The Searcher (32 page)

M
ORGAN DROVE FAST.

He was in his cruiser, barreling down the mountain road toward the twinkling lights of Redemption. Holly and Solomon were in the back, their arms still cable-tied behind them, forcing them forward in their seats.

“So where is the money coming from?” Solomon asked, pushing himself back into his seat as they rounded another tight bend. “Not the mine, clearly.”

“What do you care?”

“Just trying to put the pieces together.”

“It's drugs,” Holly answered for him. “It's always drugs.”

Morgan shrugged. “Everyone gets so moral about drugs, but they happily smoke their cigarettes and drink their liquor. People want drugs too, so who are we to tell them they can't have them? It's prohibition all over again—and look how that turned out.”

“They're illegal,” Holly said, “and you're supposed to uphold the law.”

Morgan threw them around another bend and Holly banged her head on the window. “Sorry,” Morgan said. “Let me ask you some
thing. You ever fought in a war? 'Cause I have. They call this a war on drugs, but it ain't no war far as I can tell. Wars can be won, and this one can't, least not by some small-town cop like me with a badge and a pump action in his truck. I know what war looks like and it ain't this. This is capitalism, supply and demand. It's the biggest industry around here, that's for sure. Bigger than mining ever was, only they don't pay a single cent in taxes. You only have to drive across the border to see how that works out: roads full of holes, poverty, crumbling infrastructure. You got to invest in people if you want to build a community folks want to live in. You got to put something back. The cartels don't put anything back and they don't put a whole lot of store in people neither. People are disposable to them. So, yes, Mrs. Coronado, we took their money. When the mine stopped producing, we went into a new business and a lot of the money went straight into the public purse so we could fix the roads and pay people's salaries. The sheriffs hoped they could walk Jim through the reasons we had done what we did and make him see the sense in it. But he wouldn't come down off his moral high horse. He had all these ideas for getting the town back on its feet, weaning it off its dependence on the trusts. Even said he thought he knew how to find the lost Cassidy fortune—you believe that? Like some old legend could save this town.

“He started going through everything, looking for a legitimate way out of our problems. That's how he found out about the groundwater contamination. We'd buried it because we couldn't risk shutting the mine down, but he dug it up again. We needed people to think the mine was still producing to account for all the money coming in. When Jim found it, he went nuts. Said he was going to blow the lid on everything. So . . . we had to make a decision.”

“And that decision was that you needed to kill him to keep him quiet,” Solomon said, a statement not a question.

Morgan's eyes flicked up in the rearview mirror. “People die in wars,” he said. “One man's sacrifice for the greater good. Just the way it is.”

Solomon could feel Holly shaking beside him. If her hands hadn't been bound and there wasn't a Plexiglass divider between her and Morgan she would have killed him for sure; he could feel her desire to do it coming off her like heat.

“What about the cleanup?” Solomon said.

“There was no cleanup. The levels we found were low, so we made a decision. If we started cleaning up the groundwater, people would ask why and we couldn't risk losing the mine. We stopped using the chemicals though, cut the workforce right down, and started running water through the mine instead.”

“Do you know what TCE is?” Solomon asked.

“No, should I?”

“It was one of the chemicals that showed up on your report.” He glanced over at Holly. “It's been connected to birth defects and neonatal abnormalities. It's also known to cause miscarriage in the early stages of the second trimester.” Holly stared back at him, her face a mask of shock. “Now you know why your husband acted like he did,” Solomon said, quiet enough so that Morgan wouldn't hear. “His loyalty to the town evaporated the moment he realized it may have caused your son's death.”

Holly's eyes misted over and she looked away and out of the window.

They were arriving at the airfield, the hulking, jagged shapes of parked aircraft stretching away beyond the security fence. The main part of the airfield was to the left of the road, squadrons of military and civilian aircraft all lined up in neat rows.

To the right was the museum, stocked with a hand-picked assort
ment of vintage aircraft, restored and maintained on-site. The lights were off in the main building and the entrance gates were closed. They drove on and pulled over by an extra-wide double gate, big enough to bring even the largest aircraft into the museum from the airstrip on the other side of the road. Someone had left the gate open wide enough for a vehicle to pass through. They drove in and under the wings of a bomber, then headed toward a large hangar on the far side of the field.

“We flying somewhere?” Solomon asked.

“No,” Morgan replied. “I very much doubt it.”

“G
OT HIM
,”
S
UAREZ SAID.

He could see the passenger clearly now in his night sight. He recognized the face from the earlier briefing and also from the poster that had been pinned at the number one most wanted spot on the canteen wall for the last eight years.

