Daniel Hecht_Cree Black 02 (33 page)

She got out. The ground here was a scraped plane of solid rock littered with mineral debris. The cliff rose in a broken, jagged
wall a hundred feet high, striped with dark striations. She stood, walked a slow circle, and stood again with eyes shut. From
here, the rumble of the rest of the mine was distant; she could just hear a crow calling from somewhere to the east.

She sensed nothing. It was as close to a complete psychic vacuum as she'd ever experienced.

Donny surprised her by speaking right at her shoulder. "He was being an idiot. He was vain about how fit he was for his age,
how he knew his company from the ground up, and he was showing off to his new girlfriend. They'd had a bit to drink. So Dad
climbs out on the boom to show her what a girder monkey he is, and he slips. Only fell about forty feet, but it was enough."

"Did he break his neck, or—"

"Hell, no. Landed upright, just like a cat. But the fall ruptured his spleen. Our on-site paramedics were afraid to move him.
It took a while for the ambulance to get here. He was dead by the time it arrived. I was up at the Bloomfield mine when I
got the call. What a goddamned mess."

"Were you and he close?"

Donny looked at her with his veiled eyes. Through the impatience and weariness, Cree saw a passing flicker of discomfort.
"What's it matter?"

"I want to know what kind of person he was," she reminded him. "What kind of relationship he had."

"He had his life, I had mine. He'd divorced my mother by the time I was ten, and she mostly raised me. Dad and I didn't always
see eye to eye. It wasn't easy working for him."

"How about Julieta? How did he feel about her?"

Donny walked away and stooped to pick up a rusted piece of iron, some small mechanical part from one of the behemoths that
had worked the site. He inspected it momentarily, then tossed it from him. "You really want to know? When he first met her,
he was wild about her. The man was over the moon. Told me she was young, not even my age, and then laughed and warned me to
keep my hands off, this one he wanted all to himself. This one was a keeper. He brought her flowers, courted her on bended
knee, the whole thing."

"So what happened? Why'd it go so wrong?"

"Come on, Dr. Black, don't pretend Julieta hasn't told you the story. With my father and me featured as the men in black hats."

"I'm happy to hear a different perspective."

"He was who he was. He did things the way he thought you were supposed to if you were a rich, powerful, virile but aging man.
Oh, there were affairs and the usual stuff. But he'd have stuck with her. On his own terms, to be sure, but I think he was
honestly surprised that she had different expectations. When she said she was going to divorce him, he reacted the way he'd
learned to act when somebody hurt him, which was to hurt back harder. He got mad and he got even, both. After a while, there
was nothing but that for either of them."

Cree nodded. Donny's tone was still angry, but he'd lapsed into a mood of recollection verging on nostalgia. It was something she had seen before when even the most alienated survivor visited the place of a loved one's death.

"It wouldn't have gotten so bad if she hadn't insisted on keeping the house and land here. She could have gone for the place
in Albuquerque, but no, she had to set herself up right next to the company's land. Which guaranteed he'd have lots of opportunities
to make sure her life wasn't too happy. What the hell'd she expect? He was gonna send her a welcome wagon?"

He paced and scuffed, and the way he looked touched Cree: a slim, balding, harried guy with a worried frown permanently etched
into his forehead. Clearly he admired his father a great deal, as much as he resented him. Just as clearly, he still dealt
with his dead father every day.

"So he was a man who could hold a grudge," she prompted, "who would never forget a hurt or an insult. What else?"

"Why don't you just out with it? What did Julieta send you to find out?"

Cree stared at him, trying to gauge where that was coming from. "Why are you so afraid of her?"

Donny spluttered in outrage for a moment. "Fuck this. I don't have to do this. I've gone along with this bullshit long enough,
let's get down to business. Let's get down to—"

"I'm not judging you or your father. Honestly. You're telling me Garrett was a . . . a mixed bag, just like every other human
being. So are you. So am I. I'm not buying into Julieta's anger."

He ignored her and started back toward the truck, but Cree grabbed his elbow. The touch startled him and he looked down at
her hand, the reaction of a man unaccustomed to physical contact. He shook his arm free, but he did stop walking.

"We
are
getting down to business, Donny. For me, anyway—what you're telling me is very helpful. Please keep going!"

