The next few seconds were lost time, a blackout period induced by intense stress and its sudden release. When I came out of it, I was on my feet and dragging Latimer back toward the fence, one hand bunched in the material of his jacket. We were almost there before I grew aware of the headlights fast approaching on Bluffside Drive.
Dixon, I thought. Better be. I’m in no shape to deal with strangers.
It was Dixon. Whatever he was driving bucked to a halt with the headlights shining close on my car and the Toyota. Not that he had any other choice; the way the impact had left the two machines jammed together, there was no room to drive around on either side. He came out in a hurry. He must’ve seen me—I was at the fence by then, the section of it that I’d knocked down—but he went straight to the station wagon, leaned his body inside. Looking for his son. I’d have done the same thing if the boy were mine.
Once he’d convinced himself Chuck wasn’t there, he backed out and headed my way. I was half dragging, half lifting Latimer’s limp form over the wire when he reached us. He looked at me, looked at Latimer, and said in anguished tones, “What happened, what’s Latimer doing here? Where’s Chuck?”
I tried to tell him, but my voice box wouldn’t work; all that came out of the burning in my throat was a barely audible croak. I touched my Adam’s apple to let him know I was hurt and he nodded jerkily. Then I gestured at Latimer, semiconscious and groaning; gestured at the cars, saying mutely that Dixon should help me haul the prisoner over there.
He understood, all right, but the only thing on his mind was his son. He wagged his head, backed off a step. “The house... how far is the house?”
I got words out this time in a broken whisper. “Pat, listen to me...”
He wouldn’t have listened if I’d shouted at the top of my voice. He said, “I have to know if he’s all right,” and turned on his heel and ran for the road.
Shit!
I let go of Latimer, hopped free of the fence, and went after Dixon.
On the blacktop his stride faltered briefly as his head swiveled toward his car and the other two blocking it. Then, like a long-distance runner shifting gears, his body bent forward and he was into an all-out sprint. He was in good condition, and he had long legs and the impetus of a father’s fear for his child; he began to pull away from me immediately. Even before he reached the straight stretch beyond the curve, he was eating up ground and widening the gap between us at an alarming rate.
At first I ran with one hand massaging my throat, in an effort to work off the paralysis so I could yell the right words to make him stop. But even if I’d been able to start my larynx functioning, I didn’t have the wind for forceful shouting; the suck-and-blow of my breathing was like noise in a wind tunnel. It took all I had left, as badly used and hurting as I was, to keep up the pursuit. Dixon had left me no choice. I had to get to him before he got to Chuck and it didn’t matter right then if I collapsed, maybe blew out something vital, in the effort.
More than likely I would have lost the race if he’d known which of the houses was Latimer’s. He’d opened up better than a fifty-yard lead by the time he neared the cinder block, but because the fourth house was also lighted and he couldn’t be sure which was the right one, he stayed on the road and skidded to a halt at the mailbox in front, just long enough to read the number. I was off the road by then, racing in a long diagonal for the porch. When he came charging along the path and up the porch steps, the distance between us had been chopped nearly in half. Even so, he had the door open and was bulling inside before I reached the strip of weedy front lawn.
Survival instinct shrieked at me to cut it off then and there. Urgency kept me pounding forward. I hit the bottom porch step, used the railing as a fulcrum to propel myself up the rest of the way and into the open doorway. Lights were on all through the interior, but Dixon was nowhere in sight. Then I heard him, in one of the rooms off a short hallway to my left. Involuntarily I ducked my head, hunched my shoulders—and plunged inside, into the hallway.
“Chuck, oh God, Chuckie, it’s Dad, I’m here now....”
Second room on the left. I stumbled to the doorway, and Dixon was down on his knees beside a saggy bed with an old metal frame. Chuck lay supine on the bare mattress, spread-eagled with his arms and legs tied tight to the frame, gagged and blindfolded with rags. Dixon reached out to him, crooning.
I got in there, wheezing and shaking from the exertion, and laid both hands on his shoulders and heaved him backward before he could touch the boy. He lost his balance and landed on his buttocks, yelling. “What’s the idea? What the hell’s the matter with you?”
