Days of Atonement

by Walter Jon Williams

  “Crap.” Luis gestured grandly. “Figueracion’s in charge. Figueracion’s always been in charge.”

  “You’re never gonna run anything as long as William Patience and his thugs are crawling around assassinating the voters. They’re running things exactly the way they want to.”

  Luis’s chest pumped air like a bellows, but his look turned thoughtful. He cleared his throat and stood, then turned to pick up his tie from the bed. He stuffed the tie in a pocket.

  “I’ll make some calls.”

  “You do that, Luis.” Loren opened the door.

  “Tell Deb I came by.”

  “You can tell her yourself. She’s right down the hall.”

  Luis hesitated for a moment, then nodded. “I’ll do that. Thanks.” He headed down the hall, knocked on Kelly’s door.

  Power and glory still sang in Loren’s blood.

  His mind turned over one plan after another.

  It was as if God were whispering into his ear.

  *

  For the drive Loren wore his camouflage duck-hunting clothes with his flak jacket underneath. He jammed a green John Deere gimme cap on his head and carried the Dragunov over one arm, his Remington shotgun in the other. The family crossed to the Gribbins’ yard crouched low so that they wouldn’t appear above the four-foot cedar fence that guarded their property. Loren had removed some slats in the back fence to make a gap wide enough to shimmy through. A fire-fighting helicopter overhead gave the whole thing the air of a dismaying military evacuation, the ambassador and his family getting out before the rebels rolled over the wire.

  Debra and the girls were wearing dark glasses, scarves, and dark colors in hope of seeming anonymous, but to Loren’s mind they seemed the perfect picture of a family in mourning. Nothing, he figured, he could do about that. They piled their luggage and books in the back of Archie Gribbin’s desert-colored beige Jeep, then climbed in. Its two bumper stickers said TRUST IN THE LORD and SUPPORT FIREARMS, both mottoes Loren was prepared to live by. Loren put the rifle and shotgun between the two front seats and told his family to duck down and keep their heads out of sight.

  He kept to the side streets till he was out of town but had to get on 82 eventually. Once there he cranked the Jeep as fast as it would go, which turned out to be about sixty, with the transmission screaming louder than a fighter plane’s afterburner. A little rent in the canvas top flogged in the wind and added to the noise. Loren made the turnoff onto 103 that led past the ATL facility and he reminded everyone to keep their heads well down.

  He checked the rearview mirror continually. No one was following. He looked over his shoulder. The girls were lying side by side on the back seat, tight-lipped and pale. Scared to death, probably, hiding from some unknown assassins, their father in his flak jacket, guns lying propped up just in front of them. Somebody needed to talk to them.

  “Long as you’re here,” Loren said, shouting over the howling of the transmission, “lemme tell you what’s happening. Everything’s got to do with that John Doe that died on Saturday.”

  And as the twelve-foot-high ATL chain link unscrolled on the left of the road, Loren told his story. The chronology might have been a bit muddled, and he probably garbled a lot of the physics, but he thought the central facts were clear. Randal Dudenhof had been duplicated, summoned from some unknown dimension by the colossal superconducting power of the LINAC; it was Randal1 who had died at the Rio Seco bridge and Randal2 that had been shot; ATL guards had done the shooting.

  “And that’s why your uncle Jerry got killed,” Loren said. “They thought he was me.”

  He looked back over his shoulder. Katrina and Kelly glanced at each other, then at him.

  “They were shooting at you?” Apparently this hadn’t occurred to Kelly before.

  “Of course,” Katrina said. “Who would shoot Jerry?”

  “It sounds like one of Jerry’s stories,” Debra said. Her voice was barely audible. She was slumped down in the front seat, staring at the sky through her shades. Loren couldn’t read her expression.

  “I know,” Loren said. The El Pinto crossroads were coming up: he braked and clutched and the shrieking of the transmission fell away. “The thing is,” he said, “if it were just one of Jerry’s stories, nobody would have got shot.”

  “I suppose.”

  Loren accelerated through the intersection, the Jeep shuddering through the gear changes. This vehicle, he thought, was designed for masochists.

