by David Downie
My first impulse was to hug Maggie, but Taz and I were covered with poison oak oil and she was still clutching her pistol tight in her right hand. So, we stood apart, looking on helplessly as our lives and our memories disappeared.
The above may explain why we had to postpone our departure. By the time we made it to the Eden Resort, cleaned ourselves up, repacked, and hid our precious documents and hardware, it was dusk. We were beyond exhausted and dropping with hunger. Despite the fatigue, getting to sleep proved a challenge, and I for one woke up feeling more tired than I ever have.
So, when at dawn we breakfasted quickly and silently then parted, and I piloted the RV south toward the Yono embankment, I was in no condition to put up another fight. My hope was I would encounter no one and be back at the Eden Resort by eight A.M. That would give us a full day to hike, and if the rain stayed away and no one came after us, we could cover anywhere from ten to fifteen miles before looking for a place to camp.
The thought of the hike—I preferred to think of it in those terms instead of as an exodus—buoyed me. Somehow, I found the energy to navigate the RV down the highway, park it and leave enough tracks in the mud heading south to throw them off for a while, I hoped. I doubled back north, tramping through puddles on the paved surface so as not to leave muddy footprints, then jumped from the last puddle into the shrubbery, and slid down to the bike lane leading to the banks of the Yono River and from there to the beach.
It must have been my state of deep preoccupation and anxious exhaustion, and the noise of the rushing river, that prevented me from sensing the flashing roof lights and hearing the SUV as it approached from behind. We were almost at the point where the low concrete seawall of the embankment meets the sand, with a drop of six feet or so into the Yono’s raging waters. Why would I expect anyone to drive down a bike lane at dawn without sounding a horn?
Jumping clear at the last second, I turned and saw the SUV a couple feet behind, then I rolled to the side and watched the vehicle brake and skid, jerking over at an angle. The driver’s door swung open and a cane appeared, followed by Harvey’s legs. I could hear the police radio squawking. Swiveling his bulk and stepping heavily out of the car, Harvey smiled and glowered at me in one spine-tingling glance painted yellow and red by the spinning rooftop lights.
“Fancy meeting you here, JP,” he chortled. I could see his coat was drawn back and his holster open. “Out for some early-morning exercise while the world goes to hell?” He snorted and cackled for emphasis and added, “Where’s Maddie? Gone up in flames along with that goddamn house of yours?” Using his cane for a pointer, Harvey signaled me over to the seawall above the river. “Sit down my friend,” he said with false bonhomie. “We’ve still got some catching up to do, and I think this may be our last opportunity.”
I did as he ordered, my eyes unconsciously glued to the outsized handgun in his holster. “Over there,” he barked, poking at me with the cane. “Let’s get comfortable. I’ve been looking forward to this.”
“I heard about Gus and Pete,” I said.
“Yeah, I’ll bet you did, who didn’t? It was on the radio. We stretched nets out down here but all we caught were some waterlogged trees and a couple dead sea otters.” Raising his cane, he indicated the seawalls on both sides of the river. That’s when I noticed the nets. They looked like badminton or volleyball nets that somehow had been stretched across the embankment and anchored on each side.
“Yeah,” he started up again, “I came down to see if we’d caught anything this morning and look who I find come down to help. Thank you, JP, thank you in advance for your kindness and your concern. Maybe you thought we’d find Sam and Clem in there, too? Nah, you know better.” Laughing with sinister relish, Harvey spit into the river and lumbered forward, perching on the seawall and then facing me, the gun now in his hand. “Come on down where I can see you, JP. The water’s pretty loud. I don’t like to shout.”
Again, I obeyed, wracking my brain, trying to figure out what to say and how to escape. “Maggie is fine,” I blurted out, “but the house is gone.”
“Fuck the house,” Harvey raged. “Sam is dead, too, he was in that ’copter and so was Clem, goddamn it.”
Nodding lamely, I forced myself to take a deep breath through my nose and try to appear calm. I opened my mouth, but Harvey cut me off.
“So, Maddie’s all right, is she,” he said flatly, tapping the wall with his cane and swiveling his head back and forth, back and forth, as if his neck was sore. His eyes never left mine. “It’s a funny thing, JP. Everyone else called her Maddie, but you always called her Maggie and you still call her Maggie. People are glad to call me Harv, but for you it’s always Harvey. That’s how it is across the board, except for Gus and Pete and Clem because those are their God-given names, goddamn it. Maddie or Maggie, which is it? You always were different, and difficult, and diffident, and now you’re some kind of dissident, aren’t you?”
I couldn’t help smiling ironically. “I never knew you to play with words, Harvey,” I said, and took another deep breath, “congratulations.”
