Т Паркер - The Room of White Fire

My first thought was Alec DeMaris’s security team at Arcadia. Why would they follow their own expensive, cash-only private investigator? Good question. Arcadia security had had access to my truck twice — most recently for several hours today. A guy who knew what he was doing could have clamped that little tracker on in less than two minutes. Lunchtime would have been good, because the partners were all bellied up in the mess hall instead of roaming the grounds. Maybe less than one minute.

I unlocked and opened the tool chest in the bed of the truck. It’s one of those big metal wall-to-wall chests that contractors bolt to their trucks and features not one but two lockable latches. I set the transmitter down inside of it with the jumper cables and road flares and watched its steady blue light. For now I’d let them enjoy following me, whoever they were. Drawing them along might come in handy, or it might not. If not, I could be rid of the thing in the time it would take to pull over and open a lid.

It descended through the sunrise, shiny as a new penny, engines humming and the quad rotors whapping the sound that makes people love helicopters. A svelte little Sikorsky 434 turbine with a bright copper paint job, darkened canopy windows, and the words HARD TRUTH painted on the pilot-side door. The letters were black and forward-rushing, and had tails to make them look like speeding bullets. Landing near the pond, the helo kicked up little dust, courtesy of last night’s rain. It settled on its skid tubes.

I set my coffee cup on the long communal picnic bench. The chopper’s rotor blades were still slowing when a man pushed open the door, looked at me through yellow-lensed aviators, then dropped to the ground and ducked beneath the blades, headed my way.

He looked to be near sixty, solidly built, and when he cleared the rotors I saw that he was tall. He came to the picnic bench where I sat, spread his hands on the tabletop, and leaned toward me. “Dr. Briggs Spencer,” he said. His smile said, You’re going to like me .

He still had the heroic jaw. Since the war he’d grown his gray hair long enough for the helo blades to throw it around. I could see blue eyes behind the yellow lenses, nearly blanched of color, roaming my face as if looking for a way in.

A long beat.

“Come on, I’ll take you up. You can explain to me how Clay has managed to secure a girlfriend and a truck in less than the forty-eight hours since I hired you to find him. Don’t mind heights, do you?”

“I like heights. But I’m not a fan of torture.”

The good doctor lay a hand on my shoulder and took another while to study me. The hand was heavy. He tilted his head down to look over his glasses at me. “Mr. Ford, people change. Come on. Get in.”

I didn’t move. I had told Paige Hulet about Clay’s “girlfriend” but nothing about her role in his escape or her subsequently stolen truck. Which meant the doctor had sources other than Paige Hulet and me. Sometimes people hire PIs to watch their PIs. I wondered if Briggs Spencer’s other sources of information drove a white Range Rover and a black Dodge Charger.

I finished my coffee, and followed the man to his helicopter.

We rose swiftly into the early-morning sky. I had that funny gut-drop you get in a helicopter, like some part of yourself is still on the ground and you want to go back down and pick it up. My property got smaller as the world got bigger. I saw Lindsey Rakes standing in front of her casita, looking up, shading her eyes. I thought of buzzing the rancho with Justine in Hall Pass , how she’d bring it in just over the pond, touch and go on the little strip we’d dozed, then go screaming into a climb. Being in the air makes me feel close to her, makes my problems on earth seem smaller. Less bound by the laws below.

The S-434 was configured for four, but we were alone. It had dual flight controls. The cabin noise wasn’t bad for a light turbine chopper and Dr. Briggs Spencer’s voice was clear and forceful, but we used headsets anyway.

“I didn’t learn to fly until I was in my forties,” he said, banking hard to the west. “I was stationed at Fairchild outside of Spokane and I knew some Apache pilots. Off-the-radar kind of arrangement, literally. Now, that is one enormous head-and-body rush that you’ll never forget — flying a gunship. I’d buy one, but it wouldn’t be practical for business. Terrible fuel economy. Check this out, though.”

He nodded to a holster bolted to the helo frame on his left, in which rested a large semiautomatic handgun. Spencer smiled, leaned back a little, and reached to the fuselage just above the weapon. He slid open a small window, not much larger than a gas-tank lid, made a gun of his forefinger, and pointed it out the hole. That cheerleader-winning smile again. “Coyotes,” he said. “There’s hillsides near my home crawling with them. At night I get down low, hit the spotlights, and give them hell. Nice to be a southpaw sometimes.”

“Odd hobby for a psychologist.”

“I told you, people change. There’s a gun port on your side, too. Maybe we’ll go out some night, shoot some varmints.”

“No, thanks. Did you buy this helo with your money from running the torture programs?”

“Don’t be squeamish. It wasn’t torture. It was detention and interrogation.”

Words, meaning everything and nothing again. “Bullshit is bullshit, whatever you call it.”

“Yeah, well, I made an ungodly sum from it. CIA just threw money at us — at everyone over there. Our base contract was worth eighty million, and we were paid bonuses for what they called ‘useful intelligence.’ Bear in mind that I’m nothing but a garden-variety psychologist graduated from a state school. A decent first baseman with a GPA of two point four. My only gifts are a stubborn streak and that people like me. Now, some of that government money I used for black-site maintenance, bribes, subcontractors — everything you’d expect. But Tim and I cleared about twenty mil each. We closed Spencer-Tritt Consulting in 2009, one step ahead of Obama. When DoD came after me for breach of contract, the CIA paid the legal fees. Five million. I won. Invested in some lucky IPOs that went huge, opened the door to start-ups. At that level it’s who you know. Allowed me to get into things I love. Which is tech and medical — drones and drugs. Medevac hardware conversion — helos again. Pharmaceuticals, mostly psychotropic therapies for schizophrenia and depression. I founded residential mental illness facilities where we actually make you better, not worse. Got three of them up and running and the fourth underway. Exclusive and expensive because exclusive people demand expense. I made a fortune off the United States government and turned that into a hundred fortunes more. Funny part is, the CIA always thought of me as a bargain. And let me be extremely clear on one thing — we did not torture. We applied enhanced interrogation techniques, developed by Dr. Tritt and myself. They were rational and legal and they worked. They saved American lives. Don’t believe the gutless media or the politicians. Nothing they say about us is true.”

Only a guilty conscience talks that long without being asked a question. “Except the eighty million.”

“Yes, good, the money was very true. But believe it or not, I didn’t bring you all the way up here to talk about myself. Have you seen Clay?”

“Not yet.”

“Paige told me you’ve discovered a lady friend of his. Is this a friend from his past or a new acquaintance?”

“New, unless she’s a good liar.”

“How long have they known each other?”

“One month of talking through the fence at your hospital.”