Solomon Creed

9

— Mrs Coronado?

Holly Coronado stared down at her husband’s coffin, a couple of handfuls of dry sand and stones scattered across the pine lid.

— There’s a fire blowing this way, Mrs Coronado, and I been called away to help.

When the stones had first fallen on to the boards the sound of the larger pebbles had seemed hollow to her. They had made her think, for a flickering moment, that maybe the coffin was actually empty and all this some kind of elaborate historical re-enactment they had forgotten to tell her about.

— I’m supposed to stick around until after everyone’s gone.

The coffin had not been her idea. Neither had the venue.

— I’m supposed to fill in the grave, Mrs Coronado. Only they need me back in town … because of the fire.

She had only gone along with everything because she was numb from grief, or shock, or both, and knew that Jim would have loved the idea of being buried up here next to all the grim-faced pioneers and salty outlaws no one outside Redemption had ever heard of.

— I’m going to have to come back and finish up later, OK?

Jim had loved this town, all its history and legends. All the earnest foundations upon which it had been built.

— Maybe you should come back with me, Mrs Coronado. I can drop you back home, if you like.

He had told her about the strange little town in the desert the very first time she’d met him at that freshman mixer at the University of Chicago Law School. She remembered the light that had come into his eyes when he talked about where he was from. She was from a nondescript suburb of St Louis so a town in the desert in the shadow of red mountains seemed romantic and exciting to her — and so had he.

— Mrs Coronado? You OK, Mrs Coronado?’

She turned and studied the earnest, sinewy young man in dusty green overalls. He held a battered starter cap in his hands and was wringing the life out of it in a mixture of awkwardness and respect, his short, honey-coloured hair flopping forward over skin the same colour.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

‘Billy. Billy Walker.’

‘Do you have a shovel, Billy?’

A line creased his forehead below the mark his cap had made. ‘Excuse me?’

‘A shovel, do you have one?’

He shook his head as it dawned on him where this was headed. ‘You don’t need to … I mean, I’ll come straight back and finish up here after.’

‘When? When will you come back?’

He looked away down the valley to where a moving wall of smoke was creeping across a large chunk of the desert. ‘Soon as the fire’s under control, I guess.’

‘What if you’re dead?’ The crease deepened in his forehead. ‘What if the whole town burns up and you along with it — who will come back and bury my husband then? You suppose I should just leave him here for the animals?’

‘No, ma’am. Guess not.’

‘People make all sorts of plans, Billy. All sorts of promises that don’t get kept. I planned on being married to the man in that box until we were old and grey. But I also promised I would get up out of bed this morning and comb my hair and fix my face and come up here to give my husband a decent burial. So that’s what I’m fixing to do. And a shovel would sure help me keep that particular promise.’

Billy stared down at the twisted cap in his hands, opened his mouth to say something then closed it again, turned around and loped away down the hill to where his truck was parked in the shade of the large cottonwood in the centre of the graveyard. Tools bristled from a barrel in the back and a solid, ugly bulldog sat behind the wheel, ears pricked forward. It was watching the smoke rising up from the valley. It didn’t even move when Billy jumped on to the flat bed and set the springs rocking, just kept its eyes on the distant fire, its tongue lolling wetly from its mouth.

The smoke filled almost a third of the sky now and continued to spread like a black veil being slowly drawn across the day. Vehicles and people were starting to congregate by the billboard at the edge of town, black dots against the orange roadside dust. A few weeks ago Jim would have been right at the centre of it, organizing the effort, leading the charge to save the town, risking his life, if that’s what it took. And in the end, that’s exactly what it had taken.

Holly heard boots hurry up the hill then stop a few feet short of where she was standing. ‘I could drop you back home,’ he said, talking to his feet rather than to her. ‘I’ll come back before sundown to finish up here, I promise.’

‘Give me the shovel, Billy.’

He held the shovel up and examined the blade. It looked new, the polished-steel surface catching the sun as he turned it.

‘If you don’t give me the damn thing, I’ll bury my husband with my bare hands.’

He shook his head like he was disappointed or maybe just defeated. ‘Don’t feel right,’ he said. Then he flipped the shovel over and jabbed it into the dirt like a spear. ‘Just leave it round here someplace,’ he said, turning away and hurrying down the hill. ‘I’ll fetch it later.’

Holly waited until the noise of his engine faded, allowing the softer sounds of nature and the empty cemetery to creep back in. She stood for a long while, listening to the cord slapping against the flagpole by the entrance, the Arizona state flag fluttering at half-mast, the wind humming in the power lines that looped away down the hill. She wondered how many widows had stood here like her and listened to these same lonely sounds.

‘Well, here we are, Jimbo,’ she whispered to the wind. ‘Alone at last.’

The last time they’d been up here together was for a campaign photo-op about two or three months previously. They had not been alone back then; there had been a handful of other people — press, photographers. She had stood here by his side, framed by the grave markers with the town spread out below them while he outlined his plans for its future, not realizing he wouldn’t be around to see it.

She walked over to a mound of dirt set to one side of the grave. She grabbed the edge of the stone-coloured sheet of canvas covering it and started dragging it off, stumbling as her heels sank into the ground and her tailored dress restricted the movement of her legs. She had bought it for his investiture, a little black number designed to be classy but not too showy to draw attention away from her handsome husband, the real star of the show. It was the only black dress she owned.

She stumbled again and nearly fell, the tight dress making it hard to keep balance.

‘SHIT!’ she shouted into the silence. ‘SHIT FUCKING SHIT.’

