Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015

Copyright © Simon Toyne 2015

Simon Toyne asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Cover design © Claire Ward/HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

Cover photographs © Tim Robinson / Archangel Images (man, foreground); © Shutterstock.com (flames, skin texture)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780007551385

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2015 ISBN: 9780007551378

Version: 2020-01-23

Dedication

For Betsy

(No Bean No!!)

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Part II

Extract from Riches …

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Part III

Extract from Riches …

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Part IV

Extract from Riches …

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Part V

Extract from Riches …

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Part VI

Extract from Riches …

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Part VII

Extract from Riches …

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Part VIII

From the private …

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Part IX

From the private …

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Chapter 85

Chapter 86

Chapter 87

Chapter 88

Chapter 89

Chapter 90

Chapter 91

Chapter 92

Part X

From the private …

Chapter 93

Chapter 94

Chapter 95

Chapter 96

Chapter 97

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Read on for an extract of The Boy Who Saw

If you enjoyed Solomon Creed, try Simon Toyne’s Sanctus trilogy …

About the Author

Also by Simon Toyne

About the Publisher

I

‘… all I know is that I know nothing.’

Socrates

1

In the beginning is the road – and me walking along it.

I have no memory of who I am, or where I have come from, or how I came to be here. There is only the road

and the desert stretching away to a burnt sky in every

direction

and there is me.

Anxiety bubbles within me and my legs scissor, pushing me forward through hot air as if they know something I don’t. I feel like telling them to slow down, but even in my confused state I know you don’t talk to your legs, not unless you’re crazy, and I don’t think I’m crazy – I don’t think so.

I stare down the shimmering ribbon of tarmac, rising and falling over the undulating land, its straight edges made wavy by intense desert heat. It makes the road seem insubstantial and the way ahead uncertain and my anxiety burns bright because of it. I feel there’s something important to do here, and that I am here to do it, but I cannot remember what.

I try to breathe slowly, dredging a recollection from some deep place that this is meant to be calming, and catch different scents in the dry desert air – the coal-tar sap of a broken creosote bush branch, the sweet sugar rot of fallen saguaro fruit, the arid perfume of agave pollen – each thing so clear to me, so absolutely itself and correct and known. And from the solid seed of each named thing more information grows – Latin names, medicinal properties, common names, whether each is edible or poisonous. The same happens when I glance to my left or right, each glimpsed thing sparking new names and fresh torrents of facts until my head hums with it all. I know the world entirely it seems and yet I know nothing of myself. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t even know my own name.

The wind gusts at my back, pushing me forward and bringing a new smell that makes my anxiety flare into fear. It is smoke, oily and acrid, and a half-formed memory slides in with it that there is something awful lying on the road behind me, something I need to get away from.

I break into a run, staring forward, not daring to glance behind. The blacktop feels hard and hot against the soles of my feet. I look down to discover that I’m not wearing shoes. My feet flash as they pound the road, my skin pure white in the bright sunshine. I hold my hand up and it’s the same, so white I have to narrow my eyes against the glare of it. I can feel my skin starting to redden in the fierce sun and know that I need to get out of this desert, away from this sun and the thing on the road behind me. I fix on a rise in the road, feeling if I can reach it then I will be safe, that the way ahead will be clearer.

The wind blows hard, bringing the smell of smoke again and smothering all other scents like a poisonous blanket. Sweat starts to soak my shirt and the dark grey material of my jacket. I should take it off, cool myself down a little, but the thicker material is giving me protection from the burning sun so I turn the collar up instead and keep on running. One step then another – forward and away, forward and away – asking myself questions between each step – Who am I? Where am I? Why am I here? – repeating each one until something starts to take shape in the blankness of my empty mind. An answer. A name.

‘James Coronado.’ I say it aloud in a gasp of breath before it is lost again and pain sears into my left shoulder.

My voice comes as a surprise to me, soft and strange and unfamiliar, but the name does not. I recognize it and say it again – James Coronado, James Coronado – over and over, hoping the name might be mine and might drag more about who I am from my silent memory. But the more I say it, the more distant it becomes until I’m certain the name is not mine. It feels apart from me though still connected in some way, as if I have made a promise to this man, one that I am bound to keep.

I reach the crest of the road and a new section of desert comes into view. In the distance I see a road sign, and beyond that, a town, spreading like a dark stain across the lower slopes of a range of red mountains.

I raise my hand to shield my eyes so I might read the name on the sign, but it is too far away and heat blurs the words. There is movement on the road, way off at the edge of town.

Vehicles.

Heading this way. Red and blue lights flashing on their roofs.

The wail of sirens mingles with the roar of the smoke-filled wind and I feel trapped between the two. I look to my right and consider leaving the road and heading out into the desert. A new smell reaches me, drifting from somewhere out in the wilderness, something that seems more familiar to me than all the other things. It is the smell of something dead and rotting, lying somewhere out of sight, sunbaked and fetid and caramel-sweet, like a premonition of what will befall me if I stray from the road.

Sirens in front of me, death either side, and behind me, what?

I have to know.

I turn to gaze upon what I have been running from and the whole world is on fire.

An aircraft lies broken and blazing in the centre of the road, its wings sticking up from the ground like the folded wings of some huge burning beast. A wide circle of flame surrounds it, spreading rapidly as flames leap from plant to plant and lick up the sides of giant saguaro, their burning arms raised in surrender, their flesh splitting and hissing as the water inside boils and explodes in puffs of steam.

It is magnificent. Majestic. Terrifying.

The sirens grow louder and the flames roar. One of the wings starts to fall, trailing flame as it topples and filling the air with the tortured sound of twisting metal. It lands with a whump, and a wave of fire rolls up into the air, curling like a tentacle that seems to reach down the road for me, reaching out, wanting me back.

I stagger backwards, turn on my heels.

And I run.

2

Mayor Ernest Cassidy looked up from the dry grave and out across the crowded heads of the mourners. He had felt the rumble as much as heard it, like thunder rolling in from the desert. Others must have felt it too. A few of the heads bowed in prayer turned to glance back at the desert stretching away below them.

The cemetery was high up, scooped into the side of the Chinchuca Mountains that encircled the town like a horseshoe. A hot wind blew up from the valley, ruffling the black clothes of the mourners and blowing grit against the wind-scoured boards marking the older graves that recorded the town’s violent birth with quiet and brutal economy:

Teamster. Killed by Apaches. 1881

China Mae Ling. Suicide. 1880

Susan Goater. Murdered. 1884

Boy. Age 11 months. Died of Neglect. 1882

A new name was being added to this roll call of death today and almost the whole town was present to see it, their businesses closed for the morning so they could attend the first funeral to take place in this historic cemetery for over sixty years. It was the least they could do in the circumstances – the very least. The future of their town was being secured this day, as surely as it had been at the ragged end of the nineteenth century when the murdered, the hanged, the scalped and the damned had first been planted here.

The crowd settled as the memory of the thunder faded and Mayor Cassidy, wearing his preacher hat today, dropped a handful of dust down into the dry grave. It pattered down on the lid of the simple, old-fashioned pine box at the bottom – a nice touch, considering – then continued with the solemn service.

‘For dust thou art,’ he said in a low and respectful voice he kept specially for situations like this, ‘and unto dust shalt thou return. Amen.’

There was a murmur of ‘Amens’ then a wind-shushed minute of silence. He stole a glance at the widow, standing very close to the edge of her husband’s grave like a suicide at the edge of a cliff. Her hair and eyes shone in the sunlight, a deeper black than any of the clothes flapping in the wind around her. She appeared so beautiful in her grief – beautiful and young. She had loved her husband deeply, he knew that, and there was a particular tragedy in the knowledge of it. But her youth meant she had time enough ahead of her to move on from this, and that leavened it some. She would leave the town and start again somewhere else. And there were no children; there was a mercy in that too, no physical ties to bind her, no face that carried traces of his and would remind her of her lost love whenever she caught it in a certain light. Sometimes the absence of children was a blessing. Sometimes.

Movement rippled through the crowd and he glanced up to see a police chief’s hat being jammed back on to a close-cropped salt-and-pepper head moving quickly away towards the exit. Mayor Cassidy looked beyond him to the desert, and saw why.

A column of black smoke was rising up on the main road out of town. It wasn’t thunder he had heard or rain that was coming, it was more trouble.

3

Chief Morgan pulled away from the cemetery as fast as he could without sending a cloud of grit over the other mourners hurrying to their cars behind him.

He had heard the rumble too and had known straight away it wasn’t thunder. The sound had transported him back to a time when he had worn a different uniform and watched flashes of artillery fire in the night as shells pounded a foreign city in a different desert. It was the sound of something big hitting the ground and his mouth felt dry because of it.

He picked up speed as he headed downhill and pushed the comms button on the steering wheel to activate the radio. ‘This is Morgan. I’m heading north on Eldridge en route to a possible fire about three miles out of town, anyone else call it in?’

There was a bump and a squeal of rubber as his truck bottomed out and joined the main road, then the voice of Rollins the duty dispatcher crackled back. ‘Copy that, Chief, we got a call from Ellie over at the Tucker ranch, said she heard an explosion to the southwest. We got five units responding: two fire trucks, a highway patrol unit, an ambulance from County and another heading from the King. Six units, including you.’

Morgan glanced in his rear-view mirror, saw flashing lights behind him on the road. He stared ahead to where the column of smoke was growing much faster than his speed could account for. ‘We’re going to need more,’ he said.

‘What is it, Chief?’

Morgan studied the wall of smoke. ‘Well, I ain’t there yet but the smoke is rising fast and high, so there’s gotta be some heat in the fire, burning fuel probably. There was the explosion too.’

‘Yeah, I heard it.’

‘You heard it in the office?’

‘Yessir. Felt it too.’

Rollins was a mile or so further away than he had been. Some explosion. ‘Can you see it yet?’ Morgan listened to dead air and pictured Rollins leaning back in his chair to catch a view out of the narrow window of the dispatch room.

‘Yeah, I got it.’

‘Well, it’s coming your way so you better get busy. Call the airfield, get the tanker in the air. We need to step on this thing before it gets out of hand.’

‘I’m on it, Chief.’

Morgan clicked off the comms and leaned forward. The top of the smokestack was several hundred feet high and still rising. He was closer now, close enough that he could see something burning at the centre of the fire each time he crested a rise in the road. He was so fixated on it, wanting to see it and confirm what he already knew it must be, that he didn’t notice the figure running down the middle of the road until he was almost upon him.

His reaction was all instinct and panic. He threw the wheel hard right and braced himself for a thump that didn’t come, then jerked the wheel left again. The rear wheels caught the soft dirt of the verge and he started to slide. He stamped on the brakes to stop the wheels then back on the gas to give him some traction. He was in a full sideways skid now, wheels spinning and throwing grit into the air. He hit the brakes again and clung to the wheel, steering into the slide until he slammed into a bush or something that stopped the truck dead and made him bang his head against the window.

He sat perfectly still for a moment, hands on the wheel, heart pounding in his chest, so loud he could hear it above the roar of the burning desert and the patter of grit on the windshield. The first fire truck roared past, throwing more grit over him and a crackle of static flooded the car. ‘Chief? You there, Chief?’

He took a breath, pressed the comms button. ‘Yeah, Rollins, I’m here.’

‘How’s it lookin’?’

The second fire truck thundered by and he followed its path towards the wall of flame, the burning plane twisted at its centre. ‘Like the end of the world,’ he murmured.

He glanced back to the road and was half-surprised to see the running man still there, rising from the ground where he had thrown himself. He looked strange, extraordinary, his hair as white as his skin.

Morgan had heard all the stories about how this road was built on the old wagon trail and was supposed to be haunted. People had seen plenty of things out here, especially at night when the cold hit the ground like a hammer, releasing wisps of vapour that drifted through the headlights and imaginations of people who had heard the same stories he had. He’d had reports of everything from ghost horses to wagons floating a foot above the ground. But he had never seen anything himself until now.

‘Chief? You still there, Chief?’

Morgan snapped to attention, his eyes fixed on the stranger. ‘Yeah, I’m here. What’s the word on those tankers?’

‘You got the unit from the airfield on its way and two more possibles inbound from Tucson. They’re dragging their asses a little, but I’m working on it. If they get the go-ahead they should be with you in twenty.’

Morgan nodded but said nothing. In twenty minutes the fire would have doubled in size, tripled even. More sirens wailed closer, everything the town had to send but not nearly enough.

‘Call everyone you can,’ he said. ‘We’re going to need roadblocks on all routes in and out of town. I don’t want anybody riding out into this mess, and we’re going to need to set firebreaks too. Anyone with a truck and a shovel they can swing needs to report for duty at the city-limit billboard if they want this town to still be here by sundown.’

He disconnected and fumbled in his pocket for his phone. He found a contact and opened a new message. His fingers shook as he typed: ‘Clear out now. Funeral finished early. Find anything?’

He sent the message and looked back at the stranger. He was gazing up at the fire with an odd expression on his face. Morgan held up his phone, snapped a photo and studied it. The man seemed to glow in the midst of all the grit. It reminded him of the pictures he’d seen in the books and on the websites devoted to the town’s ghosts. Only those all seemed fake to him. There was nothing fake about this. He was there, large as life, staring back at the crashed plane with pale grey eyes the colour of stone. Staring into the fire.

The phone beeped in his hand. A reply: ‘Nothing. Leaving now.’

Goddammit. Nothing was going right today. Not a damned thing.

He grabbed his hat and opened the door to the roar of fire and the heat of the desert just as the pale man turned and started to run.

4

I stare into the heart of the fire and feel as if it’s staring back at me. But that can’t be right. I know that. The air swirls and wails and roars around me like the world is in pain.

The first fire truck stops at the edge of the blaze and people run out, pulling hose from its belly like they are drawing innards from some beast in sacrifice to a burning god. They seem so tiny and the fire so big. The wind stirs the flames and the fire roars forward, up the road, towards the men, towards me. Fear flares inside me and I turn to run and almost collide with a woman wearing a dark blue uniform, walking up the road behind me.

‘Are you OK, sir?’ she says, her eyes soft with concern. I want to hold her and have her hold me but my fear of the fire is too great and so is my desire to get away from it. I duck past her and keep on running, straight into a man wearing the same uniform. He grabs my arm and I try to pull free but I cannot. He is too strong and this surprises me, as if I am not used to being weak.

‘I need to get away,’ I say in my soft, unfamiliar voice, and glance back over my shoulder at the flames being blown closer by the wind.

‘You’re safe now, sir,’ he says with a professional calm that only makes me more anxious. How can he know I am safe, how can he possibly know?

I look back and past him towards the town and the sign, but there is a parked ambulance blocking my view and this makes me anxious too.

‘I need to get away from it,’ I say, pulling my arm away, trying to make him understand. ‘I think the fire is here because of me.’

He nods as if he understands, but I see his other hand reaching out to grab me and I seize it and pull hard, sweeping his feet from beneath him with my leg at the same time and twisting away so he falls to the ground. The movement is as natural as breathing and as smooth as a well-practised dance step. My muscles still have memory it seems. I look down into his shocked face. ‘Sorry, Lawrence,’ I say, using the name on his badge, then I turn to run – back to the town and away from the fire. I manage one step before his hand grabs my leg, his strong fingers closing round my ankle like a manacle.

I stumble, regain my balance, turn back and raise my foot. I don’t want to kick him but I will, I will kick him right in his face if that’s what it takes to make him let go. The thought of the solid heel of my foot crashing into his nose, splitting his skin and spilling blood, brings a sensation like warm air rushing through me. It’s a nice feeling, and it disturbs me as much as my earlier familiarity with the smell of death. I try to focus on something else, try to smother my instinct and stop my foot from lashing out, and in this pause something big and solid hits me hard, ripping my leg from the man’s grip.

