Chapter Six
1
Ken’s house—a wood-framed bungalow at the edge of Westmorland, on a corner lot framed by scraggly oleander but also sporting some particularly healthy, jagged-leafed ocotillo that bloomed flame red in spring—was quiet that night. The smell of the steak he’d broiled still hung heavy in the kitchen. But in the bedroom he’d converted into a kind of den, he had a window open and a fan going so the air just carried the rich, fertile odor common to most of the Imperial Valley.
The fan was the only sound Ken could hear, drowning out even the insistent buzz of insects from outside. He’d had the TV on for a while but couldn’t take it anymore. Either there were entertainment programs that didn’t seem to have any connection to the world as he now knew it, or there was bad news. The President had addressed Congress and made demands that were unlikely to be met. Planes and ships had been deployed to the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan’s ruling religious zealots, the Taliban, had so far refused to turn over Osama bin Laden, and Ken had the distinct impression that the world was slipping toward a war that could never really be won.
As much as he was opposed to the idea of declaring a war that could ultimately result in the deaths of tens of thousands, if not more, he thought that part of what bothered him was just the knowledge that the world had been changed permanently, and no one, including him, had any idea what the new one would look like.
Ken’s job was keeping the people of Salton Estates safe. He took it very seriously. At night, emergency calls went to the main Sheriff’s office in El Centro, but Ken was on call twenty-four/seven. Suddenly, though, Americans everywhere were faced with a threat he couldn’t do anything about.
He logged on and checked out some of the chat on the Internet for a while, but every chat room he went into was the same. People talked about the war, about the attacks, about their anger and feelings of helplessness. Frustrated, he signed off after just a few minutes and sat in the dark den. Bookshelves surrounded him, mostly containing the Western history books that were his only real hobby, but somehow he didn’t think he could focus on reading right now.
Carter Haynes, the real estate developer, had compared his office to Mayberry. Ken was old enough to remember having watched Andy Griffith as a boy, and he had always been fond of Andy’s basic approach to law enforcement. He’d been the sheriff who refused to carry a gun, and yet he managed to keep the peace in Mayberry. Ken knew that had been fictional, though with some basis in reality, and a very different time and place. He carried a gun because he had to, and he would use it if necessary to keep the peace in Salton Estates. So far he hadn’t needed to. He hoped that would continue to be the case.
But not only was there terror in the skies, he now knew there was a killer on his own turf. Shortly before leaving to meet Haynes up at the Slab, he’d had two disturbing phone calls. One was from Henry Rios up in Mecca, confirming that there had now been a missing person’s report filed—a young lady named Lucia Alvarez, who went by Lucy, was missing, and she matched the description of the victim in the snatch job Henry’s eyewitness had reported. The other call was from Risa Emerson in the coroner’s office. She had confirmed that the skull Billy had taken down had come from a female human, who was certainly the victim of a homicide. The victim had taken a .45 slug in the back of the head at short range. She would keep working on it, she promised him, and she’d let him know more when she could. But she wanted him to know right away that he had a murder on his hands.
Tomorrow, the fire pit would become a crime scene. He could have done it tonight, but to what purpose he didn’t know—by the time Risa had called, it was already burning. By morning it would be cool enough to look at.
He switched on a floor lamp and picked up the Stegner novel again. He knew he’d have a hard time sleeping tonight. Nights like this were the worst, the kind that made him feel Shannon’s loss like a man sometimes feels pain in a long-since amputated arm. That was the first thought that struck him on that Tuesday morning when he watched the planes slamming into the World Trade Center again and again—that the people who had loved ones in the twin towers were the ones who were truly going to suffer, going to sleep alone and waking up alone and always, always, remembering what it had been like to lie in bed listening to the one you love breathing beside you.
The day he lost Shannon had been a magic day, too. He’d tasted it as soon as he’d awakened, thick as a mouthful of blood, charged like an electric current in his brain.
It was in 1989, in the spring. The kind of April day when the locals in San Diego try to skip work and go to the beach, because they know that when the tourists come in June, the beaches will not only be overcrowded but socked in with low clouds, overcast for most of the day. He was a cop then, getting up in years but still able to buckle his duty belt on every day, able to keep up with all but the fittest of the young breed. A Montana native, he’d settled in San Diego after Vietnam and had met his wife there.
Shannon taught fifth grade in a public school in Chula Vista, but now it was spring break and Ken worked a night shift, so they were spending time together running errands. On this sunny morning, they had gone to a suburban supermarket and bought bulging bags of groceries for a barbecue later in the day. Ken carried several rustling plastic bags to the car, but Shannon had stopped to chat with one of the cashiers. He had known all day that something strange would happen, something close to miraculous, because that’s what it meant when he could taste the magic. He waited for it with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension—more the former than the latter, because generally when the magic came it proved helpful, a positive thing.
On this occasion—and all these years later, he remembered it as clearly as if it had just happened moments before, the pictures as sharp in his mind as HDTV—he had stopped at the trunk and turned back to see where Shannon was, and he saw her, just stepping off the curb with a grocery bag cradled in her arms, still laughing at something the checker had said.
