The Triggerman's Dance

by T. Jefferson Parker

  “So, do I tell her we’re coming to see you?”

  “I wouldn’t. But tell her anything you want. Just get her here.”

  “Consider it done.”

  Holt turns and stares at John with his cool gray eyes. A little smile creeps to his mouth. “You’re a good man.”

  John says nothing, returning the stare, hoping he really looks as stupid as he’s trying to seem.

  “I want you to see something now,” Holt says. “I want you to look at it. I don’t want you to say a word. I want you to think about it after we leave here. Tomorrow night, if you’ve changed your mind about this arrangement, you’ll have a chance to tell me. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  Holt presses a button on the railing in front of the diorama and the scene in Kodiak gives way to a parking lot. No animals. No rocks. Just asphalt, and one eucalyptus tree with a thick white trunk that rises from a planter filled with Iceland poppies. A new Lincoln Town Car is parked in a space marked “Baum.” The backdrop is a blown-up photograph of the Journal building.

  John feels his breath catch, hears it catch. He stares at the tableau. The way it feels to see it now takes him back to the way it felt to be there. He brings in a deep breath and exhales. John wonders if his knees might buckle. And he knows for sure that whatever information his face reveals is being easily recorded by the man in front of him.

  Holt’s expression is so ordinary that John can’t infer even the tiniest meaning from it.

  “We’ll talk tomorrow night, John. If you feel the need to. Big dinner. Lots of big doings. Got to have everybody whistling the same tune.”

  “Okay. Sure. All right.”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-FIVE

  As John Menden watched a young woman wash a stained dress in a spring, Joshua Weinstein stared briefly at Sharon Dumars in the muted light of the County Crime Lab Audio-Visual room. He silently shook his head and resumed his pacing. He could not stop the pacing, only interrupt it for brief, anguished moments of worry. He worried that the Sheriff-Coroner’s deputy who had lost Snakey in the county’s paperwork would change his mind and blow Joshua’s operation to smithereens. He worried that Walker Frazee had found out about Snakey, and was ready to fire him. He worried that everyone knew he had slept with Sharon Dumars. No image of her tanned, strong, beautiful body was enough to dispel the fear that he was about to be exposed as a traitor to Rebecca. It is hell being me, he thought, looking at his watch and shaking his head again, his big Adam’s apple traveling up and down his throat like an elevator as he swallowed.

  Kenwick, the Bureau’s crack AV man, sat stooped beside Sharon, looking into a Fuji editing machine through which was running the VHS format tape of Rebecca Harris meeting her end in the Journal parking lot. He was running the frames one-by-one and Joshua had heard nothing but Kenwick’s steady, deep breathing for the last five minutes. Kenwick wore headphones to listen to the soundtrack. Cute, thought Joshua, considering there was no goddamned soundtrack. Kenwick had been flown in from Washington, accompanied by Walker Frazee. Joshua had felt nothing but disaster brewing since the two got off the Bureau jet.

  Why analyze my precious video tape, Joshua thought: what was there to say? If there was ever a case of content over form, this was it. They’d already run it through the infrared scanner for prints. Four thumbs, all perfectly delineated, all John Menden’s. Did they enjoy watching Rebecca die over and over again? Only Walker Frazee and his captious lab men could ruin a free lunch. If this wasn’t enough to earn a search warrant, what was? Owl had performed, and they had won.

  Kenwick finally straightened and removed the padded headphones. He was a big man with the features—Joshua thought—of a bison, right down to the curly brown hair that began just above his forehead as abruptly as a piece of carpet and crept around the expanded bottoms of his heavy earlobes. Watching him come down the jet ramp with Walker Frazee beside him was like watching a vaudeville act. His voice had the resonance of an opera baritone.

  “It’s not complete,” he announced, fastening two black eyes on Joshua. “It’s not intact.”

  “What do you mean, not complete? He didn’t shoot the whole tape, if—”

  “—That isn’t what I mean. I mean, we have the image here. But the soundtrack has not been transferred.”

