Stone Junction

by Jim Dodge

  The Chevy pickup with camper was where it was supposed to be, keys taped under the dash, a small toolbox on the front seat. The sight cleared Daniel’s head. There was work to do in the logical world. He opened the toolbox and found, on top, already snapped together, a ratchet, extension, and a half-inch socket.

  The bolts on the front differential were loose. Lying on his side, he spun them off, then lifted the cover. The empty differential had been lined with mink. Daniel stared, then started to laugh. He couldn’t stop. Finally, choking, he had to crawl out from under the truck and get up on his hands and knees. It took a minute to catch his breath, and when he shimmied back under the truck with the pouch he tried to ignore the mink lining and concentrate on the task at hand. He took the Diamond from the pouch, marveling again at its light, noticing that the spiral flame wasn’t visible. Now he felt certain he could only see the spiral flame in his vanished state, and was tempted to check his theory. Instead he lifted the Diamond gently into the differential casing. It fit perfectly. He replaced the cover and cinched the bolts down tight. He returned the ratchet to the toolbox and picked up his harness-vest from where he’d left it on the floorboard.

  The white flag was exactly where Volta had diagrammed it, forty yards down a shallow drainage gully to the right of the road. The buried disposal drum was directly below it. He lifted the sand-covered lid without difficulty. The drum was half full of a clear, odorless liquid. He set the harness-vest on the ground, then stripped down to his gloves, dropping each piece of apparel into the vat. Shivering in the chill dawn air, he picked up the harness-vest, gave the attached suction cup an impulsive kiss, held it over the dark maw of the drum. He was about to let go when he remembered that the unused plastique and nerve gas were still in the vest’s special pockets. The disposal plan assumed he would have used them. He was deeply unsure about how they’d react with the chemicals in the drum, another product of Aunt Charmaine’s bunker industry. He removed the gas and plastique from their pockets and dropped the harness-vest into the solution. He buried the gas and plastique farther down the gully, threw his gloves and the white flag into the drum, and then repositioned the lid, smoothing sand over it till it was well concealed. Bent over, bare ass pointed at the rising sun, he shuffled backward toward the road, erasing his tracks as best he could.

  Back at the truck, he climbed inside the camper. Most of the camper was piled with cardboard boxes of God Shots religious tracts. The small makeup table was just to the left of the door near the bed, the wardrobe on hangers suspended from a ceiling hook, the makeup case under the bench. Jean had been easy on him; the face was essentially Daniel’s own, with the addition of five more years and a scar on his neck. In ten minutes Daniel was Isaiah Kharome.

  The only thing he didn’t like about Isaiah Kharome was his sense of sartorial style. He assumed it was Jean’s idea of an April Fools’ joke. The florid Hawaiian shirt, a tangle of scarlet and lime, fought the blue-and-white-checkered polyester slacks, and the wild-plum blazer clashed with them both, though he was forced to concede a subtle coordination between the white socks and white embossed lettering – MIGHTY SPIRIT TOUCHDOWN CLUB – that encircled his hand-tooled belt, the buckle of which was a large single star. He did approve of Isaiah’s wallet, chocked with credit cards and crisp twenty-dollar bills. He checked the briefcase of emergency funds stashed in the camper’s false top. He didn’t have time to count it but if it wasn’t the twenty-five thousand dollars Volta had promised, it was close enough.

  The sun had cleared the horizon when Daniel reached the highway. He stopped and tried to make sense of the cluster of road signs: Denver, Phoenix, Kansas City, El Paso. An early morning thermal lifted a dust devil off to his right. ‘Dust to dust,’ Daniel said in Isaiah’s voice, ‘ashes to ashes.’

  Phoenix sounded good. Daniel pulled out slowly and headed west.

  Volta had difficulty adding the hours he’d gone without sleep. Forty? The last eighteen, waiting for Daniel’s call, should count double, he decided. Or triple. He took another sip of coffee, then reached for the blue phone.

  Smiling Jack answered immediately.

  ‘Anything?’ Volta said.

  ‘Nothing you haven’t heard four times already.’

  ‘No sign of pursuit?’

  ‘Nada. The guard changed at six o’clock like another day at the office. Either that gas erases memory, or he didn’t use it. No alarms. No nothing. You want my opinion?’

