see and hear as well as anyone, better than some. As well as anyone, he could serve up mixed nuts, three varieties of cheese, three varieties of crackers, thick slices of Armenian sausage, and drinks, a forty-year-old Scotch for him and Bryce Walker, and a Pepsi for the boy, Travis Ahern, who was only about ten, which in Sully’s opinion was four years too early either for Scotch or women, or life-and-death exploits.
By the time that Sully had been fourteen, he had enjoyed a good whiskey now and then and could hold his liquor. But of course he had been six feet three at that age, had looked twenty-one, on his own in the world and ready for adventure. Back then, he hadn’t lost the eye yet or the ear, or the hand, and he hadn’t sustained the sabre slash from his right eye to the corner of his mouth that left him with a livid scar in which he took much delight. In fact, at fourteen he hadn’t known much fun at all but was determined to have some, which he damn well did over the decades. Back then, all of his teeth had been real, whereas they were all gold these forty-seven years later, and he had cracked and broken off and simply lost each of them in a thrilling and memorable fashion.
They settled in Sully’s den, which was his favorite room in the house. Over the stone fireplace hung a fierce boar’s head, the tusks as pointed as ice picks, and with it the knife that Sully wielded to kill the beast. One wall and his desktop offered framed photographs of him and his buddies in exotic locales, from jungles to deserts, from mountain passes to ships sailing on strange tides, and in every case he and those good old boys — all dead now, each killed as colorfully as he had lived — had been in the service of their country, though never once in uniform. The kind of work they did was so deep cover that it made the CIA seem by comparison as open as a community- outreach organization. Their group had no name, only a number, but they had called themselves the Crazy Bastards.
On shelves and tables were souvenirs: a perfectly preserved six-inch-long hissing cockroach from Madagascar; an ornately carved wooden leg once worn by a dwarf Soviet assassin; a dirk and a dagger and a kris, all of which had cut him and all of which he had taken away from the cutters, who were rotting in Hell; the knobkerrie that had knocked out his left eye and with which he had dealt immediate vengeance to the one who had half blinded him; a blowgun, a scimitar, a pike, a tomahawk, a yataghan, intricately worked iron handcuffs, and many more items of sentimental value.
They settled in big leather armchairs around the coffee table where all the food was laid out, while Bryce and Travis recounted events they had witnessed — and escaped — at Memorial Hospital. Of the two, Bryce did most of the talking and most of the eating, as the boy slumped in a bleak mood that damn well did not become him. Sully had no patience for sulkers or whiners or negativists in general. He would have given Travis some sharp advice about the necessity to have a positive and high-spirited response to everything in life, from a certain glorious young woman in Singapore to a knobkerrie in the eye, but he restrained himself because he suspected that in spite of the boy’s current annoying mood, he had the right stuff. Sully York had a nose for people with the right stuff, which was one of the reasons he was the only surviving Crazy Bastard.
The story Bryce told — of patients being killed at the hospital, of some kind of mass-murder conspiracy that Travis insisted had to be the work of extraterrestrials — was so screwball and wild-assed that Sully quickly recognized it as the dead-serious truth. Besides, Bryce had as much of the right stuff as anyone Sully York had ever known. Bryce hadn’t spent his life cutting the throats of slick villains who needed their throats cut; he hadn’t pushed off cliffs the people who, in being pushed off, gave noble meaning to those cliffs. Instead, Bryce had written Western novels, damn good ones, full of heroism, in which he portrayed
When Bryce finished, Sully looked at the boy, who sat holding a cube of cheese at which he had fitfully nibbled. “Son, I really believe you’ve got moxie in your veins and steel in your spine. I have a nose for people with the right stuff, and you smell to high heaven of it. But there you sit as spiritless as that damn chunk of cheese. Hell, the cheese looks more capable of being ornery than you do. If half of what Bryce has told me is true — and I think it’s full true, front to back — then we have a hard job of work ahead of us, and we have to go at it with spunk and spirit and absolute confidence that we’re going to storm the hill and plant the flag. If we’re to be on the same team, I have to know why you’re moping like this and that you have the guts and the love of glory to get up out of your funk and fight to
Bryce said, “Sully, his mother has gone missing. Travis doesn’t know for sure, can’t know, but he thinks they got her. He thinks she must be dead.”
Thrusting up from his armchair, making a fist of his mechanical hand, Sully said, “Maybe she’s dead? Is that all? Hell, no, she’s not dead. Nobody’s dead until you see the stinking body. I won’t damn well believe that
The flat dull look in Travis Ahern’s eyes had given way to a lively light.
“Better,” Sully York said.
Chapter 25
Carson would have preferred to stay at the Samples house with the Riders and Riderettes, having all those well-intentioned, well-armed, tough, and savvy people covering her back. Not to mention the excellent coffee and the pumpkin pies in the oven. But considering their numbers, the percentage of them who had been in the military and therefore knew something about strategy and tactics, and the cell-phone videos of the horror at the roadhouse, they didn’t need Carson and Michael to recruit their neighbors and turn their block into a garrison.
The most urgent task at hand was locating Deucalion. With his singular gifts, only he would be able to drive the children out of Rainbow Falls, past the roadblocks, to the comparative safety of Erika’s house four miles west of town. With no telephone service of any kind, they would need to track him down somehow, which at first seemed to be an almost impossible mission in a town of nearly fifteen thousand.
As Carson piloted the Grand Cherokee through a sea of snow, tides washing across the windshield and foaming at the wheels, heading toward the center of Rainbow Falls, Michael said, “I’ve got an idea.”
“You always have an idea. You always have a dozen ideas. That’s why I married you. Just to see what ideas you’ll come up with today.”
“I thought you married me for my looks, my sensitivity, and my fabulous bedroom stamina.”
Carson said, “Lucky for you, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But I will acknowledge you really do an exhaustive job cleaning the bedroom.”
“Here’s an idea. Why do I have to do any house-cleaning? We have a full-time housekeeper. Why doesn’t she do it?”
“Mary Margaret is a great cook and a nanny. She does only light housekeeping. Keeping a spotless house requires someone with muscle, determination, and fortitude.”
“Sounds like you.”
Carson said, “Do you want me to clean, and from now on you do all the stuff I do, like fix plumbing and electrical problems, keep the cars fine-tuned, do the accounting and taxes?”
“No. I’d wind up electrocuted trying to replace a valve in the toilet just before the IRS seized the house. But back to my idea — we know Deucalion intends to take out the crews of as many of those blue-and-white trucks as he can. So if we can locate one that’s still operating and we tail it, maybe we’ll find Deucalion when he finds the truck.”
“That’s pretty much a lame idea.”
“Well, I don’t hear any dazzling suggestions from our plumber-electrician-mechanic-accountant.”
They rode in silence for a couple of minutes.
Then she said, “I’ve got a bad, bad feeling about this, Tonto.”
“The way I see it, kemo sabe, we can’t fail. When Deucalion received his gifts on the lightning, they had to have come from a higher power.”
