The Last Good Guy

6

I stayed two cars behind, padding my cover with the beach town traffic. Took Interstate 5 through Carlsbad and Leucadia into Encinitas, then Encinitas Boulevard toward Rancho Santa Fe. Hills and open land. I’d done work here in this prosperous corner of San Diego’s North County, multimillion-dollar estates with acreage, privacy, and plenty of room for horses and helipads.

Revell turned up Via Encanto, lightly traveled at this hour and leaving me exposed. I followed and fell back as he turned onto Matilija. Drove past it and U-turned, taking my time. Gave Revell his space.

Which gave R. Ford a chance to study the “Cathedral by the Sea” sign on the corner:

When the SUV’s taillights had vanished around a bend I started up the hill. Steep and wide. Up ahead I saw Revell sweep right, no signal, Matilija deserted. Again I loitered at the stop sign. Gave my mark some distance. Slowly followed him onto King’s Road.

It was a private road, with thick new asphalt that randomly glittered in my headlights. From a steep, slow curve I saw the Pacific a few miles to my left, glittering much as the asphalt was, and the lights of the San Diego coast. I poked along, enjoying the view.

Rounding the next curve, I saw the Cathedral by the Sea, rising from a hilltop and bathed in light. It was modest in size, an asymmetrical construct of white marble and wooden beams bound together by stainless-steel cable. A copper roof flowed down nearly to the ground at one end, yet formed an upswept wave rising into the sky at the other. I wondered if the architect was now institutionalized. Concrete stairs and ramps led up to a tall, arched doorway. Inset windows of stained glass flickered with color. Above it all towered a large stainless-steel cross, lit by hidden floodlights to give it a supposed glow of its own. The Cathedral by the Sea was bold and somehow forbidding. I wasn’t sure if it was expecting a worshiper or an invader.

The SUV rolled across a big parking lot, which was empty but well lit. I saw what might be an administration building, and a campus built around a stand of big Canary Island date palms, and a meandering grassy mall with fountains at each end, both still illuminated and tossing water in the night. Revell steered around the outbuildings and disappeared behind the cathedral.

I retreated to Via Encanto, backed my truck into a break in the thick chaparral, rolled the windows half down, and shut off the engine. I wondered how long it would take Revell to make his appointed rounds. Would he walk the grounds or just reconnoiter by SUV? It was hard to picture much trouble up on this swank but secluded hilltop church at ten o’clock on a warm Southern California night.

I found the Cathedral by the Sea website. Glancing from the phone to the road and back, I read:

Atlas’s picture showed an earnest-looking man in his late forties or early fifties, with soulful eyes, shaggy blond hair, and a big, welcoming smile.

I did a Google search and scanned through the articles, blogs, and posts. The Cathedral by the Sea was just over a year old. Nice reviews from scores of North San Diego visitors when it opened early last summer. Hearty best wishes from the cities of Encinitas, Solana Beach, Del Mar, Vista, Rancho Santa Fe, and Oceanside. Optimistic notices on the religion pages of the local papers, and a good-sized piece in the Union-Tribune, written by a reporter I had once helped on a touchy story. Pictures of the pastor at home with his wife and children. Reggie Atlas had an easy smile and cheerful eyes and obviously liked cameras. He was forty-eight years old at the time of the story, a Georgia-born evangelist who had started small and ministered throughout the South by vehicle for ten years before establishing his first church. It went from modest to successful to very successful. Then the Lord had called him west.

I half read and half watched. Saw headlights on the cathedral parking lot asphalt, then the silver SNR Security vehicle, with Adam Revell barely visible behind the heavily smoked window.

I was surprised when he didn’t backtrack down to the coast but headed east on Del Dios and onto I-15.

South to Santee, where he stopped for gas. I adjusted to the idea of a long night. I watched him from a competing station across the intersection, topping off my own main tank, an oversized thirty gallon. While the pump pumped, I got into the big toolbox bolted to the bed of my truck and claimed my night-vision binoculars, my holstered .45, and a small cooler stocked with jerky, candy, and drinks. Kept an eye on Revell. Set my provisions on the passenger seat.

Then off to I-8 East, which winds through the rough mountains and scorching desert and Imperial County farmland, tight to the Mexican border, then up almost to Tucson, where it joins I-10 for its long run to the Atlantic.

