Free Whirlwind by Charles Grant Page A

“Yep.”
    â€œOkay. Well, this is no real coincidence, Mulder. The brutality itself is a strong indication of that. All we need to do is find the connection.”
    â€œRight. All we need to do.”
    â€œThen think about this, Scully,” he said quietly. “Why? What’s so damn important out here that both cattle and kids have to die?”
    She didn’t respond; he hadn’t expected her to.
    But he had a strong feeling, an unpleasant one, that whatever answer they finally uncovered, it would be one neither of them would like.
    In the middle of the desert, they had been dropped into a nightmare.
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    â€œI am not crazy!” Mike Ostrand insisted from his hospital bed. He glared at Sheriff Sparrow, who returned the look without expression. “I did not imagine the accident. I did not imagine this goddamn cast on my goddamn arm. I did not imagine my brand-new car flipped over and left me hanging there like a goddamn Peking duck!”
    Sparrow was patient.
    â€œOkay.” Ostrand shifted uncomfortably, lips pulling away from his teeth in a grimace. “Okay.So I was a little drunk, I admit it. But that’s not why I crashed.”
    â€œNo, you crashed because some kind of mysterious vehicle, so low you couldn’t see it out your window, deliberately forced you off the road.”
    Ostrand looked at him angrily. “That’s right.”
    â€œAnd then it tried to kill you when you were hanging from your seatbelt.”
    The artist shrugged, winced at the pain that exploded in his shoulder, and sighed capitulation. “Okay, okay, so it was a stupid coyote, okay? So I was so damn scared it scared the hell out of me. It would have scared anybody. But it wasn’t a coyote that ran me off the damn road!”
    â€œGood.” Sparrow nodded sharply. “Now we’re getting somewhere.” He glanced down at the small notepad he held in his left hand, chewed on the eraser end of his pencil for a moment, and said, “Now, about that invisible vehicle…”
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    The Coronado Bar was unoriginal in both name and decor. As Bernalillo inexorably changed from an outpost on the Rio Grande into an Albuquerque bedroom community, the Coronado just as stubbornly refused to change with it. A long bar on the right-hand wall, tables and booths everywhere else, and a jukebox that muttered country-western all day long. The TV on the wall in back never played anything but sports, minorleague baseball tonight from Southern California. Smoke and liquor in the air, as many cigarette butts on the bare floor as in the aluminum ashtrays. It catered neither to the tourists nor the newcomers, and didn’t much care that business didn’t boom. It did well enough, which was well enough for its regulars.
    Indian Territory was at the back.
    Although there were a handful of exceptions, most of the men who drove in from the pueblos stuck to the two last booths and three last tables. There was nothing belligerent about it; it just happened that way. Even the Spanish stayed away.
    Especially when the Konochine came to town.
    Leon Ciola nursed a long-neck beer in the last booth. He was alone, seated under a wall lamp whose bulb he had unscrewed as soon as he’d taken his seat. He didn’t like the light, didn’t like the way the Anglos tried not to stare at the web of scars across his face or the scars on his knuckles.
    It was better to sit in shadow.
    It was also better to face the entrance, so when the man came in, Ciola would see him first and lift a hand in greeting, before a question could be asked or a voice raised. What he didn’t need tonight was talk, debate —What’s the matter with your people, Leon, don’t they believe in the twentieth century? The time for that was past. The others—Nick Lanaya, Dugan Velador, fools like thatthey could do their best to keep the talk alive, to deal with Anglo crooks like that Falkner woman and sell the