Days of Atonement

by Walter Jon Williams

  Because of the hatred, he’d never lost. And at some point in each fight he always transcended the hatred, found it turning to joy— a mean-spirited joy, perhaps, but joy nonetheless. And he found, suddenly, that he knew things, knew what the other fighter was going to do before he did it, knew, even if his eyes were swollen shut or if he was blinded by sweat or blood, just where his opponents were and how they were standing. And just how to take advantage of it, how to put them off balance and destroy them. Just as if he’d developed radar in his hands.

  Of course he fought dirty when the occasion demanded it, butting, using elbows, stomping on a con’s lead foot to hold him in place for the straight right . . . The politicos loved a dirty fight, screamed in pleasure when someone went down out of a clinch after taking an elbow to the jaw. If the cons fought dirty, it was to be expected; if the police did likewise, it was only poetic justice.

  Loren remembered a head butt from his last opponent, a left-handed B&E specialist who drove his forehead with stunning impact against Loren’s nose. Loren, blind with pain and half stunned, stumbled back trying to shake off the reeling dizziness, battling the certainty that he was going to vomit at any second, knowing the B&E man was driving in to follow up. Loren couldn’t see the enemy but knew he was out there, knew somehow that he could sidestep to the right and unload with a straight power right hand over the man’s thrusting left.

  Loren hit so hard he broke one of his own knuckles. The B&E man dropped to the canvas like a sack of peat and was still unconscious when they carried him away. Loren remembered leaning against the referee as the ref held his hand up in victory, trying to stay on his feet, blinking blood out of his eyes, and gazing down, through some miraculous gap in the crowd, into the back row of the audience, and saw there a state senator from Bernalillo County being given a blowjob by a redheaded exotic dancer he’d brought with him from Albuquerque.

  That was Loren’s last fight. He knew he had apprehended a clear stream of serious truth, and he didn’t want to do any of this anymore. He’d made sergeant and finished paying his dues, and it was pretty clear that Debra wouldn’t marry him until he gave up this kind of wildness.

  He had been happier than hell when the Ringside burned down, and he could write an end to the whole damn sorry chapter.

  But fights on the Line went on, just less sanctioned ones.

  The next was at the Atom Lounge, whose neon sign featured a rocket with a tail of red flame, when a hard-ass retiree and his newly unemployed son tried to take the place apart on general principles. Before any officers could show up, the bouncers had handled everything but the arrests.

  And so on through the night. Until, shortly after ten, the word went out that George Gileno had just walked into the Doc Holliday Saloon and demanded a drink.

  Loren turned on the lights and hit the Yelp button on the siren.

  Adrenaline was already doing a dance in his body. His Fury roared along the gently winding road. This one was going to be a nightmare.

  George Gileno was probably the world’s largest Apache. He’d torn up Holliday’s before, and now the place refused to serve him. This apparently furnished him with further reasons to smash up the bar.

  Loren’s cruiser was the third into the parking lot. He grabbed his baton and ran for the door.

  The place was rustic in a studied way, with rough wood paneling and old bits of buggy harness and rusting mining equipment on the walls. Standing in the middle of the barroom, Gileno towered over the crowd that surrounded him. A triumphant grin was spread across his dark, bloodied face. Two yelling officers, Begley and Esposito, hung on to Gileno’s arms while a third, Ron Quantrill, belabored the neckless Gileno from behind with his baton.

  The giant Apache looked like Frankenstein’s monster beset by peasants.

  Loren shouted as he tried to drive through the crowd. The Apache swung his stocky body left and right as he tried to brush Begley and Esposito off against pieces of furniture. Chairs and tables tumbled. A pitcher of beer exploded like a grenade. Long-haired members of a bar band stood warily on the bandstand, watching solemnly from under the brims of straw cowboy hats and gimme caps, ready to protect their instruments and amps if the fight lunged their way.

  Gileno swung completely around, driving five-foot-four-inch Eloy Esposito’s head into the side of the bar. Esposito’s eyes glazed over and he slumped to the floor, but somehow managed to hang on to the big man’s arm. A chrome-legged stool staggered, then fell. Quantrill backed up, raising his baton defensively. Behind him, Loren saw another officer lying stunned on the floor.

  Loren broke free of the crowd and charged. The smell of spilled beer hit him in the face. The neckless monster’s broad back, up close, seemed daunting as the side of a mountain.

  Loren smashed the back of Gileno’s left knee with a backhand swing of the baton, then kicked at the other knee. Gileno went down with Loren on his back trying to get his baton under the man’s chin and maybe cut off his air. Quantrill rushed forward, baton thrusting into Gileno’s midsection like a spear. Loren’s baton slipped under Gileno’s chin.

  Gileno ducked his head.

  Loren’s arms jerked forward and the world swung around him in a giddy wheel. Something hit him hard and the wind went out of him. He stared up into Gileno’s delighted brown eyes, and the first wave of real terror roared through him.

