The judge stood. “All rise!” Jane Dark said, sensing that no one else was going to do it. The judge closed the door behind her.
“What just happened?” Denny said.
Jane Dark looked at Denise. “It’s such a small jail, perhaps you two can share a cell together, just like old times.”
The sheriff was holding up Denny from behind, like a prize buck he’d just shot. “Can’t you see the resemblance? They’re twins all right. Especially the eyes.”
Denny squirmed a bit and stared at Denise. “The judge knows you! The prosecutor knows you. It’s like they’re trying to get back at you. The whole case is rigged!”
“Welcome to Lordsburg,” the sheriff said, before yanking him away. Denny could be right; the whole system was rigged. But who or what was rigging it?
Chapter 16
Outside on Shakespeare Street, Cordelia was nowhere to be seen. Denise scanned the area for a possible ambush, just in case. Other than a few zombies over on Main Street, the coast was clear.
This truly was the summer of her discontent. She got into the Lexus and cranked on the air conditioning, turned on the Wi-Fi hot spot and opened her laptop.
Denise took a deep breath; she couldn’t do this alone. Her mom might be able to help out, she had signed the form after all, so was presumably aware of the hearing, right? Denise called the five possible American and international phone numbers for Jen Song, Attorney at Law. Instead of getting the usual endless ring and then a transfer, she learned that each number was no longer in service.
Who else could she call? Team Turquoise had beaten Jane Dark before, perhaps they could do it again.
She called Hikaru first, but he didn’t pick up. She texted him to call her. He texted her back a picture of the entrance to a military check point in the desert, with a big red circle with a white line through it. It could be Alamogordo; it could be Afghanistan. She knew enough to realize he couldn’t talk right now. One down.
She called Dew next. “I need some help on Denny’s case.”
“I’ve got a group project due this week,” her cousin snapped at her. “My friends are counting on me.”
Denise could feel a cold wind blow all the way from Las Cruces.
“I’m counting on you,” Denise said. “I’m family. Denny is family. You have like a supercomputer. You can help your family out.”
Playing the family card must have worked. “Is there anything I can do from here?” Dew asked at last.
“They’re checking my credentials,” Denise said, panicked. “They might even charge me with a crime of practicing law without a license, like every time I picked up the phone could be a new felony.”
“They can do that.”
“I still haven’t heard from my mom, maybe you’ll have better luck.”
Someone else was in the room with Dew, Denise could hear heavy footprints. “I’ll try. All your mom has got to do is renew a form or maybe call the judge. Something like that.”
“I don’t think that is all they want. They will check my mom’s signature on the forms. Remember Jane Dark? She’s back and she is that much of a bitch. And my mom won’t even return my phone calls. The only way I know she’s alive is that she keeps paying my bills.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Dew said. Had Dew hung up on her? The train whistled again. Two down, one to go.
Denise tried Rayne Herring. Unlike Dew, Rayne picked up on the first ring. She was liking her friend better than family.
“I was expecting your call,” Rayne said.
“You’re good with that,” Denise said. “You are always monitoring all the news.”
“I grew up with an Air Force colonel who did military intelligence, it’s in my blood. And she might be our next congresswoman.”
“I’ll vote for her,” Denise lied. “You’re still a private investigator, right?”
“Barely,” Rayne replied. “I’m supposed to be helping the Big Red campaign, but I’ll look for any excuse to get out of it.”
With Rayne, Denise needed to play the team card. “Remember Team Turquoise.”
“Those were good times.”
“I need you to look up some things for me,” Denise said. “Do you know anything about Lordsburg? I think I’ll need some help with this case.”
“I’ve only been there once, like ten years ago. I don’t have a good memory of the experience. What happens in Lordsburg doesn’t always stay in Lordsburg.”
Denise heard a voice say “Mommy, can I come play detective too?” and then “please, please, please” on the other end of the phone.
Denise asked, “Is that you, lovely Rita, meter maid?”
“It’s me Auntie Denise!”
“I’m home schooling her,” Rayne said. “I wish I could put her in detention right now.”
“Auntie Denise is in Lordsburg, right?” Denise heard Rita say. “I’m going on the Upbound Train this weekend to Lordsburg with grandma. I can meet my Auntie Denise then. You promised!”
“Let me think about it,” Rayne said. It was unclear who she was talking to, Denise or Rayne. “There might be a conflict in me handling this case, now that I think of it.”
“Mom you really should help Auntie Denise out with her case,” Rita said.
“Let me think about it,” Rayne said again. “I’ll have some time this weekend while Rita is away. And Rita’s going to be passing through Lordsburg with her grandmother on that damn whistle stop tour. The girl really wants to meet you.”
“I can tell,” Denise said. “I want to meet her too.”
“I told her that back in high school on Team Turquoise, you were like a psychic. She’s kinda psychic too.”
“You weren’t supposed to tell anyone about me,” Denise said.
