“Slow.”
Clevenger gave me a look: curiosity and concern behind his crooked glasses. “Why don’t you come out with us tonight, Roland? I could use another hand. We’re going back to the longhorn pasture, but this time I’ve got floodlights set up. Enough to light up a soccer practice. Sometimes when you light these critters, they give you dirty looks and hightail it. Sometimes they just keep on doing whatever they’re doing. I’ve got the cameras and mikes, infrared binoculars, and two drones ready. We’ll call the animals in with the varmint recording.”
Clevenger touched a keyboard and the sounds of the coyotes killing the rabbit filled the barn again. I was sick to my soul with death. The brush parted and the coyotes looked straight up at the drone overhead.
“No Oxley?” I asked.
Clevenger shook his head. “Didn’t see him. But I’m ready if I do. Got my Kevlar animal gloves and the crate out there in the van.”
“I’ll pass tonight,” I said.
“It’s cold and boring, mostly,” said Clevenger. “But you’re welcome to come along anytime.”
* * *
—
Burt walked me across the barnyard, toward the house. He’s small and takes short, fast steps and I’m tall and take long, slow ones. If you added us together and divided by two you’d get an average man. A year and a half ago, we were little more than landlord and tenant, agreeable strangers. Then he’d offered to help me out of a very tight situation. Two capable men had wanted to do me harm. There’s a story behind it, like there’s a story behind everything, but the punchline is that Burt and I prevailed at great cost to my tormentors. The cost to ourselves, we have not discussed. But in that muzzle-flashed moment, we become something new to each other. I trust him with my life, and I owe it to him.
“Someone’s threatened Lindsey,” I said. “That’s why she’s here.”
He looked up at me, matter-of-fact. “She’s jumpy.”
“Someone wants her head, Burt. Literally. He decapitated a guy in Bakersfield two nights ago. One of Lindsey’s old Air Force buddies.”
“One of the Headhunters?”
I nodded.
“Hunter becomes hunted. You think this beheader is working alone?”
“I think he’s got help. Just my gut on that.”
“Where did it happen?”
I knew he’d talked to Lindsey, but I gave him the basics anyway. He nodded along. Burt gets things quickly, including some things other people don’t. “Samara,” he said. “The Prince Charming she dated one time in Las Vegas. The one with the handwriting that looks like the threat. I wonder if he was in the Bakersfield area two nights ago.”
I told him the FBI was looking into that.
“I’ll make sure Lindsey’s door and window locks are sound,” he said. “And install a wireless security system in her casita, something she can monitor by phone. I’m up most nights anyway, so I can keep an eye out. You might think about moving her every few days. Motels, cash, new IDs. I’ve got a friend who breeds Cane Corsos—that’s ‘dog of the guard’ in Italian. Very capable and well-trained animals. He leases them out for protection. He could have one here in a day or two. Does Lindsey still have that pistol?”
I nodded.
“Tell her to be careful with it.”
We continued along the pond, then doubled back toward the casitas and the main house. I could see lights on in Lindsey’s casita number three. Apparently, Liz and Dick had gone to their respective corners. Casita four was vacant.
I sensed that something was bothering Burt. He’s never been one for an evening stroll, or walking me home. “Saturday, the day before Lindsey got here, I went to Joe’s Hardware for a space heater,” he said. “Noticed a nice black C-Class Mercedes SUV behind me. Big guy at the wheel, long black hair, sunglasses. Wearing a blue leather moto jacket. Very fashionable for this hick town. Fine. Got the heater, put it in my trunk in the parking lot. I went east on Main for home, and by the time I’m to Mission there’s the black Mercedes SUV behind me again. Fashion boy at the wheel. He followed me two vehicles back all the way here. Waiting at the gate, I watched him in the rearview. He went right on by, not a pause.
