Cowboy Angels

by Paul McAuley

  Willie Davis, the sheriff of New Amsterdam, was waiting with two horses on the concrete slope of the landing. After Willie had shaken Stone’s hands and offered his condolences, Stone told the leader of the squad of officers that he and his men should wait by the ferry. ‘It’s more than a mile to the church, I want to get there as soon as possible, and as you can see, we only have two horses.’

  ‘I have orders to accompany you, sir. They come directly from the DCI’s office.’

  Stone looked at Willie and said, ‘Are we under martial law here?’

  ‘Not as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘I have my orders, Mr Stone,’ the officer said helplessly.

  ‘And I can lock you up if you cause trouble,’ Willie said. He was a heavily built man with dull brown skin, a shaven head, and a forthright manner. He was dressed in a blue corduroy suit and his silver star was pinned to the lapel of his jacket. The last time he’d worn that suit had been at Jake Nichols’s funeral.

  Stone said, ‘What Sheriff Davis means is that this is a private affair. You guys wait here, and try not to get into any trouble. I’ll be back in an hour or so.’

  He rode with Willie Davis through pine forest and a belt of paper birches that had turned early after the long, hot summer. Sunlight danced through yellow leaves overhead and yellow leaves carpeted the track. Willie said that he’d asked for the funeral service to be delayed after he’d heard that Stone was coming home, but the preacher wouldn’t countenance it. ‘You should know that some people are unhappy about you coming back.’

  ‘Ted McDougal, for one.’

  ‘Him and the preacher and about half of New Amsterdam. People are frightened, Adam. We haven’t had a murder here since Pete Emerson took an axe to his wife and kids and walked out into the woods and allowed himself to freeze to death. People are frightened and stirred up, and some of them have been shooting their mouths off and blaming you for . . . well, for what happened.’

  ‘They’re right. I agreed to do something without checking it out first. I stepped into a world of trouble because I didn’t look where I was going. And I got Susan killed.’

  Willie Davis looked over at Stone. ‘That kind of talk won’t do anyone any good. It was those two strangers who killed Susan.’

  ‘They came here because of me,’ Stone said. ‘How is Petey holding up?’

  ‘About how you’d expect. The Ellisons have taken him in and say they’re happy to look after him. I guess we’ll see how that goes one day at a time.’

  ‘The worst thing about this is thinking of him growing up without a mother or father.’

  ‘The Ellisons are good people. And their boy is about Petey’s age.’

  ‘It’s going to be hard for him, Willie. I speak from experience.’

  ‘If you want to do something for him when you come back,’ Willie Davis said, ‘maybe you could take care of the farm until Petey is old enough to figure out what he wants to do with it. We’ll have a meeting about it when things have settled down. Some people will no doubt speak against you, but I reckon the majority will be in favour.’

  ‘I’m here to pay my respects, and then I have to go finish a piece of work,’ Stone said. ‘I don’t know when I’ll be back.’

  He asked Willie to tell him exactly what had happened. The sheriff’s story was more or less the same as David Welch’s. He said that he’d organised scouting parties at first light and they’d ridden every square inch of cleared land. ‘We checked every outbuilding, every copse, we searched all along the shore. Used dogs. We found the woman pretty quickly - she’d passed out from blood loss. We found her inflatable boat, too, and that’s all we found. If anyone else is still here, they’re better at hiding out in the woods than any of us, and they didn’t leave any tracks either, or any scent the dogs could pick up.’

  ‘I’m pretty sure there were only two people.’

  Willie looked relieved. ‘That’s what I figured. I guess they thought it would be an easy job.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I should have gotten that woman to talk. I shouldn’t have let her kill herself.’

  ‘You couldn’t have known about the suicide pill.’

  ‘She was out cold when we found her. When she came around, she asked for a drink of water. She took one sip, started foaming at the mouth and jerking about, and that was it.’

  ‘There was nothing you could have done about it, Willie.’

  ‘I always heard cyanide is a painless way to go, but now I seen it I know it ain’t. These must have been pretty desperate people, if they were ready to die like that rather than talk.’

