River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy)

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  “It’s possible,” Ginny agreed. “Take a closer look, Wade. Please. Maybe you saw him there once or twice.”

  Hardly able to focus, Wade thumbed through the photos. Ginny’s father was tanned, slight but strong, with a ready smile. He looked like an academic, albeit one happier outside than in a classroom. There were a couple more pictures with her in them, and some included a dark-haired woman that Wade guessed was her mother.

  “I don’t know. Maybe, I guess, but nothing that left an impression on me. I’d swear that this is the first I’ve ever seen him.”

  She gathered her photos together and tucked them back into the envelope. “I figured it was a long shot,” she said, her usual smile gone now. “I just hoped, since you said you spent a lot of time there…”

  “I understand, Ginny. I wish I could be more help. That was a long time ago, though, and I can’t be sure enough to say either way.”

  “Yeah.” She retied the little string. “I appreciate you giving it a try, Wade. I owe you. I owe you a couple.”

  He waved away her thanks. “I didn’t do anything.”

  Putting the envelope back into her backpack, she stopped suddenly and looked at him. “One more thing,” she said. “There’s a word that kept cropping up in his last several letters and notebooks. It’s not in the language of any of the Native Americans who lived there, that we know of, and I’ve never been able to figure it out. But maybe it’s just some kind of local slang. Have you ever heard of kethili?”

  Once again, Wade felt like the room turned inside out with him in it. “Doesn’t sound familiar.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah. I mean, maybe I’ve heard it, but I don’t remember it.”

  That much was true, but at the same time, it was familiar. The fluorescent light in the bathroom said it behind its buzzing, the rush of traffic outside the window repeated it all day and night. The first time he remembered hearing it was that evening he had dinner with Molly, at the mall. She had said it, or he had, a nonsense word neither of them understood. And then again this morning, at the coffee shop, he had heard it again, then thought he must have imagined it. This had been right before he’d spilled coffee on the floor, and the embarrassment of it had made him forget to ask Molly about it.

  Kethili?

  He almost said it out loud, but then he realized that Ginny was staring at him. He didn’t like it. She knew something.

  He blinked and she lay dismembered on the hotel room floor, her head, eyes open, upright on the bed, blood leaking from the neck, her chest cavity cracked open, guts scooped out through smashed ribs like a pumpkin emptied for a jack-o-lantern. He blinked again, covered his eyes with his hand until the image passed.

  “You should go,” he said, his tone terse. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help you, but you need to get out of here now.”

  “Okay,” she said, eyeing him warily. She zipped her backpack, drew on her jacket, and shrugged through the shoulder straps. He didn’t like making her think he was a crazy man, but that word, kethili, had prompted a flood of conflicting emotions.

  It terrified him. At the same time, he felt a growing excitement, anticipation of some significant, wonderful event.

  And he felt something else, too…a festering, malevolent fury—at Ginny and everyone else—that would explode if he held it in much longer.

  “You need to go.” He spoke with greater urgency now, demanding instead of suggesting. “Now.”

  “Yeah,” she said. She appeared frankly afraid of him by this point. He didn’t blame her a bit. She kept her distance and made for the door. “I hope you feel better,” she added as she left.

  When the door closed, the flood of barely restrained violence that had welled up inside him passed as suddenly as a summer cloudburst.

  What it left behind might have been worse—agonized self-doubt, combined with a hefty serving of self-loathing. He had apparently become a murderer, somehow, without knowing it. This time, he’d been fully conscious of the urge to kill, almost powerless to resist it. This must have been the way his father felt that awful summer. Maybe that murderous urge had lived inside him for years, kept in check only by releasing it in increments against his wife and son, like steam escaping from a pressure cooker.

  He was gripped by a sudden need to see Byrd, to find out if Byrd recognized the word Ginny had mentioned. Kethili. What did it mean, and why did his vision go red when he thought it, as if he were looking at the world through a scrim of blood?

