Days of Atonement

by Walter Jon Williams

  “Who’s in charge?”

  “Special Agent Killeen.”

  “Huh.” Loren knew Killeen, a lazy round-faced man who deserved the Fucking Big Idiot tag more than most. He had been exiled to the Albuquerque FBI office after allegedly screwing up big-time in Los Angeles, where he was supposed to have committed a moronic series of procedural errors that resulted in racketeering charges being dismissed against a Teamster vice-president. “Where is he?” Loren asked.

  “In the house. Hey. Don’t go in there!”

  This last was shouted as Loren walked between two of the sawhorses and headed for the house in question.

  Loren would have steamed right through the front door, but Killeen came out first. William Patience, in his gray polyester jacket and red knit tie, was right behind him. For a brief, wild moment Loren wondered if Killeen had arrested Patience for sabotaging the maglev, and then he recognized the two prisoners that followed them out of the house.

  Skywalker Fortune and her father.

  Skywalker stepped out first, pale face surrounded by a disordered shroud of wind-whipped black hair, hands cuffed behind her. She was in a rumpled T-shirt, with emperor penguins on it, that she’d probably been wearing when they dragged her out of bed, and blue jeans pulled hastily up her legs. Not all the buttons were done. Her feet were bare. Two feds, both women, escorted her out of the house, one on each arm.

  Behind Skywalker, her father blinked owlishly through thick glasses. He was a tall bean pole of a man, with a graying shaggy beard, his hair still tousled from sleep. Loren watched the two of them while astonishment beat a fast, angry tattoo in his head. He turned to Killeen.

  “Hey!” he said. “Dickhead!”

  Killeen stopped on the sidewalk, cut off in midsentence in his conversation with Patience.

  “Chief,” he said.

  “What is this crap you’re pulling in my town, Killeen?” Loren demanded. He strode up to Killeen, hooked fingers in his gun belt, stared down at the man. Set face and body to intimidate. “Running some kind of major operation without telling me?”

  “We don’t need you around when we serve federal warrants,” Killeen said.

  “The fuck you don’t!” Loren felt a roar building in his chest, sent it out. Heads turned. Skywalker, behind Patience on the sidewalk, stared at him with deep eyes. “You send snipers in black outfits crawling around through people’s yards in my town, and you didn’t tell me? You’re lucky some good citizen didn’t figure you for burglars and blow you away with a shotgun! You’re lucky one of my own men didn’t do it!”

  Killeen blinked at windblown dust. “There was no danger.” Coolly. “People in nearby residences were awakened and apprised of the situation.”

  “Apprised?” Loren wrapped his mouth around the word and bit down hard. “Apprised? If there was any apprising going on, it should have been directed at my office!”

  “It reached my ears,” Killeen began, with a glance over his shoulder at Patience, “that you haven’t exactly been cooperating with local agencies.”

  Loren looked at Patience and bared his teeth. “Mr. Patience,” he said, “does not represent a local agency. He’s a private thug hired by a private concern to represent their private interests. And what the hell is he doing here, anyway?”

  “We know each other.” Another shrug. “I thought he might be interested in seeing a real op.”

  “A real op,” Loren repeated. He stared at Patience, who looked back at him with an expression of refined distaste. The Mexican wind howled in Loren’s heart. “That’s one more real op than Mr. Patience has ever been on in his life,” he said. “Guess it won’t do him any harm.”

  Even in the darkness Loren could see Patience redden. Got you where it hurts, asshole, he thought.

  Loren turned to look at Skywalker. She was dancing barefoot on the cold sidewalk. Her lower lip trembled. “A real op to arrest a sixteen-year-old kid,” Loren said. “What’d she do? Litter on a federal highway?”

  “It’s the climax to a six-month-long undercover investigation. We’re arresting these two and eight other members of the local Eco-Alliance chapter for terrorist activities.”

  Surprise barked out of Loren, an involuntary gush of air that probably sounded like an incredulous laugh. For a moment he had a hard time finding words.

