Face Blind

by Lance Hawvermale

  In accented English, one of them said, “Please exit the car.”

  “They didn’t catch him,” Gabe said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because if they’d already bagged him, they wouldn’t be acting like the two of us are Bonnie and Clyde.” He pushed open his door. “Let’s go, Bonnie. Leave the machine guns inside.”

  Had she possessed her mother’s moxie, Mira would’ve returned the quip, but it was all she could do to work the handle and get her feet beneath her. If they arrested her, how would she get word to Luke?

  “Turn around, put your hands on the car.”

  They moved swiftly, closing in on her. A female cop patted her down, and Mira realized with profound clarity that she’d never in all of her days been searched bodily, not even by the draconian TSA agents at the airport that day she accidentally left her nail clippers in her purse. Standing here now with her palms flattened against the hot steel was too improbable to be real.

  The Spanish was like a stream flowing over smooth stones, too rapid for her to discern. But she caught the important word: pasaporte.

  “My passport’s at the church,” she said, after they let her turn around. “It’s in my bag. Everything’s in my bag. My name is—”

  “You will come with us.”

  “But my bag—”

  “You will come with us.”

  Mira glanced at Gabe.

  He shrugged. She read his thoughts: You’re the one who decided we shouldn’t try to outrun them.

  The officers bundled them into the idling Humvees without shackling them, which Mira took as a good omen. The Old Testament Noah found his hope in the dove with the olive branch, and Mira found hers in the fact that she wasn’t handcuffed and gagged. To each his own.

  No one spoke during the short ride to the mission. The Atacama had given way to a bit of vegetation, and stunted trees whipped by them on either side. The driver spoke at length into the radio. Though Mira only recognized every sixth word, she detected the tension in his voice. Whatever was happening, it wasn’t routine.

  A helicopter had landed at the church.

  The chopper was emblazoned with an emerald shield and crossed rifles. Standing in front of it was a man in uniform … along with Luke and Ben.

  The winds of peace flowed through her at the sight of her brother. She didn’t know what she’d do if they were separated. Of course any decent therapist would tell her that she was codependent as hell, but so what? No decent therapist had a twin like Luke.

  Apparently these Chilean SWAT guys weren’t going to permit a reunion. The man in uniform, while escorting Ben to Mira’s vehicle, directed Luke to the Humvee where Gabe waited. She saw Gabe and Luke shake hands, and then Ben climbed in beside her. A cop in a helmet and dark glasses slammed the door behind him.

  “Hey, sugar,” Ben said. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  “What’s going on? Where are they taking us?”

  “What’s going on is that our new friend Gabe Traylin has apparently not only stirred up a hornet’s nest, he’s put his whole damn hand inside and crushed a few of them to death. As for where we’re going … I have no idea, but I suspect the chairs will be hard and the coffee a few hours old.”

  “Is Luke okay?”

  “You mean my fellow author? Yes, he’s just about as okay as anyone I’ve ever met.”

  “Author?”

  “We’re writing a book.” Ben seemed ten years younger than when Mira had met him. “Maybe it won’t be a bestseller, but it’s damn sure the cure-all tonic.”

  Mira, mystified, put away the rest of her concerns, at least for now. Luke was safe, Ben was writing again. On the other hand, they were being driven to an interrogation room because her brother had seen the face of a madman. Mira forced herself into a placid state, despite the apparent size of this particular Lipstick Smear. For now, she had only one more question. “Did they catch him?”

  Ben didn’t have to ask who she was talking about. He shook his head.

  Mira looked out the window and wondered if their convoy was being watched by someone out there in the sand.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “Mentiras is burning, Señor Traylin.”

  Gabe wasn’t surprised. He’d spent the last forty-five minutes telling his story, and this was the first thing that Fontecilla dropped on him when he was through.

  “You have no opinion on this matter?”

  “I assume there’s no way to put out the fire?”

