Watching for someone who doesn’t know you’re there is a strangely powerful thing. Such intimate detachment. My truck has barely legal blackout windows, which make me even less apparent. Lindsey told me she felt like God Herself when she was flying a drone mission and the Reaper cameras and sensors would relay all the live, nearly real-time activity taking place on the earth below. Seven thousand miles away. God Herself, watching her kill-list target crawl across the desert on his elbows, trying to collect the legs that the Headhunters had just blown off him with a laser-guided Hellfire missile. Which meant the man was functionally dead. Which meant Lindsey had accomplished her mission. Which filled her with satisfaction. And horror. And eventually drove her mad.
My fast-food tacos weren’t bad. Still warm in the bag and plenty of hot sauce. Extra napkins. Had an energy drink, checked messages on the phone, listened to the radio news. I spend a lot of time watching people. I enjoy it. It’s like a movie you haven’t seen. Some are better than others, of course. You learn to let the hours just be hours.
With my mind free to wander, I wondered what kind of brown pills Hector was toting around in his backpack. I thought of the Captagon tablets we found on many of the insurgents in Fallujah. Powerful amphetamines, good for temporary strength and stamina. Fighting pills. All sorts of stories about how crazy and brave they made you. Manufactured in rustic labs. If you can make them in Iraq, you can make them here.
But what if Hector was just a well-meaning, innocent man who was searching for something to believe in? What if the whetstone was because of his interest in creating his own sashimi? What if the brown tablets were multivitamins or weight-loss potions? It’s easy to be cynical. In my line of work it’s a virtue.
Just after nine o’clock the garage door rose and an older black Nissan Cube backed out. It was clean and freshly waxed and shone handsomely in the weak garage lights. Through the binoculars I could see the top of the driver’s head, the rest blotted out by the headrest of the seat. A man, almost certainly, dark hair, medium length and wavy. Padilla-like. By the time the Cube was almost out of the driveway I had gone into the PI slouch—sliding down the seat far enough to see my prey between the dashboard and the top of the steering wheel. Legs splayed, arms out, head back. It’s uncomfortable for a big man, and somehow demeaning, too, and probably comical if it isn’t you doing it. Just before the Cube passed I slumped to full invisible and watched the headlights play across the headliner of my truck.
Just enough traffic for an easy tail. Interstate 8 to 163, off at Genesee, a medical borough. Hector O. drove just under the speed limits and signaled every turn. The Cube is an amusing vehicle. They look so toylike and somehow all wrong, but they will accommodate seven adults, or so I’ve read. I wondered if Hector had ever carried six passengers at once. He seemed so solitary. Maybe the room for six was wishful thinking. But maybe he filled his shiny black Cube up with six people every weekend night and went square-dancing. I liked that idea. I like to dance. Makes me feel graceful. I took it up when I quit boxing. I’ve won a couple of trophies at amateur ballroom dancing contests. My specialty is the waltz, though I truly love a good samba.
First Samaritan Hospital was a seventies-era smoked glass rectangle with a big plastic stork perched on top, dangling a blanketed newborn in its beak. I fell back and passed the main entrance just in time to see the shiny black Cube veer toward employee parking.
* * *
—
I was halfway home when Taucher called. “Questioned documents wouldn’t go to court on this, other than to say those two signatures probably didn’t have the same author, but they might have.”
“Not very FBI-like,” I said.
“I told you, handwriting isn’t like fingerprints or DNA,” Taucher said. “Speaking of which, I messengered the letter, note, and both envelopes back to Washington. I’m hoping for results too good to share with you.”
“I feel treasured.”
“What have you found on Padilla?”
“Nothing at all,” I lied. I wasn’t in the mood to share, either.
“So you’re on Interstate Fifteen, just south of Sabre Springs, it looks. Heading north for Fallbrook, I’d bet.”
“Pinging my call,” I said. “That’s what I miss about law enforcement.”
“So apply to the Bureau,” she said. “We respect honest deputies who don’t shoot mentally disturbed, bizarrely behaving subjects five times.”