He looked at his watch and let his shoulders slump in acquiescence. "Three more minutes' worth of this crap here. Then the
dragline."

"If I'd met your father at . . . I don't know . . . at a cocktail party, say, what would my impression be? Who would I be
talking to?"

"A man with a big appetite for life. A man who liked shiny things—a nice car, an impressive piece of equipment, a beautiful
woman. He was impulsive, and sometimes that got him into trouble. But his instincts were usually on target, they worked for
people and business. He liked taking on challenges, proving he could master things, people, situations. If you met him at
a cocktail party, he'd try to impress you. Charm you, win you over." Donny smiled his bitter, private smile and looked Cree
up and down. "You personally? He'd want to get you into bed. And he'd probably succeed. Because he'd make you feel you were
at the center of the universe. He'd tell you things about yourself that either were insightful and true or that you would
suddenly believe were true, and in either case you'd feel deeply flattered and understood."

"That's a very perceptive observation."

"And he'd get what he wanted from you. Whatever it was. Which was what it was all about."

Cree digested that briefly. "Did he ever talk about death? Things like . . . I don't know . . . how he wanted to die when
his time came? Even things like burial preferences or services? Or what he believed would happen after death?"

Donny made a face as if he had a bad taste in his mouth, spat, frowned, then checked his watch again. "We're done here. If
you want to see the dragline, we'd better get moving."

It was a signal that he'd overcome his reflective mood, Cree thought. But when they got back to the truck, he hesitated before
he went around to the driver's side.

"I don't know what my father believed," he said sourly. "But I do know Garrett McCarty had no intention of dying. Never crossed
his mind. Wasn't part of the man's plans in any way."

It took five minutes to cover the mile and a half to the pit where the dragline was currently working, Donny driving slowly
through his kingdom of raw rock, machines, and dust. He called ahead on his CB to let the dragline crew know they were coming,
telling them to shut it down when they arrived for Cree's tour. Afterward, the air of preoccupation claimed him again, and
his replies to Cree's questions were mostly monosyllables.

Still, she gleaned some details that would be useful later, if and when she confronted the entity again. Garrett had been
right-handed. He spoke Spanish and had picked up enough of the Navajo language to say a few words to his Navajo employees.
For amusement, he played golf and poker and went to rodeos, where he bet large sums in a private pool of fellow execs. He
knew horses—he'd personally selected the thoroughbreds he'd bought for Julieta—and was a good rider. When Donny was a kid
and made his regular weekend visits to Garrett's Albuquerque house, his favorite place had been the solarium cactus garden:
Watching his father lovingly tending the spiny knobs and armatures revealed a side of the man he never saw otherwise.

Donny got quiet again after telling her that, and Cree couldn't tell if it was a guarded silence or just a moment of reflection.
His throat began making the gulping movement again—a reaction to stress, Cree decided.

"You've described your father as impulsive, charming, yet a man who'd never forgive, never let go of a grudge. I guess what
I'm trying to figure out is, if he did live on in some form, what would his psychological engine be—what obsessional feelings
or motivations might animate his ghost? Would he be so angry about something, or sad or guilty about something—"

"Like what—Julieta? Is that what you're getting at? Julieta thinks she's haunted by my father's ghost? Jesus Christ, this
is turning into science fiction here!"

"Believe it or not, I'm trying to turn it into just plain science."

"Because if she does, tell her to get over it. Tell her that the world doesn't revolve around her ass. He had plenty of younger
and better afterward, trust me. If Garrett ever had such a huge grudge against her, he'd long since gotten it out of his system."

That couldn't be true, Cree thought, not if the years of conflict that followed were any indication. She bounced some of his ire back at him: "How'd he do that? Shooting her horses?"

He stared at her, surprised she knew about it, and he seemed about to say something nasty. But he just closed his thin mouth
and ignored the question.

"So why do
you
hate her? Why do you want to hurt her?"

He rolled his eyes—a martyred, frustrated expression. "I don't want to hurt her. She's got it all wrong. If I wanted to hurt
her, trust me, she'd know it. I'm just trying to run my business without her interference."

"Interference like the in situ uranium suit? Doesn't that make you want to get back at her?"

