Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013)

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Suddenly it was over, and it was too late.

  “Chet,” he said loudly. “Art’s a cop.”

  My heart was slamming in my eardrums.

  “Not funny, my man,” I said.

  Chet froze a look at me.

  Marlon shifted his big body around and his hand came out with a revolver. “I thought he was a cop the second I saw him. Chet?”

  “Boys,” said Caryn, her rasp brittle with nerves. “Boys? Put up that thing, Marlon, for godsakes—”

  “—Shut up!” said Danny, stepping to Marlon. “Give me the gun, fatso. I’ll prove what he is.”

  Chet stood up. “One—Marlon, put that thing away. Two—Caryn, get Lauren in the house. Three—Art, you stay exactly where you are, friend.”

  “Lighten up, Chet,” I said. “You too, Marlon. If I was a cop, the last thing you’d want to do is bring out a gun.”

  But Marlon, red faced now and sweating hard, pointed the big revolver at me, right at my chest. “Cop!”

  “Come on,” I said. “What is this, something you guys pull on the first-timers? Marlon, don’t point that thing at me. Chet … what’s going on here? I didn’t pay good money to—”

  “He’s a cop!” hissed Danny. “Tapped my phone. Made me set you guys up. Said he’d get me on the news if I didn’t, wreck my whole family. His name’s Naughton.”

  Chet looked at me, then at Danny. His gears were meshing.

  It all happened at once. Johnny grunted to the top of the cinder-block wall on the far side of the pool. Marlon turned his head to the sound and Danny smashed his fist down onto the big man’s wrist. Caryn whispered shit and ran. Danny picked up Marlon’s revolver and looked at me, slurred I’m gone and blew a hole in his temple. His head jerked one way and a spout of dark blood wobbled out the other. He slumped over on the pool deck. Chet had already jumped the drink table and disappeared inside the house. Marlon held his wrist and lumbered toward the screen door, his eyes big and his mouth open in a silent O. I grabbed Lauren on her way by and fell on her. She screamed, then sunk her teeth into my face. I got my hand over her mouth. When I looked up Chet was hauling back out of the house with a little automatic in his hand. Marlon trailed him, blubbering. Louis the exterminator screamed from behind them—Sheriffs, freeze! Chet stopped at the pool and looked at Johnny and Frances, drawn down across the water from him. Then he reeled back for a look at the house. Marlon had already proned himself out, his arms over his head. Chet looked at me. Don’t shoot, he said. He dropped the gun and put up his hands. I want my lawyer. Caryn’s vulgar rasp grated from inside the house and then I could see her—all hair and flailing fists—thrashing in the grip of Louis, who pushed her through the open screen door, down to the patio deck, and cuffed her.

  Underneath me, Lauren was crying. I could smell the bourbon on her breath and feel her wet face against my neck. I cradled her head in my hand, but I was careful not to hold her too tight. I knew that I had done something good. I couldn’t keep from thinking of Matthew.

  TWO

  I watched us on County News Bureau that night with Melinda. CNB gave us the good spin, playing the suicide like an incident that tarnished an otherwise heroic op. I was warm with pride, though my cheek was throbbing from Lauren’s teeth and the six stitches it took to close the two punctures. Bites hurt. CNB was careful not to show my face on camera, but not because of the blood. Our arrangement is that I am not to be revealed. That’s how I can continue to get away with things like today.

  The reporter was Donna Mason, and she was her usual lovely self, calm and somehow dignified in her role as a digger of dirt. For the last two months, since The Horridus started his campaign here in the county, the media’s been eager for anything with kids and sex. That old taboo has been broken, or at least suspended for a while. So Donna Mason really let the Sharpes and Marlon have it. Her cameras ambushed them being led from the house, and of course, you can’t cover your face when your hands are cuffed behind your back. The CNB shooters tracked the miserable trio all the way to the Sheriff van. Got an angle on Marlon crying like a child. I had told Donna not to tape Lauren, and she had been good to her word. She always has been. So far.

  Melinda brought me another tequila on ice. My drink of choice. She curled onto the sofa a few feet away from me, and gently brushed my cheek with her fingertips.

