Days of Atonement Read online

  DAYS OF ATONEMENT

  WALTER JON WILLIAMS

  TO MY PARENTS, Eva Williams and Walter Ulysses Williams, I dedicate this story of a mythical land called New Mexico.

  I would like to acknowledge DETECTIVE DAMON FAY, Albuquerque Police Department, and DOUG BEASON, for their enormous technical assistance. I am also indebted to Howard Waldrop for the Straight Poop on exploding gophers. All credit for accuracy and accomplishment should be given to them. Mistakes and blunders, as usual, are mine.

  Other Books by Walter Jon Williams

  Novels

  Hardwired

  Knight Moves

  Voice of the Whirlwind

  Days of Atonement

  Aristoi

  Metropolitan

  City on Fire

  Ambassador of Progress

  Angel Station

  The Rift

  Implied Spaces

  Divertimenti

  The Crown Jewels

  House of Shards

  Rock of Ages

  Dread Empire's Fall

  The Praxis

  The Sundering

  Conventions of War

  Investments

  Dagmar Shaw Thrillers

  This Is Not a Game

  Deep State

  The Fourth Wall

  Collections

  Facets

  Frankensteins & Foreign Devils

  The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1991, 2011 by Walter Jon Williams

  Cover photo by Walter Jon Williams

  Fractal images by Lance Beaton. Used with permission.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The mayor's secretary was on the phone. “I thought I’d better let you know,” she said, “that the last three hundred sixty miners got their pink slips today.”

  Loren Hawn considered this information for a moment as he watched the flicker of the slow ceiling fan reflected in the bright gold surface of his boxing trophies. In the silence the cool plastic phone made distant ticking sounds in his ear.

  “Thanks, Eileen,” he said finally. “Does Ed know?”

  “The mayor’s known for three days.”

  Anger began a slow simmer in Loren's belly. “God damn, Eileen,” he said.

  “I would’ve told you,” apologetically, “but he would have known it was me.”

  “Not your fault, Eileen.”

  A picture of Eileen flashed suddenly, intensely, into Loren’s mind: a smooth-faced, dark-haired woman, her head thrown back, sweat dotting her upper lip. Passion glowing through half-slitted eyes.

  An old picture. Years before, when Loren’s wife was going through one of her failed pregnancies, Loren had cheated with Eileen.

  Years ago, though the memory still glowed in his mind. Guilt coiled about his nerves. So did arousal.

  Get thee behind me, he thought.

  “See you at church tomorrow?” Eileen said.

  “It’s a Friday, and the bars will be open late tonight. I’ll try to make it, but don’t depend on me.”

  “Sorry, Loren.”

  Loren scowled at the BUY AMERICAN sign on the opposite wall. THE JOB YOU SAVE, it said in smaller type, MIGHT BE YOUR OWN.

  No shit, he thought.

  “Does that Republican son of a bitch Edward Trujillo know you’re calling me?” he asked.

  Eileen laughed. “He hasn’t got a clue, Loren.”

  “Thank you. I hope I see you tomorrow morning.”

  “Bye.”

  Loren considered slamming the phone back into its cradle, but it was made of cheap Singapore plastic and probably would have shattered, so he placed it carefully and then, with some deliberation, smashed the walnut desktop with his big fist. Then he stood, adjusted his gun, and walked out of his office.

  His secretary’s desk was empty, its surface covered with a light film of dust and a growing pile of unanswered mail. She was on vacation and the city budget didn’t allow for hiring a substitute. Loren was answering only essential mail and went to one of Judge Denver’s clerks for his typing.

  Wanted posters fluttered in the gentle wind of another overhead fan. The face of a young girl no older than seventeen gazed sadly out at him. WANTED, the poster said, FOR ECO-TERRORISM.

  Jesus, Loren thought, he hated the new century.

  He knocked on the warped wooden door frame of the assistant chief’s office.

  “Hey. Pachuco. Qué paso?”

