“Everyone is wondering,” she defended. “It’s better to ask the truth, right?”
“My friends and I were stranded in the desert, and a man named Dreamweaver helped us get here.”
The girls nodded. “Dreamweaver is kind,” the one doing nails said.
“And a little strange,” Sophia said.
The girls covered their mouths and laughed.
Without asking, the girl standing behind Sophia began gathering her hair together. “May I oil it?” she inquired, and suddenly Sophia smelled a luxurious swirl of rosemary, pine, and a dozen other aromatic notes that reminded her of a mountain rain shower. “We make this here, in the barn,” the girl said.
“Yes, please,” Sophia said. “I would love to try it.”
Once the oil had been combed through, Zina came back and began to braid her hair, humming quietly, and before too long Sophia drifted to sleep.
___
When Dalton finally got back to the office, he googled Ishtar Energy and learned that it was based in Las Vegas, but beyond the slogans about crossing frontiers and powering innovation, he learned very little. Some more digging revealed that Ishtar had been buying up natural gas and oil leases across the Four Corners area. He couldn’t find anything about uranium. He sat back in his chair and looked around.
He had an old Army buddy who worked for the EPA in San Francisco, and he wondered if he might know anything. He tried the number he had in his phone, and it worked. After catching up, Dalton asked his question. “I’m working on something and the name Ishtar Energy came up. Can you help me learn a little bit more about them? Their website is useless.”
“I can only give you what’s in the public record,” he said.
“I’ll take it.” Dalton could hear typing on the other end.
“Only thing that comes up on Ishtar is a 2005 environmental impact statement on a project near a cultural site in central Nevada. It mentions a CEO named Kristine Frangos, looks like she used to work for the Department of the Interior. Doesn’t look like anything came of it. You could always get the full report with a Freedom of Information Act request, but since you’re law enforcement I’ll just send it to you.”
“I appreciate that, but I don’t want you getting in any trouble.”
“There’s a lot of closed-door stuff going on around here lately, and I don’t like it. We need to kick a little and let in some daylight.”
Dalton thanked him. “I need to get out there sometime, catch up, go fishing.”
“I’d love to have you.”
They hung up and the email came through a minute or so later. He skimmed the report and couldn’t make sense of most of it. The name Frangos was in it, along with maps, graphs, charts, and the testimony of geophysicists and archeologists. A lot of it mentioned strategic oil reserves. Dalton googled “Kristine Frangos” and found a two-on-two professional volleyball player from Greece. The other was a CPA living in Bloomington, Minnesota. After that, there was nothing. He thought for a minute about the kind of money it would take to not come up on Google at all.
The phone rang and Dalton answered. “Sheriff, this is LaRae. Someone from the Beehive House called about Raylene, said she went to the bathroom an hour ago and won’t come out. She’s locked it from the inside, says it’s not safe and they need to call Bruce.”
“Tell Chris to meet me at the Bronco.”
___
On their way to the Beehive House, Tanner said, “Seems like the next stage of this thing is going to involve a psychic.”
Dalton chuckled, barely.
“You holding up okay?”
“I had an upsetting lunch with Stan Forsythe today.”
“That guy’s lucky he’s his own boss.” Tanner paused. “Is this a good time to talk about those tire tracks at Antelope Flats?”
“Tomorrow could be worse.”
“Well they match the ones from the Ashdown place, except there’s no spare. He replaced it. Treads almost brand new. I got pictures and a couple of plaster casts. You know, there were people out there taking pictures. I mean, like, recreational photography. I had to put up some tape and run them off.”
“Forsythe said something like that was going on.”
“I don’t want to be a jerk about it, but I almost wish we were back at suicide,” Tanner said.
“Don’t say that. It’s giving up.”
“You know what I’m saying,” Tanner said. “I should also say we found a rental car, a few miles south of there. I checked, and you’ll never guess whose name is on it.”
“German guy who went missing?” Dalton said.
Tanner grinned. “That’s why you’re the boss.”
