by Meg Gardiner
Mom followed his gaze. “Been a while, hasn’t it?”
“Town feels different. Though that may be the circumstances.” He glanced at her, his expression oblique. “But the mountains look the same as the day we arrived.”
We approached his car. Tommy walked over, looking as alert as a cat, and shook Dad’s hand.
Dad brightened. “It’s been a long time. Good to see you, son.”
“Sir.” He lowered his voice. “After the casket’s interred, Scotty’s going to place the flowers and the teddy bear. From that point we’ll have officers surveiling the cemetery twenty-four/seven. Then we see if we draw Coyote to the bait.”
He scanned the crowd, already looking for him. Then, remembering himself, he shot Dad a smile.
“Congratulations. You must be a proud papa.”
“Excuse me?” Dad said.
“Father of the bride. Even if her dude does live to take on the Man.”
He winked at me. Excusing himself, he left to talk to another officer, pulling out a pack of cigarettes as he went.
The wind flicked against my hair. I asked the heavens for courage.
“Dad, Mom told me you know about the baby.”
He gave me his slow gaze and opened his mouth to speak. I stopped him.
“This is unexpected, but it isn’t unwelcome. It’s serendipity, like catching gold dust in my hands.” I swallowed. “If I’ve let you down, I’m sorry.”
His face softened and he clasped me to him. “Kit, you haven’t let me down. I don’t give a rip about all that. Your health and happiness are what matter to me.”
“Please understand. Please.”
God, again with the tears. At this pace I was going to dehydrate. Luckily, in a cemetery nobody considers an outburst of crying out of order. Dad hung on, rocking me back and forth, trying to calm me.
“Ssh.” He put his lips near to my ear, whispering, holding me tight. “It’s all gonna be okay. You’ll get through this.”
I scrubbed a knuckle across my eyes. “Damn straight. And then we’re throwing the biggest, in-your-face wedding bash this side of ancient Rome. Later, when we pull out the albums, we’ll just hope the kid can’t count to nine months.”
His breathing slowed, and the rocking stopped.
“What?” I said.
His arms were tight around me. “If you want a big wedding, that’s . . .”
I looked up at him. “What is it?”
“Nothing. That all sounds wonderful.” Loosening his grip, he began leading me toward his car. “Let’s get you out of this sun.”
I wiped my eyes. He kept his arm around my shoulder.
“Where’s Jesse? I thought he was going to be here,” he said.
“So did I.”
“Didn’t he . . .” He exchanged a glance with Mom. “Didn’t he drive up?”
At his tone, disquiet wormed around me. He gazed straight ahead. Mom was peering strenuously at the Sierras.
I slowed. “What’s going on?”
“He said he was going to join you. Given the circumstances, I would expect him to hold to that.”
The air thickened. I stopped. “I can’t get him to answer his phone. Something’s wrong. What do you know that I don’t?”
They looked at each other.
“Dad?”
I felt as if I’d just been hit in the face with a pie. One made out of hammers and ball bearings. I have some things to take care of here.
“You didn’t go and talk to him, did you?”
He didn’t need to answer; his face said it all. Mom’s too.
“Oh, God. What did you say to him?”
Caution came into his eyes. “Just spoke about your future.”
“Just. Just about our future?”
And, oh, the look that crossed his face with that possessive our. I had misunderstood him. I knew then how awful the talk with Jesse had been.
“Not our future. My future.” I blinked, dizzy. “You don’t see a future that’s ours, do you?”
Mom stepped forward. “Phil. Tell her.”
For a moment he held still, ruminating. “We talked about the pregnancy, yes.”
“Tell me you didn’t shoot him,” I said. “I need to sit down.”
I walked to his rental car, opened the back door, and plopped down.
“What did you say to him?”
“We talked about . . .” He frowned, and it looked to me as though he were questioning his own resolve. “We talked about you having this baby.”
All at once I wasn’t hot anymore. I was ice-cold.
“You did what?”
And a deeper chill seeped through me, biting and vile. “You don’t think I should have the baby?”
My parents stared at me. Pins and needles danced in my fingers.
“You want me to end the pregnancy?”
Dad crouched down to eye level with me. “Honey, I know the idea seems excruciating, but—”
“How dare you?”
Mom leaned into the doorway. “Ev, calm down for a second and listen to reason.”
I shrank from her. “You agree with him?”
I turned away, crab-crawled my way across the backseat, opened the far door, and climbed out. I stared at them over the roof of the car.
“You went to Jesse and told him I should get rid of his child? You wanted him to go along with that? How the hell . . . Jesus Christ, how could you?”
Dad’s face was sad. “He understands how dangerous this pregnancy is.”
“Dangerous?”
“Kit, you saw the video of Dana. You heard her husband. And you know that’s why Coyote killed her and eradicated that clinic.” He continued giving me that sad look. “Jesse understood that. That’s why I asked you where he is. I expected that he’d already talked to you about it.”
That cut me through and through. The ripping sound, the one from my dream, tore through my head.
“Are you telling me he goes along with this?”
Mom looked sad now too. “Sweetheart, don’t think badly of him. It’s an awful thing for him to have to face.”
