Shadow Play Read online

  “Looking for, trying to find the location.”

  The smile faded from her leathered, crinkled face. “The location.”

  “Yes. It’s supposed to be near Ruby.”

  “Did you find it?”

  “No.”

  “You go hiking up there?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Take any geodes?”

  “Geodes?”

  “Rocks, you know, those funky things people get for their coffee tables.”

  “I’m not a geologist. I’m not looking for rocks.”

  “You trying to find the location of the gateway?”

  “The gate was locked.”

  “Girl,” she said finally, “you aren’t making a whole lot of sense. The gateway is never locked.”

  “I saw it, I was right in front of it.”

  “You go through?”

  “No,” glad she’d offered to help me, irritated at her senseless questions, “it was locked, I told you, it was locked shut.”

  “Ha,” she cackled. “You talking about that gate into Ruby.”

  “Yes. That’s what I wanted to do, get into Ruby. A man I know has a movie location somewhere in there. I wanted to see it.”

  “A movie location.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you weren’t trying to find the gateway?”

  “Can we just get me across this water?”

  “Nope. Gotta wait at least an hour. I just wanted to get you hooked up, but when I waded in there, I could see it was no go for a while. You might as well turn off your engine, we’ll sit awhile. A movie, you say.”

  “A Western.”

  “Lots of movies been made around here. Nothing going on now, though. I’d know about it. George would know about it.”

  “George?”

  “A movie stuntman, lives in Arivaca. Worked in Hollywood, worked at that Wild West dude place in Tucson. Any Western movies being made around here, George would know about it, most likely, he’d be part of it.”

  “No movie?”

  “Nah. I know the caretakers for Ruby, I’d know if they leased some of the town to a movie deal. Unlikely they’d do that. Look.”

  “Look at what?”

  “Over there,” she whispered. “Other side of the wash, twenty feet upstream. See her?” She pointed, I sighted along her arm.

  “Is that a cat?”

  “Cat all right. Name of Bob.”

  Short tail, tufted ears, with a summer coat of yellowish tan highlighted with randomly placed dark spots and a few black stripes.

  “Bobcat. Look, her babies.”

  Three tiny kittens stumbled out of the brush, round-faced with thick legs and enormous paws, two of them tumbling in play while the mother scanned their side of the wash and then over to us. She froze instinctively, knowing us for humans, uncertain whether we wanted her pelt or just happened to be nearby. I stepped backward, ready to jump into my Cherokee if she came across to us, but the movement scared her enough that she snarled at her kittens, their play ceasing as all four took off in an awkward stumbling run, disappearing into the shrubs and creosote bushes across the wash.

  “Cute lil suckers, aren’t they. My name’s Delilah.”

  “Laura,” I said.

  “Guess you’re not looking for the gateway.”

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  “People say there’s a powerful vortex gateway up in the hills.”

  “A vortex?”

  “Yeah. I’ve got a few on my ten acres.”

  “Good and bad?”

  “You know about that, yeah, one bad and the rest wonderful.”

  “And the gateway?”

  “Who knows? Lots of stories.” Picking up the cable hook, suddenly less talkative. “Let’s give this a shot, what the hell. We’re late for the birthday party anyway, might’s get moving.”

  “I can’t go to a party, I’ve got to be in Tucson.”

  “Girl, there’s two heavy-duty flooded washes between Arivaca and I-19. You won’t be able to get past for at least two hours. This wash here is nothing compared to the others, folks sometimes hole up at the Longhorn bar until midnight, cars lined up for three miles or more waiting to get through the water.”

  “I’ve got to be in Tucson.”

  She grabbed my hands, leaned her head back. “You’re kinda worked up.”

  “Can we please get across? Now?”

  “You’re not listening to me, Laura. No matter how much you might want to be in Tucson, you won’t get there until really late. Just chill out a bit, things’ll go all right, we can party up for a while.”

  “Is there another road out of this place?”

