CHAPTER FOUR

 

The Church of the Apostles of Elohim and the Nazarene was Atocha’s largest church. The Apostles, unlike the Saints and the Holy Romans, had been imported specially in the 1880s, when Riga Brothers began their copper operation. The gold and silver miners already living here were too unreliable— they’d work long enough to get a grubstake, then go off prospecting. Riga Brothers, whose board chairman was an Apostle, proposed importing entire families of coreligionists from upstate New York and northern Pennsylvania— stable family people, the kind you could count on to form a community. Maybe five hundred families had answered the call, singing hymns as they rode to Atocha on the train.

But like all populist religions, the Apostles were prone to schism.

In the plaza across the street from the deco church was a small group of people clustered around a gray-haired man standing on a wooden box. The box was sky-blue, and on each side was painted a carefully detailed pyramid above which hovered a gold-glowing eye.

“I have the answer!” the man shouted. “I have seen!”

“Oh, hell,” Loren said as he got out of his car.

The man on the box was named Alfred Roberts, and he was a former mayor of the town and a former member of the Apostle congregation. When his brother was convicted of stealing highway funds, and after his own trial ended in a hung jury, he lost his job to Trujillo; and since then he’d been disbarred, split from the Apostles, and set himself up as a prophet, living off welfare and the earnings of his tiny band of converts.

“As the Lord spake to Samuel Catton,” he shouted, “and so he has spaken unto me!”

Spaken? Loren wondered. He and his family moved rapidly up the sidewalk, their eyes turned away. The whole scene was too embarrassing.

“Listen!” said Roberts’s wife, Amy, “and ye shall be saved!”

Loren remembered dating Amy for over a year, just after he came back from Korea. She’d left him for Roberts, he’d figured, because a successful contractor had a lot better prospects than a rookie cop.

Look at her now, he thought.

The people around him were his family and disciples, and were draped in blankets against the October morning chill, an Old Testament touch that, against the plaza’s deco background, made them seem more demented even than their ravings. Amy Roberts carried a sign that said HEAR THE TRUTH. Others carried books and pamphlets. A vacant-eyed teenage girl, visibly pregnant, with bad skin and her hair frizzed up above her ears, carried another sign that said THE CHURCH REFORMED. No one knew precisely who she was or where she had come from; she was only seen rarely, cashing her government assistance checks. Rumor had it she was Roberts’s “bound concubine.”

All false prophets, Loren figured, tended toward harems. One of the signs by which you knew them.

“The church is corrupt!” Roberts screamed. His fist thudded repeatedly against his chest. “Its doctrine is perverted! Mine is the true road to heaven!”

Another kind of asshole, Loren thought, another kind of advertisement.

“Get a job!” yelled one cheerful churchgoer.

“I am the one and true prophet!”

“Get thee behind me, welfare!”

“Follow me to salvation!”

“Give the taxpayers a break!”

Loren reached the top of the church steps, then hesitated. Official duty seemed to be interrupting him a lot this morning.

“Go on in,” he said to Debra, and turned around. He crossed West Plaza and walked up to his former boss. His skin crawled as he neared the man— he remembered Roberts as a pleasant, hand-shaking, inoffensive member of the establishment, and the transformation to Old Testament lunatic gave Loren a case of the certified creeps.

Roberts’s eyes twinkled as he beamed down from his perch. His cheeks and nose were rosy from drink or the cold. His flock watched Loren with silent, suspicious eyes. “Loren!” Roberts said. “Long time, no see! Hast thou seen the light, my son?” Loren could smell whiskey on his breath.

“If you don’t shut up, Al,” Loren said, “I’m going to bust you.”

Roberts raised a hand, but his voice was still cheerful. “Thou canst not halt this new preaching. Thou couldst as well stand against the wind, or the tide.”

“Let’s see your permit, then.”

Roberts frowned down at him. “Thou art wearing the seven-pointed Star of Babylon on thy breast. Does this mean that thou hast given thy heart to the Evil One?”

Loren sighed. Some fundamentalist looney had started the Star of Babylon business a few years ago, and he hadn’t heard the end of it since.

“What it means,” he said, “is that the sheriff’s department has six-pointed stars, and we wanted to look different. Now, how about the permit?”

