CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

 

He took the Fury home. He hadn’t been told he couldn’t use it anymore; once it was in his driveway, he doubted whether anyone would.

By the time Loren arrived at his house a vicious headache had filled his skull, soaking up the world’s pain like a sponge. Debra’s Taurus was in the driveway, but she wasn’t home. Loren took off his gun, collapsed onto the sofa, closed his eyes. Anger shuddered through his body, alternating with a fierce despair like fever alternating with chills.

His thoughts rang with belated protest. He should have pointed out that tolerating a victimless crime like prostitution was significantly different from forgiving a series of murders.

He pictured the celebration in the mayor’s office, Trujillo pouring the champagne. He’d got the hated Democrat establishment to do his dirty work for him, wouldn’t have to face the consequences of his indiscretion with the baby-sitter.

Fuck ’em, he thought. Fuck ’em all. Then:

I live here.

Get busy on what’s bothering everyone, he thought. Concentrate on blowing away the civil complaint from Dunlop and Bonniwell.

Funny that the thing that hanged him— or that had been used as the excuse to hang him— was the one thing in which his actions were perfectly justified.

A.J. and Len, he remembered, had been shooting cats. Maybe, he thought, one of the cats was a purebred that was worth money. Maybe the cats’ owners could be talked into a collaborative suit against Dunlop and Bonniwell for the value of their cats, plus pain and suffering.

The Dunlops would drop their own lawsuit like a hot potato, Loren figured, when they realized it might cost them money. With Mack Bonniwell, he couldn’t be sure. The man had conviction, and a grudge. But maybe he could talk to the judge about a parole hearing, threaten Len with lockup in juvie hall.

And of course Mack had just got laid off, really couldn’t afford an attorney.

He got up and took some aspirin. Then he took the mobile phone and made some calls.

Someone had, in fact, made a note of the contents of the collar tags of any dead cats that had them, and these had been entered into evidence in the trial. The documents were no longer in the judge’s office, having been sent out to a court reporter for transcription in her home office. Loren got the number of the court reporter, called, and got her out of the shower. Her tone told him she wasn’t pleased by this, but read out the names, phone numbers, and addresses on the tags. He could hear her swiping water off the documents as she read.

Most of his phone calls went to empty homes. He got two children who promised they’d pass the message to their parents, and one elderly lady who said she’d think about it.

The headache was still beating at the inside of his head. He stretched out on the couch again, the portable phone by his hand, and closed his eyes. Pointless strategies floated through his mind. At some point he may have slept.

He came alert at the sound of the back door opening, followed by a woman’s voice. The woman wasn’t Debra; after a few words Loren recognized her as Madeleine Gribbin, the woman who lived in the house behind them. Debra’s voice chimed in. He heard the sound of the refrigerator opening and something being taken from its shelves.

“I never know how he’s going to feel about something,” Debra said. “He’s so touchy sometimes.”

Loren’s heart gave an illicit thump. They were talking about him. Maybe he’d better make his presence known.

“My brother’s like that,” Madeleine agreed. Something liquid splashed into glasses. “I know there are some things I just can’t talk about. Like politics.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Well. Chief of police is a political office. But Elroy, he’s a miner. And you can’t talk to him about politics at all. He’s such a yahoo. He thinks we should have nuked Russia for what they did in Armenia.”

“Loren’s not a yahoo,” Debra said. “He’s too individual for that.” Loren’s heart warmed. “But still, there are things I don’t want to let him know about.” Chairs in the dining nook scraped back. Loren heard the two women settling in.

“Katrina’s abortion, for one thing,” Debra said. “I really fought with myself over that one.”

At the words Loren found himself somehow transformed, swimming in a translucent sea of absolute warm clarity. He was somewhere else, listening to two women who might be strangers, who might be suspects in some as-yet-undetermined crime. His mind hummed with perfect efficiency. He was surprised at the feeling of objectivity. It might as well be that he wasn’t connected with this at all.

“He’s against abortion, isn’t he?” said Madeleine.

“Yes,” Debra said. “But he’s not a fanatic about it. He doesn’t march or give money to the right-to-lifers or anything. He’s just . . . well, he thinks people ought to face the consequences of their actions.”

