The Triggerman Dance

by T. Jefferson Parker

  His body starts to buzz inside, a delayed reaction to his first covert mission into Holt's office. He sees the "view messages" light on the computer blinking, and presses command F2, which, as Valerie has told him, will show him what's in his basket. He is confident there is a little note from her.

  Two messages appear on the monitor

  : STOCKED FRIG WHILE YOU WERE OUT. EAT A CARROT. HOW' S LIFE ON THE RIDGE? JUST KEEPING IN TOUCH-

  A. SEX

  John smiles. His nerves are still brittle but he smiles anyway. He wonders if this is some kind of game, so he goes to the frig— freshly stocked, all right—and pulls out the vegetable drawer. He and Rebecca used to play little games on the Journal e-mail system, and he has the same anticipatory jitters he had back then, that lifetime ago, reading her innocent messages on the screen at his work station.

  Enjoyed flyfishing piece. Never had a barbecued trout. . . . The secret's not to overcook them.

  The carrots are in the crisper. But he can see that just beside them is something not vegetable at all.

  He looks at it for a long beat, then reaches down, slides away the carrots and lifts up a freezer bag. Through the clear plastic he can see paper, bent over but not firmly folded.

  He pulls it open and shakes the papers onto the tile. The pages land face-up, curving slightly from the chilled confinement of the bag. There are two.

  The first is a plain white sheet with sketch of the Journal buildings and parking lot on it. It is an aerial view. It is not highly detailed, but Susan Baum's parking place is marked by a drawing of the "Baum" sign, with her name lightly penciled upon it. Fairway Boulevard is clearly marked, and the chain link fence that runs along the parking lot is identified as such. In the upper right hand corner is a notation:

  4 to 5 Mon. Wed.

  3 to 4 Tue. Thu.

  noon Fri.

  Baum's hours of departure from work, John thinks, including her inviolable half-days on Fridays.

  John recognizes the neat, forward-slanting print that he saw in the files in Vann Holt's office desk.

  The second sheet of paper is a black-and-white aerial photograph of a home somewhere in the foothills. Grease-penciled onto the fat bottom border of white are the words, "B. Residence—Newport Beach—3:15 p.m.—1/2 12."

  Again, it is easy to see that the controlled, almost mechanically perfect printing on the photograph comes from the same hand that kept the notes in Vann Holt's desk files.

  John stares down at these things as if they were a burning bush, or a huge nugget of gold. He turns away and goes back to the dining room table, walking with his head down, as if deep in thought, in the hope that no one will see him.

  He sits down at the table and stares at his electronic in-basket, now empty, the message consumed by the software.

  He feels the cold shudder in the muscles of his back.

  He looks out the window to Holt's mission home, to Fargo's orange-packing plant house, to the Messingers' residence, once a church. Falsehood. Facade. Illusion.

  John remembers that Joshua had warned him this might happen. That there might come a time when all their planning is not enough, when all their caution is insufficient.

  If you're blown, run. If you can't run, deny. When you can't deny, confess. It will either get you out, get you turned or get you killed.

  Fargo's voice darkens his mind like a cloud over the sun:

  He went somewhere with Snakey and Snakey came back.

  He looks out toward the hills, in the direction of his box and his telephone. One hour.

  Patience, he tells himself.

  Calm.

  He takes the sketch and photograph into the bathroom, pulls the penlight from his pocket and shoots three exposures of each document. He uses tissue to handle them. When he's put them inside the bag he wipes down the bag and puts it back where he found it.

  He sets out with his dogs again, around the lake, drawn by the cellular umbilical cord to Joshua, sure that every eye in heaven and on earth is watching.

  Joshua is silent for a long while, as he digests John's story. He asks John to repeat it all, twice. When he finally speaks his voice is deep and hushed and oddly formal.

  "You have been baited. The question is by whom, and what with. Put the penlight in the box now, and get a fresh one. You were thoughtful to leave the package in the vegetable cooler, but I need it by six tomorrow morning, safe in our box of toys with your film. We have two days to analyze it, determine if it's counterfeit, and return it if it is. We know that someone deeply suspects your motives. We don't know who. If it's Holt, you are being tested in his absence. The handwriting will not be his and the photograph will be somehow fraudulent. He'll expect you to take them to him."

  "You can tell it's Holt's writing."

  "No, Owl, you cannot. Forgery is an acquired skill, and plenty of people have it."

  "What if it wasn't Holt?"

  "If it wasn't, and the material is genuine, then there's another spy on Liberty Ridge."

  "Am I going to get killed?"

  "Not if you listen, and do everything I say. Continue. "John told him about his trip to Top of the World, Holt's proposal of "work" with Liberty Ops, the Holt family vaults and statues, the golden doors stamped with birds shining in the sun "They were unforgettably beautiful," he said.

  "And the girl, Valerie. Is she beautiful, also?"

  "I don't think you need an answer to that question, Joshua.'

  "I think I have one."

