The Devil's Graveyard, Page 3

  They had been on the bus for two hours. On their arrival at an airport named Goodman’s Field, Sanchez had been surprised to find that there were no tour guides; in fact no one to tell them where they were headed. He’d asked around, but none of the other passengers was any the wiser. Even the Mystic Lady, with her dubious talent for seeing into the future, had no idea. And everyone was complaining that there was no signal for their cell phones. So a signpost truly was worth a look.

  Since leaving the airport, they had been driven along a deserted highway through an arid and almost featureless desert. The bus driver had spoken to no one and refused to acknowledge, let alone answer, any questions concerning their destination. Rude indeed, but he was a big bastard so no one was inclined to make an issue of it. And up to this point in the journey there hadn’t been a single signpost to tell them where the fuck they were.

  As the roadside billboard drew closer, Sanchez peered through the window to see what it said. The sign stood out in front of the miles of desert wasteland, framed by a distant vista of orange-coloured mesas and cliffs. It was a big black sign at least ten feet high and twenty feet wide. Five words painted in a dark red colour across became visible as they neared. The sign read ‘WELCOME TO THE DEVIL’S GRAVEYARD’.

  ‘Nice,’ Sanchez thought out loud. ‘Ain’t exactly the fuckin’ Bahamas, is it?’ Annabel, certainly more excited than him, showed it by squeezing his thigh playfully again with one hand and slapping her own thigh with the other.

  ‘Aren’t you just thrilled?’ she asked. ‘I haven’t been out of Santa Mondega for years. Isn’t this fun? Boy, I could use a drink to calm my nerves.’

  Sanchez sighed, then reached inside his jacket. He pulled out a small silver hip flask.

  ‘Here,’ he offered glumly, unscrewing the stopper and handing the flask over to Annabel.

  ‘Oh my! What’s this then?’ she asked, her eyes lighting up with alcoholic glee at the possibility of some liquor.

  ‘It’s my own homebrew. Been saving it for a special occasion.’

  ‘Oh Sanchez, you are such a gentleman.’

  ‘Don’t mention it.’

  Annabel took the flask and poured a mouthful down her throat. A second or two later she began choking. She pulled a hideous face (even by her standards).

  ‘Ugh! That’s horrible! What on earth is it?’ she asked, retching.

  ‘It’s kinda an acquired taste. You gotta persevere with it. By the time we get where we’re goin’ you’ll be addicted to it.’

  The Mystic Lady didn’t look convinced. Within ten minutes of her first sip of Sanchez’s finest, she had locked herself in the confined space of the bus’s lone restroom. Her alleged ability to predict the future had not helped her to foresee that Sanchez might serve up a flask full of his own piss.

  Even more importantly, she hadn’t foreseen the evil that lay ahead for their brief stay in the Devil’s Graveyard. A place with an even greater undead problem than Santa Mondega.

  Four

  In almost the same second, the Bourbon Kid tucked the pistol back inside his leather jacket, sliding it into a snug holster below his left shoulder. As if in slow motion, Joe’s still-vertical body began to sway. It was a sequence of events all too familiar to the Kid – the victim’s knees were about to buckle beneath him. Right on cue, after a count of three, the body wobbled a bit, then crumpled in on itself and fell to the floor like a rag doll. The old man’s face crashed into the hardwood counter on the way down. All that was left on display was his blood. An elegant spray of it speckled the long row of white mugs on the shelf behind the counter, while a few errant drops splattered a selection of candy bars by the till. A work of art indeed. If the Kid chose to add a signature to the piece, it could be worth a fortune.

  To his left, the Kid had seen the customer in the red leather suit jump to his feet in shock at what had just happened. The guy said nothing. Instead, he walked slowly over to the counter to take a look at the dead body of the diner’s owner. Normally people tended to exit pretty quickly once the Kid started blowing people away, but this guy seemed to have forgotten that the killer was still present. The Kid watched him lean over the counter and wince at the sight of Joe’s corpse. After a few seconds of staring at the body of his friend, the guy suddenly seemed to remember that the Kid was there. As was his gun. Slowly he turned to face him. The Kid waited for his reaction. More importantly, he waited for the guy to go fetch the bottles of bourbon the Kid had asked him for shortly before shooting Joe in the throat.

