The First Rule of Ten

by Gay Hendricks

  CHAPTER 28

  I pulled into John D’s place at dawn. The sizzle of adrenaline in my body had dimmed to a background hum; I could feel the dull ache of fatigue in my shoulders and arms, but otherwise I felt pretty good.

  I opened the front door and called his name softly through the screen. A slow scuff of footsteps announced he was up. He pulled the screen door open, turned, and shuffled back into the living room without a word. He looked crumpled, inside and out.

  I followed him. Dozens of photographs lay scattered in small heaps around his recliner, like autumn leaves after a windstorm. He picked one up and sank heavily into his chair, tears tracing the deep lines in his cheeks.

  I walked to his side. He was clutching the photograph of himself and the boys.

  “They were like chalk and cheese, those two,” John D said. “But they loved each other something fierce. I gave them their own acre, on the far end of the property, and they dug every dang hole themselves. Charlie wanted to plant sweet almonds, and Norman, well, he was drawn to the bitter ones, of course. They’re still growing out there, two groves, side by side—the only trees that didn’t get struck by the blight. Ain’t that a kick?”

  John D honked into a damp bandanna and cleared his throat. He raised his swollen eyes to mine.

  “Norman begged Charlie not to enlist,” he said. “Not me. I was all for it. I told my wife the military was Charlie’s ticket to a better life. But the truth is, I needed someone to blame for those towers falling. I thought we needed to go over there and kick Saddam’s butt.”

  “You and most of America,” I said.

  “I urged him on, Ten, told him to make me proud.” The tears were falling freely now. “When we lost Charlie, it damn near destroyed us.” He slugged the arm of the chair with his fist. “What am I saying? It did destroy us. Norman fell apart. He and his mother both blamed me, and they were right to, you understand? Then my wife died of hypertension, and Norman … Norman just lost his way.”

  “You were suffering. You’d lost your son, and then your wife.”

  “And then my other son. Only that was on me most of all. Norman reached out a couple times right after his mother died, but when I looked in his face, all I could see was my own failure, and when I turned away, all he could feel was denied.”

  John D let go of the photograph, and it fluttered to the floor.

  “Ten, I got nothing left. And all I can think is Norman’s out there in the dark somewhere, full of fear and shame, and with no one to lead him into the light.”

  “Send him love, John D. He’s sure to feel it.”

  “It’s too late for love,” John D said.

  I went to the kitchen and filled a glass with cold juice from the fridge. I brought it to John D.

  “Drink,” I said.

  He drank.

  “It’s too late for love,” he said again.

  I pulled up an address on my phone and wrote it down for him.

  He read the name and address, then looked up at me, bewildered.

  “Norman’s wife,” I said. “Her name is Becky. You need to pay her a visit. She needs you in her life, now more than ever. It’s never too late, John D.”

  He nodded, and I could see a faint shaft of hope push from behind the pain.

  “What about you? What are you going to do now?” he asked.

  “I’m going to find my Mustang and two missing cult members. Not necessarily in that order.”

  John D reached down for the discarded photo and handed it to me.

  “Take us with you,” he said. “For luck.”

  As I crossed the yard, my phone went off. I saw it was Wesley, Freda’s husband, and my heart clenched.

  “Wesley?”

  “She’s gone. They said there wasn’t any Freda left in there anyway, so we stopped all the machines. I thought you’d want to know.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “You any closer to finding out what happened?”

  “Maybe a little.”

  “Well, they’re cutting her up right now. I talked to her doctors about what you’d said, and they agreed with me that under the circumstances it made sense to do an autopsy, so …” His voice caught, and he hung up.

  I felt a swelling sensation, building hot behind my eyes. Shame, this time. Another death. Another loss. Maybe not my fault, but I was in too deep not to feel responsible.

  I sprinted across John D’s field, vaulted the fence, and raced down the hill into Paradise. I ran hard. It helped.

  I stopped and listened. The faint thrum-thrum-thrum of some kind of industrial equipment echoed across the predawn sky. I pegged it as originating at the pig farm.

