The Rescue

47

In answer to the resounding silence of the Strickland clan, Bettina makes the death and disposition arrangements with the county. Charley Gibbon helps, dealing with the detectives and deflecting reporters from her. Besides a local self-defense academy owner, five known gangsters have been killed and two innocent bystanders wounded in the popular Gaslamp Quarter. The media is hungry for information on the dead self-defense instructor, a decorated combat veteran with no criminal record. But they haven’t connected Bettina to Strickland or that night. She drifts around them like smoke.

It costs her a modest fortune to have Dan buried in a hillside cemetery up in Newport Beach, but she wants him close. Strickland’s father and mother actually attend the service. At first they mistake Bettina for a mortuary representative, offering compliments on their son’s appearance. They’re two of the iciest and most charmless plutocrats Bettina has ever met, and she understands a little more of why Strickland was the way he was. Allison Strickland doesn’t show but sends flowers. There are close to sixty people who file through the viewing, mostly clients and former clients of Apex, Bettina gathers. No extended family or close friends. She introduces herself to a series of attractive, mostly unaccompanied women, with an ache in her heart and a towering sense of gullibility.

She’s in a state of mild shock before and after, spending most of her hours in her Laguna Canyon apartment, staring out the windows and talking to her dog. She cries and sleeps a lot.

Gets calls and emails about her Coastal Eddy El Gordo story and video from agents and publishers, producers, studios, networks, cable, and streamers. One from a human resources executive from Los Angeles Times, implying a job offer and inviting her to lunch. And, disturbingly, an email from a San Diego Union columnist who says two witnesses told her they had recognized Bettina dining with a man — and her dog — at Mikey’s in the Gaslamp the night Dan Strickland was shot down. Did you know him?

She answers not one of them.

Her mother and father and brothers Nick and Connor come and go, as do Billy Ray Crumley and Jean Rose, and some of her Coastal Eddy coworkers, and the Biker Chicks. She realizes how alone she is — we all are — when it comes to being in our own skin, to putting one foot in front of the other.

She doesn’t work. Doesn’t ride. Doesn’t surf.

Can’t stay awake more than four hours at a time during day, can’t sleep at night. Felix is depleted, eating less and sleeping more, looking at her lugubriously.

Alejandro Godoy:

She writes El Gordo back, confirming Joe’s death in the Gaslamp shoot-out.

Her life is an empty container.

The minutes take hours; the hours take days.

On her first day back at Coastal Eddy, Bettina meets Billy at Crescent Bay in Laguna. He’s on bike patrol today downtown, but he’s got his lunch hour free. He brings food from the French café on Forest that Bettina likes, and a couple of big gourmet treats for Felix. The plastic bag dangles from his hand as they walk across the beach. Felix bolts after a seagull, but Bettina calls him in. The tide is low and they choose flat rocks up by the sandstone berm.

Billy has been a rock of empathy and subdued good cheer these days since the Gaslamp. But today Bettina senses extra weight in him. The early spring day is cool and still, and they don’t have a lot to say.

“Bettina, I’m wanting to bring up something that may not be pleasant for you. And I want you to know that I’ll just cool it if you don’t want to hear me out. And I’m not saying that what I suspect is absolutely true, but I have to say it. Say what I think is true, I mean. And there I go, tangling up my words again.”

“Shoot, Billy.”

“Dan Strickland was the Roman — the dog handler and shooter that El Gordo and the DEA talked about.”

“No. Of course that can’t be, Billy,” she says. But her words sound weak. And it’s not the ocean breeze just carrying them away. Once upon a time, she had thought that was a distant but actual possibility. But the idea of Dan as the Roman had gradually receded with his protection of her and of Felix, and his unwavering affection for both of them. And hers for him.

But now, Billy’s words hit her heart with the heavy thud of truth.

“Prove it.”

“The Tijuana Police cooperated with DEA, which ran the brass from Calderón against the gun that Strickland died with. It took some time with all the shots fired, but the toolmarks from six casings matched. Dan Strickland’s gun was used to kill three men in Tijuana that night.”

“And how did DEA think to do that?”

Billy sighs, nods compliantly. “Because I showed them the similarities between Dan as a competition gunslinger, and Godoy’s photos of the shooter in the switching yard.”

“I’m processing. I’m processing.”

“He never told you?” asks Billy.

Bettina shakes her head, zips up her windbreaker, watches a couple of black-clad frogmen back into the surf. This kind of diving had never seemed scary to her, but now it does — disappearing into that dark black water with a bunch of lead strapped around your waist.

Everything seems scary since the Gaslamp.

Like when she’s here on Laguna’s beaches, looking at the waves, she imagines dropping into a Brooks Street barrel and feels cold fear.

Or in town, when she considers Coast Highway and imagines coursing down the asphalt into town with the cars whizzing past her, she feels fear.

And if she imagines guiding a big strong horse like Sawblade in a barrel race, she feels fear. Wonders how she ever did all those things in the first place.

