Little Saigon

Chapter 29

Frye island. Hyla Wept and Edison stormed. Frye could look neither of them in the face. The family doctor, a stout Swede named Nordstrom, filled everyone but Frye with sedatives. Edison called Lansdale and bellowed nonsense. Frye called Minh, Wiggins, and the Newport Beach surf report. To the first two he gave the location of the slaughter. He almost called Cristobel.

Li, still wearing her peasant pajamas, walked into the den and shut the door. Frye could see her through the glass of the French doors, first spitting her tranquilizers into a wastebasket, then taking up the telephone, her face downcast. She made eight calls. Then she motioned Frye in, and they sat next to each other on the sofa. Her eyes were dull as sun-baked glass. She took his hand. “Xuan, too,” she said. “And Nguyen Hy. And even Eddie Vo.”

Frye listened, removed again from himself while Li talked, the names of the dead slamming into him like speeding trucks. Her hands were cold and tight.

“What I wish to do is die,” she said. “But I can’t do that. There is a debt to the living. The first thing one learns in war is that sometimes death is a luxury.”

“Who are Thach’s allies here?”

“He said nothing about them.”

“He had help.”

Li breathed deeply and sat back. “Communist agents, buried deep in the life of Little Saigon. I don’t know who they are. They have been very careful over the years.”

“What about Dien?”

“I suspected him for a long time. It is possible. But it’s possible too that he is simply a profiteer, an aging thief.”

“Someone is going to come for that ransom money.”

“You should leave it here.”

“Then they’ll come here to get it, I don’t want those people in my mother’s house.”

“That much cash is like a magnet. You will attract them.”

Frye realized fully that the suitcases in the trunk of his car were a portable curse, a beacon for the killers who had helped Thach plan his mission. It’s their payment, he thought: Thach didn’t do it for profit, not even for two million bucks.

Li told him what had happened in the last six days — being taken underground at the Dream Reader, coming up blindfolded somewhere else, a two-hour ride in the trunk of a car with ropes and a gag cutting into her flesh, then the endless days of Thach’s interrogation, the dirt and thirst in the closet where they kept her.

“Why didn’t you recognize him until tonight?”

“I never really saw him,” she said. “He was always in partial darkness, or wearing sunglasses. The light was painful to his eyes. It was so strange. He began by questioning me about the resistance positions, but he didn’t really seem to care. He gave up so easily. At the time I thought I was wearing him down, but now I know that Kim would be supplying him with all this information soon. So he talked of Saigon and An Cat, and prodded me into memories. He was very curious about Lam and Bennett and me. He wanted to know every detail of the meetings. Most of all, he wanted to know how I felt about the two men. Who I loved more, and why, and how I came to my decision to go to Bennett. More than once, I wondered if this man could be Lam. But it seemed impossible. For days I sat there on the stool in the dark, remembering.”

Li squeezed his hand and looked up with her dull eyes. “I acted as I believed, Chuck. And if Bennett told me a lie to kill my love of Lam, then it was a lie that I believed even before he spoke it.”

Then Li hugged herself and bowed over. She began to sway gently. Frye watched the tears hit the black cotton of her pants. From across the living room, Edison and Hyla looked in through the French doors.

Frye took a long shower, then sat with his mother and father and Li for a while. No one said anything. An hour later, he walked out to the dock. The night was cool now and a thin fog hovered over the water. The house lights across the bay shone through, magnified, dulled. Hyla’s keening issued from the bedroom.

