John Case - Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

Burke took a deep breath, and looked out the window, where the jackrabbit was contemplating with satisfaction his destruction of a once serviceable Nissan Sentra. Burke didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but was leaning toward the latter. At least I wasn’t going downhill, he told himself. If he had been, the skid would have taken him over the edge.

He tried the ignition.

Again and again. But there was no way it was going to start, and even if it did, Burke doubted he’d be able to get the car out of the ditch. Not without a tow truck. And even then, it wouldn’t be drivable.

He leaned in through the driver’s window, and squinted at the trip counter: 51.2. That meant he had about nine miles to go before he got to the ranch. About.

Not that he had any choice. Reaching into the car, he grabbed his new “cell phone,” and started walking.

It was harder than he’d expected, because he couldn’t really see. The road itself was easy enough to distinguish because it was paler than the abyss to his left and the rocks to his right. But whenever he tried to pick up the pace, he stumbled over rocks or stepped into a pothole. Twice, he went sprawling, and turned his ankle badly enough that it hurt like hell. He was thirsty, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it. A cloud of gnats hung in the air around him. They didn’t bite, but they got in his eyes, forcing him to stop and knuckle one out every few minutes.

After an hour of this, he began to cramp up.

It seemed like forever since he’d left the saloon in Juniper, but when he looked at his watch, he saw that he’d been gone only about five hours. During that time, he’d thought a lot about what he was doing, and why. His obsession with finding Wilson, he decided, wasn’t really about saving Tommy Aherne’s business. That was just an excuse, and even Tommy didn’t believe it. Eventually, the courts would resolve the matter, and that would be the end of it. No, Burke’s interest in Wilson was deeper, and darker than that. It was… what? The good guy’s version of “suicide by cop.” Burke’s pursuit of Wilson was suicide by terrorist, and it amounted to the same thing.

He hadn’t wanted to live anymore. Not without Kate. Or so he’d thought. But somewhere along the line, this had begun to change. Slowly, and then all at once. He didn’t know when it had happened. There wasn’t a moment when everything changed. These stars…

So all of a sudden, he needed a plan about what to do when he got to the ranch. Because getting himself killed had suddenly lost its attraction. Trudging over the uneven ground, he thought about it long and hard; and slowly, a plan began to form. And it was pure genius: first, he’d get inside. And then he’d knock Wilson out.

It was five fifteen a.m. when he reached the entrance to the ranch, which announced itself with a sign on a lodgepole over the driveway. The sign read “B-Lazy-B.” Cute, Burke thought.

About half a mile up the drive, a smattering of landscape lights glowed in the darkness. Over to the east, or what he guessed was the east, the sky was beginning to fade from black. One by one, the stars were winking out.

Burke crunched up the drive, alarmed by the noise his footsteps made. It wasn’t really bright enough to see very well, but the house was something, a sprawling stone-and-timber affair set in a little mountain meadow. A rustic mansion that reminded Burke of something you’d see at an upscale ski resort. Jackson Hole, maybe, or Telluride.

Flagstone steps curved through a grove of pine trees to the front door. Burke avoided them, and went around to the back, where another door opened onto the kitchen. He felt like a burglar, and worried that the snare drum in his chest would give him away. He tried the door, and it opened easily. They’re in bed, he decided. Which didn’t make sense, unless Burke was wrong about the solstice, or unless Wilson had changed his mind.

He stood in the kitchen with the phony cell phone in his hand, and waited for his eyes to adjust to the absence of stars. In the silence, he imagined the faint sound of music, as if there were a radio, way off in the woods. Then he moved quietly through the house, room by room, praying that Wilson didn’t have a dog. Would a stun gun even work on a dog? Was fur a conductor ?

Wilson’s bedroom – number five, by Burke’s count – was at the far end of the house. The bed was unmade, and a flowered bridal tiara rested, wilting, on a vanity crowded with little bottles of perfume. Beside the tiara was a photograph in a silver frame. Burke studied it in the moonlight.

It was a picture of Wilson in a tuxedo, with his arm around a blonde in a wedding dress. They were standing together in a gazebo, surrounded by flower arrangements, and Burke saw that she was wearing the tiara he’d found. Outsized gold and silver bows decorated the posts on either side, and a wall of candles burned in front of a stained-glass window. Burke couldn’t tell if they were inside, posing on a kind of movie set, or if they were outdoors. But the affection they felt for each other was unmistakable. They were radiant. Beaming.

And somewhere else.

Burke sagged against the window frame. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He’d come all this way, and there was no one home.

He let himself out, and began to walk back the way he’d come. It was over now. Except… there was that music again, and the sound of laughter. It was a woman’s laugh, he thought, but… where was it coming from? He turned in his tracks, this way and that, but it was gone now, muted by a breeze through the pines.

Then he saw it – a smudge of light in the treetops. A tall structure with crisscrossed timbers. It looked to be about half a mile away. It was a tower with a room at the top. Like Wardenclyffe.

On the horizon, the mountains were silhouetted against a pink seam that was just beginning to form. Burke turned toward the tower, and continued walking, certain that Wilson was there with his weapon and his woman.

As a bird began to sing, he picked up his pace, thinking, Not good, not good. He hurried on, but he was so tired that his progress was slow. Every once in a while he had to stop, hands on hips, his breath coming in ragged heaves. He was at a high altitude and he wasn’t used to it.

And then he was there, at the base of the tower. He waited a minute until his breath came easier, listening to the muffled voices and music above his head.

Then he took to the winding staircase, and began to climb. He was doing his best to be quiet, but the steps were metal and he might as well have been banging a drum.

“Jack?!” It was a woman’s voice, and there was alarm in it.

Burke paused, and activated the stun gun. Then he resumed climbing, faster now, heading for the little cabin atop the superstructure. Access was through a hole in the floor above his head, a kind of trapdoor that was open. In the darkness on the stairs, it seemed to Burke that he was climbing toward the sun.

The music was gone now.

Two more flights of steps. He paused again to catch his breath, and stared at the door in the floor. The only way to enter the cab at the top was headfirst. If Wilson had a baseball bat, he could swing for the fences, and that would be the end of it.

Burke weighed his options. He could go up. Or he could go down. He went up, taking the stairs two at a time, arriving finally at the top – out of breath, and with a submachine gun staring him in the face.

The woman in the photograph was at Wilson’s side, her mouth open, eyes wide with alarm. Behind Wilson, Burke could see what he guessed was the weapon. It looked like a telescope, mounted on a turret. It was aimed at the heavens, through what appeared to be an open skylight. A retractable roof, of sorts.