38
WEST TEXAS
H omer Prudhomme never did quite recover from how shook up he’d been that godawful night they found the lost posse. It had been three weeks since all his friends had come back without their heads attached. God knows how he tried to shake that image. But, you know, how was he supposed to forget those boys riding across the plains in the moonlight? Or the look in the sheriff’s eyes when he’d seen them coming toward him, still tied upright in their saddles? He couldn’t, and he wouldn’t, ever, forget.
Hell, nobody should ever forget.
And he couldn’t seem to run away from dreams about that ghost rider either. The man who was (or, wasn’t) behind the wheel of that semi they’d pulled. The “Yankee Slugger” going 140 with no driver behind the wheel. The way that big rig had just got itself in gear and took off down the highway all by itself. If that didn’t beat all he had no idea what did.
Even if the sheriff was right, and there was a driver, where had he gone? Thin air? Nobody in the cab. No tracks leading off into the sand. Nothing. Didn’t make any sense at all.
And don’t you know he’d gone over every last inch of that cab. Stuck his nose in the ashtray. Buried his face in the foam-rubber pillow lying back there on the bunk. Felt for gum up under the seats. He would have known it if there’d been anybody, anybody at all, recently riding up in that cab. He would have felt it, smelt it, and he hadn’t. It was enough to make you crazy. Nobody believed in the ghost rider except the sheriff, but his opinion was the only one that counted anyway.
He took another bite of his Mr. Krispy doughnut and stared at the black ribbon of highway unwinding through the desert below. He was well hidden, about a hundred yards off the road, parked up among some boulders and scrub at the top of a ridge. He hadn’t seen a car in two hours and didn’t much expect to see another one before the sun came up.
It was now three something o’clock in the morning. Even the coyotes had stopped complaining and gone to sleep. He was cold and sleepy, and the Crown Vic’s heater was acting up. Had to be down in the mid-forties tonight he guessed, looking out at the empty stretch of desert. He popped another couple of Vivarin and cranked up the radio, singing along with his dream girl, Patsy Cline.
Sheriff Dixon had been down in Florida for a few days, one more lawman making the case for stopping the chaos on the southwest Texas borderline. Homer hoped Dixon could show the folks from Washington just how bad things really were on the border. The thousands of illegals trashing the ranches on their way through, the pollos and the coyotes, the gunrunners and the drug smugglers, too many to count, all being chased around by far too few Border Patrol guys flying helicopters and driving dune-buggies. Add to that, now you had corrupt Mexican Army troops threatening to come across the river to protect the damn narcos!
It was starting to feel like a war.
Mercifully, it had been a very quiet few days in town. He looked both ways down the empty road, then put his head back on the seat and closed his eyes. He said a silent prayer for Dixon down in Key West. That he would give a good speech. That the brass would understand the truth of what he was telling them. Texas needed help down here on the border. And they needed it some kind of bad.
Homer had been lucky this week, though. Nothing much going on since that bunch of Mexican terrorists on motorcycles had rolled through, shooting up the town. All he’d had to deal with was a drunken Rawls, weaving all over the highway one night in one of his million-dollar custom Chevy Suburbans. Homer threatened to lock him up again and he’d been on good behavior ever since. He’d had a crazy visit from the bikers Zorro and Hambone, wanting to be deputized. And a lady teacher he knew had a baby at the Laundromat.
He’d decided to spend his free nights out here in the desert. The same stretch of highway where they’d pulled the Yankee Slugger guy the first time. Had his radar aimed at the top of the hill and he’d turned the warning buzz way up in case he dozed off. A truck with no driver didn’t make any sense. But it made a whole lot more sense at night on a deserted road than it did in broad daylight on Main Street.
He must have drifted off ’cause the alarm sounded and he sat up so fast he banged his head on the roof. What? Where? He looked at the digital speed bounce back. Well, well, well. He almost couldn’t believe his own eyes.
His radar showed a vehicle approaching a mile south doing over a 135 miles an hour! Hot damn, he thought, reaching for the ignition key, if this ain’t some rich prick from Houston in an Italian sports job, this could be our ghost rider.
He watched the horizon, waiting for the speeder to crest the next hill, silently praying to see a big red, white, and blue semi roar up into view. Once the truck was well past, he’d get on his tail and stay there. He’d planned the whole thing. Stay back, out of sight, follow the ghost rider wherever he went. However long it took, just stay with him and see where the truck took him. Whatever happened, happened was all. It was, he considered, his first case as a full-fledged lawman.
He was disappointed at what came over the hill.
No big eighteen-wheeler like he’d been hoping for these last couple of nights. No, not a trailer rig, just a four-wheeler going like a bat out of Hades. He sat up straight and gripped the steering wheel as the thing roared past him. The vehicle was light-colored. Maybe even red, white, and blue. Hard to tell in the moonlight. Still. Even in that flash of passing by, he had a hunch of what it was, all right. It could be, maybe it was, the “Yankee Slugger”!
The truck cab, anyway, it just didn’t have the trailer hooked up behind it tonight.
He automatically reached for the headlights and then caught himself, letting out a low whistle as he put the cruiser in gear and mashed the accelerator. No lights turning up on the rack tonight. He fishtailed crazily onto the highway and put his right foot through the floorboard, standing on it, watching the needle creep over a hundred. One ten. One twenty. Up ahead, he saw red brake lights flash on and off, disappearing over a dip in the road. He was half-mile, maybe less, behind the phantom trucker. Keep his own lights out, keep the phantom’s taillights visible. Maintain about this distance and he should be okay.
The phantom took a left off of Route 53 and now he was smoking west. Looked like he might be headed for a little ghost town about thirty miles outside Laredo. It was called Gunbarrel. It was situated at a bend in the Rio Grande about a half-mile or less north of the Mexican border.
Gunbarrel used to be thriving community in Texas oil boom times, round about the early 1900s. Did pretty good until about fifty years ago when they come to find out the oil business had all dried up and took its business elsewhere. Other than the little cemetery, which was full, Gunbarrel now had a population of maybe two, and both of them were prairie dogs.
The police radio was hopping. The chatter he was picking up tonight was nonstop reports of illegal crossings. You get down here on the border, the law speaks with a different tongue. Here they start calling the illegal crossers “bodies.” You hear a lot of chitter-chatter and then someone starts saying, “Okay, look alive! I got six bodies moving northwest toward the radio antenna!”
That kind of stuff makes a lawman uneasy on a night like this. ’Cause now the bodies are carrying heavy machine guns and they’re not afraid to use them on anybody in their way.
“Base of the tower! Base of the tower!” somebody on the radio shouted. The desert around Gunbarrel is spider-webbed with irrigation ditches and deeply rutted farm lanes. The only way you can pinpoint any location for another agent is to use some landmark like a water tower or a radio antenna or whatever. Homer didn’t see any tower, nor any bodies crossing the highway.
He saw the truck cab slowing down now and he did the same. They were both doing under thirty at this point, and it was a lot easier to keep track of what was under your four tires. He still kept a good half-mile between the Vic and the ghost rider, As far as he could tell, he hadn’t been spotted. He hadn’t made positive ID yet, either, but he was sure hopeful it was the Slugger.
Couple of minutes later, there was a faded black and white track-side railroad sign, a wooden rectangle with the word GUNBARREL painted on it in block letters. Sure enough, a hundred yards farther on he came to the old brick railway station house, looking pretty decrepit but still standing anyway. He saw some old abandoned oil tanks, overgrown with weeds, and a falling down building that had once housed something called the Shell Peanut