  “By the time our trucks arrived, there would be little left to see. So my officers, they could do nothing but watch it become smoke. As a matter of fact, they are doing this very thing as we speak.”

  Gabe imagined the destruction. The rifleman’s underground chambers would be like ovens or, more apropos, crematoriums.

  “You are lucky to be alive, yes?”

  Gabe had no reply for that. He was tired. His few hours of sleep at the church had done nothing but fill him with the spiders of bad dreams. He was hungry. His last meal had consisted of a bag of chips from the vending machine just on the other side of the room’s steel door. He was lost. They’d driven him to a city he didn’t know and escorted him to a room full of lingering cigarette smoke and poor ventilation.

  “You do not agree with that?” Fontecilla asked.

  “It wasn’t luck.”

  “No?”

  “Luke was in the right place at the right time.”

  “And you do not consider that to be luck?”

  “I consider it to be one guy saving another guy. Call it what you want.”

  “He is a remarkable young man.”

  “No more remarkable than the rest of us.”

  “I beg to differ.” Fontecilla tipped his chair back so that the front legs rose an inch off the floor, then consulted his small tablet computer. “What concerns me is his description of the suspect. A young man with such a handicap is not always able to give the details in a way that is helpful. It is called being politically correct, yes? That is what I am trying to do when I tell you that Luke could not describe the man in any helpful manner because he is … challenged mentally.”

  Gabe didn’t like where this was heading, though he knew it was inevitable. There was no way they’d let him leave this place unless he provided them with a description that he was unable to produce. He’d predicted as much, and so on a hunch he had withheld the names he’d learned. He had intentionally not mentioned the dog tags, hoping he could use them at just the right time to divert attention from the fact that he somehow hadn’t seen the face of the man who’d stood a foot away and tried to kill him. It was a story they wouldn’t believe.

  “This is a very serious and very dangerous situation, Señor Traylin.”

  “No shit.”

  “As I said earlier, you are free to contact the U.S. embassy at any time.”

  “Do I have a reason to need an attorney?”

  Fontecilla leaned forward, causing the chair legs to resound like gunshots. “I am going to make two requests of you, except neither is really a request. One, give us one more hour here so you can work with our artist, help us make a drawing of this man. Two, relinquish your passport to me and stay within the city limits for the next forty-eight hours.”

  “Stay? Stay where? I don’t even know where the hell I am.”

  “We will assign a hotel to you. The Westbrooks and Señor Cable must also remain, as they were witnesses to the alleged shooting at the science facility.”

  “Alleged?”

  “If any of this is going to be a problem,” Fontecilla said, “I will again advise you to speak with the embassy in Santiago, though I would hope there would be no need to take matters to that level.”

  “Why don’t you just tell me what’s going on?”

  “You assume that I know more than I do. What I have is a blood sample from the observatory but no body, a dismembered boy on the medical examiner’s table, and a dead scientist on his way to the same plac
e. That is what I know. What I suspect is that you are holding something back, and so I am going to keep your passport in my desk.” He stood up. “I apologize in advance if this upsets you, but I am obligated to tell you nothing. The obligations here are yours, namely to obey the laws in my country.”

  “But I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “So it would appear.” He took his hat from the table and made his way to the door.

  “Wait.”

  Fontecilla turned around.

  “At least tell me the boy’s name. Were you able to ID him?”

  Fontecilla chewed on that for a moment, plainly deliberating the wisdom of being candid.

  Gabe knew he’d get nothing from this man. The victim was under age, a minor, and if things worked down here as they did in the States, the police would keep his identity a private matter.

  “Nicky Lepin,” Fontecilla said. “Does that mean anything to you?”

  Gabe knew he was being scrutinized. Fontecilla’s radar swept the room, searching for that one blip that would reveal a possible lead. And because the name Lepin struck Gabe like a physical blow, he did everything he could to hold himself peacefully in place.

  Nicky Lepin? How is he related to the imprisoned DINA biochemist, Micha Lepin? And what does it mean?

