The Triggerman's Dance

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Then he saw some people walking along the lake on the far shore. At first they weren’t there, and then they were. It was a man and a woman and a small boy. When they reached the point opposite him, John could see that the man and woman were about his parents’ age. The boy trailed a little behind his mother, holding her hand. The woman trailed a little behind the man, holding his hand. The man had the same stout bearing and erect posture as his father. The woman had bright blond hair and she wore a loose white dress from which her stomach protruded roundly.

  “That’s the owner’s son,” said Carlos. “He’s in the FBI and he’s got a gun. Mrs. Holt looks like Miss March when she isn’t pregnant. They come here sometimes, but not very much.”

  John watched the man and his wife and son walk along the shore. The boy got tired and the man picked him up and carried him.

  “That’s a good family,” said John.

  “How do you know?”

  “They’re like mine.”

  “What makes yours good?”

  John looked at Carlos, then back to the shore. “Just is. We do lots of things together.”

  “Then why’d you run away?”

  “They took a trip for awhile. They’re coming back. I’ll see if Dad might want to live here someday.”

  “The rancho isn’t yours.”

  “He could buy it. He bought an airplane.”

  Back at the cave they sat just outside and ate the cookies and fruit cocktail John had packed. While Carlos looked at his magazines, John lay down in the late afternoon warmth and looked at the sun through his eyelids.

  For a brief moment he felt that the sun out there was his sun. He felt that the cool earth under him was his earth. He felt self-sufficient, contained and welcome. He was certain he belonged here in a way he no longer belonged in the old house, or in Stan and Dorrie’s. It was the best feeling he knew, this attachment to a place, because a place never went away. But the feeling was over quickly, like the one in his stomach when he looked at Carlos’s picture.

  Look down on that county, son. It’s yours. That’s a nice thought, isn’t it?

  It’s not really mine, dad.

  No, it is. It belongs to whoever puts down his roots there. Your mother and I have. You will . . .

  “I want to live here someday,” he said out loud. “Right here on this island. Right in this cave.”

  “It’s not yours.”

  “It belongs to whoever puts down roots here, Carlos.”

  “Here’s the one that Mrs. Holt looks like.”

  Carlos brought over the magazine. John steadied the fold-out page in the afternoon breeze. It was Miss March and she was up on her knees, on a bed, wearing a tattered old workshirt that cast her middle in shadow but parted conveniently around her big tan breasts. She had a pretty face and she was smiling. She looked like John’s mother, and his stomach dropped and tickled sweetly. She looked like the woman on the shore, too.

  That’s just exactly what a lady is supposed to look like, he thought. Just like the one that’s going to belong to me someday.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SIX

  Joshua Weinstein sat in the Quantico conference room and looked out at the sere Virginia landscape. The trees were naked and the ground was tan. It’s like Wyeth painted the whole damn world, he thought. A light breeze swayed the branches and moved the leaves in pointless patterns. The central heat huffed on and he looked at Dumars.

  “How’s your room?” he asked flatly, his red-eye voice.

  “The same as yours.”

  And right next door, he thought—anything to relieve himself of the worry and fear. What could they possible want with him? Did they know about Snakey by now? Impossible, but their job was to discover the impossible.

  Right after the call from John, he had ordered Dumars to abort their airport run and speed to the perimeter of Liberty Ridge. There, he had grimly overseen the claiming of Snakey and the package. He heatedly swore his people to secrecy, and arranged for them to book the body at county as a John Doe. He now had two weeks of grace from a deputy, calling in an old favor.

  He had flown out John’s prizes by courier jet, which landed them in Norton’s lap approximately five hours later. Then, making a mock rush for the airport, he had ordered Dumars to stop their car on the shoulder, gotten out, lifted the hood and asked her to locate the fuel line. Joshua couldn’t tell the fuel line from a battery cable but Sharon could. He yanked it from the pump, then called Bureau Tech Services to come fix his car.

  The next flight out was at eleven.

  Now he was here, half a day late, quite literally on the carpet. He looked down at the unearthly shade of green, suitable for a camouflage pattern at best, exactly what you’d expect from the federal government.