He saw Shannon there, and he saw the truck, an eighteen-wheeler with the logo of the supermarket on its side, engine roaring as it picked up speed, bearing down on Shannon.
The bags fell from his hands and he turned to run toward his wife. But then the truck sped past her and he saw Shannon emerge on the other side, bag still in her hand, a funny half-smile on her face, as if she was saying, “That was a little close, wasn’t it?” the way she would.
But a moment later, he realized that the magic was showing him things that weren’t there, because the truck hadn’t passed by. It was still closing on her, and now he saw it all in slow motion—the driver, face a rictus of terror, fighting the wheel and the brakes but with no results; Shannon, looking up finally at the truck and realizing that it was coming straight at her, faster than she could move. Ken ran, but the magic slowed him down, held him back, as if running through deep water or peanut butter. His arms and legs couldn’t get any speed up and he was still a dozen feet away when the truck clipped her—Shannon diving backward to dodge it, but a fender still catching her in midair, and that was enough, she was picked up and thrown into the air, and by the time Ken’s muscles worked right again Shannon was hitting the ground twenty feet away and sliding, hard pavement scraping the flesh off her cheek down to the bone.
Sixty-seven bones were broken, the doctors told Ken. Death was almost instantaneous. No one wanted him to think that she’d been alive the whole time she’d flown through the air, seeing the supermarket and the parking lot and her husband whipping around in dizzying circles as she tumbled to her death. She didn’t suffer, they told him, though they couldn’t have known.
And that didn’t even begin to speak to his own suffering.
The magic had failed him—worse, it had betrayed him. It had taken the woman he loved from him—the only woman he had ever loved. This had been no freak accident. The truck driver said afterwards that his truck seemed to have a mind of its own, that his foot had been nowhere near the accelerator, but the brake hadn’t responded to him, the wheel wouldn’t turn, there was nothing he could do to avoid hitting Shannon. Ken believed him. The magic had come back, and the magic had attacked that which was most precious in the world.
Ken didn’t respond well. He’d started drinking heavily, even on duty. He’d volunteered for risky assignments. He found himself tempting fate, leaving the squad car and walking around, alone, in San Diego’s most dangerous neighborhoods. The magic hadn’t protected him then, but something else had; fate or pure dumb luck had kept him alive long enough to get fired.
That was, finally, the event that had sent him into the desert. He couldn’t stay in San Diego. Its streets and beaches and palm trees and parks reminded him of Shannon and what they’d had together. He couldn’t get a job, and for a long time he’d just stayed in his house, in the dark, drinking and avoiding the world. Finally, though, when it seemed that he could sink no lower, when the depression threatened to rob him of every ounce of humanity, the magic came back again, for the last time until today.
That last time, it was barely noticeable—he couldn’t even tell for sure if it was a magic day or something else entirely, maybe a summer cold that left a slight metallic taste in his mouth. But on that July day, three years later, the world had seemed somehow bright and new and inviting, so he’d gone for a walk around his neighborhood. He had been inside so much that some of his neighbors probably thought he was a hermit or a myth, a story to scare kids with. That day, that glorious summer day, though, he felt renewed. He walked and walked, and didn’t stop until a sudden breeze plastered a sheet of paper to his leg. Ken reached down and peeled it off, and glanced at it before he threw it away.
It was a flyer announcing a job opening in the Imperial County Sheriff’s Office.
He went home and started packing.
2
As annoying as she frequently found Mick—and that was annoying indeed—Penny couldn’t help being a little glad that he’d thrown away the plan and joined her on the bombing range. The theory was that, with a big chunk of America’s warplanes in or on their way to Afghanistan, no one would waste ammunition by dropping bombs in the range tonight. But that was just theory, and theory sometimes had an unpleasant way of disproving itself. By tomorrow, the pilots would know there were people on the range, and any bombing activity would cease until they were found and removed. But for tonight there was always the possibility that she had made camp right on top of an intended target area. And if she was going to be blown up, she thought, some company might not be a bad thing. Even Mick’s.
They didn’t dare risk an actual fire, and Penny turned down Mick’s repeated suggestions that they huddle together for warmth when the night turned cool. Instead, they sat up for a while wrapped in their own sleeping bags, talking under an enormous canopy of stars.
“They don’t give a damn about Christ’s admonishment to turn the other cheek,” Mick said, repeating his theme for the evening. “They just want to go all Old Testament on someone’s ass, and I don’t think they really care who.”
“I don’t agree with it,” Penny countered. “But you can sort of understand the impulse.”
“To kill?”
“To try to persuade other would-be terrorists that they can’t get away with it.”
“But they were willing to die in the first place,” Mick argued. “So how does killing them teach them a lesson?”
“Like I said, I don’t agree with it.”
“I know, Penny,” Mick said, his tone softening. “You wouldn’t be here if you did. Days like this I just feel like I’m arguing with the whole world. Like I’m the only one who sees the light and everyone else is ready to spill blood just to have something to do with their hands.”
