by Simon Toyne
It was an odd thing for a prospector to own and so I concluded he must not be traveling alone. I fancied the birdcage must belong to his wife and he had indulged her desire to bring it with her as some small comfort and reminder of the home they had left behind. I supposed the jostling of the cart had shaken the birdcage loose and it must have fallen unheeded. I leaned down as I passed by, the mule being close enough to the ground for me to scoop it up without stopping. I had a mind to return it to its owner once I caught up with the wagon, and imagined the happiness its restoration would bring to someone who had valued it enough to bring it this far into the wilderness.
But the dented cage was not the only thing I found on the track.
22
“HELLO?” THE VOICE SAID AGAIN IN ACCENTED ENGLISH.
Mulcahy gripped the phone and heard something crack inside it. “Let me speak with my father,” he said.
There was a pause, followed by handling noise as the phone was passed over. He could smell the metallic tang of blood in the air, mingling with the mildew and the dust. He was sweating hard now, the phone damp and slippery in his hand.
“The hell’s goin’ on here, Mikey?” Pop’s voice was full of piss and vinegar but he could hear the fear in it. He also sounded echoey, so he was probably on speakerphone and the crew who had him were listening in—a crew like the one lying dead all around him with kill tags on their arms.
“Just take it easy, Pop, okay?” he said, his eyes fixed on the news. “I got it covered.”
“Don’t seem that way from where I’m standing.”
“Let me talk to the main guy for a second.”
“You in some kind of trouble here, Michael?”
Mulcahy closed his eyes and shook his head. It was typical of his father to assume that he must have messed up in some way and all this was his fault. He had done the same thing back when he had first fallen into bed with the cartels to stop them from chopping his father into small pieces, somehow managing to twist it around so it felt like just another example of his failings as a cop, a person, and a son. “No, Pop,” he said. “I’m good. Some people getting the wrong idea is all. Hand the phone back over. I’ll take care of it.”
More handling noise, then the man who wasn’t his father came back on the line. It didn’t sound echoey anymore.
“He doesn’t get hurt,” Mulcahy said.
“Oh really?” There was a pause, then he heard a yelp in the background and his phone cracked again as he squeezed it. “You don’t get to give no orders,” the Mexican said. “You understand me?”
Mulcahy’s mind sped through his options like a race car driver approaching a corner too fast. The Saints wouldn’t have known where to find his father, which meant they must be Tío’s men, an insurance move to make sure he stayed loyal.
“Okay,” he said. “I don’t give orders. But I know who does, so here’s what I’m going to do. I’m gonna call Tío right now, I’m gonna call him and straighten this out, then I’ll get him to call you back, all right? So just hang tight and give me ten minutes.”
He hung up before the man could say anything or hit his father again to show him who was in charge. He already knew who was in charge and didn’t need some cold-eyed psychopath beating on his dad to prove it. He also figured they’d only hurt Pop if he was listening, so the quicker he got off the phone the better for everyone.
Ten minutes.
He peered through a crack in the curtains, squinting against the daylight to check that there was no one outside, then wiped his prints from the room with the duster his gun had been wrapped in and went out, clutching the laundry sack full of weapons.
The day was still burning but it felt cooler after the stifling room. He headed over to the Jeep the Mexicans had arrived in, unlocking it with the key he’d taken from the dead driver. He opened the passenger door and checked the glove compartment. There were two more loaded magazines inside and a box of shells. He added them to his sack. The rest of the car was clean and professional: no personal items, no empty drink cans or food wrappers, nothing that could harbor DNA traces or fingerprints in the event they needed to dump the Jeep and run. It looked and smelled like it had been recently collected from an airport rental lot, which it probably had. The constant vacuuming and cleaning a rental went through was a pretty effective way of getting someone else to cover your tracks, and the residual soup of accumulated forensic matter acted like a smoke screen, hiding anything left behind by even the most careful of criminals.
