Solomon Creed

22

‘Hello?’ the voice said again in accented English.

Mulcahy gripped the phone and heard something crack inside it. ‘Let me speak with my father.’

There was a pause, followed by handling noise as the phone was passed over. He could smell the metallic tang of blood in the air, mingling with the mildew and the dust. He was sweating hard now, the phone damp and slippery in his hand.

‘The hell’s goin’ on here, Mikey?’ His Pop’s voice was full of piss and vinegar but he could hear the fear in it. He also sounded echoey, so he was probably on speakerphone and the crew who had him were listening in — a crew like the one lying dead all around him with kill tags on their arms.

‘Just take it easy, Pop, OK?’ he said, his eyes fixed on the news. ‘I got it covered.’

‘Don’t seem that way from where I’m standing.’

‘Let me talk to the main guy for a second.’

‘You in some kind of trouble here, Michael?’

Mulcahy closed his eyes and shook his head. It was typical of his father to assume that he must have messed up in some way and all this was his fault. He had done the same thing back when he had first fallen into bed with the cartels to stop them chopping his father into small pieces, somehow managing to twist it round so it felt like just another example of his failings as a cop, a person and a son. ‘No, Pop,’ he said. ‘I’m good. Some people getting the wrong idea is all. Hand the phone back over. I’ll take care of it.’

More handling noise, then the man who wasn’t his father came back on the line. It didn’t sound echoey any more.

‘He doesn’t get hurt,’ Mulcahy said.

‘Oh really?’ There was a pause then he heard a yelp in the background and his phone cracked again as he squeezed it hard. ‘You don’t get to give no orders,’ the Mexican said. ‘You understand?’

Mulcahy’s mind sped through his options like a racing driver approaching a corner too fast. The Saints wouldn’t have known where to find his father, which meant these must be Tío’s men, an insurance move to make sure he stayed loyal.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘I don’t give orders. But I know who does, so here’s what I’m going to do. I’m gonna call Tío right now, I’m gonna call him and straighten this out, then I’ll get him to call you back, all right? So just hang tight and give me ten minutes.’

He hung up before the man could say anything or hit his father again to show him who was in charge. He already knew who was in charge and didn’t need some cold-eyed psychopath beating on his dad to prove it. He also figured they’d only hurt Pop if he was listening, so the quicker he got off the phone the better for everyone.

Ten minutes.

He peered through a crack in the curtains, squinting against the daylight to check there was no one outside, then wiped his prints from the door and went out, clutching the laundry sack full of weapons.

The day was still burning but it felt cooler after the stifling room. He headed over to the Jeep the Mexicans had arrived in, unlocking it with the key he’d taken from the dead driver. He opened the passenger door and checked the glove box. There were two more loaded magazines inside and a box of shells. He added them to his sack. The rest of the car was clean and professional: no personal items, no empty drink cans or food wrappers, nothing that could harbour DNA traces or fingerprints in the event they needed to dump the Jeep and run. It looked and smelled like it had been recently collected from an airport rental lot, which it probably had. The constant vacuuming and cleaning a rental went through was a pretty effective way of getting someone else to cover your tracks, and the residual soup of accumulated forensic matter acted like a smokescreen, hiding anything left behind by even the most careful of criminals.

He moved to the rear of the vehicle, listening out for sirens. He had a hunch about the trunk and when he popped it he saw he’d been right. It contained a car battery booster pack and a large square bag made from heavy-duty green plastic. Inside the bag was a set of electric jump cables, two plastic dust sheets, some padded leather garden gloves, rolls of Duck Tape, some pliers, and a bag of cable ties. To the casual observer it would look like someone had been getting supplies for a weekend of home improvement projects. To Mulcahy it looked like a torture kit. Papa Tío’s son was clearly supposed to suffer before Luis finally got to ink in the numeral on his arm.

He took everything out, locked the Jeep, then walked away, carrying the bags and the battery booster pack in case he might need them.

He pulled the keys to his own Jeep from his pocket, opened the trunk and dumped everything inside except the laundry sack. He wanted the guns close, so he stashed them in the passenger footwell, out of sight but easy to reach, then moved round to the driver’s side and got in.

The Chevy Cruze was supposed to be his clean getaway ride, but there was no chance of that. He didn’t know what he might have to do in the next few hours in order to turn his situation around and a black-windowed tank of a car with a big engine and four-wheel drive would be a lot more useful than an old Chevy with shot suspension.