  ‘Of course,’ Volta said.

  ‘Daniel didn’t get it. He caught the changes and canceled out.’

  ‘And he hasn’t called in because he saw the changes and thought we might be setting him up. Is that it?’

  ‘He should know better, but yeah, that’s how it looks to me, too.’

  Volta said, ‘Don’t include me in that claim; I believe he got it. He told Eddie he did, and he had something the size and shape of the Diamond in the pouch. It wasn’t his lunch.’

  ‘It might have been sand. Eddie said he just pointed at it and gave him a thumbs-up sign. Eddie was flying balls-to-the-wall. He admits he just glanced at the pouch. I mean, maybe Daniel can’t admit that he missed, that he––’ Smiling Jack stopped. ‘Hang on, Volt, I got something on the red line.’

  Volta waited, certain what it would be.

  Smiling Jack returned. ‘Well goddamn, good thing we didn’t get to betting on it. There’s a shit-storm of commotion around the tunnel, and some jets just got off at the air base.’

  ‘They discovered it’s gone,’ Volta said.

  After a long pause, Smiling Jack asked almost angrily, ‘So how the fuck did he do it? No gas, no charge – I mean, where was it, on a silver platter in front of the tunnel?’

  ‘No telling,’ Volta said. ‘He might have seen a way to get by the alarms. That only leaves the lock and the guards. Maybe they all fell asleep, or were in one place shooting dice or doing drugs. Daniel’s sharp and resourceful.’

  ‘So we’re back to why he hasn’t called.’

  ‘Full circle,’ Volta agreed.

  ‘Listen,’ Jack said earnestly, ‘you’re a lot closer to him than me. What do you think? Think we got burned?’

  ‘I think I’m going to wait till he calls.’

  ‘He might not. I have a couple of other bad thoughts.’

  Volta said, ‘Let’s hear them all.’

  ‘They may have already nailed him. Quietly, of course.’

  ‘It’s possible. But they either don’t know what they have, or the sudden excitement around the tunnel is a ruse.’

  ‘Or maybe Shamus found him. If our information is good, he’s been looking.’

  ‘I know, but Shamus would’ve had to get extremely lucky, or one of us in close betrayed him.’

  Smiling Jack sighed. ‘So, you wait for a call. What about the rest of us?’

  ‘Get some sleep. In the morning, pick up Jean in Alamogordo. Chisholm Smith and Davy will be with him. Try to find out what happened in the vault and what the CIA is going to do about it. I imagine whatever they do will be done quietly – no APBs or sweeps involving state and local law. Probably a few hundred of their own agents, all with no idea who they’re looking for. If nothing else, we’ll find out how they handle such a problem. You know where help is if you need it.’

  ‘And you’ll wait for him to call?’

  ‘He’ll call. We might not like what he has to say, but he’ll call.’

  THE THERAPEUTIC JOURNALS OF JENNIFER RAINE APRIL 1

  My name is Jennifer Raine, Emily Snow, Wanda Zero, Zephyr Marx, April Fulsome, Annabelle Lee. I have a private unpadded room here with dull green walls, a radio, and all the Thorazine I can eat. I don’t like Thorazine. It makes me feel like a package of frozen broccoli in the supermarket. That’s why they put me here. Or perhaps I should say that’s way I took off my clothes in the Safeway and destroyed a few aisles of alleged food. I had to. I could have gone over into lightning. It’s all packaging, you see.

  I do have to say this
is the best of all the hospitals I’ve been in, especially since it’s for my own good.

  Doc, you’ve got to learn to take a joke. It was an April Fools’ joke when I said in answer to your question, nothing particularly painful happened when I was eleven except maybe getting raped by the North Bay High football team right after my older brother hung himself in the garage wearing my panties. I expected you to laugh when I said April Fool. I didn’t realize you had all that repressed anger and hostility. Don’t you think I know that you can’t help me if I won’t help myself? Why else would I joke with you? Though I appreciate your efforts, I don’t need help. I need time. Time and space and a few breaks, Doc, that’s what I need.

  But now you’ve got me feeling guilty. So I’ll tell you what happened when I was eleven, but I have to make this fast because I can only tell it on April Fools’ Day and it’s almost midnight now.

