by Nevada Barr
She looked around at the preparations like a general assessing his troops and nodded slightly. Darden had learned to watch for the small movement, her delicate chin jerking down infinitesimally. It meant all was as she would have it. When he didn’t see that chin go down he knew the fur was about to fly and he’d have to spend a good half hour smoothing somebody’s feathers to get them to go back to doing their job.
“Thanks, Darden. Keep your boys to the shadows. This is just an informal party so the good people of Texas can see what a down-to-earth, caring, witty woman I am. Tonight I’m winning hearts. Day after tomorrow we go for the jugular.”
“Kev and Gordon will be as ghosts,” he said.
“Right,” Judith said, and laughed. “You’d have better luck making ghosts of a couple Brahman bulls.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll keep them in the paddock.”
“You don’t need me,” she said. “I guess I’d better go start making myself look gubernatorial.”
“And lovable.”
“Goes without saying.” She gave him a mock salute and walked away, her back straight, her head balanced high on her neck. After a few steps she stopped and turned back. He was shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He’d never had terrific feet and the job demanded so much standing around it never mattered how much money he spent on shoes or fancy insoles, because they still hurt most of the time.
“You can sit down, you know,” she said with a wry smile.
“I’ll stand.”
Laughing, she shook her head. “Of course you will. Suit yourself.”
Head of security for the mayor of Houston, Texas, wasn’t the same as running alongside limousines in parades. There was no code insisting management couldn’t sit. The one time he’d been tempted he’d not even gotten his tush on the seat before he felt like a damn fool and a goldbrick and stood up again.
Security stood and they watched and if their feet hurt that was just too damn bad.
Later in the week Judith was going to announce her candidacy for governor of Texas. She’d chosen to do it at Big Bend National Park. It was a good time to put on the cloak of environmental concern, and the sobriquet “friend of the parks” impressed conservationists. Judith was already known in Houston for her work with environmental concerns, but Big Bend would give her visibility in West Texas.
But it was border control that was going to launch her into the big time. Chisos Lodge housed a lot of seminars every year. Because of the park’s renown—and because it was a vacation destination—they were well attended. The seminar Judith was using as her spring-board was on the environmental and social effects of the Mexican drug wars on people living in communities along the border. Drug wars scared the good citizens. Ditto immigrants. America no longer wanted anybody to give her their tired, their poor, and their huddled masses made people’s blood run cold.
Judith planned not only to announce her candidacy at a dinner in a couple days but to start her campaign. She was gutsy; the audience wasn’t handpicked to cheer the way it was usually done at these things. Every heavyweight with a bone to pick or a cross to burn was at the convention. Belief systems ran from open arms to our Mexican brothers and sisters and amnesty for all to building a great wall with sentry towers and drones flying the canyons to keep out the southern hordes and their drug overlords.
Judith decided to open her campaign with fireworks instead of bunting. Reporters from Houston and Dallas, Fort Worth, Alpine, Beaumont, El Paso, Midland, Austin and San Antonio had made the trek across the desert to capture the event. Judith was sure enough of herself that she invited them personally. It was risky, but if she pulled it off, the big boys would have to take a long hard look at her when it came to national party politics.
Darden glanced out the window to the patio where the gentlemen of the press milled around smoking cigarettes. Smoking cigarettes and salivating, he thought uncharitably. There were two women in the bunch: a skinny bleach-blonde from Austin, and Gerry Schneider. Gerry was an old warhorse in her late fifties. She’d covered the last year of the Vietnam War from Saigon, one of the few women they let get close to the front lines. He’d met her in D.C. when Hinckley had taken a potshot at Ronald Reagan. Darden liked Gerry. She was tough. With a woman like her a man wouldn’t have to check every darn thing that went bump in the night. From what Darden had heard, a while back, she’d gotten out of the fast track and moved back to Houston to get a job at the Herald.
Gordon and Kevin arrived looking as stiff and out of place in their suits as Darden did. Parks were rumpled, quick-dry, bandanna sorts of places. Darden’s agents had made a case for going native, but Darden hadn’t bought it. A man in a suit was like a cop on a horse; he got respect whether he deserved it or not.
Force of habit made him look at his watch, but they were on time. He’d had a lot of good men working for him during the years he’d been on Judith’s staff. Maybe because the marshal service inducted a bunch to put on airlines and the job was so boring they quit as fast as they could hire new ones. A lot of men and women trained to handle weapons were wandering around with shiny new guns and nobody to shoot.
Gordon was good but Darden had hired him because he looked like an agent: big with a square head, square shoulders and short neck. Judith looked great with Gordon hulking behind her, the brawn behind the brains. Kevin was a different kind of hire altogether and one Darden had never been comfortable with, though he’d worked with good men acquired this way. Kevin had been the client’s choice—Judith knew the guy from somewhere and she’d wanted him on the team. He was twenty-seven and looked like a younger, beefier, studlier, more dangerous version of Judith’s husband. That might have been why she’d wanted him. The two could be thick as thieves when the spirit moved them.
