Swift Vengeance

45

Christmas day, Tuesday, bright and blustery. Our reign of terror over. The atmospheric river had hit us just a few hours after Caliphornia and Kalima, bringing four inches of cold, hard rain to rinse off our bloody world.

Everyone on the patio had been hit with mini-bomb shrapnel — carpet tacks again. Salvano had caught shrapnel near his left eye, but no ocular damage. I’d caught my share — one high up on my thick skull, two in my left shoulder, two in the butt, and two in the thigh. First came the delight of having the jagged pieces pulled out, then nine stitches. A haze of painkillers. For three days after the blast I felt like I’d fought a bear. Then the healing itch took over.

All of us had still been turned toward Kalima when the bomb exploded, and our back-side armor had done its job. In some cosmically inscrutable way, Kalima — in killing Joan — had saved us others from worse damage or death. And left Caliphornia to bear the brunt of their own creation.

Then, suddenly and almost surreally, there were no more hospitals, doctors, needles, or stitches. No more detectives, reporters, well-wishers. Nothing but our wounds and our freedom.

And inside me, silence.

Now Lindsey was packing, with help from her son, John, and ex-husband, Brandon. She had caught shrapnel in her arms and legs, including one tack that had gone through the middle of her left hand and would probably leave some “minor” nerve damage. The hand was still thickly wrapped, though she was already deploying it for light duty. Her front door was open and her car pulled up close, trunk open.

Zeno lay smack in the middle of her living room, considering me from within his white plastic cone. It was tied at his neck by a strip of gauze. A monster in a bonnet. He’d cut his leg jumping through the casita window and taken his share of shrapnel, too. No worries, by his expression. I helped Lindsey load up the Mustang, not a roomy car to begin with, and I saw that she had tucked a serape over the backseat, most of which would be claimed by Zeno.

Lindsey took Johnny and Brandon down to the dock. She’d gotten her son a remote-controlled sailboat that he was eager to launch. He was a slender boy, and not tall yet, given his parents’ height. Brandon was well over six feet, and Lindsey just under. In the mother’s and son’s postures, I saw affection and reserve, hope and wariness. I was proud of Lindsey for taking on her demons, one by one. She was beating them back. I saw in Johnny a gentleness that would let him forgive his mother for whatever excesses she’d shown him. Brandon? Hard to say. He looked angry, while Lindsey appeared to be on the humble. They both had plenty to let go.

I sat in one of the Adirondack chairs on her front porch, in the sun, which felt good on this brisk day. Heard a grunt, then the slap of paws on floor tile inside. Zeno came from the casita and dropped his brindled gray bulk down in front of me. Head up and alert. He watched Lindsey for a moment, then threw down his head, cone be damned, and rolled onto his back. There he lay, at my feet, legs spread to reveal his shaved inner thigh where the window had cut him, his stitches and balls. Upside down, he looked at me from within the drool-smeared cone, his tongue lolling and cropped tail wagging. Something like love in his eyes. Something like, We are now together forever. I thought of him straddling Caliphornia with the man’s head locked in his jaws. It’s easy to overestimate the nobility of dogs. Other beasts come to mind, too. Everywhere I look.

Lindsey and I loaded the last of her things. The two bottles of Stoli still stood unopened on her counter, temptation overcome. “All yours if you want them,” she said.

“I’ll put them in the community stash,” I said.

“Do you have another tenant in mind?”

“No,” I said. “You know I like to have one casita open.”

She smiled. “For emergencies, like me.”

“Emergencies like you.”

Brandon started up his Jeep and Johnny climbed in. Lindsey opened the door of the Mustang and flipped the driver’s seat forward. Zeno lumbered to the threshold and jumped in, bashing his cone into the seat back. The car rocked. He climbed onto the seat and turned around with some difficulty, then looked at us hopefully as Lindsey threw the seat back into place.

She gave me a light hug. Too many wounds between the two of us for anything more than that. The breeze threw her hair against my face and I felt the warmth of her tears on my cheek.

