Run the Risk

by Scott Frost

I reached out, taking Chavez’s hand, and pulled myself to my feet.

  “He’s either already made a mistake or will make one. We just have to be smart enough to see it.”

  I pushed past them both and started walking toward my car. More officers were arriving, but none of them understood, none of them had seen Breem’s eyes. I glanced at my watch; it was nearly three A.M. Overhead, the stars that earlier had lit the night were gone. Dark, windblown clouds, heralding the arrival of another storm, now streaked the sky like coils of angry snakes.

  “Fuck it,” I whispered to myself. It was what Lacy would say, and she would like that I was saying it. “Fuck it.”

  BREEM WAS ALIVE if you reordered your understanding of what life is. His breathing was being done through a tube and a respirator. At least sixty percent of his blood had been left in the Hyundai. What else he had lost in that car wouldn’t be known until he regained consciousness. If there was a truly merciful God, Breem would be given as long a reprieve from consciousness and his new memories as possible.

  In the hallway outside Emergency, Breem’s wife sat with the dumbfounded look of a lost traveler in a bus depot. She was a small woman, pretty, with short brown hair, which she nervously kept brushing back behind her ears. She wore a white cotton sweater over khaki pants and a light tan shirt with coordinating socks and belt. It was not an outfit you just throw on unless there is a gene that some women have that allows them to properly match clothes without a second thought—a gene I apparently never got. She had even taken the time to put on appropriate lipstick for the occasion. Maybe it was how some women coped with stress; they dressed for it.

  I held out the composite drawing of Gabriel for her to look at.

  “Have you ever seen him?”

  She studied it carefully and shook her head. “Did he do this to my husband?”

  I continued without committing either way. “Do you know where he went this morning, or if he met someone?”

  Again she shook her head. “I told the other officers from before that I didn’t. I told them everything. He was fine, everything was fine. . . . I don’t understand any of this.”

  I removed a picture of Lacy from my pocket and handed it to her. “Did you ever see her with him?”

  She glanced at it without seeing it. “My husband was not having an affair.”

  I recognized something in the way she spoke that said her husband had not always been faithful.

  “That’s not what—”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I said that.”

  She glanced at it as if she wasn’t really looking. Then I saw the flash of recognition in her eyes. “Is she a contestant?”

  I nodded. “He telephoned my daughter three times. Do you know why?”

  “He talked to all of them. He was making the corsages they were to wear in the parade.”

  “Do you know if he was involved with any environmental groups?”

  She looked at me as if she hadn’t heard the question correctly or couldn’t believe that I would ask it at a moment like this.

  “You think the Sierra Club did this?” she said sarcastically.

  That was it. Whatever secrets Evans Breem had, he had kept them from his wife. She looked away down the hallway toward the emergency room.

  “The doctors haven’t told me anything.”

  She turned and looked at the bruises on my face from the door. “Were you there? Do you know what happened to him?”

  I looked down at my hands and saw the ball of explosives wrapped with silver tape. Then I saw Breem’s eyes as he made his terrible decision. I looked at her, hoping she would never know what I did and wishing that I didn’t.

  “I don’t know the specifics, I’m sorry.”

  A few minutes later I walked out of Emergency and took an elevator up to the floor where my injured partner, Traver, was recovering from the explosion at Sweeny’s bungalow. Even though I knew better, the one thing I assumed would always remain the same was Traver. And then Gabriel changed that. Just as easily as that. And now I had to find a way to tell him that my daughter had been kidnapped. I had to find a way to admit to him that I couldn’t protect her. That I had failed. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bear the look in his eyes when he heard the news. I started to reach for the stop button, but the door opened and I was there.

  The walls of the hallway were painted a washed-out yellow. From several of the rooms came the sound of ventilators rhythmically pumping air into weakened lungs. With each step I had the sense of walking back in time. I stopped at Room 308 without consciously realizing it. It was the room where Lacy’s father had died. I had walked down this hallway and into this room with her every day for two weeks. The walls had been eggshell blue then, but everything else was exactly the same: the smell of disinfectant, the voice on the PA, the sound of a gurney’s wheel wobbling on the linoleum, the not quite natural silence of a hospital’s hallways that had witnessed so many broken hearts.

  It had all begun right here, Lacy’s slipping away from me with each fading breath of her father. The first unspoken emotion, the first secret. The first step toward wherever she was now was taken right here. How could I have let it happen? It was my job to see the things that others couldn’t. Why hadn’t I seen that?

  I stopped at the nurses’ station and was told that it was more than a little past visiting hours, so I held up my badge and told her I’d just be a minute.

  I stepped into Traver’s room and hung next to the door for a moment. He looked smaller in the hospital bed. Fragile. There was a tube in his nose. His head was heavily bandaged from where they had drilled a hole to relieve pressure in his skull. His face was swollen and bruised. The doctors said he would recover fully, but you couldn’t have convinced me of it at that moment.

  I walked over to his bed and took hold of the steel handrails. On the nightstand was a photograph of the twins in matching panda bear suits.

