The Rescue

35

While Bettina snores, half a mile away, Billy Ray Crumley reads the “Inter-Agency Informal Dossier” on Dan Strickland, attached to Arnie’s email.

Billy’s in a Laguna Beach PD conference room with his laptop hooked up to the good department broadband, already in uniform for his Bike Team patrol downtown.

He’s worried sick about Bettina: last night she left him a very strange text message about being haunted by a man. She’s not returning his calls. But as of half an hour ago, at least, her Wrangler was parked in her Canyon View spot, right where it belongs.

It more than worries him that last night, Bettina was “about to square things” with this fellow who’s been haunting her for years. Years? He feels her heartache, fear and anger as if she’s sitting right here in the conference room beside him. Makes it hard to concentrate.

Billy reads that Daniel Knowles Strickland is thirty-three. He owns the apparently successful Apex Self-Defense school in San Diego.

Strickland has a rapid-fire past that includes some college, military service, law enforcement, and a now defunct private investigation company, Strickland Security.

An action figure, thinks Billy. A rugged war hero. It pisses him off that three days ago, he was with Bettina all evening and half the night. He’s not the man haunting her, is he? What is he doing to her? Hustling her into hiring him to protect her and Felix? If so, then a lot of good that did. Was he just trolling for business — trying to convince a pretty young woman to take his course at Apex? Maybe just trying to get friendly with her? Billy Ray would love to ask her but he probably never will.

DEA hasn’t included much in the way of pictures or videos of him, but there’s no doubt this is the man he talked to at the Havana Café, and saw coming from Bettina’s apartment. There’s a high school yearbook picture, and a shot of Strickland receiving his Silver Star in 2011. There’s a poor-quality picture of a young Officer Dan Strickland of the San Diego PD.

And a brief International Practical Shooting Confederation website video of a “Young Talent” shooter — a much younger Strickland — loping through a woodsy, two-minute course, nailing paper silhouettes with a Glock as he runs and fires, reloads, runs and fires. Billy notes that when Strickland is close enough, he shoots with only one hand — right or left — holding the gun a little higher than necessary, trading an easy sightline for Hollywood. Which is crazy in competition like this, he thinks.

But, as a cop who has to qualify with his sidearm every year, Billy can see how well this guy shoots. Crazy, maybe, but crazy good.

In the video, Dan Strickland reminds Billy of someone he knows, or maybe has seen before. A faint memory at best. Something about the way he swings his weapon on the move, the ease of gait and turn of torso. Like he’s after style points. Trying to look graceful. Billy has shot on the run, in ranges such as this. They’re difficult and this guy makes it look easy.

Billy thinks he might be remembering one of his fellow cadets in training. Why does that seem so long ago? Something to do with Lorna and their public secrets in Wichita Falls, no doubt. Too bad Bettina seems 100 percent not interested in going further. Because of Dan Strickland? Or is it just me?

He replays the IPSC video again, can’t connect Strickland to anybody in his past. He’s remembered dreams more clearly than this vague whisp of a memory. Maybe a memory. Or it might be a dream, for all he knows.

Billy can’t get his mind off Bettina, but it’s dangerous to be distracted when you’re patrolling a crowded city on a bicycle. With a gun on your hip, no less. When the traffic is bad you have to dismount every other minute, cut between the cars, go another block maybe, then dismount again. When traffic is light the vehicles are moving fast enough to kill you and half the drivers are either looking out their windows at the pretty little city, or on their phones.

Billy soldiers through his beat, dodging the puddles from last night’s rain. He checks the outdoor dining on Forest, going strong for March.

Gives directions to tourists; stops in at Bushard’s Pharmacy and Tuvalu and Coastal Eddy, even though Bettina’s car isn’t in the parking garage.

Chats with Crazy Larry outside the Wells Fargo entrance, tells him to quit panhandling the bank customers on their way in and out. “But this is where the money is!” says Larry, his standard reply, and Billy usually thinks it’s funny, but this morning it just gets on his nerves.

“Move along, Larry,” he says. “You smell bad.”

“Headed for the laundry right now, Captain. Got any quarters?”

In fact he has three, which he drops into Crazy Larry’s very dirty hand while Larry stares at his gun, which always makes Billy nervous.

