by Robert Crais
“He came to my trial. Not every day, but a couple of times. This once, I asked him if he was sorry he saved me, you know—because if he hadn’t saved me, those men I murdered would still be alive. So I asked if he regretted it. He told me guys like us had each other’s back, so he had my back. He didn’t have any choice.”
“Way it was, Lonny. What would you expect him to say?”
“I know. I just wanted to hear it, I guess, that I still meant something to someone, and wasn’t just a murdering piece of shit.”
Pike remained silent, which spurred Lonny to laugh.
“Thanks for chiming in there, boss. Appreciate the support.”
Lonny suddenly burst out laughing, but the laughter shivered into a sob.
Lonny said, “Shit. I’m sorry.”
“C’mon, Lonny, yes or no. Did Frank tell you he was into something? Maybe ask about certain people or say something that left you wondering?”
“You think if I could help get the pricks who killed him, I wouldn’t be all over it? I’d kill those fuckers myself.”
“ You’re sure?”
“Yes. He was the same Frank we knew. Being an Eagle Scout was in his frakkin’ DNA.”
Pike felt the tightness in his chest ease, feeling a sense of relief.
“Okay, Lon. That’s what I thought, but I had to be sure. You’re the only one he stayed in contact with.”
“I know. She drove a hard bargain, that girl.”
Cindy.
Pike was finished. He wanted to hang up, but he hadn’t spoken with Lonny in a long time, and now he felt guilty. Lonny Tang had been one of his guys for eleven years, on and off, until Lonny got hurt.
Pike asked the obvious.
“How you doing in there?”
“You get used to it. Thirteen years to go, I’m on the beach with a smile.”
“You need anything?”
“Nah. I get all the free meds and medical care I need. I crap blue nuggets and can’t eat spicy foods, but other than that I’m fine.”
On the day Frank Meyer saved Lonny Tang’s life, an RPG explosion sent a rock the size of a golf ball through Lonny Tang’s abdomen. Lonny lost his left kidney, a foot of large intestine, two feet of small intestine, his spleen, part of his liver, half of his stomach, and his health. He was left with a growing addiction to painkillers and no way to pay for them. The Perco cets led to harder drugs, and finally to a bar in Long Beach, which Lonny robbed. When two longshoremen tried to stop him, Lonny shot and killed the bar’s owner and an innocent bystander. Lonny Tang was arrested less than three hours later, passed out in his car after scoring enough dope to deaden the pain. He was tried on two counts of first-degree murder, convicted, and was currently serving twenty-five years to life at the California State Prison in Corcoran.
Pike didn’t know what else to say, so he decided to tie off the conversation.
“Lonny, listen, the police are investigating Frank—”
“They’re not going to find anything.”
“When they go through his phone records, they’ll see he talked to you.”
“I don’t care. I’ll tell’m just what I told you.”
“Tell them whatever you want about Frank. Don’t tell them about me.”
“You didn’t call me. My lawyer called.”
“That’s right.”
“You going after these people?”
“I gotta get going.”
“I hear you, brother.”
Pike was about to hang up when he remembered something else.
“Lonny, you there?”
“I’m here. Where else am I going?”
“One more thing. The police told me Frank had my ink.”
“You didn’t know?”
“No.”
“That was years ago, man. This time he came to visit, he showed me. He’d just had’m done.”
“The arrows.”
“Big ol’ red arrows like yours. Cindy was livid. She damn near threw him out of the house.”
Lonny laughed, but Pike felt embarrassed.
“He say anything?”
“Why he got them?”
“Yeah.”
“Remember all the shit she gave him about being a contractor, and how she wouldn’t marry him unless he settled down?”
“Sure.”
“The rest of us were all over him to dump her—what, you’re going to give this chick your balls? But Frank said you told him to go for it. Told him, if he wanted that kind of life, he had to make it happen. He really appreciated that, Joe. It was like you gave him permission.”
Pike considered that for a moment.
“Was he happy?”
