Interpreter for the Dead Page 4

  Dane was too tired to care that once again, neither of the people there was his lawyer.

  It was almost funny.

  The first guy Dane had never seen before. He was as worn out as his suit, with a Friar Tuck hairdo that must have been very popular with the ladies. The hard case never looked up; instead he concentrated on extracting papers from his equally worn briefcase.

  The other guy was real familiar, young and cocky. A couple weeks ago he had been decked out in FBI blue, manically grinning as he shoved the barrel of a shotgun against Dane's temple. Now he was dressed in civvies, trying hard to look nonchalant as he leaned against the wall and grinned at Dane over the top of a can of diet Coke.

  "Watching your girlish figure?" Dane asked. The FBI agent was about to reply when the old guy interrupted him.

  "Who've we got here?"

  What a line of shit, he knew exactly who they had.

  Fed boy peeled himself off the wall. "Dane, Michael Aaron. How they treating you? Would've stopped by earlier, but Jack and I have been busier than a one-legged man at an ass kicking contest lately. Why don't you pull up a chair and take a load off?"

  Dane didn't move.

  The burnout case pulled out a pair of bifocals and read through a folder while he talked. "I see you've met Captain Hollis. I'm Jack Pritchard with the federal prosecutor's office. Looks like we had some trouble getting a positive ID on you."

  Hollis crumpled his pop can and shoved it into his pocket. "We couldn't pull a print until we got the layers of superglue off his fingers."

  His partner raised an eyebrow.

  "Beats wearing sweaty latex gloves when you're busy going through other people's shit, isn't that right?"

  "The good cop, bad cop thing never gets old," Dane responded. Pritchard just ignored him.

  "Extensive juvenile record in Boulder. Charged at eighteen for Grand Theft Auto, reduced to misdemeanor. Same charge again the next two years, also reduced. Both times found with multiple false identification. Then nothing, until a year ago when you were charged in Las Vegas where you plead guilty to a drunk and disorderly charge, reduced down from felony assault and theft."

  Pritchard leaned back in his chair and took off his glasses. "You lead a charmed life, Mr. Dane."

  "You guys lonely for conversation? You can talk to my lawyer. I'm going back to my cell."

  Hollis yanked out a newspaper clipping he had in his jacket pocket.

  "Looks like they don't get the paper here, Jack."

  "Apparently not," Pritchard said soberly.

  "Got time for a story? I think you'll like this one. It's from the Rocky Mountain News. I clipped it out two weeks ago."

  Dane tried to act casual.

  "You guys have a great act. You should really think about taking it on the road. Really. It's no Laurel and Hardy, but it's got potential."

  Hollis read out loud from the article.

  "Let me skip to the good part, here it is...Hollis and his team swept and secured the entire building, seizing every computer and all records from attorney Rodney Kirsch's office. Meanwhile, at his home in the upscale community of Cherry Knolls, agents were swooping in on Kirsch himself-"

  "Swooping?" Pritchard interjected.

  "Special FBI move. It's big at Quantico," Hollis chuckled.

  "The article goes on and on, talks about how we used the files to go after a bunch of other scumbags, but I think you get the gist."

  Dane put his hand on the wall to steady himself.

  Pritchard leaned back in his chair, pointed at Dane with the stem of his glasses.

  "I'm not going to bullshit you son. You're going to prison, have no doubt about that. Not only is your lawyer gone, so is all the money you might have used to get another one. We tracked down all the accounts you opened up."

  Hollis got up, pulled out the chair.

  "You don't look so hot. Sure you don't want to sit?"

  Dane shook his head, reeling. Hollis shrugged, then knocked for the guard.

  "You're fortunate in one regard," droned Pritchard. "At least you didn't spend most of the money. That's one less thing to have to worry about when you get out. Here's something to take back to your cell."

  He thrust a manila folder into Dane's chest.

  "That's a plea agreement. Read it, give me a call."

