Full Measure: A Novel

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Ted picked up the sandwich box and lifted off the plastic lid and gently spilled the big spider onto his lap. She methodically started creeping up his aloha shirt.

  “Aren’t they poisonous?” asked Knechtl.

  “Mildly. Their fangs are big but they’re not interested in biting people. They just want to be left alone. If I grabbed her now, she’d bite me. Or if I badgered her into it. Just like if you badger people too much, they’ll bite you, too.”

  “Have you and Ibrahim Sadal talked politics?”

  “Why would we do that?”

  “Has he made anti-American remarks?”

  “Not that I ever heard.”

  “What’s your gut tell you? We know for a fact he’s a practicing Muslim. He keeps the Koran behind the counter at the station. I’ve seen him reading it when business is slow. Would Ibrahim set that fire?”

  Ted gingerly scooped the tarantula off his shoulder. He opened his hands and let her walk from palm to palm, over and over again, while he thought. Her feet felt dainty but purposeful on his skin. He liked the way her first and third legs on one side rose in unison with the second and fourth of the other. Like she was compensating for sore feet. He set her on his lap again.

  “Tell me about Cade Magnus, Ted. Do you find it interesting that the fire broke out exactly seven days after he moved back here to Fallbrook?”

  “Not really. I don’t think he set it.”

  “Why not?”

  “He isn’t sneaky.”

  “Interesting observation. Have you talked to Cade about the fire?”

  The tarantula had summited Ted’s shoulder again, and again he lifted her off. “No.”

  Knechtl steadied Ted’s arm for a better view of the tarantula. His grip was surprisingly strong. “Is she warm or cool?”

  “Slightly warm. Sun.”

  “What are those two little things sticking up under the rump?”

  “Those are spinnerets, Max. They dispense silk.”

  “Do tarantulas spin webs?”

  “No way. They line their tunnels with silk. Then they decorate the tunnels with whatever they find. I found a tiny plastic soldier in a tunnel once. A prone rifleman.”

  “What do you talk about at Pride Auto Repair when you shoot pool with Cade and Trevor and the women?

  “Why don’t you just hide a bug in the place?”

  “Expensive and time-consuming. I don’t think Cade Magnus set the fire, either. But I do like to keep tuned to what he’s up to. I’d appreciate you passing along anything that strikes you as unusual. Domestic terrorists are our number one threat.”

  “You said that twice.”

  “It can’t be said too many times.”

  Once again the spider had climbed Ted’s shoulder. She now seemed to be considering a climb up his neck, her two foremost legs raised as if to take the first steps. Ted angled his head and looked down and saw the eight stacked eyes looking up at him. “Are you good enough with that gun to shoot a tarantula off my shoulder?”

  “Piece of cake. Nice talking. I’ll be in touch.” Knechtl headed down the sidewalk.

  Ted slid his hand under the spider and tilted her back into the box. “I’d never let him do that.”

  * * *

  He stood at the Pride Auto Repair counter and watched Cade barge through the windowed double doors. Cade flung open the counter walk-through and pulled Ted outside by one of his ears. Ted yelped and tried to duck away but was forced to stoop and crab along to the front door or have his ear torn off, and to keep the spider from getting slammed around. Once they were outside Cade let go of his ear and pushed Ted to the ground. “Don’t come back here until you can account for yourself.”

  “What did I do?”

  “I don’t want your brother here. I don’t want the DHS or FBI here. I don’t want you here. You’re not worth it.”

  “Account how, Cade?”

  Cade looked like he was about to say something, then he slammed the door. Ted looked up at the neon sign of the blue Model T doing the wheelie, throwing the red flames. The sign was turned off but the sunlight played through the tubes and brought the colors to life. Ted gathered himself and stood. His knife wounds throbbed and he wondered if they were leaking. He checked the spider in the box and she looked hunched and afraid. He set the box on the seat of his truck and put a ball cap over it to give her some shade and peace. Standing by the open truck door he lifted his shirt and saw the pink discharge soaking through the dressings.

