Days of Atonement

by Walter Jon Williams

  “The dice hate me.”

  “Pay up.”

  Skywalker’s soft voice chimed in. “Welcome to the bankruptcy club.”

  “Chite,” Kelly said in Spanglish, after which she handed over three hundred dollars’ worth of Monopoly money. Buddy Mandrell, one of her older sister’s suitors, smirked and dropped the money onto his stack.

  “Watch your language,” Jerry said, rolling dice. “Your dad’s here.”

  Kelly glanced over her shoulder. “He’s not listening,” she said.

  Loren sat on an easy chair across the room, watching television and doodling on a pad. “I can hear perfectly well,” he said. “And that word had better have been chiste.”

  Kelly blinked for a moment. “Sí, patrón,” she said. “I was just making uno chiste, that’s all.”

  “Roll the dice, Ivor,” said her sister.

  “Just a second.” Ivor Thomas left the folding table in the living room and stepped through the front door. The screen closed behind him on hushed hydraulics.

  Ivor and Buddy were among the candidates to replace Katrina’s last boyfriend, whom she’d dumped about a week ago— Katrina changed boyfriends more frequently than she changed the color of her lipstick. Her tomboy tastes, fortunately for Loren’s peace of mind, led her to local kids, good ole boys in training . . . Loren figured he knew how to handle ole boys, all right.

  The only problem was that sooner or later all apprentice ole boys start to dip snuff. Judging by the worn white circles on the back of Ivor’s and Buddy’s jeans, that stage had been reached by both of them.

  Ivor reentered, dabbing at the corner of his mouth with a blue print handkerchief. Loren looked up at him.

  “You want me to get you something to spit in?” he asked.

  Ivor shambled to a surprised stop. “Uh,” he said. “No, sir.”

  Loren always brightened at the way young ole boys always called him “sir.” He looked over his shoulder at the Monopoly game. “How about you, Buddy?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Sorry to interrupt. Go right ahead with your game.”

  You had to let ole boys know right from the start that they couldn’t hide anything from you. Then keep demonstrating it, in case they weren’t bright, because often they weren’t. And the ones that were smart— and there were more smart ones than a stranger might think— had got into the habit of acting dumb, because that was what the role required.

  The phone rang, and Kelly ran to answer it. She was wearing a lot of makeup tonight, Loren noticed, scarlet lipstick and lurid purple eye shadow, nails done in a different but equally violent shade of purple. A T-shirt that read NOTHING SUCCEEDS LIKE EXCESS.

  Dressing up for her sister’s boyfriends. The difficulty with Katrina’s habit of trying out several boyfriends at once was that they all got used to hanging around the house, and when Katrina made her choice from the pack, the rest of them often as not decided to hang around Kelly, something Kelly was all too willing to encourage. Her parents had declined to let her out on solo dates— group dates were okay— but the problem was a constant one.

  “Hi,” Kelly said, answering the phone. “Tuesday? I’ll ask.” She came back to the living room, her body twisted in a coltish, ungraceful stance, ankles crossed, a stance that mirrored the social awkwardness of her position. “Daddy,” she said. “It’s Mrs. Trujillo. She wants me to sit Tuesday.”

  Loren looked at her. “No.”

  Her stance grew more awkward, more unbalanced. “What am I gonna tell her?”

  “Tell her that you forgot that you already have a sitting job.” Loren reached into his pocket and pulled out his money clip. He took ten dollars off it and handed it to Kelly. “Tell her you’ve been paid in advance.”

  “Okay!” brightly. Kelly spun about, the awkwardness gone, smiling around her braces. She danced back to the phone on winged heels.

  “I don’t believe it,” said Katrina. “Ten bucks! Are you gonna actually—”

  Loren scowled over his shoulder. “This,” he said, “is not a matter for discussion.”

  The Monopoly game continued, a bit subdued. Bursts of mechanical hilarity came from the TV set, which was pulling in an Australian sitcom off the satellite. Loren returned his attention to the white recycled legal pad in front of him.

