Days of Atonement Read online

  Bonniwell, a bright metal splint taped to his broken nose, sat next to his father and about as far away from A.J. Dunlop as the room permitted. Loren felt Dunlop’s sullen eyes on him and grinned. He wouldn’t be getting any more lip from A.J. as long as the boy’s jaw was wired shut.

  The town’s assistant district attorney, Sheila Lowrey, was in the midst of a long speech asking for the judge to throw the book at a defiant drunk named Anderson who’d been picked up on DWI for the fourth time this year. Lowrey was a short, fierce-eyed young woman who wore a gray suit with padded shoulders. She had large tortoiseshell spectacles that she rarely wore but used as a prop, waving them by an earpiece like an orchestra leader slicing air with his baton. Small-town D.A. staffs were becoming dominated by recent female law-school graduates, who could get ahead a lot faster in small towns desperate for legal talent than in the established male power structure of the big cities. So far as Loren could tell, Lowrey was a pretty good A.D.A., but she hadn’t been in town long enough to understand the foundation of kinship, religious, and political networks that lay beneath Atocha society, or to realize that Judge Denver wasn’t going to allow one of his cousins, who also happened to be a loyal precinct worker, to have a DWI conviction on his record.

  This was going to take a while. Loren parked himself on a bench. Shorty joined him.

  Something huge moved in Loren’s peripheral vision. Loren looked over his shoulder to see George Gileno pushing his wheelchair toward him. Gileno parked himself next to Shorty and leaned over Shorty’s lap to whisper to Loren.

  “Hey. Chief.” Gileno spoke through split lips in a voice that was surprisingly light and gentle. His face was a mass of contusions and bits of white tape. Both eyes were black and two of his fingers were taped together. Loren leaned toward him.

  “How’s the back?”

  “Sprained. I could walk but I’m gonna try to get sympathy.”

  “Good luck.” Gileno had been in front of Denver every time he’d busted up Doc Holliday’s, and Denver didn’t like Indians to begin with.

  “What is it,” Loren asked, “that you’ve got against Holliday’s, anyway?”

  “I don’t know, man.”

  “Why not someplace else?”

  Gileno looked stubborn. “Holliday’s is as good a place as any.”

  Loren shook his head. “Do me a favor, George. Wait till I retire before you get drunk in this town again.”

  “I wasn’t drunk. I was trying to get drunk and they wouldn’t serve me.”

  “Stay out of Holliday’s, George.”

  “I lost my job along with everyone else. I don’t think I’m gonna be visiting town very often anymore.” He looked hopeful for a minute. “Can you do me a favor, Chief?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’d like to do my time in the jail here. Not back on the reservation.”

  Loren scratched his neck. “I don’t know if I can help you, George. The municipality has an agreement with the reservation authorities. Apaches do time on the rez, white folks in Atocha.”

  “You know what the reservation cops are like. Man, I’d rather do a hitch in the Marines.”

  “I can’t help you. Not when the jail’s budget is bound to get chopped again.”

  Gileno gazed unhappily into a future filled with bullet-headed Apache cops and jailers.

  “Sorry,” Loren said.

  “Hey,” Shorty said. His little mustache twitched in a slow, wicked grin. “Listen up. Here come the punch line.”

  Sheila Lowrey had been winding up her speech while Gileno was trying to slide out of reservation stir. Judge Denver, looking stern, summoned the defendant Anderson to stand before him.

  “I don’t believe in those breath tests, anyway,” Denver said. He banged his gavel. “Case dismissed.”

  Anderson turned to shake hands with his public defender, another cousin. Sheila’s eyes bugged from her head, and Loren clamped down hard on his mirth. An angry flush began to creep upward from Sheila’s collar. Loren had a feeling she might say something rash. He stood up.

  “My apologies for interrupting, Your Honor,” he said. “I was wondering if the sheriff and I might beg some of your time in the matter of a warrant.”

  “Say what you’ve got to say,” said the judge.

  “Could we do this in chambers, Your Honor? This is a matter involving some confidentiality.”

  “Ten-minute recess,” said Denver.