He could feel his brother inside himself, tangible, actual. He could remember it all perfectly, every look and every word that Bennett had given him. I can feel you, Benny, he thought, I can almost see you. Like right there, just fifty yards off the dock here when we caught that blue shark and tried to stuff it with newspaper. When we made those wings out of wood and Mom’s dress and you tried them out from the roof and broke your ankles. The way you looked when you were mad, eyes all big and the pupils little and, you fucker, you’d heave me down and stuff sand in my mouth or hit me in the stomach so hard I’d gasp for breath while you laughed and gasped along with me. The way you’d get even madder if any other kid but you tried to do that to me. I remember the way you looked in that Little League uniform, the way you got the socks to stay up and look like the pros, the way you batted like Yasztremski. The way you pitched the playoff game with your left arm in a cast and still got a three-hitter against Orange. I remember the way you looked for the proms, with those stupid sideburns halfway down to your chin. I remember the way you rode that big old board in storm surf and got your picture in Surfer magazine. I remember the way you went and fought. They didn’t even have to draft you. I remember the way you stood up for me at my wedding, even though you didn’t have much left to stand on. I see now that you lost more than your legs over there, you lost part of your heart too, and that’s the wound that wouldn’t heal, that’s what was hardest to live without. I can see how you tried. And I see now the way you never gave up trying to make it all mean something, the way you just plain wouldn’t stop until there was nothing left, and that’s what it came down to, brother, nothing left of you at all.

He tried to gather his thoughts, piece together the collusion that had sent Bennett alone to his death. Surely, thought Frye, Burns sat on the information. As surely as Toibin and Michelsen were called off at the eleventh hour. The Feds are probably up in Mojave right now, clearing out the bodies, tidying up the scene. They’ll leave a Vietnamese or two, drum up some identification for them, and make it look like a ransom drop gone wrong. Thach’s body will disappear forever. And they’ll sit hard on me and Li to keep our mouths shut. How hard?

Five minutes later, the white belly of a chopper lowered from the darkness to the helipad. Frye watched Special Agent Wiggins and Senator Lansdale duck the blades and hurry toward the house. Not long after that, the two men, with Li in tow, headed for the cottage. Wiggins broke away and headed toward Frye.

He stood on the dock, just a few feet away. “We’re awfully sorry about Bennett,” he said.

“I’ll bet you are.”

“Chuck, we’d like to talk to you now. First you alone, then Li, then the two of you together. It’s very important.”

Frye stood up and tried to walk past him. Wiggins caught his arm. “I can put you under protective arrest, if I have to.”

“Please don’t.” Frye turned and hit Wiggins as hard as he could, an uppercut just under the sternum. The punch started down in his toes. He was amazed how far his fist went in. The special agent huffed and his hands flew out, beating like the wings of a landing bird as he fell backward into the water.

Frye went to the cottage, peered through a window and saw Lansdale explaining something to Li, his hands out for emphasis, an imploring look on his face. She glanced up at Frye, and he was sure she was about to break down.

Back in the main house, he found Edison lurking near a window, trying to see into the cottage. He looked at Frye forlornly.

“They’re hurting Li, Pop. Why don’t you throw them off your property? Or at least sit in so you can hear the lies they’ll want her to tell about your son.”

Edison hesitated, then breathed deeply, slammed open the door, and marched across the lawn toward his cottage. The dogs started yapping. Wiggins slogged to intercept him, but Edison just bellowed and walked past. Frye had never loved his father so much in all his life.

The cave-house was dark and empty.

Your money is filthy to me... I demanded it satisfy my allies in this campaign.

Frye thought: What I have to do now is deal with the final mover and shaker. He’ll come for the ransom cash. Thach didn’t want it, but he tried to collect it for his partner. Now I’ve got it, safe in the cave beside a box of Christmas ornaments. And anyone who would orchestrate all this will certainly come for the payoff. Why didn’t I know that it was Dien, all along? The connections here, and in Vietnam. The greed. The tape of DeCord. The showpiece shooting at the Wind, to move suspicion from him. The millions of dollars he leeched from his believers, so he could sink them into the Laguna Paradiso. Organizing the terror of his own city, to drum up more resistance, raise more money. And the final scam: Help Thach kidnap Li, then cash out. When his money isn’t at the airstrip, he’ll know something went wrong. When he finds out I’m alive, he’ll come.

It doesn’t matter, he thought. I’ll be ready.