  “That’s good work, Terry,” she said.

  “Well … thanks.”

  “How close was Marlon to shooting you?”

  “I don’t think he would have.”

  “The girl going to be okay?”

  I looked at her and sighed. “No.”

  CNB started in with a sidebar on Danny—Dr. Christopher Muhlberger, professor of mathematics—and the shocking secret life he might have led. I thought of his family and felt bad. I thought of him taking his own life in the backyard of a rented house and felt bad about that, too. I am long on compassion for the innocent, but there is always a little left for the guilty, too. Maybe this is a flaw in my character. But it’s not to say I wouldn’t tear the lungs out of any criminal who harms a child. I have and I will again. It’s my reason for being. But after the death of Matthew two years ago, everyone and everything became, to me, somehow forgivable. I can’t tell you why.

  “That didn’t have to happen to him,” I said. “I could have disarmed the fat guy and it wouldn’t have gone down that way. The prof didn’t even have the guts to bring his own piece. Drunk. Scared. I could have seen it coming.”

  “You did what needed doing. He blew out his own brains, Terry. You didn’t.”

  “I still think there was something I could have done.”

  “Precious little, Naughton.”

  As an investigator—Fraud and Computer Crime—Melinda’s judgment of me can cut deeply. She knows my world and its limitations, and she can flatten me not only as a woman but as a professional equal. In fact, she is not my equal: she’s a sergeant 4, one grade above mine of sergeant 3. She’s two years older and at least ten wiser. More to the point, Melinda feels no compassion whatsoever for the wicked or the inept. I believe this comes from her own sense of victimhood. Her mother died when she was young and her father abandoned her when she was six. She feels the pain of the innocent. And she feels the fury of the wronged. In fact, in our year of domestic life together I have seen her almost consumed by that pain and fury. Maybe the fact that she can feel so much for the innocent reduces her pity for the guilty. I can be touchy about her comments on me and my work. Melinda is a hard woman to please in most ways, so success with her is all the sweeter.

  “Thanks, Mel.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up.”

  “Am I a liberal?”

  “A real do-gooder.”

  “A pinko?”

  “A commie.”

  “A poet?”

  “A queen.”

  “You pour a mean drink, Melinda.”

  “Got to keep you up with me.”

  “You keep me up.”

  “I’ll bet she could, too.”

  Donna was on-screen again for her wrap. I looked at Melinda, then back to the tube. I will mention now, then forever hold my peace, that Melinda is a jealous companion. In some ways this pleases me. And she can joke about it now. Like this crack about a TV reporter. But it never hurts to set things straight.

  “Not my type.”

  “Too young and beautiful?”

  “It’s not the youth and beauty. She’s just not you.”

  “You’re a world-class liar, Terry.”

  “I know.”

  “At least you’re honest.”

  “Look at Louis and Johnny there, see how long they …”

  On-screen, Johnny and Louis stood at the curb until they realized the camera was pointed their way, then hustled off-screen. Frances did most of the talking for us—she’s well spoken, credible and unabashedly ambitious to rise in the ranks. Truth be told, though, it was hard not to look at Donna Mason. Maybe that’s why they gave her the job
.

  “Freshen up that drink, Terry?”

  “Thought you’d never ask.”

  Penny, Melinda’s daughter, came out of her room around nine. She’d been doing homework. She’s a natural student, very much like her mother in the long, silent intensities she can bring to things. She’s nine, chunky and pretty like her mom, with straight blond hair and placid gray eyes. Penelope Anne. A year ago we began the hesitant dance of getting to know each other closer than friends, but not as father and daughter. She has a continuing relationship with her real father, and I would never try to compete or interfere with that. He’s a loving, if self-serving soul, and she needs him. My son, Matthew, would have been seven. Well, in August.

  She sat down between us with her laptop computer and shook her head. “Microsoft Word sucks.”

  “Don’t use that word,” I said.

  “But it’s called word.”

  “You know what I mean, young lady.”

  Her mother pulled the little machine onto her own lap and looked at the flip-up screen. She tapped in a few commands and tilted the screen toward Penny. “It’s the Windows that’s throwing you, not the word processing program. See, you’ve got too much open, the thing just got clogged. You’ve got to go through and close them, one at a time, or, you can use this.”

