Valley of Bones

by Michael Gruber

  “This is about the oil,” Paz said.

  “Right you are, boy. The oil. Emmy knows it’s there and she wants it safe for her little jungle bunnies, so she keeps telling these lies. I thought she would come clean in her notebooks, or to Dr. Wise over there, but no. All lies. Oh, I forgot you guys didn’t see the last one. She had it hidden away, but I worked over that old lady and she came up with it pretty fast.”

  From Barlow came a low growl and he stirred, but the two women grabbed his arms.

  Skeeter chuckled. “Yeah, Gramps, you don’t want to get your head blown off.” He looked again at Emmylou. “Shit, girl, what the fuck’re you doing with these people? A nigger, a yid, and a dumbass hillbilly, what a combo! You were a lot better off as a nihilist whore, if you want my opinion.”

  “Skeeter, please…,” she said.

  “You’ll excuse me, I have to make a call. I’m a little guy and it’s going to be hard to handle this crowd without some help.” He pulled out a cell phone and switched it on. He asked Lorna, “You think that’s why I have a bad attitude, Doc? Because I’m a half-pint?”

  Lorna said, “No, I think you’d have been the same piece of shit you are if you were a gorilla.”

  Skeeter laughed. “Not very therapeutic, Doc. You need to take a cue from Emmy, sympathy, empathy, all that good shit. And just for that, I think I’ll start on you when we get to where we’re going.”

  His weapon didn’t waver as he pressed the buttons. The beeps seemed unnaturally loud in the quiet street.

  FROM THE ALLEY between the storage building and the commercial strip Rigoberto Munoz has been observing the goings-on for some time with a mixture of satisfaction and fear. He has drunk most of his bottle of white port and he has wrapped his head in tinfoil, but the voices still come through. What he is witnessing clearly confirms all of his extraterrestrial messages. That nice doctor and the woman with the wonderful smile have been captured by the aliens, which means the aliens are real, and all those stupid people at the Jackson mental health are wrong. This makes him glad. Now he sees one of the space aliens take out a controller and press its buttons. Rigoberto feels a terrible wrenching in his groin, but he fights against it. He takes out his old-fashioned Cuban fisherman’s knife and scuttles out of the alley, keeping to the shadows between the street lamps, working his way around the cars, to attack from behind. He knows what a submachine gun is from his time in the Cuban army, in Angola. Rigoberto is crazy, but not stupid.

  “I THOUGHT YOU only had those two guys,” said Paz.

  “Oh, you’ve been talking to Dave,” said Sonnenborg. “Yeah, you know it never pays to lay out all your cards, especially to dumb fucks like him. No, I got people watching your place and the doc’s….” Into the cell phone he said, “Yo, Benny. Yeah, get over to the storage. Yeah, like now, asshole.” He broke the connection and dialed another number. “Yeah, it’s me. I need you at the storage right away….”

  Paz saw Emmylou come to a decision, her mouth went thin and she nodded her head, and then she started to walk toward where Paz had dropped his pistol.

  Skeeter pointed his weapon at her. “Stop right there, you stupid bitch!” he cried and shot a short burst into her path. The bullets went screaming down the street and a car alarm started wailing. She knelt above the pistol. Skeeter extended his arm and pointed his weapon at Lorna. “You touch that fucking gun and I’ll blow her head off,” he yelled.

  Emmylou picked up the Glock and at the same instant Rigoberto Munoz came fast around the end of the white van and shoved his knife into the small of Skeeter’s back. Skeeter dropped the cell phone. He spun around and saw a bum shouting at him in Spanish, a filthy, nearly toothless man with a cap of shiny foil on his head. The man danced away and ran behind a car. Skeeter sent half a magazine after him, shattering glass, puncturing steel, but there was no indication as to whether he’d hit him. He reached around to where his back ached unbearably and felt the rough wooden handle. “What the fuck is this…?” he said to no one in particular, and collapsed.

  Paz began to move as soon as Skeeter’s head hit the ground. He kicked the man’s weapon under the van, then checked his pulse. Finding none, he took his own pistol from Emmylou and entered the white vehicle. There he found, as he had expected, the fourth and final notebook.

  “Is he dead?” asked Emmylou when he emerged. She was standing over the body.