“Two days later, on my way to golf, same black SUV fell in behind me on Old 395. Same guy. I pulled into the club, he went by. Shot nine rounds—one under—went to the restaurant for lunch, and when I left he was sitting in his car in the lot. Same blue moto jacket. I got into my car and drove home. When I came to the gate I punched the code and came through and pulled in behind the bougainvillea. Sure enough, here comes Moto Man. Slowed down when he went past your drive. Took a long look in. Gate still open. I’d already figured he wasn’t looking for me. He had me, twice. And if he just wanted to draft in past the gate behind me, why didn’t he? First, I thought Clevenger. He had some trouble back in New Orleans, moons ago. Then I thought Lindsey—something to do with her ex, maybe. The custody dispute.”
I hadn’t seen a black Mercedes SUV around Rancho de los Robles, or in any other place that might stand out. I thought back to the previous morning, when I’d driven Lindsey and myself to the Fallbrook Airpark. Still before sunrise. Darkness and empty winding roads. No hundred-thousand-dollar German SUVs that I noticed.
“Think about that Cane Corso,” said Burt. “Best guard dog there is.”
“So you say.”
“My friend Bruno? He trains them right and contracts them out for people who need protection. Expensive, and kind of limiting, a large beast like that in your face twenty-four/seven. But Lindsey in casita three with a Cane Corso napping on a pad inside the door? That’s security, Roland. The beheader would never know what hit him.”
* * *
—
I sat in the dark in my office for a while, ailing from what I had seen in Bakersfield. Ugliness causes ugliness, happiness makes happiness. Opposite momentums. Joy is easy to ride, the way I had ridden it with Justine. Higher and higher. Until. Icarus? But so hard to ride death. Which led me to Justine. Which led me to Kenny Bryce. Which led me to the rabbit screaming briefly on Clevenger’s video. Leading me, of course, to my own death, whenever and however it might come. Death. One and whole and undefeatable. Spirals inside spirals.
My mother, who is only occasionally softhearted and almost never sentimental, told me something once that had the ring of truth to it: when you feel bad, do something good for someone else.
I told Burt not to let Lindsey out of his sight or off the property until I got back. Then got a handful of LOST CAT flyers from my office desk, then a staple gun and a hiker’s headlight from the barn.
It was a cool night and dark. A quarter moon. Fallbrook’s country roads are curving and unlighted, and the shoulders are thin, and the vegetation grows right up to the asphalt on both sides. The canopies of large old oak trees join hands from opposite sides of the narrow roads. Minor moonlight blinks by overhead and there is really just the faint white line to guide you through the curves. Headlights appeared behind me, coming fast. I pulled over to let a Porsche convertible howl past. A blonde in the passenger seat, hair streaming.
I stopped along Old 395, left the engine running and the headlights on while I pulled a rain-faded Oxley poster from a power pole and stapled up a new one. In the beam of my hiker’s headlight, Oxley’s hypnotic green eyes regarded me. I made another stop on 395 as I worked my way toward Fallbrook. I tried to make a rational assessment of the obese cat’s chances of survival after nearly a week and a half of coyotes, dark roads, and fast cars. Not good chances, by my reckoning.
I sensed a tail a mile from town, made a stop anyway. Got a gun from the locked toolbox in the bed of my truck, pocketed it in my barn coat. Stapled an Oxley poster to a white post-and-rail fence. A black Mercedes SUV passed by. I continued onto Mission, passed it, and pulled into a deep, oak-roofed turnout. Saw headlights in my rearview mirror two curves back. Not terrific trade
craft.
When I hit town I hung fresh LOST CAT posters outside Vega’s Tailor, El Toro Market, and the Mission Theater. Put the old flyers and the hiker’s headlight on the seat beside me. Looked down at Oxley, blanched by rain, fading into history. I fought back the pessimism. Heard Mom’s voice. Something good for someone else. Hoped her travels with Dad were going well. This month: Florida.
I’d just stapled a poster on the wall of the Main Street Café when the black Mercedes SUV pulled to the curb and parked in front of my truck. Burt Short’s fashion man stepped out, eyed me across the hood of his vehicle, then started my way. No blue moto jacket, just jeans and a black car coat against the December chill. His hair was black and unruly, much longer than he had worn it as a San Diego sheriff’s deputy during our two months as partners.
