Nightwalker. Part 32

Brent Blackhawk was coming up with some interesting connections. One of the most surprising was that Jessy's friend Sandra was a descendant of Milly Taylor, the singer in the saloon at the time of the shoot-out. He wondered if Sandra was aware of her heritage.

He kept searching, and another correlation fell into place. Tanner Green.

His father's side of the family might have come from Philadelphia, but his mother's family had been from the West, and their surname had been Hornsby. There were a number of Riley Hornsbys listed in the Nevada census, surely one of them could have been the goon who had accompanied Frank Varny and an ancestor of Green's.

Brent was growing more and more amazed. The hapless parking attendant, Rudy Yorba, could be traced, through the maternal line once again, to the gambler Mark Davison. Odd, though, that a bad guy in the past was connected to a good guy in the present.

An hour later he sat back and considered the amazing web of names and connections he'd discovered. Virtually all the names Dillon had given him had ancestors who'd been in the area at the time, including Darrell Frye, Hugo Blythe and Detective Jerry Cheever, whose genealogy could be traced back to the ineffectual sheriff of Indigo, Grant Percy.

The real jackpot was Emil Landon, though. He could claim a direct line right back to Frank Varny.

Brent kept searching and found something odd, so odd that he wasn't even be sure it was relevant. It looked as if Emil Landon had more than the one child he acknowledged, who lived with an ex-wife back East. He'd accompanied a pregnant hooker to the hospital in Reno twenty-some years ago, when he had been just a kid of twenty himself.

Brent peered at the computer screen, reread the article he'd found and cursed. There was no mention as to whether Landon had been in the delivery room with the prost.i.tute or had only been playing Good Samaritan, but he jotted down the hooker's name and quickly turned back to his search.

The hooker was named Celia Smithfield, and her maternal great-grandmother had been named Varny. Brent pulled out his cell phone and put a call through to Dillon.

Jessy left Nikki sleeping and went out into the hall to stretch her legs. She was startled to run into Sandra there, and stunned to see that her friend's eyes were red, as if she had been crying.

"What is it? What's wrong?" Jessy asked, worried.

"You've got to see this! Come on, hurry. It's just outside," Sandra said, tugging on Jessy's hand.

"All right, calm down, Sandra."

Since she was just going down to the parking lot-and with Sandra, not some stranger-Jessy decided against waking Nikki. She put a comforting arm around Sandra's shoulders and was shocked to realize that Sandra was trembling.

"Sandra, please, let me help you."

"Just-come," Sandra said. "Please."

Jessy followed Sandra downstairs and waved cheerfully to Jimmy. "I'll be right back," she told him.

"My car is right there," Sandra said when they reached the lot, and she threw open the door to the backseat.

Jessy leaned forward to see what Sandra wanted to show her and was stunned when Sandra suddenly shoved her forward, into the car. Her head struck the handle of the far door, and she felt a searing pain. She heard Sandra gasp and say, "Oh, s.h.i.t!"

And then the pain in her head exploded and the world went black.

Dillon was still thinking about the c.o.c.ktail waitress uniform that wasn't quite right. In fact, there was something not quite right about the c.o.c.ktail waitress herself. Her hair was strange, for one thing. Too big and tilting oddly to one side. It had to be a wig.

And, according to Jerry Cheever, who'd talked to the personnel manager, all the waitstaff uniforms were made from identical fabric.

As he drove away from the station, Dillon realized that the woman was familiar. It was something about the way she stood, the way she moved.

His phone rang.

It was Adam. "I think your man Darrell Frye is in on it. I heard him in the coffee shop, talking to a strange-looking woman in a bouffant wig. She was angry, told him that 'it' had to be this afternoon. If you can get hold of your buddy Cheever, tell him he needs to find some excuse to pick up Darrell Frye."

"Got it. And I think I saw the same woman on the security tape from the night Green was killed. She was the one who slipped the LSD to him," Dillon said. "I'll call Cheever right now."

He had to leave a message, because apparently Cheever was in the men's room.

"Tell him he needs to find an excuse to pick up Darrell Frye-p.r.o.nto. And he has to get back to me right away," Dillon said.

His phone rang the moment he hung up with the cops. Brent was on the line. "Get this. Just about all of your guys collide, just like you thought, even that Darrell Frye you weren't sure-"

"I've left a message for Cheever to trump up some excuse to pick him up right away," Dillon said. "Anyway, sorry for interrupting. What else have you got?"

"Here's the wildest. I think Emil Landon had a child."

"Yeah, he has a kid back East."

"No, in Nevada. Illegitimate."

"A son?" Dillon asked.

"I don't know, the kid just disappears. But guess who the mother's family line goes back to?" Brent asked him.

"Who?"

"Frank Varny. Bizarre, huh? Landon goes back to Varny himself. So he had an affair with a woman to whom he was distantly related."

Dillon finally remembered where he had seen the woman in the tapes before, and why she had looked familiar.

"It was a girl," Dillon said, cursing his own stupidity. He'd been led around by the nose like an idiot. "Get back over to the home and get Jessy and Nikki. And Timothy, too. I'm afraid something is going down right now. I'm going to call Cheever back and get out to the morgue. Brent, I'm scared as h.e.l.l. Get over there quickly. Please."

When Jessy came to, her head was killing her. It took her a moment to realize that she hadn't been dreaming, that Sandra really had shoved her into the car and abducted her.