The engine growled to life and he cranked the air up to maximum, eased out of the parking space, away from the buildings and down the exit ramp. He’d used maybe a third of his ten minutes, but waited until he’d slipped into the flow of evening traffic on the highway before dialling a number from memory using Javier’s phone.

Someone answered and he gave a code word then listened to handling noise and the background sounds of some café. The cartels were deeply paranoid about wiretaps and call-tracing and had come up with a simple but effective solution. The man he had called sat in cafés all day reading the paper, drinking coffee and redirecting incoming calls through an internet-based phone system like Skype. Calls came in, the caller gave a code corresponding to whoever they wanted to talk to and the middleman would call that person on a second phone then sixty-nine the phones so the earpiece of the in-coming phone was pressed against the mouthpiece of the outgoing one. It meant the bosses could talk directly to anyone in their organization without being traced. The best the DEA could do was trace calls to the middleman, who wouldn’t know anything other than a few phone numbers and codes.

The handling noise stopped and he heard a phone ringing through the background hum of the café. He took long breaths, pulling the cold air into him as though he was about to dive into deep, deep water.

Then Papa Tío answered.

23

They wrapped Bobby Gallagher’s corpse in a hospital sheet shroud and carried him over to a pick-up truck to be driven back to the morgue. They couldn’t spare an ambulance, not now the fire had overrun the control line and everyone was in full retreat. The energy in the field hospital was different too; it had settled and hardened, like everything did under pressure. No one spoke, everyone carried on preparing for casualties, knowing now exactly what those casualties would look, smell and sound like.

Solomon studied the fire from the shade of the billboard, his mind ticking with information — wind-speed calculations, open burn rates of desert wildfires, what fire did to human flesh. He listened to the roar of the flames, and the gusting wind and the birds, shrieking raptors and carrion birds drawn by the promise of death. He followed their shrieks until he spotted them, high above the town, wheeling in the thermals that rose up the red-sided mountains, then blown forward by stronger winds whipping across the mountaintop. They were blowing in the opposite direction to the one pushing the fire towards town. Different weather fronts.

‘I wanted to say thank you.’ The doctor who had treated the dying man was standing in front of him, a badge pinned to his breast pocket identifying him as Dr M. Palmer. ‘I panicked, I guess,’ he continued. ‘I wasn’t thinking. You were right to do what you did. Bobby died in peace instead of clinging to false hope. It was a very kind thing you did for him.’

Kind …

Had he held the dying man’s hand out of kindness? He didn’t think so. He had done it because he had known no one else would and that it was the right thing to do. He had known this with the same certainty he knew what things were just by looking at them, and that he was here to save someone.

‘James Coronado,’ he murmured.

The doctor frowned. ‘Excuse me?’

‘He was brought to the hospital, I assume, after his accident?’

‘He was DOA, so would have gone straight to the morgue. They only come to the ER if they’re still breathing.’

‘But his notes will be on record at the hospital?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you think I might see them?’

Palmer shook his head. ‘The only people allowed to see that would be next-of-kin.’

Holly Coronado. All roads led to the widow. ‘Thank you, Dr Palmer,’ Solomon said.

He shrugged. ‘You’re welcome.’ He looked past him to where the refugees from the desert were now gathering around a pick-up truck. Some were still wearing their old-style funeral clothes, making them seem like they’d stepped out of the town’s past, drawn by the prospect of witnessing its end.

Mayor Cassidy climbed up on to the back of the truck and held his hands up for silence. ‘Friends. Listen to me now.’ All eyes turned to him. ‘We have all witnessed a tragedy here, a terrible tragedy, and there will be a proper time to dwell on that. But that time is not now. Bobby Gallagher gave his life helping defend his town from the threat of this fire and the threat still remains and continues to grow. So the best way we can honour our friend is to make sure he did not lay down his life in vain. Now we got more fire tankers, big ones, in the air and on their way here — am I right, Chief?’

Morgan climbed up next to him. ‘Yessir. Two C-130s heading up out of Tucson.’

A picture of a solid plane with a snub nose appeared in Solomon’s mind — broad fuselage, four sturdy propeller engines slung below a wide straight wing.

‘We also got the local unit back at the airfield, readyin’ up for another run. Between those and what we all can do here on the ground, we can beat this thing.’

