Highway to Hell Read online

  While I debated a few things—our underageness, his obvious but as-yet-unknown ulterior motive—Lisa just said, “Sure.”

  I shot her an incredulous look as Young Guy went back to the bar. “What?” she said. “He obviously wants to ask us something, so we may as well grease the wheels. Or else eat dinner while being stared at like tropical fish in a pediatric waiting room.”

  This was so sensible, I couldn't even come up with a wisecrack. It explained why there were no IDs or questions involved in the handover of beer. Junior was obviously the designated representative of the Duck Inn–quisition.

  He returned with three bottles under his arm and a plate of food in each hand. “Here you go, ladies.”

  The food was either really good or I was really hungry. Maybe a mix of both. As we dug in, the guy spun one of the chairs around and straddled it in the same motion. “I'm Dave, by the way.”

  “Maggie,” I said between bites. “This is Lisa.”

  “Hey! Like Bart Simpson's sisters.”

  Lisa rolled her eyes so hard, her whole head turned with the gesture. “Wow. We've never heard that before.”

  Dave missed her irony, intent on his mission. “Been hearing a lot of rumors about your accident,” he said.

  Here we go. I could sense people shifting in their seats to better catch our reply. Behind the counter, Teresa stood with her arms akimbo, alert for holes in our story. Budweiser Man had swiveled his stool so he could lean his elbow on the bar, the heel of his cowboy boot hooked on one rung.

  “So, how'd you manage that?” asked Bud Man from his perch. He had a serious case of hat head, the kind that only comes from wearing a hat while you sweat. Indicating one of the Old Guys at the coffee drinkers' table, he continued. “Carl over there hit a cow with his truck, and it smashed the whole front end. Nowhere to take it but the junkyard.”

  Carl nodded, and said something unintelligible into his coffee mug.

  I glanced at Lisa, and she yielded the floor to me with a gesture. What a pal. “Maybe because the cow was already, um, dead. We just …” I pantomimed the Jeep sailing over the carcass like a water-skier on a ramp.

  Dave leaned in, elbows on the table. “Could you tell what killed it?”

  “Does it matter?” asked Lisa, her brows arched.

  Bud Man took a swig of his beer. “Here's our pickle. Zeke Velasquez says it's got to be a coyote, maybe a pack of 'em. Teresa swears it's gotta be something else, but she wasn't there. You actually saw it—the cow, I mean—so we want to hear what you say.”

  Behind him, Teresa folded her arms under her ample bosom, her expression daring me to side with Mr. Zeke.

  “What else could it be?” I tried to keep the question ingenuous. Here was my chance to find out what these folks thought attacked the cow.

  “Maybe you saw something in the fields,” said Dave, watching my face avidly. “Maybe some eyes looking at you?”

  “Eyes?” I didn't remember seeing any, but the idea struck a bad chord of memory. Glancing at Lisa, I saw that her face was carefully impassive. No one was bothering to grill her. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Like, reflecting the light?”

  “Maybe,” said Dave. I could tell he was trying to elicit a specific answer with his mysterious—and annoying-ambivalence.

  “Like for instance,” said Bud Man, in a refreshingly normal tone, “coyote eyes are yellow when they reflect the light. Nothing hinky there.”

  Dave twisted around to glare at him. “Don't lead the witness. I'm trying to let her come up with her own description.”

  The cowboy at the bar laughed into his beer bottle. “This isn't Law and Order, David. You ease up on those poor girls.”

  It was too dark to be sure, but I thought Dave's ears reddened. When he turned back to Lisa and me, he looked sheepish. “Sorry about that. Anything you remember about last night would be helpful.”

  “Helpful in what?” I glanced at the bar full of attentive listeners. There was something about their grimly expectant faces, something about the argument between Teresa and Zeke that morning, as if it was an ongoing conversation. I couldn't remember anyone mentioning any dead cows besides the one on the road, but intuition didn't have far to leap. “This isn't the first animal that's died?”

  The beat of silence confirmed my guess, and somehow made the situation more solemn.

