Days of Atonement

by Walter Jon Williams

  “You’re not going to ask me for anything more, are you?”

  “No.” Looking at him. “I’m not.”

  Rivers seemed suspicious of this assurance, not relieved at all. He turned and headed back to his car.

  Loren looked at the paper, then put it on the seat next to him. Just a few hours ago it would have meant something to him.

  He drove home.

  Debra was waiting on the couch as he walked through the door. The tube blared the theme song of a soap opera about a firm of lawyers who lived in a neon Hollywood spill of glamour, styled and hip and clever, a group who motored their midnight Ferraris over the throbbing night Los Angeles freeways to an endless synthesized disco snare beat, and who, if Loren was any judge, must have acquired their style and money from a swinging clan of drug-dealer clients that somehow never appeared in the television’s frame . . .

  Debra rose from the couch. Loren couldn’t read her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Loren walked toward the kitchen. “About what?”

  “About your job. Cipriano called and asked how you were doing, and I didn’t know what he was talking about. So he told me.”

  “Yeah. Well. It’ll work out.” Loren got a glass from the cupboard and filled it from the water cooler.

  “You look terrible. Are you okay?”

  “I went hunting.”

  Debra watched him as he tilted back his head and gulped his glass of water. He put the glass in the sink and wiped his mouth with the gritty back of his dusty hand.

  “People have been calling,” she said. “Something about cats?”

  “I’m going to take a shower,” Loren said. Debra watched him go.

  He stood under the hot water as the headache rolled in slow time through his skull. He wanted to stop thinking, just turn over and close his eyes and become the happy hick cop that William Patience thought he was.

  Loren turned off the water, dried himself, and threw his clothes in the hamper. He put on his bathrobe and stepped out into the hallway, and immediately Kelly’s door opened and she and Katrina came out. Kelly was dressed for bed, Katrina in her usual shirttails and jeans.

  “We’re sorry, Daddy,” Katrina said. “We’re really sorry.”

  “What can we do?” Kelly said. “Is there any way we can help?”

  Loren looked at them for a long puzzled moment before he recollected what they were talking about.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It’s a political thing. As soon as the maneuvers are over, I’ll be back in my office.”

  “Oh.”

  “That’s good, then.”

  They both seemed a little disappointed— they had worked up to participation in a major crisis, and now it had faded.

  “You’re good kids,” Loren found himself saying. “All we need to do is just stay out of trouble and things will work out.”

  They each gave him a hug and then started back down the hall toward Kelly’s room. Katrina turned around in the doorway.

  “Daddy?” Her voice was tentative. “Did you find out about Skywalker?”

  “I called,” he said, “but it was too early. I’ll call again tomorrow.”

  She smiled faintly and closed the door. “I’m not interested in legalities!” someone shouted from the television. “This is a matter of right and wrong!”

  Loren decided he didn’t want to hear the rest of that conversation, so he went into his room and climbed into bed. He could hear the girls talking, sometimes laughing, in Kelly’s room. Headache beat a melancholy drum behind his eyes.

  He’d call all the cat owners tomorrow. Maybe even put an ad in the Friday paper. And talk to the judge about grounds for getting Dunlop’s and Bonniwell’s paroles revoked.

  The door opened and Debra padded to the bed. “May I sit down?” she said. Her voice was tentative.

  “Sure.”

  He moved over to allow her room. She sat on the bed and looked down at him, blond bangs hanging over her brows, her glasses sitting halfway down her nose. “I was wondering,” she began.

  “Yes?”

  “We seem to have some sort of crisis here. How serious is it?”

  “With my job?” Evading. He thought for a moment and restrained the impulse to shrug. “It’s probably not very serious. I’ve decided . . .” He sorted through his feelings. “I’ve decided to do what I have to do,” he said. “I think that’ll get me back in the saddle pretty quick.”

  “It’s really not very serious, then?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Good.” Her eyes wandered. She seemed vague as to where to go from here. She took a breath.