  Cipriano Dominguez had his booted feet up on his desk. A window was open to the breeze and the low hum of midafternoon traffic. He looked up from a dog-eared western novel and smiled with big yellow teeth.

  “Just improving my mind, jefe. What do you need?”

  “They’re closing the pit.”

  “Shit.” The smile went away fast. Cipriano closed his book and took his feet off the desk. He put the book on the overflowing shelf behind him.

  Cipriano was one of those people who would happily read anything. Thrillers, history, melodrama, biography, westerns, any book that crossed his path. Loren had once found him reading a college-level text on economics—Cipriano hadn’t understood any of it, but had read it with the same pleasure he would have got from Agatha Christie.

  “Call upstairs and tell the sheriff so he can tell the county guys,” Loren said. “Then call the night shift and let them know they’re going on at six. I’ll get on the radio and let the day shift know they’ll be working till after midnight.”

  “How about the swing shift?”

  “They’ll figure it out when they come on at four-thirty.”

  “Okay, Chief.” Cipriano reached for the phone.

  Loren went out to the front desk and the police radio. The department had once had civilian dispatchers, but there had been cutbacks, and now the desk man had to handle all the calls himself.

  Loren told his two patrolling officers that they’d be working an extra shift, then he went downstairs to let Ed Ross, the jailer, know that maybe he’d want to bring in some extra personnel. He went upstairs, then decided he was too angry to sit at his desk for the rest of the day. He walked across the yellowing white tile hallway and boomed out through the glass doors, passed between the copper deco griffins guarding the entrance and then crossed West Plaza to the old town square.

  Once— he’d seen the pictures— the plaza had had a neat little white gingerbread bandstand on it, and on Friday and Saturday nights bands from various organizations, the Knights of Columbus or the Mine Workers or the high school, would put on concerts there. The custom had ended during the Depression, when the WPA knocked down the bandstand and put up the white granite Federal Building, the same white federal granite they’d put up everywhere, just as the high school the WPA erected at the same time was the same red brick building they’d built across the entire republic.

  There were pieces of the old plaza left, sagging brick sidewalks that had once radiated from the bandstand, and a small Stonehenge of monuments, once scattered across the plaza but now collected in one area opposite Central Avenue. The grass around them was brown now, brown with the drought that had afflicted the area all summer and the three summers previous and had raised fire danger to an extreme high.

  Despite the drought, October sang in the air with a pure, cool effervescence, the first tang of autumn. Loren thought of band-tailed pigeon clustering on the high plains south of town, the feel of his shotgun in his hand, dogs rollicking and sniffing up ahead.

  He thought of pis
sed-off miners clustering in bars. Maybe if he was going to be up late tonight, he should go home and take a nap.

  Above his head the town’s art-deco clock struck one.

  An old brass memorial plaque sat at his feet, fixed to a chunk of green copper ore. NEAR THIS SPOT STOOD THE ORIGINAL VILLAGE OF EL PUEBLO DE NUESTRA SEÑORA DE ATOCHA, DESTROYED IN 1824 BY AN ARMY OF SAVAGE REDSKINS. Below, in smaller letters, were the words Women’s Historical Society, 1924. The anniversary of a bloodbath.

  The Apaches had set a range fire, Loren knew, that threatened the copper diggings. When the menfolk ran out to save the wooden mine buildings, the Apaches swarmed over the adobe wall of the town and killed or enslaved every woman and child. The disheartened men, staggered by the scope of their loss, had mostly returned to Mexico. Except, history recorded, for those who went mad, and lived in the wilderness like bears.

  Latter-day Indians had objected, Loren knew, to the characterization of “savage redskins.” The objections hadn’t made much of an impression— the past was still too much of a weight here. Who else but a savage would cut the throats of children in their cradles?

  That had been the town’s first destruction, but not its last. Long after the Apache wars had been won, in the 1920s, Atocha had been destroyed again, when the copper pit engulfed the town. Atocha had been rebuilt twelve miles to the west, and all the old nineteenth-century town that Loren had seen in photographs, all the neat brick Victorian buildings with their pillars and stained glass, gables and towers and widow’s walks, the little identical side-by-side houses that the early Mormon polygamists had built for their wives . . . all had been destroyed.

