The Third Rule of Ten

by Gay Hendricks

  “And just so we’re clear, you were never here.” His eyes were slits. I half-expected a forked tongue to flicker from between his lips. “And neither was I.”

  I stood upright, expecting at any moment to feel the gut-punch of a close-range bullet and then to feel nothing at all. I walked to the opening in the cabaña and ducked outside. The two bodyguards were gone. Maybe they were finally getting to dance.

  I started to run, alone in the dark except for a sliver of moon, a devil, and a big, black ocean.

  CHAPTER 16

  I woke up with a headache burrowing behind my forehead and settling in for the day. I barely remembered getting into bed last night. I had jogged up the beach and back to my car, avoiding the blue-and-white tent, still filled with revelers. Clancy’s car was gone. Only the fish would know if he’d called me. I was weak with hunger and headed to a nearby strip mall, where I found a Thai hole-in-the-wall. It was full of hipsters dressed like gangsters, if gangsters cared about being hip. I was starving and needed something fast—and soft enough for my swollen mouth to negotiate. When I stepped inside, the small but fierce female proprietress scurried up to me. My upper lip made smiling a challenge, but I gave it my best shot.

  “What’s fast and good?”

  “No service,” she said.

  “But the sign says you’re open until midnight.”

  She pointed to my bare feet. “No shoe, no service.”

  Oh.

  I stepped outside the door, then leaned back in. “What’s fast and good?”

  That earned a half-smile. “Soup. Tom yam nam khon. Cook just made fresh. Or we have—”

  “I’ll have that,” I said, my wounded mouth watering in anticipation of the mix of spicy lemongrass and sweet coconut milk. “To go.”

  I’d downed the entire container of soup then and there, on the sidewalk, before driving straight home. As I approached my house, I reached for my iPhone to disengage the Guard-on. Then I remembered I didn’t have a phone anymore. Then I remembered I didn’t have a connected Guard-on, either. I was shedding electronics faster than Tank shed hair in the summertime.

  Tank himself had been ready to disown me, but I couldn’t deal with him. I fed him the last of the liver bits and crashed without even flossing.

  Now I found his warm body with my foot and stroked his back with my bare sole. His low purr let me know I was once again forgiven. We humans could learn a lot from our cats about letting go of resentment.

  I lifted my head, which felt like a bowling ball. From the rectangle of sunlight reflected on my wall, I deduced it was mid-morning already. I explored the laceration inside my upper lip with my tongue. It was mostly healed, though the lip itself was still puffy.

  I swung out of bed, wincing. I had a long day ahead of me. But first on my list, after two Advil, was trying to make contact with Yeshe and Lobsang. My near-death moment last night had knocked some clarity into me—woken me up to my stubbornness, like the loud gong the elder monks used to strike at Dorje Yidam every dawn, to rouse us from our sleep.

  It was 12 hours later there. With any luck, I would catch them before they went to bed. I moved to my computer, opened the Skype app, and put in a call. As I waited for a response, my heart unfurled like the petals of a lotus, and I wondered what perverse instinct had made me think I should deny myself their support.

  Yeshe’s image swam into focus. He was smiling so hard that his eyes were squinting. “Tenzing!” he shouted. Deep down, Yeshe didn’t believe I could hear him on the computer unless he pitched his voice loud enough to reach across the miles.

  “You don’t have to shout, Yeshe. I can hear you, my friend,” I said, smiling.

  “Yes. I remember that now,” he said. “Can you wait for a moment?” He disappeared from view, and I found myself staring at the familiar simple furnishings of their shared abbot’s office, the same space that my father had once occupied while fulfilling his monastic responsibilities. A sharp twinge in my heart, like a muscle cramping, let me know I still harbored hurt from my father’s death.

  Yeshe reappeared. Next to him, Lobsang’s bald head floated, as bright and round as the moon.

  “Tashi delek,” I said, touching my hands to my forehead in greeting.

  “Good health to you as well, venerable brother,” Lobsang replied. His eyes narrowed with concern. “Your lip is swollen.” His expression grew stern. “Where are you?”

  I tipped my screen. “Here, in my living room in Topanga Canyon,” I said.

