by Simon Toyne
“Good.” Mulcahy leaned down. “Then tell me who sent you.”
Luis closed his eyes tight and a groan wheezed from his throat. He took a breath and the wound made a slurping sound as it sucked air. “Fuck you,” he said, then pain clamped his mouth shut again.
Mulcahy nodded slowly. “Look at you. Big, strong guy, sucking up the pain, keeping it together in the face of death. It’s impressive, really. Impressive but pointless. Because if you don’t talk to me, you’ll die right here in this room and I’ll put the word out that you talked anyway. So you can either talk and live a little longer, maybe a lot longer, or you can hang tough, stay silent, and die right here for nothing.”
Luis stared out through the wet slits of his eyelids, weighing what Mulcahy had said. Mulcahy knew from the many situations he’d been in before that they had reached a tipping point, the moment when a subject would decide to talk or clam up for good. Sometimes the best thing to do was shut up and let the subject slide into talking; other people needed a little help, one last nudge to push them over on to the side of cooperation. The trick was knowing what sort of person you were dealing with. Luis was clearly the strong, silent type, a man of few words, probably the sort who was happy to stay silent while others did the talking. So that’s what Mulcahy did.
“Tell you what,” he said, speaking low and intimate. “I’ll say a name and you nod if it’s the right one, okay? That way, if you get out of this alive and anyone asks, you can tell them you never talked and you won’t be lying.” Luis’s eyes were starting to glaze over. In a minute or two he wouldn’t be able to say anything at all. “Was it Tío? Did Papa Tío send you?”
Luis didn’t move. He just kept staring through the slits of his eyes.
“You hear what I said: did Papa Tío send you?”
Luis took a sucking breath, closed his eyes against the pain, then shook his head, a slow movement that made him screw his eyes tight with the effort.
Mulcahy sat back on his heels and glanced over at Carlos lying nearby, a surprised expression on his dead face. Ever since Carlos had appeared in the doorway with a gun in his hand he had suspected Papa Tío was not behind this. Tío would never trust a stranger over a blood relative for something like this.
He turned back to Luis to try a new name on him but saw it was already too late. The man’s eyes had rolled back into his head, his mouth opening and closing but the wound in his chest no longer sucking. He was drowning or suffocating, trying to breathe but getting nothing. He breathed out one last rattling breath and his mouth went slack. Mulcahy pressed two fingers into his neck and felt nothing.
He lifted Luis’s left arm and pulled the sleeve of his jacket back as far as it would go. His left forearm was almost entirely covered by a large, colorful tattoo of Santa Muerte—the saint of death—her grinning skeletal face framed by the hood of a long robe, her bony hands holding a globe and a scythe. This told him nothing; plenty of Mexican gang members had tattoos of Santa Muerte—but his right arm told a different story.
The wrist was encircled by a barbed-wire design, showing Luis had served jail time, and above it was a carefully inked column of Roman numerals—one to four—next to the outline of a gun with the barrel pointing down toward the hand. It showed that Luis was a shooter, a dedicated hit man for the cartels, and the numerals showed how many high-level hits he had carried out. There were notches on the barrel too: fifteen marks scratched into the skin with a needle and ink showing lesser kills, soldiers and civilians taken out in the usual course of business and recorded in a casual way that reflected their lesser importance. They reminded Mulcahy of the mission decals he’d seen on the planes earlier—same principle, different war. Only one gang used Roman numerals to record their high-level kills, a nod to the Catholic faith they professed to defend and honor: the Latin Saints—Papa Tío’s main rivals.
Mulcahy took his phone from his pocket to take a photo and saw he had one message—Pop: Missed Call. He breathed a little easier when he read it. Once he was clear of this mess he’d call him back, but first he had to clean up.
He took a picture of Luis’s forearm then checked to make sure it was in focus. The first three numerals were solid black but the fourth was only an outline, ready to be inked once the hit had been carried out. There was only one person who would warrant the high status of a numeral and it wasn’t him or Javier.