I hit the ground and a flash of white explodes inside my skull as my head bangs against the road. Rage erupts in me. I fight to wriggle free from whoever tackled me. Hot breath blows on my cheek and I smell sour coffee and the beginnings of tooth decay. I twist my head round and see the face of the policeman who nearly ran me down. ‘Take it easy,’ he says, pinning me down with his weight, ‘they’re only trying to help you here.’

But they’re not. If they wanted to help, they’d let me go.

In a detached part of my mind I know that I could use my teeth to tear at his cheek or his nose, attack him with such ferocity he would want to be free of me more than I do from him. I am simultaneously fascinated, appalled and excited by this notion, this realization that I have the power to free myself but that something is holding me back, something inside me.

More hands grab me and press me hard to the ground. I feel a sting in my arm like a large insect has bitten me. The female medic is crouching beside me now, her attention fixed on the syringe sticking into my arm.

‘Unfair fight,’ I try to say, but am already slurring by the time I get to the last word.

The world starts turning to liquid and I feel myself going limp. A hand cradles my head and gently lowers it to the ground. I try to fight it, willing my eyes to stay open. I can see the distant town, framed by the road and sky. I want to tell them all to hurry, that the fire is coming and they need to get away, but my mouth no longer works. My vision starts to tunnel, black around the edges, a diminishing circle of light in the centre, as if I am falling backwards down a deep well. I can see the sign now past the edge of the ambulance, the words on it visible too. I read them in the clarifying air, the last thing I see before my eyes close and the world goes dark:

WELCOME TO THE CITY OF

REDEMPTION

5

Mulcahy leaned against the Jeep and stared out at the jagged lines of wings beyond the chain-link fence. From where he stood he could see a Vietnam-era B-52 with upwards of thirty mission decals on its fuselage, a World War II bomber of some sort, a heavy transporter plane that resembled a whale, and a squadron of sharp-nosed, lethal-looking jet fighters with various paint jobs from various countries, including a MiG with a Soviet star on the side and two smaller ones beneath the cockpit windows denoting combat kills.

Beyond the parade of military planes a runway arrowed away into the heart of the caldera, snakes of heat twisting in the air above it. There were some buzzards to the north, circling above something dead or dying in the desert; other than that there was nothing, not even a cloud, though he had heard thunder a while back. A spot of rain would be nice. God knows they needed it.

He checked his watch.

Late.

Sweat was starting to prick and tickle in his hair and on his back beneath his shirt as the trapped heat of the day got hold of him. The silver Grand Cherokee he was leaning against had black tinted windows, cool leather seats and a kick-ass air-conditioner circulating chilled air at a steady sixty-five degrees. He could hear the unit whirring under the idling engine. Even so, he preferred to stand outside in the desert heat than remain in the car with the two morons he was having to baby-sit, listening to their inane conversation.

– Hey, man, how many Nazis you think that bird wasted?

– How many gook babies you think that one burned up?

They’d somehow made the assumption that Mulcahy was ex-military, which, in their fidgety, drug-fried minds, also made him an expert on every war ever fought and the machines used to fight them. He’d told them, several times, that he had not served in any branch of the armed forces and therefore knew as much about war planes as they did, but they kept on with their endless questions and fantasy body counts.

He checked his watch again.

Once the package was delivered to the meeting point he could drive away, take a long, cold shower and wash away the day. A window buzzed open next to him, and super-cooled air leaked out from inside.

‘Where’s the plane at, man?’ It was Javier, the shorter, more irritating of the two men, and a distant relative of Papa Tío, the big boss on the Mexican side.

‘It’s not here,’ Mulcahy replied.

‘No shit, tell me something I don’t know.’

‘Hard to know where to start.’

‘What?’

Mulcahy took a step away from the Jeep and stretched until he felt the vertebrae pop in his spine. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘If anything was wrong I’d get a message.’

Javier thought for a moment then nodded. He had inherited some of the boss man’s swagger but none of the brains so far as Mulcahy could tell. He had also caught the family looks, which was unfortunate, and the combination of his squat stature, oily, pock-marked skin and fleshy, petulant lips made him appear more like a toad in jeans and a T-shirt than a man.

‘Shut the window, man, it’s like a motherfuckin’ oven out there.’ That was Carlos, idiot number two, not blood, as far as he knew, but clearly in good enough standing with the cartel to be allowed to come along for the ride.

‘I’m talking,’ Javier snarled. ‘I be closing the window when I’m good and ready.’

Mulcahy turned back and stared up at the empty sky.

‘What kind of plane we looking for? Is it one of these big-assed nuke bombers? Man, that would be some cool ride.’

Mulcahy considered not replying, but this was the one piece of information about aircraft he did know because it had been included in the brief. Besides, the longer he talked to Javier, the longer the window would remain open, leaking cold air out and hot air in.

‘It’s a Beechcraft,’ he said.

‘What’s that?’

‘An old airplane, I guess.’

‘What, like a private jet?’

‘Propellers, I think.’

Javier pursed his boxing-glove lips and nodded. ‘Still, sounds pretty cool. When I had to run, I sneaked across the river on some lame-assed boat in the middle of the night.’

‘You got here though, didn’t you?’

‘I guess.’

‘Well, that’s the main thing.’ Mulcahy leaned forward. A dark smudge had appeared in the sky above one of the larger spill piles on the far side of the airfield. ‘Doesn’t matter how you got here, just so long as you did.’

The smudge darkened and became a column of black smoke rising fast and thick in the sky. He heard the faint sound of distant sirens. Then Mulcahy’s phone started to buzz in his pocket.

6

Movement rocked him awake.

His eyes flickered open and he stared up at a low white ceiling, a drip bag hanging over him, a clear tube coiled round it like a translucent snake, moving gently in time with the ambulance.

‘Hey, welcome back.’ The female medic appeared over him and shone a bright light into his left eye. He felt a stab of pain and tried lifting his hand to shield his eyes but his arm wouldn’t move. He looked down and his head swam with a chemical wooziness. Thick blue nylon straps were wrapped round his arms and body, securing him tightly to the gurney.

‘For your protection while we’re on the move,’ she said, like it was no big deal. He knew the real reason. They’d had to sedate him to get him in the ambulance and the bindings were to make sure they wouldn’t need to do it again.

He hated being bound like this. It pricked at some deep emotional memory, as if he’d known confinement and never wanted to know it again. He focused on the feeling, trying to remember where it came from, but his mind remained stubbornly blank.

The movement of the ambulance was making him feel sick and so was the cocktail of smells trapped inside it – iodine, sodium bicarbonate, naloxone hydrochloride, all mixed in with sweat and smoke and sickly synthetic coconut air-freshener drifting in from the driver’s cab. He wanted to feel the ground beneath his feet again and the wind on his face. He wanted to be free to focus and think and remember what it was he had come here to do. The pain in his arm flared again at the thought and the bar rattled when he tried to reach for it.

‘Could you loosen the straps?’ He forced his voice to stay low and calm. ‘Just enough so I can move my arm.’

The medic chewed her lip and fiddled with a thin necklace round her neck with ‘Gloria’ written on it in gold letters. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘But you try anything and I’ll knock you straight out again, understand?’ She held up the penlight. ‘And you’ve got to let me do my job.’

He nodded. She paused a little longer to let him know who was in charge, then reached down and tugged at a strap by the side of the gurney. The nylon band holding his hands came loose and he lifted his arm to rub at his shoulder.

‘Sorry about that,’ Gloria said, leaning in and flashing the light in his eye again. ‘Quickest way to calm you down before you injured someone.’ The light hurt but this time he put up with it.

‘What’s your name, sir?’ She switched the light to his other eye.

She was so close he could feel her breath on his skin and it made him want to reach out and touch her to see what she felt like and make gentle rather than violent contact with someone. ‘I don’t remember,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember anything.’

‘How about Solomon?’ a new voice answered for him, a man’s voice, high-pitched but with a touch of gravel in it. ‘Solomon Creed, that ring any bells?’

Gloria leaned down to write some notes on a clipboard and he saw the cop who had nearly run him down perched on the gurney behind her.

‘Solomon,’ he repeated, and it felt comfortable, like boots he had walked long miles wearing. ‘Solomon Creed.’ He stared at the cop, hoping he might know more than his name. ‘Do you know me?’

The cop shook his head and held up a small book. ‘Found this in your pocket, personally inscribed to a Solomon Creed, so I assume that’s you. Name’s in your jacket too.’ He nodded at the folded grey jacket lying on the gurney next to him. ‘Stitched right on the label in gold thread and written in French.’ He said French like he was spitting out something bitter.

Solomon studied the book. There was a stern, sepia-tinted photograph of a man on the cover and old-fashioned block type that spelled out the title:

RICHES AND REDEMPTION

THE MAKING OF A TOWN

A Memoir

by the Reverend Jack ‘King’ Cassidy

Founder and first citizen

He wanted to snatch the book away from the cop and see what else it contained. He didn’t recognize it. No memory of it at all. No memory of anything, but it had to be important. Frustrating. Maddening. And why had the cop been through his pockets? The thought of it made his hands clench into fists.

‘So, Mr Creed,’ the cop continued, ‘any idea why you were running away from that burning plane?’

‘I can’t remember,’ Solomon said. A badge on the cop’s shirt identified him as Chief Garth B. Morgan, hinting at Welsh ancestry and explaining why his skin was pink and freckled and clearly unsuited to this climate – like his own.

What the hell was he doing here?

‘You think maybe you were a passenger?’ Morgan asked.

‘No.’

Morgan frowned. ‘How can you be sure if you can’t remember?’

Solomon looked out of the rear window at the burning plane and a fresh torrent of information cascaded through his head and crystallized into an explanation. ‘Because of the way the wings are folded.’

Morgan followed Solomon’s gaze. One wing still stood at the centre of the blaze, folded up towards the sky. ‘What about it?’

‘They show that the aircraft flew straight into the ground. Any passengers would have been thrown downwards, not outwards – and with lethal force. A crash like that would also have caused the fuel tanks to rupture and the fuel to ignite. Aviation fuel in an open-air burn reaches between five hundred and seven hundred degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to burn flesh from bone in seconds. So, taking that into account, I could not possibly have been on that plane and still be talking to you now.’

Morgan twitched like his nose had been flicked. ‘So where did you come from, if not the plane?’

‘All I can remember is the road and the fire,’ Solomon said, rubbing at his shoulder where the pain had now settled into a steady ache.

‘Let me take a look at that,’ Gloria said, stepping closer and blocking his view of Morgan.

Solomon started undoing his buttons, watching his fingers moving, the skin as white as his shirt.

‘Back there you said something about the fire being here because of you,’ Morgan said. ‘Any idea what you meant by that?’

Solomon remembered the feeling of total fear and panic and his overpowering desire to get away from it. ‘It’s a feeling more than a memory,’ he said. ‘Like the fire is connected to me. I can’t explain it.’ He unbuttoned his cuffs, slipped his arms out of his shirt and became aware of a shift in the atmosphere.

Gloria leaned in, staring hard at Solomon’s shoulder. Morgan was staring too. Solomon followed their gaze and saw the angry red origin of his recurring pain.

‘What is that?’ Gloria whispered.

Solomon had no answer for that either.

7

‘Crashed? What do you mean crashed?’

The Cherokee was kicking up dust, Mulcahy at the wheel, eyeing the smoke rising fast to the west as they drove away from the airfield. ‘Planes crash,’ he said. ‘You know that, right? They’re kind of famous for it.’

Javier was staring out at the smoke, the obscene cushions of his lips hanging wet and open as he tried to get his head round what was happening. Carlos was in the back, hunkered down and saying nothing. His eyes were wide open and unfocused and Mulcahy knew why. Papa Tío had a reputation for making examples of people who messed things up. If the package had been lost in the crash, this package in particular, then the shit was going to hit the fan like it had been fired from a cannon. No one would be safe, not Carlos, not him, probably not even cousin Lips in the passenger seat.

‘Don’t panic,’ he said, trying to convince himself as much as anyone. ‘All we know is that a plane has crashed. We don’t know if it’s our plane or how bad it is.’

‘Looks pretty fuckin’ bad from where I’m sitting!’ Javier said, staring at the rapidly widening column of smoke.

Mulcahy’s fingers ached from gripping the wheel too tight and he forced himself to let go a little and ease off the gas. ‘Let’s wait and see what shakes out,’ he said, forcing calm into his voice. ‘For now, we follow the plan. The plane didn’t show, so we relocate to the safe house to regroup, report, and await further instructions.’

Mulcahy’s instinct was to run, put a bullet in his passengers, dump them in the desert and take off to give himself a good head start. He knew it didn’t matter that the plane crash wasn’t his fault – Papa Tío would most likely kill everyone involved anyway to send one of his famous messages. So if he killed Javier and Carlos right now then disappeared, Papa Tío would definitely think he was behind the crash, and he would never stop looking for him. Not ever. And despite his less than honourable résumé, Mulcahy didn’t especially like killing people, and he didn’t like being on the run either. He had a nice enough life, a nice enough house and a couple of women with kids and ex-husbands who weren’t looking for anything more than he could offer, and who didn’t seem to care what he did or ask how he had come by all the scars on his body. It wasn’t much in the grand scheme of things, and it was only now, when faced with the prospect of walking away from it all, that he realized how badly he wanted to keep it.

‘We stick to the plan,’ he said. ‘Anyone unhappy with that can get out of the car.’

‘And who put you in charge, pendejo?’

‘Tío did, OK? Tío called me up himself and asked me to collect this package as a personal favour to him. He also asked me to bring you two along, and like the dickhead that I am, I said “fine”. If you want to take over so all this becomes your responsibility then be my guest, otherwise shut your fat mouth and let me think.’

Javier slumped back in his seat like a teenager who’d been grounded.

Mulcahy could see flames to the west now. A twisting wall of fire curling up from the ground and spreading fast. He could see emergency vehicles, too, which meant at least the cops would be well occupied.

‘Plane!’ Javier shouted, pointing back to where they had just come from.

Mulcahy felt a flutter of hope take flight in his chest. Maybe it was all going to be OK after all. Maybe they could turn the truck around, pick up the package as arranged and have a damn good laugh about it all over some cold beers later. Maybe he would get to keep his nicely squared away, uncomplicated life after all. He took his foot off the gas and twisted in his seat, taking his eyes off the empty road for a few seconds to see what Javier had seen. He saw the bright yellow plane banking in the sky above the airfield and spun round again, stamping down hard on the gas to claw back the speed he had lost.

‘The fuck you doing?’ Javier said, looking at him like he was crazy.

‘That’s not the plane we’re waiting for,’ Mulcahy said, feeling the full weight of the situation settling back on him. ‘And it’s taking off, not landing. It’s a tanker of some sort, probably MAFFS.’

‘MAFFS? The fuck is MAFFS?’

‘They’ve been talking about them on the news ever since this dry spell set in. Stands for Modular Airborne Fire Fighting System. It’s what they use to fight wildfires.’

The chop of propellers shredded the air as the plane flew directly overhead, the sound thudding in Mulcahy’s chest.

Javier slumped back in his seat, a teenager again, shaking his head and sucking his teeth. ‘MAFFS,’ he said, like it was the worst curse word he had ever heard. ‘Tole you, you was some kind of a military motherfucker.’

8

Solomon’s skin glowed under the lights, the mark on his shoulder standing out vividly against it. It was red and raised and about the length and thickness of a human finger, with thinner lines across the top and bottom making it resemble a capital ‘I’.

