Michael Walsh Bundle

by Michael Walsh

  He shifted position to catch the tentative shade of a palm tree. As he did, he came once again face-to-face with the statue of the dying Mammuthus, perpetually frozen in the awful realization that its next bite was also going to be its last meal. If it could think that far ahead.

  The first picture: not as expected—

  A smudge of white light. A starburst against the backdrop of an infinite, threatening darkness. His mind raced, freeassociating as it always did when absorbing new information. Talk about Genesis: Let there be light. But was this the beginning, or the final flameout?

  He caught himself. It was the overexposure of an aperture, the misfire of an amateur accidentally aiming a camera at the noonday California sun, although for what reason he couldn’t guess. He was Rorschaching even before he had to.

  “The door? You see it?”

  He saw no such thing. Tijuana in a fair-weather cumulus; Megan Fox in a rain-threatening cumulonimbus. You saw what you wanted to see. And what you almost always saw was yourself. He moved on.

  Variations on the Theme of the Smudge: blurs, splotches, gradually clearing. Moving from solar apogee toward the horizon. Dusty mountains, dustier deserts. Lancaster. Or worse, Barstow. Or worst, Needles. Middle of the Mojave. The most forlorn, desolate place on God’s sometimes-green earth.

  He kept leafing. More sky, more mountains. Some people. Then more people: huge crowds. Mostly Hispanic, by the look of them. A prizefight, a cockfight, a bullfight?

  Ten pictures down so far nothing to see. It reminded him of television.

  Then something—flowers. Desert plants, two feet high, with dull green stems and brilliant hungry yellow flowers that soaked up the sun as if it belonged exclusively to them alone.

  “Marigolds,” said Jacinta.

  “So?”

  “Her flowers.” She motioned for him to keep looking.

  The next one was a little different. Fairly well-registered, it showed the desert sky, the distant mountain range, and the desert floor.

  “Mira.” Jacinta, urging him, pointing at something. Her expectant expression was irresistible.

  Devlin took a deep breath. In New York or Washington, you never had to be alone if you didn’t want to, because there were always plenty of intimate strangers around. But in L.A., alone was the default mode; the whole town was one big party you weren’t invited to. It was the only city in America, Devlin thought, where you could be truly, blissfully all by yourself.

  If he hurried he could still catch lunch at Tom Bergin’s over on Fairfax and bang back a couple of cold Smithwicks while he pondered how he was going to kill his evening before heading back to his place in Echo Park alone. He hadn’t had anyone there since she was there, hadn’t had anyone period. Because while she might have betrayed him, he would never betray her.

  What was the first rule of a confidential op? Keep your cover story 99.9 percent true. And what was the second? Never trust anybody, never fall in love with anybody. He had broken all those rules, and now he was paying the price—in heartache and career ruination. Whether he would pay the ultimate price remained to be seen.

  Maryam . . . where are you?

  “Excuse me, señor?” asked Jacinta.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Please continue.”

  Who sent her? It might have been Seelye, trying to steer him some business since his disgrace. It might have been President Tyler, torturing him, or playing him; he used to think Tyler, running desperately for reelection now against a formidable female candidate who was leading him by double digits in the polls, was a blithering idiot, but the way he had played them all over the past two years had revealed the hand of the master.

  Or it could be Emanuel Skorzeny. For his money, Door Number 3 was always where pure evil dwelled, and at this point he saw no reason to reassess his experience.

  “Mira,” insisted Jacinta, shaking the Polaroid photo at him.

  What looked like a rainbow was circling the sun. A rainbow in the desert, where the temperature was at least one hundred and twenty degrees, and the humidity near zero. A place where there hadn’t been any rain since the dinosaurs.

  “You don’t believe.” A pudgy finger punched the Polaroid. “Look again. Closely.”

  And then he saw what she was talking about: a white, vertical rectangle blazing against the darkness. It might have been Kubrick’s famous black monolith from 2001, bleached out. A reverse image, like the Shroud of Turin, unnoticed until somebody had the bright idea to take a photo of it.