  The city of Atocha had always changed its face when necessary. That was the way it had survived.

  The new town, built in the 1920s, was meant to be a wonder, a showplace of modernity. All the buildings fronting the central plaza were faced in art deco, a streamlined assembly of winged radiators and bulbous Flash Gordon cupolas, Bel Geddes speed lines and gondolas from soaring Raymond Leowy zeppelins. Even the Catholic church was streamlined, and the Church of the Apostles of Elohim and the Nazarene, right next to it, was even more extreme, with a pair of bell towers that looked like bottle-nosed rockets about to launch. Atocha, the designers implied, was not afraid of the twentieth century, of the World of Tomorrow. Things could only improve.

  It was all shabby now, the polished steel fading into rust, the black and white tile cracking. But how, Loren wondered, could the city resurrect itself a third time? It had survived the Apaches, it had somehow survived the Anaconda, but the Big Strike and the twenty-first century were another matter.

  Anger and frustration simmered in his heart. He wasn’t doing anyone any good standing here. He decided to go home for a nap.

  He was heading for the spread-winged griffins when a chocolate-colored Blazer pulled into one of the parking spaces in front of the building. Loren felt a sour taste in his mouth. This was all he needed.

  Two young men in baggy gray suits and dark knit ties got out of the jeep. Both wore gold-rimmed Ray-Bans. One fed the meter while the other waited for Loren to cross the street.

  “Excuse me, sir.” The man’s fair hair was arranged in a flattop haircut. A fringe around the top had been bleached a lighter shade, providing a halo effect. He was thick-necked and well muscled and stood an inch taller than Loren’s six feet two. He looked like a Mormon missionary turned professional assassin.

  The current look, Loren thought, in company goons.

  “Yes?” Loren said.

  The man looked at a piece of paper. “Do you know Assistant Chief Dominguez’s office? We’re here for orientation.”

  “Ah.” A slow smile crept across Loren’s features. Maybe this would be fun. “Inside,” he said, “past the desk. Corridor on your right, first door on the left.”

  “Thank you, sir.” The man started up the steps.

  “Check your guns at the desk,” Loren said.

  The man hesitated on the top step, then went on. His partner finished with the parking meter, nodded to Loren as he passed, then bounced up the stairs.

  Loren noticed the second man’s shoes. They were black and had a military shine. As they went by, Loren could see blue sky reflected in the heels. Blue sky, the solemn griffin, Loren’s own distorted face with a scowl plain to see.

  Loren waited a moment, then went back in the building. The man at the desk, Al Sanchez, was looking at a pair of heavy automatics. Both had custom walnut grips.

  “Nice,” he said. “Nine-millimeter.”

  “Berettas?”

  Sanchez picked up a gun and squinted at it through dark-rimmed spectacles. “Tanfoglio, it says.”

  Loren picked one up, sighted it on the picture of the mayor behind the desk. Bang, he thought. “Nice balance.” He put the gun down. “Don’t see why they don’t buy American, though.”

  Sanchez grinned up at him. “Wanna bet whether they were wearing anything made in this country?”

  Loren thought about it. Chinese silk suits; Italian shoes, belts, guns; Indian underwear. “Maybe their ties?”

  “Maybe. But I bet they’re English.”

  Sanchez put the guns in a drawer. Loren moved down to the corridor. Cipriano had left his door slightly ajar.

  “Ames, Iowa, sir.” Loren recognized the voice of the man with the flattop.

  “You’re from Iowa.” Cipriano’s voice. “And your partner’s from North Carolina. Guess you don’t have many Spanish people there, huh?”

  “No, sir.”

  “And you’ve been in town how long?”

  “Two days.”

  Loren grinned. He noticed that Cipriano had cranked his Spanish accent way up. Normally it was almost undetectable.

