Then She Vanished

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Broadman pointed his phone at Strait. “Let me tell you what Natalie did when she saw you in the press conference in her own home, suggesting that she was responsible for the misspent campaign money. She became ill in her apartment—the one in the hills behind the Bighorn. She cursed and vomited and tried to slash her wrist with the small pink razor I allowed her. Unsuccessfully. That was her low point. The point at which all of the past stopped and the future started. After that, your wife began to see you for who you really are. And to see me for who I really am.”

  “Who’s that?” asked Dalton.

  “A simple man trying to save a nation from itself.”

  “You blow up innocent people and get nuts to shoot cops. Get all the angry losers to burn cars in the streets. You’re not saving anybody from anything.”

  “I’m not finished with my mission, Private. Of course there’s work to do. Much to rebuild. My compound, my factory, my organization.”

  “Come on, Natalie,” said Dalton, bending his bad knee with one hand and pushing off with the other for the long task of standing up. “Sarge has lost it. Let’s get out of here.”

  “You owe him an apology, too,” she said.

  “For what? For trying to save his life while half of Fallujah was shooting at me?”

  The distant desert cars had come closer. I recognized the dull body of the old pickup truck I keep in the barn for occasions like this. The other vehicle I’d never seen: a shining metallic green-on-white ’57 Chevy convertible, top off, with enormous white-sidewall tires and a gleaming chrome roll cage overhead.

  Broadman turned to look, then back at me. “Tell them to stop or I’ll kill both of you and them.”

  I dialed Burt and a moment later saw the vehicles come to a stop, overtaken by advancing clouds of dust.

  Dalton finally staggered upright and got his balance. The backpack was still snugly in place. I wondered how powerful a charge Broadman had created.

  “I’ll give you one last chance to beg my forgiveness, Dalton,” said Broadman. “I was hoping you’d do that the day you visited me in bungalow nineteen. When you saw what your cowardice had done to me. That’s why I wanted to see you. But you refused to even remember that day in Fallujah.”

  “I remember how hard I tried to get you out, the flames and the heat and the harness that I couldn’t cut through. Then the bullets snapping past. Christ, Sarge—I was terrified . . . Made some bad decisions . . .”

  “You didn’t try to get me out. You didn’t get me into the road. I got myself there. You were behind the K-rails the whole time. I know from Axel and Donald. Others who saw it. They were the ones who helped. You were hiding the whole time. Crying and peeing your pants.”

  Dalton held both arms out, palms up and fingers spread as he limped toward his wife and his sergeant. He stopped twenty feet from them, no more.

  “I’ve been trying to make up for that day ever since! Can’t you see that? Natalie? Sarge?”

  Broadman offered Natalie his phone. Whispered in her ear. She looked up into his ruined face for a moment before taking it.

  Then stepped slowly toward Dalton, the eager, rough-cut boy she’d fallen in love with twenty-five years, two sons, and a war ago. She stopped ten feet short of him. I’m not sure what I saw on her face. Hope. Surrender. Resolve.

  I stood in the shade of the dragon’s head. I was three seconds from my pistol and ninety feet away from four gunmen in a black Yukon.

  Natalie studied her husband with a doubtful squint then turned back to Broadman.

  “I can’t do this, Harris.”

  “You can and you will, Natalie. You are free and brave.”

  Dalton took a step toward her, swinging his plastic limb in clumsy determination and unslinging the pack from his back. Another patch of cholla stopped him.

  “Natalie!” Broadman called out in his calm clear voice. “Everything we talked about. Everything you are and everything we need to do.”

  She turned to him again. Then back to Dalton, trying to pick his way through the cactus as the needled balls broke off and clung to his legs.

  She looked down at the phone in her hand again, as if surprised to find it there.

  Now entangled in the cactus patch, Dalton swept frantically with his bad leg, then tried to windmill the bomb at Broadman. But the heavy pack caught the cholla on its way up, blooped into the air and landed between him and Natalie.

  Natalie froze in confusion.

  Jackie O and Cassy ran.

  Broadman lifted a second phone and worked it with his thumb.

