Total Immunity

by Robert Ward

  And maybe this one thing he’d done, maybe even the booze didn’t stop it from seeping under the walls, and especially at this time of the year, which was when it had all happened. Just about now and . . .

  Stop it!!!

  Just stop it!!! Give it up, Paul!

  But he couldn’t.

  Why did he feel that something was coming his way, something that was unstoppable, something like Destiny with a capital D, if you believed in such things (which rational Paul Wagner certainly didn’t) . . .

  But there it was, this feeling of Doom about to rain down on him.

  This certain knowledge that something was coming and all the goddamned safeguards and preventive measures in the universe weren’t going to be able to stop it.

  Because it was Destiny.

  And because he Deserved it.

  He walked by the lovely weird bottle palms, and then stretched and looked up at the sky.

  Check it out, Paul, he said to himself. The sky is a perfect desert blue, and there are a few cumulus clouds. And as anyone can plainly see, there are no wraithlike demons riding down to get you.

  Everything is cool.

  Everything is fine.

  You’re here at the Huntington, and the cacti are blooming and the birds are chirping and the worms are happy in their wormholes, and all is right in God’s (if there is a God) Kingdom.

  And there are a couple of early-morning cactus lovers walking around the curvy, beautifully laid-out garden path, and two of them are girls and one of them is a man dressed in a seersucker sports jacket and white bucks. Good Lord, those are white bucks; just proves that everything comes back.

  What next, Pat Boone records?

  “On a day like today, we’ll pass the time away, writing love letters in the sand.”

  Ha-ha, those were the good old days.

  And the guy seems to be walking toward you, and, oh, he’s got a digital video camera, and he’s filming the cactus. Something about that guy looks vaguely familiar, though he can’t see all of his face because the camera is blocking the view.

  And just for a second, Paul Wagner feels the cold hand of vengeance coming down for him. That this is the day all the chips are called in and it’s all over.

  But it’s not like that at all, because the guy has taken a path away from Paul. So he’s obviously not here to spell out some kind of cosmic vengeance, the same vengeance that got Blakely and Hughes.

  He’s not the guy, not him at all. Just a bearded tourist with a scar on his face making a little nature movie.

  Except that now — suddenly — from behind Paul Wagner, the bearded filmmaker has suddenly doubled back, walked right off the path and between the barrel cacti, which means he picked up some sharp, thick needles in his legs, but he doesn’t even seem to notice. Doesn’t notice pain, doesn’t notice the sky, the gardens. Doesn’t notice anything, except he’s still got the camera in one hand, and with his other he’s shoving a knife into Paul Wagner’s back, and — talk about multitasking — he’s also still half-looking through the viewfinder to make sure he gets the camera super close up on the entry wound. The bloody tissue popping out and the agonizing little groan from Paul.

  And Paul Wagner is on the ground now, lying next to his cacti, and the man is over him, getting a great shot of Paul’s dying rattle/gasp.

  But even as Paul takes his few final breaths, he feels a strange relief, and a thought comes into his almost-gone mind:

  “I couldn’t struggle any longer against it. I couldn’t stand waiting. I don’t even want to fight. Maybe . . . I’m glad it’s fi - nally happening.”

  That’s all there is. All Paul Wagner (Ole Wags) can muster.

  And he feels it now, flying, speeding away from him, out into the silent California blue.

  And the cameraman is walking very quickly toward the entrance. His job is done.

  And ex-agent Paul Wagner is lying there among the sharp green needles, bloody and very dead.

  39

  AN HOUR LATER, Jack and Oscar stood in the Huntington Desert Garden and searched the ground for clues as the boys from the ME’s office took away Paul Wagner’s body on a stretcher.

  Oscar ran his massive hands through his hair and shook his head.

  “Terrible thing,” he said to Jack. “But I don’t see how Wagner’s death is even remotely connected to Blakely and Hughes. It’s more likely a break-in, a robbery that went bad.”

  Jack sat on a bench and felt the ominous shape of a huge saguaro cactus hanging over him. Like the Grim Reaper itself.