  “What happened?”

  “No accident. It was re-created this way.”

  “This isn’t the original?”

  The big bison head shook a shaggy negative. “This is a dub. Sans soundtrack. Second, perhaps third, generation. Listen. Watch.”

  Joshua sat down. Kenwick handed him the headset then started the tape in motion. Rain. Oranges. The Journal. Then, Rebecca.

  Josh watched her pick her way through the parked cars, trying for all she was worth only to make life a little easier on Susan Baum. It amazed Joshua that he could watch this now. It took all the self-control he could muster to watch this tape as dispassionately as he might an evening news clip of college basketball. Rebecca as evidence. Rebecca as a clue. Rebecca as forensic data. But surely as there was no soundtrack to the tape, there was a soundtrack in Joshua’s mind and it said: You loved her, she betrayed you, she died. And as Joshua listened to that voice inside him, he wished again that he had something more to give Rebecca than the bitterness of his rejection and the fury of his revenge. I can only give you what I have, he thought. I can only give you back what you left me.

  He snapped the headset off. “If there’s no sound, what am I listening for?”

  “The hiss. The hiss tells us that the original sound strip received input. The copy was run with a soundtrack of its own—silence. Or near silence, except for the hiss.”

  “You’re positive this is not an original tape?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Kenwick looked at Joshua with his big lugubrious bison eyes. “The sound strip must have contained something that someone was not supposed to hear.”

  Joshua sat back and stared at the now-blank editing screen. “So it exists?”

  “What exists?”

  “The original movie soundtrack.”

  “Well, it certainly did at one point. What happened to it would be purely speculation right now. I’d also speculate why the filmmaker would let the images remain for posterity, so to speak, but erase the audio.”

  Joshua nodded, but didn’t look at Kenwick. There would be no looking into this gift horse’s mouth, either, until Wayfarer’s carcass was deep in Federal lockup.

  He stood. “Thanks, Wick.”

  “Good luck, Joshua.”

  Frazee greeted them at the door of the Bureau conference room. He seemed even smaller than the last time Joshua had seen him, though Joshua could not imagine why. He wore his eternal blue suit and his usual open-faced, boyish expression. He stood aside to let them in, then appeared seated on the other side of the conference table without seeming to have actually walked there, as only a small man can do. Down the table sat Norton, red-faced and inflated as always, as if he had just gotten off the canvas after a knockdown.

  Frazee cleared his throat and leaned forward, which made Joshua wonder, as always, whether or not Walker’s feet were touching the floor. Joshua was amazed that he could wonder such a thing while the climax of his operation was being planned.

  Frazee’s eyes looked dead now, not a glimmer in them. Joshua could not remember anything so akin to sympathy on the little man’s face. His stomach dropped.

  “The warrant petition has been denied,” Frazee said.

  Joshua felt the earth shift underneath him and was hit by a sudden decompression he could not fight. His spirit seemed to pour out from his heart, right onto the floor. He felt a darkness closing in and the walls sliding in to surround him. His own voice, when he finally found it, embarrassed him.

  “Why? he bleated.

  “Chain of custody weak. That’s Owl, unsworn and unaffiliated. Partial evidence—that’s the tape with no sound on it. The fear is ‘appearance of impropriet
y.’ I quote the magistrate verbatim now. It’s become a given that law enforcement tampers with evidence. We can thank the Los Angeles Police Department for that.”

  Joshua sat back, allowing the rancorous anger to build inside him. He took off his glasses, rubbed the dark divots on either side of his nose, and looked at his compatriots through the haze of his 20/80 uncorrected vision. He could feel his eyes getting a little misty, so he slipped the glasses back on.

  “Can we try another—

  “—Already did,” said Frazee. “He sided with the first finding. It’s the atmosphere of the times, Joshua. You can’t change it.”

  He looked at Sharon, who had actually gone a little pale. “I can’t abide by it, either, sir.”

