by Robert Crais
“Someone down here made the mistake, Lonny.”
“I hear you. Joe? Thanks for calling about Frankie. I don’t get many calls.”
“I have to go.”
“Joe?”
“I gotta get going.”
“You were a good leader. You really took care of us, man. I’m sorry I let you down.”
Pike closed his phone.
7
The early-evening sky purpled as Pike turned toward Frank Meyer’s house for the second time that day. He drove slowly, buying time for the twilight sky to darken. Pike loved the night. Had since he was a boy, hiding in the woods from his raging father; loved it all the more as a young combat Marine on long-range patrols, then again when he was a police officer. Pike felt safe in the darkness. Hidden, and free.
Frank’s house was dark when Pike drove past. The bright yellow tape across the door was now ochre in the gloomy light, and the SID wagons and criminalists were gone. A radio car remained out front, but Pike noted the windows were up and the glass was smoked. Pike recognized the car as a scarecrow vehicle, left to discourage intruders, but posted without a crew. This made Pike’s task easier.
Pike circled the block, then parked in the deep shadow of a maple tree two houses away. He moved quickly and without hesitation, sliding out of his Jeep and into a row of hedges. He crossed the neighbor’s yard, then hoisted himself over a wall. He followed the side of Frank’s garage into the backyard, then stood for a moment, listening. The neighborhood was alive with normal sounds-cars shortcutting to Beverly Glen on their way home to the Valley, a watchful owl in the maple tree over Frank’s pool, a faraway siren.
Pike went to the edge of the pool, smelling the chlorine, then touched the water. Cold. He went to the French doors, popped a pane near the handle, and stepped into the deeper black of the family room. Pike listened again, then turned on a small flashlight that produced a dim red light. He covered the lens with his fingers, letting out only enough light to reveal the room. His hand glowed as if filled with fire.
The heart-shaped stain where Cindy Meyer and her younger son died was a darker smudge on the dark floor, one murky red over another. Pike studied it for a moment, but Pike wasn’t looking for clues. He was looking for Frank.
Pike circled the family room, the dining room, and the kitchen, moving as silent as smoke. He noted the furniture, toys, and magazines as if each was a page in the book of the family’s life, helping to build their story.
A hall led to the master bedroom, which was large and spacious. Photographs of the kids and Frank and Cindy dotted the walls like memories captured in time. An antique desk sat opposite a king-sized bed with a padded headboard, a plaque on the desk reading: Empress of the World. Cindy’s desk, where she had paid bills or helped with the business.
Something about the bed bothered Pike, and then he realized the bed was made. The family room and Frank’s office had been upended, but the bed here in the master was undisturbed. It had likely been made that morning, and was still waiting for a bedtime that would never come. This suggested the home invaders had either been frightened away before searching the master, or had found what they wanted. Pike concluded there was no way to know, and that John Chen might be right. The invaders could have realized they hit the wrong house, but by then they had killed Frank, so they killed everyone else to get rid of the witnesses.
Pike played the red light over Cindy’s desk, and saw more snapshots. Frank and the kids. An older couple who might have been Cindy’s parents. And then Pike found the picture he was looking for. He had not known he was searching for it, but felt a sense of completion when he saw it. The snapshot showed Frank in a swimming pool with one of the boys. Frank had heaved his son into the air amid a geyser of water, both of them laughing, Frank’s arms extended. This picture was the only photograph of all the photos that showed the blocky red arrows inked onto his del toids. Pointing forward, just as the arrows on Pike’s delts pointed forward. Identical.
Pike studied the picture for a long while before he returned it to the desk and left the bedroom. He moved back along the hall, thinking how different his own home was from the home that Frank Meyer built. Pike’s furnishings were minimal, and the walls were bare. Pike did not have a family, so he had no pictures of family on the walls, and he did not keep pictures of his friends. Pike’s life had led to blank walls, and now he wondered if his walls would ever be filled.
