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

do something for myself. I had to get to Sharon’s before someone with a badge came to take me away to less comfortable accommodations.

“Out of my way!” I shouted. “I’ve got to get to a psychologist in Topeka!”

I popped Peggy Sue’s clutch and twisted the throttle, and—uncharacteristically—she roared and leaped forward, spinning her rear tire on the cement floor with a sound like a banshee’s wail. Cathy, Jeremy, and Ringo scrambled aside, and the Ariel and I blasted into the darkness toward the Spirit Land.

As we hit the gravel, I kicked up to second gear, then kept my right hand on the throttle while I crossed my chest with my left to tap the garage door control. Glancing back, I saw that the door came down before Cathy or Jeremy could get inside, which pleased me until I noticed that Ringo wasn’t with them. For the briefest of moments I worried that the dog might have run into the garage and been trapped there—but then, in the pink wash of Peggy Sue’s taillight, I glimpsed the black mass that was rushing down the driveway after me.

I faced forward and gunned Peggy Sue onto the pavement of Southwest 163rd Street without checking for traffic, but we weren’t fast enough. As I leaned to the left to make the turn toward Topeka, Ringo’s jaws clamped on the left exhaust pipe.

Peggy Sue and I began to go over. The front fork twisted to the left, and I saw specks of green glass glittering in the asphalt. I cried out, my voice like that of a steer being slaughtered. My left hand came off the grip and reached for the pavement, but my right hand spasmed on the throttle, rapping out the engine. My eyes locked with Ringo’s, and I saw that they were nothing like the eyes of any other dog I had ever seen. They were black, faceted stones with blue sparks at their center.

The Doberman’s teeth were sinking into the exhaust pipe as if it were pizza dough.

My fingertips brushed the pavement.

And then everything—Ringo, the exhaust pipe, the glass-speckled asphalt, my Moonsuited arm—began to strobe with a scarlet glare.

Ringo jerked, lifting Peggy Sue’s rear wheel into the air and twisting me and the bike upright again. My head snapped away from the dog and the pavement, and I saw a car with flashing red lights top the hill a quarter mile away. It was straddling the center line.

My left hand grabbed the clutch lever, and my right hand reversed the torque on the throttle. Peggy Sue’s roar subsided, and I heard the sirens. The first car was followed by a second, and a third, and a fourth. The road to Topeka, and to Sharon’s, was blocked.

Ringo, growling, lowered the rear wheel to the pavement again. As it touched, I gunned the engine, popped the clutch, and jerked the bike into a right-hand U-turn. As much as the Doberman frightened me, the four cop cars frightened me more. I didn’t know whether they contained state troopers, sheriff’s deputies, highway patrolmen, or FCC enforcement officers, and I didn’t care. They were bearing down fast, and they would either run me over or take me in.

I find it difficult to deal with Authorities.

Peggy Sue was sluggish for a moment, as if her rear brake were on, but then she burst free and we shot away like a missile. A half minute later, clipping along at eighty miles per hour, I risked looking in the left mirror. The flashing lights were after me, but they were much farther back than I had feared they would be. They must have stopped at my driveway before figuring out who the guy on the motorcycle was. Ringo was nowhere in sight.

I put three hills between us and the cop cars, slowed to forty, and cut off the bike’s lights. Then we whipped west onto the next gravel road and almost went into the ditch because I could hardly see. The night was becoming cloudy, and if the moon was out, it was hidden.

“Make like the moon,” I told myself, and turned this way and that on gravel and dirt roads until I was sure that the Authorities and their sirens couldn’t find me.

I stopped under the bare branches of a walnut tree beside an ice-encrusted low-water bridge, letting Peggy Sue idle while I tried to think. My feet were freezing, and I wished that I hadn’t decided against wearing boots for the trip to Sharon’s.

That trip was out of the question now. I had stupidly told Cathy and Jeremy that I was hurrying to a psychologist, and even if the Authorities didn’t question my neighbors, they would surely decide to investigate Sharon as soon as they found her number taped to my phone.

I couldn’t go back home either. The cops would spend hours searching my house for evidence that I had mucked up the entire world’s television broadcasts, and even when they found nothing, they would put the place under surveillance in the hope of nabbing me when I showed up. I had watched enough cop operas on the tube to know that much about police procedure.

“Whattaya think, Peggy Sue?” I asked.

Peggy Sue coughed. She didn’t like to sit still, idling in the cold. I was afraid to shut her down, though, because she might not start again. Then I’d be stuck without wheels in rural Shawnee County with no place to go and nothing to look forward to except having my feet amputated.

I had no family. Mother was gone, and so were her parents and Uncle Mike. Besides, the only one I had really known besides Mother was Grandmother, and we hadn’t liked each other. There were great-aunts and great-uncles in the Des Moines area, but I didn’t even know their names.