  She showed Penny the right command and set the computer back on her daughter’s lap. Frankly, I’m amazed that any nine-year-old can learn to operate a computer at all, not to mention two word processing programs, three data operating systems and God knows how many different keyboards, printers, CD readers and floppy backups. I wonder if they stock the classrooms with these things to educate kids or just to sell them similar gadgets when they’re adults. I asked Penny what subject she was on.

  “Science,” she answered. “I’m learning the planets. Before that, I finished my report on slavery.”

  Computers. Planets. Slavery. The world of a healthy, somewhat privileged American nine-year-old.

  “Your face looks sore, Terry,” she said, looking up from the screen. “It’s turning blue, like a bruise.”

  “It is a bruise.”

  “Did they arrest the girl who bit you?”

  “They’ll put her in protective custody. Later, depending on what happens to her parents, she’ll go with relatives, or maybe to an institution.”

  “What did she do wrong?”

  I thought about that a second. “Nothing, really.”

  Melinda looked over, her eyes condemning me over the tops of her reading glasses.

  “Then you try,” I said to her.

  She shifted her body and reached out to touch Penny’s hair.

  “Don’t, Mom. What did the girl who bit Terry do wrong, to get put institution?”

  “Put in an institution,” Melinda corrected.

  “Okay. In an. What did she do?”

  “She became a prostitute. That’s when you sell your body for money, or other consideration.”

  “To do what with?”

  “It depends.”

  “Why did she become that?”

  “Her father and mother forced her to. So they’ll go to jail. She was lucky that Terry was there, to arrest her parents.”

  Penny looked at me, understandably concerned that cops taking parents away from their children was good luck. I shrugged. Melinda will sail Penny into moral oceans that no nine-year-old can be expected to navigate. Mel believes in treating children as the adults they will become. I believe in treating them like the children they will never be again. This difference of opinion is occasionally hard for us to live with. But because Penelope is not my daughter, I almost always defer to Melinda. Though I still didn’t think a nine-year-old needed to be an expert in the California Penal Code.

  My ex-wife believes I never protected my own beautiful son from the “real” world enough, and I agree. I admit that I allowed him to do some of the things he wanted to, foreseeing the hurt he might suffer in the trying. Those tears of his still move me. He was a timid boy in most ways, and I wanted to encourage his confidence. I’ve changed now, far too late to do him any good. If I had it to do all over again, I would have handled it differently. I truly wish that the living, seven-year-old Matt Naughton was here right now to prove that I had been a good father. Or a bad one; I don’t care. Just here.

  We watched TV for another hour. A little after ten, Melinda told Penny it was time for bed. Penny protested but not very hard, because Melinda is inflexible on household rules, and Penny knows it.

  “I want Terry to tuck me in,” she said.

  “Then ask Terry to tuck you in,” said Mel, and she walked out of the living room and into the kitchen.

  An hour later I found Mel in her study. She does a lot of work at home. Since being assigned to the Fraud and Computer Crime detail two years ago, she’s gone from being computer illiterate to computer devoted. I keep waiting to catch her playing solitaire, or watching a CD, or browsing consumer products on the Net, but I’ve never found her doing anything but work on her machine, or sometimes writing letters. For Melinda, work is peace. She is not a person who enjoys many things, but work is one of them. No surprise that in two years she’s worked her way to second in command of Fraud and Computer Crime—a twelve-person section.

  She looked up at me when I went in, and let her reading glasses dangle on the chain around her neck.

  “Tired?” she asked.

  “Not really. I’m going to take Moe up the hill. Want to come?”

  “I’ve got work.”

  She studied me for a moment. She has a clear-eyed, analytical gaze that gathers much more than it gives away. I’d hate to be one of her suspects in an interrogation. In fact, I’ve seen her work—through the one-way mirrors—and she is extremely effective. But her stare melted into a smile and she nodded her head slightly.

  “Nice work today, Terry. Four months to nail that creep. And you ended up doing something decent for the girl. You should feel good about you.”

  “Thanks, Mel. I do. But I think about the life Chet took away from her.”