  Gileno had pulled Loren over his back by his neck and shoulder muscles alone, accomplished by effortless strength something a judo player studied for months to learn. Loren smashed up at Gileno’s face with his baton, but he didn’t have room enough to really swing and the baton rebounded as if Gileno’s skull were made of steel. Helpless fear balled in Loren’s throat. Gileno heaved himself up to his feet, Begley and Esposito still hanging on to him, and Loren rolled away. Spilled Cheetos crunched under him.

  Gileno swung his body around, smashed Eloy Esposito into the bar again. This time Eloy crumpled. Quantrill swung again, but Gileno caught Quantrill’s baton in one hand, twisted it out of his grip, then tried to use it upside Begley’s head. Begley caught the blow on his forearm, but had to let Gileno go. A laugh rumbled out of George Gileno as he realized he was free. He scaled the baton away into a corner. The officers near him shrank back.

  Loren got to his feet and tried to think what to do. Maybe they should just give the Apache a bottle and let him drink himself unconscious.

  Two more officers, a man and a woman, burst through the crowd, stared for a moment with wide eyes, then charged, their batons held horizontally in front of them. Gileno swung to face them, left foot forward in a boxer’s stance.

  The hell with this, Loren thought.

  He lurched forward and hit Gileno with his shoulder above the right hip just as the two other officers slammed into him higher up. There was a crack that seemed to transmit itself to Loren right through his bones. Everybody went down in a tangle of limbs and obscenities.

  Loren rolled clear and rose, breathing hard, his head swimming. He’d lost his baton somewhere. The other two officers were already on their feet, batons poised. George Gileno was trying to rise, but couldn’t seem to get his legs to work. He watched, catching his breath, while four officers sat on Gileno’s arms and managed to wrestle his wrists together long enough to put a pair of handcuffs on them. The Apache’s wrists were so thick the cuffs barely reached around them. People began drifting back into the room, setting tables and chairs upright.

  The band kicked off Bo Diddley’s “I’m a Man.” They were a blues band really, but if you wanted to earn money playing music in Atocha, you played C&W and fed your blues jones by trying to sneak in the odd Chuck Berry tune when nobody was paying attention.

  Apparently the fight had inspired them to throw caution to the winds.

  “Call an ambulance from County,” Loren said. “We don’t want to move him.”

  “Damn,” someone said. “You clipped him. No wonder you can’t do that in football.” Loren recognized the voice of the saloon’s man
ager, Evander Fell.

  Loren turned and glared at him. “What the hell did you want me to do with him? Let him go on busting up my men?”

  Fell looked startled. He raised his hands. “Hey, Loren, I didn’t—”

  “Or maybe you’d just want me to shoot him? Because that’s what it would come to if I couldn’t have put him down that way.”

  “I wasn’t criticizing!”

  “It sure as hell sounded that way to me, Evander.” Loren pointed a finger at him. Adrenaline raised waves of heat in his body. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “I’ve been a police officer for over twenty years, and I haven’t drawn a weapon against one of my neighbors yet. Not in twenty years, and I’m not going to start now, and neither are any of my men.”

  Fell was turning bright crimson.

  “Let me tell you what to do, Evander,” Loren said. “How many times has he busted up your place?”

  “This is the sixth time.”

  “So go to Judge Denver and get Gileno served with a restraining order. Then the next time he comes in, you can shoot him. Okay?”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  Loren ignored him and stalked away toward where one of his officers was being carefully set on his feet by Begley and Esposito. “How you doin’, Buchinsky?”

  Buchinsky’s eyes widened as he rubbed the back of his neck. The front of his uniform shirt was torn open, revealing the gray underwear worn by devout Mormons, with the little stitches over the nipples and navel.

  “Got knocked into a table, Chief,” Buchinsky breathed. “Went out for a while.”

  “You could be whiplashed or something. Get yourself checked out at County.” He turned to Eloy Esposito. “Drive him down to the hospital. Get yourself looked at, too.”

  Esposito shook his head. “Don’t need to, Chief. I just got my chimes rung for a minute. I’m okay now.”

  “This is the kind of thing the city pays insurance premiums for. Let the city get its money’s worth, okay?”

  “Okay.” Reluctantly.

  “After you take Buchinsky home, take the rest of the night off. You guys all did good. It’s not your fault that King Kong decided to start a riot in our town.” He looked behind him. The citizens had settled into their tables for drinks, studiously ignoring the handcuffed giant lying in the middle of the floor. A few diehard dancers were swinging to Bo Diddley. Gileno was still trying to get his legs to work properly. Loren turned back to his men. “Begley, you’ll ride with Quantrill for the rest of the night.” He looked down at his uniform and brushed absently at the patches of spilled beer and powdered cheese curls. “I’m going home to change.”

  Loren found his baton and went out into the parking lot and sucked October air into his lungs. A lovely autumn coolness invaded his being. He could almost smell the band-tailed pigeon and the dusky grouse waiting out on the national forest north of town. He’d have to give himself some comp time next week and head out with his shotgun.

  The ambulance from the County arrived, and Loren nodded hello to the two parameds as they carried in their stretcher. “Can’t have a western town without a saloon brawl now and again, can you?” one said.

  “Guess not.”

  “And at Doc Holliday’s, too.”

  “Yeah.”