  “They have been arrested,” Killeen went on, “in connection with a conspiracy to destroy power lines and the Vista Linda pumping station. Maybe they even wrecked the maglev yesterday.”

  Loren found his voice. “What the hell kind of evidence do you have for this, Killeen?”

  “We have an informant.”

  “Uh-huh.” Loren saw Skywalker and her father exchange a quick glance, and his heart sank. There was significance in that look, and fear. And secret knowledge.

  They were guilty. Damn it.

  “A shipment of explosives and incendiaries arrived last week from Los Angeles,” Killeen said. “It’s the main explosives cache for the entire western U.S., and it got moved hastily because our Los Angeles office was getting close to it. We expect to find it during one of the arrests.”

  “We wouldn’t ever destroy that train!” Skywalker blurted. She shook her long hair out of her face and looked at Loren pleadingly. She sounded on the verge of tears. “That train was benign technology! We wouldn’t ever do anything to hurt anybody!”

  Loren turned to Skywalker. “I understand, honey,” he said. “I know you didn’t have anything to do with the train wreck. And I know that other people here know it, too.”

  Patience’s sharp face seemed carved out of hickory. The wind wailed around the Fortunes’ eaves. Killeen looked uncertain. “We’ll see what the evidence says,” he said.

  A sudden intuition leaped through Loren. “Who was your informant?” he asked. “Mrs. Fortune?”

  Another startled look passed between Skywalker and her dad. Killeen just seemed petulant. “You can attend the trial and find out,” he said.

  “Your informant’s involved in a messy divorce with one of your alleged eco-terrorists, right?” Loren said. “There’s a custody fight, right?”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Killeen said. His tone was defensive.

  Cold certainty settled in Loren. “What kind of credibility is your witness going to have,” Loren asked, “when it becomes clear she was framing her ex so that she could get custody of the kid?”

  Anger settled into Killeen’s face. “When we find the incendiaries, it’ll only confirm what the informant told us!”

  “You don’t even know where they are, do you?”

  “We’ll find them.”

  “Your terrorists are gonna walk, Killeen,” Loren said. “Just like that Teamster.” Killeen’s head gave a backward jerk as if he’d been punched in the nose. “They’re gonna walk,” Loren repeated, “because you’re too fucking federal vain to cooperate with local law enforcement.”

  “Your daughters hang out with a terrorist,” Killeen said, “and I was supposed to cooperate with you?”

  “You think I’m not professional enough to do my job under those conditions?”

  “I don’t know, man. Some of the things I hear about your department, I don’t know how professional—”

  “What do you hear, dickhead?” Loren bent to scream the words right into Killeen’s face. “What do you fucking hear, you incompetent fat-faced federal jerk?”

  Killeen straightened, scowled, adjusted his baseball cap and his dignity. “I’m done with you, Hawn.”

  Loren stood upright and glared down at the angry fed. “I’m sending a letter to your superior, Killeen,” he said. “I’m lodging an official complaint about your lack of liaison and your failure to share intelligence, all of which was detrimental to law enforcement, your mission, and the safety of your men. Not to mention mine.”

  “Fuck you,” Killeen said.

  “It’s my town, Killeen.”

  “Fuck you!” Killeen waved clenched fists.

  “It�
�s my fucking town.” Jamming a finger in Killeen’s face. “Don’t trespass again.”

  Loren stepped back off the sidewalk and let the caravan pass. Skywalker gave him a glance as she passed. His heart went out to her.

  What the hell did her father think he was doing, getting her involved in this kind of shit?

  “Don’t talk to these creeps without a lawyer, honey,” he said. “And you’ll be back in class by Monday.”

  She gave him a brave smile, then one of her escort put a hand on her head and pushed her down into the unmarked car that waited for her.

  Loren got in his car and drove home. He was already working on the contents of his letter.

  *

  The sin of the day was avarice. Rickey’s words spun like high desert dust in Loren’s whirlwind mind. Things had got way the hell out of his control, a thought that wouldn’t have bothered him as much if he wasn’t also confident of the fact that no one else, no one at all, had a handle on the situation, either.

