Swift Vengeance

22

Samara’s dark look grew darker.

Ticka tocka, ticka tocka.

“How do you know about that?” he asked.

“Anyone with a phone and a little money can find that out.”

Rasha shook his head slightly, then reached out and tapped his fingers on the table. “The party was called ‘Come as Your Own Cliché.’ This was before Nine-Eleven. I wore the knife in its scabbard in plain sight, on a belt, outside of my caftan. The janbiya was a dull family heirloom. I also wore a turban with a big fake diamond and a blue ostrich feather. I grew a crafty little goatee and trimmed my beard down to a thin outline of my jaw. A friend of mine, Anton Webster, came as an Eighteenth Street Crip, dissed me. Called me wooly-headed camel jockey. I drew my knife. He pulled a black plastic squirt gun on me, and I slashed at him. With much playful drama. Our acting was good enough for a call to the campus police from one of the Pi Phi sisters.”

Burt and Timothy had both moved back from their respective ends of the table. Burt moved in bursts, fast and animated. Large Timothy bounced on the balls of his feet, squatting deeply into his shots, easy of swing, head steady. The rhythm of their paddles on the ball slowed, as the ball arched higher across the widening distance, then dropped deep steeply to the table.

“Do you still have the janbiya?” I asked.

“Somewhere.”

“Do you know Kenny Bryce?”

A pause. “No.”

“Marlon Voss?”

“You’re accusing me of something.”

“I asked if you know Marlon Voss.”

“Why?”

“Do you know a man who calls himself Caliphornia? Spelled with a p and an h instead of an f? As in caliph?”

“Is he a singer or a comedian or something?”

“He’s a murderer who uses a knife.”

The dark look again. “Now I understand you. You are another fearful American who thinks every Arab is out to slaughter someone. I am Caliphornia because I own a decorative janbiya that I was dumb enough to take to a fraternity party over twenty years ago.”

Ticka. Burt, a corkscrew and a white tracer.

Tocka. Timothy’s topspin shot dropping like a stone.

I stared at Rasha the same way I used to stare down my opponents in the ring. I wasn’t looking for fear or weakness in him. You won’t find them in a fighter. Uncertainty is the best I ever got, and that, only rarely. Anger was next best because it made people behave stupidly. Rasha Samara stared back, as focused and determined as any opponent I’d ever faced. No hint of fear, but a nice dose of anger.

I threw a combination.

“The worry is he’s sponsored,” I said.

Another baleful stare, then his face relaxed. He smiled and sat back. “Why didn’t you just tell me, Mr. Ford? That I, through my family and its ties to other powerful families in Saudi Arabia, am a sponsor of Caliphornia, a knife-wielding terrorist?”

“I said nothing about terror.”

“I came here hoping to find a woman I think may be in trouble.”

“I’ve agreed to help,” I said.

“Yes, you have,” said Rasha. He squared his copy of the contract before him, gave it a long look, then tore it into quarters. Swept them into a loose pile, facedown. From his jacket pocket he took a small plump envelope, pulled out a hundred-dollar bill, and slipped it under the pile. “This will cover the hour of mine you just wasted.”

I left the bill where it was, but I turned over the top quarter-page of the contract, where we had signed and dated. “Where did you learn your penmanship?” I asked.

“My mother,” he said. “She bought me a calligraphy kit when I was ten. Of course, you know that all Arab knife assassins train in calligraphy.”

Rasha rose, buttoned his suit coat, and nodded to Timothy. The big man let the ball go past him. Burt tossed his paddle to the table and kept his eyes on Timothy, not me.

“I think you’re covering for her,” said Rasha. “I think she’s been here.”

“I heard you were in Bakersfield on Monday,” I said. “And bought yourself a beautiful horse.”

Samara shook his head, his bitter humor spent. “I bought the mare at a Bakersfield auction by proxy. Her name is Clementa. Personally, I was in Bahrain that day.”