“Hello, Jason,” I said. “What brings you out tonight?”
“Lindsey Rakes. Your new tenant.”
“You mean my former tenant?”
“Maybe we should talk.”
I considered the pros and cons of having to lie to my old partner, now a licensed private investigator himself. And I was more than a little interested in what had brought him here. “Right this way.”
11
JUST A FEW STEPS down Main Street was my new downtown office. New to me, at least, as of late last year when I decided I needed a place away from home to meet with clients—attempted murder, gunfire, and justifiable homicide being things best left outside the rancho.
The office is next door to the Dublin Pub, open but quiet at this hour. I could smell the fish and chips, hear the jukebox. I put the old-fashioned key into the old-fashioned door lock and let Jason in. Fallbrook is an old-fashioned town.
The lobby was small and neat—a directory, mail slots for each of the six offices in the building, a small table with a display of silk flowers. Old crate labels hung on the walls, brightly colored images of oranges, sunny groves, smiling young women holding out ripe fruit. And, interspersed with them, a few of my Oxley posters. I straightened the “California Girl” frame.
“Impressive office building,” said Jason.
“It gets better.”
I hit the lights and we climbed the creaking stairs to my second-floor office. The sound of shoes on carpet, then hardwood, a wide landing and three closed doors: Anders Wealth Management, Rick Topp Construction, Ford Investigations.
“I figured you for something more contemporary,” said Jason.
“None of that around here,” I said.
My office is spacious, with a coffered high ceiling and views up and down Main Street. It really is a Main Street, too—in the small-town sense—mom-and-pop shops, a candy store, a barber shop with a spiraled pole outside, a hardware store, a café with a fountain. Even a playhouse and some art galleries. But some modern touches, too—an Internet cafe, a craft brewery, hot yoga. I looked up and down the now dark and quiet street below. Switched on a lamp, set the Oxley posters on the credenza. Pulled over a chair for Jason, then sat behind my desk.
He hadn’t changed much in the last nine years. Same cut-from-stone face, ready eyes, and deep voice. He had always looked like an untalented actor playing a cop. Like he couldn’t quite emote. In the two months we’d spent as partners-in-uniform, I didn’t get to know him well. Five years younger than me, a wife and daughter. Drove an over-pay-grade BMW even back then.
With a shared past like Jason Bayless’s and mine, there is almost no room for small talk. Nine years ago we had lived through a terrible moment together, seen it different ways, and behaved accordingly. Recounted and relived it accordingly. And because of its terribleness it became not a moment at all, but a lifetime.
“Do you still think about it, Roland?”
“Not often,” I said.
“I would do it my way again,” he said.
“I’d do it mine.”
And with that, of course, I was forced to think about it.
In my memory, that three p.m. in Imperial Beach is always clear and precise. December 22 and cold, Deputies Bayless and Ford on their foot beat—specifically, we’re in a dirty alley behind a low-rent strip mall. There, in a patch of sunlight angling down through a gray-black sky, one Titus Miller backpedals away from us in his too-big overcoat and mismatched athletic shoes. One blue and the other red. Titus, homeless and occasionally violent, often high or drunk, sometimes clearly deranged, a man with nothing but his foul-smelling clothes and a bundle of possessions he had lashed to a wheeled cart with plastic newspaper bags tied end to end. Titus, age nineteen, black. Titus, who would smile and cry real tears for the ten dollars you gave him. Titus, cussing us badly and letting go of his cart and backpedaling, throwing open his too-big overcoat with both hands to get at something in his waistband, something hand-sized, dully black but metal-shiny, too, and maybe it was snagged or stuck, very hard to tell in that bright sun.
We both drew down, Jason cursing Titus while I ordered him to freeze, and Titus not freezing, still trying to get that shiny thing out of his dirty layers of clothes.
