Meaning he’d had a Plan A, Wil thought. Something, anyway. “Our luck,” he said.
Relative silence. “Tell you what: I’m going to verify your Lorenz and Maccafee with our local ATF, then turn it over to you-know-who. At least present it to him that you voluntarily gave up the connection. And you are damned lucky at that.”
“I know,” Wil said.
“Don’t pander,” Lin shot back. “With luck he’ll be more pissed at the feds. And by the way, Casa Tien? All quiet, even with a new front window to aim at.”
“Meaning your patrols are working.”
“That’s one way to look at it.”
“Thanks, Frank,” Wil said. “All of it.”
“Nada. Somebody’s got to save you from yourself.”
***
Lights spread out as Wil’s turbo-prop circled in off the ocean, touched down, rolled to a stop. He went directly to the Bonneville, paid at the gate, took a right to the motel, pulled in next to Lorenz’s Buick, up from two Nissans and an Explorer off by itself. Beyond the tidal creek, he could make out the line of spindly palms that marked the beach. To the right, the amber pinpoints of UCSB.
Old Luc had his own set of demons.
He got out and touched the Buick’s hood. Cold: Unless she’d gone for a walk along the bike paths, Lorenz was home. He rapped lightly.
“Lorenz? It’s me—Hardesty.”
Through thick curtains he could see light, hear sound, the flicker of a TV turned low. Traffic passed; a kid with a backpack and a flashing taillight cycled toward the bridge and the university. A heron flapped toward the eucalyptus roosts along the strand. He tried the door: locked, too conspicuous to force, even if he had the tools. He tried the lobby, where a dark-complected young man reading from a geography text looked up as he entered, all breathy sheepishness.
“Ed Lorenz, room 20,” he identified himself. “Wife has the key and she’s guest-lecturing. I went for a stroll and lost track of time. Left my key in the room.”
“What’s she teach?” the kid asked.
“Drama. And you could save me a good walk to get it.”
The kid tapped a keyboard, looked at his monitor, then up at Wil.
“ID?” Wil asked, fumbling for the ATF card Lorenz had given him, hoping it wouldn’t come to that. Prepared to say he didn’t drive if the kid wanted a license.
The kid didn’t. Outside again, Wil paused at the door, inserted the key. A metro bus passed, the airport loop toward town, and then he was in. To the smell of heat, closed room, and worse.
She was in the chair facing the TV, its picture bathing her in two hosts and a video-framed guest arguing politics. Jerked sideways by the blast from the Beretta still in her hand, her face was white, the temple entry hole patterned with grains of burnt powder. What looked to be chocolate syrup in the light tracked her jaw and neck, spattered the wall behind her, darkened the fabric at which she stared with glazed eyes.
Wil touched her hair, her neck, the line of her jaw.
Son of a bitch…
Son of a bitch…
As he stood there the political argument raged, then a barrage of commercials, none of which registered, then back to arguing. Same two guys, different framed guest. For a moment he felt like putting a bullet into all three, then like throwing up. Finally, after dialing Frank Lin and telling him, a numbness that left him floored against the wall, knees supporting forearms that seemed beyond weight.
***
After dismissing the kid and the owner who’d come down, some hours later, they finished up with Wil, Yanez supervising. Lin finally had reached Marotta, who insisted, as he had earlier, that if Lorenz was running something up their way, he had no knowledge of it. That Maccafee did have a brief record of ATF employment from ‘88 to ‘91 but that was it, no contact since, no idea of whereabouts, no forwarding address. Aside from what he’d read, Marotta didn’t know Luc Tien at all. Lorenz had been a good but independent-minded agent who’d been taking time to sort out her future with them. Her future, period, it seemed.
“And you believed him?” Wil asked Lin after Yanez had threatened to bust Wil on the spot for the withhold, then left the scene to the techs, Lorenz having already departed by ambulance.
“No reason I can see why Marotta would lie.” Leaning against his Crown Victoria, a hint of dried things on the offshore breeze.
“Then you buy into it being a suicide.”
