End Time (9 page)

“Let me see what you brought.”

At first he seemed confused, then slowly fished a trinkly thing out of his shirt pocket, and a scrap of paper. A hematite earring. A sliver of paper with some writing.

She reached out to touch the earring on the table; not an inch away it skittered from her finger like a Mexican jumping bean. The Senora snatched her claw away with a sharp intake of breath. The sad man started in his chair; then a cloud of suspicion crossed his face: moving tables, floating candles—séance tricks. But he couldn't see what the Senora saw. The earring leapt into her mind: the sound of screaming, a girl screaming, the girl's head was restrained; long black pony-tail grabbed and then came the knife, bad men were going to cut her, men laughing—

Senora Malvedos started to babble, some sort of song or poem she'd never heard before: “
A rag, a bone, a hank of hair!”
She paused and more came, “Love! It's an iron hand in a woman's glove, it's a hawk disguised as a dove, it's a rag, a bone, a hank of hair, it's not fair, it's a nightmare that poets call a beautiful dream.”

She stopped babbling.

Then sat up straight; she knew the fate of that young woman.

“The young lady who wore a trinket like this was kidnapped.”

She reached over the table to the little metallic hematite earring and clasped it tightly in her fingers to keep it from jumping away. The Senora quietly reassured herself the thing was real and not some parlor trick brought into her sanctum by a very clever man. Clever people tried to trick the medium. No, no parlor trick.

“This one.
Lila
. Still lives. You may see her yet.” She watched the sad man's face darken then lighten, as if with a shard of hope. “Show me the note.” He reached for it, touched it with his fingers. To him, nothing happened—to her, to Senora Malvedos, she saw the scrap ignite like flash paper and sail to the ceiling on a sliver of rising ash.

They've been real good. Thanks for everything.

A thread of smoke hung for long seconds in the air; frozen smoke dangling in front of her eyes like the ghost of a lost soul. When she looked back down toward the sad man, he was still holding the unburned scrap in damp, meaty fingers. In that short flash of light and its smoky trail, she'd seen a wall of steel lockers. A coroner or mortuary. An orderly slid a stainless steel slab into the wall, naked feet vanishing into the cold dark. The toe tag read Jane Doe, and a date written in bold red flair; they'd scheduled the body for an autopsy. And Senora Malvedos spoke clearly:

“Eleven-oh-four North Mission Road. Los Angeles, California. Zip code 90033. Telephone 323-343-0512. Business Hours: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. Autopsy day after tomorrow. They call her Sweet Jane because she's so innocent. They tried to be gentle; they tried to be kind.”

The sad man sat back in his chair, all the blood draining from his face. He began to breathe heavily, almost like a stroke was coming. With all his self-control, knowing he'd gotten the worst news possible, he held out Lila Chen's earring again. Senora Malvedos' finger reached to the hematite dangler, but this time the silvery thing hung like a dead weight. Lifeless. The attraction gone.

“And this one?” he asked. “I might still see this one?”

But the hand had left Senora Malvedos; she sighed, exhausted. Alas, there was no more left to tell him, nothing left to learn. The sad man dropped the earring and it fell to the table with a tiny clink. He'd heard her correctly, all right. Yes, he might still see the other girl. He put the trinket away. Found his wallet and fished a wad of bills from it, counting out the Franklins, one-two-three-four …

But the woman across the table merely shook her head.

“I don't want your money. Look after your Frozen Smoke.”

Bhakti started at the use of those two words,
frozen
and
smoke.
Very odd. “That's a special material we make where I work,” he managed to tell her. Senora Malvedos shrugged. To her, frozen smoke simply meant a ghost. A lost soul.

“I only saw your daughter. She's waiting for you.”

*   *   *

A thousand miles away in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, a few people, people that mattered, were beginning to notice Bhakti's absence.

Local tourist brochures, the kind you see stacked in clean plastic holders in trendy gift shops, called Sioux Falls “The best little city in America,” along with the motto, “The heart of America.” Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't—but with a population of 151K, you could hardly call it a city, more like a big town. And if you could stand a winter that felt like
North
Dakota, so much the better.

