“Will they shoot when they see us instead of a sleeping couple?”
“They won’t know what hit them.”
Holt sat in the darkness and listened to the blood moving through his body. He tried to feel the bad cells replicating but he could not. His eyes were strong again—they were always strong when he was doing justice—and even in the dark it was easy to become familiar with the room. He could smell Mrs. Vu-Minh’s perfume mixed with the fresh odor of soap that moved in from the bath. He thought about those early years with Carolyn, when he’d graduated from law school and entered the Bureau. Just them in the little apartment in McLean, the Bureau training programs, the long Sunday dinners at the Fish Market with some of the other trainees. His favor in the eyes of Walker Frazee, who brought him along and sent him west as soon as he could because Frazee was a Mormon and a family man too and he knew how badly Holt wanted to be back in the land that had bred him. Holt chose not to think of his excommunication when he renounced the church those many years later, when Patrick’s death had turned loose all that was furious and secular and ungodly inside him, when he had been unable to sense the presence of God anywhere upon the earth, in any form. Holt did not think of that. Instead, he thought of Patrick’s birth and the overwhelming, unforeseeable pride he felt when he first took Pat’s little body into his arms. He thought of the way that Carolyn looked when she was feeding their infant son, her hair up and her robe open around her breast and the aura of wisdom that had surrounded her ever since she had become a mother. It was as if she had connected with something inside her that he—and even Carolyn herself—had never known was there. He thought of Pat’s first steps, the funny little outfits Carolyn always got for him, the evolution of the boy’s smile from gummy toothlessness to the manly assurance of Patrick, age twenty-two, graduating from college. He thought of Valerie’s premature birth, the natural debut of her headstrong personality. He pictured her with the little ribbon taped to her head at Patrick’s insistence because she was born bald and Pat thought a girl needed a ribbon, hair or not. He remembered the time at the breakfast table one Saturday when Valerie announced that Pat had dreamed the night before about driving a car and she knew this because she had been in the back seat. He could see her shooting her first round of trap at age six—she knocked down four—and how proud he was that she stood like him on the trap range, brought her gun up like he did, called for the bird like he did, held her gun at rest like he did, set her empties back into the ammo pouch like he did. He remembered her coming down the stairs for her junior prom and how she seemed to contain enough life and beauty to animate a dozen young girls all at once. He thought of all these things and marveled that the world had stripped so much away but left him standing. He could feel the great fury that animated him in slumber, resting. He understood that he now had, in John, an avenue to Susan Baum. He could feel things beginning to end.
He looked at John in the darkness. The young man sat erect in the chair, his long coat parted to each side, his fedora placed squarely on his head, no angle, no comment implied. He was taller than Pat, and thinner, but John had the same strong profile and calm eyes of his son. He seemed so far away in his closeness: not blood but something akin to blood. Spirit, he thought? A kindred spirit? He wondered if he was imagining things for John that were foolish to imagine, if he was ascribing an inflated value to hope. He wondered, briefly, if perhaps there was a God who looked over the affairs of men, and had arranged John in his path as a sort of salvation. No, he decided. No.
“Did Jillian come back and talk to you after she died?”
John was quiet for a long beat. He didn’t move. “I thought I heard her voice in the wind once, but it was just the wind.”
“How did you know it was just the wind?”
“I listened hard.”
“I read a lot after Pat died. Voices from the grave. Spirit communication. All that. I tried my best to be open. Keep my senses ready for him. Never really happened. I figured maybe he was talking to Carolyn. I was always tone deaf.”
“Those ideas aren’t for everybody, Mr. Holt. I don’t think it’s a measure of your soul, how much you think you hear the dead.”
“Ever dream about her?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Me too. Sometimes I’d wake up laughing. Or crying. Or screaming. He seemed so real, then.”
“Maybe that was his way of talking to you.”
“Anything’s possible. Though I never took much heart in that banality.”
“Me neither. What I wanted most was just one minute to see her again, to say good-bye.”
Holt listened to a car pass by on the street outside. “That was a nice thing you did for Carolyn tonight.” He shuddered, though, when he thought of her taking the four majestically pathetic steps.
“I’m not sure what to do.”
“Let her call you Pat. No harm I can see.”
“Just as long as . . . well . . . I don’t disappoint her.”
“She’s never looked better. Since the bullet, I mean.”
“Makes me feel dishonest.”
“Small price.”
“True.”
“The thing I like best about these kind of stakeouts is really nailing the sons of bitches. Law enforcement, you can’t set up a situation like this. There’s no manpower for it. And the courts would murder you.”
“How many have you done?”
“Two hundred and four.”
Holt felt the telephone throb against his chest. He brought it out and listened. Carfax, one of the Holt Men assigned to the juniper hedge across the street, told him a car had passed once and was now about to pass again. Holt radioed Summers and Alvis.
“I think we’re on,” he said to John. He nodded to the window, where headlights gently illuminated the blinds in a moving, horizontal line.