  I jogged from yurt to yurt, beaming my flashlight into the dim curves. The cots were made. The floors were swept. The yurts were totally empty. I ducked into Liam’s headquarters and played my light across the floor. A couple of wooden cases with Italian lettering had been pried open and emptied—looked like they’d held some sort of liquor or wine.

  I swung my light to the far side of the yurt and illuminated two still bodies. I ran over and knelt by the first, a young man, and checked for a pulse. The open-eyed stare belonged to the third cult member I’d seen at the farmer’s market. Up close, he was more child than man, and he was very dead. Sister Rose lay next to him, gray and still as a slab of granite.

  I punched 911 and fired information at the operator: exact location, number of victims, extent of injuries, and cause of death.

  “Strangulation,” I said, noting the necklace of raw bruising around the young man’s throat. Om mani padme hum. The violent hands of Brother Liam had been hard at work, choking life out of two more sinners. I was sure in this case their sin was a last-minute reluctance to get on a helicopter.

  A ragged moan caused my skin to shrink-wrap with dread.

  I looked around, then down. Sister Rose was working her mouth. I leaned my ear close to her mouth.

  “Help me,” she rasped.

  I took her hand, careful not to jostle her until help came.

  “I’m here, Sister Rose,” I said. “You’re safe now. I’m here.”

  I sat with her. I would sit with her forever, if necessary.

  Forever turned out to be five interminable minutes. The Emergency Responders found us first. They said the cops were right behind them. Sister Rose’s breath was rough and labored, but an EMT checked her vitals, and said she’d live.

  I waited until they had loaded her safely into the ambulance.

  I ran to the far side of the Paradise property. Sure enough, my Shelby was right where Jacob had told me she was, parked under a tree, covered by a blue plastic tarp. From here, the thrumming sound was even louder. I jumped the fence and dashed across the far boundary of the pig farm, and up the steep hill, to my favorite vantage point.

  Barsotti’s Mercedes was already in his designated spot. I checked my watch. Barely four in the morning. Barsotti was keeping monastery hours, though I doubted he was meditating in there. A familiar battered green pickup was also in the lot. Off to my left, a bright halo of light spotlighted the source of the thrumming. I started downhill in the direction of the light, but skidded to a stop when a pair of black-and-whites screamed by.

  A door slammed. Barsotti burst out of the office building and ran into the lot just as a car squealed off the main road and up the farm’s driveway.

  Florio’s silver Maserati, in a big, big hurry.

  He fishtailed the curves, spewing gravel, and slewed to a stop. Tommy got out, mouth already wagging at Barsotti. He jabbed a finger to the south, then up in the air, then south again.

  I had a pretty good notion of the subject matter.

  Barsotti jumped in the pickup. Headlights off, he crept out of the parking lot and headed up the dirt road toward the back of the property, with Tommy following right behind. I was tempted to go back for my car, but the problem with that was literally easy to see: a bright yellow sports car was going to be hard to miss out here. I decided to le
g it.

  Two pairs of brake lights flickered and bumped to a stop a half mile away. I motored after them by foot, digging deep for my best pace given the uncertain terrain. I used one arm to press the Wilson tight against my rib cage.

  It was a hard, four-minute slog. I stopped just outside the circle of light to catch my breath and reconnoiter. Two vehicles: one green pickup, one silver Maserati, both lit up by a bank of temporary lights. Two sounds: the throb of a gas-powered generator, and the whunk-whunk-whunk of a drill biting into the ground.

  Three men.

  I moved closer, taking cover behind an ancient, gnarly almond tree. Tommy Jr. stood leaning against his car with his arms crossed as Barsotti talked and gestured and talked some more to his favorite multitasking employee, man number three: José Guttierez—washer of cars, stealer of weed, basher of friends, and who-knows-what-of-what this particular morning.

  Barsotti clapped José on the back in a hearty, good-job kind of way. He dug out his wallet and gave José a bill. Then he climbed into the Maserati beside Tommy and drove away.

