Meg Gardiner - The Liar’s Lullaby

Nobody had met Paine, but Keyes and Ivory volunteered as his scouts. Keyes got out of the truck and crossed the street toward the ballpark. Ivory put on a ball cap and followed.

The cap said BLUE EAGLE SECURITY. She was clocked in for work, so she covered her hair, which she dyed as snowy as a swan’s wing. She covered her tattoos with long sleeves. And at the depot, she kept her opinions to herself. She worked in San Fran-freak-show, where whack jobs could parade bare-butt naked, chanting about diversity, but an Aryan woman had to hide her Valkyrie Sisterhood tattoos and apologize for the crime of being born white.

Outside the ballpark, it was a scene. News trucks, reporters with microphones. And police cars lined up for a hundred yards, lights shrill, a bigfoot presence that made her skin creep.

Keyes tapped his watch. “Sixty seconds, max.”

They were on a late run, one of Blue Eagle’s night pickups in the city. The truck’s onboard computer automatically tracked their route. It had logged them taking a detour to the ballpark, and if they loitered there too long, their jobs would be toast.

“Do you care?” Ivory said. “When the fightback comes, these jobs won’t matter.”

“When the fightback comes, I want access to the truck and everything in it. So I stay on the payroll until shots are fired.”

The Blue Eagle uniform shirt stretched across his sloping shoulders. Years in the army, Ivory thought; a decade spent working as a security contractor on behalf of the government, earning three hundred thousand dollars a year, and for what? To get fired. To end up sitting on his butt behind the wheel of a courier truck, wearing that cheap-ass shirt. The “gubmint” had reduced a warrior to a delivery boy.

Ahead, barricades were set up. Behind them people huddled, lighting candles, laying flowers, crying. A TV crew was interviewing a Mexican woman and her little girl. The woman wiped her eyes. “Tasia grew up here—it’s like losing a member of our family. How could an accident like this happen?”

Ivory kept her voice low. “The lie’s taking root.”

Keyes’s face flattened, like a club. “Soon enough we’ll give her something to cry over.”

They kept moving. Being near so many cops gave Ivory the willies. She had a record. She’d been caught patrolling the border. Illegals infested America like lice, but hunt them, take their drugs, and you got called a criminal.

Keyes snapped photos with his phone. “Didn’t I tell you, Frisco is at the heart of the government’s plans?”

Ivory nodded. He certainly had told her San Francisco would be a staging center during the government crackdown.

“Killing Tasia here proves it,” he said.

He sent his photos to Tree of Liberty. Nearby, the little Mexican girl laid a spray of white carnations by the barricade.

“God have mercy on their souls,” Ivory said.

“Mercy, on lice ?”

Keyes eyed her with what felt like disgust. True America, the realm of freedom and power where they lived—in their hearts—was a hard-core place.

“Don’t hurt my feelings. I meant God better, ‘cause we won’t.”

He should know how serious she took it. She risked everything for True America. This job, her whole life in San Francisco, was a front. And if the cops found out, she’d take a hard fall.

Then Keyes put a hand on her shoulder. “The rocket launcher rests right here. I’ll teach you.”

She lifted her chin, thrilled. Around them, gawkers and weepers continued to gather. Cops came out of the ballpark, and a few stragglers who had been at the concert. Some wore bloody clothing. One, silhouetted by the white light of television cameras, was a lumbering figure in fatigues, a— no motherloving way —a Goliath holding a chunk of the turf from the field as a souvenir.

Ivory turned and pulled Keyes toward the truck. “Freak alert. The night crawlers are coming out.”

Keyes didn’t linger. When you drove an armored car for a living, you couldn’t afford to be late to the bank.

ROBERT MCFARLAND OWNS THE COLT FORTY-FIVE?” JO’S HEART rate kicked up. “I’d better see the footage of the shooting.”

“You should. But don’t expect it to clarify anything,” Tang said.

Tang led her to a control room on an upper deck of the ballpark, overlooking the field. One wall was lined with television monitors. Cops and stadium officials filled the room. Below, under the bleached stadium lighting, forensics techs in white bodysuits searched the scene. The medical examiner was preparing to move Tasia’s body to the morgue. A gurney had been brought in and the yellow tarp pulled aside. Against grass churned to dust, Tasia’s clothing stood out, sharp swipes of magenta and black. She looked small, delicate, torn.

Tang asked a tech to run a video. Jo braced herself.

She had seen people die—as a physician, an investigator, and a wife. Death, that radical moment, was a desperately intimate thing to watch. Being of Coptic descent, with a basting of Japanese Buddhism and a thick shellac of Irish Catholic education, Jo believed that death didn’t equate to annihilation. Still, as the video started, she knew she was going to feel like she’d had her bell rung. She slipped her emotional chain mail into place.

The footage began with Searle Lecroix and the band playing the introduction to “Bull’s-eye.” Then the camera swiveled to reveal Tasia on the balcony of the hospitality suite.

Her outfit was a western twist on the Madonna-whore dichotomy: like a barrel-racing champion had taken control of the Mustang Ranch. Yee-haw, by Victoria’s Secret . Her waist harness was clipped on to the zip line. Knowing that the cable was going to collapse gave Jo, as a rock climber, a visceral feeling of dread.

Beneath the thundering music, Jo heard muffled shouting. Tasia was wearing a headset mike. Jo couldn’t make out her words, just a rising tone of indignation—or fear. Inside the suite, the stuntman rattled the doors.

Tasia turned and beckoned to the crowd. The gun flashed in the sunlight. As people surged onto the balcony and surrounded her, stage smoke erupted. She broke into song and aimed the pistol at the stage.

“Holy crap, she’s blowing on the barrel,” Jo said.

She watched, aghast. The music soared. The crowd swarmed around Tasia. CO 2obscured the view.

The roar of the gunshot was sharp and shocking.

Tasia emerged from the roiling smoke, hanging limp from the climbing harness, and slid down the zip line. The gunshot wound was plainly visible, a gory rose blooming on her neck and head.

The camera swerved. The scene turned to panic, falling helicopter debris, collapsing stage scaffolding, people screaming.

Then, amid the chaos, the camera zoomed in on the field. In front of the stage Tasia’s broken form lay on the grass. Beside her knelt Searle Lecroix. Her headset mike amplified his voice above the torrent of noise.

“For the love of God, somebody help her,” he cried.

Jo exhaled. “Stop the video.”

The air seemed to smell of smoke and salt water and the wretched, oily stink of wrecked aircraft. She stared at the screen.

It was impossible to see who had fired the gun.

“Somebody could have taken the pistol from her, or grabbed her hand and squeezed the trigger. Still, three seconds before the shot, Tasia had possession of the weapon,” she said.

She thought about Tasia acting out a high-risk, sexualized game with the Colt .45. Blowing on the barrel was showy, attention-grabbing behavior. Not playful, exactly—more like shtick. And suicides, in the moments before death, tended not to goof around.

“Can I talk to the stunt coordinator?” she said.

“Sure. Guy’s name is Rez Shirazi. Fifteen years experience on feature films.”