C-130 payload is 2,700 gallons. It could lay a fire line sixty feet wide and a quarter mile long.

Solomon stared back out at the desert, estimating the size of the fire using the burning grader for scale. The grader was thirty feet long, which meant the fire was …

Too big. Much too big.

‘Now you all need to regroup and get back out there fast. Take some water then grab your tools and head back out …’

The distant shrieks of the high-flying birds snagged Solomon’s attention again. He looked up and zoned Morgan out, listening to their cries as they were blown forward by the high winds. He caught a scent now too, drifting down from higher up, something buried so deep it was hardly there at all, but was enough to pin a hope on.

He looked back at Morgan finishing his speech.

‘… We’ll set back-burns to clear the ground about a half a mile out of town. The tankers will draw most of the line for us, but until then it’s up to us to hold it.’

‘That’s no good,’ Solomon called out, before he realized he had spoken.

All eyes turned to him. ‘What’s that?’ Morgan said.

‘Half a mile is too far.’ Solomon moved towards the truck. ‘Too much desert to cover.’ He held his hand up and swept it through the grey ash falling all around them. ‘This is going to start falling hot soon, so any control line with dry desert behind it is going to start catching alight. You’ll have spot fires springing up all over and not nearly enough people to cover them.’ He reached the truck and leapt nimbly up to join Morgan and Cassidy. ‘The fire will jump your line and keep on coming. Your best chance is to try and hold it at the narrowest point.

Morgan’s face went pink. ‘You an expert on firefighting too, Mr Creed?’

‘No, but I know history.’ He turned to the crowd. ‘Over two thousand years ago three hundred Spartan warriors held back a quarter of a million Persian warriors by forcing them into a narrow pass between the mountains and the sea.’ He pointed left out into the desert. ‘The desert is narrowest right here in the bottleneck between the storm drain and the spill piles from the mine. This is where we can hold the fire.’

A murmur rose from the crowd, then the crackle of radio chatter silenced them again.

This is Charlie three-one-four-niner, inbound from Tucson, do you read, over?

Morgan tilted his head to his lapel mic. ‘This is Chief Morgan, I read you. Glad to have you with us, over.’

Roger that. I’m hailing you on an open frequency with Charlie eight-six-five-zero, also inbound from Tucson. We have a visual on the smokestack and will be starting our run in less than a minute. Tell us what you need.

In the distance the twin specks of the planes appeared in the sky. ‘How long will it take them to refill and fly back here?’ Solomon said.

The air was thick with ash now, billowing in the gusting wind like clouds of insects.

‘Forty minutes,’ Cassidy said. ‘Maybe less.’

‘This fire will be at the church doors in forty minutes. You should get the tankers to lay the line right here. It’s your best chance. Your only chance.’

Solomon felt all eyes upon him and saw fear and uncertainty in them. They were desperate to be led but unsure who to follow, and this indecision made the rage rise in him again. Part of him wanted to leave them to it, just walk away and up into the mountains where he could sit and watch the town burn, as surely it would if they followed Morgan’s plan. The fire was mighty and these people were nothing.

But …

If the town burned he would have failed. He knew that too. And if the town was gone, any chance of discovering what had happened to James Coronado would be gone with it. And where would that leave him? Would the fire keep coming? Would the world burn wherever he walked until eventually the flames caught up with him?

‘What about the buildings?’ Cassidy said. ‘The hot ash will drift on to those too.’

A murmur spread through the crowd and heads nodded in agreement.

Sheep. All sheep. Agreeing with whatever the last person said. They deserved to be slaughtered.

Solomon’s arm flared in pain, a reminder of his mission here. He could hear the chop of the propellers getting louder above the roar of the fire. Another minute and they would be here. Less.

He turned to the crowd. ‘If a glowing ember falls on a patch of dry grass or a roof shingle, which is more likely to catch fire?’

The faces stared up at him, some of the heads nodding in agreement with him now as they realized what he was getting at.

‘If we douse the buildings and spread out with buckets of water and rakes, we can deal with any fires that start. There aren’t enough of you to do the same out in the desert and the fires will catch faster. Too much area to cover, not enough bodies on the ground. You need to make your stand here. Make your stand, or start running. Your choice.’ He turned back to Morgan and lowered his voice so only he and Cassidy could hear: ‘Make it fast.’

The first plane roared overhead, the deep bass rumble of its engines pounding in Solomon’s chest.

