“Do you know how to find north?”
“With my dashboard GPS or without it?”
“Funny. I mean with the sun.”
“I know that it never sets on the British Empire, but other than that…”
“Remind me to show you how, assuming we ever get a moment to breathe.”
“Better watch out,” she said, feeling strangely playful. “You’ll give away all of your top-secret astronomer’s tricks.”
“You’re right. I better not divulge the instructions for making a telescope using only common kitchen supplies.”
“And duct tape,” she suggested.
“That goes without saying.”
As they walked, Mira replayed those last few phrases in her head. Hold the phone, babe, but was she actually flirting? With a man? A real-live man and not the movie stars who wooed her in her daydreams? It had been so long that she wasn’t quite sure.
“Micha Lepin is an old man in prison now,” Gabe said, changing conversational tack without warning. “But that’s too humane a fate for him, considering what he’s done. He took people who had been kidnapped by the government and used them to test all the shit he cooked up in the lab, like they were rats or something.”
“And Nicky Lepin?”
“That’s what we need to find out. He was mutilated out there. Alban Olivares tried to save him, but Nicky didn’t make it. If we can find out how the two Lepins are connected…”
“Maybe they’re not. For all I now, the name Lepin is like Smith back home. There are such things as coincidences, you know.”
“Could be. But I don’t think so. It doesn’t feel right.”
They rounded a corner and walked into Los Angeles.
Though four thousand miles south of the border, Calama’s commercial heart might have been that of any city in the States. Behind them were the rustic bones of the city, the barefoot children playing stickball, the old men in woven hats selling fish from the back of trucks. In front of them, the mannequins in the storefronts were streamlined mankillers in Parisian shoes. A popper on the corner made geometric dance moves for money, the stereo at his feet pushing out a bone-numbing bass. On each block was at least one shop that sold cell phones and protein bars.
“Every city is turning into the same city,” Gabe observed.
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
Gabe didn’t offer an opinion either way, and Mira found a certain meaning in his ambivalence. They found a public console at an Internet café. While Gabe settled in, Mira went in search of java. She bought two cappuccinos, and by the time she returned to the table, Gabe was shaking his head.
“You found something?”
He accepted the cup with a nod and pointed at the screen. “That’s Nicky’s name right here, but the page is in Spanish.”
“So?”
“So … I’m not much use beyond asking for the bathroom and bottled water.”
“Isn’t there some kind of translator thingamabob you can use?”
He took a sip and then hurriedly set the cup aside. “Duh. You’re right. I totally blanked there for a minute. Pardon me while I reboot my brain.”
“You’re pardoned. You’ve had a rough couple of days.”
“Let’s hope they don’t get any rougher.” He banged away at the keyboard. “Thanks for the coffee, by the way.”
Thanks for taking my brother down that hole, she almost said. She’d decided that Luke’s foray into the murderer’s cave had strangely been good for him. He wasn’t traumatized by what he’d seen, and he’d proven himself when things got scary. It made Mira wonder about the other ways he’d stand tall if she didn’t keep him always tethered to her side.
“Nicky Lepin was kidnapped,” Gabe said.
Mira scanned the story, working her way around the awkward phrasing of the online translation. Over a year ago, the boy went missing while visiting a Santiago museum with his classmates. His parents, Sachin and Carella, waited for a ransom demand that was never made. No body was ever found.
“Until now,” Mira said softly.
The news story concluded by mentioning that Carella was the daughter of the notorious war criminal Micha Lepin, imprisoned indefinitely for crimes against humanity during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
Gabe crossed his arms over his chest. “Nicky was Micha Lepin’s grandson.”
“What does that mean? How does it fit?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then we need to find someone who does.”
“The only person I know is the Midnight Messenger.”
“Who?”
“Alban Olivares.”
“But you said he was killed. He got shot, right?”
“Yeah, but when you’ve got no options left”—Gabe logged off and stood up—“you’ve got to find a way to speak with the dead.”
* * *
Gabe was listening to the phone ring when he realized he was missing something important about the severed limbs. The rifleman had systematically amputated the arms and legs of at least two people, giving each sutured stump time to heal before sawing off something else. Though the primary question of why he was performing these surgeries remained, waiting in its shadow was the smaller question of where.
“Where did he put the cut-off pieces?”
“Hmmm?”
Standing on the corner next to a greengrocer’s open-air market, Gabe had trouble hearing the faint rings. He pressed the phone tighter against his ear. “As sick as it sounds, I’d like to know what he was doing with them … the body parts.”
Mira made a face. She didn’t want to think about it.
Maybe he was eating them. Or stuffing them like taxidermy. Or feeding them to the demons from the Incan underworld. Gabe’s imagination sped up as it chased the notion around in his head, one race car drafting behind another.
“Quest-South, Julio Montero speaking.”
Gabe stepped away from the still-raw memory of the woman in the wagon. “Dr. Montero, hey, it’s me.”
“Traylin?”
“Is everybody doing okay there?”
“Traylin, the police have been here multiple times. What have you done to us?”
