by Simon Toyne
He cut the engine and took the keys out of the ignition. “Give me five minutes, then follow me inside.”
“Five minutes? The fuck we got to wait five minutes for?”
“Because a white guy entering a room on his own, no one notices. A white guy and two Mexicans, everyone notices because it looks like a drug deal is going down and somebody might call the cops.” He opened his door and felt the dry heat of the day flood in. “So give me the five minutes, okay?”
He got out and slammed the door before Javier had a chance to say anything then walked over to a solid gray door with 22 on it. With the engine and air switched off, it would become stifling in the car fast. He’d give them maybe three minutes before they followed him in. Three minutes was all he needed.
He unlocked the door and opened it onto a dim, depressing room with two lumpy beds and an old-style wooden-clad TV. There was a kitchenette at the back leading to a bathroom—the standard layout of pretty much every motel he’d ever stayed in.
He pulled his phone from his pocket, checked the WiFi connection, then opened a Skype application, selected Home in the contacts, and raised it to his ear.
A coffin of an A/C unit rattled noisily beneath the window, moving the gray sheer curtain above it and filling the room with cool air and the smell of mildew. Outside Mulcahy could see the Cherokee with the outline of Javier in the front seat. A dark blue Buick Verano was parked next to it, covered with a fine desert dust that spoke of the miles it had traveled to end up in this nowhere hub of a place. Salesman’s car.
His old man had driven a Buick when he’d worked the roads, hawking office supplies then pharmaceuticals all over the Midwest. Mulcahy must have been only, what, ten or eleven at the time? Mom had been long gone, so it can’t have been much earlier. His pop would get him to wash and wax the car every Sunday afternoon in exchange for five bucks that had to last him through the week. He would drive him to school in the shiny car on a Monday morning then take off, heading for different states and places that sounded exotic to an eleven-year-old kid who didn’t know any better: Oklahoma City, Des Moines, Shakopee, Omaha, Kansas City. His old man would always come back late on a Friday, pick him up from his aunt’s or, later on, when it was clear Mom wasn’t coming back, some girlfriend or other, and the Buick would always be covered in dust, exactly like the Verano parked outside.
The phone connected and Mulcahy’s own voice told him he wasn’t home. “Hey, Pop, if you’re there, pick up.”
He listened. Waited. Nothing. He hung up, found a new contact, and dialed.
It connected, his dad’s voice this time. “Leave a message. I’ll call you.”
“Pop, it’s me. Listen, if you’re not at the house, then stay away. Don’t go back there for a while, okay? Call me when you get this. Everything’s fine, just . . . call me.”
He hung up. Everything was not fine. This was not how it was supposed to go. Someone had changed the script and now his father was missing. He checked the time. Tío would be wondering why he hadn’t called. Most likely he already knew. He should have told his father to go on a trip, get him out of the way, in case something like this happened, only Tío’s men would have been watching and they would have grabbed him anyway. About a year back one of Tío’s lieutenants had been turned by the Federales. He’d promised to give them a large shipment and several key players in Tío’s organization in exchange for immunity and a new life. The day before the shipment, the lieutenant had sent all his family away somewhere—and Tío had been watching. The Federales found the lieutenant and his whole family a week later, lined up and headless in a ditch along the border. The message was clear: I am watching. You will be loyal or you will be dead, and so will anyone you hold dear. So Mulcahy had left his father where he was. And now the plane had crashed and he couldn’t get hold of him and everything was fucked and he had to un-fuck it fast.
Sunlight flashed on the passenger window of the Cherokee as Javier threw it open and escaped from the oven of its interior. He was furious. Carlos got out too, head down, eyes jumping, and they shambled toward the door, doing the most piss-poor impersonation of two people trying not to look suspicious that Mulcahy had ever seen. He selected a new contact from the Skype menu and raised the phone back to his ear just as a heavy knock thudded on the other side of the door.
“It’s open,” he called out and Javier burst in.
“The fuck’s up with that, leaving us out in the car like a pair of motherfuckin’ dogs?”
The phone clicked as it connected. “Tío,” he said, as calmly as he could manage but loud enough for Javier to hear. “It’s Mulcahy.”
Javier stopped dead in the doorway, so suddenly that Carlos bumped into him from behind.
“There was a problem at the pickup.” Mulcahy was looking at Javier but talking into the phone. “The plane never showed. We didn’t collect the package. We don’t have your son.”
13
SOLOMON WALKED QUICKLY, KEEPING TO THE SHADOWS OF THE BOARDWALK and out of the sun, feeling the warm, worn timbers beneath the soles of his bare feet. He didn’t look back at the hospital. He would hear if anyone was following him.
He took deep breaths to try to calm himself, so he could think, and smelled the town all around him, paint and dust and tar paper and decay. He felt calmer now that he was out of the confines of the ambulance with its sickening movement.
Why did he dislike confinement and crave freedom so strongly?
Maybe he had been incarcerated, even though he hadn’t shown up on the NCIC. Perhaps he had been imprisoned another way.
