Hidden River (Five Star Paperback)

by Adrian McKinty

“Fucking bitch,” John muttered. “Bet she could have sold us a ticket if she’d wanted.”

  “Aye, but it won’t make any difference,” I said. “We’ll just get it at the station.”

  “Yes,” John agreed.

  “No difference,” I said again, and we drank our beers in agreement. Two people who couldn’t have been more wrong, since getting off the train at Fraser, Colorado, was to make all the difference in the world. Our fates weren’t taking us to California, to the Golden Gate Park, to Chinatown, to the airport and a ten-hour flight to Europe. No, the center of gravity in our story, the one dragging us like a black hole, was the one who had cast the first stone, the one who had killed Victoria Patawasti. We were going back to Denver, but we didn’t know it yet.

  * * *

  When Vishnu came to the Earth as a midget, he called himself Vamana. He stopped the demon Bali from destroying the planet. He tricked Bali with his diminutive size and sent him to the Underworld, telling him that appearances can be deceiving and that you should always watch out for the little guy.

  I thought of this as John and I stared angrily at the midget. We weren’t upset at him. It wasn’t his fault that the ticket office had been closed, that a sign said “Buy rail tickets at the Continental Divide Saloon,” that the saloon was a quarter of a mile into the town of Fraser, that the Amtrak train was late leaving Denver and had to make up time by departing Fraser earlier than planned, that we had heard the air horn too late, and that the train had left without us.

  The next westbound train was coming this time tomorrow but there was a train going to Chicago in half an hour, the man selling the tickets had explained. John and I had decided Chicago would do just fine without, of course, considering that the Chicago train would have to go back through Denver.

  The midget had gotten off the train at Fraser too, but he hadn’t gone to the ticket office. Instead, he’d gone to a bar for a while and now he was standing a little down the platform from us. It made me a bit nervous.

  Especially since the Chicago train was late.

  It hadn’t come in half an hour. It hadn’t come in an hour.

  It hadn’t come by midnight.

  When you called up Amtrak’s toll-free number, an undead voice told you that the train was just arriving in Fraser. The voice had been claiming this for several hours….

  Birds. The air. The moon so bright you could see vapor trails. The cold. Snow on the mountains circling the little half-assed ski town. The steel train tracks going nineteenth-century straight into the mountain.

  John waxing philosophical:

  “Waiting’s good for you. You notice things. You slow time down into its components. Too often we put our consciousness on cruise control. You autopilot your way through the day, the week, your existence in this world….”

  Pop psychology from that motorcycle book, I imagined, but I wasn’t going to rise to the bait. It was very cold. You wouldn’t have thought it was the summer. Much chillier than those mountains behind Boulder.

  I looked up the long platform. The midget was smoking. We had no smokes, I considered going up and asking him for one to keep out the cold.

  “Look at all those stars,” John said.

  He was annoying me and I purposely did not look up.

  “I should have done astronomy. I should have gone to Oxford or Cambridge. I didn’t have the A levels. You had, Alex, you should have gone. But I suppose you needed to be near your ma.”

  I gave him a look that he didn’t see.

  “Terrible business, your ma. I was very close to her too, you know. You know, I agreed with their decision. Your da and ma,” John said.

  Never a good time for this topic and especially not when John had bloody killed someone and I’d been shot at and the cops were after us and I hadn’t had a hit of heroin after a long, stressful day that still was not coming to a fucking end.

  “What decision was that?” I said coldly.

  “You know, not to do the chemotherapy,” John said almost breezily. I could have punched the bastard.

  “You supported their embrace of death,” I said incredulously.

  “Now, Alex, that’s not fair. Homeopathy could have worked, those alternative treatments are not nonsense, there’s more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy and all that. You’re awful hard on your dad, Alex. It was your ma’s decision too.”

  John had no idea how close he was to having the shit beaten out of him. I was seething. This, he well knew, was a subject we did not ever talk about. This and my resignation from the cops, but more so this. Was he trying to provoke me into a fight to forget what had happened? Or was he just being stupid? My blood was boiling, and after all, this was all his fault. I bit my tongue and walked over to the midget.

