Pious Deception

by Susan Dunlap

  The two men who arrived were smaller, darker, older than Frank. They filed silently into the bedroom with him, leaving the other man to guard Kiernan. Once the door was closed Kiernan could hear the sporadic murmur of words inside but could get no sense of what was being said. In ten minutes they emerged, again silently, and walked out the front door.

  The old man moaned louder.

  Before Kiernan could speak, the younger man said, “The shot. Did you give it to him?”

  Frank shook his head.

  Then what, Kiernan thought irritably, were you and your friends doing in there?

  Frank took a step toward her. His whole body seemed to hang back, as if his foot alone were dragging the rest of him. “I’ll do it now. You tell me how to do the shot.”

  He opened the bedroom door just as the old man wailed. Frank’s eyes closed, then opened. Kiernan followed him into a small, bare room, darker, hotter, closer than the one they had left.

  The old man was mostly bone. His gray skin hung from prominence to prominence, like the canvas of a sagging tent. His eyes were clouded with pain. Despite the nearly suffocating heat, he was shivering.

  To Frank she said, “Start by filling the syringe. Take the needle, depress the plunger all the way, then pull it back slowly till it fills. When it’s full, move the plunger forward very slowly till a drop of solution comes out. Then you know there are no air bubbles inside. Then the needle is ready. Okay?”

  He nodded skeptically.

  She moved to the old man’s side and took his hand. Minutely, his moaning eased. Bending near him, she said, “The priest? Why are you waiting for him?”

  He moaned louder.

  She couldn’t tell whether he understood the question. “The priest?” she repeated.

  “Hey!” Frank snapped. “Be silent!”

  She turned to him. He was fingering the syringe fearfully.

  “Give it to me. I’ll just fill it.” Before he could protest, she took it, and depressed the plunger into the ampule of morphine. “Now you take one of his buttocks, and in your mind you divide it into four sections, like quarters of pie. Then you take the outer corner of the upper outside quarter—got that? That’s where you’re going to give the shot. You rub the spot on his buttocks, just like you were scuffing it up a bit. He won’t react to the needle so much. Then push the needle in, just this far, and slowly, slowly depress the plunger.”

  He nodded.

  “Now do it!”

  The old man cried out. Frank’s whole body shook.

  Kiernan steeled herself against the pain. “Do it!”

  The old man wailed. “The priest. The priest. Give back. Give …” The word faded into another wail.

  Kiernan reached for the syringe. Frank shook her off. “I’ll do it. You wait outside. Go!” he yelled with such force that the old man stopped moaning.

  Kiernan hesitated, then turned and walked out.

  When the younger man put out a hand to stop her, she said, “You heard him. He told me to leave. I’m leaving.” She walked through the front door into the blinding sunlight. All the tension she hadn’t dared acknowledge welled up. Her head throbbed, and her shoulders were so tight they squeezed her neck. She had to fight the urge to run up the hill.

  The street was as empty as the first time she’d looked down at it from Zekk’s—empty but for the younger man, who stood with one foot on the front steps of John McKinley’s house, looking first at her, then peering nervously back inside. Suddenly he straightened his shoulders, shut the door, and ran toward her.

  Had Frank called to him? Knowing it might be futile, she quickened her pace.

  But he made no move to stop her. He fell in beside her, rifle in hand.

  Kiernan resisted the urge to look back at the doorway. When Frank finished with his father’s shot and started looking for her she would hear him yell. She gazed up the hill, searching for escape routes she didn’t believe would be there. The early afternoon sun seared her face. The baking heat rose up from the dry dirt street. “Look,” she said as they started up the switchback road, “I’m trying to help you and Mac. You understand that, don’t you?”

  He hesitated, then nodded.

  “Then tell me why the priest was coming.”

  Again he hesitated, again he acceded. “Nobody but the old man knows why the priest was coming. Like Frank said, we don’t like strangers. Those before us”—he nodded at the cemetery—“had bad times with strangers. Was a time when Rattlesnake was a boomtown. Stagecoaches stopped here in those days, leastways that’s what they told us. And the miners from the copper mine—it’s not a copper mine now, hasn’t been for years. Warren’s doing something with oil there now. You can hear the noise from it. Boom. Boom. Boom. Never stops. He’s ruining the land there. Dust and noise. Enough to drive you crazy.”