She kicked her shoes off, sending her heels sailing away through the air. One skittered to rest against the sword cluster of an agave plant, the other bounced off a painted board that marked the final resting place of one J.J. James, died of sweats, 1882.

She grabbed the hem of her dress either side of the seam and wrenched it apart with a loud rip. She was never going to wear it again; no amount of dressing it up with a new scarf or belt was ever going to accessorize away this memory. She gave it another yank and it tore all the way up to her thigh. She planted her bare feet wide apart and felt the heat of the earth beneath them. It felt good to be free of the constricting dress and the heels. She felt more like herself. She grabbed the shovel and stabbed the blade into the pile of dirt, the muscles in her arms and shoulders straining against the weight of it as she heaved back and tipped it in the hole.

Dry earth whumped down on the wooden lid of her husband’s coffin.

Wood. Fifth anniversary is wood. Jim had told her that.

They had spent their first anniversary here in this town, a break from study so he could show her the place where he hoped to be sheriff one day. He had introduced her to everyone, taken her dancing at the band hall where everyone knew him, taken her riding in the desert, where they’d made love on a blanket by a fire beneath the stars like there was nothing else but him and her and they were the only two people on earth. She had bought him a tin star from one of the souvenir shops and given it to him as a present, a toy sheriff’s badge until he got a real one.

First anniversary is paper — he had told her with a smile — tin is what you give on the tenth.

She had always loved it that he knew stuff like that, silly romantic stuff that was all the more sweet and surprising coming from the mouth of such a big guy’s guy like he was — like he had been.

He never got to pin the real badge on, and the gift of wood she ended up getting him for their fifth anniversary was a pine box lying at the bottom of a six-foot hole.

She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand and it came away wet.

God dammit. She had promised herself she was not going to cry. At least there was no one around to see it. She didn’t want to give them the satisfaction. She didn’t want to give them a damned thing, not after they had taken so much already.

She remembered the last time she had seen Jim alive, sitting behind his desk in his office at home, looking as if he had been crying.

I need to fix this — was all he would tell her. The town needs fixing.

Then he had stuffed some papers in his case and driven off into the evening. But it had been Mayor Cassidy who had driven back, knocking on her door at three in the morning to deliver the news personally, his words full of meaning but empty at the same time.

Tragic accident … So sorry for your loss … Anything the town can do … Anything at all …

She hauled another shovel-load into the grave, then another, numbing herself against her sorrow and anger through the real physical pain of burying her husband. And with every shovelful of earth she whispered a prayer, but not for her dead love. The prayer she offered up, as tears smeared her face and the smell of smoke drifted up from the desert below, was that the wildfire was actually a judgment, sent by some higher power to sweep right through the town and burn the whole damned place to the ground.

Anything the town can do — Cassidy had said, his hat in his hands and his eyes cast down. Anything at all.

They could all die and burn in hell.

That was what they could do for her.

10

‘How did he die?’ Solomon kept his voice calm but he felt like howling and breaking something. His frustration was like a physical thing, a storm raging inside him, a stone weighing him down. Being confined in the tin can of the ambulance wasn’t helping.

‘Car wreck,’ Morgan said, his eyes still looking up and out of the side window towards the slopes of the mountains. ‘He was driving late at night, fell asleep at the wheel or maybe swerved to avoid something and ended up in a ravine. Bashed his head and cracked his skull. He was dead by the time we found him.’

Dead by the time I found him too …

Solomon stared past Morgan and out of the window. The town was starting to rise from the desert in scraps of broken fence and crooked shacks with rusted tin roofs or no roofs at all. None of it seemed familiar. ‘Where are all the people?’

‘Oh, those are the old miner’s houses,’ Morgan said. ‘They keep it like this for atmosphere, I guess, a curtain-raiser for the tourists before they get to Main Street. Most people live around the centre nowadays.’

A large sign whipped past — old-style lettering telling travellers they were now entering ‘The Historic Old Town of Redemption’ — and the place came suddenly to life. Pastel houses were lined up in neat rows behind white-painted picket fences along well-paved roads. A Wells Fargo wagon stood beneath the shade of a cottonwood tree, the horses tethered by their reins to a wooden rail running along a trough filled with water from an old-fashioned pump. They were twitching their heads, spooked by the smoke blowing their way and anxious to run from it. Solomon knew how they felt. He wanted to run too, away from the fire, away from this town and this strange feeling of responsibility to a man who was already dead.

‘Did James Coronado have family?’ he asked.

‘Holly,’ Gloria said, fixing a dressing over the burn mark on his arm. ‘His wife.’

‘Holly Coronado,’ Solomon repeated. ‘Maybe I should talk to her.’

Morgan shook his head. ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’

‘Why not?’

‘She just buried her husband. She’ll want to be left alone, I should imagine.’

‘She might know who I am.’

Morgan shifted in his seat like it had suddenly become uncomfortable. ‘She should be left alone, time like this.’

Solomon cocked his head to one side. ‘It’s an odd custom, don’t you think, to abandon people when they are at their loneliest? If her husband knew me, then she might know me too. And she might be glad to see an old friend.’

‘I can run a check on your name, if you want,’ Morgan said, fishing his phone from his pocket, ‘see if anything comes up.’

Solomon wondered why Morgan seemed reluctant to let him talk to this woman. It made him want to talk to her even more. He watched as he dialled a number then fixed him with a level stare as he waited for someone to answer.