  “No, Ten. I mean inside.” Lobsang’s voice rang with authority, and I realized he was not only growing up, he was growing into his position as abbot. “Where are you inside? Where has your spirit gone?”

  “Are you in danger?” Yeshe added. “Ever since we last communicated, I’ve been feeling dark emanations, a concentration of shadow-energy surrounding you.”

  I wasn’t ready to go there yet—to the two corpses sprawled outside my garage. Instead, I told them about the previous night: the quinceañera celebration, the cabaña incident, my close encounter with two thugs, a gangster, and a Glock.

  Lobsang and Yeshe already knew about Chaco from the previous time he and I had tangled.

  “I do not like that you have attracted this man back into your life,” Lobsang said. “You are inviting great risk. Why?”

  “Funny, Chaco said almost the same thing,” I said, keeping my voice light. “Don’t worry. I’ve got Tank here to keep me nice and safe.”

  Yeshe smiled, but Lobsang’s expression remained serious. He was not fooled, not one bit.

  “I am concerned, Tenzing,” Lobsang said. “I feel you may be dancing very near the edge of a steep cliff.”

  I didn’t reply. He was right, but that didn’t mean I would step back.

  “How can we help?” Yeshe asked.

  “Connecting with you is already helping,” I admitted. I sidled a little closer to honesty. “Lately, I’ve been noticing this growing tendency, you know, to keep things to myself. To isolate, go it alone.”

  Lobsang finally allowed himself a small smile. “Lately? Forgive me for disagreeing, dear Tenzing, but you have preferred to go it alone for as long as I’ve known you, and I’ve known you for most of your life.”

  I heard the echo of Lama Sonam’s voice, gently chiding me when I was a boy: “Trust the sangha, Tenzing. Let the sangha support you. You do not have to battle the world all by yourself.”

  Yesterday I had witnessed Gloria Teresa’s sangha, her built-in spiritual community, surrounding her. They celebrated her transition from girl to woman, rejoiced in her growth, and publicly honored her love for her God. At Dorje Yidam, our sangha was also a community of like-minded practitioners, in our case dedicated to the spiritual teachings and liberating techniques of the Buddha. As with any such group, we were encouraged to feel at one with the sangha, to invite its support rather than rebel against its rules, as I had been in the habit of doing back then.

  And now?

  Then, I’d rebelled. Now, I’d rejected my spiritual family entirely. Given my current lack of any spiritual practice whatsoever, what sangha in their right mind would want me? And my sincere but misguided attempt to make Heather and me a sangha of two had backfired. No relationship can bear that weight, not if the foundation is shaky.

  “You’re right,” I said. For a brief moment, it felt good to admit the truth, but almost immediately my inner defender stepped in with a lame excuse. “But it’s not easy staying connected to the sangha, living over here, doing what I do.”

  Excuses, lame or otherwise, usually evoked the same reaction from Yeshe and Lobsang: absolute, utter disinterest. Their unwillingness to engage in my habitual defensiveness was one of the reasons I loved them and needed them in my life.

  “Staying connected to the sangha is hard anywhere,” Lobsang said.

  Yeshe’s big smile broke through. “Yes! Have you forgotten what it’s like living in a monastery?”

  We all laughed at the truth of that. As novice
s, we made a daily sport of pointing out the inconsistencies and hypocrisies of the old monks who taught us. We defined ourselves as much by our opposition to the sangha as by our identification with it. Our favorite target was old Lama Jamyang, a lifelong celibate and sweetly harmless elder, who had the bad-luck assignment of informing us about matters pertaining to sex. As far as his qualifications for teaching such a course went, what can I say? Lama Jamyang was brilliant at making butter sculptures. Period. He knew less than we did about sex, and we didn’t know much. All secular courses at Dorje Yidam were taught in English, a language that the old monk spoke haltingly. No matter, because his fundamental lesson wasn’t complicated. His attitude toward any and all interactions with the opposite sex boiled down to one key concept: “Don’t stick thing in girl.” He didn’t elaborate—he just repeated the phrase over and over, accenting different words: “Don’t stick thing in girl!” followed by “Don’t stick thing in girl!”