“I cry when I’m happy,” she said, stepping away. “You’re a friend, Roland. You must know that.”

“You’re my queen.”

“I don’t want to be a queen.” She looked at me with an odd defiance, wiped both cheeks with her bandaged hand, then gingerly touched my face.

“You and I are alike, Roland,” she said. “We think that if we give up on even one small thing, everything will cave in. So we try to hold the whole world together.”

“Some truth in that,” I said.

“I’m sorry to have brought so much death and destruction to your home,” said Lindsey. “I can’t stop thinking I should have found a way to stop him. After all, I made him.”

“We all made him.”

“It’s generous of you to share the blame.”

A moment later the black Mustang was heading down the drive toward the gate. I’d watched a red Porsche Boxster head toward that gate one fateful day, never to return with its precious driver. I could see the outline of Zeno’s shoulders and cone as he sat up in the back, facing forward, looking out for his queen.

The next day I knocked on the front door of Joan Taucher’s home in the Uptown area of San Diego. Uptown is just that — up. I looked down at the Pacific and Interstate 5 and Lindbergh Field and the downtown buildings.

I waited on Taucher’s porch. The house itself surprised me. From the outside, it didn’t look anything like a place where Special Agent Joan Taucher would have lived. It was old and easygoing and needed paint.

I’d like you to come to my home and meet my people someday.

But if life is waiting, it is also a series of surprises. Such as the call from Special Agent Mike Lark early that morning. And the sight of Lark himself now opening the door. “Glad you could come, Mr. Ford.”

He led me through a narrow foyer that had a coatrack with two FBI windbreakers hanging side by side. Plenty of hats and umbrellas this time of year. Then into a living room. Hardwood floors, dark and scarred. Floral wallpaper, white paint, bookcases, and a dartboard bristling with darts. Mullioned windows with the curtains half drawn across views to the ocean. A fireplace with a tidy orange fire.

In the middle of the room was a well-used leather seating group — sofa, loveseat, and an armchair that looked roughly as old as the man sitting in it. White hair, light brown eyes. Dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and blue tie. A wheelchair to one side of him.

“Mr. Ford,” said Lark. “Please meet Max Taucher. Sir, this is the private investigator that Joan spoke so highly of.”

He turned his gaze from an ocean-view window to me, brought a gnarled hand to his brow and back down in a slow salute. “You’re not as old and ugly as she said you were.”

“Neither are you, sir.”

“Sit,” he said. “You’re just in time to see the atmospheric river slam the coast.”

“It hit two days ago, Max,” said Lark.

“There will be another,” said the old man. “Just who are you, Ford?”

I sat. “A licensed private investigator. Locally sourced and hopefully sustainable.”

“Done anything interesting in your life?”

I tried to sum up the interesting things in my life in less than five minutes. Which is hard if you’re not prepared. What is mundane and what is telling? One man’s highlights are another man’s edits. Max Taucher stared out one of the windows as I talked.

A hefty young man came into the room, a tablet in his hand and a stethoscope hanging around his neck. Langdon Bissett, RN. Big hands, polite shake. He motioned Mike to a far corner, where they had a brief, hushed talk.

“They talk behind my back all the time,” said Max. “I don’t really care.”

The nurse excused himself. Mike brought coffee and we talked shop. An address found in Hector’s home had led San Diego JTTF to a Chula Vista storage unit containing bomb-making materials and instructions. And ten formerly dummy U.S. Army hand grenades repacked with gunpowder. And one still-in-the box Baby Coo at You doll that could make five different baby sounds at the squeeze of any hand, foot, or its tummy, and came with four ready-to-wear outfits.

“We’re burying Joan here in San Diego on Friday,” said Lark. “She would have liked you to come.”

Max watched us with a stoic, faraway look that I guessed wasn’t faraway at all.

“You’re invited,” he said without looking at me. “Joan has literally thousands of admirers, but she admired you.”

