Swift Vengeance

by T. Jefferson Parker

  “Let me do this,” I said to Voss, unstrapping the gun. He eased away as I pushed the door open with my foot. Indoor air wafting out, hard and metallic. A thick slick of blood on the tile entryway.

  Adrenaline blast, game on.

  I drew the forty-five in my right hand, pulled Voss away with my left, then pushed the door hard. Shivered the wall when it hit. Never step past a half-open door. I threw it wide open, jumped inside, and slammed it shut. Nothing. Spun fast to sweep the room, eyes and laser sight moving as one, across, then back, eyes focused on everything and nothing, the doorways, always the doorways, and the stairs, always the stairs, for movement and the shadow of movement concealed: Fallujah.

  “Lindsey, Voss!” I barked over my shoulder. “Trouble here. Nobody in, nobody out!”

  When you’re clearing you can get a rhythm and it’s the rhythm of your life. Note the big revolver lying on the carpet a few feet away from the entryway tile. Note the sand-colored carpet showing blood. You follow the blood. See the living room is spacious but sparsely furnished. Sweep across, sweep back. Breakfast nook empty. Your legs stable, eyes clear. See the small kitchen and a utility room behind it and a door to the attached garage. Garage for defense. Garage to hide. Follow the blood back to the living room. Silence outside the front door. Up the stairs slowly, one at a time, eyes and gun on the landing. Blood shows the way.

  I made the landing, felt the warmer upstairs air pressing close. Scanned the hallway. A wall sconce knocked loose and dangling on its wires. One room right and another left, doors wide open. On the pale carpet a crimson drag pattern like a paint roller might make, all the way to the end of the hall, then through the open door.

  Carpet is quiet. I stayed to the left of the blood. Stepped slowly, gun raised. Cleared the right-side bedroom, then the left-side bath. Stood outside the door at the end of the hall where the drag marks went through, knowing that death had gotten there ahead of me.

  A quiet breath, then in.

  Stillness only. Sunlight through vertical blinds, slats of light and dark on the bed. Nightstand lamp still on. Big bed, still made up, two pillows side by side, a man’s head lying on one of them. Looking up. Eyes half open. Lips parted as if ready to speak. Neck severed, now a crusted red-black stump. A fly on his forehead in a bar of sunlight.

  On the floor, in the narrow shadow cast by the bed, lay the headless body. Arms and legs splayed, facedown if there had been a face. Jeans and socks. Neck flared.

  I cleared the bathroom and the walk-in closet and came back, stopping close to the bed. Lowered the gun. Breathed even and deep. Heart in my throat. Tire hiss outside. A fly in the room.

  And cop training:

  UNSUB, black male, 30–40 years old.

  Decapitated.

  Height and weight TBD.

  Defensive wounds on arms and hands.

  One long slit over the heart, probably an entry wound, the blade apparently wrenched upward to cut the aorta and vena cava, then swept up and out.

  Which had happened so fast Kenny Bryce didn’t have time to fire his weapon. And would have left him only a few seconds of waning fight. Which would have caused the first lurch of his blood to land on the entryway tile, where I had seen it, where he was stabbed. And allowed it to surge and spread and sink in as he was dragged across the living room, up the stairs, down the hall, and into the room in which he slept.

  What strength to accomplish all that, I thought. In another man’s home. What ferocious resolve. What stone calm. And speed. Kenny Bryce’s heart was Caliphornia’s first strike. Deep and final. The beheading was a ritual. Something to inspire terror in the living.

  Which it did.

  I headed down the stairs, weapon face-high and pointed up. Felt the jab of panic, whirled. Heart racing and ears screaming. Empty stairs. Empty landing.

  I cleared the garage, came back inside to the front door, and looked through the peephole. In the distorted distance, Lindsey and Voss had taken opposite ends of the porch. They stood in oddly similar postures, arms crossed and feet wide. Lindsey in the sun and Voss in the shade.

  I cracked the door. “Kenny’s been murdered,” I said quietly. “Don’t come in. You’ll contaminate more evidence. Stay put. I need a few minutes.”