  He found his keys and wallet and made it to his car, unsteady on his feet, afraid that at any moment he would lash out against whomever was closest. The hospital was only minutes away, but the drive seemed to take forever.

  Fortunately, when he stumbled into Byrd’s room, no one was there with Byrd. His friend had been drowsing, but he snapped to attention when Wade entered. “What’s up, man?”

  Wade hadn’t planned this far ahead, didn’t know what to say. “I…I think I’m in trouble, Byrd. I’m losing it.”

  “What? You look fine to me.”

  “I’m a long way from fine. I can’t even remember what fine was.”

  “Wade, slow down. What’s the matter?”

  “I…I can’t tell you, Byrd. I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

  Byrd stared at him, concern evident in his eyes. “Wade, bro, your trouble is my trouble. Tell me.”

  Wade started to, wanted to, but he checked himself. “Just tell me. The word kethili. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “Say again?”

  “Kethili.” It tasted like sweet wine on Wade’s tongue, and like the bitterest poison. “Kethili,” he repeated.

  A shrug. “Never heard it. Is it Swahili or something?”

  “I have no idea. It’s just a…Never mind, Byrd. Go back to sleep. Forget I came.”

  “Wade, man, if there’s anything I can do for you, just say so. Anything.”

  “I will.” Wade swung back toward the door, not wanting to look his friend in the eye any longer. “I will, Byrd.”

  “I’m tired, man. I’m scared, too. But mostly I’m just so tired.”

  “I know. I’ll hit the cafeteria, grab some food, and come back. You want me to bring you anything?”

  “One of the cafeteria ladies. Especially if they have any with blue hair. Like that one in eighth grade, remember her?”

  “I remember, Byrd.” He did, too. One with blue hair, one with bright orange, like rust on iron, both wearing hairnets, dishing up the green beans and mashed potatoes and fish sticks.

  “Get out,” Byrd said softly.

  “What?”

  “Karl Marx, 1883. He said, ‘Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough!’”

  “You’ve got plenty left to say,” Wade said.

  “Can you hand me that oar, Wade?” Byrd stifled a yawn, then let another escape. Wade got the broken oar from the corner, gave it to him. Byrd clutched it, feigned paddling for a moment.

  “I love the feel of it in my hands, you know? The promise…it can take you anywhere.”

  “Yeah,” Wade agreed. “We had some good times out on the water.”

  He looked back at Byrd, but his friend was already asleep, head tilted back on the pillow, mouth hanging open, oar still gripped in his fists and lying across his chest.

  On his way to the cafeteria, shoes squeaking on the tile floors, Wade realized that the more he said the word aloud, the more familiar it sounded. Kethili. Maybe it meant nothing to Byrd, but it did to him. It meant a lot.

  If only he could remember why.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Molly wouldn’t have said that visions of Pulitzers danced in her head, exactly. Maybe they did in Frank Carrier’s head. In truth, she was disappointed with what she had been able to get from Wade. He’d given her the basics of his capture and escape, but not a whole lot of detail about what had happened during his imprisonment. Torture, he’d said, but he had glossed over that. She still didn’t know w
hat he was fed, or where he slept, or much of anything else concrete. And when she’d tried to press him for more details, after her little thought-experiment, he had put her off, seemingly desperate to return to his hotel room.

  Frank wanted her to start on the story anyway, convinced that she had enough exclusive material, and that Wade could fill in the rest later.

  She sat at her desk, her scribbled notes open beside her computer, and typed madly. From Wade’s description, she tried to put herself on the scene, in the car as gunmen surrounded it and assassinated the driver, in the underground cell. She tried to taste the fear that he must have lived with all those days, not knowing if he’d ever see sunlight again.

  This could be the biggest story of her career—Frank swore it was, anyway—but she couldn’t keep her mind from drifting. Thinking of Wade and fear made her envision other things, which blurred out the monitor and made her fingers lose their place on the keyboard.

