Hard Return

by J. Carson Black

  “Yeah,” Brian Swinney said. “Like those fainting goats, you know? I saw it once on TV.”

  “So she’s okay?”

  “Oh, yeah. Any little thing, and she goes down. That fucker must’ve scared the shit out of her.”

  Landry said, “Did you know Luke Brodsky?”

  “Brodsky?” Eezil said. “Yeah, I knew him. He was one who got shot. Ninja was down-ass.”

  “That’s good, right?”

  “Oh, yeah. You better believe it.” Eezil lit up a cigarette. “Mind if I smoke?”

  “You know him well?”

  “Uh-huh. He and his ninjette, Kristal? She’s so hot.” He saw the look on Landry’s face. “Hey, you aren’t his dad or anything, are you?”

  “Just interested.”

  Jolie said to Eezil, “Do you have any idea why that guy would shoot up the school?”

  “No, that’s seriously whack.” He rubbed his tattooed arm. “Gave me nightmares.”

  “Ever see him before—the shooter?”

  “No! At least not like he was dressed up in the vid. Like a ninja. A real ninja. Then he got his ass shot up. Talk about poetic justice yo.”

  Landry leaned forward, elbows on knees. Looked Eezil in the eye. “So what do you think happened?”

  “I dunno, man.” He had backed up a little. There was perspiration on the sketchy little smudge above his upper lip—what some people would call a mustache.

  “No theories?”

  “Sounds like somebody went crazy. You know, like they do on TV? I mean like how many schools are getting shot up?” He shrugged. “We just won the lottery, dude.”

  Landry said, “So you’re good friends with Willow. She’s only a freshman, though, right?” He remembered what he thought about freshmen in high school when he was a senior.

  Eezil glanced over at Willow. “We’re, like, her uncles. We look out for her ’cause Devin can’t. Anybody messes with her, they mess with us. Don’t fuck with a Juggalo!”

  Jolie said, “Do people mess with her?”

  “Not anymore. At least not till now.” Brian laughed. A maniacal laugh—jagged and with a hint of terror in it. “Like that guy in the car? He messed with Willow. Guess he’s not a problem anymore!”

  Landry noticed the kid was shaking. Adrenaline setting in.

  Everyone dealt with it differently. He looked at the girl, passed out on the bed. Narcolepsy.

  “Any talk around the school? Anyone know who the dude who shot up the school was?”

  “Nuh-uh.”

  Brian shook his head, too. They looked scared.

  “It could have been us,” Eezil said. “If we didn’t cut that last class. We always park there.”

  Landry said, “Tell me about Kristal.”

  “Hey, I only knew her to say hi to.”

  “You said you knew her.”

  Brian nodded. “We hung out with them some, but as far as we were concerned, she was just some chick.”

  Some chick.

  “Luke we hung with in middle school. Then they got hot and heavy. That was kind of a new deal.”

  “They weren’t together long?”

  Eezil shrugged. Brian didn’t add anything.

  “Luke have any enemies?”

  Eezil said, “None I know of. He was solid—even if he wasn’t a Juggalo. He respected us. He treated us like we were something!”

  “Nobody threatened him?”

  “No.”

  “Did he ever mention that he was worried about someone?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like someone maybe was after him. Or had it in for him?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Jolie said, “What about Devin? Did Devin have any enemies?”

  “Just the usual. The bullies and Juggalo haters an’ shit. Some people, man.”

  “And Willow?”

  “She gets bullied, too. Girls, they’re mean. Nothing meaner than a mean girl. They make fun of her.”

  “Like how?”

  “Like they’re glad Devin died. Calling him all kinds of shit. No kidding, girls are mean.” His cigarette between his fingers, he rubbed his forehead. “Bitches! But me and Brian made a pact. If they want to get to her they have to go through us!”

  They left not too long after that. They drove up onto the hill by the park and looked down and saw the ambulance and police cars on the street looking at the car belonging to the man who’d tried to kidnap Willow.

  Jolie said, “Juggalos aren’t so bad after all.”

  “Those Juggalos,” Landry said.

  “Just kids, trying to make it through a hard time.”

  Landry said nothing.

  “I was bullied when I was a kid.”

  “You were?” That surprised him. If anyone he knew was strong and knew herself, it was Jolie. “What did you do?”

  “First, I avoided them. It was easy to do back then, before social media. I just faked an illness and stayed home from school.”

  “Sneaky.”

  “Survival. I stayed out a whole semester. These days they can get to you through Facebook or other social media and make your life a living hell.”

  “You said that first you avoided them.”

  “Yeah. I went back to school—I had to at some point. But by then I made a decision.”

  “And what was that?”

  “I decided to pick the biggest, meanest torturer in the school, the one who made my life a living hell, and first day of the new semester, I walked up to her and punched her in the stomach.”

  “Really.”

  “Yeah. You should have seen the look on her face. Charlene Morrisey. She sat down on the ground and cried like a baby. I got detention, but it was the best thing I ever did.”

  Landry nodded. “Always take the early advantage.”

  “Hit ’em swift and hard. Were you bullied as a kid?” Jolie asked.

  “No.”

  They lapsed into silence.

