V
‘The unexamined life
is not worth living.’
The next thing I found on that dry riverbed was a wooden box, its surface darkened by wax and wear and splintered open at one corner where it had struck the hard ground. It lay between the wheel ruts, just as the cage had done, with white cotton sheets and clothes spilling out from it and on to the dirt. There were petticoats and aprons, some boy’s britches and a pair of men’s trousers all scattered and dusty on the ground, the Sunday best of a small family. There was a twist of cloth too, knotted at the corners to make the arms and legs of a child’s doll. I scooped this up, imagining the distress of the child that had lost it, but the box looked to be too heavy to carry so I left it in the track along with its spilled contents. As I passed it I saw sunlight glint off a rectangle of brass on the lid and read the name etched upon it — ELDRIDGE.
It was evident the box must have fallen with some force for it to split open like this and yet the noise of the splintering wood had clearly not caused the wagon to stop. The wheels had carried on rolling, meandering away along the wide riverbed, following their strange course without break or pause, and I found something deeply unsettling in the way this well-cared-for box with its precious contents had been so casually abandoned.
I picked up my pace, disregarding all previous resolve to take things slowly and preserve both energy and water. I had been anxious for human company but now I feared some misfortune or disease or delirium had befallen the party to cause such aimless transit and the steady abandonment of their belongings.
I had seen things like this before on my travels, items that had seemed so essential at the beginning of a trek steadily losing value as the days and weeks wore on until they became nothing more than a worthless burden. I had once seen an upright piano, standing alone in the middle of a prairie with the stool in front of it slightly askew as if the pianist had stopped playing then vanished into the air. I wondered now whether the birdcage I had retrieved had not been lost at all but jettisoned, along with the linen box, to lighten the load on the heavy-laden wagon. Nevertheless I kept hold of the cage and the linen doll and uttered a silent prayer that the wagon party’s arrival at the well might revive them, and the subsequent appearance of a stranger returning something lost might cheer them still further. I clung on to these hopes and pressed on. Then I saw the third thing, and knew that no amount of water or rest or the retrieval of lost valuables was ever going to restore that poor family to whatever former joy they may have known.
She must have been about three years old. Her tiny body curled up the way babies do when sleeping. She wore clothes that would have been too big for her even before starvation had withered her away to almost nothing. She was lying on her side, her auburn hair spilling from beneath a salt-stained cotton bonnet and spreading out in a puddle of dark copper. Her eyes were shut, as if she were merely sleeping, but the dark line of flies clustered around her lashes as they scavenged the salt of her dried tears showed it was a slumber from which she would never wake.
She had been dead a while, I could smell the rot coming off her as my mule drew closer, and she lay so rigid and flat upon the uneven ground that I could see she had the death stiffness already, that peculiar hardening of the flesh that takes place in a body a few hours dead. I imagined the girl curled up on the floor of the covered wagon, perhaps the smallest of a family all lying in the wagon alongside her in exhaustion. This would explain the unusually deep wheel marks in the dirt. Folks generally walk alongside their wagons during the heat of the day to spare the horse — but not if they are dying.
Maybe the poor girl had been shaken loose by the jostling of the cart as her body started to stiffen. Or someone had pushed her out to rid the wagon of her growing smell and lighten the burden some, though the poor starved thing could not have weighed much more than a sack of coffee. I like to think it was the former, though I know what survival and being close to death will make a person do. I would soon come to the edge of that dread abyss myself.
I kicked my mule onward, whispering a promise to the dead child that I would return as soon as I might and properly commend her soul to God and bury her deep enough in the ground so that scavengers would not nose her and dig her up for a meal. And though it pained me to abandon her that way, I knew my Christian duty lay with the living, if any of the wagon party lived still, and I doubted but they were too far ahead of me.
My mule was labouring now, sweat foaming around the saddle straps, but I had no water to spare and precious little for myself so I pushed on, knowing that somewhere ahead of me, where the ground began to rise up to the twin mountain peaks, I would find fresh water and here my mule could rest and drink, and so could I.
I saw the trees first, a small thicket of mesquite, the crowns rising darkly beyond the bleached banks of the dead river, then, as I spurred the mule on in prospect of shade, I saw the wagon. It had come to rest in the first fringe of shadow, the dusty canvas of its cover standing out against the dark background of the trees. I took the wagon’s rest as a good sign, imagining the party’s horse must have halted the moment it came upon water.
I entered the shadows and felt the instant relief of it. The temperature beneath the trees was many degrees cooler than out in the crucible of the riverbed and it took my sun-scorched eyes a few moments to adjust to the gloom. I blinked away my sun-blindness as my mule trudged closer and saw the horse, not halted at a waterhole but lying on its side, its foam-flecked hide stretched tight across ribs that were sharp-edged and still. It looked like it had been dead for days, but I knew this could not be so. I smelled death though, and saw the flies in thick clouds, seething about the horse and cart. I reached the wagon and peered through the rear flap.
Flies were everywhere, thickening the air and crawling over every surface, so many that I wondered how they had hatched so quickly. There were three people inside, a mother and two children stretched out one next t’other between sacks of dry goods. They were folded into each other as if in some deep slumber, the woman on the left, one arm raised as a pillow for her head, the other draped over a boy of around twelve. He in turn had his arm round a girl of five or six and it was the sight of her that nearly undid me. Her arm too was extended, the arc of it preserved by the death stiffness over a small empty space on the bare boards of the wagon floor. This was where the tiny child I had found on the track must have lain until death and the movement of the wagon had edged her away from her family. There was something unutterably beautiful and unspeakably sad about this and I offered a prayer for them all, which I did silently, not daring to open my mouth on account of the flies and a fear that if I tasted that foul air I would never again rid myself of its flavor.
I said an Amen then manoeuvred past the wagon where I expected to find the last of the party, the man of the family, fallen by the horse he had led here. But I did not find him.
Instead, I found blood.
27
Holly Coronado felt like she was floating and looking down at herself, putting one foot in front of the other, her black dress torn, her feet and hands blistered and bleeding. She had buried Jim and fulfilled the promise she had made to him. Now all she wanted was to be home and curl up in the bed they had shared: fall into a numbed sleep, wrapped in the fading scent of him that still clung to the sheets. She never wanted to face the pain of another day.
The rain made it heavy going, soaking her clothes and weighing her down and making it hard to see too far ahead. She had been thinking a lot lately about the time when she and Jim had first got together, looking back at the start of their relationship from the bleak vantage point of its end, torturing herself with thoughts of whether Jim would still be alive if they had done things differently. But the truth was that, for Jim, all roads led here. The town had a peculiar hold on him, always had done from way before she even met him, and now it would never let him go.
The first time she told him she loved him he had gone quiet and sat her down, looking so serious and sad she’d thought he was going to tell her he was already married or something. Instead he had told her about this place, the town, and how it was like a family to him. He’d told her how it had cared for him when he was a baby, clothed him, fed him, educated him, impressed good Christian moral values on him, nursed him whenever he fell sick, even provided a scholarship for him to go to college.
He’d also told her that the town, his family, was in trouble: that it was struggling to survive and he felt he could help. That was why he was studying trust law; not so he could get a fancy job in a big city law firm and get rich, but so he could help the town get back on its feet. He said he’d made a promise to himself that when he graduated he would return there and run for public office and spend his life in the service of the town, and that, though he loved her more than he had ever thought it possible to love another person, if she didn’t want that, if she wanted to go off and be a big city lawyer, then he would understand and she should not waste any more time on him.
He had cried when he’d told her all this, a big bear of a guy holding her hands and talking with the kind of pain only love can bring, so selfless and loyal and noble. How could any girl turn away from a guy like that? Not her, that was for sure.
So when they both graduated, him top of his class and with several big firms dangling six-figure salaries in front of him, he had kept his promise and turned them all down and come back here to try to save the town that had raised him. And now he was dead and she felt like a piece of her had been torn out and replaced with a jagged block of ice. His future was gone and so was hers. She couldn’t see a way through it. To top it all, she was broke too.
Broke and broken.
Fancy educations were expensive. Jim had got a scholarship from the town, but it hadn’t covered much. They had both graduated with student debts and gone even deeper while Jim ran for sheriff. When he got elected they thought the tide was about to turn, but he hadn’t taken office before he died. No salary. No widow’s pension. The house was rented and she couldn’t afford to keep it — not that she wanted to. But she had nowhere else to go. Her parents were dead. She had no brothers or sisters. She had nothing. Jim had been her everything. She’d felt like a better person when she was with him. Even the colours had seemed brighter. Now the world was grey and black and ugly.
The rain was torrential now, hammering the ground and throwing up mist that washed the heat from the air and the dust of the grave from her hands and clothes. Rivers gurgled down gutters and into storm drains that fed into the main run-off channel running out of town towards where the flames had been replaced by clouds of steam. So much for the town burning to the ground.
She had to leave here, get away from all the ugliness and pain. She had been thinking about that a lot too. How she might do it. How she would do it.
She’d prepared everything the night before. Jim had always been a troubled sleeper and she had hunted through the house for his various stashes of sleeping tablets. Jim had his own mini closet in the bathroom where he kept his ‘man stuff’ and going through it had felt like a small betrayal, like she was trespassing on something private. He was everywhere inside: in the old Gillette razor he had used since college, in the few strands of hair trapped in his hair brush, in the half-empty bottle of cologne. She had sprayed it in the air then walked through it as if she was stepping through the ghost of him.
She found three bottles of Ambien in total and emptied them out on to the granite counter-tops in the kitchen. A search online had proved mostly unhelpful, her question ‘How many sleeping pills will prove fatal?’ directing her to sleep forums and links to suicide helplines. The closest she had got to real information was a post from a nurse who said an adult would need to take at least fifty. She had sixty-three and figured, with her slight frame, that it should be enough, but she crushed them inside a freezer bag to make sure she didn’t lose any, the jagged edges of the breaking pills piercing the plastic and leaving small traces of white powder on the granite. She had also noted the warnings on the label not to take the pills with alcohol and had taken a bottle of Glenfiddich single malt from the cabinet and placed it by her bed. She planned to dissolve the powder in a large Scotch, drink it straight down, then lie back and drift away on a pleasant whiskey haze. All she had to do was get home.
