Days of Atonement Read online

  After twenty minutes Loren had a good description. Two young Hispanic men, aged eighteen to twenty-five, an inch or two shorter than average, dressed in work boots, blue jeans, dark blue or black zipped nylon jackets. The man with the shotgun had long black hair that stuck out of the bottom of the ski mask. He was the only one who had talked, and he had a light Spanish accent. The other guy had the tails of a red plaid shirt hanging below the waist of his jacket. Loren told Cipriano to get the descriptions out immediately, and use the LAWSAT antenna to get them out to New Mexico and Arizona state police.

  “It’s not much to go on, jefe,” Cipriano said. “That description could fit maybe a couple hundred people living in this county.”

  “Put it out, anyway. We might get lucky.” Cipriano turned to leave. “Wait a minute,” Loren said. “I just thought. Call Connie Duvauchelle and see if she’s got these two guys celebrating in her parlor.”

  “Good idea.”

  Cipriano left the room, and Loren turned to Forsythe. “I got one important question,” he said. “Was the door to the poker room open when you went down the hall?”

  Forsythe shook his head. “No. They marched me right to the door and told me to go inside.”

  “So they knew it was there.”

  Forsythe did not seem to comprehend the significance of this. “Anyone you’ve had to fire recently?” Loren asked. “Any bad blood between you and any of your employees?”

  “Hell, Loren. Everyone in the county knows that game is back there anymore. It doesn’t have to be someone who worked for me.”

  “Answer the question, Bill.”

  Forsythe thought for a moment. “Business is good. I fired one guy for stealing three months ago, but it wasn’t him held me up.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Robbie Cisneros is almost as tall as you are.”

  Loren scratched his jaw. “Yeah, I know him. I arrested him a couple times for drunk and disorderly. How much did he steal?”

  “A lot of tip money, I think. He was a bus boy so he could just grab the money from the tables when no one was looking. But I only caught him with about twenty bucks. It seemed easier just to kick his ass out of here.”

  “Always prosecute,” Loren said. “Even if it’s for pocket money. Never let them get away with anything. Because for every theft you catch them at, they’ve committed a hundred more.”

  “Robbie didn’t hold me up.” Insistently. “He was taller.”

  “Have you had a fight with anyone lately? Anyone complain the poker game is rigged?”

  “Rigged!” Forsythe was indignant. “We don’t even have a dealer!”

  “Yeah, okay. I was just asking.”

  “And the players are too damn dumb to cheat one another.” Now that he was safe and his shock wearing off, all Forsythe’s fear and adrenaline was beginning to come out as belligerence. In a minute, Loren figured, he’d start yelling at the police for not protecting him properly. “Nobody’s complained!” Forsythe said. “Nobody! Those good ole boys have been losing all their girlfriends’ tips to me for years, and nobody’s ever said a word about it.”

  “Fine. Any of the regulars not around tonight?”

  Forsythe gave a few names. Loren knew them all and knew they didn’t fit the description of the robbers.

  Cipriano came back and reported that he’d sent the LAWSAT alert and that Connie Duvauchelle had reported no suspects in her vicinity. So much for that.

  Loren decided to leave before Forsythe’s growing anger got annoying. He thanked the man and went down the hall to the table. Maybe the ole boys had remembered something.

  The ole boys contradicted one another at every turn and it took over an hour to get their stories straight. No details of any significance were added except that they heard a car pull out of the back parking lot just after the robbery.

  “Did anyone hear it start?” Loren asked.

  A few said yes, a few no. That left the possibility of a third robber sitting in the back with the engine running. Loren grew unhappier by the minute at the implications of all this. He and Cipriano left the poker room and closed the door behind them. The EMPLOYEES ONLY sign came loose at one corner and flopped down at an angle.

  “It’s folks from around here, jefe,” Cipriano said. “There’s too much local knowledge for it to be anything else.”

  “Yeah.” Loren found himself getting unhappier still.

  “Maybe it’s that Cisneros kid, after all. Maybe he was the driver.”

  “Could be.”

  “I’ll go down to Las Animas and cruise by his folks’ place on the way home. See if his van is there.”