Timothy gave his paddle to Burt and they shook hands with some earnestness. I watched the big man and Samara march into the barnyard, Samara a step ahead. I watched him closely, gauging his light-footed gait against the balanced walk of Kenny Bryce’s killer. Captured on a very poor grainy black-and-white video. Similar? Somewhat. And his face, how similar to one I saw last night in the darkness of the vehicle? Enough to count as more circumstantial evidence that Caliphornia was now crossing my property toward his SUV? Maybe.

Burt came to my side, watching the two men board the white Range Rover. “That your cutthroat?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Timothy said his employer has a temper,” said Burt.

“He didn’t quite hold it.”

“We split the first two games and I was up eighteen — fourteen in the third.”

“Good work, Burt.”

“Timothy says Samara was overseas all week. Not in Bakersfield at all.”

“So I heard.”

“I wouldn’t expect a beheader to drive a Range Rover,” Burt said. “Too showy and easy to remember. And they break down every other week.”

We watched the too-showy SUV trundle down the rain-pocked dirt drive toward the gate. A flock of starlings lifted off from a flat tan puddle.

Burt and I collected the breeze-blown contract pieces and covered the Ping-Pong table. I put the hundred-dollar bill into my wallet, wondered if I should mail it to him. I looked again at Samara’s contract signature, picturing the ugly threat that Caliphornia had so beautifully written to Lindsey. I thought of what Samara had said about Lindsey’s beauty and power, and how I must have wanted them for myself.

A few minutes later Burt came from his casita and loaded his golf clubs into the trunk of his car. Perhaps because of his shortness, Burt drives an enormous old Cadillac, a red Coupe deVille convertible with majestic fins, a white interior, and white sidewall tires. He could stretch out and nap in that trunk, no problem.

I watched him drive away, thought of another red convertible that had gone down and up that driveway so many hundreds of times. Until that day in April when it left here and didn’t return. A Porsche Boxster, music blaring, a redhead at the wheel, her hair in a black scarf. That car was still out in the barn, washed and polished and under its cover. But impossible for me to drive or sell.

I got another cup of coffee and sat upstairs in my office, checked my messages. Fielded a worried call from Tammy Bellamy, who had received a text about a gray cat seen walking along Stage Coach Road, not far from the high school. Less than half an hour ago. Tammy asked if I could please go find the cat, and, if it was Oxley, “save” him. I explained that I could not. But I felt the need to apologize and did. Hung up feeling like a heartless son of a bitch.

I did have my reasons. I was just a few hours from my noon rendezvous with Joan Taucher in the Horton Plaza parking lot and our planned journey to Los Angeles. Where we would interview two adult children of slain Doctors Without Borders physician Ibrahim Azmeh. Dr. Ibrahim Azmeh, accidentally blown into eternity by Lindsey’s Headhunters.

No sooner had I forgotten my heartlessness than my friend at the San Diego Sheriff’s Department called with news of the 4Runner’s license plate check. The plate had last belonged to a vehicle totaled in a collision, and had likely ended up in a scrap yard. Salvage operators were required by law to return currently registered plates, but... I thanked him and told him I owed him one.

I sat awhile, contemplating through my western window the pond, the long drive leading down to the gate, the rain-greened hills. Possibly the same flock of starlings that had flown up when Rasha Samara drove past now came back to land around the same puddle.

I saw the black Ford Expedition turn off the road and stop outside my gate. Saw its exhaust lifting slowly in the still cool morning, and a hand reach for the keypad.

I answered the intercom but said nothing.

“Mr. Ford? This is Directing Special Agent Darrel Blevins of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We need just a few minutes of your time. Now.”

My good mood was being shot to hell. First by Rasha Samara, then by Tammy Bellamy, and now by the FBI.

“Badge, please,” I said. “Hold it up to the camera by the speaker button.”

He did, sighing. My security video streams into my house with a one-second delay but is state-of-the-art compared to Kenny Bryce’s.

The gate rolled open and the Expedition surged onto my property in a way that could only be federal. Feds surge. They always surge. Directing Special Agent Darrel Blevins didn’t need no stinking badge.