  They meet up again just at sunset, loading the picnic basket that Valerie has made into a little skiff and motoring out to the island in the middle of Liberty Lake. She wears a long loose summer dress of pale gray, with birds of paradise on it, and a pair of rubber thongs. John can smell the lotion she put on after the shower.

  The beach on the island is clean and sandy. Valerie points out that her father dumped eighty tons of beach sand to create such a place. The beach is shaded by an immense Norfolk Islam pine tree airlifted by helicopter five years ago when Holt began to refurbish the property. They sit on a large bedsheet with the corners held down by rocks. From the sheet John can see the meadow, the top story of the Big House, the backsides of a few of the Liberty Operations buildings, then the expanse of Valencia groves.

  They drink wine and eat the cold barbecued quail that Valerie shot on the opener.

  "Have you ever been in love?" she asks.

  Not this, he thinks. Not now. "Yes," he answers curtly.

  She looks nervous, avoiding his eyes. "What happened?"

  And because it is his duty, he tells her the story of Jillian. Ii his heart, he tells her the story of Rebecca. John is more than little amazed that a lie can contain so much truth. When he i finished all he can hear is the breeze hissing through the needle of the pine tree above, and the buzz in his ears, starting to get louder.

  "When did it happen?"

  "Twelve years ago."

  Valerie says nothing for a long while.

  Then, "Never felt the same way again?"

  "No."

  "Try to?"

  "It's not something you create, or even search out. It just happens."

  "It arrives."

  "Or, it doesn't."

  "Things are always in the last place you look for them."

  "That's not exactly profound."

  "No."

  "What about you?"

  She looks at him then quickly away.

  "Oh, you know, I've had crushes. One time, it was more than that, but he . . . well, didn't fit in very well. That was my first year at UCI. Dad detested him. So for most of college I just read a lot, rode horses and played tennis, but didn't have much luck, boy-wise. I always thought you should feel something special about someone. But I never did. I really wanted to. Nice enough boys, I guess, but not special. I didn't experiment with things—men, women, drugs. I'm not the experimenting kind. I'm the kind who waits for the right thing then takes it. Found myself kind of outside things, the Mormon prude, the F
ederal dweeb. Had a sharp tongue so I got the rep as a ballbusters, even though I wasn't. The guys, they seemed so . . . tiny. Made a few good friends, though. Outsiders, too, I guess."

  John nods but says nothing, as if confirming the importance of friends. The smell of Valerie and her lotion sends his stomach into a sweet freefall, the kind he used to get in the family car, going fast over dips in a highway.

  He thinks: there she is, talking about college boys while I'm trying to find a way to send her father to prison for the rest of his life.

  She knocks over her glass of wine, trying to lift it from the sheet.

  "Oh, damn."

  "There's more. Here . . ."

  He refills her glass and their eyes meet just briefly, before she looks away.

  "What are you thinking about?" she asks.

  That I will hurt you, he thinks. I hurt Rebecca, and I hurt Joshua, and I am here to hurt your father, and if you touch me I will hurt you too. It's contagious. It's inevitable. It's assured.

  "Rusty."

  They are sitting cross-legged and side-by-side, but she turns to look at him. She has a plate of food on her lap, her feet buried under the summer dress. Her golden hair is loose, and the breeze lifts a strand onto her forehead. He reaches out to set it back, but hesitates. John knows that to touch her would betray the truth of his desire and the falsehood of his intentions.

  "Do it," she says. "Go ahead. Please."

  He touches her forehead with his fingertips. It is warm and moist. He moves the lock of hair back into place, and it promptly blows onto her face again. He moves it back once more. His fingers move slowly over her skin because it is damp and no matter how lightly he tries to touch it the tips slow against its soft resistance.

  "Just a damned hair," he says.

  They finish the wine, then row back to shore by moonlight. Valerie is slow and unsteady as she walks, arm-in-arm with John, up to the door of the big house.

  "Like to come in?"

  "Sure."

  "You can see my room."

  Inside, they leave off the lights because the moonlight comes through the high windows and turns everything ice blue. John stands in the semi-darkness of the kitchen and opens another bottle of wine.

  "I'm a little tipsy," she says.

  "I'll pour you a glass. You can take or leave it."

  She takes it and they climb the stairs. Valerie's room is a suite, actually—a huge, high-ceilinged living room, a kitchen with a bar and stools that opens up to a dining area, a bath, and a bedroom into which she leads him. The bedroom has French doors leading to a deck. She still has not turned on the lights sc things are both visible and mysterious—sixty percent present.

  They drink in the half-light of the bedroom. Valerie's eyes are little pools of light hidden behind her hair. They sit close together on the bed, leaning against each other, her pillows piled against the headboard.

  "I've captured you," she says. "You're my trophy."

  "Are you going to mount my head on your wall?"

  "I like you better breathing. How could I throw away all those other good parts? Like you hands and your back and your arms?"

  "Well, you could do a full-body job. Stand me up in the corner like a polar bear."

  "Ugh. Have you see Dad's trophy room?"