  He drove out to Lucinda’s condo on the golf course and parked well away from her unit but with a good view of it. He looked at the security screen door and the curtained windows, and he wondered where her potted plants and flowers had gone. He could feel her consuming pain from here, he thought, and he wondered again what was gnawing away at Lucinda’s soul.

  After an uneventful half hour he drove out to the stables on east Mission in hope of spotting Dora. He cruised through the parking lot, looking down on the riding arenas and he saw equestrians and their mounts but Dora was not among them. He went back downtown and walked past Gulliver’s Travels and waved at Mary at her desk but didn’t stop. He ate lunch at the Irish pub and overtipped the friendly waitress. He got his hair trimmed at California Cuts and overtipped the stylist, too. At the salon desk he saw Cruzela Storm concert tickets on sale. He read the flyer and pursed his lips: Fallbrook clearly didn’t need lighted crosswalks, but Cruzela Storm made crazy good music. The tickets were modestly priced at $30. He felt his brain battling his heart and his heart won out. He bought two. He drove out to Bonsall and saw a movie about a superhero who gets the girl, then drove back to Fallbrook to hit the GasPro for a fill-up and a wash.

  It was nearly five by then, and the traffic was heavy leaving Pendleton and Mission was buzzing with cars. He pulled in to the gas station and saw Ibrahim Sadal out restocking the paper towels in one of the service islands. Ibrahim was a big man and he did his work quickly and efficiently, and he had to, what with half a dozen cars taking on fuel and customers heading inside to pay and buy snacks and drinks and smokes. Evelyn’s rejection had made Ted angry. Knechtl’s interrogation had left him dazed. Cade’s dismissal had reignited his anger, but now all he felt was betrayed. By everyone. His feet hurt.

  He pulled up to pump two, got out, and waved. Ibrahim recognized him and waved too, then hustled back into the mini-mart. Ted got the gas going and leaned against his truck. The line at the car wash was three cars now, which was quite a wait. He saw Ibrahim run from the store into the supply room of the car wash, come out with a new window washer, charging over and handing it to the man at pump seven. Then he sprinted back inside the mini-mart. The door to the supply room had banged when Ibrahim shut it but now Ted watched it slowly swing open. He saw a pail on wheels and a jumbo flat of paper towels and a bucket of what looked like new window washers. Someone could walk right off with those, he thought. When the nozzle clanked off Ted slapped it back in place and collected his receipt for the wash.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Monday morning Patrick stood on the front porch of Iris’s wounded bungalow. She was one day gone but he knocked anyway. She had not returned his calls. But he had seen where she hid her extra house key and now he guiltily fished it from under a flower pot and let himself in. He closed the door behind him, feeling like a stalker.

  Inside, the casualties were worse than he’d thought, though he wasn’t surprised that five jarheads and four women could cause this much destruction in a few short minutes. The dining room was the worst, especially the once-beautiful china cabinet that now stood upright again, but with its glass gone and shelves dashed loose and the frame badly cracked. Its shattered treasures had been swept into a hillock in the middle of the gouged and lacerated hardwood floor. The women, with gallows humor, had set a decorative stainless steel crucifix atop the mound. The dining-room walls were scraped and dinged. The dining-room chair Patrick had used on Grier lay on its side, two back rails broken clean in half.

>   He heard the tapping on the front door. When he opened it Salimony and Messina and another man trailed in with the stealthy lightness of men on patrol. They followed him into the dining room. Salimony looked at Patrick solemnly, then touched the pile of ceramic and crystal shards with the toe of his running shoe. “Wow.”

  Messina, stitches above his eye and mouth, stared swollen-lipped at the aerial photograph of Iris’s family’s farm, which looked as if it had come through a bombing, the glass radiating fissures from a ragged central hole, the photo torn, the frame propped against the wall.

  “Can you fix the cabinet?” asked Patrick.

  Private First Class Albert Taibo, an alleged master woodworker from Los Mochis, Mexico, and medic to Patrick’s Three-Five platoon, touched the splintered frame of the cabinet with his fingertip. He walked around the cabinet, twice. Albert was a stocky blue-eyed blond who looked more Irish than Mexican. “How long would I have?” he asked.

