“But she would agree with what this girl is saying, basically?”
“I got the impression that Zoë thought the person who did the drawing was crazier than a bog rat. And I wanted to remind you, in case you have also forgotten, that this reference to ‘snake eater’ on the upper left? That’s the Army term for Special Forces. You were one yourself, weren’t you? So think hard about what that means. And Zoë says that the Native American Church does not encourage ‘atonement’ but only the forgiveness of sins and peaceful coexistence with your neighbors. Peaceful coexistence does not strike me as Moot Gibson’s personal creed. Now what? Do you have to go join a Peyote cult?”
“What did she make of the stuff about Purgatoire and Culebra? Why is Purgatoire in French, for one thing?”
“She noticed that. She thinks the word refers to a river called the Purgatoire, which is in southeastern Colorado. The funny thing about the name is—”
“Where in southeastern Colorado?”
“Where? It starts in the Rockies, down by the New Mexico border, ends in the town of Lamar, up by the Kansas border; it flows mainly northeast through the Comanche National Grassland—”
“But this is where Pinto lived.”
“Yes. That’s right. As a matter of fact, the Purgatoire runs sort of parallel to the Timpas River, which runs parallel to a little creek called the Apishapa—”
“This is right in the middle of Pinto’s territory.”
“Yes, I think we’ve already established that. You may recall that we’ve also established that the Coroner of Munchkin Land, who thoroughly examined him, says he’s not only really dead, he’s really quite sincerely dead. Pinto, I mean. Not the coroner. Anyway, as I was saying, the Purgatoire runs northwest through the town of Trinidad—”
“Trinidad. One of Fremont’s unit guys got lost in a storm in the hills around Trinidad. Milo Tillman. This is all connected. I know it.”
“Connected to what?”
“These names. Trinidad. Goliad. The Purgatoire. Horsecoat. Wilson Horsecoat. He did the ID on Pinto’s body, didn’t he?”
“Wait a minute… yep. Wilson Horsecoat and Ida Escondido.”
“These names. They fit together. Somebody with the Horsecoat name was writing letters to Sweetwater when he was in Italy. Trinidad. Goliad. I’ve seen them somewhere else. They’re… damn, I can’t remember.”
“Micah, if you think this is vital, I can run a search string.”
“Can you? Can you do it now?”
“Sure. I’ll run the name Goliad, cross it with Trinidad.”
“I need this right now, Sally.”
“And you’ll have it. Goliad… how do you spell it?”
Dalton spelled it out for her, and waited, staring absently, unseeing, down at Irene, who was staring right back up at him while using all of her considerable powers of telepathy to convey three simple words to Dalton:
Must.
Go.
Out.
The phone beeped and crackled for a time, and he could hear Sally’s fingers on the keyboard, rapid-fire, staccato, and the rustle as she picked up the handset again.
“Okay. Maybe this is it. Dateline Monday, November seventeen, 1997: at five forty-five local time in eastern Colorado, a Consuelo Luz Goliad, age forty-nine, was killed in a multiple-car crash while traveling northbound on Interstate 25, near the town of Trinidad. Does this mean something?”
“Yes. I just don’t know what.”
“Well, there’s a cross-reference to an article in… in the Simi Valley Clarion… by somebody named Barbra Goldhawk. Dated June fifteenth, 1998. I can only get the extract — wait — okay, this Goldhawk person was calling for the FBI to investigate what she was calling the suspicious deaths of Consuelo Luz Goliad and her husband, Héctor Rubio Goliad, who was a pilot in the Mexican Air Force. Any more? No, that’s it. Nothing else. No FBI follow-up. And this Goldhawk woman is never heard from again, according to this.”
“Simi Valley? That’s near Los Angeles, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Can I borrow something?”
“Sure. Name it?”
“The Gulfstream?”
14
The brown-and-cream double-wide trailer was studded with large wooden butterflies the size of pterodactyls and was surrounded by a white picket fence made entirely out of recycled plastic. The creaking gate opened onto a large concrete rectangle painted lime green, along the edges of which sprouted dusty, faded bunches of plastic daisies and tulips and begonias and a flight of steps made of stacked blocks painted orange that led up to a rusted screen door with pink flamingoes for a frame. From inside the darkened interior he could hear a tinny radio playing “In the Mood” by Glenn Miller.
As he stood there listening, a large calico cat oiled up to his leg and began rubbing herself against him. Dalton was not fond of cats and he wished that he had brought Irene with him instead of leaving her back at Van Nuys Airport with the ex-Marine pilot who had made the flight from Greybull so gosh-darn memorable that, at several points en route, Dalton had considered shooting him in the back of his skull.
He gave the cat a not-so-discreet shove that lofted her into a patch of plastic petunias. Turning to face the door again, he found himself staring up into the disapproving glare of an age-spotted woman wearing a very loud Hawaiian shirt in coral and powder blue, pale pink terry-cloth short shorts, a hunchbacked crone with a corona of bright pink frizz around a thin liverish face deeply marked by sun damage, a face out of which shone two small black eyes bright with intelligence and ill-will.
She had a clear plastic oxygen tube that was looped around both ears, the tube running under her nose and down into a portable oxygen canister on rollers, and she had a raw-looking trachea implant that was partially covered by a filthy white neckerchief.
She glared down at him through the screen, raised a clawlike hand in which burned a Marlboro, stuffed the cigarette into her trachea implant, sealed her lips, pinched her nose shut with the other hand, and pulled a long lungful into her through the trachea port, doing so with obvious relish and clearly enjoying the effect this performance was having on her visitor. Then she exhaled it through her trachea tube again, a plume of pale-blue tobacco smoke that poured out through the screen and wandered off on the hot dry wind out of the nut-brown slopes of the Santa Susana Range far away in the northeast.
“Miss Goldhawk? I’m Micah Dalton.”
She pressed a spiky knob-knuckled index finger against some sort of device attached to her tracheal implant and emitted a droning buzz that Dalton realized was electronically synthesized speech.
“You the spook? Let me see some ID.”
Dalton showed her the impressive-looking ID the Agency gives you to show to people to whom the Agency does not want you to show your not-quite-so-impressive actual ID.
She had a pair of glasses — huge pink plastic ones with green parrots sitting on palm trees forming the frames — hanging from an amber-beaded necklace. She finally got them fixed in place and blinked down at his folio ID with rheumy eyes. She grunted and shoved the screen door open.
Dalton followed her into the cool, dank dark of her double-wide — a long barren room furnished in garage-sale odds and ends, smelling badly of the hanging stink of her Marlboros.