Daughters

by Nathan Walpow



  Daughters

  Nathan Walpow

  ~~~

  Copyright © 2015 by Nathan Walpow. All rights reserved.

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  Table of Contents

  Daughters

  More by Nathan Walpow

  Daughters

  The kid under the freeway was just a henchman, so I winged him. Then I looked at his face and shot him through the head.

  Not because he was a threat to me. Or much of one to the citizenry of Los Angeles. But there are tougher calls.

  There was another kid once, no more than nineteen, and he'd gotten mixed up with some drug guys, and the real creeps were taken care of. But he was still holding a gun, so I shot him in the biceps. And he dropped the gun and looked at me, and you could see it in his face. I screwed up here. So I tied him to a drainpipe and left him for the cops. He did three years, went to work for a plumber.

  Course, then he got caught burglarizing a place he'd plumbed at. Owner gave him the shotgun treatment and the kid bled to death on a very expensive Persian rug. So I was wrong about him. So sue me.

  Back to the under-the-freeway henchman ... the look in his eyes when the bullet went through his arm was, Here we go again. A realization that this leaking hole in his skinny limb was one more step on a stairway that only went down. He wasn't ever going to do anyone worthwhile any good. So I put him out of his misery.

  I made sure all four of them were dead. Then I grabbed their bread. They had about $3300 altogether, most of it on the Armenian with the tattoos.

  There were three girls in the back of the van. They were scared of me and I figured they'd be scared of everyone for a while. They weren't more than fourteen. It took me twenty minutes to convince them to come with me. Good thing one of them had a little English. Else they might still be sitting there. I dropped them off at Suzy's, from where they might eventually find their way back to the motherland. I took enough money to keep me going for a week or so and left the rest at the Mission downtown. Then I headed home.

  There was someone there. Lazing in the recliner, watching a nature show on the TV. The sound was down low and so were the lights. Just a dim lamp on the other end of the living room. Just enough to tell me it was a woman.

  I didn't do anything hostile. No point. If she'd meant me harm, I'd by dead by then, or gassed or wrapped in a net or something equally embarrassing. Instead I went in the kitchen and dug a beer out of the fridge. "Want anything?" I said.

  "I'm fine."

  I sat on the sofa. Took a slug of beer. Checked her out. She was in her early twenties, pretty enough, auburn-haired and green-eyed. I couldn't see well enough to tell, but I knew.

  When I'd had time to finish my beer, she said, "You're probably wondering who I am. And what I want."

  "Not necessarily."

  "I need your help."

  "Look, I'm going to bed. You can leave, or you can sleep there." I turned my back and went into the bedroom.

  Some hours later I awoke to the smell of bacon. I put on a robe and wandered into the kitchen. She was cooking breakfast. Her eyes were green, all right. A very particular green. Some would call it emerald. She asked how I liked my eggs, and I told her.

  When we'd finished breakfast, she brought me fresh coffee, sat opposite me at the table.

  "Jenny," I said.

  Deep down, I think, she was hoping I would know. "How?" she said.

  "You've got your mother's eyes." No point in letting her know I'd been keeping track of her.

  "She's dead," Jenny said.

  "I'm sorry." I knew, of course. I'd looked into it some when it happened. Hadn't found out who was behind it and hadn't cared enough to keep digging. "Is that why you're here?"

  A nod.

  "You want revenge on whoever killed her."

  She shook her head. "Revenge isn't good enough. I want vengeance."

  #

  As great loves go, it wasn't all that spectacular. We were in our mid-twenties, Vikki and me, finishing our doctorates. She got pregnant. We decided to get married. The thought of having a Jew in the family didn't sit well with her parents.

  I already knew they were a nasty lot. Exceptionally racist. He ran a natural gas development company that exploited its South American workers. She was high in the heirarchy of a big-money televangelist. But I was young and stupid. I thought I could marry into the family and change them.

  They tried to buy me off.