This is Charlie three-one-four-niner. I see a partial control line southeast of the road and a breach to the northwest. We can lay a line along the fire’s edge, if that’s what you need, keep it back for ya. Give the word and we’ll set up for a run, over.

Morgan didn’t move. He stared at Solomon, blinded by his fury at being told what to do in front of his people by this stranger.

‘Give me the radio,’ Cassidy said, grabbing it from Morgan’s belt. ‘This is Ernest Cassidy, town mayor. We want you to lay a line right on the edge of town, understand. All along the old mining shacks. Give us a minute to pull back then paint the town red, over.’ He thrust the radio back to Morgan. ‘Someone’s got to take charge of this mess.’ He stuck a smile on his face and turned back to the crowd. ‘You heard me. Everybody needs to fall back and we’ll split into teams to make sure we got the whole area behind the line covered. OK, let’s move it.’

The crowd splintered like a dropped plate, glad to be doing something again, glad to be following a leader.

‘It’s a fine thing,’ Morgan said quietly; ‘the man who brought this fire now telling us how to put it out.’

Solomon smiled. ‘I didn’t say we could put it out, I only said we could hold it back. The fire is a force of nature, an act of God.’

‘So what do we do — pray for a miracle and hope for the best?’

Solomon looked up at the birds again and breathed in. The smell was clearer now and getting stronger as the higher winds blew it ever closer. It was the coal-tar smell of wet creosote bush. His force of nature. His act of God.

The smell of rain in the desert.

24

Holly Coronado felt the ground tremble beneath her feet. She looked up from the half-filled grave to the dirt pile and saw dry rivulets of dust trickling down the sides. There was a noise too, a low rumbling that juddered through the air and trembled somewhere deep inside her. For a moment she wondered if it was coming from her, some physical manifestation of her anger. She had read a book once about a persecuted young girl with a strange and terrible power, who had snapped one day, killed her tormentors and burned a whole town to the ground.

She had always been a sucker for horror stories, enjoying the thrill of being scared whilst wrapped in the comfort and safety of her own life. Now she doubted she would ever read one again. No imagined horror could possibly compare to what her life had become. And if this was an earthquake, then let it come. Let it tear up the ground and level the town and crack open the earth to spill the dead from their graves so they could witness the end of the cursed place they had helped build.

The sound grew, huge and raw like her anger, then something rose from the valley with a noise like the sky ripping open. The propeller-wash from the tanker struck her hard, nearly knocking her from her feet and she closed her eyes and turned away from the grit-filled air and felt something wet and warm patter down from the sky. She glanced down and saw red spots on her arms as if blood had fallen from the clear blue sky.

Blood was what had tipped the girl in the story over the edge, raining down on her at the high-school prom. Holly wondered if she was imagining all this — the plane, the blood, the trembling ground — her brain throwing up phantoms born from thirst and tiredness and drenched in all the dark emotions that came with grief.

She stuck the shovel back in the ground and leaned heavily on it, imagining what she must look like, standing by the grave, her black dress torn and flapping in the hot breeze, her skin streaked with sweat and dirt and dotted with spots of what appeared to be blood. She looked like an insane person, that’s what, like a black-lined etching from the pages of a Victorian gothic novel — the grieving wife with a broken mind, a Miss Havisham figure dressed in black instead of wedding white. Was that the future that awaited her — the tragic bride in a house where all the clocks had stopped?

She rubbed at one of the spots on her arm and felt the wetness of it as it smeared red across her skin. She had not imagined it; blood had dripped from the sky. She had not imagined any of it. It was all real. She was stuck in the middle of her own horror story. She knew that people in horror stories generally hung around long after they should have fled. Not her. Once she had buried Jim and fulfilled her promise to him, she would leave this place and never come back.

The ground started to tremble again and the air began to shake, but this time she knew it was not some terrible energy born of her pain that she could unleash on the town. The only thing her pain would turn into was anger, then tears and ultimately back to pain again. And the only way out of this cycle was to break it.

She picked up the shovel and drove it into the earth, continuing her act of remembrance for her dead husband, savouring the pain in her arms and shoulders as she slowly buried him beneath the dry Arizona ground.

A second plane roared overhead, rending the sky with its noise and dripping more drops of red on to the tattered widow labouring by the grave, and the dry rocky ground, and the white-painted grave markers that spoke of all the other cycles of pain that had ended here by gunshot, and hanging, and suicide.