“The Lord’s servant,” loftily, “does not need—”

“You can stand here all you like,” Loren said, “and you can offer your literature, but if you start shouting and creating a disturbance, I’m going to pop you.”

Roberts thought for a long moment, then resolution entered his face. He drew his blanket tighter about him and straightened, staring at the church.

“I shall stand mute,” he said.

“Fine. That’s all I ask.”

As Loren turned to go back to the church, he heard Roberts’s soft voice.

“Miracles happen every day.” A miracle, Loren figured, the guy could stand up.

*

“Before I begin today’s message,” said Pastor Rickey, “I would like to remind everyone that the Calamity Fund is running low on supplies of food and clothing. Let the lucky among us share our bounty with our neighbors.”

Rickey looked up. “Today is the day in which we begin a week of contemplation and meditation upon our sins,” he said. His Susquehanna accent made the word “our” sound like “ower.”

Loren sat in his pew and scowled at the hymnal sitting in the rack in front of him. He had heard this opening sermon, or something very like it, once a year for every year of his life, and his mind was occupied with other matters.

Cipriano had called in the middle of breakfast to tell him that while staking out the Texas car, a battered old Chevy sub-compact, that was sitting in front of his cousin Félix’s house, he’d seen Félix himself walking out of the house, wearing his bathrobe and picking up his El Paso newspaper. Cipriano stopped to ask, like any friendly relation, if Félix had had any company. Félix’s relations from Harlingen had indeed stayed for two nights, but just that morning Robbie Cisneros had picked them up to go hunting, something Félix thought was just fine because, to tell the truth, he never much cared for Anthony and his horrible family, anyway.

Cipriano had then cruised by the Cisneros place, but Robbie’s van was indeed gone. Loren told him to get out a LAWSAT alert to the New Mexico and Arizona state police, and also to start calling motels throughout the area, just in case Robbie & Co. checked in somewhere for a riotous weekend of spending their money away from inquisitive relatives. Since the Texans had left their car behind, Loren didn’t think they’d gone far.

Loren figured they’d used the out-of-state car for the robbery itself, then planned to drive the strangers around in a vehicle driven by a local man.

Strange to think of a little-bitty Chevy used as a getaway car, though.

Loren doubted there was evidence enough for a warrant. Everything was purely circumstantial. If some state cop stopped them and bungled the search, the whole case could be lost.

Dammit, anyway! he thought. Some local had betrayed the town, and done so right in the middle of the worst crisis Atocha had faced since the Apaches destroyed the original settlement.

“You’re grinding your teeth again,” whispered Debra. Loren’s mind snapped back to the present.

“Sorry,” he said.

“We have before us a week devoted to the Seven Deadly Sins, which are above all other sins,” said Pastor Rickey. “Why are these particular sins thought of as deadly? Why is gluttony a Deadly Sin and not, for example, simony?”

“What’s simony?” whispered Katrina, more or less simultaneously with at least fifty other hushed voices. Katrina was Loren’s older daughter, seventeen and blond, something of a tomboy. Beneath a pale pink headscarf, she looked uncharacteristically demure.

“Hush,” said Loren. Not that he knew the answer, anyway.

“The selling of church offices,” said Jerry. Loren looked at him. Jerry blinked back in total innocence. “I don’t make this up,” he said.

“The Deadly Sins,” Pastor Rickey went on, “are so called because indulgence in these sins leads without fail to further sin as a consequence. Gluttony, aside from overeating, also includes drunkenness and the use of drugs, and alcohol and drugs can lead to violence, to adultery, to anger, to theft.

“And of the Deadly Sins, pride is considered primary, because pride was the sin of Lucifer and led to war in Heaven. So on the first day of the Days of Atonement, we consider pride.”

Pastor Rickey was young, just over thirty, but he looked older. Balding and prematurely gray, with a lined, weathered horse face, Rickey had spent years in the Peace Corps and working in soup kitchens for the needy before going to Catton College in Pennsylvania and the ministry. He brought a kind of restraint and intellectuality to his sermons that Loren wasn’t certain he quite liked. The previous pastor, an old Pennsylvania Dutchman named Baumgarten, would have jumped up and down, waved his arms, poured sweat by the bucketful, and got to the subject of Hell long before this.

