The Rescue

9

Dan Strickland can’t believe what he’s seeing on his phone.

Heart pounding, he watches the Coastal Eddy video of Joe, not dead, not injured, but looking healthy, though a little subdued.

“Felix: The Rescue of a Mexican Street Dog,” has come to Dan from one of his graduates, a Newport Beach woman who remembered Joe from her time in Dan’s penthouse, and hadn’t minded at all if the cute dog joined her in Dan’s bed after she was finished with him.

Strickland watches the video again. Joe looks kind of stunned, really, but whole and alert. The doctor talks about what the bullet did and how he had to suture the intestine and seal the artery and follow up with strong antibiotics. Dan witnesses the reporter lady — very attractive — falling in love with Joe over the five-minute segment. It comes as no surprise that she takes him home. Dan looks at the closing clip of Joe in his new home in Laguna Beach with a joyous but troubled heart.

How is he going to get Joe back from his new and obviously devoted owner? He can’t exactly tell her what Joe was doing the night he was shot. Certainly not what he was doing. Reporters can always pry into and expose you. That’s what they do. But no matter how believable and sympathetic Dan’s cover story might be, he knows the reporter would never let him have Joe back.

It takes Dan Strickland all of two more seconds to realize how to get Joe back: drive to Laguna, find the Coastal Eddy offices and where the reporter lives, and wait for Joe to be alone. Then leash him and trot him to the Maserati and let Joe leap in, as he loves to do. Drive home.

Simple, clean, and easy. Bettina Blazak will never see him, and Joe will be happy, and the team will be back together for some much-needed profit in romantic old Mexico!

He hires two of his former associates to teach his next week of classes.

He wonders who else has seen the video and would be able to link the dog to him. Only one other man in the United States knows of his moonlighting, or of Joe’s adventures south of the border. Not even Aaron knows exactly what Strickland is doing with Joe. But there are Strickland’s associates in Tijuana — the New Generation Cartel, a handful of Municipal Police, and of course the Sinaloans they steal from — who know that a button-rose-eared apparent street dog has so far cost them $1,500,000 in cash, five uncut kilos of Mexican-made fentanyl, seven kilos of Mexican brown heroin, and over twenty pounds of top-grade Columbian cocaine for a total street value of... well, Dan has no damned idea except that he gets one-third of everything Joe finds. One-third of the currency, and the cash value of one-third of the drugs’ wholesale value. Dan trusts the New Generation to do the math fairly. He counts the cartel’s Tijuana faction leader — Carlos Palma, who accepted him as a partner in this risky venture — as a friend. As he does Tijuana Municipal Police captain Benicio Zumbaya, who protects and answers to Carlos. There is indeed honor among thieves.

Success breeds loyalty, Dan thinks as he packs. His secrets are safe with them as long as he’s taking the risk and making them mountains of money. Mountain ranges of money.

That evening, just after sunset, Strickland sits in the curbside Havana Café, directly across Coast Highway from the Coastal Eddy offices in Laguna Beach.

Glancing at the intro of “Felix: The Rescue of a Mexican Street Dog” on his phone, Dan confirms that Bettina Blazak and Joe are now coming out the glass front door held open by a young man in shiny cowboy boots, pressed jeans, and a dumpy yoked blazer.

Joe looks great: composed, and even at this distance and through the hectic two-way traffic on the busy highway, Dan can see that Joe is attentive to the woman. He limps but not badly. Bettina Blazak is larger than Dan had expected. Probably six feet, he guesses, which, in her heeled boots makes her almost as tall as the Cowboy in the bad coat. Her dark brown hair has nice bounce, and it shines in the streetlight. She reminds Dan of his Newport Harbor High School art teacher, Miss Waters, who drove him utterly bats and damned near got him expelled and herself arrested.

Strickland leaves plenty of cash on the counter and parallels them up Coast Highway north, cars whizzing past, a river of headlights and taillights. He pulls his snap-brim fedora low, keeping one eye on Joe and his captors. At the lights he pulls almost even with them and thinks of crossing here at Thalia, but the Cowboy beats him to the crosswalk button. Dan turns his back on them as they approach, drifts into a clot of tourists looking through the Thalia Surf Shop window, noting Joe’s progress reflected in the glass. He loves the way Joe’s ears flap as he trots. Just incredible you can get so attached to a dog, he thinks. Irrespective of the money. Part of the sidewalk crowd, he follows them north again to the Cliff Restaurant, where a congressman whom Dan once protected from a death threat liked to dine and drink. Easy money and good food, Dan remembers.