Darden wouldn’t have been surprised if Judith was having an affair with the kid. If she was, it was discreet. He’d never seen anything to suggest it. It wouldn’t have mattered to him one way or another. Power did that to some people. Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe power didn’t give them greater appetites for sex, maybe greater appetites in general gave them a hunger for power. Kevin wasn’t going to be around long enough for anything to get out of hand. He hungered for the big show, the cloak-and-dagger, like agents had in the movies. Darden had news for him: agents only had what they had in the movies in the movies.
He’d chosen both Gordon and Kevin for this detail because they did what they were told without questions. “Get something to eat,” he told them. “That or wait till the festivities are over. I’m going to clean up a little. I’ll be back here at nineteen-forty-five. Either of you seen Charles?”
“No, sir,” Gordon said.
“I haven’t seen him,” said Kevin, his eyes following a waitress. Annoyance tweaked Darden till he realized Kevin wasn’t gazing lasciviously at her bottom but at the pot of freshly brewed coffee she was carrying.
“Call me when he shows,” Darden said. Then: “Doggone it. The nearest cell tower is behind a pile of rock and lizards two hundred miles from here. Remind me to get satellite phones in the budget when we get back to civilization.” Rustic charm and, probably, profit margins dictated that the rooms in the Chisos Lodge have no phones, televisions or radios. “Gordon, you come and get me. Got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
Charles Pierson was Judith’s second husband. Darden had never liked the guy, not even when he was doing a better job of pretending he loved his wife. Judith’s first husband had been better but she’d dumped him when Charles came along with his literary allusions and superb table manners. Darden saw it as a kind of Scarlett/Ashley thing. Charles had the gentleness and charm Judith thought she wanted, and she had the strength Charles thought he needed.
After thirteen years of marriage, Judith was still besotted. Charles had grown tired of being Mr. Judith and of the expense of endless campaigning. Darden couldn’t blame him, but there was no way Judith could let him have a divorce. One divorce on a candidate’s record wa
s pretty standard these days, but two? Maybe Giuliani could pull it off but he was male and Italian and not running in Texas.
Charles had given up on Judith but he hadn’t given up on women in general. Darden had had to pay off one and scare off one. An errant husband was another thing a female candidate couldn’t afford. It made her appear weak and pathetic to the voting public. Ten years after President Clinton got caught with a female aide and his trousers down around his knees, people still talked about what Hillary should have done. What they had forgiven the president for doing, and thus ending his career, they couldn’t forgive his wife for overlooking in the interests of pursuing her own.
It would be easier for Judith. She’d not yet said anything about the White House but Darden had known her a long time. Even when she was a tiny little thing she never wanted to play at being princess. She always played at being queen.
Darden had come down the steps from the patio where the reporters congregated to the small sitting area near the parking lot without seeing anything. Lost in his thoughts. For a man who’d spent his life watching for trouble, this was alarming. This evening, this minute, there was nothing more threatening than three of Big Bend’s midget deer. They were hardly bigger than Great Danes. Cute, Darden thought. Maybe he should get a dog. Maybe he should retire before he got somebody killed. Old men given to wool-gathering weren’t exactly prime bodyguards. Management didn’t have to see the sniper in the trees, he reminded himself. Or the elephant in the room, for that matter.
He smiled drily at that thought but wasn’t much comforted. His SUV was in the first space. When he pointed and clicked at it there was the dull thud of the locks opening but the vehicle didn’t bleep and its lights didn’t flash. One of the first things he did to a new vehicle was the removal of audio and visual signals. In the old days, unscrewing the bulb in the overhead did the trick. With new computer-run models, getting the things to lay still and pipe down was a major undertaking.
The evening was perfect: cool and dry and scented with pine. The sun had gone behind the mountains but the window to the desert below was tawny gold with the last rays of light. He rolled down the windows and enjoyed the short drive to the historic stone cabins built by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Depression. Where he was staying wasn’t a single cabin but three rooms, each opening onto a shared veranda with a view of the valley. His room was on the north end. Gordon and Kevin shared the southern-most room. Judith was in the center. As he walked past her window there was a crack of wood hitting wood, then her screen door flew open with such suddenness and force it nearly took his nose off. The gut saved him yet again; protruding farther than his proboscis, its hard fat took the blow.
Even with the added weight, Darden was quick on his feet; he leapt back to where stone was between him and the inside of the room and snatched his Glock from the holster beneath his left arm. Another reason to wear a suit.
White-faced and ragged-looking, Judith pulsed from the darkened doorway.
“Get in here,” she hissed. “I want to kill Charles.”
Well, well, Darden thought. Things are looking up.
THREE
A leave of absence, “medical leave,” the park was calling it. Anna wasn’t sure what she called it. Maybe the end of her career. More than not knowing what to call it, she didn’t know how she felt about it. Ambivalent was a good word.
“I’m ambivalent,” she said to Paul.
Paul Davidson was her husband of less than a year and most of that spent apart. “Ambivalent is a good word,” he said, echoing her thought. For a moment Anna just looked at him. He was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. White hair fell thick and straight across his broad forehead. There had been more blond in it when she first met him. Perhaps being married to her aged a man quickly. The white suited him and the hard bright sun of a Texas spring burnished it to a fine gloss. Paul was fifty-seven, eight years older than she. He wasn’t much taller, five-feet-eight in his socks, precisely the right height to hold and be held, to kiss and be kissed.