“Yeah, brother. Hell, yeah, he was happy. It was like he woke up in someone else’s life. What’s the word? He was content, man.”
Pike said, “Good.”
“Said somethin’ weird, though. Said he’d wake up sometimes, scared God was going to realize he made a mistake, say, ‘Hey, that’s not your life, Frank, you belong back in the shit,’ and take everything away. He was joking when he said it, but still.”
Pike didn’t respond, thinking that sounded like something Frank would say.
“You think that’s what happened? God realized he made a mistake?”
“Someone down here made the mistake, Lonny.”
“I hear you. Joe? Thanks for calling about Frankie. I don’t get many calls.”
“I have to go.”
“Joe?”
“I gotta get going.”
“You were a good leader. You really took care of us, man. I’m sorry I let you down.”
Pike closed his phone.
7
THE EARLY-EVENING SKY PURPLED as Pike turned toward Frank Meyer’s house for the second time that day. He drove slowly, buying time for the twilight sky to darken. Pike loved the night. Had since he was a boy, hiding in the woods from his raging father; loved it all the more as a young combat Marine on long-range patrols, then again when he was a police officer. Pike felt safe in the darkness. Hidden, and free.
Frank’s house was dark when Pike drove past. The bright yellow tape across the door was now ochre in the gloomy light, and the SID wagons and criminalists were gone. A radio car remained out front, but Pike noted the windows were up and the glass was smoked. Pike recognized the car as a scarecrow vehicle, left to discourage intruders, but posted without a crew. This made Pike’s task easier.
Pike circled the block, then parked in the deep shadow of a maple tree two houses away. He moved quickly and without hesitation, sliding out of his Jeep and into a row of hedges. He crossed the neighbor’s yard, then hoisted himself over a wall. He followed the side of Frank’s garage into the backyard, then stood for a moment, listening. The neighborhood was alive with normal sounds—cars shortcutting to Beverly Glen on their way home to the Valley, a watchful owl in the maple tree over Frank’s pool, a faraway siren.
Pike went to the edge of the pool, smelling the chlorine, then touched the water. Cold. He went to the French doors, popped a pane near the handle, and stepped into the deeper black of the family room. Pike listened again, then turned on a small flashlight that produced a dim red light. He covered the lens with his fingers, letting out only enough light to reveal the room. His hand glowed as if filled with fire.
The heart-shaped stain where Cindy Meyer and her younger son died was a darker smudge on the dark floor, one murky red over another. Pike studied it for a moment, but Pike wasn’t looking for clues. He was looking for Frank.
Pike circled the family room, the dining room, and the kitchen, moving as silent as smoke. He noted the furniture, toys, and magazines as if each was a page in the book of the family’s life, helping to build their story.
A hall led to the master bedroom, which was large and spacious. Photographs of the kids and Frank and Cindy dotted the walls like memories captured in time. An antique desk sat opposite a king-sized bed with a padded headboard, a plaque on the desk reading: Empress of the W
orld. Cindy’s desk, where she had paid bills or helped with the business.
Something about the bed bothered Pike, and then he realized the bed was made. The family room and Frank’s office had been upended, but the bed here in the master was undisturbed. It had likely been made that morning, and was still waiting for a bedtime that would never come. This suggested the home invaders had either been frightened away before searching the master, or had found what they wanted. Pike concluded there was no way to know, and that John Chen might be right. The invaders could have realized they hit the wrong house, but by then they had killed Frank, so they killed everyone else to get rid of the witnesses.
Pike played the red light over Cindy’s desk, and saw more snapshots. Frank and the kids. An older couple who might have been Cindy’s parents. And then Pike found the picture he was looking for. He had not known he was searching for it, but felt a sense of completion when he saw it. The snapshot showed Frank in a swimming pool with one of the boys. Frank had heaved his son into the air amid a geyser of water, both of them laughing, Frank’s arms extended. This picture was the only photograph of all the photos that showed the blocky red arrows inked onto his del toids. Pointing forward, just as the arrows on Pike’s delts pointed forward. Identical.