“Who's the driver?” Andrews's voice murmured in his earpiece.

Suarez shifted the scope and phosphorescent green smeared his vision. “Don't know him. Not a known associate.” He shifted back, following the movement of the car, anticipating it so he could keep Tío's head in the crosshairs.

He was about five hundred yards away now, inside his trained range. A shot had a 70 percent chance of a kill, and that percentage was getting better with every yard. “What's the order?” he murmured.

“Hold on.”

Suarez continued to follow them, switching between Tío and the driver.

He had been trained to clear his mind at times like this, but for once his training was failing him. Instead his mind whirred with all
kinds of possibilities. He was thinking about what would happen if he did take the shot. He would be famous, the guy who took out public enemy number one, like Charles Winstead, the guy who had shot Dillinger. Except now he could write a book and get a movie deal out of it. All his training and he would be famous because of one shot. But none of that was going to happen because he wasn't going to take the shot. Not at Papa Tío at least.

He let the sights drift back to the driver, his finger tightening on the trigger. If he got the order to shoot, it was this guy who would be the target. He dialed back the magnification a little as the car drew nearer. He could see them both now. A bright green smear drew his attention.

“The passenger is reaching down for something,” he said.

More bright green phosphorescence smeared and flared in his vision as Tío's hand rose up again. “He's waving something,” Suarez said. “Something white, like a sheet of paper or a napkin.”

His finger relaxed and returned to the safe position alongside the trigger guard. “He's surrendering,” he said. Then he looked up from his scope and saw that he was right. Papa Tío was turning himself in.

. . . all things are cleansed with blood, without bloodshed there is no forgiveness.

—
H
EBREWS 9:22

From the private journal of the Reverend Jack “King” Cassidy

I have tried over the years to recall what the man looked like, if indeed it was a man, but in truth I do not think I ever saw his face. The light, which lit the land around him and shone into mine, seemed to come from inside him and shone so bright I could not look directly at him. I recalled another of the priest's highlighted passages that had made no sense to me until now:

. . . and his face did shine as the sun,

and his raiment was white as the light.

I threw myself forward in fear and awe and began to pray, begging forgiveness for all my sins, for I believed my judgment had come and this angel had been sent to deliver it. And when none came I held up my hands and asked the shining man what he commanded of me and his voice came back like a whisper inside my head.

“What do you most desire?” he said.

I replied with the answer I had given to all who had questioned me on my long journey south. “I wish to build a church of stone,” I said, “where God's words of peace and love might be spoken aloud until they have driven all savagery from these lands.”

The angel spoke again, its words so intimate and soft in my head:

“But what do
you
most desire?”

And I knew then that he had seen through my half-made answer. I do not think I had admitted the truth even to myself before that moment, but his light shone so bright it lit up the darkest corners of my soul and I realized I could not hide anything from this angel and that, though it had asked me a question, it knew my answer already.

“I want to be somebody,” I replied. And when he said nothing further I spoke on, my words drawn out like yarn by his silence. “I want to be a man of substance. I want people to remember me when I'm dead and say, ‘That was a man who did great things, that was a man who found a fortune and used it to build something in the desert, something that will live forever.' I do not want to die as a nobody. I do not wish to be forgotten.”

And there it was. The truth. My truth.

The angel's silence continued but I said no more, for I had nothing more to say. I had confessed fully and I knew even his bright searching light could illuminate nothing more in me.

At long last he spoke and his words were soft and kindly. “You are an honest man,” he said, “and honesty like yours is rare and holds great value to me. So in exchange for that, and if you are willing, I shall give you what you desire.”

I wept into the dirt, hardly daring to believe I had reached this dreamed-of moment when only a few hours earlier I had abandoned the Bible along with my resolve to continue my pilgrimage. Only the light had changed my mind and drawn me on. And now here I was, making bargains with angels, or with Christ the Savior, or maybe even with the Lord God Almighty himself.

“I am yours to command, Lord,” I said to the shining man, for whatever he was—man, vision, angel—I knew he was lord over me. “Whatever you would have me do, I will do it, and gladly.”

There was a mighty crash like a mountain splitting in two and a flash so bright I saw it clear as day though my eyes were tight shut and my face pressed hard to the dirt. The ground shook violently beneath me, like a dynamite blast through bedrock, then all went dark and silent.

I don't know if I was knocked senseless for a spell but I lay there for a long time and when I eventually looked up I saw nothing but darkness. The mirror was gone. My ears sang from the loud noise I had heard and it made me feel disconnected, as if I was floating in the vast night sky. Then the singing in my ears faded and a new sound crept in, the sound of running water.

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.