‘Hey, Rollins, it’s Morgan. Run a name for me, would ya — Solomon Creed.’ He glanced down at the book, used the inscription to spell out the name, then looked back up. ‘He’s about six feet tall, mid-to-late twenties, Caucasian — and by that I mean white: white skin, white hair.’ He nodded. ‘Yeah, like an al-bino.’ He split the word up and stretched it out, in the same way that he might say neee-gro. ‘No, I’ll wait. Run it through NCIC, see if you get anything.’

Solomon felt the ball of anxiety expand in his stomach a little. The NCIC was the National Crime Information Centre. Morgan was checking to see if he had a criminal record or was wanted on any outstanding warrants. And the fact that Solomon knew what NCIC stood for suggested to him that he might.

He looked down at himself, his white skin glowing under the bright lights, no pigment, no marks at all except for the ‘I’ branded on his arm, now hidden beneath a dressing. A blank page of a man. He crossed his arms in front of himself, feeling vulnerable and exposed with his shirt off.

The ambulance turned off the main road and a huge white building filled the ambulance with reflected light. Solomon narrowed his eyes and peered through the rear windows at the church, far too large for such a small town, its copper-clad spire needling its way up into the desert sky. He felt it tug at him, as if he recognized it, though he couldn’t say for sure. Morgan had said the cross he wore round his neck was a replica of the one on the altar, and he felt a strong urge to slip out of the straps that held his legs and break out of the ambulance so he could run to it and see for himself.

‘Yeah, I’m here.’ Morgan nodded and listened. ‘OK, thanks.’ He hung up. ‘Well, Mr Creed,’ he said, tucking the book back into the folded jacket pocket. ‘You’ll be pleased to learn that you are not in the criminal database.’

He sounded vaguely disappointed and Solomon was too, a little. At least if he had been in it he would have more of an idea who he was.

The ambulance slowed, turned off the road and pulled up in front of a large stone building. Gloria handed Solomon his shirt and moved with practised speed, pushing past Morgan to the rear doors to throw them open in an explosion of sunlight and heat. She turned back and released the lock holding the gurney in place and the other medic appeared beside her, ready to pull Solomon out of the ambulance.

‘I can walk,’ Solomon said, slipping his arms into the shirt.

‘You can’t,’ Gloria said. ‘It’s hospital policy. Sit back.’

The driver tugged hard and the gurney slid out of the ambulance with Solomon still lying on it. The steel legs rattled as they unfolded and the sunlight made him screw his eyes shut. ‘I’m not hurt,’ he said, squinting up at copper letters spelling out KING COMMUNITY HOSPITAL across the facade of the building.

‘Sir, you are injured and you have amnesia.’

‘How was my PERL test?’ Solomon said, covering his eyes with his arm.

‘It was … How did— do you have medical training?’

‘Possibly. My pupils are both equal and reactive to light?’ They were certainly reacting to the light now.

‘Yes.’

‘Then I don’t need to go to the hospital.’ He reached forward to undo the straps holding his legs in place, swung his legs free and down to the ground. The moment his bare feet touched the ground he felt calmer.

The driver moved forward and Solomon pulled the gurney between them and stepped out of reach. He wanted to run and get away from these people but he couldn’t. Not yet. Morgan climbed down from the ambulance, the jacket dangling from his hand, the book sticking out from the pocket. ‘Why don’t you just go with these people and let them run their tests,’ he said. ‘Better safe than sorry.’

Safe. Interesting word. Safe from whom. Safe from what?

‘My jacket,’ Solomon said, holding his hand out.

Morgan held it up. ‘You want this? Go with these people and you can—’

Solomon darted forward, shoving the gurney at Morgan in a loud clatter that made him flinch. He instinctively reached out and the jacket swung close enough for Solomon to snatch it. He had moved clear again before Morgan even realized what was happening.

‘I don’t need to go to the hospital,’ Solomon repeated, slipping his arms into the jacket and backing away from the gurney, and the people, and whatever they wanted to do to him. ‘I need to go to church.’

11

Mayor Cassidy closed the door of his study, shrugged off his jacket and let it fall to the floor. He stood in the downdraft of the ceiling-fan, pulling his string tie loose and undoing the top button of his shirt. His collar was soaked with sweat.

The funeral had turned into a disaster, his big unifying gesture undone at a stroke by the whiff of wildfire. Everyone had drifted away before the ceremony had ended; a few at first, then a stampede as soon as the sounds of sirens had reached them and they’d seen how fast the smoke was rising and which way it was headed. They all had homes and businesses to worry about, so he couldn’t blame them, but it wasn’t exactly the gesture of community support he had hoped for. There was also the little matter of what might have started the fire, and he didn’t even want to think about that.

His phone buzzed in his pocket and his heart clenched in his chest like a hand had taken hold of it and begun to squeeze. He looked down at the crumpled jacket, the black material shivering where the phone vibrated inside it like some large insect had crawled in there and was now trying to get out. There was a small hole in the fabric and the sight of it made him burn with anger. Damn moths, the house was plagued with them. There had been a Cassidy living in this house ever since Jack Cassidy had built it and now it was all being eaten away, pulled apart fibre by fibre, everything unravelling. He felt embarrassed knowing that he had stood in front of the assembled town with a hole in his jacket — their shabby, moth-eaten mayor.

The phone stopped buzzing and silence surged back into his study. It could have been anybody calling. There was a wildfire burning on the edge of town, all kinds of people would be trying to get hold of him, wanting him to lead, wanting him to reassure them, wanting — something. Everyone wanted something, but there was no one there for him. Not any more.