It all made sense now—Carlos being the insider instead of Javier. Carlos wasn’t the hit man, he was a plant, a human homing beacon with his phone transmitting their location to the real kill crew. That’s why he had been so edgy. He had known what was coming. He was probably only doing it to pay off some debt, betraying one set of killers to appease another and trading one shitty situation for a slightly less shitty one. Mulcahy knew all about that kind of situation. He slid his phone back into his pocket and rose to his feet.
He worked quickly by the flickering glow of the TV, pulled the duster from his back pocket and wiped down all the places he’d touched since entering the room. He took a few more pictures then grabbed Javier’s gold-and-jewel-encrusted phone and a plastic laundry sack from the closet and started collecting the guns.
Luis and Tyson had both been carrying FN Five-sevens, known as mata policia or cop killers because of their ability to penetrate body armor. They had two spare magazines each in their jacket pockets and almost a thousand dollars in cash. He found the keys to the other Jeep in Luis’s pocket and took those too. Javier had a knife tucked inside his boot. Mulcahy dropped it into the sack with the rest of the weapons, twisted it closed, then pulled his phone from his pocket, found the missed call message, and selected Call Back.
He stood by the door a moment, scanning the room and checking it over for anything he might have overlooked. His eyes settled on the TV screen where the desert still burned. A reporter was talking about the plane crash that had caused it. The news banner beneath him said they were getting reports of a possible survivor. Mulcahy took an involuntary step forward, not quite believing what he was reading, then the phone clicked and someone picked up.
“Hello,” they said. It was not his father.
21
SOLOMON LOOKED DOWN AT THE BURNED MAN ON THE STRETCHER.
The medics were still trauma focused: elevating the blackened horror of his legs, taking his temperature with a noncontact digital thermometer, covering him with sterile sheets to prevent heat loss and hypothermia, talking to him the whole time, telling him he was doing okay, telling him to hang in there, that they were going to airlift him to some specialist unit in Maricopa. They were too preoccupied to notice Solomon standing there, a stranger in their midst. But the burned man saw him. He stared directly up through milky eyes that might once have been pale blue.
The vitreous liquid in the human eye is protein, Solomon’s mind told him. When you heat it up, it goes white like a boiled egg.
He surveyed the wreckage of the man, his blackened body curling into a fetal position, the result of muscle contraction caused by intense heat. The medics were cutting away what was left of his clothes before the cooked flesh beneath swelled too much and turned them into tourniquets.
Solomon held the man’s eyes and smiled. The smell of him was overpowering, an almost sweet, burned-barbecue smell of human flesh, so reminiscent of pork that in some cannibalistic tribes, humans were referred to as “long pigs.” He reached out and gently took one of the blackened stumps of the man’s hands, his own perfect white skin making the ruined claw seem all the more tragic in contrast.
“Hey!” the voice came, sharp and angry. “Step away right now! Do not touch the patient.”
Solomon gripped the man’s hand more firmly, knowing it would cause him no pain. He could feel the splits in the baked skin and see distal phalanx bones poking out through the charred, dead flesh of his finger ends. Such acute damage would have destroyed all the nerve endings, so he would never feel pain or indeed anything in this hand ever again. But he held it anyway in such a way that the b
urned man could see it even if he couldn’t feel it.
“You need to step aside, sir.”
“What you’re doing is a waste of time,” Solomon said, his eyes never leaving the burned man’s face.
“I’ll be the judge of whether I’m wasting my time or not.”
“I wasn’t talking about your time,” Solomon said, “I was talking about his.”
Morgan stepped up behind him and laid a heavy hand on his arm. “You need to let go and step away from here, let the doctors get on with their jobs.”
“You know the rule of nines, I assume?” Solomon asked the doctor.
“Excuse me?”
“The rule of nines—you assign a factor of nine to different areas of the body to quickly assess the severity of burn trauma.”