“That’s why we have medical examiners, remember? Everything consistent, nothing to contraindicate. You heard the guy.”
“I heard him,” Wil said. “No note, no nothing.”
“The serious ones don’t write notes. Most don’t, anyway.”
“I’m not talking about most, Frank. She wasn’t the type.”
“I almost forgot. You’d seen her how many times to qualify?”
Wil let it go, sat there..
“Therapy and antidepressants,” Lin went on. “A father fixation that showed up more than once as insubordination, according to Marotta. So there she is, way out there, failed in some self-appointed mission she couldn’t even convince her superiors had merit. You need a diagram?”
“She told me she needed to talk, Frank. Maccafee had disappeared and she was worried about him. She said he had enemies. I took that to mean she had, too.”
“We have an APB out on Maccaffee. He’ll turn up.”
“Ask Jimmy Hoffa about that.”
“Which means what, Wil. That you could have prevented all this?”
“Which means I should at least have—”
“Shut up and listen for a change.” Close to shouting now. “You saw Rudy tonight. All he needed was a reason, and you handed it to him. Your one chance—and I do mean one—is to butt out. Do you see that? Not only are you in over your head, you are genuinely pissing me off.”
A late bus went by as Wil sat unmoving, its scattered, brightly lit passengers resembling refugees from an Edward Hopper painting. The remaining techs exited the room and sealed it, nodded to Lin, then left. Minutes later, leaving Wil to contemplate the block letters on the tape, the empty runway with its blue and orange lights paralleling the dark line of mountains, Frank Lin did the same.
55
Marotta called him next morning at home and left no doubt whose fault he considered the death of one of his most promising agents, despite her problems. Too burnt to argue with him, Wil asked what had happened to her father, E. Russell Lorenz, in Honduras: the 1991 raid.
Silence. “Not a thing I can think of that concerns you. But then, you could always ask your friend Maccafee when he turns up. Assuming that was him, which I doubt.”
“I saw the photo, Marotta. I read the article.”
“Impressing me not a bit,” he said acidly. “And by the way, next time you call here hoping to extract information by pretending to be someone else, your ass is mine. You hearing that?”
“Lorenz was good people, Marotta. She had nothing to prove to me.”
“Then I suggest you make her death count for something the next time you decide you’re smarter than we are.”
“Whatever you say,” he said. “A question, though: Have you heard of a Red Chinese Triad called Under Heaven?”
Dial tone.
Lin phoned then and, in few words, told him forget about travel while Rudy contemplated what to do about him—obstruction being but one option under consideration.
“Come on, Frank,” he said. “You know that’s a crock.”
“It may well be,” Lin answered. “But then, I used to think of you as standup. And, yes, you are that close.”
After he hung up with Lin, Wil left a message on Lisa’s machine thanking her for the call to Li Tien. Li then told him things were pretty much the same out there, Matt was fine and Mia seemed glad to be back at classes. That with the exception of a particular female television reporter who’d been most insistent, there had been no further incidents.
A particular female reporter…
T
aking his coffee out on the deck, he thought of Lorenz, her last call to him. Not quite fear in her voice, but something approximate, her earlier observation that Jimmy might have been approached by heavier players. Who, specifically? When and about what? Luc Tien’s guests that last day? Some time before then?
Obviously Luc had a Plan B…
Just not that good a one where he was concerned, Wil thought. Which seemed unlike the man, much as Wil had seen of him—not much, admittedly.
For a while he tried losing himself in the sun on the water, fogbank in place where the islands usually crouched behind the oil rigs, gulls wheeling to land on the beach. Line of vehicles parked beachside across the highway.
And what appeared to be, looked as much like, might possibly be the gray Explorer from last night parked between two RVs.
Fighting a rising feeling, he scoped it more closely: kids brushing sand off their feet as they sat on its front bumper, sandwiches from an arm inside the lead RV, kids calling down the beach to the Explorer’s likely occupants.
Right.
Score another for the standup.