Not that Loren particularly enjoyed the contemplation of Hell. But since the Reverend Samuel Catton had been taken on a tour of Hell and various other parts of the cosmos by the Master in Gray who had dictated the Authorized Revelations, the existence of the Land of Fire was a necessary part of the faith, and Loren sometimes wondered why Rickey never seemed to mention it.

“The pride of Lucifer is one thing,” the pastor said. “We can all see it for what it is, and we can condemn it. But even if we had the inclination, none of us can raise an army against Heaven. The sin of pride nevertheless exists in our community, and it is this kind of pure domestic pride I propose to examine this morning.”

Loren gnawed his lower lip and wondered how Cipriano was faring.

“Pride is a particularly difficult sin to understand, because it is a perversion of something good,“ the pastor said, enriching the word perversion with his grand and rolling r’s. “Pride is a grace as well as a sin. “Grace was heavy on the r, too; the pastor was willing to invest glory as well as sin by his dialect. “Your soul naturally desires pride—pride in yourself, in your family, your community and country. But the sin of pride is pride carried beyond its natural limits. The sin of pride is pride carried to the point where it turns away from God!”

Loren glanced up. A rare light was burning in Rickey’s eyes. Maybe the man had finally taken fire.

“When you take proper pride in yourself, your community, and so on, that is because you recognize God in all these things.” Rickey waved an arm. “You are taking pride in the majesty of God’s creation! It is the reflection of God in which you take pride. Pride becomes an act of worship.

“But when your pride becomes a sin, it is because you have ceased to recognize God in these things, in yourself and your country and so on, and have begun to see in them a reflection of yourself. Pride has ceased to be worship, and begun to be an exercise in ego.”

This last thought rolled through Loren, leaving a surprised feeling behind. He had never thought about it this way. Pastor Baumgarten had never analyzed sins in this fashion, just relied mainly on Samuel Catton’s description of the personified Deadly Sins in the Supplementary Revelations, Pride with the diamond-encrusted gold and ivory neck brace that kept his chin aloft, Wrath with his hair aflame and his double-bitted axe that cut through friend and enemy alike, and so on.

Maybe there was a point to this fellow, after all.

“And when you see things only as bits of yourself, then you lose the sense of how they exist as their own unique and individual reflection of God. You start thinking of them as things you can toy with, to manipulate as you wish. You start thinking of your neighbors as people that you can save or condemn all on your own, instead of leaving that job up to God. You start thinking of your community as something you can arrange to your liking, and your country as something that exists to do your bidding throughout the world.

“And that is where the sin of pride enters daily life. You think of things as objects to be rearranged— not for their own good, although that’s what you tell people, but in order to satisfy your own pride. You put yourself in debt in order to have a bigger car than your neighbor. That car has become an ornament to your pride. You break up with your girlfriend not because she isn’t a fine person, but because she isn’t pretty enough, or fashionable enough— she isn’t a good enough ornament for you. You break your daughter’s engagement, say, because her boyfriend doesn’t come with enough dollars, or in some other way isn’t good enough— not for her, but for you, because he wouldn’t be a fine enough ornament to have around you. Your community becomes something you rearrange to suit yourself, so you join civic improvement organizations or run for office or join committees, and all because the way your neighbors are running their lives isn’t good enough for you, you have to interfere and improve them.”

Loren found himself becoming indignant. He turned to Debra and whispered. “Is he saying I’m not supposed to care about my neighbors and family?”

“Hush.”

“We’re supposed to care about our neighbors. That’s what being an Apostle is all about. It’s my job to care about my neighbors. They pay me for it.”

Debra’s look was fierce. “You’re supposed to be humble when you do it, that’s what he’s saying.”

“Try knocking down George Gileno with humility sometime.”

“Everyone’s looking at us.”

“I don’t think this college boy knows anything about the real world.”

“The answer is God!” the college boy was saying. “We must trust in the wisdom and mercy of the Lord! We are fallen, and we must beg the Lord for understanding and for the knowledge of our own actions!”

“What a wimp,” said Loren.

Debra pinched him hard on the hand.

Loren thought about the robbery for the rest of the service.