  Twelve years and a month ago my father and I took our little aluminum boat and went rowing on Lake Pauline. A storm came up fast like they do in March, and Dad was rowing for shore when we got hit by lightning. He was rowing, rowing, rowing (not merrily, not gently) and suddenly everything was absolutely white and my spine was on fire. No sound at all. No rumble, crack, boom, or blast. Just that silent solid endless alabaster flash and then nothing at all.

  When I came to, it was almost dark. My father was lying twisted facedown in the bow, his left hand trailing in the water. He was dead. I’d seen a film in Junior High Health and Hygiene on mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and I tried, I tried so hard, breathing into him until I was exhausted. I can taste the tobacco and licorice in his mouth, smell his burnt hair, see Mia sitting where I had been, watching, struck dumb. Watching when I gave up and held his shock-white face to my breast as we drifted through the rain.

  Do you understand why she’s like a daughter to me now? When I kiss her goodnight after another day of nursing the wind, setting the empty egg, I can taste the ashes on her lips. And I kiss her goodnight every night. It takes courage to do that, Doc. It takes love. I’m not crazy.

  My name is Jennifer Raine. Waitress. Typist. Would-be poet. Clerk. I have an imaginary daughter named Mia. When we were eleven years old, God exploded in my heart.

  April Fools, Doc. April Fucking Fools. APRIL 2 (12.04 a.m.)

  No more joking now. My mother was there when they brought the boat in with Dad and me and Mia. For almost a month she just screamed, so they put her in a padded cell and finally she quit screaming and started begging. Begged them to bring her laundry. They finally had enough sense to bring her a big hamper of clean clothes. And that’s what Mom’s been doing for every waking moment of twelve years – sorting laundry. She sorts it into colors and then puts it back in the hamper and sorts it again. And every few minutes she stops and looks up with this happy expectancy and says, ‘Is that you, Philip?’ Every time I go to see her it’s the same. She’ll smile at me very sweetly and say, ‘No, I’m sorry, you couldn’t be my daughter because you haven’t been born yet.’

  And I beg her to imagine me, please, imagine me. But she can’t.

  At a roadside flea market near the New Mexico border, Daniel handed out a whole box of God Shots magazines and impulsively purchased a dark green bowling-ball bag, bowling shoes, and a bowling shirt. The shirt was the same verdant green as the bag. On the back, in yellow letters, it read ‘Thrice Construction.’ Small script above the front pocket spelled out ‘Herman.’

  He stopped to rest several hours later. He pulled off on a dirt side road and slipped the Diamond out of the false differential into the bowling bag. He climbed in the camper. He stared into the center of the jewel for nearly ten minutes, concentrating, but couldn’t see the spiral thread of flame. He vanished. The diamond vanished with him. The spiral flame was immediately visible. He emptied his mind and focused on the Diamond-center flame. He felt himself filling with light, becoming light, and he used the light to fuel his concentration. When he reappeared, he felt amazingly refreshed. Not until he put the Diamond back in the bowling bag to ride up front with him and stepped from the camper did he realize the moon had risen. He’d vanished for at least three hours. ‘No limits,’ he shouted to the moon. ‘Hang on, honey, I’m coming to see you.’

  Volta hung between trance and sleep. He could sense Daniel but not strongly enough to locate him. The only way Daniel could have taken the Diamond was to make it vanish with him, and he would have had to do it quickly. Perhaps he’d imagined it vanished with him. Perhaps the Diamond had been amenable. Or hungry. He couldn’t imagine Daniel looking into the Diamond. He wasn’t sure if the whisper of sense he felt emanated from Daniel or from some ghost-echo of his own fears that Daniel had been, at best, deranged, or, at worst, claimed by the Diamond. Daniel had powers. Indisputably had powers. But he was not as powerful as the Diamond.

  Melvin Keyes, CIA Southwest Supervisor and a sharp-tongued man himself, would have enjoyed the sledgehammer wit of the director’s dressing-down if he hadn’t been its recipient. The director’s rage dwindled at last, and now, as they stood in the looted vault, the director was reduced to repeating the list of Keyes’s offences, less in anger than disbelief. ‘And you had the entire security forces of every intelligence office in this country at your inept disposal, on an unlimited budget, and they, or he, or she, or goddamn it – excuse me if I sputter – stroll right in and steal the diamond and walk right out. Pardon me, Mr Keyes, if I just can’t fucking believe it!’

