Paul Christopher - The Templar conspiracy

"Harry has other sources of income," said Holliday. He climbed out of the Explorer and pushed his way through the snow to the brightly lit entrance of the Subway. Peggy reluctantly followed him through the cold.

The inside of the sandwich shop was brightly lit and toasty warm. There were two men behind the long, high counter. One was an adolescent, mouth set in a constant teenage sneer, his chubby cheeks set into a square serious face. He was wearing a paper hat and smoking a cigarette. The other man was in his fifties, hard-faced, his long black hair gathered into a ponytail. He had a wrestler's body, and like the boy he was wearing a silly paper hat. He was sitting on a stool and reading a copy of the Cornwall Standard Freeholder. He jumped up when he caught sight of Holliday.

"One Eye!" He grinned. He came across the room and slapped Holliday on the back, and the two men went through a complicated ritual handshake.

"Act like two old geezers at a Masonic meeting," grunted the teenager, scowling and sneering simultaneously.

The man with the ponytail tuned away from Holliday and gave Peggy a long, appraising look. "You must be Peggy." His smile broadened. He had two eyeteeth capped with gold, which made him look like a wealthy vampire. "I'm Harry Moonblanket." He cocked a thumb in the direction of the chubby-cheeked teenager. "The lump there is my American nephew, Kai-entaronk-wen."

"What he means is, my name is Billy Two Rivers." He turned to his uncle, the sneer still intact. "Screw you, Chief Wears Depends."

"Mouth like a rat trap," said Harry proudly. "Chip off the old block."

"Hippie," grunted Billy.

"You ready, One Eye?" Harry said, turning his attention to Holliday.

"I thought we were going to wait for nightfall. No moon and all that."

"This is better," said Harry. He removed his paper hat, took a fur-lined hooded parka down from a hook and shrugged it on. "Nighttime, they fly helicopters with searchlights. Weather like this, they're deaf, dumb and blind." He pointed toward the ceiling. "Even the big eyes in the sky can't see anything." He came out from behind the counter, turning once to give his instructions to Billy. "We get any customers, give them their subs at half price. Meatball subs on special, two for one."

"Anybody who travels in this weather just to get a sub is out of his friggin' mind," Billy responded.

"Just mind the store, kid."

"Onen, Uncle. Good luck," said Billy

"Onen and Nia-wen, Nephew." Moonblanket took Peggy by the elbow. "We'll take the Rover. You ride shotgun, sweetheart. Nothing like a pretty girl beside you for good luck." They headed out the door.

"Where are we going?" Peggy asked.

"To a place where the streets are paved with gold, my dear-twenty-four carat."

Seated at the counter in Gorman's Restaurant, Chief Randy Lockwood bit into his Denver sandwich. It was way past lunchtime but there'd been a minor drug bust at the high school that morning and the paperwork had taken him well into the afternoon.

An occasional dime bag of weed trickling down from the Quebec side of the border was one thing-he'd smoked and inhaled more than his share back in the sixties-but cocaine was something else again.

The locker bust had come on an anonymous tip, which meant it was one student ratting out another. By the time he'd gotten around to it, Tommy Horrigan, the owner of the locker in question, was in the wind. Making it worse was the fact that the kid had turned eighteen the week before, putting him in adult court whenever they managed to track him down.

Complicating matters for Lockwood was the fact that Mark Horrigan, the kid's old man, was chairman of the Wolf Run Golf and Country Club and the owner of Wolf Run Retirement Estates, an adult living development on the northern edge of town. A local bigwig. Going up against Mark Horrigan was not going to be pleasant. Horrigan was a shrimp with a severe case of short-man syndrome and far too much money. He'd been an obnoxious little bastard since grade school and nothing much had changed since.

Lockwood glanced out the big, half-steamed-over window and out onto Main Street. Anything moving by necessity had four-wheel drive. It was another one of those hell-born blizzards birthed somewhere in arctic Quebec for no good reason. Maybe it was one of the old Indian gods getting revenge for the arrival of the French in the 1500s. What had one of those early explorers called it? The Land God Gave to Cain. No kidding.

"Why does everybody in this town have to know everyone else?" said Lockwood. He put down the sandwich half and picked up his cup of coffee.

"That's what small towns are all about," said Reggie Waterman, wiping his steel hook on his apron. "Everybody knows how much money you've got in the bank, everyone is screwing or has screwed your wife at one time or another and everyone knows if you're using Viagra or not."

"Small towns suck," said Lockwood on the other side of the counter.

"Amen," said Waterman. "Speaking of which, Terry Jones over at the feed store says someone came in yesterday and bought eight hundred pounds of that Incitec fertilizer. Terry'd never seen the guy."

"Who needs eight hundred pounds of fertilizer in the middle of winter?" Lockwood asked, suddenly interested. The Oklahoma City bombing had used a ton of ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel to take out the Murrah Building, yet more than fifteen years later there were still no federal regulations about buying the stuff. A couple of states required identification to be shown but that was about it.

"He get any ID?"

"Maine driver's license."

Which didn't mean a damn thing. "He say why he wanted it?"

"Said he was from a big greenhouse operation in Brunswick. They got caught short, he said."

The Falls were a long way from Brunswick. Sixty miles or so. Surely there was some place closer to buy fertilizer.

"Which greenhouse?"

"He didn't say," answered Waterman. A group of kids from the Abbey School with skates slung over their shoulders swept in on a blast of frigid air. Reggie came out from behind the counter, took their orders for French fries with gravy and cheeseburgers, then came back and went to work at the grill. Streak Lockwood took another bite of his sandwich. Bad weather or not he was going to have to take a trip out to Terry Jones's place when he was done eating. Just in case.

They stepped inside a tumbledown boathouse, but instead of boats there were two canvas-covered lumps on the frozen surface of the water. Someone was already waiting for them, an alien figure taller than Moonblanket and wearing what appeared to be a space helmet and a suit made out of dangling white strips of fabric.

"I don't see any twenty-four-carat gold," said Peggy. "Just the Abominable Snowman here."

"Brandon Redboots-a friend of mine," explained the Mohawk.

The figure in the white gillie camouflage suit nodded silently.

The blizzard wind outside was rattling the walls and roof like the Big Bad Wolf. Moonblanket went to a locker and took out three sets of loose, drooping gillie suits in pure white.

"Put these on," the Mohawk said.

"I've never dressed up as a yeti," said Peggy, slipping her legs into the one-piece suit.

"When I was a kid there was a book called The Disappearing Bag," said Moonblanket. "That's exactly what these are."

"Hot," said Peggy, her voice muffled inside the suit.

"Not for long," said the Mohawk. He went back to the locker and brought out three full-face GMAX snowmobile helmets, once again in pure white. Holliday and Peggy jammed theirs on. Moonblanket stepped down onto the ice and pulled the canvas covers off the two lumps, revealing a pair of white snowmobiles.

"Arctic Cat Z1 Turbos," said Moonblanket. "Just about the fastest you can get."