T. Parker - The Triggerman Dance

"Wishful thinking, Susan?"

"I hit him hard a few times in print. All his right-wing this and right-wing that. All those secret men he trains. I exposed his son as a probable sex offender during the Ruiz trial. I was sure he had decided to get me. He seemed like a perfect assassin. A pig with a gun. Though on some level, I felt sorry for him."

"It's a long journey from Republican to assassin."

"I know."

Sharon watched a flock of seagulls scatter as a puppy ran toward it. The birds cried, cawed, circled and gathered further down the beach, landing on feet as orange and bright as plastic.

"The Bureau thought, given the circumstances, that you should get this information first. We'll have a news conference tomorrow up at county, to fill in the other media. They'll get most of what you got."

"Thank you. Sharon, do you think there's a chance that Foster will try again?"

"No. But keep a weather eye."

Baum nodded thoughtfully.

Sharon left the interview with an uneasy conscience. She was a woman most comfortable with black and white, wrong and right and she had willingly promoted a falsehood here. Yes, it was a lie designed to put Wayfarer's mind at rest, to further draw him away from any suspicion of John. A white lie. It was important that the Bureau be seen as working hard on the wrong suspect .

Of course, the longer Foster remained at large the better, and the Bureau would help him stay that way.

Unsettled as she was by her subterfuge, Sharon was thrilled by the power of it, too. What a feeling, to sway and influence the media. Deceit ruled. She consulted the rearview mirror to see if dishonesty had changed her face. No, Sharon decided: it was the same 34-year old biological-clock-ticking-away face she'd left home with that morning. She wondered about Retin-A.

She drove by the old apartment she had shared with Donny, at the base of Third Street hill. It was still there, though freshly painted. A new Honda sat in the place her old Chevy Malibu once occupied. The apartment had new curtains. She parked in the driveway for a moment. She remembered the life she had then, all the books and part-time jobs and sharing every expense with Donny, all the lovemaking and fighting and tears and long Sunday morning hours in bed with the newspaper strewn across the covers and cups of coffee growing cool on the nightstands. Those were the best times, she thought, those Sunday mornings.

She thought about Josh Weinstein and John Menden-the men in her life now-and how close they could be to her heart, yet so far from it. Maybe that was the price you paid for a career like hers. Men all around you, really, but what did they amount to except teammates, competitors, flirts, maybe friends at best?

A woman could do worse, she thought.

October the fourteenth hovers gently upon Liberty Ridge. It is an autumn evening scrubbed by breeze, cloudless and dry, ripe wit the promise of change. If seen from above, the dominant feature of Liberty Ridge is the blue oval of lake in its center. In the middle of the lake is small round island, densely wooded and dark. The lake seems to stare upward at you, like an eye, with its calm black pupil of an island taking you in.

To the north are two hundred acres of orange grove, a perfect rectangle bordered by a windbreak of eucalyptus. Early each morning the irrigation rows fill with water and glisten like stripe of poured silver. Holt has gone to enormous expense to bring his citrus up to certified organic standards, though never applying for the final papers because his operation is not commercial ant he detests inspectors of any kind on Liberty Ridge. Without this use of chemical herbicides to control weeds, or chemical insecticides to kill pests, the two hundred acres are labor intensive Holt's ranch workers are relatively small in number and well paid. Behind the lake, to the south, lie four hundred acres of Southern California coastal scrub and savanna. Because this natural habitat is part of a greater belt of undeveloped land, it is impossible to tell, from above, where the southern boundary o Liberty Ridge lies. Only from the ground can you see the actual border-an eight foot chain link fence topped by another two feet of acutely angled barbed wire, all charged with 24,000 volt of current. The electricity to the fence is turned off and on at arbitrary hours during the day, but it is always on at night. The charge is strong enough to send a deer spasming hoof-over-ear back into the brush, or to knock a man completely senseless. One of Holt's independent springers roamed far from the pack last summer, urinated on the fence and snapped its own spine in a howling recoil. The animal scratched back to the compound a day later using only his front paws, setting off a dispute between Holt and his daughter, Valerie, that Valerie, as usual, won. She demanded surgery for the pup. The dog was operated on that day, but expired during the ordeal.

East of the lake, inland, lie soft foothills of oak and sage, grasslands, and Interstate 5, which marks the edge of the property. From a frontage road used mostly by surfers and the Marines of nearby Camp Pendleton, a private asphalt ribbon lined with date palms winds west toward the house and outbuildings, the lake, and groves. There is a gate near the frontage road-just out of sight around the first bend-which is manned round-the- clock by Liberty Ridge Security, a team of five men supervised by Vann Holt's ubiquitous protector, hunting companion, drinking buddy and personal assistant, Lane Fargo.

To the west is the Pacific. The property line ends almost half a mile before the beach, which is fine with Vann Holt because beach access in California is nearly impossible to restrict anymore, and because a long, narrow, brackish slough runs parallel with the coast on the western edge of Liberty Ridge, making electric fences, guarded gates or even routine security patrols all but unneccessary. In light moments he jokes about stocking the slough with crocodiles. It would be nice to have a beach, but when a strong south swell powers up from Mexico and Holt wants to surf, he and Valerie and Fargo just drive to the dirt parking patch like everyone else, then paddle out and fight for the waves. As a boy he'd belonged to a private surf club there, but privacy in current day Orange County-Holt once pointed out to a client visiting from South Africa-has gone the way of the mastodon, the full-service gas station and apartheid.

The compound itself is built around what Holt calls the Big House-a little joke on himself, a retired Federal crime buster. This house is made primarily of restored adobe over cinderblock and steel I-beam. This expensive combination of materials makes for very good insulation against heat and cold, and of course provides the Big House's old-time California Mission flavor. Holt often points out to guests that it is bulletproof, apropos of little but his desire to raise eyebrows. It is an imposing structure with three stories that seem to just wander on forever once you're inside. Holt designed the remodel himself, which captures the Mission ambience but has contemporary touches such as oversized double-paned windows and twelve-foot ceilings that gather plenty of sunlight. Some of the rooms are furnished with genuine Mission-era appointments, others feature pale gray walls hung with the somewhat sentimental plein-air landscapes of the early twentieth century that Holt admires.

There is a separate residence for Lane Fargo. Fargo's home is actually a portion of the restored orange-packing house that sits between the Big House and the lake. It has the functional tin facing and cavernous interior of the original. Holt has kept great deal of the old packing equipment in tact: the convey and hoppers, the processing tables, the two roll-up doors large enough for a truck to drive through. But Fargo keeps the doors locked and the windows shut on all but the hottest days, giving the old plant an air of rusty malignity. The dogs kill an occasional rat along the decking that runs around the perimeter of the packing house.