  José loaded the back of his pickup with tools, and killed the drill and gas generator. The dawn air was suddenly, inconveniently silent.

  I ran for my car.

  Ten minutes later, José’s pickup bumped its way down the hill, through the lot, and onto the main road toward town. I followed, hanging back as far as I could without losing him.

  Streaks of light brightened the sky like luminous ribbons. José turned into a strip mall and parked under a blinking neon sign shaped like a sombrero. “Los Caballeros,” it flashed, promising an all-night refuge for bad boys and insomniacs. I parked on the street and followed José inside.

  It was a dismal place, a virtual monument to loneliness. A jowly man in a dirty shirt stood guard behind the bar. I counted three customers, including me. José was already staring down a draft beer. A blowsy middle-aged woman, raucous and bleached blond, swigged straight from a bottle at the other end of the bar. The jukebox was playing a sad country song about liquor and losers.

  I sat near Blondie and ordered a draft. Normally beer wouldn’t be my top choice for a breakfast beverage, but I was looking to fit in with the crowd, and it might help soften the edge of desperation in here. I paid with one of my Ben Franklins. The bartender had to go out back for change.

  “Hey, Big Bucks. I’ll bet you’re even bigger where it counts. Name’s Olivia.” Olivia slipped onto the stool next to me and scissored her arms together so her cleavage pushed up under her tonsils.

  I signaled the bartender to give her a refill. He gave me a look I interpreted as “You have got to be kidding, dude” and grabbed a cold one out of the refrigerator.

  I was treated to the full radiance of Olivia’s smile, marred slightly by a missing eyetooth.

  “What’re you doing out and about this time of night?”

  “Sightseeing,” I said.

  Her cackle was backwashed in phlegm. “You stay in this hole awhile, you’re gonna see some real sights.”

  “How about you, Olivia? What brings you here?”

  “Oh, this and that. I met with a couple clients earlier, if you catch my drift, and I’ll probably meet with a couple more when the breakfast crowd comes in.”

  All I could think to say was, “I didn’t know they served breakfast here.”

  I saw some movement to my right. José had moved a few stools closer. Olivia stood and waved her arm, her bingo-wing jiggling like Jell-O.

  “Git on over here, sweet cheeks,” she yelled.

  José pulled up a stool on the other side of Olivia, and I got my first close look at the man. He had dull eyes and a built-in sneer. His upper lip was so short as to be nonexistent.

  Olivia didn’t seem to mind. She told him he was “lookin’ fine.” José just stole my chick. Oh, well, they come and they go.

  José was working on his third beer, which told me he was drinking for a purpose. This made me glad; drunk people will tell you damn near anything. The trick is to figure out how much of the “damn near anything” is true.

  I said to him, “You look like you’ve had a long night.”

  “Sí. Long.”

  Olivia jumped in. “That’s why I quit Burger King. Why take home fifty bucks for an eight-hour shift from hell when I can make two hundred in the parking lot easy, four clients, in and out?”

  I could think of several reasons why I’d pick Burger King over In-N-Out, but that’s just me.

  José fished a bill out of his pocket and gave it a glum stare. “He is terrible, my boss. I am working my cojones off all night making him rich, and he give me a fifty. That’s just wrong, man, you know?”

  Olivia eyed the bill and moved her stool a little closer to José’s.

  José kept going. “That cheap hijo de puta, he be making millions.” He stuffed the money back in his pocket.

  I shook my head in brotherly solidarity. “He’s making millions and giving you fifty? What a jerk!”

  “Verdaderamente,” he said, draining his beer.

  I called for another round, though my first draft sat untouched. “What’s your boss got going that’ll make him millions?”

  José cast bleary eyes up at me, suspicion forming somewhere deep in his anesthetized brain.

  “You a cop?” he asked.

  I laughed. “No way. I’m a private investigator.” I reached into my wallet and counted out five $100 bills. Olivia let out a little moan. I fanned them across the bar like a deck of cards. “I buy information,” I said. I watched José carefully to see if he was going to bite.

