The Triggerman Dance

by T. Jefferson Parker

  " Why? he bleated.

  "Chain of custody weak. That's Owl, unsworn and unaffiliated. Partial evidence—that's the tape with no sound on it. The fear is 'appearance of impropriety.' I quote the magistrate verbatim now. It's become a given that law enforcement tampers with evidence. We can thank the Los Angeles Police Department for that."

  Joshua sat back, allowing the rancorous anger to build in side him. He took off his glasses, rubbed the dark divots on either side of his nose, and looked at his compatriots through the haze of his 20/80 uncorrected vision. He could feel his eyes getting little misty, so he slipped the glasses back on.

  "Can we try another -----

  "—Already did," said Frazee. "He sided with the first finding. It's the atmosphere of the times, Joshua. You can't change it."

  He looked at Sharon, who had actually gone a little pale. " can't abide by it, either, sir."

  "This hurts me, too. I'm left with no other choice than t turn the whole thing over to ATF, as we discussed. Liberty Ridge is a cold potato now. Let them have it. We'll move on to more productive fields. Perhaps they can glean something from Owl that—"

  "Let them run my mole?"

  "Well, if they take over the op, they get the baby and the bath water."

  Joshua felt his anger boil over now, this cascade of rage behind his eyes and mouth, burning through his skin. He got up slowly from his chair, pulled it out from the table and kicked so hard it shot back on its rollers to the wall and flipped over. Frazee's face seemed to behold him from the far end of a Iong tunnel.

  "I've got three more days. They were promised by you, Walker. They were promised by the Attorney General. They are mine and I own them and I intend to use them to take down Holt. At the end of that time, if I don't have solid enough evidence to arrest him, you can turn Owl over to the Bat Boys and reassign me to El Paso, Texas. But until then, I have an operation here and I am going to finish it."

  "Sit down, Weinstein."

  Josh pulled out the next available chair, and sat.

  "You have your three days, as promised. Today is Friday. Monday morning, we'll joint-task this over to ATF. Joshua, all I can say is I'm sorry. You gave it a good run."

  Then Frazee rose to his feet—or slid down to let them reach the floor—and the meeting was over.

  Josh looked at his cohorts as they made their way from the conference room, realizing that he was about to finish the longest, most bitter journey of his young life. How it would end was anyone's guess.

  Joshua studied Norton's Scotch-riddled face. Norton was his mentor and trainer, a man who within the limits of a bureaucracy had been as good, decent and honest with him as a man could be. He could bear Norton no ill will. And when he looked at Frazee's aging but unlined face, his innocent expression and unshakable self-faith, he saw someone not only to fear, but to pity. He couldn't even look at Dumars.

  He sat for a while after the others had gone. He could see Sharon lingering in the hallway for him. It took sheer willpower to simply stand up and leave the conference room.

  He walked across the parking structure with her—his ears burning, his throat tight. He was trying to figure out how to react, what to do.

  "What's your plan, Joshua?"

  "I have no plan."

  "You're lying."

  Ever since their nights together—there had been four of them in the last four days—Joshua had noted an increasingly bold and proprietary air in Sharon. She seemed quick to bore into things that most people would simply leave alone. His defenses were no longer unassailable for her, and Joshua wasn't sure whether he liked it or not. " Sharon, I wish I was," he said

  Owl didn't call until late that night, when they were sitting in her living room watching Leno. Sharon's cat, Natalie, was sprawled across Joshua's lap, purring. He was stroking the cat though he hated cats. He had not touched his dinner. The cell phone was on the coffee table in front of him, but Joshua dreaded the words he would have to say.

  And then it was ringing. Two. Three.

  Joshua picked up the handset and went outside to the patio He simply couldn't let Sharon hear his defeat. There was a large enough shred of his pride left to never allow that. John's voice was clear and small, as if coming across the globe rather than the twenty short miles from Liberty Ridge.

  John repeated his conversation with Holt and told Joshua about the Baum exhibit. Joshua asked him to repeat it again. He wrote it down in his notepad, as always, as if any of it mattered now. He was furious that they couldn't get an arrest warrant for a man planning to stuff a corpse and put it on display with his elk and lambs and kudu or whatever the fuck they were. Joshua looked up at the sky and wished he were on one of the stars.

  Of course, his gears were spinning, no, shearing—he could almost see Wayfarer, Baum and Owl sitting up there on Top o the World, finishing off lunch before Holt finished them off. It was almost more than he could take, being able to see it so clearly but knowing it would never happen, that he would never be there.

  And then, of course, the inevitable question from his snitch

  "You'll bust Holt while I'm supposed to be getting Baum right?"

  "That is no longer the plan."

  "We didn't get the warrant?"

  "No."

  "Why? What in hell more can I—"

  "—I don't know, Owl. I honestly don't know how you could have done better."

  Joshua explained the meeting with Frazee, the denial of the warrant petition, the reasons. He couldn't remember ever having to give more shameful news in all his life. It was bad enough being governed by fools without having to speak for them, too. In the long silence that followed, Joshua truly accepted that his longstanding appointment with fate had been canceled forever.