The noise in my head got louder. I walked away from the car, across the parking lot under the sun, feeling short of breath. This wasn’t happening.
My eyes unfocused until all I saw were the Sierras chaining the horizon. Beneath those mountains Jesse had spoken to me in the moonlight, telling me he would not let my life become a compromise. He had promised. He said he would fight.
For a moment I stood with the wind slapping my hair. I turned back around.
“You’re lying.”
Mom’s face pinched. I walked toward my parents.
“That’s not what happened. Jesse fought you, didn’t he, Dad?”
Dad tried to cover it, but I saw a flicker in his eyes.
“He refused even to consider it. I know he did.”
Mom looked at Dad. Dad looked at me.
“What did you use on him? Lies? Guilt?” That elicited a twitch near his eye. I strode closer. “How did you phrase it to him? Make him think I was having this baby out of pity? Make him feel he was saddling me with not only a child but with . . .”
I had to grit my teeth to keep from spitting or shouting. “You didn’t. Tell me you didn’t take away his pride.”
I clenched both fists and raised my hands and stepped right up in his face. I was so close to hitting him that I didn’t know if I could stop myself.
His voice was steady. “This is life-and-death. I’m not proud, but I couldn’t hold back. Nothing is more important than you. Not even Jesse, no matter how much you care about him.”
“What did you say to him?”
He didn’t reply.
“Tell me.” I stared him in the eyes and refused to look away. “He hasn’t shown up, and it’s because of what you said to him. Tell me what you said.”
Slowly, painfully, the resolve ebbed from his eyes.
“I asked him to dig deep inside for the most honest truth he co
uld find. I asked him how much he loved you.”
“What did he tell you?”
He had one last moment of hesitation, gazing into the distance, as though he were taking not only Jesse’s measure but his own.
“He said he loves you more than his own life.” His eyes met mine. “I told him it was the right answer.”
The chill ran down to my bones. Jesse wouldn’t choose death for me or the baby. He would choose something else. The dream flashed in my mind and I saw him sprinting toward me through the surf, only to be ripped away. In that instant, I had never hated anyone as I hated Phil Delaney.
Dimly I heard my name being called. Tommy was striding toward us, phone pressed to his ear. Captain McCracken was with him. His face was flushed.
“There’s a break. LAPD was able to lift a print from your boyfriend’s shirt. They got a hit on it,” Tommy said.
“Oh.”
“We have a lead. Come on; we need you over at the station.”
The house and yard were noisy. Chimes, clanging, and metallic ringing surrounded him. It was the tinning of the windmills and mobiles and rickety sculptures in the backyard, some kind of art garden.
Through the kitchen window Coyote saw the woman scurrying around. She was stuffing clothing and vitamin supplements into a duffel bag. Then prescription bottles and about five ounces of what looked like Colombian weed. She didn’t look like a woman preparing to go back to work after a funeral. She looked like a woman getting ready to bug out of town.
He tapped on the window. It sounded like a tumbleweed scritching at the glass. She turned around. Jumped.
He waved.
Hand pressed to her chest, she crossed the kitchen and unlocked the door. “Christ, you startled me. What are you doing at the back door?”
“Admiring your sculpture garden. What do you call that, junk art?”
Antonia Shepard-Cantwell waved him in. “Bricolage. It’s art made from objects at hand. Robin, you should know that term.”
Hanging garbage was the term that came to his mind. The tinsel in the scrawny trees mimicked the garish earrings tangled in her long hair. Fortunately, the neighbors wouldn’t mind the trash menagerie. There were no neighbors. The house was ten miles outside of town.
She returned to the duffel bag, jamming in tie-dyed skirts and a pair of Birkenstocks and a sketch pad.
“Where are you going?” he said.
“Taking a little vacation. I have plenty of sick leave stored up with the school district. This is all getting too close for comfort.”
“Why?”
She packed. She couldn’t look him in the face. She felt uncomfortable with his bitch-princess smile and queer androgynous voice. She always had. From the beginning he had presented her with a surface that discomfited her. Not only did she never look beneath it; she never looked directly at it. She never saw him at all.
She saw only the money.
“People are beginning to figure out that your friends in the government have been keeping tabs on the exposees. It’s a bit hot for me right now.”
“Who, Toni?” he said.
“Tommy Chang and Evan Delaney went by my husband’s office. They were after information from him. They’re onto the connection with the explosion. Chang went bonkers and grabbed Tully.” She kept packing. “I know you were planning on the usual amount. But for this information I think I deserve more.”
“That’s abrupt of you.”
“Listen.” She swiped her hair back from her face. “It’s getting harder and harder. Back when Tully’s office ran on paper records, it was easy to slip the information to you. Now that everything’s computerized, things have tightened up. Only a few people have access to his system, and even fewer have his pass code to get past the firewall. If the police start looking, it won’t take them long to come looking for me.”
“And if I remind you that this is a matter of national security?”
“Baloney. The exposees are part of some experiment, and you’re harvesting information so you can control them. This is a matter of power.”
