The Border Lords

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Ozburn waited until the food came and the waitress had left. He looked across the dining room through the bright green tracers at the scattered guests. Even with the sunglasses his eyes stung and watered. His fingertips tingled. He couldn’t feel his feet and he wondered if he could stand up right now. He was thirsty but just the sight of the red plastic tumbler of ice water made him nauseous. For the first time in all of this he was feeling the scouts of defeat, stealing up on him for a look into his empty soul. He finished the tequila.

  “Father Joe, Seliah is sick and I am, too.”

  “Sick?”

  “Body and soul. Deeply.”

  “But you look young and strong, Sean.”

  “Tell me about the bat in your room at the Volcano View, Joe. Tell me the truth or I will become very angry.”

  Father’s Joe’s face went stone serious. He lifted off his hat and set it on the padded leather bench beside him. He ran a hand through his short dark hair.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The maid found a bat in your room the morning after I fell asleep in your bed. In the bathroom wastebasket. It was a vampire bat and it was alive.”

  “A maid claimed this?”

  “Itixa, the head of housekeeping. Hood went down there. He talked to her.”

  “There was no bat in my wastebasket unless she herself put it there. I know what I put into my own wastebasket, Sean. Don’t you? Rest assured, there was no bat. And I can tell you that Itixa has a passion for beer. She swills the stuff. I saw her unable to walk because of it. And she’s widely known around Arenal as a storyteller and a gossip and a woman who has visions.”

  Ozburn looked at Leftwich, thinking how easy it would be to snap his neck. The priest’s face dissolved in a shower of green tracers. “Seliah saw the bat, too.”

  Leftwich cut into his steak, looking at Ozburn with a questioning expression. “Oh?”

  “Yeah, oh. She looked through your window screen and you were sitting at the foot of the bed. When I was conked out. You were leaning forward, doing something to my feet with your hands.”

  “And she’s certainly right about that, Sean. But good gracious, I was simply fanning a fly off your toes. Remember what happened to Eduardo? I explained this to Seliah that night. It was an almost absentminded reflex to the bothersome fly. My larger concern was how to wake you up and get you back to your own room so I could get some sleep.”

  “And when she came into the room you stood up and something dropped into the bedspread that was on the floor. You saw it, too. Remember? You saw it, Father Leftwich. Seliah said you both looked but couldn’t find it.”

  Father Joe swallowed a bite of his steak, nodding, pointing his fork at Ozburn. “I do remember. That part of Seliah’s story is accurate also. We found nothing in the bedspread. Nothing under the bed. Nothing at all.” Apparently satisfied with this conclusion, Leftwich cut another piece of meat.

  “Seliah says that what dropped from your hands was a bat,” said Ozburn.

  “That’s strange, because she said nothing at all about a bat that night. While we searched, we speculated what it could have been and where it could have gone. But it’s absolutely impossible that it was a bat. I’ll tell you why—because I would never touch a bat with my bare hands. Not in a million years. I fear them.”

  “Seliah thinks you trapped it in the bedspread, probably crushed it right then and there, and hid it from her.”

  “But why? For what reason?”

  “Just a little sleight of hand is all it would have taken—late, poor light, Seliah still half-drunk.”

  Father Joe’s face flushed and Ozburn saw the anger in his eyes. The priest set down his knife and fork on the plate and looked at Ozburn. “What does she imagine I did with this alleged bat?”

  “She believes you used it to give me rabies. She believes I gave it to her a few weeks later when we made love.”

  “Rabies? You two have rabies, and I caused it? Sean. Sean, what have I ever done to Seliah to give her such a low opinion of me? What have I done to you? Ever?”

  “She tested positive for it, Joe. She’s in a hospital right now, in a therapeutic coma. They knocked her out and they’re hoping she can outlive the virus. She’s got just a very small chance of waking up again.”

  Leftwich leaned back into the booth. His ruddy face went pale. A moment later a tear ran down his face. “This is all wrong. It’s terribly and hugely wrong. There was no bat in my room. Did you hear me? No bat. Thus, there is no rabies.”

