Valley of Bones

Twenty-two

It was nearly midnight when they arrived at the scruffy banks of the Miami River. Everything at the hospital had taken longer than expected, and Paz had not the heart to rush things. He had wanted to take Lorna home first, but she refused, and Barlow backed her up on it. He pointed out that they had no idea what they would encounter at Packer’s houseboat, and they could not arrange for police backup without implicating themselves in the escape of a dangerous felon, besides which the point of that had only been to keep Emmylou out of the hands of the feds until they had the whole thing figured out. It was entirely possible that were they to retrieve Emmylou with the help of the police, she would be delivered from their custody by warrant to the very people who had snatched her from the Barlows, or their close cousins. So Lorna sat in the rental car a block away from the water with a cell phone in her hands and strict orders to get away and raise the alarm should the two men not return within the hour, or should something untoward take place.

“Untoward?” she asked. “I’m sorry, my standards fortoward are a little bent. What wouldun be at this point?”

Paz regretted his use of the word. “Multiple gunshots, automatic fire, huge fireballs, cars full of gangsters tearing down to the water. Like that. On the assumption that we’ll be in major trouble or dead.”

“Okay, got it, gunshots, fireballs, cars.” They stared at each other. “Don’t get killed, Jimmy.” TheL — word floated in her glottis and strained to push itself out, but he beat her to it, the first time she had heard it from an unrelated male of her species.

“Me too,” she said. “I’d like to spend the rest of my life with you, however short. Would that be cool?”

“Don’t talk that kind of shit, Lorna. We’ll be back before you know it.”

They walk off into the dark. Lorna sits in the driver’s seat, trying not to think about the passage of time, time on this terrifying operation, and the Time Remaining. She feels ashamed that she is so ill prepared for the ultimate things, her long career in hypochondria has not been helpful here. Oya told her that her life was over, perfectly correct, and she notices that she has started to think that it really was the Lord of Death and not a moon-faced nurse’s aide there at thebembe. Perhaps a mercy, that, to accept the reality of an unseen world, maybe cowardice, but what was the point of stoic bravery, after all, whom were we trying to impress? She realizes too that whatever the second opinion says (and she is still Lorna enough to resolve to seek one), her life as it was is indeed over. She recalls now a story told to her by Betsy Newhouse. One of Betsy’s friends had developed breast cancer, and Betsy had dropped her cold. I can’t be friends with her anymore, Betsy said, she did all the right things, diet exercise, the best doctors, or so she said, but she must have done something wrong,something….

Lorna feels a wave of self-disgust, how could she have spent so much time with a woman like that? Her precious moments listening to comments on this one’s body and that one’s sex life. She badly wants to talk to Sheryl Waits. Guilt here too, she hasn’t called her in a week, maybe more. It is late, but Sheryl is famously available twenty-four/seven. She punches the keys.

“I’m sorry, we don’t accept telephone solicitations from strangers,” says Sheryl when Lorna speaks.

“Come on, Sheryl.”

“Come on yo’self. You know how many messages I left on your voice mail? Where have youbeen, girl?”

“With Jimmy.”

“Ofcourse with Jimmy. Tell me how right I was.”

“You were right.”

“Of course I was. So? Give!”

“We went to Grand Cayman,” says Lorna and converts the trip and its sequelae into a romantic idyll, provoking squeals of delight from her friend. She doesn’t say she has had a bad biopsy, that she’s dying, because she knows that Sheryl would want to come right over and hug her and hold her hand and she doesn’t want to get into the B-movie aspects of her present situation, standing lookout for a desperate venture.

“So,” says Sheryl, “this is now officially serious. Do we have theL — word yet? Do we have theM — word?”

“The former, but not the latter.”

“But it’s in the air, yes?”

“It might be. Time will tell.”

“Hey, hon, is something wrong? Your voice sounds all funny.”

There is a loudboom from the direction of the boat that echoes against the walls of the sheds and workshops that line the river here.

“No, I’m fine,” Lorna says with a shaking voice. “Look, I got to go now. I just wanted to say that I love you.”

A pause. “Well thank you, Lorna, I love you too. Are you sure nothing’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she says and hangs up. She listens, straining her ears, and there is another boom, and then only silence and the normal night sounds of the district. Her phone buzzes. Sheryl again, but she doesn’t answer.

They crawled low on the deck of Emmylou’s old houseboat and looked across the yards of dark water at Packer’s big box-on-a-barge. The windows

were illuminated cheerily by a color television screen, and they could see the shadow of a man moving about against that light.

“What’s that he got in there, a motorcycle?”

“Yeah, a big Harley. I guess he keeps it inside at night.”

“Smart fella. A lot of crime down by the river,” said Barlow.

“He’s got a pistol,” said Paz.

“Well, we’ll just have to take it away from him then.” Barlow reached into his pocket and brought out a pair of number one shells and slipped them into the old 16-gauge double-barrel Ithaca shotgun he was carrying. He also had a big revolver stuck in his belt. The clack of the breech closing seemed unnaturally loud to Paz. He worked the slide of his Glock.