He put the phone back in his pocket, took out his .45 and breathed deeply.
“Silence, son.”
It was ten minutes later that the Bolsa Cobra Boys came through the front door. Holt could hear the pick inside the lock, the furtive anxiety of the picker, the impatience, then finally the tumble of the steel. When the door opened he could feel the change of pressure in the air. He could hear the shoes—sounding like so many—on the linoleum of the entryway, then the muffled sound of shoes on carpet, then the quickening report on the hallway tiles. Whispers. Answers. Whispers again. Suddenly the beam of a flashlight hit the far wall and they were in the room. Three, four, six. They filed in with a kind of organized hush and as the flashlight beam trailed along the walls toward him Holt stood, hit the light switch and extended his automatic straight toward the hand with the flashlight in it.
“Don’t move,” he said calmly.
Holt allowed his eyes to scan them all but focus on none. And, just as he thought, at least two of the kids were moving their guns toward him. He shot the hand that held the flashlight and the metal and bone and flesh exploded and the boy screamed. All six of them leaned back toward the door like sea grass swayed by a current but it was too late. Alvis blasted them from behind with two deafening roars from his shotgun—beach sand instead of lead, but painful inside of ten feet—and the whole contingent accordioned in upon itself while Kettering, Summers and Stanton leaped into the collapsing fray like rodeo cowboys. In less than twenty seconds the Holt Men had five pairs of hands wrenched behind five backs and cinched tight with lacerating plastic ties. Holt pulled the revolver off the kid with the splintered hand, then dragged him into the bathroom and lifted him into the tub so he wouldn’t bleed on the carpet anymore. He gave the boy a bath towel and told him to wrap it up tight. Back in the bedroom he looked down at the five trussed gangsters and the five guns—a sawed-off shotgun and four automatics—that the Holt Men had kicked against the closet door. He looked at John, who still stood in front of his chair with the .45 dangling from his right hand and a look of bewilderment on his face.
Holt smiled at him. There were few moments more pleasurable in li
fe than seeing the look on the face of someone who had just witnessed a Liberty Ops private interdiction action for the first time.
“Call the police and get an ambulance for the kid in there,” he said to Stanton. “John, our part of this procedure is over. Let’s go home now. Nice work, men.”
He tossed the boy’s revolver into the pile of firearms by the closet door and headed out with John behind him.
Ten minutes later they were back in the chopper, levitating through the star-studded early morning sky. Holt watched the lights of Little Saigon dissipate below them, then turned his gaze to John.
He took a long time to assess John Menden—his face and expression, his motives and fears, his capabilities for loyalty and betrayal. His weakness. He waited for these things to manifest. They always did, if you waited and knew how to listen. He could always feel them coming off of people—what kind of heft they had inside, what sense of follow-through they possessed. Whether or not they had bottom. He had always felt it coming off the people he worked with, the creeps he collared, the prosecutors he worked with, the defenders he answered—this silent and inadvertent confession of capacity. It was a glimpse of content.
They screamed south toward Liberty Ridge. “Smitten by my daughter, aren’t you?”
John seemed to almost choke. He cleared his throat and looked at Holt with a dazed expression.
“Very much so, sir.”
“Most beautiful thing left on earth. Cat got your tongue?”
“Just a little. I’ve never seen anything quite like that.”
“Anza comes to mind.”
“That was just a reaction. This was . . . surgical.”
“We might have trouble with the kid I shot. Summers will stand in for me on that.”
Holt stared for a moment into the eyes that looked so much like his own, so much like Pat’s.
“John. Call Susan Baum tomorrow and tell her you want to meet with her. Tell her you’re interested in working for the paper again. She’s afraid, I hear. Not going out much in public. Moving between her home and an apartment in Santa Ana. Ask her to see you as soon as she can. You’re hard up—need the steady paycheck again.”
“Why?”
“I want to talk to her on Liberty Ridge.”
“But how are you going to talk with her, if she’s meeting me somewhere?”
“You will bring her back to the Ridge with you. Simple. You can handle her, can’t you?”
John was quiet for a while.
“Sir, after what she did to Pat, and you, why talk to her?”
“Justice, John. Simple justice.”
Holt took the Hughes through a sudden shower of meteors falling all around him. The eyes again, he thought: all stars are falling, all lights liquid, all moons melting. He could see the lights of Liberty Ridge below and to the south. They were his destination, his immediate goal.
But so far as his larger desires went, Holt felt for the first time in many months that he could accomplish them. He felt that the whole tragic circle of his life was about to complete itself, become whole. And he now believed that soon, very soon, justice would be done and he could rest.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO
John’s dogs rumbled toward him as he walked across the meadow in the generous white moonlight of two a.m. A cool breeze puffed in from the ocean and rippled the lake. He heard the barking of Boomer, Bonnie and Belle, then the heavy pounding of their feet on the ground. Boomer crashed into him as he always did, then jumped up and put his rough paws against John’s stomach. He stood there and rubbed the big labrador’s ear with one hand and fingered the video tape in his coat pocket with the other.
