by Simon Toyne
“How do I go about requesting a copy of a coroner’s report?” Holly asked, and a look of pity passed over the receptionist’s face.
She picked up a phone and pressed a button. “Just a moment,” she said, in a way that made it sound like she was actually saying I’m sorry for your loss.
Holly turned away while the woman spoke to someone on the phone. She hated the fact that the tragic details of her life were so public. She hadn’t even given her name but the woman had known exactly whose report she was asking about.
Two orderlies burst through a door into the reception area, their laughter heralding their arrival. It was strange for her to think of a hospital as a happy place; they held too many bad associations for her. The last time she had been in this building was when she miscarried, and the smell of these places always took her back to the dark days of her mother’s final months. She had moved back to St. Louis and spent days breathing in this hospital smell while watching the cancer gnaw her mom away to nothing. She was only sixty-seven.
Her parents had already been fairly old when they’d had her, a last snatched chance at a family after chasing down careers. They had always been the oldest parents at the school gate, the oldest at her graduation—the first to die. Her father was seventy-six when his heart had called it quits after a lifetime as a workaholic trial lawyer fueled by coffee and cigarettes.
“Mrs. Coronado . . .” She turned and saw a man in a white coat holding out a manila envelope. “It’s a copy of the coroner’s report on your husband,” he said. “I thought you might come for it, so I got it ready.”
She glanced at the doctor’s badge. “Thank you, Dr. Palmer.” She frowned as her brain caught up with what had just happened. “How did you know I’d ask for it?”
“I treated a patient earlier—Solomon Creed? He was asking after it. He was asking about you as well. I figured once he caught up with you, you’d come for it. And here you are.”
“Yes.” She took the envelope and slid her finger beneath the flap. “Here I am.”
“I had a read,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind.” Holly pulled out the folded sheets. “The toxicology tests were all negative, and the BACS readings were negligible—that’s his blood alcohol concentrations. He hadn’t been drinking. He must have fallen asleep at the wheel or swerved to avoid something. His skull trauma is consistent with a car wreck. There were no other broken bones and no major organ damage. He was very unlucky. I’m sorry, Mrs. Coronado. I hope this is of some help.”
She folded the papers and slipped them back in the envelope. “Thank you, Dr. Palmer,” she said, and held out her hand. “You must have to deal with a lot of death in your line of work and I appreciate your time.”
He took her hand. “Grieving is a hard process and it’s often difficult to make sense of it. Knowing the details can be a big part of coming to terms with what has happened. It never gets easy, but it does get better. I thought you might want this too—” He handed her another envelope with a PD sticker and a crime number printed on it. “It’s what was in your husband’s pockets when they brought him in here. We don’t need to hold on to it anymore.”
Holly took the envelope and felt something heavy shift inside it. “Thank you,” she said. “That’s very kind.”
She felt tears welling up from somewhere deep and she turned and walked away before the doctor could see them and feel moved to offer any more sympathy. This was exactly the sort of thing she had gone out of her way to avoid. She didn’t want people’s pity.
She pushed through the main door and escaped the cheery, disinfected atmosphere of the hospital. Outside, the heat was building again and she walked across the parking lot to the shade of some mesquite trees. She broke the seal on the envelope and tipped the contents into her hand. The heavy thing she had felt were Jim’s car keys. They had a door key on them too, the key to their home, a key he would never use again. There was also twenty dollars in bills and change and a small piece of brown paper with a number on it and a printed note that read: “Your document request has been approved and is now ready to collect.”
It was a requisition slip from the town archive. She recognized it because Jim’s study had been littered with the things ever since he’d started work on his book. The tear-off stub at the bottom was still in place. It meant Jim had never picked it up.
Holly checked the time then looked down the street to the museum building that housed the Cassidy archive. It would still be open for another hour or so. She stepped out of the shade and into the heat. She didn’t want to go home yet anyway. She wasn’t sure she would ever want to go back there again. It was tainted now; they had trespassed there and torn it apart, along with everything else.
47
THE MOMENT SOLOMON’S WEIGHT HAD SETTLED UPON THE STALLION HE had known he could ride him. He could feel him, like an extension of himself, and had only to look out at the desert and the horse had taken him there. He couldn’t imagine fixing a saddle to the horse’s back and putting a barrier between them; it would be like placing a board between two people dancing the tango. That was what it was like, like they were dancing, dancing at full speed across the flame-scorched desert, the thrum of the hooves like a heartbeat across the ground.
They had taken a wide course around the airfield because he knew people would be searching for him now. The rain had dampened the ground so he rode fast with no fear of kicking up dust. There were no cacti left standing in the fire zone, only blackened stumps and the pulpy remains of exploded flesh where the heat had boiled them from within then baked them into black puddles. He could smell their remains, the smoky notes of roasted organic matter with sweet hints of putrefaction already starting to blossom. The flies had smelled it too and were already feeding on the dead cacti and whatever animals had been caught by the fire, teeming in black clouds like animated embers buzzing in delight at the feast.
