The Searcher (27 page)

S
OLOMON ENDED THE CALL AND STUDIED THE STONE TOMB IN FRONT OF HIM.

He had drifted away from Billy Walker during the conversation to keep him from overhearing and found himself beside the largest grave in the cemetery. Like the mansion in the center of town, it was bigger and grander than anything around it and had been constructed for the same man. He read the carved inscription on the stone:

REV. JACK CASSIDY

PIONEER. VISIONARY. PHILANTHROPIST.

Founder and first citizen of the City of Redemption

Dec. 25th, 1841, to Dec. 24th, 1927

The stone was white, like the church, imported. There were marks along the top and sides, jagged lightning bolts where the stone had cracked open and been repaired with cement that didn't quite match the stone.

“What happened here?” he asked, running his hand over the cracks and feeling the edges of the broken stone.

Billy didn't reply and Solomon felt a shift in the air. He turned to find himself staring down the barrel of a shotgun for the third time that day.

“Hands where I can see 'em,” Billy said.

He was holding a second phone in the same hand with which he was cradling the stock of the gun and Solomon guessed what had happened.

“I didn't kill Pete Tucker,” he said, raising his hands and taking a step forward.

“Stay right where you are.”

“You're not going to shoot me.”

“You want to find out? Keep on walking.”

“You ever killed a man, Billy?” Solomon took another step. “Ever stared into his face and watched the life leave him? You don't want that on your conscience. Thanks for the phone, by the way.” Solomon lobbed it toward him and Billy followed it with his eyes, instinct telling him to catch it and stop it from falling to the ground.

Solomon used this moment of distraction, sprang forward, and grabbed the barrel of the shotgun. He knocked it aside and pulled hard, yanking gun and man forward. A boom crashed the silence as Billy's finger triggered a shot and buckshot tore through the broad, heart-shaped leaves of the cottonwood. Solomon continued his spin, driving his elbow backward, aiming for the forehead and not the nose. A hard blow to the nose could drive bone shard back into the brain and kill a man.

How did he know all this? How did his body know the moves to disarm a man pointing a shotgun at him? How did he know what would kill and what would not?

His elbow connected with Billy's head and it snapped back. Solomon yanked the barrel again, pulling it free from his hands.

“Otis!” Billy hollered. “Otis—kill!”

Solomon continued to spin, using his momentum. He felt the heat of his rage again, like an unstoppable urge, and he drove his other elbow hard into the side of Billy's head, relishing the feel of the impact. Billy crumpled to the floor, eyes rolling up into his skull, and Solomon dropped down with him, his hand grabbing a stone from the ground, his anger like a physical thing now trying to burst out of him. He could feel the pressure of it in his chest and his hand squeezed the solid rock as he raised it over his head.

Bring it down
, a voice inside him said.
Bring it down hard on this man
's head. Break his brain out. That will ease the pressure. That will show you who you are.

He could picture it—the rock, the skull, the blood—the images so vivid he thought he must have done it. The stone came down, hard and fast, and struck the ground by Billy Walker's head. Solomon wasn't sure what had nudged his hand away from its murderous path. It might have been him or something else. Whatever it was, it had spared a life and Solomon let go of the rock and pushed himself away before something else made him pick it up again.

He was sweating and breathing hard but not from the effort of the fight. It was his rage boiling inside him.

There was a grunt to his right and he looked over at the bulldog, lying by the bowl, his great head resting on his front paws. He twitched, like he was trying hard to move, then grunted again, as much of a bark as he could manage before finally he gave up, closed his eyes, and went to sleep.

Solomon took a deep breath. Let it out slowly, then went to work.

He moved over to the truck and found a knife, some rope, and a pack of black plastic cable ties in a box in the back. He used the ties to bind Billy's wrists and feet, then dragged him over to the trunk of the cottonwood and wrapped most of the rope around him, fastening him
tight to the tree. He tied it, cut a twelve-foot length off, then tucked the knife in his belt and found a crate of bottled water in the truck. He pulled two bottles free, drank one straight down before unscrewing the cap from the second and carefully pouring a quarter of the remaining Ambien into it. He had taken it from Holly's bedroom and already used about a quarter of it in the dog's water bowl—enough to knock him out, not enough to kill him, he hoped. The dog was snoring loudly now so he must have guessed the dose right. He shook the bottle to dissolve the powder and left it next to Billy's slumped form so he would reach for it when he roused and send himself straight back to sleep again. Then he emptied the shells from the shotgun and flung it deep into the cemetery where it couldn't be seen.