A beat then, as we all no doubt thought of Joan Annabelle Taucher and how she had lived and died. A few years ago I took part in a Gold Star Families memorial ceremony on Pendleton, staged for the families and buddies of Marines recently killed in action. Young guys, brave guys, the 3/5 Dark Horse Battalion. That day on a hill overlooking the base and the ocean, I looked around me at the battle crosses — the boots and tags and rifles of the dead Marines — then at the heartbroken and the scarred and the blind and the amputated and the paralyzed, all remembering someone they had lost. It was the most wrenching and wretched experience I’ve ever gone through. Mountains of grief, unclimbable.

“Are your tenants traumatized?” asked Lark. “Joan told me a little bit about them while you were waiting for Caliphornia. The Ping-Pong guy, and the drone operator, and the funny old couple. And of course Lindsey Rakes. Joan was worried about them. With all of the... possible danger involved. Something about them affected her.”

“They’re a tough old crew,” I said.

And that they are. Christmas Eve day they had all pitched in to help me scrub the blood and related matter off the pavers, patch and paint the bullet holes in the walls and the palapa uprights, and replace some of the barbecue bricks and tiles. Clevenger, who had apparently apprenticed as a mason before turning filmmaker, got that barbecue looking good again in less than a day. Burt replaced the window that Zeno had blasted through on his quest to defend Lindsey. The Ping-Pong table, which had been folded in half, covered, and rolled far under the palapa against the next round of rain, had taken ricochets that tore six ragged holes about a foot inside each baseline. I ordered a new one — Merry Christmas from your landlord — and it had arrived just this morning, before I’d come to Taucher’s home. Liz made Moscow Mules for the work party. Dick wandered from project to project with advice and direction.

“Mike? I’m tired,” said Max.

“You’ve been up since sunrise.”

“Wake me up as soon as that storm hits,” he said.

Bissett and Lark got Max into his wheelchair. He was a tall man and it took the two of them to do it. His legs were wrapped in a Pendleton Indian-patterned blanket. The nurse backed him around to face me and the old man nodded and gave me another slow salute. His pale brown eyes caught the muted light coming through the curtains and I saw that they were the raptor eyes of his daughter, clear and intent as they studied me.

“It’s the love you make,” he said.

“I’ll bear that in mind,” I said.

“That’s how I got Joanie. She wasn’t like anyone else in the world. I should know. Now they took her away from me.”

“Come on, Mr. Taucher,” said Bissett.

Lark walked me to my car. America’s Finest City stood proudly before us, scrubbed clean and bright by the storm. A bright orange and blue passenger jet came in from the southeast and seemed to thread the buildings. A vigil for the agents and visitors killed in last week’s attacks in San Diego, and for Joan Taucher, was set for this evening on the Midway. Already the streets were jammed with motorists trying to park. Sidewalks filled with people bundled in heavy coats, toting folding chairs and blankets. Cops in cars and on foot and on horseback. Hundreds, it seemed. The police and media choppers dipping low, coming and going like bees.

“Joan liked working with you,” said Lark. “She knew you could do things that our hands were tied on at the federal level. You saved a lot of lives when you broke into that storage unit and found the guns and the attack plans. We wouldn’t do that. Joan said thank God for good outlaws.”

For a brief moment I pictured the Glorietta dinner ship gliding across the bay while hundreds of the unsuspecting partied and two men down in the little hold got their balaclavas on and their weapons ready.

“She always kicked herself for not telling the people she liked that she liked them,” said Lark.

“I didn’t understand you were close to her,” I said. “Until now.”

“We’re private people.”

I studied Lark, his hair tossed by the wind, his twenty-four-year-old face, his hard brown eyes, not unlike Joan’s.

“I loved her. Very much,” he said. “Still do and always will. She was so intense. So vivid. So absolutely funny sometimes. Seventeen years between us. But I knew that woman. And I actually made her happy, occasionally. Max and I connected right off, though sometimes he thinks I’m the son he never had. Joan was afraid I’d find someone younger, and she told me she would never let me get my eyes checked or buy a pair of glasses. That was one of our standing jokes.”