  “Run, Natalie!” he yelled.

  Dalton lurched from the cactus patch and dove onto the pack.

  I backed against the Serpent’s neck, drew my gun and shot Broadman in the chest. I didn’t hear the .45 go off. Only the sharp explosion that lifted Dalton off the ground in a bloody shrug and sent a cloud of red and white sand into the air.

  Bullets banged wildly off the Serpent as the Yukon tore off into the desert toward Cassy and Jackie O. I rose to one knee, led the vehicle and shot fast. Dalton lay heaped and shredded, Natalie on her knees beside him, screaming, her hands on his back as the flesh and blood and sand rained down. “You’re okay, Dalton. You’re okay. Honey, you’re okay!”

  I approached low in a shooter’s stance and found white-clad Broadman dead in the sand, heart-shot, one leg buckled under the other, the phone still in his hand.

  In the middle distance I saw the black Yukon sliding to a stop near Cassy and Jackie O, as my old pickup truck and the Mad Max ’57 Chevy sped across the desert to engage them.

  Natalie bent over Dalton, head on his back, sobbing.

  I listened to the wind and the diminishing whine of the engines and the tremendous pounding of my heart. Stood there for a long while, gun dangling in one hand as my old pickup and the crazy-looking ’57 Chevy pinned down the black Yukon in a crossfire. Heard the pop-pop of battle I knew too well, watched Burt and Tola take cover behind my old truck, heard the twang of bullets through metal. Watched as Virgil Strait and three of his confederates fired down from a roll-caged platform on the crudely armored, huge-tired green-and-white convertible. Saw Cassy and Jackie O go down near the Yukon, followed by two Chaos Committee gunmen, the bullets passing through them to kick up sand as they fell. The two remaining soldiers ran haphazardly away, one of them limping, as Virgil and his men ran them down in the Chevy and killed them in an extravagant fusillade.

  After which the Mad Max war wagon and the old pickup truck tore up the desert in victorious circles around the Yukon and the dead, dust rose into the darkening sky.

  The sun lowered into purple mountains, painting the vast white desert and the tiny vehicles upon it a luminous gold.

  While through the golden glow, the man-made Serpent looked down at the carnage with his starved and violent grimace.

  I helped Natalie stand.

  FORTY-TWO

  Another Wednesday with the Irregulars: Dick’s deep-fried catfish and group-effort appetizers cooled and complemented by a pitcher of Grandma Liz’s greyhounds made with fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice and a touch of blood orange liqueur.

  At cocktail hour we played Ping-Pong and commiserated over the Padres’ un-great spring. Most agreed that Phil Rivers, our beloved Chargers QB, should—at thirty-eight—take his spring training more gingerly. To live near San Diego is to love our sports teams, even when they betray us for money and move away.

  “We should have built the stadium,” said Liz.

  “Absolute waste of taxpayer money,” said Dick. “The city would have to buy up the empty seats for games again, just to keep the Chargers in town.”

  “What’s more important than that?” asked Liz.

  “The homeless, dear. Those less fortunate than us. They’re everywhere you look downtown.”

  “I know you, Dick Ford, and you do
n’t care one bit about the homeless or the poor.”

  “Absolutely true, which should tell you exactly how bad an investment I think a stadium would be.”

  “You’re a hateful miser,” said his wife. “That’s why I live as far away from you as I can.”

  A tart reference to their longtime living arrangements here at Rancho de los Robles—Dick in casita one and Liz as far down the breezeway as you can get, in casita six.

  Odile, the gentle psychic, cleared her throat. “God must love the common man because he made so many of them.”

  “And dogs, too,” said Francisco, running his hand down Triunfo’s sleek black head.

  “Dogs are superior to us, psychically,” said Odile. “They have purer minds.”

  “That’s because they’re animals,” said Dick. “No real minds at all. They’ve got it easy.”

  “I disagree,” said Odile.

  “We suffer greatly,” said Dick. “Because we know the end. We know there is an end. They don’t.”