  Norton entered the room and shook hands. He reeked of after-shave and anxiety. His cheeks were bright pink, marked with the capillary exuberance of forty years of Scotch. His smile looked too jolly; his handshake felt too warm; his tie was too tightly knotted.

  All the best appearances, thought Joshua. We’re fucked. Even Norton knows it. Did they tell him about Snakey? Norton sat and they made unbearable small talk for five eternal minutes. What do they want?

  Walker Frazee finally popped in, his bouncing stride enough to send a familiar buzz of horror up Joshua’s spine. They all shook hands. Frazee was a short man with a boyish face and a smile so disarming you wanted to hug him. His suit was dark, cheap and years out of fashion, exactly the same color and cut that Joshua had always seen him in. His shoes were polished to absurdity. His hair was an effulgent white, cut with just a little touching the top of his ears. He looked to Joshua like a funeral home counselor, which Josh knew was a wholly inappropriate impression. Because, when the boyishness left Walker Frazee’s face and he dropped his ingratiating smile, what was left was the zealous gleam of the true believer. Josh could see it in his eyes, as clear as the beam from a lighthouse on a black sea. It said: I am the vessel. I carry the word. Righteousness, and its sad obligation to the sword, was certified by the gleam. He never swore, never drank alcohol or caffeine, never smoked, never missed church, invested shrewdly and—it was rumored—tithed abundantly. His wife was breathtakingly ugly, as portrayed by the photographs in his office. His eight grown children were pillars of Mormon, spread out across the republic like the footings of a foundation. Frazee never stopped talking about his children. Crazy Frazee, went the gossip: One God, one suit, eight wives.

  “Good morning,” he said, pulling out a chair at the head of the table. “How was your flight?”

  “Fine, sir,” said Dumars.

  “Long,” said Joshua.

  Frazee held his boyish smile. “Looks like you survived it well.”

  “The movie was about a plane crash in the Andes,” Joshua noted. ‘T couldn’t figure out if it was a bad joke or a good one.”

  “Oh, I saw that thing,” said Norton. “Where they end up eating each other?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Not for the queasy flyer,” said Frazee. “Agent Dumars, you’re looking very well these days.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “And you, Joshua?”

  “I’m thinking of buying a surfboard.”

  “Really?”

  “No, not really. But the Orange County office is a beehive, I’ll say that. There’s always too much to do.”

  “Nice job on the kidnapper buying the Ferrari.”

  “Dumb shit—oh, I beg your pardon, sir—dumb clod just walked in with the cash. We had people standing around acting like salesmen. I mean, he’d done it before.”

  “Astonishing, he’d grab a casino owner’s daughter.”

  “Won’t last long in the prison population,” said Norton. “Dumb sh . . . muck.”

  “Well, I can’t say I’m not a little envious of you two, when I wake up to an October morning and the mercury is right at thirty.”

  “We don’t have weather in California, sir,” said Weinstein.
“We have nuance.”

  “I see.” Frazee’s boyish smile faded as he settled in his chair and looked at Joshua. “And you have Wayfarer?”

  “We certainly do,” said Norton. “Joshua and Sharon have procured for us documents relating to Baum’s home and work.”

  “I’ve seen them. Interesting. But no evidence to establish that Wayfarer was at the scene. They’re undergoing analysis right now—nothing is certain.”

  Joshua’s heart fell.

  “What?” asked Dumars.

  “The photograph is of Baum’s property,” said Norton. “We can establish that. Plus the sketch of the Journal grounds.”

  “Which proves nothing,” answered Frazee.

  “Then we’ll close the loop,” said Norton.

  “How?”

  Joshua thought that he moved in rather nicely. “Owl is digging much better than we thought he might. We’ve got Liberty Operations docs, and a safe that looks more than promising. We expect a .30/06 caliber hunting rifle next, to work the engraved shells against. Getting the rifle out could be tough. But he’s working Liberty Ridge like a gopher.”

  Frazee’s brow furrowed. “I thought we established that the bullets fired at the victim didn’t come from the engraved shells.”

