Stone Junction (6 page)

They rested a moment at the creek. Shamus panted ‘Coast?’ Annalee nodded, and they each took one of Daniel’s hands and forded the creek, the water shallow but swift, the rocks slippery. In moments they were gasping up the steep eastern slope of Seaview Ridge. Daniel felt like he was burning and freezing at the same time. Mindless, breathless, falling down and getting back up, he scrambled for the top.

They collapsed at the crest, huddling against the trunk of an ancient bay laurel, heaving for breath. Across the canyon, flames from their cabin paled the stars. At the edge of the flames they could make out six or seven vehicles, red lights blinking. With a strangled sob, Annalee began weeping. Shamus put his arm around her and pulled her close. ‘Just as well. Leave them ashes. You could have never gone back anyway.’

Annalee tried to slug him, all her fear and rage and grief gathered into the blow. She was in too close and Shamus, feeling her weight shift as she drew back her fist, caught it with his forearm. He grabbed her wrist and held it for a second before pulling it toward his chest, bringing Annalee’s face to his. ‘I’m sorry, Annalee. Even though it’s the truth, it was a crass and thoughtless remark. I forgot it was your life. I’ll try never to let it happen again. Your life – and Daniel’s – matter to me.’

Annalee sighed raggedly, then wiped her face. ‘Do I have time to cry?’

‘Survival says no; love says forever.’

‘Mom,’ Daniel said, ‘do you think you can still love someone when you’re dead?’

Annalee wasn’t sure if it was an innocent question or not. ‘I don’t know.’

‘We want the nearest bar or café or motel from here,’ Shamus said. ‘Without being seen.’

‘Three miles south,’ Annalee said. ‘Tough ones.’

Shamus asked Daniel, ‘You got three miles left?’

‘I think I do.’

‘Let’s vanish then,’ Shamus said.

They followed the ridge line for almost a mile, then angled downhill until they saw the occasional flash of headlights on the highway. They traveled parallel to the road for another half mile, keeping to the trees, then descended abruptly into the Shell Cove Inn parking lot. Shamus hotwired a ’59 Impala and they took off for San Francisco, heater on full blast.

Shamus stopped at a gas station in Santa Rosa and made a call from a pay phone, then drove them south to a wrecking yard on the outskirts of San Rafael. There he introduced them to José and Maria Concepción. Maria loaded them into an old Chevy panel truck while José wheeled the Impala into the wrecking yard for some fast midnight dismantling. Maria whipped them across the Golden Gate and into her warm Mission District apartment, replaced their wet clothes with luxurious terrycloth robes from the hotel where she worked part-time as a maid, and filled their bellies with a spicy menudo.

When they woke the next morning, José was there with a suitcase full of clothes for each of them. When they had dressed, he drove them to an airstrip near Sacramento and turned them over to a pilot who flew them to Salt Lake City in his battered old Beechcraft while regaling Daniel with tales of World War II dogfights in the clouds over France.

A thin, hawk-faced man was waiting for them at the landing strip near the Great Salt Lake with new driver’s licenses for Shamus and Annalee (now James and Maybelline Wyatt), credit cards in the same name, four thousand dollars in cash, and a ’71 Buick registered to Mrs Wyatt. He told them to drive to Dubuque, Iowa, and make a phone call to the number he provided. It wasn’t until the three of them were alone in the Buick and moving east that they finally caught up with themselves. Shamus tried to explain what he thought was going on.

Three weeks earlier, after eighteen months of meticulous planning, Shamus had attempted to steal some uranium-235 from a Tennessee refinery. When Shamus slithered through the hole he’d cut in the cyclone fence, a guard who wasn’t supposed to be there called halt, but Shamus clubbed him with his flashlight just as the guard pulled his gun. It went off harmlessly, but the shot brought security at full alarm. A searchlight pinned him to the ground. He kicked the guard’s gun away, pulling his own when they started shooting. He took a wild shot at the searchlight, missed, instantly understood he didn’t have a chance in a gunfight, rolled to his left as a burst of automatic rifle fire geysered dust behind him, rolled again, and came up running. Using the dust cloud for cover, he sprinted for the nearest building.

