Solomon Creed

63

Solomon picked his way carefully across land that shifted and crept and fell away beneath him. The lower slopes were made from centuries of gravel and earth that had been chipped off by the weather and washed down from the higher mountains. Plants and grasses had taken dominion here, their prodigious, drought-hardy roots spreading wide and binding the earth together, though a horse and a man riding over it still showed how fragile it was. There were no other hoof prints on the land he was crossing and anyone following him would have to do so carefully and steadily or risk losing their footing and tumbling a long way down to the lower slopes. Even so, he checked behind him regularly. He had promised Holly he would meet her at the spot where her husband had died and did not want carelessness to make a liar of him.

He made it to the road just as the sun dropped level with the top of the mountains and stayed parallel to it, walking the horse through gullies and rain-swelled streams. The land continued to rise and the ground became rockier with towering shards of stone pushing through in places to create forests of craggy boulders. After ten minutes’ walking he saw another slab of rock up on the roadside, a white monolith with an eagle carved on the surface above the words ‘Historic Wagon Route’.

He moved up to the road, stopping by the stone marker and checking the way ahead. A hundred yards further on the road curved away and disappeared behind a bluff of red rock. Beyond that was a broad view of the valley with a jagged range of mountains in the distance that seemed familiar. He made his way towards it, listening out for cars, and spotted oil patches on the bend, smeared across the surface.

He reached the curve, dropped down from his horse and led it off the road by the rope halter. He tied it to a mesquite shrub then turned and studied the road, dropping his head a little to put himself at roughly the same eyeline as the driver of a car.

The surface was in a good state, no potholes, no dents showing evidence of fallen rocks that might have caused a driver at night to swerve instinctively after catching the flash of it in their headlamps. There wasn’t even a crash barrier in place where the outer curve of the road met the verge, nothing to suggest any danger here, and yet this had to be where James Coronado had left the road and died.

He stood up and looked back down the road. A car was approaching, the rattle of its engine chugging steadily up the hill. It was still some way off so he turned his attention back to the road. He stepped out into the centre, reading the story of what had happened here — the arcing brushstrokes of rubber following the gentle curve of the road, the broken edge of rock standing out against the smoother edges either side. Something heavy had gone over here, breaking off the lip as it fell. Small drifts of sharp-edged rocks and rubble showed where the same object had been hauled back up again and more oil had soaked into the dirt beside pressure marks showing where the lifting gear had parked to pull the car up out of the gully.

Solomon moved over to the edge and peered down, letting his eyes adjust to the deepening shadows. There was lots of growth at the bottom of the gully, creosote, spiked crowns of agave, tufts of hopseed spreading in thick patches across the ground, their roots clinging to the nutrient-enriched dirt that had collected in the dip. Some had been flattened, crushed by the weight of the car. A couple of saguaro grew here too, tall enough so that the ribbed domes of their tops were visible from the road. A third one lay on its side, smashed and broken, struck by the car on its way down.

The sound of the approaching car was louder now, the engine note deep and labouring. He turned and saw the station wagon struggle round the distant corner with Holly at the wheel. He held his hand up in greeting and her face lightened when she saw him. She rattled closer then pulled over on to the verge short of where he was standing, turned off the engine and got out.

The sounds of evening were creeping in now and the light was starting to soften. She joined him at the road’s edge and looked down into the gully. Solomon saw everything through her eyes now: the smashed cactus, the flattened bushes, the gouged earth and scarred rocks where the car had been dragged back on to the road. It spoke of the violence that had happened here.

‘It’s strange,’ she said. ‘I avoided coming here because I thought it would be too painful. But now that I’m here, I don’t feel anything at all.’

‘Who first told you about the accident?’

‘Mayor Cassidy.’

‘Not Morgan?’

‘No. I think the mayor heard about it and wanted to tell me himself. That’s when he told me they would bury Jim in the old cemetery, like that meant anything. Who cares where someone is buried when they should still be walking around?’

‘Did he tell you what happened here, specifically?’

‘Only that Jim apparently lost control, left the road and died of a head injury.’

‘He didn’t elaborate on the nature of those injuries?’

‘No, but you can see for yourself.’ She pulled an envelope from her backpocket and handed it to him. ‘You asked me earlier about the coroner’s report, so I got a copy.’

Solomon smiled and took the envelope. ‘Very smart,’ he said, removing the report from inside. He devoured the contents, his mind flashing with information as it processed the dense, technical detail. ‘Interesting,’ he said, looking back down into the gully, matching up what he had just read with what he was seeing. He frowned and tilted his head to one side, studying the damage and picturing what had caused it.

‘What?’