  “I don’t think you’re in any real danger,” he said. “Not as long as you lie low. Nobody’s looking for you. I just want you out of the way so that I don’t have to worry about you.”

  He took the turn to Joaquín Fernandez’s bait shop— a sign out front said HUNTERS WELCOME— and, so he couldn’t be seen from the road, drove up behind the building and parked behind Joaquín’s old Ford pickup truck that was quietly rusting beside the L.P. gas storage tank. Loren found the old man asleep in front of a television soap opera.

  Joaquín was happy to hide Loren’s family in one of his cabins. Loren figured he had been disappointed in not being able to blast the robbers and drug dealers with his rifle when he had the chance: now, in the absence of other amusement, he was pleased to guard the womenfolks holed up in the fort.

  Loren left Joaquín happily loading his .30-’06 and drove Debra and the kids past the trout pond, past pitted igneous rock and dying willows, past the pink frame building, with the new door still leaning on its little porch, where Robbie Cisneros and his friends had hidden out with their loot. To the last cabin in the canyon, a brown-stucco cottage framed by a pair of cottonwoods. A hideout worthy of John Dillinger.

  Loren helped the family move its possessions into the two-bedroom cabin. It was immediately apparent that no one had stayed there in months, maybe years. Fastidious Katrina went in search of a broom and dustpan, discovering them in a closet stacked with cardboard boxes loaded with magazines that seemed to feature Joe McCarthy and the Korean War.

  He looked at his family: Katrina sweeping, Debra looking for rags or paper towels to wipe the countertops, Kelly gazing through the bathroom door with an uncertain expression, apprehensive of the plumbing . . . Love and confusion thrashed in Loren’s chest. Who were his family, he wondered, when he wasn’t looking?

  He didn’t know. He didn’t know their secrets any more than they knew his, knew the adultery and the violence and the payoffs, knew the secrets he was himself holding for other people, or knew and understood the strange and compelling fraternity of law enforcement . . . He had little more knowledge of these people than he had of Amardas Singh’s particles, the tiny subatomic velocities which hid most of their lives in another seven dimensions, and which were something else when no one was paying attention . . .

  Loren gave up trying to work it out. He might as well love them, he thought. They were all he had.

  “Hugs,” he said. Debra dropped the gray rag she’d found and stepped toward him. Her arms went around him, barely making it around the bulky flak jacket.

  He made his rounds of the family, cherishing each contact. The hugs were wordless— this was a cop’s family; they’d done all this before.

  Then he was ten-seven outta there.

  *

  Loren parked the Jeep in the alley behind the parsonage, then went through the gate in the sagging wire fence, passing a pair of overflowing trash cans. Garbage pickup had been cut back along with everything else.

  Loren knocked on the back door. Rickey, answering, expressed no surprise at seeing him sneaking in the back way. Rickey led him wordlessly to his study, with its ring of mystic symbols, and sat down in his accustomed place, before the dead computer screen. He was dressed in a flannel shirt and blue jeans. Loren sat down on his own lightning-backed chair.

  “I hope this won’t take too long,” Loren said.

  Rickey shook his head slowly. From Loren’s perspective a pyramid, complete with eye, seemed balanced atop the parson’s head.

 
“I hoped you could tell me,” Rickey said, then fell silent a moment. He shook his head again. “No.” Correcting himself. “I wanted you to assure me that your poor brother’s death was not a result of my meddling the other day.”

  “Meddling.” Loren’s tongue explored the word.

  “I urged you to action,” Rickey said. “I assured you of the moral Rightness of it. And now— I’m perplexed. I didn’t foresee such a thing as this.”

  “Nobody did,” Loren said.

  “An innocent man. A bystander. Gunned down in such a planned way.” Rickey looked at Loren. “They thought he was you, yes? I’ve been assuming that.”

  “I assume that, too.”

  “I can’t understand it.” Rickey licked his lips. “One sets out to do a thing, yes. A criminal thing, an awful thing. But the consequences are something other than what was anticipated.” He looked up at Loren. The all-seeing eye on the wall behind him focused firmly on Rickey’s bald spot. “How can the killers live with themselves? How can they—” Words failed for a moment.“ Is it my fault?” Rickey asked finally. “I suppose that’s what I want to know. Am I a part of this chain of consequence?”

