Т Паркер - Swift Vengeance

With my mind free to wander, I wondered what kind of brown pills Hector was toting around in his backpack. I thought of the Captagon tablets we found on many of the insurgents in Fallujah. Powerful amphetamines, good for temporary strength and stamina. Fighting pills. All sorts of stories about how crazy and brave they made you. Manufactured in rustic labs. If you can make them in Iraq, you can make them here.

But what if Hector was just a well-meaning, innocent man who was searching for something to believe in? What if the whetstone was because of his interest in creating his own sashimi? What if the brown tablets were multivitamins or weight-loss potions? It’s easy to be cynical. In my line of work it’s a virtue.

Just after nine o’clock the garage door rose and an older black Nissan Cube backed out. It was clean and freshly waxed and shone handsomely in the weak garage lights. Through the binoculars I could see the top of the driver’s head, the rest blotted out by the headrest of the seat. A man, almost certainly, dark hair, medium length and wavy. Padilla-like. By the time the Cube was almost out of the driveway I had gone into the PI slouch — sliding down the seat far enough to see my prey between the dashboard and the top of the steering wheel. Legs splayed, arms out, head back. It’s uncomfortable for a big man, and somehow demeaning, too, and probably comical if it isn’t you doing it. Just before the Cube passed I slumped to full invisible and watched the headlights play across the headliner of my truck.

Just enough traffic for an easy tail. Interstate 8 to 163, off at Genesee, a medical borough. Hector O. drove just under the speed limits and signaled every turn. The Cube is an amusing vehicle. They look so toylike and somehow all wrong, but they will accommodate seven adults, or so I’ve read. I wondered if Hector had ever carried six passengers at once. He seemed so solitary. Maybe the room for six was wishful thinking. But maybe he filled his shiny black Cube up with six people every weekend night and went square-dancing. I liked that idea. I like to dance. Makes me feel graceful. I took it up when I quit boxing. I’ve won a couple of trophies at amateur ballroom dancing contests. My specialty is the waltz, though I truly love a good samba.

First Samaritan Hospital was a seventies-era smoked glass rectangle with a big plastic stork perched on top, dangling a blanketed newborn in its beak. I fell back and passed the main entrance just in time to see the shiny black Cube veer toward employee parking.

I was halfway home when Taucher called. “Questioned documents wouldn’t go to court on this, other than to say those two signatures probably didn’t have the same author, but they might have.”

“Not very FBI-like,” I said.

“I told you, handwriting isn’t like fingerprints or DNA,” Taucher said. “Speaking of which, I messengered the letter, note, and both envelopes back to Washington. I’m hoping for results too good to share with you.”

“I feel treasured.”

“What have you found on Padilla?”

“Nothing at all,” I lied. I wasn’t in the mood to share, either.

“So you’re on Interstate Fifteen, just south of Sabre Springs, it looks. Heading north for Fallbrook, I’d bet.”

“Pinging my call,” I said. “That’s what I miss about law enforcement.”

“So apply to the Bureau,” she said. “We respect honest deputies who don’t shoot mentally disturbed, bizarrely behaving subjects five times.”

“You also work until past midnight on Monday nights.”

“I don’t have anything better to do,” said Joan.

“I know that feeling.”

“Hmmm. Later.”

The long driveway from the road to my home is protected by a hefty steel gate. It’s controlled remotely from the house or by a keypad set at car-window level. I could see my house atop the rise, half hidden in towering oaks that seem to guard it. At night the houselights glitter through the trees, and if there is a breeze they blink like fireflies. Waiting for the gate to open, I watched the few lights twinkle and I remembered the way I used to feel, knowing that Justine was up there in that house somewhere. It’s still hard for me to bend to the fact that someone of such importance can be instantly and forever gone.

As I headed up the drive I could see the row of casitas that face the pond, and the palapa over the picnic table and the big built-in barbecue. The barbecue is stout and U-shaped, decked with cobalt-blue tile, and there are barstools all around — our natural watering hole in good weather. But most of the outdoor lights were off. With winter close upon us, the Irregulars were hitting the sack early. In Lindsey’s casita a light was on and I could see Burt Short standing outside her door, hands on his hips, watching my truck.

Something wrong.

He intercepted me outside Lindsey’s casita, the door of which stood open behind him. Burt Short actually is short. And heavily muscled, with a calm eye and an indefinite past. Shaped like a bull, big in the head and shoulders, small-footed. He looked up at me. “She’s upset.”

I looked past him and saw Lindsey packing a suitcase that lay open on the bed. She looked at me, face pale and eyes dark, then back to her task.

I closed the door behind me. Watched her set some folded blouses in the bag. Then a plastic toiletries case. She wrapped the cord around the nozzle of a hair dryer, her hands trembling.

“Talk to me, Lindsey.”

“Kenny Bryce,” she said. “Our intelligence coordinator? Not only a Headhunter, but a good, sweet guy. He called an hour ago. He got a letter in the mail the same day I did. Fancy calligraphy, an English-Arabic mix like mine. He read it to me and it sounded pretty gruesome, Roland. Signed, Caliphornia. Kenny tried to be stand-up about it. Like it was some sick joke. He wasn’t sure what to do. So he called Voss, our old pilot, up in Grass Valley. Guess what? He got a cut-your-head-off announcement, too. Same day. Caliphornia himself. We’re all three meeting tomorrow at eleven hundred hours. Late breakfast and a strategy meeting. In Bakersfield, where Kenny lives — halfway between here and Voss. We’re thinking that whatever we do, it should be as a team.”

I understood that a servicewoman’s duty to her crew doesn’t end after deployment. And that loyalty to friends will shape a life.

“So,” she said. “Up at zero dark thirty for this gal. And a long drive ahead.”

“We’ll take the Cessna.”

She dropped the dryer into the bag. Wiped a tear off her cheek with the cuff of her shirt. “Thank you. Really, truly, thank you. I’m scared, Roland.”

“We’ll beat this.”

After packing, I had a night of troubled sleep in which I dreamed of Justine’s face — faintly lit, but most certainly Justine’s — floating in a slow orbit around me. Then the face was Lindsey’s. Over and over. When I reached toward the face it would glide away, like an airborne balloon shying away in a puff of breeze, slowly, but just out of reach.

We were in the air at sunrise. Hall Pass 2 churned powerfully through the sky, so confident and capable and alive. I felt that way also. And somehow less bound by the laws of gravity and of men.

Two hours and four minutes later Lindsey and I descended toward the flat expanse of Bakersfield. Land of heat and oil pumps and Central Valley cotton. Land of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard and the Bakersfield sound, a style of music sometimes described as more country than country, much beloved by my combative grandparents — Dick and Liz Ford — tenants of casitas one and six, respectively, on Rancho de los Robles.

“Looks like Syria,” said Lindsey, looking down with a thousand-yard stare. “I’ve never been in Syria. But I’ve spent hours and hours hovering over it with my cameras. Watching insurgents and farmers and women and children. Dogs and camels and cattle. People’s homes. Daesh staged from schools and hospitals. So, hours hovering, and when we had the intel and clearance we’d laser-mark the targets for the fast movers. It’s called sparkling. Their infrareds would lock on and boom ! Game over.