‘This report says your husband died of a cerebral oedema caused by a major trauma to the right temporal bone. The temporal bone is here—’ He pointed to a spot above and in front of his right ear. ‘That’s not where you generally get injured in a car crash. Usually the frontal bone hits the windshield or the steering wheel. He could have slid off the road sideways, of course, lost control then banged the side of his head as he hit the bottom of the gully, but then where are the tyre marks? A slide like that would leave rubber on the road, and he would need to have been travelling at a fair speed in order for the impact to break his skull as comprehensively as this report suggests, but when his car left the road he was only travelling at around ten to fifteen miles an hour.’

‘How do you know that?’

Solomon pointed at the smashed cactus. ‘Look at the saguaro. You see where the impact was? It’s in the middle section; the top is relatively unscathed, only a few splits and dents from where it hit the ground. A car travelling at any speed would have taken the top off it and hit the bank over there somewhere.’ He pointed to a clump of untouched sagebrush on the far side of the gully. ‘And look at the roots.’ His arm swung down to a large hemisphere of knotted ropes that had been partially lifted from the ground. ‘It was growing only about six or seven feet away from the edge, so the fact that the car hit the midsection suggests it must have almost fallen off the road. I’m going down to take a closer look.’

He followed the faint tracks left by work boots along the verge then dropped down the slope and slipped his way to the bottom. There were deep gouges in the gully wall where the car had been dragged back up to the road, and splintered branches and twigs showing where the car had come to rest at the bottom. Solomon dug the toe of his boot into the ground. It was soft and loose, not compacted and baked hard like most of the desert. The bushes were soft too, and the saguaro would have slowed the car further as it fell.

Slow speed. Soft landing.

He scanned the quiet gully, half in shade, half in evening sunlight. ‘Your husband did not die here,’ he called up to Holly. ‘Not from the car crash, at least. Everything here’s so soft he might as well have landed on an airbag. I’m coming up.’

Holly was smouldering mad by the time he made it back to the road. She was staring down into the gully, her jaw set tight. ‘I should have shot Morgan with buckshot instead of salt,’ she said.

Solomon smiled. ‘There are better ways to get even than with a blast from a shotgun.’

She shook her head. ‘Not many.’

He moved over to his horse, untied him then led him back to the road. ‘Ever wonder what your husband was doing here on the night he died?’

Holly looked around at the lonely stretch of road then out to the view of the darkening valley. ‘Not really. He used to take off sometimes to clear his head. Some guys fish, others hunt, some go bowling. Jim liked to drive. I guess that night he just ended up here.’

Solomon followed her gaze out to the distant mountain range. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘I think he was here for a reason. What’s further up this road?’

‘There’s a viewing platform a mile or so on where you can see down the whole valley, then more road and mountain passes until you hit Douglas.’

‘What about a camp site?’

Holly frowned. ‘Actually there is one. It’s not permanent, there are no facilities or anything.’

‘Is it easy to find?’

‘Should be a sign on the road for it somewhere.’

Solomon hopped up on to the back of the horse and settled. ‘Then that’s what your husband was doing on this road.’ He dug his heels into the stallion’s flanks to get it moving. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Light’s fading. I’ll meet you there.’

64

Mayor Cassidy was sitting in his office, staring out of the window at the evening light when the first armoured personnel carrier rumbled into the square.

Since hearing of Pete Tucker’s murder he had been facing up to the very real chance that he might not make it through the coming night. As a result the world shone now with a different light. Everything he did carried extra meaning as he considered that it might be for the last time: the last time he would drink a cup of coffee; last time he would see a sunset, or watch the evening light darken on the slopes of the mountains, or catch the movement of it in the jacaranda leaves.

The truck pulled to a halt in front of the church and men emerged from the back wearing uniforms the same blue-black colour as the vehicle. They were carrying guns and wearing helmets and dark-visors. Some wore full-face combat masks which made them seem sinister and robotic. A tall man got out of the front passenger seat and looked over at the house.

‘Thank God,’ Cassidy whispered, rising from his chair and checking his phone for messages. Where the hell was Morgan?

He hurried down the front steps and across the grass towards the church as a second vehicle pulled up and more men got out. In the quiet of his study he had been imagining the night ahead like some old-style western, the town defended solely by a few lawmen and some plucky civilians with shotguns and rifles against hordes of professional killers. There had to be twenty or thirty men here, trained men with modern weapons. This was more like it.

‘Ernie Cassidy,’ he said, extending his hand over the top of the wall to the tall man who had the air of command about him. ‘I’m the mayor here and boy are you ever a welcome sight.’

‘Andrews,’ the man said, crushing his hand in a reassuringly solid handshake. ‘Any idea where I might find Chief Morgan?’

‘I’m sure I can rustle him up for you. I presume he’s appraised you of the situation here?’

