T Parker - The Renegades

Draper walked into his Laguna Beach condominium a week later, tan and fit. He set his bags in the entry-way but kept the box tucked under his arm. He looked through the sliding glass door at the pale moonlit cove and the glimmering black Pacific and thought of the sliding glass door through which Hood had escaped in Jacume. And he thought of the bad luck of having a U.S. task force apparently mistake his pursuit of lowly deputy Charlie Hood for an upper-level cartel disturbance. Because of that, Hood was still alive, and the tunnel was useless, and extra law enforcement attention was now focused on Jacumba and Jacume, and Draper would never work again as a reserve deputy, at least for the LASD. It was a small consolation that he still had his shield and service sidearm.

He heard the faint sound of the TV from the bedroom, and saw the subtle shift in the light as it played into the hall.

“Coleman?”

Draper stood in the bedroom doorway. “Who else lets himself in here at night?”

“So many. But you’re the one I miss.”

Draper was not used to sincere greetings from Juliet, even humorous ones. This was an Alexia greeting. It put him on alert though he was tired of being alert.

She was sitting up in bed, surrounded by pillows, a glass of wine on her nightstand. She had on red satin pajamas and a black silk robe with a multicolored dragon on it. She tapped the sheet beside her and he came in and sat there. He handed her the long gold box.

“Things did not go well.”

“I tried your number.”

“I have a new one.”

She opened the box and smiled and touched a blossom. “Beautiful.”

He leaned in over the roses and kissed her, just barely touching. He inhaled her breath and gently bit her lip. He took a deep breath of clean cool Laguna air and cut roses and slowly blew it back into her. Her hand was warm on his cheek.

“Disaster, Juliet.”

“Did anyone die?”

“Not that kind. The kind that will multiply and complicate, like a tumor.”

“I’m very sorry, Coleman. But you look good. Did you draw an assignment in Maui?”

He smiled. They had a standing joke that if secretive, world-hopping Coleman were to travel to Maui for work, he would have to take her. She loved the Grand Wailea. In fact he had fled to Honolulu on a forged ID and spent six days lost among the tourists in Waikiki. She parted the lapel of his sport coat just a little, confirming the gun.

“Juliet, I wish it had been Maui.”

“Let’s just go there on our own.”

He looked at her. He instinctively distrusted her eagerness. He had not chosen her for eagerness, but for her stubborn reticence, her pride, her belief that she could fight distance with distance.

He got off the bed and went to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of the wine. The bottle was half full but there was an empty in the wastebasket under the sink and when he touched the opening his finger and thumb came back wet. She drank more when stressed. So far tonight: emotional, eager, stressed. He looked out at the aimless heave of ocean, and the cracking little waves racing up the sand. He thought that everything might really be okay. Juliet might just be happy to see him, and stressed by work, or by her inability to conceive children, or by life itself. Or not at all. Maybe he was reacting poorly.

He still felt some of the raw surprise and insult he had felt upon seeing the GPS transmitter clamped to the chassis of the M5. But it was more than surprise and insult. It was a total questioning of self. Of his intelligence, his abilities, his preparedness and his luck.

Hood: whistle-blowing, skirt-chasing, slow-on-the-draw, Bakersfield hick Charlie Hood. When Draper had seen the transmitter, and later the image of Hood himself sitting in the black Charger in Jacumba-caught by a security camera hidden in a tree-Draper had for the first time in his life felt enmity toward a fellow human. It was a new emotion for him, or at least a sharpening of older ones, and very different in its magnitude. For the first time in his life he truly wanted to kill somebody, rather than simply seeing that it was the easiest and most practical thing to do. Other people had come between him and his desires, but Hood had thrown himself between them. Hood had seen him.

She came into the kitchen with her wineglass and hugged him lightly, then went into the living room and turned on the gas fireplace. The flame popped to life behind the ceramic logs. Juliet sat on the leather love seat and crossed her legs under a throw blanket. She looked at the flames.

“Come sit with me,” she said. “We can see a beach without tourists and a flame without fire. I’ll rub your back.”

Draper joined her, set his wineglass on the end table and leaned forward, elbows on knees. He felt her hands on his clenched neck and knotted shoulders. She was empathetic, her strong fingers drawn straight to the trouble spots and the bundled tension. He’d been riding in the SUV that turned over, and he’d wrenched his neck and shoulder. The driver had taken one of Hood’s bullets through his hand and gotten safety glass shards in his face.

Draper took a deep breath and let it out. Juliet’s thumbs found two mounds of pain on either side of an upper vertebra and she methodically kneaded them away. She was better tonight than usual. Another concern. By the time she finished half an hour later and led him to their bed, Draper was sure that something had happened and he was reasonably sure what it was.

She made love to him with less self-absorption than usual, now more generous and attuned to him. When they were finally finished he held her face against his beating heart and he smelled her tears before he felt them on his skin.

“Talk to me, Juliet.”

She sobbed instead.

“When something hurts you it hurts me,” he said. “We can’t have a beach without tourists and a flame without fire and tears without a reason, all in one night, can we?”

“I’ve been trying to tell you something.”

“I know. What is it?”

“They asked me to betray you. Hood and Stekol.”

He felt the adrenaline hit. It wasn’t there and then it was. He felt his body fortify itself and his vision take on a new sharpness as he looked to his holster lying on the floor beside his shoes.

“And what did you say?”

“I said yes. I said I would call when you came.”

He said nothing while he dressed and slid on the shoulder rig and put on his coat over it. He stood to the side of the bedroom window and looked through the edge of the drawn blinds without touching them. More condos. A street lamp. A peek of Pacific Coast Highway. Headlights and taillights and the glittering parade of chrome, glass and paint.

“Are they watching us now?”

“No. I’m supposed to call.”

“How do you know they’re not watching us, Juliet? Why would you say that to me?”

“I can’t be sure. You have to trust me. I told them I would call, Coleman. I deceived them. But I need to ask you a question.”

Draper was glad for the darkness of the room because she couldn’t see him. What he had wanted to do to Hood he now wanted to do to Juliet, but the desire was urgent, and here she was, not five feet away, utterly defenseless.

His voice was a mamba in dry grass. “Ask.”

“Did you kill the men they say you killed?”

He walked to the bed and looked down at her. He lay beside her and again held her head against his heart. He stroked her hair and took the back of her slender neck in his strong right hand, and he pressed his body down the length of hers. “I did not. Before you and the god of beaches, flame, and tears, I swear to you that I’ve never killed anyone in my life.”

“I would know it if you did.”