Solomon reached the edge of the blackened ground and looked down into a wide gorge worn over centuries by a river. A broad stream snaked its way along the middle of the riverbed, rain running off from the mountains. On the opposite bank were lines of tracks in the drying mud where animals had come down to drink, drawn by an instinct that told them water flowed here when the rains came. There were no tracks on his side; everything on his side was dead. He scanned the land beyond the river. To the northeast he could just see the fan of a windmill rising above the desert and turning gently in the breeze.
The Tucker ranch.
A turkey vulture flew overhead, the broad black cross of its wings moving leisurely across the sky, its primary feathers splayed like fingers. It turned slowly, its head cocked sideways to check him out, then banked away and drifted off to the northeast, the same direction he was heading.
Solomon moved down the bank to the stream, slid from the horse, and crouched to cup water from the river. It tasted of ozone and earth and felt warm as blood as it slipped down his throat. The horse drank too, nudging him gently with its forearm to check that he was still there.
When the horse stopped drinking, Solomon leaped onto its back and it waded across the stream, then rose up the bank and broke into a steady trot, heading straight toward the distant windmill. Ranch buildings took form as they drew closer, lines of fences sketched on the land and curling around to form corrals. The horses inside them didn’t move, adding to the stillness of the place. The only movement came from the windmill and the turkey vulture turning slowly in the air above it.
The ranch felt deserted and Solomon wondered if the owner and all the hands had gone to fight the fire along the edge of their land or were inspecting the damage and repairing it. Or maybe they were watching him through the crosshairs of a hunting rifle.
The horse moved on toward the still and silent buildings. He could hear the squeak of the windmill now and was catching the smells of the place on the breeze: baked wood, animal dung, and something fresh and sharp and metallic. The horse snorted and tossed its head as he smelled it too and Solomon
understood why the turkey vulture had flown here rather than back to the burned wasteland where roasted treats lay thick on the ground. It was because there was something more enticing here, something that called to the primitive brain of the carrion bird. The smell of freshly spilled blood.
48
THE JEEP BOUNCED TÍO FROM HIS DAYDREAM AS IT LEFT THE ROAD AND started traveling over rougher ground toward the western horizon. He had been remembering his father and the whitewashed, red-tin-roofed bungalow he had grown up in and how they used to sit in the shade of the front wall, resting after a day spent in the opium fields hidden high in the mountains. His father had been a gomero, an opium farmer, like all his uncles and everyone else he knew, tending the fields, irrigating the crops, then slicing the seed heads with razor blades and carefully collecting the thick white sap until they had enough to sell to the middlemen who drove around the area and screwed everyone on price: everyone except his father. He had never given in on a deal and had taught his sons that every dollar you gave away was a dollar you were putting in another man’s pocket. He always said you had to have pride in yourself, in your work, and, most of all, your family.
Tío gazed out of the window and watched the distant poles moving past, slender sentries that did nothing to stop the flow of people and goods heading north. The track they were driving along ran parallel to the U.S. border, the most crossed national border in the world with 350 million transits each year, and that was only the legal ones.
When George W. Bush had been in office he had pledged to erect a fence along the entire length of the border, almost two thousand miles, at a cost to the American taxpayer of almost three million dollars a mile. They had managed to cover about six hundred miles before the project ran out of money and the Obama administration shut it down. The gaps that remained were plugged with these tall poles fitted with security cameras and infrared sensors to alert National Guard units or SWAT teams if there was any attempt to cross the border, any time of day or night. They created what they called a “virtual wall” and Tío had an army of paid informants feeding him up-to-date information about which parts were being repaired, or were out of service. This was another lesson he had learned from his father—the value of information.
Once, when they had been waiting for the middleman to come and buy their sticky black loaves of opium tar, he had told him, “The man who has the most information always has the upper hand.”
And it was true. The reason his father had always driven such a hard bargain was because he took the time to talk to the other farmers, check their yields and how much they were charging. It was a constantly fluctuating market and he would hold out for more money when the others, who never worked as hard as he did or tended their fields as well, fell short on their crop. He would use this information to sell at a premium, standing steady in the face of the middlemen who protested that he was robbing them blind with the prices he was charging. They always paid though. Expensive product was still better than no product at all and the extra cost would get kicked up the supply chain, so no one lost out. That’s what his father had figured. But there was a flaw in his reasoning and ultimately Tío had learned from his father’s mistake. Of all the lessons his father had taught him, this had been the most important, and the most painful.
“You want me to stop by the house, boss?” Miguel asked from the driver’s seat.
Two small barns and a tin-roofed bungalow had appeared on the track ahead: a cattle station and a pump house.
“Take it around to the far side and park up by the windmill.”
The front door of the homestead opened as the car drew closer and a man burned almost black by a lifetime spent in the sun stepped out.
“Flash the lights,” Tío said, “twice fast then once slow.”
Miguel obeyed and the man on the porch turned around and went back inside, closing the door behind him. Tío remembered how hot it got inside a tin-roofed house like this, the hot metal pouring the day’s stored heat down until you could hardly breathe. He and his brothers always had to stay inside whenever the middlemen came around. “This is men’s business,” his father had told them, “but you need to learn it. You’ll be men soon enough. So listen but don’t talk and don’t make a sound.”