  Wade’s fear had tasted as sweet as strawberry ice cream on a hot summer Sunday. But it wasn’t enough. It was a spoonful, and she wanted buckets.

  Molly closed her eyes and saw people filling the streets of El Paso with panic in their eyes and unvoiced screams dying on their tongues. A wall of fire as tall as a mountain swept down from the hills, down toward the river, engulfing everything in its path. Homes crackled, then exploded, windows shattering outward, gas lines rupturing and shooting geysers of flame into the air. Terrified people tried to run, but as the blaze neared them it sucked the moisture from their bodies. Blood boiled in their veins, eyeballs popped in their sockets; dry, desiccated corpses clacked to the ground like dominoes thrown down in a rage.

  She tried to focus on the individuals who starred in her mind-movies, hoping she could taste the terror more clearly in smaller doses. A woman racing down a steep road with two children in tow, not much more than toddlers. Slavering monsters chase them, teeth gnashing, claws clicking on pavement, hot saliva splashing the street and sizzling where it strikes.

  Kethili

  A man caught in the grip of nightmare as a truck tears through a stop sign without slowing, smashing into his car, his wife and daughter wailing as twisted steel and spraying glass split their flesh, pierce their organs, and try as he might, he can’t do anything to stop it.

  Kethili-cha

  Another man, younger, barely into his twenties, swimming against the rising tide of a ferocious river. He puts his all into it, reaching out with his hands, kicking with his legs, pulling and tearing at the rushing current. Then Molly sees why—he’s after a little boy he saw fall into the water from a small bridge rocked by the flow. He spots a sneaker—black and orange and white—and he thrashes through the water and gets a grip on it, but the sneaker is empty, water running from it, and the boy is gone.

  Kethili-cha riai tururensti ka—

  “Everything okay, Molly?”

  The moment broken, Molly blinked away her visions. Frank had parked himself on the corner of her desk, arms folded over his chest, shirtsleeves rolled up and tie loosened, the very image of the hardworking newspaper editor.

  “What the fuck, Frank? I mean, what the fuck? I’m concentrating and you come along and throw out your shit, right in my face?”

  He took a step away from the desk, physically reacting to her verbal assault. “Whoa, Molly. I was just asking. You looked…I don’t know, strained. I was worried about you.”

  “Just…don’t. Don’t you worry about a thing, Frank.” Molly pushed her chair back from the desk, leaving the computer on, the story only partly written, a partial word, “captivi” on her screen with the cursor blinking at its end. “Or worry, if you want, but you’re not worried about the right things. Whatever you’re worried about, that’s not what you have to fear.”

  The Voice newsroom had gone utterly silent. People sat with fingers frozen over keyboards, phones pressed to their ears, trying to watch without looking like they were watching, except in the cases of those who frankly gawked. Molly wiggled into her coat, grabbed her purse, and stormed out. The last thing she heard was someone saying the word “rehab.”

  But Molly McCall was beyond thoughts of rehab. Substance abuse had nothing to do with her behavior.

  It was all about power now. Power and destruction and violence, the holy trinity of her new, improved world view.

  Kethili-cha.

  THIRTY-NINE

  “I’ve done some digging, like you asked,” Robb Ivey said. Truly had taken the call in his Las Cruces hotel room, sitting on the bed with his feet up. “I’m still not sure why, after what happened to Millicent.”

  “Maybe because you understand that wasn’t my fault, and you know I’m trying to make it right, and you’d be helping me,” Truly said. He’d already had a version of this conversation with Robb, as well as with everyone else in his group.

  “I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. The other, of course, is to wonder if I’m putting my head on the chopping block just by talking to you.”

  “Nobody’s been hurt for talking to me, Robb. I hadn’t talked to Ingersoll in months. Something’s happening, and it’s bigger than who talks or doesn’t talk to me.”

  A heavy sigh. “I know. It’s just all got me nervous.”

