The Searcher

by Simon Toyne

  He held the cross up and saw it now for what it was. Not a cross but a key.

  He looked back down at the document Holly had brought. “Your husband had almost discovered the lost Cassidy riches,” he said. “He was so close.”

  He studied the drawing of the altar cross and the detailed elevation of the stone plinth it was to rest on. There was an inscription on the upper face of it that would be hidden by the base of the cross. It was the first commandment:

  I

  THOU SHALT HAVE

  NO OTHER GODS BEFORE ME

  Solomon studied the I, carefully drawn so that it was positioned low down and central to the plinth. Then he held up the cross around his neck and turned it around so he could see the shape of the base. It was the same. The base of the key formed an I. And he had just found the lock it fit.

  He stared out into the solid darkness, thinking about how they might get into the church, breathing in the smells of night—the still damp earth giving up its scents, creosote and sage and something else. Something that shouldn’t be there. He breathed deeper, trying to fix on where the odor of gun oil and sweat was coming from and realized too late that it was coming from everywhere.

  “Stay calm,” he said to Holly, and caught the confusion on her face. “We’re about to meet the man who killed your husband.”

  Bright lights flashed out of the dark, blinding them in an instant. “Nobody move,” Morgan called out. “Hands where I can see them.”

  More lights flicked on and black figures surged toward them. Someone grabbed Solomon’s arms, yanked them behind him, and cable-tied him.

  “How did you find us?” Solomon asked.

  “Billy Walker,” Morgan replied. “Woke up and told us what he’d heard of your conversation. Said he thought you might be heading to the crash site, so I figured you’d wind up here, smart pair of people like yourselves.”

  Holly lunged for him and strong hands had to hold her back. “And how did you know?” she screamed. “You knew because you killed him.” She spat at him and it caught him on the chest.

  Morgan looked down. “That’s the second shirt you’ve spoiled today.” He stepped forward and backhanded her across the face. “I’ve been waiting to do that all day,” he said. He shoved her aside and picked up the documents from the ground. “Sorry we messed up your house searching for these,” he said, pulling a lighter from his pocket. “If your husband had been smart, none of this would have happened.” He sparked a flame and held it to the edge of the pages of the groundwater contamination documents until they caught. He dropped them in the firepit, watched them burn, then turned back to them with a smile. “That’s one loose end tied up. Just you two to square away now. Come with me,” he said, walking away across the deserted camp. Someone shoved Solomon from behind to make him follow. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”

  68

  MULCAHY RUMBLED OVER THE RIPPLED ROAD, PICKING HIS WAY CAREFULLY across the heat-damaged surface. It was hard to tell in the twilight where the blacktop ended and the scorched desert began, and he didn’t want to end up in a ditch or with a shredded tire.

  Tío was humming something to himself in the passenger seat. He had hardly said a word since he had taken such delight in filling Mulcahy in on his family history. He had spent most of his time fiddling with his phone or staring out of the window, occasionally pointing his finger at a bird or a passing car and making the sound of a gunshot like a bored five-year-old on a long trip.

  Mulcahy had already seen Tío’s influence though, stretching ahead of them like an invisible tentacle. There had been no patrolmen at the barriers blocking off the heat-damaged road and there was no one up ahead at the crash site either.

  “Pull over,” Tío said, pointing at the twisted nest of black metal.

  Mulcahy eased the car to a stop and Tío got out and walked over to what was left of the plane. He crouched down and peered through the twisted spars and ribs of metal. Mulcahy knew what he was looking for, but doubted it would still be there. He hoped it wasn’t.

  He had traveled hundreds of miles to end up right back at this same spot. He should have stayed put and saved everyone a whole heap of bother. Some people would still be breathing and walking around if he had, though his father would not be one of them. He switched off the engine, got out of the car, and joined Tío on the road.

  “He was there,” Mulcahy said, pointing into the heart of the wreckage. “Looks like they cut him free and took him away. The morgue in town is my guess. They might have shipped him out, but I doubt it. Better to take whatever samples they need in a clinical environment than out here with the dust blowing everywhere. If you want your son’s body, it’ll be in town.”

  Tío nodded then leaned back to stretch the kinks out of his spine. “Let’s go find him then,” he said and started to amble across to the car.

  Mulcahy stayed where he was. “What’s the move here, Tío?” Tío stopped walking and turned to face him. “You pulled me off what I was doing to come play chauffeur and now we’re standing out here in the middle of the desert, staring at a town I know you want to burn to the ground, but there’s only two of us. Now I want to do what I can to get my old man off the hook here, really I do, but I can’t see the move. Are we waiting for some people? Is that what we’re doing? I’m flattered if you think I’m all you need to wreak vengeance on a whole town, but, truthfully, I think we may need some help.”

  Tío smiled. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, and got into the car.

  Mulcahy shook his head. This was what had worried him about Tío’s erratic, out-of-character behavior.

  He got in the car and turned the engine on. “So this is the move, we just drive into town?”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Well, I’m guessing that after what I did to that rancher, they might be on their guard somewhat.”