  “Jerry’s death is the fault of whoever pulled the trigger,” Loren said. “Nobody else.”

  “Yes.” Unconsoled. “I suppose.”

  “And now I’ll deal with it.”

  Rickey glanced up at him. “You have enough evidence to convict someone?”

  Loren shook his head. “Not yet. But it doesn’t matter. They’re a menace to everyone in this town till they’re dealt with. So I’ll deal with them.”

  “How?”

  “However it needs doing.”

  Rickey looked unhappy. Arab-sounding music thudded through the open window as a car passed by on Central.

  “I’ve primed you for this,” Rickey said. “I’ve filled you with righteousness and urged you to repair the wrongs of this community.” His accent chewed on the r’s: primed, urged, righteous.” It’s a job I cannot do, nor anyone. And if you attempt it now, there will be consequences beyond what you can know.”

  “You’re telling me not to do it? Not to protect my family?”

  “I want no more innocents to die.” Rickey’s eyes were cold and brittle ice. “Jerry’s killers hit the wrong man. If this becomes a vendetta, you don’t know what—”

  “I—”

  “Loren.” Firmly. “I’ve seen too much. All the deaths in Uganda, the children killed in fire . . .” After the word, pronounced fye-urr, his voice drifted away again. “The person who set the fire could not have known,” he said. “Not have known that children would have died. It had to have been unplanned.” He licked his lips. “If that man can atone, if he can find grace, then . . .” He shook his head.

  Loren stared for a long, timeless moment into the eye-in-pyramid, his mind caught in a rising whirlwind of revelation . . . and then he rose deliberately and took Rickey by his collar and wrenched him up from his chair. The antique tipped and fell, clattering on the hardwood floor. The pastor gaped in wordless terror. Loren drove Rickey back against his desk, the computer monitor rocking for a precarious instant as Loren stared intently into the fluid, shifting depths of the pastor’s spectacles.

  “You set that fire, didn’t you?” Loren’s words seemed to come from a heart of flame.

  “I—” Rickey’s lips worked soundlessly. Loren could see yellow plaque between the parson’s long horse teeth. Finally the man spoke.

  “How did you know?”

  “You’ve been confessing to me all week. Your speeches, your sermons. I just realized it.” He tightened his grip on the man’s collar, seeing the tartan flannel drawn tight over the veins at the side of the neck. Apparently it was his day for strangling people. Rickey reached back with one flailing arm, set the monitor to rocking again, grabbed the edge of the desk to support himself.

  “I assure you.” Rickey’s voice rasped out past constricted vocal cords. “I thought the fire alarm worked. I never thought anyone would be hurt.” His clouded eyes darted back and forth behind the distorting lenses. “But I couldn’t take it anymore. The misery, the endlessness of it— I was fed up. But I was needed! I couldn’t walk away.”

  “I assure you!” Loren mocked. He drove his right fist deep into Rickey’s solar plexus. Rickey bent over, gasping, his face pale. “Made me work it out, right?” Loren’s voice was loud as a trumpet in the small room. “Didn’t have the guts to confess, you had to just hint around it till I caught on.” He clubbed Rickey’s temple with a hammer fist, dropped him to the floor. “How many other people have you played this game with?” he demanded.

  Rickey whooped for air. “I— no one else could have guessed.”

  “You played it with everyone, didn’t you? Gave you a thrill, right? Thought you were too smart for them.”

  Loren’s rising foot thudded into Rickey’s ribs, lifted him up off the floor, then dropped him back against his desk. The heavy desk lurched, the monitor rocking once again—and Loren drove the monitor off the desk with a furious backhand sweep of his arm. Glass shattered; the vacuum tube exploded. Fiery joy burned in Loren’s heart, echoed in his roaring voice.

  “I should make you eat the goddamn glass!”

  “I would!” Tears poured down Rickey’s face. “I would if it would do any good!”

  Loren reached down, took the parson’s shirt, hauled him to his feet again. Rickey gasped in pain, bent double, clutched his ribs.