She forced herself on through the hammering rain, one foot in front of the other until her house appeared in the mist up ahead. She reached her driveway and almost staggered up it, forcing her legs to walk the last few feet home. Her car was tucked right up at the top of the drive to make room for Jim’s and she felt the absence of him come crashing down when she thought of how his car would never be parked there again. It made her feel sick, really sick, and she grabbed at the wooden rail, leaning heavily on it for support until the nausea passed. Then she hauled herself up the steps and on to her wide, covered porch. There was a couch to the right of the door and she was so wrung out and bone-deep exhausted she felt like lying down on it and resting a minute. If her dress hadn’t been so wet she might have done just that, but she felt wretched and chilled and there were no blankets to warm her and, besides, she had a job to do. So she carried on, heaving the screen door open and twisting the handle of the front door her urban girl heart still got a kick out of never having to lock.
She pushed it open, stepped into the sanctuary of her home — and stopped dead when she saw what was inside.
28
The rain drummed on the roof of the cruiser as they pulled away from the billboard and headed back into town and Holly Coronado’s house. Morgan was driving — he had insisted, though Solomon would have been happier to walk, even with the rain. He kept the window wide open as a compromise, the rain blowing in through it as they drove along. They headed up Main Street, past the rain-glossed storefronts and all the closed stores.
‘I guess it’s going to put a big dent in your tourist income, this fire,’ Solomon said.
Morgan nodded. ‘Guess so.’
‘Must be a worry, town this size.’
‘Money’s always a worry, but we do OK.’
‘How?’
Morgan sighed, as though talking was a burden. ‘Are you genuinely interested or just passing the time?’
‘I’m interested.’
‘OK, so we got the airfield, that brings in more than tourist dollars, what with the storage fees we get from the military and salvage money too. We also got a number of long-standing civic trusts in place that keep things running and the bills paid. We’re all right, don’t you worry about that.’
‘I’m not worried. I don’t live here.’
They turned off Main Street and started heading towards the spill piles. Beyond it Solomon could see the airfield, lines and lines of parked aircraft sitting wing to wing, their engines and windows wrapped in some kind of white protective covering to keep the dust out. There were hundreds of them, thousands; military, commercial, old, new, their various shapes prompting names and information to riffle through his mind as well as a question. ‘The plane that crashed, what kind was it?’
‘It was a Beechcraft, AT-7. You know planes, Mr Creed?’
He pictured a compact, single-winged plane with two big engine cowls and a wide twin-finned tail. ‘Advanced Training version of the Model 18,’ Solomon said. ‘Used to train navigators in World War Two.’
Morgan smiled and shook his head. ‘For a man with no memory you sure seem to know a lot of stuff.’ He pulled his phone from his pocket. ‘This model was a real beaut. Re-conditioned Pratt and Whitneys, brand-new hydraulic systems and electrics, the whole nine yards. Here —’ he showed him a picture — ‘ain’t she something?’
Solomon studied the screen. It matched the image his mind had already conjured, but there was one crucial difference. The plane that crashed had shone. Apart from its serial number the fuselage had been stripped of all paint or markings and polished until the aluminium shone like chrome, or …
‘… Mirror.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It looks like it’s made of mirror.’
‘They call it brightwork: no paint just a real high polish on the aluminium then a clear lacquer to seal it. Cuts down on drag. Damn shame we lost it. Was looking forward to flying it myself.’
Solomon thought back to the mirror in the church and the momentary illusion he had experienced that his reflection was not his own, that the mirror was in fact a doorway with someone else standing on the other side of it. He looked at the picture of the plane, taken on a desert runway, so highly polished it reflected the land and sky.
‘Maybe that’s how I got here.’
‘You think you were on that plane now?’
‘No, I meant …’ He shook his head, his thoughts incomplete and tricky to explain. He changed the subject. ‘You a pilot, Chief Morgan?’
‘Me? Oh yeah. I guess if you live by the sea, everyone’s a sailor, right? Here everyone’s a pilot. I was in the Air Reserve, 944th Fighter Wing. Ground crew. Some of the F-16s I maintained are now parked out there in the Boneyard — that’s what we call the storage part of the airfield. We get a lot of old planes coming through here. Some for repair, some for storage. Climate here is dry as it gets, means metal don’t corrode much, and the desert is caliche — you know what that is?’
‘Calcium carbonate. Like a naturally occurring cement.’
‘Exactly. Means the planes can sit right out there on the ground without the need to build concrete parking areas. We got whole squadrons of B-52s been standing out there twenty years with not so much as a crack in the ground. Damn shame. Birds like that should be in the air, not sitting around gathering dust.’
‘How come they’re here?’
‘Timing, I guess. The main copper seam ran out at about the same time the Second Word War was ending. The military needed somewhere to store all the war surplus and the town needed to find new jobs. It was Bill Cassidy’s idea to expand the airfield, Ernie’s — the present mayor’s — grandfather.’
‘Jack Cassidy’s son?’
‘Grandson.’
‘Quite a dynasty.’
‘That’s for sure.’
‘And it’s all coming to an end.’
Morgan turned slightly in his seat. ‘How do you mean?’
‘Mayor Cassidy has no children.’
‘Oh. Right.’
Morgan went quiet and Solomon stared out at the town slipping by: souvenir stores, an empty parking lot, a livery yard with blood-red barns and a sign promising ‘Desert trekking’ and ‘Stagecoach Rides up to the Historic Cemetery’. There was a corral spread out back from the road, horses huddled inside it against the weather. Then the mine slipped into view, the spill piles rising up in gravelled mountains behind a high fence topped with razor wire. The rain ran in fresh rivulets down the sides of them, thrumming on the roofs of empty-looking buildings and forming puddles around a closed gate with a sign saying DANGER. KEEP OUT. WORKING MINE.
‘You said the mine gave out at the end of the Second World War?’
Morgan glanced over at the sign. ‘It did. We opened her up again ’bout five years back. New methods of extraction.’
‘All the buildings look deserted.’
‘Most of them are. The new operation is much less labour intensive.’
He turned off the road and accelerated away from the mine and into a maze of neat residential streets. The further they rose up the hill and away from the mine, the nicer the houses became, their gardens wide and deep and opening out on to the desert beyond. American flags flew on poles in front of most of them, some Arizona state flags too — thirteen rays of red and yellow radiating from a copper star with a band of blue beneath. Solomon watched them flapping wetly in the rain, his mind automatically decoding the symbolism:
Blue the colour of liberty.
Copper for the state’s main industry.
Thirteen original colonies of the United States.
Red and yellow for the Spanish flag carried here by conquistadors like Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, namesake of the woman he was about to meet.
‘This is us,’ Morgan said, turning into a drive and pulling to a stop behind a small car. ‘Now remember this lady just lost her husband.’
Solomon gazed up at the perfect-looking house — white picket fence, rocker on the stoop, grey-painted weatherboards. ‘I only want to see if she knows me,’ he said, then stepped out of the car and into the rain, glad to be outside and feel the ground beneath his bare feet again.
Morgan turned off the engine and followed him out, fixing his hat to protect him from the rain. ‘Let me go first,’ he said, hurrying over to the covered porch. ‘She might not be in, or she might not want to—’ He turned at the sound of the screen door banging open and stopped when he saw the woman step through it, dress torn, eyes blazing, shotgun in her hands pointing straight at him.
29
‘Mrs Coronado,’ Morgan said, slowly raising both hands in a gesture that was part instinct and part surrender. ‘You need to put the gun down.’ He took a careful step towards her, his eyes fixed on hers, ignoring the gun.
‘No,’ she said, her voice low and hard. ‘You need to leave. Take one more step and I’ll shoot you for trespassing.’
Morgan stopped.
Solomon could feel the anger radiating out of her, could see it shining in her like a dark light. She was all blackness and dark focus, the gun like an extension of her fury. She was beautiful. Magnificent.
‘Is this why you wanted the funeral up in the old cemetery?’ she said, her words like rocks. ‘Invite the whole town, make a big show, get everyone out of the way, get me out of the way so you could break in to my …’
‘You’re upset,’ Morgan said, raising his hands higher. ‘But this ain’t going to solve nothing. This is only going to make things worse.’
‘Worse! Nothing could possibly make this worse.’
‘Mrs Coronado. Holly.’ Morgan took another step. ‘Let’s all calm down here. You’re not going to shoot me. That’s not going to happen, so why don’t you just—’
The explosion punched a hole in the rain and knocked Morgan clean off his feet.
He fell backwards and hit the ground hard, yelping in shock and pain. He kicked at the wet earth, instinctively trying to flee, his bloodied hands reaching for his side-arm.
‘That was rock salt,’ Holly said, racking another shell into the chamber and taking a step forward. ‘The next one is double-ought buckshot. If you touch that gun I will shoot you. If you do not leave right now I will shoot you.’
Morgan scrambled to his feet and stumbled across the wet grass towards the cruiser. Solomon watched, his brain singing with it all. She had shot him without hesitation and there had to be a reason for that, a powerful reason. Morgan crawled into the car, keeping low, and Solomon felt the dark light shine on him now. ‘You’re trespassing too,’ Holly said, and he turned to face the black hole of the shotgun barrel.
Behind him the cruiser roared into life and the passenger door popped open. ‘Get in,’ Morgan hollered.
Solomon glanced at him through the open door, bloodied and smeared with mud, the front of his shirt peppered with white powder and small holes where the salt crystals had penetrated. He stepped forward, pushed the door shut and turned back to Holly. ‘I’m not with him,’ he said.
Holly took a step forward. ‘You came with him, you can leave with him. And you’re still trespassing.’
Solomon looked down at the ground, his bare feet white against the wet grass, then started walking backwards, down the drive to the road.
‘What are you doing?’ Morgan shouted, putting the cruiser in gear and rolling backwards, keeping pace with Solomon’s retreat.
