The Triggerman's Dance

by T. Jefferson Parker

  “I remember now,” said John. “Justice please. Justice please. Free the hero, Jimmy Ruiz.”

  “You weren’t so out of touch down in Key West, were you?” asked Dumars with a smile.

  “Stick to the story, Sharon,” snapped Weinstein.

  Dumars’s smile faded. She looked at Joshua briefly, then back to John.

  “All right. To add insult to injury, Baum wrote an unflattering column about Puma two years after the trial was over. She implied that Puma had become a loose cannon, a profiteer, a racist, a nuisance. Why? Because when Puma moved out to Liberty Ridge, he had opened a private investigation and security firm that catered to the rich and, she tried to prove, refused business from minorities of any color. Baum chose off Puma in print, because Puma had donated generously, very generously, to certain organizations that Ms. Baum dislikes. Organizations such as the California Association of Peace Officers, the NRA, the Freedom Foundation, the John Birch Society, Ducks Unlimited and the California Republican Committee. Her slant was something like, ‘here’s a man so embittered by the death of his son that he’s become infected with hatred.’ Ms. Baum seemed to have a point, as Puma had given money only to the Mormon church before Patrick was murdered. Since then, not a penny. I feel that the article was overly aggressive and a violation of Puma’s privacy, though—”

  “—Sharon, don’t—”

  “—Josh, let me continue . . . I agree completely with Baum’s conclusions. But what I feel doesn’t matter. So, back to our line of logic, is it coincidence again, that Susan Baum was the intended target? Okay, we can call it coincidence again.”

  Sharon made another run on the water machine, filling up her third cup. Then she pulled out one of the chairs and sat. John watched her coat close back over the gun.

  “When Puma went into his new business after Patrick’s death, someone had to file a fictitious business statement, like any lawful company. We took a look at it. The statement ran in a little weekly paper down in San Juan Capistrano, which isn’t far from Liberty Ridge. Everything was fine, done by the book, no problem. Trouble is, the original name chosen for his new company, we assume by Puma, was The Freedom Ring. They filed it on statements two consecutive weeks, but on the third week, no DBA was filed at all. Instead, a new name for what we can only assume was the same company—with the fictitious name of Liberty Operations. Some simple research of the newspaper’s classified files showed us that The Freedom Ring and Liberty Operations DBA costs were covered by checks from the same account. That account belongs to one of Puma’s inner circle—his head of security, if you will. Coincidence? No. Hell no. When enough coincidence piles up, it isn’t coincidence anymore. The Freedom Ring claimed responsibility for Rebecca. Puma believed the name The Freedom Ring never really existed on record anywhere, and he was right—except for in the dusty files of a little mom and pop paper down in San Juan.”

  “Have you questioned him?” John asked.

  Weinstein stood now and glanced at Dumars. “Thank you, Sharon. No, we’ve chosen not to. All we would really do is tip him that we’re on. He’d have an alibi, and there sure wouldn’t be any evidence of a crime left in plain sight around at Liberty Ridge. We’re better off letting him believe we’re not even looking his way, until we’ve got enough to justify a search. Questioning him now would be like . . .”

  “—Scaring up the bird while it’s still out of range,” said Dumars.

  “Exactly,” said Weinstein. He smiled again—that smile so unmirthful, so produced. “John, there’s a final element you should know about. Come.”

  Dumars stayed behind as John followed Joshua out of the room and back down the hallway, then around a corner and into an office. The room was small, lined with bookshelves and bathed by the same chilling, fluorescent light as the conference room. On the wall behind the desk was the Bureau’s seal. A chair sat squared to the desk, empty. Joshua shut the door.

  “We used to give school children tours of the building,” said Weinstein. “Back before we had to check them for weapons. They always wanted to see a real agent. See a real agent’s gun. Sit in a real agent’s chair. So, have a seat right there, John.”

  “I’ll stand.”