He moved to the rear of the vehicle, listening out for sirens. He had a hunch about the trunk, and when he popped it, he saw he’d been right. It contained a car battery booster pack and a large square bag made from heavy-duty green plastic. Inside the bag were a set of electric jump cables, two plastic dust sheets, some padded leather garden gloves, rolls of duct tape, some pliers, and a bag of cable ties. To the casual observer it would look like someone had been getting supplies for a weekend of home improvement projects. To Mulcahy it looked like a torture kit. Papa Tío’s son was clearly supposed to suffer before Luis finally got to ink in the numeral on his arm.
He took everything out, locked the Jeep, then walked away, carrying the bags and the battery booster pack in case he might need them.
He pulled the keys to his own Jeep from his pocket, opened the trunk, and dumped everything inside except the laundry sack. He wanted the guns close, so he stashed them in the passenger foot well, out of sight but easy to reach, then moved around to the driver’s side and got in.
The Chevy Cruze was supposed to be his clean getaway ride, but there was no chance of a clean getaway now. He didn’t know what he might have to do in the next few hours in order to turn his situation around, and a black-windowed tank of a car with a big engine and four-wheel drive would be a lot more useful than an old Chevy with shot suspension.
The engine growled to life and he cranked the air up to maximum, eased out of the parking space, away from the buildings and down the exit ramp. He’d used maybe a third of his ten minutes, but waited until he’d slipped into the flow of evening traffic on the highway before dialing a number from memory using Javier’s phone.
Someone answered and he gave a code word then listened to handling noise and the background sounds of some café. The cartels were deeply paranoid about wiretaps and call tracing and had come up with a simple but effective solution. The man he had called sat in cafés all day reading the paper, drinking coffee, and redirecting incoming calls through an Internet-based phone system like Skype. Calls came in, the caller gave a code corresponding to whoever they wanted to talk to, and the middleman would call that person on a second phone then sixty-nine the phones so the earpiece of the in-coming phone was pressed against the mouthpiece of the outgoing one. It meant the bosses could talk directly to anyone in their organization without being traced. The best the DEA could do was trace calls to the middleman, who wouldn’t know anything other than a few phone numbers and codes.
The handling noise stopped and he heard a phone ringing through the background hum of the café. He took long breaths, pulling the cold air into him as though he was about to dive into deep, deep water.
Then Papa Tío answered.
23
THEY WRAPPED BOBBY GALLAGHER’S CORPSE IN A HOSPITAL SHEET SHROUD and carried him over to a pickup truck to be driven back to the morgue. They couldn’t spare an ambulance, not now when the fire had overrun the control line and everyone was in full retreat. The energy in the field hospital was different too; it had settled and hardened, like everything did under pressure. No one spoke, everyone continued preparing for casualties, knowing now exactly what those casualties would look like.
Solomon studied the fire from the shade of the billboard, his mind ticking with information—wind-speed calculations, open burn rates of desert wildfires, what fire did to human flesh. He listened to the roar of the fire, and the gusting wind and the birds, shrieking raptors and carrion birds drawn by the promise of death. He followed
their shrieks until he spotted them, high above the town, wheeling in the thermals that rose up the red-sided mountains, then blown forward by stronger winds whipping across the mountaintop. They were blowing in the opposite direction of the one pushing the fire toward town. Different weather fronts.
“I wanted to say thank you.” The doctor who had treated the dying man was standing in front of him, a badge pinned to his breast pocket identifying him as DR. M. PALMER. “I panicked, I guess,” he continued. “I wasn’t thinking. You were right to do what you did. Bobby died in peace instead of clinging to false hope. It was a very kind thing you did for him.”
Kind . . .
Had he held the dying man’s hand out of kindness? He didn’t think so. He had done it because he had known no one else would and that it was the right thing to do. He had known this with the same certainty he knew what things were just by looking at them, and that he was here to save someone.
“James Coronado,” he murmured.
