Days of Atonement

by Walter Jon Williams

  Loren got out of the car and walked through one of the gaps in the chain link fence that had been built to protect the mother ship from the violent frenzy of last-minute converts. The hot breeze burned the back of his neck. An ardis of the pentagram pointed mutely to Loren’s boots. Concrete poured, straight as a die, into a carefully gouged rut, now crumbling, covered with dust. Loren chose a concrete line and walked along it.

  Even over the wind he should have heard the howling from the Atocha pit, the trucks rolling out of the resonant cavity with their tons of ore. It was silent.

  His world, Loren realized, the one that he had lived in all his life, had come to an end. The apocalypse had come, and he had only now noticed it.

  Grouse exploded from beneath his feet, roaring up from a young juniper that had grown up here since the saucer-apocalypse had been postponed. He should have brought a shotgun, he thought, then realized that there was one in the Fury. He didn’t like the Remington for hunting— it was too heavy, too awkward, not like the turn-of-the-century double-barreled Heym he normally used— but it was the gun that was here.

  He went back to the car, got the gun, jacked out the rounds of buckshot he’d threatened to use on the poachers that afternoon, and loaded it with bird shot. He stalked carefully over the pentagram, feet stepping softly on the crumbling concrete, and brought down seven birds. The movement and shots were clean, precise. Nothing wasted. The powder smell was welcome in the hot wind. He picked up his spent shells to avoid leaving his sign on the land. Something, at least, was within the realm of his control.

  Loren tossed the dead birds in the trunk of the car, reloaded the gun with buck, and walked up the drive to the metal-walled work shack. It had an old Master padlock, not worked in ages. He got in his car and backed out.

  His headache seemed to have faded.

  On his way through town he passed the parsonage, saw a parking place, and swooped into it. There was a little squeal of rubber as the car behind braked suddenly. Had he not been in a police cruiser, Loren knew, he probably would have earned a glare, a finger, a blast of the horn.

  Rickey answered half a minute or so after Loren’s knock. The parson was naked from the waist up and without his glasses. He blinked myopically and scratched the pale hairs on his sunken chest.

  “You were taking a nap,” Loren said. “I’ll come back later.”

  “It’s time I got up.” Rickey turned around and walked away down the corridor. “You know the way to the study.”

  Loren seated himself opposite the dead computer terminal. Deco lightning bolts flashed at him from the back of the parson’s chair. A carved plaster eye gazed at him from atop a pyramid. He heard Rickey bumbling around in the back, and then the parson appeared, his flannel shirttails out. Rickey sat opposite Loren and put his metal-rimmed spectacles on, perching them on his nose first and then placing the bows behind his ears, like a bookkeeper out of Dickens.

  “I’ve been told what happened,” Rickey said. “I’m sorry to hear about all that.”

  Loren frowned at him. “About all what?”

  “About, ah, about your being laid off.”

  “Oh,” Loren said. He waved his hand. “That’s nothing. It’s administrative leave with pay. It’s a political tactic.”

  Rickey’s eyelids battled with sleep. “Oh.”

  “I didn’t agree with why it was done, but—” He fell silent, guilt’s clawed finger stabbing at his throat.

  Rickey’s glance sharpened. “Why was it done? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “Because,” Loren said, and stopped dead. He glanced at Rickey. “Public servants don’t always agree with public policy, right?” he said.

  Rickey grinned. “Nor do ministers with church doctrine.”

  Loren was surprised. “Really?”

  “Of course. Think of the poor Pope! He has two thousand years of antiquated revelations, interpretation, and doctrine to deal with every time he opens his mouth.” Rickey leaned back; the old chair creaked. “Even a radical American religion, formed by direct revelation in the nineteenth century, carries a lot of unnecessary doctrinal baggage with it. I’d just as soon dispose of most of it.”

  “I guess.”

  “That’s why I like our doctrine of continuing revelation. We can renew or alter the church whenever it proves necessary. Keep the faith fresh.”

  “Good.”