  He banged his gavel and headed toward his chambers. Loren dropped a sympathetic hand on Lowrey’s padded shoulder as he followed.

  “Facts of life, Sheila. Sorry.”

  Lowrey looked ready to hit somebody. “I’ll get the son of a bitch someday,” she said. Loren wasn’t sure whether she meant the DWI or Denver.

  “I wouldn’t go home this afternoon,” Loren said. “I’m gonna have some work for you.”

  “God dammit. I was gonna change my oil filter this afternoon.”

  “You’re a lawyer, Sheila. You can afford to have a filling station do that.”

  “Bullshit. You know what I get paid. And you know what?” She waved her spectacles like a sword. “It isn’t enough to put up with this crap!”

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  Loren walked away feeling a sincere sympathy for whoever was up next. Denver was going to have to reestablish his law-and-order credentials by being hard on somebody, and Lowrey was ready to exsanguinate the next defendant with her very own teeth.

  It took only a few minutes to secure the warrant, about as fast as it took for Denver to get a typist to process it. YOU ARE HEREBY COMMANDED, it said in big, reassuring letters, to search forthwith (check one) XX the place described in the Affidavit.

  Loren liked the word “commanded.”

  Denver didn’t question the anonymous call, nor did he balk when Loren used the “armed and dangerous” part of the tip to ask for a no-knock provision. Loren tucked the warrant into his breast pocket, shook the judge’s hand, and used the judge’s private exit from his chambers, happy in the knowledge that he could break down any doors he needed to.

  Cipriano, anticipating the warrant, had in the meantime got a knock-knock from police stores. The knock-knock was a six-inch-diameter piece of lead pipe three feet long, filled with concrete and equipped with handles. It was used for breaking down doors. Someone had put little happy-face stickers on both ends.

  Loren drove out to El Pinto with Cipriano, and two more officers followed in another cruiser. Shorty and a sheriff’s deputy followed in one of the four-wheel-drive Broncos the sheriff’s department used to negotiate the county’s horrid back roads.

  The drive to El Pinto took them west on 81, then north on State 103, past the little bedroom community of Vista Linda that had been built chiefly to house ATL employees. Tract homes sat atop barren brown earth, surrounded by breast-high concrete-block fences and empty acres of yucca, prickly pear, and ocotillo. Solar collectors stood in black, quiet rows on the roofs. On the town’s north side was a shopping mall, its parking lot crowded with cars, another blow to downtown Atocha business.

  “Those people,” said Loren, “sure like their privacy. Build on those big lots, then wall themselves off.”

  Even though laid-off miners selling out had dropped real estate values into the basement, few newcomers ever chose to live in the old town. Loren had been told that they felt that Atocha houses were too little and were set on lots that were too small. If you lived in one, you might actually be forced by proximity to pay attention to your family and neighbors, an idea that the ATL people seemed to find uncomfortable.

  Cipriano lit a cigarette with the car’s lighter as he drove. “They’re from the big city,” he said. “They don’t know how to be neighborly. In a city your neighbor’ll kill you soon as look at you. They spend their days trying to avoid talking to their neighbors.”

  “Those little cinder-block fences are gonna keep them safe, huh?”

  “They got zoning laws to keep out the riffraff
, ése.”

  “Riffraff,” Lored mused. “That would be the community they’re living in.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Those guys.” Loren found himself getting angry. “They wouldn’t know a community if it bit them. They don’t have a clue. They’re all goddamn commuters.” Even Pastor Rickey was like that, he thought, with all his talk about not caring for your community anymore.

  “You said it, Chief.”

  “Just shuttling in and out.” Loren found himself enjoying the commuter analogy. He wanted to expand on it for a while. “Getting their tickets punched,” he said. “Riding on their goddamn friction-free railway.”

  “With briefcases of money.”

  “Yeah.” Loren’s buoyant mood began to slide. “With lots of money that they all keep to themselves.” That was the foreign competition, he thought, that had taught them that. ATL was owned by a consortium of high-tech concerns, diffusing both the risk and the new technology. All of them were presumably making tens of millions on the new superconductors. Their new-style company town featured housing subsidized Japanese-style through a corporate-owned credit union. The money was kept in the family, spent in the shopping mall, where all you got with your purchase was a financial transaction and a phony smile rather than an interaction with a real neighbor. An attempt, Loren thought, to create a common corporate culture rather than a community based on shared values.