  “Yeah,” said Paz. “You knew he was involved in this, didn’t you?”

  “No. I’m not a criminal mastermind, Detective.”

  “Oh, yes, you are,” said Paz, “in your own sweet way. And you were going to let him shoot Lorna too, weren’t you?”

  She said, “He wouldn’t have shot Lorna with me pointing a gun at him, he would have shot me. But the Lord sent an angel.”

  “That was a schizophrenic Cuban, Emmylou.”

  “Yes, an angel of the Lord. Not all of them are pretty blondes with feathery wings.”

  Paz wanted to shoot her himself just then but instead spoke to Barlow. “Cletis, if you would, get the ladies into our car and take them to Lorna’s place. I’ll be there as soon as I can. You all need to get out. By now that guard in there has called the cops.”

  “You are the cops,” said Lorna.

  “Maybe not for long,” Paz said and looked sadly at Cletis Barlow.

  Then he called Tito Morales.

  It is unfortunate that the title of this work seems so technical; not everyone after all is interested in the formation of nursing sisters. Were it not so, then perhaps St. Marie-Ange de Berville’s great work would have taken its place beside The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola or St. Teresa of Avila’s The Interior Castle as monumental guides on how to live the life of a vowed religious focused on a particular aspect of God’s work. Marie-Ange begins her introduction with the famous lines “What is this life that we should love it so, even though we are assured by God Himself that bliss lies beyond the sleep of death?” She thus confronts head-on the great paradox of the Christian religion: if there is another, better world ahead of us, what is the value of the only one we know? This is the core of her training method, which is different from the training methods of her two great predecessors, in that it is anascetic; she focuses instead on the appreciation of the gift of life in all its forms, and is relatively unconcerned with a narrow propriety with respect to the sins of the flesh. “Our Lord loved sinners for a good reason,” she writes in her introduction, “and in any case, blood is the best washing.”

  —FROM THE FORMATION OF NURSING SISTERS, BY MARIE-ANGE DE BERVILLE, 8TH ED. FOREWORD BY SR. MARGARET CLARE MCMAHAN, SBC, NEW YORK, 1975.

  Twenty-three

  PAZ ARRIVED AT Lorna’s in a car driven by his partner, Tito Morales, who had been told just enough about recent events to give him cover. The young cop seemed glum and irritated, and as Paz was getting out of the car he said, “What was that line about telling your partner everything?”

  “That’s only for honest cops,” Paz said. “Take care of yourself, Morales. Stay away from crazy people.”

  He rang the bell and Barlow answered it, holding his S&W Model 10 revolver by his side.

  “Any problems?”

  “No. The ladies are sleeping. Emmylou went down in a jiffy. Lorna stayed up reading that notebook.”

  “You read it too?”

  “I did. ‘And after these things I heard a great voice of much people in heaven, saying, Alleluia; Salvation, and glory and honor, and power, unto the Lord our God.’ Revelation 19:1.”

  “As good as that, huh? Well, I guess I better read it myself.”

  “Go ahead. It’ll do you a world of good, I believe. And now, if there’s nothing else, I reckon I’ll be going. I’d like to be with Edna. I’ll take your rental, if I may. If they want me, y’all know where I’m at.” Barlow handed over his big pistol without being asked and walked out.

  Paz went into the living room and found the notebook on the coffee table and read it through, and as soon
as he finished he went into the bedroom, dropped his clothes in a pile on the floor, a thing he rarely did, and slid into bed beside Lorna. He lay flat on his back, exhausted but so jangled by what had happened and what he had just read that sleep remained a distant rumor. He thought of Emmylou’s confession—the maniac had actually signed it!—and of what any prosecutor would say if he presented it in evidence, and it made him laugh out loud, an unpleasant and high-pitched sound on the near edge of hysteria. The sound made Lorna stir and moan, and slide closer to him, and he slid his hand under the curve of her butt, and brought his face close to her shoulder, breathing deeply of the sleep-scent that rose from her skin, like vanilla he thought, or was that synesthesia, she was so creamy.