‘He has. Don’t worry, sir. We got this.’

Cassidy glanced past his shoulder at one of the masked soldiers standing guard behind him. ‘How are you going to … I mean, what’s your plan here?’

‘The fewer people know that, sir, the better our chance of success.’

‘Of course, I understand. Only, there are a lot of civilians here. Shouldn’t we warn them? Get them to stay indoors at least? Evacuate?’

‘We do that, we risk scaring off the target. And if we don’t get him now he’ll only hit you again later. We can’t guard the town forever. We took a risk coming in heavy-handed like this, but we understood the need to secure the town quickly. We took the decals off the trucks and the uniforms, so if anyone asks you can say we’re here because of the plane crash.’

‘I understand,’ Cassidy nodded. ‘Just make sure you get him.’

‘Oh, we intend to, sir. Make no mistake about that.’

The County Coroner’s car crunched to a halt beside them and Morgan got out.

‘Captain Andrews?’ he said, moving towards the commander and shaking his hand. ‘Chief Morgan. Thanks for getting here so fast. What do you need from me?’

‘We need to cover the three main roads into town,’ Andrews said, walking towards the middle of the square and taking Morgan with him. The stone wall prevented Cassidy from following and he lost the conversation. Andrews started pointing out of town and up at the roofs of the higher buildings and Cassidy felt a pang of sadness at finding himself excluded from the business of defending his own town, like being a kid again and not being asked to play ball.

He looked around at the black-uniformed men with their automatic weapons and body armour. Maybe he would see another dawn after all. And when the smoke cleared and the questions were inevitably asked, he would tell the truth and take whatever was coming to him. Saving the town was all that mattered to him now.

65

Solomon trotted along the line of the rising road, keeping an eye on the distant escarpment and watching the subtle shift in the landmarks. After about a half a mile he came across a wooden sign planted in the ground next to a dirt track running up and away from the main road. The words painted on the sign were cracked and flaking but still legible — ‘Spirit Mountain Camp Site’. A smaller sign hung beneath on metal loops: ‘Closed for the summer — mid-April to mid-October’.

He could hear the rumble of Holly’s borrowed car behind him and waited until she came into view before easing his horse forward and up the softer ground of the track.

The camp was hidden around the curve of the hill, far enough back from the road to give campers the impression of being way out in the middle of nowhere, but close enough to the road so they could drive back to town in twenty minutes if they needed to. It was little more than a collection of traditional ramada shelters with woven branch roofs supported by thick mesquite poles. A mountain creek burbled nearby, swelled by the recent rainwater, and Solomon rode over to it so his horse could drink, passing firepits ringed with white stones. He imagined faces gathered round them, eating food hot from the fire, listening to ghost stories while they stared into the flickering flames. James Coronado’s face had been one of them once.

He slipped from the horse’s back and let it walk over to the stream. He could see the whole valley from up here — the burned desert, the airfield, the town with its streetlights starting to wink on as the evening gloom deepened. The sun was sinking fast and casting long, deep shadows across the ground, as if night was leaking up from the earth to drown the day. The mountain range opposite was silhouetted against the sky, making the V-shaped niche stand out. Behind him he heard the rumble of the old engine struggle up the track. It cut out and there was the squeal of a door hinge then Holly walked over to where he was standing.

‘This is where your husband came the night he died,’ Solomon said.

Holly looked out at the view and around at the deserted camp site. There was nothing to indicate anyone had been here in months. ‘What makes you think that?’

Solomon pointed at the ‘V’ in the distant mountain range. ‘That is in the background of every group photo hanging in his study. He’d been camping here since he was a kid. This was a safe place with happy memories for him, a private place — especially at this time of year when it’s out of season — the perfect place to retreat if he felt under threat.’ He nodded down at the town nestling in the valley. ‘He could literally gaze down on his problems and put them in perspective.’

The horse snorted and tossed its head, clearly bothered by something. It pawed the ground and moved along the stream and away from the camp.

‘What is it?’ Holly asked.

‘Not sure.’ Solomon sniffed the air and followed the horse’s gaze. He took a step forward, reaching out with his predator’s senses for any sight, smell or sound from whatever had spooked the horse. The shadows were deepening as the light leaked away, making figures appear in the folds of the rock face that stretched up behind the camp. He took another step. Saw movement in the shade of the furthest ramada. Sniffed the air again and caught something that made the hairs prickle on the back of his neck and arms.

Blood. But not fresh.

He followed the scent deeper into the camp to one of the firepits. There was a pile of blackened ash in its centre whereas all the others were filled with mesquite straw and dry grass blown there by the summer winds. Someone had been here. They were still here. He could feel their eyes upon him. He looked up. Scanned the camp site, his body tensing. Night was falling fast and smothering what little light remained, turning the camp site into a place of darkness and deep shadows. He saw something, close and to his right. Movement. He turned to it and his eyes widened when he saw what had caused it.