Not one of Tío’s brothers had made it past their fifteenth birthday. Two died of fever and Ramon, the eldest, the one he had named his own son after, was shot alongside their father. Tío had learned a valuable lesson from that too.
“Right here,” he said, and the Jeep pulled to a halt in the shadow of the small pump house built at the foot of the windmill tower.
Cerdo got out first from the passenger seat, pulling his M60 from the foot well and doing his secret service shit again. Tío got out next, not bothering to wait for Miguel. He walked to the door of the pump house and threw it open, letting sunlight stream into the cramped, dusty interior.
“Take the stuff out of the trunk and gimme the keys,” Tío said, stepping into the pump room and sliding a large polystyrene foam crate to one side to reveal a manhole cover beneath. Miguel held the keys out as Tío walked past and took them, continuing over to the bungalow.
The rancher opened the door again when he was still a few feet away. He stared out from the boiling darkness like a man peering out from hell. Tío could smell the sweat burned into the air and the fabric of the building.
“¿Me sabes, eh?” Tío asked.
The man nodded, a single downward jerk of his chin, his doleful eyes never leaving Tío’s, the watchful fear in them showing that, yes, he knew exactly who the man standing in front of him was.
“Toma las llaves y váyase,” Tío held out the keys. “Nunca te vuelvas. ¡Nunca! ¿Entiendes?”
The man nodded again. He took the car keys and disappeared inside for a moment, leaving the door open so Tío could see inside. There was almost nothing in the house, a table and two chairs, a single cot pushed up against a wall with blankets piled on one end, a stove with an old-fashioned coffeepot on top, and a five-gallon oil drum with its top cut off and a pile of scavenged mesquite twigs sticking up inside.
The man reappeared clutching a battered canvas satchel he was stuffing an iPad into, the only thing that hinted at the greater income and lifestyle he enjoyed as a tunnel master. He walked past Tío without a word and headed straight for the parked car.
Miguel and Cerdo glanced up as he approached, gas cans dangling from their hands. Miguel looked at Tío, uncertain what to do. Tío shook his head and watched the dusty figure of the man close the trunk, walk up to the driver’s side, get in, and start it.
The Jeep backed away from the pump house then drove off in a wide circle back toward the same track they had come in on. The tunnel master might have been living in this place for years, but he had driven away after one word from Tío and never even looked back. There was something powerful about that. Something liberating.
Tío stepped into the house and felt the heat close around him like a fist. He tore a strip from one of the blankets then went outside, winding it around his hand as he walked back to the pump house, thinking about what he had said to the rancher:
Nunca te vuelvas. ¡Nunca!
Never come back. Never!
He stepped into the pump house, opened the hatch in the floor, and lights blinked on automatically, illuminating the painted concrete sides of a wide shaft below. There was a hydraulic platform wide enough to carry almost a ton of product and Miguel dropped down to it while Cerdo started passing everything down from the car.
Tío took in the landscape, this land he had owned and run far more effectively and comprehensibly than any government. This had been his kingdom and he had been its king, though he had never felt more free than he did now. He remembered the line from some song that had been a hit when he was a kid, something about freedom being just another word for nothing left to lose. That was how he felt now. Losing his son had set him free because he had nothing left to lose either. He turned and took one long last look at
the country he would never see again.
Never come back.
Damn right.
Then he stepped down through the manhole and into the tunnel that would take him to America.
49
SOLOMON SLIPPED DOWN FROM THE BACK OF THE HORSE AND LISTENED to the tick and creak of the ranch buildings cooling in the afternoon air. There were three long barns and a large wooden homestead arranged around a loose quadrant. The house seemed still, the tied-back curtains in all the windows revealing dark rooms framed by white-painted boards worn back to the wood in some places by the weather.
The flutter of soft feathers broke the silence as the turkey vulture settled on the roof of the pump house in the corner of the quad. The wind ruffled its feathers and rotated the blades of the windmill above it with a slow squeak. Other than that, everything was still, everything was silent. The vulture folded its wings and cocked its head to one side, looking straight at the barn facing the main house.
“I smell it too,” Solomon murmured, heading toward the two large barn doors hanging suspended from steel runners. There was a gap in the center through which the smell of blood was leaking out. His horse moved away, over to a corral where other horses twitched and flicked their heads nervously, the smell of fresh hay and water drawing him as surely as the scent of blood drew Solomon and the vulture to the barn.
The afternoon sun was dipping toward orange now and throwing a reddish light over the side of the barn, as if the blood inside had begun to soak into the building. He stopped short of it and studied the darkness framed by the outline of the doors. Thin shafts of light cut through the dusty gloom from skylights set into the roof, sketching out the edges of horse stalls with feed baskets at head height, and a faded blue pickup truck parked over to the left that smelled strongly of motor oil and hay. It was the same smell that had lingered in James Coronado’s study. Whoever had ransacked the house had come from here. Tucker, he presumed, one of the inner circle.