25

‘You seen the news?’ Papa Tío’s voice was oddly calm, which made Mulcahy feel the exact opposite.

‘Yeah, I saw it. It said someone survived the crash.’

‘That’s what they’re saying.’

‘Listen, if it’s Ramon, I can get him out, but I’ll need to move fast. I’m less than half an hour away and—’

‘It’s not Ramon.’

‘It’s … are you sure?’

‘A local source sent me a picture. The guy who walked away from the crash is a six-foot albino. That sound like Ramon to you?’

Mulcahy gripped the steering wheel hard, releasing some of his energy, his mind casting round for a new angle to try.

‘You got any kids?’ Tío asked, like they were just two guys in a bar, shooting the breeze over a beer.

‘No. No I don’t.’

‘Course you don’t. If you did I would have some of my men babysitting them right now — just like your father. You two close?’

‘Close enough that I would like to sort this situation out.’

‘That’s good. It’s good that you care about your father. Shows you got values. If you don’t have family values then what have you got? You should have yourself some kids, you feel that way; man’s not a man until he becomes a father. You know I had two daughters, as well as Ramon?’

Mulcahy knew. Everybody knew. He knew what had happened to them too.

‘Beautiful girls,’ Tío said, a smile lighting up his voice. ‘Smart too, smarter than Ramon, that’s for sure — smarter than me even. They wanted to help run the business, but I told them no one’s going to take me seriously if I put women in charge — just the way it is.’ He chuckled. ‘They got real pissed about that, wouldn’t talk to me for weeks, stopped telling me where they were going, slipped their guards so they couldn’t tell me neither. That’s when they got kidnapped. Someone called me up, said my daughters would be returned untouched and unharmed if I backed away from certain areas I had been expanding my business into. I’d recently taken over Lázaro Cárdenas — you know how much cargo that port ships each year?’

Mulcahy’s fingers drummed on the steering wheel, releasing his nervous energy as the clock continued to tick. ‘A lot.’

‘Thirty-six million tons last year: cars, clothes, toys, building materials — all kinds of things. Thirty-six million tons of opportunity to someone like me. I told them no one tells me how to do business. I vowed that I would find the people responsible and anyone they had ever loved and I would nail them to a wall and eat the hearts of their children in front of them. I didn’t plead for my daughters’ lives. I knew they were already dead. If I had caved, it would show I was weak and they would have killed them anyway to prove they didn’t fear me no more. But they do still fear me. Everybody fears me. So my daughters did help me in the business after all. They helped show everyone how strong I was. I never loved anyone like I loved those two girls.’

Mulcahy heard the anger in Tío’s voice and sensed the glimmer of an opportunity in it. ‘You ever find out who killed them?’

‘It was the Saints. The Latin Saints did it.’

‘The Saints killed Ramon too,’ Mulcahy said. ‘They sent a killing crew to my rendezvous point.’ He picked up his phone, found the photos he had taken in the motel and attached them to a secure e-mail address he had for Tío. ‘Carlos was a rat. He sold out your son to the Saints. But I don’t figure him for some kind of mastermind. Someone else must have given the order and I can find out who. I can do that for you, Tío. I can get you a name.’

‘How do you know it was the Saints?’

‘I’ve sent you some pictures. See for yourself.’

There was a long, long pause as the message left his phone and wormed its way through some complicated, encrypted network. Mulcahy’s fingers drummed on the steering wheel in time with his heartbeat. Before circumstance had led him down a different path he had been a trained police interviewer, skilled in the art of drawing people out and building trust. He was trying to do it now with Tío, drip-feeding him information to get him to engage and make him realize he was worth more to him alive than dead. So far, Tío wasn’t biting.

‘You got them?’ Mulcahy asked.

‘Yeah, I got them.’ He heard the contained fury in Tío’s voice and it made him feel hopeful.

‘The survivor,’ Tío said at last, ‘my source says he’s got a tag too. A Roman numeral burned on to his arm.’

‘I can get to him,’ Mulcahy said, pouncing on this fresh information. ‘Right now we have chaos on our side, but it won’t last. I can use that confusion, swing through, flash some ID, take him right out of their hands. Hell, they’ll be glad for one less thing to worry about, what with the fire and all. I can take this guy and find out everything he knows. You know I can do that, better than anyone.’