  Tío’s smile grew wider. “I’m counting on it. Now if you want your loser dad to see another dawn, you shut your mouth and take us into town.”

  “They’re back in the car, sir.”

  Suarez was one of the two SDMs on the detail. He was lying prone in the bed of a pickup truck to give him some elevation and watching what was happening a couple of miles out of town through the sight of his long-barreled M6.

  “On the move. Inbound.”

  They were too far out for a shot but he could see the two figures well enough and they were getting clearer the closer they got.

  “Let me know when you got a positive ID,” Andrews said through the comms.

  “Roger that, sir. Should be in a couple of minutes or so. They can’t drive too fast over this road.”

  He kept the crosshairs on the passenger, following the movement of the car, his finger on the trigger guard.

  69

  MORGAN DROVE FAST.

  He was in his cruiser, barreling down the mountain road toward the twinkling lights of Redemption. Holly and Solomon were in the back, their arms still cable-tied behind them, forcing them forward in their seats.

  “So where is the money coming from?” Solomon asked, pushing himself back into his seat as they rounded another tight bend. “Not the mine, clearly.”

  “What do you care?”

  “Just trying to put the pieces together.”

  “It’s drugs,” Holly answered for him. “It’s always drugs.”

  Morgan shrugged. “Everyone gets so moral about drugs, but they happily smoke their cigarettes and drink their liquor. People want drugs too, so who are we to tell them they can’t have them? It’s prohibition all over again—and look how that turned out.”

  “They’re illegal,” Holly said, “and you’re supposed to uphold the law.”

  Morgan threw them around another bend and Holly banged her head on the window. “Sorry,” Morgan said. “Let me ask you something. You ever fought in a war? ’Cause I have. They call this a war on drugs, but it ain’t no war far as I can tell. Wars can be won, and this one can’t, least not by so
me small-town cop like me with a badge and a pump action in his truck. I know what war looks like and it ain’t this. This is capitalism, supply and demand. It’s the biggest industry around here, that’s for sure. Bigger than mining ever was, only they don’t pay a single cent in taxes. You only have to drive across the border to see how that works out: roads full of holes, poverty, crumbling infrastructure. You got to invest in people if you want to build a community folks want to live in. You got to put something back. The cartels don’t put anything back and they don’t put a whole lot of store in people neither. People are disposable to them. So, yes, Mrs. Coronado, we took their money. When the mine stopped producing, we went into a new business and a lot of the money went straight into the public purse so we could fix the roads and pay people’s salaries. The sheriffs hoped they could walk Jim through the reasons we had done what we did and make him see the sense in it. But he wouldn’t come down off his moral high horse. He had all these ideas for getting the town back on its feet, weaning it off its dependence on the trusts. Even said he thought he knew how to find the lost Cassidy fortune—you believe that? Like some old legend could save this town.

  “He started going through everything, looking for a legitimate way out of our problems. That’s how he found out about the groundwater contamination. We’d buried it because we couldn’t risk shutting the mine down, but he dug it up again. We needed people to think the mine was still producing to account for all the money coming in. When Jim found it, he went nuts. Said he was going to blow the lid on everything. So . . . we had to make a decision.”

  “And that decision was that you needed to kill him to keep him quiet,” Solomon said, a statement not a question.

  Morgan’s eyes flicked up in the rearview mirror. “People die in wars,” he said. “One man’s sacrifice for the greater good. Just the way it is.”

  Solomon could feel Holly shaking beside him. If her hands hadn’t been bound and there wasn’t a Plexiglass divider between her and Morgan she would have killed him for sure; he could feel her desire to do it coming off her like heat.

  “What about the cleanup?” Solomon said.

  “There was no cleanup. The levels we found were low, so we made a decision. If we started cleaning up the groundwater, people would ask why and we couldn’t risk losing the mine. We stopped using the chemicals though, cut the workforce right down, and started running water through the mine instead.”

  “Do you know what TCE is?” Solomon asked.

  “No, should I?”

  “It was one of the chemicals that showed up on your report.” He glanced over at Holly. “It’s been connected to birth defects and neonatal abnormalities. It’s also known to cause miscarriage in the early stages of the second trimester.” Holly stared back at him, her face a mask of shock. “Now you know why your husband acted like he did,” Solomon said, quiet enough so that Morgan wouldn’t hear. “His loyalty to the town evaporated the moment he realized it may have caused your son’s death.”

  Holly’s eyes misted over and she looked away and out of the window.

  They were arriving at the airfield, the hulking, jagged shapes of parked aircraft stretching away beyond the security fence. The main part of the airfield was to the left of the road, squadrons of military and civilian aircraft all lined up in neat rows.

  To the right was the museum, stocked with a hand-picked assortment of vintage aircraft, restored and maintained on-site. The lights were off in the main building and the entrance gates were closed. They drove on and pulled over by an extra-wide double gate, big enough to bring even the largest aircraft into the museum from the airstrip on the other side of the road. Someone had left the gate open wide enough for a vehicle to pass through. They drove in and under the wings of a bomber, then headed toward a large hangar on the far side of the field.

