hand and we went upstairs. Her bedroom was large and airy, furnished in an unfrilly, no-nonsense style. A moose head was on one wall. I’d never seen a moose head in a bedroom. Hazel sat down and pulled off her boots.
I stood in the center of the floor and watched while she straightened up again and whisked the belt from her Levis. She skinned them down over her big hips and kicked them to one side. Her panties followed, and from her socks to the bottom edge of her buckskin vest there was just Hazel. Warm-looking ivory with a bushy-red exclamation point in front. Large, sleek, and glowing amplitudes behind.
I went to her and took her in my arms. She removed my tie and unbuttoned my shirt while I filled my hands with her velvety bare flesh. She unbelted my trousers and dropped them, then stooped swiftly to unlace and remove my shoes. I nudged the trousers away from us with my foot.
I removed her vest and bra when she stood up again. She did the same for my undershirt and shorts. She traced with a curious finger the multicolored patches on my chest, back, and thighs caused by the removal of the skin grafts that had rebuilt my face. I ran my palms lightly over the silken cheeks of her big bottom, then took handfuls of sleek flesh and kneaded it.
Clad in our socks, we adjourned to the oversized bed.
I loosened the tabs above my ears and lifted up my wig. Hazel ran her palm lightly over my skull, still serrated from the transplants. “You look like Yul Brynner’s younger brother,” she whispered, then kissed me.
“Thanks for the ‘younger’ part of that remark.” I replaced the wig. Hazel rolled onto her back and pulled me down on top of her. I played with her for a moment, but I could feel her restlessness. I moved her with my hands, and she wriggled into position eagerly. Her big arms enfolded me as I sank down comfortably upon that most solid of platforms.
I didn’t have to think, plan, or worry.
It was really like coming home.
We talked later while sharing a cigarette. “What comes next, horseman?” she asked, using her pet name for me.
I knew she didn’t mean what came next in her bed that night. “I don’t know,” I answered. “I’ve been spinning my wheels in San Diego for a month. I can’t seem to get off dead center.” I thought about it for a moment. “Maybe I’ve lost my nerve. I never used to feel this way.”
“Why don’t you bunk here for a while?” she suggested. “It’s not as though you had a train to catch in San Diego, is it?”
“No, but—”
“Relax,” she urged. “You’re as bad as Pa.” Her head came up from the pillow. “That reminds me—” She slipped from the bed. I heard the pad-pad of her footsteps, and then silence. When I looked to see what she was doing, her bell-shaped bare behind was pointed right at me as she stood doubled over at the bedroom window, staring out.
“What is it?” I asked when she remained there.
“There’s no light in the barn.” Her tone was troubled. “I don’t think Pa’s come back from the feed shed yet.”
I sat up in the bed. “D’you think—?”
“I don’t know. It’s probably nothing, but—”
I swung my legs onto the floor. “Let’s take a look. You’re worried. We can replay this scene later. Blow by blow.”
We dressed hurriedly and left the bedroom.
CHAPTER TWO
Outside the house Hazel headed for the vehicles in the old stable. The night air was bracingly chilly after the heat of the bedroom. Its effect was to dash cold water upon my first reaction to Hazel’s alarm. I reached for her arm to slow her down. “Don’t you feel you’re just imagining—”
She stopped so suddenly I ran into her. We both stared at an orange glow haloing the crest of a distant hillock. The shrill neigh of a frightened horse and the thunder of pounding hooves echoed through the darkness around us. “Those damned kids have let the horses loose and set fire to the feed shed!” Hazel cried. “And Pa’s still out there!”
She started to run toward the stable. “With you in a second!” I called after her. I sprinted to my car, opened the passenger-side door and the glove compartment, took out the.38, and slipped it inside my belt. I snatched up a handful of loose cartridges from a box in the glove compartment and dropped them into my pocket. When I reached the stable, Hazel had the pickup backed out.
“Have to use this instead of the Corvette,” she said as I climbed into the front seat. “This is a cross-country run and there’s a deep gully between us and the shed.” She rammed the pickup ahead after spinning its rear wheels in the loose dirt of the yard.
The orange glow ahead of us seemed even brighter. The pickup bounded from high spot to high spot, throwing me around in the cab. “How do they get away with this kind of thing?” I asked as the headlights picked up a yawning split in the earth. Hazel dragged the wheel hard over and the straining pickup slewed as it paralleled the gully, whose bottom I couldn’t see. “These kids can’t intimidate everyone in the county, can they?”
“Nobody will testify against them.” Hazel was hunched down over the wheel. “The sheriff says the only thing he can do is catch them at it. I don’t think he tries too hard. Some of them are from influential families. Their folks take the attitude that boys will be boys.” The pickup ran across the flattened-out bottom of the gully and boomed along through what looked like the remains of an orchard. “We’ll come up behind them and do a little catching of our own.”
If we get there, I thought. Twice we just missed trees. A low-hanging branch slapped the windshield with an explosive sound like a fistful of hard-driven hail. There was no orange glow ahead of us now. I sensed that we were circling the hill I had seen from the ranch yard. Then we burst through a scattering of scrub brush, made a hard right turn onto a short straightaway, and spurted ahead toward a scene straight out of hell.
The fire wasn’t in the feed shed. It was in a pile of logs off to one side, obviously to illuminate what was taking place. The firelight and our headlights picked up the figure of a man suspended by bound wrists from a spike more than head-high on the side of the shed. A tall boy in rodeo costume stood near the bound man, apparently talking to him. Another half-dozen kids were fanned out in a loose semicircle, watching.
Hazel scattered the watchers with the pickup. She braked to a sliding stop and we piled out the doors on either side. She ran toward the limp, dangling figure, which at close range I could see was the old man. I moved a few feet closer to the shed and then stopped. Gunnar Rasmussen’s white head lolled loosely on one shoulder. From the waist down his overalls and underwear were in tatters. His welted arse hung out of the overalls like fresh- butchered beef in a freezer, marbled and veined. The gang had whipped the overalls right off him.
Our sudden appearance had frozen the action for an instant. Then the rodeo-type standing near the old man moved toward Hazel as she tried to remove the old man’s bound wrists from the spike. He was a big kid, almost good-looking. He had a manila rope in his right hand. Its end was frayed and discolored. He reached for Hazel. I started to draw the.38, but at his touch she turned and belted him with a left hook to the chest that moved him back three feet. The kid started to raise the rope-whip. “Hold it!” I rapped at him.
He turned in surprise. When he looked back at Hazel, she had eased the bound wrists from the spike and lowered the old man to the ground. It was so quiet I could hear the crackling of the burning logs. The flamboyantly dressed tall boy smiled at me. “You picked a poor night to come sightseeing,” he said. His voice was soft. Almost pleasant. “Because I think he’s dead.”
He motioned with his left arm, and the scattered semicircle began to close in on us. “So we just can’t let you walk away from here, can we?” the boy continued. His smile widened as he returned his attention to Hazel. “Nice of
The kid stared at the old man’s prostrate body. When he first spoke to us, there had been a touch of uncertainty in his voice, but he had regained his confidence. “He must have had a bad heart,” he said.