Tío went quiet again. Mulcahy checked the clock on the dashboard. His ten minutes were almost up. He imagined his father, sitting with his captors, probably trying to strike up a conversation with them, get them to play a hand of cards while they waited, calming himself by behaving as if everything was normal. He was a pretty charming guy, a guy’s guy; Mulcahy had learned a lot from his father, like how to win a hand with weak cards or even no cards at all. Like now.

‘The people who killed your daughters,’ he said, playing the only card he had, ‘did you ever get a name?’

‘I got a whole list of names. My men get a bonus for every Saint they deliver to me alive. I got a special place I go to work on them, my own place of worship and remembrance. I got pictures of my daughters hanging on the walls and I do to those pigs exactly what they did to them. First I rape them with a metal bar, then I break a few bones, then I start with the questions — who killed my daughters? Who gave the order? Tell me and I’ll end your pain. But torture and pain breaks men’s minds, makes them tell you anything you want to hear.’

‘Not if you do it right.’

‘You telling me my business?’

‘No. I think you’re a very loving father and your emotions are getting in the way. I bet they tell you all kinds of other things too, vile things that make you so mad you hurt them more, am I right?’ Tío said nothing. ‘They’re using your rage against you. They know you’re going to kill them, so they’ve got nothing to lose and nothing to gain by telling you what you want to hear. You need a middleman, someone they can place trust in. The survival instinct is strong and you can use it to get at the truth.’

‘And would that middleman be you?’

‘It could be.’ Mulcahy thought about his next step. He had no more cards so there was no point in pretending he did. ‘Listen, Tío, I know it’s unlikely I’ll see my way through to the end of this, I know that. I’m one of the few people who knew about the flight and I can see how that looks. There’s also a bunch of bodies in a motel room, and I walked away. I know how that looks too. But I didn’t sell out your son. I can’t make you believe that, but it’s the truth. Maybe the plane crash was an accident, maybe it wasn’t. But I bet I’m not the only person still breathing who knew about it.’

‘I got things under control.’

‘I’m sure you do, I don’t doubt it. But will any of those people give you the name you want, the name of whoever was really behind all this? I can. If you give me the chance, I can get that name for you. Tell me who else knew about the flight and I’ll find out what they know. I’ll get this survivor too. You know I can do this better than anyone. I’ll do whatever it takes and then I’m yours to do what you want with. Like I said, I don’t expect to get through this. All I ask is that you let my father go.’

There was a long pause and Mulcahy let it stretch. There was nothing more he could say, nothing else he could offer.

‘It’s a credit to you,’ Tío said at length, ‘this thing you do for your father. You think Ramon would have done the same for me?’

Mulcahy considered the question. Ramon was a well-known, grade-A scumbag who lived in the protective shadow of a father he hated. ‘I’m sure he would have done exactly the same,’ he said, figuring right now was not the time for honesty.

‘It’s nice you think that. Shows you’re a good son who respects his father. Truth is, Ramon would not have crossed the road to piss on me if I was on fire. You know what that piece of shit son of mine did that forced me to stick him on that plane in the first place? He raped a general’s daughter. A two-star generale who also happens to be in charge of the border divisions. You think that’s good for business? He couldn’t just keep to the coked-up putas with the big asses and the plastic titties. No, he had to go and fuck everything up, leaving me to clean up his mess again. And how do you think a thing like this makes me look when it’s my own son that’s done it? Makes me seem weak, like I can’t even control my own blood.’

He went silent again and Mulcahy let the silence stretch as he stared ahead at the slow-moving river of evening traffic, ordinary people heading home to their ordinary uncomplicated lives. He could see a sign up ahead — right to Tucson, left to Redemption. He still didn’t know which turn he would take. His ten minutes were up. If he ended up turning right to Tucson, time would be up for his father too.

‘Step out of line here or fuck it up and your father dies hard, understand? And when I catch up with you I’ll show you that room I told you about with my daughters’ pictures on the wall.’

‘Thank you,’ Mulcahy said, more breath than words.

‘Go get this guy, this survivor. Squeeze him hard to find out what he knows. Make him suffer. And I want you to go to the crash site too. If my son is dead, I want to see a body.’

Mulcahy frowned. Getting access to the crash site would be risky. ‘What about your local guys? Couldn’t they …’

‘I don’t trust them. Some of them knew about the plane. I don’t want them to even know you’re there. I might need you to talk to them too. And use this phone to keep me informed. It’s safe.’ Then the phone clicked and Tío was gone.