  ‘You killed him,’ the guy said, stating the obvious.

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Why would you do that? Joe’s a good guy.’

  ‘Was.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Was a good guy. Now he’s a dead good guy.’

  ‘He didn’t do anything to you.’

  ‘He pulled a gun on me, case you didn’t notice.’

  ‘You pulled yours first!’

  ‘Wanna see me do it again?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘What’s your name, son?’

  ‘Jacko.’

  ‘Right. Jacko, you listen up, and listen good. If you ain’t grabbed me the two bottles of bourbon I asked for by the time I count to three, my gun’s comin’ out again.’

  Jacko nodded. ‘Yeah. I gotcha.’ He walked tentatively around the counter checking the floor, mostly to make sure he didn’t tread in any blood. ‘Bourbon, huh?’ he mumbled.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Comin’ right up.’

  ‘Get me some cigarettes, too.’

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘Any kind.’

  The Kid picked up a Texan chocolate bar from the display on the counter. With his forefinger, he flicked a piece of what might have been bloodied gristle off the wrapper and then ripped the bar open at one end. He took a bite and, deciding that the taste was acceptable, left Jacko to pick up the rest of his shopping list and headed back out to the car.

  The Kid had strong instincts when it came to sniffing out danger. They had served him well when, from the corner of his eye, he had seen Joe reach below the counter for something. It could have been a doughnut, but there was an outside chance it was a weapon of some kind. As it turned out he’d been right, so the bullet he’d used to blow the old guy’s throat out hadn’t been wasted. Now those same instincts were telling him that an evil moon was coming. That wasn’t much of a surprise on Halloween. He’d learned that the hard way. He’d killed for the first time on Halloween, a decade earlier. Since then, he’d killed hundreds of people – some had deserved it, and some hadn’t – but not one of those killings had been as hard as the first.

  Dispatching his mother with six rounds to the heart at the age of sixteen was never going to be anything other than traumatic. Even though she had been bitten by a vampire and had turned into one in front of his very eyes. True, it was only when she had attempted to kill him that he had realized that he had no choice but to kill her. But, unsurprisingly, it had been a defining moment in his life. One intertwined with drinking his first bottle of bourbon.

  And now? Well, here he was on Halloween, ten years later, in an area of the desert known as the Devil’s Graveyard, about to give a ride to a hitchhiker dressed as one of the cast of the Thriller video. And he was down to his last two bullets. He still had plenty of weapons, just no ammo for the guns, having used his last 12-gauge shell on the rookie cop in the fast cruiser. His own fault for killing so many other people earlier in the day. Could just be a tough day ahead. He toyed briefly with the idea of taking Joe’s gun and whatever ammo he could find, but discarded it. He didn’t like small-calibre pistols at the best of times, and that one had looked like the definitive Saturday-night special, accurate only to about six feet and as liable to blow up in your hand as to take down a target.

  The Firebird’s seat was still warm when he sat back in it and peered out through the dirt-covered windshield. The wipers had cleared enough of the muck away so that he
could see where he was going, but the areas of the windshield outside of the range of the wipers were caked in sand, dirt and mud. Undeniably, the chase through the desert had taken its toll, but the car hadn’t let him down. It never did. The custom-built engine was not only powerful enough to outrun most other road vehicles, it was also very dependable.

  He turned the key and fired up the engine. As he did so, Jacko came out of the diner carrying a few bottles he had snagged from behind the counter. The Kid leaned over and part-opened the passenger-side door. His new travelling companion climbed in and placed two bottles of Sam Cougar and two bottles of Shitting Monkey beer on the floor by his feet. Pulling the door shut, he opened the glove-box in front of him and tossed two packs of cigarettes in before closing it again. The Kid was impressed. Not many people had the guts to get into his car. Not willingly, at least. And to do so after he had just seen the Kid gun down an old man in cold blood – well, that took some nerve. Jacko did look like a total jerk in his red leather outfit, though.

  The Kid stared at Jacko from behind his sunglasses, waiting for him to offer up some directions to the Hotel Pasadena. Instead, the Michael Jackson wannabe started with some questions of his own.