  “This way,” Loren said. He swung Rickey toward the door.

  “I’ve been trying to atone!” Rickey wept. “I’ve dedicated my life to service.”

  A shriek rose from Loren’s lungs. “You wanted me to set the fucking world right for you!” He shoved Rickey toward the door. “You wanted me to catch the killers so you could feel good!”

  “Yes.” Rickey reached out for the door frame, hauled himself through. His arms trembled like an old man’s.

  “A murderer.” Loren’s voice filled with bile. “You’ve killed children, damn you. And I was coming to you for advice.”

  “I have no right. I have no right.”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  Loren seized the back of Rickey’s collar and marched him out of the parsonage, down Central, across the plaza, and past the tarnished deco griffins into the headquarters of the police.

  Eloy was behind the front desk, confusion dancing through his face. Loren flung the parson against the desk. Eloy peered down at him from over his foam collar. “Mr. Rickey,” Loren said, “has a confession to make.”

  “Yes.” The parson gasped for breath. “I killed some people.”

  Eloy looked at Rickey blankly, then turned to Loren. “He putting us on?” he asked.

  “I killed some people,” Rickey repeated.

  Eloy’s eyes widened. “Not Jerry . . . ?”

  “Nobody you know,” Loren said. “Read him his rights, get a video camera, take him to a room, and let him talk.”

  “Right, Chief.”

  “I’ll do whatever you want,” Rickey babbled. He adjusted his spectacles. “I must atone.”

  “Tell the truth first,” Loren said. “Do your atoning later.”

  He turned away. Sickness and loathing clawed at his throat. He went back down the hallway to the front door.

  “Chief?” Eloy’s voice. “Aren’t you gonna want to be a part of this?”

  “I’m not a cop right now,” Loren said. “I’ve heard all I need to, anyway.”

  He went out the doors and stood between the two griffins. The plaza glowed at him in the bright high desert sun. The flag on the Federal Building roof crackled in the high wind like a series of gunshots.

  All this had been some kind of weird distraction, a hallucinatory interruption of Loren’s day. He started across the plaza again, heading for the Jeep.

  “Hey! Loren!”

  It was Sheila, puffing from her daily run. She was in a ragged gray T-shirt and bright red satin shorts, and she wore o
ne of those fashionable double-helix sweatbands that were probably good for any number of things, except absorbing any significant amount of sweat.

  She jogged up beside him, blinking myopically without her glasses. “I’m sorry about your brother,” she said.

  Loren didn’t shorten stride. “Thank you,” he said.

  “It’s set things on fire in the office. The police are running around like idiots. Uh, no offense. And what the hell did you do to Luis Figueracion?”

  Loren looked at her. “What do you mean?”

  “Luis is trying to get the mayor to drop your suspension, and he got Maldonado to agree, and he went into Castrejon’s office to talk him into joining them. The three are talking to Trujillo right now. But Luis keeps calling you a son of a bitch and swearing he’s gonna have you killed.”

  Savage laughter echoed in Loren’s head. “Yeah, that sounds like Luis.”

  “So what did you do to him?” She peered a little closer. “Or maybe the question should be, What have you got on him?”

  Loren just shook his head.

  “What’s the story, Loren? C’mon.”

  “Luis is gonna use me to solve a little problem he’s got,” Loren said, “and after I’ve done that for him, he’s gonna blame me for solving it and try to cut my nuts off.”

  “Can he do that? I mean, will he succeed?”

  Loren shrugged. “Everybody who’s anybody in this town has the goods on everybody else. It’s like we’ve all got loaded guns pointed at each other’s heads. So the first person to pull the trigger— who knows where that’s gonna lead?” He found himself grinning. “I think Luis’ll probably cool off before he does anything drastic. But if he doesn’t—” He shrugged. “There’ll be blood on the moon. Can’t say as I care anymore. Whatever loyalty I had to Luis went away the day he sold me out.”

  Loren crossed Church Street. Sheila jogged silently along for a moment, then spoke. “Do you know who killed your brother?”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  “No. Not that I much care.”

  “So what are you going to do, then? Once you get your job back.”