The Rescue

32

After dinner, Bettina and Strickland talk late, sitting on her deck overlooking Laguna Canyon Road. The Festival of Arts grounds below are dark, and the traffic in and out of town is light. Heat radiates from a steel chiminea.

Between them is a table for their cocktails and sherbet, and a copper hurricane lamp. Felix lies under the table, eyeing them through the glass top as he works on his plush turkey.

Strickland prods Bettina for her version of the death of Joaquín and arrest of Valeria, what Godoy has tasked her to do, how her DEA handlers had reacted.

Recounting some of what she saw that night, Bettina feels the dull fear returning, sees Joaquín punched dead by silent bullets, sees the agent toeing his head to see if he was still alive.

“Did you see much?” she asks. “I saw you zooming around in your fancy green car.”

“Some.”

“I’d rather not remember that right now.”

“Please don’t.”

She looks out at Laguna Canyon, tries to let the remembered fear pass through her. She points out the once-notorious little cluster of homes nicknamed Dodge City, for the drug dealers who lived there in the sixties, and the cops who happily raided them, sometimes with guns drawn. Bettina has written articles and done videos on those wild days, and she’s always felt some affinity for those hippie outlaws.

“Why?” asks Strickland.

“I envy them. They were brave and half-crazy. Me, I’m just conventional.”

“Wait, you surf and race up and down Coast Highway with the Biker Chicks. And you’re good with a shotgun. Those aren’t exactly conventional things. Maybe you’re wilder than you think.”

Bettina never could take a compliment. Not that she’s ever been drowned in them, except for maybe the during her Olympic trials. “I don’t mind being me. Mostly.”

Strickland lets that one sink in. “You’re a lot. You’re good. You’re solid.”

“Thank you.”

A beat, then:

“What happened to you, Bettina? I see it on your face. It stands between you and what you want to say.”

The lamplight bevels Strickland’s face into light and shadow. It’s a hard face, but it says the man inside is smart and honest and trustworthy. Though appearances can be all wrong, she knows.

“There are two,” she says. Takes a moment to look out the stars twinkling above the black ridge of the canyon. Feels Keith, alive inside her, pleased to be thought of, taking form in her mind’s eye.

“My brother died of a fentanyl overdose when he was twenty. Keith. We were twins. He’s with me everywhere I go. I try to let in the good memories and edit out the bad ones. Sorry I can’t keep him off my face sometimes. Don’t really want to.”

“You shouldn’t,” says Strickland. She can tell by the gravity on his face that he understands. And is moved by what happened to Keith.

She goes inside, brings out her framed picture of Keith and herself as Superman and Wonder Woman, look-alike superheroes in happy times.

Strickland sets it upright on the table before them and studies it with a solemn expression.

“Tell me about him.”

“There’s so much. Maybe some other time.”

Bettina can’t talk about Keith on demand. Right now, can’t really talk at all. She wipes a tear on a knuckle.

His gaze in the steady lamplight is penetrating. “What else, Bettina?”

“No,” she says, wiping the knuckle on her jeans, toughening up. “Not a big deal.”

“Big enough to keep eating at you.”

“Avoidable,” she says.

“All of life is avoidable if you just stay home.”

“I was not asking for it.”

“No, you weren’t,” he says. “And that’s why you can’t let it go.”

“I don’t want to talk about it now.”

His gaze softens. He pets Felix. “I like that you don’t give up things easily. Fine with me and Joe.”

“His name is Felix.”

“Joe.”

“You hardly touched the bourbon all night.”

“I don’t really drink,” Strickland says.

“I do, but not like I used to. You get high?”

“A few times. Never liked it.”

“Losing control,” says Bettina.

“And coordination and competence.”

“Me too. I could barrel race Sawblade drunk on beer and bourbon, but not high on weed. Made me question myself and — oh boy, that’s not what you need in a race.”

Strickland’s laugh is hardly audible. She watches him in profile, nodding. Likes his nose.

He tells her stories from Afghanistan. They’re horrible but funny in that way that marines have. Like about the SAW gunner Tristen Chunn, who could foresee attacks and IEDs while they were on patrol, Chunn on point that day, lugging the heavy-as-an-anvil squad automatic weapon toward a Sangin footbridge and stopping dead in his tracks just a few meters short, one hand up for everyone to stop, like a cavalry captain.

Strickland tells the tale with a wry urgency that suggests both a happy ending and a sudden catastrophe.

“It’s going to blow, Sarge,” says Chunn. “I saw it happen already.”

“When?” says Sergeant Abbate.

“In the future.”

“Well, Private, our asses are in the wind right now. And we’re not turning around. So, can we get over this damned bridge before it blows?”

So, in Strickland’s telling, young Chunn takes off running as fast as he can, carrying twenty-five pounds of machine gun and two hundred rounds of belt-drive ammunition. He’s a little guy, eighteen years old. So nobody can get around him on the narrow bridge and they’re all cussing him to go faster and Chunn finally gets across and the men all surge past him and keep on going. Strickland hangs back because he likes Chunn and Chunn is still just a boy and he’s got this beautiful, innocent smile on his face, Chunn does, and when Strickland grabs his vest to pull him along, the bridge blows all right, the middle section blasted to splinters high in the sky, both ends cut off in a jagged mess, shards of wood and concrete raining down on the Helmand River like a storm from hell.

“I saw it happen exactly like that,” Chunn says.

