by Paul Levine
SIXTY-FIVE
Sitting ramrod straight astride his stallion, Rutledge felt like knocking the wiseass shyster off the Appaloosa and straight onto his skinny ass. "Goddammit, Payne. I offer you two hundred grand and you give me guff?"
Payne leaned on the saddle horn, taking pressure off his bad leg. "That's the thing. The money's way too rich. So I'm asking myself, what are you afraid of? What's the harm to you if I find Marisol Perez?"
"For once in your life, Payne, be smart."
"By dancing with the devil?"
"This devil don't dance. This devil calls the tunes."
"Just so we're clear, Rutledge. If I stop looking for Marisol, you make my life comfortable. What happens if I don't?"
"No need to go there."
"Bullshit. You're threatening me."
"I know your life's crap," Rutledge barked. "You lost your son. You lost your wife to that asshole on TV. You'll probably lose your law license. Maybe you don't believe it, but I feel for you."
"You're right. I don't believe it."
Rutledge's glare turned cold as a frozen lake. "I've taken enough of your shit. What'll it be, yea or nay?"
"Keep your money. I promised a boy I'd find his mother."
Rutledge hadn't expected this. In his experience, most men buckled at sweet pussy or fast money. But this two-bit shyster, prickly as a bale of straw, was saying no, and saying it loud. "You know what you are, Payne? You're a dishonest man with principles. That makes you dangerous. Believe me, I know."
"I'm just trying to do what's right."
Rutledge shook his head, as if saddened to put down a crippled horse. He would make one last offer. If Payne took it, fine. If not, there were a hundred miles of levee where he could bury the son-of-a-bitch.
"I can give you something you want more than a potful of gold," Rutledge said. "Something you want more than anything in the world."
"I seriously doubt it."
"I can give you Manuel Garcia," Rutledge said. "I can give you the drunken bastard who killed your son. And I can do it tonight."
SIXTY-SIX
The mention of Garcia's name sent a bolt of lightning up Payne's spine. "You're fucking with me, right? Mind games."
"If that's what you want to believe." Rutledge kept riding toward the barn, forcing Payne to catch up.
"Where is he?" Payne demanded.
No answer. Just the clop of hooves and the distant putter of a tractor. Payne brought the Appaloosa so close the two men's legs nearly touched. "How the hell did you find Garcia?"
"Not hard to do. Not with my connections."
"Is he here? In the valley?"
Rutledge patted the stallion's neck. "Took a new name, got a job working for a friend of mine down by Corcoran."
"How do I know you're telling the truth?"
"You can pay Garcia a visit after dinner, do what you gotta do. You'll be back in time to catch Leno. But once I tell you where he is, we got a deal. No more of your fussing about that Mexican woman."
Payne had more questions, but Rutledge dug his heels into the stallion, which took off at a gallop. The best Payne's horse could manage was a school-zone canter. By the time Payne reached the corral, Rutledge had hopped off the stallion and turned it over to a stable hand. Payne dismounted and painfully stretched, his bad leg throbbing. He hurried to catch up with Rutledge, who strode up a path lined with orange-andwhite impatiens. The path wound up a ridge and curled behind his sprawling country home.
When Payne came abreast of Rutledge, he said, "What makes you think I want to kill Garcia?"
"A year ago, you opened your big mouth to half the homicide detectives in L.A."
Javier Cardenas, Payne thought. The police chief had made some calls. "I didn't mean it. It was all talk."
"Bullcrap. You got yourself a primal urge. It's what I would do if someone murdered my son."
"How do you know? You don't have any children."
The older man shrugged. "Hell, if someone killed Javie, I'd gut the bastard like a hog."
"And you think I'm like you?"
Rutledge's smile was as thin as the brim of his Stet-son. "More than you know."
They stopped on a rise behind the farmhouse, a three-story structure with wide porches, green shutters, and Southern plantation white pillars. From this elevation, they looked over thousands of acres, blooming with fruits and vegetables.
"C'mon, Payne. You never even met the Perez woman. She's nothing to you. But the bastard who killed your son? Jesus! He stuck a knife in your heart."
