American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,206

raccoons interrupted while rooting through the garbage. The boy even bared his teeth, hissing.

He drove right by them. He didn’t wonder what they were doing. He was hardly even fazed by it.

This town starts out strange, then becomes normal, then becomes unbearable, he thought.

“Yeah,” says Bolan. “Go on. Get him out of here. You’ve both done enough.”

Zimmerman hung up. And that was it. Bolan’s most dependable man, and his longest-lasting business relationship, over with in just a handful of words. Zimmerman was long gone by the time Bolan returned.

He misses Zimmerman now. Here Bolan is, standing before their improvised operating table like a preacher at a lectern, trying to get his last two remaining employees (or at least the ones who aren’t just whores) to come over to his side. He cannot believe the two of them are not disturbed enough by what they’ve seen to do something.

“So you’re saying we just run?” says Dord.

Mallory brushes a sheet of ginger hair aside to look at Bolan.

He hesitates for a long, long time. Somewhere in Bolan’s heart, which has so far sat hidden deep within his chest, scarred, ignored, forgotten, he begins to feel a sinking sensation that he is about to suggest they do something that could be considered selfless.

Because Bolan is not stupid. And he does not think of himself as evil. He is definitely not willing to be complicit in whatever the hell the People from Wink are doing, not anymore.

Crime and sin are one thing, but this… he’d be a damn fool to do what they tell him to, having seen what he’s seen.

Why is it now, he sighs mentally, that I feel like being a fucking hero?

“No,” says Bolan. “We’re not going to run. Something is about to happen here. Something… something way, way worse than transporting a little H.”

“Or a fuckin’ lot of H,” says Dord.

“Shut up, Dord,” Bolan says absently. “I should have never helped them. I should have never said yes. And I don’t think we can stop them. Not now. Not us. But maybe we can make it a little harder for them.”

“What the hell are you saying?” Mallory asks.

He thinks back to the last few communications he’s had with the man in the panama hat. So often they were about just one curious topic—the newcomer, the girl in the red car Bolan hasn’t even had the chance to see yet, the one who is apparently quite proficient with firearms, the one person who seems to occupy so much of the attention of whatever is residing in Wink.

She’s important. And, yes, she shot one of his men. Yet still: the spook in the hat wants her.

“We are going to run,” he says finally. “But we’re going to go get someone first.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Gene Kelly leans his head back, staring up into the stage lights (Are there stage lights there? Where is there, anyway, Mona thinks?), and sighs. The gesture is meant to be contemplative, Mona thinks, but to her it is alienating: his face is bathed in such bright, cream-white illumination that it appears craggy, carven, a lump of calcite with two twinkling black eyes at the top. “Before we begin,” he says, “I think it’d be wise to know what you know, so I don’t repeat myself. Time’s short. So. You… know where we came from, don’t you, Mona?”

“I guess as much as anyone can,” says Mona, though she thinks—Why is time short?

“Yes. You’ve seen it, after all. You’ve been there, and you lived. Very impressive.”

“People keep saying that.”

Kelly laughs. “That’s not quite correct, is it? It’s not people who keep saying that, but my… closer siblings. You’ve met all four of them, haven’t you? All except one.”

“Weringer. Yeah. He died before I got here.”

“Just before you got here,” corrects Kelly. “Very odd, that.”

“Why?”

“Never mind. It’s just so curious that you’ve come to know my family so well, and so rapidly, within just several weeks. Though you haven’t met everyone.” He looks at her, and for the first time this picture of a person looks frightened. In fact, it looks more authentically frightened than Gene Kelly himself ever actually did, because then Kelly was acting frightened; yet this thing, this contrived image, is genuinely, seriously frightened.

He says, “You know about Mother. Don’t you?”

“Yes,” says Mona. She realizes this Mother of theirs came into the world only a few hundred feet away, on top of the mesa beside this canyon. It is a little creepy to realize Mona herself stood there just today.