  This is what she was looking at. This is what she wanted him to see.

  “The doorway. You see now.”

  One more photo to go. As he looked, he shot a last glance at the condemned mammoth, still beseeching him to do something. But sometimes you just had to embrace the suck.

  Lucky thirteen:

  At first glance, it was nothing but a big white splotch, vaguely pear-shaped. It could be anything, including what it no doubt was, a photographic irregularity. Involuntarily, he looked up at the sky, but even through the polarized sunglasses, the only thing he could see was the endless Los Angeles blue. Not a cloud, not a shadow.

  All right, embrace the suck:

  If you half-closed your eyes, you could barely, just barely, convince yourself you were looking at—

  “You see?”

  He squinted and looked again.

  Devlin took off his shades, blew on them, wiped them off with a handkerchief. This was beyond crazy, the kind of thing Mexican women saw in moldy tortillas or on the side of freeway overpasses. Crudely faked by a gangbanger with Photoshop and fobbed off on a bunch of superstitious campesinos.

  He could see it. “When?” he asked.

  “On the thirteenth of every month.”

  “Where?”

  “In the desert. Near California City.”

  He didn’t want to have to ask his next question, but as long as he was taking the job, it was his job to ask. “What do you want me to do?”

  She shook her head. “Not me. El padre . . .”

  “What does the padre want me to do?’

  She looked at him as if he were simple: “He wants you to follow her.”

  “Her?”

  Jacinta slipped the pictures back into the folder without answering. As she did, Devlin got a look at what he had assumed was simply schmutz inside the folder. Pale, pink . . .

  She caught him looking. “Rose petals,” she said, reaching inside and handing him one. “From the desert.”

  She pointed across Curson Street, toward a black Escalade with tinted windows, idling amid the fleet of yellow school buses. “Hurry,” she said, rising. “We have so little time.”

  Devlin stopped. “Why? What is coming?”

  She looked at him with fear in her eyes. “The Great Chastisement, señor. Now, come!”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Central Valley, near Coalinga

  Danny moved closer, to make sure that he was actually seeing what he thought he was seeing.

  At first glance, it looked like a water stain on the concrete. The freeway underpasses were a riot of abstract designs caused by the rush of occasional rainwater from the road above to the constantly thirsty land below. With a little imagination, you could always make out something—the World Trade Center here, a rutabaga there. Not that, under normal circumstances, anybody ever stopped under an overpass in order to discover some l’art trouvé, but these were hardly normal circumstances.

  The Mexicans were deep into the rosary now, praying with renewed fervor. These were the good, religious, hardworking people from an ancient culture, family people, descendents both of the conquistadors and the Indians, of Cortés and Juan Diego. Coming to America, thought Danny, may have improved them financially, but it had diminished them culturally, with what unknown consequences the next generations of both Mexicans and Americans would have to discover.

  Dios te salve, María, llena eres de gracia . . .

  Gently, he moved forward, toward the object of
their veneration. Some of the candles had guttered out already, but fresh votives had already replaced them, flickering in the breeze.

  He thought he knew what he saw, but he had to make sure....

  Closer now and closer still . . .

  A large woman blocked his way. The crowd, which was growing in size by the minute, pressed forward, knocking him into her. “Excuse me, señora,” he said, but it was no use apologizing because the press of humanity was too strong and he found himself propelled ever forward until, like water bursting through a dam, he went sprawling into a small clearing.

  Behind him was the crowd, a mixture of awe and wonder on their faces. Before him were the candles, their hot melted wax running down the pavement. And above him was . . .

  A Face. The face of a woman. The most beautiful face he had ever seen.

  Her eyes were half-closed, her gaze downward, a look of ineffable sadness and suffering—and yet of peace and even joy—upon her visage. She was wearing what the kids today called a hoodie, which concealed most of her hair, revealing only her face and a bit of her throat.

