The Gates of Babylon Read Free Page A

spooked?”
    “His name is Scorpion,” David said. “You don’t find that spooky?”
    Jacob smiled. “Would you feel better if his name were—I don’t know—Kimball, for example?”
    “I’m going to say no. But now that you mention it, are we sure he’s not?”
    “Elder Kimball has to run out of murderous sons sooner or later. Besides, this guy has a foreign accent. Spanish, I think, but it was kind of faint.”
    David said, “Any of the Kimballs in the theater? Good with foreign languages, that kind of thing? No? How about long-lostcousins of Fidel Castro?” David paused. “What did your wife say? You told her you were doing this?”
    “Not the specifics, but close enough,” Jacob said. “She doesn’t like it, of course, but Fernie is suspicious of anything that takes me out of the valley. These days, she doesn’t even like me driving to Panguitch on a drug run.”
    “That’s one worry out of the way,” David said.
    “Yes.”
    Not only had the pharmacy closed, but the entire hospital was chained and boarded with the evacuation of the town to Green River. Five weeks had passed since Jacob last filled a prescription. The elderly were running out of their cholesterol medication, their blood pressure pills, their insulin. Nobody had died yet, but it was only a matter of time unless he could get his hands on the goods.
    And then there was Jacob’s son. Yesterday, the bottle of Risperidone had an alarming rattle when Jacob gave Daniel his meds. The meds that suppressed the night terrors and visions of a dark angel. Sometimes, when Jacob looked at his son across the table, he felt like a medieval physician with his lancet and jars of leeches, while a priest in a cassock stood next to him, clutching a crucifix and muttering in Latin against the devil.
    ’Tis a corruption of the blood. Spread through the family by miasmas and unbalanced humours.
    Put that way, it sounded like nonsense, but Jacob couldn’t help wondering if there was some truth hidden beneath the pseudo-medieval jargon. Daniel Christianson was Jacob’s adopted son from Fernie’s earlier polygamist marriage. And the boy’s biological father had fathered three dead murderers—Gideon, Caleb, andTaylor Junior—each one suffering visions as a child. Paranoid schizophrenia with auditory and visual hallucinations.
    A handful of pills left in the jar. And then what?
    Jacob brooded over these worries until Stephen Paul slowed before the turnoff to Bryce about twenty minutes later, flicking his lights to illuminate the road sign at the approaching intersection. All three men glanced in rear or side mirrors to make sure the tanker truck made the turn as well.
    “Hand me the phone,” Jacob said to David.
    His brother handed it over. A man’s lightly accented voice answered on the first ring.
    “Is this Scorpion?” Jacob asked. He had a hard time not putting air quotes around the man’s nickname.
    “Where are you?”
    “Small change in plans. We’re meeting at the head of Bryce Canyon National Park. East on Twelve. Do you know it?”
    The man’s answer was low, suspicious. “You said north of Panguitch. I’m all the way up by Circleville.”
    “We’re short on fuel,” Jacob lied. “It took everything we could to fill the tanker.”
    “I can’t get there by four a.m. It’ll be four twenty at the earliest.”
    “If that’s what it takes. You’ll find us behind Ruby’s Inn.”
    The other man didn’t answer for so long that Jacob thought he’d lost the call. Even the satellite service was getting spotty these days. But at last the man grumbled that he would be there.
    They continued in silence over the darkened landscape. Once outside the valley, they had passed occasional vacation homes inthe wooded hills, dark and deserted, but twice, when they drove by ranch houses, lights turned off suddenly at their approach. An hour now and they hadn’t spotted a single vehicle on the road.
    It had been more than a year since Jacob visited