  They succeeded.

  I could tell you how I justified it to myself, but it would all sound like rationalization, and that's what it was. Suffice it to say, when it came right down to it, I loved a hundred thousand dollars more than I loved Vikki.

  I intended to finish my doctorate on the other end of the country, but that never happened. I managed to grab a masters and picked up an adjunct job at a local college. One fall there was a rapist on campus. I stumbled on evidence that it was one of my students. I told him what I knew, and the little ass admitted it. I said I was going to turn him in. He laughed at me.

  The next night, I lay in wait outside his apartment and cut his throat. I didn't know what I was doing, but it didn't matter. They searched his place and found the jewelry he'd taken from each of his victims as souvenirs. There wasn't much of an investigation. People in that part of New England liked justice.

  So did I, I found. So when the scion of a well-respected local family walked after he beat a gay man within an inch of his life, I drugged him and chopped off a hand. It wasn't as messy as the first piece of justice I'd meted out, but it wasn't pretty.

  I finished the school year and joined the Army and got myself into the Rangers. Learned how to kill and maim people with a lot less splatter. I tracked a thrill killer to L.A., found it fit my lifestyle, stuck around.

  "What happened to her?" I said. "Your mother." Did I feel bad about playing dumb with my daughter? Just a little.

  The face was calm. The storm was behind it. "Home invasion kind of thing. On the surface."

  "You think there's more."

  "The three guys who did it all died in prison."

  "When'd it happen?"

  "Five years ago."

  I gave her a look.

  "I needed time to train myself. I went to Israel and joined the Army. After that—"

  "Mossad."

  She nodded. "I seem to have an aptitude for cloak and dagger."

  "Why do you need me?"

  "I figure you have a stake in all this. Plus you were Special Forces. I figure I could use you."

  She didn't know about my vigilante routine yet.

  "You think it was her parents."

  She didn't answer. Took a sip of coffee. Then, "Did you know Ted died?" The guy Vikki married not terribly long after I fled the scene.

  "You think they had it done? Why? Wasn't he a nice Baptist—"

  "Skin cancer. Eight years ago. All on the up-and-up. He was an okay guy, by the way."

  I knew that. I knew everything about him. Borderline sociopathy doesn't keep a guy from keeping track of his daughter.

  "Anyway," she said, "after a suitable period, Mom met another guy."

  "They didn't like him."

  "If they were unhappy with someone like you, how do you think they felt about Ahmed?"

  #

  Jenny's theory was that her mother had been killed by accident. That the plan was to tak
e care of her fiancé, and that Vikki was home at the wrong time. Intentionally offing their own offspring seemed beyond even Earl and Susan.

  "Doesn't matter," Jenny said. "If it was their doing, I want it made right."

  "You'd kill your own grandparents."

  "Never liked them that much anyway."

  I tried to talk her out of it. Didn't do any good. Not that I expected it would.

  What she really wanted, she said, was another trained set of eyes. She wanted to make sure she wasn't going to murder a couple of blood relatives who didn't deserve it.

  I'd had the same suspicions, four years back. They hadn't come to anything. Maybe I'd missed something. You never know. So I told her I'd go with her.

  We drove up to Coulter, where Vikki'd been living. A five hour trip that we stretched into an overnighter. Getting to know each other. We pulled into town around ten in the morning. Drove to the house where it happened. Parked across the street. Someone else was living there now. They had three young kids and a golden retriever.

  "I wonder what it looks like inside," Jenny said.

  "You could knock on the door and find out. If you really wonder."

  She turned to me. "Not enough to bother."

  "Kid, you've gotten bitter a whole lot faster than I ever did."

  "Do I take that as a compliment?"

  "If you like."

  She looked away. "Seen enough?"

  "I didn't need to see any. You did."

  She put the car in gear and we got out of there. "We'll visit Ahmed next."

  "What I would have done."