  Joshua studied him, then walked around the desk and took the chair himself. “I’ve got a cubicle. If I advance to Senior Special Agent, I’ll get an office like this. Maybe this exact one . . . who knows?”

  Weinstein was quiet for a long while and John could feel the agent’s black, rapacious eyes on him. Always measuring, John thought, always taking, always judging.

  “I came here ten years ago. It was a good assignment but I grew up in New York and I thought, California, God, land of fruits and nuts, the self-worshipping and the self-ignorant. Even worse, Orange County. I thought the place would bore me to death in a month. But it didn’t bore me at all. It had everything from slick investment hustles up in Newport Center to serial killers running up double digit stats. Orange County had a nice, eclectic criminal menu, and superb weather.”

  Weinstein offered his dismal little smile again. John leaned against a wall and considered the FBI seal behind the agent.

  “For instance,” Weinstein went on, “there was a publisher in Little Saigon who got set on fire for suggesting we open relations with Hanoi, same time as Fluor Corporation out in Irvine was jockeying to be the first American behemoth into Vietnam, when Clinton opened it up. Then, there was this bright barrio kid who went to Harvard on scholarship and robbed banks here during his semester breaks—said you can’t take the barrio out of the boy. There were hookers marching the stretch down Harbor, bikers and gangs and cutthroats and junkies. Everything. Everything.”

  Weinstein chuckled. To John, the agent actually looked relaxed now, leaning back in the chair behind the desk. An odd tone of reverie had come into his voice.

  “But what made Orange County most interesting was Vann Holt. This was his office. He was a legend here—he’d gotten almost every commendation, award, citation and pay raise the Bureau has to offer—and he was still fairly young. I was very young then—twenty-six—I never really spent much time around him. I can’t even tell you if he knew I was here. But I admired him because this guy—I’m telling you, John, this guy was absolutely possessed with the idea of crushing bad guys. He breathed it. He took a bombing case all the way from Santa Ana to the Gaza strip and back—and he identified the three bombers who took out an Arab gentleman right here in Santa Ana. Vann gutted a white supremacist cell that had serious plans to murder Coretta King. He just mashed the local operations of the Aryan Brotherhood, Kahane, the White Alliance—anybody with a race or holy war to wage. He found something here at the Bureau that very few people ever find—autonomy. Somehow, he rose above the sheer bureaucracy we operate under. He didn’t break the rules so much as just, well, levitate above them. His results justified it, and his sense of personal honor enabled it. He was a mystery to everyone—and that is one very difficult thing to maintain in a Federal world. Vann Holt did it by holding the Bureau up to his standards. Back in eighty-six, he got the highest award the Bureau can bestow—the Director’s Distinguished Service medal. It didn’t seem to mean much to him.”

  Weinstein went quiet and looked away, allowing himself a pause for introspection.

  John wondered if Weinstein had learned his intensity and his humorlessness from Vann Holt. He looked at Weinstein’s profile and noted the clench of jaw, the hungry eyes, and the morose lines around his mouth.

  And suddenly, John understood.

  It appeared to him all at once, seemingly from nothing, like an oncoming vehicle through rain. The names, the stories and the setting all coalesced, and he knew.

  “Puma,” he said.

  Joshua didn’t react. He just swallowed and continued to stare at the wall. Finally, he looked back at John.

  “I thought you might appreciate Holt’s situation. You both lost someone very close to you to violence. A murdered son, a murdered lover. You holed up in the desert and
tried to forget, he holed up in Liberty Ridge. You two have a lot in common. What you don’t have in common is this: Puma did something. He tried to kill an enemy. You’ve done nothing but withdraw.”.

  “And what have you done?”

  Joshua raised his hands expansively. “Why, this, John. This. My work. I’ve spent a thousand hours trying to solve Rebecca’s murder. It practically took a papal dispensation to get assigned to it. But I prevailed. After all, I was not married to the victim. After all, they saw I wouldn’t stop, no matter what they did. So they gave me a charge number and cut me loose.”