  Leftwich stared at Ozburn as the tears came. “Sean. You don’t know this about me—how could you—but I studied medicine at Trinity College in Dublin before I decided on the priesthood. I did not graduate, but I came close. So I must ask you—who are these doctors? Did you know that very few doctors have even seen a case of human rabies? Now, look at you, Sean. You don’t look to me like a man with rabies. Rabies tests are complicated and best done postmortem. The presence of antigens is not always conclusive. What if this is just a simple misdiagnosis by inexperienced physicians? Down through the centuries rabies has been one of the most misdiagnosed of human diseases.”

  Ozburn looked at the priest’s face, suspended in a pool of bright green light. Ozburn’s legs were numb to his knees and he wondered if it was his posture. With great effort he was able to move his feet apart and he felt a tingle of feeling down in his toes. He felt Daisy next through his boot. What a feeling to have feeling.

  “These last seven weeks have been a living hell for us,” said Ozburn. “Pain. Anger. Agitation. Fear of water, fear of light. Insane thoughts, insane sensation. How do you diagnose that, Father Joe?”

  “Well, let’s think it through. I can surmise by your vitamins and aspirins that you’re not feeling well. You wear your sunglasses even at night, so I know that you’re sensitive to light. What if you and Seliah contracted an unusual strain of influenza down there in the cloud forest? A strain that, as Americans, your immune systems were unprepared to fight off? A good strong influenza infection could certainly explain those symptoms, right? In this country alone flu kills scores of thousands of people every year. And certainly you could have given it to Seliah with something as innocent as a goodnight kiss. Yes?”

  Ozburn looked at the priest and resisted the urge to bite him.

  “Or, what if . . .” Leftwich sat forward, looked hard at Ozburn and lowered his voice. “What if this rabies tale was invented by Hood and Blowdown, to lure you to Seliah’s bedside? Remember, Sean, you and Seliah never talked to this maid. Hood claims to have talked to her. And it was Hood who also forced Seliah to the hospital, correct? Where a doctor sympathetic to ATF could easily have manipulated and convinced her. As she has convinced you. Which was easy because you love her.”

  Ozburn thought he recognized the tapping of truth on the door of his heart. “But Eduardo said you wanted to see the vampire bats.”

  “That’s a lie from Charlie Hood, Sean. I swear to the god of your choosing that I have never seen a vampire bat. I feel faintly amused at hearing myself deliver that line.”

  Ozburn thought that the rabies story really did sound like something Hood would come up with. “Eduardo took you to a cave to see them.”

  “That’s another lie from Charlie Hood. And again I will swear that I was not shown a cave.”

  “You could have captured one in the cave and brought it back to the Volcano View.”

  “Except that I am too cowardly—and too prudent—a man, to ever dream of touching a vampire bat with my bare flesh. Except that I love you and Seliah and I still believe now what I believed in Costa Rica. I believe you two will do great and wonderful deeds on earth.”

  “No!” Ozburn swept his arm across the table, knocking the plates and glasses and silverware to the floor in a clattering, shattering symphony. Daisy bolted from under the table, then stopped and watched her master from a distance. Everyone was looking over. The bartender stood with his hands on his hips and the waitr
ess looked up from her order pad and one of the busboys ducked into the kitchen and came right back out with a rolling rack of bus trays.

  Ozburn saw all of this outlined in green light. The broken dishes glowed like emeralds. The room began rotating clockwise, slowly, like a great kaleidoscopic mural. He leaned close to Leftwich and hissed into his face. “I don’t believe in our God in heaven anymore. I tore him to bits and scattered him to the Mexican wind. Seliah is gone and I am alone. I don’t want to do great and wonderful deeds. Shove them up your ass and up the ass of your gutless God.”

  Ozburn felt his heart break again, like the feeling he’d had when Seliah drove away in her red Mustang. He looked into Father Joe’s eyes. Green embers. Ozburn felt the priest’s hand on his wrist.

  “No words can make me sadder than those, my son. None. You have crushed my heart and I am in anguish for you.”

