Days of Atonement

by Walter Jon Williams

  John Doe was a stranger. There had been no miracle. Loren had not been on the receiving end of any messages from God.

  Loren didn’t know whether to feel disappointed or not.

  He closed the coffin and climbed out of the grave and used the blade on the front end of the backhoe to push the earth back onto the mortal remains of Randal Dudenhof. He ran the backhoe back and forth over the grave for a while, making sure it was level, and then returned the backhoe to the service station. The station was closed, and Loren just parked the backhoe in its place, dropped the keys through the mail slot, and drove home.

  The Fury cruiser wasn’t home, and that meant Debra was still doing her costume work. The streetlight shining through the front-yard ocotillo threw crazy corkscrew stripes across Loren as he beat dust from his clothing. He opened the screen door and stood just inside the house. Middle Eastern bass rhythms thudded from Katrina’s back room. Loren could feel the vibration rising up through hardwood floors.

  Home, he thought. Querencia. He could feel the tension easing from his neck and shoulders.

  A long night, he thought. He looked at his watch.

  A little after eleven. Long past the girls’ bedtime.

  He closed the door behind him and the phone rang. It was Cyrano Dominguez, another of Cipriano’s cousins, one Loren didn’t know well.

  “Hi, Cyrano,” Loren said.

  “Hi, Loren. I figured I’d give you a call, because I need to pass a message to your brother. You gonna see him anytime soon?”

  “I’ll see him tomorrow morning.”

  “Okay, good. You know that old GMC camper pickup I got?”

  “Not offhand,” Loren said. A rising dismay sighed through him. He had a feeling he knew where this was heading.

  “It’s an old truck. I don’t drive it very often. Anyway, a couple months ago it blew a head gasket.”

  “And Jerry said he’d fix it.” The dismay was solidifying.

  “Yeah. He’s had the truck ever since it blew, and I haven’t heard from him. And I gave him twenty bucks to cover expenses.”

  Jerry probably hadn’t started the job yet. And a head gasket should take a couple hours, tops.

  “I’ll remind him, Cyrano. Okay?”

  “I’d like it by Friday. I wanna go duck hunting this weekend.”

  “I understand. I’ll give Jerry the message.”

  “Sorry to bother you.”

  “That’s okay.”

  Loren hung up the phone and thought about the burden of being his brother’s keeper. “My family life is perfect anymore,” he’d told Rickey.

  Well, maybe not.

  Music was still thumping from the back room. He went down the back hall to the little addition they’d built for Katrina five years ago.

  The only way into the room was through Kelly’s room and the bathroom they shared, that and the window, which— a bit ominously— he’d sometimes seen tomboyish Katrina use.

  An ad for Wrangler jeans, showing hard-muscled young men in cowboy hats, occupied most of the door. Loren could hear the discordant dervish wails of some weird Arab double-reed instrument. He knocked.

  “Lights out!” he yelled.

  Bagpipes and drumbox diminished. Loren heard laughter, and then the door opened and a grinning Skywalker came out, carrying a macramé schoolbag in one hand and a worn Levi’s jacket in the other. Loren’s daughters followed behind her.

  “Hi, Chief Hawn,” Skywalker said. She frowned as she looked at him. “You’re all covered with dirt.”

  “Very observant of you.”

  “What have you been doing?”

  “Something connected with work.”

  She shrugged. “Sign my petition?”

  “Depends.” Loren followed her through Kelly’s room and the hall to the living room.

  “It’s to our senators,” Skywalker said. “Urging them not to pass the new trade agreement with England until Great Britain agrees to abide by the London Dumping Convention of 1972.”

  “Till they what?”

  Skywalker turned and dug into her macramé bag. “The Brits are dumping heavy metals, fluorides, mercury, and atomic waste in the Atlantic. Again. They stopped for a while, but it looks as if they were just waiting for the world’s attention to flag.” She pulled a tattered petition from the bag and presented it to Loren. “They’re dumping it off the Irish coast, which doesn’t have Ireland happy, either.”

  “I imagine not.” Loren took the petition, glanced at the text, found it simple and straightforward enough.

