Valley of Bones

by Michael Gruber

  “Who’s Almax?”

  “A survey outfit, working for a Chinese-French consortium. Anyway, we were monitoring their transmissions and we picked up the team leader, Terry Richardson, saying they’d found what looked like a major reservoir. It looked big, really big, maybe another Libya. A diagenetic trap.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s a rare formation and hard to find, which is why it’d been overlooked. Basically it’s a fossil coral reef capping an oil reservoir. The Sirte basin in Libya is a trap like that, and it’s around thirty billion barrels. Anyway, Richardson said that he’d send the data the next day. That was the last anyone heard from him or from anyone in the Almax team. They disappeared off the map. The government sent people into the area, troops, at first only a few and they disappeared, and then they sent planes, and stronger parties, and they disappeared too. The government was going nuts because there wasn’t supposed to be anyone on the other side of the Pibor except bunches of starving refugees and a few SPLA militia. And then we started to hear about Atiamabi.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “She. A white woman. That’s what the natives called her. She showed up in this little shit-hole east of the Pibor called Wibok, and all of a sudden these raggedy-ass locals are knocking off the Sudanese like clay pigeons. The whole area is closed off. We got onto our SPLA contacts and they say she’s not one of theirs. They’re pissed at her too, and when they sent people in there, they never came back either. Or they did, but with all kinds of insane stories. She was a nun, they said, she could do miracles, call lightning from the sky, all kinds of shit. So McKay told me to check it out, because he didn’t believe that a nun was playing fucking Erwin Rommel down there. It had to be some kind of pro and he had to be interested in the oil. I mean there’s nothing else there. We figured the nun was some kind of figurehead. So I hired people to go across the river, locals, and nothing, zilch. And then Hardy showed up. He knew who she was, an American named Emmylou Dideroff. A maniac like bin Laden, he said, but Catholic and she really was a nun. Hated Muslims, wanted to stake out a little oil kingdom of her own, use the resources to set up some kind of Christian theocracy. That’s all we needed, right? Every fucking raghead in the world is going to say, See, we told you so, the crusaders are back and they’re after our oil. It’d be worse than Israel. A catastrophe! But politically we couldn’t do anything out in the open. I mean can you imagine the fucking right-winger fundies in this government if they learned we were helping the Sudanese Muslims knock out someone like that? Not to mention the pope getting on the horn with the president. So it had to be completely covert. Could I have another drink?”

  Paz provided it. The man drank, belched, resumed his story.

  “This is where al-Muwalid comes in. He was our liaison with the GOS—”

  “The…?”

  “The GOS, the government of Sudan. He was doing what we were doing, keeping the oil flowing. He had a military unit, planes, a couple of tanks and armored personnel carriers…”

  “To keep oil flowing? Tanks?”

  “Yeah, he was chasing people out of Bahr al-Ghazal, where the fields are. Mainly he used Arab militias, but he had the heavy stuff too, if the SPLA gave him any trouble.”

  “I thought they called that ethnic cleansing,” said Paz.

  “It’s part of the price at the pump. Those people were in the way and he moved them. Anyway, we funded Hardy and he was able to upgrade their equipment, I mean al-Muwalid’s outfit, and he crossed the river and won this smashing victory, according to him. Well, fuck, we gave him pretty near an armored battalion, that’s no surprise. And he captured the bitch. Which was good, but he didn’t capture anyone else. No prisoners, no oil survey team, and no fucking data. I mean let’s face it, the characters you’re dealing with, in those places, you know…” Packer’s face flushed around the cheeks.

  “Niggers, you mean,” said Paz helpfully. “Dumb-ass jungle bunnies. Go on, please.”

