Unassigned Territory (27 page)

“Just sightseeing. What’s the problem?”

The officer didn’t say anything right away. He continued to look around the car. “May I see your driver’s license?” he asked. The other man, Harlan noticed, had by now taken up a position at the opposite window where he, too, stood looking into the car. Harlan pulled his wallet from his hip pocket, flipped it open and passed it to the man. “Registration,” the man asked.

Harlan took some papers down from the visor above his head. “It’s rented,” he said. “I’ve been doing business in Las Vegas.” The man looked at the paperwork. He looked at Harlan. “You get that eye in Vegas?”

The question caught Harlan flat-footed and he was a moment in replying. At last he smiled. “Had a little accident,” he said.

The man leaning toward the window did not return the smile, “Traffic accident?”

“No.” Harlan hesitated once more, thinking how ridiculous this was. “I slipped,” he said. “Found some wet concrete during those rains.”

The man looked once more at the papers Harlan had given him. The man on the other side of the car was now looking into the backseat, trying to see if anything was on the floor. Harlan rubbed at his cheek, feeling his right eye twitch. It was very quiet and Harlan could hear the boots of the officer on the passenger side of his car as they twisted the gravel beneath them. The air was warm and dry and the rays of sunlight had begun to lengthen across the spines of the ridges, giving the sky an orange, dusty look. To Harlan’s left the mountain peaks had snow on them and in the canyons the shadows were blue and purple in the dusty light.

“I’ll be a minute,” the man with Harlan’s papers said. He went with them back to one of the cars. The other man was in the back now, looking down on the trunk, and Harlan could see the sunlight glinting off the gold-rimmed shades. The soldiers in Liberia had worn gold-rimmed aviator shades too—some of them, courtesy, Harlan had learned later, of the U.S. Air Force. Harlan rested his hands on top of the wheel. He moved his head from side to side in an effort to loosen the muscles in his neck. Whenever the brothers in Liberia were stopped by soldiers they were asked for party cards. Everyone was supposed to carry such a card—proving loyalty to one of the political parties active in the country. The Friends, of course, refused to do this. Their refusal was considered an act of sedition.

Harlan looked toward the canyons, the rugged snow-capped peaks. At last the man returned with his license and vehicle registration. “You can turn around here,” he said. “The dirt’s hard enough on the shoulders.”

“Is there any access to Table Mountain?” Harlan asked.

“Not tonight,” the man told him.

Harlan started the car. It took him a couple of passes to get the thing turned around. “Don’t make ’em like this anymore,” one of the men said. Harlan agreed that they did not.

“Try Death Valley,” the man who’d taken Harlan’s papers said. “Sightseeing’s better there anyway.”

Harlan nodded. As he made the turnaround he thought of his little puzzle. He tried to decide what this did for it. If it did anything at all. He had hoped for more. It seemed all he was able to manage was a three-and-a-half-hour drive bookended by men with guns who wanted to tell him what to do. Maybe he should put them in the puzzle too. It was something to think about. The rest of what there was to think about, backtracking now, toward a reddening sky, were the varieties of unpleasant shit which must have come down out there somewhere in the desert, come down hard enough to bring out the Rangers and close the roads, and to wonder—if his hunch was anywhere close to being right—if his boy had been there when it had.

•     •     •

As it turned out, Harlan did not have to wonder about the shit for long. He found that out in the first town he came to—a dismal-looking place by the name of Trona. He’d noticed the name when he’d passed it on the way up—a sign saying TRONA. Death Valley. There was an inn he’d heard of in the valley and he had decided that he would head in that direction—get a shower, a decent meal, a decent night’s sleep, then think about what to do next. Lately a lot of people had been telling him what to do next. He found that what he wanted was some time to think about it for himself. He also found that talking to the Rangers had given him a thirst and he stopped in Trona for a beer.

He planned to drink the beer in the car, and stopped at the first place he saw, a market at the edge of the highway, and that was how he discovered what had closed the roads. It was all right there on the front page of the
Trona Star Eagle.
BODIES FOUND NEAR DOCTOR’S DOME was how someone had chosen to put it. Harlan found the paper lying on a bench near some vending machines.