“You also work until past midnight on Monday nights.”
“I don’t have anything better to do,” said Joan.
“I know that feeling.”
“Hmmm. Later.”
* * *
—
The long driveway from the road to my home is protected by a hefty steel gate. It’s controlled remotely from the house or by a keypad set at car-window level. I could see my house atop the rise, half hidden in towering oaks that seem to guard it. At night the houselights glitter through the trees, and if there is a breeze they blink like fireflies. Waiting for the gate to open, I watched the few lights twinkle and I remembered the way I used to feel, knowing that Justine was up there in that house somewhere. It’s still hard for me to bend to the fact that someone of such importance can be instantly and forever gone.
As I headed up the drive I could see the row of casitas that face the pond, and the palapa over the picnic table and the big built-in barbecue. The barbecue is stout and U-shaped, decked with cobalt-blue tile, and there are barstools all around—our natural watering hole in good weather. But most of the outdoor lights were off. With winter close upon us, the Irregulars were hitting the sack early. In Lindsey’s casita a light was on and I could see Burt Short standing outside her door, hands on his hips, watching my truck.
Something wrong.
He intercepted me outside Lindsey’s casita, the door of which stood open behind him. Burt Short actually is short. And heavily muscled, with a calm eye and an indefinite past. Shaped like a bull, big in the head and shoulders, small-footed. He looked up at me. “She’s upset.”
I looked past him and saw Lindsey packing a suitcase that lay open on the bed. She looked at me, face pale and eyes dark, then back to her task.
I closed the door behind me. Watched her set some folded blouses in the bag. Then a plastic toiletries case. She wrapped the cord around the nozzle of a hair dryer, her hands trembling.
“Talk to me, Lindsey.”
“Kenny Bryce,” she said. “Our intelligence coordinator? Not only a Headhunter, but a good, sweet guy. He called an hour ago. He got a letter in the mail the same day I did. Fancy calligraphy, an English-Arabic mix like mine. He read it to me and it sounded pretty gruesome, Roland. Signed, Caliphornia. Kenny tried to be stand-up about it. Like it was some sick joke. He wasn’t sure what to do. So he called Voss, our old pilot, up in Grass Valley. Guess what? He got a cut-your-head-off announcement, too. Same day. Caliphornia himself. We’re all three meeting tomorrow at eleven hundred hours. Late breakfast and a strategy meeting. In Bakersfield, where Kenny lives—halfway between here and Voss. We’re thinking that whatever we do, it should be as a team.”
I understood that a servicewoman’s duty to her crew doesn’t end after deployment. And that loyalty to friends will shape a life.
“So,” she said. “Up at zero dark thirty for this gal. And a long drive ahead.”
“We’ll take the Cessna.”
She dropped the dryer into the bag. Wiped a tear off her cheek with the cuff of her shirt. “Thank you. Really, truly, thank you. I’m scared, Roland.”
“We’ll beat this.”
After packing, I had a night of troubled sleep in which I dreamed of Justine’s face—faintly lit, but most certainly Justine’s—floating in a slow orbit around me. Then the face was Lindsey’s. Over and over. When I reached toward the face it would glide away, like an airborne balloon shying away in a puff of breeze,
slowly, but just out of reach.
We were in the air at sunrise. Hall Pass 2 churned powerfully through the sky, so confident and capable and alive. I felt that way also. And somehow less bound by the laws of gravity and of men.
* * *
—
Two hours and four minutes later Lindsey and I descended toward the flat expanse of Bakersfield. Land of heat and oil pumps and Central Valley cotton. Land of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard and the Bakersfield sound, a style of music sometimes described as more country than country, much beloved by my combative grandparents—Dick and Liz Ford—tenants of casitas one and six, respectively, on Rancho de los Robles.
