Then She Vanished

Thirty-Four

In the darkness I hunkered down in a nearby stand of yuccas to watch unseen. Really observing for the first time, I saw that bungalow nineteen was different from the other units. It was slightly larger. The front door was arched and there was a grated security window built in. It stood farther apart from its third-row neighbors. It was the sole seventh unit on the three legs of the Bighorn horseshoe. Added on?

Waiting there, watching. So much like Fallujah. Not only the hot, dry desert but this nervy lead-up to engagement. In Iraq it was the long waiting for dawn — the insurgents rarely fought at night — when you couldn’t sleep and couldn’t think and couldn’t do much more than stare up at whatever happened to be above you, listening for the waking sounds of a war that would soon come reaching out to take you. Wondering why you had come here. Why your father and forefathers had obligated you to this bloody fight with peoples in strange lands thousands of miles away. When in fact your father and his father hadn’t. It was you. Wanting to hit back. Wanting to show them what you could do and why you were not to be fucked with. Wanting to get it over with so you could say you did it. I didn’t know my war was a bad war when I signed up. I was twenty-two when the towers fell. I didn’t see falsehood on the sellers’ faces when they pitched that war to me on TV. I wasn’t cynical enough. Only later.

The breeze moved through the yuccas, their knifelike spines moving in unison. The sliver of moon threw its insignificant light.

I tried to shake off my hauntings from Iraq, but cheerful thoughts found no traction in the desert night. Instead, my brain down-hilled to last year’s beating by armed “security guards” wearing helmets. They’d used a little drone to spot me. They seemed like an army. Later, I’d gotten some revenge, though not enough. Now, staring out at the faintly lit unit, I touched the .45 tucked into the small of my back.

I circled deeper into the desert for a view of the back side. The curtains were drawn but there was movement inside, shadows on the move. Purposeful. Approaching in the soft sand of a wash, I found the bank and took a knee behind it. Brought up the night vision binoculars again. Saw the neat little patio behind the casita, a low wall. Potted flowers and a small fountain turned off for the night. A shimmer of water in the tray. Saw the parabolic mic mounted to the roof tile, with a security camera next to it, their indicators blipping red in the dark. Felt the ugly surprise at being seen and heard. The light still showed from inside but no movement.

I moved back around to the front, squatted again and brought up the glasses. There was a low wall as in the rear, and a small porch. Potted cacti and bougainvillea, decorative boulders. A yellow bug light on the wall. The front door was darkly finished wood, with a small window protected by an elegant wrought iron grate.

Nothing moving inside.

With my boots I cleared a small circle of sand and settled down cross-legged. The sand had trapped the heat a few inches down. I sat still with the binoculars around my neck, silently chiding myself for having blundered into the well-monitored back side of the unit. Would they be watching the camera feed this late at night? Would they have the microphone speakers turned up? How sensitive was that mic, really, with the constant desert breeze? Much more to the point, what were they doing?

Life is waiting. I wait therefore I am: a private eye, making an hourly wage not yet collected from a California assemblyman who had recently been indicted for campaign financial misdeeds. While running for reelection and blaming his wife. A woman who, two weeks ago, had been plucked from her life as a committed partner, a good mother, a successful seller of luxury cars, and a capable manager of political campaigns, only to be transformed into… what? Who are you now, Natalie Strait?

Breeze cooling, my Rolling Thunder Security windbreaker earned its keep.

Nothing is slower than time.

Or louder than silence.

Every few minutes I lifted the binoculars to the same scene. Lights still on. No movement, no change. As if four people had frozen in place at the sight or sound of me watching them from the desert.

An hour became midnight then early morning.

I saw the front door crack open but when I brought up the field glasses I realized I was seeing things. Hopeful, untrue things.

I allowed myself to think of Tola Strait, so thoroughly imploded by the deaths of Kirby and Charity, and her employees up in the Palomar Mountains. Tola, shivering in the spring cool of my bedroom, wrapped in a blanket, her face a tragic mask in the firelight. As she spilled out good childhood memories of her older brother. Only the good ones, of course, empowered by his death.

“I apologize for putting you into the middle of all that,” she’d said.

“I asked for it.”

“All you did was say yes to a few bucks,” she said. “And to a fool playing with people’s lives.”

“It was the fool who drew me, not the bucks.”

“I owe you.”

“Nothing.”

Through her tear-and-makeup-streaked mask she’d given me a blank stare.

“This is my lowest valley,” she said. “My bottom. I can do better. I’m going to do better with everything I touch in life. In the future. I promise.”

I smelled her tears and the musky sweet scent of dope in her hair.

In the first faint light of morning, no more than a blurring of the darkness in the black Borrego sky, I gave up my pretense of secrecy and walked to the front door of bungalow nineteen.

Looked through the grated window at the sofa and chairs covered in bird-of-paradise upholstery, the small desk and coffee table, the wall-mounted TV. It looked like the motel room it professed to be. Except for the large telescope mounted on a tripod before the big picture window.

I pushed the doorbell button, heard the faint chime. Waited, then rang again. And once more.

Door locked, of course.

I picked the lock in less than a minute and stepped in, closing the door with my back.

Heart thumping, eyes clear, adrenaline high: Go.

