There were three hundred-odd galleries in Santa Fe, plus every other diner and taco joint had original artwork on the walls and on sale. Half the waiters and checkout clerks in town were aspiring artists of one sort or another, too, like the would-be actors in LA. She looked out at him, a picture from some Web site or maybe the DMV: blond, mid-twenties, full red lips, short straight nose, high cheekbones, wide blue eyes. Something in those eyes too, an odd look. Kind of haunted. The figure below…
Jesus.
'Just what I said. Anyway, she comes downstairs just after Mr. Lopez arrives. Mrs. Lopez looks out the kitchen window and notices her because she's wearing-'
He checked his notes again.
'-a white silk sheath dress and a wrap. She knew it was Tarnowski's best fancy-occasion dress from a chat they'd had months ago. Another woman was with her. About Tarnowski's age, but shorter, slim, olive complexion or a tan, long dark hair, dark eyes…'
'Really going to stand out in this town.'
Si, though if she's going around with la Tarnowski she will! I got a composite on her too, but it's not as definite. Mrs. Lopez said her clothes looked really expensive, and she was wearing a tanzanite necklace.'
'What the fuck's tanzanite?'
The other thing we have hundreds of is jewelry stores.
'Like sapphire, but expensive. Here's what she looked like.'
He showed a picture. The face was triangular, smiling slightly, framed by long straight black hair. Attractive too, but…
Reminds me of that mink I handled once when I was young and stupid and trying to impress. Pretty, and it bit like a bastard. Took three stitches and a tetanus shot and the girl laughed every time she saw me – remembered me hopping around screaming.
'I don't think she's Latina, somehow,' he said aloud, as his fingers caressed the slight scar at the base of his right thumb.
'Yeah, me too, but I can't put my finger on why. Incidentally let's do a side-by-side with the composite on the man they saw standing still outside, when the old goatsucker with the gun ran them out past him. The one he shoved into the backseat later.'
Salvador's eyebrows went up as the pictures showed together. 'Are they sure that's not the same person? It's an easy mistake to make, in the dark, with the right clothes.'
His partner nodded; it was, surprisingly so under some circumstances.
'Looks a lot like Dark Mystery Woman, eh? But it was a guy, very certainly. Wearing a dark zippered jacket open with a tee underneath. Mrs. Lopez said he looked real fit. Not bulked up but someone who worked out a lot. She got a better look at him than at the woman, they went right by. Nothing from the databases on either of them, by the way, but look at this.'
His fingers moved on the screen, and the two images slid until they were superimposed. Then he tapped a function box.
'Okay, the little machine thinks they're relatives,' Salvador said. ' I could have figured that out.'
'But could you have said it was a ninety-three-percent chance?'
'Sure. I just say: 'It's a ninety-three-percent chance.' Or in old-fashioned human language, con certesa. Okay, back up to what Mystery Woman was doing earlier. She and Tarnowski get in Tarnowski's car and drive off around five thirty, a few minutes earlier?'
'Mystery Woman was driving. Tarnowski looked shaky.' Cesar consulted his notes. 'Yeah, Mrs. Lopez said Tarnowski looked like she was going to fall over, maybe sick, the other one helped her into the car.'
'That's two people who have to be helped into cars. This smells.'
'And then two and a half hours later someone runs in waving a sawed-off shotgun, while Mystery Woman's brother or cousin or whatever was standing outside ignoring everything and talking to himself in a strange language-'
'Strange language?'
'They just heard a few words. Not English, not Spanish, and not anything they recognized. He talks in the strange language, falls, goatsucker with the gun gives him a hand, they drive off, and then the place just happens to burn down a few minutes later.'
Salvador sighed and turned up the collar of his coat; it was dark, and cold.
'I need a drink. But get an APB out on Ellen Tarnowski and flag her name with municipal services and the hospitals statewide. Also the old gringo with the sawed-off shotgun, use the face-recognition protocol for surveillance cameras. We can get him on a reckless-endangerment charge, trespassing, uttering threats, suspicion of arson, bad breath, whatever.'
' Si, and littering. The Mystery Woman and the Mystery Man too?'
'Yeah, why not? Let them all do a perp walk and we can apologize later.'
He sat down on the tailgate and began doggedly prodding at the screen. The first thing tomorrow he'd start tracing Tarnowski's life. So far nobody had died, and he'd like to keep it that way. The employer was a good first place.
In the meantime, he could try to get some sleep. He snorted quietly to himself. After dredging up this many memories, much chance there was of that.
Dream.
Eric Salvador always knew it was a dream; he just couldn't affect it or get out of it or do anything except watch and smell and taste and feel an overwhelming sick dread as it unfolded. There hadn't really been a burned- out MRAP at the end of the village street by the mosque. That had been somewhere else, that little shithole outside Kandahar he'd seen on his first tour, and it had been there only one day. It was a composite of all the bads, building up to the Big Bad itself.
A couple of other things are right for the day, he thought.
The way Olsen flicked the little Raven surveillance drone into the air, and the buzz of its engine as it climbed to circle above them, and the dopey little smiley-face button with fangs he'd glued to the nose of the corps' thirty- five-thousand-dollar toy airplane. He'd tried to put little fake Hell-fire missiles under the wings, too, and Gunny had torn him a new asshole about it. The way the translator was sweating and his eyes were flicking here and there, and you wondered if it was just the heat or generalized fear or if he knew something he wasn't saying.
Christ, I've had this fucking nightmare so many times I'm starting to sound like a movie critic.
Smith always went into the door of the compound the same way, the way he really had. Regulation, the two of them plastered on either side, Jackson taking out the lock on the gate with a door-knocker round, whump-boom, the warped old planks smacking inward as the slug blew the rusty lock into the courtyard, Smith following, his M-4 tucked into his shoulder and Jackson on his heels.
The explosion was always silent. Silent, slow-mo, the flames leaking around the fragments of wood and the two men flying and just enough time to realize, Oh, shit, this is a bad one, before a giant's hand picked him up and threw him backwards until there was the impact and the pain.
Only this time was different. This time something walked out of the fire to where he lay with the broken ends of his ribs grating under the body armor that had saved his life.
The shape twisted and its wrongness made him want to scream out the bloody foam in his lungs, but the eyes were flecked yellow. And the voice slithered into his ears:
'Who's been a naughty boy, then?'
He began to sink into the dry dusty earth, and it flowed into mouth and nose and eyes, the dust of ages and of empires.
'Naughty!'
'Christ!'
He lay panting in the darkness, smelling his own sweat and waiting to be sure he was awake-sometimes he dreamed he was, and then the whole thing started cycling through his head again. It was blurring away already, details fracturing like sunlight through a drop of water. His hand groped for the cigarettes on the bedside, and then remembered he'd stopped.
'Go back to sleep,' he told himself. 'Dreaming's no worse than remembering, anyway.'
Christ.
