The Searcher

by Simon Toyne

  I scrambled across the dirt toward it like an animal, drawn by my raging thirst. The darkness was solid to my light-ruined eyes and I made my way by sound alone, feeling my way over the ground and cutting my hands on the sharp edges of rocks and the spines of cacti in my haste to reach the water.

  Something huge loomed out of the darkness and I cried out and pulled away in terror. The stink of sweat and death sloughed off it and I wondered if I had died out in the desert, that the light I had seen had been the dying dream of a man driven mad by thirst and exhaustion and I was now in some terrible limbo populated by death creatures, cursed for eternity to crawl through the spiky darkness, tormented by the sound of water that I would never find. The thing ambled past, then snorted, and I realized what it was—not some diabolical beast sent to torment me but my mule, drawn to the same promise of water as I was.

  I stood and grabbed the hair of its hide, then let it lead me on, trusting its animal senses more than my own. And when it stopped and the smell of wet earth and the sound of bubbling water filled the air around me, I fell to the ground and into the cool shallows of a pool.

  And I drank.

  It was the sweetest thing I ever did taste and I drank long and deep of it, sinking my face beneath the surface and feeling the soothing cold water against my sunburned skin. I wanted to fall into it entire and cleanse myself like a sinner at a river revival, but the pool was scarce more than a hand’s width deep and though it bubbled up fast from some fresh crack in the earth, it soaked away fast, the land being every bit as parched as I was. I took one last, long draft then unhitched every canteen from my saddle and tossed them into the pool. I threw my gold pan in too, scouring it with wet dirt and swilling away all trace of its most recent use before chasing my floating canteens through the water and pushing each one under until every flask had been filled and stoppered.

  I sat back from the edge of the widening pool, taking steady mouthfuls of the sweet water from one of the newly filled flasks and wondering at the miracle of it all. I must have fallen asleep like that, for I seemed to blink and it was morning and the pool was now lapping at my feet.

  I gazed for the first time upon the pool of water that had appeared so miraculously in the night. It was now about the same size as a large corral, the spring still bubbling vigorously at its approximate center and sending ripples out to the irregular edges. Two halves of a large boulder lay split clean in two like the shell of a nut, exactly like the reflected image I had seen in the night. I turned to where the mirror had stood and saw a small bundle lying on the ground. A cold shiver ran through me as I recalled the dead child I had discovered on the track only the previous day.

  This could not be her.

  It couldn’t be.

  I stood slowly, my body cold as death, and walked stiffly over to the bundle. It was not the body of the poor starved child, it was only my Bible, wrapped in sacking, its pages open and fluttering in the cold morning breeze. It must have slipped from the saddle in the night and I saw that its spine had cracked in the fall and the pages were loose in the cover.

  I stooped to pick up the book and felt a sharp pain arrow through my palm, which made me drop it again. I turned my hand over and saw a fragment of silvered glass embedded in the soft heel of my hand, a remnant of the broken mirror. I gripped it with my teeth and drew it out then held it up, somewhat fearful as to what I might see reflected in it. But all I saw was myself, and the ordinary land stretching out behind me stained red by the blood that clung to the surface of the glass.

  I tucked the shard into my shirt pocket, took up the Bible again, and pushed the pages back together, checking the book from cover to cover to make sure it was all there.

  But it wasn’t.

  A single page was missing. It was from the book of Exodus, verse twenty, where Moses comes down from the mountain carrying God’s ten holy commandments. I felt sick on its discovery and felt it augured badly that, through lack of care, I had allowed God’s holy laws of all things to be lost in this wilderness. I rose up and searched the land all around for any sign of the missing page but found nothing and vowed to make amends for my carelessness however I could.

  I carried the Bible back to the water hole and placed it under a heavy rock to keep the thieving wind from its pages. Sunlight flashed on the surface of the water now, the canteens floating and bobbing like strange fish. I crouched by my gold pan to bathe my wounded hand in the water collected there and saw sunlight glinting at the bottom of this too. I stirred the sediment into murky clouds, my wound now forgotten, then lifted the pan and started moving it in small circles, tilting it forward a little each time to let the water and lighter particles of mud and rock slop out. When there was no more than an inch of water left at the bottom, I let it settle.