Holly appeared next to him, following his gaze. ‘What is it?’

‘Your husband did come here,’ Solomon whispered, staring deep into the shade of the ramada. ‘He died here too.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because he’s still here. I’m looking at him right now.’

The ghost of James Coronado stood in the dark crease of the shadow, confusion clouding his face.

Holly followed Solomon’s gaze. ‘I can’t see him,’ she said, frustration and emotion fraying her words. ‘I can feel him, but I can’t see him.’

‘He’s by the post at the edge of the shadow,’ Solomon said. ‘He’s staring right at you.’

A sob burst out of her. ‘Tell me what he looks like.’

‘Like he did in the photograph, though the colour has gone from him. He looks a little like … He looks like me.’

Holly wiped a tear from her cheek and took a step towards him.

‘He’s fading,’ Solomon said. ‘When you move closer he starts to melt away.’

Another sob. She walked faster.

‘He’s going,’ Solomon said, but she didn’t listen. She stepped into the shadow just as the ghost vanished entirely and hugged the air where he had been. She stood like that for long moments, rocking from side to side, whispering that she loved him, that she missed him, that she would give everything to see his face again.

Solomon moved over and put his hand on her shoulder. She turned to him and let her arms drop. She smiled a sad smile, then stepped forward and kissed Solomon full on the lips and held him tight as if she was holding somebody else.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t supposed to die. We were supposed to have a life together. I never got to say goodbye. This was closer than I thought I would get, so thank you for that.’

Solomon touched his lips and in the empty depths of his memory a truth floated up. He had not been kissed for a long time, not in the tender way she had kissed him, and the thought made him feel very alone. But there was something else in the kiss, something his mind identified and made him catch his breath at the significance of it.

‘Do you think this is where he died?’ she asked, looking down at the ground.

‘No,’ Solomon said, sniffing the air and following the scent of blood to the edge of the firepit. There was a stone missing from the ring that surrounded it. He surveyed the camp site but couldn’t see it. It could be anywhere: in the stream, hurled away down the side of the escarpment, tossed out of the window of a moving car. He didn’t need to find it to know what it had been used for. He crouched down and raked his fingers through the mixture of soft earth and dry straw by the missing stone. The ferrous smell of blood grew stronger.

‘This is where he died,’ he said. ‘Right here. He was hit on the side of the head with that missing rock. That’s why he had a fractured right temporal. He was most likely struck from behind by a right-handed man. Be hard to hear someone creeping up with the sound of the wind and the hiss of the mountain stream. It’s dark here too.’ He looked around at the place, rapidly sinking into shadow. ‘Whoever did it must have followed him, killed him here then staged the crash back on the road.’

‘Morgan.’ Holly said it like she was cursing.

‘Probably.’

Holly knelt beside him, ran her hand over the darker ground as if she was caressing it.

Solomon looked back at the place where the ghost had been then rose from the floor and walked over. Night had made the shadows inside the ramada solid now and he couldn’t see well enough to search the area. ‘Do you have a light?’ he called over to Holly.

She moved over to him, pulling her phone from her pocket. She handed it to him and the bright screen cast a cold glow on the ground and the upright of the post. There were marks in the wood, cut with a knife and darkened with age. Solomon rang his finger along it, tracing the letters — JC.

‘This is where your husband used to sleep on his boyhood camping trips,’ he said, imagining him working his name into the wood after lights out, leaving his mark here for the future. Solomon studied the ground.

‘The mesquite straw has been disturbed here,’ he said, sweeping it aside with his hand. The ground beneath was not hard and compacted like the rest was.

‘There’s something buried here,’ he said. He realized now why the ghost had drawn his attention to this spot.

66

Captain Andrews stood at the red painted line of the city limits, looking out at the blackened desert growing darker in the evening light.

Behind him his men were busy securing the area and taking up positions in the buildings by the road and in the old miners’ shacks. They all knew who the target was and the job they were here to do and the mood was focused and sharp and combat-ready. They were setting up for an ambush, but they could stage a defence just as easily if that was required.

There were thirty-eight men in all, each armed with an AR-15 Tactical Carbine assault rifle with Trijicon 3-Dot Tritium Green night-sight. There were two SDMs — Squad Designated Marksmen teams: two shooters, two spotters — with long-barrelled M6A2s already in position, one by the side of the billboard, one in the gas station, both covering the road. No one was going to come down this highway without being lit up, and this was the road they would be coming in on. He knew that for a fact.

