Moonbird Boy (12 page)

"Gentlemen," Morley boomed amiably, "you already know the reason for our little party here today. But let's make it official." In the silence that followed, a rustling could be heard from the room's heavy silk drapery as the air-conditioning clicked on. "Through a fortuitous twist of fate in the shape of a great white shark," Morley continued, "the Indian program known as Ghost Flower Lodge has fallen squarely into our hands. For all practical purposes, we now own it!"

"Excellent, Alex," Thompson acknowledged and then pushed the minuscule wedge he'd just driven into Morley's authority. "I'm sure we're all relieved that MedNet's interests no longer need be arbitrated by Mr. Henderson."

"Henderson's duties scarcely meet the requirements of that term, Bob," Morley replied, "he's—"

"How much did we pay this guy to 'negotiate' a done deal?" Thompson went on. The question was jovial, directed to the board's treasurer, Neal Brockman, whose immaculate surgeon's hands fluttered over his silverware like tethered moths.

"It's in the computer, Bob," Brockman answered and then tapped the crystal of his Rolex. "Is it really eight o'clock yesterday in Japan? Damned thing still isn't working right."

"I told you to stop wearing it in the shower," Kines sighed over the dark expanse of his pin-striped vest. "Ah, here's lunch!"

The exchange reinforced what Bob Thompson already knew—that Kines and Brockman would side with the old man through a nuclear blast if necessary. They were old buddies from their med school days, grown fat off the drippings from Morley's entrepreneurial savvy. At a meeting of the full board the three of them could command sufficient votes to rubber-stamp anything Morley wanted. Bob Thompson, the only member of the exec board who was not a doctor, would never be more than their employee, he thought for the hundredth time, a loyal and gifted trick dog.

"Is there something about the Indian deal you're uncomfortable with, Bob?" Morley asked through a column of steam rising from his beef Stroganoff "The Japanese have just doubled their original offer, you know. I'm counting on you to package the thing. Get out there and nail the model. We'll contract with an advertising outfit for the design, once you've told us what it is." Morley's ice-colored eyes reminded Bob Thompson of a doll his sister had when he was a kid. A doll whose oddly knowing gaze followed you around a room. The relaxed smile didn't match the eyes at all. The two expressions, Thompson thought, might have been patched together from different faces.

"Anxious to get on it," he said. "Sounds like a real challenge."

In the standoff Bob Thompson felt something odd in the air, something rust-scented and chilling. But for the life of him he couldn't get a handle on what, exactly, it was.

Bo took the long way to the desert, east on Highway 94 through parched chaparral and woodland, boulder-strewn meadows and glaring dirt side roads that had been there for centuries. The highway ran parallel to the Mexican border from the Tecate spur to the old settlement the Spanish had simply called Campo. At its closest, an area called Buck South, the road looped to within less than a quarter-mile from foreign soil. Except it didn't look foreign, Bo noted. The pale sand glistening with flecks of fool's gold, the eerie gray granite hills cracked and split so they looked like toy-block buildings—these merely continued beyond the invisible line separating the two nations. And the dirt roads snaking south into scrub sage and smoke trees would cross that line where it was not marked, where it remained so abstract it didn't really exist.

Bo grinned at the Pathfinder's second gearshift, the one built to regulate the vehicle's four-wheel drive. It would be so easy just to engage the four-wheel, turn off on a nameless southbound track, and vanish into the Baja Peninsula. Investigating the impulse, Bo found its origin in an urge to travel, to go somewhere. Anywhere. A raven swooped to land on a cracked oval topstone that reminded Bo of Humpty-Dumpty. The bird's black feathers reflected the glare in mirrorlike flashes. The Indians had called Mort Wagman Raven, and his pale little boy Moonbird in contrast. So maybe, Bo thought, this raven was significant. Maybe if it flew south into Mexico that would mean she should follow.

Easing the Pathfinder onto the shoulder, Bo slowed and watched the bird stare attentively at its own right leg until a cloud of dust from the dirt road below alerted her to the presence of a green-striped Border Patrol truck.

"Kloo-kluck," the raven sang as it flapped skyward and then soared north above the Pacific Crest Trail. The Border Patrolman glanced at Bo with professional suspicion and then turned to head back along the rutted dirt road.

A bird has just saved you from creating an international incident, Bradley. Don't let this go any further.