Frye checked the time on the wall clock, then put a blank tape into his cassette recorder and slid it under a newspaper on the coffee table. He checked the clip in the .45 that Bennett had given him, jacked a round into the chamber, and flicked off the safety. Carefully, he placed it under the couch cushion, handle out.

He got his old shotgun from under the bed, took it outside and sawed off most of the barrel with a hacksaw he used to cut out surfboards. He removed the plug, pushed one round into the ejection port, then four more into the magazine. He took it back to the cave and placed it in the box of Christmas stuff. The two suitcases sat behind the box.

He wandered. He checked his Grow-Bug: it was up to five inches now. He made coffee, took a cup back to the sofa, sat down, and waited.

It was one of those nights when you hear everything, whether you want to or not: the electricity buzzing in the power lines outside, the individual swish of each car on the road below, the ticking of the clock that you never once heard tick in the five years it’s been there. He breathed deeply but it didn’t do any good.

I’m safer here than anywhere else, he thought. Except the island, and I won’t have them coming onto the island for the money. I’m on my own ground. There’s no time to bring Donnell here, and Pop needs Arbuckle. Minh, if I could even trust him, would be out of jurisdiction. And I wouldn’t believe the Feds if they said hello.

Why not stay with the Laguna cops, let Dien come and go, and find no one here and his ransom money gone? I’ll tell you why, because I’m past the point of being a good citizen. Was never cut out for it anyway, Because it’s time and evidence and lawyers and courts and plea bargains and reduced sentences and early paroles and what I truly feel the need for here is some tangible satisfaction.

He was sitting on the couch with a fresh cup when he heard the car coming up his driveway, saw the headlights slide against the walls, then die. Outside, an engine shut off, a door opened and closed. Exactly twenty-three minutes from the time I got here, he saw: he must have been waiting on the Canyon Road. Was it Wiggins who tipped him, or “Burns”? Does it matter? With a shaking hand he found the tape recorder and switched it on. He rearranged the newspapers. He touched the handle of the .45, concealed well within the cushion of the couch. Footsteps. A knock.

“Door’s open.”

To Frye’s disbelief, it was Burke Parsons who peered in, looked around, and shut the door behind him. He was tan and fit, with a white shirt open to his chest, a blue blazer and a pair of expensive jeans. “Hello, Chuck. My money was gone, and so were you, so I figured something went wrong. I thought you’d be here sooner.”

Frye just stared at Burke. “I was with Mom and Dad.”

Burke walked slowly toward him, hands out a little, palms up, an innocent man. “That must have been real hard.”

“Worst day of my life, Burke.”

Parsons stood beside the chair across from him. “You’re awfully cool right now, Chuck. Where’s the gun?”

“No guns.”

Burke pulled a big automatic from his coat pocket and leveled it at Frye’s chest. “Don’t mind if I have a quick look, do you?”

“Go right ahead.”

Parsons waved him up. Frye stood while Burke patted him down, twice. “All I can say is I’m about done with you Fryes. Not that it hasn’t been a pleasure all along. What I need from you is my ransom money and I’ll just be on my way.”

Burke stepped back and looked at Frye. For a moment he stood there, and Frye could see that he was listening, watching, smelling, sensing. His brow furrowed. “Something’s wrong here, Chuck. I just know it.”

Burke smiled, kept the pistol aimed at Frye while he bent over and ran his hand under the couch cushion.

On his second pass, he brought out Bennett’s .45. “Well what do you know, Chuck.”

Frye sat down.

“Now, you have my money?”

“What money?”

Parsons studied him again, his face darkening. “Something’s still wrong, Chuck. What is it? You ask too many questions, and you ask them too fast. Do I smell a tape recorder? Isn’t that what I should expect from a reporter type?”

He leaned over the coffee table and poked through the mess of newspapers with the tip of his gun. He smiled, flipped the papers off the machine, pushed the stop button, then the eject switch. He pocketed the tape. “You’re not exactly bright sometimes, Chuck. But I gotta hand it to you for perseverance.”