Payne fought off the urge for vengeance. Ever since Adam's death, he had felt it as a searing heat, a torrent of molten steel. He had yearned to do what the law couldn't. Kill the man and settle the score.
"C'mere, Payne. I want to show you something."
Rutledge walked toward three gnarly and shrunken peach trees, Payne trailing. Two feet of sandy loam formed a berm around each trunk, as if someone had lovingly tucked the trees to sleep under a blanket of rich soil.
"Before I was born, my granddaddy planted four hundred Elbertas on this ridge. They're my roots, my family's sweat and tears. No way any of them should still be alive." He ran a callused hand over a tree trunk. "But look here. Three Elbertas, still growing, still bearing fruit. Like the three generations of Rutledge men."
Rutledge reached for a peach-a soft golden orb blushing with red-from the nearest tree. "Watch now. Just a gentle turn of the wrist so the stem doesn't tear out of the socket. The older I get, the more I learn that brute force is seldom the answer to life's problems."
He twisted the peach off its stem and bit into it, juice oozing from his mouth and onto his bristly mustache. He radiated a feral bliss as he polished off the fruit.
"Go ahead, Payne. Take one."
Payne shook his head, thinking of the snake and the forbidden fruit. He didn't quite picture himself as Eve- but Rutledge as a serpent, no problem with the imagery there.
Rutledge moved a few steps toward an enclosure made of railroad ties. Inside was a pile of manure so ripe it steamed in the midday sun. He tossed several handfuls into a bucket, which he carried to the nearest tree. Crouching on his haunches, he used his bare hands to shape a mound of manure around the tree trunk. Clearly, Payne thought, not a man afraid of getting his hands dirty.
"These trees will outlive me," Rutledge told him. "The way a son is supposed to outlive his father. So the father can pass on what's his. Knowledge. Property. Tradition. A father who's deprived of that, well, he's got a right to seek justice. Hell, he's got a duty to."
"I get your point."
"Last chance, Payne. Are you man enough to do what has to be done?"
Payne's thoughts turned to that misty morning on the Pacific Coast Highway. Pictured Adam, just moments before the crash. Animated, talkative, innocent. Heard the thunderclap as the pickup truck broadsided them, Adam's body crushed against his own. A moment later, the man's head appearing through the driver's window. The tang of liquor on his breath.
Now Payne inhaled the pungent aroma of the manure. He looked at the old trees, listened to the breeze tickle their leaves. He thought of his promises made. To Sharon. To Tino. And to himself.
But every thought returned to Adam and to the endless pain of losing him. His son's baseball bat was in the trunk of the Mustang. If Payne closed his eyes, he could see himself crushing Garcia's skull, could hear the bones splinter, could feel the warm stickiness of his blood.
"Tell me how I can find Garcia," Payne said. "I'll do it tonight and be gone by tomorrow."
SIXTY-SEVEN
Rigney liked his whiskey neat and his women messy.
At the moment, he was sipping Johnnie Walker Red and eyeing a woman with a little too much belly for her outfit, a sleeveless crop-top that stopped a foot short of torn, low-slung jeans. She was bent over the pool table, showing the crack of her ass to three young cops drinking Coronas and bantering with her.
I'd fuck her, but I wouldn't spend the night.<
br />
Rigney returned to his Scotch. He was hunched over the bar in a hole-in-the-wall tavern on San Pedro, two blocks from the Parker Center. Considering just how the shitstorm named Royal Payne had so totally fucked up his life.
Rigney had been grilled by Internal Affairs in the hundred-year-old Bradbury Building on South Broadway, and it hadn't gone well. The questions were antagonistic and threatening. The investigators seemed to blame him for Judge Rollins' suicide, Payne's escape, and the layer of smog that blanketed Pasadena.
Officially, he wasn't supposed to be looking for Payne, but he didn't give a shit. He wanted to find the bastard first, crack his head open, make him pay. He'd stopped by Sharon Payne's cubicle earlier today, but she wasn't in. He'd toyed with the idea of bugging her phone or planting a G.P.S. transmitter on her car. But if he was caught, they'd pull his badge and he could share a cell with Anthony Pellicano.