I felt a great relief that Joan had more than her job and her demons. Much more.

“It crushed her when the SAC showed her the door,” Lark said, an edge to his voice I hadn’t heard before.

“Will you stay on here with Max?” I asked.

“Sure,” said Lark. “We’ve got our routines, and twenty-four-hour care. Max inherited this house from his parents. And lots of money. It’s his world. Joan grew up in it. She loved her mother, who died young. Leaving her a daddy’s girl, all the way.”

“I’m glad she had you.”

“Please come to the service,” said Lark. “Joan would have liked that.”

“I’ll see you there.”

Lark nodded, let his eyes wander my face for an unhurried moment, then turned and walked back toward his house.

Later that day I decided to get that beautiful red sports car out of the barn and say hello again. I keep her clean and covered and the battery charged and the tires full. Fuss over her quite a bit sometimes. But I hadn’t driven her since the day I brought her home from Fallbrook Airpark.

By now it was afternoon and the wind had come up, bending the cattails near the pond and swaying the big oaks and sycamores. So when I steered her outside into the daylight she shined as she always had — red, beautiful red — the color of passion and desire.

When is the time right and when is it wrong?

I let her idle while I cleaned the windshield. Got back in and set the mirrors right and chose a CD from Justine’s wallet, still on the passenger seat.

Took Old 395 fast to I-15, tore south a few clicks, spun off the freeway, and gunned her back up the country roads, the Porsche flat through the turns and the engine screaming for more, shot under the freeway, back over it, then scorched Lilac to Old 395 again, all the way up to Reche to Live Oak Park, always Justine’s favorite, hugging those curves while the oaks high-five above you, the asphalt coming fast but the car true, then south again on the back roads to home and the final roar up the drive and into the barnyard, where stood Burt and Clevenger, poised to jump for their lives as I slid the Porsche across the grass at them and drifted long to a stop, neatly lined up with the open door.

Later I poured a provocative bourbon with a splash of water, put on a heavy coat, and took the drink down by the pond. Daylight was fading on this brisk winter afternoon. I watched the big sycamore leaves zigzagging down.

I dug the business card from my wallet, given to me by the elegant woman with diamonds in her ears and a green dress and a faux-mink stole at the Treasures of Araby who claimed to love the scar on my face. Who had recognized me from news coverage the year before and almost blown my cover.

I turned the card over: “Sorry. Do call.”

So I called.

She seemed genuinely surprised and happy. Her voice sounded practiced. Formal. I pictured her face and her cinnamon hair and blue eyes. We had one of those highly energetic, free-range conversations only interested strangers have.

“You certainly have a flair for getting yourself into the news,” she said.

“I’m hoping to stay out of it for a while.”

“But seriously,” she said. “What terrible things are landing on us. On our city. Our republic. I haven’t been sleeping well at all. Looking over my shoulder. Afraid of things I was never concerned about before. Wondering just how fair I am. How brave I am. Or am not.”

“But do you dance?”

A long pause from Wynn Renner. A soft clearing of throat. “I love to dance.”

We made a date for Saturday. When I rang off I felt as if I was back in high school, getting my first brief green light from Trudy Yates. Which was like jumping off the edge of the Grand Canyon and discovering you really could fly.

As the sun set I closed my eyes and thought a short prayer. There is a god to believe in, though I don’t know much more than that. Not sure I need to. You chart by your beliefs and fly accordingly.

I gave thanks and was concise and clear and not demanding. Finished, then listened for the voice of God and heard what I always hear.

God’s silence.

And it was good.

When I opened my eyes, the western hills were plated orange on top and purple below and the pond was spangled with gold.

Oxley lay in a shaft of sun a few yards in front of me, licking a gracefully extended hind leg. Toes splayed as cats do. He paused and stared at me, his eyes hypnotic green in the falling light.