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

a motorcycle bigger than that, I kick it over. I should have kicked yours over last night when it was in my way, but now I’ve made up for it. I’ve kicked it over in the mud.”

That fired up my adrenals. I sat up, and the muscular woman tumbled onto the floor between the bed and the wall, landing beside her backpack. “You kicked over Peggy Sue?” I yelled. “What’d she ever do to you? If you’ve got a problem, it’s with me! Leave my bike out of it!”

The woman rubbed the back of her head. “Take it easy, groutbreath,” she said, sounding less angry. “It landed soft.”

I struggled out of my cocoon of blankets and rolled away to stand on the opposite side of the bed. “You’re going to clean it up!” I shouted. “That motorcycle’s like a dog to me!”

She stared. “You guys are all bughouse nuts,” she said. “It’s a machine, for God’s sake. It’s not like I kicked over your mother or something.”

“A lot you know!”

She stood. “You act like I’m the one who’s the criminal here. You’re the one who wouldn’t move your motorcycle from the pump. You’re the one the guy with the gun is after. You’re the one who fixed things so I’d have to steal his car.”

The unfairness of these accusations pissed me off. I was having a tough enough time without being held responsible for this woman’s problems. “I didn’t make you do anything,” I said. “If you weren’t such a hothead, you wouldn’t have tried to move his car and he wouldn’t have pulled his gun.”

Her face took on a thoughtful expression. “Maybe,” she said. “Who is the Bald Avenger, anyway? A cop?”

“I don’t know,” I said, rubbing my throat to let her know that it hurt. “He could be, I guess. But cops are supposed to identify themselves, and he didn’t.”

“I noticed. That’s why I have to give you to him.”

I tensed. “How do you figure?”

“Simple. If he’s not a cop, he’s something worse. And if he’s something worse, he’s the kind of guy who won’t go crying to the real cops that his car’s been stolen. He’ll just find me and shoot me. But if I return you and his Jag, maybe he’ll leave me alone.”

“And maybe he won’t,” I said, estimating my chances of getting to my contact lenses, the Moonsuit, my shoes, and my helmet and then dashing out before the woman caught me and beat me senseless. I estimated that I had no chance at all. “Maybe he’ll just shoot you because he feels like it.”

The woman took a few steps and leaned against the door. “Yeah. It’s a problem.” She smiled humorlessly. “Thought you’d lose me with that crosscountry trick, didn’t you? But here I am, and you’ve got to tell me what the deal is with you and the Avenger. You’ve also got to convince me that you’re not lying. Once I know what’s up, I can decide what to do.”

I realized then that she didn’t have any idea of who I was.

“Have you watched any TV recently?” I asked. “Since, say, Thursday night?”

She scowled. “I’ve been on the road since Thursday morning. I was trying to get my worthless GMC to take me from Minneapolis to Houston. Just my luck that the tags are expired. If they weren’t, I could’ve stuck to I-35 and I wouldn’t have been anywhere near you.”

“Truck have a radio?”

“Broken. You’re not trying to be evasive, are you, crudball?” She looked as if she might be thinking of clamping her hands around my throat again.

In most Life Situations, the truth is irrelevant. Once in a great while, however, it’s the only things you’ve got. I sat on the floor and told the woman my name and everything that had happened to me, and because of me, since 1:00 A.M. Friday morning. I also threw in some stuff about Mother, UFOs, Ready Teddy, and my job at Cowboy Carl’s Computer and Component Corral to provide color and verisimilitude.

The woman stood against the door with her arms crossed. Her face was as impassive as an anvil.

I stopped the story at the point where I met her in the convenience store. She was looking at the floor now, and her tongue began moving around inside her cheeks. I guessed that she was trapped in a limbo between belief and disbelief, so I got onto the waterbed and crawled down its length, thud-slosh thud-slosh, so that I could turn on the television set.

Buddy fuzzed into existence. He wasn’t singing, but was strolling around and strumming his guitar idly. Occasionally, he stopped short as if he had bumped into a transparent wall, then changed direction and continued walking. He was exploring the parameters of his bubble, which was proving to be about the size of the inflated Moonwalks you can still see at small-town carnivals. The camera was at the center of the circle, and it tracked Buddy all the way around. Jupiter came in and out of view like an enormous striped UFO.

The woman had stepped away from the door to come closer to the TV. I flipped around the channels to show her that the same scene was on all of them.

“This is just a tape the motel is playing,” the woman said. “It’s a sci-fi smut flick, and any second now a naked space bimbo is going to show up.”

As she spoke, Buddy approached the camera and read my name and address again. Then he started singing “Dearest.”

I crawled off the bed, fetched my wallet from the Moonsuit, and showed the woman my driver’s license.

She looked at it for a few seconds. “Glad to meet you, Ollie,” she said in a faraway voice. “I’m Gretchen Laird.”

“Glad to meet you too, Gretch.”

