Wide Open (28 page)

“Jennie,” Hallie said, surprised at how calm she sounded, because inside, she wasn’t calm at all. “Can you—?” Dell’s ghost put her hand on Hallie’s wrist, and for once Hallie didn’t notice the cold. Because it wasn’t cold anymore, all the cold in the universe had been burned away.

“Jennie.”

Hallie wanted to be gentle, realized that Jennie needed her to be gentle, but that had been burned out, too. “You need to stay,” she said. “With … with … someone should stay.”

“I could— I—” Jennie’s eyes were full of fear and sorrow and horror. “I’m so sorry. I’m—” She looked at Hallie as if she were suddenly registering her. “Are you going?”

Hallie thought of a hundred things to say—
I have to stop him. It’s my fault Lorie was here, that she was looking for you, that she died. Martin did this. Martin. Did this. Martin.
But she had no more words. There was no room for words. For anything now, except ending this. For ending Martin.

She turned her back on Jennie, who was standing at the edge of the parking lot, shivering. She jumped into the bed of her pickup truck and unlocked the saddle box. When she’d taken a shotgun and a box of shells from the locked cabinet in her father’s office, she’d thought of it as a safety precaution. In case she had trouble at the Bob or someone ran her off the road.

She hadn’t thought of this.

She loaded the shotgun, hopped out of the pickup bed, and slid the gun behind the front seat.

She returned to Jennie. “It’ll be okay,” she said, a hand on Jennie’s arm.

“How?” Jennie asked. “How will it be okay?”

“It will stop,” Hallie said.

When she left, she didn’t look at the place where Lorie died.

31

Hallie hit the gravel road out of the church parking lot already doing forty. The truck slewed left. She yanked the steering wheel hard to the right, recovered, and kept right on, jamming harder on the gas until the pickup flew across the shallow dips in the road as if it were, finally, capable of flight.

She had as good an idea as any where Martin was—the company, Uku-Weber, with its lightning bolt mosaics and magic symbols on the wall.

She had wound her little truck up about as far as it could go by the time she hit the county road. At the intersection, she stepped hard on the brakes and spun the steering wheel wildly to the left. It was possible she went briefly up on two wheels as she rounded the corner. The tires slid, gripped, and held. The next twenty miles, the highway was paved and straight. She wound the truck up almost to 110 and passed an old Buick on the straight like it was standing still.

She felt like a ghost herself, cold and frigid and not entirely whole, felt like she could drive this fast forever and never touch a thing.

She had no idea what time it was, let that go, too—let go of family and friends and the future, of the army and the ranch. In this moment, on this road, there was Hallie and her ghosts, morning fog, and the whine of the truck engine.

That was all.

Her phone rang and she answered it, like an automaton, without even thinking.

“Hello, Hallie.”

Martin
.

“You son of a bitch.”

“It’s time for you to leave,” Martin said. His voice had a brittle edge.

“Dell tried to stop you, didn’t she? She found out what you were doing.” Dell the ghost floated next to Hallie in the cab. Hallie wanted to say,
See, this is what you did, you killed her.

“Dell loved the concept, the idea that we could make the world a better place, but she wasn’t willing to do what needed to be done.”

“Wasn’t willing to kill people, you mean?”

Lightning struck directly in front of the truck. Hallie slammed on the brakes. How did he know where she was? It occurred to her that he had known before, too, at St. Mary’s. She put her foot back on the gas, not driving slowly, because what did lightning care if she drove thirty-five or ninety? But more cautiously.

She looked at her phone. Dell’s phone. That’s what her father had said. The phone Lorie could call when she couldn’t reach anyone else. The phone she’d had with her since she got home. She flipped it over and thrust it straight into Dell’s ghostly side. She felt a short, sharp shock, the cold like a jolt of pure electricity. But it was there, the lightning bolt seared into the plastic case, like the one on Dell’s neck, on Jennie’s jaw, on Pete’s belt. Hallie put the phone back to her ear.

“Listen to me.” She said each word deliberately and distinctly. “I am coming after you, and I’m going to stop you.”