  Bud Man spoke first. “We're in a drought. You're going to lose animals when it gets this dry. Goats. Chickens. Calves usually go first.”

  “Drought didn't kill my best herding dog,” said Carl from the Old Guys' table. “Or Teresa's goats.”

  Teresa unfolded her arms slowly, with a sense of drama. “All with their throats ripped out.”

  I swallowed the memory of the blood, the phantom taste of it too recent. “So, what do you think it is?”

  “El chupacabra.”

  She whispered the name, whether for effect or in fear. The half-voiced word breathed across the bar to my waiting ear, lifting the hair on the back of my neck.

  “El what?” asked Lisa, her tone breaking the spell.

  Bud Man groaned, a not-this-again sound of annoyance. “Teresa, you're crazy. It's not the chupacabra. That's a load of horse shit.”

  She reached across the bar and grabbed his bottle. “You don't have to drink in my bar if you think I'm crazy.”

  He grabbed it back, sloshing beer on the counter. “Yes, I do. It's the only place in a hundred miles.”

  “Dave believes me,” Teresa muttered. “He saw what happened to my goats.”

  “What is el chupacabra?” I asked. The word tickled a memory in my mental file cabinet of useless information.

  “It means ‘the goat sucker,’ ” said Dave. “It kills livestock, drinks their blood.”

  “And you think this goat sucker killed the cow and left it on the road?” I tested the weirdometer in my head, the way you nudge a tooth with your tongue to test if it's loose. No bells went off, but it was hard to think seriously about something with such a ridiculous name.

  Especially when Lisa asked, “Wouldn't that make it a cow sucker, then?”

  Teresa scowled at her levity. “El chupacabra kills whatever it can get,” she explained. “With the drought, cows are weak, easier to catch.”

  The memory clicked. “Hang on. I remember this from an article on the Internet.”

  “Oh, well then, it must be true.” Lisa's tone was drolly dismissive.

  I ignored her. “It's like an urban legend. But in the story, someone found a dead animal they couldn't identify.”

  “You have got to be kidding me.” Lisa pushed back her plate and put her elbows on the table. “This is a real animal?”

  “Yes,” said Teresa and Dave.

  “No,” said Bud Man at the same time.

  “It is,” Teresa insisted.

  My gaze traveled across the three of them, over to the Old Guys' table, then to the audience in the booths. “So, what is this chupacabra thing supposed to look like?”

  I'd asked the magic question. Everyone answered at once.

  “It's a huge dog-shaped—”

  “Lizard … like a lizard …”

  “With spines down its back.”

  “It can hop like a kangaroo …”

  “Fly like a bat …”

  “Stop!” Teresa held up her hands. The voices subsided; their queen had called them to order. “El chupacabra is too smart to be seen. It comes out of the darkness to drain the blood of its prey, then disappears. No one sees anything, just a glimpse of glowing red eyes.”

  The bar had been warm a moment ago, but as she talked, embroidering the words with melodrama, my skin seemed to cool, and I shivered in the air-conditioning.

  “Glowing red eyes like … taillights?”

  Dave leaned in eagerly. “Did you see something like that?”

  “We were on the highway,” Lisa snapped, too brusquely even for her. “Taillights are a given.”

  Teresa held my eyes, encouraged by s
omething in my expression. “It gives a hideous scream that makes you nauseated to even hear it. A few people, a very few, have been near enough to smell its horrible stench, like burning sulfur.”

  My pulse tripped over itself, an instinctive panic of memory. I glanced at Lisa, but her face was stubbornly blank.

  “So what about it, city girls?” asked Bud Man, the easy laugh in his voice diffusing the spell of Teresa's words. “Did you smell fire and brimstone?”

  “No,” I said honestly. I'd smelled nothing but blood and gasoline. The demon in high school had smelled like sulfur and a lot of other gross things. But it had also been intangible, unable to touch things directly. At least it had at first. The problem with learning that there are things in the universe that break what you thought were the rules of reality is that there are all new rules to learn, and no textbook to study.

  Dave was asking me another question. “Had the blood been sucked out of it? The cow, I mean.”

  My stomach turned in memory. “Definitely not. It was all over the ground.”