  He lived on the other side of town, in a mid-rise condo near the convention center. Jenny rang the buzzer downstairs. Ahmed came on, Jenny identified herself, Ahmed didn't seem surprised. We went up, got the niceties out of the way, and sat drinking tea. I think he knew that whatever we were up to could end badly for Earl and Susan. This, far as I could tell, neither pleased nor displeased him. We went over how, on the day she was killed, Vikki's book group got cancelled when the hostess's kid came down with the chickenpox. How Ahmed came home and found her there and his first thought was that it was meant for him. It wasn't long after 9/11 and he'd been harassed more than once. Then, when he'd gotten over the shock a little, he changed his mind. Still thought it was meant for him. But the why was different.

  We weren't there more than half an hour. At the end, promises to keep in touch. No one believed they would be kept.

  We rode the elevator down, got in the car. "What do you think?" Jenny said.

  "He didn't have anything to do with it."

  "You seem sure."

  "I'm a pretty good judge of who's an evildoer and who's not."

  She allowed a bit of a smile, stuck the key in the ignition. The engine flared. "I didn't think so either. But I wanted your opinion."

  "Turn off the car," I said.

  She did.

  I made her look at me. "How many people have you killed?"

  Her eyes didn't waver. "Three."

  "Mossad stuff."

  "Yes."

  "Real bad guys."

  A nod.

  "How'd you do it?"

  "Two, I shot. The other, with my hands."

  "This'll be different. If it turns out they were behind it. Earl and Susan."

  "I figured."

  "What with knowing them."

  "If they deserve it . . ." Again she twisted the car key. We headed out of town.

  #

  Two of the guys who'd been knocked off in prison hadn't left anyone behind. The third had a wife and a couple of daughters. They lived twenty miles out, near a little town called Applegate. There was a highway, then a dirt road. At the end there was a farmhouse missing its farm, except for a couple of chickens pecking randomly at the dust and something that was probably a silo once.

  The guy's name was Chip Naylor and the widow's was Tina. There were two vehicles, a decrepit Jeep Wrangler and a doorless old Chevy which the two girls had turned into a fort. One of them was a little chubbo, the other scrawny and, I thought, a Down kid. They checked us out when we arrived, decided we were no threat to their kingdom, resumed screaming at the Indians who were attacking them.

  Tina Naylor was blond, tall, and very thin. She greeted us in front of the house, found out who we were and what we wanted, decided to play along. The inside was neat and clean and a whole lot better looking than the outside. The furniture was presentable and there were reasonable pictures on the walls.

  She poured us lemonade and we sat in the kitchen. She looked at a picture of Chip on the counter, turned back to us. "That's for the girls," she said. "I don't miss him one bit."

  "Real loser," I said.

  "A-number-one."

  "Why'd you marry him?" Jenny said.

  "He was gorgeous and he had a line," Tina Naylor said. "Could've had anyone he wanted. Picked me. Who was I to say no?" She drew a squiggle in the condensation on her lemonade. "I worked at the bank in town. He didn't do much of anything. Then I had Emmy and couldn't work anymore. He got mixed up with Ferdie." Ferdinand Arroyo. One of the others who got shanked at New Folsom. "They got to running a little weed and things were okay for a while. Then Duke came along." Henry "Duke" Larroquette. Made them a nice multicultural trio.

  "And Duke was into home invasion," Jenny said. She'd done her research.

  "Chip tried to talk them out of it," Tina Naylor said.

  "You know this how?"

  "He told me about it beforehand. Said they'd found out the woman had a lot of jewelry. Good stuff. But there wasn't any jewelry and she was there and she fought back and now everybody's dead."

  "And that's all there was to it," I said.

  "Well, yeah. What else you looking for?"

  "The reason they really went in there."

  "My mother didn't have much jewelry," Jenny said. "Nothing expensive, anyway."

  "They were real screwups, Chip and his friends," Tina Naylor said.

  "You said they'd found out she had a lot of jewelry. Found out how?"

