Days of Atonement

by Walter Jon Williams

  Sheila stood up abruptly. “I suppose I’ll have to settle for that.” She set her spectacles on her nose and turned to leave, then hesitated at the door. She turned, leaned a shoulder against the door frame.

  “One last thing.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Did you really call that FBI agent a dickhead?”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “My secretary lives next door to the Fortune house.”

  Loren shrugged. “Hell, Sheila. Killeen is a dickhead.”

  Sheila burst out laughing. She waved an arm and left.

  Which reminded Loren of Killeen. He got out a white recycled legal pad, wrote his letter of complaint to the director of the FBI, tore it off the pad, and put it in his secretary’s IN box to be typed when she got back from her vacation.

  Then he went upstairs to the sheriff’s office and got out the U.S. Forest Service map of Atocha County. The scale was one-half inch to the mile, and the reverse side showed gridded satellite photographs of the same terrain. Every terrain configuration, watercourse, road, cattle trail, arroyo, and butte was revealed in exacting detail. The sheriff’s department used the map when coordinating searches in the awful terrain of the national forest north of town.

  Loren took the maps back to his office and looked at the area west and south of the city. It wasn’t national forest land, but so much of the county was either forest, wilderness area, or Indian reservation that all the private land on the map was rendered in the same detail as the government property. Even individual buildings in Atocha were carefully drawn to scale.

  The arroyo behind Jerry’s auto graveyard was called Wahoo Wash, something Loren hadn’t known, but which he didn’t find surprising in view of the fact that a mile and a half down the wash was the Wahoo Mine, which Loren had heard about as long as he could remember.

  The mine had produced tons of silver in the 1880s, then closed in the next decade after the government stopped its silver price supports. It had reopened briefly during World War II, when the price of silver went up, then closed after the war ended.

  Every time silver prices rose, the Copper Country Weekly wrote another of its patented optimistic articles about whether the company that owned the Wahoo would reopen it. They never had, but the Weekly remained indefatigable in its lonely pursuit of the idea.

  Loren frowned down at the map for a moment, and then reversed it and looked at the black-and-white satellite photo on the other side. ATL’s installations showed up clearly, the arrow-straight lines that must be the LINAC, the cluster of flat roofs that were SHEP and FIDO and the others, the two rows of perimeter fences, clear tracks that were gravel and paved roads.

  And then Loren saw something else, a thin spider trail leaving the highway and tracking, not quite straight, across the desert, and his heart gave a lurch.

  It was the road— or better, the artifact of the road— that had led to the Dudenhof Ranch. Randal’s driveway.

  After Randal’s death, Loren remembered, Violet Dudenhof had sold out to Luis Figueracion, and then when ATL came calling, Luis sold that part of the Figueracion Ranch to the company. ATL had bulldozed the ranch buildings and just piled dirt over parts of the driveway until it faded away altogether— it was a road they didn’t want.

  Randal had just been heading for home, Loren thought, and then what? Spotlights, commanding voices, shots in the night?

  He looked at the map for a while as if it could give him the answer, and then quietly folded it up and parked it on his desk. He picked up his phone and called a man he knew in Albuquerque.

  “Howard? This is Loren Hawn.”

  “Hi, hoss. You’re calling about Killeen, ain’t you?”

  “Damn straight.”

  “What an asshole.”

  Howard Morton was a snuff-dipping good ole boy, one of the smart ones, who had gone to high school with Loren and played with him on the football and basketball teams. Afterward he’d gone on to law school and ended up in the U.S. attorney’s office in Albuquerque. Every summer he came back to Atocha to go fishing, and Loren sometimes went with him. For reasons unclear to anyone, he alone of all people in the world called Loren “hoss.” Loren knew he was leaning back in his padded chair with his snakeskin boots up on his desk, jacket open to reveal a bolo tie and a paunch encircled by a silver and turquoise belt.

  “Killeen didn’t liaise at all,” Loren said. “First I heard about this bust was when one of my patrolmen noticed FBI—” He pronounced the name of the agency F’bee, since he figured it might not be tactful to call them Fucking Big Idiots in a conversation with a U.S. attorney. “—F’bee with guns crawling around in the bushes,” he finished.

