“Why?” Terry asked, sounding stunned.
“I’m sure,” True said, “he knew they needed him in Iraq. They were his second family. I’m supposing from everything I’ve read that Pett intended to make the Marines his life career. He was very good at his fieldwork, but I doubt you can sustain that too long. I’m thinking he wanted to be a gunny. A gunnery sergeant. Teaching the discipline to the new boots. Maybe training new snipers. But after what happened in Fallujah…the sad thing is that you can be tested and pass the test, but something fundamental is changed about you. Something is pulled out of shape. I’ve seen the same thing happen to agents in violent situations. They do everything right, they go by the book, maybe they even win citations for bravery, but you look in their eyes—you look deep—and you see…something has gotten down in the dark, in that basement, and it presses its back against the wall for protection and it knows…it knows…that next time, the fear might win. And it’s the fear that causes you to make an error and get yourself killed. I’m thinking that after Fallujah, the next time Jeremy Pett fired a rifle he couldn’t hit a red barn at two hundred yards, because when he held that weapon everything came flooding back. So the Marines discharged him with his Bronze Star and sent him home to Houston where the bodies of his wife and son were lying in the cemetery. It wasn’t too much longer before he moved to Temple. Obviously he wanted to be close to the VA hospital. The visitors’ records say he went to see his buddy every Wednesday.”
“Wow,” was Berke’s quiet response. If anything, she could relate to loyalty.
Nomad was having none of it. “Are we supposed to feel sorry for him?”
A grim smile moved across True’s mouth, and then it went away. He said in an empty voice, “Feel the way you need to feel. No skin off my back.”
They were climbing into the jagged brown teeth. The traffic would move for a few minutes and then it would clog again with an exclamation of brakelights all down the long line. A helicopter swooped low over the road.
“Hey, a chopper!” Terry said. “I’m impressed!”
“Not mine,” True told him. “Might be media or Brickenfield’s security men making a display. My guys aren’t meant to be noticed.”
Nomad thought that was an understatement, considering how smoothly Truitt Allen had stashed a small soft leather bag down beside the driver’s seat when he’d gotten behind the wheel. Cellphone? Walkie-Talkie? Compact handgun? Probably all three.
“Question?” True asked, as if he were reading Nomad’s mind.
“I don’t have a question, man.”
“I’m saying I do have a question. I was about to ask…what’s the story behind Stone Church? It didn’t start out with that name.” True knew that much; it had been the Apache Leap Festival when it began in 1995. In the year 2000, it became Stone Church. “The highest peak up here is called Apache Leap, correct?”
“I guess.”
“Well, who knows? I’m interested in why the name changed.” He’d never thought to ask Garth Brickenfield or Roger Chester or even his own tac leader, with all the other million details that had to be worked out for this operation, and anyway it was hardly an essential point. But still, he was curious. “Anybody help me out?”
“I’ve read about it,” Ariel said, though she was underestimating her knowledge. She’d talked to other musicians who’d played Stone Church, and from their experiences she’d dug into the subject like Detective Ramona Rios on the track of a missing persons report. “The legend about Apache Leap is that—”
“A brave climbed up there to fight an evil spirit,” True interrupted. “He jumped off the peak when he realized the evil couldn’t be beaten, because it was part of himself. Yeah, that’s schoolboy stuff. I want to know about Stone Church.”
“The legend and Stone Church tie together,” she explained. “It’s been a place of evil spirits for a very long time.”
“You’re quoting someone?” He gave the Scumbucket some gas; they were moving again, but once more the line of brakelights flared ahead. The helicopter passed, throwing its shadow like a huge dark bird. “Or is that your opinion?”
“I’ll tell you what I’ve read and what I’ve heard, if you want to listen.”
“Shoot,” he said, and instantly thought that was a very poor choice of words.
Ariel began.
SEVENTEEN.
She was good at painting pictures with words, and so now Ariel painted them for Truitt Allen: yellow dust blowing through the mountain air, the stillness of the red-rimmed stone, the sun burning hot upon the cracks and fissures of a dry, old earth, and deep down below that baked brown crust the men sweating in the light of their lanterns as they swung pickaxes in the sweltering rooms of Silver Mine Number Three.
The Spanish had worked the mine before, using Indians as slaves, but not until 1887 did the industrious white men find the hole in the ground and haul up a taste of what was in it. They brought their pack mules, their tent canvas, their lumber boards and their picks and shovels by the hundreds, and then with the arrival of the barrels of nails and a proper team of construction surveyors paid for by the San Francisco investment company, wooden buildings took shape. The two whorehouses were given painted signs. The four bars earned their solidity, their batwing doors and their brass spittoons. Wagons began bringing in the wives and children. At night the wind picked up, and under the stars it sang through the telegraph wires that stretched down along the poles to Gila Ridge. A school was built, well away from the saloons and houses of ill repute. It was the third silver mine owned by the Company, and by now the managers knew how to build a town around a dream of wealth.
A lot of silver was coming out of that mine. Some other things too: a little lead, a flash of zinc, enough gold to quicken the pulse and cause women to crave the gleam and men to go buy a pocket pistol, just for protection. But a lot of silver was coming up, and Silver Mine Number Three was going to make a lot of people very rich.
A man of God arrived, in the summer of 1890. He introduced himself at a town meeting as the Reverend Daniel Kiley. He brought with him his own wife, his two young sons, his baby daughter and a wagon full of Bibles and hymn books. He was a good man. He was an intelligent man. He was a man who had his own dreams, of making a difference in a world that needed salvation.
He was a man.
Daniel Kiley had had some difficulty in Denver, their last place of residence. It might have had to do with the power of whiskey, or the power of a woman who whispered things in a man’s ear that a wife would not dare to speak, and who did those things laughingly and then laughingly watched a man’s face crumble along with the plans for a new church on Blake Street. He had been cast out of that Eden, and had wandered long in search of a purpose to redeem himself in the eyes of God, in the eyes of his wife and in the hearts of his children. He had to win his way back, and the only way he knew to do that was to build something holy, something that would last, something like a beacon to lead sinners home from the dark path. Because he knew what lay at the end of that; he had seen his destruction in a pair of green eyes and a pair of green-gloved hands. He had seen it in the distorted reflection of his own face in a mirror down along the hallway where a red curtain hid his secrets.