  The guard took the folder, and cuffed Dane's hands behind his back.

  "Don't wait too long. I get cranky when people don't appreciate my generosity."

  ***

  The lights went out and Dane began his watch.

  Three had gotten through the night before, the flutter of their legs on his skin causing him to flinch, twice waking him from a dead sleep. He found the third one underneath his pillow after he woke up and made his bunk.

  Fucking cockroaches.

  It had cost him three deserts and a bag of rolling tobacco for one roll of tape. The guy in the second cell showed him how to make the loops, sticky side out, and line the perimeter of his cell just above the floor. It stopped most of them.

  But not all.

  He leaned over his bunk and peered into the shadows until his eyes ached. Listening for the stic, stic, stic of their antennae scraping the cinderblock. He was careful about dropping crumbs or spilling Kool-Aid. Before lights out he'd spent an hour on his hands and knees, wiping the floor with a rag dipped in the water of a passing trustee's mop bucket.

  He lay on his cot, one hand wrapped around his prison issued flip-flop.

  I'm ready, you little fuckers.

  The other flip-flop lay on his chest, rising and falling with each breath. Dane waited for exhaustion to overtake him.

  Something moved along his cheek. He leapt out of bed and slapped at his face, praying it hadn't fallen inside his shirt.

  Nothing, there was nothing.

  He shuffled over to look in the mirror, feeling the scattered growth of hair on his jaw. A hair, it had been a hair. His eyes were nearly luminous in the dark.

  They had dragged him to court yesterday, told him council would be appointed if he didn't have a lawyer by the end of the week. A public defender wasn't going to be able to get him out on bail. And even if they set bail, who was going to pay it?

  Not your old man, that's for sure.

  Something moved along the edge of his cell. They would not win. Even if he had to stay awake all night...

  ***

  He was numb, not remembering when he had woken up, not remembering standing in line and getting his tray. Dane stared down at his food, shoveling so-called eggs into his mouth, not tasting anything.

  At least he had beaten the roaches.

  Dane reached for the Styrofoam cup. He knew the coffee would taste like dishwater, but the warmth felt good in his hands. He closed his eyes and drank.

  Oddly there was the sensation of needles on his tongue, moving, growing, and expanding. Not needles...legs. They moved around and over and beneath his tongue, forced it aside as they moved down into his lungs.

  He fell away from the table, cockroaches spilling from his mouth as he tried to scream. He couldn't breathe. And still they kept moving and growing, filling his stomach.

  Sitting bolt upright from the nightmare, Dane was drenched in sweat, his eyes wide.

  A cockroach dangled from his hair.

  He shouted for a guard. "I need to use the phone."

  Ten minutes later he was on the payphone, dialing a Boulder number.

  "Operator, how may I help you?"

  "Collect call from Michael Dane to John Caywood."

  Chapter 6

  The drive to Boulder had been insane, three wildfires rerouting traffic off I-70 and onto Highway 40. It was a hundred and fifty mile detour that left Michael Dane staring at the ass-end of a FedEx truck all the way through Rocky Mountain National Park and a blinking check engine light going over the Divide.

  He coasted down to the next truck stop with the engine off, the Chevy Lumina bleeding green out in the parking lot while he choked down
the Blue Plate Special.

  The rental was in John Caywood's name, so all Dane could do was refill the radiator, dump in a bottle of StopLeak and hope for the best.

  It was part of the deal he struck with the realtor. Caywood bailed him out, provided him with a car, and gave him some cash. Most importantly, he'd hooked him up with an attorney who would handle both the criminal and probate cases, for a percentage of Caywood's development deal.

  All Dane could surmise was Caywood must be looking at making a serious killing on the property, because he'd bent over backwards to meet Dane's demands. He felt like he'd made a deal with the devil, but for his freedom it was a small price to pay.

  According to the realtor, some development group was hot to build a golf course on the land. Dane had no idea how that was going to be all that profitable, but real estate was not his area of expertise. From what he knew, you couldn't build much on the land anyway. It had underground mines scattered all over it.