  “Mrs. Hawn has already signed,” Skywalker said.

  “So I see.” Loren undipped his pen from his pocket, put the petition atop an algebra textbook presented by Skywalker, and signed.

  “Thanks!” Skywalker flashed a rare, sunny smile, spun, headed for the door. Katrina and Kelly followed to say their goodbyes.

  It used to be, Loren thought, that the only petitions he’d see were for installing a traffic light near the grammar school, preserving a historical building that was scheduled for demolition, or closing down Connie Duvauchelle’s. Now most of what he saw had to do with national, often international, politics. Support for the Plastics Convention, bans on Chilote copper, protests against radioactive dumping, attempts to close down Sam Torrey’s elk ranch, support for aboriginal populations in Central America and/or Africa . . . a long, saddening, seemingly endless list of the world’s problems flashing at the speed of light into the satellite-linked neighborhoods of Atocha.

  Loren admired Skywalker for her intelligence, her commitment, her knowledge— certainly she was the brightest kid he knew— but he was wearily thankful he didn’t have her for a daughter. Skywalker, somewhere, had lost her childhood; his own daughters, happily, had not.

  He had given Katrina and Kelly a secure childhood, as perfect and safe as he could make it, standing like a ferocious dog between them and the things that could hurt them.

  Surely, he figured, that was worth the commission of any number of sins.

  *

  He came awake the instant Debra made her stealthy entrance into the room, leaping from black sleep to total alertness in half a second. Policeman’s reflexes.

  “What time is it?”

  “Almost midnight.” Her tread was louder; she’d given up trying not to wake him.

  Loren propped himself up on an elbow. “Rehearsals go on this long?”

  “No.” He heard the hiss of clothes sliding on skin as she began to undress. “Some of us went over to Lois Johnson’s. We had some coffee and talked.”

  “How’s the play coming?”

  “Aside from the soprano’s temper tantrums, we’re doing just fine.”

  Loren smiled and lowered his head to the pillow. Unfortunately there was only one woman in Atocha with a voice suitable to the part, Sandy Odell, and she and everyone else knew it.

  “It’s her moment of fame, I guess,” Debra said. She opened the closet door and began hanging her clothes on the pegs set into the reverse side. “She’s not gonna get any others. If she doesn’t play prima donna now, she’ll never get another chance.”

  “Phil still hasn’t found a job.”

  “And benefits have run out. Her job at the Dairy Queen is only part-time. If it weren’t for Calamity Fund, they’d really be in trouble.” She dropped her nightgown over her head, worked it down over her hips. She dropped into bed and giggled. “I thought the music director was going to run her through with his baton, though.”

  “The last few days have been violent enough.”

  He leaned toward her and kissed her, lingering a bit more than usual for the good-night peck. Her lips tasted of coffee. He withdrew a bit, seeing his reflection looming in her spectacles, a blackness outlined by starlight. He put his arm around her, feeling her against his chest, soft human warmth beneath a layer of sensible flannel. The erotic mood stirred in him by memories of Amy Roberts, never faded entirely, began to grow in intensity.

  “You don’t seem t
oo sleepy,” he said.

  “Too much coffee, I guess.”

  He kissed her again. She put her arm around his neck. He deepened the kiss, felt her tongue flutter against his. She gave a laugh and drew back.

  “Your breath is steaming up my glasses.” She took them off, put them atop the flat bookcase bedstead, then returned for another long kiss. Her hand slid over his back.

  “I’ll be right back.” She pulled away, then left the bed and went into the bathroom to put in her diaphragm.

  Loren rolled onto his back, pillowing his head on his hands. Anticipation beat like a pulse in his cock. He remembered Amy Roberts and other guilty pleasures, the mayor’s secretary Irene, some little blonde girl at Connie Duvauchelle’s with a zealous joggle to the way she’d moved her ass, like her hips were double-jointed or something, and who’d popped her gum right through it . . .

  And Debra, who was perhaps not as adventurous as some of his other partners, but who was at least as enthusiastic. He felt comfortable with her. Wild oats once successfully sown, he figured, you didn’t want an acrobat, you wanted a partner.