  Packer cleared his throat heavily and did so. “Okay, so it was critical to find out whether they really had a big strike or not. McKay got Washington involved here. It was a big policy deal. I mean all the way up to the top.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, if it was all that big, like another Libya, say, then they had to decide what to do about Sudan. A country that’s got reserves of point six billion is a whole nother thing from a country that’s got sixty or more. Plus the country’s run by a bunch of Islamist crazies make the Saudis look like Methodists. So do we try for a coup, get the crazies out of there? Or throw support to the SPLA, let them take over the region, push them to declare independence? Maybe it’d be a good thing to have a nominally Christian nation with a shitload of petroleum down there. It’d piss off the Muslims, though, which is all we need right now. The point was, the big fish couldn’t come to a policy decision until we knew what the Almax team had discovered. We put the screws to al-Muwalid. He had the woman then. Could we see her? No. Did you find the data? No comment. You won this big victory, you got control of the region, let’s get another survey going. The situation is too delicate at present, he says. And bullshit like that. No one’ll give you a straight answer in the whole fucking country. Then we heard three things practically at the same time. One, the Almax team was dead, burned in their truck without a scrap of data, two, al-Muwalid had actually gotten his ass creamed by the n…by the locals across the Pibor, so there wasn’t a hope of getting another team in there, and three, this Dideroff character had escaped.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Hardy. Some guys came in and snatched her out of the jail where al-Muwalid was holding her. A professional lift, not her people. We figured the Israelis, but our sources there said it wasn’t them. Washington is going nuts by this time. Meanwhile, she’s smoke for over a year. We looked for her hard, I can tell you that. The only Emmylou Dideroff on record skipped on a minor dope charge ten years ago and vanished. No record of employment, no criminal record, no credit, no passport….”

  “Just like you,” said Paz. “And then…?”

  “Hardy found her, I don’t know how. She was in some convent in Malta, but by the time we got our ducks in a row, she’d skipped. By this time she was important enough to have a federal presence on site, and they picked me. Hardy said she’d go to Miami, maybe he had people tracking her, I don’t know, but she showed on the manifest of a London–Miami flight, no attempt at an alias, on a passport under her own name, for crying out loud, and I met her at the airport. I got into a conversation with her, fed her some names of people she trusted, and the next part you know, the houseboat, the job with Wilson. We watched her like fucking hawks and she didn’t do shit. No long-distance calling, no contacts, no friends. She went to work and church and volunteered at a shelter, period. Then al-Muwalid showed up in town. Obviously, we were alerted. Hardy came up with the idea.”

  “What idea?”

  “Get the two of them together, bug the place, see what they talked about.”

  “Dave, that’s lame, even for you. The plan was to kill the Arab and frame Emmylou for it, period. You knew she was a religious nut and would go for mental evaluation, and you figured you could extract from the shrink’s notes what you couldn’t get in your torture session. That’s why you’ve been trying to lift those confession notebooks.”

  No comment.

  “Dave?” Paz pointed upward. Thump-thump of pacing feet and “He shall bring upon them their own iniquity, and shall cut them off in their own wickedness, yea, the Lord our God shall cut them off.”

  Paz picked up the knife. “Maybe I should make a start,” he said. “How hard could it be? I bet it’ll hurt a lot worse than getting dinged.”

  Packer’s face seemed to sag, and his shoulders. A tear trickled down from one eye. “Ah, shit,” he said, “I can’t do this kind of shit. Just let me go, okay?”

  “When I have the story.”

  “Okay, yeah, that was the plan. And we had someone in the nuthouse to
o, an orderly, watching the doctor.”

  “Right, and who took the photographs of us at the beach?”

  “Hardy. I told him it was dumb, but he doesn’t listen.”

  “He’s the redhead.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about Porky, Casper, and Bugs?”

  “He’s one of them. He only has two men with him.” He saw Paz’s look. “Oh, God. I swear. I don’t want to lie anymore. I want to go home.” He drizzled for a while and Paz let him while he dumped out the files from the portfolio and looked at them.

  “What are all these?”

  “Just receipts. There’s a checking account, besides all the cash. It’s a front we use, to pay for things like rental trucks and equipment.”

  “This says you rented a storage locker yesterday. Tamiami Storage, Inc.”

  “If that’s what it says. I sign a lot of vouchers.”

  “They have her there, don’t they?” Packer’s face gave the answer. He nodded.