  Odile considered Dick as she sipped the greyhound. She has a beautiful complexion and an innocent’s gaze, which belie her empathy for the darkness in us.

  “But the fact that life ends allows us grace,” she said. “For example, I sense there’s been a change in my clients over the last week. Since The Chaos Committee was stopped. Since our chances of death seem less now. I receive strength and optimism from my clients. Hope and determination. Their auras have much more energy than before. Even the timbres of their voices express positive force.”

  “I’ve noticed that, too,” said Burt. “On the links.”

  “People are just flat-out exhausted,” said Dick.

  “But their drives are carrying better,” said Burt, offering Dick his weird smile.

  “And relieved,” said Liz. “It’s only been a week but I’m already having trouble believing it really happened. Two weeks of chaos in the state. Or whatever they’re calling it.”

  And they were right. The curse of The Chaos Committee was beginning to lift. Their leader and seven of his followers had been killed; one remained hospitalized and two suspects had been arrested. The investigation would continue.

  The cop shootings abated as abruptly as they’d begun, leaving six officers dead and seven wounded across the state. Followed by civilian vigils in support of law enforcement, all of which drew large crowds and no violence.

  After the Borrego shootout, the street assaults and car burnings tapered off quickly, too, which cut down the number of citizens trying to fight their way into emergency rooms and urgent care clinics. Schools and houses of worship reopened; the post office and private carriers resumed daily deliveries; the freeway traffic got back to its former congestion. The governor appeared ubiquitously. Federal and state declarations of emergency ended. The damage to property was now estimated at over $500 million.

  In pattern with our times, the violence incited by The Chaos Committee and their deadly bombs was replaced by public and media fascination over The Chaos Committee members themselves: Who were these people, what motivated them, how did they come together, could this happen again?

  That night on my poor man’s jumbotron we watched a San Diego Channel 8 special, “Anger, Anarchy, and Chaos” about the perpetrators. Sponsored by Ford Motor Company and the redesigned Explorer. It ran complete with pictures and video:

  Harris Broadman, forty-two, motel owner and organizer, wounded in Iraq and awarded a Purple Heart. Born and raised in Kenton, Ohio, an athletic boy who became an aloof young man, earning a degree in European history and briefly publishing an anarchist blog after returning from Iraq with burns over 30 percent of his body. Showed him at two, smiling with his arm around an Australian Shepherd. And at thirty-eight, lying in a hospital bed after his seventeenth surgery.

  Brock Holland, thirty-one, a Miami native who had done prison time for computer fraud and assaulting a police officer. He’d worked security for two cruise lines, casinos in Las Vegas and Temecula, and various San Diego area hotels. The Channel 8 anchor reported that Holland had “developed a friendship” with Assemblyman Dalton Strait’s wife, Natalie, later kidnapping her for use by The Chaos Committee.

  Holland photos showed a serious boy, a defiant teen, and a seductively handsome and confident young man.

  “Vile,” said Liz.

  Holland’s Chaos Committee “partner,” said the news, was Denton-Texas-born Gretchen Deuzler, thirty-one, daughter of a mining engineer and a college math professor. Channel 8 said that Gretchen had learned the basics of blasting from her father, who used to take her along in fieldwork, and had excelled at physics under Mom. She wrote a popular blog after being raped at a college party. She was believed to be the lead bomb maker. In the pictures she was cute as a girl and sternly pretty as a woman. She was expected to make a full recovery and would face a list of charges that could get her the death penalty.

  “They seem to be living normal lives, then something goes wrong,” said Liz. “The IED for Broadman. Weld’s attack on the policeman. The woman’s rape.”

  “Are those reasons for terror, or excuses?” asked her husband.

  “People act according to how they are treated,” said Liz.

  “And some, their light becomes dimmed,” said Odile.

  “While the rest of us battle it out with our dark friends inside,” said Burt.

  It was the first time I’d heard Burt Short confess to any kind of inner struggle. Years ago he’d offered to kill a man to protect my life, and he had done so. But never hinted at the cost to himself. To his soul, or a dark friend inside.