  “I was wondering . . .” She spoke rapidly, getting this over with. “Whether you heard my conversation with Madeleine this afternoon.”

  A cold caution crept into Loren’s heart, a close approximation of the horrid objectivity he’d felt as he lay on the couch and listened to Debra’s words. He looked at Debra narrowly and decided to let her sweat a bit.

  “Not all of it,” he said.

  Debra glanced away. “We were talking about some things that I hope you haven’t heard,” she said.

  “Like what?” He realized he was acting like a cop again, following the rules of interrogation: never let the suspect know how much you know. When his shock over this wore off, he realized, he would probably feel an abiding guilt about it.

  But he didn’t feel it now.

  “About . . . family matters,” Debra said.

  “Important matters?” Loren asked.

  “Yes.” She glanced at him from under her lashes.

  “If there’s something happening,” Loren said, “I need to know about it. I’m a part of this family, too.”

  Debra took in a long, shuddering breath, then let it out. “What we were talking about,” she said, “it’s something in the past. But yes, you’re right. You should have been told then.”

  “If anything happens, I want to know.”

  “Yes.” She reached out and took his hand, then squeezed it. “You’ll know.”

  Sword and arm of the Lord, he thought. Rickey had given his blessing to whatever needed doing.

  If only he could figure out what that was.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Loren woke early, a little after two. The headache was gone. He stared at the shadowed ceiling, his mind humming with extreme efficiency, not racing, not wasting anything, just moving with quiet, unparalleled potency. His limbs felt relaxed, alert, ready for anything, ready to go six rounds with some heavyweight thug from the Santa Fe slams if he had to. He felt as if he wouldn’t need to sleep for a hundred years.

  He rose, put on some clothes and the smaller of his revolvers, and left the house. He didn’t know if Debra came awake or not: her breathing didn’t change. Perhaps she was spying on him the same way he found himself spying on her.

  He drove the Taurus to the Circle K west of town on 81. The place had been closed for hours. There was a lock on the ice machine. One fluorescent light set over the gas pumps buzzed ferociously as if to warn off the swarms of insects that were batting themselves insensible against its glass cover.

  Loren didn’t think he’d been followed. He backed into a parking place near the store’s two pay phones, just in case he needed to get away fast, and then got out of the car and plugged his phone company card into one of the telephones. He looked up a number in one of his notebooks and pressed the necessary buttons.

  The phone rang four and one-half times before it answered. Sleepy, the physicist sounded a lot more Indian than he had awake.

  “Amardas Singh.”

  “Doctor,” Loren said, “I need some answers.”

  *

  Twenty-four hours later the gunmetal Taurus rode a high trail under a bottomless dome of crisp bright stars. Loren had spent the evening in Socorro, talking to Singh, and he took the short route home, over the high land of the national forest, twisting hairpin turns with overhanging igneous crag
s on either side. The twisting road suited his mood; he felt he was himself navigating obscure mental pathways. His mind buzzed with a new vocabulary and he wondered how the hell he could phrase it all on an indictment.

  His brain was still humming. He had not slept. Under the comforting glow of the Milky Way, he felt as if he had the universe in his hand.

  Around him the forest burned, blood-orange flames reflecting off the walls of canyons, glowing in the sky, beneath the fleet of roaring choppers whose stabbing, hovering lights, floating below the night canopy, could make you believe the saucers had come at last.

  When he came back from the Circle K he found the white recycled legal pad he had used to outline the John Doe case, and he sat in the living room under the dome light, almost until dawn, drawing diagrams in different-colored marker pens. He dozed then, head tilted over the back of the sofa, until a snarling dogfight in front of the house brought him bolt awake. He jumped to the door and saw that a Doberman the color of red clay was straddling a black Lab in the driveway and worrying at his throat.

  Loren charged from out of the house and chased both dogs away. Neither, as they ran off in opposite directions, seemed seriously hurt.

  He had forgotten about the dead birds in the Fury’s trunk. The dogs had been fighting over something they could only smell.

