“Yeah, well, now we’re outlaws in New Mexico, too.”
“How’s it feel?”
“Didn’t Billy Bonney come from Santa Fe?” she asked.
“Billy the Kid? I don’t know.”
“He came from New Mexico, anyway. How I feel is not a damn thing like Billy the Kid, let me tell you. Unless he walked around so scared that he worried about wetting his pants.”
They stopped at a shopping center and purchased a tape recorder with a supply of minicassettes and batteries.
Using a directory chained in a public telephone booth, their breath pluming frostily over the pages, they went through the short list of names they had culled from the articles in Roy Closterman’s file. Some were not listed, having either died or moved out of town — or perhaps the now grown-up girls had married and were living under new names. Still, they found addresses for a few people on the list.
In the car again, eating a lunch of chicken tacos from a fast-food joint, Dusty studied the city map provided by the rental agency, while Martie inserted batteries in the tape recorder and scanned the operating instructions. The recorder was the essence of simplicity and easy to use.
They weren’t sure what testimony they would be able to gather, whether any of it would support the story that they themselves hoped to bring to the police in California, but they had nothing to lose by trying. Without the statements of others who’d suffered at the hands of Ahriman, to establish context, the complaints Martie and Dusty filed would have the grotesque quality of paranoid rants and would not be taken seriously, even with the tape of Susan’s phone call.
Two advantages gave them heart. First, because of what Roy Closterman had uncovered, they knew there were people in Santa Fe who hated Ahriman, who suspected him of the worst offenses against his oaths as a medical doctor and therapist, and who were frustrated beyond endurance to see him escape prosecution and move out of state with his reputation intact and with his license to practice medicine unchallenged. Surely, these individuals were potential allies.
Second, because Ahriman wasn’t aware that they knew of his past and because he wasn’t likely to credit them with either the ambition or the intelligence to discover the roots of his earliest attempts at brainwashing, he wouldn’t think to look for them in Santa Fe. Which meant that at least for a day or two, and perhaps longer, they could operate without attracting the frightening attention of the mystery men who had cut off Brian’s ear.
Here in the land of Ahriman’s past, flying below the radar of the psychiatrist and his enigmatic associates, they might be able to gather enough information to make their story credible when at last they approached the authorities in California.
No.
Action.
Leaving the shopping center, Martie drove while Dusty consulted the map and gave directions.
Over this high land, the sky was low and the color of New Mexico gypsum. Those slowly grinding clouds were icy, too, and according to the radio weather report, they were going to scrape some snow off one another before the day was out.
Only a few blocks from the Cathedral of Saint Francis of Assisi, the residence was surrounded by an adobe wall with a raised, stepped arch in which was set a spindled wooden gate.
Martie parked at the curb. She and Dusty went visiting with tape recorder and concealed pistol, bringing a little California style to mystic Santa Fe.
Beside the gate, a cascading
The gate was ajar, and beyond lay a brick forecourt. Agave and century plants bristled low, and tall pinons would have cast deep shadows had there been sun.
The single-story, pueblo-style house, by itself, validated the state’s claim to be the Land of Enchantment. Solid and round-edged, all soft lines and earth tones. Deep door and window openings, with simple fenestration.
A porch extended the width of the structure, supported by time-smoothed fir-log columns and by carved corbels painted with blue star designs. In the ceiling, aspen
Rosettes, conchas, and rope braids were carved into the arched front door. The hand-forged, hand-stamped iron coyote knocker hung from its hind legs. Its forelegs swung against a large iron
The thirty-something woman who responded to the knock must have been only two generations out of Italy on one side of her family; but another branch of her tree unmistakably had Navajo grafted onto it. Lovely, with high cheekbones, eyes as black as raven feathers, hair even blacker than Martie’s, she was a Southwest princess in a white blouse with bluebirds embroidered on the collar, a faded denim skirt, folded bobbysocks, and scuffed white sneakers.
Dusty introduced himself and Martie. “We’re looking for Chase Glyson.”
“I’m Zina Glyson,” she said, “his wife. Maybe I can help.”
Dusty hesitated, and Martie said, “We’d very much like to talk to him about Dr. Ahriman. Mark Ahriman.”
No tension came into Mrs. Glyson’s serene face, and her voice remained pleasant when she said, “You come here to my door, speaking the devil’s name. Why should I talk to you?”
“He’s not the devil,” Martie said. “He’s more a vampire, and we want to drive a stake straight through the bastard’s heart.”
Mrs. Glyson’s direct and analytic stare was as penetrating as that of any elder sitting on a tribal council. After a moment, she stepped back and invited them off the cold porch, into the warm rooms beyond the thick adobe walls.
Ordinarily, the doctor did not carry a concealed weapon, but with all the unknowables of the Rhodes situation, he believed that prudence required him to be armed.
Martie and Dusty were no immediate danger to him out there in New Mexico. They would pose no threat when and if they returned, either, unless he wasn’t able to get close enough to them to speak the names
Skeet was another matter. His holey brain, drilled by drugs, didn’t seem able to hold the essential details of a control program without periodic reloading. If the little dope fiend, for whatever reason, got it into his addled head to stalk Ahriman, he might not respond immediately to
The doctor’s double-breasted, gray pinstripe suit by Ermenegildo Zegna was elegantly tailored; and strictly as a fashion issue, there ought to have been a federal law against spoiling the garment’s lines by wearing a shoulder holster under it. Fortunately, ever the man of foresight, the doctor had commissioned a custom holster of supple leather, which carried his pistol so deep under the arm and so snugly against the body that even the master tailors in Italy would not have been able to detect the weapon.
Unsightly bulge was eliminated, as well, by the fact that the weapon was a compact automatic, the Taurus PT-111 Millennium fitted with a Pearce grip extension. Quite small, but powerful.
After his busy night, the doctor had slept late, which was possible because he didn’t need to keep the usual Thursday-morning appointment with Susan Jagger now that she was so dead. With no commitments until after lunch, he enjoyed a visit to his favorite antique-toy store, where he purchased a mint-condition Gunsmoke Dodge City playset by Marx for only $3,250, and a die-cast Johnny Lightning Custom Ferrari for only $115.
A couple of other customers were browsing in the store, chatting with the owner, and Dr. Ahriman had great fun imagining what it would be like to surprise them by drawing his pistol and gutshooting them without provocation. He did not do this, of course, because he was pleased with his purchases and wanted the owner to
