The Searcher (6 page)

M
AYOR
C
ASSIDY CLOSED THE DOOR OF HIS STUDY, SHRUGGED OFF HIS
jacket, and let it fall to the floor. He stood in the downdraft of the ceiling fan, pulling his string tie loose and undoing the top button of his shirt. His collar was soaked with sweat.

The funeral had turned into a disaster, his big unifying gesture undone at a stroke by the whiff of wildfire. Everyone had drifted away before the ceremony had ended, a few at first, then a stampede as soon as the sounds of sirens had reached them and they'd seen how fast the smoke was rising and which way it was headed. They all had homes and businesses to worry about, so he couldn't blame them, but it wasn't exactly the gesture of community support he had hoped for. There was also the little matter of what might have started the fire, and he didn't even want to think about that.

His phone buzzed in his pocket and his heart clenched in his chest like a hand had taken hold of it and begun to squeeze. He looked down at the crumpled jacket, the black material shivering where the phone vibrated inside it like some large insect had crawled in there and was now trying to get out. There was a small hole in the fabric
and the sight of it made him burn with anger. Damn moths, the house was plagued with them. There had been a Cassidy living in this house ever since Jack Cassidy had built it and now it was all being eaten away, pulled apart fiber by fiber, everything unraveling. He felt embarrassed knowing that he had stood in front of the assembled town with a hole in his jacket—their shabby, moth-eaten mayor.

The phone stopped ringing and silence surged back into his study. It could have been anybody calling. There was a wildfire burning on the edge of town, all kinds of people would be trying to get hold of him, wanting him to lead, wanting him to reassure them, wanting—something. Everyone wanted something, but there was no one there for him. Not anymore.

He glanced over at the photograph on his desk of Stella in the garden, standing under one of the jacaranda trees, Stella with the sun glowing in her long hair, taken about a year before the cancer wore her away to nothing and took her hair along with everything else. He still missed her, six years after he had stood over her grave, and never more than in these last few months when he had badly needed someone to talk to and share the burden of all he'd had to bear, someone to tell him that it was okay to do a bad thing for a good enough reason, and that God would understand.

The phone buzzed again at his feet, like the last effort of a dying insect, then fell silent again.

He tipped his head back and let the cool air wash over him. He felt done in. Defeated. He wanted to lie down on the floor next to his crumpled jacket and go to sleep, close his eyes on his crumbling, moth-eaten world and slide away into blissful oblivion. He half-wished he was a drinking man so he could grab a bottle and disappear into it. But he was a Cassidy and his name was written across half the buildings in town. And Cassidys did not drink, nor did they lie down on
floors and close their eyes to their responsibilities. And this was his responsibility, all of it—the town, the people, the widow he'd left standing alone by her husband's grave, the fire out in the desert—everything. He was trapped here, bound by blood, and by the name he carried, and by the generations of bones lying buried in the ground.

He looked up at the portrait hanging above the great stone fireplace, Jack Cassidy's eyes staring sternly back at him across a hundred years of history, as if to say, I didn't build this town from nothing only for you to run away and let it die.

“I've got this,” Cassidy whispered to his ancestor. “I'm not going anywhere.”

The desk phone rang, sharply and suddenly, its old brass bell cutting right through the silence. It echoed off the oak paneling and leather-bound books lining the walls. Cassidy plucked his jacket from the floor, slipped his arms into the sleeves, and stepped out from beneath the cool flow of air. It made him feel more official, wearing the jacket, and he felt he would need authority for whatever conversation he was about to have. He took a deep breath, as if he was about to dive into one of the cold-water lakes up in the mountains, and snatched the phone from its cradle.

“Cassidy.” His voice sounded as though it was coming from a long way off.

“It's Morgan.”

Cassidy collapsed into his chair with relief at the police chief's voice. “How bad is it?”

“Bad. It's the plane.”

Cassidy closed his eyes. Nodded. The moment he'd seen the smoke rising he'd feared this. “Listen,” he said, naturally easing into command. “I'll call our associate, tell him what happened here. We'll work something out, some sort of compensation. Accidents happen. Planes crash. I'm sure he'll understand. I'm sure he'll—”

“No,” Morgan said. “He won't. Money won't work here.”

Cassidy blinked, not used to being contradicted. “He's a businessman. Things go wrong in business all the time and when that happens there has to be some form of restitution. That's all I'm talking about here. Restitution.”

“You don't understand,” Morgan said. “Nothing can make up for what happened here. There is no amount of money that can fix this, trust me. We need to come up with another plan. I'm not going to talk about this on the phone. I need to head back out to the fire, but I'll swing by your office first. Don't move and don't call anyone, okay—not until we've talked.”

M
ULCAHY EASED OFF THE HIGHWAY ONTO THE UP RAMP OF THE
B
EST
W
ESTERN.

They were driving through Globe, a mining town that had seen better days and was clinging on in hope that it might see them again.

Javier kissed his teeth with his oversize lips and shook his head at the gray concrete-and-brick motel complex. “This it? This the best you could manage?”