“Now, let’s do this,” said Barlow, and in the dim sky glow Paz could see he was wearing his lynch-mob-leader face. Barlow jumped off the houseboat and started to run. Two steps on the deck of Packer’s barge and he was at the jalousied glass door, which he shattered to pieces with his boot and the stock of his weapon. He had just dodged around the Harley when he saw Packer moving, a flash of white shirt in the dim light of the TV screen. He was heading toward the bow, toward his bedroom.

Packer was just reaching under the mattress of his bed when the butt of Barlow’s shotgun cracked him hard over the ear. Then there was a knee in his back and the twin circles of steel pressing like a cookie cutter into the back of his neck. He went limp.

Barlow turned the man over and jammed the muzzle under his chin. Packer was paper pale and his eyes were rolling.

“What do you want? Money?” His voice squeaked.

“Shut up!” said Barlow. He pulled the pistol out of its hiding place, with his little finger in the muzzle and tossed it into a corner. He backed away, still pointing the shotgun, and said, “Get up!”

Packer rose and walked unsteadily to the living room of the craft. A trickle of blood flowed from the wound above his ear. The TV was still on, playing a car commercial. Barlow lifted the shotgun, pointed it at Packer’s head, and pulled a trigger, twitching the muzzle at the last half second so that the charge fired past Packer’s ear at the television, and scored a direct hit on a cruising Honda. Packer’s face contorted and he lost control of his bladder. A pool formed at his feet. Barlow grabbed a chair from the dining area and threw it at the man.

“Sit down, you goddamn piss-baby!”

Packer sat. Without taking his eyes off him, Barlow drew a six-inch hunting knife from a sheath on his belt. He put the shotgun on the dining table and took a roll of duct tape from his trouser pocket. When Packer was fully trussed, arms, hands, and feet to the chair, Barlow stood in front of him and began to sharpen the hunting knife with a small stone that he took from a pocket in its sheath. He spit on the stone and drew the knife across it again and again. Packer watched the motion as if hypnotized. He cleared his throat. “Who. Who are you?”

“Well, I am the husband of the woman that your boys broke into her home and pistol-whipped this afternoon up by Clewiston. And kidnapped a woman we had as a guest.”Snick, snick, went the knife on the stone.

“I had nothing to do with that,” said Packer. “Clewiston? I don’t know what you’re?”

The knife flashed out, quick as a snake strike. Packer felt a bite on his forehead and yelped. Blood flowed into his eye and he blinked it away.

“I swear to God…,” Packer began, but stopped when Barlow held the tip of the knife an inch away from his eye.

“None of that,” said Barlow, “we don’t hold with taking the Lord’s name in vain.”

Snick snick snick.

“What are you going to do?” asked Packer after several minutes had passed.

“Well, what do you think? What do you think is the right thing to do to a man who would hire hoods to beat a woman who never did an unkind act in her whole life? You got any ideas?”

“Look, I have money, a lot of money…I’ll make it right. I didn’t know…I never told them to hurt anyone….”

“I don’t want your money, you terrible chunk of dog shit,” said Barlow in a slow calm voice. “Blood’s been shed and has to be repaid in blood. I been thinking what to do driving down here and I guess I come up with something about right.”

Snick snick.

Barlow replaced the stone in its little pocket. He licked the back of his wrist and shaved off a swath of hair. He held this in front of Packer’s goggling eyes.

“Pretty sharp, huh?”

No comment from Packer. Barlow said, “What I come up with is I’m going to skin your head. That seem fair to you? My wife’s poor face, you ought to have seen it. It just broke my heart to look at her. They cracked her cheekbone, you know.”

“Oh, Jesus, oh God…”

“You hear what I said about taking the Lord’s name in vain? You don’t listen too good, Mr. Packer, that might be one of your main problems in life. My own main problem is anybody hurts my family I just go pure crazy out of control. Now I done this a bunch of times on deer, mostly when I was a kid, but I guess it’ll work the same with you. First, I’m going to cut a circle around your scalp like this….” Barlow drew the point of the knife lightly around Packer’s head, too lightly to draw blood.

“Then I can get my point under there and work your scalp off. I ought to have a skinner, but I guess this old Randall’s going to do the job good enough. It ain’t as if I’m going to mount it. Anyway, after that, I’ll cut in front of your ears, behind your jaw and on up. If I’m careful and slow about it and if you don’t buck too much, I guess I can pull the whole thing off in one piece. The eyelids are the hard part, them being so delicate. I’m going to tape up your mouth now, since you’re a goddamned coward who sends other men to beat up ladies in their own kitchens, which means you’ll probably bawl like a little girl, and I don’t want to wake up the whole town.”

Barlow applied the tape and then walked behind Packer and placed his arm under the wildly squirming man’s chin, pressing the back of his head against his own belt buckle. He placed the knife against Packer’s forehead and began to move it slowly across.

The boat rocked and Paz burst into the room, his pistol pointing. “Goddammit, Cletis! What thefuck are you doing?”

“Stay out of this, Jimmy!”

“Put down that knife! What’re you, nuts?”