“And I told him, Tristen, I think you should lead these patrols for the rest of your tour. And he did.”

“Did he do it again?” asks Bettina. “See the future?”

“Twice,” says Strickland. “One was a dug-in IED that nobody could see but Chunn ‘saw’ go off. The other was what happened to Carlson, who said Tristen was full of shit and he, Carlson, stood up from behind the HESCOS to demonstrate that Chunn could not see the fucking future and no rag-head sniper was going to kill him eating his goddamned lunch today. Carlson took a bullet to his head and collapsed on top of Tristen. And that was that.”

“Awful.”

“Too bad. Carlson was okay.”

Later Strickland talks about Dyson and Jennifer and his sister, Allison. Dyson strikes Bettina as slightly monstrous; Jennifer as selfish and impulsive; Allison much too tender and gullible to survive the Strickland parents. Dan no longer speaks to them.

“Do you still have things to say to them?” asks Bettina.

“I’m writing a letter to each one. Have been for some years now.”

“You could just bomb in on them.”

Bettina imagines bombing into Jason Graves’s office in Anza. Then what?

Well, she’s actually thought about that a lot recently.

“I might,” says Strickland.

They talk about tomorrow’s duties: Bettina’s at her Coastal Eddy cubicle for just an hour or two, Strickland’s at Apex for a full day of classes.

Her message notification pings and she sees a health insurance solicitation. Finds this funny with all the violence she’s seen, up close. Taps it into trash.

“El Gordo?” asks Strickland.

“No such luck.”

“He’ll contact you again. He’ll have questions about his people and his money, and your dog. It’s good to keep moving around, Bettina, vary the schedule. If El Gordo decides to punish you, or maybe make another grab for Joe, he’ll send his roughest diamonds.”

“Can’t wait to meet them.”

“It’s okay to be afraid. Fear can keep you alive.”

“That’s why I sleep with my Winchester.” She stifles a yawn. “I’m turning into a pumpkin, Strickland.”

“I’ll sleep on the couch if you want.”

Felix moves from under the table and sits, looking at them expectantly.

“No, thank you.”

“This was great tonight.”

“Maybe I’ll come down your way next time.”

“You’d like San Diego. It’s full of surfers and bikers. We even have our own Coastal Eddy. It’s called the Reader. It’s got smart, sassy stories, like yours.”

She’s still not sure she trusts Dan Strickland enough to walk into his Apex lair. Can she trust her gut? If not that, then what?

All she knows right now about Dan Strickland is that her heart is in a big, hard-beating tangle.

Bettina forces herself to push him out the door. Felix tries to go with him, but she gets him by the collar and back inside.

She slides home the dead bolt, ear to the door as Strickland’s footsteps diminish, then go silent.

She gets the picture of Keith off the deck and puts it back on her office desk.

As he walks through the parking lot to his car, Strickland is filled with two foreign emotions: love and guilt. He doesn’t understand the love, how it can just arrive inside you like this, for the first time. The guilt he understands clearly. Tonight he’s seen the consequences of his cartel adventures on a real person, with a real tear in her eye and a real wound in her soul. The look on her face is the saddest he’s ever seen.

He realizes that after this is over — tomorrow, probably — Bettina will be freshly heartbroken again and worried sick at the loss of Joe. She’ll blame herself and fear the worst. And he realizes that he won’t be able to tell her that Joe is just fine, that he’s back in San Diego with him, living a good life. No more than he can tell her that he uses Joe to make money in the trade that killed her twin brother Keith and tore her heart in half forever. Learn to live the lie, he thinks — it’s the obligation you’ve taken on.

Right now, he feels like he’s destroying the village in order to save it. In order to save her life, he reminds himself.

El Gordo has given his word and I’ve given mine.

He takes off his coat and lays it in the back seat of his car. The hour-plus drive to San Diego will give him plenty of time to call Charley Gibbon, nail down details for tomorrow, upload his Mole tracker app to Charley’s phone. Bettina told him she’d probably have lunch with Felix tomorrow, up at the park where they go all the time. Gibbon and Marcos — Charley’s assistant dognapper — are here in Laguna already, resting up at a motel.

Strickland feels a strange, blue doom falling over him.

Billy Ray Crumley, feeling like a jilted suitor, watches from his pickup truck as Strickland walks toward the fog-windowed, green Maserati that’s been there all evening and much of the night.

Billy’s already recognized him as the guy from the Havana Café the morning they met Arnie at the DEA in San Diego. The guy who heard Texas in his voice. Watching out the window for Bettina too? Yes, obviously.

A good-looking guy, thinks Billy. Has to be the reason Bettina has been so quiet the last couple of days, busy and distant and cool toward him. He’s been sitting here for hours, since texting her five times this evening, all sincere, caring messages, all unanswered. Ignored. As if she were otherwise engaged.

Which Billy saw was true when he looked in on today’s Canyon Cocktails happy hour — to which Bettina had taken him not long ago — only to find her and Felix there with this Maserati guy who was spying on her at the Havana.

Billy writes down the plate numbers so he can get an ID on Mr. Maserati. Run him for warrants.

Then pass that name to Arnie, whose DEA analysts can spit out information on people faster than shit through a goose, as Arnie likes to say.

When Mr. Maserati takes off his coat and sets it on the back seat of the car, Billy notes the paddle holster at the small of his back.

Cop or robber? he wonders.

One of Arnie’s guys?