Mentally, he stood down: fat lot of good that had done him or anyone else related to Jimmy Tien. Besides, the day was warm and clear, and he was out of it from a long list of standpoints, not simply the media’s finally tiring of him and pulling the plug. Old news.
Wil turned his telescope on the Rincon, verified what he’d heard over breakfast: that the chubasco was at last having an effect on the south swells, some weekdayers already out. What he had in mind regarding Pereira’s Harmony faxes could wait till later, he told himself. Everything, such as it was, all the scattered and broken pieces, could wait until later. The familiar tremolo call that accompanied his trips out there building in him like the incoming sets, Wil closed up the house and answered it.
***
Wil extracted Southern Cross, the longboard he’d made himself, through its slot in the Bonneville’s rear seat. Within minutes, he was in a lineup that included a dozen or so twenty-somethings and two olders he knew in passing—a guy who sold Benz’s and an ad agency art director. Out here, the offshore breeze that had been walling up the faces was much more in evidence, wavetops giving the appearance of blowing smoke. With the valley fire close to suppressed, the immediate sky was blue and haze-free, the hills and roadway and eroded bluffs above La Conchita sharp enough to have been cut with a blade.
He waited. Then it was his turn, and he was able to hold his wave all the way from the point to the creek which ran between the houses, the trees and lawns, the fences and eave-high greenery. Geraniums spilling from porch baskets, orange and pink trumpet vine climbing the myoporum bushes, kids ashore frolicking with a yellow Lab.
He’d paddled out again and was waiting, recalling the day much like this when a friend took a bullet meant for him, when he heard a voice behind him.
“Trouble you for a little help here?”
Wil looked back. Directly into the sun.
“Just paid a kid three-fifty for this thing and wondered if I got jammed, that board of yours being so big,” the voice said. “Hard to imagine what it’s worth.”
Wil raised a hand to the glare, saw no wetsuit over deeply tanned chest marred by a thumb-size discoloration above one nipple; flat hard abs, muscular shoulders narrowing to an athletic waist. The speaker wore chinos rolled above the calf—as if he’d just popped in off the road and decided to try out what he’d observing in passing. Dark lens aviator sunglasses masking the squint Wil somehow knew was there.
He heard, “Except you should get your money back from whoever taught you that cutback move.”
Wil felt the point, the houses, the very day come down to the face, the voice, the mantle of skin graft he was able to make out on the right shoulder and upper arm. His own throat filling with echoes from a time when Southern Cross was homemade new and the world flat-out belonged to seventeen-year-old Sean Wilson Hardesty and Dennison James Van Zant, the rich kid who opened doors for them both.
That or he kicked them in.
“My God,” he said, unbelieving. “Den?”
Barely believing it with the proof looking back at him, the face splitting a confirming grin.
“What’s up, Mojo?” it said. “Looks like you’ve seen a ghost.”
56
Denny Van Zant rapped Southern Cross with a knuckle and said, “What’s it been, a hundred years? I don’t believe you’re still using this thing.”
“Still holds me up,” Wil said. “What more?”
“Driving a sixty-six Bonneville wouldn’t say anything about you, would it?”
“Try to find one now for what I paid for it.”
“Right, half of what it cost you to trick it out. The time warp kid, tell me I’m wrong.”
“Change is overrated,” Wil said, having to smile.
“And I was part of those summers, too, remember?”
“No shit. That was you?”
Small talk for the long-dammed questions, the flashbacks worn by time, pebbles in a stream. They sat with the windows down, the longboard between them, Denny’s arm resting on it. The Explorer was parked alongside, the tri-fin he’d bought on a whim poking out the open rear window. The same bluff where Wil had sat stunned and numb after watching his friend’s body pulled from the water six years ago.
It was not an altogether dissimilar feeling, he realized. Denny, back from the dead; no word from him since a note written from the Ensenada hospital where he’d pulled through after being shot by an Australian hitman Wil ultimately survived. This after spending eight years in a VC prison camp following his capture at the Battle of Hue.