  JOHN DOE, it said in big letters, right in the middle. Just below, in much smaller letters, were the initials r.d.

  Loren had put the letters in lowercase so that they would be less intrusive. He didn’t even want to think about what they might represent.

  If he did his police work, he thought, he wouldn’t ever have to think about it. If he could find the killer, get the proper evidence against him, it wouldn’t matter who the victim was.

  ATL was at the top of the page, in medium-sized letters. Names— Dielh, Patience, Jernigan— were connected to ATL by radiating lines, then by another set of lines to John Doe.

  Delta E was written and circled. So was Delta t.

  Loren wished he could talk to Debra about it. Sometimes just talking helped to clarify things. But Debra was off helping to costume a production of The Gondoliers at the Presbyterian church, a favor to a friend.

  Loren looked at the pattern and couldn’t find anything new in it. He put the pad down and stared at the TV. Someone had just made a joke and the canned audience was finding it hilarious. Loren did not understand why.

  His skin felt as if it were radiating mild heat. He touched his forehead lightly with his fingers; they came away warm. He’d got a slight sunburn that afternoon, going from door to door in Vista Linda.

  He hadn’t found a thing. No one had seen Jernigan return home, no one had seen John Doe, and no jury was going to believe a ten-year-old’s evidence about something he hadn’t really been paying attention to.

  Maybe the autopsy would tell him something he didn’t know, though he doubted it.

  He’d just have to keep putting pressure on people. Sooner or later, someone— most likely Timothy Jernigan—would inform. That was how most cases got broken— people ratted out their comrades.

  And a good thing, too.

  Loren put his pad down and went into the kitchen for a grape soda. He closed the refrigerator door with its commanding GUARD THE EARTH! poster and then saw that Skywalker had followed him into the kitchen.

  “You want something?” he asked.

  Skywalker shook her head, a gentle wave rolling through her long, straight hair. Her T-shirt had a cartoon of a humpback whale in combat fatigues and helmet, clutching an assault rifle. PROTECT THE EARTH! it said.

  “No,” Skywalker said. “I’ve just gone bankrupt.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I’m not.” A bit defiantly, her lips pressed together. “I don’t want to be a success as a land developer, anyway.”

  Loren grinned. “Good for you.”

  “I’d rather play a more ideologically sound game. Like Monkeywrench or Balance of Nature or something.” She shrugged. “I got outvoted.”

  Ideologically sound, Loren thought. Jesus. He sipped grape soda. “Do your parents agree with you? Is that why they live in town instead of Vista Linda?”

  She nodded. “Yeah. They’re both active members of the Eco-Alliance.”

  “Good for them.” They were on the right side of a few things, Loren thought, even if they were fuzz-brained enough to name their kid Skywalker.

  “I mean, we drink bottled water in this town because of what the mines have done to the water table. And we’ve had three years of drought in a row, and the water table’s even farther down, and industry still won’t believe about the greenhouse effect. You’d think people would notice this stuff.”

  “You’d think they would.”

  “And all the timber industry can do is blame eco-saboteurs for starting forest fires that were clearly started by lightning strikes. Monkeywrenchers wouldn’t put more carbon dioxide in the air, for Christ’s sake. Industry can’t even keep its lies consistent.”

&
nbsp; Loren nodded. “I hadn’t considered that.”

  She scowled. “It really gets me annoyed.”

  Loren looked at her. Every time he had a conversation with Skywalker, he had the impression he was talking to an adult, not a fifteen-year-old. His own children seemed so much younger.

  And a lot more carefree.

  Her parents, he remembered, worked at ATL. And Skywalker was bright, obviously kept her eyes open.

  “I suppose you’ve heard about our murder,” Loren said.

  Skywalker gave a little smile. “I thought you had a rule about discussing police business at home.”

  Loren shrugged. “I thought you or your parents might know some of the people involved.”

  “Oh.” She seemed surprised. “You mean this is an interrogation?”

  “Sort of. Do you mind?”

  She shrugged. There was an amused light in her eyes. “I guess not.”

  “Do you know Timothy Jernigan? Or his wife, Sondra?”