“Looks like Syria,” said Lindsey, looking down with a thousand-yard stare. “I’ve never been in Syria. But I’ve spent hours and hours hovering over it with my cameras. Watching insurgents and farmers and women and children. Dogs and camels and cattle. People’s homes. Daesh staged from schools and hospitals. So, hours hovering, and when we had the intel and clearance we’d laser-mark the targets for the fast movers. It’s called sparkling. Their infrareds would lock on and boom! Game over.
“But the biggest prize of all was to take out a target ourselves. Headhunters, baby, doing our deadly best. That usually meant a target in tight quarters. In a vehicle, maybe. Or a home. Something the F-16s were too fast for. We’d use Hellfire missiles or, even better, these two-footers we called the Small Smart Weapon. Those are something. We could take out a guy sleeping in bed but his wife in the kitchen would be fine. I took lives, Roland. I’m not ashamed and I’m not proud. Saved lives, too—American and others. But I’ve never actually set foot on Syrian soil. I’d like to, someday. To just stand in the middle of that desert with my own two boots planted in the sand. It would make me feel vested. To have the part of me that wasn’t there there. I sometimes think I owe it to them. The men I killed. I’ve always thought it’s a little rude to kill a man from halfway around the world. Isn’t that like saying, You, sir, are bad enough for me to kill, but I don’t want to set foot in your miserable country?”
“Rude,” I said. “I’ve never heard it put that way.”
“Mom drilled us kids on manners,” Lindsey said, eyes still locked on the flat tan country below us. “She was very strict. Very British. Mix that with conservative Muslim ideas of behavior and you get major manners. I’ve never asked her, but Mom would say it’s rude to kill a man from seven thousand miles away, then head home to your baby and hold him in the rocker in the morning sun and get that nice warm bottle up to his funny little face and think about the nice future he’s going to have, all safe and secure because Mommy pickled some guy in Aleppo an hour earlier. The Headhunters tried to be funny about things, to make them less horrible. Like, we invented three sought-after results when we fired on an enemy. If we got close enough to our target, we demolished him. If we hit him directly, we pulverized him. But if we hit him directly in the torso, we demulverized him. Demulverization—highest honors. And that’s what I’d think about when I’d be rocking Little John. That’s where the vodka came in. Just a way of adding even more distance to those seven-thousand-plus miles. Or sometimes it was the roulette wheels downtown. When I stepped into a casino, there was no Aleppo. No Iraq. No home, even, with Johnny crying and Brandon threatening to rat me out to Child Protective Services. None of that. Just the glide of that white marble ball around and around the wheel. And me with all my might focused on making it drop where I wanted it to. You can send a missile into a man’s chest from half the world away? Why not drop a little ball into black thirty-three or red forty-eight from just a few feet back? Easy. Simple. I’ve done it. Those are my lucky numbers.”
“But you broke that cycle, Lindsey,” I said. “You clawed your way to the other side.”
“Yeah, sure I did,” she said softly. She still hadn’t taken her eyes off the land below us.
“Baghdadi was the prize,” she said. “The next bin Laden. Every grunt on the ground, every Special Forces guy, every pilot and gunner in the sky wanted Baghdadi. We spent hours looking down on Aleppo and the villages around it. We knew he was moving because that’s how you stayed alive down there. Thousands of people that might be him. Thousands of vehicles that might be carrying him. Thousands of buildings and bunkers and tunnels. The Reaper can stay in the air for a whole day without refueling. The longest they’d let us work was twelve hours, then you had to head home. That meant two hours in the air, two hours off to do paperwork, eat, rest. Then back in the air for two more hours. So we flew three missions a day. Staring at that screen. On a lot of my missions it was night over there, so the infrared video was always murky. Six hours of that and your eyes ache. Get off shift and walk outside and it’s just starting to get dark in Las Vegas.”
I cleared our landing with the Meadows Field tower, got my approach and a standby.
“But you know about that kind of thing, from Fallujah,” said Lindsey. “You know about killing somebody and what it does to you. Even when it’s your job and you’re doing something good and the dead guy deserved it. It still takes something away from you. Or maybe you don’t see it that way.”
