The Last Good Guy

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Back to my desktop monitor: Connor Donald and Eric Glassen coming from the cottage, wearing long black rubber gloves and hazmat masks. Flat-Top Woman on her way inside. Adam Revell hopped down from the forklift and followed.

  “I didn’t know you need heavy gloves and hazmat masks to handle dates,” said Burt.

  Flat-Top Woman and Revell came out a moment later, suited up like the others.

  Wasp-cam four gave us a good look at the wooden crates, each bound with three metal bands. No brands, labels, writing, or numbers on them. Pine? They looked to be nearly five feet long, a foot wide, and a foot deep.

  Revell and the woman took one end of a crate, squatting and straining mightily, horsing it away from the others. Connor and Eric took the other end, and the four of them—two on each side, short-stepping, backs straight—carried the crate toward the cottage.

  “Clearly not TV dinners,” said Burt. “What can it be now?”

  The heaviest material per volume I’d ever handled was ammunition in Fallujah. A 420-round steel can of .223-caliber M4 ammo in each hand put you in a hurry to get where you were going. Hoping you got there before the steel handles bit you. But one of these wooden crates at Paradise wouldn’t hold more than ten of those cans. Four adults? It looked like they were hauling something a lot heavier than that.

  “Metals?” said Burt. “But why freeze them?”

  “Gas under pressure,” I said. “To keep it contained.”

  “Unstable chemicals. Isotopes.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Things that date farmers and security guards depend on in their everyday lives.”

  They got up the low porch steps and crept inside on their eight straining legs, like a giant spider.

  A minute later they came out, rested in the porch shade, then went to the forklift for round two. Revell lifted his mask and wiped his forehead on his sleeve before taking his corner of the crate. Flat-Top Woman was breathing hard. Donald and Glassen had sweated through their black golf shirts.

  A few minutes after the last delivery, the four were back on the porch, breathing heavily and conversing, their hazmat masks and gloves left inside. Revell pulled the cottage door shut and locked it.

  “Heavy crates in high-performance freezers,” said Burt. “Guarded by a publicity-shy security company that has a regional office in San Diego, accounts across America, and does not hire blacks or Muslims. Speculate, Champ.”

  “Maybe later. I have a story to tell you about Penelope Rideout, Daley, and Reggie Atlas. Conflicting versions of a possibly very ugly truth.”

  * * *

  —

  THAT NIGHT I sat in my truck on a turnout of a narrow road, with a view of Pastor Reggie Atlas’s home in Rancho Santa Fe. A rural road, no lights, the moon a waning quarter whisked by clouds.

  On a gentle hilltop sat the house, well lit. Large and Italianate, stone walls and a bell tower and cypress trees lining a winding drive. Why do so many Californians want to live in homes that look Italian? Are there California-style homes all around Rome and Milan? I saw that a pasture sloped to the road. White estate fencing, screened, and a white gate with a speaker/keypad column, car-window high.

  Adjacent to the house was a big three-car garage, door open but unlit, three cars inside with room to spare.

  I listened to the radio on low, studied the grounds with my night-vision glasses, elbows steady on the window frame.

  A sudden buzz and rattle in my cup holder. I put Penelope Rideout on the speaker, returned my phone to its place, and turned off the radio.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was an awful lot to lay on you. I was covering new territory, Roland. It was harder than I thought. I’ll hang up right now if you want.”

  I spoke softly. “Atlas said it never happened and you won’t allow a test to prove it didn’t.”

  A few seconds went by and I thought Penelope really was about to hang up.

  “I know what happened, Roland. It is written in me. But I don’t want her to know that truth. I understand I’m not permitted to even think such a thing about lofty truth. It goes against what we’re taught from the very beginning. And what it said on the Grecian urn. And all that about setting us free. But the story that Mom and Dad and I invented for her is more likely. Things could easily have happened just that way. And it’s better. It frees her from knowing that she’s the result of wickedness done to me. It gives her solid ground to stand on, and a simple history to be a part of. Something to build a life on, other than self-loathing and anger.”

  “He said you went after him years ago, and he refused you.”

  A catch of breath. Then the matter-of-fact cold in her voice. “I could kill him for saying that.”

  Then came Penelope’s self-description riding the breeze through my open windows: ninety percent lover and ten percent killer.

