Calumet City (26 page)

"She." I shake my head. "They say anything else?"

He shakes his too, no more leery of me than before. I keep squeezing Chief Jesse’s hand like it will help. No one’s blackmailing me, so the G’s lost on that rabbit trail. But they
will
stumble into my truth sooner or later, or at least close enough. And although they can’t pin Chief Jesse with Calumet City, they can use me to ruin him.

I glance at the doctor. But if I kill Roland—
bullshit
—when I kill Roland and he dies big, maybe Roland and I and his horror show becomes the focus and they leave the superintendent alone.

The relief lasts a full second because that’s not how it works. Everyone connected to me will burn unless I can turn this into
Taxi Driver,
where the psycho becomes the mistaken hero—But it could happen, couldn’t it? Politicians spin absolute fantasy into fifty-year careers. Religions spin it into holy robes and gilded rule books.

The doctor interrupts with his eyes; they skip over my shoulder into the hall and land on the nurse who stopped me. She’s talking to a man in a blue suit, Special Agent Stone. Agent Stone smiles at me. I have no idea how many doors there are in and out of ICU, but there’s only one door—Chief Jesse’s—between Agent Stone and me.

"Any other ways out of here?" I ask the doctor.

"Several, if you can get past him." He glances left and smiles with his eyes. "Back in the far corner. Door’ll be open."

I pat Chief Jesse’s hand, want to kiss him on the cheek, but don’t with the FBI watching. "Take care of him, okay? He was your driver that day, you and Elfego Baca."

The doc is genuinely surprised and breaks into a little black kid’s grin. "Karma."

In the hall, Special Agent Stone stands between me and my escape route, either because he knows where it is or because he intends to arrest me. We stare. He says, "You’ll be indicted on Monday."

Le Bassinet opens on Monday. I don’t answer or try to pass. He seems surprised.

"Obstruction, evidence tampering; we’ll add more before the weekend’s over."

He’s right but doesn’t know why and hasn’t mentioned Evanston yet. Not that my little scene was federal, but he’d mention it if he knew. "You got a whole day, Special Agent Tough Guy. Give it hell."

"Get an attorney…Or we can go over to Dearborn and try to work something out." He glances past me into Chief Jesse’s room.

My face reddens, my neck too. I can feel it in my legs, the muscles bunching. "You are a serious bunch of motherfuckers, you know? You want me to front him, my friend, while he’s dying. What kinda fuckin’ world you live in?"

He waits to see if I want to be stupid and hit him. I don’t and he says, "The real one."

We stare from twelve inches. He has no backup and no cuffs out, so I bluff back at him, "You done? I got places to go."

"Today I can help you. Monday—by noon, say—nobody can."

A loud buzz lifts three nurses out of their chairs. I wheel to Chief Jesse’s window. Two nurses loop us, the last one says,
"Out. Now,"
and grabs us both. Special Agent Stone has his phone out and follows, not realizing I haven’t moved. The black doctor is met at another patient’s door by more nurses and they’re all sucked in like a fast drain. I bolt around the nurses’ station for the left corner, find the door, kick the stopper out so it’ll close behind me, and run the stairs. Two flights down my thigh muscle cramps or it’s my phone vibrating. Door. Street level.

Outside, the parking lot’s dark wherever the overhead lights don’t flood the pavement. I run to my Celica, trying to be less obvious than I’m being. With luck Agent Stone will figure me for the bathroom or Chief Jesse’s room and by then I’ll be on the highway. Ignition. Gears. Gun it. But to where? Evanston? Are we doing a B&E after all, one we don’t know how to do? My thigh vibrates again. I answer my cell and run the light, turning south onto Michigan.

It’s Tracy-the-nervous, but right on schedule. "Meet me at Midway."

The ambulance charging at me changes lanes. "What? At the airport?"

"General Aviation Terminal. Now."

"Why?"

"Big news on the PI. If we’re fast and lucky, your son may be alive tomorrow."

   Demons and ranches and death by fire and I’m jolted awake. Plane.
Small
plane; hands white on the armrests; cheek cold near the window; blink; glance—the earth below is held together by giant screws? The screw is missing and the hole’s on fire. Fast cabin glance—Tracy in her seat, eyes out her window. Calm the fuck down.

Calm down. Desperation and half a sleeping pill got me on this plane and now we’re landing, not crashing, in the Sonoran Desert, over the missing screw. I crane at my window; the round hole has to be fifty or sixty square blocks, the size of the Chicago Loop. Ridges descend inside the hole where the monster screw was removed; what’s left glows purple-gold in the moonlight. We’re making a midnight approach directly over it—right, right, I remember the plan—into Ajo, middle-of-nowhere, Arizona.