  "No."

  "It's his sanctuary. His ultimate place. With all of the paintings and sculpture everywhere, all the valuables littered around this place, the trophy room is still the only one he locks. He says it's because of the humidifier and air conditioning, but I know it's just because he loves the place so much. His place. Nobody else's. His little chapel full of animals. Over a hundred of them. Most of them are real trophies, too—Boone & Crockett, Safari International—true record-book stuff."

  "He gave me a house tour, but didn't mention it."

  "It's in the basement, actually."

  "Your father is a remarkable man."

  Valerie sips her wine. "He truly is. He went a little crazy when Patrick died and mom got wounded. I can't blame him. I do feel sorry for him."

  "Crazy?"

  "Inward. Secretive. Half-there. I mean, he was always secretive about his work—you knew he was FBI for almost thirty years, didn't you? But after Pat and Mom, well ... he got even more vague. He'd sit for hours with a Scotch in his hand and stare out a window. Wouldn't talk. Wouldn't move. Wouldn't even drink. You know something's wrong with Dad when he won't drink. I'd sit down with him and we'd go hours without talking much. It was like sitting with Mom. Pat was killed by that bullet, and Mom was paralyzed by it, but part of it got into Dad, too. Maybe into me, also—I mean, it changed the way I look at things."

  "How?"

  "It made me love more, and hate more. It made me old. It got into my dreams. It took away two things that were a big part of me, and nothing good can take their place. You have this hole inside, and you've got to protect it, keep the bad things out. I don't know—it's hard to explain."

  "I think I understand."

  He can feel her looking at him. She drinks more wine. "Yes, you do. When I saw the way you looked at Rusty, I knew you would understand. And when I was sitting across from you at dinner, I knew you'd understand. You're old, too."

  "A lot older than you."

  "Not years old. Life old. Miles old."

  John looks at her bedstand clock: 3:53 a.m. "It's late."

  "Who are you?"

  He smiles a smile of falsehood. "John."

  "Besides that."

  "What I told you."

  "I'm not fully convinced."

  "I'm not who I say I am?"

  "No. You're more than that. Much more than that."

  "Well," he says, opening the bedroom door. "Let me know when you find out the truth."

  At 4:08 a.m. John is back in his cottage, snatching his penlight from the bedstand drawer. A moment later he crouches under the rear bumper of his truck to find the magnetized hide-a-box containing his tension wrench and lockpick.

  At 4:16 a.m. he is in Vann Holt's private library office shooting copies of all of Holt's handwritten notes in the "B" file Brief and unrevealing as they are, John has wondered if perhaps Baum is being discussed somewhere here, under a code that only Holt knows. He holds the penlight camera to his eye and listen; to the faint click of the shutter opening and closing as he rotate: the shaft.

  At 4:24 he is standing in front of the basement door of what he assumes is the trophy room. It takes him five minutes to get in because the deadbolt has eight springs and he is half drunk and nervous as all get-out crouching here with the penlight in his mouth, the pick clicking in the lock and the sweat running down his neck.

  He steps inside and turns on a light.

  The room is not what he was expecting. There are no head: on the walls, no antlers, no horns, no ivory, no racks. There are no skins or pelts. There are no flattened bodies with stuffed head: tacked to the wall as decoration.

  Instead, there is the natural world. Or something that look: like the natural world.

  It is an astonishingly large room, and standing in it John feels like he is in a natural history museum.

  Along the eastern wall are dioramas of what appear to be India, China and Nepal. Each stretches from floor to ceiling and is probably forty-feet wide. They are built out from the far wall and literally spill forward into the room. They are separated by massive stanchions of river rock that form a kind of border for each. Opposite, along the western wall, is Africa, the Belizean jungle and the Canadian Rockies. The southern wall offers the Australian bush and the Ecuadoran lowlands. And the middle of the world is an immense North America rising from plains of buffalo and ending high up near the ceiling where a magnificent puma stands alert atop a pile of stones and gazes down toward John.

  The dioramas teem with figures that were once alive and now, almost, seem to be living again. Greater Kudu stand alert, on guard for danger, their horns gently tapering and their beards full and pale. A black rhinoceros moves through the veld,
one huge foot raised, mid-step. A pride of lions lounges in the savanna, watching a splendid female drag down a fleeing zebra. Hippopotami loiter in a lake while bongo and wildebeest and hartebeest and gnu race past. Water buffalo bathe; tapir drink; a leopard jumps from the jungle, tail trailing up and back, ears back and mouth open, feet extended and claws out, eyes focused on the startled axis deer in front of him. A grizzly bear towers and bares its teeth. A Marco Polo's ram stands at the highest point of Central Asia, his horns curled up, back and out in a spiral more stupendous than any John has ever seen or imagined. Many of the animals are beyond his experience. Tiny red antelope spring through a meadow; spotted, yellow-eyed cats lounge in an Asian treetop; a pure white buck with an eight-point rack peers over his shoulder with an indifferent, patriarchal majesty.