There were two photographs accompanying the story. One was a picture of one of the people who had been killed. The photograph was of poor quality and the name that went with it meant nothing to Harlan. The second photograph contained a peculiar-looking building identified as the late Ceton Verity’s Electro-Magnetron. The bodies, Harlan read, had been found near the site of the building. There were three bodies altogether and as yet two remained unidentified. The bodies had been mutilated, apparently in some ritualistic way: certain organs—the article was not specific—were still missing.

By the time Harlan had finished with the newspaper the last of the light had drained from the sky and a handful of stars lay scattered above him. As he walked back toward his car a cool wind whipped the cuffs of his slacks about his ankles. He sat heavily in the front seat and squeezed the back of his neck with his right hand. At his side the two bottles of beer squeaked against one another in the brown paper bag, which had begun to go wet beneath his hand. It suddenly occurred to him that he’d been here, in the desert, for one week. It felt like a very long time. It felt like a long way from home and he found it remarkable to think that if he wanted to he could be back in Los Angeles before the sun came up. He started the car and drove east, into the heart of the desert.

By the time he reached the summit of the range which formed the western wall of Death Valley a full yellow moon had risen to face him from the crest of the valley’s opposing wall and what looked to be the entire valley lay spread before him in a kind of snowy splendor—a lunar landscape of pans and flats and jagged ridges. To the north a sea of sand dunes glistened in the pale light. It was a spectacular vista and he realized he had timed his arrival at the summit perfectly—meeting the moon like this, the valley between them. It had happened purely by chance, of course. One of life’s little gifts. Harlan polished off the last beer and began his descent.

He was bone-tired, the moon high and white, by the time he maneuvered the coupe into a sparsely populated parking lot before a large opulent-looking building of Spanish design. An oasis of cottonwood and palm had grown up around the building and when Harlan killed the engine he could hear the sound of water tumbling over rocks somewhere in the darkness. There were some lights up on a hillside back of the building and a few brilliant patches of white stone were illuminated before the blackness of the night sky.

Harlan sat for several minutes, listening to the water, observing the Milky Way as it curved overhead. It seemed to him an impossible number of stars filled the sky here—nothing at all like the sky over Los Angeles. Harlan put the empty beer bottles back in the brown paper bag and stuck it behind his seat. He got out and stretched his legs, took his suitcase from the trunk. He’d driven to Table Mountain on a hunch. He hoped now the hunch had been wrong. Walking toward the building, he began to think once more of his puzzle but pushed it from his mind. A swimming pool would be nice, he thought. A couple of martinis. A steak. A Jacuzzi. Christ, there was no end to it. He walked toward the lights and the sound of water.

T
he Blue Heaven Motel had a pool. It was a small kidney-shaped affair which, had there been water to fill it, might, Delandra guessed, have been good for about three strokes. As things stood now it wasn’t good for much of anything. The motel consisted of about a dozen identical rooms which had been built in one long row set at a right angle to the road. At the end of the motel closest to the road there was a gravel lot and a tattered neon sign. At the other end was the pool. There were two wooden dressing rooms near the pool. His and Hers. They were painted blue but the paint was weathered and peeling. It was white beneath the blue and green beneath that. There was a concrete slab around the pool and half a dozen rusted metal deck chairs—survivors of a more prosperous time. Or perhaps, Delandra thought, only a more optimistic time. It was hard to imagine there had ever been anything like prosperous for the Blue Heaven.

Delandra was seated in one of the chairs. She was smoking a joint, her last, and staring into the bleached interior of the empty pool. She was wearing the rose-colored glasses with which the late Mr. Ott had provided her but they did little to brighten the view.

If she looked to the right she could see her car, or at least the front end of it, sticking out from behind the dressing rooms. It was not a pretty sight. All four tires had been slashed—a kind of going-away present from Jack and Lyle. If she looked to the left she was treated to the sight of Obadiah Wheeler. He was with Bill, of course. The two of them were standing near the crest of a small ridge at the far end of the pool—looking for time nodes, no doubt. Delandra shook her head and looked away. She looked at her car and took a drag on the joint, held the smoke down as long as possible. It would have been bad enough just being stuck here, no tires, no money, no Thing. Still, they could have done something. They could have sold the car for junk, pawned the guitar, started out on foot for Christ’s sake. Not her favorite mode of travel, but what the hell. They could be history in this dump right now, if not for Bill Richards and Judy Verity. She coughed and adjusted her shades. The big If. Like some grim specter it darkened her morning. Nor was she a stranger to its shadow.