He let the dogs into the cottage with him. They sniffed around the dining table legs, then looked guiltily at him, not used to the privilege of being inside.
Looking down at the computer screen, he keyed up his mailbox messages and read:
PLAY IT, CUTIE-PIE. PURE OSCAR MATERIAL.
John looked out the picture window at the inhospitable silhouette of Lane Fargo’s darkened packing plant of a home. He gazed toward Laura and Thurmond Messinger’s church, noting the faint light in the bell tower. In the Big House he saw lights on the second floor—Holt’s rooms, Valerie’s, Carolyn’s? Who’s leading me to Holt, he wondered. Which of you would betray him? Or is this only a test?
He went into the living area and slipped the tape from his pocket into the video player. He hit rewind but it was already rewound. All three dogs lined up, sat, and watched him.
He pushed the play button and waited.
The screen filled with gray light, then static, then an image—taken from the observation deck of the Big House—of the hillsides and the Pacific being pelted by a steady, heavy rain. The camera panned to record views in all four directions. There was no sound at all, just a mute storm.
Then the camera simply held, facing north, to capture the acres of orange grove beneath the gray and troubled sky. John couldn’t tell if it was morning or evening or sometime in between. The orange trees shivered in the wind and the rain heaved down in slanting torrents. It turned the irrigation ditches into flat brown ponds with surfaces that popped and roiled. It looks like March, he thought, the month of all the rain, the month Rebecca died.
Three minutes. Five.
John looked at his watch: 2:12 a.m.
Seven minutes, then eight. A storm that never ends, he thought. He reached down to press the fast forward when the image shifted from the dripping Valencias to a long shot of a building. He took his finger off the button and felt a surge of blood hit his eardrums. The Journal.
The camera held on the lobby as a woman wrapped in a raincoat makes her way through the doors. She wears a hat cinched down over her blond hair. She hesitates at the edge of the entryway overhang and looks skyward.
Rebecca, John thought. Rebecca the beautiful. Rebecca the unmistakable. Rebecca.
The rain has lessened to a constant drizzle and she jogs out into the asphalt. She chooses a path through the cars, then, holding the hat onto her head with her left hand she accelerates toward the camera. She looks far away. But the camera follows her through the cars, then it swings ahead and zooms in on a new Lincoln Town Car—white. It almost fills the screen. It is parked beside a brick planter that separates the parking slots from the driveway. The camera jiggles slightly, then stops, as if—John thought—the operator has just tightened a tripod nut. A few seconds later Rebecca enters the picture again, stops at the driver’s side door of the Town Car, extends her hand toward the doorlock and inserts a key. Her back is to the camera. The picture jumps slightly. Rebecca’s arms raise as her body pushes against the car. It looks as if someone has yanked her forward with a hidden wire. Then she rolls away to her left and takes two small, feminine, dance-like steps toward the camera, which jumps again and Rebecca folds to the ground. The camera holds the image for five seconds. There is a red blotch on the Town Car window, chest high. There is no sound. Then the picture fades to black and the black abruptly gives way to gray static.
John simply stood in place, unmoving, and stared at the silent gray screen. He felt the revulsion gathering in his stomach and a frantic anger knotting up in his heart. He imagined setting fire to the cottage, loading his dogs into his truck, driving over to the Big House and lighting it on fire too, shooting Holt in the head when he ran out, then speeding away forever. For a moment he felt like he had entered Hell and was unsure if he would ever get back out. How do you forget what is seen, erase a memory of the real?
Drawn to the horror, feeling that he owed at least this much to Rebecca, he watched the tape again. Every moment of it removed something measurable from his soul.
John loped along in the moonlight with his dogs ahead of him, Re-bec-ca-pause, Re-bec-ca-pause, along the lakeshore where he had first seen Vann and Carolyn Holt many years ago, around the western edge of the water and into the scrub hills of Liberty Ridge. He looked down on the island. He imagined being eleven again and hidi
ng there with Carlos in the cave with the spring bubbling up from the rocks and wondered why he had spent a lifetime trying to outrun the snapping jaws of loss.
What he had just seen seemed to him the ultimate profanity; Rebecca’s once vibrant body reduced to a lump of lifeless flesh in the rain. But the tape in his pocket was a prize beyond anything Joshua could have dreamed.
He made the clearing, sat on the log and felt his heart thumping in his temples. The dogs sprawled around him. He looked at the place where Snakey had died. The breeze rattled the stiff leaves of the oak tree. What had they done with his body? It all seemed such a waste.
I am here to atone and begin again, he thought.
I am here to put things right.
I am here, like Holt, to do justice.
And I won’t leave without his head on a platter.
John had never heard Joshua Weinstein so excited. Not that the special agent was giddy, no. But his voiced dropped a register when he asked John again about the video tape, the message on the computer, the interdiction mission in Little Saigon, and most of all, when he asked John to tell him again exactly what the tape showed.
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