  ”Well,“ Cipriano said, “that’s what this orientation is about. So you know how to deal with the local Spanish people.” Cipriano cleared his throat. “There are only two things you gotta remember. Two sentences. And you’ll get along fine.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Repeat after me: Out of the Tchevy, Pedro.”

  There was a moment of surprised silence.

  “I said repeat!”

  “Out of the Chevy, Pedro.” The chorus was a little uneven.

  “Not Chevy, it’s Tchevy. Let’s get the accent right.”

  “Tchevy.”

  “From the top.”

  “Out of the Tchevy, Pedro.”

  Cipriano barked like a Marine D.I. “Say it like you mean it!”

  “OUT OF THE TCHEVY, PEDRO!” In perfect chorus.

  “That’s good.” Cipriano’s voice was warm. “That’ll get the attention of any Spanish guy you need to talk to. Now here’s the other sentence: Comprende jail, asshole.”

  “Comprende jail, asshole!”

  “Like you mean it!”

  “COMPRENDE JAIL, ASSHOLE!”

  Trying not to laugh out loud, Loren ambled back to the front desk. Sanchez looked at him. “No offense, Chief,” he said, “but white people sure are stupid.”

  Loren grinned. “But they’re so well brought up.”

  “When I was in the Air Force,” Sanchez said, “they kept me busy for a whole day wandering around the base trying to get the sergeant a left-handed monkey wrench.”

  “And you say white people are stupid?”

  “Too bad ATL will only let us have these guys for an hour.” Sanchez turned meditative. “Those sons of bitches. They think Spanish people are retarded or something, need special treatment. Shit.”

  Cipriano’s voice echoed from his office. “And we’re all Spanish, okay? Or Hispanic. Latinos are from Cuba or Puerto Rico or someplace. Chicanos are from California. But we’re the pure-blooded descendants of Castilian conquerors, and don’t you ever forget it!”

  Cipriano was laying it on a little thick today. Loren hitched up his gun belt. “I’m ten-seven outta here. Gonna rest up for tonight.”

  “You can rest easy, Chief.” Grinning. “Now the ATL guys are here.”

&
nbsp; Loren left the building, got in his Fury cruiser, and drove down West Plaza to Central. He turned right, then turned left again at the big LDS church, which had its own monument, an obelisk of Utah granite, marking the resettlement of Atocha in the 1870s by Mormons sent at the command of Brigham Young. They had established a small farming community along the Rio Seco in the face of the Apache terror, intended as a way station in case the Saints’ simmering disagreements with the federal government forced them to evacuate to Mexico. It hadn’t been long before the Mormons had been submerged by miners brought in by the silver and gold strikes, but they were still a powerful presence.

  Estes Street was shaded by old Japanese elms, a contrasting green that looked startling among the dusty brown New Mexico hills. The trees’ shadows cast glowing, shifting patterns on the worn, patched cement of the street. Too many of the houses had old FOR SALE signs sitting on overgrown lawns. Loren drove past the gray-white Church of Christ— a converted private home— and then, a block later, into his own driveway. The old rusting carport, with its trellises of fading morning glorys, was empty. Loren parked to one side of the wide drive, leaving room for Debra’s Taurus in the carport. His yard was mostly bare southwestern earth, with native grasses, yuccas growing against the side of the house, and a decorative ocotillo. A rush of happiness welled up in him.

  Querencia. That was the Spanish word: home-for-the-heart. The place where he could rest.

  The house smelled of the morning’s breakfast bacon. Loren opened a window, then headed for the bedroom and took off his gun belt and shoes. He hung the gun belt on a prong of his gun rack, next to his Heym shotgun and Russian hunting rifle, and then stretched out on the bed.

  He was very good at falling asleep on command.

  When he woke he knew that things had changed, that Debra had come from her part-time job at the library— she would have gone full-time after the girls left grade school, but the town couldn’t afford full-time librarians. She had quietly started work in the kitchen. He rose from the bed and padded in stocking feet through the living room. He paused in the kitchen door.