  “From what I can tell,” Howard said, “Killeen just panicked. The undercover investigation had been going on for months, but when that train got wrecked Killeen was afraid the eco-terrs had gone on a rampage, and he decided to bust everybody right away and let God and the courts sort ’em out. The raid was put together at the last second.”

  “Does he have a case?”

  “I’m not assigned to this one, thank God,” Howard said, “so I haven’t seen the details of the indictments. Right now I’m just settin’ in my office till the prisoners get here. But I’ll help process the indictments when the prisoners arrive, so I’ll see the paperwork then. My guess is they sure as shit have a case of conspiracy.”

  “Those are hard to prove.”

  “They surely are, hoss.”

  “How many people got arrested?”

  “Eight. And Killeen found ’em all at home.”

  “Has he blown it again? Like he did in L.A.?”

  “Hard to say, hoss. When the Full-Blown Idiots start making arrests in this kind of hurry, a lot of details are bound to slip through their fingers.”

  Loren grinned. So much for his tact.

  “You figure they’re guilty?”

  Laughter. “You know better than to ask a question like that, hoss.”

  “I guess I do.”

  “You figure on gettin’ yourself an elk this year? With that fancy Russian gun of yours?”

  They discussed hunting for a while, then Loren hung up. He phoned Debra to tell her what he’d found out— the prisoners hadn’t reached Albuquerque yet, let alone been indicted— and then took his map of Atocha County and got a pry bar and some wire cutters out of storage.

  He got in his car and drove down Route 82 to the bridge over Wahoo Wash. Once there he carefully eased the Fury down the water-rutted, eroding access that had received only scarce attention from county work crews since the closure of the mine in 1945. The bottom of the arroyo was flat, sandy, and waterless, easy to drive as a highway. Early settlers had used arroyos for transport, but the smart ones kept a weather eye out for violet thunderheads in the far-off mountains that could send four-foot walls of water howling down the gullies to sweep away every lonely man-made object in their path.

  But there was no water danger today, not in the third year of the drought.

  There were marks of thick tires on the sandy bottom, one set leaving, another coming back. Loren followed them till the tall sides of the arroyo fell away into a flat barren plain, its sandy soil covered with salt deposits in the shape of ancient, long-evaporated ripples. On a rugged gray bluff over the dead land, next to a mound of black silver tailings, was the old mine. The tire marks came to an end below the bluff. Loren parked next to them and stepped out of his car, craning his head back to look at the site. The wind blew dust that had the tang of salt. Somewhere nearby a crow was cawing.

  Surrounding the mine, built atop the remnant of older, rusting barriers, was a bright new chain link fence topped with razor wire and covered with rusting KEEP OUT and PRIVATE PROPERTY signs. The company that owned the mine was concerned about their liability in the event of accidents to explorers, and had maintained their fence better than the mine itself, which was in ruins.

  The mine site consisted of creosote-black timbers partly tumbled down the hillsid
e and half concealed by young poplar. A small house, evidently an office, had fared better— the roof was still on it, and the boards over its windows held firm.

  Loren parked beneath the bluff and took his cutters and pry bar out of the trunk. The short switchback road up the face of the bluff was impassable to vehicles, the victim of decades of rockslides. Bits of it kept crumbling away beneath Loren’s boots as he trudged up it. The day was hot and Loren dripped sweat by the time he got to the gate.

  He paused for a moment to catch his breath. A faint wind breathed through the poplars. An old black iron padlock lay in the weeds next to the gate, and a bright shiny new lock was in its place. Loren cut the lock away with his bolt cutters and pushed on the gate. Gray tufts of grass resisted, and he had to shove the gate firmly open. A red-shafted flicker darted by, the startling scarlet undersides of its wings flashing intermittently against the bright blue sky.

  Once inside he went to the one surviving building. Blind boarded windows stared at him sightlessly. Nailheads trailed rust. Small drifts of tar-paper roofing surrounded the structure like fallen snow in springtime. The black planks of the porch sagged under his weight.

  There was another new padlock on the door. Loren cut it away. The lock thudded on the planks and Loren put a hand on the door.

