And so the long, deep conversations that marked their trip from Colorado to San Diego were by and large replaced by sidelong glances and weighty silence as they made their way north back to beach house.
Tony was far too preoccupied with his own thoughts to even notice the quiet uneasiness between the front seat occupants. From the moment his mother had finished telling him her story, a story revealing that before his birth and again after he went away to college, she flew around the planet killing people, he had been having a very difficult time forming any coherent thoughts at all.
After she brought him up to the moment, to the scene that he, Marc, and Neal had rolled up on, she told him that she had to go back to Tijuana to finish her mission. The next time he saw his mother, she would be fresh off her latest kill, a lioness with blood dripping from her face. As much as he would like to fall back onto any one of the words she had used, words like “cleaning” and “mission” or even his dad’s choice, “assassination,” he could only call it one thing… murder.
Tony Porter grew up idolizing his parents. His pops, the eternal goof, had made obscene amounts of money by creating video games. To him, Dan was just a fun father, if you could overlook the endless stream of lame dad jokes.
Nicole, however, he had virtually worshiped. Every boy loves his mom, he supposed, but even as he got older, Tony saw her as the picture of maternal perfection. She kept their house clean and comfortable, she fed them amazing meals – he thought now that might be sexist, but they were things that meant stability to a little boy. She never missed a baseball game from little league through high school, and she seemed to always have exactly the right answer for whatever was troubling him, even when that answer was composed solely of hugs. And while it was true that of the two, Nicole usually had to fill the role of disciplinarian due to Dan’s frequent travels during their school years, even that was handled with grace and light-handedness. For his part, pleasing his mother was its own reward. He remembered a time when he’d been four or so and had been playing in the yard. He came in with muddy hands and had left two perfectly formed prints on one of her best white towels. She’d given him a good scolding for not washing his hands, then proceeded to frame the towel, handprints and all. It still hung in her office, capped off by a small brass rectangle on which she’d had the words “Anthony ‘Picasso’ Porter” engraved.
As he had started approaching young adulthood, he realized that no one is perfect, even his mom. But it’s not an uncommon phenomenon at that point in life, when childhood begins to be spoken of in the past tense, to want to hold on to something from that time. J.J., for example, still owned Mr. Blue, a now tattered and not particularly pleasant-smelling stuffed elephant that had been her first toy. She left him at home when she started her freshman year at Notre Dame, but when she observed that more than one of her friends also held on to a similar memento of little-hood, she moved him into the dorm after her first visit home.
Tony chose to hold on to the idealized picture of his mother.
But the Nicole who drove him back to Tijuana was a stranger. How could the same person who had magically kissed away his painful boo-boos be able to inflict pain, to… end lives?
For the first thirty seconds of his mother’s narrative, he’d held on to the hope that she was just channeling his dad and was telling him some long, convoluted mom joke, but it was soon clear that was not the case. As she continued to talk, his stomach gradually tightened. His distress when crossing into Mexico had been bad, but this felt much worse. To him, it felt the way he imagined getting stabbed must feel.
He wondered how many of his mother’s victims had known that feeling. He wondered how many had looked into her gentle blue eyes and seen cold steel right before the hot lead did its job. He wondered how many people had died not even knowing they were in an assassin’s crosshairs. She’d made it sound like that was how she pictured things going on this occasion. Someone would be alive one moment, dead the next, and never even realize the transition had occurred.
“What the fuck,” he whispered.
“Huh?” Marc said from the driver’s seat.
Tony didn’t reply, and Marc let it drop, even though the silence from the backseat ramped up his anxiety further still.
J.J. was thinking heavy thoughts of her own. For the second time in her young life, she had killed a human being. Oddly, it was this one, rather than the first, that seemed somewhat unpalatable to her.
In the first instance, she had killed a man who had knocked her out with ether in order to do unspeakable things to her that, aside from very preliminary (yet still despicable) actions, had not occurred. Later, when she regained her senses, she had quickly and efficiently deprived him of his own, permanently.
This time, she had gone to rescue her mother, knowing it was very likely that she’d encounter people who weren’t going to want that to happen. That meant she might have to impose her own will. With extreme prejudice.
But, ultimately, she’d put two holes in the first person she encountered. Even in the failing sunlight, it was possible to see that the man using a shovel to dig a hole in the ground looked a lot like the actor Danny Trejo’s bigger, uglier brother. And as it turned out, he’d apparently been planning on doing some very unpleasant things to her mother.
However, when she fired the two rounds, striking the man at perfect center mass, she knew none of that – except the big and ugly part. But there were probably many big ugly groundskeepers in Mexico. He could have been digging the hole to bury a dead coyote for all she knew.
And so – bang-bang.
Her growing enmeshment with her mother’s secret had now developed an additional dark nuance, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about that.
She also wasn’t sure about how Marc would feel about it; about the things she hadn’t told him and about the lies she had. J.J. had dated at school but had never met anyone she believed was right for a serious relationship.
But there was something about this boy…
Conrad Barker was pissed. He’d paid that little college-boy pussy a lot of money to get him to hand over June and her family. He’d given him a tracking chip, also costing him a big box of cash, with one simple instruction. Find a way to get close enough to J.J.’s car to get the little magnetic circle to stick to it, so that he could make his way personally to Colorado and tie up all his loose ends in one grand gesture. Conrad didn’t like loose ends.