"Hey, Riggs. Don't you owe me a drink?"
A pudgeball named Lou Parell plopped onto the adjacent stool. Homicide. Three years from retirement. If Rigney had to hear about all the marlin the fat bastard planned to catch off Cabo San Lucas, he'd strangle the jerk.
"I don't owe you a drink, Lou. You owe me thirty bucks from poker."
"You sure?"
"At Schulian's house. You don't remember?"
Parell signaled the bartender and pointed to one of the taps. Bud Lite. As if low-cal beer would take off those forty extra pounds he was packing.
"Riggs, you catch Payne yet?"
Rigney drained his glass. "Don't bust my chops, Lou."
"I'm not. Just wondered if you knew you had competition."
"Meaning what?"
"Some badge from East Bumfuck called Homicide asking about the asshole."
Rigney slammed the cocktail glass on the bar. "Who? Who the fuck called?"
"Lemme think." Parell's light beer arrived, yellow as chilled piss. "Spanish name. But he didn't have an accent."
"What'd he say?"
"Asked about Payne hanging around our office last year. You know, when he was planning to go after that wetback who killed his kid."
"You ask the cop why he gave a damn?"
"Why would I?"
"Oh, I don't know. Maybe because you're a detective, and detectives are supposed to be curious about shit that don't smell right."
"I figured he had his reasons."
"Jesus." Rigney signaled for a refill. "Did you tell him we had warrants out on Payne?"
"Yeah. He said he'd keep his eyes open."
"And you don't remember the cop's name or where he's from?"
Parell took a long pull on his beer. "Said he was the chief of police."
"Where, Lou? For Christ's sake, where?"
Parell seemed deep in thought, or as deep as he could go without a tutor. "In the San Joaquin Valley. I remember asking if they have much crime up there. And he said, just some migrants getting drunk and fighting when the peaches are all in and they get paid."
"Jesus, that really narrows it down. They grow peaches for three hundred miles."
If he could find the police chief, Rigney thought, he could find Butch Cassidy and the Mexican Kid. The last time anybody saw them, they were in a diner in the desert town of Thermal. What were they doing upstate? And what hell had Payne raised to get the locals on his case?
"A fish pond!" Parell blurted.
"What?"
"The cop said he was eating lunch outside his office, tossing bacon to the fish."
"Jesus, how do you remember that and not remember where he's from?"
"I don't know. It just stuck in my brain."
Like dogshit to treaded shoes, Rigney thought.
"A man's name," Parell said. "I just remembered. The town is named after some guy."
"Who?"
"I don't remember."
"Hanford?"
"Nope."
"Bakersfield?"
"Nah."
"The name's on the tip of my tongue," Parell said.
"Foam's on the tip of your tongue."
"Rutledge! The guy's the chief of police in Rutledge. You know where that is?"
"I can find it," Rigney said.
SIXTY-EIGHT
"Did you know rats can't vomit?" Charles Whitehurst asked.
"What?" Javier Cardenas wasn't sure he had heard the lawyer correctly.
"If a rat comes across some strange food, it will only take a nibble. That way, if it gets sick, it won't die. If the rat doesn't get sick, next time, it'll eat the whole damn thing."
At the moment, Cardenas was eating his own lunch, his customary B.L.T., as he sat on the redwood bench under a bonsai tree outside the Rutledge Police Department. The phone call from Whitehurst did not improve his appetite.
"Simeon's like that rat," the lawyer continued. "If he poisons a neighbor's well and nothing happens, next time, he'll divert a whole river. Hire a few illegal aliens one day, pretty soon he's running stash houses and whorehouses and paying off half the legislators in Sacramento.
He thinks he's invincible. Then one day, he wolfs down that poison."
Whitehurst's sharp tone shocked Cardenas. The lawyer never would have spoken like that in front of Uncle Sim.
"What the hell are you talking about?" Cardenas demanded.