He glanced over at the photograph on his desk of Stella in the garden standing under one of the jacaranda trees, Stella with the sun glowing in her long hair, taken about a year before the cancer wore her away to nothing and took her hair along with everything else. He still missed her, six years after he had stood over her grave, and never more than in these last few months when he had badly needed someone to talk to and share the burden of all he’d had to bear, someone to tell him that it was OK to do a bad thing for a good enough reason, and that God would understand.

The phone buzzed again at his feet, like the last effort of a dying insect, then fell silent again.

He tipped his head back and let the cool air wash over him. He felt done in. Defeated. He wanted to lie down on the floor next to his crumpled jacket and go to sleep, close his eyes on his crumbling, moth-eaten world and slide away into blissful oblivion. He half-wished he were a drinking man so he could grab a bottle and disappear into it. But he was a Cassidy and his name was written across half the buildings in town. And Cassidys did not drink, nor did they lie down on floors and close their eyes to their responsibilities. And this was his responsibility, all of it — the town, the people, the widow he’d left standing alone by her husband’s grave, the fire out in the desert — everything. He was trapped here, bound by blood, and by the name he carried, and by the generations of bones lying buried in the ground.

He looked up at the portrait hanging above the great stone fireplace, Jack Cassidy’s eyes staring sternly back at him across a hundred years of history as if to say, I didn’t build this town from nothing only for you to run away and let it die.

‘I’ve got this,’ Cassidy whispered to his ancestor. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

The desk phone rang, sharp and sudden, its old brass bell cutting right through the silence. It echoed off the oak panelling and leather-bound books lining the walls. Cassidy plucked his jacket from the floor, slipped his arms into the sleeves and stepped out from beneath the cool flow of air. It made him feel more official, wearing the jacket, and he felt he would need authority for whatever conversation he was about to have. He took a deep breath as if he was about to dive into one of the cold-water lakes up in the mountains and snatched the phone from its cradle.

‘Cassidy.’ His voice sounded as though it was coming from a long way off.

‘It’s Morgan.’

Cassidy collapsed into his chair with relief at the police chief’s voice. ‘How bad is it?’

‘Bad. It’s the plane.’

Cassidy closed his eyes. Nodded. The moment he’d seen the smoke rising he’d feared this. ‘Listen,’ he said, naturally easing into command. ‘I’ll call our associate, tell him what happened here. We’ll work something out, some sort of compensation. Accidents happen. Planes crash. I’m sure he’ll understand. I’m sure he’ll …’

‘No,’ Morgan said. ‘He won’t. Money won’t work here.’

Cassidy blinked. Not used to being contradicted. ‘He’s a businessman. Things go wrong in business all the time and when that happens there has to be some form of restitution. That’s all I’m talking about here. Restitution.’

‘You don’t understand,’ Morgan said. ‘Nothing can make up for what happened here. There is no amount of money that can fix this, trust me. We need to come up with another plan. I’m not going to talk about this on the phone. I need to head back out to the fire, but I’ll swing by your office first. Don’t move and don’t call anyone, OK — not until we’ve talked.’

12

Mulcahy eased off the highway on to the up ramp of the Best Western.

They were driving through Globe, a mining town that had seen better days and was clinging on in hope that it might see them again.

Javier kissed his teeth with his oversized lips and shook his head at the grey concrete-and-brick motel complex. ‘This it? This the best you could manage?’

Mulcahy drove slowly round the one-way system then swung into a parking bay outside a room he had checked into the previous night under an assumed name. He had avoided all the independents and franchises because he didn’t want some over-attentive owner manager giving him that extra bit of service you didn’t get from the chains. He didn’t want good service and he didn’t want the personal touch, he wanted the impersonal touch and some bored desk clerk on minimum wage who would hand over the room key without glancing up from their phone when he checked in.

He cut the engine and took the keys out of the ignition. ‘Give me five minutes, then follow me inside.’

‘Five minutes? The fuck we got to wait five minutes for?’

‘Because a white guy entering a room on his own, no one notices. A white guy and two Mexicans, everyone notices because it looks like a drug deal is going down and somebody might call the cops.’ He opened his door and felt the dry heat of the day flood in. ‘So give me the five minutes, OK?’

He got out and slammed the door before Javier had a chance to say anything then walked over to a solid grey door with 22 on it. With the engine and air switched off it would become stifling in the car fast. He’d give them maybe three minutes before they followed him in. Three minutes was all he needed.

He unlocked the door and opened it on to a dim, depressing room with two lumpy beds and an old style wooden-clad TV. There was a kitchenette in back leading to a bathroom — the standard layout of pretty much every motel he’d ever stayed in.

He pulled his phone from his pocket, checked the WiFi connection then opened a Skype application, selected ‘Home’ in the contacts and raised it to his ear.

A coffin of an A/C unit rattled noisily beneath the window, moving the grey sheer curtain above it and filling the room with cool air and the smell of mildew. Outside Mulcahy could see the Cherokee with the outline of Javier in the front seat. A dark blue Buick Verano was parked next to it, covered with a fine desert dust that spoke of the miles it had travelled to end up in this nowhere hub of a place. Salesman’s car.

The phone connected and Mulcahy’s own voice told him he wasn’t home. ‘Hey, Pop, if you’re there, pick up.’

He listened. Waited. Nothing. He hung up, found a new contact and dialled.