  As they passed the exit for Santa Anita, Landry’s eyes strayed in that direction.

  Jolie said, “Do you still think the shooter came to the school because of Devin?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither.” She stared straight ahead at the police cars. “So who does that leave?”

  Landry said, “It leaves me.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Cameron Mills sat opposite a man named Jeremy Cleeves at a small table in his hotel room. There was always the small table in every hotel room in every city they had stayed in, and they always sat across from one another, their knees nearly touching, from six a.m. to eight a.m. They started at six on the dot, as they did every day.

  He’d come a long way from the stinking sand hills of Iraq.

  On the Eastern Seaboard it was eight o’clock in the morning—late enough in the day for Cam to make his calls to people there.

  Cam’s nickname for Jeremy was “The Ogre.” Jeremy might or might not have been aware of the nickname, but if he was, he didn’t seem to take offense. He simply did what he was supposed to do, pushing sheets of paper at Cam one at a time, impervious to the moans, the sighs, the rolled eyes, and sometimes, downright rebellion. Cam only used rebellion when he felt it would get him what he wanted and needed—some free time. He had learned that the bigger the temper tantrum, the more time he got.

  But the tactic also had to be portioned out at the right time. They owed him time to himself, and he would get his time, but not now. If he wanted to get where he wanted to go, he had to do The Ogre’s bidding.

  Right now The Ogre sat across from him with the same short stack of paper at his elbow, and handed Cam the first sheet.

  Cam dutifully read the sheet, which listed a man, his wife, and his children, how much to hit the man up for, and what
to settle for.

  Always ask the maximum.

  He punched in the number and said, “Hi, it’s Cam Mills.” He made his pitch. He was good at it. He knew how to massage the wealthy and the important and make them want to be a part of it all. He knew how to tailor his pitch to the particular person he was talking to, knew what to offer them and when. It was easy, actually, because if he could convince them that they had a shot at being a part of Greatness with a capital “G,” that they might—might—have a shot at sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom, they were happy to play along. If only they got in early enough, if only they were someone he could depend on no matter what, they would pay gladly. If he could convince the potential donor that he and he alone would be Cam’s right-hand man, his kingmaker, his rainmaker. The one man who had the ear of the candidate.

  And Cam was a good candidate. He had a high profile. For one thing, he was not a congressman, but a senator. The junior senator from Arizona. And he’d made some waves recently, gotten some press. They called him a “Gunslinger”—a new kind of Democrat with an appetite for a fight. The kind who shot from the hip. He had gobs of potential. At forty-four years old he was not too young and not too old. Yes, he was a Democrat, but he was a conservative Democrat—a very conservative Democrat. He reminded a lot of people of their fathers’ Democrat, back in the day. Yellow Dog, Blue Dog, whatever was farther to the right, that was what he was.

  So he had two hours. He asked for the maximum and two times out of three he got it. He was that good. He always asked them to do more. “Jim, will you talk to your friends? If I could get one, or even two, of your friends to donate . . . honestly, the sky’s the limit.”

  The Ogre pointed to his watch.

  Cam had time for three more calls, tops. Then it was on to the next thing.

  He had spoken to seventeen donors and netted $10,000 to $20,000 from each donor. Many of those would put the touch on their friends.

  The trick was to get in and out as gracefully as he could, as quickly as he could.

  And think about it. All day, every day, he worked exclusively to get money. Six a.m. to eight a.m. he worked the phones—every single day. And another two hours later in the day. Four hours. In between that, he went to fund-raisers. He solicited a lot of money but he needed a lot, too.

  He would need approximately $6 to $8 million to run a successful presidential campaign.

  The irony? He had three times that amount stashed away, but he still had to go through the charade of pulling in money.

  The money was a virtual albatross around his neck. When he’d found it—found money, seriously—it had turned on a light somewhere inside him.

  He’d grown up in politics, helping his uncle. Licking envelopes. Making up signs. Being a messenger. It was in his blood. He’d learned the ropes like few others had, had developed a keen sense for bullshit at an early age. As an only child, he always got along better with adults than with his contemporaries. And he had a gift for politics—everyone said so.

  The money was what had opened up the possibilities for him. But now it sat there, unused, waiting to catch him up.

  And so here he was, hitting up donors from six to eight every morning, eking out $20,000 here, $50,000 there. His whole day doled out by his body man and his other handlers, in increments, down to the minute. His body man, Duncan Welty, never left his side.

  He was thinking about the money. Always thinking about the money. It would help so much. He needed every penny. He had to use some of his own money for the campaign, he was working like a dog from early in the morning to late at night, and Kelli didn’t work. Not only that, but their kid was on the junior show-jumping circuit—that took a lot of money. But he could access only a little at a time.

  Although the money was laundered, his family, friends, and the people in the political realm knew too much about his financial history. There was no way to explain the obscene amount of money he had sitting in the Cayman Islands. After he became a senator, after more donations poured in and he was running for president, that could change. But not now. Right now, he was Jeremy’s slave.

  As he washed his hands in the bathroom sink, he called out to Jeremy.

  “What’s next?” he asked.

