by C. J. Howell
Okay. Come on.
They walked to the house the boy had gone into. Lorne was anxious to get out of the sun. He followed awkwardly, scooting ahead and then following behind, not able to match the boy’s even pace, at one point getting his feet tangled with the boy’s sneakers. The boy approached the house without a sound. He cracked the door open and poked his head in.
Hey, this guy needs a place to be. Says he has money.
Lorne didn’t hear if there was a response. They stepped inside. The door swung shut with a slap. Inside it was dark, sheets put up over all the windows, and hot. Lorne blinked feverishly, eyes slow to adjust to the darkness. The only light came from an old television. He could make out two forms on a couch and hear the clicking of buttons on video game controllers. On the screen the Arizona Cardinals were beating the Dallas Cowboys in a game of Madden.
He’s lost or something. He’s not a cop.
Be the sorriest looking cop I’ve ever seen, said a voice from the corner, female. Lorne could make out a large woman by the glow of the television, maybe three hundred pounds with a swatch of bleached hair coming over her eyes and Indian braids in the back.
That’s Pam, the boy said, she likes to bust balls.
Bust yours if you had any, Junior. One of the dark forms on the couch leaned forward and gave Pam a pound, touching fists.
Yeah, when are those things going to drop? A voice from the dark.
Never going to fill out your tighty-whiteys.
More pounds.
The other voice from the couch: You can have a seat if you want. Junior, give him a pipe.
The boy, unfazed by the ridicule, opened a metal folding chair, the kind that used to be common in institutional auditoriums and cafeterias, and set it next to the couch facing the television. Then he went into the kitchen, possibly the only other room in the house, and returned with a plastic cup of water and a glass pipe.
Good to drink water. People always forget when they smoke.
Lorne eased himself onto the chair, worried it might buckle under his weight, and drank the water.
Thanks....and thanks you guys. I’m kind of stuck you know?
No one responded. His eyes still hadn’t adjusted. He could just see forms, big forms. The boy had retreated to a beanbag in the corner. Fuck it, he thought, and sprinkled a pinch of white crystals into the pipe. The pipe had a thin short stem of spun glass and a round bowl the size of a chestnut. He held his lighter to the bottom of the bowl. The glass that had looked clear except for a yellow tinge of resin spiraled blue and black when put to the flame. One, two, he thought, and then, one, two again. He gently rocked the bowl from side to side, making sure the flame tasted every curve. A beautiful little convection oven warming up, one, two, and the chamber began to fill with smoke. He pulled softly and then covered the bowl with the flat side of the lighter. One, two again, and he exhaled smoke, white as Christmas morning, into the hot, damp room, and watched it settle in a wavy layer just below the crushed drywall ceiling.
Yeah, he said, yeah.
Pam laughed. The others said nothing.
Lorne felt good, a bubble of goodness welling up from his insides around his gut and groin and expanding outward until it reached the surface and strained and pulsed against his skin yearning to be free. Words came to him then, he couldn’t control it, he had to speak, to be heard, to know these people, for them to understand him.
I’ve had a…I’ve had a crazy couple of days.
Nobody took the bait.
He took a deep breath. It felt wonderful. He was content. And then he wasn’t. The bubble of goodness was poking through his skin like an alien baby, stretching it thin to where it would burst.
Do you know how I got here?
Summersaults? Pammy said. You look like it.
No man, this guy Tom, he was driving. Did you see Tom? He drove me here, he must of come this way.
No, the boy from the beanbag answered.
Went to bed and there was no car. Woke up this morning and the car was there with you sleeping in the back. I know a guy who’s good at fixing cars, if you want.
Lorne knew he should keep control if he could, but suddenly the line separating people and things completely disappeared, as if everything just merged together, could merge together, and words poured out of him and flooded the room.
At first I thought Tom was this homeless guy. We were driving to Vegas you know, like on a road trip, but then he started setting shit on fire and I thought he was crazy, but he’s actually some kind of agent deep undercover on a mission to stop this terrorist plot, they call them the Network, and they are everywhere, in our economy—
Your economy, Pammy interjected.
