Т Паркер - Swift Vengeance

And again I see, with the same unvarying clarity as always, Titus freeing that dull/shiny black thing with both hands and extending it toward me as he stops his retreat and drops into a shooter’s stance. I see his expression as he looks at me over the sights of my weapon. Nothing in his eyes but fear and nothing in his hands but a wallet. Five shots from Jason — concussive, gun-range close, bullets twang-sparking off a waste bin behind Titus. Titus in wholesale collapse, the wallet falling from his hands, still lashed to his belt by its shiny chain.

“I’d like it to go away,” said Jason.

I nodded.

But taking a life becomes a life of its own. Becomes a different life, for all involved.

December 22.

Peace on earth, goodwill toward men.

Protests in Imperial Beach, San Diego, L.A., San Francisco, and Oakland. Most peaceful, some not. Rubber bullets and bricks on cop cars.

The biker-style chained wallet was found to be empty, and was a recent acquisition of Titus’s, according to a liquor store clerk who had sold it to him at a steep discount as a Christmas present.

The crime lab found a badly rusted.22-caliber six-gun buried deep in Titus’s cart. Loaded.

Six months later, the Internal Affairs deputy-involved shooting investigation was complete, and found that Deputy Roland Ford had acted properly within the law and the scope of his authority. And that Deputy Jason Bayless had used excessive and unnecessary force in the death of Titus Miller, nineteen, emotionally disturbed and unarmed.

“You never understood that I was afraid for your life, too,” said Bayless. “Not just mine.”

“I did understand that, Jason.”

“I was trying to save my partner from a man with a history of violence and a loaded firearm in his possession.”

“We don’t need to go through it again,” I said.

“But I want to, now that time has given me a chance to hate you less.”

“Okay,” I said. “What happened that day is, I saw a wallet and you saw a gun and tried to save me from it.”

Jason leaned forward, his stone-cut face beveled in the lamplight. “When IA asked your opinion of my judgment, you did not stand by me.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I did not. I saw a terrified man brandishing a wallet. You saw a criminal with a history of violence about to shoot your partner. I can’t change what I saw and neither can you. The only difference is my eyes were better than yours that day.”

He sat back and considered me. “You took my life as I knew it. I tried to protect you. And in so doing became a murderer. A pariah. A despised man. What’s left besides hate?”

Then a long silence in which I sensed in Bayless the stirrings of revenge and dreamed-of violence, long knotted inside.

“I wish it was different, Jason.”

“Those words mean nothing.”

I looked straight across at him. “So how do you like the PI’s life?”

Which is where Jason Bayless and I had both landed. At very close to the same time.

“It pays the bills,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “Mostly.”

“I have no heiress’s fortune to spend.”

I nodded and said nothing.

“Although, Roland, I’m sorry for what happened to her. I felt bad for you, even.”

A moment of respect for Justine and the memory of her. “So what’s this about my old tenant?” I asked.

“I’ve been hired to locate her,” he said. “Her name rang a bell, so I started with the same kind of search a fourth-grader would do for a report. Took me to your helicopter shootout with Briggs Spencer last year. I confirmed a few things with friends that I still have in the department. As you know, among the players on your property that day was tenant Lindsey Rakes, a then-unemployed twenty-nine-year-old female, former U.S. Air Force and divorced mother of one. I can’t help but wonder if she came back your way.”

“She moved back to Las Vegas a month after the shootout with Spencer.”

“Tracersinfo.com told me that much,” he said. “She moved to Vegas, where, according to Clark County Court records, her custody tug-of-war for son John Goff, age nine, continues. Trouble is, she left town last Thursday and I think she might have landed here. Where she knows a few people. Like you. So if you could just tell Lindsey to call me and confirm her whereabouts, then I can get paid and cancel this case and buy my family some neat stuff for Christmas.”

“Who hired you?”

“Jesus, Ford — I can’t tell you that.”

I had a notion. “Goff. Her ex. Paper to serve?”

Jason leaned back in his chair again, his car coat falling open like a gunslinger in a western. Instead of drawing a six-gun, he opened both hands in a show of peaceful refusal to answer my question.

“I thought about going to a county service for Miller, but there wasn’t one,” he said. “Just an indigent remains disposition. They actually call it that. Cremation.”

“I looked into it, too.”

“I’d like to wake up and feel blameless for a day,” said Jason.

A moment of silence, in memory of the seconds that change our lives forever.

“Who hired you to find Lindsey?” I asked again.

Jason shrugged.

“If I knew, I might be able to help you out,” I said.

“But you haven’t seen her in a year and a half. Remember?”

I leaned across the desk toward him. “Jason, there’s some real bad stuff in the air for Lindsey right now. Terrible stuff. And you might be playing right into it.”

“My job is to find her,” he said. “If you don’t help me, maybe you’re playing into it.”

An interesting idea. One I did not like.

He stood and I walked him to the door. Picked a few Oxley posters from the credenza and gave them to Jason.

“What’s with the damned cat anyway?” he asked.

“Something my mom taught me.”

“My mom taught me loyalty until the bitter end,” said Bayless. “She’s Irish.”

“So is mine.”

Joan Taucher started out half a step ahead of me on the Embarcadero, her boots tapping a cadence on the boardwalk. We were southbound in the brisk morning, too early for tourists, under a gray blanket of clouds that looked heavy enough to lie on. A cold Pacific storm from the north was due by noon. I’d had my morning run into the hills, my half-hour alternating the heavy and speed bags in the barn, some sit-ups. Felt clear and ready.

“Thanks for the early call and the pictures,” she said. “I don’t think those images will leave my head anytime soon. Of all the stuff I’ve seen — plane wrecks to crime scenes to autopsies to cartel snuffs — those were the pure worst.”

“They’re stuck in my head, too.”

“Oh, Christ,” said Taucher, stopping and looking at me. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said plane wrecks. I wasn’t thinking.”

Planes and wrecks. My heart beats faster when I hear an older Cessna 182 churning through the sky above. Taucher had no way of knowing that I’d first laid eyes on Justine Timmerman during a cold winter storm like the one about to hit us. At a holiday party in the Grand Hyatt hotel, which was just a few blocks from where we now walked. I looked up at that hotel, a mirrored wedge atop the skyline. Remembered red-haired Justine in her red party dress and the rain lashing the windows of the banquet room.

Taucher reclaimed her half-step lead. “My bedside manner has always sucked,” she said. A gull wheeled and cried and Joan’s boot heels thumped along. “Anyway, I sent your picture of the Bakersfield threat letter to our questioned-documents section. Match. Same writer as Lindsey’s and Voss’s threats. No doubt of that. And speaking of Lindsey’s threat, the original you so heroically salvaged for me — the lab found DMSO on the letter and the envelope.”