Bill and Judy had arrived the morning after, which was how Delandra chose to think about the day following the visit of Jack and Lyle. Obadiah had gone out to check the car and Delandra had been left alone to answer the knock on the door.

She had taken an almost immediate dislike to the couple she had found there, even before she knew who they were or what they wanted. There was just something about them. Judy was small and blond. Her hair was short and tucked behind her ears. She wore silver wire-rimmed glasses. She was not unattractive. She reminded Delandra of someone you might find on a college campus taking a degree in English literature. Bill Richards was much larger. He had the look of a good-natured real estate salesman who had played football in college. They introduced themselves as Bill Richards and Judy Verity.

“As in Ceton Verity?” Delandra had asked. “His daughter,” Bill had replied. And Delandra had looked, not without some sense of wonder, into the pale blue eyes of someone who might after all be somehow like herself.

“The guy who built the Electro-Magnetron?” Delandra had asked, just to be sure.

Judy Verity nodded, solemnly.

“Oh, daddy’s way out there,” Delandra had suggested, looking for some trace of sisterhood in that frail face. She had drawn a blank and it was all downhill from there.

Delandra was disturbed in the midst of these recollections by the sound of loose rock tumbling into the empty pool. She looked up as Bill and Obadiah made their way down the side of the ridge. She was by now trying to hang on to her joint with a bobby pin. She sucked at it once more and burned her lip, then let the roach fall to the concrete beneath her. Too little too late. She eyed the remains with contempt. “I didn’t know your organ would be so small,” she said. “I didn’t know I would be playing in a cathedral,” he said. It was a joke. She didn’t know why she thought of it now. She didn’t even like jokes. Maybe that was it. Maybe it was something to remind her of how little she liked what had become of her and Obadiah’s trip.

The bad part was that Delandra could, at least to some extent, see herself as the architect of her own demise. It was apparently all those stupid phone calls she’d made trying to get through to someone in Verity’s group that put Bill and Judy onto their trail. There was still some confusion in her mind as to how, exactly, they had been led to the Blue Heaven, though by now the how seemed beside the point. The fact was, they were here. They had moved in next door and, while unwilling to loan Delandra enough to put new tires on the Dart, were, the cheap sons of bitches, apparently quite ready to subsidize some sort of expedition into the Mojave in search of a gateway to another dimension, or some damn thing it made Delandra angry even to think about, should Obadiah and Delandra care to join them. It was, from whichever side you cared to examine it, a peculiarly fucked situation.

She listened to the sound of footsteps upon the deck. She hoped Bill and Obadiah would not see that she had been crying and for the moment was grateful for the shades.

“Find any time warts?” she asked when the two men were within striking distance. It was better she thought to go first.

“Time nodes,” Bill said good-naturedly, correcting her. Bill, it seemed, was always correcting her. Obadiah stood silently behind him, the position of the sun making his expression impossible to read.

“Maybe I was thinking of time warps,” Delandra continued. “Any of those?”

“None of those, either,” Bill said. He was still smiling but the smile had something pinched about it. “And it’s like I told you the other night. First you have to locate the block. Then come the nodes. And, of course, none of it works without the crystal.”

“Of course,” Delandra said. “The crystal.” It seemed one of the things Bill and Judy had been up to when they heard about Delandra’s efforts to contact the group was checking out some piece of automatic writing they had picked up from a contactee in New Mexico. The writing had directed them into the Mojave, where they hoped to find some sort of crystal which, according to the note, might be of use in locating and then opening some sort of time block also mentioned in the note. For there were, Bill Richards had explained, certain areas of particular magnetic sensitivity—magnetic blowouts, which, with the crystal as a key, might be used as gateways into other dimensional planes. And once through the gate, it should, at least theoretically, be possible to negotiate the various nodes. Delandra actually remembered all of this. She couldn’t help herself. But she liked to pretend that she did not.