With these realities in mind, John rose quietly from the bed, dressed and slipped out the door with his dogs. From the oak tree by the electric fence he retrieved the .45, and stashed it in the center console of his truck. When he got back into bed forty minutes later, Valerie hadn’t moved.
CHAPTER
FORTY
John guides his truck up the last steep incline at Top of the World. He’s glad to be rid of Fargo, who frisked him twice before letting him through the main gate, then blatantly followed him all the way to Newport Beach and back. Baum sits beside him, dressed in a flowing bright green silk ensemble with a loose vest and oversized cuffs, huge sunglasses, heavy faux-emerald earrings and white high-top athletic shoes. At first, she took John’s change of plan—we’re going to Liberty Ridge—with a giddy acceptance. She’d silently evaluated the long, palm-lined drive up from the frontage road, the magnificent house and grounds, the windswept hills and Valencia groves. But now, as they climb the last few yards toward the vaults, John can feel her fingers digging into the flesh of his arm.
“He’s actually going to be here?”
“Actually.”
“And what about Josh? And Sharon?”
John slows the truck, then stops completely. He turns to Baum and lowers her sunglasses so he can look into her pale green eyes. “They’ll be there. And Susan, if you much as imagine their names, it will get both of us killed instantly. That’s the deal we have. Do you understand?”
“What I don’t understand is why—”
He reaches out and takes her arm, hard. “—Then shut up and play along. It’ll be over with soon.”
“Oh, God, as if that’s supposed to console me. Who are you really working for, anyway? You’re hurting my—”
“—I said shut up and play along. Act pissed off that I tricked you into this. That’s all you need to do.”
“I really am pissed off.”
“Run with it.”
He leaves the brakes, punches the gas and mounts the crest. His truck levels off and he pulls it over next to one of Holt’s Rovers.
“I’ll get the door,” he says.
Baum gathers up her big leather bag from the floorboard and, of course, starts trying to find the door handle that Fargo removed. John uses this time to retrieve his .45 from the console and slip it into the pocket of his duster. Then he hops out and goes around to the passenger side to let Baum out. She slides out of the big truck, cursing under her breath.
Together they walk across the gravel toward the stone table and benches. John feels loose and alert, but his heart takes a little downward twirl when he sees the wedge-shaped figure of Partch, standing, with his arms crossed, behind the table area. He wears the same golf shirt and slacks that he wore the last time John saw him, the same sunglasses, and a short leather jacket to cover his sidearm.
Holt comes from the table, nodding to John, then smiling at Baum. He offers her his hand.
“I’m Vann Holt.”
“You know who I am. Just what in hell is going on here?”
“Lunch. Bring an appetite?”
“Not really.”
“I made some special dishes.”
“I’m dieting.”
“Come over here to the edge with me, will you? I wanted you to see Liberty Ridge from above.”
He takes her arm and guides her past the silent Partch, over to the edge of the summit.
“I can stand up on my own,” she says.
“It’s a simple courtesy. John? Why don’t you join us?”
They stand three abreast—Baum in the middle—and look down at the Ridge. The wind is dying down, the bulk of its fury spent during the night, but it gathers now to a steady howl that lasts a few seconds, then dies.
“When did you come to Orange County from New Jersey, Susan?”
“Eight years ago.”
“Ever seen anything quite like this?”
“Sure I have. Orange County’s all the same unless it’s the beach or got streets and houses on it—just hills and vultures and plants that don’t get flowers on them. I always thought the houses looked better than oak trees and cactus. I don’t see why people like you get in such a snit about other people wanting to live where you do. Or maybe I just answered my own question—you just want it for yourself.”
Holt laughs. “I certainly do. It’s been in the family three generations now. What you say is exactly what I’d expect from a Jersey Jew.”
“Predictably ugly words. I happen to think a vibrant community of people is more interesting than something like this. The rancho days petered out about two decades ago. Haven’t you heard?”
“There’s more than just nostalgia here. There’s the community you mentioned—there’s family and blood and business and production. There’s shared culture, religion and language. There’s regular people trying to live on the land, take something from it and give something back.”
“Privileged white people,” says Baum. “And their magnificent playthings. A helicopter next to your mansion? Get real. Nobody can afford to live like this any longer.”
John inwardly winces at Susan’s words; she isn’t just standing up to Holt, as Joshua had no doubt coached her, she’s right straight in his face. How could they have expected less from her?
“I can,” Holt answers. “And I intend to. And I’ve done it without dragging innocent people through mud. I’ve done it without slandering people for profit.”
Baum looks at Holt now, and sets her sunglasses atop her swirl of hair. “Mr. Holt? Let’s cut the bullshit and maybe get to some kind of point. What in hell are we doing here right now?”
“I brought you up here to tell you about Patrick. There was a time I wanted an apology from you. But not now. I just want you to understand.”
“Apologize for what? Everything I wrote was true.”
“What you didn’t write was more true. When the real rapist was caught, you didn’t retract a word that you’d written about Pat.”
“It was in the paper. On the news side. I can’t apologize every time I rub somebody the wrong way.”
“I’m no longer expecting one.”
“Okay. I’m sorry. There. Make you feel better?”
