Voodoo Ridge

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It rained that night as if Noah and his ark were making a comeback. The first real blast of winter. Sleet whipped in cold and hard off the Pacific, pelting the runway at Santa Paula and raking the corrugated metal roof of watchman Herm Hoversten’s security shack like machine-gun fire. Not that Hoversten noticed, slumped at his desk, porcine nose bent sideways, drool pooling around his splayed marshmallow lips, fast asleep.

He was a doughy man who’d served briefly in the army, long enough for physicians to diagnose that his snoring through reveille each morning had less to do with draftee malingering than some severe, narcoleptic affliction rarely seen before. Granted a medical discharge and excused from combat duty in Korea, Hoversten soon landed the perfect job for the perfectly lethargic, surrounded by citrus groves, guarding a civilian airfield nearly as comatose as he was.

Not even when the door to the shack cracked open and the wind came howling in loud as a jet engine did he awaken. Only after the stranger booted him off his rickety swivel chair and onto the plywood floor did Hoversten come to. Don’t Be Cruel, the new tune from that boy from Mississippi with the lips and the hips, the one all the girls were so nutty about, was playing on the radio. The stranger turned it off. He was wearing a dark woolen watch cap. The left sleeve of his navy peacoat dripped blood. In his right hand was a gun.

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