It sounded like a lie. Toby said, “I understand.”
“You mustn’t blame yourself. I can only imagine what you’ve been through.”
“No. That’s no excuse.”
“Toby—”
“I didn’t know, they had me alone, I thought—” He stopped himself. No excuse, but listen to me. “I don’t know what I thought. I wish—”
“Yes.”
Neither spoke for a moment. Toby coiled the phone cord around his finger.
She said, “Do you have a place to stay?”
Toby had to think. “I’m guessing Pop’s house, I don’t know. But there’s some talk that the guy who shot him was hiding next door.”
“Oh dear. Take care, you must—”
“I’m at my lawyer’s now.”
Another pause, then: “Would it be too much to ask … Oh, this may be, how shall I … It’s a bit to ask. Would you mind terribly staying here with me?”
It seemed a clumsy touch of grace. Like being forgiven.
“Everything that’s happened, it has me a little, I don’t know, uneasy.” She chuckled sadly. “All those years living alone, then just a few months with Francis here, in the house. See what a spoiled old woman I’ve become?”
When he returned to rejoin the others, he saw his father’s horn case open on the large oak table. The baritone’s pearl keys and nickel-plated body glimmered in the light. Everyone looked up—not a word from anyone, staring at him in the doorway. He wondered if they felt guilty for having stolen a peek without asking first. Silly, he thought. Then Nadya got up, holding a crumpled white envelope, which she held out for him to take.
“They wanted to see your father’s horn. We found this in the compartment that holds the extra mouthpiece and reeds.”
The envelope had “For Toby” written on it, his father’s handwriting. It was sealed. He checked with Tina, who nodded. He worked the seal open. A letter lay inside, written on hospital stationery.
Dear Toby,
It’s been a couple hours since Veronique drove me to the emergency room. The whole time, she’s hounding me about, “Do you have a will? Have you made arrangements?” Like she can’t wait. Drive me straight to the graveyard, not the hospital, if she could.
But it got me to thinking. Before they put me under the knife, I want to say a few things.
I wasn’t the man, the musician, the father to you, or the friend to your mother I should have been. Time like this, that looms large. Wish I could change it, know I can’t, may never get to say I’m sorry.
In particular, I rode you hard, too hard. God knows there’s reasons for that I should be ashamed of, but I wanted you ready. Ready to take on the phonies and the users and the thieves who will hound you throughout your career. I know your mother wants something else for you, can’t blame her. But I sense in you the gift. Sensed that a long time, actually.
I want you to have the house. It’s paid in full, your grandmother took care of that. I built it out so I could practice with the Firefly, but not just that. For you, too. If you want, take over the band. They’re good men, strong players. I think they’ll follow, if you have the spine to lead. Don’t be shy. As they retire or pass away, replace them with players you know, players you respect. Carry on.
Any money or other valuables I leave behind—there won’t be much, I’m sure that’s no shock—divvy them up among the family as you see fit. Don’t let Veronique badger you into something you don’t think’s right. But don’t listen to your mother, neither, just walk away. Please do as I ask. It will give me some comfort, knowing that.
The nurse is here. They’re ready. Please know I loved you, Son. I always have. I have shown that badly. But I’ve paid.
Your loving father,
Raymond Carlisle
Toby read it again, twice, beginning to end, needing to sit finally. He found himself in a strange mental state, not wholly there, not wholly elsewhere, wishing for a time and place he could answer this letter.
Tina walked up, hand held out.
“May I?”
Always the lawyer. Toby passed the letter to her and glanced up at Nadya, who came close, resting her hand gently on the nape of his neck. Her skin felt cool against his own.
“Do you know what this is?” Tina asked.
It seemed a kind of trick question. Toby shrugged.
“We’ll have to verify it’s your father’s signature.”
“I can do that.”
“Someone other than you.”
“Why?”
Tina folded the letter closed and handed it back. “It’s called a holographic will.”
Following Bratcher’s directions, Ferry drove past the rock yards and auto dismantlers and salt ponds lining Green Island Road. At the very end, he parked the van beyond the blacktop at a gravel turnaround rimmed with bulrushes and fennel that had died back with winter.