The stallion raised its head from the trough when Solomon stepped onto the wooden porch, then lowered it again and continued drinking. Solomon glanced down the road and the pony track, checking to see that no one was heading his way, then moved over to the map by the door.

He found the cemetery marked on it and traced his finger along the lines of roads until he came to the one leading east into the Chinchuca Mountains. It curled and looped like the coils of a long, thin snake, following the contours of the land.

Solomon looked out across the town to the mountains beyond, his hands working the rope now, knotting and tying it quickly and expertly while his eyes studied the line of the road, calculating how he could get there without riding through town. The track he had arrived on continued in the right direction, but only for a while; after that he would be cross-country, which was why he needed the rope.

He tugged a final knot tight and walked over to the horse.

“Come on, Sirius,” he said, slipping the rope halter over his head. “We're going for a nice evening ride.”

He secured the halter behind the stallion's ears then jumped on his back, settled, then moved in circles around the parking lot for a minute, testing the new halter. It was good, it allowed him to sit up straighter and made it possible to steer the horse by the head. He would need that over the loose terrain he was about to cross. He wouldn't be of any use to anyone lying in a gully with a broken arm. He wouldn't be of any use to Holly.

Was that why he was here? Was he here for her and not her husband? He did feel a responsibility for her. That was why he had taken the Ambien. He didn't want her to die. He knew if he let that happen, he would have failed somehow, though he couldn't say why.

He moved away from the building and toward the track, glancing out at the burned desert stretching away to the northwest. The sun was sinking lower in the sky now, a burning disk of shining copper. He thought about the ranch beyond and the bloodied body in the barn. He thought about the man with the gun in Holly's house. He thought about what else might be coming their way. Then he turned onto the track and eased the horse into a trot to make time over the easier terrain, his shadow leading the way, long and dark across the broken land.

M
ULCAHY STARED AT THE DIRT TRACK UNSPOOLING AHEAD OF HIM.

He was driving, the smell of gasoline clinging to his clothes and skin, the smoking barn getting smaller in his rearview mirror. The little execution-and-burn situation had disturbed him. He had always had Tío down as a fundamentally reasonable man, ruthless but reasonable. What he had just seen had no reason in it. And if you took reason away from the equation, all you had left was ruthlessness and that didn't fill him with confidence, given his father's current situation.

“What did they do?” he asked.

“Who?”

“Those human candles we left back in the barn.”

“I didn't trust them. They annoyed the shit out of me too. I can trust you though, right?”

“Of course you can,” Mulcahy said. “But then what else am I going to say?”

Tío laughed and slapped his leg. “I like that about you. No bullshit. You should be crawling up my ass, the situation I got you in, but
you're still calling it like it is. I need to get me some more people like you instead of all these kiss asses.”

The wheels bumped across the verge as they rejoined the road and the shadow of their vehicle stretched out on the road ahead of them as they started heading east.

“Tell me something,” Tío said, like he was asking for a bit of advice. “How come you're so loyal to your pop?”

“He's family.”

Tío shook his head slowly. “No, he's not. He's no more your father than I am.”

Mulcahy's hands tightened on the wheel. He had never told anyone about his childhood—partly from shame, partly from loyalty—though he'd figured someone with Tío's resources could dig it up if he wanted to. He obviously had.

“So your mom,” Tío continued, all his attention on Mulcahy, like he was feeding on his discomfort, “what was she—a dancer, a whore?”

“You probably know better than me,” he said, forcing his voice to stay steady. “I never really knew her.”

“No. I guess not. How old were you when she took off—seven?”

“Six.”

“Six years old and she ups and leaves you with some loser she's only been banging for a coupla months. What kind of a bitch does that?”

Anyone else, anyone else in the world, and Mulcahy would have taken his Beretta out right there and shot them straight through the head.

“You ever find out what happened to her?” Tío continued, probing, enjoying it.

Mulcahy shook his head. He'd had plenty of opportunity to find out during his time as a cop. He had a name, a physical description, a last-known whereabouts, and access to all the national missing persons databases. But when it came down to it, he didn't want to know,
not the details at least. He knew enough to figure that it wouldn't be a happy ending, so what was the point in knowing exactly how unhappy or what specific form of sadness it had taken?

“Why don't you take a guess,” Tío said, like he was suggesting a game of I Spy to pass the time.