‘Looks like a cattle brand,’ Morgan said, leaning forward. ‘Or maybe …’ He left the thought hanging and pulled his phone from his pocket.

Gloria gently probed the skin around the raised welt with gloved fingers. ‘Do you remember how you got this?’

Solomon recalled the intense burning pain he had experienced when the name James Coronado had first appeared in his mind, like hot metal being pressed to his flesh, only he had been wearing his shirt and jacket when it had happened and it had felt like it had come from inside him. ‘No,’ he said, not wishing to share this information with Morgan.

Gloria dabbed the reddened area with an alcohol wipe.

‘You visited our town before, Mr Creed?’ Morgan asked.

Solomon shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘You sure about that?’

‘No.’ He glanced over at Morgan. ‘Why?’

‘Because of that cross you’re wearing round your neck for one thing. Any idea how you came by it?’

Solomon looked down and noticed the cross for the first time, a misshapen thing hanging round his neck from a length of leather. He took it in his hand and felt the weight of it. ‘I don’t recognize it,’ he said, turning it slowly, hoping his scrutiny might shake a memory loose. It was roughly made from old horseshoe nails welded together and twisted at the bottom so the points stuck out at the base. There was a balance and symmetry to it, as though whoever made it had been trying to disguise the precision of its manufacture by constructing it from scrap metal and leaving the finish rough. ‘Why does this make you think I’ve been here before?’

‘Because it’s a replica of the cross standing on the altar of our church. You’re also walking around with a copy of the town’s history in your pocket that appears to have been given to you by someone local.’

Someone local. Someone who might know him and tell him who he was.

‘May I see it?’ Solomon asked.

Morgan studied him like a poker player trying to figure out what kind of hand he was holding, and Solomon felt anger simmering up inside him at his powerlessness. His body started to tense, as if it wanted to spring forward and grab the book from Morgan’s hand. But he knew he was too far away and the nylon bindings were still strapped tight across his legs; he would never be fast enough, and even if he was Gloria would react and stick him again with whatever she had knocked him out with the first time – propofol most likely, considering how quickly he had recovered from it –

… Propofol … how did he know this stuff?

How did all this information come to him so easily and yet he could remember nothing of himself?

I have an ‘I’ burnt into my skin and yet I have no idea who ‘I’ am.

He breathed, deep and slow.

Answers. That was what he craved, more even than an outlet for his anger. Answers would soothe his rage and bring some order to the chaos swirling inside him. Answers he was sure must be contained in the book Morgan held in his hand.

Morgan glanced down at it, deciding whether to hand it over or not. He chose not to. He held it up instead and turned it round for Solomon to see. It was opened at a dedication page, something designed to encourage people to gift the book.

A GIFT OF AMERICAN HISTORY

– it said –

TO – Solomon Creed

FROM – James Coronado

Pain flared in his arm when he read the name and again he felt what he had experienced back on the road, a feeling of duty towards this man he couldn’t remember but who apparently knew him well enough to have given him this book.

‘You have any idea how you might know Jim?’ Morgan asked.

Jim not James – Morgan knew him, he was here. ‘I think I’m here because of him,’ Solomon replied, and felt a new emotion start to take shape inside him.

The fire was here because of him

But he was here because of James Coronado.

Morgan tipped his head to one side. ‘How so?’

Solomon stared out of the rear window at the distant fire. A yellow plane was flying low across the blue sky. It reached the eastern edge of the fire and a cloud of vivid red vapour spewed from its tail, streaking across the black smoke and sinking to the ground. It sputtered out before it had covered half of the fire line. Not enough. Not nearly enough. The fire was still coming, towards him, towards the town, towards everyone in it. A threat. A huge, burning threat. Destructive. Purifying. Just like he was. And there was his answer.

‘I think I’m here to save him,’ he said, turning back to Morgan, certain that this was right. ‘I’m here to save James Coronado.’

A shadow flitted across Morgan’s face and he stared at Solomon with an expression that could not mean anything good. ‘James Coronado is dead,’ he said flatly, and looked up and out through the side window towards the mountains rising behind the town. ‘We buried him this morning.’

II

‘What lies behind and

what lies before are tiny matters

compared to what lies within.’

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Extract from

RICHES AND REDEMPTION

THE MAKING OF A TOWN

The published memoir of

the Reverend Jack ‘King’ Cassidy,

Founder and first citizen of the city of Redemption, Az.

(b. DECEMBER 25, 1841, d. DECEMBER 24, 1927)

IT IS, I SUPPOSE, a curse that befalls anyone who finds a great treasure that they must spend the remainder of their life recounting the details of how they came by it. I therefore hope, by setting it down here, that people might leave me alone, for I am tired of talking about it. I had a life of a different colour before riches painted it gold, and if I could return to that drab and unremarkable life I would. But you cannot undo what is done, and a bell once rung cannot be un-rung.

The story of how I found my fortune and used it to build a church and the town I called Redemption is a brutal and tragic one, yet there is divinity in it also. For God steered my enterprise, as he does all things, and led me to my treasure. Not with a map or compass, but with a Bible and a cross.

The Bible came to me first. It was delivered into my possession by the hand of a dying priest, a Father Damon O’Brien, who had fled his native country under a cloud of persecution. I made his acquaintance in Bannack, Montana, where he had been drawn, as had I, by the promise of gold, only to discover that it had all but run out. He was already close to death when our paths crossed. I was down on luck and short on money and I took the bed next to his at a discount as no one else would have it, too fearful were they of the mad priest’s ravings and his violent terror of shadows that he could see but no one else could. He believed they were after stealing his Bible away, which he later told me in confidence would lead the bearer to a treasure that must finance the construction of a great church and town in the western desert.

The foundation is here – he would say, clutching the large, battered book to his chest like it was his own child. Here is the seed that must be planted, for He is the true way and the light.

The owner of the flophouse was too superstitious to turn the priest out on to the street, so he slipped me some extra coin to take care of the old man, keep him in drink and, most importantly, keep him quiet. Being close to destitute, I took the money and mopped the priest’s sweats and brought him bread and coffee and whiskey and listened to him mutter about the visions he had seen and the riches that would flow from the ground and the great church he would build and how the Bible would act as his compass to lead him there.

And when his time came, he told me with wide staring eyes that he could hear the dark angel’s wings beating close by his bed, and he pressed that Bible into my hands and made me swear solemnly upon it that I would continue his mission and carry the book onward.

Carry His word into the wasteland, he said. Carry His word and also carry Him. For He will protect you and lead you to riches beyond your imagining.

He also told me he had money hidden in a bag sewn into the lining of his coat, a little gold to seal the deal and help me on my way. I took his money and swore I would do as he asked and he signed the Bible over to me like he was signing his own death warrant, then fell into a sleep from which he never woke.

To my eternal shame those promises I made to the dying priest were founded more on baser thoughts of the riches he spoke of than the higher ones of founding a church. For I believed he had lost his mind long before he let go of his life and all I heard in the clink of his gold was the sound of release from my own poverty.

I used it to fund my passage west and I read that Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, in railroad diner cars, then mail coaches and finally in the back of covered wagons all the way to the very edge of civilization in the southernmost parts of the Arizona territories. I expected it might contain a map or some written direction telling where to search for the fortune the priest had promised, but all I found was further evidence of his cracked mind, passages of scripture marked by his hand and other scrawlings that hinted at desert and fire and treasure, but gave no specific indication as to where any such riches might be found.

During my lengthy travels and study of the book, and to keep it safe from thieving hands, I used it as my pillow when I slept. Soon the priest’s visions started leaking into my dreams. I saw the church in the desert, shining white like he had described, and the Bible lying open inside the doorway and a pale figure of Christ on a burned cross, hanging above the altar.

The church I had to somehow build.

9

– Mrs Coronado?

Holly Coronado stared down at her husband’s coffin, a couple of handfuls of dry sand and stones scattered across the pine lid.

– There’s a fire blowing this way, Mrs Coronado, and I been called away to help.

When the stones had first fallen on to the boards the sound of the larger pebbles had seemed hollow to her. They had made her think, for a flickering moment, that maybe the coffin was actually empty and all this some kind of elaborate historical re-enactment they had forgotten to tell her about.

– I’m supposed to stick around until after everyone’s gone.

The coffin had not been her idea. Neither had the venue.

– I’m supposed to fill in the grave, Mrs Coronado. Only they need me back in town … because of the fire.

She had only gone along with everything because she was numb from grief, or shock, or both, and knew that Jim would have loved the idea of being buried up here next to all the grim-faced pioneers and salty outlaws no one outside Redemption had ever heard of.

– I’m going to have to come back and finish up later, OK?

Jim had loved this town, all its history and legends. All the earnest foundations upon which it had been built.

– Maybe you should come back with me, Mrs Coronado. I can drop you back home, if you like.

He had told her about the strange little town in the desert the very first time she’d met him at that freshman mixer at the University of Chicago Law School. She remembered the light that had come into his eyes when he talked about where he was from. She was from a nondescript suburb of St Louis so a town in the desert in the shadow of red mountains seemed romantic and exciting to her – and so had he.

– Mrs Coronado? You OK, Mrs Coronado?

She turned and studied the earnest, sinewy young man in dusty green overalls. He held a battered starter cap in his hands and was wringing the life out of it in a mixture of awkwardness and respect, his short, honey-coloured hair flopping forward over skin the same colour.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

‘Billy. Billy Walker.’

‘Do you have a shovel, Billy?’

A line creased his forehead below the mark his cap had made. ‘Excuse me?’

‘A shovel, do you have one?’

He shook his head as it dawned on him where this was headed. ‘You don’t need to … I mean, I’ll come straight back and finish up here after.’

‘When? When will you come back?’

He looked away down the valley to where a moving wall of smoke was creeping across a large chunk of the desert. ‘Soon as the fire’s under control, I guess.’

‘What if you’re dead?’ The crease deepened in his forehead. ‘What if the whole town burns up and you along with it – who will come back and bury my husband then? You suppose I should just leave him here for the animals?’

‘No, ma’am. Guess not.’

‘People make all sorts of plans, Billy. All sorts of promises that don’t get kept. I planned on being married to the man in that box until we were old and grey. But I also promised I would get up out of bed this morning and comb my hair and fix my face and come up here to give my husband a decent burial. So that’s what I’m fixing to do. And a shovel would sure help me keep that particular promise.’

Billy stared down at the twisted cap in his hands, opened his mouth to say something then closed it again, turned around and loped away down the hill to where his truck was parked in the shade of the large cottonwood in the centre of the graveyard. Tools bristled from a barrel in the back and a solid, ugly bulldog sat behind the wheel, ears pricked forward. It was watching the smoke rising up from the valley. It didn’t even move when Billy jumped on to the flat bed and set the springs rocking, just kept its eyes on the distant fire, its tongue lolling wetly from its mouth.

The smoke filled almost a third of the sky now and continued to spread like a black veil being slowly drawn across the day. Vehicles and people were starting to congregate by the billboard at the edge of town, black dots against the orange roadside dust. A few weeks ago Jim would have been right at the centre of it, organizing the effort, leading the charge to save the town, risking his life, if that’s what it took. And in the end, that’s exactly what it had taken.

Holly heard boots hurry up the hill then stop a few feet short of where she was standing. ‘I could drop you back home,’ he said, talking to his feet rather than to her. ‘I’ll come back before sundown to finish up here, I promise.’

‘Give me the shovel, Billy.’

He held the shovel up and examined the blade. It looked new, the polished-steel surface catching the sun as he turned it.

‘If you don’t give me the damn thing, I’ll bury my husband with my bare hands.’

He shook his head like he was disappointed or maybe just defeated. ‘Don’t feel right,’ he said. Then he flipped the shovel over and jabbed it into the dirt like a spear. ‘Just leave it round here someplace,’ he said, turning away and hurrying down the hill. ‘I’ll fetch it later.’

Holly waited until the noise of his engine faded, allowing the softer sounds of nature and the empty cemetery to creep back in. She stood for a long while, listening to the cord slapping against the flagpole by the entrance, the Arizona state flag fluttering at half-mast, the wind humming in the power lines that looped away down the hill. She wondered how many widows had stood here like her and listened to these same lonely sounds.

‘Well, here we are, Jimbo,’ she whispered to the wind. ‘Alone at last.’

The last time they’d been up here together was for a campaign photo-op about two or three months previously. They had not been alone back then; there had been a handful of other people – press, photographers. She had stood here by his side, framed by the grave markers with the town spread out below them while he outlined his plans for its future, not realizing he wouldn’t be around to see it.

She walked over to a mound of dirt set to one side of the grave. She grabbed the edge of the stone-coloured sheet of canvas covering it and started dragging it off, stumbling as her heels sank into the ground and her tailored dress restricted the movement of her legs. She had bought it for his investiture, a little black number designed to be classy but not too showy to draw attention away from her handsome husband, the real star of the show. It was the only black dress she owned.

She stumbled again and nearly fell, the tight dress making it hard to keep balance.

‘SHIT!’ she shouted into the silence. ‘SHIT FUCKING SHIT.’

She kicked her shoes off, sending her heels sailing away through the air. One skittered to rest against the sword cluster of an agave plant, the other bounced off a painted board that marked the final resting place of one J.J. James, died of sweats, 1882.

She grabbed the hem of her dress either side of the seam and wrenched it apart with a loud rip. She was never going to wear it again; no amount of dressing it up with a new scarf or belt was ever going to accessorize away this memory. She gave it another yank and it tore all the way up to her thigh. She planted her bare feet wide apart and felt the heat of the earth beneath them. It felt good to be free of the constricting dress and the heels. She felt more like herself. She grabbed the shovel and stabbed the blade into the pile of dirt, the muscles in her arms and shoulders straining against the weight of it as she heaved back and tipped it in the hole.

Dry earth whumped down on the wooden lid of her husband’s coffin.

Wood. Fifth anniversary is wood. Jim had told her that.

They had spent their first anniversary here in this town, a break from study so he could show her the place where he hoped to be sheriff one day. He had introduced her to everyone, taken her dancing at the band hall where everyone knew him, taken her riding in the desert, where they’d made love on a blanket by a fire beneath the stars like there was nothing else but him and her and they were the only two people on earth. She had bought him a tin star from one of the souvenir shops and given it to him as a present, a toy sheriff’s badge until he got a real one.

First anniversary is paper – he had told her with a smile – tin is what you give on the tenth.

She had always loved it that he knew stuff like that, silly romantic stuff that was all the more sweet and surprising coming from the mouth of such a big guy’s guy like he was – like he had been.

He never got to pin the real badge on, and the gift of wood she ended up getting him for their fifth anniversary was a pine box lying at the bottom of a six-foot hole.

She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand and it came away wet.

Goddammit. She had promised herself she was not going to cry. At least there was no one around to see it. She didn’t want to give them the satisfaction. She didn’t want to give them a damned thing, not after they had taken so much already.

She remembered the last time she had seen Jim alive, sitting behind his desk in his office at home, looking as if he had been crying.

I need to fix this – was all he would tell her. The town needs fixing.

Then he had stuffed some papers in his case and driven off into the evening. But it had been Mayor Cassidy who had driven back, knocking on her door at three in the morning to deliver the news personally, his words full of meaning but empty at the same time.

Tragic accident … So sorry for your loss … Anything the town can do … Anything at all …

She hauled another shovel-load into the grave, then another, numbing herself against her sorrow and anger through the real physical pain of burying her husband. And with every shovelful of earth she whispered a prayer, but not for her dead love. The prayer she offered up, as tears smeared her face and the smell of smoke drifted up from the desert below, was that the wildfire was actually a judgment, sent by some higher power to sweep right through the town and burn the whole damned place to the ground.