“She’s my daughter.” Rayne paused, then said, “Well, I can get a lot more done for you, if she’s out of my hair…”
Was this a quid pro quo? Rayne was the only investigator she knew. “OK,” Denise said. “I will try to meet Rita at the Upbound Train tour when it comes to Lordsburg. I’ll show her the sights if I find any. And hopefully you can help me out with the case.”
“It’s a deal.”
They hung up.
She noticed that she’d missed a text from Hikaru.
“I’m alive, barely” was the text. He included a pic of him sitting in his cycling outfit in a rustic cabin by a fireplace, under a blanket, nursing a cup of a steaming hot liquid.
She called him immediately. “What happened?”
“I can’t say too much, but let’s just say not everyone is happy that I reached out to you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“My father, the world-famous Dr. Yu is still a big wheel and he called in a lot of favors with the powers that be, so I’m keeping my job for now.”
“Who are the powers that be?” she asked.
“You don’t want to know,” he said. “You don’t want to mess with them.”
“OK, but I do need some information. Can you help me get some information about Denny? I understand you know about his military experiences.”
“Give me a few weeks. I’m sorta on probation. But I promise I will do whatever I can to help. I promise you that I had no idea that any of this would happen to your brother. Or to you.”
“I hope we are on the same side.”
She could hear his heartbeat through the phone. “We will be. I can’t talk right now.” He hung up.
A spark came through the phone. Hikaru was blowing her an electronic kiss. He texted a new pic of a snowcapped peak, Sierra Blanca, through his cabin window.
It was getting hot inside the car, straining the air conditioning. She’d better get back to her hotel room.
Inside the Holiday Comfort, her key card took a moment to work on the 4th floor room, but she finally got int
o her room on the third try. The bed had not been made up yet.
She turned on some K-pop music on her computer and opened a browser to surf the web. Unfortunately, the web was down for the whole hotel.
It was Friday night in Lordsburg. Thank God It’s Friday?
She did her katas over and over again until she collapsed into the bed.
Chapter 17
Saturday, July 11
When Denise entered the hotel lobby at dawn for coffee, she was surprised to see Jane Dark.
“Don’t worry,” Jane Dark said, getting herself coffee from the front desk. “This is the demilitarized zone. You should know about demilitarized zones.”
Was that an off-handed remark about her Korean heritage? Denise shrugged.
“I want you to know that I’m just doing my job. Like I said, I was sent for.”
“By whom?”
“The government. That’s all I can say. We can be pals outside of court since we both have to stay here at the Holiday Comfort. I have a lot of respect for you.”
“Thanks.”
The lobby muzak played a version of the old Loverboy song “Working for the Weekend.” God, she really hated old white man music. Some weekend.
No one else came down for breakfast. They might be the only two guests in the hotel for the weekend. The Oklahoma tourists must have gone on to California, a long day’s journey into night. The Federal agents had been deployed to the border of the Federation for the night.
There was a “weekend brunch” buffet at least. Caliban had prepared a spread with omelets containing mystery meat. Looking at his boomerang, Denise hoped the meat wasn’t Kangaroo. She wouldn’t mind ostrich, however.
“Is it a boy or girl?” she asked Jane Dark.
“It’s going to be a girl,” Dark said. “I’m going to name her Jean Dark because it sounds like the French for Joan of Ark.”
“Jean Dark, Jean Dark,” Denise said, savoring an exaggerated French pronunciation of the name. “I like it.”
“I predict she’s going to save the world someday, just like her namesake. Jean Dark, Jean Dark indeed.”
“That’s a lot of pressure on your child. My cousin Dew was supposed to rule the world but that didn’t happen... yet.”
“Maybe they can rule it together. You don’t have kids, do you?”
“I don’t think that’s in the cards for me,” Denise said. “Let’s just say I’ve never even had a boyfriend.”
“What was the name of that boy on your mock trial team? He was adorable in an Asperger’s sort of way.”
“Hikaru Yu,” Denise replied.
“The scientist?”
“You’ve heard of him?”
“Yeah. I hadn’t realized that he did mock trial with you. He was in middle school then, so I didn’t make the connection with the tall, handsome scientist. Have you seen him?”
“Yeah. We just met again a few days ago.”
Jane Dark could read Denise easily. “Do you like him? I mean like him, like him?”
“Kinda.”
The two finished their coffees and left.
The internet was still down at the hotel, and the bars on her phone were weak. She saw a new Big Red Herring congressional billboard out the window. It must have sprouted over breakfast. At least the Upbound Train Whistle Stop tour was passing through town for its final stop on Sunday evening, and she’d made that deal with Rayne to see Rita. Lordsburg was literally the end of the line.
She drove to the jail to visit Denny, but apparently there were no visiting hours on weekends without an appointment. She returned to the hotel and sat in her room. The internet fluctuated in and out, so she tried to research the case. There wasn’t much to look up yet, just a one-page criminal complaint.
She finished all the research she could do. Now what? It was too hot to go outside, so she did katas for a while, first slow and then fast. She looked at herself in the mirror, she was actually getting in shape.
She even flexed. Feeling confident, she sat on her bed and Face Timed Hikaru, they talked about old times, and then school days. But whenever she wanted to talk about his interactions with her brother, he politely changed the subject.