  She shook her head. “Sorry.”

  “Amardas Singh? Joseph Dielh?”

  Two more shakes of the head. “I guess I’m not much help, huh?”

  “Where do your folks work, anyway?”

  “My dad’s a specialist in crystal growth. I don’t think he deals with any of the people you’re talking about. My mom’s a particle physicist working in the black buildings, and she doesn’t talk much about any of the people she works with. She’s not allowed to, basically. And I don’t see her very often in any case.”

  “She’s working all the time?”

  She shrugged. “She and my dad separated. I live with my dad.”

  “I didn’t know.” Uncomfortably. “Sorry.”

  “That’s okay. I’m glad it happened, to tell the truth. Things were getting tense.” She gave a deep sigh. “Except now there’s a big custody fight. My mom wants custody just to keep Dad from getting me. It’s not as if she ever pays attention to me or anything.”

  “Did they ever talk about William Patience?”

  “The security guy?” Skywalker gave a laugh. “He’s an anal-retentive jerk, if you ask me.”

  A gust of laughter broke from Loren. “You’ve heard about him?” he said.

  “I’ve met him. He lectured to our church group— we’re in the Earth Church— about mountaineering and showed some slides. He’s one of the climbers who try to leave a clean mountain behind, picks up all his spikes and stuff. You know.”

  “Not really.”

  “With some people it’s respect for nature, but for him it’s just another way of being tight-assed. My mother used to complain about him all the time, about how the security people were always listening in on her phone conversations or getting on her case about putting her work in the safe every time she went for a cup of coffee. Everybody hates the guy.

  “Of course,” nodding her head, trying to be reasonable, “it’s his job to be a tight-ass.”

  “There are ways of being nice about it.”

  “True. And he’s not nice at all.” She seemed happy now that she’d found a legitimate reason for disliking Patience.

  “How come,” said Kelly, appearing in the doorway, “you let her use words like tight-ass and I can’t—”

  “Because,” Loren said, “this is an interrogation. I have to take note of her exact wording and phraseology.”

  “A what?” Disbelieving.

  “I needed what your friend knows,” Loren said. “And now I do.”

  The two girls caught each other’s eyes and burst into laughter.

  Loren returned to his television and his pad, gazing for a long time into the unanswered scrawls that were his questions.

  *

  “Try and watch the tooth grinding, okay?” Debra put her spectacles on the night table and reached for the light.

  “I’ll try,” Loren said. He was lying in bed but he didn’t feel like sleeping at all. Thoughts, images, disconnected ideas kept rolling through his mind. William Patience staring at Loren’s boxing trophies, the look of fear in Jernigan’s eyes, Mack Bonniwell standing with clenched fists on the church steps, Randal Dudenhof with his chest transfixed by his car’s steering column, the blood-spattered steering wheel bent and broken in front of his chest like a crumpled target symbol.

  Debra turned off the light. “I can’t get over it,” Loren said.

  “Over what?”

  “How that dead man looked like Randal Dudenhof.”

  There was a moment of silence in the darkness. “I haven’t thought about Randal for a long time,” Debra said.

  “Do you know what happened to his wife?”

  “Violet? She hung onto the ranch for a few years, then sold out to Luis and moved to Utah.”

  “I knew that.”

  “Provo, I think. Remarried and raised a lot of little Mormons.”

  The T-bird smelled like Canadian whiskey, Loren remembered. Randal had won sixty dollars in the poker game at the Copper Country and had bought a fifth to celebrate. He’d probably been swigging from the bottle when he skidded on black ice and went off the Rio Seco bridge.

  It wasn’t even illegal back then. You had to be some kind of communist to suggest a guy shouldn’t have a few drinks on his drive home. The jack Mormons and the other good ole boys could handle their liquor and they could spit a quid of tobacco right between the eyes of a sidewinder at ten feet and they could drive forty miles above the speed limit on icy roads and handle every slide.

  They died in droves, pierced and crushed by velocity and metal that crumpled like paper, weeping and filling their drawers as their spirits bled away. Loren had cut enough of them out of crushed vehicles to know. So much for good ole boy machismo.