Anything the town can do – Cassidy had said, his hat in his hands and his eyes cast down. Anything at all.

They could all die and burn in hell.

That was what they could do for her.

10

‘How did he die?’ Solomon kept his voice calm but he felt like howling and breaking something. His frustration was like a physical thing, a storm raging inside him, a stone weighing him down. Being confined in the tin can of the ambulance wasn’t helping.

‘Car wreck,’ Morgan said, his eyes still looking up and out of the side window towards the slopes of the mountains. ‘He was driving late at night, fell asleep at the wheel or maybe swerved to avoid something and ended up in a ravine. Bashed his head and cracked his skull. He was dead by the time we found him.’

Dead by the time I found him too …

Solomon stared past Morgan and out of the window. The town was starting to rise from the desert in scraps of broken fence and crooked shacks with rusted tin roofs or no roofs at all. None of it seemed familiar. ‘Where are all the people?’

‘Oh, those are the old miners’ houses,’ Morgan said. ‘They keep it like this for atmosphere, I guess, a curtain-raiser for the tourists before they get to Main Street. Most people live around the centre nowadays.’

A large sign whipped past – old-style lettering telling travellers they were now entering ‘The Historic Old Town of Redemption’ – and the place came suddenly to life. Pastel houses were lined up in neat rows behind white-painted picket fences along well-paved roads. A Wells Fargo wagon stood beneath the shade of a cottonwood tree, the horses tethered by their reins to a wooden rail running along a trough filled with water from an old-fashioned pump. They were twitching their heads, spooked by the smoke blowing their way and anxious to run from it. Solomon knew how they felt. He wanted to run too, away from the fire, away from this town and this strange feeling of responsibility to a man who was already dead.

‘Did James Coronado have family?’ he asked.

‘Holly,’ Gloria said, fixing a dressing over the burn mark on his arm. ‘His wife.’

‘Holly Coronado,’ Solomon repeated. ‘Maybe I should talk to her.’

Morgan shook his head. ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’

‘Why not?’

‘She just buried her husband. She’ll want to be left alone, I should imagine.’

‘She might know who I am.’

Morgan shifted in his seat like it had suddenly become uncomfortable. ‘She should be left alone, time like this.’

Solomon cocked his head to one side. ‘It’s an odd custom, don’t you think, to abandon people when they are at their loneliest? If her husband knew me, then she might know me too. And she might be glad to see an old friend.’

‘I can run a check on your name, if you want,’ Morgan said, fishing his phone from his pocket, ‘see if anything comes up.’

Solomon wondered why Morgan seemed reluctant to let him talk to this woman. It made him want to talk to her even more. He watched as he dialled a number then fixed him with a level stare as he waited for someone to answer.

‘Hey, Rollins, it’s Morgan. Run a name for me, would ya – Solomon Creed.’ He glanced down at the book, used the inscription to spell out the name, then looked back up. ‘He’s about six feet tall, mid-to-late twenties, Caucasian – and by that I mean white: white skin, white hair.’ He nodded. ‘Yeah, like an al-bino.’ He split the word up and stretched it out, in the same way that he might say neee-gro. ‘No, I’ll wait. Run it through NCIC, see if you get anything.’

Solomon felt the ball of anxiety expand in his stomach a little. The NCIC was the National Crime Information Centre. Morgan was checking to see if he had a criminal record or was wanted on any outstanding warrants. And the fact that Solomon knew what NCIC stood for suggested to him that he might.

He looked down at himself, his white skin glowing under the bright lights, no pigment, no marks at all except for the ‘I’ branded on his arm, now hidden beneath a dressing. A blank page of a man. He crossed his arms in front of himself, feeling vulnerable and exposed with his shirt off.

The ambulance turned off the main road and a huge white building filled the ambulance with reflected light. Solomon narrowed his eyes and peered through the rear windows at the church, far too large for such a small town, its copper-clad spire needling its way up into the desert sky. He felt it tug at him, as if he recognized it, though he couldn’t say for sure. Morgan had said the cross he wore round his neck was a replica of the one on the altar, and he felt a strong urge to slip out of the straps that held his legs and break out of the ambulance so he could run to it and see for himself.

‘Yeah, I’m here.’ Morgan nodded and listened. ‘OK, thanks.’ He hung up. ‘Well, Mr Creed,’ he said, tucking the book back into the folded jacket pocket. ‘You’ll be pleased to learn that you are not in the criminal database.’

He sounded vaguely disappointed and Solomon was too, a little. At least if he had been in it he would have more of an idea who he was.

The ambulance slowed, turned off the road and pulled up in front of a large stone building. Gloria handed Solomon his shirt and moved with practised speed, pushing past Morgan to the rear doors to throw them open in an explosion of sunlight and heat. She turned back and released the lock holding the gurney in place and the other medic appeared beside her, ready to pull Solomon out of the ambulance.

‘I can walk,’ Solomon said, slipping his arms into the shirt.

‘You can’t,’ Gloria said. ‘It’s hospital policy. Sit back.’

The driver tugged hard and the gurney slid out of the ambulance with Solomon still lying on it. The steel legs rattled as they unfolded and the sunlight made him screw his eyes shut. ‘I’m not hurt,’ he said, squinting up at copper letters spelling out king community hospital across the facade of the building.

‘Sir, you are injured and you have amnesia.’

‘How was my PERL test?’ Solomon said, covering his eyes with his arm.

‘It was … How did— do you have medical training?’

‘Possibly. My pupils are both equal and reactive to light?’ They were certainly reacting to the light now.

‘Yes.’

‘Then I don’t need to go to the hospital.’ He reached forward to undo the straps holding his legs in place, swung his legs free and down to the ground. The moment his bare feet touched the ground he felt calmer.

The driver moved forward and Solomon pulled the gurney between them and stepped out of reach. He wanted to run and get away from these people but he couldn’t. Not yet. Morgan climbed down from the ambulance, the jacket dangling from his hand, the book sticking out from the pocket. ‘Why don’t you just go with these people and let them run their tests,’ he said. ‘Better safe than sorry.’

Safe. Interesting word. Safe from whom. Safe from what?

‘My jacket,’ Solomon said, holding his hand out.

Morgan held it up. ‘You want this? Go with these people and you can—’

Solomon darted forward, shoving the gurney at Morgan in a loud clatter that made him flinch. He instinctively reached out and the jacket swung close enough for Solomon to snatch it. He had moved clear again before Morgan even realized what was happening.

‘I don’t need to go to the hospital,’ Solomon repeated, slipping his arms into the jacket and backing away from the gurney, and the people, and whatever they wanted to do to him. ‘I need to go to church.’

11

Mayor Cassidy closed the door of his study, shrugged off his jacket and let it fall to the floor. He stood in the downdraught of the ceiling-fan, pulling his string tie loose and undoing the top button of his shirt. His collar was soaked with sweat.

The funeral had turned into a disaster, his big unifying gesture undone at a stroke by the whiff of wildfire. Everyone had drifted away before the ceremony had ended; a few at first, then a stampede as soon as the sounds of sirens had reached them and they’d seen how fast the smoke was rising and which way it was headed. They all had homes and businesses to worry about, so he couldn’t blame them, but it wasn’t exactly the gesture of community support he had hoped for. There was also the little matter of what might have started the fire, and he didn’t even want to think about that.

His phone buzzed in his pocket and his heart clenched in his chest like a hand had taken hold of it and begun to squeeze. He looked down at the crumpled jacket, the black material shivering where the phone vibrated inside it like some large insect had crawled in there and was now trying to get out. There was a small hole in the fabric and the sight of it made him burn with anger. Damn moths, the house was plagued with them. There had been a Cassidy living in this house ever since Jack Cassidy had built it and now it was all being eaten away, pulled apart fibre by fibre, everything unravelling. He felt embarrassed knowing that he had stood in front of the assembled town with a hole in his jacket – their shabby, moth-eaten mayor.

The phone stopped buzzing and silence surged back into his study. It could have been anybody calling. There was a wildfire burning on the edge of town, all kinds of people would be trying to get hold of him, wanting him to lead, wanting him to reassure them, wanting – something. Everyone wanted something, but there was no one there for him. Not any more.

He glanced over at the photograph on his desk of Stella in the garden standing under one of the jacaranda trees, Stella with the sun glowing in her long hair, taken about a year before the cancer wore her away to nothing and took her hair along with everything else. He still missed her, six years after he had stood over her grave, and never more than in these last few months when he had badly needed someone to talk to and share the burden of all he’d had to bear, someone to tell him that it was OK to do a bad thing for a good enough reason, and that God would understand.

The phone buzzed again at his feet, like the last effort of a dying insect, then fell silent again.

He tipped his head back and let the cool air wash over him. He felt done in. Defeated. He wanted to lie down on the floor next to his crumpled jacket and go to sleep, close his eyes on his crumbling, moth-eaten world and slide away into blissful oblivion. He half-wished he were a drinking man so he could grab a bottle and disappear into it. But he was a Cassidy and his name was written across half the buildings in town. And Cassidys did not drink, nor did they lie down on floors and close their eyes to their responsibilities. And this was his responsibility, all of it – the town, the people, the widow he’d left standing alone by her husband’s grave, the fire out in the desert – everything. He was trapped here, bound by blood, and by the name he carried, and by the generations of bones lying buried in the ground.

He looked up at the portrait hanging above the great stone fireplace, Jack Cassidy’s eyes staring sternly back at him across a hundred years of history as if to say, I didn’t build this town from nothing only for you to run away and let it die.

‘I’ve got this,’ Cassidy whispered to his ancestor. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

The desk phone rang, sharp and sudden, its old brass bell cutting right through the silence. It echoed off the oak panelling and leather-bound books lining the walls. Cassidy plucked his jacket from the floor, slipped his arms into the sleeves and stepped out from beneath the cool flow of air. It made him feel more official, wearing the jacket, and he felt he would need authority for whatever conversation he was about to have. He took a deep breath as if he was about to dive into one of the cold-water lakes up in the mountains and snatched the phone from its cradle.

‘Cassidy.’ His voice sounded as though it was coming from a long way off.

‘It’s Morgan.’

Cassidy collapsed into his chair with relief at the police chief’s voice. ‘How bad is it?’

‘Bad. It’s the plane.’

Cassidy closed his eyes. Nodded. The moment he’d seen the smoke rising he’d feared this. ‘Listen,’ he said, naturally easing into command. ‘I’ll call our associate, tell him what happened here. We’ll work something out, some sort of compensation. Accidents happen. Planes crash. I’m sure he’ll understand. I’m sure he’ll …’

‘No,’ Morgan said. ‘He won’t. Money won’t work here.’

Cassidy blinked. Not used to being contradicted. ‘He’s a businessman. Things go wrong in business all the time and when that happens there has to be some form of restitution. That’s all I’m talking about here. Restitution.’

‘You don’t understand,’ Morgan said. ‘Nothing can make up for what happened here. There is no amount of money that can fix this, trust me. We need to come up with another plan. I’m not going to talk about this on the phone. I need to head back out to the fire, but I’ll swing by your office first. Don’t move and don’t call anyone, OK – not until we’ve talked.’

12

Mulcahy eased off the highway on to the up ramp of the Best Western.

They were driving through Globe, a mining town that had seen better days and was clinging on in hope that it might see them again.

Javier kissed his teeth with his oversized lips and shook his head at the grey concrete-and-brick motel complex. ‘This it? This the best you could manage?’

Mulcahy drove slowly round the one-way system then swung into a parking bay outside a room he had checked into the previous night under an assumed name. He had avoided all the independents and franchises because he didn’t want some over-attentive owner manager giving him that extra bit of service you didn’t get from the chains. He didn’t want good service and he didn’t want the personal touch, he wanted the impersonal touch and some bored desk clerk on minimum wage who would hand over the room key without glancing up from their phone when he checked in.

He cut the engine and took the keys out of the ignition. ‘Give me five minutes, then follow me inside.’

‘Five minutes? The fuck we got to wait five minutes for?’

‘Because a white guy entering a room on his own, no one notices. A white guy and two Mexicans, everyone notices because it looks like a drug deal is going down and somebody might call the cops.’ He opened his door and felt the dry heat of the day flood in. ‘So give me the five minutes, OK?’

He got out and slammed the door before Javier had a chance to say anything then walked over to a solid grey door with 22 on it. With the engine and air switched off it would become stifling in the car fast. He’d give them maybe three minutes before they followed him in. Three minutes was all he needed.

He unlocked the door and opened it on to a dim, depressing room with two lumpy beds and an old style wooden-clad TV. There was a kitchenette in back leading to a bathroom – the standard layout of pretty much every motel he’d ever stayed in.

He pulled his phone from his pocket, checked the WiFi connection then opened a Skype application, selected ‘Home’ in the contacts and raised it to his ear.

A coffin of an A/C unit rattled noisily beneath the window, moving the grey sheer curtain above it and filling the room with cool air and the smell of mildew. Outside Mulcahy could see the Cherokee with the outline of Javier in the front seat. A dark blue Buick Verano was parked next to it, covered with a fine desert dust that spoke of the miles it had travelled to end up in this nowhere hub of a place. Salesman’s car.

The phone connected and Mulcahy’s own voice told him he wasn’t home. ‘Hey, Pop, if you’re there, pick up.’

He listened. Waited. Nothing. He hung up, found a new contact and dialled.

His old man had driven a Buick when he’d worked the roads, hawking office supplies then pharmaceuticals all over the Midwest. Mulcahy must have been only, what, ten or eleven at the time? Mom had been long gone, so it can’t have been much earlier. His pop would get him to wash and wax the car every Sunday afternoon in exchange for five bucks that had to last him through the week. He would drive him to school in the shiny car on a Monday morning then take off, heading for different states and places that sounded exotic to an eleven-year-old kid who didn’t know any better: Oklahoma City; Des Moines; Shakopee; Omaha; Kansas City. His old man would always come back late on a Friday, pick him up from his aunt’s or, later on when it was clear Mom wasn’t coming back, some girlfriend or other, and the Buick would always be covered in dust, exactly like the Verano parked outside.

The phone connected, his dad’s voice this time. ‘Leave a message. I’ll call you.’

‘Pop, it’s me. Listen, if you’re not at the house then stay away. Don’t go back there for a while, OK? Call me when you get this. Everything’s fine, just … call me.’

He hung up. Everything was not fine. This was not how it was supposed to go. Someone had changed the script and now his father was missing. He checked the time. Tío would be wondering why he hadn’t called. Most likely he already knew. He should have told his father to go on a trip, get him out of the way, in case something like this happened, only Tío’s men would have been watching and they would have grabbed him anyway. About a year back one of Tío’s lieutenants had been turned by the Federales. He’d promised to give them a large shipment and several key players in Tío’s organization in exchange for immunity and a new life. The day before the shipment, the lieutenant had sent all his family away somewhere – and Tío had been watching. The Federales found the lieutenant and his whole family a week later, lined up and headless in a ditch along the border. The message was clear: I am watching. You will be loyal or you will be dead, and so will anyone you hold dear. So Mulcahy had left his father where he was. And now the plane had crashed and he couldn’t get hold of him and everything was fucked and he had to un-fuck it and fast.

Sunlight flashed on the passenger window of the Cherokee as Javier threw it open and escaped from the oven of its interior. He looked furious. Carlos got out too, head down, eyes jumping. They shambled towards the door, doing the most piss-poor impersonation of two people trying not to look suspicious Mulcahy had ever seen. He selected a new contact from the Skype menu and raised the phone back to his ear just as a heavy knock thudded on the other side of it.