Barlow put his knife on the dining table but picked up his shotgun and pointed it toward Paz, who pointed his pistol right back.

“Put it down, Cletis! I mean it.”

Barlow fired the shotgun. The charge of shot hit the tank of the Harley, puncturing it in half a dozen places. The room filled with the toxic-sweet scent of gasoline.

Paz said, “Okay, Cletis, you made your point but now you got an empty shotgun there. I don’t want to have to shoot you, but I will if you don’t put the damn gun down and get the fuck off of this boat. Go out and cool off! I’ll get with you later. Go!”

After a long moment of hesitation, Barlow placed the shotgun against a bulkhead and stalked out of the room. He climbed the stairway to the overhead deck and they could hear him pacing back and forth, reciting, “Thou shalt make them as a fiery oven in the time of thine anger; the Lord shall swallow them up in his wrath, and the fire shall devour them.”

Paz pulled the tape off Packer’s mouth. “Christ, what a mess! Are you okay?”

“What the fuck does it look like? Untie me! I’m going to put that fucking redneck maniac in jail for the rest of his life.”

“Oh, you don’t want to talk like that, Dave. You don’t want Cletis in the same jail as you. No way.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Murder, Dave,” said Paz, strolling around behind the other man and into the bedroom. A little searching found an attache case, locked. He brought it back into the salon and set it on the table next to Barlow’s blade.

“You had a Sudanese named al-Muwalid killed by a man named Dodo Cortez, supervised by your pal Jack Wilson, and then you had Wilson killed too, to clear the decks. You’re a thorough fellow, Dave. You couldn’t have guessed that I had a way into Ignacio Hoffmann, but I did, and he was very forthcoming, for a gangster. He said that a Floyd Mitchell had visited him along with poor old Jack. Ignacio told me how and why Dodo killed the Sudanese and described you pretty well. Floyd Mitchell is you, Dave.”

“You can’t prove any of that.”

“You’re right, I can’t. But, you know, I don’t think I’m going to have to, because you’re going to tell me the whole story, all about SRPU and the Sudan and Emmylou Dideroff and oil, every fucking detail. Or…”

“Or what?” said Packer. “You realize I’m going to have your badge for this?”

“That’s good, that’s a good movie line. Unfortunately, you’re going to have to dig my badge out of the toilet. I’m now violating a direct written order from my superior officer, Major Oliphant, to lay off this case and specifically to stay away from you. My plan is to pursue a career in food services.”

Silence, except for the thump and muttering above.

“Yeah, you’re heavily protected, Dave, in high places. Unfortunately, right now, I’m your only low-place protection. From that.”

Paz raised his eyes to the overhead.

“…the righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance; he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.”

“He means it too. He’s a fundamentalist. He willliterally wash his feet in your blood. So start talking. I’m tired, I’ve been driving all day and I want a drink and bed.”

Packer said nothing.

“Okay, your choice. You know, you messed with the wrong guy there. He was kicked off the force for trying to murder the chief of police. He’s a religious maniac and you’re the devil. In fact, after he finishes with you, he’ll probably just toss a match into that gas puddle and walk away clean.” Paz picked up Barlow’s knife and worked it under the hasps of the attache case locks. The lid popped up, revealing that the case was full of wrapped hundreds. He whistled. “Well we don’t wantthis to get burned up, do we? What else have we got?” Paz riffled through the file folders in the portfolio built into the case’s lid.

“Passports? Here’s our old pal Floyd Mitchell, and gosh he does look just like you! Amazing. And here’s a much-used one for Wayne Semple. A traveling man is Wayne. Spent a lot of time in the Middle East, Sudan too. And here’s an ID card from the Strategic Resources Protection Unit, also in the name of Wayne Semple. I guess that’s your real name, although I think I’ll keep calling you Dave. You seem like a Dave to me. But it’s a good thing I’ve got these, because I doubt they’d be able to identify the corpse after the fire.”

“You can have the money,” said Packer. “Just call…just call a number.”

“This is incredible. You still don’t get it. Dave, Ihave the money and you’re all tied up with about twenty minutes to live after I walk out of here with it. I’ll mail the passports back to SRPU. We don’t want your family to suffer.”

Paz picked up the case and walked toward the door. He was just stepping through when Packer shouted for him to stop. Paz walked back. He went to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of beer, opened it, and took a long drink. He saw Packer watch him and lick his lips. “You must be pretty dry, Dave. Fear’ll do that. Want one?”

A pause. Then Packer nodded. Paz got another, cracked the cap and held it up to Packer’s mouth. Paz sat down on a chair with his face about a yard from Packer’s.

“So. Wayne Semple is your real name, yes?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re an employee of the federal government? In this SRPU outfit?”

“Yes.”

“And what do you do there?”

“I’m a contract manager.”

Paz laughed heartily. “In a manner of speaking. What do you do officially?”

“I told you. I’m a GS-13 contract manager. I’m not some kind of criminal mastermind. I never wanted anyone to get hurt. I just wanted some information, I wanted to know how much al-Muwalid knew. I didn’t know those morons would throw him out the window.”

