Т Паркер - The Last Good Guy

No dice. When I deleted Reggie Atlas and Four Wheels for Jesus Ministry from the search, I found a brave new world of shell companies with Marie Knippermeir’s and Alfred Battle’s names behind them. But nothing in Cotton Point. How many more holdings they might have, and what shell companies had been formed to possess them, was anybody’s guess. Even the data miners could miss a nugget. I did have an idea who would know, and where I might find her. But getting her to talk to me at all might not be easy.

Nothing under Reggie Atlas as sole proprietor.

I looked out the window, saw Melinda and Liz taking up table tennis positions against Dick and Burt. Could be a good match, with Burt’s speed and Dick’s defensive consistency against Liz’s and Melinda’s tennis smarts. Styles make fights.

On my big oak desk, Clevenger’s computer slept. It wasn’t popping to life as often with the wasp-cam feeds. I worried about the battery life of the cameras, but they still had almost a quarter of their power left. I worried that Donald and Glassen had accomplished something ominous in their large, wicked glove box. But what?

I watched the setting sun pour gold on the pond and called Penelope Rideout.

“Roland, I’m so glad you called!”

Gunfire roared in the background, loud, chaotic, and plenty of it, the reports and echoes thundering through my phone. “Where are you?”

“I’m at Iron Sights, practicing up. She’s alive. Daley’s alive!”

Popopop pop pop popopopop.

Suddenly the gunfire quieted, then stopped.

“Can you hear me? I’m outside now. Man, that derringer kicks like a mule. Goes by the name of Smokey. I was so relieved to get your call today. It was like a window being thrown open in a dark room. Daley is okay and we’re going to get her back. I know it, I know it, I know it, Roland.”

“Why are you shooting?”

“I practice once a week with the Iron Ladies.”

“Practice for what?”

“For all the creeps,” she said. “No reason a girl shouldn’t have some security. So long as she’s safe and sane. Like you know I am!”

“Do you have a concealed-carry permit?”

“As of two weeks ago. Passed the class and got the approval. A hundred and fifty-six dollars and fourteen cents, plus training costs.”

I wasn’t quite sure what to say. People with guns worry me. Especially ten percent killers.

“Roland, don’t worry. I’m not a gun nut. I’m not, like, off my rocker. Did you talk to the people who saw Daley?”

I told her about the call from my contact at the FBI, the anonymous tip to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the sergeant who had interviewed the four witnesses.

“Exactly what did the witnesses say about her?”

I synopsized carefully — the three men in their late twenties or early thirties, Daley’s apparent willingness to be there with them, her brief swim. None of the witnesses gave Daley and her companions much thought. One said that Daley and the young man she went into the water with looked like siblings.

“He’s brainwashed her,” said Penelope. “Stockholm syndrome. Patty Hearst. She’s too terrified to resist, so she’s psychologically thrown in with him. See?”

“It’s possible she’s cooperating with her captors. But I don’t think Atlas has control of her.”

“You’re wrong,” she said. “Reggie Atlas can convince anybody of anything. It’s what he does. He convinced you that I tried to seduce him. That he never drugged and raped me. That he didn’t father Daley. You still don’t believe me.”

“I’ll find Daley and bring her back.”

“I wish you trusted me,” said Penelope. “I know I’ve lied. I’m very sorry to have done that.”

“Let me do my job.”

“A minute ago I put eight nines in the black at fifty feet.”

I saw a brief but spectacular trailer of Penelope walking into the Cathedral by the Sea and shooting holes through Reggie Atlas.

“Penelope.”

“Yes, Roland?”

“Don’t do anything foolish. No matter what you think you know. Let me get Daley back to you. It’s what I do.”

“Prove it.”

I was about to answer when she ended the call.

The next morning I decided to have another look at Pastor Reggie Atlas and headed to the Cathedral by the Sea.

Melinda, Frank, and I walked across the parking lot toward the church. We were on the early side because the Four Wheels for Jesus website had warned of an overflow ten a.m. service. Three golf-shirt-and-chino-clad SNR men stood outside the entrance, feet wide, hands folded in front of them, wraparound shades in place even though the morning was cloudy.

Up ahead of us was a young black couple. I saw that they drew the attention of the SNR men, who had three oddly similar expressions on their three oddly similar faces. The couple slowed and the woman whispered something to the man and they stepped away to let us pass. I caught the expression on the woman’s face as we went by — uncertainty and resolve. Then brief words rippling among the SNR men, impossible to hear from this distance, but I could sense that the words concerned the couple.

When I turned a moment later, the man and woman were heading back toward their car with some purpose, the man’s arm light on the woman’s arm, her back straight and her head high.

“I just hate that so much,” said Melinda.

A chuckle from the security men as we passed by.

As Reggie Atlas took the stage, a bar of morning sun broke through the coastal clouds and streamed through the cathedral glass. I sensed subterfuge in this but couldn’t imagine how Reggie could manipulate sunlight. A countrified rock band played an intro, some good pedal steel guitar. Reggie stopped halfway to the pulpit, raised his arms to the crowd, smiled The Smile. His usual wardrobe: white shirt, open-collared and long-sleeved, pressed jeans, white athletic shoes. His blond mop was purposefully styled.

Melinda — the healing, less garrulous Melinda — sat on one side of me, writing in a small leather-bound notebook that she had begun to carry. She was still running insane distances throughout the hills and valleys beyond my house, but she was looking up and behind her far less than she had before her confession a few evenings earlier. I respected the terror in her soul and the energy with which she tried to fight it. As I respected all the thousands of people caught in the same storm of bullets that night. How were they managing their fear? What about the ones who didn’t have Melinda’s willpower and gumption?

To my left sat Frank, enjoying his morning off. He had just added a regular Sunday-afternoon account, which meant a six-and-a-half-day workweek. On our drive to the cathedral, he had told Melinda and me that one of his sisters back in El Salvador had told him to watch out for an old friend of his — Angel Batista — who was rumored to be in the San Diego area. Frank explained that Angel was never a friend. He was a scrawny ratón who had turned into an MS-13 soldier and went by the nickname El Diabolico. Frank’s sisters feared him and his friends, and if Angel was in the San Diego area Frank hoped he wouldn’t show up in Fallbrook. For Angel’s sake, he said. Frank had no fear of him at all that I could see.

Off to one side stood a large screen devoted to Pastor Atlas. He was gigantic but detailed. In spite of this, many of the worshipers around us were tuned in to fourwheelsforjesus.com on their smartphones. I did likewise, watching the live-stream Reggie on the small screen doing everything that the actual Reggie was doing, just in a jerkier, slightly delayed kind of pantomime. I turned the thing off and put it in my pocket.