CHAPTER EIGHT.
That same night, Eduardo removed the weapons from the cabinet in the
study and reloaded them. He distributed them throughout the house, so
one firearm or another would always be within reach.
The following morning, April fourth, he drove into Eagle's Roost, but
he didn't go to the sheriff's substation. He still had no evidence to
back up his story.
He went, instead, to Custer's Appliance. Custer's was housed in a
yellow-brick building dating from about 1920, and the glittering
high-tech merchandise in its display windows was as anachronistic as
tennis shoes on a Neanderthal.
Eduardo purchased a videocassette recorder, a video camera, and half a
dozen blank tapes.
The salesman was a long-haired young man who looked like Mozart, in
boots, jeans, a decoratively stitched cowboy shirt, and a string tie
with a turquoise clasp. He kept up a continuous chatter about the
multitude of features the equipment offered, using so much jargon that
he seemed to be speaking a foreign language.
Eduardo just wanted to record and play back. Nothing more. He didn't
care if he could watch one show while taping another, or whether the
damned gadgets could cook his dinner, make his bed, and give him a
pedicure.
The ranch already had a television capable of receiving a lot of
channels, because shortly before his death, Mr. Quartermass had
installed a satellite dish behind the stables. Eduardo seldom watched
a program, maybe three or four times a year, but he knew the TV
worked.
From the appliance store he went to the library. He checked out a
stack of novels by Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, plus
collections of stories by H. P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, and M.
R. James.
He felt no less a fool than if he had selected lurid volumes of
flapdoodle purporting to be nonfiction accounts of the Abominable
Snowman, the Loch Ness Monster, the Lost Continent of Atlantis, the
Bermuda Triangle, and the true story of Elvis Presley's faked death and
sex-change operation. He fully expected the librarian to sneer at him
or at least favor him with a pitying and patronizing smile, but she
processed the books as if she found nothing frivolous about his taste
in fiction.
After stopping at the supermarket as well, he returned to the ranch and
unpacked his purchases.
He needed two full days and more beers than he would ordinarily have
allowed himself in order to get the hang of the video system. The
damned equipment had more buttons and switches and readouts than the
cockpit of an airliner, and at times it seemed the manufacturers had
complicated their products for no good reason, out of a sheer love of
complication. The instruction books read as if they'd been written by
someone for whom English was a second language--which was very likely
the case, as both the VCR and the camcorder were made by the
Japanese.