After work he changes into his civvies and drives to Apex Self-Defense, on Cedar in San Diego.

It’s not easy to find, tucked into a labyrinth of squat brick industrial buildings, looming steel-and-glass concoctions and metro tracks, all webbed tight by telephone poles and power lines. The Apex building is a three-story brick structure with an address half-hidden in ivy and no ID other than the long-faded San Diego Sandblast sign above the front door.

Billy sits in his pickup truck on the uncovered roof lot of A-1 Parking, giving him a great view through his binoculars.

No Bettina.

No Strickland or green Quattroporte, no customers coming or going. But he sees motion through the small first-story windows. There’s a hand-to-hand combat class going on behind one window, real nasty stuff, maybe Krav Maga. Everybody is in street clothes, practicing eye-gouges and throat rips in slow motion. No contact. The instructor — who looks shorter and wider than Strickland — wears a fencing mask with a full throat bib.

The third floor of Apex looks newer than the first two, with a slightly different shade of brick, and large windows on both of the walls that he can see from here. Through the fabric blinds Billy sees faint movement, someone deep inside, crossing the room maybe. Then none.

He watches the face rippers practicing their form. Eats his still-warm In-N-Out Burger Double-Double, fries, and the chocolate shake, always amazed you can get a dinner like this for less than seven bucks.

An hour later the Apex students come out. There are three men and three women, a variety of shapes, sizes, and ages.

No Bettina, but he didn’t think there wouldn’t be.

Billy wipes his fingers on the thin paper napkins and heads back to Laguna.

Bettina’s Wrangler is in its usual spot in the covered parking.

Billy feels an uneasy relief settle inside. She may not want anything to do with me, he thinks, but at least she’s alive and home and not with the crack-shot, pretty-boy, kill ’em with your bare hands Dan Strickland.

Strickland is still on Billy’s mind later that night, as he sits at the chrome dinette in his tiny, furnished Laguna Beach apartment.

Specifically, Strickland’s distinctive shooting style in the video, which has been running through his Bettina-distracted brain since he first saw it this morning.

Billy’s got his laptop on the table before him, and a Coors Light sweating into a folded paper towel, as he opens the DEA link and again watches Strickland hustling, crouching, and blasting away at the International Practical Shooting Confederation match.

The video is from 2012 when, Billy notes, Strickland was twenty-two and working his brief stint at the San Diego PD. Billy has shot at ranges like this in the Texas Hill Country. Hitting something while you’re running isn’t easy like in the movies, but Strickland makes it look that way.

“There,” says Billy, pausing the video for a still shot of Strickland, his pistol up in one hand, caught mid-stride down a steep, curving slope, about to come into range of a paper bad guy crouching behind a small laurel sumac, gun ready.

I’ve seen this guy, he thinks again.

At the DEA office in San Diego with Bettina, Arnie, Dale Greene, and LaDonna Powers.

But it wasn’t this IPSC video. It wasn’t a video at all. It was a picture — part of Bettina’s forwarded “offer” from El Gordo.

Which Billy calls up from his email and reads again.

The attached photos are of the black-clad gunman and his pale dog in what appears to be a railroad switching yard. He’s got his pistol in one hand, like Strickland in the IPSC “New Talents” video. Felix is out ahead of him, his telltale brown ovals showing clearly, his nose down, his saber tail curving up.

Back to the man. Billy sees the same posture. Same turn of the torso, his hand raised, pistol pointed down. Not a classic shooter’s stance. Not even close. More an improvisation? An efficient, necessary movement — maybe — but there’s something else attached to it. What is it, he wonders. Performance? Celebration? Maybe even joy?

There’s not much more tying this blacked-out, masked man to Strickland at the IPSC match, except for a general tallness, his medium build, and a somewhat long-legged carriage. Billy can’t even tell what race he is, or the color of his hair.

But when he holds the printed dossier picture up next to the paused video he sees the same guy doing the same thing.

Is Strickland the Roman?

It makes no sense, but they sure as hell shoot alike. And, from what he knows of the Roman and of Dan Strickland, they share a keen interest in the dangerous.

Bettina, thinks Billy, what have you gotten yourself into?