Mulcahy drove slowly around the one-way system then swung into a parking bay outside a room he had checked into the previous night under an assumed name. He had avoided all the independents and franchises because he didn't want some overattentive owner-manager giving him that extra bit of service you didn't get from the chains. He didn't want good service and he didn't want the personal touch, he wanted the impersonal touch and some bored desk clerk on minimum wage who would hand over the room key without glancing up from their phone when he checked in.

He cut the engine and took the keys out of the ignition. “Give me five minutes, then follow me inside.”

“Five minutes? The fuck we got to wait five minutes for?”

“Because a white guy entering a room on his own, no one notices. A white guy and two Mexicans, everyone notices because it looks like a drug deal is going down and somebody might call the cops.” He opened his door and felt the dry heat of the day flood in. “So give me the five minutes, okay?”

He got out and slammed the door before Javier had a chance to say anything then walked over to a solid gray door with 22 on it. With the engine and air switched off, it would become stifling in the car fast. He'd give them maybe three minutes before they followed him in. Three minutes was all he needed.

He unlocked the door and opened it onto a dim, depressing room with two lumpy beds and an old-style wooden-clad TV. There was a kitchenette at the back leading to a bathroom—the standard layout of pretty much every motel he'd ever stayed in.

He pulled his phone from his pocket, checked the WiFi connection, then opened a Skype application, selected Home in the contacts, and raised it to his ear.

A coffin of an A/C unit rattled noisily beneath the window, moving the gray sheer curtain above it and filling the room with cool air and the smell of mildew. Outside Mulcahy could see the Cherokee with the outline of Javier in the front seat. A dark blue Buick Verano was parked next to it, covered with a fine desert dust that spoke of the miles it had traveled to end up in this nowhere hub of a place. Salesman's car.

His old man had driven a Buick when he'd worked the roads, hawking office supplies then pharmaceuticals all over the Midwest. Mulcahy must have been only, what, ten or eleven at the time? Mom had been long gone, so it can't have been much earlier. His pop would get him to wash and wax the car every Sunday afternoon in exchange for five bucks that had to last him through the week. He would drive him to school in the shiny car on a Monday morning then take off,
heading for different states and places that sounded exotic to an eleven-year-old kid who didn't know any better: Oklahoma City, Des Moines, Shakopee, Omaha, Kansas City. His old man would always come back late on a Friday, pick him up from his aunt's or, later on, when it was clear Mom wasn't coming back, some girlfriend or other, and the Buick would always be covered in dust, exactly like the Verano parked outside.

The phone connected and Mulcahy's own voice told him he wasn't home. “Hey, Pop, if you're there, pick up.”

He listened. Waited. Nothing. He hung up, found a new contact, and dialed.

It connected, his dad's voice this time. “Leave a message. I'll call you.”

“Pop, it's me. Listen, if you're not at the house, then stay away. Don't go back there for a while, okay? Call me when you get this. Everything's fine, just . . . call me.”

He hung up. Everything was not fine. This was not how it was supposed to go. Someone had changed the script and now his father was missing. He checked the time. Tío would be wondering why he hadn't called. Most likely he already knew. He should have told his father to go on a trip, get him out of the way, in case something like this happened, only Tío's men would have been watching and they would have grabbed him anyway. About a year back one of Tío's lieutenants had been turned by the Federales. He'd promised to give them a large shipment and several key players in Tío's organization in exchange for immunity and a new life. The day before the shipment, the lieutenant had sent all his family away somewhere—and Tío had been watching. The Federales found the lieutenant and his whole family a week later, lined up and headless in a ditch along the border. The message was clear:
I am watching. You will be loyal or you will be dead, and so
will anyone you hold dear.
So Mulcahy had left his father where he was. And now the plane had crashed and he couldn't get hold of him and everything was fucked and he had to un-fuck it fast.

Sunlight flashed on the passenger window of the Cherokee as Javier threw it open and escaped from the oven of its interior. He was furious. Carlos got out too, head down, eyes jumping, and they shambled toward the door, doing the most piss-poor impersonation of two people trying not to look suspicious that Mulcahy had ever seen. He selected a new contact from the Skype menu and raised the phone back to his ear just as a heavy knock thudded on the other side of the door.

“It's open,” he called out and Javier burst in.

“The fuck's up with that, leaving us out in the car like a pair of motherfuckin' dogs?”

The phone clicked as it connected. “Tío,” he said, as calmly as he could manage but loud enough for Javier to hear. “It's Mulcahy.”

Javier stopped dead in the doorway, so suddenly that Carlos bumped into him from behind.

“There was a problem at the pickup.” Mulcahy was looking at Javier but talking into the phone. “The plane never showed. We didn't collect the package. We don't have your son.”

S
OLOMON WALKED QUICKLY, KEEPING TO THE SHADOWS OF THE BOARDWALK
and out of the sun, feeling the warm, worn timbers beneath the soles of his bare feet. He didn't look back at the hospital. He would hear if anyone was following him.

He took deep breaths to try to calm himself, so he could think, and smelled the town all around him, paint and dust and tar paper and decay. He felt calmer now that he was out of the confines of the ambulance with its sickening movement.

