Т Паркер - The Last Good Guy

“True monsters always do,” said Marie. “I think I read that story in a book once. Some tragic Greek? The Bible, maybe?”

“Interesting,” said Battle.

“It’s a helluva lot more than just interesting,” I said.

Shadow and light on Battle’s hate-carved face. Something like pain. “Do you think that’s true? Penelope’s story?”

“I think it is.”

“Oh.”

Again, pain on the Old Hawk’s face. Penelope’s story must have gotten to him. Alfred Battle: moral hater.

Marie collected the glasses and napkins, left the coasters. She winked at me as she made for the kitchen. I heard her set the glasses on the counter.

“Where are they taking Daley?” I asked. “She had her things when they left.”

“That brings us to a crossroads, doesn’t it?” asked Battle.

“Here’s your crossroads, Alfred — I want the girl and you’re out of time. Where are they taking her?”

“I own a compound in the desert,” said Battle. “As you know, it’s difficult to find and has good security. Daley will be safe there.”

He squinted at me and smiled fractionally — gauging my fear of returning to Paradise Date Farm. I felt fear, even with Battle as my shield. I also smelled revenge. And, more important, a chance to parse the riddles of the wasp-cams.

“Why not keep her at Cotton Point?” I asked. “Two guard gates. Tough to crack.”

“You managed to find her,” said Battle. “In truth, I had a premonition that you hadn’t gone away. In spite of your down-home welcome at Paradise. Maybe even because of it. Scent of revenge? SNR was proud to have felled a local hero.”

“Proud of six on one?”

“I treat them like attack dogs,” he said. “Always keep them a little hungry. Psychologically.”

“Stand up.”

“I’ll need to make some calls.”

“That’s funny. Stand up, old man.”

He worked himself up from the chair. Same height as me, gray raptor’s eyes boring into mine. I reached inside his suit coat and felt for a gun. Faint smell of milk on his breath. A whiff of the same shave cream Grandpa Dick uses. Dad, too.

The weapon was napping in the small of his back, right side, where I carry mine. I broke it from the holster and held it out and away, taking hold of his necktie while I ran a boot-toe around his ankles for a second gun.

“I haven’t been frisked in forty-eight years.”

“Miss it?”

“I was contemplating a knee to your face. If you’d knelt down to check my ankles.”

“Sorry to have missed that.”

I stepped back and looked at the gun, a slim five-shot revolver with an enclosed hammer and a smooth front sight — great for concealment and snag-free on the draw. Old-fashioned and deadly, like its owner. Put it in my jacket pocket.

I heard Marie coming in from the kitchen, new sneakers squeaking, oddly slow in her approach. I turned and she stopped, a nail-studded baseball bat over one shoulder, ready, both hands choked way down on the grip.

“I implore you,” she said.

“You disappoint me, Marie.”

“I so don’t mean to.”

“Please give me the bat. By the handle. And sit back down where you were.”

“Okey-dokey, Mr. Hooper.”

I set the hideous club on the coffee table, a wave of adrenaline surging through me. Careful not to scratch the glass.

Took Alfred’s phone, turned it off, and slipped it into my pocket.

“If Daley isn’t at Paradise like you say, we’ll just swing by the sheriff’s station in Encinitas,” I said. “Where I’ll introduce you to Detective Sergeant Darrel Walker. Black dude, good cop. He’d love to see my Cotton Point pictures of you and Daley. He’s already got the crime-scene shots of Nick Moreno. He’d enjoy bringing charges against a legendary white-supremacist geezer such as yourself.”

“Proving charges could be difficult.”

“So could dying in prison.”

“Which is why I need assurance that once the girl is in your possession, you will not inform on me to law enforcement. A simple this for that.”

“No assurance,” I said. “But for tonight I’m your only hope of staying a free man, Alfred. Take me to the girl.”

A heavy lift of eyebrow. “Would two hundred thousand dollars buy your silence regarding me and the girl and the boyfriend? Allowing your cop friends to focus on the actual actors — Connor, Adam, and Eric? I have the cash, right here on the property. Or Bitcoin, if you prefer. Almost impossible to trace, as you know.”

I was disappointed but not surprised that Battle would so eagerly throw his men under the bus. I had to figure they would throw him under, too.

“You’re driving,” I said.

Extra sharpness in his eyes as he regarded his wife. “I’ll be home shortly, Marie.”

“Will you come to me by moonlight, though hell should bar the way?”

Battle looked at me. “That’s from her other Alfred. Noyes, the poet. May I say goodbye?”

“Oh, take your time,” I said. While Alfred and Marie hugged, I texted Burt and Lark, looking up to the Battles between letters. Alfred kissed her on the cheek. Her chin quivered. She rose and hugged him long and close, plump arms around his thin frame.

“Do nothing foolish, dear,” he said. “Do nothing at all.”

When he broke away and she looked at me, a tear rolled from her left eye. I looked at the nailed club on the coffee table and I tried to judge her capabilities against her madness. Close call.

“Marie,” I said, “would you like to come along?”

“I will not endanger her in any way,” said Battle.

“I thought you’d never ask!” said Marie.

I politely searched her for a phone or weapon, found neither. She smelled of lilac.

“That was a little personal,” she said, smiling.

Outside, I took the battery out of Battle’s phone, then locked them and his revolver in the big tool chest bolted to the bed of my truck.

We got in and closed the doors. Battle in the driver’s seat, me on the passenger’s side, Marie in back. She had her seat belt fastened first. I set my .45 on my lap and started the engine. Battle glanced at the gun, then adjusted the mirrors slightly. Marie looked through a window and waved goodbye to her house.

“Drive,” I said.

We wound down through the orange grove toward Holiday Lane. “I expect some kind of help from you,” said Battle. “SNR discovered a runaway girl. They did not abduct her. There was no force involved. No threats or coercion of any kind. They were protecting her from Reggie Atlas.”

“Nick Moreno,” I said.

“I knew nothing about him. I’d never heard his name until the news.”

“Save all that for Darrel Walker.”

“I will not be done in by a runaway girl and the timely removal of one muddy sexual predator.”

“Don’t count on it. What do you think about all this, Marie?” I asked.

“All what?”

A quarter-moon rose over the In-Ko-Pah Mountains, boulders heaped in the dark. Imperial Valley ahead, heat rising and the brittlebush shivering in the wind. A red Cadillac Eldorado fell in behind me from S-2.

Battle drove the speed limit, eyes on the road and one bony hand relaxed way down at six o’clock on the wheel. He’d been telling me about his boyhood in Houston, his high school days in Yuma, his time in Korea as a rear gunner on a B-29, trying to shoot down MiG-15s the Russians had sold to North Korea. Marie had fallen asleep with her head against the window.

“I had eyes like a falcon back then,” he said. “Twenty-ten, and a good sense of leads and trajectories from shooting doves in Arizona. They got me into that Superfortress in a hurry. We shot down two. I got some lead into both of them. Now we got Kias and Hyundais invading us. Should have pounded them to nothing like Japan. We’d have one big clean subservient nation under us. Instead of some nutcase with nukes and a bad haircut.”