End Time (5 page)

The item slanted her way, with bits about what a cocksucker the late and lamented Ricardo Montoya was. Doubtless some of the local Spanish papers were calling him a choirboy. But as it turned out the recently deceased Montoya was part of the VHG gang, the Varrio Hawaiian Gardens gang; a slew of them recently arrested by the Feds for targeting blacks, trying to “eliminate” persons of the African American persuasion from the Hawaiian Gardens suburb in Southeastern LA. As Cheryl and Jane Doe were both “persons of color”—albeit coffee and cream—some wretched bloggers were calling Jane Doe the
Hindu Princess
. In any case, Sweet Jane wasn't lily white—so this whole incident could be tagged on to the U.S. Attorney's spectacular indictment of sixty or so of Varrio's “Hate Gang” members.

Herman played with his cottage cheese. “This hearing is just for show so the undocumented community can wave the La Raza flag and go back home for another taco and trim. So, testify. Let the panel rumble a little.
This isn't going anywhere
. You got a house, you got a mortgage. You're a citizen.”

“That's my problem,” Chippy told him, and for a few long moments Rachel's sullen eyes in the bathroom mirror crept back into her head. The deeper message on Rachel's face as Cheryl's one-and-only came to the inescapable conclusion that she'd bit off more than she could swallow, much more than she bargained for, and a lot less than she could hope to salvage. Sure, if it meant honor and vows Rachel would fight thigh to thigh with her, but that single devastating look told of a thousand days of doubt, a thousand mute nights and morning regrets in the makeup mirror.

The worst of them, that standing thigh to thigh wasn't Rachel's first choice. Just mopping up the trail of mud Chippy had tracked inside their house, the litigation, the depositions, the liens, the writs and appeals—which
were fine
for somebody else—but God, you wouldn't want them on your own living room Bokhara. No cop's salary could possibly clean that rug up.

Cheryl came back to the delicatessen table and Herman's cottage cheese wondering if she'd been talking to herself in public.

“That's my problem,” she repeated, leaving out what she'd been thinking. “Things that aren't going anywhere.” And nevertheless finding the bottom line, “But this might just take everything, Herman. I killed a kid. The family of the bereaved served me. He was a worthless, macho slice-and-dice artist and now he's dead. His mamacita's crying and his name was on my bullet. I'm thinking of moving back east.” She took a breath. “Besides, my father was Italian. I'm half an octomaroon or something.”

“No you're a
complete
maroon if you don't do that hearing; the union can represent or co-represent on the civil suit.” Herman sighed, but hardheaded cops were his specialty. “Like you have a choice. Look, if you were a cookie or a seventeenth-century gentlewoman, I'd name you Lorna Doone. You stood up. You did your job. And you're married to a lawyer, for crying out loud. The little crap-hat would have killed you stone cold if he could have and then bragged about it later. You know you're going to testify. Even if you move, you'll want another job. You'll need a recommendation from the department. You'll have to be cleared. Capping a perp out in LA won't look so bad back east either.”

“I know, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.”

Herman cut a chunk of peach with his spoon, found some cottage cheese for it. “Who says you do? And since when is Gibson an Italian name?”

“It isn't. But Gibone was. I think we were all lucky Great Grandpa Woppo G didn't change it to Gibbon.”

“Well, look at the bright side,” Herman told her. “Once you put all this behind you, leave CHiPs, take a little tip from me, take a little trip—someplace far away where nobody'll call you Chippy anymore.”

Cheryl's angst dissolved like the sugar in her ice tea. “Low Rider” again. What was this, catching? Some kind of mental disease?

Herman pushed his messed-up plate of curds away from him. “So … you need a divorce lawyer too?”

*   *   *

That time she didn't bother answering. It wasn't like that between her and Rachel. Their thing wasn't about
things
. It was about them. Each other. The Big Trust, which a single look in the mirror had shattered. Everything deteriorating from there.… How pitiful, truly pathetic. And moving day had arrived.