‘I only want to talk,’ Solomon answered, loud enough that Holly could hear. ‘I have something your husband may have given me but I can’t remember why. I was hoping you might help me.’ He stopped walking when he reached the road and was no longer trespassing. Behind him the cruiser jerked to a halt and the passenger door popped open again. ‘Get in the car,’ Morgan hissed. ‘She’s not going to talk to you. She’s not rational. She just shot me, for Chrissakes.’
Solomon studied Holly through the curtain of rain. Despite her steel he could sense a brittleness in her. She was shaking slightly, maybe because of the wet and the cold, or because the gun was heavy, or because her anger was so fierce it was difficult for her to contain. He knew that feeling. Maybe that was why he felt drawn to her.
‘Go,’ he said to Morgan. ‘She’s not going to talk until you’ve gone.’
Morgan hesitated for a moment then put the car in drive. ‘Well, don’t come running to me if she winds up blowing your head off.’
The engine growled and the car squealed away, tyres slipping on the wet road, leaving Solomon standing in the rain.
The shotgun barrel followed the car until it was out of sight then drooped suddenly, as if it had become too heavy to hold, and Holly staggered forward and grabbed at the handrail. Solomon was already running. He could see she was going to fall. If she tipped down the steps she could smash her head or break her neck. He reached the porch and leaped up the steps, catching her as she started to crumple.
‘You’re OK,’ he said, gathering her into his arms. ‘I’ve got you.’ He could smell the graveyard on her, the wet dust trapped in her clothes, the metallic tang of blood on her hands and feet. He carried her over to the door, pulled the screen door open with his foot and carried her inside. Then he saw what had put the fury in her.
30
Morgan turned the corner back on to Main a little too fast and the steering wheel slipped in his hands. He was trying to dial and steer and not get blood over everything all at the same time and doing a lousy job of it. The phone started ringing and he switched to hands-free and dropped the phone in his lap. It rang three times before Mayor Cassidy answered.
‘She shot me.’
‘What?’
‘Holly Coronado, she shot me.’
There was a pause and the background sounds of the control-line filled the car — laughter, celebration. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Well, I’ve been better. It was rock salt — stings like hell, but I’ll live. Listen, Creed is still there.’
‘What? You said you were going to stay close, hear what he had to say.’
‘What was I supposed to do? I had a shotgun pointed at my head. He wanted to stay, I had to let him.’
‘But what if we get a call from Tío’s men? What if they want to know where he is?’
‘We know where he is. You heard anything?’
‘No.’
‘Me neither. I’m going to call them when I get to the office, but first I’m going to call dispatch, get them to send a unit round to bring Holly in to the station.’
‘You think? Shouldn’t we let it go?’
‘She shot me in front of a witness, if I don’t do anything about it, how’s that going to look? She needs to be cautioned at least. You can’t go around unloading shotgun shells into police officers with no consequences. Besides, this might work out for us. If we remove her from the house, it leaves Solomon there on his own.’
There was a pause and Morgan could almost hear the sound of the other shoe dropping. ‘You think we should tell them where he is?’
‘We need to give them something, show them that we’re cooperating. The fact that we haven’t heard anything is bad. So I’m going to call them up, tell them where he is and get my guys to clear the way for them. Then we’ll see what happens.’
He hung up to avoid further conversation and examined his hands. When he was a kid he’d come off his bike riding down the spill piles and the sharp stones and gravel had taken the skin off his palms. That’s what they looked like now. He twisted the rear-view mirror round and checked his face. A few cuts, nothing major, though he could easily have been blinded if she’d aimed higher. Goddamn that woman. He fumed all the way to the King Community Hospital, thinking about Holly and Solomon and all the things that were making this about the worst day he could ever remember.
Not long, he told himself. Hold your nerve and stick to the plan and it will all fall into place and this will all become a memory.
He pulled to a halt in the ambulance bay and reached over to the passenger seat for his phone. There was something lying in the footwell. He bent down to pick it up and discovered it was the cap Solomon had been wearing. He held it by the peak and turned it slowly, smiling when he spotted the single white hair trapped in the mesh at the back of the cap, almost glowing against the deep red material of the band.
‘Hello, Mr Creed,’ he said. Then he turned the cap over and folded it in on itself to seal the hair inside. ‘Let’s see if we can’t find out who you really are.’
31
Mayor Cassidy stood beneath the black dome of his umbrella and surveyed the carnival the control-line had become, everyone laughing, staring out at the scorched desert and shaking their heads in disbelief that they had, somehow, managed to face down the fire. The rain thundered down but hardly anyone took shelter from it. It was the rain that had saved them. Cassidy smiled too, but he knew this wasn’t the end of it. New danger was coming to their town and it would take more than rain to send it away. He checked his phone. Still nothing.
‘Mayor Cassidy?’
The voice made him turn and something clenched inside him when he saw the athletic-looking stranger in the dark suit walking towards him under a plain black umbrella. ‘I’m with the National Transport Safety Bureau,’ he said, and produced a wallet with a Federal ID inside. ‘I was on the road to Tucson when I heard about the crash so I thought I’d head straight here. The main unit are on their way, but they asked me to secure the site. Mind if I head out and take a peek?’
Cassidy peered out at the steaming road. ‘You think it’s safe?’
‘Safe enough. The thing of it is, this rain is both an asset and a liability. It put the fire out but now it’s washing away evidence. By the time the forensics teams get here, some of it might be gone. So it would sure be a help if I could get started. Sooner we find out what happened here, the sooner we can get this road opened up for you again.’
Cassidy looked out at the desert, the misting rain and steam drifting across the road like ghosts. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll go with you, Mr …?’
‘Davidson,’ Mulcahy said, and held out his hand.
‘Davidson,’ Mayor Cassidy repeated, shaking his hand and looking him square in the eye like his daddy had taught him. ‘Welcome to Redemption, Agent Davidson.’
32
The interior of Holly Coronado’s house was open-plan and tasteful and looked like the home of a young professional couple. Except someone had totally trashed it. Every drawer had been opened and the contents dumped on the floor. The couch was lying on its back, its lining slashed open and its springs exposed. Solomon levered it upright with his foot and set Holly down on it. She was blinking, her eyes struggling to focus. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I just came over a little—’
‘Where’s the kitchen?’
She studied him curiously, as if she had only now noticed him. ‘You look so pale.’
‘So do you. The kitchen?’
She gestured at a doorway and Solomon headed over to it, passing a TV unit that had been pulled away from the wall and emptied, its contents strewn across the pale oak floorboards.
The kitchen was a similar story: drawers pulled out, some cupboard doors hanging open, but not all. There was a line beyond which the neat order remained undisturbed, which suggested to Solomon that the intruder had either found what they were searching for or they had been disturbed, warned maybe that the funeral had ended and Holly was heading back.
It would be odd to hide something that was so clearly valuable in the kitchen, so his money was on them being disturbed. Which meant they had not found whatever it was they were looking for.
He grabbed a glass from the drainer and filled it from a filter jug while he breathed in the smell of the room — detergent, polish and an outdoor smell, engine grease and dry hay, that seemed to float above the other household scents like an oily film. He breathed deeper and caught something else too, the chalky trace of something that hinted at the true depth of the widow’s despair. He looked down at the granite worktops and saw the source of it: traces of white powder. He dabbed it with the tip of his finger, tasted it and his mind identified it for him.
Zolpidem — muscle relaxant — anticonvulsant — most commonly used as a sleeping pill.
He shut off the water and headed back into the living room.
‘Sip this,’ he said, handing Holly the glass. He placed his hand on her forehead. She was warm but not dangerously so. ‘Have you taken anything?’
She stiffened. ‘No.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yes, I’m … who are you?’
‘That I was hoping you might tell me.’ He pulled the copy of Jack Cassidy’s memoir from his pocket and held it out. ‘I think your husband may have given me this.’ He opened the book to the dedication and handed it to her.
‘Solomon Creed,’ she said, and shook her head. ‘I never heard Jim mention your name. Why do you only think he gave it to you?’
‘Because I can’t remember anything — not my name, not where I’m from, nothing. All I have is this book and a strong feeling that I’m here because of your husband. I think that I’m here to …’
‘What?’
‘To save him.’
Pain clouded her face and she handed the book back. ‘Then you’re too late. My husband is dead. He can’t help you, and neither can I.’
Solomon took the book and thought about the white powder he had found in the kitchen. ‘Maybe I’m here to help you too?’
‘I don’t need your help. I need to be left alone. Thank you for your concern, but I think you need to leave now.’
Solomon didn’t move. ‘I can’t do that.’
‘You’re in my house. If I ask you to go then you should go.’
He continued to look at her, taking her in, her fragile beauty, her pain, her wide pupils, dilated with shock or perhaps something else.
‘If you don’t go right now, I’ll call the police.’
Solomon shook his head. ‘No you won’t. The police were just here. You shot the police in the face. Why did you do that, I wonder?’
‘What do you want?’
‘I told you. I want to find out who I am.’
‘But I don’t know who you are.’
‘Maybe your husband did. Why would he send me this book if I wasn’t connected to him in some way? And why would I feel so strongly that I’m here because of him? I think something is wrong here. I think your husband was in trouble and you know what it is, and that I am tied up in it somehow.’
Holly stared up at him, her black eyes solid with mistrust. ‘Why do you think Jim was in trouble?’
Solomon nodded at the trashed room. ‘Because of this. Because you shot a police officer in the face. Because I get the feeling that no one wants to talk about what happened to your husband.’
A flicker of interest. ‘Who doesn’t?’
‘The mayor, Morgan. I think the only reason he agreed to bring me here was because he wanted to stick around while we talked and see what you had to say, or make sure you said nothing because he was here. But he’s not here now. So what is it he didn’t want you to tell me?’
Holly opened her mouth as if she was about to say something, then stopped herself. ‘I just buried my husband,’ she said. ‘I can’t help you right now. I’m sorry, I need to take care of myself. So, please, leave me alone.’
Solomon nodded. Took in the mess. Breathed in the smells of the house, the engine grease and hay, and the chalky note floating beneath it all. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘If you want me to go, I’ll go. But you should know that sleeping tablets are a notoriously unreliable method of self-destruction.’
She blinked and her hand rose up and across her chest, the gesture of someone who felt exposed, which told him he had guessed correctly.