‘It’s open,’ he called out and Javier burst in.

‘The fuck’s up with that, leaving us out in the car like a pair of motherfuckin’ dogs?’

The phone clicked as it connected. ‘Tío,’ he said, as calmly as he could manage but loud enough for Javier to hear. ‘It’s Mulcahy.’

Javier stopped dead in the doorway, so suddenly that Carlos bumped into him from behind.

‘There was a problem at the pick-up.’ Mulcahy was looking at Javier but talking into the phone. ‘The plane never showed. We didn’t collect the package. We don’t have your son.’

13

Solomon walked quickly, keeping to the shadows of the boardwalk and out of the sun, feeling the warm, worn timbers beneath the soles of his bare feet. He didn’t look back at the hospital. He would hear if anyone was following him.

He took deep breaths to try to calm himself, and smelled the town all around him, paint and dust and tarpaper and decay. He felt calmer now he was out of the confines of the ambulance with its sickening movement.

Why did he dislike confinement and crave freedom so strongly?

Maybe he had been incarcerated, even though he hadn’t shown up on the NCIC. Perhaps he had been imprisoned another way.

Ahead of him the church glowed, as if lit from within, and towered over the surrounding buildings: a town hall; a museum; and a grand house partly visible behind a screen of jacaranda trees, its roof clad in copper like the church and similarly aged, suggesting it had been built at the same time. The rest of the buildings making up the street and lining the boardwalk were all variations on the same theme, souvenir shops selling the same things: flakes of gold and copper floating in snow globes; treasure maps with ‘Lost Cassidy Riches’ written on them in old-style block letters; T-shirts with the name of the town printed in a similar style; and Jack Cassidy’s memoir stacked high in every window.

Solomon pulled his own copy from his pocket and flicked through the pages, hungry to see what else was written inside, hoping something might spark a new memory. Apart from the dedication the only other thing he found was a single passage at the end of the book that had been underlined:

I had always suspected the book contained a clue that would lead me to riches, but by the time I found it and understood its meaning it was too late for me and so I resolve to take the secret of it to my grave.

More secrets, but none that interested him. He turned back to the dedication and studied the handwriting, neat and smooth and written with a wide-nibbed pen. It appeared formal and old, but he didn’t recognize it. Maybe there were clues in the printed words. He flicked to the first page and started to read:

It is, I suppose, a curse that befalls anyone who finds a great treasure that they must spend the remainder of their life recounting the details of how they came by it …

He carried on reading, sucking in Jack Cassidy’s story as fast as he could turn the pages, his head filling with all the images and horrors Jack Cassidy had encountered on his odyssey through the desert. The memoir was ninety pages long and he had finished it by the time he was halfway to the church. He turned to the photo on the cover again and wondered why James Coronado might have given this book to him. Perhaps he hadn’t. Perhaps he wasn’t even Solomon Creed. Except he felt that he was. The name fit and so did the jacket. That had his name in it too.

He slipped the book in his jacket and read the label stitched inside his pocket: Ce costume a été fait au trésor pour M. Solomon Creed – This suit was made to treasure for Mr Solomon Creed.

This suit …

So where was the rest of it? Why did he only have the jacket? Where were his shoes? And how in Jesus’s name could he read French? How could he read English so fast, for that matter?

‘Je suis Solomon Creed,’ he said, and the language felt comfortable in his mouth, his accent smooth and slightly thick and syrupy – southern French, not northern Parisian.

Southern French! How did he even know that? How could he speak French and know the origin of his accent and yet have no memory of learning it or speaking it before or of ever being in France? How much of himself had he lost?

Some smaller writing was stitched on the edge of the label: Fabriqué 13, Rue Obscure, Cordes-sur-Ciel, Tarn.

The Tarn. Southwestern France. Cathar country. Formed in 1790 after the French Revolution. Capital Albi. Birthplace of Toulouse-Lautrec. Fine medieval cathedral there, larger even than the church he was now walking towards. Built of brick not stone.

He hit himself on the side of the head to silence the noise.

‘Shut up,’ he said aloud, realizing how mad he would appear to anyone watching. He looked around. No one was. Maybe he was genuinely mad, some delusional freak with an equally freakish mind: all this information tumbling through it like white noise and none of it any use.

‘I am a crazy man.’ He stated it, as if admission might be the first step towards cure. He said it again, then repeated it in French, Russian, German, Spanish, Arabic. He hit himself on the head again, harder this time, desperate to make it all stop or coalesce into something useful. He needed to tune out the noise and focus only on the concrete things that might help him remember who he was, the things that bound him to his forgotten past – the suit, the book, the cross around his neck. Physical things. Undeniable.

He reached the end of the boardwalk, stepped out of the shadows and into the stinging heat of the sun. The church was even more impressive up close, its spire forcing his eyes up to heaven, the way ecclesiastical architecture was designed to do.

Know your place, it seemed to murmur. Know that you are insignificant and God is almighty.

There was a large sign planted in the ground beside a pathway leading up to the church with CHURCH OF LOST COMMANDMENTS written across it in copper-coloured letters, a reference to something he’d read in Jack Cassidy’s memoir.

He continued past the sign and down the pathway towards the church. There was a fountain over to one side with a split boulder at the centre and marks on it showing where water had once flowed over the stones. He recognized this from the memoir too – water coming from a split stone, a miracle out in the desert commemorated here by a fountain that was no longer running.

He drew closer to the door and saw words cut into the stone above it, the first of the lost commandments the church had been named for:

I

THOU SHALT HAVE

NO OTHER GODS BEFORE ME

It reminded him of the ‘No Guns’ sign he’d seen outside the old saloon on the outskirts of town; no firearms allowed there, no other belief systems allowed here. His eyes lingered on the carved numeral, the same mark he carried on his arm. Maybe it was not an ‘I’ but a number. Or maybe it was nothing at all and the church would hold no answers for him.

‘Let’s see, shall we?’ he whispered, then passed into the cool, shadowy relief of the entrance and through the door into one of the oddest churches he had ever set foot in.

14

Cassidy sat behind the oak expanse of his desk, mouth slack, eyes staring up at Morgan. When the doctors had told him Stella’s cancer had not responded to treatment and she had only weeks to live, it had felt exactly like this, as if the oxygen had been sucked out of the room and what was left was difficult to breathe.

‘Ramon,’ he said, repeating the name Morgan had just given him.

Morgan nodded. ‘Ramon Alvarado. Tío’s son.’

‘But – what was he … I mean, why was he on the plane?’

Morgan shrugged. ‘Some trouble south of the border. He needed a fast ride out of Mexico. I didn’t ask for the details.’

Cassidy stared out of the tall window of his study and down the avenue of jacaranda trees that framed the church beyond the wall. Above the roof he could see smoke rising out in the desert. That’s what had been filling his mind until Morgan had told him what had caused the fire. Now it seemed the very least of his worries.

‘But why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I didn’t think you needed to know.’

‘You didn’t think I … but this has … Tío’s son!! Don’t you think you should have run it by me?’

‘It was a last-minute thing. I got a call. I made a decision.’

‘You made a decision?’

‘I didn’t have a choice, all right? When someone like Tío calls and asks for a favour, he’s not really asking. What would you have done different? Said, “Sorry to hear your son’s in trouble, but we’re not going to help you”? Don’t start blaming me for this. I didn’t make the damn plane crash.’

Cassidy rose from his chair and started pacing. ‘We need to do everything we can to speed up the crash investigation,’ he said. ‘Get proof that it was an accident.’

‘What if it wasn’t?’

Cassidy glared at him like he had suggested the earth was flat. ‘Of course it was an accident.’

Morgan took his phone from his pocket and stepped into the room. ‘When I went out to the crash site I nearly ran this guy down.’ He held the phone out.

Cassidy took his reading glasses from the desk and the photo on the screen came into focus as he put them on. It had been taken from inside Morgan’s car, the air outside filled with grit that softened the image, though the figure of the man standing at the centre was clear. He seemed to shine in the sunlight, his face gazing up at something the photograph did not show. ‘Who’s that?’

‘Says he can’t remember, but the label in his jacket says he’s called Solomon Creed.’ He swiped the screen and the picture changed. ‘He also got this on his arm.’

Cassidy looked at the livid red mark upon the man’s skin then at Morgan for an explanation.

‘Looks like a kill tag to me,’ Morgan obliged. ‘Cartel hit men get them to show they’ve clipped someone important. Usually they’re tattoos, but sometimes they cut themselves or brand themselves, like this.’

Cassidy looked back down at the photo as he realized what Morgan was suggesting. ‘You think this guy might have …’

‘Shot the plane down? Maybe. Say he knocked it out with some missile, got caught in the blast, banged his head and now can’t remember who he is. Or maybe he knows exactly who he is and just isn’t saying. The cartels use some pretty unusual characters as gunmen south of the border – gives the norteños something to sing about. So I don’t think the notion of an albino being used as a hit man is beyond the realm of possibility. They’re superstitious about albinos down there anyways. Hell, they’re superstitious about everything. They think the white skin shows they got divine power, like they’ve been touched by God or something. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that he might have done it. He was there, he was running away from the crash, he even said the fire was there because of him, and he’s got this mark on his arm. It’s all circumstantial, but we don’t need it to hold up in a court of law, we only need Tío to buy it. Someone is going to have to pay for his son’s death – and I don’t mean offer him cash, say “sorry” and hope everything’s going to go away. Blood will have to pay for blood here, so that’s what we have to give him. We give him this guy. We give him Solomon Creed.’

Cassidy swiped the screen and stared hard at the picture of the pale man standing on the desert road. Then he shook his head and handed the phone back. ‘I think I should talk to Tío first, try for a diplomatic solution before we start … throwing human sacrifices at him. We don’t even know who this guy is. Have you run an ID check?’

‘He’s not on the NCIC.’

‘That only proves he’s not a criminal. What about the missing persons channels – DMV, Social Security?’

‘What’s the point?’

‘The point is we’re talking about a man’s life here.’

‘No. The point is we’re talking about several people’s lives, including yours and mine. We’re talking about the survival of this town. I don’t want to know who this guy is. I don’t need to know. But I’ll tell you something else: he had a copy of Jack Cassidy’s memoir in his pocket, personally inscribed to him from Jim Coronado.’

Cassidy felt the blood drain from him. ‘You think he knew Jim?’

‘He says he can’t remember, but when I asked him about the book he said he felt like he was here because of Jim. He said he thought he was here to save him.’

‘Jesus. He said that?’

Morgan nodded. ‘Asked me how he died and whether he could talk to Holly. So, whichever way you chop it up, this guy is a potential problem for us. Or maybe he’s not. Maybe he’s actually a solution. The way I figure it, Tío’s going to find out about him sooner or later, which means he’s a dead man whatever we do or don’t do. So if we give him up, we win ourselves some loyalty points and hopefully cut ourselves some slack. And we no longer have to worry about what his connection to Jim may have been and whether that might turn into another problem for us.’

Cassidy felt sick about what they were discussing. He gazed back up at the stern portrait of his ancestor. He had always felt like the Reverend Jack was looking down on him, judging him and how he was running the town he had built. He had faced some tough challenges over the last few years, real tough challenges, but nothing like this. This was like Armageddon, apocalyptic – world ending.

Outside, the wail of a siren rose and he glanced up to see a cruiser come to an abrupt halt on the driveway, its spinning lights painting the panelling red and blue.

‘There’s my ride,’ Morgan said, heading to the door.

‘Where is this guy?’ Cassidy asked. ‘You taken him in for questioning?’

‘No. I thought it best to keep him off the record, in case he has to – disappear. Last I saw, he was heading to the church.’

Cassidy stared out of the window at the white stone of the church beyond the wall. ‘Let me go talk to him first.’

‘Now why would you want to go and do that?’

‘Because if I’m going to sacrifice a man’s life to save my town, the least I can do is have the courtesy of looking him in the eye first. And I still think we should establish whether the crash was an accident or not.’

Morgan shook his head and took in the room. ‘Must be nice, living in your oak-panelled world where everyone plays by rules and any disputes can be resolved with a handshake. Let me tell you how things work out in the real world. Talking to this guy is going to achieve absolutely nothing. If anything, it’s going to complicate things. You don’t strike up a friendship with a man you’re about to execute. And it won’t matter a damn to Tío whether the crash was an accident or not. His son died and someone is going to have to pay for it. Someone – or something. Ever hear of a place called El Rey?’

‘Rings a bell.’

‘It’s a little town up in the Durango Mountains. The local banditos took it over and it became a sort of Shangri-La for criminals fleeing south across the border. Anyone who made it there with enough money to pay for protection could stay as long as they liked, knowing no law would ever touch them. El Rey is also Tío’s hometown. Or it was. It’s not there any more.’

‘What happened?’

‘Tío happened. I don’t know the exact details, but when Tío was a kid there was some kind of family tragedy involving his father and brother. Could be they fell foul of the bosses or something but whatever happened, Tío never forgot it. When he rose to power years later, he got his revenge. El Rey was the headquarters of the old bosses, so it made sense for him to take it over. But he didn’t. What he did was massacre every living soul in the town and burn the place to the ground. It was symbolic, I guess: out with the old and in with the new. But it was also revenge, pure and simple; an old-fashioned blood vendetta. Tío did the killing himself, the way I heard it. Showed the world what would happen if anyone dared to hurt him or his family.’ He pointed out of the window at the smoke rising beyond the church. ‘And his son just died, flying into our airfield. So you think about that when you talk to this guy. I’ll be at the control line if you need me.’ Then he opened the door and was gone.

15

Solomon stood inside the door of the church letting his eyes adjust to the gloom after the fierce sunlight outside. Huge stained-glass windows poured light into the dark interior, splashing colour on what appeared at first glance to be a collection of old junk.

To the left of the door a full-sized covered wagon stood behind a model of a horse and a mannequin dressed in nineteenth-century clothes. A fully functioning Long Tom sluice box stood opposite with water trickling through it, making a sound like the roof was leaking. A collection of gold pans was arranged around it, beneath a sign saying ‘Tools of the treasure hunter’s trade’. There were pickaxes too and fake sticks of dynamite and ore crushers and softly lit cabinets containing examples of copper ore and gold flake and silver seams in quartz. Another cabinet contained personal effects – reading glasses, pens, gloves – all carefully labelled and arranged, and there was a scale model of the town on a table showing what Redemption had looked like a hundred years ago. And right in the centre of the strange diorama a lectern stood, angled towards the door so that anyone entering the building was forced to gaze upon the battered Bible resting upon it.

Solomon walked forward, feeling the cold flagstones beneath his feet. He could see the remnant of a lost page sticking out from the binding, its edge rough as if it had been violently torn from the book. The missing page was from Exodus, chapters twenty through twenty-one, where Moses brought God’s ten holy laws down from the mountain on tablets of stone.

‘The Church of Lost Commandments,’ Solomon muttered, then continued onward into the heart of the church, breathing in the smells of the place: dust, polish, candle wax, copper, mould.

The commandments were everywhere: carved into the stonework and the wooden backs of the pews, inscribed into the floor in copper letters, even depicted in the stained glass of the windows. It was as if whoever had lost the page from the Bible had built the church in some grand attempt to make up for it. The altar lay directly ahead of him, the large copper cross standing on a stone plinth. As he drew closer he studied it, his eager eyes tracing the twisted lines and spars identical to the cross he wore around his neck, hoping for some jolt of recognition. But if he had ever been here before or stood and gazed upon this cross and this altar he couldn’t remember it and he felt frustration flood into the place where his hope had been.

