Accustomed to the Dark Read online

  He set his mouth in a thin line. “No, man. No way. You got to promise.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “But I can promise you this. I’ll find him. And I’ll find him with your help or without it. But with it, maybe, I might be able to find him a little bit faster.”

  It was manipulative and it was callous. But like a lot of behavior that was manipulative and callous, it worked. He stared at me for a moment and then he looked away, his shoulders slumping in defeat. “Shit,” he said.

  “What’ve you got, Leroy?” I asked him.

  He looked back at me. He nodded. “Okay.” He lifted the briefcase, set its bottom along his thighs and unzipped its top. He peered inside the case, reached in, pulled out a small cellular phone. “You said you wanted to keep in touch. This is top of the line, man. Cutting edge. Weighs three point nine ounces. The battery that’s in here now, you got eight hours standby time, one hour talk time. Another battery in the case, gives you three hours talk time. You can recharge ’em both from the AC or the cigarette lighter in your car. You don’t want the phone to ring, you flip a switch and it vibrates instead. Case you’re in a situation where you want to keep things quiet, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay,” he said. “See this?” He pointed to the bottom of the phone. “That’s where you hook up the computer.”

  “What computer?”

  “This one, man.” He lifted the case, stood up, walked to the desk, put down the case, unzipped it down along the sides. “Okay. Here’s the computer. Pentium chip, one hundred thirty-three megahertz. Thirty-two megs of RAM. Gigabyte hard disk. Active matrix screen. Right here, that’s your PC slot, and what’s inside there is a cellular fax/modem. Rated at fourteen thousand baud, but it’s more reliable at ninety-six hundred. It works on landlines, too.” He turned to me. “You understand what I’m saying here?”

  “No. Sorry. Listen, Leroy, I don’t need all this.”

  He gave me a pained look. “Hey, man. You don’t know what this stuff is, how can you know you need it or not?” He took a deep breath, drawing in patience with the oxygen. “Okay, look. Say someone wants to send you a photo, right? Of a suspect, right? A contact, whatever. I dunno, doesn’t matter. They get to a fax machine, they call your number. You hook the computer to the phone, you receive the fax, you print it out with this. That’s your printer. Thermal. Weighs less than a pound. Take you about a minute to print out a fax.”

  “Fine. What’s this?”

  “Portable scanner, man. Three hundred dpi. You use that when you want to fax something to someone. And all this stuff, everything, works off rechargeable batteries. Like with the phone. It’s all connected to the same line. For the AC outlet, you use this plug. This one’s for the cigarette lighter. Whole thing only weighs twelve pounds. But part of that’s the case. It’s padded—see?—and it’s lined with Kevlar. You know what they use Kevlar for?”

  “Bulletproof vests. Leroy, I really don’t think—”

  “Shit, man. This is Rita we’re talking about, remember? Even if you think you don’t need it, man, you take it anyway, you hear me? Just in case. You don’t want to be in a situation, you need it but you don’t have it.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Show me how it all works.”

  6

  I SPENT A couple of hours with Leroy at the office, learning how to operate the equipment. The phone rang five or six times, but I let the machine answer it. I listened as it did, and none of the calls came from Norman Montoya. I didn’t want to talk to anyone else, and I didn’t.

  Before Leroy and I left, I called the hospital again. No change.

  I reached home at about five o’clock in the afternoon. There were more messages waiting for me on the answering machine here, so I played through the tape. No calls from Norman Montoya.

  I found a leather carryall and I packed it with clothes. I took my own Smith & Wesson from the shoebox in the closet. I unloaded it, cleaned it, oiled it, wiped it dry, reloaded it, wound a sheet of Glad Wrap around it, stuck it in the carryall.

  For a few minutes I just sat there on the living room sofa, as Norman Montoya had suggested, and I examined my thoughts and my emotions. But I didn’t much like them, so I put on a jacket and went outside to the Jeep and climbed in.