‘I can only imagine the pain you’re feeling now, losing someone so close and so young, so if you want to end that pain who am I to stop you? But if you’re really serious you should run in place before swallowing the pills, get your heart pumping a little — it’ll make the drugs work faster. And don’t dilute them too much. It weakens the effect.’
Holly studied him for a long time, her face unreadable, her mind trying to work out what Solomon was up to. ‘Who are you?’ she said at last.
‘I genuinely have no idea. And trust me, I don’t want to be here, bothering you like this, but I don’t know what else to do. I have and am nothing more than what you see in front of you. This is the sum total of me. I’m lost and trying to find myself. And I’m asking you if you will you help me?’
‘You came here with Morgan,’ she said.
‘I didn’t leave with him though, did I?’
‘Doesn’t prove anything. You could still be with them, brought here to show me sympathy and talk about wanting to help Jim to get me to trust you and find out what I know.’
‘You think if they wanted to do that they’d bring someone who looked like me?’
She studied him, her eyes lingering on his bare feet for a moment before fixing back on his face. The rain thrummed above them, filling the silence like a drumroll anticipating her answer. She held out her hand. ‘Show me the book.’
Solomon handed her the memoir and watched her read the dedication page again then frown and nod her head as if she had made her mind up. Then she stood and smoothed her dress down.
‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘There’s something you should probably see.’
33
Cassidy watched the charcoaled world slip past his window and despaired. It was going to cost a fortune to fix all this, let alone the amount of lost revenue that would come from having major roadworks on the main highway into town.
‘Looks like ground zero up ahead,’ the NTSB agent said.
What was his name again? Not like him to forget a name. Shows how distracted he was. His daddy had taught him the value of remembering a man’s name when he was still a boy. ‘They’ll know yours,’ he’d said. ‘Everyone knows a Cassidy in this town, so it’s up to you to even the score and put people at their ease. You shake their hand like you’ve been waiting all your life to meet that person and you repeat their name twice while staring them straight in the eye. Nothing wins respect more than remembering someone’s name. You forget someone’s name, you might as well spit in their face.’
And he’d forgotten the agent’s name.
They cruised to a bumpy halt twenty or so yards short of what was left of the plane. The fire had burned away everything but the metal, the road surrounding it looked like a puddle of boiling tar had been dumped on the ground and left to set.
‘I’m going to take a look,’ the agent said. ‘Stay in the car if you want.’
‘I’d like to see what nearly destroyed my town, if you don’t mind.’ — What might still destroy it.
‘Suit yourself,’ the agent said — Davidson, that was his name. ‘Just stay back from the wreckage and don’t touch anything.’
Mulcahy could have done without the mayor tagging along but he couldn’t do much about it. He opened the trunk and sheltered from the rain under the tailgate as he gathered what he needed from his own kit bag — a pair of nitrile gloves, some evidence bags, a Maglite. He had learned that the best way to remove something from a crime scene wasn’t to sneak in and try to smuggle it out, it was to walk up as if you belonged there, put it straight in an evidence bag and carry it away. It helped to get there fast while the local cops were still in charge and the situation was still fluid. Like now.
‘OK, let’s go take a peek,’ he said, closing the trunk and opening his umbrella with a sound that always reminded him of a silenced weapon being fired. The mayor joined him beneath the umbrella and they moved forward together, picking their way across the melted road.
Mulcahy could feel trapped heat radiating up through the soles of his shoes. ‘Some fire here, huh?’ he said, trying to relax the mayor and soften him up a little so he might talk. ‘Looks like the road boiled.’
The mayor nodded. ‘You must see things like this all the time,’ he said.
‘Nope,’ Mulcahy said truthfully. ‘Planes don’t generally crash on roads.’
‘What about runways?’
‘Runways are not roads. They’re much tougher — usually paved concrete or a concrete asphalt mix — so they tend to hold up better in a fire,’ Mulcahy said, reciting some, quite possibly bullshit, Wikifacts Siri had read out to him on the drive over. ‘Most planes crash at sea. Actually, most planes don’t crash at all, it’s still the safest form of transport. And even when they do crash, it’s not always fatal. You had someone walk away from this one, didn’t you?’
‘Yes. Well, he walked away from the crash site, but he says he wasn’t on the plane.’
‘We’ll need to talk to him, get an official statement.’ He stopped and turned to the mayor. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to stop here, sir.’
‘Of course.’
‘I need to take the umbrella with me.’
‘That’s OK, you do what you gotta do.’
Mulcahy turned and moved on alone, picking his way carefully through the rising forest of jagged aircraft parts and steam towards the large mess of twisted metal in the centre of a crater. He pulled out an evidence bag and the Maglite from his pocket and squatted down at the edge of it.
The rain thrummed on his umbrella and made pinging sounds as it struck metal inside the twisted structure. He shone the Maglite through the blackened ribs into the dark centre, picking up details of what lay inside. The asphalt had melted here and various heat-damaged objects were embedded in it. He swept the torch beam over them, recognizing very little of what he was seeing but searching for something very specific.
Once, back when he was still working homicide, he’d been called to a warehouse fire set to hide evidence of a triple murder. He’d seen plenty of death in his career but the blackened pile of bones he had gazed upon in that warehouse had made a deeper impression on him than anything. There were the remains of three people lying on that warehouse floor, three people who had woken up that morning, kissed their wives and kids or whatever and ended the day as nothing more than a pile of blackened bones. There’s not much of a human body that won’t burn if the temperature is high. Hell, even bone will crumble to nothing if it’s hot enough, and this fire must have been like a furnace.
He was starting to wonder whether all of this was a waste of time and he should get back to the mayor and start pumping him for more information about the survivor. Then he saw something among the wreckage.
It was sticking up from the melted road and lying in a spot where the rain ran off the tangle of metal in a steady stream. It was a human bone, a femur, largest bone in the whole body. He changed his position, moving round to where he imagined the front of the aircraft might have been, probing the twisted metal with his torchlight. Beneath one of the thicker metal bands he spotted the jagged edges of a couple of shattered ribs. He traced backwards and the torchlight picked out a blackened jawbone embedded in the surface of the road, then a little way up from the jawbone he found what he was looking for.
The skull was lying on its side, mostly crushed by a large metal strut with rain running over it, making the white bone easier to see. A small rectangle of metal was fixed to it with surgical screws, about an inch or so above what was left of the right eye socket.
‘There you are,’ Mulcahy murmured, putting the flashlight in his mouth. He shone the beam at the skull and took several photos on his phone.
‘You found something?’ the mayor shouted, his voice cutting through the thrumming rain.
Mulcahy pulled the flashlight from his mouth. ‘Human remains,’ he called back.
He stood and slipped the phone in his pocket to protect it from the rain, then turned away and headed back to the car. The real Feds would be here soon. He needed to stay out of their way if he wanted to remain useful and keep his father alive.
‘I’ve seen enough,’ he said, walking straight past Mayor Cassidy towards the car. ‘The crash scene investigators can take it from here.’
He got in the car, fired up the engine and started backing away before the mayor even had a chance to buckle his seat belt. ‘I’ll drop you at the control line,’ he said, turning around and driving as quickly over the ruined road as he dared. ‘If you could keep this road clear until the main unit arrive. I’ll call in what I’ve seen to get them up to speed. They’ll do everything they can to get the road open as soon as possible.’
The mayor nodded. He seemed distracted and Mulcahy could guess why.
They drove in silence and Mulcahy dropped him at the billboard where people were still celebrating. The mayor peered out anxiously at the crowd, checking for faces he didn’t recognize.
I’m here already, Mulcahy thought. You’re looking in the wrong direction
‘Thanks for your help,’ he said, eager for the mayor to get out.
‘You’re welcome,’ Cassidy replied, still scanning faces. ‘If there’s anything else you need …’
‘Actually, there is,’ Mulcahy said, pulling his phone from his pocket and opening up the map application. The Jeep had built-in satnav, but he never put information into a car he might have to dump. ‘The survivor you were talking about. If you could tell me where I might find him, I sure would like to talk to him about what happened here.’
34
Holly led Solomon through the quiet house, the only sound the rain on the roof above them.
‘This is Jim’s study,’ she said and pushed open a door into a room that looked like a tornado had ripped through it. Every drawer had been pulled out, every filing cabinet opened and emptied. Financial documents carpeted the floor, along with leather-bound legal books that had once lined the walls, their covers lying open like the wings of dead birds. A computer monitor sat in the middle of a desk that had been swept clear, the screen lighting up the devastation in the room.
Solomon stepped inside and breathed in, catching the musky scent of the room, leather and wood. The smell of engine grease and hay was here too, lifted from the skin of the man who had trashed it by the heat of his efforts.
‘You say you want to find out who you are.’ Holly moved over to the far wall. ‘Well, so did Jim.’
The wall was entirely covered with file cards, scraps of paper, maps, photographs. There seemed to be two distinct columns of information: on the left was a large map of the local area covered with old photographs and photocopied pages from an old journal written in old-style copperplate that reminded Solomon of the dedication in his copy of Jack Cassidy’s memoir; on the right a column of dates ran from floor to ceiling — 1850 at the bottom to the present at the top — with names written on separate cards next to various dates in between. A copy of the page of an old Bible had been pinned at the top between both columns. It was from Proverbs. A section had been underlined: ‘A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, and loving favour rather than silver and golde.’
‘This is Jim’s family tree,’ Holly said, pointing to the right-hand side of the wall. ‘As far as he’d managed to trace it. He’d been contacting all kinds of people recently in connection with it. Perhaps you were one of them.’
Solomon stepped closer, blood humming in his ears at the thought that the wall might contain a clue as to who he was. Some names had photographs next to them, the more recent ones mostly, but there were also a few steely tintypes capturing the firm jaws and faraway stares of folk long dead. Solomon’s eyes picked hungrily at it all, sucking in the details, but his name was not there, and his face did not stare out at him from the jumble of images.
He turned to the maps and documents filling the left-hand side of the wall. ‘What’s this?’
‘Research for a book Jim was writing about the lost Cassidy fortune — you know what that is?’