  “What time is it?” he said in an unrecognizable whisper. His eyes opened briefly and looked at me, then closed again. The fingers of his hands stretched out and I took hold of them.

  “It’s late.”

  His chest rose under the sheets as he took a deep breath and then exhaled with an audible whoosh, as if it took all his strength to force the air out of his lungs.

  “I’ve been hearing things,” he whispered. “Are they true?”

  “You just get better.”

  He weakly squeezed my hand, then appeared to settle back into sleep. His breathing evened out into long, quiet breaths.

  “Lace . . .” he whispered before his voice failed him. Then a single tear formed at the corner of his eye and trickled down his bruised cheek.

  12

  HARRISON HAD BEEN CORRECT about the phone number we found in Lacy’s journal. The address in Azusa was residential—a small Spanish bungalow on a street lined with tall palm trees and low-riders parked in driveways. But what were the phone number to a house twenty miles from her own home and the letter D doing in her journal? If D stood for Daniel Finley, and by proxy this house we were parked outside of, then a direct line had been drawn between my daughter’s kidnapping and the bullet that went through the back of Finley’s head in the flower shop. And if there was a connection to that murder, then there was a connection to every act of violence that Gabriel had perpetrated after that. And the acts of violence that were yet to come.

  But if there was no connection? If the letter D stood for a cute boy she had met and nothing more, then we were wasting precious time that my daughter didn’t have.

  I opened the window and took a breath of the damp night air. Half a mile north, the dark canyon of the San Gabriel River rose up out of the pavement and sliced into what the Sheriff’s Department called “the ghetto of the National Forest System.”

  I glanced at the cup of coffee from 7-Eleven sitting on the dash, then crumpled the remains of one of their ready-to-eat chicken sandwiches.

  We had already called the house twice with no result
. There were no lights on inside, no car in the driveway.

  “Try it again,” I said.

  Harrison punched in the number and let it ring ten times with no result, then hung up.

  “What do you want to do? We don’t have a warrant. A number in a journal isn’t enough for cause,” Harrison said.

  “Unless we find something.”

  “In which case it may not be useable in court.”

  “To hell with the court.”

  We both sat silently for a moment. A few drops of rain landed on the windshield and slid down into the wipers. The ribbons of dark clouds had given way to a heavy, solid cover that was moving down the face of the San Gabriels above Azusa. Another raindrop landed on the windshield, then another. Maybe the rain would keep people away from the parade, I thought. Pray for rain, torrents of it, flash floods, mud slides, the works. Pray we would get lucky.

  I saw something in the house out of the corner of my eye. Or at least I thought I saw something. I rubbed my eyes and stared at the window. I was beyond tired. It must have just been the reflection of a streetlight off the glass. Then it was there again.

  “Look.” I motioned toward the house with a nod.

  Harrison didn’t see it and shook his head.

  “Rear window on the right side.”

  Nothing.

  “I thought I saw—”

  In the dark recess of the window, the orange glow of a cigarette burned a tiny hole through the darkness. Harrison stared at it for a moment, then tilted his head toward me.

  “That’s interesting.”

  “What’s your first thought when you hear a phone ring in the middle of the night?”

  “Who died.”

  I nodded. “So why wouldn’t you answer it?”

  “I wouldn’t want anyone to know I was there.”

  “Because you’re hiding something.”

  “I’ll buy that.”

  The glow in the window appeared again for a moment and then faded back into the darkness.

  “I think we just got cause to go in that door.”

  We walked down the east side of the street and approached the house from the side opposite where the smoker had stood at the window. The front door was made of heavy oak, which would have been difficult to go through, so we slowly moved around toward the back. Shades were drawn on all the windows. Behind one of them, a candle appeared to be flickering inside. We reached the back corner of the house and stopped. Several yards away, a dog either heard us or picked up our scent and began to bark and pull against its chain, which rattled in the darkness like a Dickens ghost.

  At the back of the house was a small landing—three steps to a flimsy screen door and then a standard home improvement plywood door beyond that. We moved under the windows, up the steps, and took positions on either side of the door.

  I took my Glock in hand and Harrison followed suit with his 9mm. There were worry lines on his forehead. As cool as he was when faced with a bomb that could vaporize him, the prospect of an encounter with a living, breathing suspect scared the hell out of him. I couldn’t argue with his logic. Going through doors was for adrenaline junkies, not forty-four-year-old mothers.

  “I don’t suppose we’re going to knock,” Harrison whispered.

  “You’re fine,” I said.

  Harrison half-nodded, as if he had just grabbed hold of the fiction that he was fine and was being dragged along against his will.

  “We don’t know what’s inside, so keep your weapon down. You kick the door and I’ll go in first.”

  I reached out and took hold of the screen door and pulled it open. The hinges creaked nearly as loud as a siren.

  The light in the kitchen came on and I heard the fall of footsteps inside. Harrison looked at me with hesitation clearly in his eyes.

  “Go,” I said.

  His foot hit the door just beneath the handle, splintering the wood but not breaking the lock. He kicked it again and the dead bolt gave way completely, sending the door swinging wildly into the room. I stepped into the doorway and a can of Coke flew by my head and out the door, skidding off the landing out into the yard.