  “What are you angry about, Laura? You can’t be angry about water, you’ve gotta see past that.”

  “I don’t need a therapist right now. Just give me a tow.”

  She let go of my hands, leaned against the hood of my Cherokee.

  “Girl, you’ve gotta do some work.”

  “I’ll hook it up, just show me how.”

  “No. I mean, you should do some work on that anger.” She watched as I lifted the cable hook, lay down in the muddy dirt, and fastened the hook to the towing bolt. I stood up, half wet and mostly dirty, brushing dirt off the back of my head. “Look into the water, Laura. Look at the last light, reflected in the water.”

  Clouds drifting off to the north, opening a tunnel so the moon was imaged in the water, which no longer flowed quickly, almost at a standstill as the desert soaked it up.

  “You can get messages from water,” she said. “The molecular structure changes if you focus on it, concentrate on the water until it mirrors your anger.”

  “I don’t want New Age stuff right now.”

  “That bobcat, she’s over across there somewhere, probably at home in a hollow log. She’s watching you, watching your mirror image in the water. She’s feeling your anger.”

  “Anger,” I sighed. “I am angry.”

  “At what?”

  “Trying to solve so many things, and here I’m stuck in the desert.”

  “Just a monsoon, Laura. Nothing you do can stop a monsoon. You feeling irresponsible, that you can’t solve things, you don’t have control?”

  “I don’t want to talk about what’s making me angry.”

  “I don’t, either. You’ve got to do the work yourself, girl. You’ve got to see the mirror image of yourself, you’ve got to mirror yourself and illuminate the anger you see in yourself instead of just figuring what you want from other people.”

  “Illuminate,” I said shortly.

  “Yeah. It’s simple. Do the work. See in yourself what you think you have a right to see in other people.”

  “You mean, see myself in terms of…what?”

  “Your emotions toward other people. Flip those emotions so you see them in yourself, then you work on what that’s doing to you.” I shook my head, unwilling to listen anymore. She smiled, touched my hands again, and started wading back over the wash. “Let’s get your Jeep across. We can talk about things more at the party.”

  35

  My cell rang just after midnight. I’d crossed the last flooded wash and was on I-19 before the cell signal strength bars lit up. Anxious to call Alex, but she called me.

  “Where have you been?” she said. “God, Laura, I’ve left a dozen messages on your voice mail.”

  “Did you find anything we can use?”

  “Yes. Leon Begay is the registered owner of a house at one nine one two Avocado Place. Between Campbell and Mountain, just north of Grand.”

  “I know that neighborhood.”

  “Fries me off,” Alex said. “Should’ve been onto it hours ago. I’m getting old, I’m slipping here. Where are you?”

  “Near Green Valley, about half an hour from that address.”

  “We’ll meet you there.”

  “No. I’ll go myself. Anything else?”

  “On hold. Can’t crunch data if we don�
��t have it.”

  “My cell battery is almost shot. I’ll call when I get to that house.”

  Most of older Tucson had no streetlights, the subdivisions planned decades earlier. This wasn’t the result of zoning laws, however. Tucson was surrounded by many observatories, and in an attempt to keep reflected city light down, streets were planned without lighting. Some of the newer developments east of town, like the car lots on Speedway, had yellowish lights. But in the area north of the university and west of Campbell Avenue, the older neighborhoods were very dark at nights.

  I’d lived here several years ago, when I’d first met Rey Villaneuva and wound up with Audrey dead by a shotgun blast in my kitchen. The house was now gone, bulldozed along with two neighboring houses so the new owner could build a walled new-style hacienda. Most of the houses on Silver were still there, however, and I found myself remembering the neighborhood street names, some of the houses, Jerry’s eclectic and amazing collection of welded objects—a camel, several dinosaurs.

  I drove slowly past Leon’s other house, distinguished in style from its neighbors only by the bamboo fencing along the front yard. Like the kind of bamboo you buy to hang as window shades, except this was stacked vertically and braced every few feet with what looked like ocotillo ribs. A forty-foot mesquite leaned over the bamboo, and several palm trees ringed the left side of the house.