‘You got a number for the crash investigators?’ Andrews asked Morgan. ‘No need for them to get caught up in this.’

Morgan found the number of the NTSB coordinator on his phone and dialled it. When it started ringing he handed it to Andrews.

‘This is Captain Andrews, 27th DEA tactical arms unit,’ he said when someone answered. ‘We have intel of a high-value target inbound to the town of Redemption, undoubtedly armed, possibly hostile. We have taken up defensive positions along the city-limit line and can see your work lights. For your own safety, I need you to pack up your team and ship out as fast as you can before they get here.’

A way out in the desert, Morgan saw the work lights blink off. A couple of minutes later a Jeep and a van started heading back to town over the heat-deformed road.

Andrews raised his field glasses and lensed the desert again.

‘Anything?’ Morgan said.

‘Not yet. Should be good for another half hour, I’d say.’

Morgan glanced back at the town. ‘In that case, I got a small problem maybe you could help me with.’

Andrews finished his sweep of the desert. ‘What problem?’

‘Nothing a small team of your men can’t help me fix. I got a fugitive I need to bring in.’

‘You know where he’s at?’

‘Yeah,’ Morgan nodded. ‘I got a pretty good idea.’

67

The tin box was buried about a foot below ground, right up against the mesquite pole. Solomon’s fingers scraped across the smooth surface of it and he dug down the sides, trying to pull it up and out of the hole, but the earth had been baked hard again in the short time it must have been here.

‘Could you find me a stone or a stick?’ he asked, and the ramada went dark as Holly removed the glow from her phone and used it to search around outside. It was dark now with no moon yet to light up the night.

Solomon continued to dig, feeling around the tin with his fingers. Holly returned with the light and a stick she had found in one of the firepits. He used it to scrape the dirt from around the edges, loosening the earth until he could hook his fingers underneath and tug it free.

He laid it on the floor and brushed loose dirt from its surface. It had once contained shortbread but the rust-pitted surface suggested that it had been underground for a while, longer than a week. Solomon prised the lid off and they both leaned in to look inside.

It was filled with folded sheets of paper. Solomon took them out and saw other items below that were mottled with age and had likely been there as long as the tin had been buried. There was a small stack of baseball cards held together with a rubber band that had almost perished, a pocket knife that had rusted shut and a hand-drawn map showing a rough chart of the camp site, an X marking where the tin had been. ‘Lost Cassidy Riches’ was written across the top in childish handwriting.

‘Seems your husband’s interest in the Cassidy legend started young,’ Solomon said.

He placed the tin on the ground and unfolded the pages that had been on top. There were two folded sets of documents and Solomon opened the larger one first then held them under the light of Holly’s phone to read them.

‘They’re not financial,’ Holly said.

Solomon shook his head. ‘It’s a chemical analysis of groundwater samples taken from around the town.’ He flicked through all five pages of it. ‘It recommends immediate discontinuation of all mine works and a major programme of remedial water treatment to remove certain harmful reagents from the groundwater.’ He turned to the last page where the chemicals were listed. ‘This report is dated almost a year ago, but Morgan said the mine was still producing.’

Holly shook her head. ‘Whenever Jim talked about the town finances he never mentioned it as a source of income.’

Solomon nodded. ‘I walked past earlier and the place seemed abandoned.’

‘So if they shut down the mine like this report recommended, why pretend they didn’t?’

‘And why would your husband hide this document?’

Holly turned to him. ‘You think this was what they were after when they trashed my house?’

‘Maybe. Let’s see what else is here.’ He picked up the second piece of paper and unfolded it. It was a photocopy of an architect’s drawing outlining the footprint of the church. He spread it flat, looked at what was on it and felt like the sun had come out from behind a cloud.

The elevation revealed shapes in the building’s design that had not been apparent at ground level. It showed the traditional cross-shaped foundation, but that wasn’t what had drawn Solomon’s attention. The plinth the altar cross stood upon was outlined in the drawings too. It was an ‘I’, the exact same shape and size as the mark he had on his arm.

He held the plans to the light so he could read what was written on them. It seemed to be a combination of notes from the original document and some new ones that had been added in green ink. The older notes detailed how the altar plinth had to be positioned above something called a resting stone. The new notes, written in James’s hand, posed two specific questions:

Solomon frowned. ‘Is Jack Cassidy not buried up in the cemetery?’

‘Apparently not. Some treasure hunters broke into his tomb a few years back after reading that line in his memoir about taking the secret of the lost riches to his grave. They obviously took it literally. They posted pictures online. It was empty.’

Solomon remembered the repaired cracks he’d seen on Cassidy’s tomb up at the cemetery. ‘So where is he buried?’

‘Who knows? The mayor maybe, but if he does he’s not saying.’

