Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede - Bradley Denton (best thriller books to read TXT) 📗

more cautious after that, hiding the Jaguar behind an abandoned farmhouse until Vale had passed him a second time. Richter had resumed following the motorcycle then, but had kept well back, waiting for Vale to stop and dismount before attempting a capture.

It had almost worked. Richter had caught up with Vale at the convenience store and had parked across the highway while the other was inside, planning to nail him when he came out. Then the woman had butted in.

The bitch. Not only young, but strong too. And here he was, his arm throbbing, his eight-hundred-dollar coat covered with sand and glass, his breath coming in hard puffs. Without his car.

He replaced his pistol in its shoulder holster and looked toward the glass door of the convenience store. The counter was visible, but there was no one at the register. That meant that the clerk was hiding somewhere and telephoning the local uniforms because of the violence outside.

Richter grimaced. As if he didn’t have enough problems.

Brushing himself off, he walked to the woman’s pickup truck and climbed inside. The keys were in the ignition, so he started the engine, pulled up to the pump that his bullet had hit, and got out to fill the tank. The pump hummed to life when he flipped its lever, so at least he wouldn’t have to go inside and possibly kill the clerk just to turn it on from the counter.

The tank took eighteen gallons. When it was full, Richter let the nozzle fall to the pavement. He climbed inside the truck and started it again, then drove onto the highway and headed south.

The truck rattled and shimmied, and as Richter pushed it up to highway speed, it rocked as if an anvil had been dropped into the bed. Its headlights were dim, and the speedometer and fuel gauge were broken. The muffler, if there was one, was so full of holes that the cab reverberated with a perpetual metallic cough. The engine was firing on only five or six of its eight cylinders.

The GMC was worn out, and Richter was furious that he had to use it. He didn’t know how he would find Vale now that he didn’t have the Jaguar and its equipment, but he swore that he would. His body might be older and softer than it had once been, but he still had his instincts.

Things had become personal now. He owed Vale. Even more, he owed that interfering female citizen.

He hoped that she would stay close to Vale for a while. She had humiliated him, and that could not be allowed. He had never enjoyed discretionary killing, but sometimes it was necessary.

His considered opinion—_damn_ them for making him feel so old—was that this was one of those times.

RINGO

Ringo was bored. Occasionally, after making sure that the Ariel’s scent was so strong that he couldn’t lose it, he had cut crosscountry for variety… but that had made things worse. It was awful to come across a rabbit hole without being able to stay and bark awhile.

So he was glad when the motorcycle stopped at a convenience store. Maybe it would stay long enough for him to have a little fun. He would have to remember, though, not to interact with humans any more than necessary. He would have to remember the lesson that the fat woman with the Windex had taught him.

He circled the convenience store’s parking lot outside of its circles of yellow light so that the motorcycle’s rider (Cathy and Jeremy called him Vale) would not notice him, and then he loped behind the building to see whether he could find anything interesting in the trash.

Ringo rose up on his hind legs and put his front paws on the rim of the store’s dumpster. He looked inside, sniffing, but found only boxes and papers. What he really wanted, he decided, was food. His insides had been modified so that he didn’t have to eat, but he liked to do it anyway. Boog’s beef jerky had reminded him.

The Doberman dropped back to the ground, and as he did so, he heard an automobile drive into the parking lot and slam on its brakes. He cocked his head to listen and also heard the motorcycle’s engine start, then human voices and other noises. But the motorcycle wasn’t going anywhere yet, so he could putter here a bit longer.

He trotted past the dumpster and found the store’s back door. When he sniffed at its edges, he smelled hundreds of wonderful things: potato chips, peanuts, chocolate, cheese, salami, fish sticks, corn dogs, pretzels, donuts, frozen pizzas, gumballs, sesame crackers, and—yes!—beef jerky.

Drooling, Ringo nosed the steel door. It didn’t move, so he nosed it harder and whined, hoping that someone would let him in. No one did, so he nosed harder still. The door buckled in the middle and fell inside.

Ringo blinked. He hadn’t meant to do that, but as long as it had happened, he might as well go on in.

He padded through a storage room as a youthful human male looked in from the doorway that led to the shop. The youth’s mouth opened and his eyebrows jumped, and he turned and ran. Ringo hurried after him, making sounds in his throat that he hoped would be reassuring. “Don’t be afraid!” he wanted to say. “I just want some beef jerky! Please don’t spray me with Windex!”

The young man ran past a counter to a glass door, but then he stopped and made a squeaking noise. He turned to face Ringo, made a squeaking noise again, and then sprinted to a big metal case that sat against the wall. The young man slid open a transparent lid on top of the case, climbed inside, and pulled the lid shut over him.

