“There’s someone I want you to meet,” Littmann began.
She didn’t hear the rest. From some inner reservoir of hatred and bloodlust and bitter pride, she dragged herself up, gained her feet, then leapt onto the man’s back like a banshee straddling a wrecking ball.
He almost fell with the impact, staggered for a second, gathered himself, began trying to shake her off—but she’d wrapped her legs around his waist and locked her ankles, raking his eyes with her nails, smelling his rank sweat as she bit his ear as though meaning to rip it from his head.
Shoot to kill.
Roaring from rage and pain, he finally spun and flipped her off—she landed hard, head against concrete, stunned into a second-long blackout. When things cleared, she lay right where she’d started, only flat on her back now, not curled up, Littmann hovering over her.
Let’s be adults about this.
His eyes brightened. Blood laced his teeth as he grinned and raised his pistol, point-blank range.
Deafening blast, a mere six feet away—Tuck, having gathered the Benelli, fired twice, the buckshot entering Littmann’s back, exiting his chest like a miniature meteor shower, leaving behind a gory shred of flesh and fabric and a stunned expression, locked in place as he fell.
***
Lisa hurried to kneel by Tuck. Closing his eyes, he let the shotgun slip from his hands into his lap. His breaths came shallow and quick as she took his head in her hands, waited for him to look at her. He didn’t, couldn’t, and what he tried to say got swallowed in an empty hiss.
She held his head against her chest, stroking his gray-brown hair, feeling the weight of him slump against her, suddenly limp and heavy, wanting to tell him goodbye, let him know it was okay, all was forgiven—well, maybe not all. Enough.
It took a moment for the smell to register—something burning, the oily tang of sparked accelerant, the thicker scent of wood smoke. Glancing up at the house, she noticed a flickering zig-zag of light beyond the window curtains leading off to the right. Puzzling at first, so seemingly out of place, then reality set in: flames. One entire wing of the house was on fire.
***
Using her teeth, Meredith had managed to chew through the duct tape pinning her wrist to the arm of her chair as the first wave of gunfire began. One hand free, she unwrapped the other, then her ankles, finally able to stand for the first time since…
She eased toward the entry as the gunfire intensified and came nearer the front steps, not far outside the open door.
The intruder that poor dumb Seth stabbed in the neck lay slumped against the wall, dead presumably. Leaning down to check, she waited for some sign of movement, breathing, a tremor in the eyelids—nothing. Maybe there’s some meek justice in this world after all, she thought.
The parcel of letters lay beside him, raising the question: Where was the snippy little half- breed who wanted them so badly?
Two nearby shots, quick succession shatteringly loud—no farther than the foot of the stairs.
Then the soft clatter of metal onto concrete—the weapon, presumably—followed by silence.
She waited, wondering: Is that all?
Finally, she inched her way through the vestibule to the doorway and onto the porch.
The one with the horrible face lay dead on the stair not far from his slutty mulatto. In the distance a dozen or more others lay motionless in positions only death could arrange, scattered about a gargantuan SUV, engine still throbbing quietly as it idled in park.
At the foot of the stairs, a young woman in a business suit—the lawyer she’d spoken with via FaceTime earlier in the day—clutched Tuck to her chest, his arms awkwardly limp at his sides, head thrown back, eyes gazing emptily upward. Gideon lay in a morbid tangle nearby. The men in my life, she thought.
Leaving the rest to me.
She gathered up the parcel of letters from the entryway floor, went to the closet at the top of the basement stairs, collected what she wanted—turpentine, furniture polish, paint stripper (ah, yes: acetone)—and a large box of wooden matches.
As she stepped cautiously through the debris in the hallway leading to her room, she doused the ravaged paintings with the flammables, trying not to inhale the heady fumes.
Once she reached her doorway, she tossed the final tin, emptied of solvent, onto the top of the wreckage.
The first match hissed into flame, only to promptly flicker out. The second had more moxie—it caught, flared, and held.