  Maybe, technically, he wasn’t a midget. If he’d been a woman, you would have said she was petite. He stood about five feet tall, with a beard, leather jacket, jeans, Denver Nuggets cap. Forties, I would have guessed.

  “Couldn’t bum a smoke, could I?” I said.

  “Certainly,” he said and handed over a pack of Marlboro Lights. I took one and lit mine from his.

  “I don’t normally smoke, but it’s freezing,” I explained.

  “Yeah, we’re nine thousand feet up, it makes a difference,” he said.

  “Train’s late,” I said, drawing in the tobacco gratefully.

  “Yeah, the California Zephyr’s late. The California Zephyr’s always late. It goes at forty miles an hour and stops anytime the engineer wants to let people off.”

  “Really?”

  “Uh-huh. Did you know that in Greek zephyr means ‘fast wind’? Amtrak employs a satirist to name its trains.”

  I grinned.

  “You’re pretty funny,” I said.

  “David Redhorse,” he said, and offered me his hand.

  I shook it. The name sounded odd and familiar. Though probably Redhorse out here was like Lawson back home. Millions of the buggers.

  “Alex, uh, Wilson, Alexander Wilson,” I said. “Did you get stuck too? I noticed you getting on at Denver and then getting off the train a little behind us at Fraser.”

  “No, no, I have relatives up here, I was just visiting them. I get to ride the train free,” he said. “What were you doing in Fraser?”

  “Uh, nothing, just traveling, we’re tourists.”

  “I thought I detected an accent. Australian?” he asked.

  “Yeah, yeah, we’re Australian,” I said, and then, realizing that John might blow the gaff and make the man suspicious, called him over.

  “John, come over, David here was asking where we were from and I was saying we’re just a couple of bums from Australia, traveling around the world.”

  “Yeah, we’re from Sydney, Sydney, Australia, going to Chicago now,” John said, giving me a look. The North Belfast accent was so unlike the well-known accent from the south of Ireland that you could conceivably confuse it with Australian.

  “Chicago, how come you came out here?” Redhorse asked.

  I looked at him. There was something about him. Something not quite right. Where had I heard that name before?

  “We got on the wrong train at Denver,” I said, “we were heading to Chicago but we got on the wrong train. West instead of east. Going to Chicago, then New York and then Europe.”

  “Wrong train, huh? Not surprised, they don’t tell you anything at Denver. Lucky you noticed you were going west. The life, though. I’d love to travel the world, but I’m afraid to fly, always have been, you’ll never get me on a plane,” Redhorse said.

  “Statistically, it’s the safest way to travel, safer than the train, much safer than a car,” John said.

  “Well, that’s not the way I see it. If you have a car crash or a train crash it’s not necessarily fatal, but in almost every plane crash everybody dies,” Redhorse said.

  John said something back, but I was having trouble concentrating. The ketch wanted to find a home. Redhorse was making me
nervous. He said something to John. They both looked at me.

  “Alex, David was asking what sports we play in Australia,” John said, giving me a nudge.

  “Oh, lots of sports, Australian Rules football, cricket, rugby, that sort of thing, you don’t play them in America,” I said.

  “You’ll never guess what my favorite sport is,” Redhorse said with a big grin.

  John shrugged.

  “Go on, guess,” Redhorse said, nodding.

  “I don’t know, baseball?” I suggested.

  “No. Think about it, what would be the most unlikely sport I could play?” he said, barely able to contain a chuckle.

  “I really don’t know, football, I mean, soccer,” I said.

  “No, basketball,” he said impatiently, and then cracked up laughing.

  Neither John nor I got the joke.

  “Don’t you see?” he said, choking with giggles.

  “Not really,” John said.

  “You have to be six foot plus. Seven foot plus. Jeez. I thought basketball was big in Australia, that’s what I heard, I heard it was getting big over there,” Redhorse said.

  “Oh, oh, yeah, it is, sure we watch it, don’t we, Alex?” John said.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said, regretting this whole Australian thing now.

