“That brings us to a crossroads, doesn’t it?” asked Battle.
“Here’s your crossroads, Alfred—I want the girl and you’re out of time. Where are they taking her?”
“I own a compound in the desert,” said Battle. “As you know, it’s difficult to find and has good security. Daley will be safe there.”
He squinted at me and smiled fractionally—gauging my fear of returning to Paradise Date Farm. I felt fear, even with Battle as my shield. I also smelled revenge. And, more important, a chance to parse the riddles of the wasp-cams.
“Why not keep her at Cotton Point?” I asked. “Two guard gates. Tough to crack.”
“You managed to find her,” said Battle. “In truth, I had a premonition that you hadn’t gone away. In spite of your down-home welcome at Paradise. Maybe even because of it. Scent of revenge? SNR was proud to have felled a local hero.”
“Proud of six on one?”
“I treat them like attack dogs,” he said. “Always keep them a little hungry. Psychologically.”
“Stand up.”
“I’ll need to make some calls.”
“That’s funny. Stand up, old man.”
He worked himself up from the chair. Same height as me, gray raptor’s eyes boring into mine. I reached inside his suit coat and felt for a gun. Faint smell of milk on his breath. A whiff of the same shave cream Grandpa Dick uses. Dad, too.
The weapon was napping in the small of his back, right side, where I carry mine. I broke it from the holster and held it out and away, taking hold of his necktie while I ran a boot-toe around his ankles for a second gun.
“I haven’t been frisked in forty-eight years.”
“Miss it?”
“I was contemplating a knee to your face. If you’d knelt down to check my ankles.”
“Sorry to have missed that.”
I stepped back and looked at the gun, a slim five-shot revolver with an enclosed hammer and a smooth front sight—great for concealment and snag-free on the draw. Old-fashioned and deadly, like its owner. Put it in my jacket pocket.
I heard Marie coming in from the kitchen, new sneakers squeaking, oddly slow in her approach. I turned and she stopped, a nail-studded baseball bat over one shoulder, ready, both hands choked way down on the grip.
“I implore you,” she said.
“You disappoint me, Marie.”
“I so don’t mean to.”
“Please give me the bat. By the handle. And sit back down where you were.”
“Okey-dokey, Mr. Hooper.”
I set the hideous club on the coffee table, a wave of adrenaline surging through me. Careful not to scratch the glass.
Took Alfred’s phone, turned it off, and slipped it into my pocket.
“If Daley isn’t at Paradise like you say, we’ll just swing by the sheriff’s station in Encinitas,” I said. “Where I’ll introduce you to Detective Sergeant Darrel Walker. Black dude, good cop. He’d love to see my Cotton Point pictures of you and Daley. He’s already got the crime-scene shots of Nick Moreno. He’d enjoy bringing charges against a legendary white-supremacist geezer such as yourself.”
“Proving charges could be difficult.”
“So could dying in prison.”
“Which is why I need assurance that once the girl is in your possession, you will not inform on me to law enforcement. A simple this for that.”
“No assurance,” I said. “But for tonight I’m your only hope of staying a free man, Alfred. Take me to the girl.”
A heavy lift of eyebrow. “Would two hundred thousand dollars buy your silence regarding me and the girl and the boyfriend? Allowing your cop friends to focus on the actual actors—Connor, Adam, and Eric? I have the cash, right here on the property. Or Bitcoin, if you prefer. Almost impossible to trace, as you know.”
I was disappointed but not surprised that Battle would so eagerly throw his men under the bus. I had to figure they would throw him under, too.
“You’re driving,” I said.
Extra sharpness in his eyes as he regarded his wife. “I’ll be home shortly, Marie.”
“Will you come to me by moonlight, though hell should bar the way?”
Battle looked at me. “That’s from her other Alfred. Noyes, the poet. May I say goodbye?”