“Are you ready to do this? It’s all adventury and parky,” he said softly. The rest of the rafting group was in the middle of preparations peppered with laughter and chat as they loaded the raft with gear. “We could still do something else. Go to Italy. Hike the Great Pyrenees. Spend a week getting wrapped in seaweed and glopped in mud at a fancy spa.”
“It’s warm here and I’m not the boss,” Anna said.
Paul kissed her gently. He was the best kisser of any man she had ever met. Most men thought they were good kissers, just like they all thought they were good drivers. Most were wrong on both counts.
“Stop kissing! You’re setting a bad example for the children!” a girl shouted at them.
Though Anna could have finessed a trip down the river with other rangers, she and Paul had chosen to go with a commercial outfit out of Terlingua. Anna had wanted nothing to do with the green and gray, and it was one of those rare occasions she didn’t want to be alone in the wilderness: she needed the distraction other people provided. This group of college kids—three girls and one boy, a boyfriend of somebody, Anna assumed—promised to be more distracting than bucolic. The girl who had shouted at them was a lanky nineteen-year-old who was so thin her bones were held together only by the spandex she wore. Her dark hair was slicked back into a ponytail that stuck through the back of her ball cap. Cyril something. Anna liked her. She had a wide smile full of big teeth, and eyes so black the pupils were nearly lost, giving her the perpetual look of a night-seeing cat.
Paul released Anna but held her hand as they walked over the stones to the raft. This trip was a luxury outing. Camp chairs and sleeping pads, coolers full of food and beer, folding tables, a portable fire pit made from the bottom of a metal barrel, a grill for cooking steaks, pots, pans and tents had been stowed in the raft’s midsection. Life jackets had been provided but no one bothered to put them on. Not yet. The guide, Carmen, a small woman of muscle and attitude, told them they’d need them later but here, where the water was flat and amiable, they could use them as seat cushions.
Carmen directing, the seven of them pushed the raft into the water of the Rio Grande River. They were putting in at Lajitas on the western border of the park and would float downriver through Santa Elena Canyon. In all her years in the Park Service, including time in northern Texas at Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Anna had never visited Big Bend. She had always meant to.
“What’s with all the black SUVs?” one of the three girls asked. Her name was Lori, Anna recalled. She was quietest of the group and looked to be the strongest, which wasn’t saying a great deal. These were urban children, raised on electronics and junk food. Their minds were sharp but their bodies could have used a lot more dodgeball and tree-climbing in their early years.
“Mayor of Houston is in the park. She’s going to announce a run for governor.”
“You’d think they’d show up in Priuses or Smart Cars or something,” Cyril said. “Be all green in a park.”
“Texas does oil,” Carmen said succinctly. The raft was in knee-deep water and was twitching as if anxious to go with the flow.
“You hop in,” Paul said, and waited to see that Anna slithered over the side without incident before he climbed aboard himself. Anna had never needed anyone to take care of her, or never admitted she did, but she wasn’t minding it. She was liking it and that surprised her. The surprise was followed by a twinge of guilt. Raised by hard-working parents who had been just starting out after World War II, the virtue of carrying one’s own weight and incurring no debts had been drummed into her and her sister. Anna didn’t buy things she couldn’t afford and that included things that had to be paid off over time. Since Zach, her first husband, had died she’d more or less run her emotional life the same way: no debts incurred, no promises made for an always unsure future.
Paul, a classic with his gun and his Bible, had found a way to give and love in such a way that it actually seemed he did it b
ecause he liked to, because it enriched him, that virtue was, indeed, its own reward.
Anna caught his eye, hazel and full of life under the brim of a canvas hat. He winked at her and she was startled to think it didn’t just seem, for Paul it was.
“This is the right trip,” she said, and put her back into her paddling until Carmen hollered that they weren’t in a race.
The thundering emptiness that had taken her to the psychologist’s office in Boulder, and the broken shards of thoughts and conversations that had come in its wake, began to lose ground to the great state of Texas and the wonders of the Chihuahuan desert. The water in the Rio Grande was high, but where the banks were low and the river could spread out, it didn’t require much thought to navigate. Besides, thinking was Carmen’s job. Anna didn’t want any part of it. Fantasies, when the empty dark and the fragmented thoughts allowed her to have them, had run to quiet gardens in countries where no one spoke English, of severed phone lines and silence and no responsibility greater than pushing her hair out of her eyes and making coffee every morning.
The chatter of happy people little more than children and the wet, friendly lapping of the brown water against the sides of the raft soothed Anna. The sky was huge and deep, on the horizon towers of cumulonimbus clouds rose in great columns exploring every shade of white. Cane grass, growing out from the bank, fought a soundless battle for territory with the exotic giant reeds. The reeds had been brought from the Orient to serve as cattle fodder and had taken over. They had the lush and hungry look of countries Anna had only seen in movies drenched in blood: Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket. Larger and darker of leaf than the indigenous cane, they reached out far over the water, their stems so thick and interwoven that only the smallest of creatures could travel through them to the river.