  “Okay. Do that.”

  “I can talk to his parents tomorrow. But I don’t think they’ll give me nothing. They’re harder cases than he is.”

  All the bars were closed. If anyone was getting drunk and belligerent now, Loren figured he didn’t have to be awake for it. He thanked everybody for their cooperation, told Sanchez on the desk to send himself and everyone but the regular shift home, and drove home himself.

  The house smelled of popcorn. There was a half-eaten bowl sitting on the coffee table in front of the TV, and Loren ate a couple handfuls quietly, in the dark, before walking into the kitchen for a glass of water. The water cooler was empty and he had to use the stuff from the tap. Wincing at the mineral taste, he finished his water, then took off his shoes and gun belt and padded into the bedroom.

  Debra’s breathing pattern changed as he entered the room— without quite waking up, she was reassuring herself of his continued health and well-being— and then her breathing normalized. He undressed and slid into the bed beside her and thought about what had just happened out on the City Line.

  Some citizen or citizens of Atocha, it was fairly clear, had used his knowledge of the town to conspire to rob one of the town’s most venerable, if illegal, institutions. Growing resentment bubbled in Loren’s mind. The town— his town— and its way of life were threatened, not just from acts of God like the pit closing and the advent of ATL, but by treachery on the part of its own inhabitants. They were disloyal, Loren thought, betraying the town. Undermining its foundation. Threatening its way of life.

  He had to find the assholes, whoever they were. Make an example of them.

  He thought about the twenty-first century and what it was bringing. Chevy pickups full of designer drugs and automatic weapons. Imported gunmen holding up bars. People not standing up for their neighbors or institutions or what was right. Incomprehensible and threatening technologies like all the Star Wars weaponry erupting through the sky over the ATL compound.

  Once, he thought, the future had been a special place. Full of wonder gadgets and streamlined design, like the deco façades on the buildings downtown. The World of Tomorrow. The future had been a place, like Oz, where all sorts of delightful things seemed possible.

  Then somehow, he thought, the bad guys had occupied the future. They were sitting up there, like Apaches in a western film, occupying the high ground. And the good guys had no choice but to ride into the next century under their guns.

  “What’s wrong?” Debra was sitting up in bed, her eyes fixed on him. He looked at her in surprise.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You were grinding your teeth loud enough to wake the dead. What happened?”

  Loren had to think for a moment about what had started his train of thought. “Copper Country got held up. Including that poker game that Bill Forsythe runs in the back.”

  “And that means someone from around here did it.”

  “Yeah.” Loren wasn’t surprised at her acuity; Debra had always been quick to pick up on these things. She propped her head up on one hand and regarded him.

  “Any idea who?”

  “Not really, no. A couple Spanish kids did the holdup. They maybe had a third man as a driver.”

  “And nobody’s seen the two guys.”

  “Right. They probably got out of town before the descript
ion ever went out.”

  “Or they’re hiding out with their friend.”

  “Maybe.”

  There was silence for a moment, filled only by the ticking of the Little Ben alarm clock on the night table. Loren sighed. “Nothing I can do about it now.”

  “I can make you some hot milk.”

  “No. Thank you. I can get to sleep.”

  “Watch that grinding.”

  “Okay. I’ll try to remember.”

  She kissed his cheek and buried herself in the covers. Loren closed his eyes, tried to deepen his breathing. Bits of the day floated across his vision, superimposed in meaningless juxtaposition: Gileno looming over the crowd at Holliday’s, the deco griffins at the City-County Building staring with blind white eyes, Len Bonniwell’s sprawled body limned in the halogen light of the ATL jeep, Bill Forsythe rubbing the wrist that had worn his stolen turquoise bracelet . . .

  Out of this, somehow, he put it all together. He knew who had done the holdup, and when he realized that he knew, he wasn’t surprised.

  He looked at the fluorescent hands of the Little Ben. It was five-thirty.

  Time to get up, anyway.

  Loren had finished his shower and was starting his shave when Debra appeared puffy-eyed in the doorway. Energy hummed happily in his mind. He gave her a cheery smile. “Go to sleep for another hour,” he said. “I might as well get Jerry, since I’m up, anyway.”