When Loren came out of the church with his family, he saw that the Roberts family had left and taken their box with them. In their place was a huddle of young Apaches surrounding an older man in a flannel shirt, who was pointing from place to place on the plaza with a stick.

Loren saw that every so often. He’d have to ask someday what it meant.

Cipriano was standing by his patrol car parked in the church loading zone. Loren saw the deputy chief and at once his mind seemed to leap into high gear. He almost ran down the steps to Cipriano’s car, feeling an eagerness he could almost taste.

“What’s up?”

Cipriano smiled with his big yellow teeth. “I found them, jefe. They’re in El Pinto.”

“El Pinto?” Loren gave it some thought and came up with little that made any sense. “Why El Pinto?” he asked. “It’s just a goddamn crossroads ghost town. That’s not where I’d go to spend my ill-gotten gains, that’s for sure.”

“They’re in one of those cabins that Joaquín Fernandez owns up there. By that little trout pond.”

“Huh. Thought he’d closed those cabins years ago.”

“Guess he’ll still rent if he gets a customer.”

Loren looked at his family, who were clustered on the sidewalk just out of earshot, waiting for him to finish his business. “Have you talked to the sheriff?” he asked. “We’ll need a liaison.”

“He’s going himself.”

Loren was startled. “Shorty?”

“Election coming up, jefe. And the robbery was on his turf— technically, anyway.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

“There’s still the problem of a warrant. We got no cause.”

“Let me talk to Debra for a minute.”

He stepped back to where his family was waiting for him. He could detect the well-concealed tension in Debra’s posture, see the way the girls kept exchanging glances. It was one of those moments, known to every cop, when duty called and the family became aware, at least on some level, of the possibility of violence, of injury. He’d never known a policeman’s family not to betray the strain in these little ways, even in a small town like Atocha.

“Looks like we found the guys we were looking for,” he said.

“Good,” said Debra.

“Why don’t you take the car back home? Don’t hold lunch for me.”

Debra looked up at him. Loren could see his reflection in her wraparounds. “Take your vest,” she said.

Loren blinked. “Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”

“I love you.”

A sudden wave of pride almost took his breath away. Presumably it was the nonsinful kind, but if it was he didn’t much care. Debra was perfect. He’d never been more certain of his marriage, his place in the town.

“I love you all,” he said. “But don’t worry. They’re just some lightweight scumbags.”

Scumbags with a sawed-off. No one said the words, but the presence, the weight of the unseen weapon, seemed oppressive on Loren’s heart.

Loren went to the trunk and opened it. The Department of Homeland Security had supplied personal armor for rural police departments, just in case terrorists decided to shoot up the mountains and the woods. Loren took out the black kevlar flak jacket with the laminated steel and ceramic inserts, the spare shotgun, and the blue helmet he was supposed to wear when directing traffic. Churchgoers looked at him curiously as he carried the gear to Cipriano’s cruiser and threw it all in the back. He got in the car.

“Let’s go to the Sunshine,” Loren said. “Deal with that warrant problem.”

Cipriano drove around three sides of the plaza and parked in front of the café. Loren got out and walked through the avocado-green door into the Sunshine. He gave a half-wave to Coover behind the counter and went to the pay phone by the men’s room door. A couple decades’ phone numbers were jotted on the yellow flowered wallpaper. Two Korean businessmen, not the ones he’d seen the day before, sat drinking coffee. A plastic jar of elk blood was on the table between them. Mark Byrne, dressed exactly as he had been yesterday, grinned at him over his cup of coffee. He hadn’t bothered to shave or comb his hair this morning.

“Hey,” Coover said. “You can use the phone in my office.”

“No problem,” Loren said. He put a coin in the telephone and dialed the police number.

“Atocha Police Department.” Loren recognized Eloy Esposito’s voice.

“How’s the neck, Eloy?”

“They got me in some goddamn brace, Chief. Gotta wear it for a month at least. Even in bed.”

“Stay on the desk, then.”

“Buncha bullshit.”

“How’s Buchinsky doing?”

“Mild concussion. Doctor said he can’t work till Monday. Karen’s giving him a raft of shit about it. She keeps telling him about how she could get him a job driving truck in Albuquerque.”

“Think she’ll ever get him to do it?”