  Bud’s site was that close! But too far to do her any good now.

  “Back then Rattlesnake was mostly bars and whorehouses. They came here because it was close, and it’s the only place with flowing water for miles around.”

  Kiernan glanced back. Frank’s door was still shut. “And then?”

  “A priest came along and my great-granddad saw the light. He saw that Rattlesnake was a bed of sin. He had to fight hard, but he got the gin mills closed and the whores rid out of town, and he didn’t let strangers back in. And no one has since.”

  She moved faster as they rounded the second switchback. “What about Joe Zekk?”

  He shook his head. “No one but Father Vanderhooven.”

  “How come?”

  Again he shook his head. But this time he added nothing.

  There was no way to guess how long Frank McKinley would take giving that shot. She had heard of husbands standing, holding the needle for an hour, then suddenly shaking themselves, stepping forward, and plunging the needle into flesh. She had heard of some who, with the best of instructions, hit bone. She quickened her pace.

  The younger man matched her step for step.

  “Mac said, ‘The priest. Give back.’ What could Mac have been planning to give to the priest?” she asked. “Did he have anything of Father Vanderhooven’s?”

  “Don’t know,” he snapped.

  She turned to him. His face was pulled tight, but she couldn’t tell whether it was in fear or anger. “Did Father Vanderhooven have anything of his?”

  “Mac wasn’t a giver.”

  They turned on the next leg of the road. Four switchbacks to go. Kiernan looked down at the cemetery with its two sections. Moving faster, she said, “What happened in nineteen thirty-eight? What did all those people die of?”

  “Flu,” he said too quickly. “Flu. They all got sick, one after another.”

  “Did they have a doctor?”

  “They died too quick.” His breath was coming in pants.

  She picked up the pace. Her own breath was short. “Did the priest come to bury them?”

  “No. They died … too quick. Couldn’t be left out … of the ground.”

  She took the next switchback. The Jeep was visible over the edge of the mesa. Gulping for breath, she said, “The McKinleys … died … all different years. Only a couple … died in … nineteen thirty-eight? All the Sheltons died then. How come?”

  “God cursed them,” he panted.

  “They weren’t Catholic?”

  “Fake Catholics.”

  Kiernan recalled hearing of sects that had split from the Roman Catholic Church, sects whose members considered themselves the true guardians of the faith. Rounding a switchback—two to go—she said, “Are there Sheltons … in town now?”

  With the rifle barrel, he pointed down to the graves. “All there.”

  “Not one of them … survived that flu?” She was nearly running. One more switchback to the top.

  “Cursed.”

  She rounded the last switchback. The Jeep was twenty yards ahead.

  The man braced his rifle and stopped.

  She fingered her keys and slowed he
r pace. “What happened?”

  A yell came from below. She looked back. The man with her turned and stared down too.

  She ran for the Jeep and stuck the key in the lock. As she flung herself in she could hear another, louder yell from below. Still she couldn’t make out the words. She turned the key and floored the gas pedal.

  She was a hundred yards above the mesa when a shot shattered the rear window of the Jeep.

  32

  KIERNAN DIDN’T STOP TILL she reached the main road. Then she pulled over, closed her eyes and flopped forward over the steering wheel. Sweat rolled down her face and coated her back. Her heart thumped. She turned on the air conditioner and sighed as the air chilled her sweaty body. She pulled out the plastic bottle of water Wiggins had reminded her to carry in the Jeep, chugged greedily, and leaned back to think.

  Surely, she decided, Joe Zekk must have been down in the village at some time. Even if he was aware of the trigger-happy habits of the villagers, it would be almost impossible for a man to live in virtual isolation right above there and not be curious enough to sneak down. And then surely he too must have had questions about the Sheltons in the cemetery.