Little J.J., who’d killed one of his best paying clients, and Dan, who had nearly killed him and who had kicked in most of his teeth after finding him unconscious on the ground, were definitely done for. He knew nothing about Tony other than that he was June’s second brat and therefore his grandson, but being a Porter made him persona non grata from the starting block. He’d die too.
Conrad had planned to save his best work for his daughter. June Barker, or Nicole Porter as she called herself now, had driven him completely underground for years while all the trouble she’d caused him was still frontpage news. Greenville was a decent-sized city and there was always something new for its citizens to worry about, but his name was attached to the biggest crime in the area’s history and it took a good, long while before interest in June’s dirty work finally died down. Although he reckoned himself smart enough to weasel out of the situation, ultimately, he’d found it far better to drop out of view altogether. It had taken him decades to climb out of the financial hole that had put him in, and he had never again been able to conduct business in the light of day (not that he’d done that much anyway).
So why in the name of General Lee’s balls, he wondered, was the tracker’s signal originating from San Diego? He had been well on his way from the east coast to Denver when, on a lark, he’d remotely signaled the tracker to activate and saw the source of its signal was Southern California instead of north central Colorado. As he altered his route, he quickly decided to rid himself of Marc Steiger as well as the entire Porter clan. The pretty boy had been less and less reli
able lately, and that didn’t fly with Conrad.
But dealing with Marc would have to wait.
Because even though the signal wasn’t coming from where he’d expected it to, he might have actually gotten the little circle onto J.J.’s car after all. He did not know why his granddaughter had gone to California, although the spoiled little brats that posed as young adults these days pretty much went where they wanted and did whatever they pleased. He was a man who had endured hardships, one who had known no privilege his entire life, except those he’d built for himself. He spit out of the window as he sped along, deciding this was just another layer of reason to wipe them out.
He’d parked down the street from the million-buck beach house for several hours, waiting for some sign of life from within. The greedy electronic engineer who had designed the system for him had bragged about two things: its minute size, and thanks to what the nerd had called “cloud connectivity,” its virtually limitless range and stunning accuracy. As he had waited in the dark for a light to warm one of the windows or a door to open and let a dog out, he’d played with the receiver, looking at its HD mini-screen. He could see that the disc was now actually inside the house, no more than fifteen feet from the front door.
That threw him a little. Maybe J.J. had not driven the disc here. Maybe Marc had lost his nerve and had run away with it still in his possession. A couple of phone calls from the darkened car had revealed the owner of the house was none other than Marcia Steiger-Olson, Marc’s sister.
When Conrad had loaded up the Oldsmobile Cutlass he’d been driving for about five years now (a concession to escaping attention, and to the fact that he fucking loved the car), he’d packed several handguns, a few rifles, a very sweet pump-action shotgun, and enough C-4 to level the Porters’ mansion.
But after an hour of sitting and waiting… sitting and waiting (to Conrad, it seemed like because of June, he’d spent the best years of his life sitting and waiting), he decided he was pissed. Really pissed.
He knew nothing about Marcia Steiger-Olson, other than that she was Marc’s older sister. But at this fuming moment in time, that was crime enough. It was still a good three hours till sunup. He reached in the back seat and grabbed the extra-large gym bag filled with C-4 and blasting caps. Then he collected the black ski mask sitting next to it. Conrad knew that every house along the shore would be plastered with security cameras, able to view an approach from any angle. He bet the daddy’s-money-rich little fuckers even had security cameras just to aim at their other security cameras.
But he didn’t goddamn care. He pulled the mask on and got out of the car, dropping into a crouch at once. Again, he knew his image was being saved on somebody’s hard drive right now, but the crouch was to distort the perception of his size and not done with any pretense at invisibility. As he headed toward the house, he was already trying to determine what sort of security system Ms. Steiger-Olson had installed, figuring it wouldn’t slow him much. He believed he could defeat the one at Fort Knox, if he had to.
Confidence had never been an issue for Conrad Barker. Even during his years of hiding, he never doubted that he’d regain his money and influence. And he knew he’d have his revenge. There had been lots of time to plan for that.
He completed his crazy transit to the building and was surprised to see one of the garage doors was not completely shut. As he looked closer, he saw that it had gotten hung up on a life-jacket that had been strung on a hook to dry by the door. As it lowered, one of the straps on the jacket had gotten wedged between the door and the frame. Conrad knew from his years as a contractor (a business which mainly served as a cover for his real enterprises), that automatic garage doors were designed to stop closing if they met any sort of resistance at all. That way, your stupid little baby wouldn’t get squashed because you didn’t watch her.
The good news was that he was able to roll under the door, then pull the bag easily behind him. The only way it could get any better was if the idiots had forgotten to arm their system before leaving. After listening for any sounds from within the house, he moved toward the rear of the garage. There was a screen door, which he opened quietly but without much concern. Most people didn’t wire the outer portal. It was far superior to attach the sensors to the wooden door behind the screen, and as Conrad played the light from his phone to find them, he let out a surprised laugh. The fucking door was not only unarmed, it too was ajar. Whoever had left the house had done so in a hurry. It was almost too easy.
