Edge of Dawn (6 page)

Tecolote wasn't much different from some of the small Navajo and Pueblo reservations he had visited in New Mexico. There were a dozen or so sagging, rusting trailers, each with a satellite dish reaching toward the sky. There were a couple of houses, one built out of wood and sheets of plywood, and another out of stone. There was a pack of mangy dogs lying in the shade provided by the trailers. Whenever they gave themselves a desultory scratch, clouds of dust puffed up. There were three tiny children clad only in T-shirts playing in a cheap rubber wading pool under the watchful eye of an elderly woman who shucked corn while she sat on the steps of a trailer.

The children gaped at him. The woman stared at him with that flat, hard expression you saw in the faces of people who had been isolated due to poverty and race, and assumed every white man in a big car was bad news. It wasn't just paranoia, Richard reflected. For people like these, that was often the case.

The dogs set up a ululating chorus of bays and barks announcing his arrival, and they came racing toward the car as he pulled to a stop. They flung themselves against the doors. As their claws scrabbled at the metal, Richard pictured long scratches in the paint and reminded himself of the rental car mantra—
no curb too high.

He couldn't tell if those lolling tongues and rows of teeth were doggie smiles or held a more sinister warning. He also knew huddling in the car wasn't going to win him any points. Richard took a deep breath, picked up his Yankees ball cap from the passenger seat, and pulled it on in the probably vain hope it would protect him from the blazing sun. He opened the door and stepped out into a blast of heat that seared his lungs and sucked the moisture from every pore as he broke out in an instant sweat. California was supposed to be so great, Richard thought. Thus far he had found it to be a hellhole.

“Down!” he ordered the lunging dogs, and amazingly all of them save the Chihuahua obeyed. The Chihuahua took a grip on the tassel of his loafer and started pulling. Richard resisted the urge to drop-kick it into the wading pool.

The door of the stone house banged open, and a man emerged, tucking his shirt into jeans washed so many times they were more white than blue. He had a barrel chest and bandy legs, and long black hair hung raggedly to his shoulders. A few more doors banged and more men arrived. The man from the stone house stood well back from him and called, “Our kids are going to school.”

Allistaire had mistaken Richard for a real estate developer. Now he'd been mistaken for a truant officer. Richard wasn't sure if that was a step up or a step down. He held out a hand in a pacifying gesture. “I'm not from the government.” Tension leached out of a few shoulders. “I'm a…”
policeman,
his mind wanted to say, but that was probably worse than a bureaucrat, and it wasn't strictly accurate any longer. He decided on brutal candor. “Look, I'm rich. I need you to do me a favor and I'll pay well for it.”

Glances were exchanged all around, and the old woman on the trailer steps gave an almost imperceptible nod.

“Okay, come in,” said the barrel-chested man. He turned and headed toward the stone house. “I'm Johnny Calder
ó
n,” he threw back over his shoulder. “I lead this band.”

“Pleased to meet you. Richard Oort.”

Inside there was a window air conditioner blowing full blast. The pages of the top magazine on a stack of
Popular Mechanic
s fluttered in the breeze. The front door kept opening and closing as more people drifted in. Burly men, a few sporting tattoos that indicated military service. Slim youths with hair so black it gleamed. And an old man with sunken cheeks, who settled into a chair by the cool air. No women, however, until the old woman arrived carrying a big jug of lemonade. Richard wanted to kiss her. He removed his cap and thrust it in his jacket pocket, then took out a handkerchief and mopped his face and neck.

“Hot, huh?” Calder
ó
n said as he pulled back his hair and confined it with a rubber band

“Yes, very. It's hot in New Mexico too, but not this bad.”

“Huh, New Mexico.” He paused. “Long way to come for a favor. Don't you have any Indians to screw over in your part of the world?”

Looking into those dark eyes, Richard realized that Johnny Calder
ó
n was a very shrewd guy. Peddling bullshit was not going to fly. Calder
ó
n grabbed a chair, spun it around, and straddled it, arms resting along the back. Nobody offered Richard a chair.