“That’s the way a cop would think.”

“I suppose. And of course his attitudes toward sex are pretty old-fashioned. He’s talked about teenage bimbos trying to evade consequences.”

That’s not true, Loren thought. I’ve never said that. He found that he wasn’t offended by Debra’s words; his thought was still lucid and objective. Perhaps she was exaggerating for effect.

There was, he noticed, a cobweb on the white-painted particle-board ceiling. The web fluttered in some unfelt breeze.

“It’s because he’s spent his whole life here,” Debra said. “Aside from his time in the Army. If he’d spent time in a city . . .” Her voice trailed away. “I dunno.”

“Maybe he’s never thought about it.”

“I know he hasn’t. And I finally decided that I didn’t want him making up his mind when Katrina was pregnant.”

“That was probably the smart thing to do.”

“And who knows how he would have reacted toward Marty? You know what his temper is like.”

Marty, Loren thought. Katrina’s boyfriend from when she was thirteen to a little over a year ago. He’d always wondered why they broke up. He hadn’t seen any signs of trouble.

And Katrina hadn’t had a steady guy since, just a long, intricate tangle of hopeful suitors. No wonder.

Marty, he decided objectively, ought to have his knees broken.

Loren decided he didn’t want to hear any more of this. One of the girls could come home at any time, discover him on the couch. He leaned back, tried to relax his body. Let the air out of his lungs.

He began, deliberately, to snore. Softly at first, not knowing how to make the sound convincing, but to him the snores seemed right enough, so he increased the volume.

A guilty silence loomed from the breakfast nook. Loren heard a chair scrape back and footsteps hesitantly move toward him. He moderated his snores, tried to relax his body. The pattern of light on his eyelids shifted; there was someone hovering over the couch. Loren blew his breath out through his lips, rolled on his side, tried to imitate coming slowly awake.

“Loren.” Debra’s voice. “I didn’t know you were home.”

“Taking a nap.” Loren rolled upright, blinked his gummed eyes open. “I should have gone to bed.”

Debra, he could tell, was thinking hard. Loren decided to let her. He picked up his gun from the coffee table, walked past her, and went into the bedroom.

His headache still beat at him, but he seemed somehow to have transcended it, put the pain in another realm. The exemplary efficiency of his mind continued unabated. He wondered if this was a migraine— he’d never had one to his knowledge, but this might be what happened. He hung his gun belt from the gun rack, stretched out on the bed, and lay straight with his hands at his sides, like a corpse waiting for the body bag.

So much for querencia.

Thoughts flickered through his mind, unwinding as if from a film reel. Perhaps he should move the explosives to another location, someplace where he could uncover it later, when he judged the time ripe to become a hero. The F’bee might not have got all the eco-terrs; the survivors might shift the stash somewhere else. He’d have to prevent that.

He could at least get the Dunlops out of the civil suit with his plan to mobilize the cat owners. The Bonniwells were another matter.

He’d have to just try the cat-owner plan and see. Mack had a lot weighing on his mind right now, his own joblessness high on the list. He might be too weary to hold his hatred for long.

Which left John Doe, William Patience, the wreck of the maglev.

His mind probed at what he knew, and the name of Joseph Dielh kept rising to the surface. Flying off the labs’ private field in its private jet, the physicist had been in Washington since Sunday.

Maybe he was consulting his superiors. But it occurred to Loren that Dielh might have realized early on just how crazy Patience was and figured Washington was the best place to hide. If he could just get the man to return his phone calls, Loren might find out.

He could, he realized, fly to Washington. Nothing was stopping him. He could track Dielh down at the Department of Energy or Defense or wherever it was he was hiding.

Loren didn’t have a job here anymore.

Hell, he could do anything he wanted. He was free. He had no responsibilities at all. With cold glee he realized that Luis Figueracion and Edward Trujillo had just given him all the freedom he needed to pursue any investigation he wanted.

Randal Dudenhof’s blood splattered across his thoughts. Too much depended on whether Dudenhof and John Doe were the same person, whether there had been a miracle. His rummaging through Randal’s coffin hadn’t settled things, and Doe’s disappearance had only confused matters.

How to find out?

Maybe it was for you. Rickey’s words.

