Free Blue Lonesome by Bill Pronzini Page A

Heinous and inexplicable.
    He turned away, went across the rear yard. The low-roofed structure had been a chicken house; dried droppings and feathers lay strewn over the hardpan inside the wire enclosure. He passed the privylike shed. Its door had been pulled off and tossed aside; inside he could see a raised platform, a jut of bolts and tangle of wires. Generator, probably. They’d had electricity, and the power lines that serviced John T. Roebuck’s ranch didn’t extend out this far into the wilderness. The generator had been taken away along with everything else.
    He tried to visualize what it had been like living here, in conditions that were only a step or two removed from the primitive. Tried to fit Ms. Lonesome into these surroundings; to envision her happy, laughing, mothering and playing games with a faceless child of eight. He couldn’t manage that either. She was a stranger, dammit. All you knew was the shell of a woman, a walking piece of clay. She could have been a monster and you know it. Good people don’t have a monopoly on loneliness.
    He approached the barn. It and what was left of the corral fence were aged-silvered, tumbledown. The barn’s wide double doors sagged open; bullet holes studded them too, just a few, like afterthoughts. Beyond he could see more holes pocking the galvanized surface of the water tank. And the windmill … it looked to have been dragged down with ropes attached to the back of a car or truck; an end-frayed length of hemp trailed from a section of the windmill’s frame. Outrage at the killings. Mindless attacks on inanimate objects that had had nothing to do with the taking of two human lives. Teenagers, maybe. It was somehow worse to think that adults had been responsible.
    Messenger paused at the barn’s entrance. Dark inside, a thick gloom that stank of dried manure and rotting leather and Christ knew what else. Better not go in. Snakes … the desert was full of rattlers, and this was just the kind of place where they nested. Nothing to see anyway. Coming here had been a mistake, an exercise in morbid curiosity—
    Something smacked into the barn wall, head high, a couple of feet to the right of where he stood.
    He swung around that way as sound broke suddenly through the hush, a flat cracking like a distant roll of thunder. But the sky was clear—
    Singing buzz, and dust spurted from a spot on the ground near his right shoe. The cracking noise came again, echo-rolling this time. He stiffened, bewildered, just starting to comprehend what was happening.
    Another buzz, another spurt of dust even closer, another flat crack. It burst in on him then, full understanding that carried with it an adrenaline surge of fear and astonishment.
    Rifle shots.
    Somebody’s shooting at me!

8
    T HE ONLY PLACE for him to go was into the barn.
    He twisted around, got his feet tangled together, stumbled, and went down on all fours, jamming his left knee. His shoulders hunched; he could feel the skin bristling along his back. But there were no more shots as he scrambled inside, to safety around one of the sagging doors.
    He flattened himself on bare, lumpy earth near the front wall. He was slick with sweat; he smelled himself along with the sour stink of the barn’s interior. His breathing had a labored, stuttering quality. He opened his mouth wide, made himself take in air in shallow inhalations so he wouldn’t begin to hyperventilate.
    His mind was a clutter of disconnected thoughts. One of them: Seventeen years he’d lived in San Francisco, with all its urban threats and terrors, and he’d never once been attacked, mugged, burglarized, or bothered by anyone more dangerous than an aggressive panhandler. Now, all the way out in the Nevada desert, abandoned ranch in the middle of nowhere … somebody with a rifle, for God’s sake, shooting so close to him he’d heard and felt the bullets’ passage. It was as if it were happening to somebody else. As if part of him were standing off