“She keeps at him long enough.”

That was too bad, Loren thought. Buchinsky was a good officer. It was just a pity that all police wives couldn’t be like Debra.

Eloy’s voice was cheerful. “So what do you need, Chief?”

“You got me mixed up with someone else,” Loren said. “This is an anonymous call.”

“Huh?”

“I’m not the police chief. I’m an informant calling with a tip.”

“You’re not the chief? This is a tip?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Will you listen for a minute, Eloy?”

“If this is a tip, I’m supposed to get your name.”

“Jesus Christ, Eloy!” Loren said. “How small-town can you get? It can’t be an anonymous tip if I give you my name, now, can it?”

“I guess not.” Doubtfully.

“Here’s the tip. The guys who held up the Copper Country are in El Pinto, in one of Joaquín Fernandez’s cabins. There are three of them, and they’re armed and dangerous. You got that?”

“Armed and dangerous. Got it, Chief.”

“I’m not the chief. But if I were you, I’d call the chief and tell him.”

“Right. But I’m supposed to get your name and phone number.”

Loren hung up, trying through his exasperation to decide whether having his head jammed into Doc Holliday’s bar had scrambled Eloy’s brains or whether the man was just having some kind of weird fun with him.

He started heading for the door. Coover, misinterpreting his presence, already had a cup of coffee waiting for him on the counter.

“Hey, Chief,” said Byrne, waving a cigarette at him. “I wanna report a suspicious character. There was a guy with a turban in here a while ago eating breakfast. Probably a terrorist.”

Probably another blood-drinker, Loren thought. He looked at Byrne. “So where’s Sandoval? Gone to the library to look up some more facts he can embarrass people with?”

“Naw. He’s gone west so we can get drunk.” Byrne puffed on his cigarette. “Great anonymous tip, by the way. Anyone asks, I’ll say I didn’t recognize you.”

“Shut up,” Loren said.

Loren stalked out through the green deco door, his good mood gone. Now he just wanted to get to El Pinto, break down the door of whatever cabin the robbers were in, and get it all over with.

He got in Cipriano’s car. “Courthouse,” he said.

Cipriano waited in the car while Loren went in to meet the sheriff outside Judge Denver’s Saturday morning district court session, an institution that existed primarily to process all the Friday drunks out of the jail to make room for Saturday night’s crowd.

Eusebio Lazoya, the sheriff, was an elderly, somewhat frail man all of six feet four inches tall. He’d been known as “Shorty,” of course, all his life. He was a pillar of the local Democratic Party machine and had been sheriff for as long as Loren could remember.

Shorty was a terrible police officer, with an appallingly bad memory for procedure— he had lost, tainted, or inadvertently damaged the evidence from several important investigations— and his attitude toward his work had been thoroughly summed up by his failure to arrive at the robbery scene the previous night. He’d quite early realized that he would never make a career as a crimebuster, and allowed his underlings, and sometimes Loren’s department, to handle the occasional puzzling investigation that came along.

Nevertheless Loren had learned to respect him as an administrator and politician. Despite his early blunders, Shorty had been unopposed in the last three elections. Everyone knew him. His reelection posters just said SHORTY in big red letters; everyone knew who the signs meant to advertise. But despite his personal job security, the cuts in county services that followed the progressive closing of the Atocha pit had sliced his department in half, and now he leaned on the city police more than ever.

Loren figured that Shorty was smelling news cameras, as the sheriff was dressed in the cream-colored western-cut suit that he only wore for public appearances, and had a broad-brimmed white Stetson perched on his wide, hairy ears. As Loren walked closer he saw that Shorty’s dignified little white mustache had been freshly waxed.

“Hey, Loren,” Shorty said, grinning. “Qué paso, hombre?”

Loren shook his hand. “I’d say we got a solution to the current crime wave.”

“You got grounds for a warrant?”

“Somebody just phoned in an anonymous tip.”

Shorty gave a little laugh as dry as an alkaline wash. “I like them lucky little anonymous tips, cousin. Let’s get our warrant. Piedra movediza no cría lama.”

Loren hesitated for a moment while he mentally translated. Moving rocks, he thought, right. He nodded. “Let’s stop gathering lama, then.”