Months after the war was over, Denny had busted out in a self-set napalm fireball that nearly burned him alive before going to work as a “disposal specialist” for the same Triad Wil mentioned to Terry Leong. Red Sun—the reason, in fact, Wil had known of it. He remembered the note Denny sent two years ago from the hospital, written as Todos Santos broke enticingly in the distance, Denny chafing to get at the 40-footers.
Mojo, it read:
Funny thing about eight years in a Cong prison, you say good-bye to feelings. I did, anyway. Try getting stuck in a cage you wouldn’t wish on a contortionist, and the pain’s so bad you’d do anything for a bullet in the ear.
Now try it for weeks on end.
You reach a point where you’d as soon kill something as look at it. Surprising what that’s worth to some people: They blow away ours, we blow away theirs—regular way of life. Just don’t look in the mirror.
Then one day, it’s like a nerve coming back. Hardly noticeable at first. A toothache that keeps getting worse.
Three kids under fifteen went with this last deal I nearly did, a family they wanted made an example of. That’s when I knew it was over. That and your face popping up when I’d least expect it. My own personal Casper. Weird, huh?
Den
P.S. Friends again? Damn, I hope so…
Rubbing the bullet tissue, Denny said, “You believe this—us, I mean? The years and the bullshit? Like it was a dream or something you couldn’t break free of.”
“Too bad it wasn’t,” Wil said.
“Tell me about that.”
He grinned. “You look good, Den.”
“For burned-up and shot, among other things.” Tilting the can of Tecate from the six-pack they’d stopped to get him. “Pretty fit yourself. You sure you don’t want one of these?”
“Sure as I can be this minute.”
“Yeah, I caught a bit of that the other night from the rocks. Some life you lead, in more ways than one.”
“Then that was you over my shoulder.”
“You made me, huh?” Denny said. “I’m impressed.”
“More the shadow than the tail. Mind telling me how?”
He lowered the aviators, winked before resettling them. “Multiple rental cars. A furtive nature, well honed. What can I say?”
“Nobody other than you, then?”
; “If there was somebody else, he’s better than I am, and I’m the best I know.”
They watched a dolphin roll the surface fifty yards out, two more heading west along the shore. Nose-to-tail diesel engines working the coast train track toward Ventura.
“Best at a lot of things, apparently,” Wil said.
Denny drained off the Tecate and grinned. “There’s the cryptic side of you I love. Remember Huntington Pier? You thinking I’d thrown the surf contest your way, prize money you wanted to buy some beat-up old Harley with? How frigging righteous you got with me?”
“Did throw,” Wil said. “Obvious to anyone with eyes.”
“I must have forgotten that part.”
He let a beat go by. “What about Inez Lorenz, Den?”
“Who?”
“Skyway Motel, room 20, your gray Explorer. Same last three plate numbers, anyway.”
Denny cracked a new can, shook the foam off his hand. “Pilot error,” he said. “What happens when you have to take more than a leak and the guy you’re expecting to surveil shows up early.”
“More to the point, why?” Wil said.
Shrug. “Simple enough. I follow you to the airport, catch you looking that way, figure you might want to see her again when you came back. I had to do something. ATF, I hear somebody say?”
“Don’t play me, Den. I’m not in the mood.”
“Fair enough.” He swigged from the can. “She really kill herself?”
“I don’t know. I figured you might.”
“Sorry. No gunshots, nobody in while I was there, nobody out.”
Wil looked at him and saw nothing but the statement, a residue of smile, blue eyes the color of acetylene.
The smile faded.
“Old Wil, ever the stoic. What did Trina used to call us, the gas and the brakes?”
Trina Van Zant, clear as yesterday: Denny’s sister and Wil’s first flame—in and out of his life two years ago like a scalpel through heart muscle, the sutures still strained and prone to bleeding. Determined not to get sidetracked, he said, “San Francisco, Twin Peaks, three dead in a limo. A hitter the one witness said resembled Steve McQueen.” Swiveling the rearview toward the passenger side so Denny could see himself.
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