When Pike reached the entry, the outside of the house lit up like a blinding sun. Vengeful bright light poured around curtains and shades, ignited the cracks in the broken door, and streaked through the windows. Pike closed his hand over the tiny red light, and waited.
A patrol car was spotlighting the house. They had probably been instructed to cruise by every half hour or so. Pike was calm. Neither his breathing nor his heart rate increased. The light worked over the house, probing the hedges and side gates for three or four minutes. Then the light died as abruptly as it appeared.
Pike followed his crimson light upstairs.
The house seemed even more quiet on the second floor, where a stain on the carpet marked the older son’s murder. Little Frank. Pike counted the years back to a deadly night on the far side of the world when Frank told Pike that Cindy was pregnant.
That time, they were protecting a collective of villages in Central Africa. A group called the Lord’s Resistance Army had been kidnapping teenage girls they raped and sold as slaves. Pike brought over Frank, Jon Stone, a Brit named Colin Chandler, Lonny Tang, and an ex-Special Forces soldier from Alabama named Jameson Wallace. They were tracking the LRA to recover sixteen kidnapped girls when Frank told him that his girlfriend, Cindy, was pregnant. Frank wanted to marry her, but Cindy had stunned him with an ultimatum-she wanted no part of his dangerous life or the dangerous people with whom he worked, so either Frank would leave his current life and friends behind, or Cindy would never see him again. Frank had been shattered, torn between his love for Cindy and his loyalty to his friends. He had talked to Pike almost three hours that night, then the next, and the next.
Pike closed his eyes, and felt the carpet beneath his feet, the chill air, the empty silence. He opened his eyes, and stared at the terrible stain. Even in the bad light, he could see where fibers had been clipped by the criminalists.
Those African nights led through the intervening years like a twisting tunnel through time to this spot on the floor. Pike covered the red light, turning the world black.
He went downstairs to Frank’s office.
The drapes had been left open by the SID crews, so the office was bright with outside light. Pike turned off his red flash. He sat at Frank’s desk with his back to the window. Frank the Tank’s desk. A long way from Africa.
The night in Africa when Frank decided to change his life, he had thirty-one days remaining on his contract, but was still thirteen days from earning his nickname. Two days after Africa, Joe, Frank, and Lonny Tang flew to El Salvador. Frank had not been able to reach Cindy until they landed in Central America, but that’s when he told her. She wanted him to fly home immediately, but Frank explained he had made a commitment for the duration of his contract, and would honor that commitment. Cindy didn’t like it, but agreed. Joe and his guys spent five days in El Salvador, then flew to Kuwait.
It was a British contract, providing security for French, Italian, and British journalists. That particular job was to transport two BBC journalists and a two-person camera crew inland to a small village over the mountains called Jublaban, untouched and well away from hostile forces.
Pike was responsible for three different groups of journalists that day, so he split his crew, giving the Jublaban run to Lonny, Frank, Colin Chandler, and an ex-French Foreign Legion trooper named Durand Galatoise. Two Land Rovers, two operators per Rover, the journalists divided between them. A fast thirty-two miles over the mountains, leave in the morning, back after lunch. Durand Galatoise packed two bottles of Chablis because one of the journalists had a nasty sm
ile.
They left at eight that morning, Lonny and Frank in the lead truck, Chandler and Galatoise in trail, and reached Jublaban without incident. There to do a story on rural medical care, the journalists were interviewing Jublaban’s only physician when an incoming RPG hit the second Rover, flipping it onto its side. The operators and journalists immediately came under small-arms fire.
Galatoise was killed within the first sixty seconds, the remaining Rover was hit, then Lonny Tang caught the piece of shrapnel that tore him inside out. Frank and Chandler realized they were facing eight or ten men, then noticed an approaching nightmare: Four armored vehicles and two full-sized battle tanks were rumbling toward them across the desert. With both Rovers disabled, the operators and their journalists were trapped.