“Any sign of him? His buddy Wolf will not leave us alone.”
“He was supposed to be on a sightseeing tour, but he left a couple days ago. The tour company made a point to say he forfeits the rest of his trip.”
“God bless America,” Dalton said.
They parked and went in. An orderly and a girl with blue hair were waiting for them. “Some woman came to see Raylene today. Dressed real nice,” the orderly said, “told us she was one of her kids. Raylene flipped out, saying she didn’t have any.”
“She doesn’t. Where is she?”
The orderly pointed to the bathroom.
“What about the woman?”
“She took off,” the girl with blue hair said.
Dalton went to the door and knocked. “Raylene, it’s me, Pat Dalton.”
“How do I know it’s true?”
“We listened to some pretty good Patsy Cline yesterday, didn’t we?” he said.
“I know you, and this feels like a trap.”
“You told me all about that picnic in the ruins you had with Bruce,” Dalton said, then the door unlocked and opened. Raylene was standing there hugging herself. “Could you clear folks out of here?”
“Where’s Bruce?” she asked.
Dalton knew that every time she learned what happened her heart broke again in a different place. “He’s out on the monument today,” he said.
“That man hasn’t a lick of good sense. Once he gets all of that stuff put back, maybe I’ll see a little more of him.”
___
When Sophia awoke, it was dusk, and she was alone. She sat up in the chair and went to the window, where she saw the purple sky and dark clouds and a thin wash of orange in the west. Across the way, the bunkhouse was lit, and she saw Reinhardt move from one window to the next. Paul followed, shirtless, his bad arm across his stomach.
She found her boots and made her way to the front door. The cool air was full of cricket chatter, the unified pulse of the connected ones in the distance and the lone whirring of the isolated ones close to the house. As she crossed to the bunkhouse, one cricket stopped suddenly, and the silence felt like a malfunction. She let herself in and followed the voices to a spare, unfinished room furnished with four folding chairs and an old linoleum-and-chrome table from the 1950s.
Paul’s back was to her, and it was covered with bruises, worse than she’d imagined. He raised both arms, and Reinhardt began applying some kind of homemade liniment to Paul’s injuries, making him seize when he was touched.
“You doing okay?” Sophia asked.
“This place is Spartan, but now I have seen all the things,” Reinhardt said.
“All of what?” she asked.
“All of the promises of my tour company—ranches, relics, and ruins.”
“He’s been telling me all about it,” Paul said, “how he met you at Bryce Canyon, which was the call to adventure. He makes a good case. None of us are in the ordinary world anymore.”
Reinhardt smiled and screwed the lid back onto the liniment jar. “Paul Thrift is a tough guy, but he needs to get to a hospital for X-rays and possibly an MRI. I can do very little with what we have here. I will look for a compression bandage.” Reinhardt dried off his hands and disappeared through a door.
“It looks really bad, Paul.”
<
br /> “I know.”
“I’m glad you’re not dead.”
“I’m glad you’re not dead, either.”
They looked at each other for a while, but Sophia’s eyes went down to the bruises on his chest. “They’ve gotten worse,” she said.
“I can safely say this is the most pain I have ever felt in my whole life. I’m sorry I got you into this.”
“You didn’t—” she started to say. “I mean you sort of did, but nobody could have known it would go this way.”
“Reinhardt sort of thinks it was fate or something.”
“Yeah, fate.”
“But really, I’m sorry because I wasn’t truthful with you, and I haven’t come all the way clean.”
Sophia sat cross-legged in front of him. “I’m listening.”
“I’m currently on administrative leave pending a disciplinary hearing. I shouldn’t have been driving my vehicle or been in uniform. There’s no one out here to check, so when you sent me that text, I just suited up anyway.”
“Putting that stuff back is serious business, Paul. You know the map those guys had, the one I stashed in your Jeep? The initials PT were written all over it, with dates from, like, a few weeks ago. What else is going on?”