"Sandra, what the h.e.l.l is wrong with you?" she demanded, trying to sit up, then failing in the face of the pain.

"Reggie!" Sandra cried.

"Reggie?" Jessy said, baffled.

"They couldn't get to you because you were with Dillon, so they kidnapped Reggie and told me to get you. They're waiting in Indigo, and if I don't hand you over to them in half an hour, they're going to kill Reggie."

Jessy swallowed hard. She understood, but she had to find a way to talk Sandra into doing the smart thing. The right right thing. thing.

"Did you call the cops?" she asked.

"I can't call the cops!" Sandra cried hysterically. "They'll kill her, don't you understand? She's nothing to them. Once they have you, they'll let Reggie go. And they swore they wouldn't hurt you, either. They just want you as leverage so they can get Dillon to tell them where the gold is."

"That's insane. Dillon doesn't know where the gold is."

"They think he does."

Jessy's head was spinning. Why would anyone think Dillon knew where the gold was? She thought back to Dillon's theory about the connection between past and present, and then she remembered Timothy's words. They are a.s.sembling. They are a.s.sembling. Did someone believe that by putting together the descendants of those who had died and recreating the bloodbath, that would somehow reveal the location of the gold? That Dillon would somehow channel his ancestor's memory of the past and lead them straight to the treasure? Did someone believe that by putting together the descendants of those who had died and recreating the bloodbath, that would somehow reveal the location of the gold? That Dillon would somehow channel his ancestor's memory of the past and lead them straight to the treasure?

Jessy blinked, trying hard to clear her head and make sense of what was going on. "Have you got any aspirin or anything up there? You really hurt me-you b.i.t.c.h."

She was almost sorry for the last when she saw the tears streaming down Sandra's cheeks.

"I'm sorry, but I had to," Sandra said.

"Sandra, we have to tell the police what's going on."

"I don't trust the police!" Sandra insisted vehemently.

"Why?"

"Cheever took me home last night. He knows where I live," Sandra said. "How can I be sure he didn't tell them where to find Reggie?"

"But...Sandra, you're listed in the phone book, anyone could have found you," Jessy protested.

"Maybe. But it doesn't matter, because they said that if they saw the police, they'd kill her."

"Calm down and tell me about the whole thing," Jessy said, knowing even as she spoke that she was asking the impossible. Calm down? These people had already killed three times. What would Reggie's life matter to them?

Sandra drew a long shaky breath. "I went to the grocery store. When I came back, I could tell Reggie had come from school because-I found her knapsack. Then I got the phone call."

"Was it from a man or a woman?"

"I don't know! They used one of those things that disguise your voice."

"Are you sure they really have Reggie? That they're not bluffing?"

Sandra started sobbing even harder. "They put her on the phone. She was crying."

"Okay, so they have Reggie," she agreed. "But, Sandra, we have to call the police. Don't you see? Even once they have me, they won't let Reggie go. They can't. She knows too much. They'll kill all of us. Indigo's a ghost town in the middle of nowhere. If you don't trust Cheever, we can call the state police."

"We can't call the police," Sandra said.

"Why?"

"I forgot my cell phone again."

Dillon put through a call to Tarleton's cell, but the M.E. didn't pick up. He called the main number at the morgue, figuring Doug might be wrist deep in a corpse and unable to pick up his phone. Instead, he discovered that Tarleton was out but due back shortly, and Sarah Clay had taken the afternoon off.

The minute he hung up, his phone rang.

"Dillon, it's Brent. Jessy is gone, and so are Timothy and Ringo. Nikki's frantic. That orderly, Jimmy, said Jessy left with her friend Sandra."

"Sandra?" Dillon said incredulously.

"That's what the man said."

"Call the cops-I'm on my way out there," Dillon said, pulling a U-turn and ignoring the horns blaring at him.

"Where's 'there'?" Brent said.

"Indigo."

It had been a h.e.l.l of a long time since Timothy had driven, but it really was like riding a bike. He was sorry that he'd sneaked out and left without them, but his time was coming to a close. He'd had a long full life, and he was comfortable with whatever came his way.

Billie Tiger had warned him that it was happening, that Jessy was in danger, and Timothy had known then that he had to get to Indigo. If it was going to play out again, it was going to do so with him, not with Jessy.

Driving was fun. He would never have predicted that an ambulance could be so much fun to drive-or that it could go so fast. It was good to be on the road. They would come after him soon enough, the minute they realized they had a vehicle missing.

Before long he could make out the town of Indigo just ahead, though it was so weatherworn it blended right into the desert, like a mirage.

He heard a voice in his mind and recognized it as Billie Tiger's. Billie warned him not to take the main road all the way into town and not to leave the ambulance where it would be seen-although if anyone was looking, they would have to see him. You couldn't hide something as big as an ambulance in the vast flat expanse of the Nevada desert.

He heard an annoying clinking sound. It had been plaguing him for the entire trip, and sounded like the constant jingle of a pair of old spurs.

It was time to slow down if he was going to make a quiet entry this way.

He veered off the road, and the ambulance shuddered across the uneven ground.

If they were looking, they would definitely see him.

But they probably weren't looking, he thought as he pulled up to the rear of the buildings on Main Street and was surprised to see that their vehicles were all parked back here, too. Three of them, so far.

They were a.s.sembling.