  Bright flakes of gold shone warm and yellow, along with crystals of a lighter green. It was malachite, lots of it: the rock here was rich with copper.

  I untied the kerchief from around my neck and tipped the contents of the pan onto it. The total haul was tiny, about the size of a robin’s egg, but when I held it in my hand it felt good and heavy. I spent the rest of the day working the water hole, taking samples from the pool and the surrounding land, but it didn’t seem to matter where I stuck my shovel in the ground, it always yielded mineral-rich earth. The copper was everywhere.

  When there was about an hour of daylight left, I lit a fire and set a pan of beans atop it with some chunks of dried beef stirred in. Then I sat and drank coffee while it cooked.

  The fruits of my labors covered the most part of a blanket now, a pile of ore rising almost up to the eye of my mule. The sight of it made me anxious. There was too much to carry and I would have to return with wagons to cart it away. But I needed to make it back to the fort first and get the legal papers signed before someone else happened along, drawn by the water, someone who might have a wagon or a faster horse and who might yet steal it all away from me.

  How quickly the world turned. On my outward journey I had nothing to lose, now I had the world within my grasp and was filled with watchful fears because of it. I saw dust rising far to the north—maybe a dust devil or horses—and kicked the fire out, smothering the embers with dirt so no smoke from it could give a clue to my location. Then I sat, wrapped in blankets, and ate my banquet of beef and part-soaked beans, watching the land go dark around me.

  I had come to this spot by a circuitous route but figured if I took a direct line back to the fort I could get there in four days. When darkness had swallowed the land, I packed enough provisions for a week and gathered all the water bottles from the water hole. What little remaining space there was in my saddlebags I crammed with rock samples and a couple of small dust bags filled with the finer material I had collected. Then I slung the pale Christ across my back and balanced the Bible on top of it all and lit out of there, leading the mule north by the light of the stars, little knowing what horrors still awaited me.

  71

  MULCAHY LOOKED ACROSS AT TíO.

  “This your plan?”

  Tío stared ahead with the same weird look Mulcahy had seen before, his eyes flat and defocused, like he was on something, saying nothing.

  They had been zip-tied and bundled in the back of a DEA paddy wagon without so much as a word and were now being driven through town at speed. They both had guards on either side of them in full combat gear and tactical masks that hid their faces. It all seemed a little anticlimactic. There had to be an angle in this. Tío had bought his way out of jail before, maybe he planned on doing it again. But where would that leave him?

  Mulcahy stared out of the narrow window at the town rushing past, streets he had driven down freely only a few short hours ago. He tried to think his way back and see if there was anything he could have done differently, but he couldn’t see it. All roads led here. He had always been bound to do whatever Tío wanted him to do.

  “Did you ever plan to let my pop go?” he asked.

  Tío looked at him and smiled
. “You haven’t fulfilled your half of the bargain yet.”

  They passed the church and the building where the police station was housed. The van didn’t slow, which made his heartbeat quicken.

  Where were they taking them?

  He watched the mine slip past, then the chain-link fence and the lines of aircraft beyond it lit by rows of lights that cast jagged shadows on the ground. He was right back where he had started that morning, waiting for the plane that would never show. The van slowed and slipped through a gateway then under the vast expanse of an aircraft wing.

  “Look at these things,” Tío said, “powerful enough to fly to the very edge of space, enough firepower to destroy a town, now rotting away in the desert. How many people you think are dead because of this one plane?”

  Mulcahy shook his head. It was déjà vu. Not only was he back where he’d started, he was having to listen to the same shit too. Perhaps he’d died and this was his own tailor-made form of purgatory.

  The van slowed then stopped in front of a large hangar. The rear doors opened with a gust of cool evening air, and the guards stood them up and maneuvered them outside.