Is this what Strickand meant when he said the first thing he’d teach her about survival was to learn when to back off?

She doesn’t think so. She thinks if anyone needed to know when to back off, it was him, not her. Which was part of why she came to like and love him. Because they were alike.

Which does nothing to address the fear. No matter how still and open-minded, or how fueled by bourbon she becomes, since the Gaslamp shoot-out, Bettina has felt no spark, no flame, no fire.

“Bettina, I’m very sorry that you lost your friend like that. I’ve never lost someone I loved, in that way. It must be a heavy burden. So I’ll do what I can to help you, be a shoulder to cry on, whatever you need. I won’t crowd you like I did before, won’t shadow or badger you. If what you need is less me, I’ll clear all the way out.”

“Don’t clear out.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Let’s do this again next week.”

“You got it.”

After Billy leaves, Bettina and Felix linger at Crescent Bay. Today is her birthday. And Keith’s. Keith’s ashes were scattered at sea up in Dana Point, so Bettina figures that, technically, any part of the Pacific is somewhere some tiny molecule of Keith might be. So Crescent Bay’s as good a place to think about him than any.

She strokes Felix’s perfect round head and behind his gull wing ears, and memories of Keith come flooding out, good ones, only the good ones, only the good.

Here’s looking at you, brother. Sorry the world wasn’t enough. Sorry I wasn’t.

Charley Gibbon holds open the Apex Self-Defense door, and Felix squeezes in first. Bettina nods at Gibbon on her way in. Charley has the same hardness, the same feral cool that Strickland had.

“Thanks for this, Charley,” she says.

“I got some pictures and video for you on the desktop. Some letters I found in a file cabinet. Something for you from Dan.”

“What do you know about his life as the Roman?”

Gibbon gives her a pained smile and a small shake of his head. “Let’s sit outside in the sun for that,” he says. “Beer? Bourbon?”

Gibbon’s expression is a confirmation that Billy Ray was absolutely right about Strickland. This hurts — her last crumb of hope for Dan the Good Guy melting away.

“Bourbon,” she says.

The April afternoon is sunny, neither warm nor cool, a representative San Diego day. Bettina sits on the deck exactly where she sat the night that Strickland cooked the dinner and told her about Sangin and later let her take him to his bed. The night she picked the short pale dog hair off the collar of Strickland’s coat while they walked in the rain.

“So Felix was with you when I came here for the first time,” she says.

“I was part of the conspiracy.”

“To help me believe that my dog had been kidnapped by Godoy.”

“Yes.”

“When in fact Dan had him here all along?”

“He felt terrible about taking Joe from you. He knew how much you love him, because he loved Joe too.”

“His name is Felix.” Bettina reaches down and runs a hand over his fine round head, the doggen noggin.

“Of course,” says Gibbon. “Felix he is.”

“That was the only direct lie he told me, that I know of,” says Bettina. “Him not being the Roman. The rest of his deceits were just errors of omission. Such as Felix not being here at Apex. Such as the women. Such as working for two cartels. Such as letting me believe it was safe to have dinner together in the Gaslamp.”

“He underestimated the time it would take Carlos Palma to find him out.”

“There’s got to be a better word than ‘underestimated.’”

Gibbon nods and sips his beer. “Dan’s fearlessness is what made him a success. And got him killed.”

“Yes.”

“I get that way myself,” says Bettina. “I’ve been reckless, too, in a much less spectacular way.”

“The thrill of the hunt.”

“Felix led Dan to the drugs and money,” says Bettina, still having a hard time believing that he was the Roman. “How often?”

“In the old days, once a week, maybe twice,” says Gibbon. “When Dan played both cartels at once, it got busier.”

“How much money did he make, on a good night?”

“Fifty thousand.”

“So he could take in a hundred grand in a week?”

“Some weeks not. Some weeks more.”

“Was Furniture Calderón the first shoot-out?”

“Yeah.”

“How many men did he kill that night?”

“Three,” says Gibbon. “They were his first, outside of the war. It dimmed some of his light. The men he killed in Sangin, he chalked up to war — he was able to look back on them in a different way than the civilians in Calderón. I’d seen some changes in him over the last year. The crazier his escapades got down in TJ, the more troubled he was. Darker inside. Sometimes it looked like the risks he took for Palma were a way to keep that darkness away. Shoot his way out of it. Like the danger made him free.”

“Why Roman?”

“He thought it sounded noble.”

“Jesus.” She can’t quite laugh and can’t quite cry.

“He told me once that he wanted to be remembered as a legend.”

Bettina finds it hard to believe that this was the man she fell for and loved and surrendered her heart to. How could she have missed him by so far? Looked at one thing and seen another? How could she call herself a reporter when she got the facts of her own story so wrong?

“He loved you very much,” said Gibbon. “In his way.”

All she’s been able to see for the last days is Strickland on the sidewalk in a lake of blood, his throat blown out and his beautiful dead gray eyes drying in the wind.

“I don’t want to hear that now.”