  He said nothing, but stared down blankly at his feet.

  “You guys almost convinced me.”

  “About what?”

  “Down at Charlie’s the other day. We toasted. The whole thing was on Forrester, somehow. All we had to do was connect the dots.”

  “Come on, Jack. That case is closed. This is something else. Paul Wagner was an old guy. He never worked with Blakely or Hughes or us . . .”

  Jack looked up at the eerie cactus hovering over him and felt like he was on another planet, one with different physics, too many dimensions for him to fathom.

  “That’s where you’re wrong. He did work with them. Wags and Blakely and Hughes and . . . and me, Oscar.”

  “You? When was this?”

  “A long time ago, compadre. Before I even knew you. In fact, it was one of my very first cases.”

  He stopped then, too stunned to talk.

  “Maybe you better tell me about it, Jack.”

  Jack nodded, then stood up.

  “I will,” Jack said. “But in the car. We have to pay someone a visit. Right now.”

  Jack drove out the 5 Freeway toward the deep Valley. He looked straight ahead and talked in a voice Oscar hadn’t heard before. His voice sounded like that of a man who has just learned he has a terminal disease. Still technically alive, but emotionally already dead.

  “All this started way before we arrested Steinbach. Now I’m sure of it. Yeah, this goes way back.”

  Oscar looked at him in disbelief.

  “How can that be true?”

  Jack bit his lower lip.

  “Just listen. You’ll see. On my first big case, I was teamed up with Zac Blakely and Hughes. We reported to the supervising agent, an older guy — or at least he seemed old to me. Paul Wagner.”

  “The same guy we just . . .”

  “One and the same,” Jack said, as they cut toward Montrose. “See, back then the big thing was bank robberies. Man, some- times there were five a day. And what made it so frustrating is we knew who was the brain behind all the jobs, a guy named Adam Moore. But Moore was smart — very smart — and you couldn’t get next to him. And anyone from his organization who talked found themselves chopped up into pieces and floating in the Hollywood Reservoir.”

  “Yeah, I remember that guy,” Oscar said. “A badass. He was running four or five crews at once.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “A real entrepreneur, Mr. Moore was. But finally we got a break. We busted a guy named Billy Chase, Moore’s right-hand man. He had all the shit we needed on Moore: names, dates, where he invested his money, but he had a good attorney and there was no way he would talk unless we gave him total immunity from prosecution. You know that’s not easy to do, but we went to the DA and we got it for him.”

  “Wow, they rarely do that anymore.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Jack said, passing a Dos Equis Beer truck. “Anyway, it looked good. Chase started talking, and we were getting all ready to drop the hammer on Moore. But then Billy Chase fucked up — bad.”

  “What, he booked on you?”

  “No, he was out on bail. In fact, no one even knew he was arrested. That was part of the deal. If Moore had known he was in prison, he’d have had one of the other inmates stick a shiv in Billy. So we had to leave him out. What we didn’t know about him was he was a dope addict. Not heroin, but downers, codeine pills; the guy was a pillhead from the get-go. So he pulls this dumb little robbery
to get dope money. Robs a 7-Eleven. He walks in with a gun and holds it on the Pakistani guy behind the counter. Right in West Hollywood, near Barney’s Beanery. The gun was all for show. I don’t think he even had any bullets in it. Anyway, there was this boy in there, a fifteen-year-old boy, Jimmy Gregson. He was this ultrabright kid, sensitive . . . wanted to be a movie director, we found out. You know, the kind of kid like Spielberg might have been. Supersmart, already making his own movies at age nine and ten and winning contests. He’d served an internship at Universal Pictures the summer before. Straight As in school. Just an amazing kid.

  “Well, he’s in there, and he freaks when he sees the gun. He tries to run, and Bill Chase panics and starts to grab him. Maybe he gets a little rough with the kid — nobody ever knew for sure. Whatever, the boy falls and hits his head on the edge of the counter, and he’s knocked out. There wasn’t much of a mark on his head, but he’s unconscious. Didn’t seem like that big of a deal at the time. He recovered after a few minutes and seemed fine. And Billy? Well, two LAPD street cops caught him a few minutes later. Looked like no big deal.”

