Picking the Ballad's Bones Read Free Page A

voice behind the candle
and cowl drawled. "She's one of those Certain Parties I was telling
you about but I'm not supposed to say exactly who or what they are
for fear of offending somebody's mother."
    "But if she's one of the Certain
Parties," Minda put in, "why is she helping them so
much?"
    "She's a little different from the
other Certain Parties," the cowled voice said. "For one thing,
she's not as reliable. She doesn't much care about right and wrong,
just about doing whatever she feels like at the moment. Not much on
long-range goals, doesn't care if she spreads disease, doesn't care
if she doesn't, doesn't care if what she does kills folks, and
doesn't care if it doesn't. She just likes to see what
happens."
    "Where did she get all those drugs?"
another kid wanted to know.
    "Why, son, she's got all the drugs and
all the booze and all the other mind-bending, weird-making stuff
anybody'd ever think to look for. She's the source of all of it and
the source of anybody wanting it. She makes any other drug dealer
or vice lord look like an amateur."
    "But she helped them," Minda said.
"She helped them get away, didn't she?"
    "In about the same way a cat lets a
mouse scuttle out between its paws for a while. And she was still
putting moves on ol' Willie, trying to charm the banjo away from
him just to see if she could."
     
     

CHAPTER 3
     
    The musicians followed the flight
attendant blindly since they didn't have time to figure out the
underground schedules. She herded them on and off the underground
and onto a train bound for Scotland. Gussie nearly got a stiff neck
from looking over her shoulder so much and she could tell that the
rest of them were nervous wrecks too by the time they got settled
into the little train compartment, which consisted of two long
benches across from each other in a tiny little room with windows
on one side and a door on the other. Their compartment was the last
one in the car next to the sleeping car.
    The train rolled away from the
outskirts of London through all the ugliest, most industrial parts,
dimly seen through growing daylight. How long had it been since
they'd landed? It seemed like only a few minutes and Gussie's heart
was still pitter-patting like mad, but when she asked Anna Mae Gunn
and Anna Mae checked her wristwatch, a big old man's one on a black
waterproof band buckled up to the last notch with the tip end
hacked off with scissors so it wouldn't stick out over Anna Mae's
knobby tanned wrist bones, the time was nearly six in the morning.
Daylight swarmed in on them as they stopped for five minutes every
ten minutes or so at some little podunk village with
daub-and-wattle houses that looked a lot like the ones on the PBS
mysteries Gussie used to like to watch on her nights
off.
    Brose Fairchild stared out at the
villages backed by rolling expanses of green and grunted, "Looks
just like Missouri to me. Ain't much more than a Sunday stroll to
get across the whole damn place." He rubbed his gray, red and black
steel-wool hair with both Mississippi mud-colored fists and then
rubbed his eyes as well.
    "Don't knock it," Anna Mae Gunn told
him. "We may be glad of it if we have to make a break. Not much
cover though."
    If it hadn't been for the
events of the last few months, Gussie would have thought the former
Native American rights activist was being a little overly paranoid,
but in those same months Gussie's daughter and son-in-law had been
wrongfully arrested for trying to help a Scottish musician enter
the country, after which Gussie's own house was burglarized. When
she had gone to a folk festival to raise support for the release of
her children, she had been nearly electrocuted, shot, and arrested,
in that order, before being personally hypnotized into driving
God-only-knew how many miles into the traffic jam from hell from
which she, Willie, Julianne, and a Texas lawman had barely escaped
with the help of Brose, Anna Mae, the Randolphs, a chanteyman named
Hawkins, and a few hints