“Uh-uh, Dave. Weneed a criminal mastermind here, and remember I got the whole story of how the murder went down from Ignacio. Someone traced Emmylou Dideroff to Miami. Someone got that little houseboat all available to rent to a poor lady on the run and someone got you this one where you could keep an eye on her. You got her the job with Wilson, we know that, and we know that Wilson set up the original murder and the frame and the attempted theft of Emmylou’s confessions. Someone found Emmylou at the Barlows and kidnapped her. If that wasn’t you, who was it?”

“The contractor. He arranged everything. I’m just managing the contract, paying out money, keeping records….”

“What contractor?”

“GSE, it’s called. Global Supply Enterprises. The local honcho is named John Hardy. He’s the one who set it all up.”

“What’s his real name?”

“That’s the only one I know. Why would he use a fake name?”

Paz stared at the man. He really didn’t know. “John Hardy was the name of a famous outlaw. A desperate little man. So you didn’t check this guy out in any way?”

“Check him out? You mean with the Better Business Bureau? Don’t be stupid! The guy showed up in Khartoum and he could do the job. We hired him.”

“How much of my hard-earned tax dollars did you give him?”

“About a million two so far. A lot of it was pass-through to the Sudanese.”

“To a guy with a phony name? A million two?”

“That’s chump change. God, you have no idea how much money is washing around in this antiterrorism business. I have a thirty-two-million-dollar budget I have to spend all by myself, me, a GS fucking 13. That’s what they do when they don’t know what to do, they throw money around. And you have to spend it before the end of the fiscal year or you get dinged.”

“That’s bad, getting dinged,” said Paz. “And where’s Mr. Hardy now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Uh-huh. Well, so long, Dave.” Paz rose from his chair and picked up the case.

“I don’t!”Packer cried. “Please, the whole point of using GSE is that it’s all deniable. We pay in cash. I don’twant to know what they do. Hardy handles everything. For Christ’s sake, man, look at me? You think I’m a killer? I peed my pants when that gun went off. I’m a fucking bureaucrat. I live in Rockville and carpool to work….”

“But you went to see Hoffmann.”

“Hardy didn’t want to go. He said Hoffmann knew him from another deal. He said Hoffmann wouldn’t play if he knew he was involved.”

“Okay, Dave. Let’s start from the beginning. When was the first time you heard of Emmylou Dideroff.”

“In the Sudan, but we didn’t know that was her name. It’s complicated…you don’t know the background.”

“You’ll explain it, then. We have all night.”

Packer asked for another drink of beer, and then, after a deep breath, began.

“The mission of SRPU is to keep the oil flowing. Oil is a big terrorist target, or it could be, so we have people in the oil-producing nations to make sure nothing happens. Sudan is a small oil producer but it’s also a terrorist center, or was at one time, so we had people there. Mainly it was to make sure that the government had enough resources to keep the rebels out of the oil fields and away from the pipelines. No biggie, really. It was a shitty little post, just me and the guy I worked for, Vernon McKay, and a bunch of locals. But I needed foreign duty to get my ticket punched, a six-month posting. Okay, I’m there a couple of weeks, we started to hear rumors that an Almax survey team had made a major find in the southeastern part of the country, east of the Pibor River…”

“Who’s Almax?”

“A survey outfit, working for a Chinese-French consortium. Anyway, we were monitoring their transmissions and we picked up the team leader, Terry Richardson, saying they’d found what looked like a major reservoir. It looked big, really big, maybe another Libya. A diagenetic trap.”

“A what?”

“It’s a rare formation and hard to find, which is why it’d been overlooked. Basically it’s a fossil coral reef capping an oil reservoir. The Sirte basin in Libya is a trap like that, and it’s around thirty billion barrels. Anyway, Richardson said that he’d send the data the next day. That was the last anyone heard from him or from anyone in the Almax team. They disappeared off the map. The government sent people into the area, troops, at first only a few and they disappeared, and then they sent planes, and stronger parties, and they disappeared too. The government was going nuts because there wasn’t supposed to be anyone on the other side of the Pibor except bunches of starving refugees and a few SPLA militia. And then we started to hear about Atiamabi.”

“Who’s he?”

“She. A white woman. That’s what the natives called her. She showed up in this little shithole east of the Pibor called Wibok, and all of a sudden these raggedy-ass locals are knocking off the Sudanese like clay pigeons. The whole area is closed off. We got onto our SPLA contacts and they say she’s not one of theirs. They’re pissed at her too, and when they sent people in there, they never came back either. Or they did, but with all kinds of insane stories. She was a nun, they said, she could do miracles, call lightning from the sky, all kinds of shit. So McKay told me to check it out, because he didn’t believe that a nun was playing fucking Erwin Rommel down there. It had to be some kind of pro and he had to be interested in the oil. I mean there’s nothing else there. We figured the nun was some kind of figurehead. So I hired people to go across the river, locals, and nothing, zilch. And then Hardy showed up. He knew who she was, an American named Emmylou Dideroff. A maniac like bin Laden, he said, but Catholic and she really was a nun. Hated Muslims, wanted to stake out a little oil kingdom of her own, use the resources to set up some kind of Christian theocracy. That’s all we needed, right? Every fucking raghead in the world is going to say, See, we told you so, the crusaders are back and they’re after our oil. It’d be worse than Israel. A catastrophe! But politically we couldn’t do anything out in the open. I mean can you imagine the fucking right-winger fundies in this government if they learned we were helping the Sudanese Muslims knock out someone like that? Not to mention the pope getting on the horn with the president. So it had to be completely covert. Could I have another drink?”