Solomon studied the drawings again. The resting stone placed directly beneath the altar, most sacred spot in the church. ‘I think your husband had an idea,’ he said, pointing at the ‘I’ shape in the centre of the plan of the church.

Holly looked at it. ‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘Take this,’ she handed him her phone, then set off in the darkness. Solomon listened to her receding footsteps through the sounds of rushing water and thought he heard something else. His horse snorted over by the stream and the light came on in Holly’s car. He tilted his head back and sniffed the air but a steady breeze up from the valley brought him nothing but dust and the only smells of the road and smoke. He turned his attention back to the documents, re-reading the list of chemicals and studying it again, letting his teeming mind furnish him with more information about each one. There was a small mark by one of the chemicals on the list, made in the same green ink he had seen on the plans: TCE — trichloroethylene.

Halocarbon, clear non-flammable liquid, no smell, initially used as an analgesic but now discontinued due to health worries, commonly used as an industrial solvent.

He focused harder, digging deeper into what it was. And in the torrent of information he saw something that explained exactly why James Coronado had taken this particular document and hidden it, and why they’d had to kill him to keep him quiet.

‘Look at this —’ Holly reappeared from the dark with an envelope in her hand. ‘It was the last thing Jim requisitioned from the archive before he died.’

Solomon took it and pulled the drawing from inside. It was a design for the altar itself showing detailed drawings of both the copper cross and the plinth it sat upon. Solomon studied the diagrams, the side elevations, the shapes they made and he understood. ‘This is it,’ he said. ‘This is my connection to your husband. I’m here to finish what he started.’ He undid a button on his shirt and reached inside. ‘When I arrived here, the only possessions I had were the copy of Jack Cassidy’s memoir and this,’ he held up the cross he wore around his neck.

‘The altar cross?’

‘That’s what I thought, designed by Jack Cassidy, just like he designed all of this, the church, the decor, even the plinth the cross rests on. “Not bad for a man who started life as a locksmith”,’ he said, quoting what the mayor had said to him in the church.

He held the cross up and saw it now for what it was. Not a cross but a key.

He looked back down at the document Holly had brought. ‘Your husband had almost discovered the lost Cassidy riches,’ he said. ‘He was so close.’

He studied the drawing of the altar cross and the detailed elevation of the stone plinth it was to rest on. There was an inscription on the upper face of it that would be hidden by the base of the cross. It was the first commandment:

Solomon studied the ‘I’, carefully drawn so that it was positioned low down and central to the plinth. Then he held up the cross round his neck and turned it end on so he could see the shape of the base. It was the same. The base of the key formed an ‘I’. And he had just found the lock it fitted.

He stared out into the solid darkness, thinking about how they might get into the church, breathing in the smells of night — the still damp earth giving up its scents, creosote and sage and something else. Something that shouldn’t be there. He breathed deeper, trying to fix on where the odour of gun oil and sweat was coming from and realized too late that it was coming from everywhere.

‘Stay calm,’ he said to Holly, and caught the confusion on her face. ‘We’re about to meet the man who killed your husband.’

Bright lights flashed out of the dark, blinding them in an instant. ‘Nobody move,’ Morgan called out. ‘Hands where I can see them.’

More lights flicked on and black figures surged towards them. Someone grabbed Solomon’s arms, yanked them behind him and cable-tied him.

‘How did you find us?’ Solomon asked.

‘Billy Walker,’ Morgan replied. ‘Woke up and told us what he’d heard of your conversation. Said he thought you might be heading to the crash site, so I figured you’d wind up here, smart pair of people like yourselves.’

Holly lunged for him and strong hands had to hold her back. ‘And how did you know to come here?’ she screamed. ‘You knew because you killed him.’ She spat at him and it caught him on the chest.

Morgan looked down. ‘That’s the second shirt you’ve spoiled today.’ He stepped forward and backhand-slapped her across the face. ‘I’ve been waiting to do that all day,’ he said. He shoved her aside and picked up the documents from the floor. ‘Sorry we messed up your house searching for these,’ he said, pulling a lighter from his pocket. ‘If your husband had been smart, none of this would have happened.’ He sparked a flame and held it to the edge of the pages of the groundwater contamination documents until they caught. He dropped them in the firepit, watched them burn, then turned back to them with a smile. ‘That’s one loose end tied up. Just you two to square away now. Come with me,’ he said, walking away across the deserted camp. Someone shoved Solomon from behind to make him follow. ‘There’s someone I want you to meet.’

68

Mulcahy rumbled over the rippled road, picking his way carefully across the heat-damaged surface. It was hard to tell in the dark where the blacktop ended and the scorched desert began, and he didn’t want to end up in a ditch or with a shredded tyre.