  “This hurts me, too. I’m left with no other choice than to turn the whole thing over to ATF, as we discussed. Liberty Ridge is a cold potato now. Let them have it. We’ll move on to more productive fields. Perhaps they can glean something from Owl that—”

  “Let them run my mole?”

  “Well, if they take over the op, they get the baby and the bath water.”

  Joshua felt his anger boil over now, this cascade of rage behind his eyes and mouth, burning through his skin. He got up slowly from his chair, pulled it out from the table and kicked it so hard it shot back on its rollers to the wall and flipped over. Frazee’s face seemed to behold him from the far end of a long tunnel.

  “I’ve got three more days. They were promised by you, Walker. They were promised by the Attorney General. They are mine and I own them and I intend to use them to take down Holt. At the end of that time, if I don’t have solid enough evidence to arrest him, you can turn Owl over to the Bat Boys and reassign me to El Paso, Texas. But until then, I have an operation here and I am going to finish it.”

  “Sit down, Weinstein.”

  Josh pulled out the next available chair, and sat.

  “You have your three days, as promised. Today is Friday. Monday morning, we’ll joint-task this over to ATF. Joshua, all I can say is I’m sorry. You gave it a good run.”

  Then Frazee rose to his feet—or slid down to let them reach the floor—and the meeting was over.

  Josh looked at his cohorts as they made their way from the conference room, realizing that he was about to finish the longest, most bitter journey of his young life. How it would end was anyone’s guess.

  Joshua studied Norton’s Scotch-riddled face. Norton was his mentor and trainer, a man who within the limits of a bureaucracy had been as good, decent and honest with him as a man could be. He could bear Norton no ill will. And when he looked at Frazee’s aging but unlined face, his innocent expression and unshakable self-faith, he saw someone not only to fear, but to pity. He couldn’t even look at Dumars.

  He sat for a while after the others had gone. He could see Sharon lingering in the hallway for him. It took sheer willpower to simply stand up and leave the conference room.

  He walked across the parking structure with her—his ears burning, his throat tight. He was trying to figure out how to react, what to do.

  “What’s your plan, Joshua?”

  “I have no plan.”

  “You’re lying.”

  Ever since their nights together—there had been four of them in the last four days—Joshua had noted an increasingly bold and proprietary air in Sharon. She seemed quick to bore into things that most people would simply leave alone. His defenses were no longer unassailable for her, and Joshua wasn’t sure whether he liked it or not.

  “God Sharon, I wish I was,” he said.

  Owl didn’t call until late that night, when they were sitting in her living room watching Leno. Sharon’s cat, Natalie, was sprawled across Joshua’s lap, purring. He was stroking the cat, though he hated cats. He had not touched his dinner. The cell phone was on the coffee table in front of him, but Joshua dreaded the words he would have to say.

  And then it was ringing. Two. Three.

  Joshua picked up the handset and went outside to the patio. He simply couldn’t let Sharon hear his defeat. There was a large enough shred of his pride left to never allow that. John’s voice was clear and small, as if coming across the globe rather than the twenty short miles from Liberty Ridge.

  John repeated his conversation with Holt and told Joshua about the Baum exhibit. Joshua asked him to repeat it again. He wrote it down in his notepad, as always, as if any of it mattered now. He was furious that they couldn’t get an arrest warrant for a man planning to stuff a corpse and put it on display with his elk and lambs and kudu or whatever the fuck they were. Joshua looked up at the sky and wished he were on one of the stars.

  Of course, his gears were spinning, no, shearing—he could almost see Wayfarer, Baum and Owl sitting up there on Top of the World, finishing off lunch before Holt finished them off. It was almost more than he could take, being able to see it so clearly but knowing it would never happen, that he would never be there.

  And then, of course, the inevitable question from his snitch:

  “You’ll bust Holt while I’m supposed to be getting Baum, right?”

  “That is no longer the plan.”

  “We didn’t get the warrant?”

  “No.”

  “Why? What in hell more can I—”

  “—I don’t know, Owl. I honestly don’t know how you could have done better.”