  All these decades trying to stay out of the grip of the Anaconda, Loren thought, and we get paid with this.

  “We sort of started the feud, Chief, if you think about it,” Cipriano said. “We voted not to let their development incorporate with the town.”

  “Why should our mill rates go up so they can put in their sewers and water? We already had sewers and water. If they wanted to live in their own little town instead of moving in with us, why should we pay for it?”

  “Maybe ATL thought that was unfriendly of us.”

  “Maybe ATL wanted to fuck us over. They’re trying to cut smart deals with us, just like our ancestors did to the Indians. And before we know it, we’re stuck out on the rez like poor George Gileno.”

  Cipriano pitched his cigarette out the window. Being compared to Gileno had not pleased him.

  “You’re going to start a fire doing that,” Loren said.

  “We’re being followed,” said Cipriano. “One of those jeeps.”

  “God damn it. We’re in marked cars, fer chrissakes.”

  “Maybe you should call up Bill Patience and have him tell his people to stop following us around.”

  “Maybe I should call up Patience and tell him to ram one of his fancy Italian pistols up his fucking ass.”

  They crossed a bridge over the wandering Rio Seco. A shining concrete overpass rose ahead of them, marking where the maglev train crossed the road. Vista Linda faded away behind Loren’s right shoulder. On the left was the entrance to the Advanced Technology Laboratories, well marked, with a stoplight. The stoplight was green. Past the entrance, Highway 103 deteriorated into a patched, potholed, shoulderless two-lane blacktop. Off to the left, ATL was visible only as a long shining ribbon of twelve-foot-high chain link fence beyond which were the long mounds that covered the accelerators and a few barely visible low, earth-colored buildings.

  Sometimes at night, when they were running their experiments, you could see them firing up into the sky, bright thundering lightnings reaching for the vacuum.

  Shooting at Heaven, Loren thought. You had to live in hope that Heaven didn’t start shooting back.

  One of Shorty’s reelection posters sailed past, its one-word message riddled by someone’s .22. Tall mountains, huge slabs of eroded igneous rock, loomed closer, high clouds casting shadows on the bright green like oil spots on a lawn. Loren could count three columns of smoke rising from the mountains, forest fires started by lightning or careless campers. Fire-fighting helicopters reflected bright sunlight as they hovered over the source of the smoke. In another few weeks, Loren thought, he and Jerry would climb one of those steep ridges and shoot a deer or two.

  If the fires spared any of the timber and wildlife.

  A suppressed excitement began to hum in his mind at the thought of what was waiting for him. He tried to picture Robbie Cisneros staring down the twelve gauges of his shotgun. The thought was entirely satisfying.

  El Pinto was an old silver boom town settled in the 1890s, buried in a lightless narrow canyon, surrounded by towering igneous formations. There was nothing left of the original settlement, which had burned down eighty years ago, assuring that the town couldn’t survive as a quaint tourist village. Even the new town had seen better days. There were probably more personal computers and satellite receivers in a ten-mile radius than there were flush toilets. The current village consisted of the ruins of an old red brick filling station burned down twenty years before in yet another fire, a new cinder-block filling station across the road from the old one, a combination general store and post office, a tavern, a Tastee-Freez, and, a little north in a side canyon, Joaquín Fernandez’s bait shop and cabins.

  Fernandez was half Apache and maybe eighty years old. For years he’d been a guide, showing strangers how to track mountain lion, elk, and bear, renting cabins to his customers, and earning a small amount by placer mining on his little creek. He’d given up guiding, but fisherman who didn’t want to go home empty-handed could catch meal-fed trout on his little stocked pond for a dollar per catch.

  The roadside sign— EL PINTO CABINS VACANCY— hadn’t been repainted in years. Fernandez’s shambling house and bait shop was near the road. The cabins were a quarter mile down the canyon, screened from the highway by a clump of willows.