Rusting track led to the old rail bridge, a two-tower structure of low-carbon steel painted a puke green and tagged with graffiti. The county had taken out its center section, so boat traffic could sail up and down the Napa River at will. Trash littered the muddy weeds leading up to the rail bed. Nice just to be out there, Bratcher had said. Some joke. It was the kind of place teenagers came on Friday night to get ripped or blown, and only foreigners would bother to fish here.
He locked the van and headed toward an old rotting bench, looking across the river. Cattails lined the riverbed, their flower spikes shorn away, harvested by local florists for winter decorations. On the far side, a derelict pleasure boat, complete with paddle wheel, listed to one side in the mud flat. Beyond it, redwood piers tethered with speedboats led up to a line of houses atop the levee. The county loners lived over there, their homes accessible only by water or a two-lane road snaking down from Cuttings Wharf.
The slough-laced wetlands stretched to the south. Ferry spotted a great blue heron in the distance, making one last turn of the marshes before returning to its rookery. It was high tide; the heron scoured the levees, waiting for the mice and voles to clamber for high ground, exposed. It reminded him of Manny. Unmasked. Exposed.
He guessed the kid worked off two core principles: I am disgusting, even to myself, and The world must burn. With no inkling of how the one fed the other, let alone why. It might almost inspire a kind of pity, Ferry thought, if you weren’t obliged to clean up after him.
Ferry had to make sure Manny’s misadventure of the previous night never reached Bratcher’s radar. Not till payment was in hand, at any rate. Given the big guy’s history, you had to guess he’d find a way to make everybody suffer the cost but him.
Bratcher had begun as a fireman—there was an irony for you, Ferry thought—getting in just before the pay scales skyrocketed. Few people realize how well you can make out as a fireman in California. He moved on to business agent for the union, where he honed his lobbying chops. He liked that, the arm-twisting, the hustles, the brinkmanship. And again, there was money in it. Some of it came in cash.
Cash builds up, you gotta find a way to invest. Only so many new safes in the house you can justify. Looking for opportunities he could monitor firsthand, Bratcher turned to flooring—offering short-term loans to car salesmen who’d left dealerships to open lots of their own. Being salesmen, they wildly exaggerated their chances of breaking even, overspent, and ran to men like Bratcher for cover. He was smart, always demanding a secured debt, and took away a half-dozen homes through foreclosure, right when property values went wild.
Bratcher cashed out, then teamed up with his lawyer to invest in closely held real estate concerns bankrolling motels at South Lake Tahoe during the casino expansions, and high-rise apartment buildings around Sacramento as the state government mushroomed. He hit bliss every deal he made, a knack for timing. Then came his first bad move.
He saw a bargain in some high-rises in south Sac. Too cocky, he figured he could boot all the subsidy tenants. He didn’t foresee the gang upsurge of the mid-eighties. Within three
years, his sly investment transformed into two of the tallest crack houses in the West. He spent ten years trying to go through the police, the courts, community groups, only to see every meager victory stolen back within days, hours sometimes.
Bratcher wasn’t the kind to live with that—getting jobbed by the underclass was for social workers—which led to his linkup with Ferry. Bratcher’s lawyer was the one who heard about him—former narc, contacted through the Internet, already wielding a heavy, if slippery, reputation.
Ferry’s strategy was twofold.
One, focus on women in the family. Make it plain—the trouble goes or they go. You get a fight, plant evidence if need be, drop the dime. Women hold the whole thing together. Send the women to jail or put them on the street, the men won’t stand tall—they’ll vanish.
Two, scope it out, see who travels with whom, then pick off a low-rung slinger or tout—better still, a family member—leave a telltale mark on the body if you can, kick off a war. Bodies buy action. The ones left behind kill each other off, get popped in a street sweep, or, with the jacked-up heat, scurry on down to the next relation in line. Home is where they have to take you in: Elk Grove, Rio Mirada, Vallejo, Pittsburg, Richmond, Oakland, Hunter’s Point, East Palo Alto. Skip tracers, bail bondsmen, parole officers, the police—they all knew the circuit well. But for Ferry, all he needed to know was there was somewhere else for Bratcher’s problems to head. As long as they went, problem solved.