  “Why am I here?”

  Joshua ignored the question. He leaned forward in the chair now, rested his forearms on the desk before him, and again aimed his unforgiving gaze at John. “You’ve begun to understand the power of loss, haven’t you?”

  “I believe so.”

  “And the hatred that fills a heart when love is removed?”

  “That, too.”

  “Loss and hatred don’t just go away, you know. They fester and curdle and grow and they will eat you alive if you let them. The cure is the act. You must do something about them.”

  “I know that.”

  “But you don’t know what to do, do you? You can’t drink your life away in Anza fucking Valley, now can you? No. So, now what?”

  “I don’t know, yet.”

  “But you feel . . . willing, don’t you? Inspired? All suited up for the big game, if you could just find the court?”

  “Yeah, Weinstein, that’s how I feel.”

  “Funny feeling. I know. I spent a lot of time like that—it was called training.”

  “Why am I here?”

  The pale agent smiled his death mask of a smile. “Vann Holt murdered the woman I loved and wanted to marry, and I want you to help me take him down. For me. For Rebecca. And for yourself.”

  “How?”

  “You would have to learn how, John. You would have to learn to act and to think. You would have to learn to take steps. One step, then another. I can open the book for you. I can help. And finally, what you learn will be tested, and tested very hard. When it’s over, no matter how it ends, you will never be the same again. That’s the only promise that I can make.”

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  John Menden’s secret education begins two days after his visit to the Bureau office in Orange County. They use his trailer and the open desert around it for basic instruction in self-defense, small arms skills, micro-camera photography, mnemonic memory assistance and lock-picking.

  The long evenings of autumn give them over two hours of sunlight after John’s work day at the Anza Valley Lamp. It is hard to picture a better place for this kind of training. It is out of the way, accessible only by one road that is rarely traveled, and the kind of area where gunshots, hand-to-hand drills and endless roadwork wouldn’t turn a head. Any air surveillance would be immediately apparent. Most importantly, it allows John to continue his work at the paper, which he knows is an important factor in the operation, though he doesn’t know why. Weinstein has installed a small trailer—purchased under billing code, “Wayfarer”—alongside John’s for the nights when he or Sharon Dumars are simply too tired to drive back to Orange County.

  Under the soothing evening sunlight, John shoots pistols and revolvers, puncturing human silhouette targets with tight groups at ten feet, good groups at twenty, fair ones—still all in the black—at fifty.

  He spars with Weinstein and Dumars, learning close-in self-defense.

  He listens carefully to their guidance regarding the array of micro-cameras they supply for training.

  He concentrates on the lockpicking, but is not particularly adept.

  He retains the memory boosters and mnemonic devices.

  He runs, and he runs, and he runs.

  Seven miles a night now, on the punishing, hilly dirt road leading into the High Desert Rod and Gun Club, he runs along a barbed wire fence, watching the deadwood fence posts reel past, huffing to himself with the thudding of his shoes, Re-bec-ca pause, Re-bec-ca pause, Re-bec-ca pause.

  Re-bec-ca.

  Her name is the punctuation of his thoughts, the increments of his clock. It is his blueprint, his refrain, his true north. Her memory is his atmosphere and his sustenance. Her justice is his reason.