"It would have been fun," Bo told the steering wheel. "But I guess I'll just go on up to Ghost Flower, maybe build a cairn of stones out at Yucca Canyon where Mort was killed." The idea held a certain appeal. Besides, hauling rocks around in the heat might diminish this sudden inclination to travel. Inspired, Bo accelerated north, crossed under 1-8 near Manzanita, engaged the four-wheel and dived off the road into the dry bed of Tule Creek. From the creekbed she could skirt the eastern boundaries of the Manzanita and Campo reservations and the northern edge of the property called Hadamar. She could get to within a half mile of Yucca Canyon from the back of the Neji land, she assessed. No one would know she was there, and no desert flora would be smashed by the Pathfinder's tires. Perfect.

After twenty minutes the creekbed forked upward into the barren In-Ko-Pah Mountains and became impassable. Bo parked on the eastern side of a pale peach-colored boulder encrusted with continent-shaped patches of lichen. The rock, she thought, looked like a swollen earth, its oceans long evaporated and its landmasses reduced to brittle distortions. The future, painted by nature on a canvas no one would ever see.

Bo sighed and grabbed her canteen and hiking boots from behind the seat. As usual, the manicky skew of her imagination wasn't delusional, wasn't wrong. It was just true. But if she came out of the desert to stand on a San Diego street corner urging passers-by to stop blasting holes in the ozone layer with chlorofluorocarbon hair spray and the decimation of the world's forests, she'd be eating orange Jell-O from a Styrofoam cup in County Psychiatric's dining room by six o'clock that night. The real challenge in having a psychiatric illness, she thought, lay in keeping your mouth shut.

"Nobody wants to confront the truth," she told the boulder, "but thanks for trying." Already the noon light had shifted slightly, layering yellow glare with white and returning the shadowless little continents to their masquerade as patches of lichen. Bo finished lacing her boots and crammed a straw hat with a wide, sloping brim on her head. Eva had warned about excessive sun. The hat and sunglasses would have to do. After filling her canteen from the five-gallon water can strapped to the back of the Pathfinder, she began to climb toward the rim of Yucca Canyon.

The chalk outline of Mort Wagman's body was still there, a small black stain inside it obvious against the white granitic rock. Bo wrapped her arms about her ribs and remembered the kindness of a young man with raven-black hair who had reached outside his own illness to help her. Then she selected the first, melon-sized stone and nudged it with her foot to cover the dark stain where Mort Wagman's heart had been. After an hour the mound of stones was sufficient, identifiable.

"A kind man died here," Bo spoke loudly into the clean wind blowing up the canyon wall. "These stones mark the end of his life and honor the memory of his kindness."

Others would add to the cairn, Bo knew. The Neji, future guests at Ghost Flower Lodge, strangers traversing the desert for reasons of their own. People instinctively knew the meaning in a cone of stones piled at a crossroads, wayside, or precipice. And instinctively reached for another rock to mark their private acknowledgment of death.

Already the western slope of the sheer little canyon was mottled in shadow as the sun began its downward slide into the sea sixty miles away. Overheated, Bo scrambled partway down into cooler grayness and wedged herself behind a split rock for a long drink of water and a few minutes of rest before hiking back to the car. From a hole near her left boot heel a whiptail lizard emerged and dashed to the cleft in the rock, where it lay breathing and staring at a daddy longlegs nearly invisible in the shadows.

Tentatively the daddy longlegs began to move away, and Bo could see the lizard's five front claws tense against the rock as it prepared to stalk the insect. The claws were so handlike, she thought, looking at her own freckled hands holding the canteen. The evolution of reptile to primate was so obvious. And the old reptile brain buried deep beneath more recent human frontal lobes, that was obvious, too. Obvious whenever a human killed another not out of passion but for personal gain. The cold-blooded killer, Bo nodded at her own train of thought, was aptly named. A throwback. A reptile cloaked in human form.

Arachnid and lizard remained frozen as if awaiting a thrown switch to begin their drama as Bo pondered Mort Wagman's death. He'd been wealthy, especially after the lucrative SnakeEye promotion made him a millionaire. But as far as could be ascertained, no one would benefit financially from his death except Bird. And Bird had not stood armed in the desert dark, waiting to murder his father. But someone else had. Why?