  “Five days,” said Patrick. “It all has to be done before she gets back on Saturday. Everything.”

  “Whew,” said Taibo. “She’ll be able to tell the cabinet’s been worked on.”

  “How will it look?”

  “It will look good. But Patrick, this is going to cost some money. Just the materials will run you a grand. If I charged my usual that would be another thousand but I’ll do it for free.”

  “In five days.”

  “That’s only if I can get the birdseye maple and good oak. Which means I should get to the builders’ supply like right now.”

  “You need to fix the floor, too,” said Patrick. “All these scrapes and cuts. It has to look like it did before. And also that chair I broke on Grier’s head.”

  “You gotta hire floor and furniture guys to do that, Pat. I can’t work that fast. And, sorry, but I’ll need the materials money up front. I’ve got almost nothing.”

  Patrick pulled the wad of tip money from his pocket and handed it to Taibo. “That’s five hundred fifty-four bucks. Buy what you need to get started. I’ll have the rest by the end of the day.”

  “Gonna rob a bank?” asked Messina. He took out his wallet and gave Taibo a twenty.

  “Maybe just sell his truck,” said Salimony, handing Patrick all twelve dollars from his wallet.

  Patrick got the Fallbrook phone book from the kitchen counter and took it outside. The backyard looked idyllic compared to inside, nothing smashed or broken, the picnic benches still arranged for the six-across sunset photo taken by Natalie. In his memory Patrick returned to that wonderful sunlit moment just a few hours ago, and to Iris, and his heart sank with the weight of what he’d done. The sunlight was far different, now the sky had a flinty look to it, the kind of distant icy whiteness that his father had told him meant a storm.

  He called the glass store and the art framers and the flooring people and painters, and set up times for them to come out, promising cash for priority scheduling. He called and got a price on a comparable big-screen TV at a big-box store in Oceanside: another $589 plus $179 for the DVD player. Back inside he wrote down a list of broken things, guessing that some would be pricey to replace and some impossible. Next he called Kevin Pangborn down in La Jolla and explained his situation.

  At noon he was traveling south on Interstate 15, bound for La Jolla, with Fatta the Lan’ trailered securely behind his truck. He looked back at her in the rearview. The way she bounced along jauntily, as if she were heading out to the water, made him angry at himself. How did he get so fucking dumb? Then he was just sad.

  The matching Pangborn boys clambered screaming over the boat while the father, young and potbellied, strolled around her twice, looking for damage. “I can’t go the full eleven. I can only give you five.”

  Patrick’s heart fell down and out of him and landed half a mile away in the cold Pacific. “Five thousand dollars? You made me a fair deal at eleven. Now I’m offering the same fair deal back to you.”

  “But I can’t take her.”

  “Why can’t you take her?”

  “It would be against my principles as a man, and my training in finance. I no longer want the boat. But I’ll give you five thousand dollars for it.”

  “I need the eleven thousand, right now.”

  “I understand that.”

  Patrick weighed the satisfaction of kicking Pangborn’s flabby ass against his own responsibility to Iris. At the moment, the ass-kicking was winning out. Pangborn gave him an uneasy look. The boys tried to push each other off the captain’s chair and claim ownership of the wheel. Pangborn snapped at them and they stopped fighting and focused their sullen stares on Patrick. “I expect you to pay what I paid you for the same boat.”

  “What lesson are my boys going learn from that?”

  “How to do the right thing.”

  “They’ll see me as weak.”

  “Get back Fatta the Lan’, Dad!”

  “Yeah, Dad … we want our boat!”

  Patrick turned his back on the boys and the craft and looked down on the pink mansions and the heaving Pacific. He tried to think of anything but his anger. He thought of Iris far away. He thought of Zane panting in the shade of the Hesco blocks, eagerly awaiting his next patrol. He saw that the La Jolla sky was an unusual gray down low, graduating higher up to storm white. Good distractions all, but he still thought the only answer here was to beat Pangborn senseless.