She flipped the phone closed, tossed it out the window, and turned down the next section line road she came to. It would take a little longer. She’d have to travel a more circuitous path than she’d planned. But she would get there. And she would stop him.

She didn’t know how long the siren had been wailing behind her before it finally registered, the pitch so perfectly in tune with her own thoughts that it could have been forever and she wouldn’t have noticed, might never have noticed, that was how much her world had narrowed, except now she could see the crossbar lights—red and blue—strobing in her rearview mirror. Diffuse and pale in the early morning light, like they were underwater, like they were drowning.

She ignored them. What were sirens and flashing lights to her? They had nothing to do with fire giants or Lorie Bixby burned to death or what Hallie meant to do. The siren persisted. The red and blue lights flashed at the periphery of her vision like an approaching storm.

When she slowed for the last turn before Uku-Weber, the car sped past her. A flash of white and gold, then it turned into her, angled her truck toward the side of the road. Hallie accelerated. If she were fast enough, she could slip past in the narrow space between the car and the ditch. The other car matched her.

She slammed on her brakes, thought she’d swing left behind the other car, but she hit a patch of loose gravel that had been run up onto the pavement from the shoulder. The back end of the pickup skidded sideways. She turned into it and braked hard to avoid the ditch. By the time she straightened the pickup out again, the sheriff’s car was sitting across the road in front of her.

Hallie jumped down from the cab, grabbing the shotgun from behind the seat. She didn’t wait for him to come to her. Because she knew who it was. Because it was always him.

Boyd
.

“Don’t you stop me,” she said. She held the shotgun loose in her hands.

Dell floated halfway between the two of them, like she couldn’t choose.

Choose,
Hallie thought.
Now is the goddamned time to choose.

*   *   *

“Jennie called the station,” Boyd said as he approached. His voice was low and calm, familiar and irritating, but Hallie swore that his hand shook in the particulate light of the headlights when he reached out to her. He looked angry and scared.

Welcome to my world,
Hallie thought, because she was both—angry and scared—herself.

A chill wind cut across the prairie, brown grass along the road bending over like tired soldiers. Hallie smelled horses and cattle and, faintly, the sharp scent of death, of some animal that had crawled in the ditch to die. The ghosts—except Dell—were ranked behind her, her own personal phalanx, like Boyd was the enemy.

And maybe he was.

The sun was up, but hidden by cloud cover, the air damp, fog still clinging to everything so that they seemed cut off, the two of them, from the world and its concerns. The flashing lights on Boyd’s car reflected back at them against the pervasive gloom. Everything was both sharp edged and flat, as if watching Lorie die had dropped her into a world with limited dimension.

“Jennie told me what happened.”

“She doesn’t know what happened.”

“I do,” he said. His headlights cast his face in planes and angles, and for once, he looked his age.

“You’re not going to stop me,” Hallie said.

“Let me help you.”

Neither of them saying what it was that he couldn’t stop and that she intended to do. The shotgun in her hand spoke her intentions loud and clear.

She cocked her head. “It’s not going to take both of us to shoot him,” she said. “Not that you would.” She let her anger flare, because if she could make him take one step backwards—just one—she would know that she was right, that this was the right path. “Because you’ve already told me where you stand. And it’s all about the rules, isn’t it? Because you know what’s coming—you’ve known what was happening for a while now. You could have stopped it before Lorie died, before
Dell
died. But no. It has to be legal. It has to be right. And we’ll pretend the world is all—pretend there’s hope and justice and the sun coming up every morning and everything will be okay if we just really really want it to be.”

The skin around her eyes was tight as a drum. Her words were tight, too, as spare and mean as an old dog left to die on a battlefield.

They stood like that for a long moment, like it was a standoff, which it wasn’t. Hallie had a loaded shotgun in her hands. Boyd had a pistol in a holster with the flap still snapped closed. But she wanted him to push her, wanted it to be on him, wanted him to force her to shoot out his tires or threaten him or even punch him. She wanted him to do it because he was kind or concerned or something—just goddamned
something
.