Mulcahy focused on his breathing like a sniper preparing to take a shot. He could feel his heart hammering in his chest and sweat starting to prickle at his scalp. Tío knew, he could hear it in his voice, he knew what had happened to his mother and he was about to tell him.

“What you think?” Tío persisted. “Overdose? You think she was beaten to death by some fucked-up john? Or she cut her wrists in some rat-hole motel when she couldn't face another day of her shitty life? You must have wondered about it.”

“Can't say I ever did.”

“Bullshit. You must have thought about it all the time when you was a kid, wondered what had happened to your mom, why she'd never come back for you.”

“No,” Mulcahy said, trying to shut the conversation down. “I didn't.”

“Well, that's cold. I thought you was a good kid, the way you stick your neck out for your old man and all, even though he ain't really your old man. Now I find out you don't even care what happened to your real mother. That's stone cold. That's ice. I'm disappointed in you.”

Mulcahy shrugged. “Sorry.” He hoped Tío would drop it, but knew he wouldn't. He was enjoying it too much and information was his thing, knowing something that you didn't know, telling you things you didn't want to hear.

“Tell you what I'll do,” Tío said, taking his phone from his pocket, “you take a guess at what happened to her and if you're close, I'll call my guys and get them to cut your pop loose right now.”

“What if I don't want to play?”

“Then I'll get them to break something instead—a finger, an arm maybe—and I'll stick it on speakerphone so we can both hear him screaming. How's that sound?”

Mulcahy didn't say anything. He was trembling and trying hard not to show it.

“Come on, we got to pass the time somehow. These long desert roads bore the fuck out of me. You see that rock up ahead?” Tío pointed at a large red boulder by the side of the road. “When we pass that, you got to give me your answer. I got to put a time limit on this thing, and don't you be slowing down to stretch it out neither. If you cheat, I'll get them to cut an ear off and you'll still have to give me an answer.”

Mulcahy glanced down at his speed. He was doing a steady fifty. The rock was about a mile away, rising up above the desert like a tombstone. They would reach it in a minute. Maybe two. No more.

He hadn't thought about his mother much in years, blocking her out like a traumatic experience he wanted to forget. When he'd been little and she was freshly gone, his pop had talked about her a lot, like she was away somewhere, visiting a relative or something, and she'd be coming back any day. Whenever they did something fun he'd always say, “We gotta remember to tell your mom about this.” So for a long while she remained present in his life even though she wasn't there. And because of this he genuinely thought she would come back one day and that they'd continue as a family, all together, like his pop clearly wanted to—like he wanted to.

Then, when he was eight or nine, his pop took him to a diner one day and there was a woman there, sitting in a booth, a woman who wasn't his mother. His pop had sat next to her and held her hand and said, “This is Kathleen, she'd like to live with us and be a family; what do you think about that?”

Well, he hadn't thought much, but they bought him a cheeseburger and a chocolate shake and an ice cream after and his pop laughed real hard at her jokes, so he thought that if it made Pop happy, maybe it would be okay.

Kathleen had been nice enough, but it hadn't worked out. Pop stopped laughing at her jokes pretty quick and she got mad at him because he was always on the road and because he spent too much time at the track or in back-room poker games. And because Pop was away so much, he had ended up home alone with Kathleen and, though she was never mean to him, he could tell by the way she looked at him that she didn't like him much. “He sure must have loved her to keep you around like he does,” Kathleen had said to him one day, about a week or so before she moved out for good. “He sure don't love me nearly so much.”

There were a few Kathleens over the years, well-meaning women who thought they could turn his father into a home bird instead of a night owl. All of them went the same way as the first. But with the Kathleens around, Pop didn't talk about his mom anymore, and it was his aunt who finally told him, “You know your mama ain't never coming back for you.”

She had said it one evening when his pop was on the road and he was at the kitchen table in his school clothes eating a Kraft dinner. “Woman like that don't got time for no children. Bad for business is what it is. She stuck around long enough to get her hooks into your daddy, then she took off, leaving you behind like a pair of shoes she got tired of wearing. She picked a good man to dump her child on, I'll give her that much, but I won't give her nothing more. You should forget about her. She's forgotten you by now, if'n she ain't dead in a ditch somewheres.”

“Here comes that rock,” Tío said. “You got an answer for me?”

Woman like that don't got time for no children.