She tossed it onto the nearest painting, the fake Maynard Dixon, now soaked in Old English. A second of smoldering, then pop—the flames erupted nearby at first, then rippled to life all along the hallway, creating an almost instantaneous curtain of heat, roiling and greasy and massive, driving her back into her room.
But we’re not finished, she thought. The letters. Gideon wasn’t exactly wrong when he said they’d been destroyed. Merely premature.
She untied the shabby ribbon, letting it fall to the floor, then reached in for the first brittle envelope. Venturing toward the doorway into the hall, which now lay convulsed in ragged flames, she pushed herself into the scalding wall of smoke, then flipped the letter into the fire, watching as it caught. She dug into the velvet satchel for the next letter, followed suit, the next after that, one by one, throwing the worthless invaluables into the hypnotic flames.
Were they genuine, or fake? Small matter now, she thought. If you want to calculate what they were worth, look outside. Nothing tallies up value like the dead.
PART V
The more you struggle to live, the less you live. Give up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing. Instead, surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure. As stars high above the earth, you are above everything distressing. But you must awaken to it.
~ Baruch Spinoza
CHAPTER 46
September 15, 1887
My Dearest Mattie:
I shall be brief, and may need to break off writing for spells of rest, making for a disjunctive narrative. I now live in a web of lassitude and weakness from which, I realize only too well, there is no escape. And yet I need to write to you, if only because I lack all conviction I will find the strength tomorrow, or the day after, should it come.
As the jigsaw nature of my cursive indicates, I am having increasing difficulty containing the tremor in my hands. Every morning, my first activity, once I have coughed up enough pus, is to summon the bellboy and slip him two dollars, one for the whiskey I need to soothe my lungs and control the trembling, the other as a tip, which earns me my first smile of the day.
The symptoms I mention are but two of those that reveal to me the affliction is impatient—galloping, as is often said—to progress to its natural end.
Every indication is there. Sores have opened up on my skin, which never feels warm anymore, no matter how close I huddle next to the fire, even as I break into rivers of sweat from the fever. My cheeks have hollowed out as my weight plummets, to the point I resemble a sack of rags. I doubt I outweigh the boy who brings me my whiskey—did I mention him already? Ah, so I did. My apologies. I will try to pay more attention.
At all hours of the day and each endless night I find myself remembering how you and I and your sisters hovered at Mother’s bedside near the end, holding her hand, watching as the sickness clawed its way through her, as though hoping to dig out her soul and slip it to one of the dogs.
My bed beckons like the grave. I know that there, on those damp sheets, white as a shroud, I will draw my last ragged breath. Pitiful, but appropriate. Vain to believe otherwise.
I am done perfecting grievances and escalating quarrels. I have spent my life trying to honor what I believe to be the truth—the truth about myself, about the world. From my present vantage point, however, I can attest that truth has given me no peace, and it is peace that I crave now.
Please do not interpret what I am about to say as indictment or complaint, but ever since word reached me that you did at last e
nter the convent, my fortunes have spiraled downward, dragging my body with them. It is not your fault. Rather, it is testament to how greatly I deceived myself.
I believe I squandered my chance at a life my heart would find worthy. In particular, I did not live up to the one affection that meant most to me.
I hope to rectify that in the next life. There is a priest here, Father Edward Downey, a good sturdy Irishman, I think you would approve. I have submitted to his guidance and accepted baptism into your faith, our faith, the Roman Church. I can now say, as I might have said long ago had I only been wiser, that I can reach out my hand to you as a fellow Catholic, and accept yours in mine.
I do not mean I intend to lie down and give in. Quite the contrary. One, it is simply not my nature to do such a thing, no matter how strong the temptation. The coward’s way out, et cetera. Second, surrender of that sort indicates despair, and that, like suicide, I know to be a mortal sin.