The man had called him by name. Called for help, and Loren could give none.

Betrayed. He had been betrayed. The unblinking realization rolled up from deep inside him, filled his skull, pressed outward. Pain crackled along the bone seams. His fit of abstraction had kept the feeling from him.

He had served Luis Figueracion all his career, and this had been his reward. Bounced out of his office, told to hunt elk while killers cleaned their guns and lined up the next target.

He had served his family with the same diligence that he had served Luis. And they had betrayed him as well.

What would he have done if he had been confronted with Katrina’s need for an abortion? He thought about it and realized that he didn’t know. Now, thanks to the silence in which he had so carefully been wrapped, he would never have the chance to know.

This seemed too large and important a concept for so small a room as the one he was lying in. He rose from the bed, walked to the door, and stood in the doorway. The scents of home, of querencia, came newly to his senses. He could still hear voices in the breakfast nook— hushed, self-conscious voices.

He walked down the hallway to Kelly’s room and entered. Dirty laundry was ground into the carpet. Posters of male celebrities, bare-chested, long-haired, gazed from the wall with narrow-eyed, suspicious scowls that were, from one to the next, oddly similar. Loren drifted through the room, through the bathroom that smelled of baby powder, perfume, and hair spray. A pile of wet, dirty towels invited mold in a corner. The cowboys in the Wrangler ad on Katrina’s door stared at him like members of a Hollywood posse.

Loren opened the door to the room he had built for his daughter and drifted in. Katrina was orderly compared to her sister. Books and recordings were filed neatly. There was room to walk here, and the only clothing in sight was her pajamas thrown over a chair, and the dress she’d worn to church that morning laid out on the bed. The computer she shared with Kelly sat under its plastic cover.

Two of the windows were open to the dusty wind, and a third— the one without a screen that she sometimes used as a door— was shut. Marty probably got in that way, Loren thought, and had very likely impregnated her on her own bed.

Loren decided not to think about that anymore. He stood in the room for a while, absorbing it, knowing that it seemed different now than it had before, not in detail, just in the way Loren was looking at it.

He realized that he was acting like a cop. He was looking for evidence, clues as to what was going on here. He didn’t want to behave that way with his family.

He concluded that he needed an infusion of clarity. He went to his room, changed out of his uniform, put on Levi’s and a jeans jacket. As he left via the front door he heard the conversation in the kitchen stop.

Once out the door he wondered whether he should have said goodbye.

He got in his Fury and drove at random around Rose Hill, past the Fortune house with the FBI seals on the doors, past the battered old Queen Anne where Roberts made his nightly consultations with his bottle and the Almighty. No prophet appeared; no miracle dazzled his eyes. He drove on, downtown, past the deco storefronts designed to speed into the future. He headed out beyond the city limits, past the turnoff to Connie Duvauchelle’s, the hatchet-waving Indian of the Geronimo, and the speeding rocket of the Atom Lounge. The unnatural fenced-off flatness of the UFO field spread out on his left, and he slowed.

Weeds covered the field now, obscuring the pentagram that the patient, passive gang of saucerheads had assembled. The big metal-walled work shed where they’d slept and stored their tools was dripping rust from its galvanized roof. Loren turned into the field, bounced along old ruts, parked by the work shed.

Another millennium postponed. Joseph Smith and Samuel Catton had both announced the momentary end of the world in the impending cry of Gideon’s trumpet; somehow the world had avoided its judgment and finale. Another apocalypse was to come in a rain of thermonuclear fire, again postponed indefinitely. The turn of the millennium was to feature the saucers, glowing vic formations rolling soundlessly across the midnight sky, bringing salvation and enlightenment to their sad, hopeful, hopefully sad worshipers.

The greenhouse was the world’s nightmare now, glaciers calving, oceans rising, crops browning in the furrow-striped fields like waffles on the griddle. People like the eco-terrs, with their spiked trees and wrecked power lines, fought a rear guard against that future, a future already visible in the heat and drought that bleached this alkaline country.

That wouldn’t be the end, either, though it would be bad enough.

Enough people would survive to imagine, perhaps realize, another, more ominous conclusion to their existence.