Ringo looked out through the glass door and saw two humans, one of them Vale, locked in a weird dance. Another human, a female, was standing beside a white pickup truck and yelling. The situation didn’t look like anything that was any of the dog’s business, so he ambled over to the big metal case to see what the deal was there.

The young man lay on his back among colorful cardboard cartons and cylinders, peering up at Ringo through the lid. A circle of fog had formed on the glass over his mouth.

Ringo sniffed, and his processors told him that the cartons and cylinders inside the case were filled with ice cream. No wonder the young man had jumped in there. The stuff smelled terrific. But Ringo didn’t want to be greedy. He would let the human have the ice cream. There were plenty of other things to eat.

He trotted down an aisle and gulped a jumbo bag of sour-cream-andonion potato chips, then found a refrigerator chest containing packages of bologna and cheese. He wolfed down several of each, wrappers and all. Next he nosed open an upright case and pulled out a cluster of red-and-white cans labeled “Budweiser.” He popped the first can between his teeth, and the foam tickled his nose. He swallowed the other five for safekeeping, then munched a frozen pepperoni pizza.

When the pizza was gone, Ringo went to the counter for dessert. The beef jerky was inside a plastic jar beside the cash register. He tore open the jar and ate every salty, delicious strip.

Now that his hunger was sated, he thought to look outside again. Vale and his motorcycle were gone. Caught up in his revelry, the Doberman hadn’t even heard the Ariel leave. The man with whom Vale had been dancing was at one of the gasoline pumps, holding a hose to the side of the pickup truck.

Ringo started toward the door, but paused beside the icecream case. He had told himself to have as little to do with people as possible, but the young man had allowed him to eat, and Ringo couldn’t leave without acknowledging that favor. He nosed back the case’s lid and licked the whimpering human on the face. The nose was cold; a good sign.

That done, Ringo went to the front door, shouldered it open, and trotted out, belching because of the Budweiser. He sniffed the air and discovered that the motorcycle was still heading south.

The pickup truck was leaving now, and it too was going south. Ringo hesitated, cocking his head and considering, then bounded after the truck. It would have been no physical strain for him to continue after Vale on foot, but he had always found it pleasant to lie down and snooze after a meal.

He leaped into the truck bed as the noisy vehicle accelerated, and its body bounced and swayed as he landed. Hunkering down so that the driver wouldn’t see him, the Doberman curled up below the cab’s rear window.

His olfactory processors would alert him if the Ariel got too far ahead or if the truck deviated from the motorcycle’s path. For now, though, he could nap.

He coughed up one of the Budweisers and popped it with his teeth, first savoring the foam and then chewing on the can. He was content.

5

OLIVER

1967 began as though the world were coming to an end. A fire during an Apollo test killed Gus Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee on January 27, and I lost one of my most treasured dreams. Edward White had been the man I had first seen floating above the Earth, an atmosphere away from all of the trouble below. With his death, I realized that even space was not a refuge. To get there, you had to find a way to leave the planet, but the planet did not want to let you leave. If it could, it would kill you first.

Mother saw the tragedy as another omen, like the tornado of seven months before. She was certain that still worse things were yet to come.

They took their time, but they came.

That summer was the Summer of Love. At least, it was in San Francisco. In Topeka, it was the Summer of Sweat. The city was sticky and miserable, and so was I.

My babysitter from the summer before had now found better things to do than spend eight hours a day with a kid, but Mother could neither quit her job nor leave me home alone. Thus it was that I spent June with first one babysitter and then another, and finally with something that made even first and second grades seem pleasant in retrospect:

Vacation Bible School.

Every Protestant church in the Midwest runs one of these. Some last only a few weeks, and some last the whole damn summer, but all have several things in common: A lack of air-conditioning. “Bible Heroes” coloring books. “This Little Light of Mine,” an inspirational song written for three-year-olds but forced on persons up to the age of ten. The Children of Israel’s Escape from Egypt. Blue-haired teachers with fat arms and cheek rouge the color of red M&Ms. The walls of Jericho. King David. Construction paper. The baby Jesus. Elmer’s glue. The adolescent Jesus. Crayola crayons. The adult Jesus. Rounded-tip scissors. The crucified Jesus. Severe discipline for the unruly. The dead Jesus. Warm Kool-Aid and stale cookies. The resurrected Jesus. Bible-quiz contests (“What is Jael best known for?”). The ascended Jesus. Why the Devil (aka Satan) is bad and how to avoid him. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.

I was furious with Mother for sending me to a place like that, but she had little choice in the matter and did the best she could in picking the church. She enrolled me in the Vacation Bible School that was operated by the Central Shawnee County United Methodist Church of God in Christ of the United States of America, which she probably figured was the Vacation Bible School that was the