River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy)
Read River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy) Online
Authors: Jeffrey J. Mariotte
Digital Edition
River Runs Red
© 2013, 2008 by Jeffrey J. Mariotte
Cover Artwork © 2013 by Frank Walls
All Rights Reserved.
Copy Editor: Scott Alexander Jones
A DarkFuse Release
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
For Maryelizabeth, with love.
For their contributions to my understanding of El Paso and west Texas, I would like to thank Cindy Chapman, Charles Bowden, Elmer Kelton, Clay Reynolds, the El Paso Times, the Desert Candle, the El Paso Museum of History, the Hueco Tanks State Historic Site, the Museum and Missile Park at White Sands Missile Range, and many more, particularly the good residents of El Paso. Courageous reporters whose personal accounts of Iraq proved extremely helpful include (but are by no means limited to) Jill Carroll and Richard Engel. To these people, and others including Howard Morhaim, Dave Thomas, Shane Ryan Staley, and Dianne Larson, I offer my greatest appreciation.
None of them would ever know
when
it all began. Human memory doesn’t reach that far back. Recorded history has its limits. Time is a veil not easily pierced.
Where
it began? That’s another story. It began on the river, always on the river. This, everyone could see. Rivers take the long view, and the signs they carve into the earth survive the ages.
Every ripple, every riffle, every eddy, each rush of wild whitewater over rocks or between towering limestone walls, every still-seeming pool hiding quick currents—all these aspects of the river exist in the now yet hold the memory of eons gone by. And at night the river whispers or roars or babbles its secret memories to those who know how to listen.
The river is at fault, yet blameless. The river doesn’t choose sides or hold grudges.
But the river remembers…
PART ONE: EL PASO
“The past is never dead; it’s not even past.”
—William Faulkner,
Requiem for a Nun
“The river’s tent is broken; the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank.”
—T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”
“And listen again to its sounds; get far enough away so that the noise of falling tons of water does not stun the ears, and hear how much is going on underneath—a whole symphony of smaller sounds, hiss and splash and gurgle, the small talk of side channels, the whisper of blown and scattered spray gathering itself and beginning to flow again, secret and irresistible, among the wet rocks.”
—Wallace Stegner, “Overture,” in
The Sound of Mountain Water
ONE
Lawrence Ingersoll intended to take the night off from death.
The fact that it didn’t turn out that way was no fault of his. He got caught up in events. Best laid plans, and all that. A man who took his gaming seriously, he might have said that he played the cards he was dealt. But when the red king calls, somebody has to answer.
All day long, bitterly cold rain had fallen from skies as gray as a stretch of old road; after the November evening enveloped the San Juans, it turned into a gentle, persistent snowfall. Ingersoll had no appointments, and no client would make the trip up the mountain, not until the snowplows went through, so he looked forward to a rare quiet night. In his lodge-style home outside Creede, he stirred the embers of a fire with an iron poker, jabbing it into a pinion log and releasing swirling nebulae of sparks, which wafted up the chimney and away. He liked the warmth against his nose and cheeks, enjoyed watching the orange clouds he agitated, and when his phone made an obnoxious chirping noise that could in no way be described as ringing, he swore, closed the wire mesh curtain, and set the poker down on the stone hearth.
The bearskin rug he crossed on his way to the phone had once been a mature black bear; Ingersoll had bought it from the neighbor who had killed it a couple of miles from the house. Life was that way in the mountains; more to the point, death was that way.
Ingersoll cared about the natural world. He chose to live in rural Colorado, far from big cities, because he wanted to feel connected to nature. But he was no stranger to death and he had no problem with those who hunted for sport. His occult studies had taught him that death was a transition, not an ending. Although he could no more know if wild creatures had an afterlife than he could know their hearts and minds while they lived, he had no reason to think they didn’t. He was, furthermore, pretty sure they didn’t spend their lives afraid of death, as so many people did.
But then, most people didn’t share his understanding of it. Death was as much a part of Ingersoll’s daily life (or nightly life, since he met most of his clients after dark) as numbers to an accountant or whips to a dominatrix. He made his living—and a very comfortable one it was—communicating with the dead on behalf of the living. When not working, he was usually in his study reading rare, often forbidden texts, trying to increase his understanding of the various worlds outside the one most people knew, which he had always referred to as the straight world.
Of course, like everyone, he had his fears. Ingersoll’s included high ledges and cliffs, roof edges and the like, public speaking, incapacitating injury, and the idea that restaurant chefs might spit disease-ridden saliva into his food.
Not death, though. Never that.
“…the seventeenth day of apparent captivity in Iraq for CNN reporter Wade Scheiner,” his plasma TV blared. “Last seen in a video released more than a week ago, bruised and gaunt but—”
Ingersoll snatched the remote off the arm of a sofa, punched mute, then grabbed up the phone.
“Ingersoll,” he said. A bad habit, he knew, left over from corporate days when he and the other guys in his technical writing office had pretended that first names didn’t exist.