  I couldn’t sit by myself, but I couldn’t sit with anyone else, and especially not with anyone I knew, so I drove south on St. Francis Drive, away from the center of town. The sun was setting, the blue was fading overhead. There were more cop cars than usual on the road, prowling like sharks between the other vehicles. Off in the distance, high up, the state police helicopter was slowly quartering the sky, still searching for needles in the barren haystack of scrubland to the west of the penitentiary.

  I started drinking at Fox’s, on St. Michael’s. It was a new place, built only a few years ago, but it had the feel of an old neighborhood tavern. Low ceilings, neon beer signs, dark walls. Everyone knew everyone else, and no one knew me, and just then that was exactly what I wanted. Men in blue collars and men in white collars, women in denim and women in raw silk, sat and stood and nestled at the bar, prolonging that sweet empty space between their escape from work and their return to home, between one reality and another. Rita once told me that the Aztecs spent five days a year very carefully doing nothing while they waited for the lunar calendar to realign itself with the solar calendar. It was a time out of time, a period when chronology stopped. We have the cocktail hour.

  I found a thin slice of unoccupied bar near the end, two women in suits on my right, two men in suits on my left, and I ordered a Jack Daniel’s on the rocks. The air smelled of perfume hastily applied, and of beer and tobacco smoke. No one in here had read the warning label on their cigarette packs, or seemed likely to.

  That first drink went down well, and quickly, and I ordered a second. I told myself that the alcohol wasn’t having any effect, but it was, because with the second drink the bar lights grew brighter and more intense, the background rumble of conversation grew louder and more distinct and I could make out some of its individual elements.

  Everyone was talking about the prison break. For the two women on my right it provided an opportunity to express fears that in some women, maybe in all women, swim beneath the surface of their feelings for men, fears of assault and of sudden violence, overpowering and deadly. “I heard it on the radio,” said one of them, a slender Hispanic. “They raped her before they killed her. And it only happened a few miles from here, out near Airport Road. They could be anywhere now.”

  It seemed to me that she said this with a certain amount of relish, as though a perverse pleasure secretly shivered beneath her concern. In the mirror over the bar, the thin attractive face beneath the shiny black bangs was narrowed with worry, but her large brown eyes were bright.

  For the two men on my left, the prison break provided an opportunity for them to explain how much more efficiently the world would operate if they were in charge of it. “Fry ’em all,” said one of them. “Slap ’em in the chair and turn on the juice.” There was no doubt about the relish in his voice.

  He was facing me as he talked, a tall fleshy man in his mid-forties with razor-cut thick blond hair artfully coiffed back from a shiny red face. Powder blue linen shirt snug against the round comfortable belly, silk Countess Mara tie loosened at the neck to signal that his exceedingly important business day had ended and that he was once again a regular guy.

  Something else Rita had once said: all overheard conversations sound inane, because we have nothing invested in them.

  He noticed me watching him and he raised his chin slightly and held my stare. Which left me three choices. Look away, join the conversation, or keep staring until something happened, probably something physical. I looked away.

  He took that as a ratification of his position, and he said, more loudly, “Burn ’em like the fuckin’ animals they are. Am I right, Johnny?”

  Johnny thought so, energetically.

  I felt a sudden surge of fu
ry, partly because I’d looked away, and partly because at that moment I agreed with him, and he wasn’t someone I would ever want to agree with. I swallowed my pride and my anger with the rest of my drink, tossed a couple of singles to the bar, and I left.

  I drove for a while, going nowhere in particular. Evening was settling around the town. Off to the west, beyond the low rolling ridges of the Jemez range, flat bands of cloud were aglow with pastel reds and yellows, the colors beginning to fade now into the cinder gray they would become. To the east, where the mountains were nearer and higher, the sky had deepened to a dark glossy purple.

  Cerrillos Road was packed with cars as I headed north, everyone in a hurry to get somewhere. More police cruisers glided among them, the men inside watchful and alert.

  I cut onto St. Francis, slipped off it at Agua Fria, followed that for a few blocks, then turned right on La Madera, toward the river. This was one of Santa Fe’s Hispanic neighborhoods, and the houses were mostly frame, all of them neat and trim beneath carefully cropped trees. Their windows were lit up, giving me brief vignettes through lace curtains of busy kitchens, cozy dining rooms, snug living rooms blue with the electric glow of the television.