  Certainty rose up around him like warm, enveloping mist. Querencia. Whatever he’d done to shore all this up, he thought, it was worth it.

  *

  The phone tore Loren from his postcoital sleep. He reached to the nightstand and picked up the receiver.

  “Loren Hawn,” he said. Debra gave a long sigh, rolled over, and began to breathe regularly.

  “This is Alan London.”

  “Yeah?” Loren glanced at the watch on the nightstand. Dr. Alan London was the medical investigator in Albuquerque.

  “It’s kind of late for you to be calling, isn’t it?”

  “Things are a mite unusual.” London gave a little smoker’s cough: some people in the OMI smoked constantly to deaden their sensitivity to the smell of formaldehyde and cadavers.

  “Your John Doe has disappeared,” London said.

  “What,” half laughing, “the body’s gone?”

  “That’s right.”

  It still seemed funny. “Did you bury it by mistake?”

  “No, we did not.” London’s voice wasn’t the least amused. “It was here just a few hours ago. Somebody got past my assistants into the cold room and took off with it.”

  “Are you serious?” Loren sat bolt upright in bed. Debra’s body gave a little jerk, and then Loren felt her turn over to look at him. “Why would— I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t either. I thought I’d call and see if you had any notion why someone would—”

  “You’ve got the fingerprints on record, right?”

  “That was the first thing I thought of. But I still have the prints, both on computer and on card. And I still have photographs of the body.”

  “I have them, too. It’s still possible to find out who Doe was.”

  “Assuming his prints are on file somewhere, yes.” Coughing. “Or that someone can ID the picture.”

  “This is weird.”

  “That’s not the half of it.” London’s voice took on a bemused quality. “The internal organs are gone, too.”

  “They—” Retracking. “Say again?”

  “We take out the internal organs and the brain during the autopsy, okay? And some samples are sent upstairs to the histology lab and the rest are either returned to the cadaver or preserved in jars.”

  “And the jars are gone, too?”

  “Not the jars.” London was nearly shouting. “The jars are still there. It’s the organs that are gone. And the blood.”

  “The organs and the blood,” dully repeating. He looked at Debra and saw the opalescent glimmer of her eyes. She was paying careful attention.

  “The formaldehyde in the jars gets discolored from the blood, okay? But it isn’t cloudy anymore. Not even a taint. Whoever did this poured out the jars completely, cleaned them, and partially filled them with formaldehyde again.”

  “Or replaced them with new jars.”

  “Could be. I hadn’t thought of that.” London’s voice cracked, was superceded by a fit of coughing. “One other thing,” he added. “They left the toe tag.”

  Ghostly feet ran cold up Loren’s spine. Up till this last detail the whole episode had existed somehow in the realm of burlesque, soft-footed intruders slipping into the M.I.’s office, tossing a corpse over one shoulder, playing games with jars of formaldehyde— all like characters in a good-natured horror film. Now everything had turned eerie, spectral, significant. Visions of quiet, efficient CIA spooks moved like black cats through Loren’s mind. Or the Men in Black that the UFO freaks believed in. Or the Cybercops. Left the toe tag behind . . . Unseen supermen had done this, and they liked to play games.

  The line gave a little click. Paranoia surged through Loren’s veins. Was somebody listening? he wondered.

  Time to be a cop.

  “When did it go?” he asked.

  “The cadaver? It was in its drawer at shift change, at four-thirty. The assistant coming on duty— tonight it was Esquibel— normally he checks every drawer as he comes on, and he remembers seeing it.

  “Later we got a hit-and-run, and instead of checking the spreadsheet to see which drawer was free, Esquibel just started pulling them open till he found one empty— and then he saw that there was paperwork on that drawer, that it was supposed to be occupied.”

  “When was that?”

  “Around eight-thirty.”

  Loren felt like he was flying high and fast, blinded by dense cloud glowing with an eerie light. Lost, lost in time or meaning. At eight-thirty he’d been pushing dirt back into Randal Dudenhof’s grave.