  “What’s your favorite NBA team?” Redhorse asked without suspicion.

  “Um, favorite team, well, um, oh yeah, I like the, uh, Harlem Globetrotters, they’re pretty good, they always seem to win,” John said, and I nodded in agreement.

  Redhorse looked at us strangely for a second and decided to change the subject.

  “So are you boys students?”

  “Yes, we’re on our gap year, we’re traveling the world before going back to university,” I said.

  “Yeah, like I say, love to do that, but you can’t go by boat, it’s too expensive. Besides, I don’t like to be away from the reservation for too long, my family lives there, I am the only one that lives in Denver.”

  “You’re an Indian?” John asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Cool,” John said.

  “From what I read, the Native Americans around Denver got treated pretty rough,” I said.

  “I suppose you read about the Sand Creek Massacre,” Redhorse muttered, and threw away his cigarette, immediately lighting another.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, it’s good that people know that history, but it’s the wrong focus, there were many little massacres and killings that never got recorded, they stole all this land from us, Denver is stolen land, these mountains are stolen land, not that we claimed to own them, we were the guardians of it, the white man claims to own it,” Redhorse explained quickly and deliberately like he’d said this all before many times.

  “Is that what you do for a living, then? You’re a lawyer, an advocacy person?” I asked him.

  “No, no, I’m a cop,” Redhorse said with a little grin.

  John looked at me, froze. I shook my head slightly. We weren’t going to react, we weren’t going to run for it, we weren’t going to do anything stupid at all.

  “You’re a policeman?” John asked hesitantly.

  “Yes.”

  “What type, like traffic or drugs or—”

  “I’m a homicide detective,” he said flatly.

  “You’re a homicide detective?” I found myself asking.

  “Yes, I know what you’re thinking, I’m too short to impress people, I can’t intimidate witnesses, that sort of thing?” Redhorse said, again, like he’d done this speech many times before too.

  “No, I wasn’t thinking that.”

  “No? Well, a lot of people do think that, they think I’m too short and they think because I’m an Indian and my parents live on a reservation that I get drunk all the time. Well, they don’t and I don’t and I’ve got one of the highest clearance rates in the department.”

  “I’m sure you have, I wasn’t thinking any of those things, I’m sure you’re a great detective,” I said.

  “I am,” he agreed.

  “W-what are you working on at the moment?” I asked.

  John had turned white, lapsed into silence; he was sucking desperately on his cigarette and generally drawing attention to himself.

  “Where’s that train?” he was mumbling quietly.

  “Oh, well, I’m running the RH department. Not leading any particular case,” he said.

  “Ok,” I said. “What’s RH?”

  “Robbery Homicide,” he said flatly.

  “No interesting cases you can talk about?”

  “Well, my big headache is a felonious assault that’s become a murder now the victim’s died. The lawyers are saying that the suspect didn’t have his Miranda rights read to him in Chinese within twenty-four hours of his arrest. Both victim and suspect were Chinese. A lot of eyewitnesses, but we might have to let him go. That sort of thing is out of our hands, though. DA’s problem, not ours. Still, if he gets off, it’s in our files. It makes me crazy.”

  He shook his head, clenched his fists, obviously upsetting him a bit to think about this, to think about guilty men getting away with a terrible crime. I smiled nervously.

  “Where is that bloody train?” John said again.

  I smoked and told myself to relax. The cop seemed ok. Like most cops, he’d want to complain about his work. The best thing to do was ease him by keeping him talking until the train came. Still, my mind wasn’t thinking as clearly as it could and we had obviously fucked up somehow by mentioning the Harlem Globetrotters. Any question would do.

  “So this Miranda, whatever happened to him? You always hear about the Miranda rights on TV. NYPD Blue, Law and Order, all that, but you never hear about Miranda. He must have got off because they didn’t read him his rights? Is that right?” I said.