That thought gave him pause. Was he being set up? For a moment, Conrad considered bailing. It would be just as easy to push the duffle back out. But then he thought about Marc and he snarled. The prick had made him come all the way down here and waste the C-4 he’d brought for June-Bug’s fireworks display.
“Fuck it,” he said aloud, pushing open the door. “I can always get more C-4, but I might not get another chance to hurt that little bastard Marc.”
They got to the beach house just after sunrise. Marc opened the garage doors with his remote but parked the Lincoln on the asphalt driveway without pulling in. Dan, following his lead, did the same with the Humvee.
Neal asked Marc the easiest way to get to the beach. He, Dan, and Manny quickly walked through the house and down the stairs to the sandy strip. J.J. peeked out the window at them a few minutes later. It appeared they’d commandeered the beach chairs Marc and Tony had used to watch the beach volleyball game. It also appeared they’d fallen asleep. She smiled and shook her head. That was when she heard the shouting.
She ran into the living room to find Tony screaming at Marc. “What do you mean you didn’t fucking tell her, man?”
Marc stammered a few incoherent syllables by way of reply.
Seeing J.J. enter, Tony wheeled and said to her, “So he didn’t say anything to you? Anything about Conrad Barker?”
J.J. felt her heart falter. “Wha… Who?” she managed to ask.
“Conrad Barker. Some jackass who apparently has a grudge against our family… don’t ask why, because Mister LSU Drop Out doesn’t really know. He just took his money to find out where we lived and where we liked to go and what color socks you wear on Tuesdays.”
J.J.’s mouth had fallen open, and as she turned to face Marc, it remained so. But then her face began morphing from gobsmacked to furious. “Is that true?” she asked him, not loudly but in a voice that sounded like rattlesnake venom dripping from the tip of a bayonet.
Marc merely cast his eyes toward the floor, an idiosyncrasy Tony had already witnessed.
J.J. turned to look at Tony. She was so furious that the thought of being unforthcoming never occurred to her. “Do you know who that is, Tony? Do you? Did he tell you?”
Tony found himself a little taken aback, and if he was being honest, a bit frightened by his sister’s fury. He shook his head.
“He’s our gra… he’s Mom’s…” She’d become so angry, she couldn’t form a complete sentence. Finally, although she wasn’t certain if Tony knew what it was their mother really did, said, “He’s the reason Mom does what she does.”
“Oh, yes. What she does!” Tony shouted, once again livid himself. His fear was not gone, but it was no longer controlling him either. “She told me what she does, and that you all already knew. Like none of you thought it might be something I should know about too?”
J.J. suddenly remembered Marc was still in the room, and the meshing of her stormfront with Tony’s had slowed her brain’s whirring sensation enough to recall that she hadn’t told him the truth about what their mother did, and now knew she’d been right to withhold that information. The boy she thought might be worthy of her consideration was working for her pervert grandfather.
“Tony, this isn’t the time or place. Besides, those guys are asleep by the beach. If you keep screaming, you’re going to wake them up.” Even as she said it, J.J. heard the absurdity of the statement. Not only was it probably untrue, but she doubted Tony cared whether he woke them or not.
“Y
ou know what? Screw this! Screw this whole trip, screw Mom’s ‘career,’ screw you, J.J. Screw this whole fucking family.” He ran out of the living room. An instant later, they heard the front door slam.
J.J., stretched to her mental limit and suddenly very exhausted, burst into tears and ran in the opposite direction, toward the slider that led to the beach. Marc followed her.
“J.J., wait!” he said as she continued down the stairs to the waterline, where Neal’s snores could already be heard.
She stopped and whirled around. Through clenched teeth and with tears flowing down her tired but still beautiful face (Dammit! So beautiful, Marc thought), she said, “I’m fine. If you care one lick about me… go stop my brother.”
Marc stared at her for a moment, then went back into the house. J.J. walked down to the beach, careful to stifle her sobbing until well past the chairs where her dad, Manny the Mummy, and Neal the Apnea Emperor were sleeping. She put her feet in the salt water, then turned to look at the house through which Marc was passing.
As Nicole pulled slowly down the oceanfront street toward the address Marc had given her, she saw Tony run out the front door of the house. She was close enough to see that his face was contorted with emotion. She reached for the button to roll down the window to call to him when she saw the car, on the other side of the street and a hundred feet past Marc’s driveway. It caught her attention immediately. The Olds was a bit too outdated and pedestrian to belong to the neighborhood. Back east, it would have been called “hoopty.” It also happened to have South Carolina tags.
You have got to be fucking kidding me, she thought.
There were almost two million vehicles registered in Nicole’s home state. The car could belong to any one of those millions of people.
But as she saw it and felt the blood drain from her face, she knew that the odds of it not being Conrad Barker were zero. Her father was nearby. Maybe right inside the car itself. She had left all the firearms in Mexico, but that didn’t matter. She’d gladly tear her father apart with her bare hands.
The Terror of Tijuana Page 20