“Oh, I know, you always thought I was a dumb fuck, but I’ve done all right for myself.” He spoke in what passed for an affable tone. “I’m not so sure you’re in for a happy ending, after all your shining brilliance.” Pausing, he rapped the cane on the ground, moving it up and down, up and down in his massive left hand. The folksy tone had gone out of his voice. “Let’s cut the crap, JP, I’m getting tired of this.”
“That makes two of us.”
“Good, we finally agree. So, tell me, have you ever been in a helicopter?”
I hesitated, but seeing we were in an endgame, I said, “Only inside, never dangling underneath.”
Grunting, Harvey sucked his teeth, spit again and said, “Good, so you do know. That saves us time.”
“I’m all for it. We’re both busy men. One of us has to get back to it.” I paused. “Tell me something,” I said in my earnest, lawyerly voice. “Was it you who came up with the idea or was it Clem or Pete or Gus or someone in the bureau?”
Harvey thundered out a belly laugh and struck at my legs with the cane. I moved in time to save my knees but felt the wooden tip smack painfully into my lower left thigh. Wincing, I repressed a shout and glared at him. “That’s a heap of questions in one, JP,” he said as if nothing had happened. “But since you won’t likely be sharing the answers with anyone except the Lord or Charlie the Tuna, I’ll tell you. Pete and Gus didn’t have ideas. They never owned an idea in their lifetimes, bless their souls. Clem was smart, he was as sharp as you. He thought I was his flunky, but he had no flair, if you see what I mean. He was an editor, he fixed things other people wrote, and told stories about other people’s lives, so maybe he tweaked the plan I came up with, the master plan, and made it better, but it was mine, all mine. My friends in the bureau said they’d be sure they never knew. ‘We have no knowledge and no recollection,’” Harvey mimicked in a theatrical voice, and laughed sardonically.
“I’ll tell you why I’m going to lay it out now, JP. Either you’re dead this morning and, in that case, it don’t matter a tinker’s damn, or I am, and then it sure don’t matter to me. Either way, I have the pleasure of sharing with a true connoisseur, a real sophisticate from the city.”
“If it wasn’t for that gun, you know I would thrash you.”
“Yeah, maybe, but the gun is here where it should be, and I suspect you’ve seen what a body looks like once a .45 has been at it. So, relax and enjoy, JP, it’s going to get worse.” Pausing to snicker and spit, he hefted the cane trying to get me to cringe. Then he laughed a hyena laugh. “I just want you to know how much fun your grandson is going to have in the county jail before he has his tragic accident. And I also want to reassure you that our dear Maddie, our old Kitten sweetheart, won’t be alone. She’ll always have Harv to take care of her.”
Before I knew it, I’d scoffed and jumped up and was laughing at him savagely. “You think you can go ba
ck to screwing your sister and Maggie? Wait and see, Harvey. They’ll cut your little dick off. Jackie will live to spit on your grave.”
“But you won’t.” He grinned. “I’m glad to see you’ve still got the fighting spirit, JP. There’s one last thing you need to know. Those bones in that ugly old cage of yours? I almost told you the other day, but I decided to save it for dessert. Well I’ll be damned if those bones didn’t still have some meat on them, a chunk of stuff up on the gums between the teeth. Imagine that, after all these years. And now, who do you think that lucky piece of dead meat was, JP? I’ll give you a hint. He was the son of a bitch and a bastard, and he screwed a nigger squaw, and I’ll be damned if he wasn’t your kith and kin, your very own son. Now you go and put that in a movie and people will complain and want their money back, but that’s the damnedest thing about life, JP, it’s stranger than any movie I’ve seen. I’ve done the world a big favor. I’ve gotten rid of a whole tribe of treacherous, subversive terrorists.” He stopped smiling and waved the gun, grunting at me threateningly.
“Go on and get up on the end of that wall, JP, so I can kill you clean in one shot. Otherwise I’ll have to shoot off one piece at a time and make you crawl, because I ain’t going to drag you. Go on, over there, so you don’t wind up in the nets.”
Buying time, I said, “They know I’m here, everyone knows.”
“Oh, everyone, now,” he snarled. “Who’s that and who cares? Go on, right over there to the edge . . .”
The seawall was only a foot higher than the bike lane, and as I stepped up and turned I heard a thrumming, whirring sound nearby and so did Harvey. He looked up and smiled wide. “Isn’t that beautiful,” he blurted out, getting to his feet and beaming like an angel. “Isn’t that great? Tom gets to watch, and it’ll be on video, just like a snuff movie. I think I’ll show it to Taz and Maddie, show them how JP got blown away by stupid old Harvey Murphy.” He waved at the drone and said, “Do salmon eat dead things, JP?” The drone hovered closer, its lenses moving in and out.