  ‘They were.’

  Stone and Willie Davis rode out of the woods and rode up a slope of rough pasture to Broadway’s white track. The little clapboard church and its cemetery stood to the east of Broadway, overlooking the broad, rush-lined pond of the Collect. Horses and wagons were parked out front and everyone in the little community was gathered inside, singing Susan’s favourite hymn, the song faltering as people turned to look at Stone when he entered. A coffin of raw pine planks stood on trestles in front of the altar, a spray of wild flowers laid on top of it. Stone felt a swelling ache in his throat when he saw it.

  He stood in the back of the church while Susan’s neighbours stepped up to the lectern and talked about why they had valued her as a friend and how much they were going to miss her. Petey sat at the end of the front pew in his best shirt and jeans, his hair combed back from his scrubbed face. He was restless and kept looking this way and that, as if expecting his mother to walk in at any moment. When he spotted Stone at the back of the church, he smiled and gave a little wave, and the sudden ache in Stone’s throat almost gagged him.

  He kept to the end of the procession that followed Susan’s coffin as it was carried out of the church to the grave newly dug beside the grave of her husband. A fresh wind tugged at clothes, snatched away the words of the preacher as he intoned the prayer for the dead, raised cat’s-paw waves out on the Collect. Several women were crying. Small children hugged their parents’ legs. Petey stood dry-eyed at the head of the grave, solemn and still and small amongst the press of adults, clutching Nora Ellison’s hand.

  After the coffin had been lowered and he had taken his turn to cast a handful of dirt on its lid, Stone worked his way through the small crowd toward Petey, accepting condolences from those who came forward, doing his best to ignore the hostile stares of those who didn’t. When Stone called to him, Petey ran straight to him, and he knelt and gathered the boy into his arms.

  ‘Hey, little man.’

  ‘You came back. I said you’d come back.’

  They were awkward and solemn with each other because of the people around them, because they didn’t know what to say about the catastrophe. Stone tried to tell Petey that he wished more than anything that he had never gone away and Petey told Stone that he was staying with Mr and Mrs Ellison.

  ‘I hope they’re treating you right.’

  ‘I guess. They won’t let me go home.’

  ‘You’ll probably have to stay away a little while.’

  ‘We can look after it together, can’t we?’

  ‘When I come back, sure.’

  ‘There are an awful lot of chores.’

  ‘Listen, Petey. I have to go away again for a little while. I have some work to do. But it won’t take long, and when I’ve finished I’ll come straight back.’

  ‘She said Mommy’s gone away. Mrs Ellison. But I know she’s dead.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Like Daddy.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When the bad people came, Mommy told me I had to run and get help,’ Petey said. ‘I ran real hard. It was dark and I fell over twice, but they didn’t catch me.’

  ‘You did good. I’m proud of you, Petey. More than I can say.’

  ‘They killed Blackie,’ Petey said, and burst into tears.

  Stone did his best to comfort the boy, but there was a ripple of agreement in the crowd
when Nora Ellison stepped forward and drew Petey to her and gave Stone a flinty look and said that he’d already caused enough trouble.

  Willie Davis told Stone that he was welcome to come back to his place and freshen up before he took the ferry, but Stone said that he had to ride back straight away. He refused as politely as he could Willie’s offer of company, told him that he’d leave his horse with Ted McDougal.

  They shook hands. Willie said, ‘If you don’t come back to help out, I’ll send a party to fetch you.’

  ‘I’ll be back,’ Stone said.

  The slender birches tossed their heads in the wind and the air was suddenly full of their yellow leaves. It was as if he were riding away from his own wedding.

  PART TWO

  LOOK FOR AMERICA

  1

  The railcar from First Foot drew into the Johnson sheaf’s version of Brookhaven station a little after three in the afternoon. The squad of officers escorted Stone across the crowded concourse toward a spur platform tucked under the curve of the dome where a chunky diesel locomotive with a single passenger car was waiting. On the neighbouring platform, handlers armed with cattle prods, whips, and shotguns were driving a shock force of big, white-pelted apemen, shackled in groups of four, out of a slatted boxcar.