Loren got out of the car and walked through one of the gaps in the chain link fence that had been built to protect the mother ship from the violent frenzy of last-minute converts. The hot breeze burned the back of his neck. An ardis of the pentagram pointed mutely to Loren’s boots. Concrete poured, straight as a die, into a carefully gouged rut, now crumbling, covered with dust. Loren chose a concrete line and walked along it.

Even over the wind he should have heard the howling from the Atocha pit, the trucks rolling out of the resonant cavity with their tons of ore. It was silent.

His world, Loren realized, the one that he had lived in all his life, had come to an end. The apocalypse had come, and he had only now noticed it.

Grouse exploded from beneath his feet, roaring up from a young juniper that had grown up here since the saucer-apocalypse had been postponed. He should have brought a shotgun, he thought, then realized that there was one in the Fury. He didn’t like the Remington for hunting— it was too heavy, too awkward, not like the turn-of-the-century double-barreled Heym he normally used— but it was the gun that was here.

He went back to the car, got the gun, jacked out the rounds of buckshot he’d threatened to use on the poachers that afternoon, and loaded it with bird shot. He stalked carefully over the pentagram, feet stepping softly on the crumbling concrete, and brought down seven birds. The movement and shots were clean, precise. Nothing wasted. The powder smell was welcome in the hot wind. He picked up his spent shells to avoid leaving his sign on the land. Something, at least, was within the realm of his control.

Loren tossed the dead birds in the trunk of the car, reloaded the gun with buck, and walked up the drive to the metal-walled work shack. It had an old Master padlock, not worked in ages. He got in his car and backed out.

His headache seemed to have faded.

On his way through town he passed the parsonage, saw a parking place, and swooped into it. There was a little squeal of rubber as the car behind braked suddenly. Had he not been in a police cruiser, Loren knew, he probably would have earned a glare, a finger, a blast of the horn.

Rickey answered half a minute or so after Loren’s knock. The parson was naked from the waist up and without his glasses. He blinked myopically and scratched the pale hairs on his sunken chest.

“You were taking a nap,” Loren said. “I’ll come back later.”

“It’s time I got up.” Rickey turned around and walked away down the corridor. “You know the way to the study.”

Loren seated himself opposite the dead computer terminal. Deco lightning bolts flashed at him from the back of the parson’s chair. A carved plaster eye gazed at him from atop a pyramid. He heard Rickey bumbling around in the back, and then the parson appeared, his flannel shirttails out. Rickey sat opposite Loren and put his metal-rimmed spectacles on, perching them on his nose first and then placing the bows behind his ears, like a bookkeeper out of Dickens.

“I’ve been told what happened,” Rickey said. “I’m sorry to hear about all that.”

Loren frowned at him. “About all what?”

“About, ah, about your being laid off.”

“Oh,” Loren said. He waved his hand. “That’s nothing. It’s administrative leave with pay. It’s a political tactic.”

Rickey’s eyelids battled with sleep. “Oh.”

“I didn’t agree with why it was done, but—” He fell silent, guilt’s clawed finger stabbing at his throat.

Rickey’s glance sharpened. “Why was it done? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“Because,” Loren said, and stopped dead. He glanced at Rickey. “Public servants don’t always agree with public policy, right?” he said.

Rickey grinned. “Nor do ministers with church doctrine.”

Loren was surprised. “Really?”

“Of course. Think of the poor Pope! He has two thousand years of antiquated revelations, interpretation, and doctrine to deal with every time he opens his mouth.” Rickey leaned back; the old chair creaked. “Even a radical American religion, formed by direct revelation in the nineteenth century, carries a lot of unnecessary doctrinal baggage with it. I’d just as soon dispose of most of it.”

“I guess.”

“That’s why I like our doctrine of continuing revelation. We can renew or alter the church whenever it proves necessary. Keep the faith fresh.”

“Good.”

Loren saw he’d triggered another one of Rickey’s unpredictable enthusiasms and resigned himself to a lengthy explication, but the parson, with a visible though genial effort of will, managed to drag himself back from the brink. He cocked his head and looked at Loren. “You were talking about public servants?”

“Yeah. How if you’re a cop, you’re not responsible for policy. You have to work within the system, and the system is imperfect. And you didn’t make the system in the first place, you inherited it.”