  Ozburn rose and leaned over the table and clamped a hand on Father Joe’s cowboy shirt. He lifted him up and threw him against the wall behind the booth. Leftwich hit with a loud huff and fell to the booth bench like something suddenly deflated. A painting of calla lilies slid off the wall and crashed to the floor. Father Joe came to rest approximately where he had been seated before. His eyes were wide and welling and he fought to catch his breath. It took a moment. Then he wiped the cuff of his Western shirt across his eyes.

  “You’re a strong one, Oz.”

  “You’ve ruined us. All of you.”

  “No bat. No virus. This is not a time for superstition and speculation. It is time for the cold light of reason. It is up to you to carry on, Sean, despite your wild fears. Rise to your task or you will be destroyed.”

  Ozburn stared down at Father Joe for a long moment. He was a little surprised that he could still do something like this. He felt his feet going numb on him again. Then Ozburn looked up at the busboy who would not approach, and at the bartender still glaring at him, and into the faces of the guests, men and women amazed at what they were seeing, at the cooks peering over from the kitchen, at the waitress whose face was filled with fear and sympathy.

  Ozburn pulled out his wallet and took out five hundreds and dropped them on the table. He picked up Father Joe’s cowboy hat and slapped it back onto the priest’s head. “I’ll still need your help on Monday.”

  “You shall have it. You’re a good man, Sean Ozburn. I wish you would believe it, as I so strongly believe.”

  Ozburn pulled the duffel from under the table and slung it over one big shoulder. Snapping his fingers for Daisy, he strode across the dining room and into the entryway. He stumbled on his unfeeling feet and nearly knocked over a woman who had just entered the building. She was dark-haired and singularly pretty and wore a red dress with white polka dots that looked to be from another era. She had a black coat folded over one arm.

  “Madam,” Ozburn managed, dizzied by her scent.

  “Excuse me,” she answered without slowing down.

  The Amigos manager stood behind the counter at the cash register with a look of indignation on his face.

  “I left five hundred to cover the dinner and the damage,” said Ozburn.

  “I hope that covers it. Do not come back here.”

  “I’m sorry for the spectacle. I didn’t want it to happen.”

  “This is a family restaurant.”

  Ozburn leaned over the counter and he saw, even in his green vision, a blush of fear on the man’s face. Ozburn bared his teeth at him.

  He swung open the door and looked back across the dining room at Leftwich, who was holding the black coat belonging to the pretty woman as she waited for the busboy to ready the booth. They looked like a pair from central casting: the dude ranch cowboy and a forties femme fatale. The woman was speaking to Joe, sharply it looked, and the small cowboy-priest had the coat over his arm and a hapless expression on his face.

  In the parking lot Ozburn hit the Ram key fob and swung open the truck door. Daisy sprang into the driver’s seat, then hopped over the center console to the passenger side. Ozburn threw open the half door and climbed into the rear part of the cab and set the duffel out across the bench.

  “Back here, girl,” he said. Daisy obeyed, curling into the floor space between the seats.

  From his duffel Ozburn took both of his Love 32s, loaded with full magazines, and set them on the front passenger seat. He took two extra full magazines and set them up front next to the weapons. He tossed a windbreaker over them all. He zipped and yanked the duffel back down to the floor, which gave Daisy plenty of room to stretch out on the rear bench. She did so, thumping her tail.

  “Just in case, sweetie. You never know who you’ll run into on the road.”

  At the sound of his voice Daisy’s tail thumped harder and faster. Ozburn shut the rear door and climbed up front and started the engine. He roared out of the parking lot for Interstate 8, his foot with little feeling in it and heavy on the accelerator.

  32

  Hood sat in his dining room with the American League division series muted on TV, reading online stories about bats, rabies and the Milwaukee Protocol. An October wind bent the white sagebrush outside and rattled the paloverde and his windows. He was tired from the day but very much looking forward to a visit from Beth Petty, who was coming over after her four-to-midnight ER shift. He hadn’t seen her since the Buenavista safe house massacre twelve days ago. He had bought good wine and a light dinner to prepare.

