The Searcher (29 page)

M
ORGAN WAS PARKED ON THE MAIN ROAD BEHIND A HOTEL SIGN THAT KEPT
him hidden but gave him a view of the junction into Goater Way, the street Holly Coronado lived on, named after one of the town's original citizens. He watched the red Toyota pull out onto the main road and head out of town. He hunkered down as it passed him, then rose again and watched it in his mirrors until it was far enough down the road for him to pull a U-turn and start following.

He was driving the county coroner's Crown Victoria because it was about the most inconspicuous car ever manufactured and was a lot more discreet than his cruiser. Still, he kept at a steady distance. From what Janice had told him, Holly was jumpy and he didn't want her to spot that she was being followed: he wanted her to continue where she was going and take him to Solomon Creed.

Solomon was the one loose end he still needed to tie up. He'd run some further searches on him, got a friend of his at the hospital to check the AMR to see if he was on the medical register, but he wasn't. If he'd gotten his medical training in the United States, there was no record of it. He'd even tried to find out if there was a national regis
ter for albinos, but all he got was a Facebook page that looked more like a political action group. He had scanned some of the pictures but Solomon didn't really resemble any of the people on it. They were generally more pink—pinkish skin, pink eyes, freaky—whereas he was pure white and his eyes were a pale gray and he was extraordinary looking, he had to give him that. Probably had no bother at all with the ladies. Hell, plenty of women would be into him, thanks to all that vampire shit they had these days. Maybe that's what he was—a vampire.

He caught sight of the Toyota up ahead, the brake lights glowing red before turning off and heading up another road. Morgan slowed right down. He didn't need to follow closely to know where she was going. The only place that road led to was the cemetery and this road was the only way in or out.

He turned onto the road then pulled over and left the engine running while he checked his phones. No messages on either. He unclipped the safety tab on his holster and removed his gun, checked it over, oiling the slide, removing the magazine and slotting it back in again. He had never once fired his gun anywhere but the range, not even to shoot cans out in the desert. That didn't mean to say he couldn't. But Solomon was a fugitive from justice now, which meant he was more likely to do something stupid and desperate. And if he did, he would put him down, no question. There was far too much at stake for some loose cannon to come along and mess it all up.

Morgan flexed his hands and felt the ache spread beneath the dressings, then picked up his phone again and dialed dispatch.

“Hi, Chief.”

He never could get used to caller ID. “Hey, Rollins, you ever off duty?”

“Never. What you need?”

He told him, then sat back and waited, thinking about Janice Wickens and the easy life he might have with her if she didn't get too clingy and naggy like they usually did.

Four minutes after he'd put in the call, a cruiser drew up alongside him. He wound his window down and saw Donny McGee behind the wheel and Tommy Miller riding shotgun. “Follow me, boys,” he said, and put his car in gear. “Get yourselves ready for a resisting-arrest-type situation.”

He pulled away and threw the car into the turn on the mountain road. He slid up over the loose gravel and kept the speed up until he saw the red Toyota parked up ahead by the tourist office. He pulled up in front of the car and Donny slid in behind to keep it from getting away.

Tommy was out first, a dark vest tied tight over his shirt, his gun pointing at the ground as he ran. Donny was close behind. They ran past Morgan's Crown Vic and he followed.

He heard shouts ahead, then a scream, and he took out his gun and picked up his pace. He passed through the gate and saw a pickup truck parked in the shade of the cottonwood and Billy Walker tied to a tree with his dog Otis asleep on the ground next to him.

Margaret Bender was standing in front of Donny and Tommy, her hands raised, her eyes wide as she pleaded with them. “He was like this when I found him,” she shrieked. “I was only trying to untie him.”

Morgan stepped forward, starting to realize what had happened. “Where's Holly Coronado?”

“I'm not in trouble, am I, Chief Morgan?” She looked terrified.

“No, you're not in any trouble. Just tell us why you're driving Holly Coronado's car.”