  She took another drink of water. There were so many questions. What had caused the Sheltons’ deaths? Had the McKinleys killed them in a feud? In a religious battle? If so, where did Mission San Leo fit in? Had the priest there covered up for them because McKinley willed him the land for the retreat the previous year? And what did the old man want to give or take back? That land? Was that why Joe Zekk had hunted out the will? Or had Austin Vanderhooven brought the will out here to the dome, and Zekk had come across it after his death?

  But the will itself was nothing. If McKinley wanted to supercede it he had only to write another. He had had plenty of time to do that all these years. And the land was still his. No one had to give it back. So what did he want?

  And Austin Vanderhooven? He came to Phoenix, revitalized Dowd’s retreat plans, he got backers, then ignored them. He planned a great retreat, and what he built was a ten-foot meditation dome. The man was a jumble of contradictions. Even his dome—was it for meditation or for screwing Beth Landau? And what in all of that had moved someone to kill him?

  Suddenly, surprisingly, Kiernan found herself ravenously hungry. Sweat rolled down her forehead. Throwing aside caution, she took another drink of water, and another. “Damn you, Stu Wiggins,” she muttered. “Why didn’t you tell me to bring food, too? I’m not likely to find a McMiddle-of-the-desert.”

  Following the map Bud Warren had given her, she turned right onto the main road. Ahead the land was as flat as it had been in Phoenix, only thousands of feet higher up. The only vegetation was the low chollas and other cacti and the thin wisps of mesquite. No rodents skittered over the hardtop; no birds broke the beige of the sky. If the hardtop had not been there, the arid mesa would have looked the same as it had a hundred years ago when they named the area White Bone Mountains. She shivered and found herself scanning the horizon for bleached skeletons and wondering how many of them, over the years, had been human.

  Ahead the sky was becoming browner. The air seemed thicker. She stepped on the gas.

  The turnoff to the Warren Works came a mile and a half farther on. It was a well-rutted dirt road. Despite its four-wheel drive, the Jeep bounced in the deep potholes. She steadied the wheel and overrode the urge to step on the gas and try to skim the top. Instead, she braked, steering to the side of the road, almost on the embankment.

  The road cut through a rocky promontory and descended sharply, down a hundred feet. An explosion shook the Jeep. Kiernan slammed on the brakes.

  She was poised at the rim of a huge hole. The center was another couple of hundred feet down. The remains of the strip-mining the villager had mentioned. Five-foot rocks rolled down the loose side, bouncing wildly against one another at the bottom. Huge clouds of dust flew up, engulfing them, as more rocks careened down from the site of the explosion. Rock hit rock; the noise was like a battlefield. Like battalions of McKinleys.

  Suddenly she found herself shaking so hard that the Jeep stalled. Despite the cool air in the car, her skin had a sick, clammy feeling. Closing her eyes she breathed deeply, and it calmed her. After a few minutes she opened her eyes, started the engine, and drove on, around the rim to a road that descended into a similar depression.

  Although she had heard Bud Warren describe his oil-shale retort as the size of a five-story building, she wasn’t prepared for the magnitude of the project. In the center of the site stood the retort, like a giant metal ampule, surrounded by a scaffolding of pipes and ladders and chimneys spewing brownish gas. Conveyor belts moved giant buckets of rock from the pile in the strip-mine depression to one shaking machine after another and carried the crushed rock to the top of the hundred-foot hopper and dumped it in. Dust was everywhere. The banging, smashing, and clattering of machines echoed and bounced around the side of the depression, melding into a painful wall of noise. The smell of ammonia and sulphur and dust made it hard to breathe. The scene was like a picture of Hell.

  Steeling herself against the noise, she drove down the road to the edge of the works. The sign simply said WARREN PROCESS WORKS. A man in a gray jumpsuit knocked on her window. She asked for Bud Warren, and in less than a minute she spotted him walking out of the low building at the south corner of the site. Despite the heat, Warren wore jeans and a work shirt. He had the easy walk of a man at home here. The wind tossed his dark hair, and his clear blue eyes seemed to light up as he came toward her. Kiernan found herself smiling too.