The company Bhakti worked for—Lattimore Aerospace—was housed in a modest glass-and-steel building. In Sioux Falls, most of the buildings were modest, under eight stories, and Clem Lattimore's world headquarters was no exception, a giant rectangular children's block. The only striking difference was the bronze-colored windows that wrapped around the structure in a seamless band, offset by bluish steel. It even looked like an aerospace building: stoic, advanced, and shiny like a strong face hiding a thousand secrets.

This Saturday afternoon the Lattimore offices were empty, the cubicles and conference rooms, the long laboratories dark and lonely. And as usual William Ohanzee Howahkan had stopped by to see if the boss needed anything.

And there were matters to discuss.

The elevator gently stopped at the private suite at the top of the building. The triple security display lit up. First retinal, then palm print, then voice. He looked at the electric eye so it could look back at him. Put his hand on the glass plate so the database could confirm his handprint and said, “It's Billy.” He looked up at the tiny video camera in the corner of the elevator for good measure, showing his smooth, handsome, Lakota face. The triple security computer took its good time today, so after a moment he repeated himself dryly, “It's Billy,
Mr. Hughes
. Tonto come see if Big Papoose need nappy change.”

A disembodied voice chuckled back at him in the stainless steel elevator, “Hah! Not today, Billy—but come on in anyway.” And the doors whooshed open.

William Ohanzee Howahkan, quite a mouthful.

In Lakota, Ohanzee meant “Shadow,” and Howahkan, “Of the Mysterious Voice.” Billy Shadow of the Mysterious Voice. And not so far off the mark if working for Cowboy Clem was any measure. But it went farther back than that. After his parents passed on was it the mysterious voice that made him walk off the reservation, leaving only his shadow behind? But what was the alternative?

Stay on the rez, drinking welfare for a living? Turn into a social worker; get into the “antiques” business? No … better to leave it all like the broken washing machines on the burnt lawns.

So he enlisted in the army at seventeen, later getting picked for Officer Candidate School, then a sponsorship, a commission at West Point. And to the great dismay of some back home—joined the modern incarnation of the 7th Cavalry, now called the 1st Cavalry. How messed-up was that? The very same outfit his great-great-grandpappy left to rot deep in the Black Hills with arrows planted in their blues. The same blue bellies that had great-great-granny on all fours after the surrender of the Nez Perce. Traitor to his people, they called him.

Sure, some of the hotheads were ready to put his head on a lodgepole. But a word from one of the elders took the heat off at home, and it came to him in Iraq in the desert e-mail tent—that it would be all right for him to return, if that's what he wanted. The simple statement from Granny Sparrow: “You're a warrior now.”

Fair enough. He'd reached his “twenty” in the army, more like twenty-five, seen all the war a man could see and still survive to tell about it—Major Howahkan resigned his commission and took his leave of boots and BDUs. Old Granny Sparrow always thought he looked strong in his battle dress uniform; a modern brave wearing digital camo instead of war paint. But at age forty-three, the retired Major Howahkan still had a whole life to live.

Which is when Tonto found the paleface.

Billy tripped over Clem Lattimore, a lost tenderfoot in the Sonoran Desert with a fractured ankle, a dead cell phone, and a blistered hour away from final dehydration. Billy saw the man lying up against a pretty red boulder, his pants ripped, shirt open, sunburnt to a crisp. Little boy lost, separated from his group along with their sunblock, fruit juice, and evening margaritas. Clearly the easy field trip to the Saguaro National Park had gone the way of
Deliverance
. A Gila monster kept Clem quiet company from a nice warm spot on the rock. Perfectly happy to watch the white man die and do nothing about it.

What had drawn Billy Shadow to the spot was the bird. He'd seen the vulture high in the sky, and there was always something interesting to see under the shade of the vulture's wings. The vast spirit of land and sky ran strong in him; memories of birds singing their morning songs and smart foxes smiling in the tall grass—the “old ways” rattled in his gourd long after Billy put on long pants. The ancient ground, forever in your bones; just the way you looked at things.

A vulture in the sky. A lizard on a rock.