  I turned left at Alto, drove past the house where Sally Durrell, a lawyer friend, had once lived, a tiny adobe crouched behind a low adobe wall. Turned right on Camino Alire, right again on Alameda, followed that to Guadalupe, turned left. Turned right on San Francisco, up the gentle incline into the Plaza. It was early in the evening still and there were very few pedestrians on the streets.

  In the darkness, the Plaza looked not much different now than it had looked fifteen years ago, when I first saw it. A dark square of grass, a few broad trees rising above it, their leaves billowing from black to green in the yellow glare of the street lamps. But in those days, the shops facing the Plaza had been family businesses, bookstores, pharmacies, restaurants. Since then, most of the commercial buildings had been gutted and converted into mini-malls crammed with slick little shops that sold overpriced Navajo jewelry and beaded buckskin jackets, blue corn pancakes and jalapeño sorbet.

  I hooked a left at the floodlit brown facade of Bishop Lamy’s cathedral, hooked a right at Palace Avenue, drove past the compound where my office was located, and I hooked another left onto Paseo De Peralta. I made the right at Marcy, swung back onto Hillside, and eased the Jeep into a parking space at the base of the hill. I got out of the car, locked it, and walked along Paseo to the stairway entrance. There was no sidewalk on this side of the road, and a car honked, loudly and insistently, as it swerved around me. I ignored it.

  Fifteen years ago, when I first climbed the hill, on a quick visit to Santa Fe, the path had been uneven, hard-packed dirt, and it had been lighted only by the moon. Now it was notched into the slope with cement and brick, the mass of the hillside held back by a restraining wall of stacked flagstone. Sconces set along the wall illuminated the brickwork, and tall metal lamps drew pale ocher circles upon the landings where the path switched back on itself as it rose.

  There was no one at the top when I got there. A wind was picking up from the north.

  Before me stood the towering white Cross of the Martyrs. It was a memorial to the Franciscan priests who had been killed throughout New Mexico’s Indian pueblos during the seventeenth century. There were quite a few names on the plaque at its base, representing quite a few deaths that stretched over quite a few years. Neither the priests nor the Indians had ever learned anything from their encounters. There were times, like tonight, when I wondered whether anyone ever did.

  I turned away from the cross and looked out. Up here, I stood above the entire town. I could see the walls of The Round House, our state capitol building, beaming brightly about a half a mile away. I remembered what a friend had once told me: that they kept the capitol lit at night so the politicians wouldn’t sneak back in and steal the furniture.

  A bit farther out, I could see the thin, brilliant necklace of streetlights strung along St. Francis Drive. Still farther out, beyond the radiance of the buildings and the darkness of the trees, I could see the finely etched line of the Interstate, where a narrow rivulet of faraway headlights flowed inexorably toward Santa Fe, sliding down that long gradual slope from the top of La Bajada Hill.

  Back then, fifteen years ago when I’d first stood here, the town had been a small cluster of lights clinging to the hem of a huge sheet of blackness flung out to the ragged horizon, a blackness broken only here and there by the tiny light of an isolated house bravely gleaming in the distance, like a solitary star. Now, from east to west, left and right as far as I could see, out to the line where the earth met the graying sky, a gaudy Milky Way covered the land.

  And every day new houses were being built, new people were flowing into town—Texans, Californians, New Yorkers, all of them hungry for their slice of the stylish Santa Fe pie.

  The world keeps moving on. Flowers growing, rivers flowing, people multiplying.

  Back then, on that first visit to Santa Fe, seven years before I actually moved here, I had climbed up this hill to get some sense of the town, its layout, its physical reality. I suppose I thought that I might, by understanding its geography, somehow understand its spirit. It hadn’t worked.

  Tonight, maybe, I’d come up here to get some sense of my connection to the place, to this beautiful and tawdry town in the high desert that over the centuries had been home to American Indians, Spanish hidalgos, French trappers, Union soldiers, railroad men, politicians, cowboys, whores, gamblers, gunfighters, artists, writers, speculators, spies, flower children, junkies, remittance men, movie stars, private detectives, real estate agents, crystal gazers, tarot readers, fakirs and fakers, hustlers and grifters and drifters of every persuasion, and even the occasional saint.

