When she saw he was headed for the front door, Patsy stepped out of it ahead of him and held it open behind her. He had one foot across the threshold when Alex said, “What about your decision?”
“I’ve made it!” John said. “I’m not cutting you loose. Mike Bowers saved my life, and you’re the only thing he left behind. That’s not up for debate.”
He drew the door shut behind him before Alex could use any words to distract himself from what sat right in front of him.
After John finished telling her the story of how Bowers had saved his life and lost an eye for it, Patsy cracked the driver-side window of her Jeep Grand Cherokee and lit a Virginia Slim. “And if he doesn’t go to the authorities? What then?”
“I teach him how to defend himself.”
“Against who? Ray Duncan?”
“Against whoever he runs into on the road to being a complete fucking idiot.”
“So you teach him how to fight? Then what? You wash your hands of him?”
“I’ll get out of California, probably. I’ve always wanted to see Montana.” He thought of the CHP study guide sitting in the kitchen drawer of a trailer he didn’t feel safe returning to.
After a few seconds of silence, he realized she was glaring at him as if he had cut wind. “You’re shitting me, right?” Patsy asked.
“It’s not going to come to that,” he said, with a glance back toward the trailer. “Not after what I just showed him.”
“The Hunt for Red October,” she said quietly. “The Russian guy. Sean Connery’s friend. The whole movie he’s talking about how he wants to see Montana. Then he gets shot at the end and before he dies he says, ‘I would have liked to have seen Montana.’ Just like you did right now.”
“I don’t remember the film that well, Patsy.”
“Well, sometimes when we’re scared and stupid, old shit just comes up. Old memories we didn’t know we had.” She pursed her lips and stared back at the seemingly lifeless trailer a few yards away. “Montana,” she whispered. “What the fuck, John?”
“California hasn’t been so kind to me, Patsy.”
“Iraq was nicer?” she asked. The anger in her tone told him she had taken the comment as an indictment of her parenting skills. “Maybe you should look at how you’ve treated California.”
“I’m trying to do something right now, Pats. Something good.”
“And you’re already planning the vacation you’re going to go on afterward.”
“I was going to start cadet training in a few weeks. For the CHP.”
“You’re not exactly paving the way for a career in law enforcement here.”
“Yeah, well, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to wear a uniform again until I set things right with Bowers.”
“Good. So go back in there, get what’s in that cash box, and take it to the police.”
“That won’t work.”
“Why the hell not, John?”
“Because it’s not what he would have wanted! Bowers was about the man standing next to him. It’s what made him a great Marine. It’s the reason he saved my life and never asked for any credit for it. He wasn’t a lawyer. He wasn’t about justice. He wasn’t about setting the record straight. He left those jobs to God, the president, and the men they chose to do their work for them. What he did was take care of the man standing next to him, and whether I like it or not—and believe me, I don’t, Patsy—that man is Alex Martin. So that’s what I have to do.”
“You’re still a Marine, John. You’re still repeating words you never bothered to learn the meaning of.”
“What would you know about being a Marine?”
“Don’t you try to pull rank on me, little brother. I was cleaning up after devil dogs when you were still jerking off down the hall to my Victoria’s Secret catalogs. I’ve been in this valley a decade, and it’s full of the messes Marines make after their M-4s get taken away. Most of those messes have names like Debi and Kristina, and they come into my bar with their arms in slings thinking I’m actually going to believe them when they tell me they fell down the front steps.”
“I’ve never lifted a hand to a woman in my life. You know that.”
“Do I? It’s been ten years, John. Honestly, what do I really know about you?”
“You know what I’m telling you right now. Just because you don’t want to hear it doesn’t mean it’s not the truth.”
She dropped the butt of her exhausted cigarette through the crack in the window and rolled it all the way up. The AC blew strands of her chocolate-colored hair back over her left shoulder, making her look like something out of a music video. John said, “You do the job that gets put in front of you. Not the one you want. Not the one you picked ahead of time. The one that gets put in front of you by war or by God or whatever. That’s what it means to be a Marine.”
Patsy fought an eye roll by rubbing her temples with the middle three fingers on each hand. Her loud exhalation turned into a groan. Then she said, “So, what do you want from me then? Money?”
“We’re going need a place to stay for a little while, no matter what he decides.”
“A hideout,” she whispered. “Jesus. I thought I might have to bail you out of prison someday, but this I wasn’t prepared for.”
“Why’d you think you’d have to bail me out someday?”
Her smirk vanished, and with what looked like effort, she met his eyes. “I was pretty sure that as soon as you weren’t a Marine anymore, you would try to kill Danny Oster.”
The remark blindsided him, reminded him of how close he had come to driving to Redlands, even with someone else’s nine-year-old child in the front seat of his truck. Patsy furrowed her brow and stared down at her clasped hands as if she had just imparted terrible news. Maybe the name Danny Oster was too much even for her to bear.