  Loren saw he’d triggered another one of Rickey’s unpredictable enthusiasms and resigned himself to a lengthy explication, but the parson, with a visible though genial effort of will, managed to drag himself back from the brink. He cocked his head and looked at Loren. “You were talking about public servants?”

  “Yeah. How if you’re a cop, you’re not responsible for policy. You have to work within the system, and the system is imperfect. And you didn’t make the system in the first place, you inherited it.”

  “Yes. I understand.”

  “And—” Loren restrained an impulse to rise and pace, to add visible motion to the impetus of his thoughts. “All I want,” Loren said, letting his resigned hands rise from his lap, “is for my town to be a nice place. A safe place, okay?”

  “I was in Uganda during the sigatoka famine,” Rickey said.

  “I guessed you had. From what you’d said earlier.”

  “The area had been hit hard by war, and revolution, and then by HIV, and just as things were starting to look better, along came the plantain blight.“ He pronounced it plahntain. “Plantain and bananas are the staple of the poor people—you can raise enough plantain on a small plot to feed a family—”Smahl plaht. “—and the plantain and banana trees were being hit by black sigatoka faster than blight-resistant trees could mature. Well—” He shrugged his shoulders. “You know what happened from pictures on the TV. Refugees, unrest, revolt. Starvation.” Stah-urr-vation. “I was supposed to help the farmers shift their production to wheat, but the American wheat I was given was unsuitable to Africa, and though an acre and a half sown with plantain will keep a family fed, you need a lot more land to feed that same family on wheat, and the land wasn’t available. There’s enough rainfall to raise wheat if the rain is distributed evenly, but in Uganda it doesn’t come regularly, it comes in torrential cloudbursts followed by weeks of tropical heat.”

  Rickey shook his head. “I knew all of this, you understand, within a few weeks of my arrival. But my superiors in Washington insisted that I follow the program. Recommendations to the contrary were discouraged or ignored. And what could I do? I could do nothing and watch the Ugandans starve, or I could teach them to plant wheat and maybe save a few.” He gave a long sigh.

  “After a while I began to wonder if Washington really wanted to save anybody. I thought they were just after good P.R., they just wanted people to believe they were helping, but didn’t care what actually happened.”

  “Good P.R.,” Loren said. “I know what you mean.”

  “All the new wheat fields turned into eroded deserts. Worse than if we’d done nothing. The local people began to blame us, the Americans, for their problems. They identified us with the corrupt government that was getting rich off the relief effort. All the strife they’d had before had left a lot of modern weapons around. I got evacuated back to the States after some of the other Peace Corps people were shot or hacked up with pangas.”

  He leaned forward, looking into Loren’s eyes. “All I wanted, Chief, was for Uganda to be a nice place. But it was not permitted for me to make it that way. Do you understand?”

  Loren nodded, fully intending to thank Rickey for his little speech and leave, but guilt seized his heart and somehow he found himself talking on.

  “That’s not quite the way it is,” Loren said. “It’s more like, if you were in Uganda, and you had the food to give to the people, and your superiors told you not to.”

  Rickey’s eyes flickered behind his spectacles. “You must feed the people, Loren.”

  “The thing is,” Loren said, “they say it’s because
they can get more food later. But in the meantime, there’s starvation.”

  “You cannot know what will come. You must feed the people while you can.”

  “I know who shot the man the other night,” Loren said abruptly, “and I know who wrecked the train yesterday.”

  Loren saw surprise behind the glittering spectacles. “And you can’t prove it?”

  “I’ve been advised not to try. I’ve been put on leave so that I won’t.”

  Rickey seemed genuinely surprised. He struggled with his thoughts for a long moment. “Your . . . superiors ... are covering up a series of murders?”

  “It’s more like they don’t want to know who did it. It doesn’t matter to them. They’ve got other things on their minds.”

  “Like what, for God’s sake?”

  “Like saving the town. A bunch of strangers got killed, okay. They didn’t have anything to do with it, they didn’t know the people who died, it’s nothing to them.” He remembered Sondra Jernigan weeping in her car, Jernigan’s head with its furious scowl. “Nothing to them,” he repeated. “But they figure they can do a deal with . . . well, with some people connected to the people who did the crime. Get money and jobs for the town.”