Paz provided it. The man drank, belched, resumed his story.

“This is where al-Muwalid comes in. He was our liaison with the GOS?”

“The…?”

“The GOS, the government of Sudan. He was doing what we were doing, keeping the oil flowing. He had a military unit, planes, a couple of tanks and armored personnel carriers…”

“To keep oil flowing? Tanks?”

“Yeah, he was chasing people out of Bahr al-Ghazal, where the fields are. Mainly he used Arab militias, but he had the heavy stuff too, if the SPLA gave him any trouble.”

“I thought they called that ethnic cleansing,” said Paz.

“It’s part of the price at the pump. Those people were in the way and he moved them. Anyway, we funded Hardy and he was able to upgrade their equipment, I mean al-Muwalid’s outfit, and he crossed the river and won this smashing victory, according to him. Well, fuck, we gave him pretty near an armored battalion, that’s no surprise. And he captured the bitch. Which was good, but he didn’t capture anyone else. No prisoners, no oil survey team, and no fucking data. I mean let’s face it, the characters you’re dealing with, in those places, you know…” Packer’s face flushed around the cheeks.

“Niggers, you mean,” said Paz helpfully. “Dumbass jungle bunnies. Go on, please.”

Packer cleared his throat heavily and did so. “Okay, so it was critical to find out whether they really had a big strike or not. McKay got Washington involved here. It was a big policy deal. I mean all the way up to the top.”

“Why?”

“Well,if it was all that big, like another Libya, say, then they had to decide what to do about Sudan. A country that’s got reserves of point six billion is a whole nother thing from a country that’s got sixty or more. Plus the country’s run by a bunch of Islamist crazies make the Saudis look like Methodists. So do we try for a coup, get the crazies out of there? Or throw support to the SPLA, let them take over the region, push them to declare independence? Maybe it’d be a good thing to have a nominally Christian nation with a shitload of petroleum down there. It’d piss off the Muslims, though, which is all we need right now. The point was, the big fish couldn’t come to a policy decision until weknew what the Almax team had discovered. We put the screws to al-Muwalid. He had the woman then. Could we see her? No. Did you find the data? No comment. You won this big victory, you got control of the region, let’s get another survey going. The situation is too delicate at present, he says. And bullshit like that. No one’ll give you a straight answer in the whole fucking country. Then we heard three things practically at the same time. One, the Almax team was dead, burned in their truck without a scrap of data, two, al-Muwalid had actually gotten his ass creamed by the n…by the locals across the Pibor, so there wasn’t a hope of getting another team in there, and three, this Dideroff character had escaped.”

“Who told you that?”

“Hardy. Some guys came in and snatched her out of the jail where al-Muwalid was holding her. A professional lift, not her people. We figured the Israelis, but our sources there said it wasn’t them. Washington is going nuts by this time. Meanwhile, she’s smoke for over a year. We looked for her hard, I can tell you that. The only Emmylou Dideroff on record skipped on a minor dope charge ten years ago and vanished. No record of employment, no criminal record, no credit, no passport….”

“Just like you,” said Paz. “And then…?”

“Hardy found her, I don’t know how. She was in some convent in Malta, but by the time we got our ducks in a row, she’d skipped. By this time she was important enough to have a federal presence on site, and they picked me. Hardy said she’d go to Miami, maybe he had people tracking her, I don’t know, but she showed on the manifest of a London-Miami flight, no attempt at an alias, on a passport under her own name, for crying out loud, and I met her at the airport. I got into a conversation with her, fed her some names of people she trusted, and the next part you know, the houseboat, the job with Wilson. We watched her like fucking hawks and she didn’t do shit. No long-distance calling, no contacts, no friends. She went to work and church and volunteered at a shelter, period. Then al-Muwalid showed up in town. Obviously, we were alerted. Hardy came up with the idea.”

“What idea?”

“Get the two of them together, bug the place, see what they talked about.”

“Dave, that’s lame, even for you. The plan was to kill the Arab and frame Emmylou for it, period. You knew she was a religious nut and would go for mental evaluation, and you figured you could extract from the shrink’s notes what you couldn’t get in your torture session. That’s why you’ve been trying to lift those confession notebooks.”

No comment.

“Dave?” Paz pointed upward. Thump-thump of pacing feet and “He shall bring upon them their own iniquity, and shall cut them off in their own wickedness, yea, the Lord our God shall cut them off.”

Paz picked up the knife. “Maybe I should make a start,” he said. “How hard could it be? I bet it’ll hurt a lot worse than gettingdinged.”