Frank pushed Lonny Tang’s intestines back into his body, then wrapped him with pressure bandages and belts to keep him together. While Chandler laid down cover fire, Frank ran to his burning Rover for radios, more ammunition, and a.50-caliber Barrett rifle they used for sniper suppression. The Barrett, a beast of a rifle that weighed over thirty pounds, could punch through engine blocks at more than a mile.
Chandler herded the journalists to a more defensible location, but Lonny Tang could not be moved. Frank stashed him in a stone hut, then moved forward with the Barrett gun. Frank later said he was crying during the entire firefight; blubbering like a baby, he would say, running, then firing, then running again.
Pike heard much of it through his radio, with Chandler broadcasting a play-by-play as Pike coordinated a rescue mission with a British air controller.
Frank Meyer fought on like that for almost thirty minutes, running and gunning with the Barrett even when the tanks and armored vehicles crunched into the village, Frank banging away like a lunatic to draw them from Lonny Tang.
Everyone later assumed the big boomers turned back into the desert after they picked up their troops, but Colin Chandler and the BBC journalists reported that a young American named Frank Meyer had shot it out toe-to-toe with four armored vehicles and two heavy tanks, and driven the bastards away.
Frank’s contract expired five days later. He wept when he shook Pike’s hand for the last time, boarded an airplane, and that had been that, changing one life for another.
Pike officially retired from contract work sixty-two days later, and maybe Frank’s decision had something to do with Pike’s decision, though Pike never thought so. Pike had told Frank to do it. Build the family he wanted. Leave the past. Always move forward.
Pike was still at Frank’s desk when his cell vibrated, there in the cool blue light.
Stone said, “All right, listen. They’re watching a guy named Rahmi Johnson. Been on him for almost a month. I’ve got an address here for you.”
“If they’re on him, he didn’t murder Frank.”
“Rahmi isn’t the suspect. Cops think his cousin might be involved, a dude named Jamal Johnson.”
“Might be, or is?”
“Gotta have proof for it, but he looks pretty good. Check it out. Jamal was released from Soledad two weeks before the first score. He crashed with Rahmi when he got out, but moved out three days after the score. Four days after the second score, Jamal dropped by with a sixty-inch plasma to thank Rahmi for putting him up. A week after the third score, Jamal tools up in a brand-new black-on-black Malibu with custom rims. He gives the car to Rahmi, too. Can you imagine? My guy’s telling me this, I’m thinking, shit, I wish this asshole was my cousin, too.”
Stone broke out laughing, but the laughter was too loud and too long. Stone had been drinking.
Pike said, “Where’s Jamal?”
“Nobody knows, bro. That’s why they’re sitting on Rahmi.”
“Maybe Rahmi knows. Have they asked him?”
“They did, and that’s where they fucked up. Rolled by something like two months ago, when Jamal was first identified as a person of interest. Heard he was crashing with Rahmi, so they went by. Rahmi played stupid, but you know he warned Jamal the second those cops were out the door. That’s when Jamal dropped off the map.”
Pike thought about it. Thought how he would play it.
“They should ask him again.”
Stone laughed.
“Well, they’re cops, not you. That timeline business, that’s not proof, but it’s convincing. They don’t want to arrest the guy, they want to follow him. They want to catch him in the act or clear him, one way or the other.”
“So SIS is covering Rahmi, hoping Jamal will come around again.”
“They got nothing else, man. Jamal’s their only good suspect.”
Pike grunted. SIS was good. They were patient hunters. They would shadow their target for weeks like invisible men, but Pike didn’t want to wait that long. Stone was right. The police were trying to build a case, but Pike didn’t care about a case. His needs were simpler.
“What’s that address?”
Stone cleared his throat, suddenly uncomfortable.
“Okay, now listen, we can’t have any blowback here. You go barging in and it comes back to me, the SIS guys will know who gave them up. You ruin their play, my guy is fucked.”
“No blowback. They’ll never see me.”
