T. Parker - Full Measure

“What did I do?”

“I don’t want your brother here. I don’t want the DHS or FBI here. I don’t want you here. You’re not worth it.”

“Account how, Cade?”

Cade looked like he was about to say something, then he slammed the door. Ted looked up at the neon sign of the blue Model T doing the wheelie, throwing the red flames. The sign was turned off but the sunlight played through the tubes and brought the colors to life. Ted gathered himself and stood. His knife wounds throbbed and he wondered if they were leaking. He checked the spider in the box and she looked hunched and afraid. He set the box on the seat of his truck and put a ball cap over it to give her some shade and peace. Standing by the open truck door he lifted his shirt and saw the pink discharge soaking through the dressings.

He drove out to Lucinda’s condo on the golf course and parked well away from her unit but with a good view of it. He looked at the security screen door and the curtained windows, and he wondered where her potted plants and flowers had gone. He could feel her consuming pain from here, he thought, and he wondered again what was gnawing away at Lucinda’s soul.

After an uneventful half hour he drove out to the stables on east Mission in hope of spotting Dora. He cruised through the parking lot, looking down on the riding arenas and he saw equestrians and their mounts but Dora was not among them. He went back downtown and walked past Gulliver’s Travels and waved at Mary at her desk but didn’t stop. He ate lunch at the Irish pub and overtipped the friendly waitress. He got his hair trimmed at California Cuts and overtipped the stylist, too. At the salon desk he saw Cruzela Storm concert tickets on sale. He read the flyer and pursed his lips: Fallbrook clearly didn’t need lighted crosswalks, but Cruzela Storm made crazy good music. The tickets were modestly priced at $30. He felt his brain battling his heart and his heart won out. He bought two. He drove out to Bonsall and saw a movie about a superhero who gets the girl, then drove back to Fallbrook to hit the GasPro for a fill-up and a wash.

It was nearly five by then, and the traffic was heavy leaving Pendleton and Mission was buzzing with cars. He pulled in to the gas station and saw Ibrahim Sadal out restocking the paper towels in one of the service islands. Ibrahim was a big man and he did his work quickly and efficiently, and he had to, what with half a dozen cars taking on fuel and customers heading inside to pay and buy snacks and drinks and smokes. Evelyn’s rejection had made Ted angry. Knechtl’s interrogation had left him dazed. Cade’s dismissal had reignited his anger, but now all he felt was betrayed. By everyone. His feet hurt.

He pulled up to pump two, got out, and waved. Ibrahim recognized him and waved too, then hustled back into the mini-mart. Ted got the gas going and leaned against his truck. The line at the car wash was three cars now, which was quite a wait. He saw Ibrahim run from the store into the supply room of the car wash, come out with a new window washer, charging over and handing it to the man at pump seven. Then he sprinted back inside the mini-mart. The door to the supply room had banged when Ibrahim shut it but now Ted watched it slowly swing open. He saw a pail on wheels and a jumbo flat of paper towels and a bucket of what looked like new window washers. Someone could walk right off with those, he thought. When the nozzle clanked off Ted slapped it back in place and collected his receipt for the wash.

Monday morning Patrick stood on the front porch of Iris’s wounded bungalow. She was one day gone but he knocked anyway. She had not returned his calls. But he had seen where she hid her extra house key and now he guiltily fished it from under a flower pot and let himself in. He closed the door behind him, feeling like a stalker.

Inside, the casualties were worse than he’d thought, though he wasn’t surprised that five jarheads and four women could cause this much destruction in a few short minutes. The dining room was the worst, especially the once-beautiful china cabinet that now stood upright again, but with its glass gone and shelves dashed loose and the frame badly cracked. Its shattered treasures had been swept into a hillock in the middle of the gouged and lacerated hardwood floor. The women, with gallows humor, had set a decorative stainless steel crucifix atop the mound. The dining-room walls were scraped and dinged. The dining-room chair Patrick had used on Grier lay on its side, two back rails broken clean in half.

He heard the tapping on the front door. When he opened it Salimony and Messina and another man trailed in with the stealthy lightness of men on patrol. They followed him into the dining room. Salimony looked at Patrick solemnly, then touched the pile of ceramic and crystal shards with the toe of his running shoe. “Wow.”

Messina, stitches above his eye and mouth, stared swollen-lipped at the aerial photograph of Iris’s family’s farm, which looked as if it had come through a bombing, the glass radiating fissures from a ragged central hole, the photo torn, the frame propped against the wall.

“Can you fix the cabinet?” asked Patrick.

Private First Class Albert Taibo, an alleged master woodworker from Los Mochis, Mexico, and medic to Patrick’s Three-Five platoon, touched the splintered frame of the cabinet with his fingertip. He walked around the cabinet, twice. Albert was a stocky blue-eyed blond who looked more Irish than Mexican. “How long would I have?” he asked.

“Five days,” said Patrick. “It all has to be done before she gets back on Saturday. Everything.”

“Whew,” said Taibo. “She’ll be able to tell the cabinet’s been worked on.”

“How will it look?”

“It will look good. But Patrick, this is going to cost some money. Just the materials will run you a grand. If I charged my usual that would be another thousand but I’ll do it for free.”

“In five days.”

“That’s only if I can get the birdseye maple and good oak. Which means I should get to the builders’ supply like right now.”

“You need to fix the floor, too,” said Patrick. “All these scrapes and cuts. It has to look like it did before. And also that chair I broke on Grier’s head.”

“You gotta hire floor and furniture guys to do that, Pat. I can’t work that fast. And, sorry, but I’ll need the materials money up front. I’ve got almost nothing.”

Patrick pulled the wad of tip money from his pocket and handed it to Taibo. “That’s five hundred fifty-four bucks. Buy what you need to get started. I’ll have the rest by the end of the day.”

“Gonna rob a bank?” asked Messina. He took out his wallet and gave Taibo a twenty.

“Maybe just sell his truck,” said Salimony, handing Patrick all twelve dollars from his wallet.

Patrick got the Fallbrook phone book from the kitchen counter and took it outside. The backyard looked idyllic compared to inside, nothing smashed or broken, the picnic benches still arranged for the six-across sunset photo taken by Natalie. In his memory Patrick returned to that wonderful sunlit moment just a few hours ago, and to Iris, and his heart sank with the weight of what he’d done. The sunlight was far different, now the sky had a flinty look to it, the kind of distant icy whiteness that his father had told him meant a storm.

He called the glass store and the art framers and the flooring people and painters, and set up times for them to come out, promising cash for priority scheduling. He called and got a price on a comparable big-screen TV at a big-box store in Oceanside: another $589 plus $179 for the DVD player. Back inside he wrote down a list of broken things, guessing that some would be pricey to replace and some impossible. Next he called Kevin Pangborn down in La Jolla and explained his situation.