“I still think about it,” I said. “How to deal with it. How you decide to deal with it. How you deal with what you can’t decide.”
“The things that are bigger than your deciding.”
“Those exact things.”
She was watching me then, the earth widening below us, landing strip a distant black dash.
“Would you like to hear my story about killing Zkrya Gourmat someday?” she asked.
“You’ve never said a word about it.”
“Zkrya Gourmat was a high-value ISIL leader, back when we called it ISIL. Killing him wasn’t an Air Force assignment. It was for two of the acronyms. In this case, CTC and JSOC. They draw up the so-called ‘kill list.’ The formal name for that list is the ‘Disposition Matrix.’”
The CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and the Joint Special Operations Command, I thought—the odd couple from the feuding families of intelligence and the military. Often in bed but never married. I’d brushed up against both of them in my Marine days. And just last year I’d collided with some of them on my own property, with mortal results.
I told Lindsey I’d like to hear her story.
“Let’s save it for the flight back,” she said. “After you’ve met Kenny and Voss, it will make more sense.”
9
KENNY BRYCE HAD CHOSEN a no-frills café called the Mine for the Headhunters’ 1100 hours strategy breakfast. The morning was cool and bright. I hadn’t been in Bakersfield in ten years. I’d always liked its rough history and reputation. A few years ago, The Guardian named Bakersfield PD America’s Deadliest Police Force, as it had, at the time, the highest number of per capita police shootings in the country.
Voss arrived exactly on time, as ex–military officers tend to do. He was a tall, beak-nosed man with short, back-brushed hair and quick eyes. Lindsey rose and they hugged.
She introduced us and Voss offered me his hand. “Are you taking good care of my best sensor?” he asked.
“I’m trying,” I said.
“She’s worth all the trouble.”
“You liars,” she said.
They caught up. Voss’s wife, Lindsey’s divorce, the kids. Then the important stuff: acronym-riddled anecdotes, comic memories, gossip and speculation. I half listened and enjoyed the warm December sun on my face. The Mine’s patio had Christmas lights along the roofline and a manger scene tucked into a shady corner.
After twenty minutes and no Kenny, Lindsey left him a message. We ordered and ate. I had the Golden Nugget Omelet. The waitress brought refills. When we finished eating, Voss left Kenny another message. His annoyance hung in the air with the smell of the coffee.
Which put us at the front door of Kenny Bryce’s apartment at precisely 1220—one hour and twenty minutes after his botched arrival tim
e.
Tuscanola was a newer complex, swirled white plaster and prefab stonework and wrought-iron touches on the windows. The porch was good sized and Kenny had furnished it with a bistro set. A potted succulent and an ashtray sat on the round tiled table. I noted that the long carport across from Bryce’s row of apartments was roofed with solar panels and hung with floodlights and security cameras mounted high up on alternating stanchions.
Voss knocked and waited. The door sounded solid and the peephole bezel looked shiny and new. “Remember that Christmas party when Kenny got blasted and decided to sleep in the restaurant booth?” he asked.
“I do,” said Lindsey. “And how damned hard it was to get him up and out of there. Didn’t the manager help?”
Voss nodded irritably and knocked again. He looked at Lindsey, at me, then took hold of the iron opener and pressed. The thumb pad clunked down and the door opened, swung in six inches, then came to a stop.
My first thought on entering a quiet home, uninvited, is: Where are they hiding and how are they armed?
Seven weeks in Fallujah.
Seven years as a cop.
Six years as a hardworking private investigator and the sudden, wicked surprises sometimes sprung on us.
For such surprises I carry a forty-five autoloader in a strong-side inside-the-waistband holster. I wear it far back so the gun is easily concealed by a jacket or an untucked shirt. I’m right-handed.
I made a deal with myself early on as a freelancer, one that favors my personal survival: I carry the heavy, tumorous, soul-damaging gun even when I’m not expecting to need it.
Such as now, meeting with friendlies in a public place in these peaceful and secure United States of America.
Swift Vengeance Page 6