Where’s that feeling now, Frye wondered, the one I had down in Burke’s basement when I thought I could kill him?

All he felt was numb.

“Chuck, what I really want out of this is my money. You do have my money, don’t you?”

Frye nodded.

“When Thach’s men didn’t deliver, I just knew you were the reason, Chuck. You’ve got a helluva talent for getting in my way. Of course, I can’t have you telling what happened, so I’m in a tough position here. Basically, I have to kill you, ‘less I can think of some reasonable alternative.”

“You set this whole thing up?”

“Me and old Thach, or Huong Lam, or whatever the fuck he called himself.”

“Dien?”

“Naw. Dien and me just do business. He wasn’t in on the kidnapping. Hell, he almost stopped it that night at the Wind, didn’t he?”

“Why’d you do it?”

Burke sat down, placed the gun on the coffee table in front of him. “Why not’s a better question. It was one of those opportunities that just fall in your lap. See, Thach and Lucia talked on one of her early trips to the ‘Nam. He told her the story of his big historic tank battle, how he got his face shot off and still saved his company. When she got to know him a little better, and he told what really happened, about Huong Lam, the whole deal. Those gooks trust my sister, Chuck, I don’t know what it is about her. Lucia told me and I thought: Bingo. I know that guy. So I got to thinking, sent word to him through Lucia, and we started communicating. He remembered me. He remembered what a dipshit I always thought Bennett was. He’d already heard Li on the Secret Radio, and he was burning to nail Bennett and his pipeline. He already had Kim in his pocket. It was slow, but over time, it got clear what we could do with a little... creativity. Thach got a little more creative than I did, though, that’s for sure. Original plan was to off your brother and Li, but Thach decided he wanted to take them back with him. I told him it wouldn’t work, but by that time I’d made up my mind to grease him anyhow. For my part, hell, it was just a way to make my ransom money and get Bennett out of Lucia’s way.”

“Out of the way?”

“Well, Hanoi sure wasn’t gonna deal for the POWs with some legless American shipping guns over, now were they? Early on, they told Lucia that one condition of release was to stop the Secret Army. That’s why she talked to Thach in the first place — because he was the counter-terrorism pro. And, of course, your pig-head brother wouldn’t stop, even when DeCord cut off his government scholarship. So I said to myself, self, you can help Thach raise some hell over here, make a big pile of money, and do your patriotic duty to get those POWs home, if you stick up Bennett and wreck his pipeline. After that, it was just a matter of planning it all out.”

“So you used the Dark Men and framed Eddie?”

“Sho’nuff. They’re young and violent. We knew Minh would suspect Vo, and when he ducked out of the Wind, it didn’t help the kid any. When the FBI shot him, that was great good luck. We’d planned all along to plant the evidence in his house. Perfect. All we needed from Vo was a little time to make Bennett sweat — that was one of Thach’s ideas. And, of course, to get the ransom stuff set up proper. I put on a mustache and dressed like a gigolo to do business as Lawrence.”

Burke picked up his pistol, studied it with a philosophical air, put it back down. “Chuck, the times they are a-changin’. Uncle Sam and Hanoi’ll be in bed together before you know it — POWs out, diplomatic thaw, the same old story. That’s gonna happen soon enough, you know. But we got thousands of refugees here, burning up ‘cause they got no homeland left. We got guys like Benny who still just can’t believe the United States couldn’t win a war. We got enough free-floating residual hatred these days to start up our own hell. That’s all energy, Chuck, needing to be channeled. In just a few short months, it’ll be gone. The war will really be over. Well, I saw a chance to make a killing while the nerves were still raw, and I took it.”

Frye could feel the rage gathering, rising up inside himself. It seemed to be coming from Burke, some psychic osmosis. Keep feeding it, he thought: it feels good. “You’d help Thach kill Bennett and Xuan and Li. You let him bomb Nguyen Hy and half a dozen innocent people. What kind of a man are you?”