  “Correct, sir,” said Joshua. “We’re hoping to find that they came from another gun in Wayfarer’s arsenal.”

  Frazee nodded with undisguised irritation. “If Owl hopes to get inside that safe I’d like to know how. Can he bend steel in his bare hands?”

  “He’s been in just over a week, sir,” said Dumars.

  “How often do you talk?” he asked Joshua, ignoring Sharon.

  “Every other day, sir. It depends on John—Owl—getting to the phone. It’s out on the perimeter of the property.”

  “Why not closer?”

  “We assumed Wayfarer would find it.”

  “I’d say that was a good assumption. Does Wayfarer suspect him, yet?”

  The “yet” struck Joshua as condescending and fated, but he held his tongue. “Wayfarer’s security man has jumped him through some hoops. He cleared them all, so far as we can tell.”

  “Fargo?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmmm,” mumbled Frazee. He sat back and looked briefly at Norton, then Joshua. “Hmmm. You know, this Hate Crimes money doesn’t come to us for free.”

  Joshua waited. He had no idea where Frazee was going or why he was going there. An abrupt one-eighty like this was why they called him Crazy. Besides, Joshua believed the Hate Crimes money did come for free, more or less, taxed out of a dazed populace and spent by bureaucrats like any other federal funds. It was beyond Joshua’s belief that Frazee would have called them back to Washington to talk about money.

  “Appropriations feeds us, as you know. As it does Commerce, State Department, etc.”

  Shit, thought Joshua. My joe kills an innocent thug in the southern California hills, and Frazee’s doing Economics 101.

  The little dandy droned on.

  “We’re Justice, of course, so we see our precious dollars shared with such critical programs as the Weed and Seed Fund in General Administration, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Trust Fund, and of course our friends, the Drug Enforcement Administration. The House Committee cut us again this year, as you know. As you also know, the President bailed us out—partially—with the Federal Hate Crimes funding. We were asked by the Attorney General to streamline and cooperate between agencies. The idea was that we could be cost effective. They actually used the phrase ‘more bang for the buck.’ Well, we’ve been asked to liase with the other agencies, in order to stretch the Hate Crimes windfall.”

  “We’ve been liasing all along,” said Norton. “What a word. We get our piece of pie, everybody else gets theirs. We always cooperate until everybody gets out of our way.”

  “That just changed. We’re barely past one quarter of the fiscal year, and we—that’s not just the Bureau, but all of us inside Justice—have eaten up the Hate Crimes funding like it was candy. C-SPAN aired our foibles before the nation, just last week. Certain Representatives heard from their constituents, and the Inspector-In-Charge heard from the Congressmen. We’ve decided to joint task some of the operations where we overlap. There’s a Joint Task Committee and I am on it.”

  “Congratulations,” muttered Dumars.

  “So what are we supposed to do?” asked Weinstein. “Help INS run down aliens?”

  Frazee aimed a crisp stare at Joshua. “You are supposed to arrest an assassin.”

  “We’re working effectively toward that end,” said Norton.

  “Hmmm,” Frazee grunted. He sighed and shook his head. “You know, Norton—this isn’t the kind of thing I’d have approved, if it had come across my desk to begin with. It’s too risky, too time-consuming, too expensive. Joshua, you don’t necessarily need to know that, but now you do. Of course, it’s beside the point. But the fact that I’m our man on the Joint Task Committee isn’t beside he point at all. Are your fingers to the wind now?”

  Joshua nodded. “We’re wasting money.”

  “In the eyes of the House, yes. And let’s face it, twelve million for Hate Crimes, even divided up by Justice, isn’t just change. Would you say?”

  “Not at all, sir.” said Joshua. “But our total outlay for Owl is less than eighty-five thousand.”

  “Counting salaries it isn’t.”

  “We’re always working on something, sir. You can hardly figure that into overhead for Wayfarer.” Joshua mustered his best expression of agreeability, but he could feel his Adam’s apple bobbing and his ears growing hot.

