Their particular deaths were not what rocked me so profoundly. I was shaken instead by the cumulative killing that I had done, as if I’d committed the act often enough that, here tonight, I crossed some moral boundary beyond which I would be forever changed, some boundary that I could not retreat behind and find again the person I had once been.
No matter what I had become, I could not say enough of this, could not walk away from the fight. That choice was forbidden to me, as it had been most of my life. Something big and bad would happen to Pico Mundo if the cult wasn’t stopped. My horror, guilt, and sorrow mattered not at all when compared to the deaths of thousands that I had foreseen. This task would not be lifted from me, and to refuse it would be to refuse the desired destiny that I’d been promised: Stormy.
I had to get out of there before someone drove by and saw the carnage. Because of the threat to the dam, a patrol car might cruise along that lonely road, in which case my friendship with Wyatt Porter and even my unwanted reputation as a hero would not guarantee me the freedom of movement that I must have for the rest of the night.
First I needed their wallets. No. I didn’t need them. I wanted them. Not for the money. To prove something to myself.
I stepped carefully, grateful for the Mercedes’s headlights, loath to step on a fragment of skull bone, a twist of hair and flesh, a spattering of brains.
Behind the wheel of the Explorer, I searched the pockets of my jeans for the keys, then my jacket pockets, panicking, wondering if I had dropped them somewhere between there and the public restrooms in the park. In the last pocket, my fingers closed on the coiled plastic ring, and then on the key itself.
I hung a U-turn and drove west. A mile from the park entrance, I pulled to a stop on the shoulder of the road.
The two billfolds I had taken lay on the passenger seat. My hands still trembled as I went through one wallet and then the other, searching for ID.
This is a world where tragic mistakes are common. The white Mercedes SUV might not have been the same one that I’d seen earlier. Perhaps the men whom I’d shot would prove to be not who I thought they were. I had killed them without hearing a word of what they had to say, without asking a question of them. They had pulled their guns only after I’d drawn mine. Maybe they had licenses to carry concealed weapons, which I did not, and maybe they were authorities of some kind, with legitimate reasons to ask me what I had been doing in the park when it was closed for the night.
Both men possessed current Nevada driver’s licenses. James Morton Sterling. Robert Foster Cokeberry. Jim and Bob.
My relief wasn’t as complete as I might have anticipated. They were indeed the men I suspected they were; but if I had not made a tragic mistake back at the park gate, I might well make one the next time.
Headlights appeared in the distance, and a vehicle approached from the west.
I drove onto the state route once more, and a moment later, a Dodge pickup swept past me in the eastbound lane.
In a minute or so, the dead men would be found.
In California, hardened criminals were often turned loose after serving a mere fraction of their sentences, because prison crowding was considered cruel and unusual punishment. But if you drove while talking on a handheld phone, you would be shown no mercy. I risked the pitiless brute force of the law by calling Chief Porter without pulling off the highway.
“Sir, you’re going to get a call soon about a white Mercedes SUV and two dead men at the gate to Malo Suerte Park.”
“It’s not been half an hour since we last talked.”
“Yes, sir. I’ve got a wristwatch. Their names are James Morton Sterling and Robert Foster Cokeberry.”
“Jim and Bob.”
“The two and only.”
“Let me get a pen. There. Okay. Repeat their names.”
I repeated them. “They both have Nevada driver’s licenses.”
“Are you okay, Oddie?”
“Yeah. Sure. I’m okay.”
“Because you don’t sound okay.”
“Not a scratch,” I assured him.
After a silence, because he knew me well, he said, “Not all wounds are the bleeding kind.”
I didn’t want to talk about it. “I’ve got their driver’s licenses, Chief. I’m going to the dam now, so I’ll leave them with Sonny and Billy.”
“By the way, I talked to Mr. Donatella.”
“Who?”
“Lou Donatella, you know, in the bear suit. Though he wasn’t wearing it by the time I got to him. He and Ollie were drinking coffee, eating brown-sugar pavlovas. They’re delicious. Have you ever had one?”
“No, sir. I don’t even know what a pavlova is.”
“They’re delicious is what they are. Lou made them himself. He’s a nice little guy. He gave me some useful stuff about this Wolfgang Schmidt.”
Ahead on the left loomed a sign rimmed with pentagons of highly reflective plastic: MALO SUERTE DAM.
“Schmidt claimed to come from a carnie family when he bought out one of the concessionaires, but Lou says the guy was no more a carnie than Mozart was a carnie. Lou’s into classical music.”
“I’m turning on to the service road to the dam, sir. I’ll call you back in a little while.”
“What do you expect to find there, son?”
“I don’t know. I’m just … drawn to it.”
“You sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“Call me when you get a chance. I’ll be here. This is looking like an all-nighter.”
“No, sir. My hunch is … this thing is going to blow before midnight.”
“Let’s hope you’re right,” he said.
I thought, Let’s hope I’m wrong.
Twenty-seven
The service road led through land so parched that you wouldn’t expect to find a dam and a large body of water at the end of it. To both sides, my headlights showed bare earth, scatterings of stones, an occasional bristle of nameless weeds, no mesquite, no cactus.
Far to the south, along the horizon, heat lightning pulsed through the clouds, smooth radiant waves rather than jagged spears. Forty or fifty miles away, perhaps a downpour washed the desert. Rain didn’t always travel as far as heat lightning could be seen, and Pico Mundo might not receive a drop all night.
The breast of the dam didn’t in scale match that engineering wonder Boulder Dam, over in Nevada. Pico Mundians prided themselves on being “the smallest town of forty thousand anywhere in the world.” That slogan, created by the chamber of commerce, meant to convey to tourists that we were big enough to offer a wide range of activities and accommodations, and that nevertheless we remained simple people with homespun wisdom, down-home manners, and a tradition of welcoming strangers as we would our own kin. You could go to Boulder, Nevada, and do your boating on Lake Mead, behind the ostentatiously massive breastworks of their dam, if you didn’t mind the greedy casinos, all owned by humongous corporations, luring you to nearby Vegas, trying every minute of the day to get their hands in your pockets. Or you could come to Pico Mundo and enjoy boating on Malo Suerte Lake, behind a dam that was practical and human in scale, nothing like that Hitlerian structure across the border, only one hundred and two feet across and thirty-eight feet from crest to sill.
Our dam had no hydroelectric powerhouse, because it had been constructed with the modest intention of creating a pristine lake for recreational use and, in times of drought, a lake that could also serve as a source of water for a few major Maravilla County reservoirs downstream from it. There were sluice gates toward the north end of the dam and a squat concrete outlet-control structure about twenty feet square. The building looked like a miniature fortress, with a crenellated parapet around its flat roof and windows hardly larger than arrow loops.