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By Root 1047 0

honor student in high school. His father died when he was three, and his mother worked at a hardware store and raised him and his half sister by herself. He was never an athlete or a class officer or a joiner of any kind. He won a scholarship to MIT and went to work for the government when he graduated. As far as anybody knew, he was always religious. When it came to girls and social activities, he was as plain as white bread and just about as forgettable. The exception came when he was seventeen. A three-year-old boy wandered away from the neighborhood, and the whole town organized search parties and went looking for him. Barnum found him in a well. He crawled in after him and got bitten in the face by a copperhead but carried the kid on his back four miles to a highway. By all odds, he should have died.”

“What happened to the mother and the half sister?”

“The mother passed away while Barnum was at MIT. The half sister moved to New York and went to work for a catering service. Some stories came back about her, but no one is sure of the truth. She wasn’t looked upon favorably in her hometown. She had been arrested in high school for possession of marijuana and was believed to sleep around. This is where it becomes cloudy.”

“What does?”

“She used her father’s last name when she moved to New York. Hang on,” Pam said. She got up from the chair and went to the door. “Maydeen’s off the phone.”

When Maydeen walked into Hackberry’s office, her expression was blank, as though she were looking at an image behind her eyes that she did not want to assimilate.

“What is it?” Hackberry said.

“The Alabama state attorney did some hands-on work for us,” she replied. “He found a guy in a state rehab center who was the half sister’s boyfriend. She died in the Twin Towers. She was called in to work on her day off because somebody else was sick. She was in the restaurant on the top floor. She was one of the people who held hands with a friend and jumped.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

AT THE BOTTOM of Danny Boy Lorca’s land was a ravine that few people knew about or chose to travel. It led from Mexico into the United States, but the entrance was overgrown with thornbushes that could scrape the skin off a man or the paint from an automobile. The sides of the ravine went straight up into the sky and had been marked in four places by the lances of mounted Spaniards who littered the bottom of the ravine with the bones of Indians whose most sophisticated weapons had been the sharpened sticks they used to plant corn. The few illegals who used the ravine and even the coyotes who guided them swore they had seen Indians standing on ledges in the darkness, their faces as dry and bloodless and withered as deer hide stretched on lodge poles. The specters on the ledges did not speak or show any recognition of the nocturnal wayfarers passing between the walls. Their eyes were empty circles that contained only darkness, their clothes sewn from the burlap given them by their conquerors. No one who saw the specters ever wanted to return to the area, except Danny Boy Lorca.

He woke to the grinding noise of a car in low gear laboring up a grade and a brittle screeching that was like someone scratching a stylus slowly down a blackboard. When he went to his back door, he saw a gas-guzzler bounce loose from the ravine, its lights burning in the fog, strings of smoke rising from the rust in its hood. He saw the silhouettes of perhaps four men inside the vehicle.

He pulled on his boots and lifted his twenty-gauge from the antler rack on the wall and limped out onto the back porch. The fog smelled of dust and herbicide and a pond strung with green feces and someone burning raw garbage. The gas-guzzler was traversing his property, its engine rods knocking, its low beams swimming with dust particles and candle moths.

He walked toward it, a pain flaring in his thigh each time his foot came down on the ground, the shotgun cradled across the crook of his left arm. His twenty-gauge was called a dogleg, a one-barrel one-shot breechloader he had used to hunt quail and doves