  “Roland, he’s trying to justify his own monstrous behavior. Did he ask you to find Daley and bring her to him?”

  I saw Atlas come from the house. He went a few yards down the walkway, stepped under the leaves of a magnolia tree. He wore his regulation jeans and white shirt, but tonight he was barefoot.

  “Roland?”

  “Yes, he asked me to bring her to him.”

  Atlas lit a cigarette. The smoke rose and spread.

  “And what did you say back?”

  “I’ll bring her to you, as contracted.”

  “You don’t believe Reggie Atlas, do you?”

  “I believe that Daley is in danger.”

  The sound of Penelope breathing. “You do believe him. You believe I brought this all upon myself and Daley. You big dumb man. Isn’t my word good enough?”

  “You’ve given me a lot of words, Penelope. Some are more truthful than others.”

  “Yes, I have,” she said. “What a terrible mistake I’ve made. But you’re still under contract with me. Daley is mine and you will deliver her to me, as written.”

  And hung up.

  The phone screen went to black. Atlas smoked his cigarette under the magnolia. He pulled a phone from his pants pocket and I could see the faint light on his downturned face. He worked it with one hand, read the screen, then tapped a command.

  Penelope again:

  “Roland Ford, you’re not a big dumb man at all. You’re a huge, stupid ox.”

  I waited for her to end the call. Instead I heard her breathing again, this time faster and louder.

  “For an ox,” I said, “I’m of average intelligence.”

  “I’m going to get the better of you someday.”

  She hung up again.

  As I raised my eyes from the phone to the house, I saw that a vehicle had stopped at Pastor Reggie Atlas’s pearly white gate. It was a silver late-model Cadillac CTS, the ones with the stealth body panels and fighter-jet front end. Wrote the plate number in my notebook. Rolled down the driver-side window.

  Atlas ground his cigarette butt into the grass at his feet, tapped something into his phone, and the gate lurched to life. The car started up the drive, curbside motion lights coming on to show the way. Atlas stayed beneath the tree until the Cadillac came to a stop a few yards short of the garage.

  In my night-vision binoculars I watched the driver’s door swing open and a tall, slender old man unfold from the front seat. He looked to be eighty, with brisk white hair brushed back over a creased, hawklike face. Sharp nose, thin lips, bushy eyebrows. A brown suit, cut and cuffed in an older style. Expensive, by the look of it. White shirt, red tie. He was familiar, in a distant, secondhand way.

  Penelope, back for thirds: “I’m sorry for what I said. Please find my daughter.”

  And just as suddenly, gone.

  Old Hawk lifted the trunk lid and left it open, then walked to the magnolia tree. He conversed with Atlas in a terse, all-business kind of way. I wasn’t close enough to hear
their words or even the sound of their words. Guessing from Atlas’s gestures—his open hands and interrogative expressions—he was asking for something. Old Hawk seemed to listen patiently, but nothing in his posture or movements gave me any indication of positive or negative. To Old Hawk, Reggie Atlas could have been a branch to perch on or a mouse to eat.

  Old Hawk tapped a finger against Reggie’s chest. Words from a dry smile. Atlas poked the older man back and said something in return.

  Old Hawk marched long-legged into the garage, turning on the lights, and opened the trunk of a gleaming black Mercedes AMG sedan. Lifted out a metal Halliburton case and walked to his car. Set the Halliburton in the trunk and closed the lid with a touch of a button.

  Reggie stepped from under the tree and joined the old man by his car. The two men talked for less than a minute, then Old Hawk climbed into his Cadillac. The silver sedan made a wide turn and headed down the drive.

  I followed him through the winding roads of Rancho Santa Fe to Del Dios Highway, and all the way to Escondido. Plenty of traffic for cover. Out on the east side of town the homes got older and smaller, and the business signs turned to Spanish and the barrio said hola. The silver CTS proceeded comfortably down the avenue, went right on Holiday Lane, then made a sharp left and stopped at a gate.

