Swift Vengeance

11

Just a few steps down Main Street was my new downtown office. New to me, at least, as of late last year when I decided I needed a place away from home to meet with clients — attempted murder, gunfire, and justifiable homicide being things best left outside the rancho.

The office is next door to the Dublin Pub, open but quiet at this hour. I could smell the fish and chips, hear the jukebox. I put the old-fashioned key into the old-fashioned door lock and let Jason in. Fallbrook is an old-fashioned town.

The lobby was small and neat — a directory, mail slots for each of the six offices in the building, a small table with a display of silk flowers. Old crate labels hung on the walls, brightly colored images of oranges, sunny groves, smiling young women holding out ripe fruit. And, interspersed with them, a few of my Oxley posters. I straightened the “California Girl” frame.

“Impressive office building,” said Jason.

“It gets better.”

I hit the lights and we climbed the creaking stairs to my second-floor office. The sound of shoes on carpet, then hardwood, a wide landing and three closed doors: Anders Wealth Management, Rick Topp Construction, Ford Investigations.

“I figured you for something more contemporary,” said Jason.

“None of that around here,” I said.

My office is spacious, with a coffered high ceiling and views up and down Main Street. It really is a Main Street, too — in the small-town sense — mom-and-pop shops, a candy store, a barber shop with a spiraled pole outside, a hardware store, a café with a fountain. Even a playhouse and some art galleries. But some modern touches, too — an Internet cafe, a craft brewery, hot yoga. I looked up and down the now dark and quiet street below. Switched on a lamp, set the Oxley posters on the credenza. Pulled over a chair for Jason, then sat behind my desk.

He hadn’t changed much in the last nine years. Same cut-from-stone face, ready eyes, and deep voice. He had always looked like an untalented actor playing a cop. Like he couldn’t quite emote. In the two months we’d spent as partners-in-uniform, I didn’t get to know him well. Five years younger than me, a wife and daughter. Drove an over-pay-grade BMW even back then.

With a shared past like Jason Bayless’s and mine, there is almost no room for small talk. Nine years ago we had lived through a terrible moment together, seen it different ways, and behaved accordingly. Recounted and relived it accordingly. And because of its terribleness it became not a moment at all, but a lifetime.

“Do you still think about it, Roland?”

“Not often,” I said.

“I would do it my way again,” he said.

“I’d do it mine.”

And with that, of course, I was forced to think about it.

In my memory, that three p.m. in Imperial Beach is always clear and precise. December 22 and cold, Deputies Bayless and Ford on their foot beat — specifically, we’re in a dirty alley behind a low-rent strip mall. There, in a patch of sunlight angling down through a gray-black sky, one Titus Miller backpedals away from us in his too-big overcoat and mismatched athletic shoes. One blue and the other red. Titus, homeless and occasionally violent, often high or drunk, sometimes clearly deranged, a man with nothing but his foul-smelling clothes and a bundle of possessions he had lashed to a wheeled cart with plastic newspaper bags tied end to end. Titus, age nineteen, black. Titus, who would smile and cry real tears for the ten dollars you gave him. Titus, cussing us badly and letting go of his cart and backpedaling, throwing open his too-big overcoat with both hands to get at something in his waistband, something hand-sized, dully black but metal-shiny, too, and maybe it was snagged or stuck, very hard to tell in that bright sun.

We both drew down, Jason cursing Titus while I ordered him to freeze, and Titus not freezing, still trying to get that shiny thing out of his dirty layers of clothes.

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.”