“Oh, take your time,” I said. While Alfred and Marie hugged, I texted Burt and Lark, looking up to the Battles between letters. Alfred kissed her on the cheek. Her chin quivered. She rose and hugged him long and close, plump arms around his thin frame.
“Do nothing foolish, dear,” he said. “Do nothing at all.”
When he broke away and she looked at me, a tear rolled from her left eye. I looked at the nailed club on the coffee table and I tried to judge her capabilities against her madness. Close call.
“Marie,” I said, “would you like to come along?”
“I will not endanger her in any way,” said Battle.
“I thought you’d never ask!” said Marie.
I politely searched her for a phone or weapon, found neither. She smelled of lilac.
“That was a little personal,” she said, smiling.
Outside, I took the battery out of Battle’s phone, then locked them and his revolver in the big tool chest bolted to the bed of my truck.
We got in and closed the doors. Battle in the driver’s seat, me on the passenger’s side, Marie in back. She had her seat belt fastened first. I set my .45 on my lap and started the engine. Battle glanced at the gun, then adjusted the mirrors slightly. Marie looked through a window and waved goodbye to her house.
“Drive,” I said.
We wound down through the orange grove toward Holiday Lane. “I expect some kind of help from you,” said Battle. “SNR discovered a runaway girl. They did not abduct her. There was no force involved. No threats or coercion of any kind. They were protecting her from Reggie Atlas.”
“Nick Moreno,” I said.
“I knew nothing about him. I’d never heard his name until the news.”
“Save all that for Darrel Walker.”
“I will not be done in by a runaway girl and the timely removal of one muddy sexual predator.”
“Don’t count on it. What do you think about all this, Marie?” I asked.
“All what?”
41
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A QUARTER-MOON rose over the In-Ko-Pah Mountains, boulders heaped in the dark. Imperial Valley ahead, heat rising and the brittlebush shivering in the wind. A red Cadillac Eldorado fell in behind me from S-2.
Battle drove the speed limit, eyes on the road and one bony hand relaxed way down at six o’clock on the wheel. He’d been telling me about his boyhood in Houston, his high school days in Yuma, his time in Korea as a rear gunner on a B-29, trying to shoot down MiG-15s the Russians had sold to North Korea. Marie had fallen asleep with her head against the window.
“I had eyes like a falcon back then,” he said. “Twenty-ten, and a good sense of leads and trajectories from shooting doves in Arizona. They got me into that Superfortress in a hurry. We shot down two. I got some lead into both of them. Now we got Kias and Hyundais invading us. Should have pounded them to nothing like Japan. We’d have one big clean subservient nation under us. Instead of some nutcase with nukes and a bad haircut.”
The heat rose when he hit the valley floor. Flat rows of crops fanning by, the smells of cut alfalfa and onions drawn into the cab by the AC.
Battle gave me a quick hard look, then turned back to the road. “You’ve got all the fixin’s to become a red-blooded American patriot,” he said. “A father in the Navy, mother a history teacher and a DAR. You served in Iraq, First Fallujah, if my IvarDuggans search is correct. Law enforcement. Now you’re a sneaky PI. Charging money to commit unsavory acts. Deceiving a kindly older woman with a long history
of mental illness. What happened to you?”
“I know phony indignation when I see it.”
“So it’s all okay, what you do?” asked Battle.
“When I can’t sleep at night it’s not from something I did,” I said. “It’s always from something I didn’t.”
“Hmm,” he said. “Might your abrupt slide down the moral ladder have been caused by the fact that you should have killed that crazy nigger when you had the chance? Instead of letting your partner do it?”
I’d thought about that over the years, a lot. What I’d done and hadn’t done on that cool cloudy day in an alley behind an Imperial Beach strip mall.
“If I could,” I said, “I’d not kill him all over again. His name was Titus Miller and he wasn’t armed.”
“He had a gun in his belongings.”
“Some yards away from him, not within his reach. Down in a cart that held all his worldly riches.”
“Blah,” said Battle. “Coward’s talk. Hiding behind the least understood commandment of them all. You want to see true Christianity, get yourself a look at Judith Beheading Holofernes by Caravaggio.”
