Free Whirlwind by Charles L. Grant Page B

there.
    There were no clouds, no signs of rain. It was hard to believe there ever was.
    He rode with Scully in the back seat of Sheriff Sparrow's dusty blue-and-white cruiser, Garson up front on the passenger side. It was evident from their conversation that the two men had known each other for a long time, using shorthand
    gestures and single-word answers, mostly grunts. As far as Mulder could tell, the gist of it was, there had been no further incidents since the death of the boy, except for a drunk driver who claimed to have been forced off the road by an invisible, or incredibly short vehicle.
    "It brings out the nuts, this kind of thing," the sheriff said, lifting his gaze to the rearview mirror. "You find that, too, Agent Mulder?"
    He nodded. It was true. Just as it was true that Chuck Sparrow was laying on the western sher-iff routine a little thick, constantly hitching his gunbelt, chewing a wad of gum that was sup-posed to simulate tobacco, getting a deeper drawl in his voice every time he opened his mouth. It wasn't necessarily a bad thing, but it made him wonder why the act at all. Garson would have already filled the man in, and it was the sheriff who had finally asked the FBI for help.
    It didn't sit right.
    Like not wearing a suit and tie, like wearing running shoes.
    He knew Garson was right—wearing his usual clothes out here would have been ludicrous as well as stupid; still, like the sheriff, it didn't sit right.
    The Sandias passed them on the right as Interstate 25 left the Albuquerque suburbs behind. And although other ranges broke the horizon,
    there was nothing out there now but the high desert.
    And the sun.
    "Cult," Sparrow said then, raising his voice to be heard over the air conditioning.
    "What?" Scully, startled out of a reverie, asked him to repeat it.
    "Cult. You know .. . cult. One of them Satanist things, probably. Look hard enough, betcha them poor folks were all involved somehow."
    "A seventeen-year-old boy?" Mulder asked skeptically.
    "Hey, that ain't no rare thing, you know what I mean? You got your heavy-metal crap with all that subliminal stuff, you got your rap stuff telling kids to kill cops, shit like that . . . drugs and sex . . ." He lifted a hand off the wheel, palm up. "What more do you want?"
    Mulder saw his eyes in the mirror, watching him, gauging.
    "Maybe," he answered reluctantly.
    "No maybe about it, son, no maybe about it."
    Fifteen miles later, at a speed Mulder thought would soon launch them into orbit, the cruiser slowed, pulled onto the right shoulder, and crossed a narrow wooden bridge. A two-lane paved road led into the desert.
    Sparrow pointed with a thumb. "What you got up there, them hills there about ten miles along, is what they call the Konochine Wall." He
    scratched under his hat. "Kind of like a jagged outline of a lightbulb lying on its side. Fat part, it's pointing toward the Sandias back there to the south. The base part, it crosses the road onto the ranch where we're going. Unless you want to climb the hills, the only way in or out is a gap where the road is."
    Mulder watched a barbed-wire fence blur past on his left. Beyond it was desert, and he couldn't imagine how anyone could raise any-thing out here, much less cattle. When he had asked at breakfast, Garson only told him to hold onto his horses, he didn't want to spoil the surprise.
    "Do the Konochine fit in here?" Scully asked. "This case, I mean."
    Sparrow shrugged one broad shoulder. "Who the hell knows? Doubt it myself. Their place isn't like the other pueblos, see. It’s a res and all, but they don't like tourists, they don't like Anglos, they don't like other Indians . . ." He laughed. "Hell, I don't think they much like each other a whole hell of a lot." He yanked at an earlobe, then scratched vigorously behind it. "Some of them, mostly the young ones, they've been trying for years to change things. Most of the time it don't work, though, and they leave, don't come back."
    "And the ones who