Devil in Texas(50)

"Too bad," Collie taunted, shoving a cake into his mouth.

The coon whimpered.

Collie grimaced.

"A little heavy on the molasses," he choked, reaching for his bourbon. He washed down the confection with a hearty swig. "Reminds me of something Sera used to bake, before her sister-in-law gave her cooking lessons."

Vandy pricked his ears. He knew all about Sera. She was the preacher's daughter, whom Collie had worshiped from afar. Before the coon grew too fat, he used to hide out in the copper kettle hanging over Sera's kitchen sink. He would wait there for his chance to steal the hickory nuts—better known as "hiccurs" to Kentucky folk—that Sera liked to chop for her bake-off recipes.

Sera Jones (now Mrs. Jesse "Lynx" Quaid, Collie thought a tad enviously) had been aptly named Seraphina, after angels. She and her doctor brother had taken Collie in, treated him like kin, and made him feel like being born hadn't been the revenge of a vindictive God. Until he'd met the Jones family, Collie had been a wild thing. He'd spent most of his childhood hiding in the woods outside of Blue Thunder—at first to elude the heavy-fisted moonshiner who'd been his Pa, and then to avoid the Orphanage Committee.

Of course, he'd also had to disappear for weeks on end from lazy-ass tin-stars, who'd preferred to blame him for every runaway dog and broken window in the town, rather than conduct a real investigation into the complaints.

"It's better to wear a tin star than to be arrested by one," Collie advised Vandy. "Or in your case, it's better to be a coon than a hat. So I reckon I should stop letting you steal food. Even from dead folks," he added grudgingly. "Here."

He offered the gingerbread to the coon.

Eagerly, Vandy rose on his haunches. He wrapped a paw around Collie's forefinger. His whiskers twitched. He sniffed the confection.

Then the strangest thing happened. Vandy, who ate everything from tarantulas and rattle snakes, to scented soap and rotting melons, turned up his nose at Poppy's soul cake.

Collie hiked an eyebrow. "The cake wasn't that bad, churnhead."

Vandy shuffled over to Seňor Garcia's burned-out luminarias. Hunkering down, the coon began to gnaw a candle in a saucer of sand.

"Seriously? You'd rather eat wax?" Collie frowned. "Hey. You aren't sick from all those sugar skulls, are you?"

Shouts rose from the revelers, distracting Collie. Apparently, the ring-leaders had bullied three of the youngest boys into pranking The Beast. Clutching their sacks of flour in one hand and their eggs in the other, the trio was creeping with great trepidation onto the porch of the house. Lightning sizzled over the chimney in great, purple spears. The oak tree moaned like some wounded soul. In the filtered moonlight, Collie recognized Joaquin, the shoeshine boy, leading his companions to their ultimate goal: the bell pull by the door.

Five feet.

Three feet.

An arm's length away.

Joaquin stretched shaking fingers.

A sudden light flashed behind the house's jagged windows. A deafening boom shook the panes even as splinters spewed from the hole that materialized in the door's rotted wood.

Holy crap!

Miraculously, Joaquin wasn't hit by the rifle blast. Bleating like a lamb, the kid dropped his flour and eggs and bolted off the porch. His companions followed in hot pursuit, shrieking, "La Bestia!" The rest of the revelers took up the cry. Soon all the Tejano children were bounding around like moonstruck jackrabbits, while rifle cartridges chipped tombstones, splintered fence rails, and cracked through tree branches. When a rotted old oak bough tumbled from the sky, it nearly crushed Collie's skull.

Sonuvabitch!

"Beggarticks!" he hissed at his well-trained coon, and Vandy dived under the bush where Collie had stashed his Winchester and saddlebag. But when Collie tried to grab his rifle, he nearly got his hand blown off.

Grabbing his bourbon, Collie ran in the opposite direction. Bullets were whining over his head. He felt like a metal duck in a shooting gallery. When he dodged right, the sniper drilled a cartridge into the dirt by his boots. When he ran left, a potshot zoomed past his shoulder.

"I owe you a slug, boy!" a Midwestern accent bellowed from the cottage. "For putting a hole in my bowler!"

Even as Collie recognized Hank's voice—and realized The Ventilator had been the sniper on the grocer's roof—the bourbon bottle shattered in his fist. Collie swore. There wasn't a damned thing he could do to retaliate. His .45 was out of firing range.

Why would Hank try to plug Baron if Baron's paying him hush money?

Maybe Tito was the real target in the Square...

But why finger me for Tito's murder? Hank doesn't know me—at least, not well enough to hate me...

Wait a minute. Hank must have an accomplice. An accomplice who doesn't like me.

I'll bet it's Pendleton!

His mind racing with allegations, Collie ran for the cover of a mausoleum. He had some half-formed plan to pick the lock and hide inside. But he'd barely charged through the porch's skeleton dolls and marigolds when his gut started burning. The pain came out of nowhere; he thought a shell had hit him. He clutched his stomach. He doubled over. When he didn't feel blood, he realized he was sick.

The churning in his gut reached volcanic proportions. Helpless to stop the fiery surge to his throat, he spewed gingerbread, blood, and other chunky matter that he dimly recognized as dinner. He had a moment to be mortified; another to realize he'd been poisoned.

Pendleton isn't Hank's accomplice.

Poppy is!

Then the second wave of nausea hit. Collie's retching sounded like the roar of a locomotive to his ears. Even though the rifle blasts had stopped, he figured he was doomed. Hank was probably listening, enjoying the sound of a stomach turning inside-out in a graveyard on Devil's Eve.

Feeling like his innards were exploding, Collie toppled face down beside his vomit. His tongue had swollen. He was struggling to breathe. By the time stars started spinning inside his head, his toes and fingers had grown numb. He was completely helpless. He couldn't hold onto his .45. It bounced down the mausoleum's steps.

The squeal of an opening door was the last thing he remembered before the vortex claimed him.





Chapter 17



Halloween dawned beneath ominous, gray clouds pierced by jagged spears of light. In Lampasas, most people rejoiced to see the thunderheads and prayed the drought had finally come to an end.

Jazi was among the contrary folks, who prayed for another dry rain. As she watched Sadie apply her make-up in Wilma's cave, Jazi confided, between coughs, that she wanted to dress as a Mambo, go trick-or-treating, and maybe even sing for soul cakes with Joaquin, the shoe-shine boy, who'd told her about Tejano traditions. Jazi had set her heart on getting twice as much candy by celebrating both Halloween and the Day of the Dead.

"I thought you were afraid of witches," Sadie teased. Her whiskey alto was raspier than usual after standing in the woods last night—with wet hair—and arguing with Cass.

"Not any more. Cass said he'd save me from the witch," Jazi confided with an impish grin. She broke the seal on a fresh tin of Serenata's pastilles and offered one to Sadie.

Shaking her head at this newest evidence of her lover's Coyote Charm, Sadie politely refused a lozenge. When her singing voice became strained, she favored a brand called Fishmerman's Friend. Its base ingredients of menthol and eucalyptus were rare, because most modern-day nostrums relied upon cocaine to relieve discomfort. Sadie shunned opiates. In the immortal words of her field agent manual, "A Pinkerton must keep her wits about her."