A couple of weeks had passed, and now it was Rachel's turn to find the tequila bottle a little too often. She sat at the spectacular safety glass table in the dining room under the $2,000 chandelier she'd gotten half price at the Cherokee Iron Works. The chandelier ran the length of the thick glass like a pool table light, translucent parchment behind paper-thin iron silhouettes marching along its sides. The fancy lamp was called
Cattle Drive
: little doggies and longhorns wandering between cactus and cowboys on horseback. The lamps behind always made it look like sunset. Pure kitsch, but Cheryl loved it. No, not something she could unbolt from the ceiling and take away.

A cloying melancholy had descended on both of them. No shouting, no hair-pulling, no anger or recriminations. No jealous love scenes. And maybe no divorce either, just a separation. It sort of depended on what the lawyers said. There had to be some kind of asset protection, but maybe not. If divorce meant Rachel's liability could be limited, they'd do it. If it didn't … well, Cheryl still had to get away.

“You can take what you want,” Rachel told her.

“I know.”

“We could fight it out here, together.”

“I know.” She took a sip from Rachel's shot glass. “Let's just see how things go, okay?”

But she knew she was lying. Moving back east pretty well broke it. Rachel wasn't about to give up her lawyer job and put the house up for sale. One of the movers rolled an overstuffed wardrobe box toward the front door, its sides bulging. All those party clothes.

Rachel pounded back the rest of the shot. “You're going to be the best-dressed lipstick lez in all of Dutchess County.”

“That's not hard, Sugah.”

“I know.” Rachel reached for the bottle again. “I've been to Dutchess County.”

One of the movers, a bald guy with bulging pecs, popped his head around a hallway corner. “Hey, there's somebody out here for you.”

He meant Cheryl.

*   *   *

She stopped short as she came out the door. A man was waiting by the moving van, dark suit, open collar. Never seen him before. Broad, open face and scruffy graying beard; intelligent, sad, knowing eyes. The fellow seemed a cross between John Q. Citizen and a well-established foreign gentleman, originally from somewhere in northwestern India—now standing in her driveway in American clothes. A guy some people might have called a Dot head or Sabu when he wasn't looking. He'd come in a rental full-size black SUV Ford Explorer, anonymity in four-wheel drive. And he spoke in a whisper-soft voice:

“Miss Gibson,” the man asked. “May I come in?”

Something in his manner—the sincerity and gentleness—made it so she didn't want to refuse. But he could see she was a little apprehensive. “My name is Dr. Bhakti Singh.” That meant nothing to her. He held out a photo of a young lady, smiling with daddy at a birthday party table. Daddy was wearing a silver cone hat. The girl was kissing him on the cheek, like she'd just got her first pony. Sweet Jane. Sweet Jane alive, before she became an armless Jane Doe torso in the back of a Chevy.

“Janet was my daughter.”

“Oh my God, come in.”

They sat at the long glass table; Rachel had magically pulled herself together, tequila bottle back on the shelf, water for green tea on the bright red Viking range. Boy, was she good. But this sudden appearance of Sweet Jane's father stopped Cheryl. How the hell had he found his way to her door? Maybe he read Officer Gibson's name in the papers. But that didn't come close to explaining how he made the leap between Sweet Jane and his
Janet.

The man, apologetic, said, “I'm sorry for disturbing you. I can see you're busy. And I won't take much of your time. The coroner's office gave me your name, after…” He paused to breathe; then with some effort, “… after I identified Janet's body. I hope that was all right?”

“No, please—it's all right.” Still, Cheryl remained confused. “Did you register Janet a missing person? We never got a CODIS hit, nothing. How did you know to come here?”

“Just lucky, I guess.” He looked down at his large hands; they left faint sweat outlines on the safety glass table. “I'm from Texas,” he said with the exhausted look of a man who'd just driven from Texas. “Three weeks ago, my Janet went down to a little border town on the Rio Grande with a friend for a local music festival. And neither of the girls ever came back. I've been looking for her since.”

The green tea arrived; kind of pointless now. Bhakti stared at the steaming cup and nodded at it, as if finally recognizing the stuff. “I don't think Janet's DNA was properly entered into the system—so that's why there was no CODIS recognition. I just—” His eyes clouded over. “Some people have asked me, how it was possible for such a homely man like me to make such a beautiful daughter.” He reached into his breast pocket for a handkerchief. His swarthy face pale and dry but he patted it anyway. “I just came by to say, I know it doesn't make any difference now—” He choked a moment, then regained his voice. “I just came by to say thank you.”