Stone laughed again, still too loud and too long, and now more than a little nervous.
“Only you could say that, Pike, talking about SIS. Jesus Christ, bro, only you.”
Stone was giving Pike the address when light exploded into the office, so bright the walls and furniture were white with glare. Pike, still in the chair with his back to the window, did not move. The patrol car had returned.
Pike said, “Sh.”
“What’s wrong?”
An enormous blue shadow crossed the office wall as if someone had moved in front of the light. Pike heard faint radio calls, and listened for approaching footsteps.
Stone’s tiny voice came from the phone.
“You sound weird, man. Where are you?”
Pike whispered, as still as a fish at the bottom of a pond.
“Frank’s. The police are outside.”
“You break in?”
“Sh.”
The light swung away, moving to another part of the house like an animal tracking a scent.
“What the fuck are you doing at Frank’s?”
“I wanted to see what his life was like.”
“You’re a strange cat. I mean, really.”
The light snapped off. The yard plunged into darkness. The radio chatter faded. The patrol car rolled on.
Pike said, “Okay.”
“Hey, is it nice?”
“What?”
“Frank’s house. Does he have a nice place?”
“Yes.”
“Fancy?”
“Not like you mean. It’s a good family home.”
Pike heard Stone swallow. Heard the glass tink the phone.
“You think it’s true, he went bad?”
“Chen thinks the people who did this got the wrong house.”
“Like, what, they got confused about which house they wanted to rob?”
“It happens.”
“What do you think?”
“ Doesn’t matter.”
“No. No, it surely doesn’t.”
Stone made a deep sigh. Pike thought it might have been a sob, but then Stone had another sip of whatever he was sipping, and went on.
“Assholes like this, they go in these houses, right house, wrong house, murder people like they were nothing, probably sleep like a baby after it’s over. How many times have they done this?”
“Frank was the seventh.”
“You see? This is my point. Six times before, they got away clean. Murdered some poor bastard, and there have been no consequences. Hence, these people do not fear the dead. They LOVE the dead, Joe, because the dead-and I apologize if my assessment here seems harsh-but, the dead have not been effective when it comes to consequence and retribution.”
“What are you drinking?”
“Consequence and retribution.”
“Right-”
Jon Stone was grieving, so Pike let him continue.
“But then… then they hit Frank the Tank, them not knowing he was Frank the Tank, them thinking he was just another ordinary dead guy without recourse to consequence. So dig this-and this is my favorite part-those assholes are somewhere right now, shootin’ up, corn-holing each other, whatever-they are somewhere right now, and they do not know a shit storm is on the horizon, and it is coming for them.”
Pike said, “Jon? Do you have photographs on your walls?”
“What, like naked chicks?”
“Pictures of your family. Friends.”
“Shit, yeah. I take pictures of everything. I got pictures of fuckin’ human heads. Why?”
“No reason.”
“Hey, man. Those fuckers. Those fucks fucked the pooch this time, didn’t they, fuckin’ with Frank?”
“Get some sleep.”
“I want in on this, bro. I mean it. Whatever.”
“Get some sleep.”
“I’ll call Colin. Colin will be on the first plane.”
“Don’t call Colin.”
“Wallace would come.”
“ Don’t.”
“Fuck it. Hey, Joe? Joe, you there?”
“What?”
Stone was silent for so long Pike thought he had fallen asleep.
“Jon?”
“None of us had families. You never married. Lonny, Colin, not them, either. Wallace got divorced. I’ve been married six fuckin’ times, man, what does that tell you? None of us had kids.”
Pike didn’t know what to say, but maybe Stone voiced it for him, soft, and hoarse from the booze.
“I really wanted Frank to make it. Not just for him.”
Pike closed his phone.
He sat in Frank’s office for almost an hour, alone with himself and the silence, then walked back along the hall to Cindy’s desk. He took the framed picture of Frank in the pool, tucked it into his pocket, then let himself out the way he had entered, and drove home for the night.