Mulcahy blew out a long stream of air. He swapped Javier’s phone for his own and tapped to call his father back, his hand trembling as the adrenaline in his system started to curdle.

The same voice answered. ‘That weren’t no ten minutes, motherfucker.’

‘Go tell it to your boss, that’s who kept me talking. Put my dad on, would you?’

There was a pause then his father came on the line.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ He sounded more rattled than before. ‘You coming over here to straighten things out or what?’

Mulcahy thought about the deal he had just done with Tío and how unlikely it was that he would ever see his father again. He swallowed hard against a tightness in his throat. ‘I’m coming, Pop,’ he said, ‘but I got to square a couple of things away first. You hang in there and remember not to take all their money if they get the cards out, it’ll only piss them off and they sound like vindictive types.’

‘They don’t look like they got much to take,’ his father replied, his voice low.

Mulcahy smiled. Even with a gun to his head his old man still had the instincts of a born hustler.

‘I’ll see you soon, Pop,’ he lied. He hung up before his voice betrayed him, then indicated and turned left towards the town of Redemption.

26

Morgan stood at the edge of town inspecting the red line the tankers had painted, the ash falling thickly around him now. He turned to the crowd and held up a loud-hailer so everyone could hear. ‘OK, everyone, we have a line to hold here. The tankers will be back soon as they can, but we need to do our part and split you up into pairs.’

Solomon sat at the back of the pick-up, studying the women in the crowd, wondering if one of them was James Coronado’s widow.

‘Once you’re in a pair,’ Morgan continued, ‘come see me and you will be assigned an area.’ He held up a tourist map that had been roughly gridded up with a Sharpie. ‘Soon as you have your area, go there and make it safe. Knock on doors to check no one’s inside, then commandeer as many containers as you can, fill them with water and soak everything that’s flammable, shift any woodpiles and anything else that looks like a bonfire waiting to happen, and keep your eyes open for the first sign of smoke in your area. If you see smoke, call out and put it out before it becomes anything worse. Shovel dirt, use a garden hose, roll on it if you have to, but do not let a fire take hold in your area, you understand?’

There were nods and murmurs. Everyone was subdued now the tankers had gone and the fire was roaring closer, pushed by winds that seemed angered by the town’s attempts to defend itself.

‘The fire trucks are spraying down the area immediately behind the control line and will act as frontline defence. Most of the fires are going to start here anyhow, so we’ll cover those. Your job is to watch our backs. We need you to stop any small fires from becoming big ones. If we can hold the fire here, it will have nowhere else to go and will eventually burn itself out or the tankers will come back and put it out. We just gotta hold on here. Y’all think you can do that?’

A small chorus of ‘Yeahs’ rumbled up from the crowd.

‘Come on,’ Cassidy said, stepping forward with his campaign smile. ‘Don’t let me be the mayor who let the whole dang town burn down. Can we beat this thing?’

‘YEAH!’ the crowd hollered back.

‘All right.’ Cassidy turned to Solomon. ‘You got anything you want to add, Mr Creed?’

Solomon stood up, regarded the assembled faces and leaned into the loud-hailer. ‘You’re all going to die,’ he said, and watched every expression shift from hope to fear. ‘But when and where you die is up to you. The tankers won’t save you; this will all be over by the time they make it back. Only you can save you. So stay alive — and pray for rain.’

He stepped back and smiled at Morgan, who raised the loud-hailer to his mouth, looking at Solomon like he couldn’t make head nor tail of him. ‘Well, I guess prayer never hurt at that,’ he said. ‘All right then, get yourself into pairs and get busy.’

The crowd quickly split and formed a line in their new pairs in front of the truck. Morgan pointed to sections of the map, marking each one off once it was assigned.

‘I don’t think that was a particularly smart trick to pull, Mr Creed, frightening everybody like that.’

‘Fear is powerful fuel,’ Solomon replied, studying the faces of the women as they filed past.

‘So is hope.’

‘Yes, but they’re already frightened, look at them. Might as well use what we have. James Coronado’s widow, she wouldn’t be here, would she?’

‘No, she would not.’

‘Pity.’ The wind blew again, a deep roar carrying more ash that stung Solomon’s face. He tilted his head back and sniffed the air. He had lost the scent of the rain, the smell of smoke far too strong now. ‘If we make it through the next hour, I would like to talk to her, if I may.’