  "I think someone they hung out with. Named Jay."

  "He dead too?"

  She shook her head. "Never met him. Don't know anything about him."

  She couldn't remember if she'd told the cops about him. But she didn't think so. The police investigation had been half-assed. They didn't ask her much. The three guys admitted they did it, they pled, they went to jail for what everyone expected to be a very long time.

  "This Jay . . ." Jenny said, when we'd gotten back onto a decent road.

  I hadn't run across him last time around. Might be worth following up on. "Probably a dozen lowlifes named Jay in a twenty-mile radius."

  "Probably."

  "But, if you want to—"

  "I want to."

  We spent a couple of days in the area. Maybe I'd been a little excessive when I said a dozen Jays, but we tracked down three of them. We found one in a pool hall. He hadn't known any of the home invaders. The second had gone straight, more or less, and was working in an auto parts store. He'd gone to high school with Chip, but that was the last time he'd seen him. We found the third one shooting craps behind a feed store. He tried to play tough with us until Jenny twisted his arm. Literally. But it turned out he'd been in the Navy when Vikki was killed.

  I believed what all three told us. None of them would have been a very good liar.

  #

  After we left Tina Naylor, Jenny and I drove inland. Through Nevada, down into Arizona. I didn't like Scottsdale much the couple of times I'd been there before, and it wasn't any better this time. Too many rich white people with too many lousy attitudes.

  I made a couple of calls and brought myself up to date. Earl had retired from active participation in the natural gas company and was devoting his retirement to golf. Susan was doing a lot of work with her Christian charities.

  They lived in the same overlarge two-story house on a placid street in a perfect neighborhood. The palm trees that didn't belong th
ere looked happier than the cacti that did. They were tall and full and one of them had a couple of undocumenteds lopping off any fronds that had the audacity to turn brown.

  On Sunday morning, while they were at church, we let ourselves in. The place was sterile. Nothing half an inch out of place. Some perfect roses in a sparkling vase were the only sign that anything had ever been alive there.

  Photos told me Susan'd had more work done. Her smile was tighter than ever. There was one lousy picture of Vikki and Jenny and Ted, taken when Jenny was ten or so. It sat on the baby grand alongside a couple of crystal bells.

  Jenny did reconnaissance while I concentrated on Earl's den. The safe took me a couple of minutes. Nothing in there but fifty thousand dollars and a bunch of stock certificates. The desk wasn't much help either. I don't know what I expected to find. Maybe a letter that said, Dear Jay, Enclosed find a bunch of money to hire a couple of thugs to off the infidel who wants to sully my daughter. Sincerely, etc., etc.

  No such luck. Nothing I wouldn't have expected. Nothing that wasn't there the last time I'd gone through the exercise, five years back. Just the detritus of a rich couple's life. I wasn't disappointed, either time. I hadn't expected anything useful. They weren't stupid.

  Jenny came in. Shook her head. We got out of there and went back to the motel. Killed time until ten that night. Drove back to the house. Jenny got out, walked up to the door, rang the bell. The door opened, there were surprised looks, followed by somewhat pleased ones, and in she went.

  Twenty minutes later I was at the front door. Soon it opened. Jenny stood there, and behind her were Susan and Earl. They thought they were saying good night.

  They had no idea who I was. I hustled them inside and locked the door. Earl was frightened out of his wits. Susan was cooler.

  I gave them a minute to figure out my identity. Not a clue. I was like a mosquito they'd swatted at some long-ago garden party. They stood together as far from me as they could and still be in the room.

  "Long time," I said.

  Susan got it first. She said my name.

  "Nice to see you," Earl said.

  "Can I get you anything?" Susan said. "Coffee? Tea?"

  "Please," I said. "Cut the hostess with the mostest act. Go sit down, the two of you. We need to talk."

  They did as told. No bluster, no I'm going to call the police. It was their house, but my turf, and they knew it. People like them recognize power, no matter how it expresses itself.