  Though it was hardly the point here, Joshua wanted to ask why the California Feebies always got shortchanged by the Bureau budgeteers. He thought of the Los Angeles office, so strapped for money that the agents actually shared rides on stakeouts. One of them was caught selling Amway products from the trunk of his Bureau Ford, then later busted wide open for selling Government information to his Russian girlfriend. But Josh knew the truth, sad or not: Washington thought California was unworthy of federal dollars the same way New York thought California unworthy of intellectual respect. It was a nasty little prejudice he’d noticed from day one.

  “We’re playing it as tight as we can,” Joshua said.

  “You know that and I know that. But Appropriations sees twelve million going out and nothing coming back. If we can’t make a cost-effective go of it this year, we’ll get nothing from Hate Crimes next time around. I don’t have to tell you that. Unfortunately, there’s no neat way out of this. That’s why I’ve called you here. You now have a deadline. A short one.”

  Joshua actually felt his stomach turn. It rotated, then settled back down into a new, less comfortable position. He had tried to isolate his own tiny operation in this labyrinth of finance and politics but that was hopeless. It was just a speck in the federal wind.

  There was silence in the room now, all hands aware that Captain Frazee was about to make a major course correction. Joshua’s stomach squeezed out a gurgling surge of gas, which he held in with great discomfort.

  “And if we can’t make a clean arrest of Wayfarer I’m going to have to turn him over to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Let them finish it.”

  “No,” said Joshua.

  “Shut up, Weinstein,” said Norton. He stood now, sighing histrionically. Josh saw the fresh rush of blood to his already heated cheeks. He circled the conference room once, like a lion pacing the confines of a cage. “Walker, we can’t sit still for that.”

  “You will if I tell you to.”

  “Why? We’ve put in the time. We got the money from the Hate Crimes bill. We’ve worked Wayfarer up one side and down the other, we’ve got a man inside, just inches from pay dirt, and you want the Bat Boys to finish it? On what possible grounds?”

  “All grounds,” said Frazee, offering his smile, his clear and guileless eyes, his Gleam, his righteousness. “ATF takes Wayfarer off our books, but the
dollars stay. We are seen to be Joint Tasking effectively. We use what’s left of our Hate Crimes windfall for more achievable goals. We still get our man. Moreover, the nation sees that our fellows in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms are not the bumbling murderous fools last spotted in Waco, Texas.”

  “Oh, God,” said Joshua, his stomach churning like a washing machine now, his tongue all but frozen by anger.

  “Don’t ‘oh God’ me, Mr. Weinstein,” snapped Frazee. “You can sit back in your Bureau seat and call ATF anything you want. You can laugh, scorn, micturate or moan. But that won’t change the fact that they’re looking for redemption. They’re not just looking for it—they’re frothing after it. I had lunch with the Attorney General yesterday, and I can tell you that she is absolutely resolute on this point—ATF needs another chance. And, hint, hint: Hate Crimes largesse is much in question for next year. So, if we don’t have Wayfarer’s head on a platter soon, ATF gets their chance. I’ve got to give them something.”

  Norton was still standing, his mouth open, a look of incomprehension in his wet, blue eyes. He’d taken a cigarette from his pack but hadn’t lit it—federal regulations, of course. For just a moment Joshua saw Norton as ridiculous, a Scotch-soaked old triceratops wandering heavily in a world of smokeless bureaucracies, smug, soulless zealots like Walker Frazee and muscle-headed storm troopers like the Bat Boys. He wondered if Norton would start to fossilize, right before his eyes.

  “How soon is soon?” managed Weinstein. His own voice sounded like something released from under pressure. He could hardly form words around his jumping larynx. He saw Sharon Dumars staring at him, which encouraged a fresh jolt of anxiety.

  “Six days is the best I could do. Believe me, the Attorney General was this close to shutting us down right there, over lunch—redlining about ten of my operations. She pointed out with unfortunate accuracy that the murder of Rebecca Harris—a heterosexual WASP—does not, in fact, even constitute a hate crime.”

  “We all know who the target was!” yelled Joshua.

  “That doesn’t change the outcome,” said Frazee.