“Yes. I understand.”

“And—” Loren restrained an impulse to rise and pace, to add visible motion to the impetus of his thoughts. “All I want,” Loren said, letting his resigned hands rise from his lap, “is for my town to be a nice place. A safe place, okay?”

“I was in Uganda during the sigatoka famine,” Rickey said.

“I guessed you had. From what you’d said earlier.”

“The area had been hit hard by war, and revolution, and then by HIV, and just as things were starting to look better, along came the plantain blight.“ He pronounced it plahntain. “Plantain and bananas are the staple of the poor people—you can raise enough plantain on a small plot to feed a family—”Smahl plaht. “—and the plantain and banana trees were being hit by black sigatoka faster than blight-resistant trees could mature. Well—” He shrugged his shoulders. “You know what happened from pictures on the TV. Refugees, unrest, revolt. Starvation.” Stah-urr-vation. “I was supposed to help the farmers shift their production to wheat, but the American wheat I was given was unsuitable to Africa, and though an acre and a half sown with plantain will keep a family fed, you need a lot more land to feed that same family on wheat, and the land wasn’t available. There’s enough rainfall to raise wheat if the rain is distributed evenly, but in Uganda it doesn’t come regularly, it comes in torrential cloudbursts followed by weeks of tropical heat.”

Rickey shook his head. “I knew all of this, you understand, within a few weeks of my arrival. But my superiors in Washington insisted that I follow the program. Recommendations to the contrary were discouraged or ignored. And what could I do? I could do nothing and watch the Ugandans starve, or I could teach them to plant wheat and maybe save a few.” He gave a long sigh.

“After a while I began to wonder if Washington really wanted to save anybody. I thought they were just after good P.R., they just wanted people to believe they were helping, but didn’t care what actually happened.”

“Good P.R.,” Loren said. “I know what you mean.”

“All the new wheat fields turned into eroded deserts. Worse than if we’d done nothing. The local people began to blame us, the Americans, for their problems. They identified us with the corrupt government that was getting rich off the relief effort. All the strife they’d had before had left a lot of modern weapons around. I got evacuated back to the States after some of the other Peace Corps people were shot or hacked up with pangas.”

He leaned forward, looking into Loren’s eyes. “All I wanted, Chief, was for Uganda to be a nice place. But it was not permitted for me to make it that way. Do you understand?”

Loren nodded, fully intending to thank Rickey for his little speech and leave, but guilt seized his heart and somehow he found himself talking on.

“That’s not quite the way it is,” Loren said. “It’s more like, if you were in Uganda, and you had the food to give to the people, and your superiors told you not to.”

Rickey’s eyes flickered behind his spectacles. “You must feed the people, Loren.”

“The thing is,” Loren said, “they say it’s because they can get more food later. But in the meantime, there’s starvation.”

“You cannot know what will come. You must feed the people while you can.”

“I know who shot the man the other night,” Loren said abruptly, “and I know who wrecked the train yesterday.”

Loren saw surprise behind the glittering spectacles. “And you can’t prove it?”

“I’ve been advised not to try. I’ve been put on leave so that I won’t.”

Rickey seemed genuinely surprised. He struggled with his thoughts for a long moment. “Your . . . superiors ... are covering up a series of murders?”

“It’s more like they don’t want to know who did it. It doesn’t matter to them. They’ve got other things on their minds.”

“Like what, for God’s sake?”

“Like saving the town. A bunch of strangers got killed, okay. They didn’t have anything to do with it, they didn’t know the people who died, it’s nothing to them.” He remembered Sondra Jernigan weeping in her car, Jernigan’s head with its furious scowl. “Nothing to them,” he repeated. “But they figure they can do a deal with . . . well, with some people connected to the people who did the crime. Get money and jobs for the town.”

“Blood money.” Rickey was appalled.

“I’ve been loyal to them,” Loren said. “I’ve done stuff they wanted me to, even though I didn’t like it. It’s my town, you know? I had to take it the way I found it.”

“I have heard, of course . . .” Rickey chose his words carefully. “I have heard stories of corruption. Payoffs, that sort of thing.”