Ajo’s airport lights rush at us. I hear Tracy say that the airport is a combination rifle range, country club, roping arena, and runway. The landing gear hums and the plane jolts sideways. The wing dips on my side. Less than a mile away, and way too close to the missing screw, a stunted mountain range is burning without flames. The entire formation is purple-gold like the screw hole, but with a white phosphorescent vein as tall and long as Navy Pier.

I confirm that I’m sober, ungrip my hands, wipe nightmare-drug sleep from my eyes, and fast glance Tracy again. Miss All-Everything still looks edgy, no better than when we boarded, and knowing what’s supposed to be out there, maybe she should be. I asked for better detail; what little she explained en route didn’t add up to baby shit, not the right response considering the stakes and effort. "Stakes" whitens my knuckles. She had a magic word that got me on the plane.

Six hours ago Miss All-Everything scammed this eight-seat King Air from the
Herald
for an overnight trip to Why, Arizona. Why is a fifty-six-person suburb of Ajo, which according to Tracy, was a mining town until twenty years ago. I’m light-headed from the cabin pressure and sleeping pill and about to add Ajo’s missing screw and burning mountains to my list of unanswered questions, but we slam into the runway. My eyes and mouth jam shut. We don’t die—by impact, fire, or collision—and hurtle down a dark runway until we slow, then turn and taxi toward the silhouette of a metal building with two headlights. A gentleman I’ve heard two sentences about named "Bob" is waiting on the fender of a 1979 Cadillac Seville that was ugly when it was new.

Tracy and I deplane into crisp night air and a chance to stand up straight. I bury the nightmares. "Bob" grins when Tracy makes our introduction. I don’t grin, nor am I getting in "Bob’s" car until he explains who he is.

Bob says he’s a reporter for the
Phoenix Sun
and that he’s known Tracy "since that thing we did in Costa Rica." I’m guessing Bob is mid-fifties, and I’m guessing Tracy has promised him something beyond the Wild Turkey in his hand or he wouldn’t be out here at near midnight. That, or he got a good look at her in the Miss Costa Rica Pageant.

I ask why the mountains are Technicolor and why the big screw’s missing. Bob points to the mountains that from the ground now look more like the battlements of a fortress and says, "New Cornelia mine. Copper."

"That’s a mine?"

Bob nods. "Tailings slag. Seven billion cubic feet of poison. World’s largest manmade dam. Made the
Guinness Book of Records.
"

We don’t get a lot of "tailings" in Chicago, but I can taste the metal on the sides of my tongue. "What about the hole?"

Bob takes a sip of Wild Turkey and slips into hillbilly: "That’d be your mine, Missy. Thousand feet deep, mile wide. Mondo bizarro, huh?
Burrrrrp
. Looks like we threw a screw, those roads cut into the side of it?"

Tracy winces at "Missy," then stretches for her and Bob’s benefit and eases into the Seville’s passenger seat. I take a good look at Bob’s eyes. I’ve seen worse and get in the backseat. The back seat will have a seatbelt and two ways out if we crash. Bob fires the Seville, then bumps us past the gateless airport fence and onto the two-lane—maybe lane-and-a-half—Ajo Highway. His headlights illuminate mile after mile of nothing, not even fences, before they light up Ajo Town. At sixty miles an hour in the dark Ajo Town appears to be constructed of gravel, scrap wood, and trailers. We follow railroad tracks for a mile that he says belong to the mine and we don’t stop at the American Citizen Social Club even though Bob says it can be fun. Town lasts another ten or twenty seconds before we’re surrounded by blazing rock massed on both sides of Highway 85, rock that’s somehow on fire without flames.

This goes beyond Rod Serling and reruns of
The Twilight Zone
—it’s Jules Verne,
Journey to the Center of the Earth
. Bob rambles while he steers ten miles south to Why, mostly about the history of the area, the Indians, outlaws, and cactus. As the flameless glow of the tailings mountains and slag heaps disappears behind us, the Sonoran Desert goes dark. Bob stops the car in the middle of the road on a low ridge, quits talking, and the desert goes to dead quiet. Spend your life in a city and real "dead quiet" will knock you off balance worse than Chinatown.

Shiver. Don’t think about Chinatown. Not where we’re going.