Why did he dislike confinement and crave freedom so strongly?

Maybe he had been incarcerated, even though he hadn't shown up on the NCIC. Perhaps he had been imprisoned another way.

Ahead of him the church glowed, as if it were lit from within, and towered over the surrounding buildings. There was a town hall, a museum, and a grand house partly visible behind a screen of jacaranda trees, its roof clad in copper like the church and similarly aged, suggesting it had been built at the same time. The rest of the buildings making up the street and lining the boardwalk were all variations on the same theme, souvenir shops selling the same things: flakes of gold
and copper floating in snow globes; treasure maps with “Lost Cassidy Riches” written on them in old-style block letters; T-shirts with the name of the town printed in a similar style; and Jack Cassidy's memoir stacked high in every window.

Solomon pulled his own copy from his pocket and flicked through the pages, hungry to see what else was written inside it, hoping something might spark a new memory. Apart from the dedication the only other thing he found was a single line at the end of the book that had been underlined:

I had always suspected the book contained a clue that would lead me to riches, but by the time I found it and understood its meaning it was too late for me and so I resolve to take the secret of it to my grave.

More secrets, but none that interested him. He turned back to the dedication and studied the handwriting, neat and smooth and written with a wide-nibbed pen. It appeared formal and old, but he didn't recognize it. Maybe there were clues in the printed words. He flicked to the first page and started to read:

It is, I suppose, a curse that befalls anyone who finds a great treasure that they must spend the remainder of their life recounting the details of how they came by it . . .

He continued reading, sucking in Jack Cassidy's story as fast as he could turn the pages, his head filling with all the images and horrors Jack Cassidy had encountered on his odyssey through the desert. The memoir was ninety pages long and he had finished it by the time he was halfway to the church. He turned to the photo on the cover
again and wondered why James Coronado might have given this book to him. Perhaps he hadn't. Perhaps he wasn't even Solomon Creed. Except he felt that he was. The name fit and so did the jacket. That had his name in it too.

He slipped the book in his jacket and read the label stitched inside his pocket: “
Ce costume a été fait au trésor pour M. Solomon Creed”—
This suit was made to treasure for Mr. Solomon Creed.

This suit . . .

So where was the rest of it? Why did he have only the jacket? Where were his shoes? And how in Jesus's name could he read French? How could he read English so fast, for that matter?

“
Je suis Solomon Creed
,” he said, and the language felt comfortable in his mouth, his accent smooth and slightly thick and syrupy—southern French, not northern Parisian.

Southern French! How did he even know that? How could he speak French and know the origin of his accent and yet have no memory of learning it or speaking it before or of ever being in France. How much of himself had he lost?

Some smaller writing was stitched on the edge of the label: “Fabriqué 13, Rue Obscure, Cordes-sur-Ciel, Tarn.”

The Tarn. Southwestern France. Cathar country. Formed in 1790 after the French Revolution. Capital Albi. Birthplace of Toulouse-Lautrec. Fine medieval cathedral there, larger even than the church he was now walking toward. Built of brick not stone.

He hit himself on the side of the head to silence the noise.

“Shut up,” he said aloud, realizing how crazy he would appear to anyone watching. He looked around. No one was. Maybe he was genuinely crazy, some delusional freak with an equally freakish mind: all this information tumbling through it like white noise and none of it any use.

“I am a crazy man.” He stated it, as if admission might be the
first step toward a cure. He said it again, then repeated it in French, Russian, German, Spanish, Arabic. He hit himself on the head again, harder this time, desperate to make it all stop or coalesce into something useful. He needed to tune out the noise and focus only on the concrete things that might help him remember who he was, the things that bound him to his forgotten past—the suit, the book, the cross around his neck. Physical things. Undeniable.

He reached the end of the boardwalk, stepped out of the shadows and into the stinging heat of the sun. The church was even more impressive up close, its spire forcing his eyes up to heaven, the way ecclesiastical architecture was designed to do.

Know your place
, it seemed to murmur.
Know that you are insignificant and God is almighty.

There was a large sign planted in the ground beside a pathway leading up to the church with Church of Lost Commandments written across it in copper-colored letters, a reference to something he'd read in Jack Cassidy's memoir.

He continued past the sign and down the pathway toward the church. There was a fountain over to one side with a split boulder at the center and marks on it showing where water had once flowed over the stones. He recognized this from the memoir too—water coming from a split boulder, a miracle out in the desert commemorated here by a fountain that was no longer running.

He drew closer to the door and saw the words cut into the stone above it, the first of the lost commandments the church had been named for:

I

THOU SHALT HAVE

NO OTHER GODS BEFORE ME

It reminded him of the No Guns signs posted outside the old saloon on the outskirts of town; no firearms allowed there, no other belief systems allowed here. His eyes lingered on the carved numeral, the same mark he carried on his arm. Maybe it was not an
I
but a number. Or maybe it was nothing at all and the church would hold no answers either.

“Let's see, shall we?” he whispered, then passed into the cool, shadowy relief of the entrance and through the door into one of the oddest churches he had ever set foot in.