His old man had driven a Buick when he’d worked the roads, hawking office supplies then pharmaceuticals all over the Midwest. Mulcahy must have been only, what, ten or eleven at the time? Mom had been long gone, so it can’t have been much earlier. His pop would get him to wash and wax the car every Sunday afternoon in exchange for five bucks that had to last him through the week. He would drive him to school in the shiny car on a Monday morning then take off, heading for different states and places that sounded exotic to an eleven-year-old kid who didn’t know any better: Oklahoma City; Des Moines; Shakopee; Omaha; Kansas City. His old man would always come back late on a Friday, pick him up from his aunt’s or, later on when it was clear Mom wasn’t coming back, some girlfriend or other, and the Buick would always be covered in dust, exactly like the Verano parked outside.

The phone connected, his dad’s voice this time. ‘Leave a message. I’ll call you.’

‘Pop, it’s me. Listen, if you’re not at the house then stay away. Don’t go back there for a while, OK? Call me when you get this. Everything’s fine, just … call me.’

He hung up. Everything was not fine. This was not how it was supposed to go. Someone had changed the script and now his father was missing. He checked the time. Tío would be wondering why he hadn’t called. Most likely he already knew. He should have told his father to go on a trip, get him out of the way, in case something like this happened, only Tío’s men would have been watching and they would have grabbed him anyway. About a year back one of Tío’s lieutenants had been turned by the Federales. He’d promised to give them a large shipment and several key players in Tío’s organization in exchange for immunity and a new life. The day before the shipment, the lieutenant had sent all his family away somewhere — and Tío had been watching. The Federales found the lieutenant and his whole family a week later, lined up and headless in a ditch along the border. The message was clear: I am watching. You will be loyal or you will be dead, and so will anyone you hold dear. So Mulcahy had left his father where he was. And now the plane had crashed and he couldn’t get hold of him and everything was fucked and he had to un-fuck it and fast.

Sunlight flashed on the passenger window of the Cherokee as Javier threw it open and escaped from the oven of its interior. He looked furious. Carlos got out too, head down, eyes jumping. They shambled towards the door, doing the most piss-poor impersonation of two people trying not to look suspicious Mulcahy had ever seen. He selected a new contact from the Skype menu and raised the phone back to his ear just as a heavy knock thudded on the other side of it.

‘It’s open,’ he called out and Javier burst in.

‘The fuck’s up with that, leaving us out in the car like a pair of motherfuckin’ dogs?’

The phone clicked as it connected. ‘Tío,’ he said, as calmly as he could manage but loud enough for Javier to hear. ‘It’s Mulcahy.’

Javier stopped dead in the doorway, so suddenly that Carlos bumped into him from behind.

‘There was a problem at the pick-up.’ Mulcahy was looking at Javier but talking into the phone. ‘The plane never showed. We didn’t collect the package. We don’t have your son.’

13

Solomon walked quickly, keeping to the shadows of the boardwalk and out of the sun, feeling the warm, worn timbers beneath the soles of his bare feet. He didn’t look back at the hospital. He would hear if anyone was following him.

He took deep breaths to try to calm himself, and smelled the town all around him, paint and dust and tarpaper and decay. He felt calmer now he was out of the confines of the ambulance with its sickening movement.

Why did he dislike confinement and crave freedom so strongly?

Maybe he had been incarcerated, even though he hadn’t shown up on the NCIC. Perhaps he had been imprisoned another way.

Ahead of him the church glowed, as if lit from within, and towered over the surrounding buildings: a town hall; a museum; and a grand house partly visible behind a screen of jacaranda trees, its roof clad in copper like the church and similarly aged, suggesting it had been built at the same time. The rest of the buildings making up the street and lining the boardwalk were all variations on the same theme, souvenir shops selling the same things: flakes of gold and copper floating in snow globes; treasure maps with ‘Lost Cassidy Riches’ written on them in old-style block letters; T-shirts with the name of the town printed in a similar style; and Jack Cassidy’s memoir stacked high in every window.

Solomon pulled his own copy from his pocket and flicked through the pages, hungry to see what else was written inside, hoping something might spark a new memory. Apart from the dedication the only other thing he found was a single passage at the end of the book that had been underlined:

More secrets, but none that interested him. He turned back to the dedication and studied the handwriting, neat and smooth and written with a wide-nibbed pen. It appeared formal and old, but he didn’t recognize it. Maybe there were clues in the printed words. He flicked to the first page and started to read:

He carried on reading, sucking in Jack Cassidy’s story as fast as he could turn the pages, his head filling with all the images and horrors Jack Cassidy had encountered on his odyssey through the desert. The memoir was ninety pages long and he had finished it by the time he was halfway to the church. He turned to the photo on the cover again and wondered why James Coronado might have given this book to him. Perhaps he hadn’t. Perhaps he wasn’t even Solomon Creed. Except he felt that he was. The name fit and so did the jacket. That had his name in it too.

He slipped the book in his jacket and read the label stitched inside his pocket: Ce costume a été fait au trésor pour M. Solomon Creed — This suit was made to treasure for Mr Solomon Creed.

This suit …

So where was the rest of it? Why did he only have the jacket? Where were his shoes? And how in Jesus’s name could he read French? How could he read English so fast, for that matter?

‘Je suis Solomon Creed,’ he said, and the language felt comfortable in his mouth, his accent smooth and slightly thick and syrupy — southern French, not northern Parisian.

Southern French! How did he even know that? How could he speak French and know the origin of his accent and yet have no memory of learning it or speaking it before or of ever being in France. How much of himself had he lost?

Some smaller writing was stitched on the edge of the label: Fabriqué 13, Rue Obscure, Cordes-sur-Ciel, Tarn.