Solomon recalled all the books and treasure maps he’d seen in the souvenir shops that referenced it. He had also read something in Jack Cassidy’s memoir that had hinted at it. ‘“I have become famous in my lifetime”,’ he quoted from memory, ‘“for finding a great fortune out in the desert, but in truth there is another treasure far greater than the first, that I discovered late in my life after a great amount of study”.’
‘You’ve read his memoir.’
‘Yes.’
‘So have lots of people. Ever since it was first published people have been coming here looking for it. They still get busloads of folks turning up to search for the lost fortune.’
Solomon studied the maps, the documents, the photocopies of Bible pages with notes scrawled on them. ‘Was your husband searching for it too?’
Holly shrugged. ‘Maybe. I don’t know if he actually believed in it. He liked the idea of it, he was a romantic that way, but he kind of abandoned writing the book once he got a lead on his real family.’
Solomon turned back to the column of dates and names. ‘How long had he been working on his family tree?’
‘Not long. Only since he got elected, a month maybe. As sheriff elect he got access to the town’s confidential records so he could familiarise himself with the finances and all the charitable trusts he was going to be managing. But it also gave him access to other parts of the archives, including the admission papers to The Cassidy.’
‘The Cassidy — what’s that?’
‘The orphanage. It closed about ten years ago when money started getting tight. Jim grew up there. He was an orphan.’
The word was like a bright lamp shedding new light on everything: the white picket fence outside, the white gables, the rocker on the porch — it was all a projection, a child’s idea of a perfect family home, imagined and then created by someone who had never had one. It also explained James Coronado’s obsessive need to find out where he was from and who he was. Solomon understood that well enough.
‘One of the things Jim campaigned on was re-opening The Cassidy,’ Holly continued, ‘putting the heart back into the community, he called it, returning the town to what Jack Cassidy had always intended it to be, a place of charity and Christian goodness. Jack Cassidy originally set it up as a home for abandoned women and children, but over the years it became an orphanage. It was Jim’s home for the first seventeen years of his life, the closest thing he ever had to a family. But the admission files opened a door to his real family.’ She took a photocopied form from the wall and handed it to Solomon. It detailed the admission of the infant James Coronado. There was a girlish, looping signature at the bottom of the page in the section for next of kin: ‘Carol Nielsen’ then, in brackets, ‘mother’.
‘Jim managed to track her down to a trailer park north of Nogales. She’d been living there for years with some guy. He was still there, but she had died of cancer a few years back. He had a bunch of her stuff and was more than happy to get rid of it.’ She looked up at a bookcase that had been swept clean, then down to the pile of things on the floor below it. She crouched and retrieved a clear plastic bag from the pile and handed it to Solomon. ‘He found this among her things.’
The seal at the top of the bag had been opened then folded back over again, presumably when it had been found not to contain whatever the intruder had been searching for. Inside was a small black book. He opened the bag and a smell of old cigarettes billowed out like a foul genie escaping a bottle. He pulled the book out and turned it over in his hand. It was old and worn and bound in thin leather that might have been pale blue when it was new but had gone a mottled, greasy bluish-grey from years of being handled by unclean hands. The spine had started to crack and the gold lettering mostly worn away, leaving only the outline of the words ‘HOLY BIBLE’ stamped into the leather.
He opened the cover and saw tiny writing inside recording a family’s history stretching back to the middle of the eighteenth century. It was the same list of names pinned to the wall in front of him, only with one significant difference. In the Bible the family tree ended at Carol Nielsen’s name. She had not recorded the birth of her son.
‘Look at her birth date and then Jim’s,’ Holly said. ‘She was sixteen when she had him. We thought maybe she’d fallen pregnant and either the father didn’t want to know or wasn’t around, so she brought him to The Cassidy and left him with nothing but a name she’d borrowed from her oldest relative.’ She pointed at the first name written in the greasy Bible — James Coronado (b. 1857 — d.?).
‘She was so young and she must have been so scared. I can’t imagine how awful it must be to walk up to a building with your baby in your arms and walk away again without him.’
In these words, Solomon caught a freash glimpse of how enormous Holly’s loss had been. When James Coronado died she had lost more than her husband, she had lost her own future as well, the years they would have spent together, the family they’d planned on having. He looked up at the top of the wall where a card with five blank spaces marked on it was pinned next to James and Holly’s names.
‘That was kind of a joke,’ Holly said, following his gaze. ‘Jim always said he wanted enough kids to form a junior soccer team.’
‘How about you, how many did you want?’
She looked at the empty card and her eyes misted. ‘One would have been fine.’
Solomon felt her sadness deepen and wondered whether he should move away from this tender subject. He glanced down at a small square of paper he had spotted when he had first stepped in the room, half-buried in a pile of papers by the desk. Maybe it was nothing to do with him, but he felt, somehow, that it might be.
‘So what happened?’ he asked.
‘What do you mean?’
Solomon stepped over to the desk, picked up the square of paper and handed it to her. ‘What happened to your baby?’
Holly caught her breath when she saw what it was. She took it and crumpled slowly down into the chair by the desk. ‘I didn’t know he’d kept this,’ she said, her finger tracing the lines of the barely formed nose and chin picked out on the ultrasound scan. ‘This is the twelve-week scan. We lost him a week later.’
‘Him?’
A single tear dripped down her cheek. ‘Jim Junior, we called him, though I don’t think he would’ve ended up being called that. We thought we had plenty of time to come up with another name.’ She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. ‘Turns out we didn’t.’
‘How did your husband take the loss?’
She let out a long sigh. ‘Like a man, and by that I mean he was strong and stoic and supportive but kept his own feelings hidden. He did that a lot, it seems, more than I knew.’ She turned in the seat and moved the mouse across the screen. ‘I found this the other day.’ She clicked on an icon with ‘ForJJ’ written beneath it and a screen popped open showing a still of a man sitting in the chair Holly now sat in.
‘Hi,’ the man said as the clip started playing and Solomon felt the skin on the back of his neck tighten when he realized who it must be. ‘I just found out you were coming and felt like I wanted to talk to you, so here I am. I never had a dad when I was growing up so I don’t really know how this works. I always wished I’d had one, so I could talk to him, ask him about stuff. So that’s what I want to say to you, little man, that I was thinking about you and wanted to talk to you before you were even born. So remember that, if you ever feel like you can’t tell me anything. Because you always can. I’ll always be here for you. You’ll always have me and your mom. And I can’t wait to meet you. Take care, little man.’
The picture froze and Solomon studied the face of James Coronado, the man he had come in search of, the man he was here to save. He looked up at the wall behind the screen and the same face stared out of a series of framed photographs showing a group of five boys standing by a campfire and in front of what appeared to be a house with no walls and a woven, wooden roof.
Ramada — the word floated up in Solomon’s mind — Hohokam Indian word for a shelter.
The landscape beyond the ramada was prehistoric, unchanged since before the Hohokam or anybody else had stood there. An escarpment rose behind them on the horizon, a deep V-shaped niche cut into it by an ancient river.
Solomon studied the boys’ faces, frozen in time by flashbulbs that had charted their childhood in yearly increments. Each year they grew a little more until the last picture showed men in their twenties, some fatter, some with hair that was starting to thin, but still recognizably the same boys who had posed for that first photograph. James Coronado stood at the centre, a little taller than the rest and with a gravity to him that seemed to pull the others in. If this group of boys had a leader, it was him.
Solomon studied his face, willing it to be familiar. But he didn’t recognize him. James Coronado, the man who had recorded this message for the son he would never see, the man he was here to save, was a stranger to him.
35
Mulcahy eased the Jeep to a stop several houses short of the address the mayor had given him. He cut the engine and scanned the street through the rain. It was small-town Americana perfection with decent-sized plots and double-car drives with garages at the top. Only one car was parked in the drive of Holly Coronado’s house, but he could see a light in a lower window showing someone was there.
He picked up his phone and studied the archived webpage of a local newspaper. The article had a picture of the other car that was usually parked here, all twisted up at the bottom of a ravine like an empty beer can. The headline above it read:
SHERIFF ELECT DEAD IN TRAGIC ACCIDENT
He scrolled down the article and found another picture, a photograph of the dead man and his wife standing in an old graveyard and smiling for the cameras. She was pretty. They were a handsome couple. They looked like they had it all worked out and everything going for them. Just goes to show.
He looked up again and studied the street. A single porch light was glowing weakly in the shade of a wide verandah a few houses down from the widow’s home but he could not sense any life behind the windows of the house. Probably just a sensor that had tripped automatically in the flat grey light beneath the storm clouds. Most of the townsfolk were still down at the control line. He figured they would stay there a while, even with this rain. It wasn’t every day you saved your town from destruction. If he lived here, he would want to stay there too, savouring every happy, noisy, back-slapping moment before he had to return to his nice house on a safe street like this where lights came on automatically to keep the darkness at bay.
This was the kind of street he had once imagined living in, before his life had veered off in a different and darker direction. For a long time, when the life he had left behind was still fresh in his mind, he had replayed certain events over and over like an armchair quarterback trying to win a lost game, thinking about how things might have turned out if he had made other choices, or been a better man, or a stronger man, or a smarter one. It was only over time he gradually realized that he had never had any choice in the first place. Nobody did really. The truth of it was that if someone with power wanted to reach into your life and tear the heart out of it, there was nothing much you could do about it. Just like now.
He attached the photograph he had taken at the crash site to a new message, pressed send and watched it go. It would get bounced around a few times before it got to Tío. Then things would get interesting. People would die because of what had happened here. Some of them would deserve it, but not all. He clicked on another message and studied the blurry photographs Tío had sent of the man with white skin and hair, and a mark on his arm that may or may not have been a kill tag — the man who was in the house he was looking at now.
He opened the glovebox, took out his Beretta and the sunglasses case with the suppressor inside. He replaced the partially spent magazine with a full one, checked his gun then screwed the suppressor to the muzzle. Tío had said he wanted the man alive, but Mulcahy wasn’t going to take any chances. He laid the gun down on the seat and looked back up at the house. The storm was easing now, the drumming of the rain on the roof of his car getting softer.
