Dead Men's Dust Read Free Page A

made.
    “You know something, Shank? You should have listened to me.”
    I pulled the trigger again.
    Shank fell next to his friend, clutching at his own shattered knee.
    “Next time I will kill you,” I promised.

4
    HE HAD THE DESIRE AND THE PASSION. HE CERTAINLY HAD the ability. But that wasn’t everything. Tubal Cain also had an agenda.
    Right now he was short on materials.
    There wasn’t much hope of acquiring what he needed here, but for these cretins, he’d make the effort.
    “You know something? You should all be damned straight to hell!”
    There weren’t too many things that got him riled, but these pigs on wheels were the exception. Motor homes! These monstrosities of engineering were a blight on the landscape. Colossal steel bullets fired from the devil’s cannon to cause woe and destruction wherever they landed.
    Without their intrusion, this oasis turnoff beside Route I-10 in Southern California had its own beauty. A semicircular drive ran up to an artesian well, and trees had been artfully arranged to block the view of the interstate. Laurel trees made a pretty silhouette against the star-filled sky, but not when a goddamn Winnebago hunkered beneath them, square, unnatural, and spewing light from a cabin the size of the flight deck of the USS Enterprise.
    “It’s enough to make you sick,” Tubal Cain said.
    Neither Mabel nor George or whatever the hell they were called argued the point. George was equivocal on the entire subject. However, that could be expected. Speaking could be difficult with a gash the width of your thumb parting your trachea.
    For her part, Mabel was pretty verbal, but nothing she’d said up until now would change his opinion. She was too intent on screaming for her unheeding husband. Another thing: she wasn’t giving any clues to George’s actual name. She’d only refer to him as Daddy. She was obscene, like a wrinkly Lolita.
    “Aw, for crying out loud!” Cain said. “Put a lid on it, will you? How do you expect me to work with all that racket you’re making?”
    Mabel hunkered down in the kitchen compartment. She was a hunched package stuffed beneath a fold-down counter, looking like the garbage sack George had been about to drop into the bushes when Cain surprised him.
    “Daddy, Daddy! Help me, Daddy!” she screamed for about the hundredth time.
    “Daddy’s not interested,” Cain pointed out. “So you might as well shut up.”
    Daddy sat in the driving seat, surrounded by the luxury of leather and walnut. But he was of no mind to point out the lushness of his surroundings. The elderly man was currently preoccupied with trying to stem the tide of blood flowing down the front of his pullover. Chalk white, his features showed he was losing the battle.
    “Daddeeee…”
    Cain took the man’s hands away from the wound, guiding them to the steering wheel. His final earthly experience would be gripping the wheel as though with the intention of taking the Winnebago through the Pearly Gates with him.
    The knife snicked through tendons and gristle, the old man’s death grip loosened, and his hands flopped onto his thighs. Sans thumbs, his hands looked like dead squid.
    Moving toward the woman’s hiding place, Cain slipped the thumbs into a sandwich bag and dropped them in a pocket.
    “People have to learn to take their trash home with them, Mabel.” If there was anything that got his goat even more than motor homes it was the irresponsible and harmful littering George had been engaged in. Bad enough that he destroyed the picturesque beauty of the desert with this huge beast—but then he deposited its shit before he left. “Maybe if George wasn’t so indiscriminate with his garbage, I wouldn’t have had to call on you and teach you such a valuable lesson.”
    “You killed Daddy because there were no trash cans?”
    “Yes. And for his ridiculous taste in vehicles.”
    “You’re insane!” Mabel shrieked.
    “No, Mabel. I’m angry.”
    “You killed