“I’ve seen it. It has what to do with me?”
“It’s got everything to do with bringing our race back to its natural leadership of the world,” said Battle. “The rest of the world is Holofernes, Mr. Ford. You can see it in his dark, bestial, beheaded face. On some level you understand that. That you are superior. That you are Judith. But you’re afraid of it. It offends you because you have been brainwashed into being offended.”
I waved him off, indicating boredom. “Hate never changes,” I said. “Just the packaging. Hitler. Spencer. Enoch. You. It’s the same old whining.”
“Hitler?” asked Marie, head bobbing off the window glass.
“How are you back there, hon?”
“Can you turn the AC down a little?”
I reached between the seats to the rear control, turned it down.
Then got another glance at me from the old man, the crags of his face deep in the dashboard glow.
“I need to pee,” he said.
“You can pull over. The shoulder looks firm.”
“There’s a rest stop up ahead,” he said.
“No. I don’t want you out of my sight.”
“He’s too old to run,” said Marie. “Look at all that dust.”
Battle signaled and eased the truck onto the shoulder.
“Make it quick,” I said.
“Settle down, now, Roland,” said Battle.
We got out and Battle ambled into the desert in his brown suit, the wind whipping his coat. I leaned against the bed with a peripheral view of Marie and watched him. Wingtips raising sand. Read Lark’s message: Paradise search warrant and SWAT in hand. I saw Battle stop, spread his legs, reach forward with both hands. Old men take a long time to pee. Maybe the wind was a factor. My high school buddy Dirk Ott went fifty-one seconds, no double-clutching, fueled by a twelve-pack. Battle finally turned, zipping up on his way back. The wind gusted and Battle teetered uncertainly.
* * *
—
HALF AN HOUR to turnoffs for Coyote Wells, Plaster City, Dixieland. I felt my nerves rising and the clarity brought by fear. Battle got off on Rattlesnake, went east toward Buena Vista, and turned right onto the familiar dirt road that would take us to Paradise Date Farm.
“Know where you are?” he asked.
“Pretty much.”
“I failed world geography,” said Marie.
“Scared, Roland?” asked Battle.
“Some,” I said.
“How many stitches?”
“A bunch.”
“You must want a rematch,” said Battle. “Revenge. One of the building blocks of civilization. I wish you were one of us.”
“And so do I, Mr. Hooper!”
“You’ve got enough young men to order around,” I said.
“You have a conscience, though.”
“Is that good or bad in SNR Security?” I asked.
“It’s good, Roland. My people are the deep and strong. The straight and true. Right belief. Right convictions. Right thought.”
“There is only one right,” said Marie.
“That’s the nonsense that trips you people up every time,” I said.
“There’s the entrance,” said Battle. “Oh, damn. What is this?”
I looked through the darkness to the faintly lit guard tower and the guardhouse and the twinkling chain-link fence.
Saw the white FBI Suburbans, the black-and-white Imperial County vehicles—six in all—and Mike Lark in a Bureau windbreaker and street clothes, waving us closer. In the side mirror, Burt’s red Eldorado swept in from the darkness behind.
“You’ve betrayed me,” said Battle.
“I told you I couldn’t help you.”
“For a fourteen-year-old runaway?” said Battle.
“And the crates you’ve been smuggling in from San Onofre.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Let’s go see about that, Alfred.”
I pointed to the gate. He pulled behind Lark’s Suburban, handed me the key fob, and shook his head. Lark started toward Alfred’s side of the truck.
“This has federal overreach written all over it,” said Battle.
“You’re about to meet FBI Special Agent Mike Lark.”
“Him? He looks like he’s still in high school.”
We climbed out of the truck and into the gusting wind. The Paradise Date Farm sign shuddered in place on the gate, and the desert dust swirled in the cones of the floodlights.
