Days of Atonement

by Walter Jon Williams

  “Hey, Loren. Good bust.”

  Loren looked up at the sound of the new voice and saw Salomon Tafoya, the chief of the police at the Apache reservation. Salomon was a barrel-chested, muscular man with a close-cropped Marine D.I. haircut. His bearing was straight-spined and military, and his uniform was black with silver flashes, reminiscent (if anything) of Hitler’s SS. He was not one of the gentle, pollen-scattering, Earth-loving Indians beloved by recent Anglo immigrants, but rather an Apache in an older style, practical, unsentimental, and as ruthless as he thought necessary.

  Loren shook Salomon’s strong, capable hand. “What’re you doing in town, Sal?” he asked.

  “An errand or two. And I’m picking up that troublemaking son of a bitch George Gileno.”

  Loren nodded. “What’s Gileno’s problem, anyway?”

  “The problem,” Salomon said, “is that he’s a troublemaking son of a bitch.” No humor intended.

  “Buy you a cup of coffee?”

  “Thanks, Loren, but I’ve got to pick up Gileno and get back to the rez.”

  “Say,” remembering what he’d seen the other day, “I saw a group of young Apaches out on the plaza the other day. Some older man was pointing stuff out to them.”

  “Part of the young men’s initiation,” Salomon said. “They have to memorize all the water sources in the territory.”

  Loren looked at him. “What water source?”

  “There used to be a spring on the plaza about a hundred years ago. We figure it’ll be there again.”

  Loren contemplated his surprise. “Guess that explains why the Federal Building basement is always having these leaks.”

  Salomon allowed himself a cold smile. “Water’s funny in this country. It comes and goes. Folks come and build, they should ask the people who’ve lived here for hundreds of years.”

  “They had to take all the records out of the basement and move them into the old dance hall on Railroad.”

  “Why am I not surprised?”

  Loren shook Salomon’s hand again and said goodbye, then went to his office and sat at his desk. The paperwork from the double deliveries to Albuquerque, drugs and a body, were waiting in his In box. He ignored them and called the Office of the Medical Investigator in Albuquerque. John Doe’s autopsy, he discovered, was under way. The M.I. would call as soon as he was done.

  Loren thought for a moment, then called an old fishing buddy named Larry, who worked at the Riga Brothers power plant, and told him he wanted to fish for some facts. Larry checked the weekend logs and confirmed that ATL had ordered full generating capacity for Friday, beginning at ten-thirty, but that the actual order for the power hadn’t come till six minutes after noon. ATL had taken all the power the old facility could provide till just before three the next morning and had announced its intention of buying more power beginning at ten-thirty that same morning. The power order had been postponed till two in the afternoon, then canceled altogether.

  Loren thanked his informant and promised to catch some trout with him before the weather turned chill.

  Loren looked at the figures he’d jotted down. Jernigan and Singh’s report of the first accelerator run, and the cancelation of the second run, were now confirmed. He hadn’t really ever thought their stories false, but if the stories had been lies, he would have had something to hang the liars with.

  He looked up Joseph Dielh in the phone book and telephoned, encountering an answering machine. He left a message asking Dielh to call, then called ATL and left another message with his secretary. He was about to call Patience with a few questions, but there was a knock on his door.

  “Photo opportunity, Chief,” Cipriano said. “Pedro and his buddies are being arraigned in ten minutes.”

  “Be down in a minute. Which courtroom?”

  “Santos.”

  Loren heaved himself out of his chair and went to the men’s room to comb his hair and make sure his navy-blue uniform didn’t have too much lint. Then he made his way to Judge Santos’s court and sat in the back.

  Television cameras squatted on tripods like one-eyed Martian invaders. Shorty was wearing his white suit, star, and Stetson. District Attorney Castrejon had shown up in person instead of delegating things to Sheila Lowrey, who was nevertheless present in her broad-shouldered suit. Mayor Trujillo pumped hands and passed out buttons among the spectators. Santos, the judge, ignored the circus and went on handing out sentences to the weekend’s drunks.