  “You can’t be everywhere at once.”

  I stepped forward and kissed her lips. I didn’t hold it long because I knew she had work to do. Those lips are sweet as sugar when she wants them to be. Just six months ago we were to the point of going weeks or more without anything more intimate than a peck on the cheek—if that. Mel was a wreck. Her father had died. And though he had avoided her in childhood like some guilty secret, she had tracked him down and stayed in touch with him in a remote but regular way the last few years of his miserable life. His death hit her hard. And I realized that the end of someone you desperately want to love you but never did can hurt as much as that of someone who treasures you. Maybe it’s just one last confirmation of your own unlovability. But Melinda’s inner darkness gradually broke, and something of her old self has emerged from the long, black night.

  “See you soon,” I said.

  Our house is on Canyon Edge, the fifth one in from Laguna Canyon Road. It’s a ramshackle little place, built in three stages, over three decades, in three “styles”—none of which I can really define. But it was affordable for Mel and me as co-buyers, and the money is worth the quiet canyon life and the beautiful Pacific, which is just a couple of miles away. In the big fire of ‘93, it was one of only eight houses on Canyon Edge that didn’t burn down. Thirty-seven were reduced to nothing but fireplaces and chimneys that day in October.

  I let Moe out of the backyard and we headed down Canyon Edge, away from Laguna Canyon Road. The road is crooked and uneven, without streetlights and sidewalks, but it also has almost no traffic because it dead-ends a half mile into the canyon. Once we were past the last rebuilt house I stood for a moment on the scorched foundation of Scotty Barris’s place. Scotty didn’t rebuild because he wasn’t insured. It was an old place, the oldest on the street, built by Scotty’s father and uncles back in the early twenties. Now it’s just a rectangle of black cement with weeds growin
g up through it and some twisted rods of rebar bent at odd angles. For sale.

  Past the black foundation you pick up a trail in the high weeds and climb a steep embankment. The trail levels off, then meanders back down to the canyon floor and follows a creek bed that is dry except after a rain. Moe led the way. He’s a real dog’s dog when it comes to the outdoors, always in the brush after birds or critters—true to his Labrador instincts. I’ve never hunted him. I quit shooting things for sport when Matthew died, just another one of those things I used to love to do and then didn’t love anymore. I miss the taste of quail and dove and pheasant. I miss those evenings when I’d take the birds out of the marinade and Ardith would make the salad and rice and Matthew would blunder around in the kitchen with his plastic swords or superhero gear.

  We headed up the creek bottom. In the black sky a sliver of moon rocked on its back. The stars looked close. The hills rose up and away in the distance, and their shapes were black like the sky but without stars in them.

  Around the first big bend the trail starts uphill again, rimming around the sandstone hill, winding up. It’s steep and narrow. It passes through a canopy of scrub oak and lemonadeberry that you have to duck through and walk with your hands in front of you so your face doesn’t get scratched. I could feel Lauren’s gift on my cheek, and it pulsed hard when I bent my head toward the ground. Then, on the far side of the trees, the trail opens into a nice flat outcropping of sandstone where you can look out to the city to your left, Laguna Canyon Road straight in front, and the dark hills on the right. Below is a long drop. Behind you is a hill face pocked with big and little caves that far-flung families of the Juaneño Indians lived in centuries ago. You wonder if they chose this steep abode for safety or beauty, or both.

  The smallest cave on the left holds my hiking provisions—a quart bottle of good Herradura, a coffee cup and a wooden box of Dominican cigars. I keep them in a pillowcase, which is stuffed way back, behind a sleeping bag I bought just for this place. Some months ago, when I first found the caves, I liked to smoke and drink in the big one, way back inside where the Juaneños used to be. I’d listen for their souls brushing against the rock. It was a mess when I found it—all beer cans and trash, an old mattress, skin mags—the usual things adolescents would drag into their den. But after I cleaned it out, no one ever seemed to go there again. Maybe that generation of kids had outgrown the caves and gone on to serious things like colleges or jobs. At any rate, I finally got tired of being inside it, and moved my recreations to the flat outcropping in front, unless it’s raining hard.