She looked at the stove. “Your food’s burning.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
I DUMPED THE PAN in the trash, then tried to call Wade Benbow at home. No answer. I pulled on my coat.
“What are you doing?”
“Leaving.”
“Just like that? It’s been kicks?”
“I wish it had turned out different, Jo. Tell Spud and Cotton and Maisie I’m sorry I got them out on a bad night.”
I went out the door. The snow crystals stung like chips of glass in the wind. I got into my car and began to back out of the driveway. The front door of the house flew open, and Jo Anne ran for the car in a sheepskin coat and a beat-up felt cowboy hat tied on with a scarf. She jumped into the passenger seat and slammed the door. “You’re not going anywhere without me,” she said.
“I have to do this on my own, Jo.”
“Do you have a flashlight?”
“No.”
She turned off the engine and pulled out the key. “Stay here.”
She went back into the house and returned a few minutes later with a flashlight and a deerskin bag tied on her belt. The bag banged against the doorjamb when she got in.
“What’s in there?” I said.
“Shit.”
“Jo—”
She leaned forward so she could see the sky through the windshield. “The storm is coming right out of the Sangre de Cristos. The clouds look like they’re full of coal dust or smoke from a big fire.”
* * *
I CAUGHT THE TWO-LANE up to Ludlow, then turned west on the dirt road that led through the site of the massacre and the Cordova Pass and then northwest to the mountains named for the blood of Christ. The night was black and the snow white and blinding in my headlights, the wiper blades coated with ice. “What’s that up ahead?” Jo Anne asked.
“The miners’ shacks or what’s left of them,” I said.
“No, there’s a man. I saw him.”
“Out in this weather?”
“Hit your brights.”
I clicked the floor switch. “Jesus!” I said.
I swerved to miss the figure who stood in the middle of the road, his hooded face as gray as bone. The front of the car hit a pothole and splashed water and mud all over the windshield. But I had no doubt who the figure was. I had seen him at the United Farm Workers gathering and had spoken with him outside the Lowry bunkhouse.
The engine had died. When I restarted it, the wipers went wild, then stopped for no reason, slush sliding in waves down the windshield. My heart was thudding, my breath short. “You know who that is?” I said.
“No.”
“Think.”
“I have no idea who he is.”
“Did you see his eyes?” I asked.