I put myself between him and the bed, dragging in air with my mouth wide open, rubbing again at my aching throat. The first time I tried to talk, nothing happened. The second time, I was able to make words, cracked but with some force behind them. They felt bloody coming out, as if they’d torn skin off the walls of my esophagus.
“Bomb in here.”
“What!” He stared at me in confused disbelief.
“Chuck... the bed... wired somehow. Latimer boobytrapped him.”
It took a cautious look under and around the bed to convince Dixon. The explosive device was on the floor underneath, packed in a cardboard carton with wires coming out of the far side and snaking, tight with tape, along the bed frame and along Chuck’s left arm to the rope that bound his wrist. Cut or pull on those wires and father and son—and me along with them—would’ve been torn apart by whatever Latimer had put into the carton. Judging from the size of the carton, there was enough black powder and frag in there to blow up the entire house.
“The dirty son of a bitch,” Dixon said. He was trembling like a man with palsy. “I ought to go back and kill him for this. I mean it, I ought to blow his miserable fucking head off.”
But it was just talk, an expression of the most intense kind of hatred one man can feel for another. He had himself more or less under control and I would not have to go chasing after him again. I left him with Chuck, found the phone in the kitchen and called the SFPD. My voice had come back strongly enough so that I had no difficulty explaining to the night chief of inspectors what we had here. He said he’d get the bomb unit out the fastest way possible, and that he’d take care of notifying the local authorities.
I went to tell this to Dixon, but he was kneeling again beside the bed with his head bowed in an attitude of prayer. He hadn’t touched the boy in any way, but he must have talked to him, let him know everything was going to be all right: Chuck lay relaxed now, waiting, secure in the presence of his father. I went away quietly, without saying anything to either of them.
The long walk back up the road left me weak-legged and shambling a little. I’d been running on reserves for some time now and the tank was almost empty. Latimer wasn’t where I’d left him, but he hadn’t gone far; I spotted him in the pumpkin field again, crawling along crabwise on his belly between two of the rows. He was in much worse shape than I was, still dazed and disoriented, mewling words to himself. I could make out some of what he was mumbling, and it was mostly gibberish dominated by phrases like “make them pay” and “blow him sky high” and “boom boom big boom.”
Wrong, Latimer, I thought. This is the way it ends for you.
Not with a boom but a whimper.
TWENTY
IN THE BACK OF THE TOYOTA WAGON, among Latimer’s jumble of personal effects, the police found half a dozen thick 8½ × 11 spiral-bound notebooks. All were filled with chronological entries in a small, crabbed hand, dating back as far as Latimer’s last five months in San Quentin. Pat Dixon had access to the notebooks, and later in the week he let me look through them in the privacy of the D.A.’s office.
They made chilling reading.
Madman’s diaries. Psychotic ramblings on every page. The most disturbing thing about them was not the references to me in what he’d written at Deep Mountain Lake and that last evening in Half Moon Bay, but the casual way he spoke of killing as the answer
to all his problems—the assumption that he had a moral right to destroy lives, as many lives as he deemed necessary, simply because he felt he’d been wronged.
On the day of his release from prison he’d written, “Free at last. Except that I’m not free, not yet. I won’t be free until I make every last one of the bastards pay. Dixon, Turnbull, Cotter, Kathryn, Strayhorn, their brat, all of them for what they did to me. That’s all that matters. That’s the shining focus of my life from now on. I don’t even care if I die in the process as long as I get them first. Vengeance is mine, saith Donald Michael Latimer.”
Vengeance is mine. It’s an attitude that is becoming more and more prevalent these days—the lunatic’s battle cry, the mantra of the alienated, the dysfunctional, the outraged, the fanatical. Me, me, me! they shriek. I’m what’s important, nothing and nobody else. And all the while they’re stockpiling handguns and assault weapons and explosive materials, getting ready to Make Them Pay. And when the pressure becomes too great, the shrieks too deafening in their own ears, out they go to perpetrate as much carnage and mayhem as they can in the name of glorious retribution, in the sick, pathetic certainty that their deaths and the deaths of their victims will have more meaning than their empty lives.