Introductions made and search warrant served, Battle agreed to lead us onto his property. He entered the code and the tall steel-pole gate opened on squeaky wheels. When he turned to face the rest of us, a dozen headlights blanched his face.
Marie was boarded into the back of an armored sheriff’s Bearcat, accepting a hand up from a hefty black deputy. No sooner had Lark ushered Battle into his Suburban than Burt slipped into my truck, a red PGA windbreaker twice his size billowing around him.
“This is going to be a good one,” he said. “It’s got some O.K. Corral going for it.”
“What I want,” I said, “is Daley Rideout in one piece.”
42
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THE road to Paradise was dirt washboard that kept our speeds down and a steady blizzard of dust blown by the vehicles ahead. I wore shooting glasses against the wind and sand, yellow lenses for low light. We were fourth back, behind the Bureau Suburbans, and ahead of the sheriff. I guessed ten FBI agents, including their SWAT, and ten deputies.
No surveillance drones in the sky that I could see. The gusting wind would keep them down, ditto law enforcement helicopters, in case Lark and the sheriffs had any airborne ideas.
The old boxing scar on my forehead burned, and the swirling black night seemed to sneer at my hopes. I wondered if Battle had fooled me. If his bargaining over Daley was cover for luring me away from her. And into an SNR ambush. Burt had sensed it, thus his Tombstone remark. And why not a trap? Battle had known full well that I’d deliver him to the police. His $200,000 hush money having failed, maybe an ambush was his only option. Send me to the sandman. Literally. Plenty of places out in this desert where the pesky PI would never be found. Ashes to ashes and sand to sand. Not too deep, boys. Let the sun and the critters do their work.
I had assumed that my multiagency backup would surprise him. Feds, no less. But maybe SNR had standing plans for such a raid.
We pulled into the floodlit center of the compound, the buildings forming a loose circle around us. Lark dropped to the ground, then Battle, who buttoned his coat in his oddly formal way and stood facing the farmhouse. The rest of us scrambled from our vehicles as a unit, everyon
e but Marie.
The farmhouse door swung open and out marched Connor Donald, followed by Eric Glassen and Adam Revell. Each wore chinos and black golf shirts and yellow shooting glasses, and each carried an M4 machine gun on a sling over his shoulder.
The shuffle of guns, safeties, and slides. My hand back and ready. Burt with his feet spread, the windbreaker rippling.
The three SNR men stopped ten feet short of their boss.
“Bring out the girl,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” said Donald, raising an open hand into the air.
Daley stepped onto the front porch between Flat-Top Woman and Tattooed Forearms, guns on their hips as before.
She wore the same shorts, flip-flops, and comedy hoodie. Same backpack. She pulled her rolling carry-on behind her and carried her backpacker guitar in its gig bag.
My heart sank.
She was ready for me.
They were ready for me.
Battle had ordered them to have her ready to go. How and when?
And what else had he ordered?
A rifle shot cracked from the darkness behind us and a sheriff’s deputy pitched forward. I hit the dirt as Daley broke away into the darkness and Flat-Top Woman and Tattooed Forearms drew their guns and were cut down by agents and deputies not thirty feet away. The Bearcat tore back toward the gate.
Then a barrage of fire from the main house, and more from the barn and the metal hangar and the row of bunkhouses behind us. Slugs clanged into the FBI Suburban and the sheriff’s vehicles, sparks flying and windows collapsing in the twang of ricochets. Battle strode toward the hangar as if invincible, Connor Donald and Adam Revell backpedaling beside him, M4s rattling rounds back at us.
Burt and I crawled under my truck and out the other side, jumped to our feet and zigzagged after Daley.
I made the darkness and saw her running through the swirling desert sand, not fifty yards away. From behind me came a fusillade of law enforcement return fire, and, looking over my shoulder, I saw their tracer rounds punching through the home and the metal hangar and the barn and bunkhouses. Teargas rockets arched and plummeted. Lark bellowed orders and men screamed in agony.
The Last Good Guy Page 26