“You own the business, but you still take calls?”
This time her smile seemed more genuine. “They’re such pathetic little boys. It’s fun, turning them inside out with words. They don’t even realize how completely they’re being humiliated—and they pay you to make fools of them.”
Behind her, still without a toothy edge, storm light fluttered like veils of radiance cast off by luminous wings. But the subsequent thunder cracked hard and rumbled rough, the voice not of angels but of a beast.
“Someone must have killed a blacksnake,” she said, “and hung it in a tree.”
Considering her frequent inscrutable statements, I thought that I had been holding my own pretty well in our conversation, but this defeated me. “Blacksnake? Tree?”
She indicated the darkening sky. “Isn’t the hanging of a dead blacksnake certain to bring the rain?”
“Could be, I guess. I don’t know. It’s news to me.”
“Liar.” She sipped the wine. “Anyway, I’ve had money for a few years. It gives me the freedom to pursue spiritual matters.”
“No offense, but it’s difficult to picture you on a prayer retreat.”
“Psychic magnetism is new to me.”
I shrugged. “It’s just my fancy term for intuition.”
“It’s more than that. Danny told me. And you’ve given me a convincing demonstration. You can conjure spirits.”
“No. Not me. You need Moses for that.”
“You see spirits.”
I decided that playing dumb with her would accomplish nothing except to anger her. “I don’t summon them. They come to me. I’d rather they didn’t.”
“This place must have its ghosts.”
“They’re here,” I admitted.
“I want to see them.”
“You can’t.”
“Then I’ll kill Danny.”
“I swear to you, I can’t conjure.”
“I want to see them,” she repeated in a colder voice.
“I’m not a medium.”
“Liar.”
“They don’t wrap themselves in ectoplasm that other people can see. Only I can see them.”
“You’re so special, huh?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“I want to talk to them.”
“The dead don’t talk.”
She picked up the remote. “I’ll waste the little shit. I really will.”
Taking a calculated risk, I said, “I’m sure you will. Whether I do what you want or not. You won’t risk going to prison for Dr. Jessup’s murder.”
She put down the remote. She leaned against the window sill: one hip cocked, breasts thrust forward, posing. “Do you think I intend to kill you, too?”
“Of course.”
“Then why are you here?”
“To buy some time.”
“I warned you to come alone.”
“There’s no posse on the way,” I assured her.
“Then—buy time for what?”
“For fate to take an unexpected turn. For an advantage I can seize.”
She had the sense of humor of a rock, but this amused her. “You think I’m ever careless?”
“Killing Dr. Jessup wasn’t smart.”
“Don’t be thick. The boys need their sport,” she said, as though there was a logical necessity to the radiologist’s murder that should be obvious to me. “That’s part of the deal.”
As if on cue, the “boys” arrived. Hearing them, I turned.
The first looked like a laboratory-manufactured hybrid, half man and half machine, with a locomotive somewhere in his heritage. Big, solid, the kind of specimen who seemed muscle-bound and slow but who could probably chase you down faster than a runaway train.
Heavy brutish features. A stare as direct as Datura’s, but not as readable as hers.
They were not merely guarded eyes, but deeply enigmatic as none others I had ever seen. I had the weird feeling that behind those eyes lay a mind with a landscape so different from that of the ordinary human mind that it might as well have belonged to an entity born on another world.
Given his physical power, the shotgun seemed superfluous. He carried it to the window and held it in both hands as he stared at the desert afternoon.
The second man was beefy but not as pumped as the first. Though young, he had a dissolute look, the puffy eyes and ruddy cheeks of a barroom brawler who would be content to spend his life drinking and fighting, both of which he no doubt did well.
He met my eyes, but not boldly as had the human locomotive. His gaze slid away from me, as if I made him uneasy, though that seemed unlikely. A charging bull probably wouldn’t make him uneasy.
Although he carried no weapon that I could see, he might have had a handgun holstered under his summer-weight cotton sports coat.
He pulled a chair out from the table, sat, and poured some of the wine that I had declined.
Like the woman, both men dressed in black. I suspected that their outfits matched not by happenstance, that Datura liked black and that they dressed to her instructions.
They must have been guarding the staircases. She had not called them on a phone or sent them a text message, yet somehow they had known that I had gotten past them and was with her.
“This,” she told me, indicating the brute at the window, “is Cheval Andre.”
He didn’t glance at me. He didn’t say Pleased to meet you.
As the brawler drank a third of a glass of wine in one swallow, Datura said, “This is Cheval Robert.”
Robert glowered at the candles on the table.
“Andre and Robert Cheval,” I said. “Brothers?”
“Cheval is not their last name,” she said, “as you well know. Cheval means ‘horse.’ As you well know.”
“Horse Andre and Horse Robert,” I said. “Lady, I hav
e to tell you, even considering the strange life I lead, all this is getting too weird for me.”
“If you show me spirits, and everything I want to see, I might not have them kill you, after all. Wouldn’t you like to be my Cheval Odd?”
“Gee, I suppose it’s an offer most young men might envy, but I don’t know what my duties would be as a horse, what the pay is, if there’s health insurance—”
“Andre and Robert’s duty is to do what I tell them, anything I tell them, as you well know. As compensation, I give them what they need, anytime they need it. And once in a while, as with Dr. Jessup, I give them what they want.”
The two men looked at her with a hunger that seemed only in part to be lust. I sensed in them another need that had nothing to do with sex, a need that only she could satisfy, a need so grotesque that I hoped never to learn its nature.
She smiled. “They are such needy boys.”
Lightning with a dragon’s worth of teeth flashed across the black clouds, sharp and bright, and flashed again. Thunder crashed. The sky convulsed and shook off a million silvery scales of rain, and then millions more.
THIRTY-TWO
THE HEAVY DOWNPOUR SEEMED TO WASH out of the air some of the light that managed to penetrate the storm clouds, and the afternoon grew both murky and dismal, as if the rain were not only weather but also a moral judgment on the land.
With less light from the window, the glow of the candles swelled. Red and orange chimeras prowled the walls and shook their manes across the ceiling.
Cheval Andre put down his shotgun on the floor and faced the tempest, placing both enormous hands flat against the window glass, as if drawing power from the storm.
Cheval Robert remained at the table, gazing at the candles. An ever-shifting tattoo of victory and money played across his broad face.
When Datura pulled another chair out from the table and told me to sit, I saw no reason to defy her. As I had said, my intention was to buy time and wait for fate to take a turn in my favor. As if I were already a good horse, I sat without objection.
She stalked the room, drank wine, stopped again and again to smell the roses, frequently stretched like a cat, ripe and lithe and acutely aware of how she looked.