I varied my lanes and distance from the SUV, used the I-8 traffic for cover. Plenty of cars and tractor-trailers for that, even as we dropped down from the cool of the mountains to the September heat of the Imperial Valley and the dashboard clock hit midnight. Eighty-one in Ocotillo.

Onward to Coyote Wells, Plaster City, and Dixieland. Seeley and El Centro. Just past Buena Vista, the SUV got off at Rattlesnake Road and I had to slow way down as I came to the ramp and followed him off. He California-stopped at Rattlesnake, swinging left, which would take him through Buena Vista. I went right and continued on, his dust rising in my mirrors. I saw him make a right onto what looked like a dirt road, unlit, then disappear.

I made a slow U-turn and crept back along Rattlesnake, through tiny sleepy Buena Vista — part of it in California and the other part in Mexico, with a twenty-foot-high steel wall to prove it. The gas station was closed. The convenience store open. A restaurant and a bar and signs for the post office and library. Houses scattered back in the dark, low hills.

The dirt road was wide and well graded. I cut my lights and used the nearly full moon, clear as a bulb in the north. Revell’s dusty taillights shimmered far ahead. Headlights sprayed left and right in his turns. The shadows of creosote and ocotillo, leaning away from the moonbeams. Narrow dirt roads, one marked by a pile of rocks and another by a tire half buried in the sand. No signs, no mailboxes.

A trickle of nerves. Because there is no backup for PIs. No one to help you but you. No partners or departments, no cavalry to bugle in. You have your wit and skills, a phone that may or may not be in range, binoculars, a gun if you’re licensed to carry one. Maybe a little cooler of food and drinks for those long hours on watch. Maybe even some luck. I believe in luck.

The road narrowed and got rougher. From the top of a slight rise I could see that the SUV had stopped, and the driver’s door stood open. I glassed the low-beamed silhouette of a man dragging open a rickety barbed-wire-and-scrap-wood gate. A moment later he drove past it, then came back and escorted the wobbly gate back to its rustic post. Dropped a loop of chain over it. A breeze swirled around the SUV and it was gone.

The next gate was nothing like the first. Far ahead, bathed in the floods from a tall metal stanchion, the gliding wall of steel poles looked ten feet high. When it closed I saw the security guard accelerating away. And the metallic glimmer of two chain-link fences running in opposite directions as far as my night-vision glasses could follow.

The sign on the gate showed a fruit-heavy palm tree against a pale background. Beneath the fronds, heavy dark letters declared:

I sat tight. Watched the taillights rise and fall and grow smaller. It was twelve fifty-five. One minute later the gate lights went off. I gave the scene another good long look with my night glasses, saw no way in except through the gate, which I doubted would open to welcome the curious PI Ford.

Which meant you jumped the fence. I glassed it with an eye for electrical or razor wire. No and no. Ten feet was ten feet, but I could do it. There was a chance of my truck getting broken into by the time I got back. More practically, I tried to guess how far I would have to walk. All I had to go on was a low ridgeline that looked to be less than half a mile away. Over which the SUV had passed less than a minute ago. And from behind which shone soft light.

I lowered the glasses and thought about my first professional boxing match, Trump 29 Casino in Coachella, 2005. It was less than a year after Fallujah. Back then I was Roland “Rolling Thunder” Ford, a United States Marine Corps vet, weighing in at 210 out of San Diego, California. My opponent was Darien “Demolition” Dixon, a veteran not of war but of the ring.

I knew before the first round was over that I was outmatched. But when he knocked me down in the ninth, I refused to surrender. I got myself off the canvas and nodded to the ref and commanded my legs to move, and Darien promptly knocked me unconscious. I still remember seeing my mouthpiece sailing out through the lights. Next thing I knew I was on my stool, dazed in a not unpleasant way, seeing myself from the outside at the same time I was looking out at the crowd. I was learning something I’d never learned as a college student or a Marine: defeat. In that moment I became mortal. I’ve fought again since then, but never in the ring.

So my question is: Is it better to fight a fight you can’t win or to give up and take the loss so you can fight again?

I found a stand of tangled greasewoods to watch over my truck. Spooked an owl that fell into flight when I opened the door. Worked the paddle holster into place inside my waistband, pushed the gun in snug, and snapped the strap. I loaded a small backpack with the binoculars, a compact thirty-five-millimeter camera with a great zoom, and a bottle of water. Pulled on some gloves. Chugged an energy drink from the cooler, locked up, and deployed.