  ‘Reckon you’re the Bourbon Kid, ain’tcha?’

  ‘What gave it away?’

  ‘I have a real sixth sense for these things.’

  ‘Good. Your sixth sense had better be workin’ real good from here on, too. ’Cause, make no mistake, we take one wrong turn, I’ll kill you.’

  ‘Okay. When you get to the crossroads up ahead, take a right.’

  The Kid released the parking brake and slammed his foot down on the gas pedal. The car raced away from Sleepy Joe’s and back on to the highway. The wheel-spin from the screeching rear tyres created an almighty kick-up of sand and dust. By the time it had settled, the diner-cum-gas station was long out of sight.

  At a crossroads half a mile down the road, the Kid slid the Firebird into a right turn as Jacko had instructed. The car was half-covered in dirt already from the journey thus far, and this particular shitty concrete road, with its gravelly surface and frequent potholes, wasn’t going to improve things any time soon.

  ‘So whatcha doin’ round these parts anyway?’ Jacko asked.

  ‘Mindin’ my own fuckin’ business. It strike you that you should do the same?’

  From his response it shouldn’t have been difficult to work out that the Kid didn’t have much use for small talk. Jacko, however, seemed oblivious to this.

  ‘I’m hopin’ to enter that singing contest at the hotel, he continued. ‘Y’know, the Back From the Dead show?’

  The Kid didn’t respond or even take his eyes off the road ahead. Jacko carried on regardless. ‘Y’see, I’m a Michael Jackson impersonator.’

  The Kid took a deep breath through his nostrils, held it for a few moments then breathed out slowly. He was trying to keep himself calm, something that he often struggled with, never more so than on Halloween. At last he took his eyes off the road and glanced over at Jacko. His words, when he finally spoke, were surprisingly reasonable.

  ‘Seein’ as how he’s dead, there’s gonna be thousands of Michael Jackson impersonators at this show. All tryin’ to cash in on his fame. Why’n’t you just be yourself?’

  ‘You gotta be impersonatin’ a famous dead singer. And in case you ain’t noticed, I ain’t dead… or famous.’

  ‘I can make you both of those things.’ The gravelly edge had returned to the other’s voice.

  Jacko raised an eyebrow. ‘Guess you don’t really mix too well with others, do you?’

  ‘Got no need to.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, you’re gonna meet lots of people like me at this hotel, and they tend to be friendly sorts. You might wanna brush up on your social skills.’

  There was a profound silence. Even the Firebird seemed to hold its breath, until the Kid grated, ‘And you might wanna practise keepin’ your mouth shut.’

  ‘I would,’ Jacko replied happily, ‘but I need to be tunin’ up my voice.’

  ‘Not in my car you don’t.’

  ‘Aw, come on, I gotta practise. I’m gonna sing “Earth Song” for my audition in the show. Wanna hear it?’

  The Kid tightened his grip on the steering wheel. ‘You sing so much as one word a that song, I’ll make sure the screamin’ part in the chorus goes on for a long long time.’

  ‘I see. I could do “Smooth Criminal” if you prefer?’

  The Kid hit the brakes. Tyres smoking and squealing, the Firebird fishtailed to a halt. ‘Get out,’ its driver rasped.

  Even Jacko could see he meant it.

  ‘But there’s a couple more turns still to take from here,’ he protested. ‘You could get lost without me.’

  The Kid took some more deep breaths as he deliberated on whether or not to pull out a weapon and kill his travelling companion. Eventually he decided, Yeah, the guy deserved to die, but what to kill him with? Bare hands? A blade? Or a beating over the head with a gun butt? As he was reaching inside his jacket for his pistol, his passenger made a wise decision.

  ‘Let’s not talk any more. I’ll just give directions. How’s that?’

  ‘You’ll live longer.’

  ‘Cool.’

  The Kid put his foot down on the accelerator and the car sped off again down the dusty highway, kicking up another cloud of dust, sand and smoke behind as it went.

  ‘There’s a fork in the road ’bout two miles from here,’ said Jacko. ‘You wanna kinda hang a right when you get to it.’