  Weinstein is pleased to see that John is a natural. He is already better with a sidearm than either he or Dumars, which proves a little embarrassing. Weinstein vows to improve his skills at the indoor range when he can get the time. John’s short-term memory, even considering the effect of the alcohol he continues to consume, is excellent. The micro-camera photography goes easily, because all the student has to learn is to shoot documents at a consistent range—the camera is best inside three feet—and to grid off the subject in such a way that nothing will be lost along the borders. A child could do it, Joshua reminds him. Lockpicking is a little tougher, but it is something that Weinstein believes will be of lesser importance. Besides, the real problem with locks these days are the alarm systems keyed into them. So far as the hand-to-hand self defense goes, Joshua believes it stupid to teach in the first place, but he does so anyway due to Bureau protocol. Weinstein notes that John is fast and strong enough to land effective blows to the well-padded Dumars, but even his good reflexes can’t keep him from receiving them in turn. John is tough up to a point, Weinstein is happy to see, but he is also happy to see that John knows when to give up and when to play possum. After one particularly fierce battle, his nose bloodied and his eyes glazed, he simply went to his knees in the dust and, groaning, told Dumars, “finish me off.” Then he caught her padded foot just in front of his face, and twisted her down to the dirt. Joshua sees to it that John develops a working knowledge of the choke-hold used to render an enemy unconscious. Joshua teaches both the throat blow and throat pull, which puncture the trachea by splintering the delicate bones beneath the jaw, killing fairly quickly. Weinstein has John practice on a dummy they name Amon.

  They run. They shoot. They run. They fight.

  For Weinstein, the road work is hellish, all three of them jogging down and sprinting up the hard, dusty trail. They start at three miles a day and work up from there. Even for a nonsmoker, Menden’s endurance is very good, though the first thing he doe’s after finishing is light up a cigarette and open a beer. Weinstein hears John’s rhythmic grunts begin after mile two, and on the third day he realizes that they are the syllables of Rebecca’s name.

  Most of the training is, in Joshua Weinstein’s mind, silly. Silly because, should John need to employ any of this side arm or combat training, he will most likely get killed for his efforts. Bureau experience has proven that. And certainly, whether John Menden runs a six- or a seven-minute mile wasn’t going to matter a bit if things went wrong. You can’t outrun a bullet. In truth, the training is intended more for John’s mental fitness than his physical prowess; it is always to the good if an informant goes in feeling strong. Invincible, no, but strong.

  During the first week, Weinstein watches particularly closely for indicators of John Menden’s mental state. Weinstein plays the devil’s advocate, looking hard for a reason to call the whole thing off. That is an option he—or Washington—can exercise any time until John gets close to Wayfarer, if he gets close to Wayfarer.

  They run. They shoot. They run. They fight.

  Weinstein observes. He looks for fatigue, doubt, carelessness, and most importantly, any sign that John Menden finds what is happening amusing. The second his student hints that his education or his mission is anything but a matter of the deepest gravity, the whole thing is dead in the water. And although Weinstein does his best to discover something insincere in his student, he does not.

  On the dark cool nights he chooses to sleep over in the desert, Joshua lies on his back and looks out the uncurtained window to the big clear stars in the desert sky. He hates the emptiness of it all, the huge spaces between things. He worries, tosses, grunts, curses, doze
s. Everything worries him.

  What worries Joshua most is that his own feelings toward Rebecca might blind him to Menden’s weaknesses—we all have them, he knows. But Weinstein rationalizes that if he could sell this operation to his superiors in Washington—surely the most difficult thing he had ever done—then his vision must have been very clear. It is a matter now of seeing well, of remaining objective and effective.

  But staring up from the narrow trailer bed at night, he often wonders: how can I be objective about you, Rebecca, you love, you betrayer. How can I possibly do that? Because you died in the rain and I loved you. I owe you everything, but all I can give you is vengeance.

  John keeps his own counsel and allows his easy politeness and placid gray eyes to mask the emotional storm brewing inside him. He is still almost amazed that this—whatever it might turn out to be—is actually happening. He has wanted it for so long. He has tried to imagine it so many times. He has prayed for it so often. And he has believed that someday it would come. It is happening.

  So he runs. He shoots. He runs. He fights.

  But none of this is really new. In fact, John began his training nearly three months ago, when he moved out to the club property. At the time he had not known what it might be for, only that he must do it, he must be ready, he must prepare himself for . . . something. It was an article of faith that he be fit for the task, whatever the task might entail.