He had found a picture of her once in his father's room, hidden behind a framed school photograph of him that Pop kept on his bedside bureau. It was a flyer for some revue bar featuring a reed-thin, red-haired woman dressed for the tango, all long hair and legs. H
OT
S
ALSA
S
TARRING
B
LAZE
it said. Her face was in profile but he recognized enough of himself in it. The picture was creased, like it had been stuffed in a jacket pocket. The next time he looked for it, it wasn't there. He wondered if one of the Kathleens had found it and made Pop get rid of it. Maybe his old man got rid of it himself.

Mulcahy had hung on to that image of her, young and beautiful, even after he became a cop and saw how fast the street wore down women like she had been, all those crumbling beauties with caricatures of their younger selves painted onto sagging skin, walking the streets and working the bordellos, winding up dead in alleys, or in Dumpsters or abandoned cars, beaten and bloated and tossed aside like sacks of garbage.

Working Vice, he had also seen the sort of lives the kids of these women led: dead eyed and feral, lousy with fleas and stinking of piss, parked in front of cartoon channels while their mamas went to work in the bedroom or sometimes behind a thin blanket tacked to the ceiling to make a divider. That was the life his father had spared him and that was why he owed him so much.

The rock grew big and red by the side of the road and they cruised past it, the sound of the car's engine reflecting back off its side.

“She's dead,” Mulcahy said.

Tío shook his head. “Not good enough. You got to do better than that if you want to win a prize. How'd you reckon she died?”

“Overdose.”

“Final answer?”

“Yes.”

“Died of an overdose. Eeeeergh. Wrong.” Tío swiped the screen of his phone and started reading. “Madeleine Mary Kelly, born April third, 1952, also known as Blaze, Scarlet, Red Riding Hood, Mary Kennedy . . .”

He swiped the phone again and held it out. Mulcahy wanted to knock it from his hand. He wanted to scream and cover his ears so he didn't have to hear whatever Tío was about to tell him.

“. . . is now known as Mary Schwartz and living in Southlake, Texas, with her husband, Garry Schwartz, and their two lovely teenage sons.”

Mulcahy felt like someone had reached into his chest, torn his lungs out, then stomped on them. He couldn't breathe. His ears were singing. He looked at the phone, his eyes struggling to focus on the photo. It showed two boys, awkward and a touch overweight, standing on either side of a country club couple, a balding man with a paunch that strained against the middle of his pink polo shirt, his cookie-cutter corporate wife beside him. She was slightly taller than he was, her red hair straightened and salon shiny, her face collagened and Botoxed and filled with expensive dental work that gleamed from her full smile.

“Eyes on the road,” Tío said, and Mulcahy snatched at the wheel, breathing fast, pulling the Jeep back on the blacktop from where it had almost drifted onto the verge.

“How's that make you feel?” Tío asked, still holding the phone out, taunting him with the photo. “She upped and left you with a stranger, then traded up. Looks like she made a smart choice though, huh? Dumping her unwanted kid on some traveling salesman so she could hook up with Mr. Country Club here. What you think he drives—Lexus? Lincoln Town Car with the full package? She's probably got a Mercedes too, little two-seater in a garage bigger than your old man's
apartment.” He let that thought sink in awhile before continuing. “Mr. Mom here works for some big travel company, something in accounts. Sounds boring as shit to me, but I guess it's nice and safe. How much was it your old man was in to me for by the time you stepped in and settled his debts?”

Mulcahy swallowed. His mouth had gone dry. “Just north of three hundred.”

Tío nodded. “Three hundred g's. I bet this guy earns that in a year—probably more with bonuses and all his health and dental crap. Yep, I reckon your mom made a smart move, dumping you and that loser you call your pop. She saw a chance and she took it. You got to admire someone for doing that.”

“Yes,” Mulcahy replied. “I guess you do.”

He could see buildings on the road ahead, a motel or something, and he fixed his eyes on them to keep from sliding off the road again. Everything he knew about himself had been turned on its head in the space of a few minutes. He had always thought his mom was living some tragic life and that was what had stopped her from coming back or looking for the son she had abandoned. Either that or she was dead. It had never occurred to him that it might be shame that had kept her away: not shame of what she had become but shame of what she had left behind.

The buildings started taking shape and he could see a Texaco sign affixed to a large concrete awning stretching across a six-car forecourt.

“Okay if we stop for a minute?” he said. “I need a bathroom break.”

“Why not,” Tío replied, squinting through the windshield at the old-fashioned gas station with its modern pumps. “We can get us some more gas too. And more cans to put it in.”