He got lucky twice in a row. The first piece of good fortune was a bullet that grazed his lower lip, so close it raised a blister but didn’t break the skin. The second break was a rumpled old man walking toward the parking lot, oblivious to the probing searchlight and bursts of gunfire, so lost to the moment that when Shamus pressed the gun barrel to the back of the old man’s head and told him, ‘Get in the car and go,’ he’d turned around and said, puzzled, ‘Escargot?’

Finding a hostage, however obtuse, wasn’t the end of Shamus’s luck, for the old man who drove him through the front gate with a gun at his head was Gerhard von Trakl, Father of Fission and the ranking nuclear scientist in America. Shamus intended to keep von Trakl only until they reached the getaway car, the first of three switches he’d already set up.

But to Shamus’s wild surprise, von Trakl begged to go along. He told Shamus that he was a virtual prisoner of the U.S. government and was no longer interested in the work they wanted done. He wanted to explore the other side of the equation, the conversion of energy into mass, and ultimately, he supposed, the obliteration of the distinction. He confided to Shamus that he’d made a fundamental scientific error in his career – he’d viewed the universe as a machine instead of a thought.

While Shamus was delighted to discover that the most brilliant physicist in the country was a fellow alchemist at heart, he knew that von Trakl’s employers would never stop looking for him till the old man was returned. But von Trakl refused to be freed, and for reasons Shamus honored.

Shamus compromised. He kept von Trakl through the first car switch, but a mile from the second switch Shamus pulled over and forced von Trakl out on the empty country road. He promised von Trakl he’d leave the car a mile up the road, wished him luck with his new research, and thanked him for his company, then fried rubber as von Trakl started to reply.

A mile down the road he exchanged the car for the dirt bike he’d stashed the day before. He gunned the dirt bike up the hill. He cut the engine at the crest and coasted down the long, gradual slope into Coon Creek Valley. He abandoned the bike in a dense stand of hickory, covering it with the camo netting he’d pulled off the battered Gimmy pickup he’d hidden there earlier in the week. But when he reached to open the truck’s door, a laconic voice behind him said, ‘Ain’t none of my business, friend, but less’n my scanner done fucked
all up
, they’ll have a roadblock at the end of the valley ’fore you can fart the first bar o’ “Dixie.” Be my suggestion to ride with ol’ Silas Goldean here, seeing as how me and most of the local law grew up together and get on fine, and they know I got a fondness for going over to the res’vor this time of night and soaking a doughball for them catfish. Got a good place for ya to ride, too.’

And so Shamus went through the roadblock curled up in a cramped compartment under the backseat of Silas’s dusty Packard sedan while Silas jawed with a sheriff ’s deputy about a turkey shoot early next month to raise money for the local Grange. Silas’s second cousin was waiting at the reservoir in a funky johnboat to ferry him over to another cousin who locked him in a camper and drove all night to an airstrip south of Nashville. A cross-country flight punctuated with what seemed like twenty refueling stops eventually ended on Cummins Flat, two miles down the ridge from the Four Deuces, where Smiling Jack had picked him up.

Though Shamus found it difficult to believe, Gerhard von Trakl had evidently made his own escape, a fact that pleased Shamus immensely even though it meant personal grief. The Feds unfortunately assumed the daffy old bastard was still his captive and had poured on the heat – or as much as they could without causing undue media attention. They didn’t seem to want
any
, in fact, since there hadn’t been a hint in the press or on screen that the country’s foremost nuclear physicist had been kidnapped inside the nation’s largest facility for the production of fissionable materials – an understandable silence, as such information would not inspire the citizens’ confidence or advance any political careers.

‘But,’ Shamus said, bringing his story up to date, ‘somebody wasn’t silent. Somebody had to tell them where to find me, because they did. When they turn up the heat, somebody burns, and then it all starts burning, collapsing as it’s consumed. I can’t tell you how sorry I am about your losses – your possessions, your home, the labor and heart you put into it.’

‘It’s not the first time,’ Annalee assured him. ‘That’s how we got to the Four Deuces, even though Daniel might not remember.’ She was driving, so had to prompt him with a quick glance over her shoulder, ‘Not that you
should
.’

But Daniel, who’d listened intently from the backseat, didn’t want to talk about what he didn’t remember. ‘How many people knew you were staying with us?’