‘If we make it? If — don’t be talking that way. Of course we’ll make it.’

‘I hope you’re right.’ He glanced over at the two fire trucks, their hoses sending arcs of water across the buildings closest to the control line. ‘I fear you may not be. How much water do they hold?’

Cassidy followed his gaze to the trucks. ‘About three thousand gallons apiece.’

Solomon nodded. ‘I don’t see a hydrant system on the streets.’

‘That’s because we don’t have one.’

‘So what happens when the fire trucks run out of water?’

‘What happ—’ Cassidy leaned in, his face flushing red. ‘If we run out of water then we’ll run hose from the houses and do what we can with that. Hell, we’ll start a bucket chain, if that’s what it takes.’

Solomon shook his head. ‘You don’t have the manpower. But at least you’re getting angry now. That’s good. Anger is almost as powerful as fear.’

Cassidy made to say something but never got the chance.

‘FIRE! WE GOT A FIRE HERE!’ someone hollered.

Smoke was pouring through a gap between two houses a block back from the control line and a little way off the main road. The crowd in front of the truck broke up and started running towards it. Solomon shook his head. The first whiff of smoke and everything fell apart. The town was doomed.

‘Go to your area,’ Morgan hollered through the loud-hailer. ‘Go to your area. Let the trucks deal with this one.’ His amplified words cut through the roar of the main fire and the hiss of the fire hoses. ‘We start running after every fire and we will lose this town.’

One of the fire trucks disengaged and sped down the street towards the smoking house, turning its hose towards the fire. Everyone else hurried to their section, running now, frightened of the fire, the memory of Bobby Gallagher still fresh in their minds.

Fear.

Solomon could feel it crackling in the dry air. He could smell it, mingling with the sweat and the stench of smoke. Fear was good. Fear could make people do almost anything. Maybe the town wasn’t doomed after all.

Another blast of wind brought heat and embers flying out of the desert. The billboard was starting to steam now, the water-soaked images of old-style cowboys looking like they were sweating for real. The fire was coming fast but the heat was coming faster, a solid pressure wave so dry it made the air uncomfortable to breathe. Solomon remembered the coach horses, restless and desperate to run but tethered by their reins. He felt like that too — wanting to run but bound here by a promise he did not understand. He felt like the fire was a part of it, part of his story.

Only those who face the fire … can hope to escape the inferno.

He took a step forward, his feet cracking the red-stained crust of the earth, and stared into the heart of the fire. He could feel the heat of it like a solid thing and he was breathing fast, drawing the hot air inside himself, feeling like he was part of the fire already. The flames roiled and twisted like something about to strike and Solomon braced himself as the wind gusted and roared in his ears. He felt it buffet his body and rock him on his feet. But the fire did not surge forward. Instead it pulled back, rearing up and away like a horse from a snake.

The wind had changed. The gust had come not from the desert but from behind him. It had come from the mountains.

‘You smell that?’ The shout came from behind him and he turned and saw one of the medics turn towards the town. ‘You smell it?’

Others stopped work and turned their noses to the air, breathing in the coal-tar smell of the creosote bush being carried to them on the wind, a smell desert folk learned to identify before they learned their ABCs.

‘Look —’ someone else shouted and pointed up at the high mountains. A raft of grey cloud had appeared over the ridge and was sliding fast across the sky. ‘Rain. There’s rain coming. Lord be praised, there’s rain on its way.’

Solomon turned back to the fire and stared up at the great arch of smoke like the vaulted roof of a burning cathedral. A loop of fire lashed out like a tentacle, whipping across the air above Solomon’s head.

‘Go,’ he said.

And the first drops of rain began to fall.

The fire hissed and the rain hissed back, falling fast and washing the heat and ash from the air.

Cheers rang out behind him. Cheers, and prayers of thanks, and sobs of relief.

The flames began to shrink away and melt into steam, and rain ran down Solomon’s face like tears, soaking his clothes, cooling his skin. A surge of people surrounded him, some still holding the tools they no longer needed. Arms snaked round his shoulders, a woman kissed him. They were all talking and laughing and treating him as if he had personally summoned the rain in order to save their town. Someone offered him shoes, another asked if he needed a place to stay while he was in town. But there was only one thing he wanted. He turned to Cassidy.

‘I’d like to visit Holly Coronado,’ he said.