Т Паркер: The Room of White Fire

I told her what I could about him, which wasn’t much. Prosperous family, military service, a diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, sometimes delusional and violent.

“Jeez, for reals?”

“Really. When did you next talk to him after the ‘Crazy, wanna come’ line?”

“The very next day. I was curious, you know. So I drove back at the same time and waited a while, and there he came, running again. I got out of the car and yelled out, ‘Nice day, isn’t it?’ He came over, breathing hard, pretty sweaty. He asked if I had any water in my truck and I did. So I got a bottle and tossed it over the fence and he drank it half down. He said his name was Jason. He asked me if I lived around here. Then he finished off the bottle and tossed it back. One of the guys in white came running out of the trees about then, way behind. Jason asked if I could meet him the next day, same place and time. So we did. And that’s when he told me how he needed to get out of the hospital but they were keeping him prisoner and he’d pay me a lot of money for a shovel. I said I’d bring him the shovel but not for money. I had a good feeling about him from the very start. I’ve always been an excellent judge of character. Except once, actually, when I was a really bad judge.”

“Do you have any idea where he went?”

She looked out to the oaks and the distant chaparral. “He said his parents were rich. Own the Family Suites hotel chain, and I know they got one of those down on Hotel Circle.”

From what had been suggested about his family, I figured the Family Suites might be the last place Clay Hickman would land.

Sequoia set her can on the table with a tinny knock. “What he talked about was his mission. Which was to bring white fire to Deimos. ‘My mission is to bring white fire to Deimos.’ He said Deimos was the Greek god of terror, which I barely remembered from Miss Benson in high school. Clay — I still want to call him Jason — but Clay said he was almost clear on how to accomplish his mission. And when the meds finally washed out of him he’d see everything perfectly, like he used to. He said that he’d built up resistance to electroshock but the doctors didn’t know it. I didn’t think they did electroshock anymore. Shocking another human being’s brain ? No animal in nature would do such a cruel thing to another.”

I thought of what young male lions do to the cubs when they take over a pride. And weasels in a henhouse. Feuding chimpanzees. But also of a torture basement I’d seen in Fallujah where the loyalists worked over the local Shia. Bloodstains on the walls and floor, several coats. Smell of burned flesh. They had a car battery rigged with cables but it wasn’t for jump-starting vehicles. That got to me, that battery. Humans. Animals. The human animal. Where’s the big difference? Maybe Sequoia had a point.

“He could have made that up,” I said. “About electroshock.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Good question.”

She considered me. “He didn’t seem, like, delusionary at all to me. Just... excitable. But my mom? She took some heavy meds for depression and she could fool people. I remember how convincing she could be, even when I knew she was making stuff up. To her it was true. That’s a terrible deal, when a mind turns down reality and makes things up instead. Like there’s a little devil up in your skull, directing his own movie for you to see.”

I got Sequoia’s phone, driver’s license, and plate numbers, and a description of the missing truck — a “trashed” silver Nissan with a lowland gorilla key chain dangling from the rearview mirror. She had not reported it stolen because she didn’t want to get Clay in trouble, but I encouraged her to file the report because if Clay Hickman did anything illegal, then she could be considered an accomplice. And in case he abandoned it, she could get it back. And because the truck was, well, stolen. She agreed.

She put both of my phone numbers into her phone. An office landline and a cell. I gave her my email address, too. She promised to call me immediately if she had any contact with Clay whatsoever.

“Hey, can I have one of those pictures of him? The color one? I love his different-colored eyes.”

I slid the picture back out of the envelope and set it on the table by the empty root beer cans. “I really need that call from you, Sequoia. So does Clay, whether he knows it or not.”

She studied me. “Maybe he just wants to be free.”

“Some people can’t handle freedom.”

“Well. Okay.”

“Be very careful with this guy if he contacts you again. Your job is to contact me. He has a history of violence. Don’t be alone with him.”

“I’m nineteen and I can take care of myself.”

I gave her a hyper-dubious look. “Drunk boyfriend.”

“You don’t have to bring him up. I learned.”

I was forty miles from the Family Suites on Hotel Circle. I picked my way down the mountain to the state routes and finally to the interstate and hit the city at rush hour. Hotel Circle is pretty much what it sounds like, a loop of chain hotels set up for San Diego’s tourists. Beaches, zoo, Chargers, Padres, trained killer whales, more beaches. We’ve got it all. A large white charter bus was pulling out of the Family Suites lot as I squeezed in. A group of maybe sixty tourists was checking in but I managed to catch the eye of a tall young man who waved me to the end of the desk and welcomed me to his hotel. His badge said PETER. I showed him the picture of Clay Hickman. He turned it over and read the PROPERTY OF ARCADIA claim, then looked at the face again.

“He was here Monday evening, say six o’clock. He came in and looked at me, then at Lannie — she’s one of the other night clerks — and I remember it was slow right then and we both said ‘Welcome to Family Suites’ at the same time. Me and Lannie laughed but the guy didn’t. He turned around and hurried out. We joked about him all that shift, how we scared him off with too much hospitality. I remember him because the moment was funny and weird. What did he do?”

“He’s on the run.”

“A criminal?”

I pictured Sequoia Blain’s trusting face, and remembered that Clay had pistol-whipped someone before being committed to Arcadia. “Not yet.”

I left Peter my card with both numbers and a twenty, and he said he’d call if he saw Clay Hickman again.

Hotel Circle is too big to walk so I drove from hotel to hotel, all the way down, across the interstate, then all the way back up on the other side. Those bloodhounds and me, down and up, then up and down. I saw no trashed silver Nissan pickup with a gorilla key chain hanging from the rearview in any of the lots.

I live sixty miles northeast of San Diego, fifteen miles from the coast. The property is oak woodland and has been in my wife’s family for almost a century. Twenty-five acres, nearly perfectly square on the plat map. The main structure is a 1922 adobe-brick house that holds the high ground, and downslope are six casitas built around a spring-fed pond. There’s a barn and a paddock. It has a name, possibly pretentious: Rancho de los Robles — Ranch of the Oaks. The nearest town is Fallbrook.

The entire rancho became a wedding gift to Justine and me — just a little something to get the newlyweds started — and when she died a year later I tried to give it back to the Timmerman family because it seemed like the right thing to do. But they said no — I was family and it was mine now. It was one of several Timmerman properties in the American West. Two years now since Justine’s death. I feel both surrounded by her and abandoned by her, a form of torture familiar to anyone who loses someone they love. To all of us, sooner or later.