  Robbie Cisneros, the Texas cousins, and the drug dealers were brought in shackled. Their attorney was a guy from Albuquerque named Axelrod, a man Loren knew by reputation as a syndicate mouthpiece. There was a story that he’d had a judge’s legs broken when the man found him guilty on a traffic citation.

  Apparently the dealers’ connections had bought some high-class legal muscle. Axelrod wore, Loren considered, too many rings on his thick fingers, and had a few too many glossy waves in his dark hair. His manner, as glossy as his hair, made Loren want to take him into an alley and twist his head off.

  Axelrod had made some effort to put his clients in coats and ties for the event, but even so they looked no more respectable than would Geronimo and his Apaches had they been likewise dressed. Robbie looked ghastly, eyes swollen shut, yellow and purple oil slicks seeping down his face. A walking bruise. The two Mexicans, Medina and Archuleta, were not being indicted for the drug-running charges— that would happen later, in federal district court— but on charges of firearm possession. Axelrod moved for separate trials for everybody, with translators provided for the two Mexicans. The two were alleged not to speak English, though when busted they seemed to have understood things well enough. Santos, a dignified, sleepy-eyed member of the Democratic apparat, took everything under advisement and set bail at $150,000 apiece.

  The gavel banged— a recess— and all the extras filed out, leaving behind the usual shabby assortment of weekend drunks waiting to take their legal medicine. The two Mexican nationals were turned over to federal marshals, who marched them, chains and all, across Plaza Street to the Federal Building, to be arraigned on the drug charges. Shorty and Castrejon and Loren and the mayor, lined up in the hallway outside, each spoke their piece for the cameras before the reporters drifted off.

  Loren, microphones jammed in his face, doing his rhetorical bit for law ’n’ order, saw Sheila Lowrey waving at him from behind the press of reporters. He finished and waded through the mob to her side.

  “Can I buy you some coffee, Loren?” she asked.

  “If it’s quick. I’m kind of busy.”

  “Let’s go to my office, then.”

  Sheila pushed through a heavy fire door and Loren followed her up a flight of stippled steel stairs toward her office. She poured him a foam cup of coffee from a mineral-scarred coffee machine waiting in the hallway, then led her past her secretary into her office.

  It was a comfortable book-lined place, with shabby old furniture drawn from county storage and an untidy collection of paperbacks occupying the top of the bookshelf, above the law books. One of the two old varnished wood chairs was draped with her jogging outfit: T-shirt, shorts, white socks, and shabby running shoes, white with blue stripes. Loren had seen her bounding around the plaza at lunchtime. Loren’s gaze modestly shrank away from the halterlike arrangement she strapped about her breasts when running.

  He hitched his gun around and sat on the other chair. He knew better than to actually drink his cup of coffee. He put it on her desk and left it there.

  Sheila took off her horn-rims and waved them casually in his direction. “I think we’re in trouble on the Cisneros indictment.”

  Loren looked at her in surprise. “Just because he got that syndicate hotshot from Albuquerque? We can—”

  “Medina turns out to be the cousin of one of Mexico’s biggest drug dealers. The ones the papers call kingpins? The guy can spend millions if he has to in order to get the guy out of jail.”

  “Let ’em see if it works here.”

&
nbsp; “Axelrod has requested medical reports on all his clients.”

  “’Cause Robbie resisted and got clocked? He—”

  “And he’ll go to town on that warrant. An anonymous call, for God’s sake! And it didn’t come in on a 911 call, so it wasn’t recorded.”

  Heat flared under Loren’s collar. He remembered the call, Eloy’s recognizing his voice. And he remembered that every call into the station was logged, though only the emergency calls were recorded.

  Have to talk to Eloy, he thought.

  “That warrant was legal,” he said. “Denver signed it.”

  “Axelrod will try to have it overturned. And you can damn well bet he’ll charge police brutality. All he has to do is win one of those and the case gets thrown out. Robbie and the Texas boys walk. And he’ll try to get the drug shipment thrown out on the same grounds, fruit of the poison tree and all that—”

  “Now, wait a minute!” Loren began.

  Sheila held up a hand. “Give me a second, Loren. He’ll try to get that evidence tossed, but he probably won’t succeed. You didn’t search the truck on the grounds of that warrant, you searched it because you got a warning off the LAWSAT, and that’s legal.”