  “Who is it?” he found himself whispering, prone, worshipful.

  “Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, señor,” someone said.

  “Who?” He should have known. Every Angeleno, whether Latino or Anglo, knew the Virgin of Guadalupe, the miraculous image impressed by the Lady upon the cloak of the Indian, Juan Diego, in 1531. It was one of the first recorded apparitions of the Virgin in the New World. It ensured the conquest of Latin America by Catholicism, and it turned Juan Diego into the first native American saint. And the cloak remained to this day in the Basilica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe in Mexico City.

  Powerful voodoo, if you believed. Powerful even if you didn’t.

  As one look at the Face would tell you.

  He looked at Her, right in the eyes—

  Miracles were curious things. Like pornography, you could not define them, but you knew one when you saw it. It wasn’t as if she looked directly at him—great images, like the Mona Lisa, did that all the time, the eyes following you around the room, out the door and across the street—but she may as well have, for the effect it had on him. Not just at him, but in him and through him and with him, just like in the doxology, the one he had had learned so many years ago, before reality had intervened, and the world had taken his breath away.

  Suddenly, unbidden, the words of the Eucharistic prayer came back to him, half-remembered, as in a dream, but tantalizing and near . . .

  Per ipsum, et cum ipso, et in ipso . . .

  What was the rest of it? He couldn’t remember

  He took a deep breath. The fetid smell of the bovine corpses lying just over the freeway was already wafting over. Something terrible had happened, and he needed to know what it was. He glanced back to his car, to see if Hope and the kids were all right, but the crowd was too large, and getting larger every moment.

  There was no way out: he was penned in on all sides by the locals, mostly Mexicans now, he could see, who had been joined by a few Anglos, landowners most likely. The primitive illumination of the candles had given way to the powerful flashlights of the farmers, who had augmented their torches with shotguns. Whatever had happened, it required firearms to deal with.

  “What the hell is going on here?” barked a big man. He was at the head of a group of white men, the only one unarmed, and he moved through the crowd of Latinos as if he owned them, which he probably did.

  The crowd parted like the Red Sea, and soon enough Danny found himself looking up at the big man, who prodded him with his boot.

  “Don’t do that,” said Danny softly. He was still processing what he had seen just now, and was in no mood for a reality intervention just yet.

  “I said,” repeated the man, “what the hell is going here? There are dead cows from here to Stockton, and I want to know why.”

  The Mexicans were backing away, their candles flickering out. Struggling, Danny forced himself into a sitting position, from which he could get a view of the car. Damn! Rory was getting out, a young man coming to the aid of an older man, a man not his father but who soon would be, at least in the eyes of the law and perhaps even, if he played his cards right, of the Lord....

  “Rory, stay in the car!” shouted Danny.

  “I asked you a question,” said the big man, which interrogatory was followed by another prod, this one closer to a kick—

  Big mistake.

  In a flash, Danny flipped to his feet, whirled, and dropped the man with a high kick to the Adam’s apple. Two throwing knives shot from his sleeves, pinioning the trigger hands of two of the armed men. Quick, vicious punches brought down the others. It was all over in less than a minute, just the way he had been trained so long ago, in the special forces and the 160th SOAR.

  In another time, in another life, Danny might have made sure his opponents were down for the count, unable to rise and hurt him. But now he didn’t care. It was not that he had lost his edge, but that he had found a new one—a higher power than the ones he formerly had answered to. He didn’t know what it meant, wasn’t sure what he would do with this newfound clarity, but it didn’t matter. He still had more to learn, and that was what some power had brought him here, at this moment, to do.

  The past sloughed off—all of it. The military operations, the night flights into Iraq and other places in the world he never talked about, never admitted, the contract with Blackwater, now called Xe—none of that mattered anymore. It was past, gone, and yet . . . and yet the past was always prologue to whatever new life was coming your way. Embrace the suck, was the old motto in Iraq. Well, he was embracing it now.