Shamus responded without hesitation, obviously having given it some thought himself. ‘You, your mother, Smiling Jack, and the pilot, a young black guy named Everly Cleveland, Bro for short. Those are the ones I know for certain; there were probably others.’

‘The pilot betrayed you,’ Daniel said.

‘Said with great certainty,’ Shamus noted. ‘Your evidence?’

‘Mom and me wouldn’t do it and neither would Smiling Jack. And besides, the pilot flew over two thousand miles with a bunch of stops, so the plane almost had to be noticed. See, that would be smart – to check the little airstrips.’

‘Yeah,’ Shamus sighed, ‘that’s the most likely case, but who knows? If it was the pilot, though, I hope he turned me cold. Went straight to a pay phone and snitched me off.’

‘Why?’ Daniel said, puzzled.

Shamus, who had turned around to face Daniel, shifted his gaze past Daniel and out the rear window, following the white line back to the horizon. Daniel didn’t think Shamus was going to answer but Shamus suddenly snapped back to attention, his eyes boring into Daniel’s as he said, ‘Because if he didn’t turn me cold, they beat it out of him, and that puts his blood on my hands.’

On a hand and a glove
, Daniel thought. He didn’t say it because something in Shamus’s voice and eyes frightened him, something feverish and weak, something that fed on its own corruption, drew nourishment from its self-loathing and suffering, and Daniel wanted to leap away from Shamus’s intimate guilt. He prefaced his question with a vague reassurance. ‘But you’ve got friends, too. Besides Mom and me, I mean. Somebody is helping you. Helping
us
, really. Who is it?’

Shamus glanced at Annalee, then back to Daniel. ‘You’re sharp, Daniel. What one of my teachers called “a good sense of what’s going on inside what’s going on.”’

Daniel shrugged off the praise. ‘It’s pretty obvious that somebody is flying us around and giving us cars and money. And instructions.’

‘AMO,’ Shamus said.

Daniel didn’t understand. ‘You mean like ammo for guns? Ammunition?’

‘No, though the pun is suggestive.
Amo
as in the Latin
I love
.’ Shamus reached backhanded along the front seat and lightly touched Annalee’s neck with his right hand.

Annalee wanted to pull over and hold him in her arms and let him touch her just like that anywhere he wanted, the warmth of his bare fingertips at the base of her neck, the brush of soft leather on thigh, belly, nipples, throat.

She listened distractedly as he continued. ‘AMO is the acronym for Alliance of Magicians and Outlaws – or, as some members claim, Alchemists, Magicians, and Outlaws, which they contend was the original name. Another faction, small but vocal, insists AMO has always stood for Artists, Myth-singers, and Outriders. As you might sense, there is constant and long-standing contention about AMO’s origins and development, a situation encouraged by the fact that the Alliance does not keep a private account of itself – all records must be public. Since AMO forbids nearly all direct reference to its principles and practices, the public accounts – books and music being the most available – are extremely oblique, hidden in images and the arc of metaphor.

‘But whatever the true derivation of its name, AMO is a secret society – though more on the order of an open secret, in fact. Basically, AMO is a historical alliance of the mildly felonious, misfits, anarchists, shamans, earth mystics, gypsies, magicians, mad scientists, dreamers, and other socially marginal souls. I’m told it was originally organized to resist the pernicious influences of monotheism, especially Christianity, which attacked alchemy as pagan and drove it underground. From what I gather (I’m not a scholar on the subject), AMO has survived as an
extremely
loose international alliance of self-described moral outlaws and wild spirits. And though the alliance is so loose it’s nebulous, the center is tight.’

‘What do you mean?’ Daniel said.

‘In each country or region, there’s a seven-member council called the Star. Council members can serve up to forty years or resign at any point. Star members nominate potential successors, who must be approved by the other council members. I’ve never been sure exactly what the Star’s job is beyond administration and special projects. Each Star member has a small field staff to assist her – and I use
her
because four of the seven Star members, by tradition, must be women.’

‘That’s wise,’ Annalee nodded, glancing at Shamus long enough to flash a smile.

‘Can
more
than four be women?’ Daniel said.

‘Yes – but not any fewer. That make sense?’

‘I suppose,’ Daniel said, not so much lacking conviction as withholding judgment.

Without taking her eyes off the road, Annalee said, ‘I have a feeling that we were keeping house for AMO, right? That’s who we’ve been working for?’