  Parking down the street, I walked back, not wanting to use my flashlight but wary of my footing once I stepped off the paved street onto a sand-and-loose-gravel sidewalk area. A mailbox lay atop a stack of three concrete building blocks, the bottom two painted purple. Two feet from the entrance, I stopped, alarmed, as a light flickered suddenly in the draped front windows, and I heard sounds from a TV. It took me a minute to realize that somebody’d set up a timer inside, the cheap-person’s burglar alarm, controlling a lamp or CD player or TV so people would think somebody was home. Without hesitating I opened the front gate, moved inside the yard, and refastened the gate hasp. Bushes grew irregularly on both sides of the house, shielding me from the lighted living-and bedroom windows of the houses on each side. Even with their blinds down, I didn’t want to make any noise that might cause somebody to take a look. Three steps up to a concrete porch, some wicker chairs positioned around two tables. No screen door, just solid wood with three small windows at eye level.

  Every door and window locked tight and covered. I waited ten or fifteen minutes, couldn’t detect any changes in the pattern of sounds from the house. TV played, one lamp switched off and another on in a back bedroom, but nobody seemed to be moving around. At the back of the house, a narrow window that wouldn’t budge until I wrapped a large, flat rock inside my blouse and smacked the window just enough to break the glass, only one shard falling inside to crinkle on a wooden floor. I removed the rest of the glass and boosted myself over the sill.

  A laundry room, an ancient washer and dryer, hoses and power plugs unconnected. Opening the door, I crept into a hallway, saw a crack of light under a closed door. I tapped on the door, heard nothing, opened it to see a totally empty room with dingy white sheets hanging over the windows. Down the hall, the living room, bathroom, and kitchen were also completely empty. One bedroom left.

  Entirely by itself, an old Mac G3 computer sat in the middle of the floor, a long extension cord running to a power outlet, the computer unplugged. An old monitor sat next to the box, unplugged. I attached the monitor cable to the back of the computer, plugged the power cords into the wall socket. The monitor jumped on with a sizzle and the screen opened in the middle and slowly expanded to the outer edges, the monitor so old that everything was in green.

  The computer ground through the boot-up process until a box appeared asking me for a log-in password. Without hesitating I pulled both power cords out of the wall socket, removing the monitor attachment. Hoisting the computer, I went to the front door, unlocked two dead bolts, and closed the door behind me to stand on the front porch. Two mourning doves hooted their baleful cries, but no traffic moved on the street, none of the neighbors seemed awake.

  I went quickly to the Cherokee, set the computer on the floor behind the driver’s seat, and called Alex to say I’d be at her place in twenty minutes.

  36

  The gateway, I kept thinking of the gateway all during my two hours at the birthday party, over fifty people crowding inside La Gitana, packed against the walls, several people dancing outside on the terrace.

  A vortex, Delilah told me. An archway into another time. Up there in the hills near Ruby. All kinds of stories about it. People run through and disappear. Somebody throws a jackrabbit through, the rabbit disappears but three lambs run out. You just disappear or reappear around the gateway, you reverse in time or forward in time or who knows, into another world. A few people claim to know where the gateway is, they say the arch has crumbled, it’s just two curved columns now, me, I don’t go up there, I don’t need to know, I’m happy in this time, in this world.

  Finally driving up to my own house. Almost two in the morning.

  Alex and Steffi couldn’t easily crack the computer’s log-in requests and after fifteen minutes, I left them running their own cracking software, knowing she’d call me if and when they got something useful.

  Driving through empty streets, even the birds quiet, I expected to find an empty house. Lights shone from the living room and kitchen. I parked in the drive, stretched, did some breathing to get myself calm, I knew my daughter had come home, I knew what I wanted to say to her. Nothing else much mattered.

  “Laura,” she said with a huge grin. “This is so cool.”

