Days of Atonement

by Walter Jon Williams

  Neither, however, did Eloy.

  Loren decided not to think about it any more. He booted his computer and used the LAWSAT antenna to connect himself with FBI LAWNET, a bulletin-board service run by the feds in Washington. It featured chitchat on various law enforcement topics, as well as services where you could ask questions of various experts, chief of whom was a free-lance criminalistics expert who called himself “Dr. Zarkov” and who advertised that he was “the East Coast’s foremost expert on blood spatters, patterns, and the velocity of blood in flight.” All no doubt of fascination to some.

  Loren bypassed all that and went to the data library on firearms. He looked up the Tanfoglio TZ-M and discovered that it was, as Patience had said, an Italian version— the file called it a “near copy”— of a 9mm Czech military sidearm. He then moved to another section on .41-caliber weapons. The list was not very extensive.

  He scrolled down the list, looking for a barrel with five lands and grooves and a right-hand twist— it was most of them. And then his eyes lit on something in the “Descriptions” section and a cold hand touched the back of his neck.

  A company called U.S. Military Sidearms, it said here, made a .41-caliber replacement barrel for the Tanfoglio.

  Loren looked at the screen for a long moment and felt his mouth go dry. He wrote down the information in his notebook and logged off.

  Where do we go from here? he wondered.

  He picked up the phone and called Oliver Cantwell at the number given on his message slip.

  Cantwell was an attorney and had been a year behind Loren in high school. The two of them had hung together when young, driving fast cars, roaring from one place to another along the Line, heading to Connie Duvauchelle’s on occasion or taking their girlfriends out to the hot springs on the rez . . .

  Years ago. Nowadays Loren didn’t see Cantwell much except in court, but Loren figured they were still friends.

  “Who’s this Sondra Jernigan cooze?” Cantwell demanded.

  A little hum of triumph sounded in Loren’s nerves. “Why do you ask?” he said.

  “Because she’s been calling every other attorney in town asking about me. It seems you mentioned my name, and she wants to make sure she isn’t being sandbagged.”

  Loren restrained the impulse to shout hallelujah. “Have you heard from her yourself?”

  “Yeah. She and her husband are coming in at four-thirty.”

  “Good.”

  “This ain’t some kind of divorce matter, is it?”

  “Nope. I think they’re just in over their heads on something.”

  “Can you give me a hint?”

  “I was just about to. I think they know something about the John Doe that got killed here a few days ago. He was shot in Mr. Jernigan’s car.”

  “Ah.”

  “My working hypothesis is that they didn’t have anything to do with the shooting, but that they know more than they’re telling.”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell ’em that whatever it is they were doing, I’m not interested in prosecuting for that. I just want the shooter.”

  “You can’t give guarantees like that. I’ll have to talk to Castrejon.”

  “Talk to him. I think he’ll agree in return for a chance to put away an honest-to-God murderer.”

  “I’ll talk to this Jernigan guy first.”

  “I doubt he’s done anything serious. But I don’t think he’s got much connection to the real world, so he might think that whatever he’s done is a lot worse than it is.”

  After Loren hung up he felt like dancing. Things were finally starting to look up.

  He was dealing with paperwork when Sheila Lowrey knocked on his door. She had just finished her run and was wearing shorts, Nikes, and a T-shirt that said CASTRATING BITCH. There was a Diet Coke in her hand.

  “Can we talk?”

  “I was just going to call you. Sit down.”

  Breathing hard, Sheila took a chair, pressed the chilled soda can to her sweating forehead, then her upper sternum.

  “Axelrod’s going crazy on the missing log sheet,” she said.

  Loren shrugged. “His own guy probably stole it.”

  She looked at him, held his eyes. “Do you believe that?”

  “Doesn’t matter what I believe,” Loren said. “It matters what can be proved to the satisfaction of the judge.”

  She opened the Diet Coke and took a long drink. Loren watched her little Adam’s apple bob up and down as she swallowed. She sighed, lowered the Coke, looked at Loren.