"A sealed indictment. Racketeering. Bribery. Human trafficking. A hundred seventy-two counts, thick as a phone book. United States of America versus Simeon Rutledge."
"Jesus!" Cardenas tossed his sandwich into the stream. Koi jumped for the bacon, miniature whirlpools stirring in their wake. "What can I do to help?"
"I'm hoping he'll listen to you, Javier."
A realization then. Though the chief had met Whitehurst dozens of times over the years, never had the deep-carpet attorney called him by his first name.
"Simeon respects you and trusts you," Whitehurst continued. "You're the son he never had."
"I'll do anything for Sim. You know that."
"The U.S. Attorney offered a deal. Simeon pleads to one count of racketeering and does a token amount of time at a country club prison. Six to nine months. He pays five million in fines, plus steps down as president of the company. The court will appoint a trustee to oversee the operation."
Cardenas laughed, but it was as bitter as hemlock. "The trustee better have a thick hide, because Uncle Sim will take a bullwhip to him."
"That's pretty much what Simeon said, except he mentioned a shotgun."
"What can I do if he's already rejected the deal?"
"Help me sell him on it."
Cardenas shook his head. "You know Sim. He'll fight to the end. He'll never surrender."
"Then he'll lose what it took three generations to build. The ranch. The farms. All the businesses. Everything forfeited to the government. He'll die in prison. His only wish interred with his bones."
"What wish?"
"For you to take over the business when he's gone."
"Jesus." Cardenas sucked in a breath. "I thought Sim wanted me to be governor or a senator. He never mentioned the business."
"You're the sole heir."
"You're sure?" Cardenas blurted out.
Whitehurst laughed. "I better be. I wrote the will."
For a moment, the only sound was the hum on the line.
"Just to be clear, Javie," Whitehurst continued, "if Simeon Rutledge dies tomorrow, you inherit everything."
Cardenas shook his head, resisting the notion. "And the crimi nal case, what happens to that?"
"A very astute question," the lawyer praised him. "In the untoward event of Simeon's death, the criminal case dies with him. The government will move on to other cases of notoriety, and you'll take over the company."
Cardenas was aware of a tingling sensation, an electrical impulse sparking up his spine. It was not an unpleasant feeling.
"While it hardly needs to be said," Whitehurst continued, obviously believing it did need to be said, "rest assured that I will always be your trusted advisor, Javie. Ju
st as I have been to Simeon."
Cardenas stayed quiet. He sensed Whitehurst wasn't finished.
"But if Simeon's convicted," the lawyer started again, "there'll be nothing to pass on. The sad fact is, the only way for your uncle Sim to achieve his fondest wish is for him to die."
Javier Cardenas discovered he was holding his breath, his throat dry as sand. He exhaled, a hot wind rustling dried leaves. "Neither of us wants that to happen."
"Of course not," the lawyer assured him.
SIXTY-NINE
"What do you mean you're going out tonight?" Tino asked.
"Something I gotta do, that's all." Jimmy keeping it nonchalant. No way he would tell the boy he was setting out to kill a man.
"So you're leaving me alone in the hotel?"
"You want a babysitter?"
"Not unless she wants to watch the titty channel with me."
They had just finished dinner at a barbecue joint, attracted there by the hickory smoke wafting over downtown Rutledge. Ribs, chicken, tri-tip, baked beans, and sweet potato fries. For a skinny kid, Tino could pack it away. Now they were walking back to the hotel, their conversation interrupted by frequent burps and the occasional fart.
"How long till you're back?" Tino asked.
"It'll be late. You'll be asleep."
"You hooking up with that waitress?"
"What waitress?"
"Ay, Himmy. The one you were hitting on, the one whose hair smelled like carne asada."
"Nope."
"Why the big secret, vato? You afraid I won't understand?"
"Exactly."
But that was a lie. Tino would surely understand. He'd expressed the very same emotion a number of times when confronted with someone who would hurt his mother. Tino knew very well the driving force of bloodlust and the bone-deep need for revenge.
SEVENTY
I'm not like Simeon Rutledge.
Sure, we're both members of the human race, but that's where the resemblance ends.