“Some of them are probably true,” Loren said.

Rickey said nothing, just looked at him.

“But it’s not . . . it’s not evil,” Loren said. He felt sweat prickling his scalp. “It’s just a way of life. It’s almost neighborly, the way it happens. It’s the way things have been here for over a century.”

“It’s still wrong.”

“I accept that.” He looked at the parson and the words grew dry in his mouth. “I live with it,” he said. “It’s not something I take pride in. But change it? I’d have to change everything.”

“It will have to end sometime.”

“I’ve been loyal to certain people.” Insistently. “I’ve been loyal, and I’ve expected loyalty in return.”

“You have reason to expect that.”

“Damn right.” Loren’s fists clenched. “And they— I’ve been betrayed. My trust. I don’t know . . .” His mind whirled.

“Render unto Caesar if you must,” Rickey said, “but you must not conceal a great crime. You must arrest the killers. You must arrest them and put them away.” The words crime and arrest were turned to fierce growls by his thick r’s.

“In order to arrest someone, I need evidence,” Loren said. “I have to convince the district attorney’s office that I have evidence enough to convict, and I don’t have that. If I had it, I’d be able to arrest the perpetrators, sweat them until one of them agrees to cave in and testify against the others. That’s the way it is. That’s the way it works. But if the D.A. won’t hold them, I can’t do that, and if I told the D.A. what I know, he’d think I was crazy.”

“But still you must—” Hesitation surfaced in the pastor’s look. “The evidence you have— is it, ah, supernatural in origin?”

Loren gave a laugh. “My miracle, you mean? No, it’s not even that good. It’s circumstantial. Based on what I know of the people involved, their movements, and so on.”

“I’m relieved.” Rickey took a long breath. “I wonder what it is like, you know, to have a life on your conscience.”

“I’ve thought about that myself. But I’ve never had to use my weapon. I’ve always found other ways of dealing with my neighbors. I’m proud of that.” Defiance filled his mind. “Handling it informally. That’s the best way, whatever the lawyers say.”

Rickey seemed not to have paid attention. “That man who burned down my shelter,” he said. “The arsonist. He probably knew the place had smoke detectors and alarms. How would he have known that twelve people would die? That he would kill children? That couldn’t have been part of his plan.”

“From what I’ve seen of criminals,” Loren said, “they just don’t give a damn what damage they do. It’s not something that even fits into their calculations.” He shrugged. “That’s why we catch them, most times. Because they don’t calculate at all.”

“I’m sure that whoever did it is suffering,” Rickey said. The pastor, Loren realized, hadn’t heard a word Loren had said; he was locked into his own nightmare, his eyes focused a thousand miles away, on choking children and scarlet flames scarring the night. “How could such a man atone?” Rickey asked. “What service could he offer to society or to God?”

“A life busting rocks in Leavenworth wouldn’t be out of line.”

“A lifetime wouldn’t be enough, surely.” Rickey’s eyes flicked to Loren’s. “Murderers must be punished. Right must be done. If you know who . . .”

A hot bubble of frustration expanded within Loren, exploding in anger. “It’s a goddamn game!” he said. “Right and wrong don’t have anything to do with it! You’ve gotta dance a fucking waltz with lawyers and judges, dot every i, cross every t!”

“Dot them,” Rickey said, his look intent. “Cross them.”

“If this were the old days, a hundred years ago, I could just raise up a posse and find the perps and arrest them. Chances are I could count on the posse doing the judge’s job for me, filling them with lead during the arrest or hanging them after.” He shrugged. “But it’s the twenty-first century. You don’t do things that way, not even in Atocha. Things are run the old way here, but not that old a way. Not lynch law.”

“You have seen a miracle.” Mirahcle.

Loren’s mind jolted onto Rickey’s new track. He looked at the pastor in surprise. “Yes,” he said. “I think I have.”

“What did I say about miracles the other night? That they turn things upside down, that they change everything?”

“Yes.”

“I want you to consider whether the miracle was intended for you, because you are meant to change everything.”

Loren looked at Rickey bleakly. “Sword and arm of the Lord,” he said.

“Yes.”

“God’s backing me into a corner. He wants something done and he’s not giving me any choice.”