  “We flying somewhere?” Solomon asked.

  “No,” Morgan replied. “I very much doubt it.”

  70

  “GOT HIM,” SUAREZ SAID.

  He could see the passenger clearly now in his night sight. He recognized the face from the earlier briefing and also from the poster that had been pinned at the number one most wanted spot on the canteen wall for the last eight years.

  “Who’s the driver?” Andrews’s voice murmured in his earpiece.

  Suarez shifted the scope and phosphorescent green smeared his vision. “Don’t know him. Not a known associate.” He shifted back, following the movement of the car, anticipating it so he could keep Tío’s head in the crosshairs.

  He was about five hundred yards away now, inside his trained range. A shot had a 70 percent chance of a kill, and that percentage was getting better with every yard. “What’s the order?” he murmured.

  “Hold on.”

  Suarez continued to follow them, switching between Tío and the driver.

  He had been trained to clear his mind at times like this, but for once his training was failing him. Instead his mind whirred with all kinds of possibilities. He was thinking about what would happen if he did take the shot. He would be famous, the guy who took out public enemy number one, like Charles Winstead, the guy who had shot Dillinger. Except now he could write a book and get a movie deal out of it. All his training and he would be famous because of one shot. But none of that was going to happen because he wasn’t going to take the shot. Not at Papa Tío at least.

  He let the sights drift back to the driver, his finger tightening on the trigger. If he got the order to shoot, it was this guy who would be the target. He dialed back the magnification a little as the car drew nearer. He could see them both now. A bright green smear drew his attention.

  “The passenger is reaching down for something,” he said.

  More bright green phosphorescence smeared and flared in his vision as Tío’s hand rose up again. “He’s waving something,” Suarez said. “Something white, like a sheet of paper or a napkin.”

  His finger relaxed and returned to the safe position alongside the trigger guard. “He’s surrendering,” he said. Then he looked up from his scope and saw that he was right. Papa Tío was turning himself in.

  PART 9

  . . . all things are cleansed with blood, without bloodshed there is no forgiveness.

  —HEBREWS 9:22

  From the private journal of the Reverend Jack “King” Cassidy

  I have tried over the years to recall what the man looked like, if indeed it was a man, but in truth I do not think I ever saw his face. The light, which lit the land around him and shone into mine, seemed to come from inside him and shone so bright I could not look directly at him. I recalled another of the priest’s highlighted passages that had made no sense to me until now:

  . . . and his face did shine as the sun,

  and his raiment was white as the light.

  I threw myself forward in fear and awe and began to pray, begging forgiveness for all my sins, for I believed my judgment had come and this angel had been sent to deliver it. And when none came I held up my hands and asked the shining man what he commanded of me and his voice came back like a whisper inside my head.

  “What do you most desire?” he said.

  I replied with the answer I had given to all who had questioned me on my long journey south. “I wish to build a church of stone,” I said, “where God’s words of peace and love might be spoken aloud until they have driven all savagery from these lands.”

  The angel spoke again, its words so intimate and soft in my head:

  “But what do you most desire?”

  And I knew then that he had seen through my half-made answer. I do not think I had admitted the truth even to myself before that moment, but his light shone so bright it lit up the darkest corners of my soul and I realized I could not hide anything from this angel and that, though it had asked me a question, it knew my answer already.

  “I want to be somebody,” I replied. And when he said nothing further I spoke on, my words drawn out like yarn by his silence. “I want to be a man of
substance. I want people to remember me when I’m dead and say, ‘That was a man who did great things, that was a man who found a fortune and used it to build something in the desert, something that will live forever.’ I do not want to die as a nobody. I do not wish to be forgotten.”

  And there it was. The truth. My truth.

  The angel’s silence continued but I said no more, for I had nothing more to say. I had confessed fully and I knew even his bright searching light could illuminate nothing more in me.

  At long last he spoke and his words were soft and kindly. “You are an honest man,” he said, “and honesty like yours is rare and holds great value to me. So in exchange for that, and if you are willing, I shall give you what you desire.”

  I wept into the dirt, hardly daring to believe I had reached this dreamed-of moment when only a few hours earlier I had abandoned the Bible along with my resolve to continue my pilgrimage. Only the light had changed my mind and drawn me on. And now here I was, making bargains with angels, or with Christ the Savior, or maybe even with the Lord God Almighty himself.

  “I am yours to command, Lord,” I said to the shining man, for whatever he was—man, vision, angel—I knew he was lord over me. “Whatever you would have me do, I will do it, and gladly.”

  There was a mighty crash like a mountain splitting in two and a flash so bright I saw it clear as day though my eyes were tight shut and my face pressed hard to the dirt. The ground shook violently beneath me, like a dynamite blast through bedrock, then all went dark and silent.

  I don’t know if I was knocked senseless for a spell but I lay there for a long time and when I eventually looked up I saw nothing but darkness. The mirror was gone. My ears sang from the loud noise I had heard and it made me feel disconnected, as if I was floating in the vast night sky. Then the singing in my ears faded and a new sound crept in, the sound of running water.