“I’d love to argue with you, Doc, but I don’t have time. I need to talk to—”
“I’ll get Professor Rubat.”
“No! No, I’m not calling for him. Give me to Vicente, the maintenance chief.”
“What?”
“Just please get him, okay?” He ran a hand through his hair. “Come on, Doc. I showed you the flaw in your King’s Indian Defense. Do this one favor for me.”
“I hardly think that a chess lesson is anywhere near as important as what’s going on here.” He sighed. “Fine. Hold on.”
Gabe waited. He had a plan for tracking down Alban Olivares, but it would die a premature death without Vicente’s help.
After thirty seconds, he stole a glance at Mira. She was inspecting a spinning rack of bottled spices but remained within earshot. Maybe she was a bombshell or maybe she was the bride of Frankenstein. Most likely she was somewhere in between. Gabe didn’t care. She was cool. Far cooler than a geeky stargazer who’d memorized the Green Lantern’s creed at the age of ten and visited gaming forums where people traded insults such as “My m4d skllz pwned j00 n00b!” Though astronomers and astrologers usually didn’t view the universe through the same lens, this time, at least, Gabe counted himself lucky; his horoscope must have known he’d need a partner if he was going to survive this.
“So Luke and Ben are writing a book?” he asked as he waited.
Mira inspected a jar of dried epazote. “So they say.”
“I take it by your tone that this isn’t something they’ve done before.”
“We just met. I’ve known Ben only a few more hours than I’ve known you.”
“But you came down here to meet him, right? You and Luke flew all this way to … what? Talk to Ben about his book?”
“More or less. Lu
ke can do things with Ben’s writing.”
“Things?”
“Magic things.”
“Magic like pulling quarters from people’s ears?”
“Except with words, yes. He’ll have to show you.”
“Amigo, that you?”
At the sound of Vicente’s voice, Gabe disengaged from thoughts of Luke the magician. “Hey, Vic. Yeah, it’s me. You all right?”
“For the love of Mary and the saints, Gabe, what the hell’s happening?”
“I’m okay, at least for now.”
“You confronted that guy? You found another body?”
“I need to know something about the lay of the land. Can you help me?”
“They’re looking for you.”
“I know. They found me.”
“The consulate called.”
“Who?”
“The bigshot ambassadors in Santiago. It’s their job to butt in when a U.S. national is involved in criminal activity. And you, my friend, are involved.”
“Criminal activity? Jesus, I…” He pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. “Forget it. I need to know about army bases.”
“What? What the hell do I know about any of that?”
“Maybe more than you think you do. Is there a base anywhere near Calama or not? You’re from this area. You live here. I need to know.”
“Do I look like some kind of military installation expert to you?”
No, Gabe wanted to say, you look like goddamn white wallpaper.
“Gabe? You still there?”
“Please, Vic.”
“Fine, fine, I, uh … I have some buddies in the military. Is that good enough?”
“It’ll do. You got a name and number?”
“They hang out at a cantina called El Estribo. You’re in Calama, right? El Estribo is one of those bars where the uniforms like to get together and talk shop. Really full of machismo, you know?”
“Yeah, I get you. When I was a kid there was a joint about two blocks from my house where all the firemen went.”
“Same kind of thing, except without the Dalmatians. If you have army questions, I’d start there. Except there’s one problem.”
Gabe tightened his grip on the phone.
“Army types aren’t the only ones who go there. It’s also full of cops.”
“Wonderful.”
“I know I probably don’t need to ask this, but you’re watching your ass, right?”
“I’m doing my best.”
“Good. Very good. I really don’t want to hear secondhand that something happened to you. Something bad, I mean.”
“Something bad has already happened. I’m just trying to keep it from getting any worse.” He hung up.
Mira stopped pretending to be interested in the spices. “What’s the verdict?”
He handed her phone back to her. “How does crashing a cop bar sound?”
“Dangerous.”
“Well, I promise not to start any tavern brawls if you promise to limit yourself to four shots of tequila.”
She dropped the phone in her purse. “You seem rather nonchalant about all of this.”
“Actually I’m scared as hell. Glad to know it doesn’t show.”
“Not too much.”
“I’ll settle for that.” He went in search of the grocer to get directions for El Estribo, but not before looking once more over his shoulder.
Not that it mattered. He wouldn’t have recognized the rifleman had the man been standing right behind him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Mira planted herself on the stool and thought, Belly up to the bar!
She hadn’t been in a place like this since college at the University of Nebraska. But the watering holes in Lincoln seemed carved from the same beer-stained wood as El Estribo, the neon signs promising the same distractions. Mounted above the door was a chrome-plated scorpion, gazing down on the patrons with lustrous animosity. The rest of the décor was a sparring match between soccer paraphernalia and yellowed snapshots of Chilean soldiers from bygone campaigns. Soccer, by virtue of the two flat-screens on the wall, appeared to be winning.
“Not so bad,” Gabe decided, taking the stool beside her.