  “Blood money.” Rickey was appalled.

  “I’ve been loyal to them,” Loren said. “I’ve done stuff they wanted me to, even though I didn’t like it. It’s my town, you know? I had to take it the way I found it.”

  “I have heard, of course . . .” Rickey chose his words carefully. “I have heard stories of corruption. Payoffs, that sort of thing.”

  “Some of them are probably true,” Loren said.

  Rickey said nothing, just looked at him.

  “But it’s not . . . it’s not evil,” Loren said. He felt sweat prickling his scalp. “It’s just a way of life. It’s almost neighborly, the way it happens. It’s the way things have been here for over a century.”

  “It’s still wrong.”

  “I accept that.” He looked at the parson and the words grew dry in his mouth. “I live with it,” he said. “It’s not something I take pride in. But change it? I’d have to change everything.”

  “It will have to end sometime.”

  “I’ve been loyal to certain people.” Insistently. “I’ve been loyal, and I’ve expected loyalty in return.”

  “You have reason to expect that.”

  “Damn right.” Loren’s fists clenched. “And they— I’ve been betrayed. My trust. I don’t know . . .” His mind whirled.

  “Render unto Caesar if you must,” Rickey said, “but you must not conceal a great crime. You must arrest the killers. You must arrest them and put them away.” The words crime and arrest were turned to fierce growls by his thick r’s.

  “In order to arrest someone, I need evidence,” Loren said. “I have to convince the district attorney’s office that I have evidence enough to convict, and I don’t have that. If I had it, I’d be able to arrest the perpetrators, sweat them until one of them agrees to cave in and testify against the others. That’s the way it is. That’s the way it works. But if the D.A. won’t hold them, I can’t do that, and if I told the D.A. what I know, he’d think I was crazy.”

  “But still you must—” Hesitation surfaced in the pastor’s look. “The evidence you have— is it, ah, supernatural in origin?”

  Loren gave a laugh. “My miracle, you mean? No, it’s not even that good. It’s circumstantial. Based on what I know of the people involved, their movements, and so on.”

  “I’m relieved.” Rickey took a long breath. “I wonder what it is like, you know, to have a life on your conscience.”

  “I’ve thought about that myself. But I’ve never had to use my weapon. I’ve always found other ways of dealing with my neighbors. I’m proud of that.” Defiance filled his mind. “Handling it informally. That’s the best way, whatever the lawyers say.”

  Rickey seemed not to have paid attention. “That man who burned down my shelter,” he said. “The arsonist. He probably knew the place had smoke detectors and alarms. How would he have known that twelve people would die? That he would kill children? That couldn’t have been part of his plan.”

  “From what I’ve seen of criminals,” Loren said, “they just don’t give a damn what damage they do. It’s not something that even fits into their calculations.” He shrugged. “That’s why we catch them, most times. Because they don’t calculate at all.”

  “I’m sure that whoever did it is suffering,” Rickey said. The pastor, Loren realized, hadn’t heard a word Loren had said; he was locked into his own nightmare, his eyes focused a thousand miles away, on choking children and scarlet flames scarring the night. “How could such a man atone?” Rickey asked. “What service could he offer to society or to God?”

  “A life busting rocks in Leavenworth wouldn’t be out of line.”

  “A lifetime wouldn’t be enough, surely.” Rickey’s eyes flicked to Loren’s. “Murderers must be punished. Right must be done. If you know who . . .”

  A hot bubble of frustration expanded within Loren, exploding in anger. “It’s a goddamn game!” he said. “Right and wrong don’t have anything to do with it! You’ve gotta dance a fucking waltz with lawyers and judges, dot every i, cross every t!”

  “Dot them,” Rickey said, his look intent. “Cross them.”

