Т Паркер: The Room of White Fire

The toolbox in the back of my truck screeched open. Burt Short stood, pointed his combat shotgun at Bodart, and blew him off his feet. I wheeled on wide-eyed DeMaris, hit him with a left uppercut that started way down in my toes. His jaw shattered and his head snapped up and he went down, senseless as a bale of hay. I stood on his wrist and wrenched away his gun. Bodart lay on his back, arms out, hands slowly opening and closing. Face missing above his mustache, blood flooding out, the back of his head lying in the dirt ten feet away.

I looked from Bodart to DeMaris. Smells of blood and pine and fresh earth. Burt jumped out of the pickup, leaned in for a closer look at Bodart, and crossed himself.

“Got him.”

“I’m glad you did.” I heard my voice as if from a distance.

“We didn’t ask for this,” he said.

“No.”

My body had a funny lifting feeling. Like it was a balloon and not tied down. But my soul weighed a thousand black tons and there was no way I was going to float off. My plan had worked.

“I’m going to offer you some free advice, Roland. Any time you feel bad about what we just did, you remember that hole in the ground and what they were going to put in it.”

DeMaris moaned softly, scraped his fingers through the dirt. I went over to Bodart and retrieved my weapons from the pockets of his duster. Thought I owed him a look. Respect. Maybe that was a bad idea. Blood and dirt and shiny pieces of scalp. Bleeding less but the smell of it strong. Smell of a new grave ten feet away. Mine. I moved to the truck and leaned back against it. I’d felt like this a few times in my heavyweight “career.” Late, between rounds, looking through swelling eyes at an opponent, measuring his misery against my own. You just want it to be over. But you will not give up because you are a fighter.

“We have a decision to make,” said Burt. “Best-case scenario is DeMaris wakes up and buries Bodart, straightens up around here, and keeps quiet. But it’s hard to keep quiet about something like this for long. DeMaris has a small conscience but a big mouth. Bodart’s people will be all over him. So, worst-case scenario is he panics and runs off to the law. He and Tice would play this off as a bluff staged to scare you silent. Not going to harm a hair on your head. I think we’d beat them in court, but what a long, expensive, public headache. You could make bail, but your business would suffer badly. Details gruesome enough for the news at eleven. The Ford and Timmerman clans would not love it. And think how many hikes with Wesley you wouldn’t have time for while you’re sitting in the defendant’s chair. More likely, DeMaris waddles off in a hurry to Bodart’s handlers and tells them what happened. In which case, we might expect them to assign someone more capable to deal with us. In the long future.”

I watched him, listening.

“The alternative is to white out DeMaris forthwith, dump him in the hole with Bodart, and use those shovels, you and me. Pack it down good. Spread some pine needles over it. Tice might dig them up later out of pure curiosity, missing boss and all. But I bet he’d take one look and cover them up again. What’s he got to win? We could be out of here in less than an hour. Then back under the palapa at Rancho de los Robles, bourbons in hand, plenty of time to see the sun rising on a beautiful new day. I’ll do the actual deed, since I’m one-for-one tonight anyway.”

“It’s wrong to kill him.”

Burt looked down at DeMaris. “Don’t forget my advice, Roland. This pathetic oaf was seconds away from shooting you in the head and dragging you to that hole. ”

“No.”

Burt gave me a long look and I gave him one back. “Okay,” he said. “You’re the boss. It’s endearing that you still care about right and wrong. I’m glad you let me help you out of this mess, but I wish we could have come up with something neater.”

I looked out at the grave and the mound of dirt behind it. Just enough foggy moonlight to see. Wanted to be gone from here. Up in Hall Pass with Justine, free in the sky, alive in a beautiful world.

“Do you believe in good luck or bad luck, Roland?”

“Yeah.”

“I only believe in good luck.”

“Where did you learn to do this kind of thing?”

He shrugged. “Born in L.A. but moved around a lot.”

One week later Paige and I sat across from each other at the picnic table under the palapa. I’d given her the pond view. I could see the rooflines of the casitas up on the embankment, and beyond them, the big house. She’d spent Good Friday, Saturday, and Easter Sunday in the hospital. Then another three days at home trying to rest, surrounded by FBI agents, Air Force Office of Special Investigations interrogators, and San Diego County Sheriff’s detectives — the same humorless posse that tag-teamed me.

Freed from Arcadia, she wore a loose floral dress with a light white jacket, and her hair was down. The day was sunny and warm. I’d told the Irregulars I wanted privacy for this lunch and they’d decided to see a matinee and go bowling.

She flinched as she reached to pour more wine into my glass. A couple of fat red drops hit the tablecloth. “Ouch,” she said.

“Here.” I poured some wine for her. I served her some of the ahi salad that Lindsey and Burt had made for the occasion, pushed the baguette basket closer to her for an easier reach.

I broke off a piece of bread. “You invented Dan,” I said.

She set down her fork and looked at me, her irises brown with some red in them — rust or cinnamon — and her expression flat.

“When did you suspect?” she asked.

“The first time you said his name.”

“I thought you believed me.”

“Not quite,” I said. “But I didn’t know what to believe instead.”

“Yes. I invented Daniel.”

“Remember, he went by Dan.”

“Don’t peck at me,” she said. “I’m not proud of what I did.”

I heard waterfowl skidding to a stop on the surface of the pond behind me. Figured it due to the brace of mallards that had shown up last week. Watched Paige Hulet’s eyes tracking them right to left. “Why pretend you were married and he had died?”

She met my gaze, then looked away. “I wanted a way into you. So I made myself a widow in my mind. To understand yours.”

“To heal me.”

She touched her side very lightly. “You see what I did for Clay.”

“I’m in awe of what you did for Clay. Were your five years without a dance invented, too?”

“No, Roland. I gave up dancing and what goes with it. It was all about my patients and my writing. I was thriving. But, when I got to know you, I thought you were beautiful and I wanted to dance again. I knew from the start that your heart would be in the right place.”

“How did you know?”

She studied me over her wineglass. “Everything I found about you told me that you were a good and feeling man. The killing of Titus Miller. What you did and didn’t do when your partner opened fire. What you said and didn’t say. I admired you. And later, the U-T article about you doing well as a PI, and marrying a beautiful public defender — I was happy for you. What you said about her death a year after that. So, at the moment I met you, I already believed in you.”

“Yesterday I looked at our contract again. I was trying to figure out how much money I’d return to Dawn Spencer. And I saw that you were the only Arcadia principal who actually signed the contract. Another light went on. It wasn’t Briggs or DeMaris who thought to hire me. It was you.”

She held my gaze.

“You amaze me, Paige. And I’m hard to amaze.”

“Over time, I hope you forgive me.”