  “Kiernan,” Warren shouted as she opened her window. “Great. I didn’t dare hope you’d come up here so soon. I was afraid you might not really be interested.” He grinned. “Sometimes, you know, people don’t quite share my enthusiasm. But it is a fascinating process. Let me show you around.”

  “Can you give me food first? And a beer?”

  His tanned forehead creased. “Did I invite you for lunch? No matter, we’ll pretend I did. Will a sandwich do?”

  “Perfect.”

  Warren walked around the Jeep and climbed in. “The office is at the far side. Take the road straight through.” He looked at the shattered back window. “Are you okay? What happened?”

  “Unfriendly McKinleys in Rattlesnake. I’ll tell you about it after I eat.”

  “I’ll have one of the guys tape some plastic over the window. That should hold you till you get back to town.”

  “Thanks.” Kiernan rolled up the side window against the dust outside and headed around the conveyors that joined the giant machines—what were they called? “Are those the lock hoppers?”

  Warren laughed. “No, they’re the grizzlies.”

  “Grizzlies?”

  “Rock crushers. We’ve got three different sizes of grizzlies—”

  “Poppas, mommas, and babies?”

  Kiernan could almost see Warren changing mental gears. It was a moment before he laughed. “Right, poppa over there takes the big bites. See?” He pointed toward a huge, rumbling machine. “Then he spits them out onto the conveyor belt to momma, and she chews it better, and spits …” Warren laughed. “Maybe regurgitation similes aren’t the best way to make a good impression before lunch, huh?”

  “Good save. It’ll take a lot more than rock-crushing stories to dim my appetite.”

  “My kind of woman. Okay, here, veer around this building.”

  “The conveyors lead in there. But there are no windows? What’s inside?”

  Putting a hand on her arm, he said, “That, my dear, is the process. It’s the baghouse!”

  “Eyes only?”

  “You got it. I can’t afford to take a chance. Everything’s wrapped up in that process. And when it sells, Kiernan, I’ll take you to a lunch fit for a queen.”

  Following Warren’s directions she drove around the baghouse to a one-story stucco building in the far corner of the site. It too was windowless, and the walls, she found on entering, were three fee
t thick. “Like a bomb shelter,” she said.

  “Noise’ll kill you otherwise. I can’t have the workers wandering off half the day to find a little peace. This doesn’t muffle it entirely, but it’s not too bad. Here”—he pulled a chair out from one of the two red Formica tables—“sit. Ham, roast beef, or pastrami?”

  “Pastrami.”

  Warren’s green metal desk and file cabinets filled one end of the room. The other housed a sink, a small refrigerator, and the table, which reminded her of a 1950s kitchenette. On the wall was a poster of the Denali National Park in Alaska.

  Warren plucked two bags from the fridge, plopped them on the table, and went back for cans of beer. “Carta Blanca, okay? It’s your only choice.”

  “Great.” She took a bite of the sandwich. The pastrami was good, the rye bread fresh, the mustard sharp. Nodding at it she said, “Do you have a hot line to the only kosher deli in Phoenix that delivers?”

  Warren laughed. “I figure the guys are out here in the middle of nowhere, at least I can provide good food.”

  “I’d work for you.” She took another bite.

  “I’d like you to think it’s because I’m such a nice guy, and I am, of course. But it’s good business. Things like this room, the movies, the food, it keeps the guys out here. Otherwise they’d be driving into town every night, and in no time they’d have found other jobs. It gets pretty tedious out here.”

  “How do you handle it?”

  Warren laughed. “Same as they would. I take every chance to get into town.”

  Warren took a bite of his own sandwich. In the silence she was more aware of the thumping outside, like a kid across the street playing the drum. Enough to cause suburban feuds. Enough to cause rural feuds. “Bud,” she said, “all the guards and the precautions outside, it’s not just because of spies, is it? The villagers in Rattlesnake complained about you. How much of a threat are they?”

  Warren held his sandwich halfway to his mouth, staring. “They told you that much? You are good at your work. They don’t let strangers down there. No one but Vanderhooven, and him not often.”