  Morgan appeared from inside the hangar, walked over to someone who seemed to be in charge, and spoke to him for a few seconds. The man in command nodded, then looked around, checking that there was no one else there, and walked back over to him and Tío. A knife appeared in his hand and for one moment Mulcahy thought he might kill Tío right there. Instead he slipped it between Tío’s wrists and snicked it upward, cutting the zip tie free.

  Tío rubbed his wrists and turned to Mulcahy. “This was my move,” he said. “If you know there’s going to be DEA waiting for you, make sure they’re bought and paid for.” He turned to the commander and took the knife from him. “Go back to the church and get to work,” he said. “I want you to tear the beating heart out of this community. Just leave me a piece and a couple of your men.”

  The commander pulled an FN Five-seven from his holster and handed it to Tío. “I’ll stay,” he said. “You pay me to protect you, so I’d feel better if I was close enough to do it.” He beckoned another guard over, one of the soldiers in full combat gear, his face hidden and sinister behind combat mask and visor. “The rest of you head back to town.” He turned to Morgan. “You too. You don’t need to be here for this.”

  Morgan looked at Tío, then the commander, nodded and left.

  Tío stepped forward and snicked Mulcahy’s ties free then handed him the knife. Mulcahy studied it. It was seven inches long with a sturdy quillon, sharp enough for paring skin from muscle and solid enough not to bend. He didn’t need to ask what it was for.

  “You still want to save your father?” Tío said. He turned to the commander, who handed him the framed photographs of his dead daughters and the printout of the blackened skull. “Help me get the name of the bastard who ordered my son’s death.” Then he turned and walked into the hangar.

  72

  SOLOMON HEARD THE VAN APPROACH, THEN VOICES OUTSIDE AND FOOTsteps approaching.

  He was hanging by the arms from a steel beam that spanned the width of the hangar. The rope bound his wrists and was pulled so tight he practically had to stand on tiptoe to relieve the pain in his shoulders. Morgan had ordered him to take his jacket and shirt off before stringing him up. The gun pointed at Holly had ensured he had obeyed. Holly was tied up next to him and hanging from the same beam. He had not made her strip down, which suggested to Solomon that whatever was coming was coming to him.

  He heard footsteps approaching from behind, then a man stepped into view, short and squat and with thinning black hair and bad skin. He walked past Solomon and made his way over to a workbench lined with neat racks of tools. He took three photographs and carefully arranged them along it, taking his time, getting it right according to some design he carried in his head. Two were framed and were of young women, smiling at the camera with some reserve and some intelligence in their eyes. The third showed a skull, blackened by fire, a rectangle of metal bolted onto it. It wasn’t framed and he had to rest this one against an oilcan and hold it in place with a wrench.

  “¿Quien te envió?” the man asked, when the pictures were in place.

  Solomon studied the photographs, the girls clearly related, sisters probably, the blackened skull still unfathomable but a portent of nothing good.

  “Who sent you?” he repeated, in English this time, and turned to face him. He resembled the young women in the photographs, or they looked like him, which was unfortunate for them. Solomon guessed the skull might have resembled him too before the fire burned everything away.

  “My family,” the man said, following his stare. “My flesh. My blood. My bone. All rotting now. All gone. These people called me Papa. Everyone else calls me Papa Tío. You heard of me?” Solomon shook his head. “Yes you have. Now tell me who sent you.”

  “I haven’t heard of you,” Solomon said. “And nobody sent me.”

  Tío nodded at someone unseen and Solomon felt the rope bite into his wrists as it was pulled tighter.

  The knife felt cold when it first touched his skin then flared into white heat as it started to cut. He could feel the burn of it as it sliced through his flesh—just below the skin, above the muscle—severing capillaries and nerve endings in a sensation so intense and so far beyond pain that it almost flipped over into pleasure. Solomon gasped and shuddered and tried not to howl while the waves of whatever he was feeling washed over him then gradually ebbed away. Hot blood spread down his back and dripped onto the oil-dappled concrete. It felt like someone was pouring hot water down his back.