“I’m a good man, Chuck. A patriot. Of course, I’d have killed Thach before he got a chance to go back home.”

“Why kill your partner?”

Burke looked at Frye as if he were a fool. “To make sure the POWs get back! Uncle Sam isn’t going to deal with Hanoi while one of their colonels is running amok over here, any more than Hanoi’s going to set POWs free while Bennett was running guns. Talk about a situation that needed fixing. It was like turning loose the dogs to eat the cats, then shootin’ the dogs. And I am a patriot, Chuck. DeCord couldn’t stop the pipeline without killing your brother, and the CIA may be low, but they’re not that low. Besides, Benny had DeCord on tape, making payments. And the FBI couldn’t find Thach without help, so Burke Parsons came to the rescue.”

“Our government knew Thach was here?”

“As of about two days ago. A select few knew it. At first, everyone thought Thach was quarantined in Hanoi for his political trouble. He was. Then he disappeared. Hanoi stalled a few days to figure out where he’d gone, but when Li got taken and Xuan’s head rolled, they knew damn well where he’d gone. They didn’t want that maniac on the loose. See, Hanoi’s going to collect close to two million bucks for each POW they let go. That’s one of those diplomatic conditions Lucia hasn’t discussed with the American people. Hanoi loves those dollars. So about eighteen hours ago, they let it be known that Thach was gone and probably here. I told DeCord I could find Thach faster than he could. I suppose I left him with the idea that I’d grease him fast and keep it quiet.”

“What was in it for you?”

“I got rid of a murderous Commie bastard for one thing. I got three hundred grand ‘operational expenses’ coming from the agency. And I closed down the Secret Army once and for all. Actually, Bennett did most of it for me. But I’m the hero, Chuck!” Burke grinned, then rotated his head quickly, seeming to assess everything in the apartment in one glance.

“If you knew where Thach was, why didn’t DeCord just throw your ass in jail?”

Parsons shrugged, smiled. “Because I played it cool, Chuck. I never told him I knew where Thach was. I said I’d find out what I could with my connections in Little Saigon. But mainly I just took a page from your brother’s book and blackmailed ‘em. I showed DeCord the tape of him paying Nguyen. He couldn’t touch me. Still can’t. Why should he? Thach is dead, the Secret Army’s wiped out and the POWs can come home. I’m a good guy, Chuck. I made this country a better place to live.”

“DeCord got the administration to call off the FBI and just let Bennett walk into a trap at the airstrip?”

Burke’s brow furrowed. “That’s what I told him would work best. If he let Thach take out Bennett, then I take out Thach, we could keep it all real quiet. No cops. Minimum Feds. No reporters. No nothing. Couple of bureau gophers already planted IDs on Thach’s guys. Then they’ll set the place on fire. When it’s all said and done, Bennett got shot trying to ransom his wife from slant gangsters. Press will love it. Clean. Look how right I was.”

Parsons’s eyes narrowed. “You do have my money, don’t you, Chuck?”

“I’ve got it.”

Parsons smiled.

“What about me, Burke?”

Burke leaned forward, arching an eyebrow. “Chuck, I got to admit, I’ve never seen anybody nosy, stubborn, dumb, and clever as you. If you hadn’t written that crap about my fighter, I’d have left you alone. But I’m kinda sensitive about people snoopin’ around Elite. So I hired Cristobel for a little kiss and tell. Just in case you got motivated and started poking around Little Saigon when we bagged Li — like you poked around my business. Crissy kept me posted on what you were doing, and everything was fine. But then you trail Bennett to the airstrip, take the money, and come home with it. Jesus, boy, don’t you ever just give up and quit? I tried to cover every angle, Chuck. I’ve been working on this for three years, so no expense was too great. Now you can see why that two million ransom is only what I’ve earned.”

“And you’ve been playing up to my father and brother for three years, getting your foot in the Paradiso.”