There is something fundamentally skewed about a society that breeds so many psychos of this type; that teaches violence, or at least offers more than a modicum of tacit approval of it, as a viable problem-solving option; that allows some individuals to believe, actually feel morally justified in their belief, that it’s all right to slaughter innocent people as a means of Fighting Back or Getting Even.
Reading Latimer’s notebooks put all these thoughts in my mind, and led me to express them to Dixon. He agreed. But what can you do about it? he asked me. How do you go about altering the direction of a societal mindset that seems to be edging out of control?
I had no answer for him.
The only answer I had was personal. The one I’d come to accept for myself at Deep Mountain Lake; the one that said, among other things, that vengeance is not mine and never would be again. The one that had been around for thousands of years, long before Moses brought it down from the mountain with the nine other commandments.
Thou Shalt Not Kill.
A lot of people saw fit to thank me over the days following Latimer’s arrest and Chuck’s safe return home, in person and on the phone. Pat, Marian, Chuck, Callie Ostergaard, Mack Judson, even Sheriff Ben Rideout. All the expressions of gratitude embarrassed me; I still felt that if I’d been smarter, or quicker on the uptake, or more cautious, some of what had happened could have been avoided. But the thank-yous were nonetheless good to hear, and not because of any stroking of my ego.
They said to me that maybe society was not so bad off after all, and men like Donald Michael Latimer were only an aberration, not a proliferating mutant breed, and there was still hope for the future, for a genuine kinder, gentler world.
Maybe this was an answer, too. Or part of one.
Caring. Simple caring.
Kerry came home on Saturday afternoon. I picked her up at SFO. She took a long look at me when she got into my abused but still drivable car, one of her analytical studies, but she didn’t say anything then about the condition of my face—the bandaged cut over my eye, the bruise on my throat, the various abrasions and contusions. It was not until we’d been at the Diamond Heights condo for a while that she came over and sat on the arm of my chair and did some tender probing of a battered old phiz only she could love.
“Can’t even go away on a normal vacation, can you?” she said. More with sadness, I thought, than exasperation.
“Seems not.”
“Why do you always get mixed up in volatile situations like this latest one? Where you end up being hurt in some way?”
“If I knew how to avoid them, I would. I guess I’m a magnet—the negative-attraction kind.”
“Maybe, but that doesn’t explain why you let yourself become so deeply involved every time. What do you get out of it?”
“Do I have to get something out of it?”
“Well, you must or you wouldn’t let it happen.”
“What did you get out of roasting your pretty little hinder for eight days in Houston?”
“That’s hardly the same thing.”
“Bottom line, it is. Answer the question.”
“I told you last night. Milo Fisher signed on the dotted line.”
“So what you got out of it was a contract for the agency.”
“For a major ad campaign.”
“Right. A major ad campaign that means a lot more work for you. Eight days out of your life for a piece of paper and the thrill of putting in long hours to benefit a new client, not to mention Jim Carpenter’s bank account?”
“Of course not—”
“Money? A bonus or a big raise?”
“Money isn’t important to me, you know that.”
“Well, then? What did you get out of signing up old Milo Fisher? You personally, not Bates and Carpenter.”
“All right, smart guy, you tell me. That’s what you’re leading up to. What did I get?”
“Satisfaction,” I said.
“Oh, is that the payoff?”
“Sure it is. That’s what you get out of what you do and it’s what I get out of what I do. It’s why we work so hard, get so involved, care so much. And why we love each other, too. I satisfy you and you satisfy me, sexually and every other way.”
“You think so, do you?”
“Don’t you?”
We looked at each other. Seeing eye to eye, at last.
Pretty soon she said, “I guess you still hurt a lot.”
“Not much now. I guess you’re tired after the long trip.”
“Not too tired.”
“So?” I said.
“So?” she said.
So we went to bed. And some time later Kerry got up and I heard her singing in the shower. I grinned when I recognized the tune and lyrics. Yawned, stretched, and then laughed out loud.
The song was “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.”
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