He would have liked it if his pop had lived somewhere nice like this instead of the ratty three-room apartment over the laundromat. Then again, Pop didn’t seem to mind where he lived. He had never been particularly good at holding on to money either. Easy come, easy go, that was the closest they got to a family motto. He remembered when he was eleven and Pop would return from his week-long trips to those exotic-sounding places, his car covered in road dust. It was only later in life, when Mulcahy had been to these places himself, that he figured out why Pop had sometimes returned happy and bearing gifts and other times quiet and broke.
He ran through the names in his mind again, a roll-call recalled from his youth: Oklahoma City; Des Moines; Shakopee; Omaha; Kansas City. He went through it a second time, adding other names: Remington Park in Oklahoma City; Prairie Meadows in Des Moines; Canterbury Downs in Shakopee; Ak-Sar-Ben in Omaha; Woodlands in Kansas City. Racetracks. Every place had a racetrack.
He reached down and pulled the laundry sack out from beneath the seat, the sharp edges of magazine clips and gun-sights stretching the plastic and poking through in some places. He picked out Carlos’s Glock and a spare magazine then stashed the bag back in the footwell. He tested the Glock’s action and swapped out the magazine for a full one. He would need a backup weapon in case the guy was cartel like Tío suspected. The Glock was reliable and had no safety, which made it a good choice for a backup piece — you didn’t want to be fiddling round with safety options in the middle of a firefight. It was also generic and untraceable. Carlos had done him the service of filing off the serial number. He laid it on the seat next to the Beretta and checked the street again.
If he had managed to buy a house like this for Pop, chances are he would only have re-mortgaged it on the sly for some up-front cash and lost it all at the track or in some back-room poker game. Just the way it was, no point in getting bent out of shape about it. If you started having issues with the bad things in people and trying to change them, you were in danger of losing sight of what was good about them too. And for all his faults, he wouldn’t change Pop for anything. If it hadn’t been for him he might not even have made it out of childhood.
He picked up the Glock, slipped it into his shoulder holster then took the silenced Beretta in hand. He owed him everything, could never repay him for what he had done, but right now, in the next hour or so, he was going to have to do whatever it took to try.
36
Holly watched Solomon moving around the study, his head turning slowly, taking everything in. He seemed unreal in some ways, his white skin and hair making him seem like a beautiful, classical, marble statue that had been brought to life and dressed in ordinary clothes. He had an extraordinary stillness about him and she found it calming, like staring at the surface of a deep lake.
During her recent internet trawls she had come across several accounts of potential suicides who had been saved by what one had described as a ‘familiar stranger’, someone who had appeared and seemed to know them and understand their pain. Some described these strangers as angels, others as the spirits of loved ones — fathers, mothers, grandparents — who had come to stop them crossing over to the other side. When she had read these stories she had put it down to some kind of extreme mental and emotional state creating subconscious projections of the survival instinct. Perhaps that’s what he was. Except in all the reported cases the stranger had dissuaded the witness from suicide whereas Solomon had given her specific instructions on how she might do it more effectively. Then again, that was exactly the slightly perverse, counter-intuitive way her subconscious would work, tell her to do something, knowing she was most likely to do the exact opposite.
He turned and looked at her, his pale, grey eyes so piercing she imagined he could read her thoughts. ‘What do you think they wanted?’ he asked.
‘A file, something like that — I don’t know for sure. I think Jim found out something about the town, something they didn’t want getting out.’
‘Who’s “they”?’
‘The town elders. The sheriffs. They run this place. Redemption is more like a corporation than a town, with members of a board instead of public officials. There’s the mayor, who is the chief executive, then there are two sheriffs who answer to him, one for commerce and one for philanthropy. Jim had been elected sheriff in charge of philanthropy.’
‘Seems a grand title for such a small town.’
‘This whole place has delusions of grandeur. Have you seen the church? It’s like they shipped a cathedral over from Europe and dropped it in the middle of the desert. Can you imagine what it must have looked like when most people here were still living in tents or one-room cabins? Redemption was built on Christ as much as copper, Mr Creed, never forget that. And you can’t win a fight against someone who thinks they have God on their side.’
‘I thought God was supposed to be on everyone’s side.’
‘Not in this town. Here, if your name is Cassidy then you are God. Morgan and the other sheriffs, they’re disciples. Except Jim wasn’t. He was never part of their club. I think to them he was always going to be an orphan boy from The Cassidy who made good. But they needed him because of the trusts.’
Solomon nodded. ‘Morgan mentioned those. What are they?’
‘They’re the lifeblood of this town and also why the Cassidy family is so powerful here. Jack Cassidy set them up when he founded the town. They act like a localized welfare system, a large charity fund, run by his family, that supports the community. As long as a Cassidy lives here they’re protected and so is the town. But no more Cassidys, no more trusts.’
‘And Mayor Cassidy has no children.’
‘Exactly. As soon as he dies the trusts will revert to the church. When Jack Cassidy set them up this wasn’t a problem because the church was part of the town. But now it’s not, now it’s part of the Episcopal Diocese of Arizona. So when Cassidy dies the trusts will no longer be owned or administered by the town alone, they will be managed by the church, which means the funds could go anywhere in the state — and probably will. And most people here rely on subsidies from the trusts to keep going.’
‘What about the mine? Morgan said it was still producing.’
‘If it is, it can’t be much. They had to close down production about fifteen years ago because of groundwater contamination. Bunch of people got sick from the chemicals they were using. Cost the town a fortune to clean it all up and pay damages. If it wasn’t for the trusts this whole place would have gone under. The trusts are where the money is, not the mine, not the airfield and not the tourists. Jim’s job was to try to find ways of securing them for the town. It was his area of expertise. That’s why they needed him.’ She spotted a card on the floor, picked it up and gave it to Solomon:
Mayor Ernest Cassidy
and the Sheriffs of Redemption
request the presence of
Mr James Coronado
at a formal dinner at the Cassidy residence
to celebrate his election as sheriff
‘Jim got it the day after the election, an invite to sit at the big table. I teased him about it, saying he’d probably have to go through some kind of hazing ceremony where they’d paint him copper and get him to recite the Lord’s Prayer while they smacked him on the ass with bibles or something. He laughed, acted like it was no big deal, but I knew it was, the orphan kid being invited to dine at the Cassidy Residence.
‘Anyway, the day of the big dinner came and he had been studying hard for it like it was the bar exam or something. He’d been going through the old town budgets, reading through all the trust paperwork going back years. The finances were in a worse state than he thought, I know that much.
‘I remember kissing him goodbye and telling him not to worry, that he should enjoy the moment and that they should be glad to have him in their corner. He had his best suit on. He looked so handsome. And he was happy, nervous but happy. And I was so proud of him because he’d done exactly what he’d set out to do, and all he had in front of him was hard work, and he had never been afraid of that.
‘I suppose in some ways it was the last time I saw him properly, the last time I saw the Jim that I knew. I went to bed that night hoping they were being kind to him and that he was having a good time. The bed seemed too big without him. I wasn’t used to him not being there — I’m still not used to it. Anyway, I woke up just after dawn. The sun was coming up and the birds were getting noisy and the bed was still empty. I sat up and, I don’t know why but I could feel that Jim was in the house — you know sometimes when you can feel someone’s presence, even if you can’t hear them?’
Solomon nodded. He knew.
‘I called his name but he didn’t reply, so I got up and went to find him. I found him here, sitting in this chair. He had a bottle of whiskey open and a glass that was half full. I could smell the alcohol before I even stepped into the room. There was something about the smell of it and the fact that Jim hadn’t answered when I had called that made me feel uneasy, like something terrible had happened, like someone had died and he didn’t want to face me and have to tell me the news.
‘He was pretty drunk, which made me think he must have been home a while, because Mayor Cassidy is not a drinking man. He must have downed about half the bottle, sitting in the dark on his own.
‘I asked him what had happened, thinking it must be something terrible to have made him drink like that, but he wouldn’t tell me. He just kept shaking his head and staring at the bottle. I was scared. I had never seen him like that before.
‘I made him get up and walked him to the bedroom and put him to bed, thinking he would sleep it off and talk to me about it later. But he never did. Whatever had happened at that dinner, whatever they had talked about, whatever he found out, killed something inside him. I think it broke his heart.
‘After that night I hardly saw him. He slept it off, got up, showered and changed then drove into town. He came back later with a trunk full of archive boxes filled with files and went straight to his study. The only thing he said to me was that there was something he needed to fix but he couldn’t tell me what it was because he needed to protect me from it. That was the word he used — “protect” — like he’d found something poisonous and was trying to keep it from me for my own safety.
‘So I left him alone. He was unreachable anyway, so I kept away, figuring he would work through whatever it was then come back to me. But he never did. Three days later he was dead.’
‘What about the others who were at the dinner, have you spoken to them?’
‘After Jim died the mayor called and offered condolences. I asked him about the dinner but he wouldn’t talk about it, kept saying that I was upset and it was all a tragic accident.’
‘But you don’t think it was — an accident.’
‘No. Something happened. I don’t know if they killed Jim to silence him or whether whatever he found drove him off that road, but either way I blame them for it.’
‘Have you talked to the other sheriffs?’
‘The only other one is Pete Tucker, sheriff for commerce. He’s a big landowner around here, has a majority stake in the airfield because a lot of it is built on his ranch. I haven’t spoken to him.’
‘What about the coroner’s report, have you seen a copy?’
‘No.’
‘It would be useful to see exactly what killed him, whether it was a car crash or something else. Though if your husband was trying to save the town, it doesn’t make sense for them to—’
A loud knock echoed through the house, three raps on the front door.
‘Stay here,’ Holly said. ‘I’ll go see who it is.’
She left the study and walked down the quiet halls of her house, thinking about the pale stranger in her husband’s study and wondering if he was really there at all. She felt slightly panicked at the thought that she might return and find him gone, his mission to distract her complete. She didn’t want him to go. Talking to him was comforting. She moved through the disordered mess of her living room and opened the front door. She saw the gun first. Then she saw the man who was holding it.
37
Morgan pushed through the door into his office and closed it behind him, muffling the sound of ringing phones in the outer office. There was no one there to answer them, everyone out in the field dealing with the aftermath of the fire.
