End Time (27 page)

Something in the way this bad man looked at the Senora forced her to shudder; Inspector Frederick knew a lot about her. About what she saw and what she knew about him. Someone had tipped him off. The vague impression surfaced: of long legs stretching from a padded chair while a preppy black kid tapped away on a keyboard nearby, the sound of jet engines whirring.… Nothing more.

When the inspector smiled, Senora Malvedos saw that brassy big woman with the limp, again, Big Sis—the saloon keep worried about her brother, Webster. The weasel knew all about them.
Right now, right this very second the big brassy woman was tending bar in her roadhouse, pulling a tap handle. She slid the suds to her brainy brother sitting on a barstool. “Here's mud in your eye,” Big Sis told him while he laughed, hoisted the mug, and said, “To frozen smoke and comet dust!” Webster took a swallow. “You won't see me for a while, but don't worry. I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be.”
But the cop wasn't concerned with them. The two were just where they were supposed to be. No urgency.

Inspector Frederick had come to clean things up; each little tick of his face told her more and more.
Everyone—Daddy Long Legs, the preppy kid, the bad cop—was looking for a girl, and looking for the two searchers who were looking for the girl.
The Inspector even knew about the Senora's session with the sad man from India. It was that Indian scientist who filled the space behind his eyes. The sad, gentle Sikh. The bad cop knew the fellow's name. And most importantly knew who the poor man was looking for. The lost young lady Lila Chen, surviving daughter of Professor Bhakti Singh's friends and colleagues Wen and Amy Chen. He even knew the Senora's own words,
“This one. Lila. Still lives. You may see her yet.”

The unreliable goons Inspector Frederick had assigned the job of kidnapping the filly were missing in action, fled to parts unknown—gone rogue. The weasel cop had picked up the girl's scent in Los Angeles, but lost it again. Now a twinge of concern;
Dammit!
the Punjab scientist and his new copper gal pal could follow the trail too. So he was rolling up the scent from where it started. Right here in Las Cruces. The Senora felt his very thoughts …
maybe the old fortune-teller frump knew more than she was telling.

But how this weasel got the Senora's locale and street address, Senora Malvedos had no clue. Someone else was pointing the weasel in her direction. Again, the whisper of jet engines in a luxurious Gulfstream cabin … long legs stretched out from a padded chair, expensive tweed trousers, polished wing tips.

Inspector Frederick came to the table and paused, glanced at the chair. “May I?”

“Everyone is welcome here.”

The chair scraped; he sat, his Arnold Palmer sports coat bunching more around his armpits; she could see the butt of his gun staring at her from behind the flap of his jacket. He carefully put the statue of a saint between them. Little Maria came to her side and clutched her hand. Senora Malvedos looked at her protégé and quietly told her, “Go to Nona's. Tell her what we want for dinner.”

That was a code between them. It meant,
Run away and hide.
And since the weasel was totally absorbed in the old woman before him, the secret warning glanced off his mind and vanished into thin air. Little Maria sweetly said, “Okay!” and trotted from the room with a coy look over her shoulder. He barely noticed.

Senora Malvedos and the bad policeman sat in silence. The saint he'd picked from the table in the parlor was Dona Sebastiana. Santa Muerte. Saint Death. And this lady had more names than a Spanish noble family. Nina Santa, Holy Girl. La Flaca, the Skinny One. Senora de la Noche, the Lady of the Night.

Condemned by the church, but adored by those on the lower stratum of society: the pimps and the prostitutes, tamale vendors, pickpockets—an endless legion of the supplicant. Anyone who feared the random violence of the streets. The old fortune-teller's copy of Santa Muerte was an opulent one. A hooded skeleton covered in a glittering robe of red and gold, hung with fake pearls and silver trinkets, and in her skeletal hand a tiny intricate bouquet of bright flowers.

Inspector Frederick cleared his throat and found a cigarette. “May I?” he asked again. The woman across from him shrugged, found an ashtray, and slid it across the table. The rotten cop contemplated Dona Death for a moment.

“I understand that ancient Mexicans used to tie this girl up to a post and beat her if she didn't give them what they wanted.”