  “I have to be frugal and firm,” said Pangborn. “In the church I’m known for my generosity.”

  “I need the money for something very important.”

  “I’m sure you do. Okay. Six thousand. Best and final.”

  “You’re a hypocrite and a coward, Mr. Pangborn.”

  The boys looked at their father. “I’ll go write the check. My bank is down there in town.”

  * * *

  Patrick got back to Iris’s house that afternoon with a new flat screen and DVR and all the right cables; dishes and place settings for ten that looked somewhat like the broken ones; good quality wineglasses, tumblers, and margarita glasses; three crystal vases that, based on the shards Patrick showed to a suspicious clerk, resembled the casualties; two tablecloths not unlike the one drenched by wine and tequila. He had also bought things that were not replacements but he thought Iris might like: a costly hallway runner; a stone vase made in Italy; an electric massage pad with “shiatsu” rollers. Thirty-three hundred and change, gone just like that.

  While Salimony and Messina brought the boxes in and started setting up the TV and DVR, Patrick paid the painter half of his twelve hundred dollars up front. Work would start tomorrow. Patrick also paid the glass-and-mirror man two hundred against his estimate of four hundred to replace the mirror glass and repair the frame—work to be completed no later than Thursday. The flooring guy called to say he couldn’t get there today as promised but would be there first thing Tuesday.

  Out on Industrial Way he arranged with a furniture maker to repair the oak chair for an estimated two hundred dollars, work guaranteed by Friday. On Main, the art framer said he could build a new frame for the aerial farm photo—two hundred fifty dollars was a cash only price—but the picture itself was beyond his skills to repair. He suggested a printmaker in town who might be able to do something with it.

  The printmaker had a gallery that sold original California watercolors and posterlike copies of them. The walls were hung with them and good light streamed through the windows and seemed to project the paintings onto the white walls. Patrick’s eyes wandered to the paintings as the young man examined the farm photo. He told Patrick he could glue the clean cuts from the back but the punctures had destroyed some paper, and this would require small patches and hand-painting. The repaired photograph would still be bent and the reconstruction work would be visible, but he could make a computer-generated giclée that would be nearly perfect. He would personally see to the color corrections. Patrick could have the repaired original and the swanky new copy of it by the end of the workday tomorrow. Patrick gave him one
hundred and fifty dollars, half of the job. “Is that one for sale?”

  “The horses? That’s Free Spirits by Millard Sheets. Steals your eye, doesn’t it? It’s a lithograph, which makes it affordable and collectible at the same time. Signed and numbered by the artist.”

  “How much?”

  “It’s eight hundred dollars.” Patrick attempted an unimpressed nod. “We can change the frame if you’d like—there’s no charge for that.”

  Patrick walked over for a closer look. There were two horses, one light and one dark, both graceful and spirited. They were running or playing. There was power in them, and a spark of the wild. The animals were engaged with each other and paid not Patrick nor anyone else one bit of attention. They were not meant to be perfectly realistic, which took some getting used to. But the horses said something to him—the dark and the light. He wondered if this was an artist’s trick. They reminded him of some of the other works of art in Iris’s home. But did he truly like the horses or mainly think Iris would like them? Well, mainly he wanted Iris to like them. Was this a bad thing?

  “Just back from overseas?”

  “Afghanistan.”

  “We have a military discount of twenty percent. So it would be six hundred and forty dollars. And I’ll pay your tax.”

  “Thank you. I’ll take it.”

  “If you don’t like it after a few weeks, bring it back and I’ll refund your money.”

  “She’ll like it.”

  “A gift?” The young man shook his head and smiled slightly. “She’ll love it.”

  It was almost dark by the time Patrick and his two friends got the electronics working, the wall dents patched and the debris taken to the dump. Taibo had set up his table saw and sanders in the garage and some of the newly cut shelves and splines were already stained and drying. Patrick smelled the varnish and thought they just might pull this off.

  He marched into Domino’s Pizza just in time for his six o’clock shift. He wolfed a small pizza while attaching the Domino’s light to the top of his truck, then donned the blue, red, and black uniform shirt.