  “I came here to see Kenny,” said Lindsey. “I’m coming in.”

  “Think,” I said. “The police are going to question all of us, long and hard. I’ll take the heat for going in. You stay ignorant. A tampering charge won’t help your custody fight.”

  “We didn’t know it was a damned crime scene,” said Voss.

  “That’s my best defense,” I said. “So let me go collect some things we’ll need. We’ll never get them if I don’t get them now. A few minutes. Then we’ll call the cops.”

  Lindsey looked to Voss, defaulting to the old order.

  “He’s right,” said Voss.

  She glared at Voss, then at me. “Did they cut off his head?”

  I nodded, shut the door, and turned the deadbolt.

  * * *

  —

  Got my phone into camera mode and shot the bloody tile and the bloody inside of the front door, and the revolver on the floor, and the carpet and steps and landing and hall and bedroom. The terrible bedroom. Shot his head and body. Macro to close-up. Video.

  Then to the bed stand, where the reading lamp spread its cool light. Where waited Bryce’s phone, charging, and placed to hold down the top of a handwritten letter that looked very similar to Lindsey’s. An AF Falcons money clip, thick with bills, anchored the bottom.

  Dear Lt. Bryce,

  To cause another’s death is to cause your own.

  I am going to decapitate you with my knife. Like the swords of the great Saracen warriors, it has a name. It is Al Ra’ad. The thunder.

  Watch for us. Listen for us. Believe every fearful thought.

  Your end is our beginning.

  Sincerely,

  Caliphornia

  I rattled off ten shots on auto-drive. Ten more. Wanted that letter cold.

  The spare bedroom was Bryce’s office. The desktop computer was sleeping. I tried some passwords based on Kenny Bryce’s name, and Headhunters, USAF, and Air Force Falcons, which were featured on a wall poster, a coffee mug on the desk, even a mouse pad, in addition to the money clip. No luck. Looked over the last three months of a hardcover appointment calendar and found nothing of particular interest. Dinner with Ron and Kaya last Saturday. An appointment with Dr. Leising one day previous. Haircut next week. I shot the September through December calendar pages anyway.

  In the bathroom I tore off some toilet paper, then went back to the meaty hell of Kenny’s bedroom. The horror of a body and its severed head is not describable in the language that I know. There, I hovered over Kenny Bryce’s cell phone. Hoped he’d left it on while charging. Figured the chances were fifty-fifty. Covered my fingertip with the toilet paper, hit the screen control. Clean blue light. Icons. A fly buzzing. Such a lucky day for Kenny and me and the world. I opened Contacts and scrolled down for Ron and Kaya, then Dr. Leising, wrote their numbers in my notebook. Noticed that my handwriting was forceful and shaky. Searched his contacts for anyone of obvious utility. Got Mom and Dad. I chose a few first-name-only contacts at random, on the theory that they were close to him. Brandon Goff’s name jumped out at me like a clown from a dark closet.

  Back downstairs I went through the mail on the kitchen counter. Found the envelope that the letter had come in—postmarked the same day as the threat to Lindsey, with a San Diego postmark and a return address belonging to World Pizza of Ocean Beach. Shot that and looked through what else was there.

  I rolled off a paper towel and dampened it under the sink faucet. Cleaned my prints off the garage doorknob and the front-door deadbolt. Squeezed the towels dry over the sink, set the soggy wad in my coat pocket. I’d faithfully confess to Ameri
ca’s Deadliest Police Force the basic truth of what I’d done, but I saw no use in advertising my curiosity. No, sir. I had no idea what I was walking into.

  I stepped outside and closed the door behind me.

  Lindsey was leaning against the porch railing. She offered me a hard stare and smeared a tear off her cheek with her palm.

  Voss stood beside her. “We’ve just broken a bunch of laws,” he said. “I think we should at least get our stories straight.”

  “Don’t get creative,” I said. “Tell the cops exactly what happened. I’ll take point. When I’m done sending these pictures to myself, I’ll call Bakersfield PD.”

  And Taucher.

  “Lindsey, you need to answer a very important question. What was Brandon Goff’s relationship to Kenny Bryce?”