“Yeah. There’s a ball game on TV this afternoon I want to catch.”

Loren and Shorty filed into the courtroom. The room was occupied primarily by the bruised warriors that Loren and his crew had hauled in the night before. Broad-shouldered George Gileno bulked huge in a wheelchair, almost blocking the aisle. Len

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.

Blood wailed in Loren’s ears. “Fast and quiet,” he said. “Number nine. It’s painted pink.”

The Fury spat gravel as it spun in a short turn, then dove down the two-rut drive. Dying willows shot past them. Towers of eroded igneous rock, a miniature Grand Canyon, eclipsed the sun. There was a blue glimpse of the trout pond sitting in its meadow, the wooden structures of Joaquín’s placer mine, and then cabins started flashing past.

“There’s the van. Number four. Right here.”

The cabin was a square frame building plastered over and painted to look like adobe. There was a tiny front porch with a peaked roof on it that made it look like an ancient one-room school.

The Fury skidded to a halt like a baseball player sliding into home. Loren’s door was already open, his foot ready to take the first step onto the brown soil.

He lunged out of the car, his shotgun at port arms. The door was a flimsy frame thing, he saw, and he wouldn’t need the knock-knock. The second step took him onto the porch, and at the third he turned his body and drove his shoulder into the door.

There was a shriek of wood and the frame tore away. Loren spilled into the room, took a cross-step, recovered his balance, brought the shotgun down. A five-foot white sliver of the door frame clattered to the floor.

“Hi, Robbie,” said Loren. What he was actually supposed to say was something like “Police! Open!” and say it before he actually smashed the door down. It seemed pointless now. Blood sang in his ears like a swarm of angry bees.

Three young men had been half lying on pieces of furniture in the front room. They were all dressed in tank tops and rolled-up blue jeans. One of them, a stranger, was wearing a green pachuco handkerchief low over his eyes and had a little goatee. There were prison tattoos on his forearms, and he wore Bill Forsythe’s turquoise bracelet. All three were sitting up now, staring at the shotgun with glazed eyes.

There was a bong on the scarred old coffee table. A green mound of marijuana sat on an opened newspaper next to it. Sharing the table with the dope was the sawed-off, several piles of dirty bills, and a bunch of Riga Brothers paychecks.

Cipriano ran through the door, followed by another pair of cops.

Robbie and his friends seemed too stoned to react. Loren nevertheless advanced cautiously, reached down, picked up the sawed-off. He pushed the lever that opened the breech with his big thumb and broke the action. He read the inscriptions on the base of the shells. Double-ought buck.

“Serious kind of fishing equipment,” he said. “Now, everybody get up slowly and put your hands on top of your head.”

Shorty and his deputy came in while the suspects were being handcuffed. Loren’s heart was turning over like a smooth turbine. His body felt light, almost weightless. He knew he was invincible, that anything was possible.

Shorty reached into a pocket, took out his six-pointed sheriff’s badge, and put it on his perfect white lapel.

“You guys are under arrest,” he said, as if for the cameras.

Loren looked at Robbie Cisneros. “Too bad one of you decided to resist.”

He grabbed Robbie by his hair and pulled him across the room. “Something you forgot, Robbie,” he said, hustling the boy into the bathroom. “Nothing happens in my town without my say-so. And when you decided to invite a couple of strangers to come into my town and point a sawed-off full of double-ought in my neighbors’ faces and steal a bunch of laid-off miners’ paychecks, you didn’t ask my permission first.”

He pushed and Robbie crashed over into the old claw-foot bathtub, unable to keep his head from slamming into the tile because his hands were cuffed behind his back. Loren raised his shotgun butt over the boy’s body. Robbie looked up with a dazed lack of comprehension.

In his mind Loren saw his daughters, their eyes hard with need, veins pitted with addiction.

Not here, he thought.

“I am the sword and the arm of the Lord,” Loren said.

*

Some time thereafter Loren felt a hand on his arm. He shrugged it off and brought the shotgun down again. The hand came back, more insistent this time.

“That’s enough, cousin.” Shorty’s voice.

Loren looked down at the bloody, whimpering mess in the bathtub and took a long breath. Sweat was pouring down his face inside his helmet. Vertigo eddied through him. He rocked on his feet.