The church seemed gloomier here, as if the walls around the altar were made of darker material, and as he drew closer he saw the reason for it. The stonework, bright white in the rest of the building, was covered in dark frescoes. They depicted a desert landscape at night, populated with nightmarish creatures: hunched men and skeletal women; children with black and hollow eyes, their clothes ragged and tattered. Some rode starved horses with ribs sticking out from sunken hides, their eyes as hollow as their riders.

Beneath the ground, emerging from a vast, burning underworld, were demons with sharp, eager teeth and leathery wings that stirred the dust, and taloned hands that reached up through cracks in the dry land to grab at the wretched people above them. A few of the demons had snagged an arm or a leg and were gleefully dragging some poor soul down into the fire while their terrified eyes gazed up at the distant glow of a painted heaven. And there was something else, something moving in the shadows – a figure, pale and ghostly – walking out of the painted landscape towards him. It was his reflection, captured in a large mirror that had been positioned so that anyone looking at the fresco became part of what they observed. Either side of the mirror were two painted figures – an angel and a demon – gazing out of the picture, their eyes focused on whoever might stand and gaze into it.

Solomon moved closer until his reflection filled the frame. He studied his face. It was the first time he had seen himself properly and it was like looking at a picture of someone else. Nothing about his features was familiar, not his pale grey eyes nor his long, fine nose nor the scoops of his cheeks beneath razored cheekbones. He did not recognize the person staring back at him.

‘Who are you?’ he asked, and a loud bang echoed through the church as if in answer. Footsteps approached from behind a curtained area in the vestry and he turned just as the curtain swept open and he found himself facing a modern version of Jack Cassidy. They held each other’s gaze for a moment, Cassidy’s face a mixture of curiosity and suspicion as he looked him up and down, his eyes lingering on his shoeless feet. ‘You must be Mr Creed,’ he said, walking forward, hand extended. Solomon shook it and his mind lit up as he caught the hint of a chemical coming off him.

Napthalene – used in pyrotechnics, also a household fumigant against pests.

He saw a small frayed hole in the pocket of his jacket – Mayor Cassidy smelled of mothballs. It was a dark suit, a funeral suit. ‘You just buried James Coronado,’ Solomon said, and pain flared in his arm again at the mention of his name.

Cassidy nodded. ‘A tragedy. How did you know him?’

Solomon turned back to the painted landscape. ‘I’m trying to remember.’

There was something here, he felt sure of it, some reason the cross around his neck had brought him to this place where its larger twin sat.

‘Impressive, isn’t it?’ Cassidy said, stepping over to the wall and flicking a switch. Light faded up, illuminating the fresco in all its dark and terrible detail.

There were many more figures populating the landscape than Solomon had first thought, their black arms and shrunken bodies almost indistinguishable from the land, as if they were made from the earth and still bound to it. The ones with faces had been painted in such realistic detail that Solomon wondered if each had been based on a real person, and what those people had thought when they had seen themselves immortalized as the damned in this macabre landscape. They seethed over the desert, their faces ghostly, their eyes staring up at the too distant heaven. Solomon looked up too and saw something he had missed when the fresco had been sunk in shadow, something written in the sky, black letters on an almost black background.

Each of us runs from the flames of damnation

Only those who face the fire yet still uphold God’s holy laws

Only those who would save others above themselves

Only these can hope to escape the inferno and be lifted unto heaven

The brand on his arm flared in pain again as he read the words, bringing back the feeling he’d first felt back on the road, that he was here for a reason, that there was something particular he had to do.

Only those who would save others … can hope to escape the inferno …

‘I’m here to save him,’ he muttered, his hand rubbing at the burning spot on his arm.

‘Who?’

‘James Coronado.’

Cassidy blinked. ‘You’re … but we just buried him.’

Solomon smiled. ‘I didn’t say it was going to be easy.’

A noise outside made them both turn, a siren howling past, heading somewhere in a hurry. Solomon could smell smoke leaking in through the open door.

The fire.

… Only those who face the fire …

The whole town would be heading to the city limits now, preparing to defend their town from the oncoming threat. Most of them would have known James Coronado. Maybe his widow would be there too.

‘Are you OK?’ Cassidy asked, stepping closer. ‘You seem a little shaken. Maybe you should head to the hospital, get yourself checked over.’

Solomon looked back at his reflection, trapped between the angel and the demon, their painted eyes looking at him as if asking: ‘Which of us are you?’

Let’s find out, Solomon thought, and the pain in his arm flared again.

He shook his head. ‘I don’t need the hospital,’ he said. ‘I need to go back to the fire.’

III

‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’

Exodus 20:3

Extract from

RICHES AND REDEMPTION

THE MAKING OF A TOWN

The published memoir

of the Reverend Jack ‘King’ Cassidy

I ARRIVED AT FORT TUCSON with the priest’s gold all but spent. To raise more funds – and to my eternal shame – I tried to sell the Bible to an itinerant preacher name of Banks who balked at the size of the book, saying if God had meant him to have such a thing He would have sent it in smaller form. He told me instead of a Jesuit mission south of Tucson where a fine old example of scripture might find a permanent home on some sturdy lectern where no poor soul nor mule would have to carry it more.

I blamed encroaching poverty on my decision to try and part with the Bible, but in truth I could feel the hold it had on me and I was frightened by it. The visions of the white church and the pale Christ on the cross haunted my waking hours now and I feared I might be losing my mind, as the priest had lost his. But setting it down now, it seems clear to me how all of this was God’s design – the priest travelling from Ireland and finding himself in the bed next to mine, the Bible being signed over to me, the gold funding its journey west, and my chance conversation with the preacher who sent me on the path that would lead me to the Jesuit mission and the pale Christ on his burned cross.

We saw the smoke rising in the morning sky a couple of hours after sunrise on the second day. I had joined a cavalry supply train heading south to Fort Huachuca via the trading post where the Jesuit mission was based. We smelled them long before we saw them, poor murdered souls roughly delivered to God at arrow point or at the keen edge of a savage’s knife. The trading post was an inferno, roof timbers sticking up from burning buildings like smoking ribs and a large burning cross standing by a pile of smouldering timbers that had been the Jesuit mission. At first I thought the cross and crucified figure of Christ upon it too large for such a humble chapel. It was only as we drew closer that I saw the truth. The burning man was real.

He blazed like a grotesque torch, all signs of identity razed from him, his head thrown back in agony and fire pouring from his open mouth as if his screams were made of flame.

Captain Smith, the officer in charge, ordered someone to throw a rope round him and drag the cross to the ground and away from sight, but no rope could ever drag the image of that burning man from my memory. I uttered a prayer, commending his immortal soul to God where it would be forever at peace and free from whatever demons had made their evil sport here. And when I finished I heard a murmur of ‘Amens’ around me and realized that my prodigal companions, normally so cavalier and contemptuous of God when in the warm embrace of a bottle or by the light of a campfire, were drawn straight back to His goodness and love when faced with this bleak and terrible example of its opposite.

We set to work smothering the smouldering church with shovels of dirt and I wondered how an all powerful and merciful God could allow such monstrous sport to be visited upon His faithful servants and lay waste to His own house of worship. I could see no purpose in it and wondered if, in the battle between God and the Devil, it was the Devil who had already won. It was only then, in the deepest depths of my doubt, that Christ Himself appeared to me, rising from the ashes of His father’s ruined church to show me the way and the truth.

I saw His face first, shining white against the grey-black ashes. He was staring straight at me with an expression of such agony and anguish that I stumbled back in shock and my boot trod heavy on the charcoaled remains of a roof spar, which levered the thing up further and I saw it entire. It was the Christ crucified, carved from pure white marble and fixed to a cross of hard wood that had been burned by the fire but not destroyed.

I guessed from its position in the ruined church that it must have hung above the altar and I imagined how the Christ must have stared down in lament as flames consumed His father’s house. It was a miracle the cross had survived, a miracle that I had found it, and I recalled the words of the raving priest as he had pressed the Bible into my hands and transferred his mission to me.

– You must carry His word into the wasteland. Carry His word and also carry Him. For He will protect you and lead you to riches beyond your imagining.

And here He was.

I walked into the smoking ruin of the church and took the pale Christ in my arms – His cross now mine, my burden now His. I could feel the trapped heat of the fire radiating out of the solid wood and it felt like the warmth of His love flowing into me and I realized then why God had allowed the savages to slaughter good Christian folk and burn His house to the ground.

It had all been for me.

He was showing me, in such a way as a simple soul like mine could understand, that the church I had to build must be stronger than this. If it was to stand against such evil as thrived here in this blasted wilderness, it had to be like the pale Christ who had been untouched by the fiery instruments of evil that had destroyed all else.

The church I was to build had to be made of stone.

16

‘He said we should stay right here?’

‘That’s what the man said.’ Mulcahy was standing by the window of the motel, cell phone in hand, staring out through the grey sheer curtains at the parking lot beyond.

Behind him, Javier paced, stamping dust and the smell of mildew from the carpet. ‘He didn’t say nuthin’ else?’

‘He said plenty, but the main thing he said was that we should stay put and wait for him to call back.’

Javier shook his head and continued to pace. He’d already visited the john several times in the twenty or so minutes they’d been in the room and Mulcahy had only heard him flush once, suggesting either that he had terrible hygiene or he was doing something in there other than pissing. The slime-shine in his eyes gave Mulcahy a pretty good idea what.

‘You think Papa knows where we’re at?’ Javier said, twitching and flicking his fingers as if they had gum on them.

‘Probably.’

‘Probably? The fuck does “probably” mean? Either he know or he don’t.’

The only illumination in the room was coming from the TV. It was tuned to a local news station with the volume turned low. Carlos sat silently on the edge of one of the beds, his eyes fixed on the flickering screen as if he’d been hypnotized by it. He’d been like that ever since they’d walked in the door and heard what Papa Tío had to say. Mulcahy had seen that look a few times before: once in a jail cell outside of Chicago when he was still in uniform and Illinois still had the death penalty, and a couple of times since when he’d been the cause of it. It was the look someone got when they’d resigned themselves to whatever was coming their way, like a rabbit when the headlights were speeding towards it and there was no time to get out of the way.

‘You got a cell phone, either of you?’ Mulcahy asked.

‘Yeah, I got a phone.’ Javier said it like he’d just asked him if he had a dick or not. He held up a BlackBerry in a gold-and-crystal encrusted case, the blank screen angled towards Mulcahy. ‘I switched it off though, motherfucker. I ain’t stupid.’

‘Good for you. Who pays the bill?’

‘The fuck’s that got to do with anything?’

‘Because if Tío pays the bill then he’ll be able to track it whether it’s switched off or not. Does he pay the bill?’

Javier didn’t answer, which was answer enough.

Mulcahy nodded. ‘Then he knows where we’re at.’ He turned back and looked outside, squinting against the brightness. Beyond the reception building he could see the traffic out on the highway.

He checked his own phone, making sure the Skype app was still running. Tío had said he was going to call some people then call him back, but that wasn’t why he was checking. His pop still hadn’t called.

‘How come your phone’s still switched on, pendejo?’

Mulcahy stared out at the day, felt the heat of the outside burning through the window and the cool air from the ancient air-con unit blowing feebly against his legs.

‘I asked you a question, motherfucker.’

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. If he had to kill Javier in the next few minutes – which was entirely possible – it would definitely be the highlight of an otherwise shitty day. ‘Papa Tío doesn’t pay my bill,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t pay my bill, so he doesn’t know the number or the network, and I called him on Skype so it would take him at least a few hours to trace the call and I don’t plan on being here in two hours’ time. But the main reason I’ve still got it switched on is because he said he was going to call me back – on Skype – so if I switched my phone off he wouldn’t be able to. And if he couldn’t get hold of me he might get all suspicious and send a bunch of guys round to find out why I’d turned my phone off. And he’d know exactly where to find me because you’re too cheap to pay your own bill. That answer your question … motherfucker?’

‘Shit, man. Oh shit, shit.’ Carlos was rising to his feet and pointing at the TV.

A shaky aerial shot of a big fire in the desert filled the screen. It wobbled unsteadily behind a caption saying: BREAKING NEWS – plane crash starts large wildfire outside Redemption, Az.

‘Where’s the remote?’ Javier had stopped pacing, his eyes fixed to the screen now. ‘Where’s the fuckin’ remote at?’ Carlos held it up. ‘Turn it up, man.’ Javier jabbed his finger at the screen.

Carlos pointed the remote at the TV, nudged up the volume and the room filled with the sombre tones of someone reporting on something serious. Mulcahy stared at the twisted wreckage of the plane, fuel and desert burning all around it, catching snatches of what the reporter was saying:

… believed to have been a vintage airliner … en route to the aircraft museum outside Redemption …

This was not how it was supposed to happen. The plane crash was not in the script. It was most likely an accident, it was an old plane, old planes crashed more than new ones he imagined. Except Papa Tío didn’t believe in accidents. He didn’t believe in coincidences or apologies either. If something went wrong then there was always a reason and there was always someone who had to pay.

And Tío hadn’t called back yet.

And neither had his pop.

He turned to study the traffic out on the road, a slow-flowing river of metal and glass, and felt envious of the safe little lives each car contained. He wanted to join them and slide away from here, but that wasn’t going to happen. He knew that as soon as he saw the truck ease off the road and up the ramp towards the motel. It was a Jeep Grand Cherokee, just like his. Black-tinted windows, just like his. It slowed to a stop at the top of the ramp by the reception building, but the two men inside showed no interest in going in. They were checking the parked cars, looking for someone.

Looking for him.

17

Cassidy drove, Solomon sat in the passenger seat, his window wound right down so he could feel the wind on his face. It was an old car, leather seats, chrome trim, lots of space.

Lincoln Continental Mark V, Solomon’s mind informed him.

It was nicer than being in the ambulance, the leather seats and padded doors made the experience less synthetic, but he still didn’t like it.

‘Would you mind closing the window, the air-conditioning doesn’t work so well with it open.’

Solomon pressed the button to raise the window. He was thinking about the church and the altar cross and the words written on the wall, all of it revolving around the remembered image of his reflected self, the stranger in the mirror, the big mystery at the centre of it all. The church was peculiar. Maybe that was why he felt an affinity to it. For a start it was way too big for a town this size, like it had been built as a declaration of something grand or maybe to compensate for something. The interior was odd too, the fresco more reminiscent of a medieval European basilica than a church from the Old West. And then there was the strange collection of memorabilia cluttering up the entrance like an afterthought.

‘Why have a mining exhibition in a church?’ he wondered out loud, his toes gripping the carpet as his sense of confinement started to gnaw at him.

‘Tourists,’ Cassidy replied, like he was cursing. ‘About a year back we moved some of the exhibits from the museum into the church to try and get more people through the door, on account of people being far more interested in treasure than God these days, and ain’t that a sorry state of affairs?’

Solomon nodded and gripped the edge of his seat, trying to relax away his growing nausea.

‘A lot of folks thought it was inappropriate, said it’s not what the church is for. They cash the subsidy cheques the trusts give out, but they don’t want to think about where that money comes from. One of the joys of being mayor: all the grief and none of the credit. Like being a parent, I guess.’

‘You don’t have children?’

‘Never was blessed. Are you OK? You seem kind of uncomfortable.’

‘I’m fine,’ Solomon said. ‘Just don’t like being confined.’

Cassidy looked across at him like he was afraid he might throw up in his nice antique car. ‘Leave the window open if it makes you happy.’