  At which point Paz let the reptile brain take command. She responded in her sleep and then awoke quite in midfuck, and made pleased and pleasing sounds, somewhat louder than was her usual wont he thought, a gasp ’n’ groaner rather than a screamer or talker, which was actually his favorite type of the three. He thought the increased volume might have had something to do with the woman sleeping (or not) in the guest room on the other side of the headboard. Some women liked to advertise they were getting it, he had found, or maybe it was the special circumstances here.

  In any case, it blew most of the static out of his brain, and afterward she rolled around and he saw her face in the rosy glow from her digital clock and was pleased that it seemed once again drained of the pinching tension it had worn, suffused with pleasure, looking years younger. He said, “ ‘A woman touched by a man pretends, sometimes, to sleep, for the pleasure of letting him think that she awakens. After, her thighs sleep differently from before.’ ”

  “Did you just make that up?”

  “No, it’s from one of Willa’s poems. ‘Sleep,’ it’s called.”

  Lorna stiffened and then let out a long, deep sigh, like an unraveling of something tangled in a dank internal place. “I don’t mind. You can go back to her after I’m dead.”

  “Oh, would you just shut the fuck up,” he said gently and kissed her face innumerable times until she drifted off again. Moments afterward he joined her in sleep.

  She was still out when he rose in the morning. He took a quick shower and dressed in fresh clothes from his suitcase, then peeked into the guest room and was pleased to see the cropped dark head of the Former Suspect from Hell on the pillow. By the bed was the bag he’d used to bring her possessions from the houseboat.

  Lorna was stirring when he went back to her room. He leaned over and kissed her, which turned into more than a simple farewell smack.

  “Get those clothes off!” she ordered.

  “I can’t. I have to see Oliphant first thing. He’s out on a long limb on this and I owe him an explanation.”

  “Are you going to tell him the…what the hell’s that?”

  “It’s a .38 revolver. I’m leaving it with you, and your cell phone’s right next to it. We might’ve got all the bad guys last night, but who the fuck knows? Don’t let anyone take her without, one, seeing a warrant, and two, calling me. Okay?”

  “Yes, captain,” she said sourly, touching the brim of a notional hat. “If I go to sleep again, will all of this not have happened when I wake up?”

  He laughed, kissed her again, and left to call a cab.

  THIS MORNING PAZ had his police coffee in a mug that said NATIONAL TAX FRAUD CONFERENCE, SALT LAKE CITY, 1999, which did nothing to improve the flavor of the brew. Oliphant looked tired, as if he had not been able to return to sleep after Paz’s call had roused him in the middle of the night.

  Oliphant tapped the stack of papers on his desk, the report Paz had knocked together in the small hours. “It says here you were pursuing a lead in connection with the Wilson killing, which is not our case, and which I specifically ordered you to stay off of. You were alone, also against orders, and armed with a shotgun. Two men drove up in an SUV, pointed weapons at you, and you killed them both with the shotgun. Then, while you were examining the bodies, a third man jumped out of the SUV and disarmed you, threatening you with a submachine gun. Next, this person, while making a cell call, was stabbed in the back by a homeless man, who fled. You called for backup and later arrested two other men, who had been summoned by Mr. Submachine gun, who turned out to be behind both the Wilson killing and the al-Muwalid killing, a Siegfried W. Sonnenborg, aka Skeeter Sonnenborg, aka John Hardy, an arms merchant and international security consultant, also our long-sought criminal mastermind. Approximately how much of this is true?”

  “Say half?”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “You’re sure? You lose deniability.”

  “Oh, fuck that! I’m so fucking tired of deniability I could puke.”

  “Okay, boss. First of all, we have Emmylou. They snatched her from a place I stashed her upstate after breaking her out of the hospital. They had her locked in a storage locker. She’s now at a secure, undisclosed location.”

  “Along with the vice president. I’m sure they’ll have lots to talk about.”

  “Right. Second, I didn’t shoot those guys. Cletis Barlow did. He was backing me and they drove up and jumped him. Both of them had federal fugitive warrants out. They were skinhead gunrunners and meth dealers, and probably won’t be missed.”

  “No. And what about Sonnenborg being stabbed by a street person? You make that up too?”

  “No, that’s true. Sonnenborg had the drop on us, I mean me, Emmylou, Barlow, and Dr. Lorna Wise…”

  “Wise too? What, you didn’t bring the Hurricane Marching Band?”