  Hood was fascinated to learn that the vampire legends originating in eighteenth-century Eastern Europe followed a major rabies outbreak there in 1720. The author, Spanish neurologist Juan Gomez-Alonso, pointed out that rabies victims have symptoms very similar to the traits often attributed to vampires. He wrote that because the virus attacks the limbic system, which is a part of the brain that influences aggression and sexual behavior, rabies victims—like vampires—are prone to biting and to hypersexuality. And because rabies also affects the hypothalamus, which controls sleep, people with rabies suffer—as do vampires—from insomnia and become energized and agitated late at night. The doctor pointed out that rabies causes hypersensitivy to strong stimuli such as light, bright reflection and strong odors—including garlic—all of which appeared early in the vampire legends. He pointed out that rabies victims commonly vomit blood, and of course, an over-full vampire could be expected to do the same. Most obviously, Gomez-Alonso pointed out, both rabies and vampirism are most commonly spread by biting.

  Hood took a sip of beer and checked his watch. A gust of wind rose outside, and in the island of light cast by his security floods he saw the desert sand stand up and take a human shape and travel a few feet toward the house before collapsing. As a child, he had been more frightened by vampire movies than by other horror movies. They had seemed more possible, and a vampire could appear to be normal—a threat that could walk unrecognized among us.

  Tapping at his keyboard now, Hood brought up the picture that he had e-mailed to Sean just minutes after Seliah had gone into the coma. In the picture she looked fresh and lovely and relaxed but Hood knew she’d been blasted into unconsciousness by drugs. He’d hoped that the picture might help persuade Sean to surrender himself. He’d promised Ozburn that if he did surrender, their first stop would be UCI Medical Center. Hood had also told Ozburn that Seliah had given him some things she wanted Sean to have. Again, a lure. But there was only silence from Ozburn. Hood wondered if Oz might be shamed or infuriated by the picture and by Hood’s proximity to her. Who could know?

  He called the nurses’ station at the ICU and got Marliss. She told him there was no change; Seliah’s vitals were all good.

  “The doctor will let you know when she’ll be brought out of it,” she said. “It will be days, Mr. Hood. They will taper her off of the sedatives when the rabies is over. And she will come back. Very slowly.”

  He asked if she could hear what was going on around her, down in a sleep that deep.

  “No,” said Marliss. “She’s not aware of anything at all.
Nothing. Are you in law enforcement?”

  “Yes.”

  “Her husband called a few minutes ago. He sounded very agitated and angry. He said if she dies, terrible things will happen. We reported it to hospital security as we were told.”

  “Is the marshal still there?”

  “Oh, yes. There is supposed to be a marshal twenty-four/seven. He looks bored to tears.”

  Hood called Soriana at home and told him about Ozburn’s threat and asked him to put another U.S. Marshal outside Seliah’s room. Soriana was quiet for a beat, then said he would.

  Back on his computer Hood looked at a pictorial of vampire bats in the wild. A camera crew had gotten video and stills of a cave filled with them. The scientists all looked happy to be there but the local guides looked spooked and guilty. One of them held out a vampire bat by its wingtips while the animal bared its teeth and hissed. One ran along the bottom of the cave floor upright on its feet, wings half-out for balance, its tiny chest strangely human, its face piggish. Vampire bats almost always approach their prey on the ground, Hood read. They are nimble runners.

  Hood pictured the priest leaning forward over Sean’s feet and Seliah at the window screen with the moths and beetles and flies seething around her. He pictured the priest standing when he became aware of her, and Hood saw the small dark thing drop from his hands as he turned to open the door for her. He pictured Sean asleep through all of this, ignorant that the seeds of his and Seliah’s destruction had just been introduced to his innocent blood. Again, Hood heard the voice of skepticism commenting on these images and this story. A priest with a vampire bat in his hands? Come on, Charlie, could this have happened? Isn’t there a simpler explanation for what had fallen to the floor and what had happened to Sean and Seliah? How truthful was superstitious, heavy-drinking Itixa?

  He checked his e-mail and found another communication from one of the German bird-watchers who had stayed at the Volcano View back in July, at the same time as the Ozburns. So far, six of them had responded to his inquiries about Father Joe Leftwich, specifically, pictures of the man, but none had taken a picture of him and none knew anything at all about where he might have gone.