Paul’s face dropped and he shut his eyes. “Okay, so . . .” He tried to laugh, but he couldn’t. “I have a friend in the regional office in Denver who got a look at the reports I’ve been sending. They were headed for a Senate committee hearing about the monument rollbacks. I was documenting the artifacts I’d returned with Bruce’s help, presenting them as if they’d always been there, and apparently someone in the pipeline flagged them. My friend tipped me off that somebody at the top was planning to bust me for falsifying documents.”
“But you were. I’m starting to wonder what they were going to do when they saw my research,” Sophia said.
“Bury it. Same as my stuff. Stick it in a box in the basement.”
“It would turn into an X-file?”
“Pretty much. When I heard about it, I drove to Denver and barged into a meeting that maybe I shouldn’t have barged into. And”—Paul made a grand gesture with his hands—“abracadabra, now I’m under investigation for manipulating federal documents.” Paul’s eyes fell sad, and he shrugged.
Sophia remembered Dalinda talking about a problem in Denver. “So, Dreamweaver wasn’t wrong.”
“He rarely is.”
“And when you didn’t call in for backup?”
“I messed up again. Just trying to save my own hide,” he said.
Paul leaned forward suddenly, and Sophia put out her hands to block him. “I’m not going to kiss you, Paul. Read the room, this isn’t some kind of rom-com,” Sophia said, looking around to see if Reinhardt was near.
Paul pulled a crumpled towel from underneath his butt, sat back, and handed it to her. “Sorry, this was really uncomfortable. And yes, it’s definitely not a rom-com.”
“How stupid does that make me?” Sophia said.
“Zero percent,” he said.
Gunshots rang out from the big house. The first one grabbed their attention and the second sent them to the ground. A tremendous silence followed for a few seconds, then there were shouts. They crawled to the window and saw the silhouette of a man on a ladder falling away from the house. Lights came on at random, the man’s legs bicycling in midair like in a Buster Keaton movie.
“I can’t see him no more,” someone shouted, “but I think I got him.”
Reinhardt ran into the room. “It is our assassin,” he said.
“Seems like the shots came from inside the house,” Paul said.
The man dropped to the ground, rolled with the impact, and disappeared through the brush. Women gathered in the lit windows.
“There’s no way it’s not him,” Sophia said.
Paul turned to Sophia. “You’ve got to tell them to stay put. Don’t follow him.”
Outside a boy shouted, “He’s run off.” Other voices scolded the boy and called him back inside. Through the window they saw someone following the man with the beam of a flashlight until he was gone.
“We should just tell him where the map is,” Sophia said. “It’s not worth it.”
“Then he kills us anyway,” Reinhardt said. “Why leave us alive?”
“Reinhardt’s right,” Paul said.
“Well, it is only an abstraction,” Reinhardt said. “I haven’t proven the idea empirically. I only know this from television.”
“He’ll be back. That house is full of kids. We can’t stay here,” Sophia said.
They heard people coming and turned to meet them. Three women, including Euphrenia, came into the bunkhouse and quietly shut the door. Sophia recognized one of the other women as Bethany. The third carried a double-barreled shotgun, and her left leg ended in an off-color prosthetic foot. “We presume he was here for you,” Bethany said.
“I’m afraid so,” Paul said.
“I was talking to her,” Bethany said, gesturing to Sophia.
Sophia nodded. “It’s true.”
“Why in the world—never mind, we don’t want to know. Did Dreamweaver say anything about this?” Bethany asked Euphrenia.
“He said they were in danger,” she answered. “But there was a situation with the Carvers today, one that may have involved David Hamblin’s pistol. Perhaps this is the fallout of that indiscretion. If that is true, then this would be my fault.”
The third woman said, “We’re still in Dreamweaver’s debt.”
Bethany cleared her throat. “We’re pleased to see nobody is hurt, but whatever the cause of this intrusion, I’m afraid you people can’t stay. Euphrenia will drive you where you need to go, but we’ll need you to leave immediately.”