  “If this were the old days, a hundred years ago, I could just raise up a posse and find the perps and arrest them. Chances are I could count on the posse doing the judge’s job for me, filling them with lead during the arrest or hanging them after.” He shrugged. “But it’s the twenty-first century. You don’t do things that way, not even in Atocha. Things are run the old way here, but not that old a way. Not lynch law.”

  “You have seen a miracle.” Mirahcle.

  Loren’s mind jolted onto Rickey’s new track. He looked at the pastor in surprise. “Yes,” he said. “I think I have.”

  “What did I say about miracles the other night? That they turn things upside down, that they change everything?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want you to consider whether the miracle was intended for you, because you are meant to change everything.”

  Loren looked at Rickey bleakly. “Sword and arm of the Lord,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “God’s backing me into a corner. He wants something done and he’s not giving me any choice.”

  “In a sense. Yes.” Rickey’s look was intense. “You are a public servant. You’ve lived in the world, among the fallen, but you are also a man of faith, because you sense a higher world. Perhaps you are being called to make Atocha a nice place. As you said.”

  Loren looked for a long time at the parson, then rose slowly from his chair. The sense of calling had not exhilarated him at all, just filled him with sick foreboding. His headache was coming back.

  “I’ll do what I can,” he said.

  “That is all anyone can expect.”

  He drove toward home beneath the overhanging elms of Estes Street in the darkness, and suddenly a car pulled away from the curb behind him, the headlights dazzling in his rearview mirror. The lights dimmed, then brightened again, then dimmed. He was being signaled.

  His nerves hummed and his mouth turned dry. He was suddenly aware that he wasn’t carrying a pistol.

  He set the parking brake and drew the pump shotgun from its rest. The other car, a Saab, pulled around him and parked in front, in the spill of his headlights. He could see only a single passenger.

  The man got out, a young man in a blue nylon jacket and work boots, with a neatly trimmed blond mustache. Loren turned the side spotlight on and shone it at the man, aiming it with the control stick inside the car. The man shaded his eyes with his hands— both hands. Loren wanted to see both the man’s hands. He rolled down his window.

  “Chief Hawn?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Paul Rivers. We talked last night.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  �
�I got the information you wanted. It’s kind of weird.”

  The man reached into his jacket pocket. Loren tensed, his nerves screaming, and his grip tightened on the stock of the shotgun.

  Rivers pulled out a piece of paper. “The same four guys were working all weekend. From Saturday morning on, no one else from our office was in the facility, aside from the gate guards.”

  Loren took the paper and looked at the names. Patience, Nazzarett, McLerie, Denardis.

  “That’s unusual, right?” Loren said.

  “It’s never happened before. And none of those guys have been on duty since first shift Monday. They’re not on the roster, and I haven’t seen any of them personally.”

  Whatever had happened, Loren thought, happened Friday night. And it had been so unusual that Patience had kept the same people on through the weekend, keeping the number of witnesses low, till he could get rid of the yellow Thunderbird on Monday morning and destroy the last of his evidence.

  “I arrested Nazzarett on Tuesday afternoon,” Loren said. “He was shadowing me in one of your Blazers.”

  Rivers shrugged. “He wasn’t on the duty roster. I didn’t think to check who’d signed out a vehicle.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  “I didn’t want to call you. Patience can monitor any calls going in or out of the facility from his board, and—”

  “Wait a minute.” Loren stared at him. “Do the employees know this?”

  “Some do, some don’t. It’s not a big secret, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  That was why Jernigan died. Because Patience had overheard his call to the lawyer on Tuesday morning.

  “Anyway, Patience has other monitoring equipment. Phone taps and so on.”

  “They’re illegal.” Pointlessly.

  Rivers only shrugged. “Things have been getting pretty tense. He’s been pulling intruder drills, snap inspections. Being more hard-ass than usual. He’s under some kind of pressure. Maybe he’s tapping your line, maybe he isn’t. Maybe he’s tapping mine. I thought I ought to be careful.”

  “Okay.” Loren looked at the list again. “Thanks.” A thought struck him and he grinned. “If they’re tapping my line, they’re not getting anything but long hours of conversation between teenage girls. I almost feel sorry for them.”