The doctor frowned. “Excuse me?”
“He was brought to the hospital, I assume, after his accident?”
“He was DOA, so would have gone straight to the morgue. They only come to the ER if they’re still breathing.”
“But his notes will be on record at the hospital?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think I might see them?”
Palmer shook his head. “The only people allowed to see that would be next of kin.”
Holly Coronado. All roads led to the widow. “Thank you, Dr. Palmer,” Solomon said.
He shrugged. “You’re welcome.” He looked past him to where the refugees from the desert were now gathering around a pickup truck. Some were still wearing their old-style funeral clothes, making them seem like they’d stepped out of the town’s past, drawn by the prospect of witnessing its end.
Mayor Cassidy climbed onto the back of the truck and held his hands up for silence. “Friends. Listen to me now.” All eyes turned to him. “We have all witnessed a tragedy here, a terrible tragedy, and there will be a proper time to dwell on that. But that time is not now. Bobby Gallagher gave his life helping defend his town from the threat of this fire and the threat still remains and continues to grow. So the best way we can honor our friend is to make sure he did not lay down his life in vain. Now we got two more fire tankers, big ones, in the air and on their way here—am I right, Chief?”
Morgan climbed up next to him. “Yessir. We got two C-130s heading up from Tucson.”
A picture of a solid plane with a snub nose appeared in Solomon’s mind—broad fuselage, four sturdy propeller engines slung below a wide, straight wing.
“We also got the local unit back at the airfield, readyin’ up for another run. Between those and what we all can do here on the ground, we can beat this thing.”
C-130 payload was 2,700 gallons. It could lay a fire line sixty feet wide and a quarter mile long.
Solomon stared back out at the desert, estimating the size of the fire using the burning grader for scale. The grader was thirty feet long, which meant the fire was . . .
Too big. Much too big.
“Now you all need to regroup and get back out there fast. Take some water, then grab your tools and head back out . . .”
The distant shrieks of the high-flying birds caught Solomon’s attention again. He looked up and zoned Morgan out, listening to their cries as they were blown forward by the high winds. He caught a scent now too, drifting down from higher up, something buried so deep it was hardly there at all, but was enough to pin a hope on.
He looked back at Morgan as he was finishing his speech.
“. . . We’ll set back-burns going to clear the ground about half a mile out of town. The tankers will draw most of the line for us, but until then it’s up to us to hold it.”
“That’s no good,” Solomon called out before he realized he had spoken.
All eyes turned to him. “What’s that?” Morgan said.
“Half a mile is too far.” Solomon moved toward the truck. “Too much desert to cover.” He held his hand up and swept it through the gray ash falling all around them. “This is going to start falling hot soon, so any control line with dry desert behind it is going to start catching alight. You’ll have spot fires springing up all over and not nearly enough people to cover them.” He reached the truck and leaped up nimbly to join Morgan and Cassidy. “The fire will jump your line and keep on coming. Your best chance is to try and hold it at the narrowest point. And that’s right here.”
Morgan’s face went pink. “You an expert on firefighting too, Mr. Creed?”
“No, but I know history.” He turned to the crowd. “Over two thousand years ago three hundred Spartan warriors held back a quarter of a million Persian warriors by forcing them into a narrow pass between the mountains and the sea.” He pointed left out into the desert. “The desert is narrowest right here in the bottleneck between the storm drain and the spill piles from the mine. This is where we can hold the fire.”
A murmur rose from the crowd, then the crackle of radio chatter silenced them again.
This is Charlie three-one-four-niner, inbound from Tucson, do you read, over?
Morgan tilted his head to his lapel mic. “This is Chief Morgan, I read you. Glad to have you with us, over.”
Roger that. I’m hailing you on an open frequency with Charlie eight-six-five-zero, also inbound from Tucson. We have a visual on the smokestack and will be starting our run in less than a minute. Tell us what you need.
In the distance the twin specks of the planes appeared in the sky. “How long will it take them to refill and fly back here?” Solomon said.