  The thought of a booby trap occurred to him. He pushed the door open slightly, looked carefully through the crack for wires, and saw none. He stepped to the side of the door frame, behind some solid timber, and pushed the door open all the way.

  He heard it thud against the wall. Nothing happened. Loren took a breath and stepped into the doorway. Something huddled under a tawny piece of canvas in the center of the room.

  Loren stepped forward and twitched the canvas off.

  Ranked neatly on another piece of canvas, each item in its own individual plastic bag, were long, careful rows of incendiaries, bombs, and detonators.

  Enough to blow up half the town.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  On the table, in their own plastic bags, Loren found the same series of Special Forces manuals, Improvised Munitions, that he’d seen in Patience’s office. Apparently it was the standard text for making bombs in attics and garages. Loren held one of the bags up to the light in a half-assed search for latent prints, found none on the label. He opened it, took the book out, paged through the text. The Green Beret motto, DE OPPRESSO LIBER, was still on some of the pages, along with the warning OFFICIAL USE ONLY. The chapter titled “Urea Nitrate Explosive“ began with the instruction “Boil a large quantity of urine.“

  Talk about recycling.

  Nothing like a government publication to inform a person the approved way of doing things, be it sowing soybeans or blowing up water plants. Loren returned the book to its bag.

  Heavy glass cider bottles had been filled with a gelatinous mixture and turned into incendiaries. Wrapped in old copies of the Los Angeles Times were blocks of what seemed to be plastic explosive. Coils of det cord, still in factory plastic, lay on the table. Timers and delay devices— a vast array, some homebuilt out of clocks and some factory-made— occupied about a square yard. A metal box, cushioned with foam, held detonators— none homebuilt, fortunately. Apparently the local ecologists had a healthy desire to avoid suicide.

  Loren put the canvas back over the evidence, then left the building and closed the door behind him. He closed the hasp over the eye, then put the broken shackle of the padlock through it. It wasn’t secure, but it would hold the door closed. He shut the outer gate the same way.

  He was going to make Killeen’s case for him. Damn it.

  *

  It took him two tries to get out of the arroyo; the first left the Fury spinning wheels hopelessly on the soft embankment. The big car lurched out of the arroyo on the second try and Loren pulled onto Highway 82 behind a rusted-out Jeep station wagon with local plates and a bumper sticker that said DON’T TREAD ON ME: FIGHT TAXES.

  Confidence hummed through him. He’d call himself a press conference, he figured. Announce that he’d found the explosives cache that the Fucking Big Idiots hadn’t been able to locate.

  Steal a little of Killeen’s thunder, anyway. And show that asshole the virtues of cooperation.

  The Jeep ahead of him slowed down to five miles below the speed limit as soon as it reached the city limits. Clearly the driver saw the patrol car behind and was being careful not to get clocked for speeding.

  Loren’s eyes glanced up as something— a swift shadow, an indistinct suggestion of a thrashing figure— made a sudden movement in the back of the Jeep. The Jeep gave a little lurch to one side, then recovered. Then Loren saw the flash of a knife, and a rush of adrenaline struck at his heart like a hammer.

  He reached for the siren button.

  Blood sprayed the Jeep’s rear window. The tailgate crashed open. Loren saw a thrashing figure, spouting blood, a man crouched with a drop-point hunting blade in his hand. Loren hit the Yelp button and the lights, and then the knifeman was thrown back against the side of the Jeep and a brown and white animal, a mule doe, scrabbled out of the tailgate and flopped onto the road.

  Loren slammed on the brakes, a blaze of terror in his veins. There was an impact as the deer went into the Fury’s bumper. The Jeep swung toward the curb, came to a stop with a river of blood pouring off the tailgate.

  Loren set the parking brake, grabbed the Remington pump, shoved his door open. The siren yammered in his ears. He jacked a round into the shotgun as he left the car. The dying doe’s hooves scrabbled hopelessly on the pavement. Loren crouched behind the door and propped the shotgun on the door’s window frame. The man with the knife, his arm and unshaven face covered with blood, was staring stupidly out the tail of the Jeep, the bill of his gimme cap knocked over one ear. A man walking up the sidewalk, carrying a shopping bag from Fernando’s Hi-Lo, stopped, saw the shotgun, stared, then clumsily turned and lumbered for cover.