  And then, while he searched his vocabulary for the best terms of surrender, a light flashed inside him.

  The light was so bright that Joshua couldn't look directly at it, only to the side, like trying to peek at an eclipse of the sun.

  Was this real? Was he seeing it correctly? Or was it just a mirage hovering over a long, hot, lonely highway?

  "Wait," he said.

  He thought it through one way, then back again. One more time, then another. It was there. It was real.

  "I'm tired of waiting," said Owl.

  "I need thirty seconds. Give them to me."

  Gentle static. The occasional breathing of his mole. His own accelerating heartbeats thumping in his ears as he flipped back through his little book to the notes of John's second call—after he'd accompanied Holt to Top of the World and seen the statues and the vaults. He backed toward the porch light to see them better. Pay dirt.

  "Listen to me. There's a way we can do this. It is possible. You would have to put your head on the chopping block. Right there, directly on it. Then, trust me."

  "I'll listen."

  "There's nothing for you to listen to, Owl. Just do what Holt tells you. Bring Baum to Liberty Ridge for him. I'll be there when you need me. I promise you that."

  Sharon was eyeing him as he returned to the house a few minutes later. He glanced at her, then away, then set the phone back on the coffee table and began pacing the room. Natalie looked at him with eyes that seemed fixed on some other dimension.

  "I ordered him out, but he refused. He's going to take Baum back to Liberty Ridge for Holt."

  Sharon said nothing and Josh felt the accusing silence. He knew she would unravel his dishonesty in a matter of seconds.

  "You asked him to disobey you."

  "It was totally his doing. He refuses to come out."

  "Joshua—that's perilous. It's stupid and it's . . . homicidal. Holt plans to kill her, and John, too. You know it."

  He allowed himself the smallest of smiles. "Therefore, we have a reasonable assumption that a crime is about to take place. On those grounds, we can be there to prevent it. We'll take hit for conspiracy to commit the murder of Susan Baum. We'll add Rebecca later."

  Her silence tried to accuse him, but
Joshua Weinstein's conscience was beyond reproach. He was beginning to feel invincible now. He felt as if he had banged his head against the wall, and the wall had given.

  "John is willing," he said.

  "Of course he is. He needs Wayfarer just as bad as you do.

  He looked into Sharon's level brown eyes and saw the terrifying evenness of her common sense, the endless flat line of he moral horizon—good above and bad below and nothing in between.

  She went to the kitchen and poured herself more coffee. When she came back she sat at the far end of the sofa, away from Joshua and the cat.

  Joshua could sense the envelope of tension around her, palpable as the buzz in a prison.

  "I don't know what the right thing to do is," she said.

  "Welcome to the human race."

  "Fuck you and your hatred, Josh."

  "It makes a better light than your doubt does."

  "I don't like the doubt, either. It makes for weakness an< indecision. It's paralyzing. But this is the first time since coming to the Bureau that I haven't felt right about something. Some thing big, I mean. If this goes wrong, Josh, it goes wrong big."

  "Then I'll be looking for work in the private sector. Maybe Holt could use me. I might open my own little dry cleaning business."

  "You might be dead."

  Thoughts of his own mortality couldn't dent him. The joy of victory, even the thought of victory swept the fear from Josh's mind. He looked at Sharon now, at her face behind the rising steam from her coffee cup. She's beautiful, he thought, isn't she? In a different way than Rebecca, but beautiful just the same.

  "I'll do it alone, Sharon."

  "Do you want me there?"

  "Of course I do."

  "I'm afraid of doing the wrong thing. Of getting someone innocent killed. Aren't you?"

  "No."

  "You should be." "It scares me that I'm not. So I'll do it alone."

  "No, you won't. I won't let you. I never considered that, even for a second."

  chapter 36

  John had just ended his conversation with Joshua when he heard the cottage door open and close. He was upstairs in the cottage loft. His hands were jittery as he replaced the cellular unit under the sink cabinet, pressing it down into a box of cleaning products between two sponges of roughly the same size and laying the rubber gloves over them.

  "Val?"

  "No such luck, Bun-boy."

  He heard footsteps across the hardwood floor. He quietly closed the cabinet and went downstairs.

  Lane Fargo sat in the living room, an open Sports Illustrated draped over a crossed knee and a paper grocery bag beside his leg. He looked at John with his standard expression— mean spirited and noncommittal.

  "Come to borrow some Pepto?" John asked. There was something in Lane Fargo so easy to detest.

  "Not exactly."

  "You still look a little peaked from Uganda. Bed rest, plenty of fluids."

  "Feel great, actually. I've made some solid formulations lately."

  "A firm stool can't be overpraised."

  "Always talkin' shit, aren't you?"

  Fargo tossed the magazine to the coffee table, uncrossed his legs and stood, never taking his eyes off of John. He made a fast sighing sound as he turned. John studied Fargo's dark, shadowy face. The vein throbbing in Fargo's neck and the one throbbing in his forehead kept the same cadence. His black widow's peak made him look simian. He had on his black t-shirt again, and the shoulder holster with the automatic jammed up along his rib cage.