  Cipriano pulled the cruiser up on the overgrown lawn in front of the bait shop, keeping between it and the cabins. A dead century plant and a big white old-fashioned receiver dish cast a shadow on the car’s hood. The other lawmen joined Cipriano on the lawn. Loren got out of the car and stepped onto the worn wooden porch, pulled aside the battered screen door that said WE HAVE WATER DOGS, and stepped inside. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the ATL jeep drive past on the patched old two-lane.

  The sound from the ice machine almost drowned out the report of a football game coming from one of the back rooms. Old bags of potato chips stood on shelves next to racks of dusty canned food. “Hey, Joaquín.“ Loren pushed into the back room.

  Galvanized tanks full of live bait bubbled on all sides. Big black salamanders with huge branching gills on either side of their goggle eyes— “water dogs“— seethed in the frothing water. The Longhorns were down 14-3 on the live satellite feed from Austin.

  Fernandez was tilted back in an overstuffed chair, eyes closed, mouth open. His pants were unbuttoned. A cold shudder went through Loren at the thought the old man was dead. But then Fernandez opened his black eyes and gave Loren a sharp, birdlike look.

  “Pretty damn nice clothes if you’re going fishing,” he said.

  “You got some people staying in your cabins?” Loren asked. “Three young guys? Robbie Cisneros and his two cousins from Texas?”

  “First customers I’ve had in four weeks.” Fernandez stood up and buttoned up his pants. “I got some coming in later today, and that makes a good season anymore.”

  “Go ahead and sit down,” Loren said. “Robbie and his punk cousins held up a bar in Atocha last night, and I’ve got a warrant to go in and get them.” He took the warrant out of his pocket. “You want to read it?”

  Fernandez patted the pockets of his flannel shirt. “Ain’t got my reading glasses, Loren. I’ll take your word on it.”

  “What cabin are they in?”

  “Number nine. The one that’s painted kinda pink. You want the key?”

  “I guess. What kind of door is it?”

  “It’s just a door. You ain’t gonna bust it down, are you?”

  “Might have to. They’ve got a sawed-off.”

  “Jesus howdy.” Fernandez seemed impressed. “Hell, Loren,�
� he said. “Bust the son of a bitch down. I’ll get it fixed.”

  “Thanks.”

  Fernandez shambled into the back and came out with a key hanging on an old twisted piece of wire, the kind that came on loaves of bread. There was a piece of tape on the key that had once had the cabin number on it but had since faded completely.

  “I’ll get my thirty-ought-six and go with you,” Fernandez said.

  Loren put a hand on the old man’s arm. “No way, Joaquín. You stay here till it’s over.”

  “I’m a good shot,” Fernandez complained. “With my scope I can shoot a sparrow in the eye no sweat.”

  “Sit down, Joaquín.” Loren guided him back to his chair. “Listen to the game. This won’t take but a minute.”

  Anticipation chanted a vengeful chorus in Loren’s mind. He took off his blazer as he left the store, folded it carefully, and put it on the front seat of the car. Cipriano stood wordlessly on the other side of the car, chewing on a long brown stem of grass. Loren opened the back door and took out his flak jacket, then buckled it on. Fire-fighting helicopters throbbed in the distance.

  “What’s the plan, Chief?” Cipriano asked.

  “We go in and knock the door down before they figure out we’re here.”

  “I take it you’re going in first?”

  Loren buckled on the helmet and lowered the faceplate. He felt as if his blood were singing a Wagner aria. “Fuckin’ A,” he said.

  “Hey,” Shorty called from his Bronco. “What’s happening?”

  “Follow us,” Loren said.

  “That’s your plan?”

  Loren skinned his lips back from his teeth. “That’s the plan.”

  “You might consult, you know. That’s what I’m here for.”

  “Shit, Shorty. We’re wasting time. Anything else, we’ll have to call in a negotiating team from Albu-fucking-querque or something.”

  Shorty waved his hand. “Yeah, okay. It’s your funeral, cousin.”

  Cipriano got his vest out of the car trunk and buckled it on. Loren jacked a shell into the chamber of his shotgun and got in the car. Cipriano slid behind the wheel and gunned the Fury’s engine.