Did Mort Wagman have an enemy, someone close enough to his daily movements at the lodge to know that he prowled the edges of Yucca Canyon when he couldn't sleep? The murderer would have to be someone at Ghost Flower, Bo thought. No one else could have known that the young comedian would be a sitting duck almost any night, silhouetted by moonlight at the edge of the canyon, and alone. But who?

The other guests were remote, wrapped up in their struggles to get back to their lives. They enjoyed the program set for them by the Neji, but worked it primarily in solitude or one-on-one with a Neji counselor. None of them had been at all interested in Mort Wagman. Except Old Ayma, Bo remembered. Ayma had hovered around everything that went on at the lodge, watching from beneath layers of castaway fabric. But Ayma was really crazy, wouldn't take her meds, and then wandered off. It was unfortunate, but it happened sometimes. Bo didn't think Old Ayma could have shot Mort Wagman. With a twinge of sadness she faced the fact that Old Ayma couldn't have done much of anything except be a burden and an embarrassment. Nobody but the Neji had really cared when the old woman who vanished into the desert, presumably to die. Certainly, Bo admitted to the lizard, she hadn't cared very much.

The admission brought a flush of shame to her face as the daddy longlegs suddenly skittered into sunlight and away, pursued by the whiptailed lizard. Bo peered through the rock's cleft, rooting for the smaller creature. But the desert creatures had vanished, leaving only a narrow view of the canyon's west-facing wall and its floor three stories below.

Something was moving on the ground where a shallow pool would form in the spring beneath a threadlike waterfall. The pool was just a depression of baked mud now, flaking upward in stiff, leathery curls. But something was down there. Something large moving about and casting quick, jerky shadows like moving stains on the colorless rocks. Bo remained motionless and waited for whatever it was to move into her line of vision through the split boulder. It was Zach!

Shirtless in the afternoon heat, he wore the rattling wooden bracelets and ankle cuffs he'd worn for Mildred's Kurok, and seemed to be doing a shuffling dance. But he also seemed to be searching for something. At regular intervals he ceased bobbing and shuffling to inspect the ground and nearby canyon rock slides. Then he danced again.

Fascinated, Bo drank the rest of the water from her canteen and settled in to watch. Zach must be inducing some sort of trance, she thought. Dancing in the sun could quickly produce an altered mental state, a dizziness born of heat exhaustion and the effect of too much light on the brain. But it was dangerous and what could be the point? And Zach had removed his shirt, increasing the likelihood of dehydration. The Kumeyaay, Bo remembered, even the men, exhibited a characteristic modesty about their bodies and were always fully clothed. Zach might be courting more than a trance state with his exposed torso, she thought. He might be demonstrating vulnerability, even shame. This was a personal ritual, not meant to be observed.

She wished she could sneak back over the western rim of the little canyon without being seen by Zach, but it was impossible. Even if she weren't wearing a white shirt he'd be sure to notice the movement, hear the long, scrabbling fall of pebbles and dirt dislodged by her feet. There was nothing to do but wait until Zach completed whatever he was doing.

The idea seemed reasonable until a bright Sleepy Orange butterfly landed to bat its rounded wings on a cholla growing from the canyon wall two feet above Bo's left shoulder. The insect, she realized with a wave of icy nausea, had attracted the attention of eyes other than hers. From one of the million ubiquitous holes in the desert sand, this hole only inches from her left knee, a pair of tiny black orbs watched the butterfly from the black-and-orange-banded head of a snake!

You've finally done it, Bradley. Black and orange—that's a coral snake, isn't it? Don't move, don't breathe, or you're dead.

As the snake stretched another inch from its hole, Bo fought the freezing nausea that brought a taste of bile to her throat, and tried to track a sense that something was wrong with her reaction. Something about coral snakes. They were orange and black all right. She'd haunted classes at San Diego's Natural History Museum when she'd first moved from New Mexico and was curious about the local landscape. But hadn't the guy there said there were no coral snakes in California? Only Arizona, he'd said. Then this orange and black snake was some other kind of snake.

The knowledge did nothing to slow Bo's accelerated heartbeat and inclination to throw up. There was just something sickening about snakes, period. Something to do with the way they moved. In a flash of useless insight she identified a central fallacy in the Old Testament story of the Fall. No woman, she saw with absolute certainty, would under any circumstances take a bite from an apple offered by a huge, scaled worm!