He dropped a plastic hospital sack on his desk, made his way over to a battered locker in the corner and took out a fresh shirt. The locker had been in his life longer than most of the people he knew, a souvenir from high school he’d saved from the bulldozer when it closed its doors for the last time eight years earlier.
He shrugged out of his ruined shirt, his eyes fixed on the initials he had scratched into the locker door when he was eleven. There was something instinctive about making your mark on things. Some people scratched their names on lockers, others, like the Cassidys, on the side of buildings, but the impulse was the same; it showed that you had been there, it showed that you had existed.
He dropped the ruined shirt in the trash can by his desk and studied the red spots on his chest where the salt crystals had hit him but not broken the skin.
Goddamn woman. He knew she was upset but, Jesus! Did she have to go unloading shotguns on people? As if he didn’t have enough to deal with.
He slipped his arms into the new shirt, his hands stinging inside fresh dressings as he fastened his buttons, then he settled behind his desk in the same oak-and-leather chair that had been intimately familiar with the behinds of every single one of the town’s police chiefs. He tapped a password into his computer and opened up the National DMV database. Now the fire was out, his mind had fixed on what would happen next. A firestorm of a different kind was heading their way and he needed to tread very carefully if he was going to survive it. He liked to be prepared and have all the information to hand and there was one variable he was increasingly unhappy about.
‘OK, Mr Creed,’ he said under his breath, typing Solomon’s name into the search field. ‘Let’s find out who you really are.’
He hit return and got three matches, all African Americans aged between fifty-five and seventy. Whoever Solomon Creed was, he wasn’t on this database, which meant he didn’t have an American driving licence. He opened a new window and set up searches on all the other national and international identity databases he had access to — Social Security, passport agencies, Interpol — then he sat back in his chair and stared at the wall opposite while he waited for the searches to run.
Sixteen faces stared back at him, portraits of every one of his predecessors stretching right back to a silver nitrate print of Nathanial Priddy, first police chief of the town of Redemption. He was a flinty-looking character, stiff-necked, impressive whiskers and the flat eyes of a killer — which is exactly what he was. Even with God on their side and the Rev. Jack preaching love and understanding from the pulpit, Nathan Priddy had been a necessary evil at the birthing of this town. He was buried up the hill in the old cemetery, along with several people he had personally put there.
Simpler times. Direct solutions. No comebacks.
Morgan traced the line of faces representing over one hundred and thirty years of law enforcement. You could see how things had softened over the years just by looking at them. They started with bony, humourless faces captured in stark black and white, their profiles strong, their eyes gazing past the camera as if something far more important was happening just out of frame. Then, with each new photograph, the poses softened and the lean bones of harder times slowly disappeared beneath the padding of prosperity and easier lives. Smiles started to creep in, then colour too. Any fool could keep the town running while a river of money flowed through it. But when it dried up and the earth started to crack, it took someone with real strength of character to stop it all from falling apart. Someone like Nathan Priddy. Someone like him.
His computer chirped, telling him it had finished its search. He glanced at the screen — eighty-two matches — opened the first and started working through them.
He was convinced Solomon must be working for someone; he was too accomplished to be just some guy who had happened along — the way he had taken over at the fire line, the fact that he seemed to know more than the doctors, even the manner in which he had dumped Lawrence Hayes on the ground when he’d first appeared on the road. Lawrence had been all-state wrestling champion before becoming a medic and Solomon had tossed him on the ground like he was leaving a dollar tip for a diner waitress. And there was that burn on his arm, and the copy of Jack Cassidy’s memoir in his pocket with Jim Coronado’s name on it — far too many question marks to be hanging over a stranger’s head with things standing the way they were. But Morgan was also cautious. He was treading a fine line and couldn’t afford to put a foot wrong. He needed to know who Solomon Creed was before he threw him to the wolves, or decided which wolves to throw him to.
It took him less than ten minutes to go through all eighty-two results and he drew a blank on every one of them. The Solomon Creed he had dropped off at Holly Coronado’s house did not appear to officially exist, which told a story in itself. People couldn’t not exist these days, it was almost impossible. So either he was some off-the-grid undercover operative — or he was using a false name.
Morgan picked up the plastic sack he had brought from the hospital and took an evidence bag from his desk drawer. He carefully removed the starter cap from inside the sack, holding it by the peak and turning it slowly until he found the single strand of white hair trapped in the seam of the headband. He held it over the opened evidence bag and squeezed his finger and thumb to nip the hair between the plastic then pulled the cap away to leave the single strand of hair inside. He sealed it and held it up to the light. The hair glowed. At one end he could see the bud of a root where it had been pulled from Solomon’s scalp, carrying a nice little plug of DNA-rich cells with it.
He filled in the paperwork for the DNA sweep, clipped the evidence bag to the requisition form and dropped the whole lot in his out-tray, ready to hand it to the Feds when they took over the crash investigation. The presence of the NTSB would add some weight to things and speed up the paperwork. He would intercept the results before anyone else saw them and make them disappear, pass them up a different food-chain, the one he was helping put in place.
He opened the top drawer of his desk and reached to the back where he had taped a phone to the underside of the desktop. It was a cheap contract-free throwaway with internet capability so he didn’t need to go through one of the networks to make a call. He switched it on and looked up at the wall of faces again while he waited for it to power up. He doubted any of them would have had the guts to do what he was about to do, except maybe Nathan Priddy, who’d put five people in the ground to protect the town. That was all he was doing really — making sacrifices for a greater good.
The phone finished its start-up routine and he dialled a number from memory.
‘Si?’ someone answered after three rings and Morgan caught the sound of a busy street or café behind the voice.
‘Soledad,’ Morgan replied, giving the code word.
He heard handling noise as the middleman fumbled with another phone and called a different number. Then Morgan heard the sound of a phone ringing through the burble of conversation and clink of coffee cups.
‘Si!’ someone new answered.
‘The fire’s out,’ he said, his hand stinging as it curled round the small phone. He didn’t need to identify himself. The phone had been given to him when he had brokered the deal beneath a star-spattered sky on a desert track running parallel with the Mexican border. They would know who was using it.
‘You all set your end?’ The voice was flat and cold.
‘Almost. There’s a guy here, an albino, showed up by the crash. Calls himself Solomon Creed. He anything to do with you?’
‘Never heard of him. He a problem?’
Morgan shook his head. ‘Not any more.’ He looked up at Nathan Priddy, killer of five men, and wondered if he’d beat that number by the time this thing was over. ‘What now?’ he asked.
‘Now we wait,’ the voice on the line said. ‘The trap is all set. We just got to see if we catch anything.’ Then the phone clicked and went dead.
38
‘Mrs Coronado,’ the man pointing the gun sounded embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry to have to do this but you’re going to have to surrender your firearm and come with me.’
There were two of them, uniformed cops wearing flak jackets, side-arms drawn. Holly recognized the lead cop but couldn’t recall his name. His jacket was hiding his badge. He was Bobby or Billy, something like that. All the men in town seemed to have names that ended with an ‘ee’ sound. Even those who didn’t twisted them round until they did, like Mayor Ernest Cassidy insisting everybody call him ‘Ernie’.
‘You need to surrender your firearm and come with us,’ the cop repeated.
Donny! That was his name.
‘We need to talk to you about what happened here.’
Donny McGee — two ‘ee’s for the price of one. Fairly new guy. One of Morgan’s men. The thought made her lips thin.
‘I can give you a statement,’ she said. ‘There was an intruder on my property. I asked him to leave and warned him that I would shoot if he did not. He did not, so I shot him — with rock salt. Then he left. The gun is legal and licensed to my husband at this address. That’s my statement.’ She started to close the door but Donny stepped forward, planting his boot over the threshold to keep it open. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Coronado. I still got to take you in.’ His voice dropped a little as if the whole street might be listening and he didn’t want them to hear. ‘You didn’t shoot just anyone and we can’t let a thing like that slide, don’t matter what you been through.’
‘You mean the fact that I only finished burying my husband a couple hours ago?’
Donny lowered his gun a little. ‘Like I said, I am real sorry about this, but it’s for your own good as much as anything. You shouldn’t be left on your own with a loaded firearm, not at a time like this.’
‘She’s not on her own.’ The voice made Donny look up.
Holly turned and felt a rush of relief to see Solomon standing in the hallway. If he was a figment of her imagination he sure was a persistent one. She turned back to Donny. ‘Can you see him?’
He looked confused. ‘Sure!’
‘Then you can see I’m not on my own, so thank you for your concern.’ She attempted to close the door again but Donny’s boot still blocked it. He lowered his gun and slipped it into its holster. The cop behind him held his position. Holly was pretty sure he was called Tom, which inevitably meant he was known as Tommy.
‘Listen, Mrs Coronado,’ Donny said in his best let’s be reasonable voice. ‘I’m sorry we had to come knocking on your door like this, but you unloaded a shotgun into Chief Morgan’s chest. We were dispatched here to bring you in and make sure you’re OK. That’s the full extent of it, for now. But if you don’t come voluntarily then we’re going to bring you in anyway, which means we will have to arrest you. I don’t want to do that, but if you make me I will. I’m sorry.’
‘You keep saying “sorry”,’ she said, listening to the water gurgling in the gutter. ‘If you truly are then stop doing the thing you’re having to apologize for and leave me alone.’
‘Can’t do that,’ Donny said as if the words caused him pain. ‘I hate having to do this, but I do think it’s for your own good. Where’s the shotgun?’
Holly stared past him at the rain. It was easing now and the day beginning to lighten as the sun broke through the clouds. Raindrops fell through shafts of sunlight and shone like diamonds against the wet road and the dark houses opposite. There was probably a rainbow somewhere but she couldn’t see it from where she was standing.
‘Mrs Coronado.’ She looked back into the earnest face of the cop. ‘The shotgun?’
She let out a sigh then opened the door and pointed at the floor. ‘Over there by the couch. Safety’s on.’
Donny moved past her, nodding politely as he entered the house like he was just Sunday visiting. He pulled a large evidence bag from his pocket and shook it out as he walked over to the shotgun. ‘What happened here?’ he said, looking around at the disordered room.