Tío was humming something to himself in the passenger seat. He had hardly said a word since he had taken such delight in filling Mulcahy in on his family history. He had spent most of his time fiddling with his phone or staring out of the window, occasionally pointing his finger at a bird or a passing car and making the sound of a gunshot like a bored five-year-old on a long trip.

Mulcahy had already seen Tío’s influence though, stretching ahead of them like an invisible tentacle. There had been no patrolmen at the barriers blocking off the heat-damaged road and there was no one up ahead at the crash site either.

‘Pull over,’ Tío said, pointing at the twisted nest of black metal ahead of them.

Mulcahy eased the car to a stop and Tío got out and walked over to what was left of the plane. He crouched down and peered through the twisted spars and ribs of metal. Mulcahy knew what he was looking for, but doubted it would still be there. He hoped it wasn’t.

It occurred to him that he had travelled hundreds of miles to end up right back at this same spot. Maybe he should have stayed put and saved everyone a whole heap of bother. Some people would still be breathing and walking round if he had, though his father would not be one of them. He switched off the engine, got out of the car and joined Tío on the road.

‘He was there,’ he said, pointing into the heart of the wreckage. ‘Looks like they cut him free and took him away. The morgue in town is my guess. They might have shipped him out, but I doubt it. Better to take whatever samples they need in a clinical environment than out here with the dust blowing everywhere. If you want your son’s body, it’ll be in town.’

Tío nodded then leaned back to stretch the kinks out of his spine. ‘Let’s go find him then,’ he said and started to amble across to the car.

Mulcahy stayed where he was. ‘What’s the move here, Tío?’ Tío stopped walking and turned to face him. ‘You pulled me off what I was doing to come play chauffeur and now we’re standing out here in the middle of the desert, staring at a town I know you want to burn to the ground, but there’s only two of us. Now I want to do what I can to get my old man off the hook here, really I do, but I can’t see the move. Are we waiting for some people? Is that what we’re doing? I’m flattered if you think I’m all you need to wreak vengeance on a whole town, but, truthfully, I think we may need some help.’

Tío smiled. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said, and got into the car.

Mulcahy shook his head, got in the car and turned the engine on. ‘So this is the move, we just drive into town?’

‘Anything wrong with that?’

‘Well, I’m guessing after what I did to that rancher on your behalf they might be on their guard somewhat.’

Tío’s smile grew wider. ‘I’m counting on it. Now if you want your loser dad to see another dawn you shut your mouth and take us into town.’

‘They’re back in the car, sir.’

Suarez was one of the two SDMs on the detail. He was lying prone in the bed of a pick-up truck to give him some elevation and watching what was happening a couple of miles out of town through the sight of his long-barrelled M6.

‘On the move. Inbound.’

They were too far out for a shot but he could see the two figures well enough and they were getting clearer the closer they got.

‘Let me know when you got a positive ID,’ Andrews said through the comms.

‘Roger that, sir. Should be in a couple of minutes or so. They can’t drive too fast over this road.’

He kept the crosshairs on the passenger, following the movement of the car, his finger on the trigger guard.

69

Morgan drove fast.

He was in his cruiser, barrelling down the mountain road towards the twinkling lights of Redemption. Holly and Solomon were in the back, their arms still cable-tied behind them, forcing them forward in their seats.

‘So where is the money coming from?’ Solomon asked, pushing himself back into his seat as they rounded another tight bend. ‘Not the mine, clearly.’

‘What do you care?’

‘Just trying to put the pieces together.’

‘It’s drugs,’ Holly answered for him. ‘It’s always drugs.’

Morgan shrugged. ‘Everyone gets so moral about drugs, but they happily smoke their cigarettes and drink their liquor. People want drugs too, so who are we to tell them they can’t have them? It’s prohibition all over again — and look how that turned out.’

‘They’re illegal,’ Holly said, ‘they ruin people’s lives and bring misery and death, and you’re supposed to uphold the law.’

Morgan threw them round another bend and Holly banged her head on the window. ‘Sorry,’ Morgan said. ‘Let me ask you something. You ever fought in a war? ’Cause I have. They call this a war on drugs, but it ain’t no war far as I can tell. Wars can be won and this one can’t, least not by some small-town cop like me with a badge and a pump action in his truck. I know what war looks like and it ain’t this. This is capitalism, supply and demand. It’s the biggest industry around here, that’s for sure. Bigger than mining ever was, only it don’t pay a single cent in taxes. You only have to drive across the border to see how that works out: roads full of holes, poverty, crumbling infrastructure. You got to invest in people if you want to build a community folks want to live in. You got to put something back. The cartels don’t put anything back and they don’t put a whole lot of store in people neither. People are disposable to them. So, yes, Mrs Coronado, we took their money. When the mine stopped producing we went into a new business and a lot of the money went straight into the public purse so we could fix the roads and pay people’s salaries. The sheriffs hoped they could walk your husband through the reasons we had done what we did and make him see the sense in it. But he wouldn’t come down off of his moral high horse. He had all these ideas for getting the town back on its feet, weaning it off its dependence on the trusts. Even said he thought he knew how to find the lost Cassidy fortune — you believe that? Like some old legend could save this town.