“I know what the rule of nines is.”
“And have you applied it to this patient?”
“Mr. Creed,” Chief Morgan said. “I ain’t gonna ask you again.”
“Wait,” the doctor said, regarding the man on the stretcher afresh. His arrival had been so fast that he had clicked into autopilot, falling back on his core training, checking the patient’s airway, his breathing, making sure his legs were elevated and he was getting fluids. There wasn’t much else he could do; they weren’t set up for serious-burns trauma. He was only doing what he could to stabilize him before sending him on to the specialist burns unit. He turned to Chief Morgan. “It’s okay,” he said. “We’re okay here.”
Morgan looked like he had just been slapped, but removed his hand from Solomon’s shoulder and stepped away.
“How do you know the rule of nines?” the doctor asked, turning to Solomon.
“I don’t know,” Solomon said, all his concentration fixed on the eyes of the man whose ruined hand he held.
The man looked down at Bobby, his eyes dove gray, his skin and hair white as clouds. He looked so extraordinary that Bobby wondered if he was imagining him. But the doctor spoke and the man answered with a soft voice that sounded like it was coming from a long way off then smiled down at him and took his hand, and leaned down until his face was all Bobby could see.
You are close, he said with his soft, calm voice. You know what I mean by that?
Bobby tried to nod but his neck was too stiff. Stiff as wood.
The man tilted his head to the side, like he’d spotted something curious in him.
Are you afraid?
Bobby turned the question over in his mind like he was checking the blade of his knife. He did feel a little afraid, but not out-and-out scared like he had been at different times in his life, like when his mom told him she had cancer and was going to die and there wasn’t a thing anyone could do about it. The thing he felt most was regret. He regretted he would never see Ellie again, or be there to help guide her through life. He regretted he would not be there to hold her and tell her it was okay when she heard the news of what had happened to him, stupid as that sounded.
It was too fast.
The pale man leaned in closer, turning his head to catch the whisper of his words.
What was too fast?
Something in the fire. Something alive. Tell her I’m sorry. Tell her it’s all right. Tell her she’ll be all right. Tell her . . .
Tell me her name, the man said. I’ll tell her she was in your thoughts and that hers was the last name you spoke.
The voice was like warm water being poured over his head.
Ellie Tucker, he said, and a shiver ran through him that made the gurney shake. He wanted to close his eyes but he didn’t want to stop staring at the man either. There was something compelling about him, like staring into deep water. He didn’t feel afraid anymore and he didn’t feel sad either. He felt like he was weightless and this man was the only thing stopping him from floating up into the sky.
I’m sorry, Ellie, he said again. Then he closed his eyes—and let go.
PART 4
Unknown soldier: “General, all Arizona needs is some good people and more water.”
General Sherman: “Son, that’s all hell needs.”
—APOCRYPHAL
Extract from Riches and Redemption—The Making of a Town
The published memoir of the Reverend Jack “King” Cassidy
We arrived at Fort Huachuca less than a day after departing the ruins of the burned church, such was our haste to quit one place and arrive at the other. Here I spent three days and the last of the dead priest’s coin gathering what provisions I needed for my onward expedition into the vast southern desert where I believed great riches awaited me.
I purchased dry food and as many canteens as my pack mule could carry, and a map showing the known and charted terrain to the south of the fort. The map had water holes marked upon it and Sergeant Lyons, the quartermaster there, spoke all hugger-mugger as he removed it from a niche beneath the table that served as his shop counter, touching the side of his nose all the while and looking about him as if he feared discovery. The chart was army property, he said, and therefore not rightly his to sell to civilians. I parted with my last ten dollars to secure it and considered it a bargain, for water is worth more than gold to a man in the desert in want of it and I knew I would need to fill my canteens with more than prayer.