“People desperate for salvation or miracles do a lot of things,” Senora Malvedos told him. “For my part, I never threaten almighty powers with violence.”

He inhaled and let the serpent of smoke float across the room. “Don't you think it's really the other way round? Powers we don't control threatening
us
with violence? Been to Chicago lately? In my lovely city of Los Angeles, we've essentially given up. Our very own LAPD public database omits nearly forty percent of any given year's crimes. Better not to write it down. Wouldn't want to alarm the public, now would we?”

He didn't seem to care whether she answered or not. He leaned across the table and his jacket fell open, blatantly showing the butt of the gun.

“Where are they?” he asked quietly.

“They who? Which they?”

Inspector Frederick's face became drawn and pale—capable of anything. Softly he told her, “Don't play with me.”

Senora Malvedos looked at the statue of Dona Death on the table. The skull face stared with open eyes, almost a touch of pity. And Senora M implored her,
Please make it quick.
The vise at the back of her neck squeezed a little tighter, and she saw how it had happened to the girl. A glimmer here, a fragment there. Yes, the Chen girl still lived; everyone might see her yet
.

The goons had them in the van, tearing off their clothes, dumping the torn rags in a pile along with their cell phones on the railroad tracks. A man's hand held a bloody ear, almost fondling it. Laughing. “Who's gonna drop it on Mama Chink's lawn?” Then the sound of tires squealing along the road.
Senora M turned her face from the statue on the table, pressing her temples to make the vision go away. She told him what she knew:

“The
cucarachas
you put on the job, the local chapter of the Kitty Kat gang, got carried away. They were just supposed to grab the two girls. Which they did; they found your prospects. But they took too much rainbow dust. And forgot to cut it. Too pure.
Muy puro.
Then they went haywire. Sold Sweet Jane for drugs; maimed Panda girl and now they carry her as a freak in a traveling circus. They don't want to be found. Your mistake was leaving such an important task to lunatics. Now you lost the Chinese girl. Your last best prospect and there's no time to locate another. The Kit-Cat clock says it's thirteen to twelve. The Tall Man isn't happy.”

The inspector's narrow face twisted at her. “You say
my
mistake? Like those body snatchers were
mine
? Like I picked them?” His skinny chicken neck quivered.

“I didn't pick them. They were
His
.” Inspector F's eyes bored across the table. He leaned a little closer over the table, his suit jacket open, the gun nearly slipping from his armpit. Senora Malvedos shrugged. Did it really matter who picked who? The world was teeming with available scum. The Kitty Litter Map in the LA precinct men's room scrolled across her eyes, then expanded from coast to coast, telling the tale. Scores of smiling kitty cat dots splattering the map. Almost like the devil had put out a bounty:
WANTED: PANDA GIRL—BIG REWARD.
Everyone was hunting for Lila Chen, leaving a trail of bodies behind when none of the victims turned out to be the girl they wanted.

“
La cucarachas.
Every cockroach in America is looking for that girl,” she said. “But no one will find her as long as she's with that traveling freak show that snatched her.”

And this seemed to relieve the inspector a little. He wasn't alone in failure—not now at least. There was still hope he could fix his little problem. Even with competition.

“What about that pathetic scientist and that dyke cop?”

Senora Malvedos sagged in her chair. Nothing to tell him. Nothing that would help. She looked to the statuette again, the grinning smile, the empty eyes. “Burgers and fries. Malted milk.
Justly famous since 1939.
” That's all that came.

And the knowing ended there. The touch gone, the vise on her neck fading like the smoke from the inspector's crushed cigarette in the ashtray. Her head fell to her breast, exhausted. Santa Muerte's eyes were no longer speaking to her—a mere figure of a saint. Inspector Frederick took the gun from under his armpit.

“Thank you for your cooperation, Senora Malvedos. You've been very helpful. Now I'd like to talk to your Little Maria. Maybe you can tell me where she likes to hide.”

