starts to wonder if the body has disappeared. Then the light falls upon a two-tone shoe in a pale blue pants leg, and he inwardly sighs in relief. It’s way down at the bottom, where no one would ever think to look, and it’d take a rock climber to safely get down there.
He is about to leave when he stops. Didn’t they have the body wrapped tight in a tarp? If so, how could he see the leg? When he carried it down the only thing that stuck out was the man’s feet. And those shoes were quite bloody, yet the one he just saw was not…
Dord turns and flashes the light back down. He finds the two-tone shoe and shines the light on the rest of the body.
The tarp is gone. Did it unroll? he wonders. But something else is different… the man’s suit is not bloody anymore. It’s dusty and dirty, but not bloody. Dord can see the blue color from here. And he still has his white panama hat on… yet Dord is sure they left that behind in the road.
Then the light falls upon the bundle of red hair spilling out from under the hat, and he sees that the man’s fingernails are painted bright red, and he realizes this is not a man at all.
It’s a woman. A dead one, but a woman all the same. Yet she is dressed in the exact same clothing as the man from Wink.
“What the fuck?” breathes Dord. He realizes he is sweating, and has to blink the drops out of his eyes. Then, trembling, he shines the light out a little farther.
The dead woman is not alone. Far from it. The bottom of the ravine is littered with dozens of corpses, all of them dressed in pale blue suits, two-tone shoes, and the odd white panama hat. They have been killed in a number of ways—throats or wrists slashed, or, judging by the bruises around some of their necks, some were hanged—but by far the most predominant method is a single bullet wound to the head, just like the man Dord and Zimmerman scraped off the road not more than a half an hour ago. Dord can see their man in the tarp now: he has landed in something dark and gray-black and glistening, yet Dord thinks he can see the shape of a hand or a curled foot among that rotting mass, and through all the yammering and howling in his mind Dord wonders exactly how long this has been going on.
Most of them are men. They vary in size: short, tall, fat, skinny. A few of the bodies are women. But it’s not until the beam of light falls upon a small boy, no older than eleven, dressed in a small pale blue suit and cute two-tone shoes, that Dord begins screaming, especially when he sees the neat little hole drilled right between the boy’s eyes, which stare up at him from the bottom of the ravine with hollow, rotted sockets.
The next thing Dord knows he’s sprinting up the path to Zimmerman’s truck. Because as it turns out, Zimmerman was right: he did not want to know. He did not ever, ever want to know.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
It’s easy, Mona thinks, to understand why so many prophets found gods while wandering out in the desert. Because there cannot be any place on earth as strange and empty as a desert. Merely passing through it warps your thoughts: your perceptions of how the world works are broken down with each empty mile until civilization feels like a dream. And though any barren wilderness falls well short of achieving anything close to infinity, the sight of so many leaning red cliffs and so much empty horizon manages to inch the mind closer to understanding what infinity is.
For as Mona powers the Charger up the road to the mesa, she realizes she has never felt so small in her life. It’s as if the world has been upended, and she is clinging to the point of a copper-red stalactite hanging from the roof of an endless cave, and below her are oceans and oceans of that cloudless, electric-blue sky, and were she to slip and drive off the road she would surely go plummeting into it, falling into that endless, flat blue, and though she might plead and beg for the fatal kiss of hard earth she would never, ever receive it. She would just keep falling.
She’s been eyeing the chain-link