John watches Holt look down on Baum with an expression of pure bitterness.
“I suppose you want it in the paper?”
Easy, thinks John.
“It’s amazing to me how little you know.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?”
Holt smiles. “Understand. Join me for lunch. This way. Your place is right here. John, you’re at the head.”
John looks at the fancified table: three settings—two facing each other from each of the long sides of the rectangular stone, and a third at the head of the table, facing the two others and the Holt vaults. There is a linen cloth, a small vase of wildflowers as a centerpiece, place settings, cloth napkins, wine and water glasses and plates at each place. The plates are covered by shiny silver domes. The wind buffets the little flowers.
John sits. Baum is to his left, and beyond her, still fastened in his silence, stands Partch. Holt is on his right, directly across from Baum. He wonders why he is at the head of the table, knowing it’s not an accident. For one thing, Partch has a clean line of fire at him.
He looks up at the blue. He wonders how they’ll arrive—by land or sky. He pulls the long side of his coat up onto his leg so the .45 rests on his thigh. He unrolls his napkin and scrunches it out of the way between his legs. He feels to make sure the coat pocket slit is up and convenient and the flap is tucked inside.
John watches Baum look up at the figure of Patrick and his books, then to Vann and Carolyn in a wedding-cake pose, then to Valerie with her dog.
“Susan, take off your sunglasses,” says Holt.
“It’s bright out.”
“I want to see your expressions while we talk.”
“I choose to leave them on.”
Holt leans forward and reaches out to her lik
e an optician, slowly and deliberately, with both hands open. He’s smiling. Then he takes her lips between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and sharply yanks her face toward him. She whinnies, raising both hands helplessly beside her face. She wiggles but her face can’t move. With his left hand he pulls off the glasses and sets them next to him.
“Better,” he says, letting her go.
“Oh, God,” she hisses. “You . . . you . . .”
But she doesn’t finish the sentence and for the first time all day John can see the fear rising in Susan Baum’s lovely green eyes.
“Pat was twenty-two, just out of college,” he says, laying his napkin across his lap. He points to Baum’s. “Show some manners, lady.”
Baum dumps the silverware and snaps the cloth open. John watches her shaking hands take the napkin beneath the table top.
“Religious kid. We started Mormon, but by the time I gave it up, Pat was had. Okay with me. There’s worse things than religious convictions. Something to believe in is always better than nothing, long as it lasts. Had a girl he was going to marry after his mission to Africa. Had an A-minus grade average—Economics. Had a nice way with people and animals. Actually, kind of a shy kid. Never really liked to hunt or fish, didn’t care for the killing. I respected that about him. Had these real pretty blue eyes, light skin. He was a happy soul. The kind of kid who’d wake up happy, jump into bed with you and smile and say, it’s time to get up, Mom. Time to get up, Dad. One of those kind of kids. Rare. Val was always grumpy in the morning. Me, too. Carolyn so-so. But Pat, there he was, first light of day charging in to get you going. This was when he was three.”
John watches Holt. Maybe it is the events of the night before, or the cancer inside him, or the memory of his son or the hideousness of the task at hand, but his face—John sees—has lost its usual robust glow and now looks pale and loose. Behind the lenses of his yellow shooting glasses his gray eyes have taken on an ocher, otherworldly cast. He catches John looking at him and John looks away.
“In fact,” Holt continues. “One of the reasons it was so easy for you—and those alleged victims of yours—to put Pat down in the barrio was because Pat was down in the barrio a lot—doing his domestic mission work. That’s what they do before sending them out into the world to convert souls. And you, Ms. Baum, you and your frightened lady friends turned that into the possibility of a rape spree. It was so preposterous I’d have laughed if it wasn’t my own son. But it wasn’t very goddamned funny when I read about it in your columns and there was no Pat left to even fight for his own good name. I’ll tell you, Baum—I’ve been a lot of places in my life and I’ve done a lot of things. And nothing ever made me as sick as what you wrote. Nothing made the bile jump into my throat and my face sweat and the sweat smell foul. Nothing ever.”
Baum looks at John.
Hang in there, he thinks.
“Then you should have called me,” says Baum.
“I did. Several times. And not a single return call. Not one.”
“I was busy.”
“—I was busy, too. Trying to find a good motorized wheelchair for Carolyn. Whom you described in one column as ‘the kind of subservient wife and child-bearer Mormons cherish, who had probably never disobeyed her husband in all her life.’ You implied rather obviously that those characteristics—untrue, by the way—were what made her deserve what had happened to her. ‘Perhaps a more independent woman would have refused to accompany her twenty-two year old son that day on a Christian crusade into the dear, near barrio to troll for souls less in need of redemption than either of them could have known. Perhaps she had suspected that in the past his sorties into Santa Ana might have been for quite another purpose altogether.’ “
Baum looks down at the silver dome covering her lunch. “Overwrought. Maybe.”
“Carolyn would have laughed at that if she’d had any sense left to laugh with. I couldn’t. Still can’t. It’s an insult to the finest human being I’ve run across on earth. You knew nothing about her. You just took the trendy generality and ran with it.”