“Once Lucia tumbled with Edison, we couldn’t lose. Your old man rolled her in the hay a couple of times and thought she was the perfect girl next door. Horny old goat. Anyway, it was three years of hard work, so you can see what that two million means to me. You know something, it’s the old-money people like you Fryes that sucked the life out of this country. Now it’s a new ballgame. People like me who came from dirt-poor nothing are going to raise this country back up to where she was. Me and Lucia never had any oil money. We had to scrape together the rent. That ain’t right, salt of the earth folks like us struggling through life while the government helps all these ‘disadvantaged’ types. Mess with me, and you’ll get disadvantaged real quick. Fuckin’ Vietnamese, anyway. This isn’t their country. This is my country. All men were created equal, but a lot’s changed since then.”

Frye regarded Burke’s dark eyes, his curly brown hair, white even teeth. “I’m trying to figure out how a man like you can do what he does.”

Burke’s face went matter-of-fact. “I just do what I gotta do, Chuck, same as anyone else. I work on a bigger scale, is all.”

Frye smiled, wondering if Burke could see the hatred behind it. His heart was racing now. “Count the bodies, Burke. There’s the kidnapper from the Wind, two Dark Men, Xuan, Eddied Hy, Thach, Bennett. There’s a hundred-plus freedom fighters in Vietnam and the network. You killed all those people just for a resort and a bunch of money. How do you shave that face in the morning?”

Parsons was frowning, shaking his head like Edison used to do: Dumb kid, won’t you ever understand? “I told you once, Chuck, back there at my target range. I plain old don’t care about some things that other folks make such a big deal about. I have no opinions at all about killing people. Far as my face goes and shaving it, well, hell, I like my face.”

Parsons picked up the gun with one hand and reached into his pocket with the other. He screwed on a silencer and stood. “Let’s get the money now, Chuck. Time for me to be rollin’ down the road.”

Frye worked himself up from the couch. He expected his legs to be heavy and useless, but they felt strong and ready. He could imagine where the shotgun was, precisely where he had positioned it, and he could see, as clearly as he’d ever seen anything, what he would do with it. He could hear every movement, smell every smell. His eyes seemed to gather in details he’d never noticed. He looked at Burke, thinking: Your ass is mine. “Money’s in the cave.”

Parsons smiled, looked quickly around again, then moved to Frye. “You’re a big strong boy, aren’t you, Chuck? You ought to relax a little.”

Frye never saw the pistol move, he just felt the bony crunch as it hit the side of his head. He knew he was on his knees. He saw the floor moving, rectangles of hardwood floating, mixing, reforming.

Parsons hit him again. The next thing he knew, Burke had yanked him up by the shirt collar. Frye felt himself swaying, trying to keep his legs under him.

“I don’t like all this quiet.” Frye watched him push one of Li’s tapes into the little portable player and turn the volume up. He waved the pistol toward the bedroom. “You first, Chuck. Move quick, I’ll shoot you right between the shoulder blades.”

Frye stumbled into the bedroom. He braced himself against the doorjamb, stopped, looked back at Burke. There were three or four of him, all moving in perfect unison. They waved guns at him.

Frye’s heart started roaring now, sending tidal waves into his ears. He moved into the cave. The light from the bedroom was weak. “Back there,” he heard himself say, “in that box.”

Parsons looked hard at him. “You get it out, Chuck. You got so many tricks here tonight, I plum don’t trust you no more.”

For some reason, Frye thought this was perfect. Then he remembered the.12-gauge he’d hidden there. Yes, he thought, this is going according to plan. When he took his next step, Parsons caught him by his shirt.

“You moved too fast, Chuck. That changed my mind. I think I’ll just fetch it myself.”

“It’s booby-trapped.”

“Don’t expect me to believe that now, do you?”

“It’s not here. It’s somewhere else.”

“Getting desperate, Chuck? Don’t do that. It’s unbecoming. Well, this is it. Head or heart? Nobody’s gonna ever find your body, ‘cept the sharks, so I’d vote head.”