  He bit. “What you want to know?”

  I was too tired to be bothered with a preamble.

  “How’s Barsotti going to make his millions?”

  The bartender set down two more drafts, and a bottle for Olivia. I gave him two twenties.

  “Good-bye” I said.

  He grunted and moved off.

  José took a swig and licked the foam off his upper lip. “He ask me to drill his land, until I make the water flow again.”

  “How’s that going to make him millions?”

  “The water, she is no good.”

  I pushed a hundred over to him. He blinked at it: Really? Free beer and a hundred bucks for that? The bill disappeared into his pocket.

  Welcome to the Information Economy, José.

  “That’s interesting,” I said. “Why does he want to pump toxic water?”

  “He suing the government. Por mucho dinero. For a lot of money.”

  “Why would the government care?”

  He went silent on me. Quick learner.

  I slid two more bills over. “Holy Mother of God,” Olivia said. José’s pocket fattened.

  “Why, José?”

  “The government, they bury some kind of nuclear pipes in the land. Long time ago. Never told nobody about it. My boss, he think he can get a million an acre for they do this. He say the same thing happen in Utah.”

  “How many acres does he own?”

  “Maybe twenty, but he thinking he have more very soon. I hear my boss talking with his friends. They say they getting maybe five hundred acres.”

  And five hundred million dollars.

  My son is working on a real estate deal for me.

  The stakes were finally high enough to justify Florio Sr.’s presence.

  I had to think this through. But first things first.

  “I want to talk to you in private, José. Can we go outside?”

  He watched me pick up the remaining two hundreds.

  “Por que no?”

  I walked him away from the flashing sombrero, into the shadowy corner of the parking lot. I kept my voice light.

  “How much did you get paid for mugging the old guy at the bank?”

  His eyes blinked rapidly at this new twist in the conversation. “Barsotti gave me a hundred bucks,” he mumbled.

  “A hundred dollars, huh? That’s your price for hurting an old man who never hurt you or anyo
ne else?”

  He started backing away from me. “Guess what?” I said. “I’m going to do it to you for free.” I drove my right fist deep in his groin.

  He doubled over and projectile-vomited five and a half beers across the asphalt. He stayed down, clutching his belly and moaning.

  I said, “That old man is a friend of mine, and he had just gotten, guess what, a hundred dollars out of the ATM when you rolled him. So you got his hundred, plus a hundred-dollar tip. You need to make reparations.”

  He looked up at me, confused.

  “Give me two hundred back and we’ll call it even.”

  He dipped into his pocket and fished out two of the three bills I’d just given him.

  “You crazy, man,” he said.

  I tucked the money away. I’d give it to John D later.

  “Hey, what’s going on?” Olivia had followed us into the shadows.

  “Karma,” I said. I gave Olivia my last two hundreds. “Take the rest of the night off.”

  Olivia smiled. “I like karma. I’m going home. Get me some sleep.”

  It sounded like a good idea all around.

  CHAPTER 29

  I dragged my limping carcass out of the Mustang and up to the house. It was eight in the morning, and I hadn’t really slept for 36 hours. Julie’s car was parked in the driveway.

  Tank.

  I ran inside. She had left a note on the kitchen table.

  I read “Eucalyptus tree” and knew exactly what had happened. I grabbed my stepladder from the garage and lugged it down to the tree, where Julie stood, looking up. I followed her gaze. A fuzzy blue tail flicked back and forth, from a very high branch.

  “How did you find him?” I said.

  “I looked and looked. Finally I just gave up, and sat on the deck. He must have spotted me from his perch, because he meowed.”

  “Tank meowed at you?”

  I felt an actual stab of jealousy. I really needed to get some shut-eye. I was losing it.

  I climbed up the ladder and reached across for Tank. He gave me the eye, but I was just able to grab some loose neck skin and tug him toward me until he gave up and walked over. I clasped him close, and he let me, all the way down the ladder and back into the house.