  The attorney, Ansel Harding, was quick and professional. He immediately filed with the probate office. From what he'd gleaned from Harding, the house was being cared for by Oren McConnell, who filed to be executor of the estate after his father died. All the utilities and phone service were still hooked up, his father had paid so far ahead on them.

  Not surprisingly, the Federal prosecutor's office had not been pleased that he'd turned down the plea deal and opted to go to trial.

  Dane made Boulder just before nightfall, shadows extending out from the mountains as the sun sank behind them, blood red and hazy through the smoke that covered the entire Front Range. The highway gave way to streetlights and stop signs, taking him right past the Juvenile Detention Center he'd frequented as a kid.

  Wanting nothing more than to wash away the stink of pine smoke and sweat and to crawl into bed, he kept an eye out for a cheap motel.

  Once familiar landmarks were now replaced by fast-food joints and corporate coffee shops - cancers cells that had drifted in and settled along major veins and arteries, feeding off the decaying remains of the Mom-and-Pop shops that had once thrived.

  He passed three no vacancy signs before pulling into a gas station to continue the search by phone. After finding half the phonebook at the payphone torn out, he went inside.

  "You're not gonna find anything," the clerk lisped, talking over a tongue stud and lip ring. "Nebraska game."

  He called anyway, giving up after a while and handing the book back. He went outside and called the house, guessing the phone number was probably still the same.

  The electronic buzz of the TTY answering machine confirmed nobody was answering, deaf or otherwise. He headed west on 119, driving over a stretch of highway he hadn't been on since he was seventeen and going the other way - not caring where he wound up, just knowing it had to be better than here.

  A few miles down the road he saw the sign for Cottonwood and turned off. Ancient silver-barked trees leaned over the road like tired sentinels, clearing momentarily after short distance and giving him a glimpse of a small, red sandstone church.

  He drove on, the crunch of gravel beneath the tires beginning to lull him to sleep when the check engine light came on again, followed by an angry hiss of steam.

  Trying not to get scalded, he opened the hood. Hot green water gurgled onto the ground. Not fatal, but he wouldn't be going anywhere until he got some more water. The church was barely visible now through the gathering dark, but it was a lot closer than the house. Dane started walking, wondering why the hell he hadn't at least kept the empty antifreeze bottle, let alone filled the damned thing.

  No, that would have required too much forethought.

  A breeze rippled across the prairie grass and rattled the leaves on the trees, raising bumps on his arms and the hair on his neck.

  Circling around the church, he couldn't remember whether or not there was a water spigot. There wasn't. He tried the front door. It was locked. Same with the back, and none of the windows would budge. He eyed the ground hoping to find something he could use to pick the lock on the back door.

  What was the first thing you did when you got out of jail? Broke into a church.

  A rusty wire wrapped around the graveyard gate caught his eye.

  Near the back, nestled by a grove of aspen trees, was his mother's grave. Undoubtedly his father's grave was next to it. He'd only visited once after she died, the pain too much to bear.

  Turning away from the graveyard, he went instead to the church, listening to the gate creak in the wind as he worked the lock on the back door. Finally the mechanism gave and he went inside, groping along the wall until he found the switch.

  The air was warm and dry, laden with the smell of dust and age. The inside still looked the same. Tattered hymnals were tucked into the pew backs, within easy reach of the deaf and hearing alike. His parents had stood with everybody else, his father never singing, but his mother sometimes trying. Her voice was flat and hoarse.

  "You should not sing," he would sign to her, his face warm. "Your voice is not good."

  "God likes my voice just fine," she would sign back, turning away but lowering her volume a little.

  He sat down at the same pew they had sat at every Sunday, until they finally left him to fend for his own soul when he turned thirteen. He could still make out his initials carved into edge of the hard wooden bench, its unyielding surface usually the only thing that kept him from falling asleep during services.