The air was thick with ash now, billowing in the gusting wind like clouds of insects.
“Forty minutes,” Cassidy said. “Maybe less.”
“This fire will be at the church doors in forty minutes. You should get the tankers to lay the line right here. It’s your best chance. Your only chance.”
Solomon felt all eyes upon him and saw fear and uncertainty in them. They were desperate to be led but unsure whom to follow, and this indecision made the rage rise in him again. Part of him wanted to leave them to it, just walk away and up into the mountains where he could sit and watch the town burn, as surely it would if they followed Morgan’s plan. The fire was mighty and these people were nothing.
But. . . .
If the town burned, he would have failed. He knew that to be true. And if the town was gone, any chance of discovering what had happened to James Coronado would be gone with it. And where would that leave him? Would the fire keep coming? Would the world burn wherever he walked until eventually the flames caught up with him?
“What about the buildings?” Cassidy said. “The hot ash will drift onto those too.”
A murmur spread through the crowd and heads nodded in agreement.
Sheep. All sheep. Agreeing with whatever the last person had said. They deserved to be slaughtered.
Solomon’s arm flared in pain, a reminder of his mission here. He could hear the chop of the propellers getting louder above the roar of the fire. Another minute and they would be here. Less.
He turned to the crowd. “If a glowing ember falls on a patch of dry grass or a roof shingle, which one is more likely to catch fire?”
The faces stared up at him, some of the heads nodding in agreement with him now as they realized what he was getting at.
“If we douse the buildings and spread out with buckets of water and rakes, we can deal with any fires that start. There aren’t enough of you to do the same out in the desert and the fires will catch faster. Too much area to cover, not enough bodies on the ground. You need to make your stand here. Make your stand, or start running. Your choice.” He turned back to Morgan and lowered his voice so only he and Cassidy could hear: “Make it fast.”
The first plane roared overhead, the deep bass rumble of its engines pounding in Solomon’s chest.
This is Charlie three-one-four-niner. I see a pa
rtial control line southeast of the road and a breach to the northwest. We can lay a line along the fire’s edge, if that’s what you need, keep it back for ya. Give the word and we’ll set up for a run, over.
Morgan didn’t move. He stared at Solomon, blinded by his fury at being told what to do in front of his people by this stranger.
“Give me the radio,” Cassidy said, grabbing it from Morgan’s belt. “This is Ernest Cassidy, town mayor. We want you to lay a line right on the edge of town, understand? All along the old mining shacks. Give us a minute to pull back then paint the town red, over.” He thrust the radio back to Morgan. “Someone’s got to take charge of this mess.” He stuck a smile on his face and turned back to the crowd. “You heard me. Everybody needs to fall back and we’ll split into teams to make sure we got the whole area behind the line covered. Okay, let’s move it.”
The crowd splintered like a dropped plate, glad to be doing something again, glad to be following a leader.
“It’s a fine thing,” Morgan said quietly, “the man who brought this fire now telling us how to put it out.”
Solomon smiled. “I didn’t say we could put it out, I only said we could hold it back. The fire is a force of nature, an act of God.”
“So what do we do—pray for a miracle and hope for the best?”
Solomon looked up at the birds again and breathed in. The smell was clearer now and getting stronger as the higher winds blew it ever closer. It was the coal-tar smell of wet creosote bush. His force of nature. His act of God.
The smell of rain in the desert.
24
HOLLY CORONADO FELT THE GROUND TREMBLE BENEATH HER FEET. SHE looked up from the half-filled grave to the dirt pile and saw dry rivulets of dust trickling down the sides. There was a noise too, a low rumbling that juddered through the air and trembled somewhere deep inside her. For a moment she wondered if it was coming from her, some physical manifestation of her anger. She had read a book once about a persecuted young girl with a strange and terrible power, who had snapped one day, killed her tormentors and burned a whole town to the ground.