Ahead of him the church glowed, as if it were lit from within, and towered over the surrounding buildings. There was a town hall, a museum, and a grand house partly visible behind a screen of jacaranda trees, its roof clad in copper like the church and similarly aged, suggesting it had been built at the same time. The rest of the buildings making up the street and lining the boardwalk were all variations on the same theme, souvenir shops selling the same things: flakes of gold and copper floating in snow globes; treasure maps with “Lost Cassidy Riches” written on them in old-style block letters; T-shirts with the name of the town printed in a similar style; and Jack Cassidy’s memoir stacked high in every window.
Solomon pulled his own copy from his pocket and flicked through the pages, hungry to see what else was written inside it, hoping something might spark a new memory. Apart from the dedication the only other thing he found was a single line at the end of the book that had been underlined:
I had always suspected the book contained a clue that would lead me to riches, but by the time I found it and understood its meaning it was too late for me and so I resolve to take the secret of it to my grave.
More secrets, but none that interested him. He turned back to the dedication and studied the handwriting, neat and smooth and written with a wide-nibbed pen. It appeared formal and old, but he didn’t recognize it. Maybe there were clues in the printed words. He flicked to the first page and started to read:
It is, I suppose, a curse that befalls anyone who finds a great treasure that they must spend the remainder of their life recounting the details of how they came by it . . .
He continued reading, sucking in Jack Cassidy’s story as fast as he could turn the pages, his head filling with all the images and horrors Jack Cassidy had encountered on his odyssey through the desert. The memoir was ninety pages long and he had finished it by the time he was halfway to the church. He turned to the photo on the cover again and wondered why James Coronado might have given this book to him. Perhaps he hadn’t. Perhaps he wasn’t even Solomon Creed. Except he felt that he was. The name fit and so did the jacket. That had his name in it too.
He slipped the book in his jacket and read the label stitched inside his pocket: “Ce costume a été fait au trésor pour M. Solomon Creed”—This suit was made to treasure for Mr. Solomon Creed.
This suit . . .
So where was the rest of it? Why did he have only the jac
ket? Where were his shoes? And how in Jesus’s name could he read French? How could he read English so fast, for that matter?
“Je suis Solomon Creed,” he said, and the language felt comfortable in his mouth, his accent smooth and slightly thick and syrupy—southern French, not northern Parisian.
Southern French! How did he even know that? How could he speak French and know the origin of his accent and yet have no memory of learning it or speaking it before or of ever being in France. How much of himself had he lost?
Some smaller writing was stitched on the edge of the label: “Fabriqué 13, Rue Obscure, Cordes-sur-Ciel, Tarn.”
The Tarn. Southwestern France. Cathar country. Formed in 1790 after the French Revolution. Capital Albi. Birthplace of Toulouse-Lautrec. Fine medieval cathedral there, larger even than the church he was now walking toward. Built of brick not stone.
He hit himself on the side of the head to silence the noise.
“Shut up,” he said aloud, realizing how crazy he would appear to anyone watching. He looked around. No one was. Maybe he was genuinely crazy, some delusional freak with an equally freakish mind: all this information tumbling through it like white noise and none of it any use.
“I am a crazy man.” He stated it, as if admission might be the first step toward a cure. He said it again, then repeated it in French, Russian, German, Spanish, Arabic. He hit himself on the head again, harder this time, desperate to make it all stop or coalesce into something useful. He needed to tune out the noise and focus only on the concrete things that might help him remember who he was, the things that bound him to his forgotten past—the suit, the book, the cross around his neck. Physical things. Undeniable.
He reached the end of the boardwalk, stepped out of the shadows and into the stinging heat of the sun. The church was even more impressive up close, its spire forcing his eyes up to heaven, the way ecclesiastical architecture was designed to do.
Know your place, it seemed to murmur. Know that you are insignificant and God is almighty.
There was a large sign planted in the ground beside a pathway leading up to the church with Church of Lost Commandments written across it in copper-colored letters, a reference to something he’d read in Jack Cassidy’s memoir.
He continued past the sign and down the pathway toward the church. There was a fountain over to one side with a split boulder at the center and marks on it showing where water had once flowed over the stones. He recognized this from the memoir too—water coming from a split boulder, a miracle out in the desert commemorated here by a fountain that was no longer running.
He drew closer to the door and saw the words cut into the stone above it, the first of the lost commandments the church had been named for:
I
THOU SHALT HAVE
NO OTHER GODS BEFORE ME
It reminded him of the No Guns signs posted outside the old saloon on the outskirts of town; no firearms allowed there, no other belief systems allowed here. His eyes lingered on the carved numeral, the same mark he carried on his arm. Maybe it was not an I but a number. Or maybe it was nothing at all and the church would hold no answers either.
“Let’s see, shall we?” he whispered, then passed into the cool, shadowy relief of the entrance and through the door into one of the oddest churches he had ever set foot in.
14
CASSIDY SAT BEHIND THE OAK EXPANSE OF HIS DESK, MOUTH SLACK, EYES staring up at Morgan. When the doctors had told him Stella’s cancer had not responded to treatment and she had only weeks to live, it had felt exactly like this, as if the oxygen had been sucked out of the room and what was left was difficult to breathe.
“Ramon,” he said, repeating the name Morgan had just given him.
