, defied
any germs the worst devils could throw at her.

The music was medicine too, and they all
knew it. Lazarus the Mandolin began playing not just at danger or
for a joke, but every time they cooked food or accepted food. They
sang when they washed clothes or took a bath, and they sang when
they put up new tents or filled sandbags to shore up the
riverbanks. They taught anybody who was willing to learn every song
they could think of, old ones and new ones.

In the evenings Molly and Barry joined them,
and so did Faron, Ellie, Callie, and Aldin. But later in the
evening, when most of the music had stopped and lots of people had
gone to bed, you could still hear Lazarus playing away in its case,
making a spritely song sound sadder and lonesomer than it had ever
sounded before as the strings played "Rattlin' Roarin' Willie."

The first lime that the murderer struck—and
we all know it was Farnham—everybody thought that maybe the crime
was committed by one of the refugees who had cracked under the
strain. Except for the music and the kindness they showed to one
another, people were feeling pretty low and short-tempered.

But it was hard to believe that anybody
could have ever been more than mildly irritated at the first
victim, a childless, unmarried retired children's librarian. The
cops insisted she might have been selling drugs to kids at the
library or something, you never knew. She wrote furiously across a
page of paper that she most certainly had not, but she couldn't
speak up for herself because she had laryngitis.

She wrote that she had not seen her
assailant because he was plagiarizing the old slasher movies by
wearing a hockey mask, and it was dark, so she couldn't make out
the details of his clothing. Really, if she had not fallen asleep
with the five-book hardbound collection of Agatha Christie under
her sleeping bag, where she read with her flashlight as she had
when she was a little girl, the horrible deed might have done more
than make a point. When she felt the knife strike, the pages of the
book crushed themselves against her chest as if imploring
protection, and she sat bolt upright, banging heads with the hockey
mask and automatically spewing the speech she had given children
for the last forty years about how damaging books was a shame and a
crime, and only good-for-nothing low-down no-account little
video-games-for-brains brats would do such a loathsome and
despicable deed.

When it occurred to her, after the assailant
had fled without his knife, that he had meant to damage her instead
of the book, she screamed and shook and cried, which was partly how
her laryngitis came to be such a problem.

Farnham was a sorry sight now. He had to
steal another knife, not nearly as good as the first one, and his
hockey mask had a crack in it, besides which, his voices would not
let him alone for a second and they told him that he should be
preaching against the singers by day while trying to kill them
secretly by night and reminded him that he had a score to settle
with Gussie.

He tried preaching. He really did. And since
he was crazy, he didn't sound much worse than your average TV
evangelist, though he did forget to ask for money often enough. A
few malcontents listened and tried to get a disturbing-the-peace
order enforced against the little group of singers, but mostly
everybody was too sick or too busy to pay him much mind, so he went
on with his killing plans.

Gussie was his target of choice. For one
thing, she looked more fragile than the younger women. For another,
she was the right age to remind him of the figure in his life that
he kept trying to kill over and over.

Actually, if he had asked her permission,
she might have agreed, because she was in that state where she was
so sick that even though she knew she wasn't going to die, she sort
of wished she would.

* * *

It was a dark and stormy night. It hadn't
been much of anything else for weeks. Some days it was just cold
and the wind blew and there was actually a little sunshine, and
other days it was fairly warm and it rained all the time. But
basically you didn't get away without one or the other; rain, or
wind, or dark of night when it should have been getting light
outside.

Little streamlets seeped inside the single
musicians' tent. Although it was a big enough tent as tents went
(when the center crosspieces didn't collapse its dome shape into
more of a squashed melon shape), it was pretty small for four
people. The floor was a mire of muddy footprints. Gussie was
wrapped up in all of her blankets and all of Brose's and all of
Molly's, since Molly was working late. Gussie had taken three
aspirin and a tot of cough syrup that was mostly alcohol, but she
still hurt too bad to sleep. Her throat burned and her ears burned
and her eyes ached and she kept coughing.

Furthermore, she had heard about the attack
and it confirmed her fears about Farnham, but the others had been
steering clear of her cough, so she hadn't had a chance to tell
them about it.

The Doom and Destruction Devil was
determined to do his bit so that Farnham should have all of the
coincidence his patron devil could manufacture. To that end, at
nine o'clock that evening a careless and soon-deceased soul smoked
his last cigarette too near the flood-battered gasworks across
town, while at the same time an oil tank truck crashed into a
munitions factory. Nobody needed a flashlight to see that night,
which was the only thing that was unfortunate for Farnham. Every
able-bodied person from the refugee camp had gone to help the new
evacuations under the direction of every national guardsman,
policeman, army reserve soldier, and fireman for miles around.
Faron, Brose, Dan, Terry, Anna Mae, and Ellie, the Curtises and
Aldin and Callie, all went, leaving the re-resurrected Lazarus in
Gussie's care. The mandolin lured Threedee's henchman to Gussie's
tent as if she had hung out a big neon sign that said, "Victim
Available: Inquire Within" outside her tent flap.

She woke up about to cough again and heard
Lazarus screeching away at "Silver Dagger" so loud and fast it
sounded as if the mandolin were trying to play its way out of the
case. The music startled her, and she began one of those long
spasmodic coughs even before she opened her eyes.

She jerked into a sitting position with the
violence of her cough and felt something make a cool breeze past
her feverish neck before digging into her shoulder with burning
intensity. Her eyes flew open. She saw the masked figure and
screamed like a banshee.

Just about then Julianne Martin, who had
decided that maybe the mandolin could be useful in calming the
refugees, returned to the camp, heard the mandolin screeching away
at "Silver Dagger," and started running.

She saw right off that Gussie was engaged in
hand-to-hand combat with a man. At first she didn't see the man's
masked face or the knife and mistook the activity for something
more intimate and almost said, "Excuse me," and backed out. Then
she saw his knife gleam as he tried to wrench it out of Gussie's
two-handed grip while her feet were pummeling his midsection like
an angry cat's. Juli decided she was not intruding after all.

She had her trusty set of spoons stuck in
the pocket of her zip-fronted sweatshirt, and she pulled one out
and stuck its handle in the man's back, saying "Drop it, buster,"
and took the assailant's knife away from him and held that on him
too.

"Good—ahuh ahuh—work, kiddo," Gussie said
between coughs as she ripped off her attacker's hockey mask,
whipped the shoelaces out of her sopping wet running shoes and
bound the man's wrists behind him with a trick she had learned from
her early girlhood as a barrel-racing and calf-roping cowgirl. To
Farnham she said, "You're the same bozo who attacked that Miz
Galbraith and tried to kill me down in the Big Bend, aren't
you?"

"You recognized me!" he said with pleasure,
and her tying him up did not seem to bother him none except that he
looked as if he expected her to ask for his autograph.

"I certainly do, you awful man."

"I'm not so awful," he said. "The prison
therapist will tell you, I've had a terrible past."

"Hmph," said Juli. "We'll be glad to give
you the opportunity to go back and talk with him about it some
more, if you don't make us incur a lot of negative karma by having
to kill your sorry ass first." She was very angry, and starting to
be very scared, as scared as she had been back at Lucien's. She
felt like the tiger rider of folkloric fame who had managed to ride
the tiger, then realized it wasn't too healthy to try to get
off.