  They turned into a gas station and sat there by the pumps, neither one of them getting out of the car. Behind them loomed the San Gabriel Mountains looking serene, majestic. Jack looked up at the golden butte and thought how it would have made a nice moment if his stomach wasn’t tying into knots.

  “Then, two weeks later, it happened,” Jack said. “Jimmy went to bed one night, complaining that his head had started hurting again, on the side he’d hit it. His parents didn’t think anything of it. Only when they went to wake him up for school in the morning —”

  Jack couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “Jesus,” Oscar said. “That’s terrible!”

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “It ate me up. Man, I didn’t know what to do. Jesus . . .”

  “But it was your first case, right?” Oscar said. “It wasn’t your call.”

  “That’s right,” Jack said. “It was Zac Blakely’s call. I didn’t really foresee anything bad happening from it. It sounded like we did a simple trade-up. It wasn’t all that unusual back then.”

  “Yeah,” Oscar said. “You couldn’t blame yourself. Anyway, it’s a bad thing, but I don’t see how it has anything to do with this case.”

  “Well, it does, trust me. I don’t know exactly how. The thing is, Osc, I knew it was going to come back someday. Even then I knew that case would never die, that someday we were all going to have to pay for what we did. We made a deal with the devil, and he still has to collect.”

  “Hey, now, wait a minute,” Oscar said. “Look, this Chase guy: After the accident, did his information help you catch Moore and his crew?”

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “From what he told us, we got Moore and his gang. Locked them up for good. They’re still serving time.”

  “That’s my point,” Oscar said. “Who knows how many people they might have killed or hurt if they’d been out there taking down more banks? It’s not a science, Jack, it’s a trade-off . You made a call, and basically it turned out for the best.”

  Jack laughed bitterly.

  “No, don’t you see? Whoever is doing this . . . he’s making it seem like it’s related to Steinbach. That was the deal.”

  “But how did he get Steinbach to go along with it?”

  Jack shrugged.

  “Well, I don’t know for sure. But I bet when we get our answer back from our agents in South Africa, we’re going to find out his kids are missing. That had to be what he was trying to tell me when he was dying. Whoever did this kidnapped his boys.”

  “Ah, it’s fantastic,” Oscar said. “After all these years.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” Jack said. “When some people lose their child — their only child — time stops for them. How many times have you seen it, people making shrines to their dead kid, keeping his or her room the exact way it was when they were kids, talking to them like they’re still there? There are cases where people waited twenty or thirty years just to get revenge. And who knows, maybe they deserve it.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Oscar said. “You couldn’t have known how it would turn out. You’re an agent, a cop . . . not God.”

  “Trust me, I know that,” Jack said. “God wouldn’t have made a deal with Billy Chase. But, really, there’s only one way to find out for sure. And it involves going to see someone I hoped to never have to see again.”

  “Who’s that?” Oscar said.

  “Jimmy Gregson’s mother.”

  Jack turned the key and they shot off toward Palmdale. Sweat rolled down his cheeks, and he had a feeling that time had collapsed. The death of Jimmy Gregson hadn’t happened in the past at all. In fact, there was no past.

  Because it was still happening all these years later. Still happening right now.

  40

  THEY DROVE UP Daggett Way, a sunbaked, golden-dust, unpaved road with small houses, some of them with little horse runs attached to the side. Spanish knockoffs stood next to Western ranch-style houses from the ’50s, and down near the end of the street there was even a small Southern-style mansion, as if somebody had seen Gone with the Wind one too many times and had tried to build a miniature Tara.

  For a second or two, Jack managed to fool himself into thinking that he wouldn’t remember the place, or that when they got there, the Gregsons would have moved away. That the whole story he had just told Oscar was too crazy to be real.

  But who was he kidding?

  The Gregsons would never move.

  No, they’d never move away from the place where their genius filmmaker son had lived and died.

  If they were still alive, they’d be there.