The boy who rode with them earlier ran up, out of breath. “He drove off in a car.”
“Get upstairs with your sisters,” Euphrenia said, pushing him toward the house.
“He was holding his arm,” the boy said, imitating the way it looked.
“I knew I got him,” the one-legged woman said.
“The return is often more perilous than the journey,” Reinhardt said.
“You shut it,” Sophia said. “I’m serious. One more word, and I will not be responsible for what happens next.”
PART III
Day Ten
King-size Butterfinger : Keyhole satellites : Outer space : #herosjourney : Useless to archeologists : Two old windmills : A breached contract : It’s no Hilton : “Ozymandias” : A low rumble : He could have gone around : It’s a Maslow thing
Scissors bolted the restroom door, then hung a plastic sack from the crank of a rusted paper towel dispenser. The blue fluorescent lightbulb chattered overhead as he unbuttoned his shirt and peeled it off. He examined his right shoulder in the dull mirror by turning his knuckles toward the floor. The skin was crusted in dark blood.
He moved the sack to the crook of his other arm, then took out a small brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide, uncapped it, and peeled off the seal, placing his trash carefully back into the bag. He dispensed a length of paper towel and doused it with peroxide, swabbing the wound, which hissed and foamed. He turned his head to one side to deal with the pain, then he packed the towels into the bag with everything else. He repeated this process until the wounds were clean.
He pulled a cheap off-brand multi-tool from the bag, which he sterilized with disinfectant wipes. He stood in front of the sink and peered inside the wounds. With his teeth clenched, he dug out each of the three small 20-gauge balls and dropped them on the floor with a tac-tac-tac.
In this way he administered to himself, being careful to gather the dropped shot and store them with the other trash. He filled the ravaged holes with antibiotic ointment and covered each one with its own clear adhesive bandage. When that was done, he pulled a king-size Butterfinger from the bag and devoured it in five decisive bites, then he pulled a new shirt from the bag and switched it out.
He cleaned everythin
g with more wipes, put the last of it into the one bag, and tied it shut. Outside, a man was filling his car with gas while checking his phone. Scissors closed the door and waited for the man to drive off.
When he heard the car pull away, Scissors waited another minute, then came out cautiously, stowed the plastic bag in his trunk, and drove to his motel.
___
They came to a stop in front of a dark house five miles from the state highway. They had driven the entire way from Short Creek without talking. The dawn sky was no longer black, and the stars were nearly gone. There were no neighbors and no lights shining in the valley. Euphrenia sat behind the wheel as they climbed out, dressed in simple clothes with their laundry tied up in grocery-sack hobo bindles, their backpacks slung loose across their shoulders.
“You have to understand,” Euphrenia said. “It’s not you. They’re thinking about the children.”
“It’s what I would have done,” Sophia said.
“This is more than we had any right to ask for,” Paul said.
Euphrenia nodded once and rolled up the window. Gravel spat behind her tires, her headlights wandering across the sagebrush as she drove away.
“Back into the frying pan,” Reinhardt said, staring into the sky.
Paul adjusted his arm in the new sling Reinhardt had made for him out of a flowered pillowcase, and they all watched the darkness to see if any lights might come up the hill. From this spot, they’d be able to see anyone who approached.
After a time, Sophia asked, “Does this guy know we’re coming?”
“Euphrenia said Kimball would be gone, but his truck is right there, so I don’t know,” Paul said.
They let themselves through the front gate and closed it behind them. Reinhardt and Sophia separated to let Paul go first. As he approached the house, they saw the curtains part, then close.
“I guess we don’t have to knock,” Paul said.
In a few seconds the door swung open and a man with long gray hair stepped forward with a pistol in his hands. He spoke through the screen. “Who the hell is out there?” His voice was low and cautious.
“It’s me, Paul.”
“Dreamweaver sent me a message and told me to hightail it home, which is not the kind of message I was hoping for. You upset that man something terrible.”
Picnic in the Ruins Page 31