Her back stiffened, and she glared at me. “I hate being called ‘Gretch,’ ” she said.

“I hate being called ‘Ollie,’ ” I said.

She looked back at the TV and turned down the sound. “The way I figure it,” she said after a minute or so, “the Bald Avenger must be a foreign agent—say Russia or Poland. If he were American, he’d be driving a Ford or GM product, right? Besides, I took a look in the Jag’s trunk and there are about thirty different license plates.” She paused. “Guess I might as well keep it. Nobody’s going to care that I swiped a car from a Communist.”

“What would Russia or Poland want with me?” I asked.

“Well, you’re obviously a valuable guy if this stuff is coming from another planet,” Gretchen said, gesturing at the TV. “If I were a president or a dictator or whatever, I’d sure want to be the first to get hold of you and dissect you. It’d be a real feather in my cap.”

For the first time, it occurred to me that I might have more than domestic Authorities to worry about. I grabbed the Moonsuit and began pulling it on.

Gretchen frowned. “What are you doing?”

“If you found me, he can too,” I said as I struggled with the Moonsuit’s flapping arms. “He probably took your truck when you took his car.”

She grinned. “If he did, he didn’t get more than twenty miles. The radiator leaks like a rhinoceros pisses. I’ve had to stop and refill it every forty miles ever since Kansas City. I was gonna take care of it right after getting gas, but the Jag showed up. Right about now, the Bald Avenger is stranded with no idea of where we are.”

I stopped struggling with the Moonsuit. “So what was all that crap about turning me over to him?”

“That’s still an option,” she said. “And that’s why I’m not letting you out of my sight for a while. See, I’m a capitalist, and capitalists are realists. I’ll do whatever’s necessary for my own best interests.”

I sat down on the bed, my rump hitting the floor hard. “Why’s a capitalist driving a truck with expired plates and a busted radiator?”

She gave me a dark look. “That isn’t my fault,” she said, and proceeded to tell me the story of her life.

I lay down and wrapped myself in the blankets again. As long as she didn’t try to strangle me anymore, I didn’t much care what she did. Besides, it was kind of nice to have some company.

Gretchen told me that she had been born in 1967 to San Francisco flower children who became embarrassingly wealthy marketing lava lamps. Unfortunately, by the time Gretchen had turned fourteen, the bottom had fallen out of the lava-lamp market, and her parents had cut off her allowance. As a result, she had rebelled against their liberal politics and had become a hard-core conservative. She had left home after graduating from high school at the age of seventeen (her parents had “gone back to the land,” which had disgusted her) and had been wandering from city to city ever since, a materialist without material, a money-lover without money. She had garnered enough grants and loans to attend college, but had dropped out of the University of Illinois during her sophomore year.

“This fruit of an English professor wanted us to write a twelve-page paper on the Beat poets,” she told me. “You know, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, that bunch?”

“I’ve heard of them.”

“They were a bunch of faggots and junkies,” Gretchen said vehemently. “So I asked the prof, why should I want to write about drugged-out, left-wing, unpatriotic mental popsicles? Besides, what did any of that literary Bob Dylan crap have to do with my double major in Business Administration and Physical Education, I’d like to know?”

“It’s a puzzle,” I acknowledged.

After dropping out of college, Gretchen had worked for the Illinois Republican Party for a year and had found it emotionally, if not financially, rewarding. Then she had become romantically involved with a law student and had quit her job to move to Minneapolis with him. She had supported him with her savings account while he worked on his J.D., confident that when he graduated and passed the bar, she would at last have the secure, conservative life she deserved.

Unfortunately, the young man’s studies had slipped when he had become a trance-channeler for a member of Genghis Khan’s horde who had a penchant for expensive motorcycles. At first, Gretchen had embraced the New Age channeling phenomenon, for although she had long been certain of her politics, she had never been able to decide upon an appropriate spiritual life. Her trust and belief had been crushed, however, when her Mongolian-possessed boyfriend had cleaned out their bank account, stolen her Penny’s credit card, and left her for a middle-aged vegetarian Democrat.

“So here I am,” Gretchen told me. “My politics are beyond reproach, and I’m in perfect physical shape. Yet I’m almost broke and spiritually void. Even if I were to get hold of lots of money, I have this sick feeling that I’d still be unhappy. I’ve been trying to get to Houston because a college friend just opened a health spa there and might give me a job, but even that doesn’t thrill me. Nothing seems to matter much these days.” She gave me a piercing look. “At least, nothing seemed to matter until I ran into you last night. You gave me something to care about, to get mad about.”

“You’re welcome,” I said.

“But now that we’ve talked, I don’t feel mad anymore,” she continued. “Instead I feel, I don’t know, anticipation. I feel like maybe it was Fate that I met you.”

That made sense. Fate and I go way back.

Gretchen nodded at the TV. “I mean, there’s something spiritual about Buddy Holly coming back to life, isn’t there? Didn’t he die a