  Paz picked up the attaché case, grabbed the mini–tape recorder he had placed covertly on the shelf behind Packer’s head, and walked across the salon, stepping around the pool of gasoline.

  “Where are you going?” Packer shouted. “Don’t leave! I swear I told you everything! Please!”

  Out on deck, Paz motioned to Barlow, who stopped his declaiming and climbed down to the lower deck.

  “Did he talk?” Barlow asked. They could hear Packer blubbering and screaming for Paz to come back.

  “Yeah. They’ve got her in a storage place on West Flagler. Where’re you going?”

  Barlow stepped through the shattered door. “My shotgun. And my knife. It’s a Randall.”

  Packer gave an unearthly shriek and fell silent. Barlow emerged, wiping his blade.

  “For God’s sake, Cletis…”

  “I didn’t touch him,” said Barlow, replacing the blade. “Fella don’t have the nerves for this kind of work. He fainted away like my old grannie soon as he saw me. I sliced the tape on his wrists a little so’s he can get free and don’t have to mess his pants.” They started to walk back to the car and Paz asked, “Did you make up all that stuff you were spouting about killing and devouring fire?”

  “Those’re Psalms, Jimmy,” said Barlow in an offended tone. “The word of the Lord.”

  “I’m glad I didn’t know you when you were wild,” said Paz in an amused tone, and then checked when, by the light of a street lamp, he saw the expression on Barlow’s face. The lynch-mob guy had gone, replaced by a tired old man.

  “You okay, Cletis?”

  “Oh, I’ll survive. But you can’t do like I just done without letting the devil into you a little, and I still got the stench of him in my mouth.”

  “I KNOW THIS place,” Lorna said as they pulled to the curb in front of a modest commercial strip. “This is the world’s greatest Cuban sandwich joint. We stopped here when we went to the beach.”

  “That’s right and there’s Tamiami Storage right next to it.” Paz swiveled to face the backseat. “How do you want to play this, Cletis?”

  “You’re the cop,” said Barlow. “But I’d just go in that office and show the square-badge in there your tin and say you think you got a kidnap victim in such and such a locker. I’ll just set here with Lorna and watch the street.”

  They watched Paz walk into the alley between the two four-story blank-faced cubes of Tamiami Storage, toward the lit sign that announced the office. Cletis loaded his shotgun.

  “Do you think you’ll have to use that?” she asked.

  “I sure hope not,” said Barlow. “But if someone shows with bad intent and they’re armed and they don’t throw down, I’m going to be thinking that they’re the fellas who beat up Edna, and woe to them.”

  THE SQUARE-BADGE was a dozy fat man who looked wide-eyed at Paz’s detective ID and made an effort to hide the porn magazine he had been studying. Paz showed him the rental receipt and demanded to be shown to the locker indicated. The man looked through a card file and led Paz down gray, ill-lit corridors to a door closed with a large padlock. Paz demanded a bolt cutter, snipped the thing off, and went in.

  A long canvas package lay on the floor, wrapped with cords. He used his pocketknife to slice through the binding and peeled the tarpaulin back like a banana. At first he thought she was dead, but then he saw her eyelids flutter and heard her breathe. She sighed and opened her eyes.

  “Edna…?”

  “She’s okay,” Paz said. “Banged up, but fine. How are you?”

  “Conked on the head one more time,” she said, and there was that smile again. He stripped away the rest of the wrapping and helped her stand.

  “Did you recognize any of them?” he asked.

  “No, they had cartoon masks on. Bugs was the one giving orders. I thought I recognized the voice, but I couldn’t tell for sure. He didn’t say much. They wanted the notebook. That’s why they beat Edna, may God forgive me.”

  “Does the name John Hardy mean anything to you?”

  She nodded and recited, “ ‘John Hardy was a desperate little man, he carried a six-gun every day. He kilt him a man on the West Virginia line, you ought to see John Hardy gettin’ away, good Lord, see John Hardy get away.’ It was Orne Foy’s favorite song. Why?”