“She asked if she could borrow my station wagon because she wanted to get rid of a bunch of stuff—you know, Jim's stuff. She said
after the funeral she wanted to clear out some things, take them to the church hall.”

“That doesn't explain why you're driving her car, Mrs. Bender, or why you came up here.”

“She said she left her purse up here at the funeral and couldn't face coming up to get it, so of course I said I'd be happy to fetch it for her and she gave me the keys to her car, then asked if I wouldn't mind doing it while she was away borrowing mine.” She pointed at Billy Walker and his dog. “They were like this when I got here. I didn't have nothing to do with this.”

Morgan looked over at them. Donny was on his knees, checking Billy.

“He's alive,” he said. “Dog's alive too.”

Morgan turned back to Margaret and caught her staring at the dressings on his hands. He clenched his fists and felt them sting.

Goddamn woman had played him for a fool again.

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

—
“O
ZYMANDIAS
,”
P
ERCY
B
YSSHE
S
HELLEY

From the private journal of the Reverend Jack “King” Cassidy

I write these words on the twenty-third day of December in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and twenty-seven. Two days from now it will be my birthday. I will be eighty-six years old, or I would be if I were to make it that far. In truth I do not intend to. I cannot face another gang of well-wishers or panegyric sermon that will do nothing but make me shrivel inside. I deserve none of it. I am weary of life and am sure it feels the same about me. We are like a married couple who have long since fallen out of love and run out of things to talk about. There is only one thing left to say, but, as I have no one to say it to without poisoning their life in the way it has poisoned mine, I will take the coward's path and write it down instead. Before I quit this life and face the consequences in the next, I need to confess the great secret I have carried with me ever since I found the fortune that has so shaped my life. But to do so requires that I restore some omissions from that millstone of a memoir of mine and complete the picture of what I did and who I truly am.

The account of my travels in my published memoir is true up to where Eldridge lay dying of thirst in the mesquite stand with me close behind. It is true also that I prayed to God then to grant me safe passage back to Fort Huachuca so I might bring Sergeant Lyons to justice. But I also prayed for other things, which I omitted from my memoir out of shame. For the thing I prayed for most was
a selfish thing. I prayed for God to spare my miserable life. I begged Him not to let me die out there all alone save for the company of dead strangers. I pleaded for Him to show me what he required of me that he might spare my life. And when those prayers were met with silence, I rejected Him. I took the Bible I had carried so far and threw it aside in anger, calling Him cruel and powerless and hateful to have led me on and brought me here only to abandon me to death and oblivion. And as I raved and howled in my self-pity the wind blew through the trees and riffled the pages of the Bible, turning them not to Exodus, as I wrote in my memoir, but Genesis. The priest had marked a section here too and when I read it now I saw new meaning in it. I had prayed to God to spare my life, to show me a sign of what he wanted of me, and here was my answer:

And they came to the place which

God had told him of; and Abraham

built an altar there . . .

and bound Isaac his son, and

laid him on the altar upon the wood.

And Abraham stretched forth his

Hand, and took the knife to slay his

Son.

I stared at Eldridge, so close to death already that I knew I would kill him by not sharing my few remaining mouthfuls of water. What difference would it make if I used a swifter weapon?

Without a second thought I rose and walked back to the jumbled pile of my possessions and retrieved my large gold pan. Then I went over to where Eldridge lay in the shade, took him under the arms, and dragged him to where the pale Christ on the cross was propped
against a tree. I took my knife from my belt and, before I could dwell on it more, I cut his throat in front of that makeshift altar.

He was too weak to fight, or perhaps just ready and willing to die. He lay perfectly still as the life pumped out of him and into the gold pan I had laid beneath his neck. And when he was dead, and the pan near full of his blood, I led my mule over and let him drink of it. So thirsty was the poor animal and so starved of nutrition that it drank the blood without hesitation, as if it was the purest spring water fresh from the ground.