  Fourteen hours’ delay wouldn’t have hurt the birds; he’d heard of people hanging them up for a week. He took the grouse to the backyard, sat on his old weathered bench, and cleaned them. The Mexican wind, hot on his unshaven face, carried the down away. He bagged the entrails and feathers and dumped them in the trash, then put each cleaned bird in an individual freezer bag and placed them all in the big freezer on the back porch. By that time Debra was awake and cooking breakfast, and it was time to fetch Jerry from his trailer.

  Jerry’s topic of the day was ESP. He went on about Rhine cards and premonitions and how quantum physics showed that little atomic thingies— his exact terminology— could communicate at speeds faster than that of light. Presumably this demonstrated telepathy, though Jerry did not make this connection entirely clear. All this skimmed only the surface of Loren’s attention: his mind stayed in its perfect hum.

  Thursday’s sin was envy. Rickey developed his thesis at great length, and with great exuberance, but it skimmed across Loren’s mind like Jerry’s talk of telepathy. Envy was not something he’d ever had much of a problem with. His concerns were more basic.

  Singh either had classes or meetings till four o’clock that afternoon. It would take three hours or so to drive to Socorro. Loren was free till after lunch.

  He made plans to shoot duck with Jerry the next day, took his family home, then drove the girls to school. He let them off in the high school parking lot under the HOME OF THE MINERS sign, then drove back to the City-County Building and parked in his reserved space. He saw Vincent Nazzarett parked across the street in a dark green Mustang and his mind began to hum at a higher pitch. The bastard was a murderer, and Loren was going to prove it.

  He stopped for a short chat with Eloy at the front desk, then headed to Cipriano’s office and knocked on the door. Cipriano was leaning back in his chair, boots on his desk, reading a battered thirdhand James Michener paperback.

  “Qué paso, ése?” Loren asked.

  “Just improving my mind.”

  Loren took a seat. “Much happening?”

  Cipriano’s shoulders twitched. “Drunks. Kids shooting up stop signs. The usual.”

  “Anything happened on the John Doe matter?”

  Cipriano frowned, put the yellow carbon of a parking ticket in his book to mark his place, then put the thick paperback on his desk. “Nothing.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  Cipriano was nettled. “Anything happens, I know what to do.”

  Loren looked at the Michener paperback. “My impression is that you got my job with the understanding that you wouldn’t do any more about John Doe than was strictly necessary.”

  Heat flickered behind Cipriano’s eyes. “I didn’t ask for this situation,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Anybody comes forward with information about John fucking Doe, I’ll follow it up.”

  “I don’t doubt that.”

  “But if the perps are good enough to steal a body and its goddamn internal organs from the M.I.’s office, plus his clothes and boots from the criminalistics lab—”

  “Wait a minute—”

  “—then they’re better than anybody this office is gonna catch. You know what I’m saying, jefe?”

  “Hold on!” Loren shouted. “Doe’s clothes disappeared, too?”

  “Yes. From a locked drawer in a locked building that had Albuquerque cops marching in and out all night. The only thing that was left was the plastic bags they put the stuff in.”

  Loren sat back in his chair, stunned. “Like the toe tag.”

  “The criminalistics boys didn’t find out till this morning, and called this office first. That’s how come I know about it and you don’t. Now, what’s this about a toe tag?”

  Loren explained. Cipriano listened, tapping his fingers on the arms of his chair. Finally he just shrugged.

  “This is too weird for me, jefe.”

  “I’m going to keep working on it,” Loren said.

  Cipriano’s head gave an upward jerk. “You what?”

  “I realized it this morning. I’ve got more freedom to pursue the Doe killing now that I’m on leave than I did when I was working here.” Loren laughed. “When I was in the office, I had to deal with paperwork and hassle from the mayor and personnel problems and God knows what else. Now you’re stuck with all that, and I can work the killings full-time.”

  Cipriano’s eyes narrowed. “This is just gonna get you in trouble.”

  “Not if I come up with indictments against the four scumbags who killed John Doe.”

  “Jefe!” Cipriano’s tone was sharp. “Who the hell are you talking about?”

