Half Breeds in the desert. When she finds ’em, she’ll have to bring me a few of their hides in one piece so I can get a few of their sweat glands and mix up something that will make her smell like one of them and not a Full Blood.”
“Can we really make that?”
Jessup let out an exasperated sigh. “What the hell did Paige teach you, boy? Anyway, that won’t keep her busy for too long. She should find some Half Breeds, but bringing back pieces large enough to use will be tricky.”
“What if those things kill her?” Cole asked.
Stabbing a finger at Cole, Jessup said, “Just because that girl is scared and young, don’t forget what she is. She’s a Full Blood, so she can handle any Half Breeds. We also need to watch her to see if she’s setting us up for another fall. Understand me?”
Cole nodded, but hesitantly.
“When we get to town, you’ll follow my lead,” Jessup said. “You’ll just have to trust me on the rest because there ain’t time to tell you every little thing.”
“The hell there isn’t,” Cole said while opening the glove compartment and digging beneath the receipts, napkins, tire pressure gauges, and Handi Wipes to find a snub-nosed .38 revolver.
“How’d you know that was in there?”
“Skinners are more likely to have one of these in the glove compartment than they are a pink slip.”
“So you know all about us, huh?” Jessup asked. “If you know so damn much, you should know there aren’t a lot of us left out here and that we have to stick together no matter how badly we got along before. Oh yeah,” he added when he saw the expression that drifted across Cole’s face. “I remember what a dick you were to me in Philly.”
“Actually, I remember you as the dick.”
“We need to put that aside. More importantly, you need to put that gun aside.”
Cole tossed the revolver back into the glove compartment and slapped the little folding door shut. “There. Now since I’m willing to go along with you, the least you can do is show me the same respect and tell me what the hell you’re dragging me into. If you can’t trust me that far, then I might as well get out of this truck right now.”
“All right. But first I need you to tell me somethin’.” Placing his hands on the steering wheel at ten and two, Jessup turned to point a cockeyed stare at Cole when he asked, “Ever seen a gargoyle?”
The road circling around Mt. Calvary Cemetery ran straight along the eastern border of a burial ground surrounded on all sides by a cement wall that angled steeply up or down to accommodate the natural flow of the terrain. Naked trees scattered among dry scrub, making the barren stretch of land look as if it had been scooped straight from the desert. Unlike the lonely outside of town, this one’s graves were marked.
Jessup parked on the northern edge of the cemetery on Hillside Road. From there he led Cole around the perimeter of the cemetery like a Scout leader taking his troop on a tour of the Grand Canyon. “See there?” he said while waving his hand to a chipped stone statue erected on the cement barrier.
As he had with all the other statues he was shown, Cole nodded. “Yeah. I see it. It’s a statue of a dog.”
“What about that one?”
A few yards away from the knee-high statue of Man’s Best Friend, there was another, much larger, statue. Those two were part of a collection were set up around the cemetery that included a few wolves and one old man whose features had been worn away by the elements. Examining the next one Jessup pointed out, Cole could only find a few hastily spray-painted words on the side of the sculpture. “It’s a horse. So what?”
“So what? Take a look at those up there. Don’t they strike you as peculiar?”
He looked at the row of statues scattered unevenly near the wall. The cement barrier was barely as tall as he was and seemed to be there not so much for decoration as to keep drunk drivers from interrupting the peaceful slumber of residents interred on the other side. While they weren’t exactly works of art, the statues on the wall itself were of birds, and one winged creatures that had enough detail for Cole to make out ridges of skin above the claws it used to grip its perch. One