“And you’re a voice crying in the wilderness?”
Mick laughed, craning his neck to survey the empty dark around them. “Literally,” he said.
“Listen, Mick, no offense, but I’m kind of glad we’re out here where there’s no talk radio and no cable news. Do you think we can just be silent for a while, maybe get some sleep?”
“Sure,” Mick agreed. “Sure, that’s a good idea. Plenty of time to talk tomorrow, right?”
She didn’t answer, because it sounded like he’d already forgotten his promise to leave after they were set up. She didn’t want to get into another argument, though. What she really did want was silence. She wanted to commune with the wilderness, to be at peace with the velvet touch of night and the eternal flow of the natural world around her.
Ten minutes later she heard Mick’s steady breathing and knew he was asleep. She stretched out and shut her own eyes, happy to join him in that.
3
True to their word, her captors had given Lucy a bottle of water and taken off her gag long enough for her to drink it, though they’d made it clear they weren’t going to engage in conversation and would answer no questions. Then two of them had escorted her, weapons in hand, to a plastic-walled portable toilet down a short trail away from the cabin, where her hands had been freed so that she could clean herself when she was finished. She had stayed in there longer than they’d wanted, exulting in finally being able to move her arms again. Finally, they had pounded on the walls, threatening to come in after her, and she had emerged. They had cuffed her again, hands still behind her back, and they’d all gone back into the cabin.
At bedtime, she was allowed to choose whether to be face up or face down. She chose down—feeling slightly more vulnerable but at the same time not wanting to have to look at her captors. Her cuffs were removed again, and she was bound, arms extended, legs spread, to four D rings bolted to the floor, so her limbs made a big X in the center of the living room. If there had been any uncertainty as to the fate that awaited her with these men, this arrangement erased it. She would be a prisoner, a slave to their pleasures. Then, most likely, dead, since she couldn’t imagine that they’d let her walk away after they’d finished with her.
The men took shifts guarding her, beginning with the guy in the muscle shirt, who sat in the curly guy’s chair, rifle across his legs. If anyone had asked her, she’d have sworn that it would be impossible to sleep in such circumstances. But that turned out not to be the case. Sleep was a mercy, a blessing, taking her out of her situation and back into a world where things made sense, where people didn’t snatch others off the street and call them doves. She felt it coming, felt her mind begin to drift in unexpected directions, and welcomed it.
4
Harold found that he didn’t sleep much these days, a fact that filled Virginia with dread. She kept the trailer door locked at night, in case he forgot where he was and wandered off, he figured. Of course, he’d also have to forget how to open a locked door from the inside, and so far, though his memory was often bad, it hadn’t become that bad.
Still, he didn’t want to frighten her, so most nights—most nights that he remembered, anyway—he simply sat up late watching old movies or sitcoms on TV. They had a VCR and solar panels and had all the power they needed for simple things, and he hadn’t lost the ability to change channels.
For some reason that he couldn’t quite put his finger on, tonight he very much wanted to watch a war movie. One of those classics about World War II. He didn’t care from what era, or what part of the war it dealt with—Midway would be fine, as would Tora! Tora! Tora! or In Harm’s Way or The Bridge at Remagen or The Guns of Navarone. He wanted to see the camaraderie of men in combat, and preferably those fighting for what he considered a noble cause.
He loved Virginia more than he could ever express, not being very handy with words. She was the best thing that had ever happened to him, and their fifty-three years of marriage had been satisfying in so many ways he couldn’t begin to enumerate them. But she was all he had, now, and that was a lot of weight to put on one person’s shoulders.
Somewhere out there in the desert—surely at the cabin, now, sleeping off the night’s drunk—were the last men he’d faced combat with. Combat of a different kind, for a cause that was anything but noble. But still, they were men and they had carried arms together. They shared secrets and they shared history and they had placed their lives in one another’s hands, and that created an unbreakable bond.
Harold knew why he couldn’t be with them—who would trust a man with a gun who couldn’t even remember his own name half the time? Knowing the reason didn’t mean he didn’t miss it, though. He tried to remind himself that it was wrong, inhuman, what they had done together for so many years. That was not, he thought, the kind of man he was. His was the “Greatest Generation,” they were saying now, people who had willingly risked everything to go to a foreign land and fight for justice. People like that wouldn’t—couldn’t—do the things he had done. There was some kind of gap, an empty spot, in his brain or his heart or his soul, to let him willingly go along with such acts.
That, he decided, was the real reason he couldn’t sleep at night. Not just that he had gotten old and required less sleep, not even that his most strenuous physical activity these days was walking out to a lawn chair and lifting a glass of lemonade to his lips. It was the memory of the things he had done coming back to haunt him. His brain tried to shield him from it by shutting down, by turning off the memory banks, but that was only so effective. There were nights that it worked, but there were too many others, when it failed to protect him from the memory of his own crimes.
He snatched up the remote and pointed it at the TV, jamming his finger down on the channel button again and again, trying to find something, anything, that would shut off the torture his memory inflicted on him. Nothing worked, and he knew this would be a long, difficult night.