And so did I, God help me, so did I.

There is no describing a true thirst to someone who has never known one. It is a demon that grips your body and soul until you can think of nothing else and would drink anything, anything at all, to be rid of it. I have heard stories of castaways, sailors driven mad by drinking seawater because there was nothing else to drink and, though they knew it would drive them to madness, they drank anyway. Thus I gorged on the warm blood, praying to God and offering Him this blood sacrifice like the prophets of old, one man's life to save another, one man's life to save many, and I asked Him to grant strength to my animal so it might carry me safe and spare my miserable life. I thought of the Catholic sacrament and how worshippers of that Church drank the blood of Christ and I closed my eyes and imagined that I was drinking the blood of the Savior as they did. And indeed it did prove to be my savior, for I would surely have perished there had I not been quenched by the warm spring of that man's life.

Afterward I sat across from Eldridge in the shade of my strange chapel, the pale Christ at one end, the open Bible beside me. And when I set out at dusk, it is true I saw a light burning in the desert to the south and followed it to the spot where water and riches
bubbled from the ground, but there is more to it than I recorded in my published memoir. Much more.

I followed the shining light as darkness fell around me, the beam from it casting stark shadows across the undulating landscape like a fixed lighthouse on a frozen sea. It was shining straight at me and no matter where I moved it always seemed to follow.

It was full night now and the light so bright within it that it outshone the stars. I could hardly look at it direct and had to tilt my head down so the brim of my hat shaded my eyes and follow instead the pathway of light laid out upon the ground. I glanced up from time to time to see if I was getting closer, but it was impossible to tell. Then, three hours or so into my trek, when I was beginning to doubt my own sanity, my mule suddenly stopped and I looked up and finally saw where the light was coming from, or more precisely—what.

At first I thought it was a doorway cut into the fabric of night leading to some dazzling, sunlit world beyond. But as my eyes adjusted a little I saw it was not a door at all but a mirror, long and narrow and set on a floor stand. There was something so out of place about finding such an object way out in the middle of this wild and savage country that for a moment this seemed more remarkable to me than the sunlight shining out of it. There was a small dark patch in the center where my own reflection stood. I dropped the reins and took a step toward the mirror, moving to the side a little and watching the dark shape of my reflection move too and the bright, reflected land shift behind it. It appeared to be the same desert I was standing in, same rolling landscape and distant mountains, though the season seemed different there. There was more green and flashes of bright color—reds, purples, and yellow—where green shrub and grass and cactus flowers bloomed. Nothing thrived in the desert
where I stood, only death. The sky in the mirror was different too: storm clouds boiled gray and heavy with rain at the distant mountain peaks, explaining the strong smell of creosote bush that flowed from the mirror, mingling with the fresh smell of the flowers. Creosote was the smell of the wet desert. Somewhere in the mirror land it was raining.

I continued walking in a slow circle all around the mirror, like an amazed spectator at a conjurer's show, invited onstage to prove there was nothing behind the magic cabinet. The mirror itself was plain, a simple wooden frame with no carving or other ornamentation.

I moved around to the front again and saw that the reflected view now showed a new part of the desert. The mountains were gone and in their place I could see the prairie running all the way to the horizon. The mirror land was so hot there were whole lakes of rippling heat haze upon it and in the near foreground sat a large boulder. I had seen its twin as I had approached with my mule, but the boulder in the mirror was different. It had been split clean in two and where the two halves fell away from each other, spring water bubbled from the ground, sparkling in the sunlight and forming a crystal pool around the broken rocks.

The sight of it made me gasp and I took a step forward, forgetting that what I was seeing was only a reflection. I hit the mirror hard, banging my forehead against the cold glass and stumbling backward and onto the ground. I looked back up and gasped again. For though I was sprawled on the floor, my reflection was still standing and I realized with dread and amazement that the person in the mirror was not me.