I waited for the next full moon, intending to slip away in the night and avoid the heat of the day and any eyes that might be watching the fort. I spent my time rereading the marked passages in the Bible and staring south at the vast empty land beyond the stockade walls, though what I was searching for I knew not. The only directions I had, if you would call them such, was a small drawing in the priest’s hand on the back page of the Bible—a picture of crossed sabers with an arrow pointing south and a verse from Deuteronomy beside it:
He found him in a desert land, and in the waste howling wildernesse: Hee ledde him about.
I took the sabers to mean the fort, the crossed swords being the symbol of the cavalry. The rest I supposed to be a test of my faith, or maybe my sanity.
I set out shortly after midnight on the first day of the new-minted month—All Fool’s Day, as fitting a day as any upon which to begin my fool’s errand. The night was as frozen as the day had been molten and I had my blankets wrapped about me for extra warmth. My pack animal was laden with all my other supplies save for the cross and the Bible. These I carried myself, for they were my compass and my guide and, I believed, my protection against whatever evil awaited me.
A group of prospectors watched me leave. They were squatted on the ground close by the sentry hut, huddled around a fire they had built to keep away the cold and the darkness and to light the patch of ground where their dice rolled. They had been drinking, passing the whiskey around, and gambling away the fortunes they had yet to find. Their faces seemed grotesque in the flickering firelight, like cathedral gargoyles come to life, and the sight of them, huddled over their orange fire, sent a chill through me to rival the one nature had already sent.
“There goes Jesus,” a man shouted as I waited for the guard to open the main gate, pointing at the plaster figure on the cross I carried slung across my back where most men would bear a shotgun or a rifle. I recognized the voice as belonging to a Scottish man named Garvie, one of the group I had traveled in with, a man who liked a crowd when in drink and his own company when not. He was holding court royally now. “Ye’ll not find God oot there, preacher man,” he said, which shook a rattle of laughter out of the others. “All ye’ll find are demons and hell and damnation.”
I walked out with the sound of laughter at my back, feeling the weight of the cross pressing down on me and clutching my Bible to my chest, shaking with far, far more than the desert’s chill.
It was on the second week of my trek, with water supplies starting to run low, that I began to follow the map Sergeant Lyons had sold me. The directions were vague, distances measured in days’ rides rather than miles, but there were certain features that corresponded to the terrain around me and I followed a low ridge to the east that
ran due south like a long, brittle spine pushing up beneath the dry skin of the land. The map showed two high peaks rising above it and a river running betwixt them down to a stand of trees with a cross marked beside them showing where a well was to be found. I could see the twin peaks shimmering in the far distance and made my steady way toward them.
After several hours of travel, I came across a dry riverbed with cart tracks running along the center of it. I followed their course with my eyes and saw that they wound their way up the rising ground east toward the peaks, the same place I was headed. The tracks appeared fresh, the sharp edges of the ruts not yet blunted by the grit-filled wind that scoured the land. They were deep too, even though the ground was baked and hard compacted, suggesting the wagon was exceptionally heavily laden. I figured it must have passed this way no more than a day ahead of me, possibly less, and my heart lifted at the prospect of meeting another human soul out there in that lifeless wilderness. I steered my mule between the twin wheel ruts, glad of the small degree of order created by this narrow, man-made path in the middle of nature’s chaos, and started to follow the cart.
It was by this measure that I realized the wagon had started to sway in transit, gently at first then to an increasingly marked degree as it continued on its way. The riverbed was wide and flat and easy to cut a straight path along and yet the tracks suggested the wagon was following some unknown course of its own, as if, during its journey, it had been forced to negotiate obstacles that I could not see or were no longer there.
After an hour or so of following the increasingly erratic path of the wagon, I spied a curious object ahead of me, lying between the wavering wagon tracks. It was a wire birdcage, finely made and painted white, the like of which you would find in the parlor of a genteel hotel or on the end of the bar at one of the more exotic city saloons. It was lying on its side, dented by the fall, the cage door open, with no sign of a bird inside save for some downy feathers sticking to the wire hinge of the open door.