  “Traylin?”

  Gabe looked at the man’s empty face. “It doesn’t sound familiar.”

  Fontecilla left, closing the door behind him.

  As the air rushed out of him, Gabe lowered his forehead to the table. The metal was cold against his skin.

  * * *

  Tilanna squeezed her gloved hand into a fist when she saw the dust from their tires.

  The sun was its usual pinhole in the sky, offering scant light. Nevertheless, Tilanna saw the shape of the tri-bikes as the pack of them rumbled over the undulating hills. She hurried back to the home that she and Dycar had constructed—“our geodesic love nest,” he called it—and sealed the hermetic portal behind her.

  Her hand went immediately to her stomach. Somewhere beneath her fingers was her dead lover’s parting gift, the pollen of him left to float on the Martian breeze until it took root within her. It gave her strength.

  She went to the locker and found his guns.

  “Totally cool!” Luke shouted, his voice filling the room. “I forgot Dycar’s guns!”

  “So did the Kanyri bandits. And they’ll pay for it.”

  Luke clapped his hands. “Keep going!”

  “You keep going.”

  “Okay … um … I want to hear what the guns look like again. I liked that part.”

  “You did, huh? And here I thought I was too heavy-handed with the description. Let’s see if we can do it a bit differently this time around.” He wrote for a minute, gobbling up another page of hotel stationery, then handed it to his orator, this Cicero in Down’s clothing.

  “‘Tilanna lifted the bandoleer and withdrew one of the weapons. What gleamed in the lantern’s light was not the sleek titanium of modern automatics but rather the ageless steel of a bygone frontier. The revolver’s rosewood handle was worn smooth from use. The barrel was as heavy as a lead pipe. Tilanna thought this thing less a firearm and more a steamroller. Other guns would kill you with surgical precision and Teflon-tipped bullets; this one would mangle your bones.’”

  “Not too bad, eh?”

  “Is Tilanna going to fight them all?”

  “I was sort of hoping that we could find that out together. What do you think she’s going to do?”

  Luke rested his chin on his hand, unwittingly assuming the posture of Rodin’s The Thinker. Ben just sat there, marveling at him, marveling at himself. Who was he to have a part in such a play? A bogeyman cutting people up, a dyslexic and mentally challenged savant … Ben Cable had no business among such extremes of humanity. He was a second-rate writer, a tinker, a tailor, a magic-bean buyer, but here he sat in the middle of something so large he couldn’t yet see its final form.

  Mira let herself into the room and interrupted whatever her brother was about to say. Gabe trailed after her, the usual look of wary curiosity on his face.

  “… and I don’t even know what city this is,” she was saying.

  “Calama,” Ben informed her, brandishing his stationery. “Says so right here. The Agua del Desierto Hotel, to be specific. The Water of the Desert. I like that.”

  Mira didn’t seem impressed. She sat down on the bed and cradled one of the overstuffed pillows.

  “I take it you two didn’t experience any epiphanies during your walk,” Ben said.

  Gabe sank to the floor and leaned his back against the wall. “My only revelation is that I’m no fan of police sketch artists.”

  “I thought it was neat,” Luke said.

  “You were probably more helpful. The first time I ran into the rifleman, I was with my friend Vicente. He described the guy as having a narrow face and saggy eyes, so I just went with that.”

  “Pardon me for pointing this out,” Ben said, “but you don’t look so swell.”

  “Goes with the territory.”

  “I’ll buy that.”

  “How’s Jonah?”

  “I just spoke with him. He’s on his way back to ACEF to run damage control with the higher-ups. He wasn’t happy. In point of fact, he was as pissed as the devil, called me more than a few names I haven’t heard since we were kids, and told me not to bother him until he rode out the storm with his supervisors. Eduardo was a member of a cooperating university and wasn’t on the NASA payroll, but still, I imagine Joe’s up to his afro in phone calls and long-winded explanations.”

  “Jonah doesn’t have an afro!” Luke said.