Pike studied the picture for a long while before he returned it to the desk and left the bedroom. He moved back along the hall, thinking how different his own home was from the home that Frank Meyer built. Pike’s furnishings were minimal, and the walls were bare. Pike did not have a family, so he had no pictures of family on the walls, and he did not keep pictures of his friends. Pike’s life had led to blank walls, and now he wondered if his walls would ever be filled.
When Pike reached the entry, the outside of the house lit up like a blinding sun. Vengeful bright light poured around curtains and shades, ignited the cracks in the broken door, and streaked through the windows. Pike closed his hand over the tiny red light, and waited.
A patrol car was spotlighting the house. They had probably been instructed to cruise by every half hour or so. Pike was calm. Neither his breathing nor his heart rate increased. The light worked over the house, probing the hedges and side gates for three or four minutes. Then the light died as abruptly as it appeared.
Pike followed his crimson light upstairs.
The house seemed even more quiet on the second floor, where a stain on the carpet marked the older son’s murder. Little Frank. Pike counted the years back to a deadly night on the far side of the world when Frank told Pike that Cindy was pregnant.
That time, they were protecting a collective of villages in Central Africa. A group called the Lord’s Resistance Army had been kidnapping teenage girls they raped and sold as slaves. Pike brought over Frank, Jon Stone, a Brit named Colin Chandler, Lonny Tang, and an ex-Special Forces soldier from Alabama named Jameson Wallace. They were tracking the LRA to recover sixteen kidnapped girls when Frank told him that his girlfriend, Cindy, was pregnant. Frank wanted to marry her, but Cindy had stunned him with an ultimatum—she wanted no part of his dangerous life or the dangerous people with whom he worked, so either Frank would leave his current life and friends behind, or Cindy would never see him again. Frank had been shattered, torn between his love for Cindy and his loyalty to his friends. He had talked to Pike almost three hours that night, then the next, and the next.
Pike closed his eyes, and felt the carpet beneath his feet, the chill air, the empty silence. He opened his eyes, and stared at the terrible stain. Even in the bad light, he could see where fibers had been clipped by the criminalists.
Those African nights led through the intervening years like a twisting tunnel through time to this spot on the floor. Pike covered the red light, turning the world black.
He went downstairs to Frank’s office.
The drapes had been left open by the SID crews, so the office was bright with outside light. Pike turned off his red flash. He sat at Frank’s desk with his back to the window. Frank the Tank’s desk. A long way from Africa.
THE NIGHT IN AFRICA when Frank decided to change his life, he had thirty-one days remaining on his contract, but was still thirteen days from earning his nickname. Two days after Africa, Joe, Frank, and Lonny Tang flew to El Salvador. Frank had not been able to reach Cindy until they landed in Central America, but that’s when he told her. She wanted him to fly home immediately, but Frank explained he had made a commitment for the duration of his contract, and would honor that commitment. Cindy didn’t like it, but agreed. Joe and his guys spent five days in El Salvador, then flew to Kuwait.
It was a British contract, providing security for French, Italian, and British journalists. That particular job was to transport two BBC journalists and a two-person camera crew inland to a small village over the mountains called Jublaban, untouched and well away from hostile forces.
Pike was responsible for three different groups of journalists that day, so he split his crew, giving the Jublaban run to Lonny, Frank, Colin Chandler, and an ex-French Foreign Legion trooper named Durand Galatoise. Two Land Rovers, two operators per Rover, the journalists divided between them. A fast thirty-two miles over the mountains, leave in the morning, back after lunch. Durand Galatoise packed two bottles of Chablis because one of the journalists had a nasty smile.
They left at eight that morning, Lonny and Frank in the lead truck, Chandler and Galatoise in trail, and reached Jublaban without incident. There to do a story on rural medical care, the journalists were interviewing Jublaban’s only physician when an incoming RPG hit the second Rover, flipping it onto its side. The operators and journalists immediately came under small-arms fire.