That was four years ago. In the interim, Bratcher fended off two grand jury investigations, one into improper campaign contributions (he’d funneled union money to retired firefighters in a scam to skirt spending limits, and laundered developer kickbacks through his lawyer), the other for orchestrating a pattern of HUD fraud, relating to abuse of the Officer Next Door Program.
Cops and firemen and teachers could purchase HUD foreclosures for 50 percent of the outstanding loan if they agreed to live in the house three years. It was a way of getting respectable community members into marginal neighborhoods. But HUD lacked the manpower to enforce the terms; scammers had a field day. Buyers got in low, rented or turned the properties around in just a few months with minor, cosmetic changes, and walked off with a killing. Bratcher, after a decade of hassles with the agency over his drug dealing problems, saw this as sweet revenge. He had his hand in locating properties for willing takers, finessing the back end sales and rentals, keeping tabs on HUD investigations, and again letting his attorney’s client trust account serve as a slush fund for unreportable cash.
He’d paid a fine on the campaign charges. The results of the second investigation were strangely vague. There were rumors Bratcher and his lawyer were cooperating, which of course made sense. Amazing, the crap you can manage with federal juice.
Then last fall, Bratcher resumed contact with Ferry. He had a different problem, he said, a bigger one. He didn’t need to drive out just a few problem bangers. He needed more.
It was tricky, given the rumors that he stooled for the feds. But Ferry knew this about Bratcher: he was too cutthroat to betray someone still useful to him, too hard-nosed to let the law badger him into it. And Bratcher could hardly bring down Ferry on his drug dealer drop plays and killings—juries never let the paymaster snitch off his muscle, it went against the American grain. Besides, Bratcher was earnest, he wanted this thing done, and from just a glance you could see the money at stake. It made sense. That kind of making sense, it protected you, unless you got sloppy.
Manny’s killing the old spade, that was sloppy. Demented and sloppy. Which was why Ferry could feel his heartbeat kick a little as finally, pulling onto the gravel at the end of Green Island Road, Bratcher’s Escalade appeared—big and white with gold hardware and gaudy horsepower—kicking up dust as it left the asphalt.
Bratcher parked beside the van, got out, removed two fly rods from the back of the Escalade, and charged forward.
“You weren’t supposed to take me serious, Clint, when I said I wanted to fish.”
“You showing up like that, it’s no good, understand?” Bratcher’s face was red; he gripped the two fly rods tight in his huge hands. “End of the day, the risks you thought were no big thing, they’re the ones do you in.”
Ferry didn’t like the feel of this. “Clint, we’ve met there before, alone, first time, remember?”
“That was then. I brought you into this thing because you’ve got the kind of head can handle it. Pull a stunt like that, I gotta think—”
“I poked my nose in the damn door. Get real. Anybody recalls my face he’s lying. I page you, beep you, call your cell, there’s a record. I did the right thing.”
Bratcher grunted and held out one of the rods. “Grab that. Walk with me.”
Ferry obeyed. Secretly he preferred not meeting in the Escalade, which could be bugged. That was paranoia for you, it never slept. The rod Bratcher gave Ferry came fitted with a Penn Sixty reel, a decent rig for the stripers he said were here. Not that Ferry’d seen any. All he’d spotted so far was a few schools of threadfin shad darkening the water, surging upriver from the bay.
“I’m not seeing any bait here, Clint.”
“Shut up for once, will ya? I’m gonna practice casting, used to do it here all the time. You can do what the hell you want.”
Bratcher pulled up at a divide in the cattails edging the water, then let out his line, stretching it to remove the memory. Ferry didn’t bother to do the same. He was thinking. It was a good sign, he decided, Bratcher’s foul mood. The crankiness seemed genuine. That and his plan to come out here, where they might get seen but not noticed.