  “Packer said that was the name of the guy who ran the operation. Any idea what his real name is?”

  She shrugged. “I couldn’t say.”

  Liar, thought Paz, but said nothing, and led her out of the room, past the stunned guard, through the dim halls.

  OUTSIDE, CLETIS BARLOW stood by the Taurus, cradling his shotgun. It was past two, and misty, the traffic light, the sidewalks deserted except for the occasional man or woman pushing a shopping cart. It was a great neighborhood for the homeless.

  The sound of an engine roaring, and it came fast around the corner out of Nineteenth Avenue, a white Ford Explorer with dark-tinted windows. The driver pulled it to a sharp stop across the street from Tamiami Storage and jumped out, as did the man in the front passenger seat. They were big men, wearing black jeans and dark hooded sweatshirts. Their faces were covered with plastic masks, Porky Pig and Casper the Ghost. As they crossed the centerline of the roadway, Barlow stood in their path, pointing his old Ithaca at them.

  The men stopped. They saw a skinny old guy with an old two-barrel shotgun and were not impressed. Barlow could see their thoughts spinning that way by the set of their bodies. Each cast a quick glance at his companion and both bolted, one going east, one west. Four steps and they spun around, pulling out heavy-caliber pistols. It was a good trick but not against a man who had been hunting dove for forty years. Barlow emptied both of his barrels, filling the air with sixteen .30-caliber pellets from each, one right, one left.

  Lorna had never seen a shotgun fired before in real life. It was much, much louder than it was in the movies, and the targeted men did not fly through the air backward for twenty feet. They collapsed in place like punctured balloons and lay in two dark heaps.

  Paz came running out, pistol in hand, with Emmylou walking slowly some paces behind him. He inspected the bodies on the street and saw that they were beyond help. Together, he and Barlow dragged them from the road, leaving long, wide trails of blood, black as oil in the anticrime light’s yellow glare.

  “Well, you got to see their blood all right, Cletis.”

  Barlow said, “ ‘I have pursued mine enemies, and overtaken them: neither did I turn again until they were consumed.’ Psalm 18:37. I hope you don’t think I take any satisfaction in this, Jimmy. They come at me tricky and I had no choice. Thirty-two years in the PD and this’s the first time I ever shot a man to death….”

  Barlow sat down on the curb and put his head in his hands. Emmylou sat beside him and embraced him. Lorna came out of the car and sat on the curb on Barlow’s other side, taking his hand. Paz observed the tableau stone-faced; he thought it looked like an allegorical sculpture: Faith and Reason Consoling Justice. He couldn’t look at Ba
rlow’s face, because he knew that had he been the one with the shotgun he’d be dead, not because of his reflexes but because the power to deal out death had been taken away from him.

  Then he heard the sound of a car door opening behind him, turned, and saw a man jump out of the back of the white Ford SUV. He was small and slight, so that for an instant Paz thought he was a boy. He didn’t have a boy’s face, though. His hair was short and red, and he was dressed in the same dark jeans and sweatshirt as the two dead men. He held some kind of submachine gun, an Uzi or an MP5, Paz couldn’t tell.

  “Bugs,” said Paz. “Or John Hardy.”

  “What’s up, doc?” said the man with a broad grin. “Paz, why don’t you carefully draw your weapon by the butt and place it on the ground, and then go and sit down with your pals.”

  Paz did so.

  “Hello, Skeeter,” said Emmylou Dideroff.

  “Emmy,” said the man with the gun, “it’s nice to see you again after all these years.”

  “Don’t hurt these people, Skeeter. Take me, and let them go. I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

  “Oh, you can put that in the bank! But I need all these folks, honey bunch. Torture don’t work so good on you, as our late Sudanese friend found out, but when I put it to your buddies here, maybe it’ll work better. I actually haven’t done a lot of torture, but maybe I’ll have beginner’s luck.”

  Paz couldn’t take his eyes off the man’s face. He was happy, delighted, like a kid at a carnival. Paz had always thought that happy was the whole point of life, but no longer, not if this guy existed.