Packer’s face seemed to sag, and his shoulders. A tear trickled down from one eye. “Ah, shit,” he said, “I can’t do this kind of shit. Just let me go, okay?”

“When I have the story.”

“Okay, yeah, that was the plan. And we had someone in the nuthouse too, an orderly, watching the doctor.”

“Right, and who took the photographs of us at the beach?”

“Hardy. I told him it was dumb, but he doesn’t listen.”

“He’s the redhead.”

“Yeah.”

“What about Porky, Casper, and Bugs?”

“He’s one of them. He only has two men with him.” He saw Paz’s look. “Oh, God. Iswear. I don’t want to lie anymore. I want to go home.” He drizzled for a while and Paz let him while he dumped out the files from the portfolio and looked at them.

“What are all these?”

“Just receipts. There’s a checking account, besides all the cash. It’s a front we use, to pay for things like rental trucks and equipment.”

“This says you rented a storage locker yesterday. Tamiami Storage, Inc.”

“If that’s what it says. I sign a lot of vouchers.”

“They have her there, don’t they?” Packer’s face gave the answer. He nodded.

Paz picked up the attache case, grabbed the mini-tape recorder he had placed covertly on the shelf behind Packer’s head, and walked across the salon, stepping around the pool of gasoline.

“Where are you going?” Packer shouted. “Don’t leave! I swear I told you everything! Please!”

Out on deck, Paz motioned to Barlow, who stopped his declaiming and climbed down to the lower deck.

“Did he talk?” Barlow asked. They could hear Packer blubbering and screaming for Paz to come back.

“Yeah. They’ve got her in a storage place on West Flagler. Where’re you going?”

Barlow stepped through the shattered door. “My shotgun. And my knife. It’s a Randall.”

Packer gave an unearthly shriek and fell silent. Barlow emerged, wiping his blade.

“For God’s sake, Cletis…”

“I didn’t touch him,” said Barlow, replacing the blade. “Fella don’t have the nerves for this kind of work. He fainted away like my old grannie soon as he saw me. I sliced the tape on his wrists a little so’s he can get free and don’t have to mess his pants.” They started to walk back to the car and Paz asked, “Did you make up all that stuff you were spouting about killing and devouring fire?”

“Those’re Psalms, Jimmy,” said Barlow in an offended tone. “The word of the Lord.”

“I’m glad I didn’t know you when you were wild,” said Paz in an amused tone, and then checked when, by the light of a street lamp, he saw the expression on Barlow’s face. The lynch-mob guy had gone, replaced by a tired old man.

“You okay, Cletis?”

“Oh, I’ll survive. But you can’t do like I just done without letting the devil into you a little, and I still got the stench of him in my mouth.”

“I know this place,” Lorna said as they pulled to the curb in front of a modest commercial strip. “This is the world’s greatest Cuban sandwich joint. We stopped here when we went to the beach.”

“That’s right and there’s Tamiami Storage right next to it.” Paz swiveled to face the backseat. “How do you want to play this, Cletis?”

“You’re the cop,” said Barlow. “But I’d just go in that office and show the square-badge in there your tin and say you think you got a kidnap victim in such and such a locker. I’ll just set here with Lorna and watch the street.”

They watched Paz walk into the alley between the two four-story blank-faced cubes of Tamiami Storage, toward the lit sign that announced the office. Cletis loaded his shotgun.

“Do you think you’ll have to use that?” she asked.

“I sure hope not,” said Barlow. “But if someone shows with bad intent and they’re armed and they don’t throw down, I’m going to be thinking that they’re the fellas who beat up Edna, and woe to them.”

The square-badge was a dozy fat man who looked wide-eyed at Paz’s detective ID and made an effort to hide the porn magazine he had been studying. Paz showed him the rental receipt and demanded to be shown to the locker indicated. The man looked through a card file and led Paz down gray, ill-lit corridors to a door closed with a large padlock. Paz demanded a bolt cutter, snipped the thing off, and went in.

A long canvas package lay on the floor, wrapped with cords. He used his pocketknife to slice through the binding and peeled the tarpaulin back like a banana. At first he thought she was dead, but then he saw her eyelids flutter and heard her breathe. She sighed and opened her eyes.

“Edna…?”

“She’s okay,” Paz said. “Banged up, but fine. How are you?”

“Conked on the head one more time,” she said, and there was that smile again. He stripped away the rest of the wrapping and helped her stand.

“Did you recognize any of them?” he asked.

“No, they had cartoon masks on. Bugs was the one giving orders. I thought I recognized the voice, but I couldn’t tell for sure. He didn’t say much. They wanted the notebook. That’s why they beat Edna, may God forgive me.”

“Does the name John Hardy mean anything to you?”

She nodded and recited, ” ‘John Hardy was a desperate little man, he carried a six-gun every day. He kilt him a man on the West Virginia line, you ought to see John Hardy gettin’ away, good Lord, see John Hardy get away.’ It was Orne Foy’s favorite song. Why?”

