Т Паркер - The Last Good Guy

We sat in a silence longer than the song. The sickened look came back to Penelope’s face. She wiped a tear and flicked her hand sharply and the tear shot toward the kitchen.

“Fuck, I’m tired of this,” she said. “Can’t you just go get her and bring her back? Then Daley and I can turn around and light out for the territory ahead. Move again. And move again and again, a million more times. Move for fucking ever. And you won’t have to deal with me and my melodramas, or try to figure out what you think about me. I’ll get over you. We’ll send Christmas cards. I was happy running away because it was always away from him. Now I’ve stopped and tried to fight, and I’ve lost her.”

“You don’t know that,” I said.

“I know SNR Security works for him. I know you’re just one man. And you can’t go up against them alone again.”

“Roger that. Don’t lose hope.”

The trail leading to Pastor Reggie Atlas’s mansion on the sand wasn’t quite as hard to find as I thought it would be.

It took me most of the next day to pick it up through the labyrinthine IvarDuggans.com “Known Associates” and “Doing Business As” listings for Reggie Atlas and his Four Wheels for Jesus Ministry. A Mexican LLC controlled by six known Atlas associates had formed a real estate investment trust and brought shares to market on the U.S. stock exchange.

The trust was called Sand Mansion Investments, and offered shares in properties in Baja California’s burgeoning East Cape, just north of La Paz. East Cape was serviced by two good airports, one in San José del Cabo, the other in La Paz.

I knew the area. Once a loose necklace of peaceful villages strung along the Gulf of California, East Cape was rapidly developing into a land of luxury hotels, ecotourism, and tony golf resorts.

I’d even worked a case down there, locating and finally helping a careless gringa get back to the U.S. She had gotten herself into some ugly trouble, an impromptu kidnapping attempt that was both amateurish and potentially lethal. She was very happy to finally board her plane out of La Paz. So was I. As American journalist Ambrose Bierce had written to a niece more than a century ago, not long before he disappeared in Mexico, “To be a gringo in Mexico — ah, that is euthanasia.” For me, it almost was. For the gringa, too.

Studying the computer monitor in my home office, I saw that Sand Mansion Investments was a legal shell company comprising the six known associates of Reggie Atlas, but also of Ronald White, aka Reggie Atlas, and Mary Lavoy, aka Marie Knippermeir, heir to the Knippermeir Breakfast Meats fortune and wife of the hatemonger Alfred Battle.

I felt my pulse jump when I saw that one of the Sand Mansion REIT properties on the Bay of Dreams in Baja California was Casa de Angeles Caídos. House of Fallen Angels.

I’d fished the Bay of Dreams. A beautiful bay and a rich fishery. For decades it was known as Bahía Muertos — Bay of Death — because of the hundreds of head of cattle that had died there in a hurricane. More recent developers changed the name for obvious reasons, and the former Bay of Death was one of the most ruggedly beautiful places I’d ever seen. Like the Middle East, lower Baja California has an almost otherworldly beauty where the desert meets the sea. The coast is dotted with mansions, some merely spectacular and others competitively outdoing their neighbors. Sprawling estates painted in bright colors, mostly. Extravagant properties.

House of Fallen Angels was a ten-acre, ten-thousand-square-foot compound overlooking the Bay of Dreams. A main house and two guest houses, all painted white, with blue domes that appeared — on the House of Fallen Angel’s rental website — to be made of lapis-blue tiles. The windows were trimmed in red. A wide slope of green grass. Palms, neatly coiffed. Three crosses towered above it all, high in a pale blue sky. A helipad, landing strip, two swimming pools. All offered by the month, domestic and landscape staff included, for fifty thousand USD, serious inquiries only.

So Reggie had gotten his mansion, I thought. Bought it in partnership with a storied white supremacist’s breakfast-meat fortune, remodeled it to his own fantasy specs, and offset the costs by renting it to the wealthy when he wasn’t using it himself.

Not bad for the rookie Georgia evangelical who’d almost had his career beaten out of him by three black men but was rescued by an angel disguised as an old man, white hair combed back, blue eyes in a haunted face. A pastor who had mixed himself up with an eighth-grade girl who admittedly had a crush on him. And had unleashed his powers of seduction upon her. Although it could very well have been the other way around. Or some of each.

I took the virtual tour of the House of Fallen Angels. Mexican/Spanish/Moorish architecture. Hard to say where one style ended and another began. High windows and sunlight. Heavy wooden furniture. Blue-and-yellow tile mosaics framing the doors. Mahogany window frames. Bold paintings on white walls, elegant ceramics on pedestals, each one singled out by the gallery spotlights. Christs and Madonnas and saints and martyrs of all sizes and postures and materials, from the bloody to the beatific. But mostly angels. Angels everywhere, in paintings and stained glass, as sculpture, as wall sconces and freestanding figures, as candles and dolls, in metals and wood and wax and glass.

Twelve beautiful children would appear... and our family would become the foundation of the lost tribe of Israel...

And here in the House of Fallen Angels — I had to figure — was where the rest of those beautiful children were to be conceived. According to the gospel of Penelope. Based on sayings attributed to Reggie Atlas. One down. Eleven to go. And, if they were not to be born of the fallen child-angel Penelope, then why not by her daughter? His daughter?

I remembered his words the Sunday morning I’d met him in his office: The young are our future, Mr. Ford. They will multiply us into heaven.

From the far side of my spacious oak desk, wasp-cam one from Paradise Date Farm jumped to life on Dale Clevenger’s heavy red laptop. I watched Connor Donald striding from the main house toward the large, corrugated metal hangar. Evening by then, the school closed and most of the cars gone. Orange desert light, dust puffing with each fall of his duty boots.

Wasp-cam three picked him up, unlocking the convenience door to the hangar. A moment later the rolling door came up, revealing the dusty ATVs and the shiny John Deeres and the two long work benches behind them. I saw that the hand tools had been moved since I’d first seen them a few days back. The cans of nuts and bolts, too, and the soldering guns. Elves at work , I thought, making presents for Christmas . Just three months away, and all those millions to provide for.

Connor Donald weaved through the vehicles and past the work benches, then stopped outside the perforated steel security door near the back of the building. He pulled a key ring from his pants pocket, unlocked the door, and pushed it open.

He stepped in and turned on a light and I finally got a look inside. A long stainless-steel table ran almost wall-to-wall in the back, upon which sat a large glove box roughly the size and shape of a coffin. The glove box was clear acrylic or glass, and had two sets of articulating arms on the side facing me. A rolling backless stool for each work station. I could see heavy-looking black hands — somehow both mechanical and human — at rest within the box. There were latches and lock pins at both ends, for loading and unloading from either direction.

Connor Donald walked around the table to the other side and returned with a handheld monitor of some kind, set it on the table near the glove box.