  Keyes, eyes averted, waited till he was sure the director had finished. ‘Sir, I share your distress, but consider the evidence: four checkpoints, cameras, laser detection grid, five-pound trip pressure alarm on the floor, double-key and coded lock untouched – it simply was not humanly possible to steal that diamond undetected. Therefore, I’m forced to conclude we’re dealing with an alien species, one whose technology far surpasses ours. Consider, too, that our scientists have never seen anything like this diamond. Geologists, physicists, they all agree the probability of its occurring naturally is incalculably small. I think it was an information-gathering device of some kind, and they simply took it back.’

  ‘They?’ the director curled his lip.

  Keyes wasn’t anxious to say it again. He looked at the vault floor. ‘I think we’re dealing with alien beings, sir. Nonhumans.’

  The director said icily, ‘I don’t believe in little green men. Nor does the president.’

  Keyes gave up. ‘Well, if it was taken by humans,’ he said crisply, ‘they’ll be caught. We have two hundred agents in the field as of this moment, another fifty on their way, and a number of specialists working on forensics and interviewing the guards.’

  ‘Wonderful!’ the director said, his sarcasm so massive a D-8 Cat couldn’t have budged it. ‘The agents will remain under your questionable command for the time being. However, after my humiliating conference with the president and the NSC this morning, Dredneau has been called in to take charge of the investigation.’

  Keyes was incredulous. ‘Paul-Paul Dredneau? Sir, the Diamond is classified as a Zero-Access Red-Line Secret! Dredneau is a Canadian –a French Canadian at that. Not to mention he’s crazy, a schemer, a fraud, a notoriously––’

  ‘As the president ordered,’ the director cut him cold, ‘Dredneau is in charge of the investigation. If you’d done your job, the president and NSC wouldn’t have required his services.’

  ‘With all due respect, sir, in my estimation the man is a show-boating fool, untrustworthy, and utterly incompetent.’

  It was Dredneau himself, standing at the open vault door, who murmured, ‘Your estimations, Mr Keyes, have already proven their considerable poverty.’

  Dredneau was dressed in early Alfred Noyes: a long claret duster, a spotless white shirt with a ruffle of lace at the chin, doeskin trousers, calf-length boots of Spanish leather, and silk gloves – also spotlessly white – that he ordered by the dozen from Paris. Barely an inch over five feet and slightly bow-legged, he looked less like a nineteenth-century hi
ghwayman than a jockey turned fop.

  The director, momentarily taken aback, offered his hand in greeting. ‘Dredneau. I’ve looked forward to meeting you.’

  Dredneau, ignoring the director’s extended hand, bowed. ‘Paul-Paul Dredneau at your service, sir. I understand’ – he glanced pointedly at Keyes – ‘that your security has failed, resulting in the regrettable loss of a most valuable gem.’

  ‘It was stolen sometime between noon of the thirty-first and 1 a.m. on April second. As you may have already been briefed, it was seemingly stolen from a locked vault without tripping or bypassing five separate and quite sophisticated alarm systems.’

  ‘How perplexing,’ Dredneau simpered. ‘Fortunately, I was in New York concluding a nasty case involving a planned terrorist attack on the city’s Easter Parade – now foiled, thank goodness – and I was able to respond with alacrity to your president’s urgent summons. But before I bring my faculties to bear on the case at hand, allow me to introduce Roshi Igor, my assistant, bodyguard, and valet.’

  Neither the director nor Keyes had noticed Igor standing outside the vault door, a surprising oversight. On hearing his name, Igor entered. Four hundred pounds of dense muscle, he had wrists like mahogany four-by-fours protruding from his frayed coatsleeves and a neck like a redwood stump. Igor’s eyes, though, were more imposing than his bulk. Set close beneath the Neanderthal slope of his brow, they looked like the bore end of a sawed-off double-barreled twelve-gauge.

  Dredneau said, ‘Igor only recognizes his name and a small number of commands, but he is extremely sensitive to any feelings of rejection, hostility, and – No!’ he barked, as the director offered his hand to Igor. ‘I don’t allow him to shake hands. He has no conception of his strength. I’ve seen him turn a baseball into a frisbee.’