  “Police!” Redundantly. “Drop the knife!”

  The man, still gaping stupidly, obeyed.

  “Out of the car!” Shouting over the siren. “You and the driver both! Let me see your hands!”

  At the sight of the driver all Loren’s fear began to drain out of him. It was Henry Sigourney, whose last visit to the jail had been occasioned by his poaching tame elk off Sam Torrey’s game ranch.

  Shit. A couple of poachers killing a deer out of season.

  Smoky whiskey fumes gusted from the Jeep. Sigourney and his friend allowed themselves to be handcuffed amiably enough. Loren peered into the back of the Jeep and saw enough blood to fill a slaughterhouse. A mental picture of Jernigan’s dismembered head queased through his mind. Two hunting rifles, in cheap plastic cases, lay in the mess. A pair of one-liter bottles of Jack Daniel’s, one empty, the other not, lay as further evidence. A bag of pork rinds was broken open and scattered in the blood. Loren went to his radio, turned off the siren, called for backup and someone from the Game and Fish Department to take the dead doe into evidence.

  Traffic moved carefully around the cars. Loren could see pale faces gaping at the carnage. Loren looked down at the dead doe under the wheels of his car, then at Sigourney.

  “You couldn’t even find a buck to shoot?”

  Sigourney unloaded a gumful of Red Man onto the pavement.

  “Jimmy was shooting at the buck. He hit the fucking doe on a ricochet. Hit her right in the head.” He looked at Loren and shrugged. “So what could we do? We figured she was dead, and we didn’t want her to go to waste. So we put her in the Jeep.”

  “And she woke up.”

  “Yeah. Turned out she was just stunned. And you were right behind us. So Jimmy jumped on her and tried to kill her with a knife.”

  “Cut her throat,” Jimmy said. He kept trying to spit blood out of his mouth. “Jesus! What a mess!”

  An adrenaline shudder rode up Loren’s back, struck as a galloping instant of unspecific anger. “You had to go and poach a deer two weeks before the season opened?” He
could feel his voice rising.

  “I’m not a poacher,” Sigourney said with dignity. “I’m a traditional hunter.”

  “Traditional hunter.” Loren wanted to gag on the words. Jernigan’s head stared at him, bloody lip curling, from somewhere behind his eyes. “That’s just a poacher with pretensions.”

  Sigourney was offended. “We kill to put meat on the table,” he said. Reciting the party line. “We feed our families.”

  As opposed to the law-abiding hunters who just riddled their deer and let them rot. Right.

  Loren forbore from reminding Sigourney that his wife had walked out on him years ago, taking the kids with her, and had since remarried a miner who preferred working for a living to sneaking around the wilderness trying to bushwhack out-of-season fauna.

  “And other hunters don’t?” he said.

  “Not those trophy hunters at Torrey’s, anyway.”

  “You want meat on the table,” Loren said, “you coulda shot grouse today, and done it legally.”

  “Jimmy wanted venison.”

  Another wave of adrenaline rose up Loren’s spine. This one unaccountably turned to laughter. He looked at the dead deer under his wheels and the bloody knife on the pavement, looked at the shotgun in his hand, and laughter rose from deep inside his belly and exploded past his lips. Tears fell from his eyes. He leaned against the fender of his car.

  “I thought you were Jack the fucking Ripper! Holy Jesus Christ!”

  Whooping laughter tore from his chest. Sigourney laughed along with him— this would all make a good story for his new comrades in the jail. Jimmy looked resentful and spat more blood.

  A pair of patrolmen arrived. One put on a Day-Glo orange vest and started directing traffic; the other assisted Loren with his prisoners and helped drag the doe to the side of the road, where her blood could drain into the gutter and she would stop blocking traffic.

  Pictures of the train wreck kept floating in front of Loren’s eyes. After he finished booking the prisoners, he decided he needed to spend time away from accidents, blood, and the law enforcement business, and walked across Central to the Sunshine. The tow truck from Armistead’s service station was parked out front. The beefy bear hunter sat at the counter in his mechanic’s overalls. Byrne and Sandoval, natch, occupied a red Formica table in the back.