  As a self-appointed rebel, I, of course, had to press. “Which particular thing?” The shocked hush that followed was worth the sure punishment my father would mete out later on.

  “Any thing!” Lama Jamyang bellowed, before banishing me from class.

  Sadly, this severe approach to a natural instinct is not the sole province of Tibetan Buddhists. The world is rife with extreme, shame-based attitudes toward the opposite sex. Even Bets McMurtry’s born-again gang had a name for Don’t stick thing in girl: abstinence education. I doubt it works any better here and now than it did with me over there back then.

  “Tenzing?”

  I herded my wandering mind back to the present. I looked at the screen, at the openhearted concern radiating from my friends’ faces. Their unquestioning love tapped against the wall of resistance, and a small crack opened up.

  “I need your help,” I said. “With the case I’m working on now. I’m a little lost.”

  Without hesitation, they nodded in unison. “We are at your service,” Yeshe said. “Always.”

  I rubbed my eyes. “I’m like a mongrel chasing his tail, utterly convinced he’s closing in on his target. I’m running in circles, and I’m running out of time.”

  Lobsang said, “There’s also the small issue of bad men kidnapping you, of a gangster wanting you dead. Such things would affect any person’s serenity.”

  I nodded.

  “Can you tell us more about your adversary?” Yeshe’s eyes were steady. He, too, was maturing. There was a time not that long ago when he didn’t want to hear anything bad said about any other sentient being.

  I told them what I could about my complicated foe, including what my research had uncovered: the hundreds of brutal deaths; the billions of corrupt dollars; the sense I had that there was no destroying this creature, that its tentacles were too numerous, too easily replaceable by others. They listened in silence, eyes closed, breathing in and out. They were Buddhist monks committed to ahimsa, to nonharming, but they were also Tibetans, victims of an enemy regime responsible for mass cruelty, if not genocide.

  “But I have no visible proof,” I continued. “All the evidence keeps disappearing. He’s been one step ahead of me this whole time, and I don’t know what to do.” I reached toward the screen, as if to touch them. “Do you have any intuitions based on what I’ve told you so far?”

  Yeshe opened his eyes. His head bobbed. “Something came to me as you were talking. When did this start, Tenzing? Can you remember when you first tugged on these particular strings of karma? Where were you when it happened? Can you go back?”

  I blinked, as the voice in my dream came back to me, clear and low. Go back.

  “Back to the beginning?”

  I reached back, sorting through the past week.

  Impressions formed: Mac Gannon’s estate … Bets McMurtry, Mac, and me drinking iced tea … Bets scratching her arms … Mark Goodhue’s pursed lips and stiff back … Melissa leading me to the forbidden nylon backpack, the tracker planted inside it like a ticking bomb … A maid delivering drugs to a woman with ongoing pain in her hip and probably her heart.

  All that felt like eons ago. Had it only been a matter of days?

  I shared the incidents with Yeshe and Lobsang. I told them about Bets and her missing housekeeper, and how the misper case had catapulted me into this underground world, linked to the first like a bardo state and filled with danger.

  Lobsang, ever the practical one, said, “So, who is paying you?”

  I started to say “Mac Gannon,” but then I realized I didn’t know the answer. He might be paying me, but then again, he might merely be funneling money from elsewhere, including from Bets. And the payment was specifically for finding a missing person, Clara Fuentes. Who was paying me to do whatever I was doing now, chasing down Chaco and Chuy Dos and the rest of them?

  Lobsang saw the look on my face and said, “Nobody?”

  “Bets, I think. Or Mac Gannon. I don’t even know anymore.” I sighed.

  “Don’t waste time judging yourself,” Lobsang warned. “It is an indulgence. Whatever is, is. You know that.”

  “Listen to you, venerable Lobsang,” I teased. “You’re starting to sound like a real abbot.”

  He ducked his head and smiled.

  Yeshe was following his own train of thought. “The real question is not who is paying you but what is driving you. I trust you have a higher motive. But Tenzing, if your motivation stems from lower intentions, from forces of your unconscious mind, you must bring them to the light right away. Remember what the Buddha says: we must always explore the root cause of our actions; to cling to our ignorance is to return to the mud. And in your case, to invite danger.”

