T. Parker: Storm Runners

“I had something more substantial in mind.”

“Such as what?”

“Five minutes alone with him.”

Birch stood, shaking his head. “The visitation setup is all wrong for that. Besides, the only one who can grant you a visit is Tavarez.”

Stromsoe thought about five minutes with El Jefe.

“Forget it, Matt. You kill him, you may as well just move right into his cell, put on his jumpsuit.”

When Birch had gone Stromsoe limped through the house with a big vodka in hand. He walked with his head down, focusing on the ice in his drink, and when he came into a room he lifted his head and looked around but then would have to close his eyes against the memories. Every cubic inch of space. Every object. Every molecule of every object, tied to Hallie and Billy. Their things. Their lives. Their life. It was impossible to endure.

He stood swaying in the courtyard for a moment, watching the sliver of moon slip down then rise back into place over and over.

His cell phone pulsed against his hip and Stromsoe slid it off, dropped it, and then knelt and picked it up.

“The bomb was for you,” said Tavarez. “God put them there for reasons we don’t understand.”

“You blew up a woman and a little boy.”

“But you made it possible.”

“You’ll burn in hell for what you did.”

“Hell would be better than this,” said Tavarez. “Now you understand how bad it is, don’t you? Living without the ones you love?”

“If they ever let you out, I’ll find and kill you,” said Stromsoe.

“Life can be worse than death,” said Tavarez. “So I’m going to let you live. Live first in the smell of their blood. Then live without them, month after month and year after year. Until you begin to forget them, until your memory is weak and uncertain. Because you know, Matt, wives and lovers and even children can be forgotten. They must be forgotten. But an enemy can live in your heart forever. The more spectacular his crime against you, the more durable your enemy becomes in your heart. Hate is stronger than love. I tried to kill you but I’m much happier that I didn’t. Tell me, are you blinded by fury?”

“Inspired by it.”

“Pray to your God for vengeance, to the one who ignores you. And welcome to prison. The bars here keep me from freedom. The bars around your heart will do the same to you.”

With a dry little chuckle, Tavarez clicked off.

Stromsoe hurled his drink against the side of his house. He turned and lurched toward the garage. He pushed through the construction site tape, got tangled and kicked his way out as his legs burned with pain. He pulled open the garage door and flipped on the light.

Here it was, his personal ground zero, the heart of his loss.

He forced himself to stand where they had been standing. The concrete floor was thick with drywall dust and he swept aside some of it with his foot. The floor had been bleached. He looked at the wall in front of him — new drywall. And the wall to his left — new drywall too. He looked up at the new framing that was being roofed with new plywood and new paper and new mastic and new tiles. He didn’t see a drop of what he was dreading to find. Not one tiny trace. New was good.

He walked slowly around the Ford to the far corner of the garage. Here were some cabinets he had built many years ago. The bottom cabinet was long and deep and fitted with duckboards. The slats were now stained from years of two-cycle oil spills and gas-can seepages, leaking weed eaters and blowers and chain saws.

Stromsoe bent over and rocked the red plastic gas can. It sloshed, heavy with fuel. He hefted it out, twisted open the cap, and pulled out the retractable spigot. The fumes found his nose.

The smell of escape, he thought.

He backed the Taurus into the driveway, set the brake, and killed the engine. Back in the garage he poured gasoline where Hallie and Billy had last breathed, then across the cement floor, out the door and across the bricks of the little courtyard to the back porch, then through the slider and into the dining room, kitchen, living room, the bedrooms.

He set the can down by the front door, got a plastic bag from under the sink, and slid most of Hallie’s jewelry into it. He found a pack of matches in the coins-and-keys drawer of his dresser. Then, in Billy’s room, he added three of his son’s favorite stuffed bears to the bag.

He went back to the front door, opened it, and continued his gas trail outside to the porch. The door he left ajar. Dropping the gas can and the plastic bag to the porch boards, Stromsoe then fished the matches out of his pocket. The moths and mosquito hawks flapped against the porch lights and the waves swooshed to shore in the dark.

He sat down to think it over.

With his back to the door frame he brought up his knees and rested his face on his forearms. The nail wounds in his body flared like struck matches. His ears rang. He could feel his glass eye moving against the skin of his arm, but the eye itself felt nothing. The matchbook fell from his hand. He asked God what to do and got no answer. He asked Hallie and Billy what to do and they told him not this — it was dangerous and stupid and wouldn’t help. Hallie’s argument that he couldn’t let his son be without a home made sense to him.

Stromsoe got up and went back inside and fell asleep on the living-room couch with the gas fumes strong around him and the waves breaking in the black middle distance.

He opened some windows before he crashed, a precaution that brought to him both cool night air and a sense of cowardice and shame.

The next morning he woke up with a tremendous hangover, for which he used hair of the dog and more Vicodin. After a shower and shave he dressed in pressed trousers and a crisp plaid shirt and called the neighborhood office of a national realty company.

Twenty minutes later a Realtor showed up, and by 11 A.M. Stromsoe had listed his home for sale. He offered the place furnished and as is. The Realtor’s suggested asking price was so high he could hardly believe it. The Realtor smiled fearfully as they shook hands out by his car. He said he’d sell the place within the week, though an escrow period would follow.

“I’m sorry for what happened,” he said. “Maybe a new home can be a new life.”

By noon Stromsoe and Susan were back in his courtyard, sitting on the picnic benches again. She’d brought a new cassette for the tape recorder and a handful of fresh wildflowers for the vase.

“When I saw Hallie again it was ’86,” said Stromsoe. “We were twenty years old.”

Mike’s phone call the night before had convinced Stromsoe that he had to tell what Tavarez had done to Hallie, and how she had survived it. Tavarez could take her life but he couldn’t take her story. Or Billy’s. And El Jefe could not make Stromsoe kill himself, or diminish his memories, or make him burn down his house. Tavarez could not break his spirit.

“I was at Cal State Fullerton. I was taking extra units, and judo at night, and lifting weights — anything to not think about her. Them.”

His words came fast now, Stromsoe feeling the momentum of doing the right thing.

“Every once in a while I’d read about Tavarez in the papers — they loved the barrio-kid-conquers-Harvard story — and I’d think about her more. Then one night I just ran into them in a Laguna nightclub, the old Star. She was wearing a gold lamé dress with white and black beads worked into the brocade. Tight, cut low and backless, slit up the side. It was very beautiful. And her hair was done up kind of wild, and dyed lighter than it used to be. She came running over and wrapped her arms around me. I remember that she was wearing Opium perfume. I looked past her at Mike, who was watching us from a booth. He looked pleased. She pulled me over there and he invited me to sit with them but I didn’t.”