  “Friends. Air Force. We had us some times.”

  “Did they have a fight or a falling out?”

  “Never.”

  “Was Bryce trying to get close to you since the divorce?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  I glanced up toward the early-afternoon sun, a dazzling orange ball high in the blue. Wondering, if I could take away the roof of Kenny Bryce’s upstairs bedroom, would that powerful sun burn away the blood and the bones and the horror? Burn them right down to nothing? I knew the answer, though: not in my lifetime. But if I could replace the roof with a magnifying glass of the same size—stupendously heavy and thick and perfectly proportioned and polished—maybe then? In the end I figured if I really wanted it all cleaned up right, I’d have to pour a gallon or two of gas over it and light the match.

  I lit a cigarette instead, sat in one of the little bistro chairs and started tap-tap-tapping on my goddamned phone, bouncing images of headless Kenny Bryce from one point on planet Earth to another.

  10

  TWENTY-SEVEN HOURS LATER I was back home, outside on a chaise longue, bundled in my barn jacket and watching the black-orange December sunset. My grandfather Dick had just delivered to me a bruising bourbon. Just a splash of water. Dick doubts my well-being when I don’t have a cocktail in my hand, and this time he wasn’t totally wrong. I couldn’t get the Bakersfield images from my brain. I wondered if I ever would. I wanted that drink.

  “Judging by your face, I’d say your trip was not a huge success,” said Dick. He sized me up over his highball glass, took a sip, and sat down on the chaise next to me.

  “No, not huge.”

  I’d been detained and questioned for ten hours over two days, since calling 911 from Kenny Bryce’s front porch. At the end of the first day I’d talked our way out of an overnight discretionary hold and into the Marriott downtown. A little sleep, then round two. I felt bent and folded and torn, but I had not yet been charged with any crime.

  “Lindsey looked ready for the grave,” Dick noted. “Might I have an executive summary of events?”

  “No,” I said. “Events involved a freshly slaughtered human being. That’s all I’ll say. And keep it to yourself.”

  I watched orange and black compete low in the western sky, black winning out. Listened to the clink of ice in Grandpa’s glass. His wife, my grandma Liz, walked past him without a look and sat on the other side of me. She carried a balloon glass half full of red wine. They’ve been married fifty-something years, raised three children, helped to spoil eight grandchildren, and now reside in respective casitas at opposite ends of the pond.

  “Welcome home, Rollie,” she said, studying me. “Looks to me like you and Lindsey must have closed the nightclub twice.”

  “I wish I looked better for you two.”

  “Honey, can’t he just enjoy a sunset?” asked Dick.

  “Overall, though, Lindsey is quite fetching these days,” said Liz. “And apparently her custody battle is going in her favor, too.”

  I nodded, sipped the bourbon. “It’s nice to have her back,” I said, regretting it immediately.

  “I would think so,” said Liz, swirling her glass.

  “In what way is it nice, Roland?” asked Dick.

  “In the way that a strong young man likes having a lovely woman around,” said Liz. Another lift of her balloon glass.

  “I’ve forgotten,” said her husband.

  “Fifty-one years of marriage and Dick lost interest halfway through,” said Liz. “Garaged the car with plenty of miles still left on her.”

  “Do we have any noise-canceling headphones around here?” I said.

  “I’ve got a pair in the house,” said Dick. “Believe me, they’re well used!”

  Liz sighed and leaned back on the chaise. “Rollie, just FYI? The electrical in my place is acting up again. My brand-new microwave sparked and fizzled out last night. Had to drink my hot toddy cold.”

  “Why not use the stove?” asked her husband. “You remember how to boil water, don’t you?”

  “This Chilean wine I found must be really good. Halfway through and even you seem funny, hon.”

  “What’s the latest on the cat?” asked Dick.

  Owner Tammy Bellamy had left me four emails when I was closing nightclubs in Bakersfield. There had been two false sightings yesterday, Tuesday, and two more today. People were reporting average-weight gray striped cats—not twenty-two-pound Oxley. One was not even gray, and only one of them had Oxley’s green eyes. Tammy said that the brief rain shower on Monday night had ruined most of the posters. Would I take a few minutes to replace the soaked posters with fresh ones from my stack?