  "Look, Lane. You couldn't put me with Joshua What’s his name or Rebecca Harris, so why don't you just cave in and admit you were wrong? I'm clean. I won. Valerie kind of likes me, too. Go home and weep."

  "That was the past," he said. "You beat me at it, like you beat me out at Olie's that day." At this, Fargo's dark visage crimped into a mock frown. "I'm more interested in the present, the right-now. Like in what happened to Snakey."

  "Not him again."

  "The plot's thickened, Bun-boy. I found this little tape recorder in his room, remember? Listened to the tape that was in it last night, after you and Mr. Holt went up to see the sights in Little Saigon. Snake was just using it for an activity log—what you did each day while we were gone. He was watching you. You know, Snakey wasn't a literary giant like you. But he was a good watcher and he loved to talk, though, so he just used the tape. Some awfully revealing notes on that tape, about you and Valerie. Quite a picnic on the island, wasn't it? Meaningful, touching and all that. How'd you keep the sand from sticking to your pecker tracks? Anyway, he's still up the second morning, watching you leave the main house just before sunrise. What a night. Then at 6:20—he says on the tape—you set out around the lake with your dogs, heading up into the hills. Says—this is right on the tape again—he couldn't figure out how anybody could have so much energy after being up all night drinking and necking, so he's going to follow, have a look. Do his job. That was the last thing he had to say to anybody, as far as I can tell. So, where'd you go that morning?"

  "I thought you just told me."

  "How far up the hills did you walk that morning?"

  John went to the refrigerator. "Beer, Lane?"

  "No thanks. So, how far up?"

  John returned to the living room with a cold beer. He sat in a leather chair with his back to the picture window overlooking Liberty Lake. He popped the can and drank.

  "Lane, beat it. I'm done."

  "Come on, John, humor me. Play along. You play along, I won't tell Mr. Holt about touching his daughter."

  "I told him anyway."

  "Made a quick father figure out of him, didn't you? I loved the Patrick-act for the Missus, by the way. I can see Holt and Carolyn falling for it, but not Valerie. Mister and Missus, they're so fucked up after Patrick they'd believe anything. She's got a bullet in the brain, but I swear some of it chipped off and got into Mr. Holt, too. Anyway, you told him you touched his kid. Good for you. Humor me anyway. Just cooperate for a minute or two. Show me how futile it would be to go to Mr. Holt and tell him we should bounce your ass off Liberty Ridge. He listens to me, you know. I keep him alive."

  John felt tired and surprised. He was not expecting to be playing this game on this field now. But he recognized that he needed to play. Anything on earth was worth forstalling now, until noon Sunday.

  "I went a ways up the hill, Fargo."

  "To the fence?"

  "What fence."

  "Perimeter, chain-link, electrically charged."

  "No, then."

  "Why?"

  "Exercise. I couldn't have slept. I knew that, so I took a walk with the dogs. It's an old habit."

  "When did you first see Snakey?"

  "I didn't."

  "You're not observant, are you?"

  "Gee, Lane. I guess not."

  "Then what happened to him, Bun-boy? He just fell in a hole up on the hillside and we haven't found him yet?"

  John shrugged. "I guess. I don't care what happened to him."

  "Well he didn't, and you should. I followed his trail and there was no Snakey, no hole. Wasn't very hard, either, because the brush is dense and he was paralleling the path you used. You do take paths on these morning walks, rather than blazing fresh trails as the sun comes up, right?"

  "Right." The tree, he thought. The gun. The hole. The box of toys.

  "The tracks up on the trail are from your Redwings in the closet up there. Plus, Snakey wore these ugly athletic shoes with the wavy pattern on the bottom. I remember because I told him to get some decent hiking boots if he was going to pay good money anyway. So, there was the Snake's shoe pattern, going the same direction as your path."

  John looked at Fargo with all the weary patience he could feign. "Next time you drag out my Redwings, put a little mink oil on them, will you?"

  "Two sets of tracks, heading up the same way. One was yours, the other Snakey's. Nobody's seen him since."

  "Wow, this drama's so thick you could cut it with
a knife. I surrender. Where'd he go, Lane?"

  Fargo paced the living room once, his black combat boots thumping soft against the wood floor. "I don't know yet."

  "Yet."

  "I made it to the property line, mostly by following Snakey's trail. Tracks led me almost to the fence—twenty, thirty yards shy, maybe. And there, they mixed with yours. Yours were everywhere. His were, too. A young oak tree. The fence. Two sets of prints. I sat down on a log and tried to figure it. Snakey could have gone over the fence if the electricity wasn't on, though that's a helluva lot harder than just driving his Toyota away. He could have tunneled under the fence, then back-filled the hole. Not likely. He could have been lifted headfirst by God's thumb and index finger, straight up out of there and into heaven. Naw, not Snakey, he was too much of a sinner for that."