  Eco-terrorism, by members of his community. A crime that hadn’t even been invented when he’d joined the force.

  He couldn’t think of any way that this would not hurt him. His daughters were friends with an accused terrorist— not exactly the sort of thing calculated to raise family esteem in the eyes of the town. Worse was the paranoid thought that maybe Skywalker had been ordered to become friends with Katrina and Kelly, that it was one way her terrorist— was cell the right word?— used to keep track of the law ...

  A shipment of explosives. Jesus. If the FBI didn’t find them— and he had no confidence that Killeen would— that meant a stash somewhere that would turn unstable in time, ready to blow up in the face of the first inquisitive child who stumbled across it.

  Wonderful.

  He wished they had blown up the damn Vista Linda water supply. Vista Linda was incredibly wasteful with their water, pumping down the water table for the whole district, and it would serve them right. It wouldn’t have made things any worse, and probably would have kept Patience and his psychotic goons busy with something else for a while.

  Rickey’s Pennsylvania accent intruded on Loren’s thoughts. “The desire of money is the root of all evil,” he said.

  Loren recalled that this would be the first Wednesday in all his years of police work that someone hadn’t handed him an envelope full of graft. Good thing, he thought, with the FBI swarming all over the town.

  Guilt put a cold hand around his throat. He tried to shake it off. Why the hell did he feel bad for putting a stop to the mail? He’d never liked it, never felt comfortable about it even when the money came in handy.

  Was he betraying something? His town, his colleagues? The way of life he’d sworn to protect?

  He ought to be feeling relief. Especially with the feds in town.

  Loren slowly realized that the service was over. He rose, walked down the aisle, shook Rickey’s hand, murmured something. He stood on the top step of the church and looked pointlessly across the town plaza as if there were an answer there somewhere. Wind howled around the white granite spear of the war memorial.

  “Daddy?”

  “Yes?” Loren was surprised by Katrina’s voice. He looked down at her, saw that she was looking at him worriedly.

  “Can you call somebody? Find out what’s happening to Skywalker?”

  “I know some people I can call,” Loren said, “but it’s probably too early.”

  “Call them, anyway,” biting her lip, “would you?”

  “Okay.”

  His family had been in a quiet state of shock ever since he’d come back for breakfast. Katrina had excused herself from the breakfast table in order to go into her room and cry. They were all convinced of Skywalker’s innocence.

  Loren remembered Jerry telling him about Skywalker being a passenger in a slow-moving jeep driving down the arroyo behind the junkyard.

  He drove his family home, changed into his uniform, switched the small revolver for the big revolver, and headed for work. Once there he logged onto FBI LAWNET— the feds had a few uses— and found his answer from Dr. Zarkov.

  “There is no known way to beat the Shibano test,” Zarkov wrote. “The test is so sensitive that it has found powder residues on hands that fired weapons while wearing heavy welder’s gloves. If you HAVE found a way to beat the test, for God’s sake don’t put it here where people can read it [but send me E-Mail NOW!!!].

  “P.S.: Sorry I just blew your case out of the water.”

  “It wasn’t my case,” Loren typed in answer. “It was the theory of a psychotic who’s trying to frame a man he just murdered for something he did himself. Many thanks.”

  He looked at the words glowing on his screen, realizing that this was the first time he’d ever put his thoughts down where he, let alone anyone else, could see them.

  He had to be out of his mind.

  He tapped keys and wiped his reply out of existence. He wrote a simple thank-you in its place, then filed it.

  “Okay, Hawn.” It was Sheila Lowrey, leaning against his door frame with one hand jabbing her spectacles at him. “How’d you do it?”

  “Do what?” Logging off.

  “Got our three felons to fire their lawyer, accept a friendly local public defender, and then get him into a room with Castrejon for a plea-bargaining session.”

  Loren smiled up at her. “Is that what happened? And all this morning? I’ve been in church.”

  “Axelrod’s blown a gasket. He’s claiming intimidation, that you made offers to his client without his being present . . .”

  Loren shook his head. “It isn’t true. I haven’t seen those scumbags since I busted them.”

