Т Паркер - The Last Good Guy

I called Lark again, but he hadn’t heard anything from the San Clemente sheriffs. Because they’d gotten there too late to intercept Daley, I thought. Or it was a false tip to begin with. Happens all the time. Sometimes on purpose.

It took a minute to talk my way past the Cyprus Shore guard. I played my ex-Marine card and he accepted it, an ex-jarhead himself.

However, this is a “double-gated community,” so that meant I had to get past the stately Cotton Point Estates guard as well. His name plate read Eccles. I produced my CDL and a “Damian Thomas, Locations” business card, which features a logo criminally similar to that of a famous motion-picture studio. Introduced Burt as my assistant. Told Eccles it was a Leo DiCaprio — Jennifer Lawrence picture, Iñárritu to direct, and I had only ten minutes. Smiled and confessed that Orange County wasn’t as dull as they said it would be. Eccles seemed to suspect that I was a liar, but the distant scent of Hollywood seduced him.

The beach was sparsely attended for a warm day. It’s a public beach but privately accessed. The waves were small and the tide was high, so there were more rocks than sand.

Two uniformed Orange County deputies came down to the beach behind us, a bulky sergeant and a muscular young man with a curt mustache.

When the sergeant asked us for ID, I gave him my PI’s license, which brought a long look from him.

“ That Ford,” he said. His nameplate said Ionides. “I thought so.”

The younger deputy handed back Burt’s driver’s license.

“What happened to you?” asked the sergeant.

“I was looking for Daley Rideout and I found six bad guys instead.”

“Six. You were lucky.”

“I was, but the girl’s family is taking this hard,” I said. “They’re good people. So I’m still here. Did you see her?”

Ionides shook his head.

“Had anyone here on the beach seen her?” I asked. “Besides the tipster? I’d appreciate your help, Sergeant. Daley Rideout is mixed up with some very bad people.”

“So I understand.”

Ionides had a heavy, unsurprisable face and flat, wet eyes. He sized me up without a blink and handed me back my license. He had what he needed on me. I was the chickenshit cop who betrayed his partner and cost him his career. I was also the stand-up PI who’d helped the FBI save some lives recently, down in San Diego. But it would come down to a fourteen-year-old girl.

“Couple surfers thought they saw her when they were waxing up,” he said. “Weren’t sure. Mainly focused on the waves. She looked kind of like the picture we showed them. Same top — black, with Beethoven on it. She was with three older guys. She and one of them went swimming, didn’t stay out long. When the surfers came back in, they were all gone. Two other witnesses gave us similar statements. All four witnesses said she looked fine to them. Just a girl and a guy who went swimming. One said they looked like brother and sister. Nobody said she looked afraid. We missed her by ten minutes. Ten damned minutes.”

I texted my employer and told her there had been a reliable sighting of Daley less than three hours ago on the beach at Cotton Point. She appeared to be at ease and unharmed. She swam in the ocean. I was there right now and Daley was gone again.

Penelope called and I let it go to message.

Burt and I drove to Cotton Point Estates. Sixteen homes plus Nixon’s old Western White House, now owned by a big-pharma go-getter and marked down to $63.5 million. Quite a ’hood. You could see the blue Pacific from almost anywhere, beyond the bright white plaster and stony old-world walls and clay-tile roofs and fountains and cypress and palms and flowers. Beautiful, serene, rigidly coiffed.

There was a private Cotton Point Estates beach path that Daley Rideout might or might not have used to arrive for her swim. The next nearest beach access was more than half a mile away, according to my phone maps. Without using the Cotton Point Estates beach access, Daley and her “friends” would have had to walk more than a mile and a half to and from Cotton Point. A long, rocky walk along a perfectly swimmable beach, just to get here and back. Which suggested to me that she’d come and gone right here where we were parked.

We watched the surfers out on the point. I surfed a lot until I went to war, then not. It was another thing that changed for me in Fallujah. Don’t know why. It wasn’t as if someone shot me off my surfboard in Iraq. Watching now made me want to do it again.

“She was here just two hours ago,” I said. “They escorted her here. They allowed her to come here.”

“They,” said Burt. “Friends or keepers, Roland?”

“Friends the day she left Nick Moreno’s condo with them,” I said. “She was comfortable with these men. But less than forty-eight hours later, she got cold feet and ran away. Made it as far as the 7-Eleven in San Clemente before they got her back under control.”

“ They being SNR Security.”

“Specifically, it’s Donald, Glassen, and Revell,” I said. “Maybe they’re acting on orders. But maybe they’ve gone rogue.”

“On behalf of Pastor Reggie?”

“That’s what I thought at first,” I said. “We know he contracts SNR to patrol his church. We know he funnels some of his hard-earned fortune to Alfred Battle. We know that’s big money, pouring in through the Four Wheels for Jesus Ministry — the cathedral, the streaming sermons, the podcasts. But Reggie tried to hire me to find and deliver Daley to him instead of Penelope.”

“Leading you to believe what?”

“That Atlas doesn’t know where she is any more than we do.”

“Yet SNR Security does,” Burt said. “To what end?”

“To shake down Atlas for even more.”

Burt went quiet and stared out the window for a long beat. Drummed his thick fingers on the armrest. “But what if trying to hire you was just a way of putting you off his stink and keeping you close? And the SNR gentlemen are in fact already holding Daley for him? And he can get to her whenever he wants? In keeping with Penelope’s idea that the man is determined to seduce his own daughter?”

I’d considered that before Reggie Atlas had even left my downtown office. “Then he’s more dangerous than I thought.”

Burt looked at me, shook his head. “Really? Follow this through, Roland. If Penelope is correct about what Atlas did to her when she was a girl — and what he will do or has done to Daley — then at some point he’ll have to tuck Penelope in, once and for all. He absolutely can’t afford not to. And he’ll want a dirt nap for you, too — as party to what she knows. So of course he’d ask you to work for him. Keep you handy.”

Sitting here in a place approximating paradise, a place of sun and sea and riches, it was important to be reminded that there is a darkness in some men that is unstoppable unto death.

“Thanks for reminding me,” I said.

“Of what, Roland?”

“What we’re up against.”

He grunted.

“My next life I’m going to be a doctor,” I said. “Or a farmer. Or maybe I’ll learn to dance really well, and teach. Imagine — The Roland Ford Academy of Dance.”

“Just be a PI in your next life. Think how good you’ll be by then.”

We drove past each of the sixteen Cotton Point Estate properties again. The oceanfront lots are big and some of the homes are all but hidden. We drove slowly and loitered when good views of the houses presented themselves.

Spent the next couple of hours parked in different locations. Finally admitted we might be wasting our time.

That evening in my upstairs home office I poured a hopeful bourbon. I scoured IvarDuggans.com and my other online data dealers for a Cotton Point Estates property owned by Reggie Atlas and the breakfast-meat maven Marie Knippermeir.