“In a sense. Yes.” Rickey’s look was intense. “You are a public servant. You’ve lived in the world, among the fallen, but you are also a man of faith, because you sense a higher world. Perhaps you are being called to make Atocha a nice place. As you said.”

Loren looked for a long time at the parson, then rose slowly from his chair. The sense of calling had not exhilarated him at all, just filled him with sick foreboding. His headache was coming back.

“I’ll do what I can,” he said.

“That is all anyone can expect.”

He drove toward home beneath the overhanging elms of Estes Street in the darkness, and suddenly a car pulled away from the curb behind him, the headlights dazzling in his rearview mirror. The lights dimmed, then brightened again, then dimmed. He was being signaled.

His nerves hummed and his mouth turned dry. He was suddenly aware that he wasn’t carrying a pistol.

He set the parking brake and drew the pump shotgun from its rest. The other car, a Saab, pulled around him and parked in front, in the spill of his headlights. He could see only a single passenger.

The man got out, a young man in a blue nylon jacket and work boots, with a neatly trimmed blond mustache. Loren turned the side spotlight on and shone it at the man, aiming it with the control stick inside the car. The man shaded his eyes with his hands— both hands. Loren wanted to see both the man’s hands. He rolled down his window.

“Chief Hawn?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Paul Rivers. We talked last night.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“I got the information you wanted. It’s kind of weird.”

The man reached into his jacket pocket. Loren tensed, his nerves screaming, and his grip tightened on the stock of the shotgun.

Rivers pulled out a piece of paper. “The same four guys were working all weekend. From Saturday morning on, no one else from our office was in the facility, aside from the gate guards.”

Loren took the paper and looked at the names. Patience, Nazzarett, McLerie, Denardis.

“That’s unusual, right?” Loren said.

“It’s never happened before. And none of those guys have been on duty since first shift Monday. They’re not on the roster, and I haven’t seen any of them personally.”

Whatever had happened, Loren thought, happened Friday night. And it had been so unusual that Patience had kept the same people on through the weekend, keeping the number of witnesses low, till he could get rid of the yellow Thunderbird on Monday morning and destroy the last of his evidence.

“I arrested Nazzarett on Tuesday afternoon,” Loren said. “He was shadowing me in one of your Blazers.”

Rivers shrugged. “He wasn’t on the duty roster. I didn’t think to check who’d signed out a vehicle.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

“I didn’t want to call you. Patience can monitor any calls going in or out of the facility from his board, and—”

“Wait a minute.” Loren stared at him. “Do the employees know this?”

“Some do, some don’t. It’s not a big secret, if that’s what you’re asking.”

That was why Jernigan died. Because Patience had overheard his call to the lawyer on Tuesday morning.

“Anyway, Patience has other monitoring equipment. Phone taps and so on.”

“They’re illegal.” Pointlessly.

Rivers only shrugged. “Things have been getting pretty tense. He’s been pulling intruder drills, snap inspections. Being more hard-ass than usual. He’s under some kind of pressure. Maybe he’s tapping your line, maybe he isn’t. Maybe he’s tapping mine. I thought I ought to be careful.”

“Okay.” Loren looked at the list again. “Thanks.” A thought struck him and he grinned. “If they’re tapping my line, they’re not getting anything but long hours of conversation between teenage girls. I almost feel sorry for them.”

“You’re not going to ask me for anything more, are you?”

“No.” Looking at him. “I’m not.”

Rivers seemed suspicious of this assurance, not relieved at all. He turned and headed back to his car.

Loren looked at the paper, then put it on the seat next to him. Just a few hours ago it would have meant something to him.

He drove home.

Debra was waiting on the couch as he walked through the door. The tube blared the theme song of a soap opera about a firm of lawyers who lived in a neon Hollywood spill of glamour, styled and hip and clever, a group who motored their midnight Ferraris over the throbbing night Los Angeles freeways to an endless synthesized disco snare beat, and who, if Loren was any judge, must have acquired their style and money from a swinging clan of drug-dealer clients that somehow never appeared in the television’s frame . . .

Debra rose from the couch. Loren couldn’t read her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Loren walked toward the kitchen. “About what?”