  End of my welcome. I drove past, made a U-turn, and came back in time to see the CTS heading up the drive. It was narrow and curvy but paved. No buildings or dwellings, only a poorly kept grove of orange trees. The Cadillac’s headlights raked through trees with thin branches, sparse leaves, and small stranded fruit. More oranges in the dirt than on the trees. On top of the hill stood what looked to be a cluster of buildings surrounded by trees that nearly hid them from sight. A few lights through the foliage. When the Cadillac was about halfway to the top, security lights came on along the road, leading the way through the dark to the buildings within the trees.

  27

  ////////////////////////

  FBI Special Agent Mike Lark was not quite a friend but much more than an acquaintance. We had had the same boss, though at different times in our careers. Her name was Joan Taucher. Joan was a tough and complex woman, and her death last year—shot by a terrorist on my property—rocked Mike’s world and mine considerably. I killed that terrorist, a few seconds too late to save Joan’s life. A soul-bruising series of events. I will take them to my grave.

  Mike Lark had been not only Joan Taucher’s FBI understudy but her lover, too. I hadn’t seen him since her funeral, late last December. Now he looked more than nine months older. Mid-twenties. Same short blond hair, but leaner in the face and harder in his brown, Taucher-like eyes.

  We met in the pay lot at Torrey Pines State Beach, shook hands. I told him I’d explain my most recent facial improvements later. We headed north on the dry, low-tide sand. Plenty of surfers on the small waves. Walkers and runners and kids with beach toys. On this mid-September day I could feel the change of seasons coming on. Just a liner of cool in the air that hadn’t been there a week ago.

  The license plate number I’d taken down from Old Hawk’s CTS had led me to Lark, whose FBI database had swiftly revealed the registered owner of the car, and his history.

  “Alfred Battle is the godfather of San Diego’s once formidable white supremacists,” said Lark. “Two years ago returned from Idaho. Even Hayden Lake was glad to be rid of him. He told the media here he was ‘returning to the land of the mud people’ to live permanently. ‘Mud people’ being blacks and Hispanics. He bought his old spread up in Escondido, where he held the Aryan rallies and conferences in the seventies and eighties. Hoping to recapture his glory days, like everyone else. He has informal rallies on Sunday mornings. Bills them as the ‘White Power Hour.’ Guest speakers, glossy propaganda, fruit punch and sandwiches. Late in the morning, though, so he’s not competing with church. I stopped by with a couple of other agents one Sunday and they were happy to escort us out. We’ve got nothing actionable on him. We’d love to shut him down, but it’s a free country. He’s got the city and fire permits, the porta-potties, plenty of parking. It’s a big compound. Views to the ocean, much too nice a place for him. Battle’s a hateful sonofabitch and it shows. A nasty dude in his day. Yet he’s never spent a night behind bars. What else do you want to know about him?”

  “I’d like to know why he picked up a Halliburton case from Pastor Reggie Atlas last night,” I said. “For starters.”

  A sharp-eyed question from Lark. “You’re sure it was Reggie Atlas?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “It tracks. If Battle worked for a college, you’d say he’s in development. He raises money. He lectures, gives these long, booming speeches. He writes propaganda blogs on Reddit and 4chan and any other Internet platform that will have him. Agitates. Riles people up. Big in Europe. He’s a modest trust-funder himself. His wife has the deep pockets, though—Marie. An heir to the Knippermeir family fortune—Knippermeir’s Breakfast Meats. She’s the nominal owner of most of Alfred Battle’s portfolio. Law-abiding, a generous donor, protected by money. Reclusive. There have been questions about her mental health, over the years.”

  I thought that over for a moment. “You think we have a briefcase full of cash meant for the Cathedral by the Sea, but actually going to Alfred Battle’s haters?”

  “They’ll take money anyplace they can get it,” said Lark. “They prefer Bitcoin, but church dollars spend well, too. Plus, the Cathedral by the Sea gets the big tax breaks, which drives our lawyers bats.”

  “Is Battle on your watch list?”

  Lark stopped, picked up a flat black oval rock, and skipped it over the incoming soup. I wanted to do that, too, but my rib shrieked at the thought. Mike gave me a long look.

  “Probably,” he said. “There’s social buzz about the Cathedral by the Sea discriminating against blacks and browns. That catches our federal attention. Hate crimes give us certain, well, latitudes. Nothing actionable yet, like I said.”

  “Atlas insulted Mexico in his Sunday sermon.”

  “Why are you looking at him, Roland?”