I will not stain my soul in such a way, for I intend to see you again in the next life. I know, absent catastrophe, that I will be the first between us to pass on, and so it will be up to me to wait for you to follow.
I will do so gratefully. As Uncle Phillip so often sang, “And I will sleep in peace, until you come for me.”
Yours forever,
John Henry
CHAPTER 47
On the plane trip home, Lisa read an article in the airline magazine concerning the recent discovery of a long-lost Caravaggio, Judith Beheading Holofernes, found by a couple investigating a roof leak in their house in the south of France. They entered the attic, traced the leak to a spot behind a door they had never opened, and broke the door down. They found the forgotten masterpiece waiting like a dotty uncle who’d wandered off after lunch—excellent condition, untouched in a century and a half. Experts placed its value at nearly $140 million.
There are times, she thought, when the entire universe seems to have formed a massive conspiracy to make you the butt of a joke.
She had remained in Arizona for three days, seeing to the disposition of Tuck’s and Rayella’s remains. The others were the coroner’s concern.
Meanwhile, she endured the predictably endless onslaught of questions, posed by every law enforcement agency imaginable: Tombstone Marshals Office, Arizona State Troopers, Homeland Security, even Veterans Affairs.
The most poignant encounter, perhaps, was with good old Jim Preston, head of the Investigation Division for the Cochise County Sheriff—the man who originally told her that the theft of the letters was “a civil matter.” He entered the interview room with the same Tony Lama boots and Stetson and revealed that same hairband halo in his crewcut as he placed the wide- brimmed hat on the table between them. The flinty voice seemed a bit more subdued, though not exactly chastened, despite the fact—as it came out in the media—he knew personally two of the men left dead at Littmann’s ranch, one a former deputy, the other off-duty. He conducted his questioning with an air of meticulous abstraction, like he was puzzling through a theorem in advanced calculus, then thanked her quietly, left the room, and never reappeared.
As for the other agencies, each had its own particular ax to grind—and unique exposure of rear end to cover. It turned out the Cochise County Sheriff wasn’t the only outfit left holding a sizable bag. Also among the dead were several vets, a rogue agent from Border Patrol, and a fugitive from Texas wanted by a veritable alphabet soup of law enforcement bureaus—ICE, ATF, DEA, IRS, DCIS, FBI, Arizona DPS, Mesa PD—for trying to acquire Stinger missiles for a Nomad chapter of the Hells Angels.
The one saving grace, if it could be called that, was the appearance of U.S. Marshals sent by Judge Numkena, with an encouraging nudge from Elan Wingfield. They were the first to arrive at the scene that night, with Elan riding along—the Navajo woman at the parking garage had tipped him off to Lisa’s abduction—and he stood by her throughout all the ensuing interrogations, assuming the role of protector, confidante, adopted big brother, secreting her away at night in the home of a friend in the hills to escape getting badgered by the media.
He made sure she was fed and left alone, unless she wanted to talk, which by and large she didn’t. If anything, she was worn out by talk.
Sleep was what she wanted. Not that sleep obliged.
At least four times a night, she snapped awake, disoriented in the strange bed, frightened by the darkness, remembering what happened.
She’d been standing at the gate to the Littmann property—clutching herself against the cold as the sprawling house burned to the ground behind her—when the spinning strobes of the Marshal’s vehicles appeared in the distance, nothing but them and the dark.
She sat in the back of one of their vans, wrapped in a disposable foil blanket, submitting to a gunshot residue test and sipping coffee from a thermos, watching as the various forensic crews arrived, some local, some federal, big badges flashing at little badges, until finally they hammered out an overall approach, treating the scene like the crash site of a commuter aircraft given the sprawling range of the bodies, the number of dead, the relatively few survivors—four, excluding Lisa, all critical.
Over the next hours and days, she was shown a lot of pictures, faces of the fallen, asked to identify this one, that one, provide whatever background she could. More than once, she got asked point-blank—good cops, bad cops, sympathetic men, steely women—how many of those fatalities were hers to claim. In one form or another, her answer typically amounted to, “Depending on your perspective, none of them. Or all.”