  Teresa was undeterred. “Maybe the car came before the creature could drink.”

  Bud Man rolled his eyes. “And maybe it's not el chupacabra. Give it up, Miss T You owe me a case of beer.”

  She pursed her lips and swept the empty out of his hand with a broad gesture. “No way. She didn't say it was, but she didn't say it wasn't.”

  As if that was some kind of signal, people turned back to their private conversations. If folks were still talking about us, the accident, or the goat sucker, they did it among themselves. Music blared out of the jukebox speakers, and I realized it must have been playing all along, only I hadn't noticed.

  Dave crossed his arms on the back of the chair he straddled. “So, how long are y'all going to be in town?”

  Lisa stared at him coldly. “You can't tell us about a monster, then hit on us. Are you that desperate for fresh meat around here?”

  He grinned, unrepentant. “The dating pool is awful shallow.”

  “Still not making any points, cowboy.”

  I wasn't really listening. I needed to think, and I had to do it away from all these people. Turning to Lisa, I lied abruptly, “We told Justin we'd call at nine o'clock.”

  We weren't best friends for no reason. She dropped her napkin on the table and didn't miss a beat. “Gotta go, Dave. It's been real.”

  He rose to his feet in time to pull out her chair. “I'll walk you to your room. Wouldn't want Ol' Chupy to grab you on the way.”

  Dave was harmless. I picked that up even without touching him. He was a nice, eager guy with a big mouth, and he was totally in the way when I needed to talk to Lisa ASAP.

  A man at the Old Guys' table—the one really not old enough to hang out with them, the same one who had saluted me when the evening first started—spoke up, his voice casual but somehow authoritative. “Don't try so hard, Dave. Nothing will get them between the Duck and their room.”

  Dave looked unabashed, but he also seemed to back off from us without really moving. “Just trying to be a gentleman, Hector.”

  The older guy, Hector, had a long face that I couldn't see clearly in the smoke-filled room. He met my gaze with reassuring dark eyes. “You'll be fine as long as you don't go wandering around out in the dark.”

  Lisa grabbed my arm, steering me toward the door as she tossed back over her shoulder, “Thanks. Fortunately, we left our idiot pills at home.”

  I dug in my heels as soon as we were alone outside. “Jeez, Lisa. That was really rude, even for you.”

  She faced me on the cracked concrete path between the empty swimming pool and the stairs up to our motel room. “Me? You're the one with the fake phone call.”

  “You're welcome to go back in and get Dave's hopes up if you want.”

  “That's not what this is about.” She set her fists on her hips. “You think this chupacabra thing is real.”

  I took a deep breath to clear my lungs of the secondhand smoke, and to phrase my answer. “I don't think it was a coyote that attacked that cow by the road.”

  “I suppose it was the comment about burning sulfur that convinced you?”

  “That did catch my attention.” I noticed it had caught hers, too.

  “Did you smell anything like that on the highway?” she asked, repeating Dave's question, but with the weight of our shared memories.

  “No. But think about it, Lisa. The brake lights—those could have been glowing red eyes.”

  “And they also could have been brake lights.”

  “Okay, what about the footprint? We both agreed it looked like a lizard claw. And this thing is supposed to look like a lizard.”

  Her brows knit skeptically. “You really think it could be this dog-kangaroo-vampire-bat thing the village people were talking about?”

  “Would that be any weirder than some of the things we've seen?” It was strange to be the one using reasonable tones to discuss an unreasonable thing. “I know there's something here. Maybe it's related to this … whatever it is.” I leaned in, dropping my voice earnestly. “We should at least check into it, Lisa. Aren't you even curious?”

  “Of course I'm curious, nimrod.” She jabbed a finger at her chest. “Evil-genius sorcerer, remember? But someone has to be the Scully to your Mulder.”

  I gave her an I-don't-buy-it look. One, because there was more to it than that. And two, because … “Lisa, you have wake-up voodoo in your shower gel. You don't get to be the Scully.”

  She blinked, and slowly her mouth curved—just one side. She looked as sheepish as I'd ever seen her. “Touché.”