  “Yeah, it is, Ernesto Miranda got away with kidnap, torture, and rape on a retarded girl. Shit, man. But the story has a happy ending,” Redhorse said with grim satisfaction, his eyes lighting up, so that even in the moonlight I could tell they were a deep brown.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah, a few years later he got stabbed to death in a bar. Nice play, I’d do the same if it was my kid, wait a few years, kill the bastard.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  And it was only then I remembered my phone call to the police department. That was only this morning? Detective Redhorse. Jesus. And he was a good ’un. I could see he was a digger. He was one of those who would keep after you. And was he here just by chance? No. Bad cops believe in coincidence. At Denver he got on the train with us. He got off with us at Fraser and was now going back to Denver with us. I looked at him. Not coincidence. This was the type who played a hunch. Hear about two guys running from a murder scene. Go to the train station, follow a couple of guys, see what happens.

  “What happened to your shoulder?” he asked sharply.

  “What?”

  “You’re bleeding.”

  I looked at my shoulder and, sure enough, blood was soaking through the paper towels and onto my jacket. Just a spatter or two. I decided to play it casual.

  “You know anything about first aid?” I asked.

  “A little.”

  “Yeah, we were climbing up some rocks in Boulder yesterday,” I began, but Redhorse interrupted.

  “You don’t need to finish, you didn’t have the proper equipment, you fell, am I right?” Redhorse asked, shaking his head.

  “Uh, yeah,” I said, trying to sound embarrassed.

  “It’s always the same, you don’t know how many kids get injured every year. Some die, you know. You kids, you just can’t go off into the mountains unprepared. Wow, it’s always the same. So dry around here too, because of the drought, tree limb, root can just snap on you. Better let me take a look at it,” Redhorse said with a sigh.

  It would be suspicious to refuse, so I rolled down my T-shirt and bent down so he could take a look. John staring at me aghast. I shot him a glance to bloody pl
ay it cool.

  “Ok, ok, let me see. Yeah, it’s just a scrape. Keep it clean, get a big Band-Aid on it, don’t pick it when it scabs over. And don’t go climbing without proper safety gear,” Redhorse said.

  “The train,” John yelled, “it’s the train.”

  I looked down the line.

  A tiny light in the distance. John frantic:

  “Look, what’s that light? Do you see that light? That’s not a truck. I tell you, it’s the train, it has to be, it’s the train, believe me. Alex, have you got our tickets? Look, it’s getting bigger. It’s the bloody train. It’s coming. Maybe it’s a house light. No, it’s it.”

  The sound of an air horn, the massive engine, the bell on the crossing. It pulled in aggressively, slowed and stopped. We piled into the carriage, bumping people with our luggage and belongings, looking for seats, but it was slim pickings. The dirty train sweating with exhausted people who had just come through the desert and over the Rockies in thirty hours of Amtrak’s version of hell. Eventually, the steward found three seats together in the nonsmoking section.

  Redhorse sat next to a hairy man who asked him if Jesus was his personal savior. He didn’t reply, lit himself a cigarette, took out The Grapes of Wrath, and began reading furiously.

  “Have you accepted Jesus into your life?” the man asked me.

  “I have,” I said solemnly, the only sensible answer on these occasions.

  “That’s great, and what about you?” the man asked John.

  “Well, no, not really,” John said.

  I groaned.

  “If you don’t mind, I’d like to tell you a little bit about our Lord Jesus Christ,” the man said.

  “I don’t mind at all,” John said.

  Having killed someone a few hours earlier, John was obviously vulnerable at this point. I stood up and found my soap bag.

  “John, I’m away to the bathroom, ok?” I said, and closed my lips very tight, which I hoped communicated my desire that he should keep his bloody mouth shut, even if the Messiah himself showed up and asked him to confess. A peeler on one side, a bloody missionary on the other. Fantastic. I was sure at the next stop a man with a lie detector would get on.

  The bathroom was remarkably clean, considering the length of the journey and the busyness of the train. I found my heroin, boiled it, got a clean needle, exposed a vein, tied it off, and sank away from all this madness. The rattling train, the long tracks, the mountain air. I nodded off, slept a little, woke up as the train went over a set of points.