My eyes adjust and the land sort of
silvers
in places, like the ground’s on a low dimmer. Very strange, and it’s also full of twenty-five-foot prickly-green cactus. Those I’ve seen in the early Clint Eastwood movies. Tracy calls them
saguaro
and rolls the "r" like she’s still in Costa Rica modeling bathing suits from her back.

Tracy still hasn’t looked at me since we got off the plane.

Bob veers off the pavement and onto a hard dirt road. His Seville’s bright lights don’t define desert from hardpan. Tracy suggests Bob tell me the "story."

Bob tells me his surname instead. It’s Cullet, French, he says, by way of Gibraltar and his mother’s marriage of convenience to a Phoenix car salesman. Bob Cullet is also drunk. How drunk is one issue, the other is whether or not the Sonoran Desert has cliffs. From the backseat there isn’t shit I can do about any of it, other than bounce and listen. And try to prepare for another trip to the basement with Roland Ganz.

I have been blocking that thought till now, waiting for Bob Cullet to explain what Tracy couldn’t or wouldn’t. She’d determined that this outpost was Roland’s and likely his hideout since he put Annabelle in the wall. This was the reason I got on the plane.

Bob drives another minute in silence, then says, "The Pentecostal Ranch is now called His Pentecostal City." He burps again and adds, "Eerie," as if answering a question, then takes a slow drink. "Smelled like sulfur, and crazy, every last one of ’em—" pause "—all of ’em livin’ out here ten miles deeper into the Sonoran and Indian nowhere. A square mile of paradise, six hundred sixty acres of mostly unfenced desert ranch, built by Reverend A. A. Allen,
Triple A
, like the antiaircraft guns."

Bob bounces over something that throws Tracy bracing into the dash. This would not be a good place to break down. He two-hands the wheel and continues.

"Triple A was a tent-show evangelist back in the late ’50s, a God-fearing lunatic from North Carolina who had trouble accepting denominational structure; had trouble with his reproductive organs too. Rumors of progeny."

My teeth grind. Gee, there’s a new story.

"But Triple A could find water without arsenic and fluorine in it—that’s a big damn deal on the res or off—and in ninety-some years no one else had. He found it, he said, with ’God’s divine ordainment.’" Bob uses his chin to point beyond his side window. "Compared to his square mile of sand and scrub, Triple A’s ’divine’ well was worth double or triple."

I ask, "What’s a res?"

"Reservation. Injuns."

Outside Bob’s window, low mountains rise and blacken the sky. They seem to be rising on all sides now but appear and disappear as we bump through washboard scrub and moonlight. I shiver once and for the first time, realize it’s cold—assuming that I’m not dreaming. Dull-silver light brightens only odd patches. The stars are just a couple of miles away and closing. I try to imagine water with arsenic in it that you’d drink anyway. Not to mention what tailings mountains might do to your daily intake of minerals. Bob is oblivious, either warming to his storyteller role or the Wild Turkey.

"Reverend Triple A held desert baptisms. The profits from his well’s ’106-degree Holy Water’ built the ranch’s three frame buildings—slant-roof
cobertizos
like you see out there on the res, bunkhouses God needed to house the pilgrims who didn’t succumb on the trip." Bob stops explaining and bends closer to the steering wheel, then cranes over his pudgy hands to see something. "…lost souls who stayed, who couldn’t catch on with permanent work elsewhere. Not that there’s permanent work out here. Ain’t nothing in this part of Sonoran Arizona but rock and poison."

That’s not hard to believe, and neither Tracy or I argue.

"For his
main
customers, the baptisms were a shorter-term pilgrimage—" Bob glances at Tracy "—not unlike the Yankees up on Route 66, stopping to see our three-headed snakes and UFO evidence, thank y’all very much."

I can’t decide if Bob is a real southern boy or just hillbilly drunk, so I ask. "How long we been drinking today, Bob?"

He checks a watch he can’t see. "Far as I know, Missy, today just started."

It’s unlikely that Bob’s had a woman put a pistol in his ear this week. That will change if he stays with "Missy" or his driving worsens. We veer away from the moon and Bob goes silent again, this time for two miles and ten minutes of endless starry dark. Then out of the vast desert and Wild Turkey nowhere (Bob’s term) he starts talking again.

"The ’70s and ’80s were less godly, likely due to cocaine Triple A said, and the Reverend had to supplement his ranch’s income by touring. His circuit was the Colorado River mining towns—Nevada, Old California, and Utah—preachin’ about apparitions in the desert, promisin’ salvation to those who undertook the trip.