  In the distance, he could hear car doors opening and shutting. His car. He knew it was his car. Rory was already out, and so now it was the women, the women he was suddenly responsible for, not just his daughter Jade, wounded in the terrorist bombing of the Grove but now by the grace of God healthy and well, but Hope and her daughter Emma, poor kidnapped Emma, for whose rescue he had flown into the heart of that bastard Skorzeny’s prison in France.

  Mission accomplished. Emma was restored to her mother and her brother, and Jade restored to life. Both he and Hope had lost their spouses—she in the siege of Edwardsville, he in Los Angeles—but somehow she had found him and together they were becoming stronger than they had ever been in the past.

  It had never been personal before—not even during the darkest days in Iraq. He had a job to do, and he did it. The body count was not his concern. He was a warrior, trained and sent into action by his country; if he had had to live with one of those JAG monkeys on his back, he never would have made it out of country alive. But now, after all that had happened—to him, his family, to Hope, her family, and to their country—it very much was personal. He could only hope—and, now, pray—that he would be the divine instrument of infinite justice.

  The Mexicans had pulled away from the crazy gringo. The white men were down. And now he found himself swarmed by the people in his life whom he most loved. Hope and Rory and Emma. And Jade. Always brave Jade.

  Who was staring at the image on the wall. If Danny thought he was empathetic, Jade was positively telepathic. She got it from her mother, Diane. . . .

  For a long time Jade said nothing, just took in the image of the woman, the mother, the Blessed Mother, her sorrow, her tears.

  “What is it, Jade?” asked Danny softly. “What is she saying?”

  Still, Jade said nothing. Danny knew better than to press her. Teenage girls were never to be rushed. They could see things others could not, hear things audible only to a special few. As they bloomed and blossomed, they not only transformed themselves, they transformed the world—sacred vessels, receptive, the gateway to the unknown, the promise, and the future.

  “What does she want?” whispered Danny to his daughter. He had to learn her secret.

  What was she trying to tell him? What was she trying to tell all of them? Not just those present, but everyone in the Centr
al Valley, everyone in California, the country, the world? Had she witnessed whatever calamity lay just outside the sacred circle of candle fire?

  She had something to say—but what?

  Jade shuddered a little, then stepped back, coming out of a kind of trance. She nodded to the image, then turned to her father.

  “What did you say, Daddy?” she asked.

  Danny waited a moment. “What?” he hissed. “What did she say?”

  Hope moved toward them. “Danny,” she said softly. “Let Jade—”

  “No,” said Danny. Then, to Jade: “You heard something?”

  In the distance now, sirens. Lots of them. Sirens coming from both the north and the south, their wails building in harmony with the scope of the disaster. The stench was becoming overpowering. They had to get out of here, go on north, on to San Francisco, toward their hotel, the restaurant, the moonlight walk near Fort Point.

  “Hear something,” replied Jade. “I hear something. She’s talking to me. To you. To all of us.”

  Rory looked at the image on the wall. “Awesome!” he exclaimed.

  Protectively, Hope threw her arms around the children. Neither Jade nor Danny moved.

  “What is she saying, darling?” asked Danny. The sirens were very near now.

  Jade moved toward the wall, on which the miraculous image had been projected, and started to put her ear to it.

  The force of the shotgun blast would have taken her head off, but the shot was high and to the right, chipping the concrete and sending it flying. Danny had hardly heard the blast when he jumped on his daughter, the memory of the Grove explosion still vivid in his memory.

  In one smooth motion, he scooped Jade up in his arms while signaling for the others to run. The Mexicans scattered as another blast came—this one hitting the Virgin right in the face. The miracle was over.

  They hit the car running and hopped in. It wasn’t a chopper, but Danny could still make it fly, and they peeled out long before the inevitable third blast—the one directed at them—came. But they were already far away, and the force of the shot dispersed itself into the fetid air.