  I yelled, “Police,” but the figure was already disappearing back into the house.

  “This is the police!”

  I heard the suspect’s footsteps retreating and the sound of a door closing.

  There was a short hallway leading out of the kitchen and through an archway. Another open archway led into what appeared to be the living room on the left. Down the hall were two doors on the right and another one at the end. Harrison stepped past me and took a position in the archway leading into the living room.

  I pointed to the light coming from under the door at the end of the hallway.

  “Follow me and cover the doors on the right.”

  Harrison nodded and I started down the dark hallway, holding on to my Glock like it was a safety line and I was just a step over the edge of a cliff. Harrison moved behind me, his gun trained on the doors on the right. I stopped and pulled open the first door. It was an empty closet. The second wasn’t tightly closed and opened with a gentle push.

  “Bathroom,” I whispered.

  At the far end of the room, a dark shower curtain hung across the length of a tub. A sharp, metallic ping came from behind the curtain. I raised my gun and trained it on the center of the curtain. Harrison took two steps in, then slowly reached out, took hold of the curtain, and yanked it open. A drop of water slipped from the showerhead and fell onto the side of a metal wash pail that was overturned in the tub. Harrison glanced at me with a sigh of relief.

  I swung around and trained my Glock on the door at the end of the hall. I could see the movement of a shadow from inside the room, breaking the line of light coming out from under the door. I motioned to Harrison, who slipped past me and took a position at the side of the door.

  “This is the police. Come out of the door slowly with your hands in the air!”

  Harrison’s hand touched my shoulder.

  “What is that smell?” he whispered.

  I took a couple of breaths, testing the air.

  “I don’t smell—”

  “Smoke.” He looked at the door. “He’s burning something.”

  The high-pitched squeal of a smoke alarm let loose inside the room.

  “Take the door,” I said.

  Harrison rushed forward and hit the door with a powerful kick. The lock gave way with almost no resistance, flying open like it had been blown by a powerful gust of wind. I stepped inside and raised my weapon. A figure was crouched on the floor, madly fanning a small fire inside a wastebasket with a magazine.

  “Put your hands in the air and drop the magazine, right now!”

  The magazine fell out of his hands and he dropped to the floor, covering his head like he was doing a duck-and-cover drill from the sixties.

  “Spread your hands!”

  “I am not armed and am offering no resistance!” he yelled. “I am not armed and am offering—”

  “I have a gun pointed at your head. Now lie down flat with your hands and legs spread-eagle.”

  He began to repeat his rehearsed statement.

  “I am not armed—”

  I pressed my Glock to the back of his head.

  “Spread-eagle, now.”

  He nodded and stretched out.

  “I am unarmed and am not offering—”

  “If you say that again, I’ll shoot you.”

  I put a knee into the middle of his back and holstered my weapon as Harrison took a position in front with his 9mm pointed at the suspect’s head.

  “Give me your right hand.”

  He pulled his left hand back.

  “That’s not your right, but it will do.”

  I put the cuff on his wrist, then drew his right hand back and clamped it tight behind his back.

  Harrison moved over to the burning wastebasket, flipped it over, depriving the fire of oxygen, then walked over to the fire alarm above t
he door and shut it off. The silence felt like the immediate aftermath of a car accident when your perception of the world has just violently changed in a heartbeat. I stood up and took what felt like my first breath in over a minute.

  The suspect was male, white, twenty-something, with long dreadlocks that were spread out on the floor like the legs of a large, blond spider. His clothes were baggy and dark.

  “Look at this,” Harrison said.

  He was standing at two folding tables in the corner. Stacked on top were half a dozen large cardboard boxes. Harrison opened one of the boxes and removed a metal cylinder.

  “Smoke grenades, Mexican military. I think we just connected another dot.”

  I opened another box and removed a plastic one-gallon jug.

  “Roundup.”

  “Herbicide,” Harrison said.

  I turned and looked around, then whispered the words Lacy had spoken. “Direct action.”

  “A call to arms,” Harrison said.

  The room was a monument to environmental extremism. There were photographs of burned ski lodges, spiked old-growth trees, burned lumber trucks, ransacked college labs that were working on the best corn that altered genetics could produce. There were fake wanted posters for Monsanto, DuPont, and the secretary of the interior. A laptop computer that was turned off sat in the corner.

  “You don’t suppose Lacy got caught up in something and it has nothing to do with Gabriel’s plan to attack the parade?” Harrison said.

  I looked over at the kid lying facedown on the floor.

  “You think a bunch of twenty-somethings trying to save the planet blew off Breem’s hands?”

  “No.”

  “Neither do I.”

  We both turned at the same time and looked at the upturned wastebasket.

  “What was he trying to destroy?”

  “I have rights. Unless you have a search warrant, you are trespassing,” the kid on the floor said.

  He had a high, nasal voice with the soft gentle curves of Vermont or Massachusetts rounding his vowels. I imagined he had nice, liberal parents who wore jeans and L.L. Bean sweaters, and who at some point lost the ability to communicate with their son. I walked over and knelt next to him.