  And this hadn’t worked, either. I felt removed from it all, from the town’s past and from its present, from the people who lived in it and from everything they did, and everything they had done. I felt remote and adrift, more a part of the darkness that surrounded the place than a part of the glittering, relentlessly cheerful lights that made it up.

  I didn’t stay up there for very long. The wind was growing colder. And I was having trouble breathing again.

  I did some serious drinking. I ran the Cherokee over to the lot on Water Street, parked it, called the hospital from a pay phone, learned there had been no change, and then hit a couple of nearby bars, places I’d never been to before. Despite the early hour, despite this being a Wednesday, in both bars the smoky air was dense with the buzz and clatter of wall-to-wall people. Most of the people looked maybe twelve years old, their faces bright and mobile and hopelessly unguarded. But they moved with assurance and grace, and they laughed heartily, and they spoke with conviction, and already they had apartments and jobs and serious long-range financial goals. They were getting good at impersonating grown-ups. Soon, like the rest of us, they would forget that it was only an impersonation.

  No one was talking about the prison break and the dangers it might represent. Despite their grown-up postures, and impostures, these people were still immortal, and danger of any sort was irrelevant.

  I don’t remember how much I drank. I thought about Rita. I thought about Rosa and her husband, Robert. I thought about Ernie Martinez. Sitting there at the bar amid the warmth and the crush of young bodies, I grew slowly more remote and adrift, and more bitter. By the time I returned to the car, I was surly. I was also staggering. I shouldn’t have driven, but I did. When I reached home, the telephone was ringing. It was Norman Montoya, calling to tell me that he’d located someone who had known Ernie Martinez and Luiz Lucero in the state pen.

  7

  FROM DEEP UNDERWATER I could hear a distant beckoning chime. The sound insinuated itself around my body, a thin glistening wire, and slowly it grew taut. I couldn’t see the faraway surface, but I knew that it shimmered up there like quicksilver, bright and blinding and lethal. I burrowed deeper into the sand, sliding my hands into it, aga
inst the grains of it, clutching, squeezing. The chime pulled at me, tugged at me, then abruptly it jerked me loose. Pale yellow sand drifted from the tips of my fingers like clouds of falling stars as I rose upward, slowly, relentlessly.

  I opened my eyes and I pushed myself off the bed. Groggy, I fumbled my robe from the dresser and fought my way into it.

  I didn’t have a hangover. I had drunk so much the night before that my body hadn’t had a chance to burn off the alcohol. I was still drunk, and I was feeble and dizzy with it.

  I shuffled through the living room to the front door, peered through the peephole, and pulled open the door.

  Jimmy McBride looked me up and down and his narrow features went concerned and he said, “Hey, Mr. Croft. I can come back. You want me to come back?”

  “No,” I told him. “I want you to come in.”

  I stood aside to let him pass and I closed the door.

  McBride stood in the center of the room, looking around, nodding at everything with an admiration that needed a little more practice. “Real nice place you got here. Very livable, you know?”

  “Yeah. Sit down.”

  He sat on the sofa, a small skinny man in stained and wrinkled blue work pants and a wrinkled blue work shirt with an oil company logo on the pocket. His forehead was balding, thin wisps of hair above the shiny scalp forming a spidery outline of his former pompadour, like an afterimage. The genes that had stripped the hair from his head had grown a fine thick crop everywhere else. A single long eyebrow furred the ridge above his close-set brown eyes and his large irregular nose. Stubble darkened his hollow cheeks and his receding chin. A thick black pelt curled up his knobby Adam’s apple and spilled over the limp neckband of his gray T-shirt.

  He had been sent to prison for beating his three-year-old daughter so badly that he nearly killed her. It hadn’t been the first time he’d beaten her. I had met him once or twice, before he went up, and I knew that he wouldn’t have come here if he hadn’t been frightened into it.