Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (47 page)

     
“Thanks for bringing my car back . . . undented,”
said Raszer, tossing his keys onto the pale green table. “At least you’re an
honorable thief.”

    
“I only
steal what I need,” Ruthie said. “I’m a practical girl.”

    
“And you
stole Henry’s sigil to do some practical magic?”

    
“What in
hell’s a sigil?” she asked.

    
The
previous night’s prewar Berlin hairstyle was gone, and Ruthie now displayed a
sunset-red townie cut, cropped and blunt cut. It was closer to the look he’d
expected, except that her round cat’s face was scrubbed clean and free of
makeup. She wore an army green T-shirt and baggy cargo pants and made Raszer
think of those bright-eyed, barely legal Alabama girls they’d sent over to
serve in the slaughterhouse in Babylon. The sexuality remained but was now more
androgynous. Was this, too, intentional?

    
“Don’t
be coy, Ruthie. You knew Henry’s MO. He’d summon his ‘thought form’ down into
the rock and then do some voodoo. I’m just wondering why
that
rock.”

    
“Well,
since you know so much, you oughta know that it can be any rock, or statue, or
whatever, but a power object is best. Somethin’ with some history. And that
rock—the one with the big dimple in it—if what he said was true, it’s got
some
history.”

    
“Tell
me.”

    
“If I
tell you, I’ll have to kill you,” she said, and the corners of her mouth
curled.

    
“Do I
have time for a drink?” Raszer asked, pulling out a chair. The Taos Inn’s broad
porch was about half-full with locals and a few off-season tourists and the
wooden floor creaked drily as the waitress approached.

    
“Sure,”
said Ruthie. “We got all night.” And then she added, “At least, until it’s time
to see my friend Shams. Order one for me while you’re at it.”

    
“Sure,”
said Raszer. “How about a Virgin Mary?”

    
“Very
funny,” she said. “I’ll have a Dos Equis.”

    
Raszer ordered two of them and turned to Ruthie.
So, Shams must be his mystery contact for the evening. Interesting name. The
sun dropped into the V between two distant peaks, and gilded the Taos Inn with
a diffracted ray. Raszer sat back. He decided to let the matter of the black
rock go for now. “Tell me about Shams,” he said. “He or she?”

    
“He’s a
he,” Ruthie answered. “But I think he’s seen it from both sides.”

    
“How
so?”

    
“He told
me that he lived as a woman for a year, wearing a burka and sucking off the
soldiers who came over the border between Iraq and Turkey. He said he wanted to
understand Muslim women and the ‘mystique of the veil.’ I guess he does now. Funny
thing is, he said it wasn’t all that unusual over there, men dressing up as
women. The soldiers didn’t seem to care. A mouth is a mouth, right?”

    
“So
what’s his story?” Raszer asked. “Was he in the fight over there? Did he know
the boys, Johnny and Henry?”

    
“He
didn’t know ’em, but he could’ve,” Ruthie said. “He was based in Karbala at
first. Then in Mosul. He enlisted right at the beginning. First in line. Not
because he was gung-ho or anything. I think maybe he thought it’d be a good way
to die. He was, like, thirty or something. Shit, I dunno how old the guy is. I
just know he’s the shit. After three fuckin’ tours, he still wasn’t dead, so he
figured maybe he was immortal. He signed up with Blackwater and went back. He
said he had to finish the game.”

    
“The
game?”

    
“Right.
Then he saw what they were doin’ over there. That’s when he went native.”

    
“What
game? The Gauntlet?”

    
“Shams
knows about all the games. I think he’s even invented a few. And he knows these
people.”

    
“Katy’s
abductors . . . ”

    
“Yeah,”
she said, grabbing the cold beer from the waitress’s tray. “Them.”

    
Raszer
waited for his beer to be delivered. The sun had now dropped fully into the
breach, and the alpenglow rendered the mountains luminescent.

    
“How
does he know them? From the game?”

    
“He’ll
tell you the story,” said Ruthie. “One day he just walked away from his post.
Lived like an Arab, in Turkey, Syria . . . even Iran, I think. Converted to
Islam and learned all sort of weird shit. I guess they must’ve pulled him in
the same way they did Johnny and Henry. Except Shams got free of ’em. They
don’t scare him. The fucker lives in a yurt up by Red River. He knows all this
survival shit. Like I said, he’s deep.”

    
Raszer
picked up the tabletop candle and lit it with his Zippo. He studied her eyes
for a moment in the underlight. Until now, he hadn’t been able to gauge
Ruthie’s intelligence, and knew even less about Katy. Judged solely by their
actions, neither one seemed more than natively bright, but he saw now that
Ruthie had a plan for him.

    
“When do
we go see him?” he asked.

    
“After
you feed me,” she replied. “Can I order a burrito?”

    
“Order
whatever you like,” he said. “Has your mother or father ever hired anyone else
to find Katy? PIs, ex-FBI men, bounty hunters . . . ”

    
“Not as
far as I know,” she answered. “My mom couldn’t afford it, and my old man . . .
well, for a while, he was gonna go lookin’ himself, but I guess he gave that
up.”

    
“Where
would he have looked?”

    
“I dunno
. . . Asian sex clubs, maybe. Maybe that’s why he never went.”

    
“And
where do
you
think she is?”

    
“Who the
fuck knows?” Ruthie said. “She doesn’t send me postcards. But Shams says he
knows, so I figure it must be over there.”

    
“In
Turkey?”

    
“Ask
Shams,” she said, and took a look around to see who was within earshot. “See,
I
am
scared of these guys. They like to cut off parts of you.” The waitress checked
in. Ruthie ordered a burrito with extra cheese, Raszer a bowl of
albóndigas.