  Which is why Jack hadn’t even bothered to call.

  The whole thing felt like it was out of his hands now. It was going to play out however it played out . . .

  And once again, he had the feeling that if the Gregsons wanted to put a bullet through him, maybe that was okay. Maybe he deserved it.

  It was a feeling he had to fight. If not for himself, then for Kevin and Julie.

  The dust kicked up into the windows and Oscar coughed and pulled out a handkerchief from his suit jacket.

  “There it is,” Jack said. “Right over there.”

  They looked over at a broken-down ranch house with a wagon wheel out in the front yard. At one time, the wheel was painted robin’s-egg blue, but that day was long gone. The paint had peeled off , and it looked like the last remnant of a Conestoga wagon’s wheel after an Apache attack. All that was missing were a couple of feathered arrows in the spokes.

  The front porch was lopsided, the old pine beams twisted and half falling over.

  One more earthquake out here in the Valley, and the Greg- sons’ house would collapse forever.

  Jack parked in front of the place and saw a battered old dog glaring at him from the broken-down steps.

  He felt his tongue getting larger in his mouth. Like a toad’s. Dreading every step, Jack and Oscar headed into the dusty

  yard.

  Oscar tried the doorbell, but there was no sound inside. He rapped on the old screen door, waited. Nothing. They rapped again, and the door opened, a half inch. A woman with good bones but deep wrinkles in her face looked out at them.

  “Whatever you two are selling, I don’t need any,” she said.

  Jack held up his badge.

  “Mrs. Gregson. We’re with the FBI. We need to speak with you.”

  Faye Gregson’s head jerked back a little, as if Jack had slapped her in the face.

  “FBI? I ain’t got anything to say to you.”

  “Ma’am, it’s very important,” Oscar said. “Please let us in.”

  Faye Gregson sighed, and gave a bitter little hiccup of a laugh.

  “Like I got a choice in the matter. You people do whatever the hell you want.”

  She stepped back and wearily held open the screen door. Jack and Oscar walked inside.

  Faye Gregson�
�s home was a place where the amenities were no longer observed. The yellowing shades were pulled down so that no one could see the old newspapers and magazines which spilled all over the battered furniture. Several soda bottles sat on chair arms, and the coffee table was covered with tabloid newspapers like The Star and World Weekly News.

  The old throw rug was covered with crumbs and dust and what looked to Jack like pieces of an old ham sandwich.

  There was an odor in the place, too. An odor of mold, and from the back of the house what could easily be recognized as urine. Apparently, Faye Gregson didn’t bother cleaning her toilets very often.

  She made a halfhearted gesture for the two agents to sit down and sat across from them on an old overstuffed couch.

  “So, what little surprises you guys got for me today?” she said, as though she were trying to be casual.

  “Well, Mrs. Gregson . . .” Oscar started.

  “Call me Faye,” she said sarcastically. “I know we’re going to become great friends.”

  Oscar looked at Jack who began to feel impatient.

  “Faye, my partner here, Agent Hidalgo, and I are investigating the deaths of three FBI agents.”

  Faye Gregson snorted a mocking laugh, then took out a Camel and lit it. She blew two trails of smoke across the room at them.

  She looked, Jack thought, like an old, battered lizard on her last legs.

  “You think maybe I did it? Well, can’t say I blame you. I thought about it enough times.”

  “Is that right?” Oscar said.

  “Yeah, that’s right. You ever have a kid, mister?”

  “Yeah,” Oscar said. “Three of them.”

  “Well, then you know something about it. Wonder what you’d do if someone just came along and killed one of ’em. And you knew he did it. And the law wouldn’t touch him.”

  “That would be rough,” Oscar said. “That’s what happened to you?”

  “You know it is or you wouldn’t be here. So why don’t you cut the bullshit?”

  She got up so slowly that it seemed almost like a joke, a parody of motion, then walked over to an old, scratched-up wooden cabinet, opened the top drawer, and took out a picture. Just as slowly she walked over and handed it to Oscar. Jack leaned over and looked on.