“Time to get some air,” Shorty said.

Loren turned and brushed past Shorty and stepped past the other officers and the wide-eyed suspects and out onto the porch. He unbuckled the chin strap of his helmet and pulled it off, then put down his shotgun and laid the helmet next to it. A breeze that carried the scent of high mountain flowers cooled the sweat on his face. Loren unbuckled the vest and dropped it, then stepped to Cipriano’s car, got the keys out of the ignition, and opened the trunk. He took out the LAWSAT kit, put it on the roof of the car, and opened it. The antenna was about the size and general shape of an attaché case. Loren took it out and laid it on the roof, then took the antenna lead and jacked it into the C.A.D. keyboard in the Fury. He leaned over the car’s keyboard, pressed a function key, and looked at the car’s little liquid-crystal display.

ESTABLISHING SATELLITE UPLINK, it said. Then, SATELLITE UPLINK ESTABLISHED.

Loren entered his user number and password and told the LAWSAT computer in Washington to cancel the alert for Robbie and his pickup. OK, the display said. Loren logged off and leaned his head back against the rest. Cipriano walked over to the car door and leaned down to look at Loren.

“I think maybe I’ll go hunting,” Loren said. “I don’t have any dogs and I’m not dressed for it, but what the hell. The pigeon won’t care how I’m dressed.”

“You gotta work on that temper of yours, jefe,” Cipriano said.

“Fuck that. It needed doing.”

“You can’t get away with that kind of shit anymore, man.”

Loren pulled the antenna jack out of the computer. “It’s my town, Cipriano,” he said.

He got out of the car and packed the LAWSAT kit and put it back in the trunk. He put on his blue blazer and went back into the cabin. He could hear the shower running as somebody cleaned up the mess. The money was still lying on the table. He reached down and picked up a couple twenties.

“For Joaquín,” he said, just in case anyone wondered. “So he can get his door fixed.”

Robbie Cisneros, limping, eyes swollen shut, was marched to the back seat of the second cruiser, and the two Texans were put into the sheriff’s Bronco. Cipriano and Loren followed the other two cars to the bait shop, then pulled into the parking space out back and went in the rear, through the screen door into Fernandez’s kitchen.

Fernandez shambled toward them out of the front. Behind him Loren could see a pair of ATL security people, one a stranger, the other one of the men who had been at Cipriano’s lecture the previous day, the guy with the halo of bleached hair around his flattop.

“Everything go okay?” Fernandez asked.

Loren gave him the twenties. “For your door,” he said.

Fernandez gave a grin. Loren looked up into the Ray-Bans of the two security men. “Buying some bait?” he said.

“Potato chips,” one said.

The sound of a starter grinding came from the front. Fernandez looked over his shoulder. “Glad my other customers didn’t show up till it was over. Hate to scare off the only ones I got.”

“Hunters?” Loren asked.

“I dunno, Loren. Maybe. They didn’t say.”

The world seemed to slow down for a moment. The starter ground on. Loren drifted through the door into the little store and looked out the window.

Fernandez’s other customers were two dark-skinned men in a cream-colored Chevrolet pickup with a small camper shell. They were towing a little homemade trailer.

“Lookit that,” Loren said. Now Loren knew why Robbie and his buddies had come to a nowhere place like El Pinto to celebrate their stickup.

They were waiting for someone to come and sell them something.

Cipriano came up and looked out the window and gave a whistle. The ATL guys followed, sensing something significant.

Loren mentally reviewed the search-and-seizure laws. He didn’t need a warrant for something he had an active LAWSAT tip on, and in any case the Supreme Court had pretty much abolished the Fourth Amendment for drug dealers, anyway.

The pickup’s engine finally caught. Loren pushed open the screen door with one hand while he withdrew his pistol with the other. Cipriano was right behind him.

“Uhh,” said one of the ATL men, trying to decide how to react.

Aware that the security men were watching his technique, Loren stuck the Chief’s Special through the open window and put the barrel under the astonished driver’s left ear. Cipriano ran around the other side, his own pistol out.

Loren looked at Cipriano’s face through the cab of the pickup.

“Out of the Tchevy, Pedro,” he said.

The expression on Cipriano’s face was like a sunrise.