  “You bet it is,” Loren glowered.

  “Here’s the deal,” Sheila said. “One of the things we can do to really nail the Mexicans is to get one or more of the Texans or Robbie to turn state’s evidence. But if the indictments get tossed out, we won’t have any pressure to put—”

  “They’re not going to get thrown out,” Loren insisted. “The case is going before Santos, for Christ’s sake!”

  Sheila pursed her lips. “That’s what Castrejon thinks.”

  “Well, he’s the D.A.”

  “He figures all he has to do is deal with his cousin the judge and all the fellow cousins and Democrats in the system— and maybe he was right so long as Robbie’s lawyer was one of our sterling local public defenders, also cousins of the judge or cousins of Castrejon or cousins of somebody. But I disagree. I think it’s gonna be a bitch.”

  “Just because of that Axelrod? He’s—”

  Sheila put on her spectacles and leaned forward. “He plays by different rules than the local boys, Loren. Justice in this county is like a private club— things get done in this building in a certain manner because they’ve always got done that way. I don’t belong to the club, and working here has really opened my eyes.”

  “Sheila . . .”

  “But Axelrod doesn’t belong to the club, either!” The spectacles were off again, jabbing at Loren like a penknife. “And Axelrod is being paid a lot of money by somebody, not just to flout the club, but to burn the clubhouse down!”

  Loren felt tongue-tied in the face of her vehemence. “Hey,” he said. “I’m on your side.”

  The spectacle-knife sliced twice, disemboweling invisible foes. “The only way he can get his two boys off is to completely discredit the police force that busted them, okay? He can try to suppress the warrant, and he’ll either file a civil suit against you on behalf of Robbie, or he’ll file a civil rights complaint.”

  “Civil rights complaint?” Outraged filled Loren’s heart. “On what fucking grounds—!”

  “Robbie’s Hispanic, right?”

  “I didn’t beat him up because he’s Spanish!” Loren said. “I beat him up because he’s a fucking thief!”

  “Loren. Watch what you say around me, okay?” Sheila flung herself back in her chair. Her look was grim. “For a minute there it almost sounded as if you beat up Robbie Cisneros because you felt like it, not because you had difficulty apprehending him in the course of an arrest.”

  Loren glared at her, knuckles turning white as he gripped the arms of the old wooden chair.

  “Because if you did beat up Robbie just for the fun of it—” She peered at him nearsightedly. “—and I’m not saying you did, okay? But if you did, with someone like Axelrod on the defense, it’s going to come out in court.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Let me tell you what Axelrod is going to do, Loren. He’ll get expert medical testimony that will indicate— well,” with a shrug, “that might indicate— that Robbie was beaten while he was in handcuffs. No defensive wounds, handcuff marks around the wrists, that sort of thing. He’ll fly his own doctor into town if he has to. Then he’ll depose every witness— you, Shorty, every officer present— and he’ll ask you to go through your story piece by piece. He’ll be hoping to trip someone up on the sequence of events. ‘And then what happened, Officer?’ ” imitating Axelrod’s glossy tenor. “ ‘The chief handcuffed the suspect,” another voice. “ ’What?’” back to Axelrod’s voice again—” ‘He handcuffed the suspect before Mr. Cisneros was struck?’”

  “Loren,” seriously, “you know what he can do with that. He’ll tear us apart.”

  Loren just looked at her.

  The spectacles came jabbing forward again as Sheila leaned toward Loren. “If there’s a problem with this bust,” Sheila said, “I want you to tell me now. I can plea-bargain Robbie and his buddies and nothing will ever come out in court.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with it.” Flatly.

  “Loren,” warningly, “think about it.”

  “Nothing wrong,” said Loren.

  Sheila gave a long sigh. She put her spectacles on and leaned back in the chair. “Funny that I’m the only person in this building who doesn’t belong to the goddamn Atocha Men’s Dinosaur Association, and I’m the only one who knows how to defend it.” She picked up a pen and began writing on a white recycled legal pad, making notes to herself. “What I want to do is rehearse every witness. I want to do it before Axelrod can get to them.” Her level eyes rose from the pad and gazed steadily into Loren’s. “I want it clear to everybody that Robbie Cisneros tried to run away, that he resisted arrest and received all his injuries before he was handcuffed.”