The bad cop left the fortune-teller's with nine bullets in his clip instead of ten. A dozen paces out the door he turned the block, walked down an alley, and paused. He looked down at his feet, then knelt to a foot-by-foot square of grillwork in the side of the building about the size of a dog door. The grillwork was metal and meshed over with a lint-covered mosquito screen—an old exhaust duct from a basement commercial drier. He pried the mosquito screen free, and the grillwork came off with it. His flashlight lanced down the metal air tunnel. Ten feet in, Senora Malvedos' Lil' Maria stared back at him. She crouched like a frightened rabbit, blinking at the light. Inspector Frederick let the thought of his presence sink in. Would it really be necessary for him to pull his gun?

“Hi,” he said.

*   *   *

Billy Shadow had been driving all night, hoping to make it in time for the Wild 3 satellite recovery at the Dugway Proving Ground, just like Lattimore wanted. West on I-70 through Utah, to 36-N up by Provo; then headed west again onto a nothing blacktop, Route 199. Lattimore had texted him a brief update:
Clearance ID confirmed Dugway. Hurry up.

Alas, Billy was already four hours late for the Wild 3
Stardust
touchdown; the probe must already have landed as it was due to hit Mother Earth around 4 a.m.; but hopefully he'd be able to ascertain the performance of the company's Aerogel particle collector anyway.

A gray dawn came, overcast, raining hard. He'd turned off the AC hours ago, and now the heater blasted warm air everywhere in the minivan. Route 199 led to the long-lost town of Dugway, Utah. The old town was mostly gone now, and if anyone wanted a Motel 6 or a Comfort Inn they'd have to go over to Provo or Salt Lake City—same for a Slurpee or a beer. This was U.S. Army country, home of the military's Dugway Proving Grounds—the government's biological and chemical testing site a few miles south of the Great Salt Lake. About a million acres of nuttin', honey. And the best landing area tax money could buy.

When Billy cracked the window for a little air, a clammy blast filled the car, and he shut it again. For some while the memory of old Grandma Sparrow—her lined and withered face—floated behind his eyes. Her smiling lips moving silently, she was trying to tell him something; one word, a single word: “Good.” That's what she was trying to say. Glad he was doing the right thing. On the right path.

The road led to a cluster of well-planned streets, grassy lawns, multistoried buildings behind wire fencing, and warning signs, a number of them reading
BE PREPARED TO STOP
—
the army's way of getting you to pay attention, as repetition works every time. He turned onto a quarter mile of pavement past a large granite sign reading
DUGWAY PROVING GROUNDS
toward the main gates and checkpoint, where another sign told him
DO NOT BACK UP.

The two soldiers on duty looked as if they were expecting him and were not the slightest bit tired at 5 a.m.—freshly shaved, alert, exuding a kind of professional competence and reserve. A contagious calm that everything was all right, just the way it was supposed to be. Dawn or no dawn, rain or shine, day or night. Billy powered down his window and handed over a wad of identification through the open window of the guard post, the trump card being his Lattimore Aerospace ID. The young sergeant took it and handed it to a lieutenant who couldn't have been a year older than a junior at Princeton. The older one began running various pieces of ID under a scanner.

“Am I too late for the recovery?”

“Couldn't say,” the young sergeant replied. “You're not the first to arrive, but I don't think you'll be the last.”

The wad of Billy's identification came back through the open driver's window. Inside the reinforced booth a machine hummed, automatically contacted Lattimore Aerospace, paused for confirmation, then printed his laminated visitors' tag. The sergeant clipped it to a metal necklace, handing it through the window. The visitors' tag showed Billy's official Lattimore corporate photo, along with his thumbprint and a speckled bar code with God knows what else. Probably his service record.

Yes, they knew all about him.

“Please wear this tag at all times, Major Howahkan. The visitors' parking lot is up and to the right. The public relations offices are in the first building at the top of the lot. The public relations officer will meet you inside the hospitality area. Please leave your car unlocked and the keys in the ignition.” A tiny smile. “Or we'll tow it out to the range.” The smile went away. “Welcome to Dugway Proving Grounds.”

The soldier saluted, and the reinforced window slid closed. Billy Shadow saluted back and nudged the car forward. He drove through the first of two gates. An electric arch of sensors scanned the minivan; when the car passed the automobile-scan a green signal light allowed him to proceed. Another gate slid open, and the car clanked over a grate of traffic control teeth—tire rippers to stop any vehicle slapped into reverse. No second thoughts allowed. One way forward, no way back.