That got his attention: a flash of pure ire and calculation in the eyes, a radiant chill Cree could feel from four feet away.
"That's a matter for the courts to decide. What she doesn't get is, a business this size, I've got two dozen suits, injunctions,
regulatory hassles, you name it, pending at any time! She's the one with the 'psychological engine' here. She's the one can't
leave well enough alone!"

Donny swerved the truck hard enough to throw Cree against the door, and then they were pulling up near the walking dragline.

They got out and for a moment Cree had to just stand there, looking up at it in awe.

It was one of the biggest man-made objects she had ever seen. A gargantuan rusty orange cube supported a vertical mast about
fifteen stories tall, connected by cables to the main boom, which angled up and out over a deep trench. The whole structure
pivoted on a steel disk seven feet thick as it dragged its enormous bucket up the slope on its cables. Each of the bucket's
steel chisel teeth was as big as Cree's dining-room table. To her surprise, there was no diesel roar; the loudest sound was
the massive groaning of metal under stress.

"Electric," Donny explained. "Eight separate motors. Thing cost my father thirty-two million bucks when he bought it in 1979.
It's one of three we keep going twenty-four/seven."

From this angle, she could see the operator's cab, a tiny glass box at the base of the boom, and the platform between the
boom's huge hinges. The boom itself was a girder of tube steel, massive as a suspension bridge, with welded rungs on the main
tubes providing ladders to the upper reaches. Cree could visualize Garrett, clambering drunkenly up this outsize phallic symbol,
turning to observe his lady friend's reaction, losing his footing. His grip would've stayed his fall for an instant, but the
jerk was too much. He dropped, just missing the superstructure below him. The jolting collision with the ground, the awful
pain inside as his organs ruptured. It would have been an agonizing death.

But that was all imagination. She didn't feel an entity here. The only echo of human feeling was a faint swirl of the ever-changing
moods of the men who worked here.

They had just started toward the thing when Donny's cell phone rang and he stopped to put it to his ear.

"Hey, Nicko. Yeah, we're there now." He turned his head away from Cree. "Oh, yeah? Okay. Okay. Just hold on. You just get
here, let me handle it."

When he flipped the phone shut, his affect had changed utterly. His face hardened into a baleful mask, immobile but for the
striating muscles in his jaw.

"Is everything okay?" Cree asked.

Donny flashed her a look of contempt, then gazed past her to the access road they'd come by. A company Jeep was barreling
down it, trailing a plume of dust, sliding through the turns. In another moment it had skidded to a stop not far away, and
Joyce exploded out of it as if she'd been thrown. She slammed the door and hurried over to Cree, breathing fast, wide eyes
signaling alarm.

Nick Stephanovic got out to stand with his legs braced, hands clasped in front like a club bouncer, glaring at them. No trace
of the boyish charm remained.

"Wait here," Donny snapped. He went over to Nick, and the two men conferred. Nick lit a cigarette and gestured with it as
Donny glanced from Joyce to Cree, nodding. The dragline had gone still and silent.

"What the hell?" Cree whispered. "I didn't think you two would be done for a while."

"I think I screwed up badly, Cree! But I'm not sure how."

"What happened?"

Joyce checked to make sure the men were still out of hearing. "I get into the Jeep, right, and we drive up out of the mine
and go east? We're getting along fine, flirting a little, talking about our jobs, he seems like a nice guy. After a few minutes
he stops and says okay, this is where the mutilated horses were found. I get out, walk around. No sign of anything, no bones
or whatever. So I ask how he even knows we're in the right area, the ground's all the same as far as you can see, not so much
as a big cactus or something. So he opens this map of the mine property, right? It's all marked in sections. He shows me where
we are—out on the far eastern border, Area Two. So I open the pack, I'm gonna go through the motions. There's nothing to
take a sample of, so I figure I'll run the Geiger counter around, then take site photos? And when Nick sees the Geiger counter,
everything changes. He asks me what's that for, I tell him it's routine with mutes, looking for trace radioactivity. And by
the way, I say—it hasn't totally dawned on me that something's the matter yet, I'm just being conversational, I figure maybe
I've got it wrong?—I say I thought the mutes were found at the other end of the property, closer to Highway 12. I point to the map and tell him I thought it was in, like, Area Eighteen on that map. And then the guy goes ballistic! He—"