“Packer said that was the name of the guy who ran the operation. Any idea what his real name is?”

She shrugged. “I couldn’t say.”

Liar, thought Paz, but said nothing, and led her out of the room, past the stunned guard, through the dim halls.

Outside, Cletis Barlow stood by the Taurus, cradling his shotgun. It was past two, and misty, the traffic light, the sidewalks deserted except for the occasional man or woman pushing a shopping cart. It was a great neighborhood for the homeless.

The sound of an engine roaring, and it came fast around the corner out of Nineteenth Avenue, a white Ford Explorer with dark-tinted windows. The driver pulled it to a sharp stop across the street from Tamiami Storage and jumped out, as did the man in the front passenger seat. They were big men, wearing black jeans and dark hooded sweatshirts. Their faces were covered with plastic masks, Porky Pig and Casper the Ghost. As they crossed the centerline of the roadway, Barlow stood in their path, pointing his old Ithaca at them.

The men stopped. They saw a skinny old guy with an old two-barrel shotgun and were not impressed. Barlow could see their thoughts spinning that way by the set of their bodies. Each cast a quick glance at his companion and both bolted, one going east, one west. Four steps and they spun around, pulling out heavy-caliber pistols. It was a good trick but not against a man who had been hunting dove for forty years. Barlow emptied both of his barrels, filling the air with sixteen.30-caliber pellets from each, one right, one left.

Lorna had never seen a shotgun fired before in real life. It was much, much louder than it was in the movies, and the targeted men did not fly through the air backward for twenty feet. They collapsed in place like punctured balloons and lay in two dark heaps.

Paz came running out, pistol in hand, with Emmylou walking slowly some paces behind him. He inspected the bodies on the street and saw that they were beyond help. Together, he and Barlow dragged them from the road, leaving long, wide trails of blood, black as oil in the anticrime light’s yellow glare.

“Well, you got to see their blood all right, Cletis.”

Barlow said, ” ‘I have pursued mine enemies, and overtaken them: neither did I turn again until they were consumed.’ Psalm 18:37. I hope you don’t think I take any satisfaction in this, Jimmy. They come at me tricky and I had no choice. Thirty-two years in the PD and this’s the first time I ever shot a man to death….”

Barlow sat down on the curb and put his head in his hands. Emmylou sat beside him and embraced him. Lorna came out of the car and sat on the curb on Barlow’s other side, taking his hand. Paz observed the tableau stone-faced; he thought it looked like an allegorical sculpture: Faith and Reason Consoling Justice. He couldn’t look at Barlow’s face, because he knew that had he been the one with the shotgun he’d be dead, not because of his reflexes but because the power to deal out death had been taken away from him.

Then he heard the sound of a car door opening behind him, turned, and saw a man jump out of the back of the white Ford SUV. He was small and slight, so that for an instant Paz thought he was a boy. He didn’t have a boy’s face, though. His hair was short and red, and he was dressed in the same dark jeans and sweatshirt as the two dead men. He held some kind of submachine gun, an Uzi or an MP5, Paz couldn’t tell.

“Bugs,” said Paz. “Or John Hardy.”

“What’s up, doc?” said the man with a broad grin. “Paz, why don’t you carefully draw your weapon by the butt and place it on the ground, and then go and sit down with your pals.”

Paz did so.

“Hello, Skeeter,” said Emmylou Dideroff.

“Emmy,” said the man with the gun, “it’s nice to see you again after all these years.”

“Don’t hurt these people, Skeeter. Take me, and let them go. I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

“Oh, you can putthat in the bank! But I need all these folks, honey bunch. Torture don’t work so good on you, as our late Sudanese friend found out, but when I put it to your buddies here, maybe it’ll work better. I actually haven’t done a lot of torture, but maybe I’ll have beginner’s luck.”

Paz couldn’t take his eyes off the man’s face. He was happy, delighted, like a kid at a carnival. Paz had always thought that happy was the whole point of life, but no longer, not if this guy existed.

“This is about the oil,” Paz said.

“Right you are, boy. The oil. Emmy knows it’s there and she wants it safe for her little jungle bunnies, so she keeps telling these lies. I thought she would come clean in her notebooks, or to Dr. Wise over there, but no. All lies. Oh, I forgot you guys didn’t see the last one. She had it hidden away, but I worked over that old lady and she came up with it pretty fast.”

From Barlow came a low growl and he stirred, but the two women grabbed his arms.

Skeeter chuckled. “Yeah, Gramps, you don’t want to get your head blown off.” He looked again at Emmylou. “Shit, girl, what the fuck’re you doing with these people? A nigger, a yid, and a dumbass hillbilly, what a combo! You were a lot better off as a nihilist whore, if you want my opinion.”

“Skeeter, please…,” she said.

“You’ll excuse me, I have to make a call. I’m a little guy and it’s going to be hard to handle this crowd without some help.” He pulled out a cell phone and switched it on. He asked Lorna, “You think that’s why I have a bad attitude, Doc? Because I’m a half-pint?”

Lorna said, “No, I think you’d have been the same piece of shit you are if you were a gorilla.”