“The jury’s still out.” She glanced around. Apparently tourists were not the norm in this place, as several pairs of eyes stared at her from the semidarkness. They enjoyed the safety of familiar shadows, while Mira felt exposed. Perhaps the scorpion was not the only predator here.
Gabe kept his voice low. “You okay?”
“Not really. I can’t stop thinking about the man who was shot.”
“Eduardo?”
She nodded, then waited for Gabe to offer some words of commiseration. But he made no attempt. Mira had washed a murdered man’s blood from her chin, and she’d have to deal with it. To distract herself, she checked out the other patrons. She counted only two other women in the bar, one of them with her hair screwed into an inflexible bun. She wore a police uniform, as did the two men sharing her table. None of them looked pleased to see her. “So what do we do from here?”
“I was hoping you’d have a brilliant idea.”
“Not me. I’m just along for the ride.”
The bartender addressed them gruffly in accented English and produced two bottles of something called Cristal when Gabe asked for beers. Just as Mira hadn’t been bar-hopping in years, neither had she knocked back a brew anytime in recent memory. Was she so lacking in girlfriends these days that she hadn’t even been properly hungover in ages? Did she hold so tightly to twindom that she’d forgotten what life was like on a Saturday night without Luke?
“Beer okay?” Gabe asked. “I just assumed…”
“It’s perfect.” She took a long swallow, the glass cold against her lips.
No jukebox interfered with the soccer commentators, and Mira found herself wishing for some music. It wasn’t really a bar without half-drunk thirty-somethings slinging their arms around one another and belting out Patsy Cline or Journey. But instead she got play-by-play in a language she didn’t understand, talking about a game that bored her. Far worse were the vibes she picked up from the regulars. She gave them another glance. She caught the lady cop looking at her. Though the woman turned away, she wasn’t fast enough to conceal her suspicion.
“We should hurry,” Mira suggested.
“Agreed.” Gabe wasted no more time. For someone supposedly inexperienced at dealing with murderers and disappearing dead men, he acquitted himself well, asking the bartender about Alban Olivares and sticking an asterisk on the end of his question in the form of a fifty-dollar bill. Mira wondered about the wisdom of bribing someone with foreign currency, but evidently U.S. green was fluent in any tongue.
The bartender immediately went to one of the tables in the corner.
Mira watched him in the mirror. “What’s he doing?”
“Probably laughing with his friends about how stupid Americans are with their money. Or plotting how to dispose of our bodies.”
“I don’t suppose it would do any good to ask you why it’s not Officer Fontecilla here instead of us. I know things work differently down here, but I’m fairly sure that cops still get paid for investigating homicides.”
“I guess Fontecilla isn’t here because I didn’t exactly tell him I knew the name of the man whose blood they found at the observatory.”
“Okay, so you withheld information. Interesting. And you made this decision because you … feel responsible somehow?” Having just met him, Mira could only guess at his motives. But she sensed the idealist streak in him. It took one to know one, and all of that. “The amateur psychiatrist in me says that you’re harboring some kind of guilt about it, but that doesn’t make sense, because from what I understand, you had nothing to do with it.”
“Maybe I just know how he feels.”
“How could you know that? He never even said a word to you.”
“Long story.”
“Do I look like I’
m on my way to a manicure? I have time.”
Gabe took a lengthy pull on his bottle and stared straight ahead into the mirror behind the bar. He looked at his own anonymous reflection. “What if I told you that I have no idea who those two people are right there?”
Mira glanced at the mirror and saw the two of them sitting there with strangers forming silhouettes behind them. “Is this one of those philosophical questions about the meaning of life? Because if that’s the case, then I’m afraid you’re not going to get any answers from this particular chick, at least not on the first beer.”
“What I’m saying is, why is it that we think we have to recognize a person to really know them? Isn’t there a chance we could empathize with them without ever really seeing them?”
“Uh … sounds a little too esoteric for casual conversation, but we don’t need to see somebody to feel a connection with them. I guess. We hear about people suffering in other countries and we feel sorry for them.”
“I’m not talking about feeling sorry for anybody.”
“Then I think you’ve officially lost me.”
He didn’t break eye contact with himself. “You know what I realized?”
“Lay it on me.”
“The eyes aren’t the windows to the soul.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. Then what is the window to the soul? And don’t be predictable and say the heart.”
“No, it’s nothing as simple as that. It’s our actions. It’s what we do in the important moments that shows who we are. I don’t know if that’s the soul or just good old human guts, but there it is. Olivares died trying to carry a mangled boy across the driest place on Earth. I’ll take that window any day.”
Mira saw the truth in that. It wasn’t such an earthshaking philosophy; Plato had nothing to worry about. But if every action was a kind of self-definition, then what was she saying about herself? She lived a compartmentalized life, working her daily routine like a Rubik’s cube with all the sides the same color. She hadn’t taken her little black dress out of the closet in God knows how long. And she’d certainly never cowritten a novel or Tasered anyone, so which of the Westbrook sibs was getting the most out of this deal?
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