  She’d unboxed the small Zen garden that Alex had given me, she’d poured the almost white sand into the eight-by-twelve-inch framed box, five small rocks placed at different spots and she’d been pulling the small rake through the sand, creating wavy lines in a random pattern.

  “Where’ve you been?” she said.

  “At a birthday party. And you?”

  “Got back earlier. Whose birthday?”

  “Some woman in Arivica, her forty-fifth birthday party and the day she got her divorce papers after years of waiting. Got back from where?”

  “Mexico. Didn’t you get my phone message?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then. I got back about nine tonight. A bad monsoon north of Nogales, Carlos loves his low-rider convertible but the ragtop leaks like crazy. What was her name, the birthday girl?”

  “Monica.”

  She turned to the Zen garden, shifted two rocks, raked out the sand in a different pattern. “Where’d you get this?”

  “From Alex.” I stretched, felt the Beretta shift and dig into my butt. I took it out and set it on an end table.

  “I’d never figure you Zenning out, Laura.”

  “Yesterday, I wouldn’t have figured it, either.”

  “You seem…I don’t know, like, you’re so calm.”

  “I am. Tired, but yeah, I feel good. Really good.”

  “Carlos said you’d jump all over me for taking off. I said you’d understand, once I told you what I’d been doing.” I waited for her to continue and my silence confused her. “Laura, what’s been going on, you’re so different. Look at this.” She stood up, turned sideways so I could see her profile, stretched her spaghetti strap tanktop tight over her belly. “I think I’m starting to show.”

  “I can’t see anything,” I said, thrilled anyway.

  “Well, maybe it just feels that way. From inside, I think I’m showing.”

  “So you’re going to have the baby?”

  “Yes, I’m going to have the baby.”

  “And Carlos, what’s he going to do?”

  “Mom,” she said with exasperation, “Carlos is so not the father.”

  “He’s not?”

  “Carlos is my best friend.” I opened my mouth to ask about the father, realizing that it really didn’t matter to me, and she saw that it didn’t matter and ran to hug me. “You thought Carlos and
I…no way. He offered to loan me his car, to go to Mexico, but I wanted him there for me as a friend.”

  “What were you doing down there?”

  “You probably thought, you heard my message, you thought I was down there getting married?”

  “Worse.”

  “Having an abortion? Mom, please.” The second time in a single minute she’d called me Mom. “I want this baby. Oh. Alex tried to get you. And somebody else has been calling. After three times I answered, I just let the answering machine take it.”

  “Okay, I’ll listen in a minute. What were you doing in Mexico?”

  “I was looking for Dad.”

  That astonished me, my jaw dropping until I could finally say something. “Spider, he’s…your father is dead.”

  “No. He’s not. Are you all right?” I’d stumbled to sit on the floor with a thud. “He’s still with that peace activist group. They changed their name, but the policía and the army still want him for some old charges, so he changed his name and went into hiding down with the Zapatistas.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. He called me. Four months ago. He called from Mexico, he needed to talk to me, to hear that I was all right and doing okay. He sounded lonely, but he cheered up as we talked.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “I couldn’t find him. Everywhere I went, even with meeting the contacts he told me about, a woman in Caborca who sent me to a man in Guaymas, nobody knew where he lived. Or they didn’t trust me. Anyway, after two days in Guaymas he called me. I know it’s him, I know his voice. I didn’t think you wanted to ever see him again, that’s why I didn’t tell you.”

  “I’m glad,” I said. “I’m really glad to know that.”

  “Yeah. Me, too. So, what’s up with you? What’s happening?”

  For half an hour I ran through everything from the past few days. The killings, the houses, the people, the casino and Vincent Basaraba and Wes McCartney and Bob Good Fellow and then I began sobbing, Spider sat beside me, pulled my head into her lap, and kept stroking my head, smoothing out my hair and the lines and tears on my face. When I finally smiled up at her, she smiled back and gave me a thumbs-up.