  “Axelrod’s doctor saw Robbie Cisneros. My best indication is that they took some very good photographs of the damage done to him, including the raw stripes around his wrists that would seem to support the theory that he was wearing handcuffs when he was damaged.”

  “He went berserk when I put the cuffs on him. That was in my report.”

  “Berserk enough to be hit a minimum of fourteen times with the butt of a rifle? That’s what’s on the report from the emergency-room doctor, I might add. God only knows what Axelrod’s doctor would have found.”

  “It was a shotgun. And it happens.”

  She looked at him levelly. “I’m going to advise Castrejon to plea-bargain.”

  “Don’t do that, Sheila.”

  “They’ll still be found guilty of most of the charges.”

  “Don’t do it, dammit!” Rage burned through him. “Robbie’s a fucking traitor to the town!”

  She stood up, took another drink of her Coke. “It’s up to the D.A. But I’ll tell him what I’ll tell him. Which you might well consider the next time you’re tempted to hit a suspect fourteen times with a shotgun.”

  Loren watched her leave and wanted badly to break something in half with his bare hands, very possibly Sheila’s spine. Instead he went back to his paperwork, jabbing his mechanical pencil so hard into the blotter that the lead snapped off. He threw the silver thing across the room.

  Right on cue, the mayor came in.

  “Loren?” Pretending he hadn’t seen the pencil go flying. “I left you a message.”

  “I was just going to call you. I figured you were out for lunch.”

  “I had a pita sandwich in my office.”

  Trujillo sat down without being invited, tugging at the knees of his tan corduroy slacks. “We need to talk,” he said. “I’ve been getting complaints.”

  “Who from?”

  The mayor’s mouth gave a little twitch. “It doesn’t matter. But there have been complaints as regards your behavior on this John Doe murder.”

  Loren vented a contemptuous laugh. “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve been told that you’re wandering around Vista Linda harassing people.”

  “I’ve been knocking on their front doors and asking if they’ve seen anyone who might have committed a murder. That’s harassment?”

  Trujillo licked his lips. “I want you to lay off the ATL employees. I’m involved in negotiations that have reached a delicate stage.”

  Loren leaned back in his chair. “I don’t give much of a damn, Ed. I’ll conduct the investigation as I see fit.”

  “Be reasonable, Loren.”

  “I’m being perfectly reasonable. My question is, who’ve you been talking to and why is he so concerned about the murder of some nobody?”

  Trujillo’s lips thinned. “I am ordering you to lay off any investigation outside of this jurisdiction. It’s absurd to be wasting department resources for an investigation of someone who hasn’t even been identified.”

  “Who’ve you been talking to, Ed? Over at ATL.”

  “It doesn’t matter!”

  “How do you know he’s not a killer?”

  “Don’t be absurd.” Trujillo stood. There was a steady little twitch in his thigh. “Will you follow my directive or not?”

  Loren looked at him. “Elisa Hawking,” he said.

  Trujillo looked abruptly away. The twitch was making his knee tremble. “It wasn’t what it looked lik
e,” he said.

  Loren smiled up at him, savoring the moment. “It looked like you porking the baby-sitter in the front seat of your LTD. That’s what it looked like.”

  “God damn it!” Trujillo stuck his hands in his pockets and began to pace. He looked over his shoulder at Loren. “It was just a little slip. I’d been drinking that night.”

  “She was fifteen, Ed.”

  “She didn’t say no.”

  “I doubt you gave her much chance. And anyway the law doesn’t much care.”

  Trujillo approached Loren’s desk. “Look,” he said, “I appreciate what you did. Not telling anybody.”

  “And I appreciate your not interfering in department business, Ed. And submitting budgets that don’t make me lay off any more of my people.”

  “I’ve got a press conference tomorrow.” Trujillo’s words came rapidly. “ATL is going to announce the sponsorship of a museum of high technology. Three-D holo theater, the works. Here in town.”

  “Good for them.”

  “It may help to save our economy. This is a three-million-dollar project! But I can’t let it be jeopardized by bad relations between ATL and the town.”