“Crabs do,” I said, “bottom-feeders and shit-eaters like you.” I bellowed at him, about to spring. Harvey raised his pistol and shot at the ground between my legs. He raised it higher, smiling beatifically, but the drone dove at his arm and knocked him off balance. The shot grazed my windbreaker. I jumped down from the wall and ran toward him. Stunned and still off balance, Harvey struck out with his cane, waving it in the air and batting at the drone. But it rose vertically out of reach, then dove again and rammed him in the face. Stumbling backward over the seawall and pitching into the Yono River, Harvey shouted and grappled to stop his fall. A shot rang out. I dove and grabbed at his ankles, catching his left boot near the heel. Struggling to pull him back up, his screams sounding like the keening of a stuck pig, I heard the gun go off again and felt a bullet fly past, grazing my shoulder. With a slippery, sickening twist of tendon and flesh, his boot came off in my hands, and I watched as he fell screaming into the current.
Chasing its tail around and around above me, the drone flew up then dove into the river after him, leaving me alone on the seawall with the SUV, its driver’s door still open and roof lights swirling to the squawking and crackling of the police radio.
POSTSCRIPT
You will want to know what I did with the boot. I threw it in the Yono, put the SUV in drive, wiped off my prints, and watched the vehicle roll down the bike path, bump its way across the beach, and disappear into the surf.
Back at the Eden Resort, the trekkers were ready for anything. They had watched the showdown live on Taz’s smartphone screen. I told them I was going to unpack and asked Beverley if we could do a swap: hard labor for the use of the Ocean View and Sea Breeze cottages for six months. We’d have fun fixing them and digging out the garden. There was a breakwater to build. We might even figure out how to re-create a ramp and a dock on Greenwood Gulch and do some archeological excavations. Now that Beverley was going to be the mayor pro tem, she’d have no trouble with permits.
I pulled the McCulloch out of the mud and cleaned it inside and out. It never worked better. I haven’t told anyone what it was used for by Harvey, and I haven’t mentioned that the skull and thighbone are Paul’s. The blissful ignorance won’t last.
Taz is finishing community college a year early and could already teach his courses. He got that driver’s license after all. It’s amazing what you can find in an archive if you look hard enough, a birth certificate, for instance, not to mention what can be lost, like a developer’s construction permit. Meanwhile, Maggie has revived her private practice. The Tom Cat is her latest client. She has special permission to see him behind bars at the county jail, before he’s shipped to a federal penitentiary.
Oh, and The Seventeen Club has gone out of county, with cells multiplying, clusters of unkillable, resilient resistance cells that one day will grow into a renascent democracy.
Of course, there is no Carverville and never has been. But if you paint some redwoods into the picture, knock together several real places I know on the Northern California coast, in the Sierra Nevada and the Pacific Northwest, then change the names not to protect the innocent but to satisfy curious readers, I think you’ll figure out where and what the place is.
As to me, I still don’t know why Holmes was obsessed by the number seventeen or what crime Mark Twain committed in the eyes of Ronald Rossi, Beverley’s Number Three. One day I’ll find out. In the meantime, I am pruning roses, making cuttings from them and the buddleia, and trying to figure out how to get those fish back up our rivers. I’m too old to spawn, but I’ll be damned if I don’t drop dead happy one day in the middle of Five Mile Creek.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With thanks and love to A. M. H. for her encouragement and unflagging aid, to E. M. for her early readings and exquisite words, to J. S., A. J. B., P. A. T. and B. M. for their perceptive, helpful comments, and to J. R. S. for being such a fine friend for over fifty years.
I would also like to thank my enthusiastic editor Jessica Case-Hancock and my wonderful agent Alice Fried-Martell for their wisdom, patience and generosity. The affable Donald Bordenave of OPC Drone Services of California provided the essential information on drones and cellular telephony.
ALSO BY DAVID DOWNIE
A Taste of Paris: A History of the Parisian Love Affair with Food
A Passion for Paris: Romanticism and Romance in the City of Light
Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James
Paris City of Night: A Novel
Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light
Quiet Corners of Rome
The Terroir Guides: Rome, the Italian Riviera, Burgundy
Cooking the Roman Way: Authentic Recipes from the Home Cooks and Trattorias of Rome
THE GARDENER OF EDEN
Pegasus Crime is an imprint of
Pegasus Books Ltd.
148 W 37th Street, 13th Floor
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2019 by David Downie
First Pegasus Books cloth edition March 2019
Interior design by Maria Fernandez
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN: 978-1-64313-004-0
ISBN: 978-1-64313-116-0 (ebk.)
Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company
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