  As Stone and the squad went past, smoke grenades detonated underneath the boxcars. Thick jets of green vapour spurted up and flooded across the platform, enveloping the apemen; then a miniature thunderstorm of flashbang grenades exploded, lighting up the spreading smoke. Apemen shrieked and fell over each other as they pulled in different directions. A handler vanished beneath a scrum of the white giants; two more fired shotguns loaded with rock salt in a futile attempt to drive them back into the boxcar.

  The squad surrounded Stone and hustled him toward the checkpoint at the head of the spur platform. Stone grabbed the shoulder of the man in charge of the squad and yelled into his ear, asking for his sidearm.

  ‘Keep moving!’ the man shouted back. ‘We have to get you out of here!’

  They kept moving, reaching the checkpoint moments before the apemen overwhelmed their handlers and burst out of the spreading billows of green smoke and charged into crowds of soldiers and aid workers like convicts escaping into a corn field. Soldiers fought apemen with rifle butts and knives and fists. A cacophony of shouts and shrieks and screams echoed under the dome’s high canopy. A group of white-helmeted MPs battled through fleeing aid workers toward the mêlée, blowing their whistles and firing warning shots into the air.

  Stone and the officers bulled through the checkpoint and headed for the passenger car, jogging through tendrils of green smoke, and a quartet of apemen clambered over the edge of the platform as clumsily as a disarticulated albino spider. The officers felled them with a volley of small-arms fire, regrouped around Stone and started to move forward again, and their leader spun in a half-circle and collapsed, the back of his head blown away. Someone shouted ‘Sniper!’, and men grabbed Stone’s arms and rushed him toward the passenger car and bundled him through an open door.

  The officers who had questioned Stone last night, Carella and Dvorak, were flattened either side of the door, pistols drawn. A little way down the car, Linda Waverly crouched in the aisle between the rows of fat brown-leather seats, tending a man in a black suit who’d fallen there. She had ripped open his shirt and was trying to stem the flow of blood from a chest wound. A sniper’s bullet punched a sudden hole in a window and thumped into the back of a seat. Dvorak hit the button that shut the door and shouted ‘Go! Go! Go!’ into her cell phone. The train got under way with a violent jerk. Carella lost his balance and sat down hard; Stone and Dvorak grabbed handrails.

  As the train cleared the edge of the dome, Carella got to his feet, picked up a briefcase from one of the seats, and told Stone that he’d brought his pistol.

  ‘Fuck his pistol,’ Dvorak said, and shot her partner in the head, knocking him back into the seat, and swung around and pointed her pistol at Stone, telling Linda Waverly to stand up and step away from the bodyguard.

  ‘He needs medical attention—’

  ‘Do it right now, or I’ll shoot your friend!’ Dvorak’s voice was shrill and breathless; her face a rigid mask.

  Linda got to her feet. She was wearing a denim jacket over the jeans and checked shirt that Stone had bought for her yesterday morning. Her hair was bunched in a short ponytail. She held the top of the seat either side of her for balance as the train rocked over a set of points and picked up speed as it headed for the tunnel and the Turing gate.

  ‘Come down the aisle toward me,’ Dvorak said. ‘Sit down, lock your hands on top of your head and stay still.’

  Linda did as she was told. Dvorak ordered Stone to turn around and sit on his hands, facing the door.

  Stone measured angles and distances, and said, ‘Take it easy. I’m unarmed.’

  Dvorak fired her pistol into the floor, pointed it at Stone’s leg. ‘I’ll put the next one in your knee. Turn around, motherfucker. Right now!’

  Stone began to turn, slowly then quickly, grabbing one of the handrails by the door, left hand over right, kicking off and swinging out full-length through the air. Dvorak got off one shot, the round plucking the wing of Stone’s jacket, and he kicked her in the chin and felt her jaw click. She staggered backward and he landed on the balls of his feet and chopped at her wrist with the side of his hand, but she twisted sideways, raising her elbows to avoid his blow, and swung her gun hand down and clouted the top of his skull with her pistol as the train plunged into the tunnel that housed the gate.