Skeeter laughed. “Not very therapeutic, Doc. You need to take a cue from Emmy, sympathy, empathy, all that good shit. And just for that, I think I’ll start on you when we get to where we’re going.”

His weapon didn’t waver as he pressed the buttons. The beeps seemed unnaturally loud in the quiet street.

From the alley between the storage building and the commercial strip Rigoberto Munoz has been observing the goings-on for some time with a mixture of satisfaction and fear. He has drunk most of his bottle of white port and he has wrapped his head in tinfoil, but the voices still come through. What he is witnessing clearly confirms all of his extraterrestrial messages. That nice doctor and the woman with the wonderful smile have been captured by the aliens, which means the aliens are real, and all those stupid people at the Jackson mental health are wrong. This makes him glad. Now he sees one of the space aliens take out a controller and press its buttons. Rigoberto feels a terrible wrenching in his groin, but he fights against it. He takes out his old-fashioned Cuban fisherman’s knife and scuttles out of the alley, keeping to the shadows between the street lamps, working his way around the cars, to attack from behind. He knows what a submachine gun is from his time in the Cuban army, in Angola. Rigoberto is crazy, but not stupid.

“I thought you only had those two guys,” said Paz.

“Oh, you’ve been talking to Dave,” said Sonnenborg. “Yeah, you know it never pays to lay out all your cards, especially to dumb fucks like him. No, I got people watching your place and the doc’s….” Into the cell phone he said, “Yo, Benny. Yeah, get over to the storage. Yeah, like now, asshole.” He broke the connection and dialed another number. “Yeah, it’s me. I need you at the storage right away….”

Paz saw Emmylou come to a decision, her mouth went thin and she nodded her head, and then she started to walk toward where Paz had dropped his pistol.

Skeeter pointed his weapon at her. “Stop right there, you stupid bitch!” he cried and shot a short burst into her path. The bullets went screaming down the street and a car alarm started wailing. She knelt above the pistol. Skeeter extended his arm and pointed his weapon at Lorna. “You touch that fucking gun and I’ll blow her head off,” he yelled.

Emmylou picked up the Glock and at the same instant Rigoberto Munoz came fast around the end of the white van and shoved his knife into the small of Skeeter’s back. Skeeter dropped the cell phone. He spun around and saw a bum shouting at him in Spanish, a filthy, nearly toothless man with a cap of shiny foil on his head. The man danced away and ran behind a car. Skeeter sent half a magazine after him, shattering glass, puncturing steel, but there was no indication as to whether he’d hit him. He reached around to where his back ached unbearably and felt the rough wooden handle. “What the fuck is this…?” he said to no one in particular, and collapsed.

Paz began to move as soon as Skeeter’s head hit the ground. He kicked the man’s weapon under the van, then checked his pulse. Finding none, he took his own pistol from Emmylou and entered the white vehicle. There he found, as he had expected, the fourth and final notebook.

“Is he dead?” asked Emmylou when he emerged. She was standing over the body.

“Yeah,” said Paz. “You knew he was involved in this, didn’t you?”

“No. I’m not a criminal mastermind, Detective.”

“Oh, yes, you are,” said Paz, “in your own sweet way. And you were going to let him shoot Lorna too, weren’t you?”

She said, “He wouldn’t have shot Lorna with me pointing a gun at him, he would have shot me. But the Lord sent an angel.”

“That was a schizophrenic Cuban, Emmylou.”

“Yes, an angel of the Lord. Not all of them are pretty blondes with feathery wings.”

Paz wanted to shoot her himself just then but instead spoke to Barlow. “Cletis, if you would, get the ladies into our car and take them to Lorna’s place. I’ll be there as soon as I can. You all need to get out. By now that guard in there has called the cops.”

“Youare the cops,” said Lorna.

“Maybe not for long,” Paz said and looked sadly at Cletis Barlow.

Then he called Tito Morales.

It is unfortunate that the title of this work seems so technical; not everyone after all is interested in the formation of nursing sisters. Were it not so, then perhaps St. Marie-Ange de Berville’s great work would have taken its place besideThe Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola or St. Teresa of Avila’sThe Interior Castle as monumental guides on how to live the life of a vowed religious focused on a particular aspect of God’s work. Marie-Ange begins her introduction with the famous lines “What is this life that we should love it so, even though we are assured by God Himself that bliss lies beyond the sleep of death?” She thus confronts head-on the great paradox of the Christian religion: if there is another, better world ahead of us, what is the value of the only one we know? This is the core of her training method, which is different from the training methods of her two great predecessors, in that it is anascetic; she focuses instead on the appreciation of the gift of life in all its forms, and is relatively unconcerned with a narrow propriety with respect to the sins of the flesh. “Our Lord loved sinners for a good reason,” she writes in her introduction, “and in any case, blood is the best washing.”

— FROM THE FORMATION OF NURSING SISTERS, BY MARIE-ANGE DE BERVILLE, 8TH ED. FOREWORD BY SR. MARGARET CLARE MCMAHAN, SBC, NEW YORK, 1975.