‘Thanks.’ Solomon opened it all the way down again and relished the wind on his face. It carried the smell of smoke with it now and he could see it ahead of them, a curtain of darkness spreading right across the sky with tiny figures and vehicles spread out in front of it. ‘Only those who face the fire,’ he murmured, ‘can hope to escape the inferno.’

‘You know who wrote that?’ Cassidy asked.

Solomon dredged his mind and was surprised to discover that he didn’t. And in the perverse nature of his teeming brain he regarded any knowledge that didn’t come easy to him as significant. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t.’

‘It was Jack Cassidy. He designed the whole church then painted the frescoes too. He was what you might call a renaissance man. Could turn his hand to anything: miner, businessman, architect, painter, author – you name it, he tried it. And most likely mastered it too. Not bad for a man who started life as a locksmith.’

‘Quite a troubled man too, I think. A man with his fair share of demons.’

‘Well, he … maybe so, but … what makes you say that?’

‘The figures in the fresco. The black words he wrote on a dark, dark sky. The fact he painted hell so vast and vivid and heaven so small and distant.’

‘He was complicated, I would say. A serious man. You should read his memoir.’

Solomon pulled his copy from his pocket and turned it over in his hand. ‘I have.’ He opened it to the dedication page, felt the familiar stab of pain in his arm when he read James Coronado’s name. ‘What about James Coronado, was he a troubled man?’

‘Jim? No, I wouldn’t say so. I would call him pretty straightforward.’

‘Was he in some sort of trouble?’

‘No.’

‘You sure?’

‘He was very well liked.’

‘That’s not what I asked. What about his death – is there any question hanging over that?’

‘No,’ Cassidy snapped, a little too quickly, then took a hold of himself. ‘Listen, I don’t know what ideas you have about how you might save him, but he’s gone. Jim Coronado is dead. It was an accident, is all. A terrible, terrible accident. He was driving at night, he crashed his car. That’s all there is. There ain’t no point in raking up the mud searching for something that ain’t there. You’re only going to hurt people who been hurt bad enough already.’

He said it as though he was pushing a door closed and Solomon left it shut. The mayor clearly didn’t want to talk about it and Solomon didn’t think he’d get anything out of him anyway. The person he really wanted to talk to was James Coronado’s widow. Maybe she would be at the city limits along with everybody else, lining up to try and save the town from the fire.

They rounded a corner and started dropping down towards the edge of town. Beyond it the whole world was on fire. The smoke was so high it blotted out the sun, and the flames at the base twisted and leaped in the air as the bright line of fire slithered closer. The fire crews were positioned half a mile out of town and about the same from the fire, working in lines, their forms smudged almost to nothing by the dust they were stirring up with rake and shovel as they cleared the ground of anything that might burn in an attempt to stop the flames from advancing. To the left of the road a tractor was creeping like a clockwork toy, ploughing up the ground behind it. It was making its slow way towards a concrete storm drain that cut across the ground in a straight line all the way to the slopes of the mountains. To the right a grader was struggling over uneven terrain it wasn’t built for towards the anaemic piles of crushed stone that rose sterile and ugly around a tall skinny tower with a lifting wheel at the top. Between the mineworks and the storm drain the flanks were pretty well protected, but there was nothing in the centre but a mile or so of clear ground and dry vegetation. Two vehicles and maybe a hundred men against an army of flame.

‘You should tell everyone to clear out,’ Solomon said.

‘Be a waste of breath,’ Cassidy replied. ‘The folks here are kind of stubborn that way. Most of ’em would rather burn than abandon their town.’

‘Then they may well get their wish.’

They pulled off the road and came to a halt next to a line of parked cars and trucks. Cassidy cut the engine and Solomon was already out of the door, desperate to feel the ground beneath his feet again. The wind gusted a greeting, roaring out of the desert and bringing the smell of the fire with it.

‘Now I appreciate you volunteering to help here, Mr Creed, I really do,’ Cassidy said, climbing out the driver’s side and fixing his Stetson on his head. ‘But if you want to help us fight this fire, then you’re going to need something on your feet.’ He pointed to a pick-up parked over by an ambulance that had lots of activity buzzing round it. ‘See that man in the green shirt? His name’s Billy Walker. Tell him I sent you over and ask if he’s got a pair of work boots he can loan you, then report to one of the fire crews. Sorry to cut and leave, but I’ve got a town to try to save and people look to me to lead.’ He walked away, heading over to where Chief Morgan was standing by a tow truck, his own stricken truck perched drunkenly on the back.

Shouts drifted out of the desert. Out on the control line someone was pointing up at the sky where the yellow tanker was levelling out and getting ready for another run. It settled into position and the sky behind it turned red, as though the wings had sliced through the flesh of it and made it bleed. A bright scarlet cloud spread and fell on to a section of desert, then the vapour trail sputtered out. The red line had covered a little less than a quarter of the leading edge of the fire on one side of the road and the air around Solomon was already starting to thicken with ash and embers falling softly around him like black snow. He held out his hand and caught one, rubbing it to nothing with his fingers. It was warm, most of the heat blown out of it by the wind, but the ashes falling closer to the control line would be fresh from the fire, maybe even still glowing as they settled on the dry grass. Soon there would be spot fires breaking out all over the control zone. It would only need one to take hold and the fire would have breached the thin line they were drawing in the sand. They were in the wrong position, wasting time and energy with what they were doing. At this rate the whole town was going to burn, along with everything in it. Then where would he be? What answers might he sift from the embers?

The wind roared again, twisting the distant flames into columns of orange and red, and Solomon felt as if the fire was sniffing him out, searching for him. He headed over to the ambulance and into the welcome shade of the billboard.

The man in the green shirt was helping set up a makeshift field hospital around the ambulance. Men and women in green scrubs and white rubber clogs were weaving in and out of each other, checking lists, carrying boxes of supplies, filling movable stands stacked with suture packs and dressings. Solomon recognized Gloria. She was unpacking boxes of gel dressings and FAST-1 infusion kits.

‘Billy Walker,’ Solomon said, and the man in the green shirt turned round. ‘Mayor Cassidy sent me over to see you.’

The man looked him up and down, his eyes lingering on Solomon’s bare feet. ‘Lemme guess – pair of boots, right?’

‘Actually no, I was hoping you might have a hat.’ Walker shook his head then loped off towards his truck.

The wind surged again, so hard it rocked the billboard and drove the smell of smoke into Solomon’s face like a threat. There was something else there too, something ominous and familiar.

Gloria appeared at his side. ‘You feeling OK now, Mr Creed?’

‘I’m fine,’ he said, sniffing the air again. ‘How ready are you here?’

She looked around at all the activity. ‘About as ready as we’ll ever be, I guess.’

‘Good. You’re about to get busy, I think.’ The sound of a distant siren whooped out in the desert and the radio in the ambulance crackled to life.

‘Incoming,’ a voice said with an urgency that made everyone else go silent. ‘The grader got caught in a fire surge. The driver’s hurt bad. We’re bringing him to you now.’

18

Mulcahy’s eyes never left the Jeep.

The angle of the sun and the tinted windows turned the two men inside into dark shapes. It was impossible to see if anyone was in back. There could be two or three more guys in there, but he doubted it. One maybe: two to do the job, one to stay in the car, ready to roll when it was done. He had a pretty good idea what the job was too. He guessed they were on the phone right now, talking to whoever had sent them. He had a pretty good idea about that too.

They were staring over in his direction, towards the parked Jeep. He wondered if they could see the movement of the curtain and thought about shutting the air-con off. If he did Javier would pick up on it and he didn’t want him to know what was unfolding outside. He’d freak out most likely, start shooting and they’d end up in a siege situation which no one would walk away from.

The passenger door of the Jeep opened and a short, solid Mexican man slid out. He had a Mike Tyson style tattoo curling round his left eye and rolled his neck like a boxer preparing to spar as he sauntered over to the reception building, no doubt to ask the clerk about the Jeep parked over by G-block. Mulcahy imagined him walking up to the desk now and flashing some fake ID – FBI or Border Patrol. The clerk was probably illegal anyway and likely to freeze in the face of anything official. He would do whatever the guy asked, tell him whatever he wanted, even give him a master key. Except that wasn’t what happened.

Tyson reappeared, walking fast, tucking something into his jacket and Mulcahy knew he had been wrong. All wrong. There had been no fake ID because there had been no need for one. He hadn’t heard a gunshot but over this distance and with the TV noise he might have missed it. More likely they were carrying suppressed weapons. Assassination pieces.

Tyson climbed back into the Jeep and leaned over to talk to the driver. Then the Jeep started to move.

‘Anyone want ice?’ he said, moving towards the door, forcing himself not to hurry. ‘I’m going to get a bucket and stick it on this shitty unit. Might cool us all down a little. Who knows how long we’re going to be stuck here, right?’ He placed the car keys down on the counter by the door and made sure Javier saw him do it.

Javier stared at them. ‘Yeah, ice,’ he said, like it was his idea. He sounded guarded, all the strut ground out of him by the flow of bad news from the TV, his face rippling with drug-tweaked tics and suspicion. He knew that being third cousin – or whatever the hell he was – was going to cut him zero slack in their current situation. Tío’s relatives might get a leg up in the organization, but if they messed up they paid the same price as anyone. ‘Don’t be long,’ he said, like he was in charge.

‘Be right back,’ Mulcahy said, looking out through the window in the door. He watched the Jeep make a right past the reception building and disappear from sight, then he opened the door in a burst of heat and sunlight, stepped outside and closed it quickly behind him.

He forced himself to saunter past the window because he knew Javier would be watching, his amphetamine-sharpened paranoia ready to catch the slightest whiff of haste. It would take ten seconds for the Jeep to clear the east side of the complex and swing back into view; he knew because he’d spent a whole afternoon on a previous stay timing cars, watching the sedans peel off the highway and work their tired way round the one-way system. But if the guys in the Jeep had left a body back at reception they’d be in more of a hurry to get this done and get out.

Call it five seconds.

The moment he cleared the window he took off, running smoothly and keeping low, past the ice-machine in the shadow of the stairwell, feeling in his pocket for a second set of keys.

Four seconds.

The lights flashed on a two-year-old white Chevy Cruze sedan parked near the end of the block, the backup vehicle he had intended to drive away in – the one he still intended to drive away in. It was America’s third most popular car, painted in its favourite colour – utterly unremarkable, totally unmemorable, perfect. He glanced back toward C-block, at the spot where the Jeep would reappear. Still no sign.

Three seconds.

He reached the Chevy and moved along the passenger side, squeezing alongside a Pontiac that had parked too tight against it.

Two.

He grabbed the handle, opened the door and squeezed through the narrow gap and into the car.

One.

He fell into the seat and pulled the door shut, reached down to the side, found the adjustment lever and tugged hard.

Zero.

He leaned back, throwing the seat almost flat and dropping from view just as the black shadow of the Cherokee appeared round the edge of the far building.

He lay there, taking deep breaths. Calming himself. Sweating. The Chevy had been parked out front for most of the day, soaking up the heat until the inside felt like a pizza oven.

The throaty rumble of the Cherokee’s V8 engine drew closer. He could hear it through the thump of his heartbeat and the low whisper of the cars out on the highway. He tried to think himself into the minds of the two men, assuming it was only two. Tyson had already killed the desk clerk, so they were not about stealth and finesse, they were about speed and surprise, which meant they would most likely storm the room. Javier and Carlos would be dead before they even knew what was going down, but the crew would know they were looking for three men so would think he was in the bathroom. One of them would move fast through the smoke-filled room towards it, past the still figures of Carlos and Javier, leading with his gun, maybe firing to keep him pinned down while the other guy – or guys – covered. And that was when he would move. That was his best chance of getting out of this alive.

The Cherokee’s wide wheels swept into a space seven or eight spots short of where he was lying. The engine cut out and there was the muffled clunk of doors opening then the double thud of them closing again at almost the same time.

Two doors. Two men. Maybe one still in the Jeep.

Mulcahy glanced down at the glove box. His Beretta was stashed inside, along with loaded magazines and a sound suppressor. He dearly wanted to feel the comforting weight of it in his hand but he didn’t dare reach for it in case the car moved and someone saw it.

He pictured them outside, walking toward the grey door of room 22. They would be reaching into their jackets, pulling their hands out high to clear the long barrels of their silenced weapons. The lead man would take the key, stolen from the front desk, and fit it in the lock. The other would stay high, checking behind before taking a step away from the wall to get a better angle. He would level his gun at the door, give a nod – then …

There was a loud bang as the room door flew open, then a shout cut short by the staccato taps of rounds hitting thin walls and furniture and everything else in the room.

Mulcahy reached forward, keeping his head below the window. He yanked open the glove box, grabbed the sunglasses case and the duster the gun was wrapped in, then popped his door open and rolled back out onto the narrow strip of hot tarmac between the Chevy and the Pontiac.

The popping of suppressed gunfire stopped and he heard the sound of the TV drift out through the open door. He tipped the gun and a spare magazine from the duster into his hand, stuffed the clip in his back pocket then took the suppressor out of the sunglasses case and fixed it to the barrel of the gun.

The men would be checking the room now, making sure the two men were down. Then they would start searching for the third.

He checked the suppressor was secure, flipped the safety off with his thumb and started making his way round the back of the Chevy, keeping low, heading towards the Jeep the Mexicans had arrived in. The blackened glass made it hard to see inside but there was no one in the driver’s seat and the engine wasn’t running. Two then. You always left the driver behind in a three-man team. He reached the dusty Buick, peered round the edge of it.

The driver was standing inside the open door to the room. He had his back to him, the material of his jacket stretched tight across his shoulders suggesting he was holding a pistol in a double grip. Mulcahy moved forward, keeping low, aiming centre mass, the best percentage shot given the distance and added inaccuracy of a silenced weapon. He couldn’t see into the room but he imagined Tyson would be at the bathroom door now, ready to kick it in and spray rounds into the room. He kept on moving, increasing his odds of a clean shot with every step. Then he heard a voice from inside, a voice he recognized.

‘He went that way.’ Carlos pushed past the driver and pointed along the block where Mulcahy had headed. ‘Said he was gettin’ ice.’

He had a gun in his hand, an un-silenced Glock. It was a three-man team after all.

Mulcahy re-sighted on Carlos’s chest just as his eyes swung round and spotted him. The Glock rose fast but not fast enough. Mulcahy squeezed off two rounds and Carlos twitched twice and spiralled to the ground.

The driver spun round, swinging the long barrel of his pistol to where the shots had come from. Mulcahy hit him with two shots in the chest that knocked him backwards into the room, leaving him half in and half out of the door.

Mulcahy was already moving forward, firing as he went, spreading his shots left, right, level and low, hoping to clip Tyson with at least one of them, or keep him pinned down until he was in the room. He passed through the doorway, stepping over the driver and opened his eyes wide to adjust for the dark interior.

Javier was lying dead in the far corner, a smear of blood on the wall behind him. No sign of Tyson. Mulcahy dropped down to the side, behind the bed, making use of its limited cover. He kept his gun and eyes on the bathroom door.

The TV cast a flickering light into the dark of the room and the modulated tones of the news report filled the silence. Mulcahy listened through it for breathing, or the snick of a gun being reloaded. He thought about shooting out the TV so he could hear better but he had already used ten rounds and his Beretta only held eleven. He needed to reload but Tyson might know that and be waiting in the bathroom, listening out for the snick of a magazine release, ready to capitalize on the few seconds Mulcahy would be unarmed.

He glanced at the two men sprawled in the doorway: Carlos on his back, his eyes open and staring up at the water-stained ceiling; the driver lying across him, legs sticking out the door where anyone could see them. He needed to get him inside and out of sight but couldn’t risk it until Tyson was dealt with. He reached for the spare magazine and switched his attention back to the far end of the room.

