Dreamcatcher(161)

Kurtz, a pretty decent storyteller, took them back to Kansas during the Korean conflict. Ed Davis and Franklin Roberts had owned similar smallhold farms not far from Emporia, and not far from the farm owned by Kurtz's family (which had not quite been named Kurtz). Davis, never bolted together tightly in the first place, grew increasingly certain that his neighbor, the offensive Roberts, was out to steal his farm. Roberts was spreading tales about him in town, Ed Davis claimed. Roberts was poisoning his crops, Roberts was putting pressure on the Bank of Emporia to foreclose the Davis farm.

What Ed Davis had done, Kurtz said, was to catch him a rabid raccoon and put it in the henhouse  -  his own henhouse. The coon had slaughtered those chickens right and left, and when he was plumb wore out with killing, praise God, Farmer Davis had blown Mr Coon's black-and-gray-striped head off.

They were silent in the rolling, chilly Humvee, listening.

Ed Davis had loaded all those dead chickens  -  and the dead raccoon  -  into the back of his International Harvester and had driven over onto his neighbor's property with them and by the dark of the moon had chucked his truckload of corpses down both of Franklin Roberts's wells  -  the stock-well and the house-well. Then, the next night, high on whiskey and laughing like hell, Davis had called his enemy on the phone and told him what he had done. Been pretty hot today, ain't it? the lunatic had inquired, laughing so hard Franklin Roberts could barely make him out. Which did you and them girls of yours get, Roberts? The coon-water or the chicken-water? I can't tell you, because I don't remember which ones I chucked down which well! Ain't that a shame?

Gene Cambry's mouth was trembling at the left corner, like the mouth of a man who has suffered a serious stroke. The Ripley growing along the crease of his brow was now so advanced that Mr Cambry looked like a man whose forehead had been split open.

'What are you saying?' he asked. 'Are you saying me and Pearly are no better than a couple of rabid chickens?'

'Watch how you talk to the boss, Cambry,' Freddy said. His mask bobbed up and down on his face.

'Hey man, f**k the boss. This mission is over"

Freddy raised a hand as if to swat Cambry over the back of the seat. Cambry jutted his truculent, frightened face forward to shorten the range. 'Go on, Bubba. Or maybe you want to check your hand first, make sure there aren't no cuts on it. Cause one little cut is all it takes.'

Freddy's hand wavered in the air for a moment, then returned to the wheel.

'And while you're at it, Freddy, you want to watch your back. You think the boss is going to leave witnesses, you're crazy.'

'Crazy, yes,' Kurtz said warmly, and chuckled. 'Lots of farmers go crazy, or they did then before Willie Nelson and Farm Aid, God bless his heart. Stress of the life, I suppose. Poor old Ed Davis wound up in the VA  -  he was in Big Two, you know  -  and not long after the thing with the wells, Frank Roberts sold out, moved to Wichita, got work as a rep for Allis-Chalmers. And neither well was actually polluted, either. He had a state water inspector out to do some tests, and the inspector said the water was good. Rabies doesn't spread like that, anyway, he said. I wonder if the Ripley does?'

'At least call it by its right name,' Cambry nearly spat. 'It's byrus.'

'Byrus or Ripley, it's all the same,' Kurtz said. 'These fellows are trying to poison our wells. To pollute our precious fluids, as somebody or other once said.'

'You don't care a damn about any of that!' Pearly spat  -  Freddy actually jumped at the venom in Perlmutter's voice. 'All you care about is catching Underhill.' He paused, then added in a mournful voice: 'You are crazy, boss.'

'Owen!' Kurtz cried, chipper as a chipmunk. 'Almost forgot about him! Where is he, fellows?'

'Up ahead,' Cambry said sullenly. 'Stuck in a f**king snowbanks'

'Outstanding!' Kurtz shouted. 'Closing in!'

'Don't get your face fixed. He's pulling it out. Got a Hummer, just like us. You can drive one of those things straight through downtown hell if you know what you're doing. And he seems to.'

'Shame. Did we make up any ground?'

'Not much,' Pearly said, then shifted, grimaced, and passed more gas.

'Fuuck,' Freddy said, low.

'Give me the mike, Freddy. Common channel. Our friend Owen likes the common channel.'

Freddy handed the mike back on its kinked cord, made an adjustment to the transmitter bolted to the dash, then said, 'Give it a try, boss.'

Kurtz depressed the button on the side of the mike. 'Owen.' You there, buck?'

Silence, static, and the monotonous howl of the wind. Kurtz was about to depress the SEND button and try again when Owen came back  -  clear and crisp, moderate static but no distortion. Kurtz's face didn't change  -  it held the same look of pleasant interest  -  but his heartbeat kicked up several notches.

'I'm here.'

'Lovely to hear you, bucko! Lovely! I estimate you are our location plus about fifty. We just passed Exit 39, so I'd say that's about right, wouldn't you?' They had actually just passed Exit 36, and Kurtz thought they were quite a bit closer than fifty miles. Half that, maybe.

Silence from the other end.

'Pull over, buck,' Kurtz advised Owen in his kindliest, sanest voice. 'It's not too late to save something out of this mess. Our careers are shot, no question about that, I guess  -  dead chickens down a poisoned well  -  but if you've got a mission, let me share it. I'm an old man, son, and all I want is to salvage something a little decent from - '