Morgan nodded. “Ramon Alvarado. Tío’s son.”
“But—what was he . . . I mean, why was he on the plane?”
Morgan shrugged. “Some trouble south of the border, I think. He needed a fast ride out of Mexico. I didn’t ask for the details.”
Cassidy stared out of the tall window of his study and down the avenue of jacaranda trees that framed the church beyond the wall. Above the roof he could see smoke rising out in the desert. That’s what had been filling his mind until Morgan had told him what had caused the fire. Now it seemed the very least of his worries.
“But why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t think you needed to know.”
“You didn’t think I . . . but this has . . . Tío’s son! Don’t you think you should have run it by me?”
“It was a last-minute thing. I got a call. I made a decision.”
“You made a decision?”
“I didn’t have a choice, all right? When someone like Tío calls and asks for a favor, he’s not really asking. What would you have done differently? Said, ‘Sorry to hear your son’s in trouble, but we’re not going to help you’? Don’t start blaming me for this. I didn’t make the damn plane crash.”
Cassidy rose from his chair and started pacing. He looked back out at the smoke. “We need to do everything we can to speed up the crash investigation,” he said. “Get proof that it was an accident.”
“But what if it wasn’t?”
Cassidy glared at him as if he had suggested the earth was flat. “Of course it was an accident.”
Morgan took his phone from his pocket and stepped into the room. “When I went out to the crash site I nearly ran this guy down.” He held the phone out.
Cassidy took his reading glasses from the desk and the photo on the screen came into focus as he put them on. It had been taken from inside Morgan’s car, the air outside filled with grit that softened the image, though the figure of the man standing at the center was clear. He seemed to shine in the sunlight, his face gazing up at something the photograph did not show. “Who’s that?”
“He says he can’t remember, but the label in his jacket says he’s called Solomon Creed.” He swiped the screen and the picture changed. “He also had this on his arm.”
Cassidy looked at the livid red mark upon the man’s skin then at Morgan for an explanation.
“Looks like a kill tag to me,” Morgan obliged. “Cartel hit men get them to show they’ve clipped someone important. Usually they’re tattoos, but sometimes they cut themselves or brand themselves, like this.”
Cassidy looked back down at the photo as he realized what Morgan was suggesting. “You think this guy might have . . .”
“Shot the plane down? Maybe. Say he knocked it out with some missile, got caught in the blast, banged his head, and now can’t remember who he is. Or maybe he knows exactly who he is and just isn’t saying. The cartels use some pretty unusual characters as gunmen south of the border—gives the norteños something to sing about. So I don’t think the notion of an albino being used as a hit man is beyond the realm of possibility. They’re superstitious about albinos down there anyways. Hell, they’re superstitious about everything. They think the white skin shows they got divine power, like they’ve been touched by God or something. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that he might have done it. He was there, he was running away from the crash, he even said the fire was there because of him, and he’s got this mark on his arm. It’s all circumstantial, but we don’t need it to hold up in a court of law, we only need Tío to buy it. Someone is going to have to pay for his son’s death—and I don’t mean offer him cash, say sorry, and hope everything’s going to go away. Blood will have to pay for blood here, so that’s what we have to give him. We give him this guy. We give him Solomon Creed.”
Cassidy swiped the screen and stared hard at the picture of the pale man standing on the desert road. Then he shook his head and handed the phone back. “I think I should talk to Tío first, try for a diplomatic solution before we start . . . throwing human sacrifices at him. We don’t even know who this guy is. Have you run an ID check?”
“He’s not on the NCIC.”
“That only proves he’s not a criminal. What about the missing person
s channels—DMV, Social Security?”
“What’s the point?”
“The point is, we’re talking about a man’s life here.”
“No. The point is, we’re talking about several people’s lives, including yours and mine. We’re talking about the survival of this town. I don’t want to know who this guy is. I don’t need to know. But I’ll tell you something else: he had a copy of Jack Cassidy’s memoir in his pocket, personally inscribed to him by Jim Coronado.”
Cassidy felt the blood drain from him. “You think he knew Jim?”
“He says he can’t remember, but when I asked him about the book he said he felt like he was here because of Jim. He said he felt like he was here to save him.”
“Jesus. He said that?”
Morgan nodded. “Asked me how he died and whether he could talk to Holly. So, whichever way you chop it up, this guy is a potential problem for us. Or maybe he’s not. Maybe he’s actually a solution. The way I figure it, Tío’s going to find out about him sooner or later, which means he’s a dead man whatever we do or don’t do. So if we give him up, we win ourselves some loyalty points and hopefully cut ourselves some slack. And we no longer have to worry about what his connection to Jim may have been and whether that might turn into another problem for us.”
Cassidy felt sick about what they were discussing. He gazed up at the stern portrait of his ancestor. He had always felt like Reverend Jack was looking down on him, judging him and how he was running the town he had built. He had faced some tough challenges over the last few years, real tough challenges, but nothing like this. This was like Armageddon, apocalyptic—world ending.
Outside, the wail of a siren rose and he glanced up to see a cruiser come to an abrupt halt on the driveway, its spinning lights painting the oak paneling red and blue.