Т Паркер - The Last Good Guy

“Call me immediately when you find Daley,” said Atlas. “Better yet, bring her straight to me. That paternity test is the right thing to do, and you know it is. No matter who’s signing your checks.”

At the door, he turned. “Has Penelope mentioned her husband, Richard?”

“Yes, she has.”

“She made him up. He never existed.”

“I came to the same conclusion.”

A beat as he studied me. Spun his hat in his hands. Then a small smile. “Have you been spending some extra time with Penelope?”

“Only what’s required, Pastor. Why do you ask?”

“I’m concerned for your soul.”

“Save it for the choir.”

“I’m willing to pray with you right now. I could use some strength. So could you.”

“Not necessary, thanks.”

“It is so much more than necessary. But I respect your decision.”

That smile again, boyish and conspiratorial. “Penelope is beautiful, isn’t she? So bright and open. So sexual. Always has been. And, boy, she knows it. She offered all that charm of hers to me, more than once. Threw it right at me. She was fourteen and I was thirty-five. I won’t deny that I was tempted. I prayed like a condemned man. Prayed, and prayed again. Jesus stepped forth and offered his hand to me. Now you know how I answered Penelope, and you see where it got me. Paul said it best. He said, ‘Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness... On account of these the wrath of God is coming.’”

“I hope He takes His time.”

“I’ll say a prayer for you.”

I watched him leave and then walk up Main Street. Tipped his hat to a mom walking a baby in a stroller. Got into a sleek Mercedes Sprinter painted in high-gloss copper and black, with “Four Wheels for Jesus” airbrushed in racing-yellow script along its flank.

I sat back down just in time to watch my sleeping computer monitor wake up.

Burt Short’s bold italic Times New Roman 14 font hit the screen in a drop-down:

LIVE AND URGENT FROM PARADISE FARMS

BURT

Dust rising in bright light and the strangeness of things happening without sound.

Clevenger’s motion-activated wasp-cam streamed beautiful video, startlingly clear. I recognized the bunkhouse with the modified freezers in the living room and the gloves and white hazmat suits hanging on the walls.

The front door had been propped open. Connor Donald and Eric Glassen crossed the porch and disappeared inside. A forklift pulled up to the front porch, Adam Revell in the cage, four wooden crates stacked two-on-two waiting on the forks. Flat-Top Woman with the gun on her hip stood talking to him, her mouth working silently.

I put Burt on speaker as I watched Clevenger’s wasp-cam feed.

“None of the usual activity earlier,” said Burt. “No SNR vehicles coming and going. No Paradise shipping trucks in and out. No kids to the barn with their laptops and backpacks. They cleared the decks for this, whatever it is.”

Back to my desktop monitor: Connor Donald and Eric Glassen coming from the cottage, wearing long black rubber gloves and hazmat masks. Flat-Top Woman on her way inside. Adam Revell hopped down from the forklift and followed.

“I didn’t know you need heavy gloves and hazmat masks to handle dates,” said Burt.

Flat-Top Woman and Revell came out a moment later, suited up like the others.

Wasp-cam four gave us a good look at the wooden crates, each bound with three metal bands. No brands, labels, writing, or numbers on them. Pine? They looked to be nearly five feet long, a foot wide, and a foot deep.

Revell and the woman took one end of a crate, squatting and straining mightily, horsing it away from the others. Connor and Eric took the other end, and the four of them — two on each side, short-stepping, backs straight — carried the crate toward the cottage.

“Clearly not TV dinners,” said Burt. “What can it be now?”

The heaviest material per volume I’d ever handled was ammunition in Fallujah. A 420-round steel can of .223-caliber M4 ammo in each hand put you in a hurry to get where you were going. Hoping you got there before the steel handles bit you. But one of these wooden crates at Paradise wouldn’t hold more than ten of those cans. Four adults? It looked like they were hauling something a lot heavier than that.

“Metals?” said Burt. “But why freeze them?”

“Gas under pressure,” I said. “To keep it contained.”

“Unstable chemicals. Isotopes.”

“Of course,” I said. “Things that date farmers and security guards depend on in their everyday lives.”

They got up the low porch steps and crept inside on their eight straining legs, like a giant spider.

A minute later they came out, rested in the porch shade, then went to the forklift for round two. Revell lifted his mask and wiped his forehead on his sleeve before taking his corner of the crate. Flat-Top Woman was breathing hard. Donald and Glassen had sweated through their black golf shirts.

A few minutes after the last delivery, the four were back on the porch, breathing heavily and conversing, their hazmat masks and gloves left inside. Revell pulled the cottage door shut and locked it.

“Heavy crates in high-performance freezers,” said Burt. “Guarded by a publicity-shy security company that has a regional office in San Diego, accounts across America, and does not hire blacks or Muslims. Speculate, Champ.”

“Maybe later. I have a story to tell you about Penelope Rideout, Daley, and Reggie Atlas. Conflicting versions of a possibly very ugly truth.”

That night I sat in my truck on a turnout of a narrow road, with a view of Pastor Reggie Atlas’s home in Rancho Santa Fe. A rural road, no lights, the moon a waning quarter whisked by clouds.

On a gentle hilltop sat the house, well lit. Large and Italianate, stone walls and a bell tower and cypress trees lining a winding drive. Why do so many Californians want to live in homes that look Italian? Are there California-style homes all around Rome and Milan? I saw that a pasture sloped to the road. White estate fencing, screened, and a white gate with a speaker/keypad column, car-window high.

Adjacent to the house was a big three-car garage, door open but unlit, three cars inside with room to spare.

I listened to the radio on low, studied the grounds with my night-vision glasses, elbows steady on the window frame.

A sudden buzz and rattle in my cup holder. I put Penelope Rideout on the speaker, returned my phone to its place, and turned off the radio.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was an awful lot to lay on you. I was covering new territory, Roland. It was harder than I thought. I’ll hang up right now if you want.”

I spoke softly. “Atlas said it never happened and you won’t allow a test to prove it didn’t.”

A few seconds went by and I thought Penelope really was about to hang up.

“I know what happened, Roland. It is written in me. But I don’t want her to know that truth. I understand I’m not permitted to even think such a thing about lofty truth. It goes against what we’re taught from the very beginning. And what it said on the Grecian urn. And all that about setting us free. But the story that Mom and Dad and I invented for her is more likely. Things could easily have happened just that way. And it’s better. It frees her from knowing that she’s the result of wickedness done to me. It gives her solid ground to stand on, and a simple history to be a part of. Something to build a life on, other than self-loathing and anger.”

“He said you went after him years ago, and he refused you.”

A catch of breath. Then the matter-of-fact cold in her voice. “I could kill him for saying that.”