‘He started going through everything, looking for a legitimate way out of our problems. That’s how he found out about the groundwater contamination. We’d buried it because we couldn’t risk shutting the mine down. We needed people to think the mine was still producing to account for all the money coming in. When Jim found it, he went nuts. Said he was going to blow the lid on everything. So … we had to make a decision.’

‘And that decision was that you needed to kill him to keep him quiet,’ Solomon said, a statement not a question.

Morgan’s eyes flicked up in the rear-view mirror. ‘People die in wars,’ he said. ‘One man’s sacrifice for the greater good. Just the way it is.’

Solomon could feel Holly shaking beside him. If her hands hadn’t been bound and there wasn’t a Perspex divider between her and Morgan she would have killed him for sure, he could feel her desire to do it coming off her like heat.

‘What about the cleanup?’ Solomon said.

‘There was no cleanup. The levels we found were low so we made a decision. If we started cleaning up the groundwater, people would ask why and we couldn’t risk losing the mine. We stopped using the chemicals though, cut the workforce right down and started running water through the mine instead.’

‘Do you know what TCE is?’ Solomon asked.

‘No, should I?’

‘It was one of the chemicals that showed up on your report.’ He glanced over at Holly. ‘It’s been connected to birth defects and neo-natal abnormalities. It’s also known to cause miscarriage in the early stages of the second trimester.’ Holly stared back at him, her face a mask of shock. ‘Now you know why your husband acted like he did,’ Solomon said, quiet enough so that Morgan wouldn’t hear. ‘His loyalty to the town evaporated the moment he realized it may have caused your son’s death.’

Holly’s eyes misted and she looked away and out of the window.

They were arriving at the airfield, the hulking, jagged shapes of parked aircraft stretching away beyond the security fence, lit yellow by sodium lights. The main part of the airfield was to the left of the road, squadrons of military and civilian aircraft all lined up in neat rows.

To the right was the museum, stocked with a hand-picked assortment of vintage aircraft, restored and maintained on site. The lights were off in the main building and the entrance gates closed. They drove on and pulled over by an extra-wide double gate, big enough to bring even the largest aircraft into the museum from the airstrip on the other side of the road. Someone had left the gate open wide enough for a vehicle to pass through. They drove in and under the wings of a bomber, then headed towards a large hangar on the far side of the field.

‘We flying somewhere?’ Solomon asked.

‘No,’ Morgan replied. ‘I very much doubt it.’

70

‘Got him,’ Suarez said.

He could see the passenger clearly now in his night-sight. He recognized the face from the earlier briefing and also from the poster that had been pinned at the number one most wanted spot on the canteen wall for the last eight years.

‘Who’s the driver?’ Andrews’ voice murmured in his earpiece.

Suarez shifted the scope and phosphorescent green smeared his vision. ‘Don’t know him. Not a known associate.’ He shifted back, following the movement of the car, anticipating it so he could keep Tío’s head in the crosshairs.

He was about five hundred yards away now, inside his trained range. A shot had a seventy per cent chance of a kill, and that percentage was getting better with every yard. ‘What’s the order?’ he murmured.

‘Hold on.’

Suarez continued to follow them, switching between Tío and the driver.

He had been trained to clear his mind at times like this but for once his training was failing him. Instead he was thinking about what would happen if he did take the shot. He would be famous, the guy who took out public enemy number one, like Charles Winstead, the guy who shot Dillinger. Except now he could write a book and get a movie deal out of it. All his training and he would be famous because of one shot. But none of that was going to happen because he wasn’t going to take the shot. Not at Papa Tío at least.

He let the sights drift back to the driver, his finger tightening on the trigger. If he got the order to shoot, it was this guy who would be the target. He dialled back the magnification a little as the car drew nearer. He could see them both now. A bright green smear drew his attention.

‘The passenger is reaching down for something,’ he said.

More bright green phosphorescence smeared and flared in his vision as Tío’s hand rose up again. ‘He’s waving something,’ Suarez said. ‘Something white, like a sheet of paper or a napkin.’

His finger relaxed and returned to the safe position alongside the trigger guard. ‘He’s surrendering,’ he said. Then he looked up from his scope and saw that he was right. Papa Tío was turning himself in.