And again I see, with the same unvarying clarity as always, Titus freeing that dull/shiny black thing with both hands and extending it toward me as he stops his retreat and drops into a shooter’s stance. I see his expression as he looks at me over the sights of my weapon. Nothing in his eyes but fear and nothing in his hands but a wallet. Five shots from Jason—concussive, gun-range close, bullets twang-sparking off a waste bin behind Titus. Titus in wholesale collapse, the wallet falling from his hands, still lashed to his belt by its shiny chain.
“I’d like it to go away,” said Jason.
I nodded.
But taking a life becomes a life of its own. Becomes a different life, for all involved.
December 22.
Peace on earth, goodwill toward men.
Protests in Imperial Beach, San Diego, L.A., San Francisco, and Oakland. Most peaceful, some not. Rubber bullets and bricks on cop cars.
The biker-style chained wallet was found to be empty, and was a recent acquisition of Titus’s, according to a liquor store clerk who had sold it to him at a steep discount as a Christmas present.
The crime lab found a badly rusted .22-caliber six-gun buried deep in Titus’s cart. Loaded.
Six months later, the Internal Affairs deputy-involved shooting investigation was complete, and found that Deputy Roland Ford had acted properly within the law and the scope of his authority. And that Deputy Jason Bayless had used excessive and unnecessary force in the death of Titus Miller, nineteen, emotionally disturbed and unarmed.
“You never understood that I was afraid for your life, too,” said Bayless. “Not just mine.”
“I did understand that, Jason.”
“I was trying to save my partner from a man with a history of violence and a loaded firearm in his possession.”
“We don’t need to go through it again,” I said.
“But I want to, now that time has given me a chance to hate you less.”
“Okay,” I said. “What happened that day is, I saw a wallet and you saw a gun and tried to save me from it.”
Jason leaned forward, his stone-cut face beveled in the lamplight. “When IA asked your opinion of my judgment, you did not stand by me.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I did not. I saw a terrified man brandishing a wallet. You saw a criminal with a history of violence about to shoot your partner. I can’t change what I saw and neither can you. The only difference is my eyes were better than yours that day.”
He sat back and considered me. “You took my life as I knew it. I tried to protect you. And in so doing became a murderer. A pariah. A despised man. What’s left besides hate?”
Then a long silence in which I sensed in Bayless the stirrings of revenge and dreamed-of violence, long knotted inside.
“I wish it was different, Jason.”
&nbs
p; “Those words mean nothing.”
I looked straight across at him. “So how do you like the PI’s life?”
Which is where Jason Bayless and I had both landed. At very close to the same time.
“It pays the bills,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “Mostly.”
“I have no heiress’s fortune to spend.”
I nodded and said nothing.
“Although, Roland, I’m sorry for what happened to her. I felt bad for you, even.”
A moment of respect for Justine and the memory of her. “So what’s this about my old tenant?” I asked.
“I’ve been hired to locate her,” he said. “Her name rang a bell, so I started with the same kind of search a fourth-grader would do for a report. Took me to your helicopter shootout with Briggs Spencer last year. I confirmed a few things with friends that I still have in the department. As you know, among the players on your property that day was tenant Lindsey Rakes, a then-unemployed twenty-nine-year-old female, former U.S. Air Force and divorced mother of one. I can’t help but wonder if she came back your way.”
“She moved back to Las Vegas a month after the shootout with Spencer.”
“Tracersinfo.com told me that much,” he said. “She moved to Vegas, where, according to Clark County Court records, her custody tug-of-war for son John Goff, age nine, continues. Trouble is, she left town last Thursday and I think she might have landed here. Where she knows a few people. Like you. So if you could just tell Lindsey to call me and confirm her whereabouts, then I can get paid and cancel this case and buy my family some neat stuff for Christmas.”
“Who hired you?”
“Jesus, Ford—I can’t tell you that.”
I had a notion. “Goff. Her ex. Paper to serve?”
Jason leaned back in his chair again, his car coat falling open like a gunslinger in a western. Instead of drawing a six-gun, he opened both hands in a show of peaceful refusal to answer my question.
“I thought about going to a county service for Miller, but there wasn’t one,” he said. “Just an indigent remains disposition. They actually call it that. Cremation.”
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