  “You’re not the only one.” Truly wanted him to get to the point—handholding was the part of the job he enjoyed the least, and he wasn’t even on the job anymore, officially speaking. He had asked Robb to research Victorio Peak, because with his large collection of occult literature he might be able to find out things that wouldn’t turn up in a Google search. “Were you able to learn anything?”

  “That’s a strange part of the world,” Robb said. “I haven’t come up with a lot, but I found enough to suggest that there’s more going on there than meets the eye. More than the government probably wants to admit.”

  “We do keep a lot of secrets.”

  “I keep forgetting you’re part of the government.”

  “Maybe not for much longer. What’d you learn?”

  “For starters, there are a bunch of caves out there. Early races in the area, the ancestral Puebloans and Apache among them, used them long before the Europeans came along. The peak is named for an Apache war chief. They considered the mountain a special place of power, not one of their holiest sites, but an important one. After the Spaniards came, they used the caves as well. Eventually, long after the United States took the land from Mexico, it was explored again, in the 1930s and ’40s. This time, explorers found a room containing twenty-seven skeletons, lined up in a row, like dancers or warriors. Exploring further—I’m not sure I’d have been willing to, after that—they found old Spanish silver and gold coins, weapons, armor, and so on. And beyond that, they found a huge room full of crudely formed gold bars. Left over from the Spanish occupation, they believed, and some of them may have dated back earlier than that.”

  “What, they think the Apache shaped gold into bars?”

  “Who knows? There might have been trade between Apaches and Mayans, or Puebloans and Mayans. Or maybe Apaches just stole it from Spaniards. Either way, gold could have wound up in the hands of Apaches who hid it there. The claim was that there was a lot of it. I’m talking tons and tons, not just a few bars here and there.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “That’s the curious thing. The discoverers kept it in the family, for the most part. They used it like a bank, drawing enough out to live comfortably, knowing that there was plenty more. But in the late thirties, trying to open up a passageway with dynamite, they accidentally brought a chunk of mountain down on top of the main entrance to the treasure room. Now the interior was full of gold and they couldn’t get to it. They kept pulling out little bits and pieces that had been stashed in other rooms, but that big haul was out of reach, no matter what they tried.

  “Then the army moved in. During the Second World War, they took over the whole area as a bombing range, and the original family was denied access. Some military people expl
oring the mountain found treasure in another, previously unexplored room, guarded by a Spanish cross on the wall. One of them took a bar to military authorities in nearby Fort Bliss, figuring that since the mountain was on army-controlled land it would require an official government expedition to bring out any substantial amounts.”

  “What happened to him?” Truly asked.

  “Within a few days, he was transferred to the Pentagon. Or at least that’s the story his friends were told, although they never heard from him again. There are rumors that other bars surfaced now and then, but anyone who asked too many questions—or worse, tried to get in and see for themselves—developed sudden health issues.”

  “Health issues?”

  “Like, murder threats. Maybe actual murders.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “One man, an airline pilot, claimed that CIA agents threatened him and his family.”

  “Well,” Truly said, “that part I can believe.”

  “Here’s the kicker. According to various reports, in the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson and former Texas governor John Connally spent ten days at the peak, after which modern excavation equipment was brought in. Theoretically, many tons of gold bars were removed from the mountain and shipped aboard military aircraft to Johnson’s ranch in Texas, then to Zurich, where it was sold to a Middle Eastern buyer.”

  “That’s pretty far-fetched, Robb.” He had seen some of the same information online, but only at sites of questionable authenticity.

  “I’m not saying I vouch for it, only that it’s out there. There’s a lot of detail in some of the more esoteric journals—the kind that lean toward huge conspiracy theories, especially. For your purposes, I think the important thing to know is that the Native Americans considered the mountain a place of immense spiritual power, and that even today, for whatever reason, it’s one of the most heavily guarded spots on the White Sands Missile Range. The public can visit a missile museum on the post, and certain people, like members of the press, can get tours of some of the other areas. Nobody gets to go to Victorio Peak, though, without high-level clearance.”