Everything meant something; everything significant, if you could read the signs. Clem Lattimore cracked his blistered eyelids, hearing Billy Shadow's footsteps, and heard for the first time the mysterious voice of salvation.

“You know, Chief,” the voice from the silhouette told him, “you really look like you need a drink.” And before Lattimore knew it, the water bottle splashed his face and came to his mouth. The man wanted to say thank you, to cry—but he was simply too dry for tears. All that came out was, “Dahh…”

“Easy now, Kemo Sabe.” The voice told him. “We're going to find your friends.”

So an accident of fate and the Tonto wisecrack started Billy's second life, getting him a job with one of the richest men in America. And the two were a natural fit: Clem needed an XO, and a US Cavalry major, retired, three months home, who'd saved his life in the desert, couldn't be beat. Besides, Major Billy Shadow, retired or not, knew things besides walking out of the desert alive. And the old Lone Ranger shtick went on from there. Something personal between them. And not for outsiders, who hadn't nearly died or been saved.

*   *   *

Beyond the elevator, Lattimore's private floor engulfed you. Billy called it “the Library”; not just hearth, home, and bed, but something much more—a collection of books and artifacts spanning disciplines and centuries. He'd once joked to Clem, “So you got the Spear of Christ in here somewhere?” But still the Library made a kind of sense; so much of the mind of mankind represented on its shelves and from its spines: literature, poetry, the sciences, history. You could find Alexander Marshack's
The Roots of Civilization
next to Cremo and Thompson's
Forbidden Archeology,
and even Däniken's
Chariots of the Gods.

Billy had spent countless hours after work and even weekends up here reading, trying to separate truth from fantasy, at last exasperated, demanding of Lattimore, “Aren't Däniken with his god's hot rods and Marshack with his knuckle-scraping, hairy moon-counters, cutting notches in pieces of bone, in some way mutually exclusive? We either received our religion, technology, and science, even our DNA, in fallen comet ice from the stars”—he took a breath—“or we dragged ourselves from the slime right here at home, alone. It's either one or the other, don't you think?”

As usual Lattimore sat at his desk, back turned, his swivel chair facing out the bronze-colored window. A wreath of cigar smoke floated above his head, still and nearly frozen. It always reminded Billy of floating snow in the Black Hills, the air so cold the flakes wouldn't really fall, just hover about your face so you could taste them.

“Are they?” Lattimore's voice came back at him. “Mutually exclusive? I suppose. But you can see them as a greater whole. That's why the King James version of
The Bible
along with
The Five Books of Moses
is sitting next to Downing's
The Bible and Flying Saucers.
And beside that
The Nine Doors of the Kingdom of Shadows
by Torchia, burned at the stake by the Inquisition for writing a how-to book on invoking the Devil. And next to that a history of the Vril Society, the Kraut cranks who manufactured Nazi UFOs. The inescapable conclusion I've drawn is that if the Almighty is all-powerful he made Satan too, right? Did life evolve here on Earth alone or was it seeded from far-off stars? Why not both? God made the stars too, didn't he?”

“So that's what Lattimore Aerospace is all about, eh Kemo Sabe?” Billy teased. “Finding Klaatu and his silent servant Gort?” Billy heard Lattimore laugh in his wreath of smoke at the reference to the visitor from outer space Klaatu, better known as Michael Rennie and his invulnerable robot with the Cyclops laser eye in the old sci-fi classic
The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Lattimore cleared his throat and turned from the window. “Well, it's not because I'm so in love with communication satellites—and if I can only reach out with my little pinkie to the stars, why wouldn't I go that far? Why wouldn't anyone? For all Columbus and Vasco de Gama knew they were sailing off a cliff. We know a little bit better now. Just a little.”

Today, as Billy crossed the library Lattimore lit a fresh cigar and swiveled around in his chair to face him. He pushed some papers across the solid surface, personnel files with photos.

“You seen these yet?” A mixture of annoyance and worry fed the lines across Clem Lattimore's forehead. The husky voice slid from Clem's broad throat on a silky carpet of nicotine. “We seem to have a brain drain.”

Billy nodded silently; he'd seen the files late Friday.