“Then I apologize.”
“Too late.”
“You want it in print?”
“No. An apology was never the point.”
“Then what is it you want me to do?”
“Eat your lunch.”
John watches Baum lift the cover of her plate and set it aside.
“What is it?” she asks with a diminished self-assurance.
“Your articles, shredded and topped with fifty cc’s of Carolyn’s blood and a dash of Pat’s ashes. It might need salt and pepper.”
She looks at Holt with a glazed expression. John sees the panic building, the tic in her cheek.
Holt lifts the cover on his plate to reveal a snub-nosed revolver, polished and gleaming on the white china. In an act of humor, a sprig of parsley sits beside the cylinder.
“John, see if you like your entrée,” he says.
John looks at Holt and tries to assess the intentions in the pale ocher eyes. The eyes seem to hold only conviction, nothing more—no humor, no pity, no latitude. As he looks into those eyes John passes the point where he is sure how to act, sure what is expected and planned. In his mind he sees Joshua and Sharon parachuting down from the heavens but this is only a mirage of hope.
Where are they?
Then, like a prayer answered, he really does see something that makes his pulse race—yes, he’s sure it’s actual, far out over the Pacific—a small dark object in the sky. Inwardly, he smiles.
The wind howls across the Ridge and John lifts his silver dome to find an identical revolver on his plate. It is pointed toward the tombs, mid-way between Baum on his left and Holt on his right. A similar sprig of parsley shivers in the wind.
Baum looks at John’s plate, then at John.
“I’m finished,” she says. “I can’t do this anymore.”
“Too bad,” says Holt. “Take a bite. John, when Susan’s finished, either one of us can serve the dessert.”
We’re ready, John thinks. He looks out to the airborne miracle moving in over the ocean now, a helicopter etching an achingly slow line toward them. It is descending.
Holt follows John’s gaze. “That chopper coming our way, John?”
“Looks like it, Mr. Holt.”
“Well, I wonder who it could be.”
“I’ve got no idea.”
“Maybe it’s the air cav, come to rescue Susan from having to eat her words.”
Baum’s head is turned toward the helicopter.
“Eat your lunch, Susan,” orders Holt. “There’s nobody on earth who can relieve you of your obligations now.”
Baum looks at John again, and he can see her panic. He tries to express reassurance with his eyes. Hang in here, he thinks.
“Do what he says, Susan.”
She takes this as evidence of John’s duplicity. Her gaze hardens against his. She looks quickly at Holt, then back at Partch, then up at the chopper lowering toward Top of the World.
“Oh, shit,” she says.
John watches too as the black-and-orange machine hovers above them, tilting one way with the wind, then the other. The tail pivots out and the nose drops and the pilot waves down at them. John is aware of Holt waving back. Then the Liberty Ops patrol chopper rises as if strings are cinching it back into the blue.
“Good soldiers,” says Holt. “Always looking out for the old man.”
John notes the satisfied smile on Holt’s face. The sound of the helicopter’s engine vanishes in the wind and the mute craft tilts back toward the Pacific.
In the wake of its departure John feels a sickening emptiness in his stomach. He knows that what Baum is feeling is worse. He understands that all roads have led him here, that all moments have converged here, though this understanding leaves him with little but a sense of profound foolishness.
Where are they?
Baum looks at him, crestfallen: “John—I’m finished.”
H
olt looks hard at him. John can see the gears turning now in Holt’s mind, the questions ratcheting by, the answers rotating up to engage them. He knows it will only take another second or two for it all to mesh. Time, he thinks, anything now for time.
So he picks the revolver off his plate with his left hand and holds the barrel out, inches from Baum’s head. He slips his right hand into his coat pocket and locks his palm around the butt of the automatic, slipping his finger through the trigger guard. He tries to tilt the muzzle toward Holt, but the hammer is caught in the soft material of the pocket and he can’t free it.
His own voice sounds tight and unconvincing: “Shut up and eat, Susan. Trust me now. It’s good for all of us. Believe me.”
Holt: “Eat your words, you wretched swine.”
John sees nothing but terror in Baum’s green eyes. Her pupils look like black dimes.
She looks down at her plate, lifts her fork, and picks at the pile of shredded newsprint with the tines.
“Drink some water, Susan,” John says. And as he says this, he glances past Baum to Partch, gauging the distance he’ll have to swing the revolver in order to shoot past her head and hit the big man. Four inches? Five?
“This gun loaded, Mr. Holt?” he asks, staring down the barrel at Baum.
“What do you think?”
“I think you’d like me to use it.”
“It would reveal your weight. Conviction. Follow-through.”
“Question is, do you trust me enough to load it?”
“That is the question, John. Million dollar one. What if you lost your nerve? Tried to use it on me? I had to consider that.”
“There’s Partch.”
“Damn straight. Up to you, John. Totally your call. Follow your heart.”
Where are they?
John glances at Partch: arms loose at his side now, full attention directed back at him.
When he shifts his gaze to Baum, he sees something different in her eyes. But is it resignation or understanding?
She lifts her water glass and drinks.
She picks up her fork again and pokes at the bloody, ashstrewn paper. Then she looks at Holt.
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