  “I don’t have any bad relations with ATL.”

  Trujillo paused, took a breath, let it out. “I’m glad to hear you say that, Loren.”

  “But I’m going to conduct a murder investigation the way I see fit.”

  “You’ll never get her to talk!” Trujillo exploded. “If she hasn’t complained by now, she won’t ever!”

  Loren looked at him again. “If I have a little chat with her, Elisa will talk. She doesn’t have the brains not to. She’ll sing like Natalie goddamn Dessay.”

  Trujillo stared at him a moment. His face was drained of color. Then the mayor turned and left the office.

  Win some, Loren thought, lose some. Thinking of his last two visits.

  He decided to win two out of three.

  He got out of his chair and walked from his office and past Eloy’s desk and down the foyer to the glass doors. He went through the doors and past the griffins and across West Plaza to where the chocolate-brown Blazer waited.

  There was only one person inside, a thin-lipped thirtyish man with short black hair slicked back from his forehead. Hiding behind his Ray-Bans. He didn’t show any surprise when Loren knocked on his window. He rolled down the glass.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m the chief of police,” Loren said.

  “I know.”

  “You’re under arrest.”

  There was, to Loren’s ultimate satisfaction, surprise on the goon’s face. “What for?” he asked.

  “Carrying automatic weapons. There’s a city ordinance against it.”

  “Bullshit!”

  Loren opened the door, gestured with his hand. “Out of the car,” he said. “And don’t do anything to make me nervous.”

  When somebody pushed, Loren thought as he handcuffed the man and marched him across the street, you pushed back.

  It only stood to reason.

  The goon’s name was Vincent Nazzarett. He wouldn’t give the combination to unlock the UZIs, so Loren had to bring in someone in with a torch. It took a full twenty minutes to cut through the retaining rod and liberate the guns.

  While that was going on, Loren ordered his patrolmen to bust every other ATL vehicle in town. It turned out there was only one. Two more bewildered company goons were added to the lockup, and two more UZIs were cut free. It was only after the guns were cut free that Loren realized that he might have just pressed the same number’s he’d used while visiting the labs, that Patience might not have got around to changing the combination.

  Nazzarett tested positive on the Shibano test for gunpowder residue on his hands. “I went to the company range and fired off fifty rounds on Sunday,” he said. “What about it?”

  “Did anyone see you?” Loren asked.

  It seemed for a moment that Nazzarett didn’t have an answer for that one. “It’s of no relevance,” he said.

  The other two tested negative.

  It was almost three-thirty, over two hours, before William Patience showed up to bail his men out. His eyes were ice and his face was so taut that his cheekbones were sharp as flint.

  “You’ve really fucked up this time,” he said to Loren. Loren had followed him downstairs into the jail, watched him hand his company credit card through the bars to Ed Ross, the jailer.

  “Seems like you forgot to tell me something. You forgot to tell me that U.S. Military Sidearms makes a .41-caliber barrel for the Tanfoglio.”

  Patience’s narrow eyes flickered. “This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

  “Seems to me I told you not to bring automatic weapons into my town.”

  Patience turned to him. “This ends my cooperation in any investigation. If you want any documents from me in the future, you can subpoena them.”

  “Answer me a question. Did you tell Nazzarett to follow me around? Or did someone give you an order?”

  Patience’s lips twitched back from his teeth, like he wanted to snarl but didn’t quite allow himself the satisfaction. “I’m not cooperating anymore, remember? So take your tin-pot small-town badge and shove it.”

  “Shove it yourself. If you think you can.”

  There was a brief magnesium flare in Patience’s eyes. His hands, holding Ed Ross’s paperwork, tightened. Loren felt readiness filling him, licking his nerves with little flaming tongues. In another few seconds, William Patience was going to need plastic surgery.

  Patience let the air in his lungs hiss out, turned away, and hunched down over his paperwork. Loren felt a little rush of disappointment.

  Pity. It would have been interesting.

