Given my talk of gunfire and considering her situation, she ought to have been afraid, but instead my babble seemed to further incense the lady. Her fury became so hot that I thought maybe I was about to witness one of those cases of spontaneous human combustion that you read about in those stranger-than-fiction books that detail weird but true occurrences. She punched me in the chest again. “Sparky Rainking, my grandfather. What’ve you done with Sparky Rainking?”
“I didn’t do anything to him. I never met Sparky Rainking. I don’t want to meet him. Seems like it’s dangerous to know Sparky.”
In silence, she seethed at me for a moment. She scanned the barn again, and then she looked me up and down. “Where’s your suit?”
“I don’t own a suit.”
“Then you’re not one of them?”
“They’re all about the suit. How could I be one of them if I don’t have a suit? You do know who they are, don’t you?”
“Oh, yeah. Yeah, I know who they are. Internal Security Agency Nazi zombies.” Suddenly alarmed, she said, “Oh, shit. I remember now. More of them are coming.”
She turned away from me and ran toward where the barn door had once been.
Hurrying after her, I said, “Where are you going?”
“I think I know what they did with Grandpa Sparky.”
|?6?|
Half an hour before sunset, oblique orange sunlight gilded the prairie grass, painted long shadows across the land, and transformed the former dude ranch from mere rack and ruin into a sinister assemblage of shapes, like half-toppled megaliths erected thousands of years earlier to serve as a place at which to worship cruel gods.
Behind the barn stood two vehicles: a new black Suburban with government plates and a midnight-blue Buick older than my Toyota.
“They came on foot, snuck up on us, then brought the Suburban here afterward. We were too sure we couldn’t be found.”
The granddaughter of Sparky Rainking popped the trunk lid of the Buick. A sixty-something guy was in that cramped space, wrists and ankles bound with plastic straps, hands connected to feet with a trammel.
“Bridget!” he declared. “All that noise and gunfire, I thought you were dead. I’m so glad you’re not dead.”
“Me too,” she said.
I used my scissors to cut his bonds, as I had cut hers. His muscles had stiffened. He needed help to get out of the trunk.
“And what’s your name, young man?” he asked.
“Quinn Quicksilver.”
“That’s a mouthful, isn’t it—especially for Porky Pig. Pleased to meet you, Quinn.”
“Likewise, Mr. Rainking.”
“Call me Sparky. It’s from the Old English spearca, meaning ‘to provoke and set in motion.’ I try to live up to it. Who got shot?”
“No one,” I said. “Those ISA guys shot at me, but they missed.”
Bridget said, “He ran them down with his Toyota. A coupe, if you can believe it.”
Walking back and forth, flexing and stretching, Sparky Rainking said, “Quinn, if you’re going to be running people down on a regular basis, you’d be wise to invest in a larger, sturdier vehicle.”
Never having experienced a grandfather of my own, I hadn’t spent any time studying the species, but it seemed that Sparky was not a standard-issue grandpa. Yes, he had the wizened face that you might expect, crinkles at the corners of his eyes, white hair, and a thick white walrus-style mustache. But one small detail suggested his outlier status: Each of his largish earlobes featured a tattoo of a tiny, grinning skull.
Squinting his steel-gray eyes, he scanned the ranch as the place darkled in the fading light. “We’re grateful for your Bruce Willis heroics, Quinn. But how did you come to be here?”
“I came from Phoenix. I’m a staff writer at Arizona! magazine.”
With one eye still squinted and the other eyebrow raised, his expression made it clear that he knew I had avoided answering his question. “Seriously? You’re writing about this dump?”
“No, sir. I came here because.”
“Because?”
I shrugged. “Just because.”
“Just because what?” he persisted.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“I’m a simple, trusting, gullible old man. Try me.”
“Magnetism,” I said.
Sparky looked at Bridget.
I, too, looked at Bridget. Now that no one was shooting at me and I wasn’t busy running them down, it was as if I saw her for the first time. She was beautiful, but even better than that, she was cute. Always before, when I saw something so cute that it made me go all gooey inside, it had fur. Bridget didn’t have fur, but I felt as if I was a marshmallow on a stick held over a campfire.