When Bratcher started to restrip his line, Ferry said, “It’s gonna happen tonight.”
The look, you’d have thought he’d tried to feed the guy a clump of mud.
“You’re not serious.”
“It’s okay, we’re ready.”
“That’s not the point.”
On the far levy, a woman in a sweat suit walked down to the dock beneath her house, accompanied by a toddler and a dog. The woman threw a tennis ball into the water, the dog sailed in after it, and the toddler applauded with mittened hands.
“Some old dusk got killed last night up on the St. Martin’s side of the panhandle. Turns out my guy was crashing at the house next door. Cops found that out.”
Bratcher stopped what he was doing. “Gonna tell me how?”
“Guy they’ve got as their chief suspect, he’s a banger, works for people my guy hung with.”
Bratcher grimaced and shook his head. “Nice class of people you bring into this.”
“Yeah, well, I thought about an ad in Boys’ Life, but the last couple issues, I dunno, just didn’t ring my bell.”
“You think this is funny?”
“Cops’re looking for my guy now, got him pegged as a possible material witness.” Ferry had thought it through. This seemed like the most readily defensible lie at his disposal. Besides, it was at least half-true, which was pretty good as lies went.
Bratcher twitched, shook his head. “So keep him under wraps, like you shoulda done in the first place.”
Oh, sure, Ferry thought. Blame me. “Too risky, Clint.”
“He goes in, says he didn’t see anything.” Bratcher turned, glared. “Did he?”
“Not the problem. He’s got baggage, he’s suspected in some heavy fires up north. He goes in for questioning, he stays in.”
Without warning, Bratcher snapped his rod back to two o’clock, listened for his line to hit ground, then snapped the rod forward. One smooth movement. No de-barbed lure or yarn ball for this guy. Hook catch your eye? Shoulda ducked. The lure hit water with a thunk.
“This thing’s gotten so fucked up,” Bratcher said.
What else has gone wrong, Ferry wondered, knowing better than to push his luck and ask. He’d already heard Bratcher’s rag about the last project that had fallen through. His buddies Glenn and Craugh had bought up a dozen warehouses near the river, operating under long-term lea
ses from the city at negotiated low rents due to promises to rebuild. But then the project got tied up by the city when it tried to squeeze out extra CAM charges and pass-throughs. None of Bratcher’s muscle had gotten the city to budge. Craugh was overleveraged and couldn’t get more financing. Now squatters had taken over some of the buildings.
Worse, the city, feeling its oats after backing down Bratcher, had dug in its heels. It wanted any businesses lined up as tenants to pay triple rents, working it through a Municipal Services District that didn’t exist when the leases were formed. The city had also invoked Mello-Roos and tried to form a new district for extra taxes to bounce up school funding. As if all that weren’t enough, insurance was going through the roof due to the World Trade Center attack and the threat of reparations lawsuits.
It was that last part that really galled Bratcher. In their first meeting, when Bratcher explained the vision he had for Baymont—gated community, all wired for satellite or cable, high-speed Internet, multiple phone lines, exterior surveillance and home theater surround sound, the wiring package alone worth five grand, plus peninsula kitchens, built-in gas fireplaces, master baths with jetted tubs and custom glass—he described his plan for ridding the hill of its current structures and tenants by saying, “Think of it as reverse reparations.” He got the biggest kick out of that.
“There is,” Ferry said, “a bright side to what happened last night. Rains got the sewers backed up, which means the gas will move slow through the system. Fumes will build up and ride high. You got smoke crews working the top of the hill, where everybody can see. Nobody’s gonna second-guess the problems up there with the storm drains. And every other Sunday night, mom-and-pop gas station up top, it gets its delivery. That’s tonight. It’s the key to the whole thing.”
“Gonna be true as long as there’s an every other Saturday night. Besides, the rain cuts both ways, it’s too wet.”
“There’s a good wind today. Dry enough.”
“That’s crap.” Bratcher scanned the westward horizon. “You got storms coming in. What’s the point, the thing doesn’t spread?”
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