Sharon wasn’t the only friend to whom I could conceivably go for help. There were others—coworkers at Cowboy Carl’s, mostly—but I was sure that the cops would start watching them almost as soon as they started watching my house and Sharon’s apartment. Ditto for Julie “Eat shit and die, Oliver” Calloway. There was no sanctuary in the area for me.

Turning myself in to the FCC wasn’t an option either. Aside from the fact that I didn’t believe I would be treated with constitutional fairness, I wasn’t entirely sure that I wasn’t guilty and that sooner or later some evidence to that effect might turn up.

So I only had two possible destinations. On some level, I must have known that from the first moment that Buddy appeared on my Sony.

I could go to Clear Lake, Iowa, where he had played his last concert. But my feet were too cold already, and Clear Lake was four hundred miles northeast of where I sat by the low-water bridge. Even with the Moonsuit, I would be a fugitive popsicle before making it as far north as Ames. Besides, what could I do at Clear Lake? Start looking for UFOs to come down and save me, the way Mother did? I had already made my pilgrimage there, and there wasn’t much to see. The Surf Ballroom was a run-down brick building, and the field where the Bonanza had hit was only a field.

The other possibility was that I could try to reach Lubbock, Texas, where Buddy had been born and raised. The city lay a few hundred miles farther to the southwest than Clear Lake lay to the northeast, but at least the weather would get a little warmer as I went. And once I arrived, if I arrived…

Long after Buddy’s death, a statue of him had been erected across the street from Lubbock City Hall. It was placed in the center of a large flower bed, a rarity in that part of the country. I could go in among those flowers and stand with him awhile.

And when I had done that, there was something else I could do.

Buddy Holly’s body had been flown to Lubbock for burial on Thursday, February 5, 1959. I knew from a photograph in one of Mother’s books that the ground-flush headstone that came later had been inscribed with these words:

IN LOVING MEMORY

OF OUR OWN

BUDDY HOLLEY

SEPTEMBER 7, 1936

FEBRUARY 3, 1959

To the right of those words was a carving of an abandoned electric guitar. It was leaning against a column that looked as if it had belonged in a temple of Apollo.

Until now, I had seen no point in undertaking the long journey for so little reward. Dead was dead, and Charles Hardin Holley would not come back to life for me simply because I spent a day or two on the road for him. I had seen photographs of the grave and the statue, and I hadn’t been able to think of anything the objects themselves could do for me that the photographs couldn’t. Buddy’s true legacy, after all, lay in his music, and I could hear that anytime I liked. Compact disc technology would preserve it with crystal clarity until we wiped ourselves out as a species, and even then those digital codes might survive and give pleasure to whatever took our place. Besides, who the hell wanted to go to Lubbock, Texas? Might as well head into Topeka for a hot night at Taco Bell.

But when I tried to watch The Searchers and saw Buddy instead, everything changed.

My brain knew that he couldn’t really be talking and singing from a pressurized, heated radiation-shielded bubble on a satellite of Jupiter; my brain knew that someone had rigged up the fraud and had framed me for it.

My soul, however, could feel that Buddy had come back to life. I had seen him and heard him, and no actor or computer-generated simulacrum could have done what the figure on my Sony had done. He was real. He was alive.

So I would ride Peggy Sue to Lubbock. I would screw up my courage by going to the statue first, and then, if no one stopped me, I would go to the grave. I would discover for myself, for both brain and soul, whether his body was still there.

I turned on Peggy Sue’s lights and dismounted to examine the contents of my wallet in the glare. My credit cards would be worse than useless; buying gas with Visa would be like revealing my position with a flare gun. I would have to rely on whatever cash I happened to have.

I had fifty-eight dollars and twenty-three cents. Based on Peggy Sue’s usual fuel consumption, I calculated that I might make it to Lubbock if I didn’t eat and if I stole a few bucks from vending machines or video games on the way. I was already a Federal fugitive, so what difference would a misdemeanor or two make?

Before remounting, I looked down at the bike’s left exhaust pipe. Ringo had bitten off approximately seven inches, and a canine fang was wedged into a ragged tear in the chrome. I grasped the tooth and tugged, my gloves protecting my hands from the heat, and it came free. Examining it, I discovered that its base was not a bloody root, but a bent metal screw.

Veterinary dentistry had made strides of which I hadn’t been aware. I was glad that I was miles away from Ringo and about to increase the distance.

I dropped the tooth into a Moonsuit pocket, then straddled Peggy Sue and put her into gear. It was only as I twisted the throttle that I noticed how different she sounded with the shortened, ragged exhaust pipe. The noise was as loud and raucous as that of a piston-engine airplane.

We headed south across the low-water bridge. If we managed to make it as far as Oklahoma, I’d buy