The Last Good Guy

26

Dust rising in bright light and the strangeness of things happening without sound.

Clevenger’s motion-activated wasp-cam streamed beautiful video, startlingly clear. I recognized the bunkhouse with the modified freezers in the living room and the gloves and white hazmat suits hanging on the walls.

The front door had been propped open. Connor Donald and Eric Glassen crossed the porch and disappeared inside. A forklift pulled up to the front porch, Adam Revell in the cage, four wooden crates stacked two-on-two waiting on the forks. Flat-Top Woman with the gun on her hip stood talking to him, her mouth working silently.

I put Burt on speaker as I watched Clevenger’s wasp-cam feed.

“None of the usual activity earlier,” said Burt. “No SNR vehicles coming and going. No Paradise shipping trucks in and out. No kids to the barn with their laptops and backpacks. They cleared the decks for this, whatever it is.”

Back to my desktop monitor: Connor Donald and Eric Glassen coming from the cottage, wearing long black rubber gloves and hazmat masks. Flat-Top Woman on her way inside. Adam Revell hopped down from the forklift and followed.

“I didn’t know you need heavy gloves and hazmat masks to handle dates,” said Burt.

Flat-Top Woman and Revell came out a moment later, suited up like the others.

Wasp-cam four gave us a good look at the wooden crates, each bound with three metal bands. No brands, labels, writing, or numbers on them. Pine? They looked to be nearly five feet long, a foot wide, and a foot deep.

Revell and the woman took one end of a crate, squatting and straining mightily, horsing it away from the others. Connor and Eric took the other end, and the four of them — two on each side, short-stepping, backs straight — carried the crate toward the cottage.

“Clearly not TV dinners,” said Burt. “What can it be now?”

The heaviest material per volume I’d ever handled was ammunition in Fallujah. A 420-round steel can of .223-caliber M4 ammo in each hand put you in a hurry to get where you were going. Hoping you got there before the steel handles bit you. But one of these wooden crates at Paradise wouldn’t hold more than ten of those cans. Four adults? It looked like they were hauling something a lot heavier than that.

“Metals?” said Burt. “But why freeze them?”

“Gas under pressure,” I said. “To keep it contained.”

“Unstable chemicals. Isotopes.”

“Of course,” I said. “Things that date farmers and security guards depend on in their everyday lives.”

They got up the low porch steps and crept inside on their eight straining legs, like a giant spider.

A minute later they came out, rested in the porch shade, then went to the forklift for round two. Revell lifted his mask and wiped his forehead on his sleeve before taking his corner of the crate. Flat-Top Woman was breathing hard. Donald and Glassen had sweated through their black golf shirts.

A few minutes after the last delivery, the four were back on the porch, breathing heavily and conversing, their hazmat masks and gloves left inside. Revell pulled the cottage door shut and locked it.

“Heavy crates in high-performance freezers,” said Burt. “Guarded by a publicity-shy security company that has a regional office in San Diego, accounts across America, and does not hire blacks or Muslims. Speculate, Champ.”

“Maybe later. I have a story to tell you about Penelope Rideout, Daley, and Reggie Atlas. Conflicting versions of a possibly very ugly truth.”

That night I sat in my truck on a turnout of a narrow road, with a view of Pastor Reggie Atlas’s home in Rancho Santa Fe. A rural road, no lights, the moon a waning quarter whisked by clouds.

On a gentle hilltop sat the house, well lit. Large and Italianate, stone walls and a bell tower and cypress trees lining a winding drive. Why do so many Californians want to live in homes that look Italian? Are there California-style homes all around Rome and Milan? I saw that a pasture sloped to the road. White estate fencing, screened, and a white gate with a speaker/keypad column, car-window high.

Adjacent to the house was a big three-car garage, door open but unlit, three cars inside with room to spare.

I listened to the radio on low, studied the grounds with my night-vision glasses, elbows steady on the window frame.

A sudden buzz and rattle in my cup holder. I put Penelope Rideout on the speaker, returned my phone to its place, and turned off the radio.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was an awful lot to lay on you. I was covering new territory, Roland. It was harder than I thought. I’ll hang up right now if you want.”

I spoke softly. “Atlas said it never happened and you won’t allow a test to prove it didn’t.”

A few seconds went by and I thought Penelope really was about to hang up.

“I know what happened, Roland. It is written in me. But I don’t want her to know that truth. I understand I’m not permitted to even think such a thing about lofty truth. It goes against what we’re taught from the very beginning. And what it said on the Grecian urn. And all that about setting us free. But the story that Mom and Dad and I invented for her is more likely. Things could easily have happened just that way. And it’s better. It frees her from knowing that she’s the result of wickedness done to me. It gives her solid ground to stand on, and a simple history to be a part of. Something to build a life on, other than self-loathing and anger.”