Watching them enter the little village of shops and galleries that surround the Cliff, Dan sees that the Cowboy and the reporter don’t know each other very well. The guy is as attentive as a butler, while she has the straightforward economy of movement enjoyed by people who know what they want. The man is also alert and protective: cop-like.

Strickland walks past the jewelry shop and the art galleries and the bead-and-necklace boutique and the classic longboards shop. He keeps plenty of distance because if Joe smells him, he’ll likely come charging over, and that might be a little difficult to explain. Bettina leads Joe and her date to the far end of a long communal table that overlooks the swelling black sea.

Dan sits at the bar behind the diners, in the very place where he’d kept an eye on the congressman and his wife. Those were his protection days — Strickland Security.

Dan has a rear view of Bettina and her suitor. Joe is in the darkness under the table. Dan can see that they’re in a meaningful conversation, and again, from their postures and the cant of their heads, don’t really know each other. They’re a little formal. Getting to know each other, Dan thinks. The lucky Cowboy.

He lays his phone on the bare table and cues up the Felix video again. Mutes it and watches Bettina Blazak on-screen, kneeling before a cautiously appreciative Joe, scratching his chest, smiling at the camera, and talking to her viewers. Dan likes the way she touches Joe. She’s been around dogs.

Something odd now stirs in Dan Strickland. He hasn’t felt it before and he’s not even sure what it is. With women he has always accepted what is given, and over his thirty-plus years, he has been given much. But he has never given back; neither his nature nor his nurture seems to allow it. He’s not really sure how you do that. Now, this odd feeling of generosity. Wanting to give her something good. It’s new. Bettina on the screen is still talking, as Bettina here at the Cliff shakes her shiny hair and turns to look in Dan’s direction.

He sweeps the screen to cut the light on his face, and looks down.

Dan tails them back south on Coast Highway, still plenty of highway between him and Joe, and plenty of pedestrians for cover. Joe, Bettina, and the Cowboy go down steps to the parking garage under the Coastal Eddy building. A moment later the Cowboy comes out on foot and continues on south down the sidewalk, sizing up the world around him. Definitely a cop, Dan thinks. Notes the lump under the frumpy, practical coat.

A red Jeep comes up the ramp and waits while the gate arm rises through the headlight beams. Dan can see Joe in the front seat, face observant, and Bettina’s long look down Coast Highway before making the turn.

He gets into his car and follows the Jeep three cars back to Broadway, which becomes Laguna Canyon Road and will lead inland, Dan knows, to the freeways. But soon Bettina signals and turns right on Stan Oaks, into a small retail village tucked beneath towering eucalyptus. Dan slows and turns in without a signal, parks in front of an antiquarian bookseller, keeping an eye on the Jeep as Bettina ferries Joe through the lot. At the far end, she heads up a narrow drive leading to Canyon View Apartments — says the sign — built on caissons along the steep flank of the canyon.

Through his good Leicas, Dan watches her take one of the covered stalls that run beneath the back of the building. Bettina does whatever it is that takes women so long to do before leaving their vehicles. She and Joe finally get out, climb the stairs, and disappear, Joe perfectly fitted at her left calf, no chance he’ll pull or drag her into a fall. Dan watches, wishing he were Bettina Blazak, leashed to his beloved Joe — and wishing he were Joe, leashed to Bettina Blazak.

In his rearview he sees the police radio car turn into the little shopping center. Dan slides the binoculars under the seat and takes up his phone. Watches as the cop car slowly makes its way along the shops, all closed, and only a few vehicles here this late.

It stops behind him, and Dan, phone to his ear, watches the spotlight seize his dashboard and flash off the mirror. He tells the phone he sure hopes this fucking cop will buzz off.

A moment later, the light vanishes and the radio car moves along, loops the lot, and exits onto Laguna Canyon Road, headed back to town.

Dan gets a room at the Laguna Montage for a week, where he’ll blend in with the affluent tourists. From what he’s seen of Bettina’s work and living arrangements, it might take some time to steal Joe without getting caught.

He stands in his stupidly expensive room overlooking the twinkling black Pacific, wondering what it would be like to meet Bettina Blazak. What it would be like to be close enough to really see her.

And when she wasn’t looking, of course, jack the dog.