Richard cleared his throat. Knowing it forcibly displayed his nerves but unable to prevent it. “I read about your situation. How the community center burned down and there's no money to build a new one. How you're trying to buy fifty acres from your neighbors, but they're not budging on the asking price. I know unemployment is chronic.” He paused and surveyed the ring of implacable faces, and hurried on. “I'm prepared to rebuild your center, buy the fifty acres, and build and staff a health clinic.” Richard tilted a hand toward Calder
ó
n, physically passing the conversational ball.

“And what do we gotta do to earn all this unsolicited generosity?” Calder
ó
n asked.

“Violate your religious beliefs.”

That got a reaction. People shifted, and there were even a few basso rumbles from the circle of men. Calder
ó
n shrugged. “I'm a lapsed Catholic. Not sure how that's going to help you,” he said.

“Not Christian beliefs. Your traditional beliefs.” There were more rumbles at that and more than a few head shakes. Richard held up a hand. “Just hear me out. I need to shift a road or a house in a subdivision that's being built down near Anaheim. I'd thought about seeding an archaeological site, but an archaeologist told me it wouldn't stand up to any kind of scrutiny.”

“He's right. You can't just throw around pot shards and arrowheads. You gotta show habitation, middens, fire pits,” the old toothless man said.

“How you know that, Granddad?” one of the younger men scoffed.

The old man was offended. “Worked a few digs in my time. Learned some things. You should try it.”

Richard took back the conversation. “This archaeologist suggested I use TCP—

“What's that mean?” Calder
ó
n interrupted.

The old man broke in again. “Traditional cultural property.”

Calder
ó
n glanced at him, then looked back to Richard. “And I repeat, what the fuck does that actually mean?”

Richard hesitated, certain he didn't want to directly quote Allistaire. “Basically, I need you to find a shrine or a sacred area in this subdivision and force a change in the design and layout.”

“Why?” Suspicion made the word sharp as ice.

This time there was no hesitation. Richard knew what was at stake and he didn't hold back.

“The layout of the buildings and streets forms a rune. If it's completed, it will tear a hole in reality and allow monsters to enter our world. I intend to keep that from happening.” A ring of carefully bland faces was all the response he got.

If this had been three years ago, the people in the room would have decided he was nuts, but the events in Virginia and around the world had removed that worry.

“Is this more of that crap that went on back east?” Johnny asked.

“Yes.”

The man's eyes raked Richard up and down. Richard tried to stand a little taller. He knew what Calder
ó
n saw—a short man who was a little too thin and looked younger than he was.

“And you're going to handle that, huh?” Doubt and amusement laced the words.

Richard's spine stiffened and his jaw tightened. “Your help will make this easier, but with or without you I'm going to stop them.”

There were more looks around the room. Then the old woman left her chair, walked over to him, and took his chin in one gnarled hand. She smelled of dust and the sweet scent of cornhusk. She turned his face from side to side. Richard allowed it “You're that boy,” she finally said, “the one in the papers.”

“Yes,” he said simply, though he wasn't thrilled at being called a boy. He would be thirty in December.

“Make up a god,” said the old woman.

A few people shifted uneasily. Calder
ó
n shook his head. “It's not good to piss off the gods.”

“This made-up god won't care. The white men won't know.” She pinned the listeners with a glance as fierce as a hawk's. “There are only a handful of us left. They killed us and our traditions. Let them pay.” She paused and looked down into Richard's face. “Starting with this one.” She released his chin and hobbled back to her chair.

*   *   *

After leaving Tecolote, Richard decided to check out Gilead. Driving down the twisting streets, he tried to get a sense of the shape of the magical rune formed by the streets and houses. It had been so obvious when he'd viewed the satellite photo of the subdivision, but from ground level it just seemed like winding roads lined with palm trees. He wondered what each twist and turn signified to the Old Ones who were trying to enter through this five-square-mile rune. That raised a new worry. Were the Old Ones pressing close to the boundaries of human reality able to sense the weapon nestled at his back? If yes, would they inform the human quislings who did their bidding by building this gateway?