  Edward Trujillo was waiting upstairs for Patience to emerge. The two of them walked out together, down the long white-tiled corridor. Loren watched them from next to the front desk and had the feeling that Trujillo was apologizing. He became aware of Cipriano standing next to him.

  “I dunno, jefe,” Cipriano said.

  “Dunno what, pachuco?”

  “I dunno if that was wise.”

  Loren looked at him. “Fuck wisdom.”

  Cipriano frowned and gazed toward the mayor. Loren looked at Patience, then turned to Cipriano. “The guy who told you about the cows,” Loren said. “Who is he?”

  “What?” Distracted.

  “The cows that got through the fence at ATL. Who told you about that?”

  “That was Begley. He goes hunting with one of the ATL people.”

  “Is Begley on duty?”

  “Swing shift, I think.”

  “What else did he tell you?”

  Cipriano looked at Loren, his face screwed up in thought. “I don’t remember what all, jefe. I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention. All I remember is this thing about Patience.”

  “What about him?”

  “He pretends to be this big Special Forces covert operations guy. But Begley’s friend got a look at his actual army record. Patience broke a leg in training and never did anything.”

  Loren stared at him. “He told me he went into Armenia!”

  “The team he trained with did. But Patience was laid up in the base hospital with a compound fracture.”

  Cold mirth waltzed through Loren. He looked at Patience again and grinned. “You should see his office. It’s a goddamn shrine to Armenia. Flag, carpets, pictures of his special-ops unit.”

  “Guess he wishes he’d gone.”

  “It’s more than that. It’s pathological. The guy’s a nut case.”

  “Could be, jefe.”

  Feeling buoyed, Loren went back to his office and opened the big nineteenth-century walk-in safe where he kept evidence. A musty marijuana scent wafted out, a reminder of all the years he’d kept contraband there. Four submachine pistols were sitting on the top shelf, each in a plastic bag and tagged with the name of the violator. Below was the sawed-off and the pot he’d seized from Robbie Cisneros. T
he Ingram Mac-11 was bagged on another shelf, along with the other weapons taken from the Mexican couriers.

  Evidence of an interesting week.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw the video viewer that he kept in the safe to keep people from fooling with it. He took it out, put it on his desk, and got the flash memory disk from the file with Saturday’s date and the name of John Doe, the video that Eloy had shot of the crime scene.

  The quality of the video wasn’t very good. The blood was redder than it had been in real life and the skin of the corpse was jaundiced.

  It was still Randal Dudenhof. Even in the video, that was clear.

  A warm fist closed around Loren’s heart. He found himself whispering to himself, words just coming to the surface. He realized he had no idea what it was he was saying, but that he knew he was praying.

  There was a knock on the door. Loren looked up and saw Eloy.

  “Big accident, Chief. The maglev hit a truck on the Rio Seco bridge.”

  Even as he absorbed the words, as his nerves sparked and his pulse began to race, he knew what had happened.

  And he knew who’d been on the train.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Velvet elk antlers, hundreds of them, littered the bottom of the Rio Seco, scattered like shrapnel on the brown sand. The maglev train dangled off the bridge, the lead car crushed like a beer can under a fat man’s foot. One of Sam Torrey’s five-ton trucks had been parked on the ATL side of the railroad bridge and the train had plowed right into it. The truck had split in half and tumbled into the arroyo, somehow without catching fire.

  Loren had to park his car on the auto bridge, next to an expectant volunteer fire truck, and walk the quarter mile to the wreck along the edge of the arroyo. Once there, there wasn’t much he could do. Sheriff’s deputies were already at work with the jaws of life, trying to extricate something or someone from the first car.

  Pointless, Loren thought. Even if the guy hadn’t been crushed, he’d been bounced around the interior of the train at close to two hundred miles per hour.

  Some of Patience’s men were standing around, jabbering into walkie-talkies, looking self-important in their suits and shades and otherwise contributing nothing. Hot wind traced swirls of dust in the air. Loren looked at them and felt a ghostly hand brush his spine.