  “That will be made clear,” said Loren. “Absolutely clear.”

  “And in your written report?”

  “Almost done. I’ll get busy on it.”

  She made a tick mark on her pad. “I want all the officers concerned to make appointments with me in the next day or so. I’ll also want to talk to everyone involved with the George Gileno arrest, because if Axelrod goes the route of the civil rights complaint, he’ll want to show that you beat up Indians, too.”

  “That’s all?” Loren shifted in his seat. He just wanted to get out of there.

  “No.” She was looking weary. “I happen to know that Mack Bonniwell is going to make a complaint against you for hitting his kid.”

  “At least Len Bonniwell and A.J. Dunlop are Anglos.”

  “Want to bet Axelrod offers his services to the father free of charge?”

  Loren felt a tingling in his spine. They were lining up against him, his enemies, coming together, like the Deadly Sins all marshaled in Samuel Catton’s visions by the Master in Gray . . . Bonniwell and Dunlop and Cisneros and Timothy Jernigan and William Patience and Axelrod the legbreaker . . . He hadn’t quite seen the pattern before.

  Atocha was under siege. Its enemies wanted to alter its ways, take away the rightness that, with all its faults, nevertheless underlay its existence. Of that Loren felt an absolute moral certainty.

  “Axelrod is going to try to make this last weekend seem like a bloodbath,” Sheila said.

  “If that’s the way he wants it,” said Loren.

  She looked up sharply. “We’re going to have some absolutely clean cops here,” she said. “We’re going to have absolutely clean cops until this trial is over.”

  “Cops here have always been clean.”

  Her eyes were searching. “That’s not what the rumors say, Loren.”

  Loren shrugged. “People always talk.”

  “Fortunately,” Sheila said, “what people say, and what can be said in court, are two different things.”

  “Fortunately,” Loren echoed. He stood up. “Thanks for the coffee.”

  Sheila look
ed at the cooling, untouched cup that sat on her desk. “You’re welcome.” Her eyes turned up to his. “If you think I was hard on you, picture what Axelrod’s going to do. I hope you’re ready for that.”

  “When the time comes.”

  “The time is now, Loren. He’ll be waiting for you to slip up, waiting every second. Till this whole thing is over.”

  “I’m always ready, Sheila.”

  She looked at him, a small frown on her face. “I hope to hell you are, Loren.”

  Loren made his way to the front desk, where Eloy was chatting on the phone. “Just a sec, Gloria,” he said, cupping the mouthpiece, and looked up at Loren.

  “Business, Eloy,” Loren said.

  “Right away, Chief.” Eloy excused himself from Gloria, whoever she was— certainly not his wife— and hung up the phone.

  “Been ringing all morning,” he said. “People with missing children. They heard we had a John Doe, everyone’s scared it’s their John Doe. Pretty damn sad.”

  “Sheila Lowrey wants to see you, about the anonymous tip that led to Robbie Cisneros’s arrest.”

  “Oh. Sure.” Grinning.

  “Now. I’ll answer the phones while you talk.” Loren cleared his throat. “The thing is, you have to be absolutely positive that the call was anonymous. That you have no idea who it was that called.”

  Eloy winked. “Sure, Chief. No problem.”

  Loren looked stern. “No winking, Eloy. Not at Lowrey, not at me, not at anyone. We could lose the bust.”

  The grin faded from Eloy’s face. ”Right, Chief. What you say.” He rose from the chair. “By the way. The M.I. up in Albuquerque called for you. That London guy.”

  “Autopsy’s over?”

  “Yep. He said to call back.”

  Loren sat at the chair and waited for Eloy to leave. He turned the pages of the phone log and looked at the entries for two days before. The 911 emergency calls were recorded on disk, but those coming into the desk were simply logged by the man on the desk. 09:03,the entry said, Chief Hawn, personal. This was crossed out with a neat blue ballpoint line, with Refused ID, tip re: armed robbery written in a smaller hand in the remaining space above.