Rays from the setting sun glinted on a glass lens. Richard frowned and realized that the palm tree was a clever fake and that it sported a CCTV camera in place of a coconut. As the son of a federal court judge and the brother of a former defense attorney, he found such intrusions on privacy disturbing. As a police officer, he loved the cameras and wished every American city was surveilled as closely as London. Though in this community, Richard had a feeling that it had less to do with preventing crime and more to do with monitoring behavior.

The last of the newly planted real and fake palm trees petered out along with the pavement. Richard negotiated the final sharp curve, and there were the three houses straggling out toward graded ground waiting for the next house to be built. Plowed-in roads formed Nazca plain–like patterns, and fire hydrants stuck up like yellow teeth from brown gums.

He stopped on the side of the bladed-in road, pushed his sunglasses up onto his forehead, and contemplated the parched landscape. A sudden breeze lifted dust into a spiral. Richard's gut clenched. Sometimes there was a change in air pressure when a rent opened. But this wasn't a tear in reality. It was just a normal wind in drought-stricken earth.

It was important that Calder
ó
n not be perceived as a pure opportunist. He and Richard had agreed the man needed to get a job with the construction company working at Gilead so he could
see
the sacred site. That meant a delay of at least a couple of days while Richard hired away one of the crew and Calder
ó
n replaced him.

Lumina had an L.A. office. Richard could work from there while they got things arranged. Realizing he had probably lingered too long, Richard put the car in gear, turned around, and headed for a freeway going north.

*   *   *

By the time he got off the freeway at the Wilshire Boulevard exit, he was quivering with tension. It had taken him four hours to drive the thirty-some miles between Anaheim and L.A. in bumper-to-bumper traffic. But it wasn't just the traffic that had his gut roiling. He had been to California only once before, when he'd come to neutralize a deadly enemy. The fact that enemy had been an eighteen-year-old girl, and he had turned her into a vegetable, lay heavy on his heart. He told himself there was no other choice. Half human and half Old One, Rhiana had been a formidable magical talent who had abandoned humanity and thrown in with the monsters. He still didn't feel good about it, and, to assuage his guilt, Lumina paid for Rhiana's care. Richard briefly toyed with the idea of calling her adoptive parents to see how she was doing. He shoved away the thought; he knew how she was doing. She was lying in a bed at a long-term care facility being fed through a tube and crapping into a diaper.

The need to listen to the instructions from the GPS bot-girl helped push Rhiana out of his thoughts. Even with the navigation aid, it was confusing as hell, but eventually he located the office in a ziggurat-shaped building very close to the L.A. art museums. As he drove down the ramp into the underground parking lot, the weight of the multistory building seemed to be pressing down on his head. He prayed that the Big One wouldn't hit at that instant. Earthquakes were something he found terrifying—unpredictable and they struck without warning. They were like nature's version of an Old One.

The lobby continued with the whole Babylonian Hanging Gardens motif. It was festooned with plants, their tendrils stretching up toward the central peak of the ziggurat, which was a large faceted window with thick glass.
Pyramid power.
Richard knew what Kenntnis would have said about such nonsense. The alien's scorn wasn't reserved just for traditional religions but for New Age gibberish too.

Richard found that the legacy of 9/11 had infested Los Angeles as well. The armed rent-a-cop at the desk demanded to know Richard's business before he would let him approach the elevators. Of course the security didn't extend past harassment and security theater. All Richard had to say was he was going up to Lumina Enterprises and he was waved through. It was nearly five o'clock, and he wondered if the assistant who manned the office would still be there. Like so much else with Lumina, Richard kept the L.A. office open because Kenntnis had. Maybe Kenntnis had actually used it.

He walked into the small office suite and caught sight of a slim, beautiful girl with bobbed red hair and a tiny diamond nose pierce just standing up from the reception desk and pulling on a very high-heeled sling-back shoe.