There was no blood around the bathroom door or on the white tiles of the kitchenette, and if he’d clipped him there should be. He would expect to hear something too, the laboured breathing of someone fighting pain and going into shock. There was always the chance he had killed him outright and the impact had spun him into the bathroom, but he didn’t believe in luck and he knew better than to rely on it. He’d seen too many people lying dead with looks of surprise on their faces.

He held the spare magazine up in front of him and sighted on a spot by the bathroom door, four feet up and a foot away from the wall. He took a deep breath to steady his breathing, blew it out slowly then moved his thumb across to the magazine release button and pressed it.

The magazine slid cleanly out with a distinctive snicking sound, a blur of movement appeared in his sights and Mulcahy fired his last bullet. He dropped down, rolled on to his side, jammed the fresh magazine into the empty slot then flicked the safety off and peered through the gap between the base of the bed and the floor. Through the twisted condom wrappers and dust bunnies he could make out a dark shape over by the bathroom door, dragging itself across the floor towards a gun lying on the tiles a few feet away.

Mulcahy sprang up, swinging the Beretta round as he cleared the top of the mattress. He fired two rounds. The first caught Tyson between his shoulders in a puff of white padding and pink mist. The second hit him in the back of the head and sent a small section of his skull spinning across the tile to the far wall. Mulcahy waited until it stopped spinning then moved to the centre of the room. He grabbed the remote from the bed and muted the sound on the TV so he could hear sirens or anything else heading his way. He tossed his gun on the bed and hauled Carlos inside first, dumping him next to Javier before grabbing the arms of the driver. He was heavier than Carlos and he had to tug hard to get him moving. Something cracked in the man’s chest and a yelp of pain squeaked out of him.

Mulcahy dropped the man’s arms like they were snakes, grabbed his Beretta from the bed and pointed it down at the driver. Blood was leaking out of a chest wound that was gently rising and falling. He was breathing.

The driver was still alive.

19

The ambulance screamed to a halt in the shade of the billboard and medics and doctors swarmed around it. Everyone else stood back, grimly fascinated by what would emerge from inside and frightened at the same time.

Solomon knew what was coming. The strangely familiar smell of charred flesh had already told him. It warned him exactly how bad it was going to be too. The siren cut out and was replaced by a howl that came from inside the ambulance.

‘Here –’ Billy Walker appeared at his side and handed Solomon a starter cap, his attention fixed on the ambulance. ‘Best I could do. Got you some boots too.’

‘Thank you.’ Solomon took them and inspected the cap. It had a red flower logo and the name of a weedkiller on it. He pulled it over his head, folding the peak round with his hands until he was looking at the ambulance through an arc of shadow.

‘You should use this too –’ Walker handed him a tube of heavy-duty sunscreen squeezed almost empty.

The howl doubled in volume with the opening doors and there was a clatter of tubular steel as a man, or what remained of one, was pulled from the ambulance. He lay twisted and charred on starched white sheets, his whole body shaking, his hands baked to talons by furnace heat and clawing at the smoke-filled air above him while the inhuman noise howled from the seared ruin of his throat.

‘Jesus,’ Walker said, his voice flat with horror. ‘I think that’s Bobby Gallagher. He was driving the grader.’ The medics wheeled the gurney to a covered area and doctors clustered round him. ‘You reckon they can save him?’

Solomon squeezed sunblock from the tube and rubbed some on to his neck and the back of his hands, disliking the greasy feel of it but disliking the growing itch of sunburn even more. ‘Not a chance,’ he said.

Bobby Gallagher stared up at the ring of faces crowding over him. Worried eyes stared down.

A doctor leaned in, his face filling his vision. His mouth was moving but he couldn’t hear what he was saying. Too much noise. Someone screaming close by. Someone in pain. At least he didn’t feel nuthin’. That was good, wasn’t it? Surely that was a good thing.

A penlight snapped on, shining in his eye and making the world turn bright and milky, like everyone was wrapped in white smoke … smoke …

The fire …

He had seen the flames curling towards him, the desert writhing in heat like the surface of the sun. The fire running alongside him, chased by the wind, leaping from shrub to shrub like a living thing. Never seen fire race so fast, faster than that old grader, that was for sure, but not as fast as that Dodge he’d had his eye on, the silver-grey one with the smoked windows and the V8 under the hood. That would have evened the race out some. Would have bought it too, taken the hit on the finance and all, if he hadn’t been saving for something else. He wanted to see old man Tucker’s face at summer’s end when he cashed in all the extra shift hours he was pulling and slipped that big ole ring on to Ellie’s finger. Eighteen-carat yellow-gold band with a one-carat, heart-cut diamond right in the centre: three and a half grand cold, every cent he had in the world and all of it for Ellie – fuck old man Tucker, the way he treated him, like he wasn’t good enough to even speak his daughter’s name.

The penlight snapped off and the doctor leaned in, his mouth moving again, everything slow like he was underwater. Still couldn’t hear a damn thing, what with that howling. He’d heard something like it before and the memory of it needled into making him shake with more than cold.

When he was eight his daddy had taken him hunting. They’d tracked a big old mule deer out into the desert for almost three hours and when they caught up with it his daddy had handed him the rifle. It was that old Remington, the one that hung above the fire with the walnut stock worn smooth at the neck by the bristled cheeks of his daddy and his daddy before that: beautiful rifle, but heavy, and tight on the trigger.

Maybe it had been the weight of it or the excitement of being handed something he’d only ever seen in a man’s hand before, but when he beaded up on that big old bull his heart had pounded so hard he felt sure the deer must be able to hear it even with him two hundred yards away. It had lifted its head and sniffed the air, its haunches tightening as it readied to run. He snatched the shot just as it moved, missed the heart and punched a hole right through its belly. Gut shot or not, that thing took off, blood pumping out all over the desert, innards flyin’ out behind it like streamers. His daddy said nothing, just grabbed that rifle back and took off after it, carrying it as easy in his hand as it had sat so heavy in his.

The blood trail was wet and bright against the dry orange earth. And the deer howled as it ran, a great bellowing noise, like fury and pain mixed together. Ever after, when he sat on the hard wooden pews in the cool dark of the church and heard the reverend deliver his ‘hell and damnation’ sermons he would remember that noise. It was like he imagined hell must sound, the echoing tormented howl of a soul trapped deep underground – the same thing he was hearing now.

The doctor leaned in again, swimming down through the milky air. He still couldn’t catch what he was saying. He tried to tell him he couldn’t hear above the howling, managed to snatch a ragged breath and the noise stopped. He made to speak and it started up again even louder than before, so loud he could feel it deep within his chest. Then he realized where the sound was coming from, and began to cry.

They had caught up with the deer not so far up the track from where he’d shot it, down on its front knees like it was praying. He wanted to shoot it and put it out of its pain, but his daddy had the gun and he daren’t ask him for it. They stood a ways back, watching it trying to get up and run, eyes rolling in its skull, and that awful sound coming out of it. He had turned to look away but his daddy put his hand on the top of his head and twisted it back round again.

You need to watch this, he’d said. You need to watch this and remember. This is what happens when you don’t do a thing right. This is what happens when you fuck somethin’ up.

The jolt of him cussing like that, his best-suit-on-a-Sunday daddy who he’d never even heard say ‘damn’ before that day had been more shocking than the sight of the dying deer or the noise it made while it was about it.

I’m sorry, Daddy, he whispered now, and the faces moved closer as the howl took the rough form of his words.

I think he’s calling for his daddy, the doctor said.

Bobby, we’re doing everything we can for you, OK? Just hang in there.

He had been trying to steer away from the fire but the damn grader could only run over the flat land and the contours had kept him too close. He’d seen a place to turn ahead of him and he’d kept his eyes focused on it, too focused to notice the wall of flame sweeping in from his left. He could have jumped and run but he didn’t. He knew they needed the grader to draw the fire line and help save the town. Might be old man Tucker would show him some respect if he came out of this a hero.

The heat had closed round him like a fist, the skin on his knuckles bubbling where they curled around the wheel. He’d kept his eyes ahead of him and his foot on the gas, holding his breath like he was deep underwater and kicking for the surface. He’d known that if he breathed in, the flames would get inside him and he would drown in that fire, so he had held on, thoughts of Ellie and diamond rings running through his head until he reached the turn and steered the grader away and out of the fire. He didn’t remember much else.

He looked up into the doctor’s face now and realized that the fact he could feel no pain was actually a very bad thing. He didn’t care for himself. It was Ellie he felt bad for. Maybe old man Tucker was right, maybe she was better off without him. He had spent his life running away from that sound, the sound of failure and pain, and now it was coming out of him.

I’m sorry, he said, I messed up. I messed it all up.

Then the pale man stepped into view.

20

Mulcahy moved to the door, keeping as far from the wounded driver as he could. He checked outside, scanning the parking lot and all the curtained windows to see if any were twitching.

Nothing.

He closed the door. Pulled the heavy drapes across the window then turned his attention back to the man on the floor.

The driver was lying on his back, lit by the glow from the TV, the flickering-fire images making it appear he was smouldering. He moaned softly, a slow creaking sound that came from somewhere deep inside him. His hands clutched at his chest wound, working at the sodden material of his shirt and squeezing foamy blood between his fingers. A second wound oozed in his gut, soaking his shirt further, the blood looking black in the darkness of the room.

Mulcahy crouched down, keeping his gun pointed at the man’s head. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘can you hear me?’ The man’s eyes opened a little. ‘What’s your name?’

The driver’s lips pulled back in a grimace. ‘Luis,’ he said through bloodied teeth.

‘Hi, Luis, I’m Mike. Listen, I’m not going to dick you around and tell you everything’s going to be fine, because it’s not. You’ve been hit in the chest and the stomach and you’re bleeding out fast. The good news is the blood loss won’t kill you, but that’s only because the stomach acids leaking into your body cavity or the blood filling your lungs will get you first. But if you get medical help in the next ten minutes or so I reckon you have a pretty good chance of surviving.’ He took his phone from his pocket and held it where Luis could see it. ‘You want me to call an ambulance, Luis?’

Luis shivered like he was cold, though the room was hot from the door standing open so long. He managed another nod.

‘Good.’ Mulcahy leaned down. ‘Then tell me who sent you.’

Luis closed his eyes tight and a groan wheezed from his throat. He took a breath and the wound made a slurping sound as it sucked air. ‘Fuck you,’ he said, then pain clamped his mouth shut again.

Mulcahy nodded slowly. ‘Look at you. Big strong guy, sucking up the pain, keeping it together in the face of death. It’s impressive, really. Impressive but pointless. Because if you don’t talk to me you’ll die right here in this room and I’ll put the word out that you talked anyway. So you can either talk and live a little longer, maybe a lot longer, or you can hang tough, stay silent and die right here for nothing.’

Luis stared out through the wet slits of his eyelids, weighing up what Mulcahy had said. Mulcahy knew from the many situations he’d been in before that they had reached a tipping point, the moment when a subject would decide to talk or clam up for good. Sometimes the best thing to do was shut up and let the subject slide into talking; other people needed a little help, one last nudge to push them over on to the side of cooperation. The trick was knowing what sort of person you were dealing with. Luis was clearly the strong silent type, a man of few words, probably the sort who was happy to stay silent while others did the talking. So that’s exactly what Mulcahy did.

‘Tell you what,’ he said, speaking low and intimate. ‘I’ll say a name and you nod if it’s the right one, OK? That way if you get out of this alive and anyone asks, you can tell them you never talked and you won’t be lying.’ Luis’s eyes were starting to glaze. In a minute or two he wouldn’t be able to say anything at all. ‘Was it Tío? Did Papa Tío send you?’

Luis didn’t move. He just kept staring through the slits of his eyes.

‘You hear what I said: did Papa Tío send you?’

Luis took a sucking breath, closed his eyes against the pain, then shook his head, a slow movement that made him screw his eyes tight with the effort.

Mulcahy sat back on his heels and glanced over at Carlos lying nearby, a surprised expression on his dead face. Ever since Carlos had appeared in the doorway with a gun in his hand he had suspected Papa Tío was not behind this. Tío would never trust a stranger over a blood relative for something like this.

He turned back to Luis to try a new name on him but saw it was already too late. The man’s eyes had rolled back into his head, his mouth opening and closing but the wound in his chest no longer sucking. He was drowning or suffocating, trying to breathe but getting nothing. He breathed out one last rattling breath and his mouth went slack. Mulcahy pressed two fingers into his neck and felt nothing.

He lifted Luis’s left arm and pulled the sleeve of his jacket back as far as it would go. His left forearm was almost entirely covered by a large, colourful tattoo of Santa Muerte – the saint of death – her grinning skeletal face framed by the hood of a long robe, her bony hands holding a globe and a scythe. This told him nothing; plenty of Mexican gang members had tattoos of Santa Muerte – but his right arm told a different story.

The wrist was encircled by a barbed-wire design, showing Luis had served jail time, and above it was a carefully inked column of Roman numerals – one to four – next to the outline of a gun with the barrel pointing down towards the hand. It showed that Luis was a shooter, a dedicated hit man for the cartels, and the numerals showed how many high-level hits he had carried out. There were notches on the barrel too: fifteen marks scratched into the skin with a needle and ink showing lesser kills, soldiers and civilians taken out in the usual course of business and recorded in a casual way that reflected their lesser importance. They reminded Mulcahy of the mission decals he’d seen on the planes earlier – same principle, different war. Only one gang used Roman numerals to record their high-level kills, a nod to the Catholic faith they professed to defend and honour: the Latin Saints – Papa Tío’s main rivals.

Mulcahy took his phone from his pocket to take a photo and saw he had one message – Pop: Missed Call. He breathed a little easier when he read it. Once he was clear of this mess he’d call him back, but first he had to clean up.

He took a picture of Luis’s forearm then checked to make sure it was in focus. The first three numerals were solid black but the fourth was only an outline, ready to be inked once the hit had been carried out. There was only one person who would warrant the high status of a numeral and it wasn’t him or Javier.

It all made sense now – Carlos being the insider instead of Javier. Carlos wasn’t the hit man, he was a plant, a human homing beacon with his phone transmitting their location to the real kill crew. That’s why he had been so edgy. He had known what was coming. He was probably only doing it to pay off some debt, betraying one set of killers to appease another and trading one shitty situation for a slightly less shitty one. Mulcahy knew all about that kind of deal. He slid his phone back into his pocket and rose to his feet.

He worked quickly by the flickering glow of the TV, pulled the duster from his back pocket and wiped down all the places he’d touched since entering the room. He took a few more pictures then grabbed Javier’s gold- and jewel-encrusted phone and a plastic laundry sack from the closet and started collecting the guns.

Luis and Tyson had both been carrying FN Five-sevens, known as Mata policiers or cop killers because of their ability to penetrate body-armour. They had two spare magazines each in their jacket pockets and almost a thousand dollars in cash. He found the keys to the other Jeep in Luis’s pocket and took those too. Javier had a knife tucked inside his boot. Mulcahy dropped it into the sack with the rest of the weapons, twisted it closed then pulled his phone from his pocket, found the missed call message and selected ‘recall’.

He stood by the door a moment, scanning the room and checking it over for anything he might have overlooked. His eyes settled on the TV screen where the desert still burned. A reporter was talking about the plane crash that had caused it. The strap beneath him said they were getting reports of a possible survivor. Mulcahy took an involuntary step forward, not quite believing what he was reading, then the phone clicked and someone picked up.

‘Hello,’ a voice said. It was not his father.

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