“Lawrence.” A female voice, throaty and velvet, a Chinese accent evident in the single word.
“Millicent,” he answered. Millicent Wong of Hong Kong, whose identity, so like a child’s rhyme, disguised the fact that she was a mature, graceful, accomplished woman, far from childlike in every way but her physical appearance. “What a pleasure to hear from you.”
“You won’t think so in a moment, Lawrence.”
“Something’s wrong?” He had already noticed an unfamiliar tightness in her voice. She was worried. “What is it?”
“I’m not certain,” she said. “There’s a problem of some kind. It’s disrupting the ley lines. I’ve been trying to perform a reading and nothing’s working as it should. I am very concerned, Lawrence. Frightened, a little.”
“I’m no expert at that sort of thing, Millicent,” Ingersoll said. Ley lines directed mystical energies around the world, and to points beyond, worlds beyond. Like electricity or the Internet, he could use them, but that didn’t mean he could fix them when they were broken. “Why call me?”
“As well as I can determine from here, you’re the nearest of my acquaintances, physically, to the disruption’s focal point. I hoped that perhaps you could learn something from there.”
His mind buzzing with possibilities, Ingersoll quickly agreed. As he had warned her, this sort of thing was far from his realm of expertise. Compared to an old hand like her, he considered himself a novice, a mere dabbler in the petrifyingly deep waters of the occult. No way to learn like on-the-job training, though. Anything that scared Millicent had to be significant, and therefore something from which he might gain wisdom.
On the other hand, if Millicent, with her wealth of experience, was afraid, it had to be pretty damn scary. Treading carefully would be a good idea.
He exchanged a few more terse words with her—the usual
how’re you doing, what’s new, how about them Broncos
pleasantries didn’t seem appropriate—and ended the call, anxious to get started. A cup of tea he had brewed earlier was abandoned in the living room, along with the muted TV.
Ingersoll’s study was the sort of “masculine” room that model home designers built and magazine editors loved. From high on knotty pine walls, the lifeless, unblinking eyes of mounted elk and bobcat heads gazed down at his rough-hewn wooden desk. Indian rugs covered part of the polished plank floor. Other artifacts, mostly mystical objects he had collected around the world, crowded onto bookshelves and a wide burl coffee table in front of a pair of low-slung brown leather chairs. The bookshelves would have looked wrong in a magazine layout, because they were stuffed with books—mostly old, thick, bound in leather, and well-used.
He used the study to sit and read in when he needed a large desk surface, and he interviewed prospective clients there, but it was primarily a showplace. For his real work, he left the study through a doorway almost hidden between two of the massive bookcases. As a private joke, he called the next room his “inner sanctum,” aware of both the name’s pretentiousness and the old radio show of the same name.
The room itself did not lend itself to jokes. The study was meant to impress, while the inner sanctum was purely functional. Its hardwood floor was painted a dull battleship gray. To muffle the sound, dark purple curtains draped every wall. The room was wired for electricity, but Ingersoll preferred to light the candles scattered on top of antique wooden tables and chests. He lit one now, placing it on a small table in the exact center of the room, then pulled up a shabby but comfortable chair and sat down.
Gazing into the nascent flame, he worked on blanking everything else from his mind: the cup of tea that had seemed so important a short time before, the television news, the snow outside, the checks for his mortgage and the payment on the Escalade that had to be mailed before the end of the week, even the greasy scent of the thick black candle. Mentally taking each item and closing it into a black box, he folded down the flaps and stacked those boxes neatly on a shelf. His greatest gift was the ability to slip quickly and easily into a trance state, in which he could commune with any of several spirit guides with whom he had developed a relationship.
Ingersoll stroked his mustache a couple of times, the few white whiskers thrusting through the darker ones notable for a little extra wiriness. He had been forty pounds heavier when he worked in the tech industry (and living in a second-floor apartment in Cupertino, California, overlooking a sea of carports, instead of a six-bedroom lodge with its own sauna and a stunning view of Uncompaghre Peak). He had cultivated a new image to meet the expectations his clients brought with them: a drooping, Fu Manchu mustache, a thick head of curly hair that required a curling iron to get just right, a sturdy yet not intimidating physique. He wore dark pants and a fitted dark shirt or V-neck sweater with a couple of esoteric-looking yet purely decorative medallions on thin gold chains around his neck. He had patterned the look, basically, on Dr. Strange from the Marvel comic books—although he didn’t think he could pull off the voluminous red cloak—and once he had adopted it, the difference in attitude on the part of potential clients had persuaded him that he had nailed it.
More meaningful than any physical change, though, was the change in how he felt about what he did. He helped people now. In his previous career, he had written technical documents read by precisely no one. Engineers thought they already understood everything, and lay people didn’t believe they ever could. Now, people left his home with a deeper comprehension of their own lives and an acceptance of things they couldn’t alter. He had never felt so rewarded as a tech writer, not in any emotional sense.