  “Tammy needs some help putting up new posters,” I said. “You guys up for that tomorrow?”

  “There are hundreds of them,” said Dick.

  “The rain ruined them,” I said.

  “She should never have let that cat get over ten pounds,” said Liz.

  “Tammy needs our help.”

  “You’re making the big money off of this cat, not us,” said Dick.

  “I’ve got some of Tammy’s apricot-brandy jam and you’re welcome to it.”

  Dick shrugged. “Okay. Liz and I will put up more posters. But it’s been what, ten days? Every time I hear those coyotes yapping I think Oxley just got lunched. What a racket those things make. And almost every night. Maybe Dale can shed some scientific light on why those animals are running around unchecked. Maybe find a way to cut their numbers down. Dale’s won awards, you know.”

  “Coyotes have to make a living, too,” Liz pointed out.

  Dale being Dale Clevenger, award-winning video-journalist now residing in casita number two. Who, judging by the lights already on in the barn, was hard at work on his next program.

  After the last strip of orange had blipped out over the black hills, I got a handful of LOST CAT flyers from my office and brought them down for Dick and Liz. They were disputing the truth of the “flash of green” in Key West sunsets: Liz pro and Dick con, on and on as always—poster models for how not to grow old. Or maybe they had it right: the secret to longevity was dispute.

  Liz took the flyers and squared them on her lap. “We’ll find this kitty.”

  * * *

  —

  Clevenger and Burt were in the barn. Radio news playing low, every light on. Clevenger had taken over one end of the space, arranging two long utility tables in a wide V shape for a workstation. One table for his three custom-made computers, three monitors, a bank of wireless speakers, and an audio mixing board. The other table for his drones and their corresponding tools. He had four, five, or six drones—the number kept changing. Tonight it was five, three of them whole and two taken apart for maintenance or repair.

  Clevenger stood inside the V like an impresario, looking up from one of the monitors when I walked in. He’s husky, curly-haired, and thick-armed. Hangdog eyes, big and expressive. Glasses always out of kilter, an air of benign intensity. He reached down to the audio mixer and the barn filled with the sound of yipping coyotes. It�
��s a high-pitched sound, wild and inscrutable. Starts and stops abruptly. Eerie. Sounded like there were ten of them right there in the barn with us.

  “How many of them are there, Roland?” he asked in his soft Georgia accent.

  I’d been told that one coyote can make much more noise than you think. This sounded like a platoon. “Four.”

  “You’re close. What’s the most you’ve ever seen together, here in Fallbrook?”

  “Four,” I said. “Parents and two young ones, by the look of them.”

  “Check these guys out. Got them out near Winterwarm Street last night, that big field where the longhorns are pastured.”

  I came to the monitor to see six coyotes moving across a moonlit meadow, shot from above by drone. The light was weak and the animals looked ghostly. They had the familiar, light-footed coyote trot, and their heads were up. As if on cue they stopped, listened, then started yipping and howling again. Paced nervously. Something out there. Snouts raised, they howled at the drone. The camera panned to a half-dozen Texas longhorns—staunch and imposing creatures kept for nostalgia by a Texas-raised Fallbrook resident—watching the coyotes with little apparent interest.

  Then back to the coyotes, silent and spreading into a loose half-circle to work their way across the pasture. Noses down. Noses up. One by one, disappearing into the thick scrub of an arroyo. Consumed, they struck up their inquisitive yipping again, their voices braiding together. I could barely see the forward shiver of brush as their bodies pushed through.

  Suddenly the yips turned urgent, a crazed blast of determination rising in pitch. Then came to a perfect stop. Hushed snarls as the bushes quivered in the darkness. A rabbit shrieked and a puff of dust rose in the moonlight. Then the snarls of the five hungry coyotes snapping at one another while the lucky one tore into his prey. Beneath the soundtrack, the radio news ran on, Redskins in L.A. against the Chargers on Sunday. Clevenger stopped the show.

  “How was Bakersfield?” asked Burt.