  “True enough. But he sure used to. Man, I have this picture of us in ’76…” Ben put on the brakes in midmemory. “Forget it. Styles change, and people do, too.”

  The room fell silent. Mira sat with her eyes shut. Luke reread the paragraph about Dycar’s guns. Gabe stared at things only he could see. Ben recalled hearing a theory that said once every seven minutes there was a break in conversation. The four of them hadn’t even made it that far.

  After another thirty seconds, he knew that he had no choice but to jolt them from their respective trances. That old proverb about striking while the iron was hot … Well, Mars had never called to him as hotly as it was now. “I, uh … don’t mean to be the lone voice of optimism here, but Luke and I … Well, we’re onto something good here. I’d hate for us to stop. We sort of have this project going—”

  “So do we,” Gabe said, rising to his feet.

  Mira looked at him skeptically. “We do?”

  “The way I see it, we can either sit around waiting for the cops to grill us again or we can get out there like Alban Olivares and do something.”

  “What Olivares was doing got him killed.”

  “We’re safe here.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “We’re in the middle of a city of nearly two hundred thousand people. We don’t have to worry about that guy finding us.”

  “Martians never give up,” Luke reminded him.

  “So I’ve heard. Look”—he walked backward toward the door—“there are some things I need to know. What does Nicky Lepin the boy have to do with Micha Lepin the convicted torturer? And how did Olivares end up out there at Mentiras? How did he know where to look?”

  “Sounds like something the police would be happy to investigate,” Ben said.

  “I’m not just going to sit around on my ass and hope there’s a happy ending.”

  Mira stood up. “I’m coming with you. Don’t ask why. Just give me a second.” She stepped into the restroom.

  While the water ran behind the closed door, Ben appraised the astronomer. He remembered that look, one part idealism and two parts stupidity. Ben had worn it himself not so long ago. These days, the most daring thing he did was to return to Dycar’s literary grave and see him reborn in the womb of his true love.

  Mira emerged, ponytail hangin
g through the back of a Kansas City Royals ball cap.

  Luke gave her a wave. “Bring us back some food. Serious, serious food.”

  “Will do. You two going to be all right in the meantime?”

  “The question is,” Ben said, “whether or not you two will be all right. Luke and I here are kicking ass and taking names.”

  Luke made a fist. “Like Rambo!”

  Mira smiled, but Ben knew it was only for Luke’s benefit. He wondered how many of the smiles in her life had been for that very reason.

  “Skedaddle,” Ben said. “But stay on high alert. You never know.” As soon as they were gone, he picked up his favorite fountain pen. Made of aircraft aluminum and inlaid with gold, it seemed a fitting device for those who sought the glittering mysteries of space. “So where were we?”

  “With Tilanna.”

  “Right. And what was she doing?”

  “Kicking ass and taking names!”

  “Exactly. So tell me how it went down.”

  Luke told the story as it came to him, and Ben chased him across the dunes of Mars.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Calama devoured them.

  Mira fended off black-haired children looking for handouts—“¡Señorita bonita! ¡Señorita bonita!”—and dodged a flatbed truck stacked with chicken crates. Dirt streets intersected with modern thoroughfares lined with tourist shops, newsstands, and a corner bazaar selling what looked to be pirated DVDs. An elderly woman carried cloth sacks from the market, strings of garlic and onions around her neck. A dirty Volkswagen sat at the light, the vintage hip-hop of LL Cool J shaking its doors.

  “Starting to feel overwhelmed?” Gabe asked her as they stepped aside to avoid a messenger on a bicycle with plastic ivy woven around the handlebars.

  “I hope you know where you’re going, because I have no idea where I am.”

  “I never get lost,” Gabe assured her. “Famous last words, I know, but it’s true. Mostly.”

  “Hopefully your sense of direction won’t be totally canceled out by my remarkable ability to get lost at a moment’s notice in any neighborhood I happen to be visiting.”