‘Isn’t that what you should be finding out?’ Solomon said.
The second cop moved forward to cover the room like this smart suburban home might actually be a meth lab and he expected armed resistance to manifest at any moment.
Donny turned the evidence bag inside out and used it to pick the gun up from the floor without touching it. ‘You notice anything missing?’
‘I don’t know,’ Holly replied. ‘I haven’t had chance to check. Maybe you should ask Chief Morgan about it — he didn’t seem too surprised when I told him there’d been a break-in.’
Donny stood up and turned the bag the right way again, sealing the shotgun inside. ‘We can get someone out if you want to report it.’
‘You’re already here,’ Solomon said. ‘Why don’t you take a look?’
‘We were only told to bring Mrs Coronado in and grab this.’ He held up the bag with the shotgun in it.
‘Who told you? Morgan?’
Donny looked over at Solomon but didn’t say anything.
‘Did he tell you to bring me in too?’
‘Just Mrs Coronado and the gun.’
‘What if she doesn’t want to come?’
‘Then we’ll have to arrest her.’
‘It’s fine,’ Holly said, stepping forward and giving in to the flow of things like someone tired of swimming against a strong current. ‘I’ll come with you, but can I change out of this first?’ She held up the tattered ends of her dress.
‘Sure,’ Donny said.
Holly left the room with Solomon and the cops staring each other out. She stripped her dress off the moment she stepped into her bedroom and threw it in the tub in the en-suite so it wouldn’t drip everywhere. It left muddy smears on the side and made her want to shower, but she figured the cops might take exception if she made them wait so instead she splashed water on her face then opened her closet, dug out a pair of grey jeans and a blue work shirt and pulled them on. She felt a knot tighten in her stomach when she spotted the bag of crushed sleeping pills next to the bottle of Scotch. She wondered, if things had happened differently — if she hadn’t come home to find the place ransacked, if Morgan hadn’t turned up and got her mad, if Solomon hadn’t refused to leave — whether she would be lying on this bed now, a half-drunk, cloudy glass of Scotch on the night stand next to her. She shuddered at the thought and hurried over to hide the pills like a guilty secret she didn’t want anyone else to know.
Solomon stood in the living room waiting for Holly to return. He was watching the two cops who were looking around the room, down at the floor, outside at the street, anywhere but directly at him. No one spoke.
‘Don’t you need a statement from me?’ he asked.
‘No,’ Donny replied, still not meeting his eye.
‘Why not? I’m a witness to what happened.’
‘We were only told to bring Mrs Coronado in.’
‘I’m here,’ Holly said, reappearing in the living room and handing Solomon a pair of work boots. ‘Jim was a size eleven, you look to be about the same, you can’t go walking around barefoot, people will think you’re strange.’
Solomon took the boots. ‘I am strange,’ he said.
‘There’s some thick socks in there too, in case they’re too big. You might as well have them. They’re good boots. They should be worn.’
Solomon took them and frowned. ‘Does this mean you want me to go?’
‘No, not at all.’ She seemed flustered. ‘Stay, please. Have another look through Jim’s research, see if there’s anything there that sparks a memory. I want to help you if I can.’ She turned to the two cops, ‘I won’t be long, will I?’
Donny shrugged. ‘Guess not.’
‘Good,’ she moved to the door. ‘Then let’s go get this over with.’
39
Solomon watched them drive away and listened to the silence flood back into the house. The rain had almost stopped now, the thrum of it falling on the roof replaced by gurgles and drips as it ran off the sun-baked land.
He breathed deeply and caught the gun-oil and boot-polish smell of the cops mingling with the faint, citrus scents of Holly and the house and the greasy hay overlay of the intruder.
There had been something odd about the cops and their unwillingness to engage with him. He would have understood if it had been regular small-town unfriendliness, but that would usually manifest itself as suspicion and some kind of territorial power display. They had demonstrated neither of those things. Instead they had practically ignored him, and he wondered at this as he sat on the couch, brushed away the loose dirt and dust from his feet and pulled the socks then the boots over his feet. He stood up and walked around. They were solidly built but the leather was supple and well broken in by the man who owned them. A phrase floated into Solomon’s mind, one that had been coined by Cherokee Indians then stolen by the colonial invaders along with everything else:
Don’t judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes.
He liked wearing James Coronado’s boots. It felt right somehow. He liked the sound they made, the hard-leather soles staccato across the oak floorboards, as he walked to the back of the house. There was a door that hadn’t been open before and paused by it. Holly had left her bedroom door open in her hurry to leave and the citrusy smell of her flowed out from it, mingling with soap and the chalky odour of the crushed sleeping pills. He stepped across the threshold and followed his nose to the closet, opened the door and picked up the bag of white powder, enough to put an adult to sleep permanently. He thought about the sequence of events that had brought him here and how his insistence on coming to talk to Holly had probably saved her life. He glanced into the bathroom and saw her wet funeral gown in the bath, wet and ragged like a shed skin. He thought of her now, in the back of the car with the two cops who hadn’t met his eye. Then he frowned, turned and headed out of the room.
Mulcahy watched the cruiser drive away then looked back at the house.
The street was still quiet, no new cars or activity. The rain was easing so he imagined people would stay down at the city limits even longer. Even so, he needed to be quick. Now he’d sent Tío the photograph of the blackened skull he would need to show him something else to prove his value and make sure the anger Tío would feel at the evidence of his son’s death would not be turned on him or his Pop.
He checked the Beretta one last time then slid the long, silenced barrel inside his jacket, then opened the car door and stepped out into the street.
40
Solomon returned to the study and went straight to the map pinned on the wall. His heart was beating hard, though from anxiety or excitement he couldn’t quite tell.
His eyes moved across the drawn contours of the land, north to where the airfield was marked and beyond. A straight line cut across the desert showing where the storm drain marked the boundary of the airfield. Beyond it haphazard tracks cut across flat land and converged about a mile or so outside of town at a cluster of buildings with ‘Tucker Ranch’ written next to them. He recalled the dying words of the burned man.
Tell her I’m sorry, he had said. Tell Ellie Tucker I’m sorry.
He stared at the map, committing it to memory, then moved to the desk and picked up the formal invite to the sheriffs’ dinner. Tucker had been at the dinner too so he would know what had been said there. Most likely he wouldn’t share that information, but Solomon wanted to look him in the eye when he asked him the question. Besides, he had a promise to keep to a dead man. His eyes shifted to the monitor where James Coronado was still frozen. Two dead men.
He hit the space bar to set the message playing and listened again to the voice of the man he was here to save, a dead father talking to his dead son.
Mulcahy moved quickly across the street and up the slope of the drive. He softened his footfalls as he mounted the wooden steps of the porch and stopped by the door. He checked the street once more, pulled the Beretta from inside his jacket then pulled the screen open. The main door was unlocked, like he’d expected it to be. He had seen Holly leaving with the two cops and she hadn’t paused to lock it. Why would she when there was someone still inside?
He pushed the door open and heard a man’s voice coming from somewhere in back of the house. He moved inside, closing the door quietly behind him, then across the floor and past the couch, checking around as he went, zeroing in on the voice.
He passed an open bedroom door, checked it was clear and carried on down the hallway towards the voice.
He already knew what would happen here, had planned it all while sitting in the car. He would put the guy down then plant the Glock on him, fire it at the wall before he left so it would look like he’d come second in a gunfight. He would tell Tío the stranger had been working for the Saints, because that’s what he wanted him to believe. It didn’t matter whether he was or not, he was collateral, that was all, a pawn about to be played in a bigger game.
He reached the door, the voice loud now, loud enough to cover any noise he might have made though he knew he had made none. He took a breath. Swung the long barrel of the gun into the room and followed it in, eyes wide, following where it pointed, almost enough pressure on the trigger to fire but not quite. Instinct would add the rest as soon as he saw someone appear at the end of his barrel.
Except no one did.
He swept the gun around fast, checking all four corners of the room, but there was no one here and nowhere anyone could hide.
He moved round the desk so he could see the screen. A man was looking out and talking to the empty room. The clip reached the end and it jumped back to the start again.
Hi. I just found out you were coming and felt like I wanted to talk to you …
Mulcahy tapped the barrel of his gun on the space bar to stop it.
He listened in the silence that followed for movement, or the creak of a floorboard, or breathing, or — anything. All he heard was the trickle of water outside. There was no one here. The house was empty.
Solomon watched the man tap the keyboard with the long barrel of his gun and listen. He was in the garden, crouched low behind some clumps of deer grass that formed a natural screen. The garden was deep, running all the way back to the desert, no fences to hem him in. He could see the house but no one looking out would see him.
He wondered who this man was, stalking him with a weapon designed to kill quietly, and why the police were clearly helping him. The sight of him with the long lethal gun in his hand stirred a burning anger inside him, boiling and dangerous and ready to explode. He wanted to steal back in the house, pluck the gun from the man’s hand, shoot him in the knees and ask him who had sent him while he writhed on the ground. He could picture it clearly in his head, hear the pops of the bullets and the howl of his agony. It would be so nice to give into it, but he knew he could not. He tensed every muscle and remained perfectly still, then relaxed them one by one, blowing out a steady stream of air like he was letting off steam.
It had been the cops’ refusal to take him in for questioning that had made his instincts bristle, that and the sight of Holly’s funeral dress. She had accused Morgan of using the funeral to get her out of the way, which made him think they were doing it again, only this time they were getting her out of the way so someone could get to him. The man standing in James Coronado’s study proved he’d been right.
He watched the man move over to the window and stare out into the garden. It looked like he was staring straight at him but knew he couldn’t be because Solomon’s skin and hair were almost the same colour as the sun-bleached grass and he was staying perfectly still. He wondered who this man was and why he had come to kill him. He turned away from the window and disappeared from view. Solomon imagined him searching the house, looking for him or whatever James Coronado had found and most probably died for. He was now certain that he had been killed and that his part in James Coronado’s salvation was to find out why.
After a while he heard a car engine start up on the far side of the house then drive away, its tyres hissing across the wet road. He waited a few minutes longer. Watching. Thinking. Then he stood and turned his back on the house James Coronado had called home and walked straight out into the desert.
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