  He opened his eyes and looked over at Holly. She was staring at him wide-eyed, her shock rising to new levels with each atrocity she was forced to bear witness to. Solomon winked at her to reassure her, or himself, because he had no idea how this was going to pan out. He looked back at the photographs on the workbench. “Who’s the skull?”

  Tío stared at him with his dead eyes. “You know who he was. You know who I am and you know who he was too.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “Then let me tell you. He was the reason I did everything, the reason I breathed in and out and got out of bed in the morning. I heard someone say that having kids gives you a reason to live the second half of your life. That’s true. Only someone took away my reasons, piece by piece, and I think you know who it was. So if I have to cut it out of you piece by piece to find out what you know, I will. I got nothing left but time.”

  He nodded at the knife man standing behind Solomon, the man who had sliced him and was about to slice him again, in all the same places the old man had been cut.

  “Wait!” Solomon said, realizing something. He turned as much as he could and spoke to whoever was behind him. “What’s your name?”

  “What does it matter?” a voice replied.

  “Kind of intimate, don’t you think? You sliding a knife into me, slicing bits of me away. The least you can do is give me your name.”

  “Michael,” said the voice. “Michael Mulcahy.”

  “Are you two gonna start fucking or are we going to get on with this?” Tío said.

  Solomon ignored him, chasing something down now, making sure his next question was loud enough for Tío to hear. “Tell me, Michael, why did you stage the torture of Old Man Tucker?”

  Tío’s eyes moved to Mulcahy. “What’s that?”

  “The cuts in the skin were all made postmortem. I wondered at the time why Ellie Tucker hadn’t been alerted by the screams of her dying father—she didn’t know he was dead when she came out to find me. And how come you didn’t lock her up more securely, kill her even—a blind girl taken by surprise should have been no trouble for someone like you. Then it occurred to me that she might not have heard any screams because there hadn’t been any. You killed him quickly, mercifully even, a quick stab to the heart that made him bleed out fast and would have killed him in seconds. Then you made it appear like he’d been tortured. Why do t
hat?”

  Tío pulled his gun from his waistband and pointed it at Mulcahy. The commander and the guard pointed their weapons too. “That’s a good question,” Tío said. “Why would you do that?”

  Mulcahy walked forward so Solomon could see him. He was holding a bloodied knife in his hand and studying it like he had never seen it before. “It was the blood, wasn’t it?” he said, seemingly untroubled by the fact that three loaded guns were being pointed directly at him. “The cuts were too clean because the old man had already bled out.”

  Tío shook his head and pulled a phone from his pocket. “You know the only reason I haven’t put a bullet in your head is because I want to see your face when you listen to your piece-of-shit father die in agony.” He pressed a button to speed-dial a number and put it on speakerphone. The sound of ringing echoed in the hangar. Nobody picked up. “The fuck?” Tío checked his phone and dialed the number again.

  “They’re not going to answer,” Mulcahy said, looking up from the knife. “My father has been safe for about an hour now. The guys who were holding him don’t work for you anymore, Tío. None of us does. Things change. People change. You’re not in charge any longer.”

  The commander and the guard shifted position so their guns were now pointing at Tío. Tío looked at them then back at Mulcahy like he had just sprouted horns. “Are you serious? Who is in charge then? You?” He laughed and pointed at Holly with the barrel of his gun. “Her?”

  “Me,” the other guard said, his voice sounding muffled behind his full-face mask. Tío whirled around and pointed his gun at him. “You don’t want to shoot me,” the guard said, and the gun dipped as Tío recognized something now in the voice.

  The guard crouched slowly and laid his automatic rifle on the ground. Then he rose back up and unclipped the side fastening of the mask. He slipped it off along with his visor and helmet, revealing a six-inch scar on the side of his head. “Hello, Papa,” Ramon said. “Did you miss me?”