“Give me some time,” he said. “I don’t know what I’m allowed to say yet.”
“Take all the time you need,” she lied. She saw he had his big screen TV on pause. “What are you watching?”
“An old movie called The Player,” he said. “It’s about Hollywood. My dad suggested it. He said that the military industrial complex is remarkably similar to show business. Everybody’s pitching something.”
“So is the justice system,” she said. “But I remember that movie, there was some line in that movie, I think it was said by Bruce Willis at the end. I can’t remember the line, but both Dan and Luna told me that it’s been in every story that our family has.”
“That’s very meta,” he said. “I haven’t seen Willis in the film yet, but I’ll keep that in mind when he says that line.”
“It’s a weird coincidence that you’re watching that film when it’s been so important to our family.”
He smiled. “There are no coincidences.”
She didn’t ask him to explain and they hung up. She didn’t have Netflix on her hotel TV, but thankfully, there were infinite channels so she could binge watch Korean soap operas the rest of the afternoon. Denise was hooked by the second episode. How Korean was she? She might say she was half on her mother’s side, but her mother was really half Korean and Half Latina. That would make her only a quarter Korean if she took a DNA test. Still, she could relate to the trials and tribulation. “My life is a Korean soap opera.”
At six o’clock, utterly restless, she ate dinner at Denny’s at the travel center, which at least had decent Wi-Fi for her laptop. She watched the video of her brother’s incident over and over again. Some soap opera. What was that damn line in The Player?
Chapter 18
Sunday, July 12
She could have closed down the Denny’s restaurant in Lordsburg, with coffee after coffee but Denny’s never closed of course, even here. She surfed the web and only reluctantly went back to her room after midnight and went to sleep.
Absolutely nothing happened on Sunday morning. She wasn’t allowed to visit Denny, and she couldn’t think of anything else to do. She wasn’t particularly religious, so church was out of the question. Her plan to research the case was thwarted because the internet was off and on again. A quick update on her phone warned of interrupted service because of “sunspot activity.”
Apparently, sunspots were affecting the internet all over the world, yet for some reason the sunspots affected Lordsburg worst of all that weekend.
She talked to Hikaru again and somehow the conversation switched to their favorite movies. They both favored science fiction; he liked the science and she preferred the fiction.
“We have a lot in common,” he said.
“Kinda.”
She was smiling when she hung up. Could she be falling for this mysterious stranger? It’s not like she had anyone else, ever. He was a weird scientist who was always traveling and preferred sending pictures to talking. He probably never had a girlfriend either. On her phone’s home screen, she now saw a pic of two figures cycling together through the desert. Seconds later the image was gone.
She sighed. Was there anything else to do in this town on a Sunday while she killed time waiting to see Rita? There was no local shopping of course, the Walmart in Deming was sixty miles away. She wasn’t going to drive an hour for a Walmart. It was over a hundred and five degrees, so hiking was out of the question. There was a nearby state park called City of Rocks, but that sounded well… rocky.
She briefly considered crossing the border in Palomas and shopping at the legendary Pink Store. She was the daughter of Laser Geisha Pink a
fter all. Still, she didn’t want to risk Border Patrol, especially since there were Federal agents everywhere.
The Holiday Comfort’s pool was closed for maintenance so she couldn’t swim. She hadn’t packed any books and the hyped-up K-pop beats made her nervous. She soon tired of the Korean soap operas on TV.
Restless again, she rode a stationary bike in the hotel’s gym. After an hour, she was exhausted but hadn’t gotten anywhere. She was sure that was a metaphor for something. She practiced a few moves with her staff, but quit when she almost broke the mirror.
The waiting was unbearable. She almost thought of riding the stationary bike again to pass the time. She even missed Jane Dark who must have escaped town for the day.
At five o’clock on that endless Sunday afternoon, it seemed even hotter and even brighter. Denise wondered if this day would ever end. She tried Hikaru again and they talked, mostly focusing on their respective childhoods. He’d grown up in Los Alamos where his father was a rock star in the lab’s universe. Even though Hikaru was brilliant and skipped grades, he’d lived his whole life in his father’s shadow. Dr. Yu had invented the electronic thimble, basically Star Trek technology, and was usually off on lab tours.
“I get it,” Denise said. “My mom wasn’t always there for me after she won that massive verdict. We’re the same in that respect.”
“Kinda,” they both said at the same time.
His phone beeped. “I’ve got to take this,” he said.
She knew she couldn’t call him back. It was twenty after five, at least she could head over to the Whistle Stop event which was supposed to start at six.
She didn’t want to park the Lexus out in the open by a crowded train station. It was less than half a mile walk north to the railroad “station,” that small shelter, and the sun had gone behind the single cloud in the sky. She might as well walk.
The sun came back out and it was still over a hundred degrees. So much for the dry heat. As she walked toward the small shelter where the passengers were supposed to wait, she was surprised that there was a sizeable crowd already there. This was a big deal out here in the outback—a congressional candidate on a train! It might as well have been FDR back in the forties.
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