  He was, he remembered, a cop. First, eliminate the obvious. “You’ve looked in the other drawers, I assume.”

  “Yeah.” London’s answer was cut by a fit of coughing. “It’s not a mistake. The body’s definitely gone.”

  “No one was in the cold room the whole time, right?”

  “No. But Esquibel was just next door, in the office, and in order to get to the cold room you have to go past the office. Although they could have got through a locked, alarmed fire door.”

  “Yeah!” Loren recognized Esquibel’s protesting voice in the background. “I woulda seen ’em. And if they’d used the fire door I would’ve heard. Them things are noisy. And I was in and out of the cold room, anyway.”

  “There were two DOAs,” London said.

  “Yeah!” Esquibel’s echo. “DOAs! I was in and out!”

  “And the samples have disappeared from the histology lab as well. And that’s not even on this floor.”

  “Shit!” Esquibel’s comment.

  “The problem is,” London said, “is that the circumstances cast a certain light on my assistants.” Esquibel’s voice shouted something indistinct in the background, then was followed by a round of coughing. Loren pictured the two of them at an autopsy, smoking Cuban cigars and hacking up lungers into someone’s abdominal cavity.

  “I trust Esquibel, of course,” London went on. His tone suggested he was saying this only to be polite. “And I want him and the other assistants removed from suspicion. So if you have any reason to suspect anyone else in the removal of this body, the APD really needs to know.”

  “I wanna know!” Esquibel shouted. “I’ll kill the motherfuckers!”

  I don’t know what to make of it, Loren thought.

  “If you get anything at all,” London said.

  “Sure. You’ll be the first to know.”

  “And hang on to those fingerprints. Make lots of copies.”

  “Honestly,” the M.I. said, “it’s as if the guy never existed.”

  Loren hung up and stared for a long moment at the ceiling.

  As if the guy never existed.

  Maybe he never had.

  Maybe someone— or Someone— had done this for a purpose, just to preserve Loren’s faith in miracles.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Dust swirled across the mesa in the wake of a mercile
ss, unseasonal warm wind from Mexico that piled tumbleweed at every fence and leached the remaining moisture from the dry country. Soon there would be more forest fires. Junkyard dogs barked and pranced and flung themselves bodily against Loren in hopes of attracting attention. He rubbed their heads absently and crunched across the oil-spotted ground toward the GMC pickup parked behind Jerry’s trailer.

  He thought of dust trailing across Randal Dudenhof’s grave. He realized he wanted to open the grave again and make absolutely certain the body was still there.

  The GMC was battered, rust-streaked. Drifts of dust lurked in its defilades. Loren opened the hood and saw the V-6 engine with the valve covers and valve assemblies removed, pistons frozen in their cylinders, awaiting new gaskets. Loren walked around the truck to look in the window in the back of the camper shell. Tools and the valve assemblies were laid neatly on a piece of canvas, and had probably been sitting there for two months or more.

  Jerry’s trailer door boomed open. Loren walked around the truck again, slammed the hood down. When he turned, Jerry was standing there, head tilted back as he fumbled with the knot in his tie. Wind tore at his dark, curly hair, flew it like a flag over one ear.

  “That’s Cyrano’s truck,” he said. “I’m doing some work for him.”

  “I know. He called me.”

  “What about?”

  “He wants his truck back by Friday. Better make that Thursday night. So he can go duck hunting.”

  “Okay.” Shrugging.

  The wind was eroding Loren’s patience. “You’ll do it by then?”

  Jerry turned and started walking for Loren’s car. “Sure. All I have to do is install a couple of gaskets.”

  Loren walked after. Hopeful dogs bounded around him, ears and slobber flying. Irritation danced through Loren, and he knew he should just drop the subject and take Jerry home for breakfast. But somehow he couldn’t stop, couldn’t stop trying to puzzle out Jerry’s mode of thinking.

  “Why didn’t you do it before?” Loren asked.

  “Didn’t do what?”

  “The gaskets.”

  “Oh. He said I could take as long as I want.”

  “I don’t think he meant two months.”