T. Parker: Full Measure

The neon red, white, and blue of the Pride Auto Repair sign glowed clearly in the Fallbrook night. Cade’s Bel Air was parked in its usual place along with a light blue Volkswagen Beetle convertible that Ted didn’t recognize. He parked and went to the front door. The blinds were drawn and it was locked but music pulsed. Loud. Through a thin slice of space between the blinds and the window he looked in. Cade, shirtless, his back gleaming with sweat and his pants around his ankles, plunged into the backside of a woman wearing only high heels, her arms braced on the pool table, hair swaying. Cade pulled her hair like a rein and her face came around. Jasmine.

Ted covered his head with his elbows and bashed through the front door in an explosion of shards and slats and blind cords. Jasmine was already scrambling away as he found his balance on the slippery glass and pulled the Glock. Cade looked at the holstered pistol on the floor and Ted shot him twice in his naked ribs, and when Cade spun away screaming, Ted shot him twice more in the back. Cade’s gun spun loose as he crashed facedown on the pool table, blood lurching and arms spread and his anguished screams cutting through the music. Ted shot again but missed and the green felt jerked. He wasn’t seeing right and his ears were roaring. What had just happened? He didn’t know how he’d gotten here, or why he’d come. Instinctively, he strode after the woman into the repair bay and although it was only half-light in the big room he tracked her by her sobbing and the sound of her heels retreating from him on the concrete floor.

“Don’t, Ted. Don’t, please don’t.”

“I can barely hear you.”

“Let me get around you to the door, Ted. Remember me? I’m Jasmine.”

“I don’t remember you.”

“Please don’t kill me.”

“You should go.” He felt the gun, suddenly heavy in his hand, and looked down at it.

“Can I get by you?”

“Go.”

Her pale naked body shook by. He stood for a moment looking at the paisley couch and the reading lamp. They meant something to him, something from his past, but what? When he got back to the lobby the woman had already left through the ruined door. He could see her unlocking the Volkswagen, shaking her head and talking to herself, naked and clutching a handful of clothes to her chest, eyes wide and her face slack-jawed with terror. The wounded man had slid off the table and was now on the floor, curled in on himself, breathing fast. It looked like enough blood for two or three men.

Ted turned off the music and sat down on one of the bar stools. He set the gun on the counter and put his hands over his ears and watched the man on the floor. A moment later headlights came down Oak Street and raked across the still open door with the broken glass around its edges like shark teeth, its blinds snapped and dangling, and the pull cords swaying in the warm breeze.

When the man came through the door everything came back to Ted. A flash. An avalanche. Everything. “Oh, hi, Pat. I messed up pretty bad this time.”

Patrick stepped into Pride Auto. He registered Cade in the lake of blood, Ted and the gun on the counter next to him, the heavy smells of blood and gunpowder and solvent. “I saw a car leaving.”

“Jasmine, the escort. I let her go.”

Patrick called 911. While he spoke to the dispatcher he studied Ted, who slumped at the bar like a common drunk, dreamy and deranged. Patrick knelt over Cade Magnus and he saw the look of death in his eyes — a gaze locked open on the faraway. “You’ve got help coming, Cade. If you can hang in there they can help you. Hang in there. Can you do that?”

Cade coughed a mouthful of blood across the floor and whispered, “Christ...”

“I got mad when I saw him with Jasmine,” said Ted. “Doing that stuff to her. I thought you were my friend, Cade. I introduced you to her, you son of a bitch.”

Patrick put a hand on Magnus’s shoulder, felt the tremble. Taibo would have slammed a vial of morphine into him, eased his way onward. But there was nothing he could tourniquet or do with wounds like this. “If you can hang on just five minutes, Cade.” Magnus said nothing.

“What happened at the concert, Ted? What were you doing so close to the stage, then leaving so fast?”

“I was going to shoot the mayor but I couldn’t. My hand just wouldn’t move.”

“Where’d you get the gun?”

“Open Sights. Marked down. Shooting Evelyn was going to be my big important thing but it didn’t work out.” Patrick watched Ted pick up the gun and heave off the stool and come over. “I liked Jasmine.”

Patrick stood. “What are you going to do now?”

“I know what my big important thing is. Not Evelyn at all. Now I get it. It started a couple of days ago with this woman I know. She told me you have to tell the truth about what you’ve done. Even if it’s bad. She told the police what she’d done.”

“Well, isn’t that great?” said Patrick. Cade Magnus sighed once and shivered hugely and his throat rattled and caught. Patrick knelt and touched his bare bloody shoulder again and felt the buzz of life stop. “Look, Ted. What you did.” A shadow moved over Patrick. He turned his head to see Ted leaning down. Patrick stood and tried to swipe the gun from his brother’s hand but Ted was quick. He backpedaled and braced against the bar for balance, weapon still in hand.

“That isn’t all I did.” Patrick heard sirens and he saw his brother glance in their direction. “Ibrahim Sadal didn’t set the fire. I did. Later I put an accelerant and timer and the Al-Qaeda magazines in the supply closet at the gas station. Then I called Knechtl from a pay phone. I wanted to see it all burn, Pat. I needed to. I did my research and waited for the right weather. I wanted to burn this city down. Even the houses here and the people in those houses. Mayor Anders’s house for sure. And every avocado tree we owned. Most of all I wanted to burn Dad to ashes and watch the wind blow him away one puff at a time every day for the rest of my life. And every time a puff of him went up I would know. I couldn’t ever do much right, Pat. I tried. So I just went with wrong. Big wrong. Important wrong. Of course I messed it up. I was worried about Mom and the dogs and my creatures so I cut back the bushes around the house and barn. My fire never made it downtown. I don’t know why. I set plenty of others. This was the best by far. It’s all written down in a letter under my mattress. Everything. The letter is to Lucinda Smith but you can read it before you send it to her.”

The sirens wailed, closer. Patrick tried to make all of this useful, get it into workable condition, but could not. “Three people died in your fire.”

“Four now total.”

“God damn you, Ted.”

“I love you, Pat. You’re what I wanted to be.”

“Damn you again, then.”

“I’ve been damned my whole life. But now my big important thing is half accomplished. I’m almost done. I’ll be remembered for it. And it will make the world better. Sound good?”

“Okay, Ted. You make the world better now.”

“Do you know what I’m saying?”

Patrick studied his brother’s face for the clues he had missed. Missed for a lifetime. Again and again and again. Even now he didn’t see them. But he thought he understood what Ted meant about making the world better. “You have to mean it.”

“Oh, I mean it. But I want it to come from you. Here.” Ted held out the gun unsteadily. Patrick heard the sirens bearing down, out on Main Street now.

“I won’t do it, Ted.”

“I can’t do it alone.”

“It has to be from you.”

“But is it right?”

“It’s right, Ted. It will matter.”