Then he saw a figure out in the sandy distance, walking toward them across the expanse behind the trailer, vaguely familiar but too far away for him to make out. Patsy saw it, too. “Who is that?” John stepped out of the Jeep and pulled the Sig from the holster at his waist. Patsy followed him, and then stopped cold when she saw he had drawn his weapon.
After a minute, John recognized Alex’s blond hair. He had taken off the light jacket he’d been wearing the night before and untucked his dark green polo shirt.
“I didn’t even see him leave,” John said.
He holstered his weapon and passed through the back gate in the chain-link fence. He and Alex were a few yards apart when Alex stopped walking. His shirt was soaked through with sweat, and his hands were caked with sand.
“You buried it,” John said.
“It seemed like the right thing to do,” Alex said.
“It is if you don’t want to take it to the authorities.”
Alex was silent.
“Or if you don’t want me to take it to the authorities.”
“I love the way you say that word, John—authorities. Like it gives you a warm feeling all over. Is that how it feels to be protected by the system?”
“You tell me, Mr. Cathedral Beach.”
“I don’t live in Cathedral Beach anymore. And you never did. So we don’t have that working in our favor now, do we?” John had no response to this. “So tell me—what’s next? Since you’re not going to cut me loose.”
Before he could answer, John looked back over his shoulder at his sister. She was holding the fence with one hand and studying Alex with a pinched expression, like he was a girlfriend of hers who had demanded her real opinion of a dress that didn’t fit her. She hadn’t mentioned the possibility of turning them in herself, and he was willing to bank that she was grateful enough to have him back in her life that she would go a good ways with them.
“Here’s the deal,” John said. “I’m going to teach you how to defend yourself no matter what choice you make. That means I’m going to teach you how to fight. But if you choose to use what I teach you on Ray Duncan, you’re on your own. Got it?”
�
�How else would I use it?”
“You could end up running from this for the rest of your life, and God knows who you would meet along the way.”
“Fine, then. Yes, John. Please. Teach me how to kill.”
“I’ll teach you how to win a fight with your bare hands. But first I’ll have to find out what’s standing between you and your ability to kill another human being.”
“And then what?” Alex asked.
“I’ll get rid of it,” he answered. He let this hang for a minute. Then he said, “Whether or not you kill anyone is up to you. But let it be said just for the record here”—he looked back at Patsy, who was staring at him with glazed eyes—” I extended two offers of protection to you, and this is the one you chose.”
“Fair enough,” Alex said quietly.
“Do you accept?”
At first Alex smirked at the formality of it, but when he saw that John was dead serious, he raised his head slightly, studied John intently for a few seconds, and without a trace of hesitation in his voice said, “I accept.”
Behind him John heard Patsy give a weak voice to what he was feeling inside—she cursed under her breath and started toward the trailer. Alex watched her departure with a skeptical expression.
“Looks like you should talk to her,” Alex said.
“I’ve got my sister covered. Thanks.”
“Really? It’s been—what? Ten years?”
Once again, John was reminded of the fact that Alex had been given all sorts of facts about him, while his knowledge of Alex grew inch by painful inch with each passing hour. John told Alex to take a shower and then he started back toward the Jeep, where Patsy had slipped behind the wheel and started the engine.
She rolled down the window as he approached, but remained silent as Alex walked past them and went back inside the trailer. Instead of chewing him a new asshole, his sister said, “I might have a place. It’s out of state, but we can leave tonight.”
“You’re coming with us?”
“This is a friend, and it’s a big favor. It’s with me or not at all.” He doubted the truth of this statement, but he wasn’t in a position to argue.
“Who?”
“Let’s just get there, okay?”
Her reticence relieved him. He truly didn’t want to know. His sister had been annoyingly accepting of wackos throughout their time in the desert, and there had been no shortage of Indian shamans, recovering drug addicts, and all-around loonies in her past. She must have thought she didn’t have the right to judge people too harshly, considering the universe had taken so many advantages away from them, such as parents and affordable health care.
“I’m going to withdraw some cash,” she said. “I figure we’ll need it.”
“I can’t ask you to come in on this, Patsy.”
“Good,” she said. “’Cause you didn’t.”
She took the Jeep out of park, his signal to step away as she backed out of the lot and onto the two-lane blacktop that led back to Old Woman Springs Road.
Only after her Jeep had faded from view did he realize that she had patted his hand gently before he had stepped away from her vehicle, the first time they had touched in ten years.
9
Forty-five minutes after they crossed the border into Arizona, John turned down the Carrie Underwood song on the radio and said, “How much longer?”
Patsy said, “We’ll probably get there just before sunrise. I figure you’d prefer it that way.”
The digital clock said it was almost midnight, and they had been on the road for almost two hours already, which meant she wasn’t taking them much farther than Arizona, possibly New Mexico if she put the pedal to the metal. She had convinced John that they should go in one car—hers—and had suggested that they leave his truck in the one place Duncan knew they had already been: the location off Old Woman Springs Road where Duncan had buried the cash box. If they had been declared fugitives, there was no mention of it in the news, and the fact that Duncan hadn’t turned to the media suggested he had a darker plan in store.