  Joshua explained the meeting with Frazee, the denial of the warrant petition, the reasons. He couldn’t remember ever having to give more shameful news in all his life. It was bad enough being governed by fools without having to speak for them, too.

  In the long silence that followed, Joshua truly accepted that his longstanding appointment with fate had been canceled forever.

  And then, while he searched his vocabulary for the best terms of surrender, a light flashed inside him.

  The light was so bright that Joshua couldn’t look directly at it, only to the side, like trying to peek at an eclipse of the sun.

  Was this real? Was he seeing it correctly? Or was it just a mirage hovering over a long, hot, lonely highway?

  “Wait,” he said.

  He thought it through one way, then back again. One more time, then another. It was there. It was real.

  “I’m tired of waiting,” said Owl.

  “I need thirty seconds. Give them to me.”

  Gentle static. The occasional breathing of his mole. His own accelerating heartbeats thumping in his ears as he flipped back through his little book to the notes of John’s second call—after he’d accompanied Holt to Top of the World and seen the statues and the vaults. He backed toward the porch light to see them better. Pay dirt.

  “Listen to me. There’s a way we can do this. It is possible. You would have to put your head on the chopping block. Right there, directly on it. Then, trust me.”

  “I’ll listen.”

  “There’s nothing for you to listen to, Owl. Just do what Holt tells you. Bring Baum to Liberty Ridge for him. I’ll be there when you need me. I promise you that.”

  Sharon was eyeing him as he returned to the house a few minutes later. He glanced at her, then away, then set the phone back on the coffee table and began pacing the room. Natalie looked at him with eyes that seemed fixed on some other dimension.

  “I ordered him out, but he refused. He’s going to take Baum back to Liberty Ridge for Holt.”

  Sharon said nothing and Josh felt the accusing silence. He knew she would unravel his dishonesty in a matter of seconds.

  “You asked him to disobey you.”

  “It was totally his doing. He refuses to come out.”

  “Joshua—that’s perilous. It’s stupid and it’s . . . homicidal. Holt plans to kill her, and John, too. You know it.”

  He allowed himself the smallest of smiles. “Therefore, we have a reasonable assumption that a crime is about to take place. On those grounds, we can be there to prevent it. We’ll take him for conspiracy to commit the murder of Susan Baum. We’ll add Rebecca later.”
>
  Her silence tried to accuse him, but Joshua Weinstein’s conscience was beyond reproach. He was beginning to feel invincible now. He felt as if he had banged his head against the wall, and the wall had given.

  “John is willing,” he said.

  “Of course he is. He needs Wayfarer just as bad as you do.”

  He looked into Sharon’s level brown eyes and saw the terrifying evenness of her common sense, the endless flat line of her moral horizon—good above and bad below and nothing in between.

  She went to the kitchen and poured herself more coffee. When she came back she sat at the far end of the sofa, away from Joshua and the cat.

  Joshua could sense the envelope of tension around her, palpable as the buzz in a prison.

  “I don’t know what the right thing to do is,” she said.

  “Welcome to the human race.”

  “Fuck you and your hatred, Josh.”

  “It makes a better light than your doubt does.”

  “I don’t like the doubt, either. It makes for weakness and indecision. It’s paralyzing. But this is the first time since coming to the Bureau that I haven’t felt right about something. Something big, I mean. If this goes wrong, Josh, it goes wrong big.”

  “Then I’ll be looking for work in the private sector. Maybe Holt could use me. I might open my own little dry cleaning business.”

  “You might be dead.”

  Thoughts of his own mortality couldn’t dent him. The joy of victory, even the thought of victory swept the fear from Josh’s mind. He looked at Sharon now, at her face behind the rising steam from her coffee cup. She’s beautiful, he thought, isn’t she? In a different way than Rebecca, but beautiful just the same.

  “I’ll do it alone, Sharon.”

  “Do you want me there?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “I’m afraid of doing the wrong thing. Of getting someone innocent killed. Aren’t you?”