The Hammer of Eden Read Free

longer like an hourglass: she weighed a hundred and eighty pounds. But she still exercised an extraordinary sexual magnetism. When she walked into a bar, men stared.
    Even now, when she was worried and hot, there was a sexy flounce to the way she paced and turned beside the cheap old car, an invitation in the movement of her flesh beneath the thin cotton dress, and Priest felt the urge to grab her right there.
    “What happened?” she said as soon as he was within earshot.
    Priest was always upbeat. “Looking good,” he said.
    “That sounds bad,” she said skeptically. She knew better than to take what he said at face value.
    He told her the offer he had made to Mario. “The beauty of it is, Mario will be blamed,” he added.
    “How so?”
    “Think about it. He gets to Lubbock, he looks for me, I ain’t there, nor his truck, either. He figures he’s been suckered. What does he do? Is he going to make his way to Clovis and tell the company he lost their truck? I don’t think so. At best, he’d be fired. At worst, he could be accused of stealing the truck and thrown in jail. I’m betting he won’teven go to Clovis. He’ll get right back on the plane, fly to El Paso, put his wife and kids in the car, and disappear. Then the police will be sure he stole the truck. And Ricky Granger won’t even be a suspect.”
    She frowned. “It’s a great plan, but will he take the bait?”
    “I think he will.”
    Her anxiety deepened. She slapped the dirty roof of the car with the flat of her hand. “Shit, we have to have that goddamn truck!”
    He was as worried as she, but he covered it with a cocksure air. “We will,” he said. “If not this way, another way.”
    She put the straw hat on her head and leaned back against the car, closing her eyes. “I wish I felt sure.”
    He stroked her cheek. “You need a ride, lady?”
    “Yes, please. Take me to my air-conditioned hotel room.”
    “There’ll be a price to pay.”
    She opened her eyes wide in pretended innocence. “Will I have to do something nasty, mister?”
    He slid his hand into her cleavage. “Yeah.”
    “Oh, darn,” she said, and she lifted the skirt of her dress up around her waist.
    She had no underwear on.
    Priest grinned and unbuttoned his Levis.
    She said: “What will Mario think if he sees us?”
    “He’ll be jealous,” Priest said as he entered her. They were almost the same height, and they fit together with the ease of long practice.
    She kissed his mouth.
    A few moments later he heard a vehicle approaching on the road. They both looked up without stopping what they were doing. It was a pickup truck with three roustabouts in the front seat. The men could see what was going on, and they whooped and hollered through the open window as they went by.
    Star waved at them, calling: “Hi, guys!”
    Priest laughed so hard, he came.
    *  *  *
    The crisis had entered its final, decisive phase exactly three weeks earlier.
    They were sitting at the long table in the cookhouse, eating their midday meal, a spicy stew of lentils and vegetables with fresh bread warm from the oven, when Paul Beale walked in with an envelope in his hand.
    Paul bottled the wine that Priest’s commune made—but he did more than that. He was their link with the outside, enabling them to deal with the world yet keep it at a distance. A bald, bearded man in a leather jacket, he had been Priest’s friend since the two of them were fourteen-year-old hoodlums, rolling drunks in L.A.’s skid row in the early sixties.
    Priest guessed that Paul had received the letter that morning and had immediately got in his car and driven here from Napa. He also guessed what was in the letter, but he waited for Paul to explain.
    “It’s from the Bureau of Land Management,” Paul said. “Addressed to Stella Higgins.” He handed it to Star, sitting at the foot of the table opposite Priest. Stella Higgins was her real name, the name under which she had first rented this piece of land from