The Tarn. Southwestern France. Cathar country. Formed in 1790 after the French Revolution. Capital Albi. Birthplace of Toulouse-Lautrec. Fine medieval cathedral there, larger even than the church he was now walking towards. Built of brick not stone.

He hit himself on the side of the head to silence the noise.

‘Shut up,’ he said aloud, realizing how mad he would appear to anyone watching. He looked around. No one was. Maybe he was genuinely mad, some delusional freak with an equally freakish mind: all this information tumbling through it like white noise and none of it any use.

‘I am a crazy man.’ He stated it, as if admission might be the first step towards cure. He said it again, then repeated it in French, Russian, German, Spanish, Arabic. He hit himself on the head again, harder this time, desperate to make it all stop or coalesce into something useful. He needed to tune out the noise and focus only on the concrete things that might help him remember who he was, the things that bound him to his forgotten past — the suit, the book, the cross around his neck. Physical things. Undeniable.

He reached the end of the boardwalk, stepped out of the shadows and into the stinging heat of the sun. The church was even more impressive up close, its spire forcing his eyes up to heaven, the way ecclesiastical architecture was designed to do.

Know your place, it seemed to murmur. Know that you are insignificant and God is almighty.

There was a large sign planted in the ground beside a pathway leading up to the church with CHURCH OF LOST COMMANDMENTS written across it in copper-coloured letters, a reference to something he’d read in Jack Cassidy’s memoir.

He continued past the sign and down the pathway towards the church. There was a fountain over to one side with a split boulder at the centre and marks on it showing where water had once flowed over the stones. He recognized this from the memoir too — water coming from a split stone, a miracle out in the desert commemorated here by a fountain that was no longer running.

He drew closer to the door and saw words cut into the stone above it, the first of the lost commandments the church had been named for:

It reminded him of the ‘No Guns’ sign he’d seen outside the old saloon on the outskirts of town; no firearms allowed there, no other belief systems allowed here. His eyes lingered on the carved numeral, the same mark he carried on his arm. Maybe it was not an ‘I’ but a number. Or maybe it was nothing at all and the church would hold no answers for him.

‘Let’s see, shall we?’ he whispered, then passed into the cool, shadowy relief of the entrance and through the door into one of the oddest churches he had ever set foot in.

14

Cassidy sat behind the oak expanse of his desk, mouth slack, eyes staring up at Morgan. When the doctors had told him Stella’s cancer had not responded to treatment and she had only weeks to live, it had felt exactly like this, as if the oxygen had been sucked out of the room and what was left was difficult to breathe.

‘Ramon,’ he said, repeating the name Morgan had just given him.

Morgan nodded. ‘Ramon Alvarado. Tío’s son.’

‘But — what was he … I mean, why was he on the plane?’

Morgan shrugged. ‘Some trouble south of the border. He needed a fast ride out of Mexico. I didn’t ask for the details.’

Cassidy stared out of the tall window of his study and down the avenue of jacaranda trees that framed the church beyond the wall. Above the roof he could see smoke rising out in the desert. That’s what had been filling his mind until Morgan had told him what had caused the fire. Now it seemed the very least of his worries.

‘But why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I didn’t think you needed to know.’

‘You didn’t think I … but this has … Tío’s son!! Don’t you think you should have run it by me?’

‘It was a last-minute thing. I got a call. I made a decision.’

‘You made a decision?’

‘I didn’t have a choice, all right? When someone like Tío calls and asks for a favour, he’s not really asking. What would you have done different? Said, “Sorry to hear your son’s in trouble, but we’re not going to help you”? Don’t start blaming me for this. I didn’t make the damn plane crash.’

Cassidy rose from his chair and started pacing. ‘We need to do everything we can to speed up the crash investigation,’ he said. ‘Get proof that it was an accident.’

‘What if it wasn’t?’

Cassidy glared at him like he had suggested the earth was flat. ‘Of course it was an accident.’

Morgan took his phone from his pocket and stepped into the room. ‘When I went out to the crash site I nearly ran this guy down.’ He held the phone out.

Cassidy took his reading glasses from the desk and the photo on the screen came into focus as he put them on. It had been taken from inside Morgan’s car, the air outside filled with grit that softened the image, though the figure of the man standing at the centre was clear. He seemed to shine in the sunlight, his face gazing up at something the photograph did not show. ‘Who’s that?’

‘Says he can’t remember, but the label in his jacket says he’s called Solomon Creed.’ He swiped the screen and the picture changed. ‘He also got this on his arm.’

Cassidy looked at the livid red mark upon the man’s skin then at Morgan for an explanation.

‘Looks like a kill tag to me,’ Morgan obliged. ‘Cartel hit men get them to show they’ve clipped someone important. Usually they’re tattoos, but sometimes they cut themselves or brand themselves, like this.’

Cassidy looked back down at the photo as he realized what Morgan was suggesting. ‘You think this guy might have …’

‘Shot the plane down? Maybe. Say he knocked it out with some missile, got caught in the blast, banged his head and now can’t remember who he is. Or maybe he knows exactly who he is and just isn’t saying. The cartels use some pretty unusual characters as gunmen south of the border — gives the norteños something to sing about. So I don’t think the notion of an albino being used as a hit man is beyond the realm of possibility. They’re superstitious about albinos down there anyways. Hell, they’re superstitious about everything. They think the white skin shows they got divine power, like they’ve been touched by God or something. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that he might have done it. He was there, he was running away from the crash, he even said the fire was there because of him, and he’s got this mark on his arm. It’s all circumstantial, but we don’t need it to hold up in a court of law, we only need Tío to buy it. Someone is going to have to pay for his son’s death — and I don’t mean offer him cash, say “sorry” and hope everything’s going to go away. Blood will have to pay for blood here, so that’s what we have to give him. We give him this guy. We give him Solomon Creed.’