“About your job. Cipriano called and asked how you were doing, and I didn’t know what he was talking about. So he told me.”

“Yeah. Well. It’ll work out.” Loren got a glass from the cupboard and filled it from the water cooler.

“You look terrible. Are you okay?”

“I went hunting.”

Debra watched him as he tilted back his head and gulped his glass of water. He put the glass in the sink and wiped his mouth with the gritty back of his dusty hand.

“People have been calling,” she said. “Something about cats?”

“I’m going to take a shower,” Loren said. Debra watched him go.

He stood under the hot water as the headache rolled in slow time through his skull. He wanted to stop thinking, just turn over and close his eyes and become the happy hick cop that William Patience thought he was.

Loren turned off the water, dried himself, and threw his clothes in the hamper. He put on his bathrobe and stepped out into the hallway, and immediately Kelly’s door opened and she and Katrina came out. Kelly was dressed for bed, Katrina in her usual shirttails and jeans.

“We’re sorry, Daddy,” Katrina said. “We’re really sorry.”

“What can we do?” Kelly said. “Is there any way we can help?”

Loren looked at them for a long puzzled moment before he recollected what they were talking about.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It’s a political thing. As soon as the maneuvers are over, I’ll be back in my office.”

“Oh.”

“That’s good, then.”

They both seemed a little disappointed— they had worked up to participation in a major crisis, and now it had faded.

“You’re good kids,” Loren found himself saying. “All we need to do is just stay out of trouble and things will work out.”

They each gave him a hug and then started back down the hall toward Kelly’s room. Katrina turned around in the doorway.

“Daddy?” Her voice was tentative. “Did you find out about Skywalker?”

“I called,” he said, “but it was too early. I’ll call again tomorrow.”

She smiled faintly and closed the door. “I’m not interested in legalities!” someone shouted from the television. “This is a matter of right and wrong!”

Loren decided he didn’t want to hear the rest of that conversation, so he went into his room and climbed into bed. He could hear the girls talking, sometimes laughing, in Kelly’s room. Headache beat a melancholy drum behind his eyes.

He’d call all the cat owners tomorrow. Maybe even put an ad in the Friday paper. And talk to the judge about grounds for getting Dunlop’s and Bonniwell’s paroles revoked.

The door opened and Debra padded to the bed. “May I sit down?” she said. Her voice was tentative.

“Sure.”

He moved over to allow her room. She sat on the bed and looked down at him, blond bangs hanging over her brows, her glasses sitting halfway down her nose. “I was wondering,” she began.

“Yes?”

“We seem to have some sort of crisis here. How serious is it?”

“With my job?” Evading. He thought for a moment and restrained the impulse to shrug. “It’s probably not very serious. I’ve decided . . .” He sorted through his feelings. “I’ve decided to do what I have to do,” he said. “I think that’ll get me back in the saddle pretty quick.”

“It’s really not very serious, then?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Good.” Her eyes wandered. She seemed vague as to where to go from here. She took a breath.

“I was wondering . . .” She spoke rapidly, getting this over with. “Whether you heard my conversation with Madeleine this afternoon.”

A cold caution crept into Loren’s heart, a close approximation of the horrid objectivity he’d felt as he lay on the couch and listened to Debra’s words. He looked at Debra narrowly and decided to let her sweat a bit.

“Not all of it,” he said.

Debra glanced away. “We were talking about some things that I hope you haven’t heard,” she said.

“Like what?” He realized he was acting like a cop again, following the rules of interrogation: never let the suspect know how much you know. When his shock over this wore off, he realized, he would probably feel an abiding guilt about it.

But he didn’t feel it now.

“About . . . family matters,” Debra said.

“Important matters?” Loren asked.

“Yes.” She glanced at him from under her lashes.

“If there’s something happening,” Loren said, “I need to know about it. I’m a part of this family, too.”

Debra took in a long, shuddering breath, then let it out. “What we were talking about,” she said, “it’s something in the past. But yes, you’re right. You should have been told then.”

“If anything happens, I want to know.”

“Yes.” She reached out and took his hand, then squeezed it. “You’ll know.”

Sword and arm of the Lord, he thought. Rickey had given his blessing to whatever needed doing.

If only he could figure out what that was.