Galatoise was killed within the first sixty seconds, the remaining Rover was hit, then Lonny Tang caught the piece of shrapnel that tore him inside out. Frank and Chandler realized they were facing eight or ten men, then noticed an approaching nightmare: Four armored vehicles and two full-sized battle tanks were rumbling toward them across the desert. With both Rovers disabled, the operators and their journalists were trapped.
Frank pushed Lonny Tang’s intestines back into his body, then wrapped him with pressure bandages and belts to keep him together. While Chandler laid down cover fire, Frank ran to his burning Rover for radios, more ammunition, and a .50-caliber Barrett rifle they used for sniper suppression. The Barrett, a beast of a rifle that weighed over thirty pounds, could punch through engine blocks at more than a mile.
Chandler herded the journalists to a more defensible location, but Lonny Tang could not be moved. Frank stashed him in a stone hut, then moved forward with the Barrett gun. Frank later said he was crying during the entire firefight; blubbering like a baby, he would say, running, then firing, then running again.
Pike heard much of it through his radio, with Chandler broadcasting a play-by-play as Pike coordinated a rescue mission with a British air controller.
Frank Meyer fought on like that for almost thirty minutes, running and gunning with the Barrett even when the tanks and armored vehicles crunched into the village, Frank banging away like a lunatic to draw them from Lonny Tang.
Everyone later assumed the big boomers turned back into the desert after they picked up their troops, but Colin Chandler and the BBC journalists reported that a young American named Frank Meyer had shot it out toe-to-toe with four armored vehicles and two heavy tanks, and driven the bastards away.
Frank’s contract expired five days later. He wept when he shook Pike’s hand for the last time, boarded an airplane, and that had been that, changing one life for another.
Pike officially retired from contract work sixty-two days later, and maybe Frank’s decision had something to do with Pike’s decision, though Pike never thought so. Pike had told Frank to do it. Build the family he wanted. Leave the past. Always move forward.
PIKE WAS STILL AT Frank’s desk when his cell vibrated, there in the cool blue light.
Stone said, “All right, listen. They’re watching a guy named Rahmi Johnson. Been on him for almost a mon
th. I’ve got an address here for you.”
“If they’re on him, he didn’t murder Frank.”
“Rahmi isn’t the suspect. Cops think his cousin might be involved, a dude named Jamal Johnson.”
“Might be, or is?”
“Gotta have proof for it, but he looks pretty good. Check it out. Jamal was released from Soledad two weeks before the first score. He crashed with Rahmi when he got out, but moved out three days after the score. Four days after the second score, Jamal dropped by with a sixty-inch plasma to thank Rahmi for putting him up. A week after the third score, Jamal tools up in a brand-new black-on-black Malibu with custom rims. He gives the car to Rahmi, too. Can you imagine? My guy’s telling me this, I’m thinking, shit, I wish this asshole was my cousin, too.”
Stone broke out laughing, but the laughter was too loud and too long. Stone had been drinking.
Pike said, “Where’s Jamal?”
“Nobody knows, bro. That’s why they’re sitting on Rahmi.”
“Maybe Rahmi knows. Have they asked him?”
“They did, and that’s where they fucked up. Rolled by something like two months ago, when Jamal was first identified as a person of interest. Heard he was crashing with Rahmi, so they went by. Rahmi played stupid, but you know he warned Jamal the second those cops were out the door. That’s when Jamal dropped off the map.”
Pike thought about it. Thought how he would play it.
“They should ask him again.”
Stone laughed.
“Well, they’re cops, not you. That timeline business, that’s not proof, but it’s convincing. They don’t want to arrest the guy, they want to follow him. They want to catch him in the act or clear him, one way or the other.”
“So SIS is covering Rahmi, hoping Jamal will come around again.”
“They got nothing else, man. Jamal’s their only good suspect.”
Pike grunted. SIS was good. They were patient hunters. They would shadow their target for weeks like invisible men, but Pike didn’t want to wait that long. Stone was right. The police were trying to build a case, but Pike didn’t care about a case. His needs were simpler.