 

4

The Sikh's Wife

That Felix face reached into peoples' lives in the most peculiar ways.

Hours after his daughter had failed to return from the Rio Grande border town music festival, Professor Bhakti Singh lost his only child, his wife, and a chunk of his mind all in the same day. Actually it took nearly two days, the longest of his life. Or maybe it was just Eleanor his wife who lost her mind—when they lost Janet. Or couldn't get her back or—it hurt just to think about it.

Amazing how quickly things could crumble, all in a few hours, making him wonder at everything he'd ever built, through years of struggle—gone in a matter of hours. His CV read like alphabet soup: MA in Applied Physics from the Rajiv Gandhi Technical University, a PhD from the California Institute of Technology, another from MIT in Materials Research.

Then onto real life.

Meeting Eleanor at NASA where he steadily rose with her help to head their radiation materials research team. The idea was to create a woven polyethylene fabric that could be molded around a spacecraft with two goals in mind: preventing punctures from micrometeoroids or space bullets, and attempting to solve the allied problem of solar radiation, capable of frying things flying beyond the Earth's safe atmospheric cloak.

Even though their blessed life didn't work out as planned, Bhakti and Eleanor pursued what they loved. Perhaps their private heaven started with the birth of Janet—but for twenty years Bhakti never quite saw it that way. Except for the night his daughter failed to come home.

Janet's birth wasn't an easy one. When Eleanor's time came, something with the epidural went wrong. The obstetrician called it a one-in-a-million spinal trauma. Maybe the nurses had left her lying on her side too long, Bhakti never really found out; Eleanor lost the use of her left leg, and her right one below the knee. Even with physical therapy, and hobbling around on prosthetic braces, she'd be sitting in a wheelchair for most of the day for the rest of her life. But somehow with each other and with baby Janet to raise, none of this destroyed them. Sure, living on braces or sitting in a wheelchair made things take longer, but Eleanor's sunny disposition helped make things easier.

Yet even as her condition deteriorated with the loss of more personal motor functions, his wife's will to live, to participate and overcome, seemed like a rock on which their family stood. The indignities of an adult in diapers faded to their proper place; another unremarkable aspect of life, no more, no less. So Janet—child, girl, adolescent—didn't think anything was strange in their house growing up: a miracle in and of itself.

Then came the Job. The move from Houston.

From NASA to space tourism, with the fledgling company Escape Velocity, founded by the eccentric but immensely wealthy media master Clem Lattimore—or Cowboy Clem as he was known to many. Besides owning a cable network, a publishing conglomerate, an online You-Buy-Mart, a few of the remaining profitable newspapers in America, and Lattimore Aerospace, none of this was nearly enough for Cowboy Clem—he still lusted after going where no man had gone before. And that meant booking suborbital and soon orbital flights for wannabe Buck Rogers with enough cash in the bank and a hankering for the weightless beyond. It also meant buying up nearly 100,000 acres in Somewhere Texas for his spaceport.

Actually it did have a name: Van Horn.

And as big a bit of nowhere you couldn't find if you were looking for it.

Endless acres of flats and rocky hills; a hunk of desert north of the Rio Grande and an hour east of Laredo. Nothing more than a bus stop of a town; with a traffic light, a Budget Motel, a Budget Rent-a-Car, and any number of Budget Bar-B-Qs. No doubt soon to have helicopter pads in everyone's backyard and airstrips for George Jetson's flying car.

The distance from Houston to Van Horn was six hundred or so miles, leaving a real city, with real hospitals, real universities, a real museum, and real restaurants—yet what smart ole Clem offered Bhakti beat all. The scientist's own budget, his pick of team, a blank check. Cowboy Clem built Bhakti and family a house to suit down to the last detail, wheelchair accessible, the counters, the beds, the bathrooms, wind and solar net metering, backup generator, swimming pool, the works. Not only that, the house was done in four months, before they moved in. Eleanor Singh couldn't say no. She even liked the color.