Dustin Thomason - 12.21

THE STREET VENDORS WHO’D WON A LOTTERY SPOT ON THE SEAWARD side of the boardwalk were gone, their African reeds and bird-houses and octopus bongs packed in crates until morning. It was just after midnight, and the police were sweeping the beaches for partyers and the homeless. Stanton opened his front door to find Chel standing on his stoop.

He motioned her toward two weathered wicker chairs on the porch of his condo. Barefoot men and women poured toward them like newly hatched amphibians crawling onto the land, searching for a place to curl up until the beach reopened at five.

As Stanton and Chel sat, a hulking Asian man wearing a heavy overcoat and camouflage pants stepped onto the boardwalk, carrying a sign: party like it’s 2012. He plopped down in the middle of Ocean Front Walk, directly across from them. “It will be completed the thirteenth b’ak’tun ,” he chanted.

Stanton shook his head and turned to Chel, who stared at the man with a look he couldn’t categorize.

“What can I do for you?” Stanton asked her.

He listened in disbelief as she told him her story, beginning with the codex, through the real reason for her trip to the hospital. Once she finished, he had trouble resisting the urge to shake her. “Why the hell did you lie to us?”

“Because the manuscript was looted, so it’s illegal for me to have it,” she said. “But there’s something else you should know too.”

“What?”

“I think the man who caused the accident on the 101 is the man who gave me the codex in the first place. His name’s Hector Gutierrez. He’s an antiquities dealer.”

“How do you know it was him?”

“I watched him drive away from my church in that same car.”

“Jesus. Was Gutierrez sick when you saw him?”

“He just seemed anxious to me. I’m not sure.”

Stanton processed this. “Did Gutierrez ever travel to Guatemala?”

“I don’t know. He may well have.”

“Wait a second. Were you lying about Volcy being sick before he came here?”

“No, that was what he told me. The only thing I didn’t tell you was that he started having trouble sleeping near the temple he looted the book from. He wasn’t out there meditating. But he really hadn’t been eating meat for a year.”

Stanton was furious. “The Guatemalans have teams on the ground searching every dairy farm in the Petén because of the information you gave us. And they already think we’re wasting their time and money. Now we have to tell them our translator lied, and they should be searching for ruins in the jungle?”

A skateboarder rolled down the boardwalk and called out, “Chill, bro.”

“I’ll tell immigration everything,” Chel whispered after the kid had passed.

“You think I give a shit about immigration? This is about public safety. If you hadn’t lied, we could have asked him more questions, and we could already be searching the jungle for the real source.”

Chel ran a shaky hand through her hair. “I know that now.”

“What else did he tell you?”

“He said the temple where he got the book was three days’ walk from his village in the Petén,” she said. “Less than a hundred miles, probably.”

“Where’s his village?”

Hair strands blew across Chel’s face in the ocean wind. “He wouldn’t say.”

“So somewhere in the vicinity of those ruins,” Stanton said, “could be VFI’s original source. Some sick cow putting off milk that’s being shipped all over the world. Hell, for all we know, the runoff could be going into the water supply down there. Did he tell you anything that could point us toward it? Anything at all?”

Chel shook her head. “The only other things he told me were that his spirit animal was a hawk and that he had a wife and daughter.”

“What’s a spirit animal?”

“It’s an animal every Maya gets paired with at birth. He said his was Chuyum-thul. The hawk.”

Stanton was pulled back to the ER, where he’d watched the other victim die. “Gutierrez said, The birdman did this to me ,” he told Chel. “He was blaming Volcy for getting him sick.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Maybe Volcy brought some kind of food across the border with him, not realizing it was what got him sick in the first place.”

“And what could that be?”

“You tell me,” Stanton said. “What would a Maya man give to someone he does business with? Something Gutierrez could’ve eaten or drunk with dairy in it?”

“There are a lot of possibilities,” Chel said.

Suddenly Stanton turned for his door. “Meet me at my car,” he told her, his voice full of purpose. “Around back.”

“Why?”

“Because before you turn yourself in to the police, we’re going to find out.”

WHAT DID IT SAY ABOUT HER, CHEL WONDERED, THAT EVEN now she was fixated on the codex and the fact that she’d probably never be allowed to see it again? That she might never get a chance to find out who the writer was and why he risked his life to go against his king? What did it say about her that even now, as she and the doctor drove toward Gutierrez’s house, she was still focused on all the wrong things? To Stanton, sitting silently in the driver’s seat, Chel knew she was beneath contempt. He’d spent his life trying to stop disease from spreading, and her little academic exercise had put the whole city at risk.

Strangely, it was Patrick’s voice she now heard in her head. They were in Charlottesville, Virginia, for a meeting about the Mayan Epigraphic Database Project, and they were planning to hike the Appalachian Trail after it was over. When Chel told him she’d agreed to head another committee and couldn’t go, Patrick gave it to her. “Someday you’ll realize you’ve sacrificed too much for your work, and you can’t get it back,” he’d said. Chel thought he was speaking out of spite, and that it would blow over like all the other times. He’d moved out a month later.

She shifted in her seat and felt something catch on the heel of her shoe: a dog’s leash. From the size of the collar, it looked like the dog wasn’t a small one.

“Throw it in the back,” Stanton said, no warmth discernible in his voice. It was the first he’d spoken on their journey south. Chel watched him as he drove, both hands on the wheel like a driving-school student. Probably he was the type who never broke any rule. Stanton seemed to her to be a stern man, and Chel wondered if he was as lonely as he appeared. At least he had a dog. Chel stared out the windshield at the billboard-dotted Pacific Coast Highway. Maybe she’d get a pet once they fired her from the Getty and she had more time on her hands.

“Give it to me,” Stanton said.

Chel glanced over. “What?” Then she realized she was still clutching the dog’s leash, ridiculously. Stanton reached for it and tossed it into the backseat as he accelerated.

Chel had remembered that Hector Gutierrez lived in Inglewood, north of the airport. As they pulled up in front of the two-story Californian, she didn’t know what to expect. It was still possible the man’s family had no idea what had happened; no one had come forward yet to ID him.

“Let’s go,” Stanton said, turning off the car engine.

At the front door, he knocked, and a minute later a light went on inside. A raven-haired Latina woman came to the door in a long navy robe. Her puffy eyes suggested she’d been crying. It was clear to Chel that she already knew. And Chel also realized why she hadn’t gotten in touch with the authorities: Not only had the woman lost her husband, she was in danger of losing everything else. ICE and the FBI were unrelenting in their seizures of black-market profits.