Т Паркер - Swift Vengeance

“So you say.”

“My friend Bruno? He trains them right and contracts them out for people who need protection. Expensive, and kind of limiting, a large beast like that in your face twenty-four/seven. But Lindsey in casita three with a Cane Corso napping on a pad inside the door? That’s security, Roland. The beheader would never know what hit him.”

I sat in the dark in my office for a while, ailing from what I had seen in Bakersfield. Ugliness causes ugliness, happiness makes happiness. Opposite momentums. Joy is easy to ride, the way I had ridden it with Justine. Higher and higher. Until. Icarus? But so hard to ride death. Which led me to Justine. Which led me to Kenny Bryce. Which led me to the rabbit screaming briefly on Clevenger’s video. Leading me, of course, to my own death, whenever and however it might come. Death. One and whole and undefeatable. Spirals inside spirals.

My mother, who is only occasionally softhearted and almost never sentimental, told me something once that had the ring of truth to it: when you feel bad, do something good for someone else.

I told Burt not to let Lindsey out of his sight or off the property until I got back. Then got a handful of LOST CAT flyers from my office desk, then a staple gun and a hiker’s headlight from the barn.

It was a cool night and dark. A quarter moon. Fallbrook’s country roads are curving and unlighted, and the shoulders are thin, and the vegetation grows right up to the asphalt on both sides. The canopies of large old oak trees join hands from opposite sides of the narrow roads. Minor moonlight blinks by overhead and there is really just the faint white line to guide you through the curves. Headlights appeared behind me, coming fast. I pulled over to let a Porsche convertible howl past. A blonde in the passenger seat, hair streaming.

I stopped along Old 395, left the engine running and the headlights on while I pulled a rain-faded Oxley poster from a power pole and stapled up a new one. In the beam of my hiker’s headlight, Oxley’s hypnotic green eyes regarded me. I made another stop on 395 as I worked my way toward Fallbrook. I tried to make a rational assessment of the obese cat’s chances of survival after nearly a week and a half of coyotes, dark roads, and fast cars. Not good chances, by my reckoning.

I sensed a tail a mile from town, made a stop anyway. Got a gun from the locked toolbox in the bed of my truck, pocketed it in my barn coat. Stapled an Oxley poster to a white post-and-rail fence. A black Mercedes SUV passed by. I continued onto Mission, passed it, and pulled into a deep, oak-roofed turnout. Saw headlights in my rearview mirror two curves back. Not terrific tradecraft.

When I hit town I hung fresh LOST CAT posters outside Vega’s Tailor, El Toro Market, and the Mission Theater. Put the old flyers and the hiker’s headlight on the seat beside me. Looked down at Oxley, blanched by rain, fading into history. I fought back the pessimism. Heard Mom’s voice. Something good for someone else. Hoped her travels with Dad were going well. This month: Florida.

I’d just stapled a poster on the wall of the Main Street Café when the black Mercedes SUV pulled to the curb and parked in front of my truck. Burt Short’s fashion man stepped out, eyed me across the hood of his vehicle, then started my way. No blue moto jacket, just jeans and a black car coat against the December chill. His hair was black and unruly, much longer than he had worn it as a San Diego sheriff’s deputy during our two months as partners.

“Hello, Jason,” I said. “What brings you out tonight?”

“Lindsey Rakes. Your new tenant.”

“You mean my former tenant?”

“Maybe we should talk.”

I considered the pros and cons of having to lie to my old partner, now a licensed private investigator himself. And I was more than a little interested in what had brought him here. “Right this way.”

Just a few steps down Main Street was my new downtown office. New to me, at least, as of late last year when I decided I needed a place away from home to meet with clients — attempted murder, gunfire, and justifiable homicide being things best left outside the rancho.

The office is next door to the Dublin Pub, open but quiet at this hour. I could smell the fish and chips, hear the jukebox. I put the old-fashioned key into the old-fashioned door lock and let Jason in. Fallbrook is an old-fashioned town.

The lobby was small and neat — a directory, mail slots for each of the six offices in the building, a small table with a display of silk flowers. Old crate labels hung on the walls, brightly colored images of oranges, sunny groves, smiling young women holding out ripe fruit. And, interspersed with them, a few of my Oxley posters. I straightened the “California Girl” frame.

“Impressive office building,” said Jason.

“It gets better.”

I hit the lights and we climbed the creaking stairs to my second-floor office. The sound of shoes on carpet, then hardwood, a wide landing and three closed doors: Anders Wealth Management, Rick Topp Construction, Ford Investigations.

“I figured you for something more contemporary,” said Jason.

“None of that around here,” I said.

My office is spacious, with a coffered high ceiling and views up and down Main Street. It really is a Main Street, too — in the small-town sense — mom-and-pop shops, a candy store, a barber shop with a spiraled pole outside, a hardware store, a café with a fountain. Even a playhouse and some art galleries. But some modern touches, too — an Internet cafe, a craft brewery, hot yoga. I looked up and down the now dark and quiet street below. Switched on a lamp, set the Oxley posters on the credenza. Pulled over a chair for Jason, then sat behind my desk.

He hadn’t changed much in the last nine years. Same cut-from-stone face, ready eyes, and deep voice. He had always looked like an untalented actor playing a cop. Like he couldn’t quite emote. In the two months we’d spent as partners-in-uniform, I didn’t get to know him well. Five years younger than me, a wife and daughter. Drove an over-pay-grade BMW even back then.

With a shared past like Jason Bayless’s and mine, there is almost no room for small talk. Nine years ago we had lived through a terrible moment together, seen it different ways, and behaved accordingly. Recounted and relived it accordingly. And because of its terribleness it became not a moment at all, but a lifetime.

“Do you still think about it, Roland?”

“Not often,” I said.

“I would do it my way again,” he said.

“I’d do it mine.”

And with that, of course, I was forced to think about it.

In my memory, that three p.m. in Imperial Beach is always clear and precise. December 22 and cold, Deputies Bayless and Ford on their foot beat — specifically, we’re in a dirty alley behind a low-rent strip mall. There, in a patch of sunlight angling down through a gray-black sky, one Titus Miller backpedals away from us in his too-big overcoat and mismatched athletic shoes. One blue and the other red. Titus, homeless and occasionally violent, often high or drunk, sometimes clearly deranged, a man with nothing but his foul-smelling clothes and a bundle of possessions he had lashed to a wheeled cart with plastic newspaper bags tied end to end. Titus, age nineteen, black. Titus, who would smile and cry real tears for the ten dollars you gave him. Titus, cussing us badly and letting go of his cart and backpedaling, throwing open his too-big overcoat with both hands to get at something in his waistband, something hand-sized, dully black but metal-shiny, too, and maybe it was snagged or stuck, very hard to tell in that bright sun.

We both drew down, Jason cursing Titus while I ordered him to freeze, and Titus not freezing, still trying to get that shiny thing out of his dirty layers of clothes.