  The hard blow and the black flash of translation exploded inside Stone’s head. Grey light flared in the windows of the passenger car. Dvorak was smiling at him behind her pistol, showing bloody teeth, and Linda stepped up behind her and swung Carella’s briefcase in a tight arc that connected with the side of her head. Dvorak dropped to her knees and Linda hit her again with a sweeping backswing and she fell sideways and lay still.

  Stone and Linda grinned at each other. They were both breathing hard. ‘I guess she’s one of the bad guys,’ Stone said, and knew then that Tom Waverly really had stolen something from GYPSY.

  Dvorak was unconscious, her eyes half-closed, her breathing ragged. Stone jammed two fingers into the nerve cluster under the hinge of her jaw, hoping that the pain would bring her around, but she was too far gone. Killing her would satisfy his anger, but it would be better to leave her to the tender mercy of the Company. Maybe Kohler could get her to talk.

  He patted her down, found in the pocket of her jacket a rectangular black box about the size of an ammo clip and almost as heavy, with a pair of metal prongs at one end that snapped blue sparks when he pressed the button. There was a Colt .45 semi-automatic in a safety holster inside Carella’s briefcase. Stone strapped the holster to his belt and pocketed the spare clip. Down the aisle, Linda was kneeling over the wounded man. As Stone came toward her, she sat back on her heels and wiped her bloodied hands on the carpet. ‘He’s gone,’ she said flatly.

  The train was rolling through the switching yard at Brookhaven, in the Real. Moving at walking pace now, exactly according to plan.

  ‘We have to get out of here,’ Stone said.

  ‘They tried to kill us—’

  ‘They tried to snatch us, and caused all kinds of mayhem to keep Kohler’s people busy. They had Dvorak, they had a sniper, and they’ll have people here, too, waiting to pick us up. As soon as they realise we overpowered Dvorak, they’ll chase us down. And Kohler’s people will be after us too. But if we move now, we have a chance to get away and hitch a ride to wherever it is you want to go. Want to tell me where that is, by the way?’

  ‘The American Bund sheaf. My father has an apartment there, in New York,’ Linda said, and stood up. ‘Let’s do this before I lose my nerve.’

  Stone jumped first and hit the ground running, managing to stay on his feet as the rear end of the passenger car went past. He saw Linda Waverly jump and land awkw
ardly, tumbling over, rolling amongst tall weeds, and he ran toward her as she got to her feet, brushing gravel from her scraped palms. The shoulder of her denim jacket was ripped and she’d torn holes in the knees of her jeans.

  All around them, trains were moving through a web of tracks five miles long and a mile across. A pair of diesel locomotives hauled a string of passenger cars out of one of the short rows of grassy mounds scattered here and there like the graves of giants from some lost heroic age. Snow crested the motor units of the locomotives and the roofs of the passenger cars.

  As they hurried through a broad triangle of wet, waist-high grass, heading toward the far side of the interchange, Linda told Stone that the bodyguard had been shot just after the smoke grenades had gone off. ‘He pushed me to the floor and then a window broke and he fell down. Carella wanted to call it in, but Dvorak told him they’d deal with it on the other side of the mirror. I should have known then that she was planning something.’

  ‘As far as I’m concerned you didn’t do anything wrong,’ Stone said. ‘You saved my life just now. Both our lives. I don’t know what Tom said to you back in Pottersville, but he did a hell of a job. You went in a loyal Company soldier, and you came out a cowboy.’

  ‘You don’t know the half of it,’ Linda said. ‘But he didn’t tell me everything, Mr Stone. He didn’t tell me what he stole from GYPSY, or why it was so important. What I do know is that the trail starts in the American Bund sheaf. We have to find his apartment.’

  ‘Is that where he hid this thing? How could he be sure we’d get there before the bad guys?’

  ‘He said it would take both of us to find it. That’s all I know.’

  ‘What about the apartment? Did he give you the address?’