—in our technology, in our infrastructure, in our communications, so he had to go completely off the grid…see, I thought he was a bum because he’s broke, but it turns out he can’t handle paper money because the little metallic strip that’s in all bills, the watermark, they can track that shit from satellites, that’s how they made all the agents they sent in undercover before. Any credit card, check, wire, bill can all be traced and instantly GPS’d and then they’d be on him, so he only handles change, that’s why I thought he was a bum, but if you think about it it’s the perfect cover.
Bullshit, Pam coughed, lighting up her own pipe.
Wait, you’re with some kind of Fed? The couch spoke and Lorne sensed eyes training on him.
No, no, it’s not like that. He’s single-minded, they’re going blow up the Hoover Dam, that’s all he’s about. It’s life or death. Millions of people.
Bullshit, Pam said again.
The boy pulled up his beanbag next to Lorne’s chair.
I’ve read about this, the boy said. They put those strips in all the dollar bills a few years ago.
Some spare-changer says he’s out to save the world from some global conspiracy. Starts fires. That’s textbook looney bin shit, Pammy said.
No, you don’t understand, Lorne stammered, the line obliterated, all of them coming together in bonds so tangible he could almost see the wisps of thoughts connecting them. It all fitting into place.
I’ve seen it, in an abandoned mine, rows of computers and servers and all this high-tech shit. He was right. He torched the place and he was right. It all made sense.
Lord knows what makes sense to you. You been smoking too much glass, Pam said, passing the pipe to the couch.
No, you don’t understand. The invisible bonds forming and unforming, Lorne almost desperate to complete the circle.
We killed a guy.
They were all listening to Lorne now.
Chapter 7
Memories are like any other thoughts except they might be real. In the telling of what happened at the mine Lorne knew that his perception of events may have been influenced by the acid, but he trusted that drugs affected only details, not the actual facts themselves. His life experience was entirely to the contrary. Nonetheless, this is what he believed.
The night was wild and windswept. The Merle Haggard from the jukebox was instantly extinguished by the door slamming shut, blown hard against its wooden frame by the swirling canyon winds. It was dark, the only light from a few distant and unearthly floodlights and the yellowed sepia of the barroom that seemed pinched off, dimmed and useless, swallowed by the night outside.
The mine loomed across the street. The two men followed a chain link fence so tall that at its top it curved out over the street, Lorne feeling the oxidized metal scrape against his fingertips imparting a dry metallic powder. After a time Tom eyed some irregularity in the fence that Lorne couldn’t see. To Lorne the fence looked like it was melded into the road, like the road was really a tube, a massive particle collider in which they were two atoms waiting to be smashed. But Tom had adeptly spotted a bulge in the fence where the chain link mesh was slightly curled up and loose from the ground. He lifted up the flap and told Lorne to hold it up a few inches while he slid underneath, and then he held the buckling fold
for Lorne to do the same.
The far end of the canyon lit up. Tom’s first thought was that they’d triggered a motion sensor, but he quickly saw that the illumination was from a set of headlights sidewinding the empty canyon road at a less than safe speed. His instinct was to remain perfectly still and play the odds that the vehicle would pass them without incident, but Lorne had already started on a dead run, bad foot and all, across a dirt pit and up a slag pile toward one of the mine’s towers. Tom gave chase, hit the slag pile, and the two of them clawed their way over junk rock and tailings even as the car continued down canyon without slowing.
Lorne, on all fours, reached the top of the rock pile and crouched against the corrugated tin siding of a six-story tower. His hands were scraped bloody, but they didn’t hurt. In fact, feeling the pulsing blood produced an exhilarating tingle. Tom reached him, jogged once around the tower and, not finding a door, immediately started climbing the riveted steel beams like scaffolding, wedging himself up the crisscrossed supports stacked in X shapes up one side of the tower. Lorne climbed after him, laughing gleefully, his hands knowing just where to go, not sure how he was doing it, like he was flying, his muscles working in rhythm with his fingertips, never looking down, fear replaced by the lightness of energy, until Tom had his hands gripping his back from above and was heaving him up onto a flat platform high in the sky.