  I took a deep breath. Then another. I was sorely out of the habit of tuning in to myself. I closed my eyes and floated a couple of questions through my mind: What is so important about this case? Why am I putting myself in danger?

  Chaco’s flat eyes looked back at me. I opened mine and said, “One thing I feel is a drive toward completion. I don’t like loose ends. I can’t walk away from a situation unless I know order has been restored.”

  They both leaned toward me. The slight bow meant, You are on the right track. Please continue.

  “It’s a feeling, deep in my belly,” I said, sensing further into the physical clues offered by my midsection.

  Yeshe’s answer was prompt. “Then you are experiencing fear, hunger, or thrill. Those are the key sensations all of us feel in our bellies. Can you tell which one it is?”

  I drew another slow breath down into my abdomen, trying to explore the river of sense impressions flowing through me. Talk about muddy. The only clarity available was the fact that I was really out of practice.

  Finally I said, “Half fear and, uh, half thrill … maybe?”

  Lobsang shook his head. “There are no halves in the belly. It’s all one thing.”

  Aah. I felt a shift, a bigger area opening up, and then a vast spaciousness. The sensation was disorienting, dizzying even. I realized how tightly I’d been separating my feelings, trapping fear inside one tributary, anger in another, excitement off to the left, shame to the right, and surrounding any hint of sadness with the strongest sea wall of all. For one brief moment, I felt all the barricades drop. I was liberated. Free. The expansion was dizzying: suddenly I could experience everything I felt, all at once. A deep wave of unity and calm washed through me.

  Lobsang gave me all of three seconds to ride the sweet rush before marching, in his methodical way, directly into the heart of the matter. He’d always had a knack for gently nudging me into wisdom and then kicking my butt.

  “Of all your feelings,” he pressed, “what is the one you have kept most hidden from yourself?”

  Out of nowhere an overwhelming upsurge of sadness, like a rogue wave, loomed. I started to back-paddle furiously. Then I caught myself. No, allow. I was swept into a vast gulf of grief, awash with the ancient debris of my parents’ divorce and my mother’s suicide. I shuddered. Opened my eyes wide and looked
into Yeshe’s, then Lobsang’s.

  “Oh,” I said. “Sadness. My father and mother, their relationship. Her …” My voice trailed off, as a lump of hardened grief caught in my throat. They nodded. They knew my story.

  “Do you know what your parents’ struggle and your mother’s suicide have in common?” Lobsang’s voice was kind.

  My mind was blank. I shook my head.

  “Both were beyond your control. You were powerless to help your parents get along with each other. You were powerless to make your mother happy.”

  All that time, all that energy I’d expended, trying to cajole my mother out of her drinking and depression, trying to keep my parents from fighting.

  “Tenzing, do not judge,” Yeshe broke in. I nodded, grateful for the intervention.

  “There is another thing,” Lobsang said. “Your parents’ relationship and your mother’s suicide were both loose ends. Loose ends you could never tie up. No wonder you have chosen this line of work.”

  I felt a prickle of irritation. “That’s not what’s driving me,” I said. “That’s not the only reason I’m a detective.” I bristled, a sure sign he was close to another truth.

  They both laughed. Yeshe said, “I agree! Certainly not the only one! Fear, thrill, compassion, old family patterns—you probably have a dozen motives that drive you, just like the rest of us. Don’t think you’re so special all of a sudden. But whatever the motives, you must learn to recognize them and, who knows, maybe even make them your friends. Inquire into all your motives, Tenzing. Don’t wall them off from each other or yourself.”

  Irritation shifted into grudging acceptance, which in turn moved into relief at hearing the truth.

  Lobsang stifled a yawn, and I realized with a start how long we had been talking.

  “I’ve kept you from your sleep,” I said.

  Yeshe smiled. “Knowing you are better, I will sleep better.”

  “But yes, we should go now,” Lobsang said. “Tomorrow, we welcome a new crop of novices. And do you know what I am certain of?”