  Debra blinked at him sleepily, then without a word turned and headed back to bed.

  Loren finished shaving, then dressed in a blue wool blazer, white shirt, red linen tie, and gray slacks. He unlocked the gun rack and took out the short-barreled .38 Chief’s Special, clipped the holster to his belt on the left side, under the jacket, then went out to the driveway and got in the police cruiser.

  He headed north along Estes, through the town center and across the maglev tracks, and down the steep hillside, lined with willows, that marked where the Rio Seco cut through town. Estes Street cut right through the bottom of the dry river, with a steel pole stuck in the riverbed nearby. The pole was painted with depth markers so people would know whether they could safely get across in case of flood. On the opposite bank was the ramshackle neighborhood called Picketwire, all cinder block and rusty tin roofs and old cars sitting on blocks in sandy front yards.

  True to every small-town stereotype, in Atocha there was a right side of the tracks on which to be born. Picketwire was on the wrong side.

  Loren turned right and drove past the residence of A.J. Dunlop’s father— no fewer than four cars sat on blocks in the front yard— then west along the barren ridge that overlooked the south side of the Rio Seco. He went down another slope, then up another rise, into another neighborhood. This one was called Las Animas on the town plots, but Taco Town by snotty Anglo kids like Loren’s daughter Kelly.

  Las Animas was still on the wrong side of the AT&SF tracks, and looked more or less like Picketwire, the same rusty tin roofs rising up the side of a treeless ridge, the same junked autos gathering graffiti as they sat in the sun. Maybe there was a higher percentage of adobe used in construction, but the main difference was not architectural, but racial.

  No one had ever drawn any lines, and there had never been any formal segregation, no racial laws, no Jim Crow. There had always been exceptions, intermarriages— many of the town’s founding aristocracy, in fact, had created Spanish/Anglo marriages, Anglo businessmen marrying Spanish women to have access to the Hispanic market, after which the children chose their ethnic identification for themselves. Informal segregation was simply a fact— Las Animas was for the poor Spanish, Picketwire for the poor Anglos, both being named after the same evocatively named Colorado river, El Rio de las Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio, the River of Lost Souls in Purgatory–– Picketwire being an Anglo corruption of Purgatoire, which was itself a French version of Purgatorio. Loren had never been clear concerning how neighborhoods in a southwestern New Mexico town had been named after a Colorado river, but then the other districts were oddly named, too. Loren’s neighborhood, Rose Hill— few roses, not much of a hill— was for the better class of Anglo; and it was mirrored by Port Royal— no port, no royalty— where Cipriano and the better-off Hispanics lived. The city’s tiny handful of black people clustered around the African Baptist Church in an informal no-man’s-land north of Picketwire. Nothing concerning this arrangement had ever been said; nothing ever needed saying.

  Power in the town had been divided up in the same quiet way. The police chief was always Anglo; the assistant Hispanic. The president of the city council was always Spanish, and the chairman of the county’s Democratic Party organization had been a member of the Figueracion family for over a hundred years. The mayor had always been Anglo, at least till Edward Trujillo created a minor political earthquake first by running, then by getting himself elected, not simply the first Hispanic mayor ever, but the first Republican since the 1890s.

  Unseen boundaries were coming down. It made Loren nervous.

  Loren drove into Las Animas, then slowly down the cracked surface of Cedar Street. He passed a little adobe chapel, its windows and doors painted blue to symbolize devotion to the Virgin. A miniature house of worship built on someone’s front lawn, marking the meeting place of a few families who had come from northern Mexico to work in the mines during the Depression. Ostensibly Catholics— Bob Sandoval would have called them heretics— they belonged to some small divergent sect that had gotten thrown out of Spain in the 1600s. Another of Atocha’s forty-one Welcoming Churches.

  Parked right where he thought it would be was a little dusty car with Texas plates. Loren took down the plate number, used the Computer-Aided Dispatch Keyboard to check the license number, then drove home. He walked through the living room to the kitchen phone and speed-dialed Cipriano.