She chose to embrace candor—naïve approach with John Law, perhaps, but she stuck with it, like a dog that has finally mastered its lesson. Remaining steadfast in her commitment to the truth, the whole truth, nothing but, she waived her right to counsel—Nico offered to come down himself but she told him no, look after the practice, she’d be fine—and repeated what she knew ad nauseum as though by rote, correcting misinterpretations, countering accusations, wiggling out of traps. They wanted so badly someone alive to blame.
Meanwhile, a search party of local volunteers found Meredith Littmann wandering barefoot along the valley floor, picking wildflowers out near the dirt-pack airfield at the foot of the Dragoons. She confessed that she had, of course, yes, destroyed the Holliday letters—less than a day after testifying to Judge Numkena she hadn’t. Almost immediately, her two adult children materialized and whisked her away to a private clinic, where it was said she was recovering—from what, exactly, remained unclear.
On the third day, the questions at last seemed exhausted. What more was there to say, really? People are angry and jealous and greedy. They want to hold onto the one good thing they’ve got. Add guns. Stir until ingredients are dead.
She gave the lawmen her contact information, agreed to submit to any and all further inquiries, then collected her carry-on from the house overlooking the city where she’d been staying and let Elan drive her to the airport, cracking a window to escape the lingering miasma of cigarette smoke in his car.
As he dropped her off, he said in that slow, distinctive, rumbling tone, “What I am hearing through the grapevine—tribal cops talking to local cops talking to the feds and so on—is that everybody kinda feels like they’re standing out on the freeway, pants around their ankles, you know? Gotta answer to higher-ups, who have to kowtow to the guys over them, clean up the mess, or shovel it over the fence so it’s somebody else’s problem. But except for a few hardliners—you know, the kind that think everybody oughta be in jail yesterday—just about everyone involved is pretty much convinced that if anybody’s innocent in this, it’s you.”
“What a relief,” she said dryly. “Though I think ‘innocent’ is a bit of a reach.”
He finally reached for the cigarette he’d so thoughtfully denied himself during the drive. Lisa took that as her cue. Opening her door, she collected her bag from the backseat, got out.
She was about to walk away when the passenger-side window slid down. Elan, leaning across the center c
onsole, said, “If they really do call you back, contact me ahead of time. I will make arrangements. For everything.” One last smoke-scarred chuckle. “At least, everything I can think of.”
“Thank you,” she said, bowing so he could see her face, the genuine warmth in her smile. “You’re a very unique and wonderful man, and I’m grateful for all you’ve done. So don’t take this personally, okay? But I kinda hope to God I never see you again.”
***
A man in a black suit bearing a cardboard sign with “Lisa Balamaro” blazoned across it waited outside baggage claim at San Francisco International. He was a decoy, in case any reporters caught wind of Lisa’s travel arrangements.
Nico, who’d thought up the scheme, met her upstairs just beyond the final security checkpoint and hustled her out to the actual limousine waiting for them.
How gallant, she thought. How Nico.
“Phone’s been ringing off the hook,” he said as they headed up the Bayshore Freeway toward Candlestick Point. “I’ve just let everything go to voicemail, but that means for every message left by an honest-to-God client I’ve had to plow through a dozen requests for callback from reporters.”
Lisa resisted the impulse to say she was sorry. Strange, how that was getting easier, despite so much to feel guilty for. There is just life…
“Thank you,” she said. “For everything.”
“No need to thank me. I’ve been worried sick. Glad to have you back.”
She wondered if he’d mind if she curled up, lay her head in his lap, and fell asleep. She’d found herself imagining that a lot the past few days.
“By the way,” he said, “did you hear about the Caravaggio they found in an attic in the south of France? Worth how many hundreds of millions?”
The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday Page 26