  “No, they had a game. Anyway, this guy came out of nowhere and put a big fish knife through his liver and ran away. Rigoberto’s real, a Marielista fruitcake. We’ll pick him up and put him away for good. He needs to be inside.”

  “I guess. Still, pretty strange coincidence, him showing up like that, just when you needed him. Forty years of law enforcement work have taught me to be suspicious of coincidences like that.”

  “What can I say, Major? That’s how it went down. But the fact is that weird coincidences pop out like mushrooms after the rain when Emmylou Dideroff is in play. It seems to be part of her M.O.”

  “Mm. I guess there’s not much doubt that this Sonnenborg guy is the mastermind?”

  “Oh, yeah, he’s our guy on al-Muwalid and Wilson and on the assault and kidnap upstate, him and his gang, also confirmed by the pair of mutts we grabbed later. Same kind of lowlifes, and they’re anxious to talk. On the mastermind thing, well, Sonnenborg officially worked for a fed named Wayne Semple, aka Floyd Mitchell, aka David Packer.”

  “Who we don’t have.”

  “No, but do we want him? My sense is that all the nasty stuff came directly from Sonnenborg, who was apparently quite a piece of work. Packer wrote the checks, but he’s not a player down here anymore. When me and Morales went by there at four-thirty this morning, there was no houseboat at all. Packer must’ve called his cleaners. He’s probably back in the ’burbs outside Washington and the boat is somewhere out at sea, heading for a watery grave.”

  Oliphant said nothing. He pursed his lips and stared up at the ceiling. Paz had the strange feeling that he could see the man’s thoughts, like the news feed that runs along the bottom of the screen on CNN. Paz took a microrecorder cassette out of his pocket and laid it on Oliphant’s desk. “This is for you.”

  “What is it?”

  “A full confession from Packer, naming names. This whole thing is about Sudanese oil and the attempt by agents of the U.S. government to influence Sudanese oil policy and get information about a huge oil find. They committed God knows how many illegal acts both here and over there in furtherance of that goal, including ethnic cleansing, attempted genocide, and torture, plus the two murders here in Florida. My thought was that if you had that in a safe place, and let people up in D.C. know about it, you’d be off the hook as far as any pressure from that end was concerned. I mean it’d be a Mexican standoff. Or am I missing some subtlety?”
<
br />   Oliphant stared at the little rectangle for a good while and then slipped it into his shirt pocket. “No, I’d guess you were right. They won’t indict me. They might kill me, but they definitely won’t go the other route. I’d thank you…no, I do thank you, but by Christ, I hate all of it like poison!”

  “You’re welcome,” said Paz. “Only two other items. One is the dangerous nutcase fugitive Emmylou Dideroff me and Dr. Wise illegally sprang from state custody. I vote for letting her disappear just like Mr. Packer.”

  “Second the motion. You have a plan, I presume.”

  “Sort of. Last night I put in a call to Rome a little after three-thirty A.M. our time. I spoke to a very nice woman at the Society of Nursing Sisters of the Blood of Christ. I told her who I was and I said that her prioress general might be interested to know the current situation of one of their ladies. They call her Emily Garigeau. Rome seemed pretty interested.”

  “What are they going to do?”

  “I haven’t got a clue. But they’re a resourceful outfit. I’m sure they’ll think of something.”

  “Yes. What’s the other item?”

  Paz took out his Glock and his shield wallet and placed them on Oliphant’s desk.

  “I’m handing it in, Major. I suggest you put it out that you forced me to resign. It’ll cover you better if any of this stuff starts to work loose. Irresponsible cowboy resigns under pressure of squeaky clean new administration. I’ll take the pension in a lump sum.”

  “Christ, Jimmy, you don’t have to do this.” Oliphant’s face showed real concern, but at a somewhat more veiled level, Paz observed, it showed relief as well.

  “I do. I killed two guys already on the job, and I just realized last night I can’t do it again, and if I stay on the street, one day I’m going to choke and get someone killed.” He stood up and held out his hand. “Been a pleasure, Major,” he said. “Come by the restaurant sometime. I’ll buy you a dinner.”