  As a hearing child, he'd had to interpret for his parents in a million awkward situations. Situations that were often beyond his comprehension.

  Sitting there brought it all back...

  He was eight years old, watching dust drift in the sunlight slanting in through the windows. He swung his legs back and forth beneath the pew until his mother put her hand on his knee, shook her head and pointed to the pulpit. He sat up and looked at Pastor Anderson, trying hard to listen. The low, dull voice made his eyelids heavy like always.

  He picked up the hymnal from the pocket in the next pew, feeling its weight. Fanning through the gilt-edged pages, he held the book up to his nose and inhaled the smell of vinyl and dust. His mother took it from him and put it back.

  Everybody was wearing dark clothes and the area all around Pastor Anderson was covered with flowers. The lady who made the signs for the deaf families wasn't there today. People checked their watches, wondering where she was.

  His mother and father began signing to their friends. The girl wasn't coming. They wouldn't know what Pastor Anderson was saying.

  His father looked down and signed to him, telling him they needed him to help them understand the pastor's words. He didn't want to. His father's face grew red and he signed harder, telling him it was very important and not to embarrass him. His father pulled him up out of his seat and pushed him into the aisle, Michael feeling his face burn red as everybody turned at the sound of his father's broken voice and pointed at him.

  Pastor Anderson's face looked funny as he walked to the front of the church and stood where the lady was supposed to be. The pastor cleared his throat and nodded at Michael, smiling but not smiling. Everyone was staring.

  "Sign," his father told him, circling his hands, his face getting mad.

  He listened to what Pastor Anderson was saying and lifted his hands, changing the words as best he could into their language, spelling out many he did not know the signs for.

  There was a box up by the flowers he realized, black and bigger than his toy box. It was turned away with the lid open and he couldn't see inside.

  His fingers began to ache as he struggled to keep up with the Pastor, spelling more and more of the words. Some of the words he did know. He recognized Rayna Jurgin's name, she was in his grade at school. He heard Pastor Anderson say she was resting. Michael didn't see her sitting by her mom and dad. They seemed pretty upset that she wasn't there.

  Pastor Anderson finished and nodded to him. He dropped his hands and walked back to his parents. He glanced over and
saw Rayna Jurgin sleeping inside the big box, wondering why she was the only one who got to lay to rest in church.

  Dane shook off the memory.

  Eager to get away from the ghosts, he found a mop bucket and filled it from the sink. He carried the water outside, and stopped to rewire the gate before going back down the road.

  It was pitch black now, the crunch of the gravel under his feet magnified as he made his way back to the car. He filled the radiator and got going again, lost in thought until he came to another clearing and turned.

  The splintered remains of an old trestle bridge greeted him, broken timbers jutting out of the ground like shattered teeth. The rails had been removed long ago, scavenged and melted down, turned into tanks and guns and shipped halfway around the world.

  At the mailbox he turned one last time, a floodlight out near the stables showing him the way.

  No cars or interior lights. Good.

  The arched stone windows of the house were dark and empty beneath the overhanging roof. Built by his great grandfather, the house was an old railroad depot. Along with a water tower and a few outbuildings, it was all that remained of a proposed electric railroad system that was to join Boulder and Lyons, with Cottonwood being the way station in between.

  "A New Town and a New Opportunity" according to the old flyers. It had been neither for anybody. Not realizing the old mines beneath the land would not withstand the pressure of trains running over them, old Eli Dane went bankrupt soon after the ground beneath the tracks began to subside. The deathblow to the venture came when a section of the mine finally gave way, sending a new engine to an early grave. He committed suicide, leaving two thousand acres of barren land as a legacy. The engine still protruded out of the ground, what was left of it anyway.

  A wooden sign hung from the eaves, old-fashioned directional hands pointing away from Cottonwood, the place anybody with a lick of sense had gone long ago.

  Dane parked behind the house, beneath the steel portico of the waiting platform. The rusted iron rails disappeared into the ground to either side.