  Evander Fell’s place was supposed to be a kind of spiritual descendant of a place the real Doc Holliday had owned briefly in the 1880s, at least till he emptied a pair of pistols at his business partner during a drunken argument. He missed, at close range, with all twelve bullets; and the pious citizens of Atocha, no longer impressed by his death-dealing reputation, promptly rode him out of town on a rail.

  It was enough, Loren thought, to make a man nostalgic for traditional forms of law enforcement. Now the only way a bad man got run out of town was if he lost his job at the pit.

  Inside the bar, the band caved in to popular prejudice and started on an Ernest Tubb tune. Bright neon, orange and blue and green, burned westward along the Line to the darkened copper pit. For how long? he wondered. A lot of these businesses were barely surviving as it was. With the mine closed, not just the bars but a lot of Central Avenue businesses were in jeopardy.

  And that meant bad times for Loren. More cutbacks on his force, and more nasty police work for those who remained. Financial desperation led to a gradual erosion of all civilization. There would be more frustrated, unemployed, angry people getting drunk, getting loaded, getting themselves in accidents or fights. More cases of jobless men going after their wives or children or parents with fists or belts or baseball bats, more wives trying to carve up girlfriends, more guys in pickup trucks shooting up streetlights or traffic signs or each other. All totaled up in police radio codes: ten-thirty-two, a fight; ten-eighteen, a drunk; ten-fifteen, family fight. Codes designed as if to suppress how sad and sordid it all was.

  Serve and protect, Loren thought. His job. He thought of his family, his two daughters, and resolve began to stiffen his weariness.

  All he wanted was for his town to be a nice place.

  From down the neon strip came a chocolate-brown Blazer. It slowed when it saw the collection of emergency vehicles. Loren caught a glimpse of young eyes, a brush cut, a neat suit. At least they didn’t wear their Ray-Bans at night.

  The Blazer speeded up, heading into town. Apparently ATL Security had concluded there were no foreign spies in Doc Holliday’s parking lot. Just another Friday night among the working class. Hardly the sort of thing the lab would concern itself with.

  The locals, perhaps, could be trusted to do a few things on their own.

  *

  Debra’s Taurus was in the old vine-covered carport. Loren parked behind it and walked through the front door. Debra was watching television with their younger daughter, Kelly. Sitting next to Kelly was a friend from high school whose parents had loaded her with the unfortunate name of Skywalker Fortune.

  Loren winced at the title music he heard coming from the box. Cybercops, last year’s hit series, based on Cybercops, the motion picture. Impossibly hip and styled police— hundred-dollar hair clips, three-thousand-dollar jackets— doing unlikely and largely illegal things with high technology. Sixteen-ounce tumblers now available at Burger King.

  Loren hated television police shows. He hated television police with implant cyberware worse than anything.

  Kelly looked up and giggled. “Been in a food fight, Daddy?”

  “Exactly that,” Loren said.

  “You smell like a wino,” Kelly said.

  Kelly was fourteen. She wore a plaid shirt with the long tails worn outside of her roll-cuffed Jordache jeans. The shirt was open to reveal a GUARD THE EARTH! T-shirt. There were pink foam-plastic Reeboks on her feet. Loren believed she was the only child he’d ever known who looked good in braces.

  Skywalker was a couple years older, a quiet girl with long black hair who was a friend of both of Loren’s children. She wore baggy light blue denim pants and an ECO-ALLIANCE T-shirt. Her parents worked for ATL in some scientific capacity, one of the few ATL families who chose to live in town instead of their little self-created suburb. She used words like “syzygy” and “advolution” in conversation, but otherwise seemed a fairly normal girl, a member of the drill team with Katrina and the chorus with Kelly.

  Loren went to his room and yanked off his tie. It was the kind sold to law enforcement people, with the velcro tabs in back so that it would come free if someone grabbed it in a fight. Loren took off his gun and ID, then began to empty his pockets.

  Debra quietly came into the room and closed the door. “Anyone I know?” she said.

  “George Gileno.”

  “At Holliday’s again?”

  “He never goes into any other bar. Just Holliday’s. It’s weird.”

  She touched his shoulder. “Are you okay?”

  “I just got rolled around in the Cheetos some.” Loren stood on one leg and pulled off a boot.

  “Any wives I should call?”

  Loren
stood on the other leg, hands gripping the remaining boot, and thought for a moment. “Chuck Buchinsky got knocked around a bit. I sent him to the E-room, but I don’t think he was hurt too bad.”

  “I’ll call Karen, then.”

  Loren pulled off the boot and began unbuttoning his trousers. “Don’t get her alarmed. You know what she’s like. It’s probably nothing.”

  “It may be something.”

  Loren pulled off his pants. “I won’t say it isn’t. But Karen’s excitable— try not to get her too worked up.” He considered for a moment. “Why don’t I call the E-room and find out how he’s doing? Then you can call Karen.”

  “Fine. Just don’t leave it too long.”

  Debra went to the closet and took out a clean uniform. “I can get Jerry tomorrow morning,” she said. “Let you sleep a little later.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “It’s okay. Katrina and Kelly can finish making breakfast.”

  He thought for a moment. “Where is Katrina, anyway?”