“Hallie…” Boyd struggled with what he wanted to say. “This—” He gestured with his right hand, attempting to encompass the prairie. He was wearing that same bulky black watch, and Hallie thought the top of her head might blow off from the fury, from looking at that watch. Something about it—the watch against bone, made him human—individual—to her. Made him Boyd. And she didn’t want him to be human, didn’t want to remember a moment when they’d wanted the same thing or seemed to understand each other. She wanted him to be Teedt or Sally Mazzolo or even Ole.

If one of them had stopped her, she would have blown a hole in their radiator and gone right on, like she was the Terminator back from the future, put together from scrap and a clockwork heart.

“I’m going to leave now,” she said.
Stop talking to me. Go away
. “You’re going to let me.”

Boyd spoke slowly, as if he knew he had to choose his words carefully. “I’m not asking you to let me take care of this. Or saying that you shouldn’t be angry. Because you should be, you should be really angry.” He took a step toward her. “But it’s not going to work, Hallie. I can
see
that it’s not. Martin is— He gets more powerful. With every sacrifice. Every ritual.”

Hallie considered the fire giant, how it had snuffed out Lorie like she was nothing. They cremated bodies at, like, two thousand degrees, and it took hours. Martin’s power, what was required to reduce someone to bone and ash, took seconds, was way beyond funeral parlors and cremations. Hallie didn’t care.

She didn’t care.

If Boyd couldn’t understand that. Maybe he couldn’t understand anything.

“I don’t care,” she told him.

Boyd’s hands clenched into fists. “I do,” he said.

When Hallie’d been a kid out on the middle of the prairie in the middle of the night, she had sworn she could hear traffic in downtown Rapid City. Her father would tell her she was crazy, and the two of them would walk clear out away from the house, lie on their backs in the prairie grass, and listen. And maybe she hadn’t really been able to hear downtown Rapid City traffic, but she could hear cars on the road six miles from the ranch, hear the whine of a semi changing gears out on the interstate.

And right now, she heard the deep rumble of cars or pickup trucks. The sound half-hidden by the muffling fog and the undercurrent of the early-morning prairie waking up, by their conversation and their own idling vehicles. Maybe they were several miles away, maybe it was someone’s family car, or a couple of pickup trucks on the way to town for breakfast or the paper.

But Hallie knew it wasn’t.

Boyd unsnapped the flap on his holster. Clearly he knew, too.

“You have a plan for this?” Hallie asked.

Boyd stepped up next to her. “There’s something I need to tell you,” he said. “About what I’ve been dreaming.”

“Yeah? Now’s not really a good time.” She stepped up and turned so that they were not quite back to back. She raised her shotgun. The fog wasn’t all that thick, but it obscured things so she couldn’t see more than thirty or forty feet in any direction. And it was starting to rain.

Dell nudged Hallie’s elbow, kept nudging it, like she was trying to push her somewhere—closer to Boyd, farther away, Hallie couldn’t tell. Her elbow was numb and cold, and she didn’t need that right now. She moved away from Dell, a step closer to Boyd.

A flash, blue white like lightning but everywhere at once, blinded her. She stepped forward. Boyd grabbed the back of her shirt and hauled her backwards. She heard them, felt them, the rush of something big inches in front of her, the roar of pickup engines revving high and hot. She blinked furiously against the afterflash from the lightning. When she could finally see again, Pete’s truck was three-quarters across the road directly in front of them, stray bits of gravel plinking against the fender of Boyd’s car from its spinning stop.

Two men slid out the passenger door, both of them armed. Pete appeared from the other side, a grin plastered on his face, his eyes wide—Hallie could see a rim of white around the edges. Dell drifted across the gap toward him. Sarah Hale chose that moment to drift right through Hallie’s right shoulder. She almost dropped her shotgun.

“You are really starting to piss me off, Hallie.”

Martin strode around the back of Hallie’s pickup truck. Hallie had to move sharply to the right to watch him and Pete and the other men all at once. Boyd had already moved, as if he’d known where Martin was before he even announced himself. The truck Martin had arrived in lurked behind Hallie’s pickup, like a rumbling black shadow, cutting off their escape.

Hallie tried to smile at him, pretend this was all a game and she knew it. But she couldn’t do it, could only twitch her lips. She pointed her shotgun straight at his chest instead, got some small satisfaction out of the gesture.