  I told him about runaway Daley Rideout, the murder of Nick Moreno, Daley’s link to Adam Revell of SNR Security, and my discussion with said security guards when I surprised them at Paradise Date Farm. Also about Penelope Rideout’s and Reggie Atlas’s sharply divergent stories regarding Daley’s nativity, and her most recent sighting at the Blue Marlin restaurant in La Jolla. Told him that I’d staked out Atlas’s house and Alfred Battle had come up in the net.

  Mike mostly frowned at the sand as he walked and listened, but again, he studied me intently when I spoke of Reggie Atlas.

  “So you really don’t know if the girl is being held against her will or not,” said Lark.

  “She wasn’t at first, but now I’m not so sure,” I said. “She left for school that morning, came home at lunch with Moreno, changed clothes, packed, and went to Moreno’s condo. Followed by Connor Donald and Eric Glassen of SNR. She knew them. She and some of her girlfriends had accepted rides from them after school to an Oceanside teen club. More than once. She left the condo with them, after they’d killed Moreno. Left willingly, too—although she couldn’t have known what they’d done to him at that point. Later seen on the beach at San Onofre, possibly partying with friends. Who either scared her or pissed her off or both—no details. Maybe they said something about Nick. They took her phone. I think they were SNR handlers, based on a description from a surfer who talked to her—possibly Connor and Glassen, possibly not. She surfaced late that night in San Clemente, apparently trying to ditch them. She called her sister from a 7-Eleven in San Clemente to come get her. Or her mother. To be determined. Then left, possibly with the same SNR handlers she had gotten away from. Vanishes completely for days. Last seen at dinner with SNR people from Paradise Date Farm, at an expensive restaurant in La Jolla. She flips and flops, Mike. I don’t get her.”

 
“Drugs, fear, and hunger,” said Lark. “Throw in some expensive clothes and fancy restaurants and it will take the fight right out of her. Pimps ’R Us.”

  “I don’t think these guys are sex traders,” I said. “They’re up to something else, but I don’t know what.”

  We picked our way around a spit of boulders buffed to ovals by the centuries. A huge raven overtook us from behind, shadow first.

  “Who do you believe?” Lark asked. “Penelope or Atlas?”

  “Neither all the way,” I said.

  “It’s a sad story, if what she says is true.”

  “Oh, I think she’s telling mostly truth.”

  He squinted to acknowledge the way I’d contradicted myself. “Then you’ll return Daley to her?”

  “I believe so.”

  “But she won’t allow a paternity test,” said Lark. “Which means you still won’t know who the mother or father are. That doesn’t sound like you, Roland, not getting to the truth. Good former lawman that you are.”

  I knew he was right. And once again—for probably the thousandth time since that night in Penelope’s house, when she’d told me the story of the lovestruck girl and the lust-bitten preacher—I tried to weigh her story against Atlas’s.

  “I’ll make sure to get a test,” I said.

  “You can’t,” said Lark. “Only the court can order it.”

  “I’ll find a way.”

  Mike raised a doubtful eyebrow. “Unbelievable what some people will do. If Atlas did what she says, I mean.”

  I had nothing to add.

  “I wish Joan was here,” said Lark. “She’d have some choice words on Atlas. On human nature in general. Get into a lather over it. Then she’d say something critical of herself and make me laugh.”

  I laughed softly, first time in a long time, knowing exactly what he meant. We continued north in a long silence, lost in separate remembrances. Taucher was a fierce cop. Devoted, indefatigable, principled, and resourceful. Haunted by an opportunity that her San Diego FBI had missed in the days before 9/11. That ghost seemed to swirl around her, and she made little effort to deny it. She told me once that she thought about the FBI’s having an informant living with two of the hijackers—but, thanks to CIA silence about these men, no knowledge that they had been linked to al-Qaeda—“every damned day of my life.” It showed on her face and in the way she spoke and in the ceaseless energy she brought to her work. She had loved her job and her city—she’d grown up here in San Diego—and the attacks on our republic had left Joan Taucher feeling like a mother whose children had been betrayed. She was ferocious and, somehow, I have come to believe, cursed. She left her dying blood on me. A lot of it. All I could do was try to talk her through the divide. But I had tried that in Fallujah and had already lost my faith in words.