  “William Patience. Vincent Nazzarett. Jim McLerie. And Carl Denardis.”

  “What evidence do you have?”

  Loren told him about the revised work schedule for the four, that and the fact that none of them had been on duty all week despite Nazzarett’s having been busted for carrying automatic weapons in his ATL Blazer.

  “Who told you this?”

  “Somebody.”

  Cipriano threw out his hands. “You gotta tell me, jefe. How can I evaluate this shit unless I know who it comes from?”

  “I protect my informants,” Loren said.

  Cipriano leaned back in his chair, frowning, and tapped his fingers on the arms again. “Okay,” he said, “but I have to be kept informed of your progress. I can’t have you running around like a bull in a china shop.”

  “I’ll be subtle. Honest.”

  This assertion seemed to make Cipriano skeptical. Loren considered telling him about the tow truck driver he’d found in El Paso, then decided against it. For all he knew somebody had bugged Cipriano’s office.

  “Look,” Loren said, “I just came by to use the phone in my office. Is that okay?”

  “I want to be kept informed, jefe.”

  The jefe lifted Loren’s spirits. He rose, grinning. “You got it, pachuco.”

  Once in his office he called Howard Morton in the U.S. attorney’s office. “I been expecting your call, hoss,” Howard said.

  “What’s happening with my neighbors?”

  “Tucked away nice and safe in the calabozo. Judge refused bond on account of they’s terrorists.”

  “Even Skywalker?”

  “Heh.” A dry chuckle. “Skywalker Fortune. What kind of parents would name a kid something like that?”

  “I guess we know what kind.”

  “Reckon we do. But don’t worry— Skywalker’s tucked in the county D-home. They might let her out if they can find a foster family in this jurisdiction— her lawyer’s making enough stink about a minor being held on a terroris
t charge.”

  “Who’s her lawyer?”

  “Heh-heh.” A double-dry chuckle this time. “L. Roy Friedman.”

  Loren whistled. L. Roy Friedman was a coiffed blue-eyed world-class shark who picked his white and perfect dental implants with the bones of chewed-up district attorneys. His blonde ex-model wife probably shaved her legs on his cheekbones. He made gold-chained syndicate shysters like Axelrod look like bleary-eyed nighttime bail bondsmen.

  “Friedman was waiting in the Federal Building when the caravan got here,” Morton said. “Somebody back home must have called him. The Eco-Alliance had him on retainer and he flew in from San Francisco on his private jet.”

  “The trial’s gonna be a circus.”

  “Three rings plus all the freaks in the sideshow. My boss is about pissing in his pants. I’m just glad I’ve got a full calendar and don’t have to do anything on this one but watch. Jesus, it’s gonna take Friedman three months just to pick the jury.”

  Loren laughed. “I wouldn’t want to be Killeen right now.”

  “Heh. You got it, hoss. A hasty bust like that is just the thing Friedman’ll need to spring half his clients on technicalities and make the rest of our indictments look like they were written by Larry, Moe, and Curly.”

  “Which they may well have, anyway.”

  “Shhh.” There was amusement even in his shushing. “We don’t talk ’bout that round here.”

  Loren and Morton conversed about hunting and the Miners football team for a while— the Miners hadn’t scented a state championship since 1962, and their record seemed unlikely to change— and then Loren hung up. He called Debra, Jerry answered, and Loren relayed the information and the phone number of the Albuquerque juvenile detention home. Katrina and Kelly could call their friend when they got home from school.

  Businesslike, his mind continuing its efficient conduct, Loren next made his calls to cat owners. Every click and murmur of the phone system seemed loud as a cannon, pointing with steel-clawed fingers to wiretaps. The whole cat business seemed impossibly trivial by now, and he could picture Patience and his people listening to a disk recording and guffawing over what they were hearing, but the idea seemed to pan out. Several of the animal lovers agreed in principle to Loren’s idea concerning a civil suit. A nice bludgeon, he thought, to hold over the head of Bonniwell, Dunlop, & Co.