    
“I’m
betting you have a pretty good idea where she is, too,” said Raszer. “Because Henry
must’ve known, and the two of you stayed close.”

    
“Henry
had visions. ‘Flash frames,’ he called ’em. Things he saw in his scrying
stones. But he’d never been there . . . to El Mariah, or whatever they called
it.” She reached down into an oversize Navaho-weave handbag she’d set beside
her chair, and drew out a plain tan envelope stuffed with documents. “Here,”
she said. “Check it yourself. This is what you came for, right?”

    
Raszer
accepted the folder, opened it, and saw immediately that it contained printed
copies of the email correspondence between Ruthie and Henry. He nodded. “This,
yes,” he said, then reached across the table, gently touched her head, and
indicated her heart. “And what’s in here . . . and there.” He sat back. “So,
why do I rate?”

    
The food
arrived and was set before them. The waitress paused for approval.

    
“’Cause
you didn’t fuck me when you could’ve,” said Ruthie. The waitress cleared her
throat and backed away. “And because you went to see my mother.”

    
“She
knew who I was?”

    
“No. She
told me some guy came by about a homecoming, and
I knew
.”

    
“How did you manage to keep these from the FBI?”
Raszer asked.

    
“Simple.
I hid them.” Ruthie forked into her burrito.

    
“Yeah,
but the original data. Hell, the feds can decrypt email with a keystroke.”

    
“Henry
and Johnny used a pirate server. They might’ve been hicks, but they weren’t
dumb. They picked up a lot from the insurgents in Iraq. The FBI is old school.
Wherever they are, guys like Henry are three steps ahead. Those files are long
gone, and they used the hard drives to make IEDs.”

    
Raszer
set the folder aside
.
“So nobody’s
ever seen these?”

    
“That’s
right,” Ruthie said. “That FBI asshole . . . he never got close. These are
Henry’s last will and testament. These are his love letters to me.”

    
At nine thirty, they navigated a switchback on
their way up the Front Range and sent a coyote scampering into the chaparral.
It was dark on the mountainside; the lights of Taos, far below, did not send up
much spill. There were other predators in that darkness. It occurred to Raszer
that the dark had never been the friend of social man. Social man loved fire,
gaslight, even neon. It was the sociopath who found allies in the lampless
night.

    
On the
other hand, you could love the dark and not love what it concealed. Once, on a
conditioning trek through Goblin Valley, Utah, Raszer had awakened in his tent
to a holy vacuum, soundless except for the gentlest of
tip-tap-tip-tap-tip-tap-tip-taps
. He’d switched on his flashlight
to find his sleeping bag swarming with little scorpions. That’s what the
darkness held.

    
Never, ever forget it
, he told himself.
“How much further?” he asked.

    
“About
four miles, and then another mile up a dirt road,” Ruthie answered. “Almost to
the ski valley. Shams gets snow in October sometimes. Least he says so.”

    
“Well,
since we’ve got a ways, why don’t you tell me—from your memory of Henry’s
letters—how he and Johnny first hooked up with these guys.”

    
She said
nothing at first. They made another switchback, and Raszer lit her a cigarette.
It was a small gesture, but it would mean something passing from his lips to
hers.

    
“They
were in some little village south of An Najaf, supposedly a nest of bad guys.
They’d been there all day, goin’ from house to house, herding the families out
on the streets to search for weapons, and they hadn’t found nothin’ except a
bunch of scared kids and women. The men were mostly farmers and boys too young
to fight. Henry said it was just like what his uncle said about Vietnam: that
you didn’t know which old hag might be packing heat in her laundry basket, or
which kid might be running information to the enemy, even though prob’ly none
of ’em were. There were about eleven of ’em, all young guys from the boonies,
and one girl from Arkansas.

    
“Around
sundown, one of the soldiers freaked ’n shot a kid—a boy who’d snuck up behind
him, wantin’ to trade his mom’s jewelry for American candy bars. Blew his
little head off right in front of his house. They tried to make it right with
the family, but Henry knew they should get the fuck outta there. There was
blood and brains on the ground, and the kid’s mother just laid down in it and
screamed all night until finally they shot her, too.

    
“Anyhow,
they made camp in the middle of town, and just before dawn, the villagers
attacked with knives and hatchets and whatever they had. Just crazed, that’s
all, ’cause of the kid. And Henry ’n Johnny’s unit started blasting away,
killing anything that moved. Killing the women and the kids and the old men.
Then all of a sudden the insurgents—I guess they were Sunnis there, I can never
remember which—came down outta the hills, started raining shit down on them.

    
“Three
or four of their guys—Johnny and Henry’s guys—went down right away. Another guy
had his arm shot off. Henry said the fucker just sat down in the dirt and kept
tryin’ to stick it back on. The Alabama girl, she musta looked at those dead
kids and thought,
What the hell am I
doin’ here instead of gettin’ married to the town dentist
? ’cause she
turned around and shot the CO, and then she took it in the chest.”

    
“Anyhow,
now they’re down to, like, four or five, and Johnny just goes apeshit, picks up
one of the bodies for a shield ’n just wails on these wogs, killing, like, ten
of ’em, screaming the whole time, ‘Not me, motherfuckers! Not me!’ And there’s
smoke everywhere and they can’t see shit. They can’t see shit except each
other, Johnny and Henry. It’s just the two of them. They’re all that’s left,
and outta the smoke come the insurgents, walkin’ real slow and wearing rags on
their heads and scarves so they can’t smell the death, and it gets real quiet
and the boys know it’s all over. Henry says that’s when he died. He said he was
never the same after. And the insurgents—the Sunnis or whatever—make a circle,
and the guns go up and they try to make Johnny and Henry get on their knees but
they won’t do it. And then there’s machine gun fire from every direction, and
the Iraqis just drop where they are. Just like that.