  Sheila narrowed her eyes. “Who has?”

  “Other prisoners, mainly. And the jailers.”

  “So who told them about the plea bargain?”

  Loren shrugged. “If I told you, I would only be speculating.”

  Because he wasn’t absolutely sure that it had been Ed Ross who delivered the prisoners their evening meal and stopped to chat about how their attorney had refused a plea bargain without even consulting them. Nor was he entirely certain that his patrolmen, when delivering drunks or speeders or domestic violence cases into Ed Ross’s willing hands, hadn’t stopped to jaw with him about how Robbie Cisneros’s attorney Axelrod was going to sell him and his two buddies down the river, refusing a reasonable plea bargain in hopes of using them to shake his big drug-dealer clients free in an unrelated trial. The patrolmen going on at great length, with much laughter and anticipation, about what idiots Axelrod’s clients had to be in order to let their attorney sacrifice them for his wealthier and better-connected important pals.

  Said conversations taking place in the hearing of the prisoners being booked, who would soon repeat it into the ears of Robbie and his pals in the jail. By sunrise, the trio were probably boiling over what their Axelrod had done.

  It would never have worked, Loren thought, if Robbie’s gang were smart. But no one had ever accused the criminal classes of intelligence.

  “I know you had something to do with this,” Sheila said. “You as much as said so last night.”

  Loren shrugged. “So what do you want me to do about it? Go down to the jail and convince Robbie to get his old mouthpiece back?”

  “This move is of dubious ethics, Loren.”

  Loren threw up his hands. “I didn’t do it, Sheila. I haven’t been near the goddamn jail.”

  She stood over him for a long moment, then put her spectacles on and pulled a chair next to his desk. She sat down and looked at him intently.

  “You’re a hell of an operator, Loren. I can’t figure you at all.”

  Loren grinned. “I’m just a country boy, Sheila. A plain ole peace officer.”

  “And you don’t know shit from Shinola. You’ve always made that perfectly clear. How about John Doe and the train murders?”

  “What about them?”

  “They’re related, right?”

 
“I think so, yes.”

  “And you know who did it.”

  Anger twisted in Loren’s belly like a knotted rope. Had he really been so indiscreet? And only one night after he’d ranted to Rickey about miracles, then dug up Randal Dudenhof’s grave just to make sure. He had to stop babbling like this to people he barely knew.

  “I can’t prove anything, Sheila,” he said.

  “It wasn’t the eco-terrorists who did the job?”

  “No.”

  “You seem pretty sure of that.”

  “I am.” He leaned back in his chair, looked at her. “It’s not their style. They don’t like Torrey’s game ranch—nobody around here does—but they approve of the kind of technology the maglev represents. And most of the environmental extremists are very careful about not taking human life.”

  There was a bright gleam in Sheila’s eyes. “Who did it, Loren?”

  “I don’t have enough to give you yet.”

  “If we put our heads together—”

  Loren shook his head. “No, Sheila.”

  “This is a major prosecution, Loren.”

  “It’s big-time, yeah. You said so last night. You think it’s your ticket out of here. Prosecute this one, and you’ll get a good job in the metropolis of your choice.”

  Sheila whipped off her glasses, stared at him. “Is that so bad?”

  “No. But it’s affecting your judgment. And the fact is, I don’t have a case.”

  “But if we—”

  “Look. Here’s what happened with Cisneros, okay? I knew within hours that he and his pendejo buddies pulled the job, but I had no evidence. Not until that tip came in.”

  “So what are you doing? Waiting for a tip?”

  “My only witness got killed on the train. So I’m poking around and hoping something will turn up. That’s all I can do.”

  “And what’s with all this stuff you were telling me last night, about Doe being somebody who’s already been declared dead in an accident?”

  “I’ve got no grounds to order an exhumation.”

  “Dammit, Hawn!” Her arms flew up in frustration. “I want to work with you on this one!”

  Loren grinned. “If I get enough evidence to take it to a lawyer, you’re the one I’ll talk to, okay?”