  They carried on down the highway for another couple of minutes until the fork in the road came into view. The Kid did as suggested and headed off down the road on the right. The peace and quiet in the car suited him just fine, but he could sense that his passenger was finding the silence uncomfortable. The knowledge that this imbecile might start jabbering again was enough in itself to irk him. Eventually, just as the Kid expected, Jacko spoke again.

  ‘You gotta radio in this car?’

  ‘Can’t get no tee-vee or radio or cell-phone signals in this shithole desert. Place is totally cut off. Just how I like it.’

  ‘Well, I could whistle some tunes. Y’know, keep us entertained for the rest of the journey.’

  ‘Not with a broken neck you couldn’t.’

  Jacko opened his mouth as though about to respond, but, suffering a sudden attack of common sense, decided against it. The two men didn’t speak for the rest of the journey, other than one last direction Jacko offered when he advised the Kid to turn left at a T-junction. Half an hour’s silence later, the black Pontiac Firebird pulled into the long concrete driveway that led from the road up to the Hotel Pasadena. There were surprisingly few other cars around as he cruised up to the front of the hotel. A young valet with thick dark hair greeted them at the foot of the steps that led up to reception. People were busily hurrying back and forth outside, and there were a lot of rich-looking people visible in the foyer through the glass double doors at the hotel entrance.

  As the car came to a stop right outside the front of the hotel, the valet approached. He was in his early twenties, and his uniform consisted of a white shirt with a red vest and black pants. The Kid looked over at Jacko, who was reaching for the door handle to get out of the car.

  ‘You. Stay in the car. Make sure the valet doesn’t crash into anything.’

  Jacko nodded. ‘Okay.’

  ‘And hand me a pack of cigarettes.’

  Jacko reached into the glove box and pulled out one of the packs of cigarettes he had tossed in there earlier. He threw it over to the Kid who caught it and tucked it into an inside pocket of his jacket. As he opened the driver’s side door, he issued one last instruction to his passenger. ‘When the valet’s finished parking the car, make sure you squeeze his knee.’

  ‘’Scuse me?’

  ‘Squeeze his knee, just once. It’s a custom in this place. You don’t do it, they get really offended.’

  Jacko looked baffled.
‘Jeez, thanks. I had no idea.’

  ‘Sure.’ The Kid stepped out of the car and pulled a hundred-dollar bill from his hip pocket. He slipped it into the valet’s right hand. The young Latino’s face lit up.

  ‘Say, thanks, mister.’

  The Kid nodded at Jacko in the passenger seat. ‘See him?’ he asked.

  The valet peered into the car and saw Jacko with his tightly permed black hair and his red leather suit, grinning back at him. ‘Yeah. I see him all right.’ He sounded wary.

  ‘He touches your knee, punch him in the goddam face.’

  As he walked up the steps to the hotel’s front entrance, the Kid had a feeling he would see Jacko again before the day was through. His instincts were telling him that there was something about the Michael Jackson impersonator that wasn’t quite right.

  He just hadn’t figured out what it was yet.

  Five

  The Hotel Pasadena was as impressive up close as it had looked from afar. The desert sun glinted from the many windows on the forty-storey building, giving the impression from a distance that they were approaching a giant mirror. The closer the bus got to it the more magnificent it looked. The bus took a right turn off the highway through a sturdy set of solid iron arched gates set into a white concrete wall that ran along the perimeter of the hotel’s grounds. There was a sign across the top of the gateway with a name in bright red metallic lettering.

  HOTEL PASADENA

  No shit, thought Sanchez.

  A smooth concrete driveway almost a quarter-mile long led up to the front of the hotel. As the bus headed round to the back, Sanchez stared open-mouthed at the sheer magnificence of the place. Maybe this wasn’t such a bad deal after all. In Santa Mondega there wasn’t a single building that could even come close to matching it. The local museum was impressive, but looked old and decrepit in comparison to this brash beast of a building.

  The bus parked up at the rear of what was already an extremely busy parking lot, in contrast to the marked lack of cars at the front. After grabbing his luggage from the trunk of the bus, Sanchez headed quickly (by his standards) round to the lobby at the front of the hotel before Annabel the Mystic Lady could latch on to him. Four wide white marble steps led up to a set of large glass double doors. Sanchez took them two at a time before darting through the automatic doors, which parted for him as he reached the top step.