See, don’t think. Long steps, all angles, no frontals. Room to room.

I drew the .45 and cleared the place swiftly: two bedrooms, two baths, closets and cabinets.

No one there and no evidence that anyone had been there recently. The kitchen and bathroom sinks were clean and dry, the refrigerator empty, beds neatly made. Two TV remotes on the coffee table squared side by side over the satellite guide.

The kitchen suddenly sprang with motion — fast and airborne. I swung my pistol toward a big white cat sliding across the countertop, surprised as I was, trying to reverse course on smooth tile and knocking over a phone that slid off the counter and clattered to the floor. I picked it up and set it back in its cradle. No messages on the recorder. The cat disappeared under the couch.

Standing in the hallway, gun down and still amped by the cat, I asked myself if four people could have possibly left while I was out there watching. Gone out the front when I’d staked out the back? But from the rear I’d still been able to see the Suburban, and it hadn’t moved. And out front I’d planted myself at a distance and angle that gave me a view of most of the desert behind the little building — good enough to see them picking their way through the cactus-mined desert, headed for… where? If they had managed any of those feats on my watch, it was time for me to consider a new career.

Which left two options: an attic or a basement.

I looked up to see an attic hatch neatly framed in the old plaster ceiling, exactly where you’d expect to find it in a building this size and shape. They could easily have climbed through and pulled the ladder up behind them. Which could partially account for the motion I saw through the curtains. Which meant they could be up there right now.

However, I also saw that the colorful kilim hall runner at my feet lay askew. As if recently disturbed.

Dragging it aside with my boot, I saw the dark cut lines through the pavers, neatly done but still visible. In the shape of a trapdoor, large enough for people. No handles or recessed pulls. No easy way in. So, likewise, they could be just feet below me in a basement or crawl space, waiting for me to pass. I toed the runner back into place.

Then retreated outside and through the desert darkness to my truck. Continued my watch. Puzzled and off-balance.

The darkness surrendered to gray, and the calls of desert songbirds joined the morning. Across the parking lot from bungalow nineteen the office light was on but none of the other units were stirring yet. There were only two cars besides Holland’s Suburban, Cassy Weisberg’s Beetle, and Broadman’s silver Chevy Tahoe.

A few minutes later, Brock Holland and Gretchen Deuzler came from the front door of bungalow nineteen, quickly got into the white Suburban and drove toward town. I didn’t even have to duck and hide.

I got my Vigilant 4000 up and running. Noted that Holland and Deuzler were headed west, toward San Diego.

I waited another hour, then drove into the Bighorn lot and parked up near the office, one space over from Broadman’s silver Tahoe and Cassy Weisberg’s sun-blanched blue Beetle.

Cassy buzzed me into the office, welcomed me with a distant smile.

“Hello, Cass, is Harris around today?”

“Who wants to know?”

“The PI, Roland Ford.”

“I was only kidding you, Mr. Ford.”

“You’re a good kidder, then.”

“Mr. Broadman is sleeping, no doubt. He doesn’t usually get up until after noon.”

“Would you tell him I’m here?”

“I’m not supposed to wake him.”

I tried to look disappointed and I was probably sleep deprived enough to be convincing.

She pressed something on the counter I couldn’t see. “Mr. Broadman, Roland Ford is here to see you. The PI.”

The soft buzz of static, like the sound of a phone being picked up but not answered.

“Probably sleeping, like I said.”

“May I see him?”

“I don’t see how.”

“Can I just go knock?”

“That’s rude, Mr. Ford. I can’t allow that.”

My first impulse was to embrace rudeness. Natalie Strait was alive and kicking, and last seen a couple of hundred feet from where I now stood. Maybe, if I was face-to-face with Broadman, I’d be face-to-face with Natalie, too. My second thought was that Cassy Weisberg, employed by a kidnapper, and undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, might suffer for my rudeness more than me.

“Roland, what do you want?” asked Harris Broadman through the speaker.

“I have a question about Natalie Strait,” I said.

“I know nothing about her.”

Did he know it was me watching them last night? If not, I could still be just a harmless pest to him. If so, he would try to derail me.

I stalled and threw out something that Dalton had told me just recently.

“Dalton said he used to brag about her when you were in Fallujah,” I said. “That you three talked on Skype once, and you told Dalton he’d better take good care of her when he got home or you would.”

“And what’s the matter with that?”

“I’m trying to figure out if Natalie might have looked you up recently,” I said. “As a friend of her husband.”

“She did not. She did not.”

“No communication from her at all?”

“I’ve told you. None. Be gone, Ford. You’re trespassing on my property and my patience.”

“It’s my job, but thank you, Sergeant. I apologize for getting you up so early with long-shot questions.”

“You know I will always help.”

I thanked Cassy and told her to have a great day.

Stopped in front of bungalow six. The blinds were open.

Broadman looked back at me from the far side of the living room. He was sitting on the same ’50s turquoise sofa as when we’d first talked here and he’d told me about the IED that Dalton Strait had not quite saved him from. Same molten face. Same white clothes, white ball cap, and aviator sunglasses. Same sprigs of downy white hair.

He pointed the remote at me and the blinds shut tight.