  This was one of those times when I wished I could read minds. “Does this have to do with your wanting to be normal for a week?”

  Her fingers flexed where they rested on her hips, but she didn't reject my question. “Have you considered what this means for us if it is a supernatural creature? Like, is it impossible for us to be normal, even away from home?”

  I stared at her, absorbing that, and feeling fear flutter lightly in my stomach. “That is a very uncomfortable thought.”

  “Yeah, well. That's why I want to be the skeptic.” She dropped her arms. “I'm in, but I'm going to keep hoping for the least weird possibility.”

  “Okay.” Because now I was, too. I mean, it might be some kind of normal animal. We didn't smell anything weird at the highway. The psychic fence in my dream could be unrelated. Maybe that was a statistically small probability, but what were the chances that, of all the people cruising down Highway 77 last night, Lisa and I were the ones to hit that cow?

  Great. I'd worked my way around in a circle, and was back to dreading that I was right about the weirdness here.

  “If you don't want to stay,” I ventured, though it killed me a little to say it, “maybe Zeke would drive you somewhere you could rent a car or catch a flight home.”

  With a withering look, she started up the stairs to our room. “Please. Like I'd want to answer to Sir Justin if I deserted you. Not to mention your grandmother, who would curse me, or your mother, who would come after me with a hatchet.”

  “That's probably true.” I climbed after her, pulling the key from the pocket of my jeans.

  “And let's not forget, my karmic account is enough in the red. I don't need to add to my debt by leaving you helpless against el chupacabra. Whatever the hell it is.”

  I unlocked the door, and pushed it open—hard, because it stuck in the humidity. A rush of stale motel smell wafted out. “You're such a pal, Lisa.”

  She entered ahead of me. “What are friends for?”

  7

  “You've reached Justin MacCallum. Leave a message, and I'll get back to you as soon as I can.”

  Sitting cross-legged in my pj's on the motel bed, I waited for Justin's voice mail to beep. Lisa sat on her own bed, legs stretched out in front of her as she surfed through the three television channels and stated the obvious. “No answer? He and his buddy are probably out doing bachelor stuff.” />
  “What kind of bachelor stuff can a pre-priest do?”

  “Same kind of stuff as any other guy, but with less boobies, I guess.”

  “Jeez, Lisa!”

  The voice mail beeped in time to catch that. Great. “Hey, Justin.” I sounded flustered, and not at all as I'd planned. “I'm going to be stuck here in Dulcina for a while. At least until Tuesday.”

  I caught Lisa watching me with a sardonic twist to her eyebrow. I shot her a silent What? and she rolled her eyes back to the TV.

  “Lisa gets obnoxious when she's bored,” I said into the phone, earning a glare, “so we're going to investigate this local folk legend called el chupacabra. Something's been killing the livestock and, um, that's what they think it is.”

  Ordinarily, Justin would be my go-to guy for information on myths and things. He's getting his degree in the anthropology of magical folklore. I would have been more frustrated at his unavailability when I needed intel, except that I knew his field of study was European legends, so I wasn't sure what he could have told me in any case.

  “Anyway. You don't have to call me back. Just keeping you posted. Hope everything is going well.” I was back to the signing-off dilemma, only ten times worse, with Lisa a witness to the awkward. “Um. See you soon.”

  I closed the phone and glared at her. “What?”

  “I didn't say anything.” She rolled out of bed and headed to the cooler.

  “You don't have to. I'm psychic girl, remember?”

  She grabbed a Diet Coke and wiped off the melted ice. “Then why are you asking?”

  Glaring at the back of her head wasn't very satisfying. “You know what? Someday when you fall for a guy and have to learn all new rules of conversation, I am going to laugh.”

  She snorted and popped the tab on her can. “I thought you didn't see the future.”

  “I don't need any hoodoo to know that when you run up against something you can't control, you're going to be a sad case.”

  “Please.” Dropping back onto the bed, she reached for the remote. “Something I can't control. Don't make me laugh.”

  I grabbed it before she could and turned off the TV. “You don't seriously think you're immune to everything, do you?”