But Toni Cantwell liked power. She liked excitement. That was why she had agreed to their cloak-and-dagger act all those years ago. And she liked money, enough for her to wangle Little Mr. Faggot a temporary job in her classroom as a student teacher after the explosion, so that he could keep tabs on the exposees. She liked it enough to betray her husband by providing the man she knew as Robin Klijsters with unlimited access to the exposees’ medical records.
If she still thought he was working for the government, then he would leave her illusions intact.
“I see. How much were you thinking?” he said.
“Two thousand. And I’m in a hurry. Tully’s coming to pick me up. He’ll be here any minute, and I don’t want him to find you here.”
“He still knows nothing about our arrangement, right? He wouldn’t recognize me, or even my name.”
“Of course not.”
He smiled. “You can’t honestly think he’d be jealous of a queeny little thing like me.”
She looked at him at last, with distant curiosity. “One question, Robin. All these years you’ve been working for Uncle Sam, didn’t they ever complain about a flaming gay in their midst? Or in your department is it Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell?”
“In my department, such a question might be the last one you ever asked.”
“Right.” She zipped up the duffel. “You don’t know who it is, do you?”
“Who?”
“Coyote.” She looked at him. “I don’t want to sound paranoid, but I have to wonder if the government knows who he is but doesn’t want it to get out.”
“No, Toni, I have no idea who Coyote really is.”
“If you knew, you’d tell me, right?”
“You would find out immediately.”
She nodded, reassured, and held out her hand for the money.
“One question of my own,” he said. “The day of the explosion. You were in sole charge of the children, weren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“So the four who ran off and wandered into range of the explosion were your responsibility.”
“I was leading the discovery of the petroglyphs. I didn’t see them run off.”
Her hand was open, palm up. He unzipped his fanny pack and reached inside.
“Did it never occur to you that insufficient security could lead to unforeseen consequences?” he said.
Toni frowned. “They were thirteen, fourteen years old. Their lives were nothing but a series of unforeseen consequences.”
“Their lives are irrelevant. I’m talking about my life.”
“What?”
He pulled the Taser from his pack and fired. The darts hit her in the chest. Her head snapped back and her earrings flickered in the light. So did the knife.
26
I slumped in the backseat of Dad’s rental car. We barreled along the road behind Tommy and McCracken, heading for the police station. Dad gripped the wheel, talking low and fast at Mom as though giving her a mission briefing.
“South Star got out of control. The pain vaccine proved to be an infectious agent and they had to shut down the project.”
“By blowing up the lab?” she said.
“We’ll never find any paperwork confirming it, but you bet your butt.”
“Wasn’t that overkill?”
“They must have needed to sanitize the site.”
“Didn’t it occur to them that an explosion would spread the vaccine agent into the air and contaminate anybody who came in contact with it? Jesus, who was running that project, the Three Stooges?”
“We can assume it was a controlled explosion that didn’t go as planned. I imagine they needed extreme heat to destroy the South Star agent. They couldn’t just put a flamethrower to the place. And remember when this happened.” He glanced at me in the mirror. “Kit, Russian satellites overfly the base. If Moscow had downlinked photos showing hazmat teams and flamethrowers dismant
ling the lab brick by brick, it would have raised their suspicions. Whereas a building out in the back ranges at China Lake blowing up, that’s just SOP.”
Standard operating procedure. I looked out the window at the ragged desert. Jets howled overhead, shredding blue sky. Dad was trying to bury our argument by putting the discussion on crisis footing, and I wasn’t having it. I took out my phone and tried again to reach Jesse. I couldn’t.
Dad forged onward. “For whatever reason, the explosion didn’t go to plan and your class was exposed to the vaccine. And Sway was wrong. South Star was effective. It worked.”
Mom crossed her arms. “Corrosive fuel additives, my ass. I told you Swayze was a stone liar.”
“It was a classified project, Angie.”
“I know. So you lie about it. SOP.” She tightened her arms against her chest. “Swayze’s still lying about it. She told you Coyote couldn’t have been infected and that South Star couldn’t possibly be making people sick.”
“She may actually believe that.”
“Phil, do you think my bullshit detector has gone offline? The explosion turned Evan’s class into guinea pigs. And it took twenty years, but now the test results are coming in, and somebody’s decided to shut down South Star all over again.” She ran a hand over her spiky hair. “I goddamn wish Coyote had shut Swayze down all those years ago.”
“Can it, Angie.”
She smiled. It was an acid smile, lips drawn back, eyes corrosive. My brother and I can do it to perfection. It’s called the Delaney Fuck You.
“Yeah, she’s Albert fricking Schweitzer nowadays. Too bad her defense research created a monster who’s killing mothers and children.”
“Coyote’s stalking Maureen, so bite your tongue. If anything happens to her, you’ll feel pretty damn lousy.”
I raised my hands. “Shut the hell up, both of you.”
Dad glanced at me again in the mirror. Mom stared out the window. The town rushed by.
At the Civic Center, a van with the call letters of a Los Angeles TV channel was parked outside the police station. The reporter sat inside freshening her makeup. By the time we pulled up, Tommy and McCracken had already gone inside. When Dad parked, I jumped out and headed for the door without speaking to either of my parents.