“He was driven by powerful things he didn’t understand,” says Gibbon. “He was misshapen.”

“But in the end, what you do is on you.”

Echoing what Godoy said about Keith. Reminding Bettina that Strickland was on the same side of history as El Gordo, for a time. Which makes her love him less and miss him more: People change, she thinks. He could have become a good man. Couldn’t he? Couldn’t he!

“I agree, Bettina. Dan would too. He liked to say, ‘Wear the crown, wear the target.’”

Sitting at the big desk in Strickland’s penthouse office, Bettina browses the pictures that Gibbon has curated for her. Felix lies in a rhombus of sunlight fading through a western window. Being in his former home has left him spiritless.

Bettina considers Strickland’s birth certificate, issued by Hoag Hospital of Newport Beach.

Then a picture of Strickland as a first grader, bundled up in a preppy sweater, with a big gap in his smile.

And a Daily Pilot article about Daniel Strickland winning a Snowbird regatta at the Balboa Bay Club when he was ten. He looks like Hemingway, posed in the boat with a big smile and the wind in his hair.

There are family portraits in which Dyson’s presidential bearing and Jennifer’s composed beauty seem to drain the energies of their son and daughter.

Prom and beach pics.

A friend named Rupert.

Cage diving with white sharks.

Racing a Ducati into a perilous curve, if that’s him inside the helmet.

Skydiving, solo.

Shooting competitions.

Strickland with unidentified girls — not many — and Bettina wonders if Gibbon has redacted the babe shots in consideration of her.

Sangin, Afghanistan: Strickland kneeling in front of a low mud wall, M16 in hand. He looks exhausted.

Shots of Strickland and his Apex students in action. He looks fierce.

A picture of “Wade and Aaron, Joe’s trainer and handler at Excalibur K-9.” With a proud Felix.

A close-up of a dark-haired woman asleep on a pillow, her face peaceful and pretty, which certainly annoys Bettina until she realizes it’s her, in his bed, right here in this building.

Gibbon has arranged for the SDPD to transfer some of Strickland’s phone pictures from their Mammoth run: ski shots and selfies of Bettina and Strickland and Felix before the condo fireplace, Death Valley panoramas, and them dressed up for dinner at the Oasis at Death Valley.

Enough, thinks Bettina, a hard, painful knot tightening in her throat.

Felix comes over and looks up at her. No limp. Licks her fingers and slides his noggin under her hand.

The letters that Strickland had once mentioned writing to his family are in a file cabinet folder labeled LETTERS, FAMILY.

One each to Dyson, Jennifer, and Allison.

They all say exactly the same thing:

I’m writing to explain to you some of the decisions I have made, and the unusual things I have done since I was a small boy.

And that’s it, just this sentence, this huge promise followed up with nothing.

Bettina closes the folder on them.

She knows she’s missed the truth of Strickland by a mile, and that there will be, in the end, no one else to know it except Charley.

She opens a big brown clasp envelope with her name written in Strickland’s perfect, forward-slanting, all-caps print. It’s been staring at her since she first sat down, and she’s been dreading it.

No letter inside, just packets of new hundreds, packed with paper bands like they do at the bank.

Lots of them.

She and Felix roam Strickland’s bedroom. Felix seems listless and uncertain. Bettina kneels and scratches behind his goofy ears, feels again the terrible responsibility for what has happened to Felix’s former master.

I’ll do anything to protect Joe and you.

“Maybe we’ll all be together someday,” she says.

What a strange thing to believe, she thinks, working Felix’s ears. Not sure I do.

Throat lump and eye burn.

She slides open Dan’s closet, looking for something of his to have. Something she can take home, just a reminder. The clothes hang neatly. There are shelves with meticulously folded sweaters and knit shirts. She finds that dark sweater that Strickland was wearing when they met in the Coastal Eddy office. Takes it.

Joe sleeps in the Team Bed with Bettina that night, and by then he knows something is really Bad. He knows that the smells on Bettina that night of the guns were powerfully Bad. That the tall man outside the Jeep was Bad. That Dan being gone is Bad. Joe knows that Bettina’s unhappiness is Bad.

But he knows that Dan will come back and they’ll be a Team again. He thinks that was what Bettina was trying to tell him. Dan and Bettina and him. The Team.

And Aaron will come back, too, even though Aaron was often unhappy with him.

Teddy will come back, his first Boy, his first Team.

They will all be a Team. Together and happy.

Joe always looks forward, but he never forgets.

Especially his first human.

When she gets back to her office the next day, there’s an older man in the lobby, and a boy, holding open the latest Coastal Eddy newspaper spread across his lap.

When he stands, Felix sails over the coffee table at him, leash trailing midair. The newspaper floats free and the boy catches Felix in the falling sheets of newsprint, then dog and boy crash to the blue leather sofa in a storm of crackling paper, canine caterwauling, and urgent human words: “Joe, Joe, Joe!”

Shit, Bettina realizes: Teddy Delgado.