“He said you went after him years ago, and he refused you.”

A catch of breath. Then the matter-of-fact cold in her voice. “I could kill him for saying that.”

Then came Penelope’s self-description riding the breeze through my open windows: ninety percent lover and ten percent killer.

“Roland, he’s trying to justify his own monstrous behavior. Did he ask you to find Daley and bring her to him?”

I saw Atlas come from the house. He went a few yards down the walkway, stepped under the leaves of a magnolia tree. He wore his regulation jeans and white shirt, but tonight he was barefoot.

“Roland?”

“Yes, he asked me to bring her to him.”

Atlas lit a cigarette. The smoke rose and spread.

“And what did you say back?”

“I’ll bring her to you, as contracted.”

“You don’t believe Reggie Atlas, do you?”

“I believe that Daley is in danger.”

The sound of Penelope breathing. “You do believe him. You believe I brought this all upon myself and Daley. You big dumb man. Isn’t my word good enough?”

“You’ve given me a lot of words, Penelope. Some are more truthful than others.”

“Yes, I have,” she said. “What a terrible mistake I’ve made. But you’re still under contract with me. Daley is mine and you will deliver her to me, as written.”

And hung up.

The phone screen went to black. Atlas smoked his cigarette under the magnolia. He pulled a phone from his pants pocket and I could see the faint light on his downturned face. He worked it with one hand, read the screen, then tapped a command.

Penelope again:

“Roland Ford, you’re not a big dumb man at all. You’re a huge, stupid ox.”

I waited for her to end the call. Instead I heard her breathing again, this time faster and louder.

“For an ox,” I said, “I’m of average intelligence.”

“I’m going to get the better of you someday.”

She hung up again.

As I raised my eyes from the phone to the house, I saw that a vehicle had stopped at Pastor Reggie Atlas’s pearly white gate. It was a silver late-model Cadillac CTS, the ones with the stealth body panels and fighter-jet front end. Wrote the plate number in my notebook. Rolled down the driver-side window.

Atlas ground his cigarette butt into the grass at his feet, tapped something into his phone, and the gate lurched to life. The car started up the drive, curbside motion lights coming on to show the way. Atlas stayed beneath the tree until the Cadillac came to a stop a few yards short of the garage.

In my night-vision binoculars I watched the driver’s door swing open and a tall, slender old man unfold from the front seat. He looked to be eighty, with brisk white hair brushed back over a creased, hawklike face. Sharp nose, thin lips, bushy eyebrows. A brown suit, cut and cuffed in an older style. Expensive, by the look of it. White shirt, red tie. He was familiar, in a distant, secondhand way.

Penelope, back for thirds: “I’m sorry for what I said. Please find my daughter.”

And just as suddenly, gone.

Old Hawk lifted the trunk lid and left it open, then walked to the magnolia tree. He conversed with Atlas in a terse, all-business kind of way. I wasn’t close enough to hear their words or even the sound of their words. Guessing from Atlas’s gestures — his open hands and interrogative expressions — he was asking for something. Old Hawk seemed to listen patiently, but nothing in his posture or movements gave me any indication of positive or negative. To Old Hawk, Reggie Atlas could have been a branch to perch on or a mouse to eat.

Old Hawk tapped a finger against Reggie’s chest. Words from a dry smile. Atlas poked the older man back and said something in return.

Old Hawk marched long-legged into the garage, turning on the lights, and opened the trunk of a gleaming black Mercedes AMG sedan. Lifted out a metal Halliburton case and walked to his car. Set the Halliburton in the trunk and closed the lid with a touch of a button.

Reggie stepped from under the tree and joined the old man by his car. The two men talked for less than a minute, then Old Hawk climbed into his Cadillac. The silver sedan made a wide turn and headed down the drive.

I followed him through the winding roads of Rancho Santa Fe to Del Dios Highway, and all the way to Escondido. Plenty of traffic for cover. Out on the east side of town the homes got older and smaller, and the business signs turned to Spanish and the barrio said hola. The silver CTS proceeded comfortably down the avenue, went right on Holiday Lane, then made a sharp left and stopped at a gate.

End of my welcome. I drove past, made a U-turn, and came back in time to see the CTS heading up the drive. It was narrow and curvy but paved. No buildings or dwellings, only a poorly kept grove of orange trees. The Cadillac’s headlights raked through trees with thin branches, sparse leaves, and small stranded fruit. More oranges in the dirt than on the trees. On top of the hill stood what looked to be a cluster of buildings surrounded by trees that nearly hid them from sight. A few lights through the foliage. When the Cadillac was about halfway to the top, security lights came on along the road, leading the way through the dark to the buildings within the trees.