Alex was sleeping peacefully in one of the bucket seats in back, his head resting against his balled-up jacket, his lips parted. Something about Alex’s slack jaw and the way the passing headlights streaked his face reminded John of a lance corporal who had died right in front of him, just seconds before being loaded into a Black Hawk, so he tried to avoid looking at him in the rearview mirror.
Why shouldn’t he be sleeping like a baby? John thought. Now that I’m covering his ass.
“You know,” Patsy said quietly, and John realized she had not turned the radio back up after he had turned it down, “he might just be out to prove something to you.” She was watching Alex in the rearview mirror to make sure he wasn’t listening.
“He said I wasn’t his type,” John said.
“I didn’t say he wanted to get in your pants,” she whispered. John was startled by how easily she was able to use this phrase when two men were involved. “Maybe he just wants to prove he’s not a sissy.”
“He almost shot an officer of the law in my trailer,” John said as quietly as he could without whispering. “And it was clear he didn’t have the slightest damn clue how to even hold a gun. He’s impulsive and irrational, and if I don’t do something about it he’s going to get himself killed.”
He didn’t want to consider the possibility that there might be more truth in what Patsy was saying than he was willing to believe. But what did it matter? Doing right by Mike meant giving Alex the skills to survive whatever he chose to confront. That was where it ended. That was where he needed it to end.
“John?”
“Yes, Patsy.”
“When I made that comment about Danny Oster. About you—”
“Trying to kill him?”
“Yeah.” She gave him a quick glance and then returned her attention to the road. “You didn’t say anything.”
“What was I supposed to say?”
“Can we not play it like that? I know it’s been ten years, but today hasn’t really been the reunion I was hoping for, and you got to admit I’m meeting you a lot more than halfway here.”
“A couple of days ago an old buddy of mine…not just a buddy; a guy whose life I saved…he brought me a file on Oster he got from a PI buddy of his. See, I had told him the story one night after I got wasted—”
“The story?”
“Of what happened to Dean.”
“I know, John. What is it that happened to Dean again?” Her gaze was dead ahead, but her hands had tensed on the wheel and her voice was tight, sure signs she was gearing up for one of her subtle but effective strikes. And he couldn’t help but wonder if she was forcing them to visit the past again because she didn’t want to know what John had considered doing with the file Charlie had brought him.
“I don’t want to do this,” John said quietly. “I really don’t want to do this.”
But Patsy seemed undeterred. “Because, see, John, the story Dean told me that day is that you misinterpreted what you saw. That what you saw were two guys roughhousing on a bed and you lost it.”
John checked the rearview mirror, saw that Alex was still sound asleep, his body rocking sluggishly with the Jeep’s motion. “Is that why Oster’s pants were around his ankles? You think I made that up? He lied because he was ashamed, Patsy. Because part of him thought it was his fault.”
“Is that what he told you?”
“No,” John said. But when he didn’t finish the thought, Patsy shifted in her seat, sucked in a long breath through her nose that signaled her irritation, signaled the fact that she was holding back in a way she never would have when they were younger. In terms of cutting through any bullshit that was shoved her way, Patsy had been a better mother than their own mother, a career nurse who had only paid serious attention to her kids when they were bleeding or in acute physical pain.
“What did he tell you, John?”
“Please, Patsy.”
“I’
m the one who buried him. I have a right to know.”
He was suddenly dizzy, as if he were about to take a jump off the high board, what it felt like to get ready to unload something that had tormented him for so long. “He said he lied to you so you wouldn’t hate me. So you wouldn’t think I failed.”
“Why would I think you failed?”
“Because I was supposed to be watching him that day and I was down the street at Tina Gray’s. Because I should have known that Oster was a freak who was spending way too much of his time with a seventeen-year-old boy. Because he was my responsibility.”
“Says who?”
“Me. I say it. Because it’s the truth, Patsy.”
Her stunned silence seemed to hang over them both like a kind of humidity. Finally, in a voice that had a threat of tears in it, she said, “Tell me this isn’t the reason I haven’t heard a word from you in ten years. Please, John. Tell me this isn’t the reason I’ve spent the past five years watching every newscast, waiting for some mention of your name.”
“He was my responsibility. It was just the way things were in our house. And it’s the way they should have been because, God knows, you were doing everything else.”
“He lied to both of us, John. He lied because he didn’t want either of us to know what happened in that bedroom.”
“I know what happened,” John hissed. “I was there! I saw it!” Patsy lifted one hand at the anger in his voice, and at first he thought she was trying to shut him up, but then, when she glanced behind her, he saw she was warning him not to wake Alex.
A long silence passed between them until Patsy found her voice again. “If you want to take this on, go ahead. I can’t stop you. But you listen to me, John, and you try to remember this along with everything else you can’t seem to forget. I never made Dean your responsibility. Not because I didn’t think you were up to it, but because I loved you. And I would never ask someone I love to throw their arms around a hurricane.”
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