Frye turned to face him. “The money’s at the Mega-Shop.”

“The money’s either on Frye Island or right here. If it’s on the island, I’ll deal with that. But either way, you’re gonna be dead in less than two seconds.”

Burke sighed.

Frye pivoted and lunged toward the box.

The pistol went off, louder and from a slightly different direction than Frye expected. He waited for the rip of pain, but it didn’t come. Then Parsons tripped clumsily, like a drunk man. The gun spilled from his hand as he caught himself on all fours. “Shit,” he muttered.

Cristobel stepped into the cave from the bedroom, her small automatic held out. Frye kicked Burke’s weapon away, then pulled the shotgun from the box.

Parsons worked himself up from the floor unsteadily, hands pressed against his stomach, blood running over his fingers. His hair was tousled, his eyes dim, his skin gray. He looked like a man who just woke up. He considered Cristobel, first with irritation, then disappointment. He stared at Frye and offered a wouldn’t-you-know-it shake of the head. “What a dumb-ass way to lose this one,” he said quietly. “That stupid bitch.”

He wobbled, reached into his jacket, and had a derringer halfway out when Frye shot him as close to dead-center as he could get, which from that distance was close indeed. Parsons went everywhere, but most of him slammed into the cave wall and crumpled into a heap. The air drizzled warmly.

Frye jacked another round into the chamber and walked to Cristobel.

She backed out, eyes wide, face pale. She dropped the pistol. Frye looked at her, and she looked back with an expression of fear and disgust almost as deep as his own. Her voice was quiet, sickened. “Everything I told you was a lie.”

Frye turned off the music. Cristobel went into the bathroom. When she came out, she leaned against the living room wall and stared at him. She looked white as the paint. “Burke used me to watch you. I didn’t know why, not at first. When things got clear, it was too late. The rape story was just to put you off, because I had no intention of making love to you.”

“Why? Money?”

She shook her head. “My brother didn’t die over in Vietnam, Chuck. Not officially. He was just missing. Burke found out he was alive. He played me a tape of Mike talking to Lucia. Said he could get Lucia to spring Mike first, when Hanoi started letting them come home. When I started getting scared, he also said she could get Hanoi to leave him in prison until he died. I did what he wanted.”

Frye looked into her dead brown eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But I couldn’t let him get away with this. I’m so fucking sorry. I’d have told you sooner, but I was afraid of what he’d do to me. I know you saw through me—” Her tears ran fast, but she still looked straight at him. “I was so glad you saw through me, Chuck, but I wasn’t going to crack. I just wasn’t. He had me fooled a while. Then real scared. I didn’t know what he’d do. Until I realized he was going to kill you, Mike came first. Everything I did was for my brother. Everything except when I made love to you.”

She cried silently as she looked at Frye. Slowly, by sheer force of will, Cristobel recomposed herself. “I did that for me. Funny part is, I’d fallen in love with you. I lay in bed that night knowing I’m in love with a man I’m cheating on and lying to and setting up for God knows what. I’d never treated a person worse than I treated you. It doesn’t mean anything now. It means less than anything.”

She turned, walked toward the door, stopped. “Tell the cops I did it, I don’t care. I’m actually proud I shot that sonofabitch. I had a lot to live for a couple of days ago. Right now, all I want is to see Mike again.” She looked down for a long moment, as if in prayer. When she looked back up at him, Frye saw how far gone she really was. “I’d get something on that head of yours, it’s bleeding an awful lot.”

“Stay.”

“I’m sorry, Chuck. You’re a pretty good man.”

Frye watched her go — a single body moving down a dark tunnel, surrounded on all sides by relentless steel — no exits, no yields, no turns, no options, no comebacks, no light at the end of it... just footsteps, golden hair, echoes.

He went back to the cave and dug Burke’s house keys from his sopping pocket.

Then he carried the shotgun to his car, placed it on the seat beside him, and drove to Lucia’s house.