Strum Again? Book Three of the Songkiller Saga by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough Read Free Book Online Page B

of sow frequents Highway Sixty-six, heading east. She
will be laughing at your stupidity if you let her live as far as
the Texas border. Find her and scourge the earth of her presence.
That is all."
    "They believe that crap?" Chair asked
wonderingly.
    "Some people are so eager to come to us,
they'll believe anything as long as it tells them to do what they
want to already, boss."
     
    * * *
     
    James Francis Farnham heard the call and was
for the first time in two years (following a conviction and
imprisonment for the robbery, beating, rape, and mutilation of two
elderly sisters) able to answer. He had been a model prisoner,
everybody agreed, in the prison facility where he had been living
and working with other men. He had no problem with other men,
guards or prisoners. Other men did not remind him of his
grandmother, who had raised him and deprived him of all of the
things he was entitled to, of his mother, who deserted him to work
at a job where she did not earn enough to buy those things, or of
his ex-wife. He had seen to it that she, at least, wouldn't screw
anybody else around. He had never known his father and so had no
particular grudge against men.
    He couldn't easily get a gun without waiting
so long that the trail would get cold, but a gun was not his weapon
of choice anyway, and you didn't need a license for a hunting bow
or a butcher knife. He stole a car easily enough within a block of
the probation office and cruised out Route 66, while visions of
body parts danced in his head.
    Before the old girl reached the Texas
border, the voices had said. Now, what was important about that?
She was running away, that was what. Bitch. Who had she screwed so
that she had to run away now? He'd bring her back from the border
okay. He had just the hardware to do it and enough butcher paper to
conceal the evidence.
    He spotted the van at a truck stop outside
Roswell. The voices were wrong. She wasn't heading east. She was
heading southeast. She was trying to confuse him. Lying to the
voices. Trying to throw him off her track.
    She climbed back into the van. She looked
just like the voices said. Small, gray-haired, deceptively sweet
looking in her little pink jogging suit. Too bad he'd arrived after
she stopped or he could have taken her there, when she got out to
go to the ladies' room. Never mind. She would no doubt stop again
in Carlsbad, and he'd catch up with her there. Darkness was coming
soon too, and he could always wait for an opportunity to run her
off the road.
     
    * * *
     
    Gussie would never have noticed the dark
blue truck with the camper shell if it hadn't been for the
personalized license plates that said SHONUF. She wondered what
kind of a person put something like that on license plates. Some
kind of a business, maybe? She also noticed that although the truck
had pulled into the truck stop outside Roswell as she emerged from
the station, the driver didn't get out and buy gas but exited right
behind her. A few years ago she wouldn't have made much of that,
but she was more cautious now.
    She was still ahead of schedule. Though she
could have driven through Amarillo, where she used to live, to
visit friends, she decided that she would rather swing down through
the Big Bend to see Remie Collins and her husband, Don, who ran a
white-water rafting business through Santa Elena Canyon. They were
old folk-music cronies, and their raft trips were perfect for
musicians or storytellers. The laws and tastes of people changed
often while they were in the city, but stories and old songs around
camp fires went back to cavemen, so deep in racial memory that not
even devils could wipe them out.
    Unfortunately, scouting organizations didn't
seem to do camp outs anymore, or that would have been the perfect
place to spread the music. The organizations had sold off most of
the old camps for timber. Nowadays kids raised on slasher movies
that were set in such camps weren't all that eager to go away for
the summer. And the timber