  “First man I ever saw die,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Damn. What a waste.” Meaning all of them, all the bodies torn by metal.

  Suddenly Loren wished he had a cigarette. He’d never smoked— at the age when most kids in Atocha took up smoking or snuff, he’d been on the football team under a strict Mormon coach who would cut a player for drinking, smoking, or (he said) masturbation, though how he intended to enforce the latter proscription was never clear. (He could have, come to think of it, at least with the Mormons on the team— he was a bishop, and had the spiritual authority to ask them questions about their sex lives and demand straight answers.) Loren had never taken up smoking— drinking and strangling the goose were something else— and in Korea he used to give his free G.I. cigarettes away to the locals.

  But for some reason he had a powerful urge to smoke now, to lie in bed and hold his wife’s hand and think aloud about what was happening in his town. The image of himself doing that struck him as impossibly poignant.

  He took Debra’s hand. Her fingers were cool.

  “Do you suppose he could be Randal’s son?” he asked.

  “I was wondering that.”

  “He used to run around on his wife a lot, Randal.”

  Debra was silent for a moment. “That’s what everyone said.”

  “But who the hell would he have a kid with?”

  “I never heard anything.”

  “Me, either.”

  The words faded into the darkness. Loren remembered Randal at Connie Duvauchelle’s one night trying to make a deal with one of the girls to perform some sexual act, just about any sexual act, for the four dollars and change Randal had left in his pocket after pissing away the rest playing poker at the Copper Country.

  “It couldn’t be the real Randal,” Loren said. “The guy was too young.”

  The words seemed to hang in the dark, refusing to fade, and a sudden wave of panic struck Loren. Had he actually said that aloud?

  Implied that the dead man might be the real Randal, even in the darkness of his own bedroom, to his own wife?

  He could never say that, not even here. It would be taken as evidence he was losing his grip.

  But Debra didn’t reply, and Loren felt a current of relief.

&
nbsp; Tomorrow, he figured, he’d have to start applying pressure.

  *

  Roberts was back on his box across West Plaza for the early Monday service, swaying slightly with drink as he condemned the church by his presence. As Loren passed by he called out, “Miracles happen every day!” in a cheerful voice. Loren didn’t answer.

  The church was only two-thirds full. It was perhaps appropriate that the sermon was on sloth. Sloth, the pastor maintained, was a sin that prevented people from doing their duty to God and their fellow human beings. Loren thought that even so, sloth was a pretty boring sin all things considered.

  Loren didn’t need the sermon to fire him up for duty. He drove his family home, changed from his church clothes into his uniform, and then took the cruiser back to his parking place. Sword and arm of the Lord, he thought.

  Eloy was in place behind the front desk. Loren gave him a cheery wave as he walked buoyantly up the hall. “Hey, Chief,” Eloy said, “the custodial staff are back from their weekend and want to know if they can clean up the hall.”

  “Of course,” Loren said. He hadn’t given the old bloodstains a single look.

  “You got some headlines, boss.” Eloy pulled out a folder and opened it to reveal a headline from that morning’s Albuquerque paper. POLICE CHIEF LEADS CHARGE ON DRUGS, it said, with a photo from the press conference, Loren in his helmet and armor, holding up the confiscated Mac-11.

  Loren admired himself for a moment. “Mind if I take this?” he asked.

  “I made a bunch of copies. Take all you need.” Eloy grinned up at him. “You noticed something funny about the headline?”

  Loren looked at it. “No,” he said. “It’s a nice headline.”

  Eloy gave a laugh. “It makes it sound as if you were on drugs when you led the raid.”

  Loren looked at the headline again and the double meaning jumped out at him. He scowled. “Some asshole wasn’t doing his job at the damn paper.”

  “Huh.”

  “I should call and give them a piece of my mind. Letting the story go under a headline like that.”

  “That kind of thing happens all the time.”

  “Pisses me off.” Loren felt like waving a fist. “Finally we get a chance for some good publicity, and instead people are going to be laughing at us. I guarantee that.”