Cassidy swiped the screen and stared hard at the picture of the pale man standing on the desert road. Then he shook his head and handed the phone back. ‘I think I should talk to Tío first, try for a diplomatic solution before we start … throwing human sacrifices at him. We don’t even know who this guy is. Have you run an ID check?’

‘He’s not on the NCIC.’

‘That only proves he’s not a criminal. What about the missing persons channels — DMV, Social Security?’

‘What’s the point?’

‘The point is we’re talking about a man’s life here.’

‘No. The point is we’re talking about several people’s lives, including yours and mine. We’re talking about the survival of this town. I don’t want to know who this guy is. I don’t need to know. But I’ll tell you something else: he had a copy of Jack Cassidy’s memoir in his pocket, personally inscribed to him from Jim Coronado.’

Cassidy felt the blood drain from him. ‘You think he knew Jim?’

‘He says he can’t remember, but when I asked him about the book he said he felt like he was here because of Jim. He said he thought he was here to save him.’

‘Jesus. He said that?’

Morgan nodded. ‘Asked me how he died and whether he could talk to Holly. So, whichever way you chop it up, this guy is a potential problem for us. Or maybe he’s not. Maybe he’s actually a solution. The way I figure it, Tío’s going to find out about him sooner or later, which means he’s a dead man whatever we do or don’t do. So if we give him up, we win ourselves some loyalty points and hopefully cut ourselves some slack. And we no longer have to worry about what his connection to Jim may have been and whether that might turn into another problem for us.’

Cassidy felt sick about what they were discussing. He gazed back up at the stern portrait of his ancestor. He had always felt like the Reverend Jack was looking down on him, judging him and how he was running the town he had built. He had faced some tough challenges over the last few years, real tough challenges, but nothing like this. This was like Armageddon, apocalyptic — world ending.

Outside, the wail of a siren rose and he glanced up to see a cruiser come to an abrupt halt on the driveway, its spinning lights painting the panelling red and blue.

‘There’s my ride,’ Morgan said, heading to the door.

‘Where is this guy?’ Cassidy asked. ‘You taken him in for questioning?’

‘No. I thought it best to keep him off the record, in case he has to — disappear. Last I saw, he was heading to the church.’

Cassidy stared out of the window at the white stone of the church beyond the wall. ‘Let me go talk to him first.’

‘Now why would you want to go and do that?’

‘Because if I’m going to sacrifice a man’s life to save my town, the least I can do is have the courtesy of looking him in the eye first. And I still think we should establish whether the crash was an accident or not.’

Morgan shook his head and took in the room. ‘Must be nice, living in your oak-panelled world where everyone plays by rules and any disputes can be resolved with a handshake. Let me tell you how things work out in the real world. Talking to this guy is going to achieve absolutely nothing. If anything, it’s going to complicate things. You don’t strike up a friendship with a man you’re about to execute. And it won’t matter a damn to Tío whether the crash was an accident or not. His son died and someone is going to have to pay for it. Someone — or something. Ever hear of a place called El Rey?’

‘Rings a bell.’

‘It’s a little town up in the Durango Mountains. The local banditos took it over and it became a sort of Shangri-La for criminals fleeing south across the border. Anyone who made it there with enough money to pay for protection could stay as long as they liked, knowing no law would ever touch them. El-Rey is also Tío’s hometown. Or it was. It’s not there any more.’

‘What happened?’

‘Tío happened. I don’t know the exact details, but when Tío was a kid there was some kind of family tragedy involving his father and brother. Could be they fell foul of the bosses or something but whatever happened, Tío never forgot it. When he rose to power years later, he got his revenge. El Rey was the headquarters of the old bosses, so it made sense for him to take it over. But he didn’t. What he did was massacre every living soul in the town and burn the place to the ground. It was symbolic, I guess: out with the old and in with the new. But it was also revenge, pure and simple; an old-fashioned blood vendetta. Tío did the killing himself, the way I heard it. Showed the world what would happen if anyone dared to hurt him or his family.’ He pointed out of the window at the smoke rising beyond the church. ‘And his son just died, flying into our airfield. So you think about that when you talk to this guy. I’ll be at the control line if you need me.’ Then he opened the door and was gone.

15

Solomon stood inside the door of the church letting his eyes adjust to the gloom after the fierce sunlight outside. Huge stained-glass windows poured light into the dark interior, splashing colour on what appeared at first glance to be a collection of old junk.

To the left of the door a full-sized covered wagon stood behind a model of a horse and a mannequin dressed in nineteenth-century clothes. A fully functioning Long Tom sluice box stood opposite with water trickling through it, making a sound like the roof was leaking. A collection of gold pans was arranged around it, beneath a sign saying ‘Tools of the treasure hunter’s trade’. There were pickaxes too and fake sticks of dynamite and ore crushers and softly lit cabinets containing examples of copper ore and gold flake and silver seams in quartz. Another cabinet contained personal effects — reading glasses, pens, gloves — all carefully labelled and arranged, and there was a scale model of the town on a table showing what Redemption had looked like a hundred years ago. And right in the centre of the strange diorama a lectern stood, angled towards the door so that anyone entering the building was forced to gaze upon the battered Bible resting upon it.