Lorne stood atop the platform and marveled at where he was. He could make out the dark silhouettes of the mountains encircling the mine at eye level against the blackness of the night sky, decipherable only by the scattershot of stars that seemed to move and multiply the longer he stared. Below and across were the parapets and ramparts of the skeletal mine cast in sharp shadows by sporadic floodlights, and further below the shacks, outbuildings, trussed conveyor belts and idlers, pumps, hoses and dilapidated machinery left aging aside and among a waste pond and various waste puddles.
The platform, really the bratticed roof of the mine’s tallest and most menacing structure, shook with the wind, which made the stars move more and the entire canyon rise and sink as if on surf. To Lorne’s dilated pupils the stars left tracers that jogged with his vision like a neon spirograph on the sky’s black canvas. Lorne continued to stand until he felt it unsafe and then crouched hoping his hands could find perch on the weather worn metal. Tom took no notice of their greater surroundings but instead was on his hands and knees feeling the surface with his fingertips. He found a hatch and traced the dirt and rust that grouted its square outline. A heavy padlock clamped over its steel latch. It only then occurred to Lorne that they had no way to get down other than the way they came up. So he was astonished to see Tom quickly pick the lock with what looked like a pair of tweezers he kept in his backpack. He lifted open the hatch and climbed down a metal ladder into a small room. Lorne noisily followed him down the ladder and started to say something but Tom shushed him, physically putting a hand over Lorne’s mouth. Tom froze, listening intently. The wind outside intensified, and through a plexiglass window he could perceive the tower rocking by marking its movement relative to the silhouetted mountains. He felt a steady surge of air leaking from a ventilation duct and knew somewhere a giant fan must be drawing air from the tower into the mine, and then he heard it, the unmistakable hum of electricity. The mine was in operation.
In the corner of the room was a cage and a circuit breaker. Tom removed a rubber cover and pressed a green button on a panel next to the cage, and a set of thick cables creaked to life, slowly bringing up an elevator car. The lift felt rickety but had the imprimatur of industrial grade. They entered the cage and slid shut the rusted mesh gate which bounced back slightly on its rollers. Neither man spoke as they descended story after story, passed electrical equipment for the ventilation unit, a backup generator system with rows of hazmat suits, lamplit helmets and other heavy fire retardant emergency gear, and an administrative office with dusty file cabinets until they were subsurface and the car came to an abrupt stop in a room with gunite sprayed walls and florescent overhead lights, filed with banks of black and white monitors and chairs with wheels on their bases, all empty save for one. At the far end of the room, a man in a white shirt, black striped pants, and a jacket with some type of emblem on the breast and patch on the shoulder was watching a monitor and talking softly into a microphone.
The man heard the elevator car clank to a stop and looked up from what he was doing. Tom and Lorne didn’t see the man until Tom had slid open the elevator door. Tom and Lorne stopped in their tracks. The man looked at them as if trying to compute something, to put together pieces of a puzzle. The men stared at each other not moving for some time. And then in a flash, with what must have been well-practiced speed, the man drew a .38 service revolver with one hand and a flashlight with the other and trained both on Tom and Lorne.
Don’t move.
For a moment, neither man moved. Tom felt naked, totally unprepared for this moment that he’d been spent years striving for, suffering for. And then Lorne reacted wildly, irrationally, struck by the primal fear of having a gun pointed at him heightened by the acid and the panic of not knowing what was real. Lorne leapt over a chair and threw himself over a bank of monitors taking an angle toward the man with the gun. Surprised, the man spun to his feet and fired three shots in Lorne’s direction, sparks showering off the walls, countering Lorne’s advance by sidestepping to the center of the room, his back now toward Tom. Lorne slipped and fell, regained his feet and came straight at the man, flailing his fists. The man took a wide stance to steady himself and raised the gun to Lorne’s chest in perfect firing position. Before he could pull the trigger, Tom grabbed a fire extinguisher that was mounted to the wall and brought it down squarely on the top of the man’s head, caving in his skull.