  But he barely heard Jeremy’s reply. He was thinking about Iraq.

  They had been on an endless loop of patrol—looking for trouble—and stopped near a bombed-out farmhouse in the boonies somewhere south of Nasiriyah. These houses could shield enemy combatants—something they had to worry about as they patrolled the Mars-scape of Iraq endlessly and for no reason.

  But now, Cam didn’t care. His bladder was full and he couldn’t hold it any longer. They had a female photog with them and she’d been cracking dirty jokes all along to show she was one of them. Asshole.

  He was sick of it all. His second skin was granules of dirt that poked their way into every crevice. He could smell himself. It was so fucking hot he couldn’t stand it one more minute, and he hadn’t been able to stand one more minute since he got there. His mouth was dry—always. Cam sensed that Martín, one of the Three Amigos, had turned against him for some reason. Sometimes he felt like he’d fallen into a nest of pirates.

  Jedediah—he was a true friend. But Jed was in the sick bay with a fever. Without someone who had his back, commanding this crew was an uphill battle.

  He needed quiet, and taking a leak was a good enough excuse.

  Cam realized he wasn’t even nonstop terrified anymore. If some raghead wanted to blow his head off, so be it. “No skin off my nose,” he muttered, and then laughed at the image. His head blown off but no skin off his nose! Hilarious.

  Was he going just a little bit crazy? He wondered for the hundredth time if he was a candidate for the puzzle factory. “Humpty Dumpty,” he muttered. “That’s me.”

  There was the bombed-out house, under a listing Aleppo pine tree that had been scorched halfway up, branches and pine needles rust colored where they weren’t singed.

  “I’m gonna take a leak,” he said to his men. “You stay here.”

  Nobody argued with him. They didn’t like him any more than he liked them.

  He knew they laughed at him behind his back. Even his friend Martín.

  He walked through the dirt, thinking, Go ahead and shoot me now. But no shot came. No mortar came. Just the sand crunching and blowing under his feet, the desert grit in his teeth, and ahead of him the blackened walls of the bombed-out house, which looked like every other bombed-out house he’d seen in this godforsaken shithole.

  Keeping the woman in mind—not that he was a prude or anything, but he’d been raised to be private—he decided to go around to the far corner of the house, where the pine was.

  The blackened wall was about waist high.

  He unzipped.

  He could hear them laughing in the Humvee and wondered if they were laughing at him. Hyenas. Jackals. He hated every single one of them. The wind carried their voices. He heard no mention of his name.

  The problem was, his bladder was so full it had become balky. He looked around. Try to think of something else . . . Just let it happen . . .

  He noticed that the door was set low. It had been blown open. It led down a few steps covered with debris and dusty cement blocks. He could feel the coolness emanating from the place, underground.

  Something down there. Boxes. Munitions? He knew there were stashes of weapons all over the goddamned place. Mostly, they were dumped—or stolen. People out here stole everything that wasn’t nailed down, and the stuff that was nailed down they used a blowtorch on.

  Finally, his bladder loosened up. He was drenched with relief, inside and out.

  His eye wandered to the low-cut doorway, the basement, the junk-littered steps going down. It was dark but there was a gold bar of light partway across from another opening—a half window, probably.

  He looke
d back at the Humvee.

  Their voices drifted out to him. Talk, talk, talk.

  Not even aware of their surroundings, the dumb fucks. Always yakking. And he’d been reprimanded more than once for their actions. How could you control a pack of dogs?

  The way they looked at him, as if they couldn’t contain their mirth another moment. “Pretty Boy.” That’s what he’d heard his name was.

  Their eyes.

  Like wild pigs in the darkness.

  Let ’em wait. He zipped up and started down the steps.

  CHAPTER 20

  “If it’s not Devin, it’s you?” Jolie said to Landry. “How can you be sure? There are a lot of victims. It could have been random.”

  “No.”

  “Okay, the shooter was a professional, but that doesn’t mean he was after Kristal.”

  “The shooter was an operator.”

  “Is that what you people call it?”

  “Among other things.” Landry looked for the exchange. “Desert or mountains?”

  “What?”

  “Do you want to go to the desert or mountains? It’s almost four p.m.”

  “And you think we should lay low?”

  “Lie low.”

  “Didn’t you ever get it that correcting someone’s grammar is rude?”

  Landry said nothing. He realized he was making it too hard on himself. He had two town houses. Might as well just hole up at one or the other. Few people interacted in either of the neighborhoods, but the handful who had seen him saw him enough to know he belonged there. They kept to themselves and he kept to himself.

  He exited the freeway and drove into Lake View Terrace.

  The street was empty. The townhomes, usually beige, were yellow in the late-afternoon light. Nobody was outside, as usual. No kids on bikes, or people walking their dogs, or neighbors chatting in their front yards. That was the way the neighborhood was. Maybe there were people looking out their windows, but one drive past showed him the blinds were closed in all the houses on both sides of his street. People would be coming home from work soon, but Landry had a detour he needed to make.

  He checked his watch. The post office was closed. He wouldn’t be able to pick up Betsy, his sniper rifle, until tomorrow. He drove past the neighborhood, and turned in the direction of the boonies.