  Debra was loading the coffeemaker with water from the water cooler that she’d loaded with a fresh bottle. She brushed straight blond hair out of her face and looked at Loren with narrowed eyes, squinting without her glasses.

  “Where’s Jerry?” she said.

  Loren gave a laugh. “I got distracted by police work. I’ll get him in a minute.”

  She nodded. “Got it figured out?” she said.

  “I think so.”

  The line went four rings before it answered with a single word.

  “Dominguez.” Cipriano’s voice was full of sleep.

  Loren grinned into the phone. “Y andale, bubba,” he said.

  There was a long moment of silence. “I hope this is good, jefe. It’s six in the fucking morning.”

  “I figured out who popped the Copper Country. But I’ve got to go to church at seven o’clock and I can’t keep on top of it.”

  “Let me get a pencil.” There was another moment of silence. “Okay, jefe. Shoot.” Each word sounded like a groan.

  “Remember your cousin Félix?”

  Another moment of silence. “My cousin by marriage. You’re saying he robbed the Copper Country?”

  “Naw. But remember when we had to bust his daughter’s wedding reception because some asshole called Rose’s mother a fat old bruja, then got punched in the nose by the old lady’s bad-ass nephew Anthony from Laredo?”

  “He’s from Harlingen. But okay.”

  “So who did we have to drag off to the jail because they kept trying to slug it out even though they were too drunk to stand up?”

  “Anthony. And his two boys. And Rose’s mother, because she tried to kick Eloy Esposito when he was hauling Anthony away.”

  “She really is an evil old bruja, you know? But who else?”

  “Ahhh.” Cipriano was beginning to sound as if he was awake. “Robbie Cisneros.”

  “Yeah. So if you go drive by Félix’s place you’ll see a car with Texas plates out front. Because my working hypothesis is that Robbie and Anthony’s two boys got to be good buddies in our drunk tank, and that yesterday the two boys from Harlingen drove up here to stick up the Copper Country with Robbi
e as their driver.”

  “God damn. I’m impressed, jefe.” Cipriano sounded as if he had finally come awake.

  “The car is there. I’ve run the number on the C. A. D. and it has a Harlingen address. I need somebody to watch the car, okay?”

  “I’ll check it out.”

  Loren put the phone back in its cradle. The smell of coffee began to rise in the room. Debra peered at him nearsightedly. “When did you work all that out?” she said.

  “When I was grinding my teeth.” He grinned and backed out of the room, heading for his brother’s place.

  Loren’s brother, Jerry, had been living for the last ten years or so in an automobile graveyard east of town, where the owner allowed him to live in an old trailer in exchange for looking after the place and doing some free-lance auto repair. A ruddy tinge crept across the horizon as Loren drove the Fury out of town on Route 82, the red horizon calibrated by a marching succession of silhouetted black power poles. The automated maglev train, off to Loren’s right, winked redly as it soared airborne over its pathway of rusting steel.

  A bulky adobe structure appeared on the left: the Earth Church, Atocha’s forty-second, a religion for those who found spirituality in environmental activism. The doctrine itself was, to Loren, an offensive, not-quite-settled mixture of revived paganism, political radicalism, and bits borrowed from Christianity and Daoism— the “Earth gospel was evolving,” to quote the official literature. Evolving, Loren figured, to the point where it could extract the maximum contributions from the gullible.

  Churches, Loren thought, were about eternal things, not about contemporary politics. Loren knew all he needed to know about politics, and he knew he wanted to keep them as far away from his own faith as possible.

  In the church parking lot Loren saw a pair of elderly Apaches, in traditional garb, climbing out of an old jeep. This morning’s guest shamans, Loren figured. White people who, strangely, had no use for Native Americans as people nevertheless seemed to need them as spiritual entities— yuppies who would look with a certain well-bred trepidation upon an Apache and his large family moving into the neighborhood would nevertheless happily participate in a ceremony in which the same Apache, in a shamanistic capacity, blessed them with pollen and urged them to respect Mother Earth. Indians, in this respect, were treated as both inferior and superior— superior in terms of spiritual resonance, inferior in every other way. You didn’t want them next door, you wanted them safely up on a mountain somewhere, talking to spirits on your behalf.