Chapter 8
She awoke to the dog sitting upright in bed next to her with one paw on her chest. The phone was ringing.
Yeah.
Hailey?
This is Hailey, who is this?
Damn girl, you are really worrying me.
Jen…sweetheart…it’s like…morning.
It’s lunchtime on the east coast. Don’t you have a job?
I hate you.
So…seriously, what the hell is going on?
What? I’m going to work.
So what do I care? Are you going to Stef’s wedding or not? What do you do, anyway? Don’t you have drug dealers to arrest? I feel a lot safer for my kids knowing you’re thinking about getting to work at ten-thirty in the morning.
Jen, my job’s not like that. I work nights, and weekends, I’m like, on call.
You can’t not go to this wedding. It’s in freaking Vegas. You can practically see it from wherever it is you are. Borrow Uncle Fester’s horse and meet us there. I’m making you a hotel reservation, we’re staying at the MGM Grand.
I can’t just commit. You don’t understand my job—what if there’s a murder or something?
Hailey, I know you don’t understand this concept, but the wedding is in three weeks. They have to have a headcount for the caterer. They pay money for everybody who comes. So send in your invitation and get shitfaced with your friends. The only people who love you. Don’t be a crack. We miss you. Tell them you are taking vacation time and get your fat ass to Stef’s wedding.
Vacation time, like I can just punch out. And what about my dog?
No one can replace you? People take vacations Hailey. I’ve got a sitter for a whole three days, so don’t mess this up for me. And the dog? I can’t believe that thing hasn’t killed anybody yet. Fill the bathtub with water and leave a carcass in the backyard. The dog will be fine.
All right, look, I’ve got to arrest someone. I’ll call you later.
Just be there bit—
Hailey hung up the phone. The dog rolled on his back and stuck his arms straight up in the air.
She fell back asleep.
Hailey awoke ten minutes later. Last night fell on her like a weight. She was pissed. She slammed he
r hands together in a sudden and loud clap.
Fuck.
The dog flipped over and slinked off the bed with his ears pinned back behind his head. She couldn’t shake the image of Larry McCabe, the look in his eye, the pain in her wrist, and felt ashamed, embarrassed, and guilty at the same time, like she’d allowed it to happen, to make her feel that way. Only she was allowed to make herself feel this way. But most of all, she was pissed.
She jumped out of bed and ran to the shower, slamming doors behind her and cursing at the bathroom mirror.
Fifteen minutes later she wheeled the cruiser onto I-15 and gunned it up to 100 mph, her blonde ponytail dripping water down the back of her navy blue windbreaker. She drove deceptively fast as police do, never blowing by the few station wagons and SUVs on the interstate, but rather closing gaps quickly and then passing smoothly on the left an even twenty or thirty miles per hour faster than them after she was sure they weren’t going to swerve into her lane.
She did this unconsciously, out of habit. When she turned onto UT 23 she really opened it up, feeling the engine vibrate and the wheels spin faster than friction, picturing that white curly hair, like a bleached cheese puff. Something had to change, she thought.
She made Bartonville in under an hour and a half. She hadn’t been here since the mine shut down, and she was shocked by the desolation. The last time she had been here was more than four years ago on an investigation of an interstate meth ring she had suspected was run by white supremacists. The investigation ended when the principal rolled his F-150 off of Barton Pass and was Flight-for-Lifed to Paige, Arizona, and then ambulanced to Flagstaff where he spent the next week on life support in Flagstaff Medical Center before dying with a Coconino County Deputy outside the hospital room door, sticking the State of Utah with a forty-seven thousand dollar medical bill. She’d had enough to indict some of the crew on gun charges, but Western didn’t want to spend the resources, and the Garfield County Sheriff declined to go further with it since gun charges without anything else were not popular and the Sheriff had won the last election by fewer than one hundred votes. Of course, there were fewer than two thousand registered voters in the county. Not that there was wide support for white supremacists, but they’d styled themselves as some sort of militia, and guns are guns.