  Cassy Weisberg was twenty-six when she died in the Borrego shootout. She’d come to Los Angeles after high school in Athol, Massachusetts. Worked for Marriott and Hilton as a desk receptionist, then a series of boutique hotels in and around Palm Springs. Then the Bighorn Motel, hired by Harris Broadman. She was described by high school acquaintances as a shy and solitary girl. Her mother hadn’t heard from her in eight years and she had developed no friendships that reporters could discover. She was believed to have mailed the Encinitas bombs. She was being treated for uterine cancer at the time of her death. Her high school yearbook pictured the same wan girl who had fooled me into believing she was nothing more than an ailing desk clerk in a small desert motel.

  Jackie O was Roxana Rajavi, thirty, an American-born daughter of Iranian refugees living legally in Seattle. She was a good student and a devout Muslim and, like Cassy Weisberg, socially withdrawn. She had moved to Ramona five years ago and met Harris Broadman through the Internet shortly thereafter. She had mailed the first two Chaos Committee bombs and likely the bomb that had killed the police chief in Hopedale, California. She was believed to be communicating with possible sponsors of terror in Tehran, but investigators had found no concrete evidence that Iranian treasure or know-how had benefited The Chaos Committee. She was believed to be a part of the Local Live! studio takeover.

  “The last two girls seem so young and lost,” said Liz.

  “Old enough to hate,” said Dick.

  “And to fall under the spells of evil men,” said Odile.

  “Girls cast spells of their own,” said Dick.

  I looked at the brief video and photographs of Roxana Rajavi, seeing the same woman I’d watched in Lark’s post office video so many times. In better focus, and when not mailing a box of death to an innocent person, she looked pleasant and composed.

  The other four committee members killed in Borrego—the gunmen in the black Yukon—were:

  Daniel Dawes, a fifty-one-year-old school custodian living in Warner Springs, thirty miles from the Bighorn Motel. Bachelor, loner, and a U.S. Army veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He was believed to be one of the ninja gunmen in the Local Live! takeover.

  Lamont Anthony, forty-nine, the sole black Chaos Committee member discovered so far, was a Portland, Oregon, native who�
��d gotten a philosophy degree from Oregon State and worked his entire adult life for the United States Postal Service. He was believed to have been the driver during the kidnapping of Natalie Strait.

  James Diggory, twenty-five, born in L.A., a community college student with an interest in martial arts and Norwegian black metal music. He had no criminal record, no friends that could be located, and no social network presence.

  Trent Hodge was a thirty-three-year-old Tennessean who had joined the French Foreign Legion at eighteen because the marines rejected him for excessive tattoos. He’d fought in Syria and Yemen for six years. Had a tattoo that read L’Enfant Terrible above his right eyebrow.

  “Quite the collection,” said Grandpa Dick.

  “They actually seem kind of normal, except for the French Foreign Legion boy,” said Liz.

  “I sense great histories of abuse and pain in their faces,” said Odile.

  “A United Nations of misfits,” said Dick.

  “Led by a man who lost his face in a war,” said Burt.

  “Do you sympathize with him?” asked Dick.

  “I sympathize with all men and no causes.”

  FORTY-THREE

  When I picked her up the next morning, Tola looked as professional as I’d ever seen her, stepping from her tiled portico into the good June sun. Leaning on my truck I watched her walk toward me, her smile and sunglasses on, and a cinnamon-colored business suit that showed off her fair skin and red hair, which was up and held loosely in place by a faux ivory Nectar Barn cannabis-leaf barrette.

  “Thanks for drumming up the media,” she said. “Hope they all show.”

  “I still think that was a bad call.”

  “You can’t use celebrity. I can.”

  A beautiful and complex woman. I pictured her in the courtyard of the Hotel Casa Grande, pleading her case before taking her bloody, triple-barreled vengeance. I’d never forget what happened there. Did it lessen her? Clearly. But the part of me that was drawn to Tola argued that those men had it coming and, therefore, what she’d done was justice. Frontier style, appropriate to its time and place. So was I lessened, too? I was there. On her account. For now I was going to let my demons wrestle it out.