Solomon walked forward, feeling the cold flagstones beneath his feet. He could see the remnant of a lost page sticking out from the binding, its edge rough as if it had been violently torn from the book. The missing page was from Exodus, chapters twenty through twenty-one, where Moses brought God’s ten holy laws down from the mountain on tablets of stone.

‘The Church of Lost Commandments,’ Solomon muttered, then continued onward into the heart of the church, breathing in the smells of the place: dust, polish, candle wax, copper, mould.

The commandments were everywhere: carved into the stonework and the wooden backs of the pews, inscribed into the floor in copper letters, even depicted in the stained glass of the windows. It was as if whoever had lost the page from the Bible had built the church in some grand attempt to make up for it. The altar lay directly ahead of him, the large copper cross standing on a stone plinth. As he drew closer he studied it, his eager eyes tracing the twisted lines and spars identical to the cross he wore around his neck, hoping for some jolt of recognition. But if he had ever been here before or stood and gazed upon this cross and this altar he couldn’t remember it and he felt frustration flood into the place where his hope had been.

The church seemed gloomier here, as if the walls around the altar were made of darker material, and as he drew closer he saw the reason for it. The stonework, bright white in the rest of the building, was covered in dark frescoes. They depicted a desert landscape at night, populated with nightmarish creatures: hunched men and skeletal women; children with black and hollow eyes, their clothes ragged and tattered. Some rode starved horses with ribs sticking out from sunken hides, their eyes as hollow as their riders.

Beneath the ground, emerging from a vast, burning underworld, were demons with sharp, eager teeth and leathery wings that stirred the dust, and taloned hands that reached up through cracks in the dry land to grab at the wretched people above them. A few of the demons had snagged an arm or a leg and were gleefully dragging some poor soul down into the fire while their terrified eyes gazed up at the distant glow of a painted heaven. And there was something else, something moving in the shadows — a figure, pale and ghostly — walking out of the painted landscape towards him. It was his reflection, captured in a large mirror that had been positioned so that anyone looking at the fresco became part of what they observed. Either side of the mirror were two painted figures — an angel and a demon — gazing out of the picture, their eyes focused on whoever might stand and gaze into it.

Solomon moved closer until his reflection filled the frame. He studied his face. It was the first time he had seen himself properly and it was like looking at a picture of someone else. Nothing about his features was familiar, not his pale grey eyes nor his long, fine nose nor the scoops of his cheeks beneath razored cheekbones. He did not recognize the person staring back at him.

‘Who are you?’ he asked, and a loud bang echoed through the church as if in answer. Footsteps approached from behind a curtained area in the vestry and he turned just as the curtain swept open and he found himself facing a modern version of Jack Cassidy. They held each other’s gaze for a moment, Cassidy’s face a mixture of curiosity and suspicion as he looked him up and down, his eyes lingering on his shoeless feet. ‘You must be Mr Creed,’ he said, walking forward, hand extended. Solomon shook it and his mind lit up as he caught the hint of a chemical coming off him.

Napthalene — used in pyrotechnics, also a household fumigant against pests.

He saw a small frayed hole in the pocket of his jacket — Mayor Cassidy smelled of mothballs. It was a dark suit, a funeral suit. ‘You just buried James Coronado,’ Solomon said, and pain flared in his arm again at the mention of his name.

Cassidy nodded. ‘A tragedy. How did you know him?’

Solomon turned back to the painted landscape. ‘I’m trying to remember.’

There was something here, he felt sure of it, some reason the cross around his neck had brought him to this place where its larger twin sat.

‘Impressive, isn’t it?’ Cassidy said, stepping over to the wall and flicking a switch. Light faded up, illuminating the fresco in all its dark and terrible detail.

There were many more figures populating the landscape than Solomon had first thought, their black arms and shrunken bodies almost indistinguishable from the land, as if they were made from the earth and still bound to it. The ones with faces had been painted in such realistic detail that Solomon wondered if each had been based on a real person, and what those people had thought when they had seen themselves immortalized as the damned in this macabre landscape. They seethed over the desert, their faces ghostly, their eyes staring up at the too distant heaven. Solomon looked up too and saw something he had missed when the fresco had been sunk in shadow, something written in the sky, black letters on an almost black background.

The brand on his arm flared in pain again as he read the words, bringing back the feeling he’d first felt back on the road, that he was here for a reason, that there was something particular he had to do.

Only those who would save others … can hope to escape the inferno …

‘I’m here to save him,’ he muttered, his hand rubbing at the burning spot on his arm.

‘Who?’

‘James Coronado.’

Cassidy blinked. ‘You’re … but we just buried him.’

Solomon smiled. ‘I didn’t say it was going to be easy.’

A noise outside made them both turn, a siren howling past, heading somewhere in a hurry. Solomon could smell smoke leaking in through the open door.

The fire.

… Only those who face the fire …

The whole town would be heading to the city limits now, preparing to defend their town from the oncoming threat. Most of them would have known James Coronado. Maybe his widow would be there too.

‘Are you OK?’ Cassidy asked, stepping closer. ‘You seem a little shaken. Maybe you should head to the hospital, get yourself checked over.’

Solomon looked back at his reflection, trapped between the angel and the demon, their painted eyes looking at him as if asking: ‘Which of us are you?’

Let’s find out, Solomon thought, and the pain in his arm flared again.

He shook his head. ‘I don’t need the hospital,’ he said. ‘I need to go back to the fire.’