The Last Good Guy

by T. Jefferson Parker

  He has an aptitude for auto mechanics, having learned from his father, who owned a two-man garage in the coastal El Salvadoran village of Puerto el Triunfo. His father was shot to death in his small office for refusing to pay protection money to the local MS-13 thugs. Francisco had watched through an open door. Over the months, as I’ve gotten to know Frank, when I listen to his broken English and study his expressions, I sense in him no desire for a life in the north but rather for a return to his home. And vengeance. He talks to his family and friends on his flip phone, and my Spanish is good enough to understand his anger and calculation. He is interested in weapons, and Burt has taken him under his wing for shooting instruction. Burt also helped him get a driver’s license. Which Frank used to drive my pickup back from the desert in the wee dark hours earlier this morning.

  Frank gave me his automatic smile as he helped Burt steady the wheelbarrow over the Victorian tub. The tub had been in the barn, covered but unloved, long before I met Justine Timmerman or first saw this place, one of scores of treasures left behind by generations of Timmermans. The property was just one of their many holdings in the American West. I tried to return it to her father and mother after their daughter died. The terrible plane accident happened scarcely a year after we were married. The Timmermans refused to take back Rancho de los Robles. Family is family.

  Thinking of Justine, hoping that there was an afterlife and she was happy in it, I looked down at my beaten body, the clean white T-shirt I’d put on, the swimsuit, my bruised and abraded legs, the flip-flops, the blue ligature marks around my ankles. I felt helpless and witless and somehow at fault. I pictured Justine. The weather is wonderful; wish you were here.

  Our fifth and newest Irregular is a young woman named Violet Drew. I could hear her and Liz playing Ping-Pong behind me, back deeper in the shade of the palapa. The ball ticked and tocked back and forth and I heard occasional yelps, but mostly I heard the steady effervescence of Violet’s voice.

  She moved into casita four last month, just in from St. Louis. She was twenty-four, a flight attendant. A native of St. Louis and a graduate of Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. After three years flying for United Airlines in St. Louis, she had relocated to fly out of Lindbergh Field in San Diego. She was dark-haired, talkative, and antically nervous, often looking behind her as if someone was sneaking up.

  Violet likes to run around the pond for exercise, and she does this at least once a day, sometimes two or even three times. Long, fast runs, too—half an hour or so. Her strides are graceful and strong. In keeping with her nervy personality, she looks behind her constantly. Behind and up, an airborne threat. Ponytail flying. Never breaks stride.

  I think Violet is bearing secrets, but so far she’s been a happy addition to the Irregulars. I respect secrets. They help keep me in business.

  9

  ////////////////////////

  BURT AND FRANK finished preparing my ice bath. They muscled the Victorian tub to the sandy beach that surrounds the spring-fed pond, propping the claw feet up on cinder blocks so the tub wouldn’t sink with me in it.

  If the mid-September day hadn’t been so hot, I might not have got into the damned tub at all. Burt gave me a stern look.

  I toed off the flip-flops and managed to stand with the help of Liz and Violet. Holding my arms, they guided me across the patio and down the railroad-tie steps to the soft, sloping beach. We stopped at the tub, positioned to give me a pleasant view of the water, the hills, and the sky beyond. The sunsets from here are excellent, though I didn’t think I’d last more than a few minutes in the sparkling bed. The tub was half full, and the ice had been dug out so my body could be instantly packed with cold. An unopened half-gallon of budget gin stood on the blue tile of the barbecue deck, beside a box of large freezer bags.

  “After you’re comfortable, we’ll pack it in around you,” said Burt. “Then we’ll fill some bags for your face and head, and you will indeed feel as if you are in a freezer.”

  He cracked the seal on the gin bottle and twisted open the top. Used his teeth to pry off the pour spout, spit it into the barbecue sink, and smiled. He had explained earlier that an ice bath without gin is thirty percent less effective.

  I watched him pour the booze over the ice with lengthwise strokes, the liquid gurgling out. Frank stepped forward, pulled a garden trowel from within a clean blue shop cloth, and worked the gin into the banks of ice, carefully re-forming the body-hugging berms.

  Using Liz and Violet for training wheels, I stepped in near the bow, eased down butt-first, and lay back, propping my head up on a pillow of ice. A sharp cold bit into me and my body ordered me to retreat. Burt and Frank raised bag after bag of ice, cubes clinking down over me. The women packed the cubes firmly until all I could see when I looked down was a blanket of diamonds glimmering in the sunlight. Not even my toes. I closed my eyes against the cold. Felt it sucking the warmth out of me. Where did it go? Listened to them filling the face-freeze bags. Violet warbling on about getting buried in the snow at Christmas by her brothers, a frozen-stiff snow angel and then after a while I couldn’t feel a thing. Which is what’s going to happen to you, Roland! They built up pillows between the tub rim and my neck and head. Lay the bags over my throat and face, lightly because of the cuts. Through two courtesy peepholes I looked out at the pond and the hills and the clear blue sky. Felt the ache within. Heart thumping like some separate beast. Could see the blurred Irregular shapes on the edges of my vision.

  “Everything cool in there?” asked Dick. A chuckle.

  “Don’t make him talk, honey—you’ll break the seal.”

  “I suppose. Ignore that question, Roland.”

  “Roland?” Burt’s rough voice. “I always found it helpful to count up from one to fifty, then back down again. Slowly. What you do is, when you come to a number, imagine what you were doing at that age of your life. Take a moment. Enjoy it. Then move on, up your years and back down again. You’ll get a few mulligans, since you’re only forty.”

  Almost at the point when the full-body ache had become unbearable, it began to recede.

  Seventeen: high school first baseman, a grand slam against La Mesa, in love with Trudy Yates, called me the “lovable lump” in the yearbook . . .

  Twenty-two: Student Union at SDSU, history major, watching the Twin Towers collapse and burn . . .

  Twenty-five: Fallujah. Avalos bleeding out in front of me . . .

  From within these memories I heard Burt Short ordering the others to leave us alone so we could talk. On the periphery of my peephole vision I saw them moving away. Heard Dick and Liz grumbling, and Violet’s tale about playing tennis when it was so cold the balls froze and Frank and Burt talking in Spanish that I couldn’t quite hear.

  Then it was quiet. My body was numb. Even the deep ache in my ankles was gone. I felt only a strange heaviness, meaty and alive, but not cold at all. It was as if the flames of pain in my eyebrows and lip and forehead and back had been doused.

  Burt’s voice came through the frozen blanket. “Do you want me to sic the Imperial County Sheriffs on them? There are pluses and minuses for you.”

  “Not yet.”

  “I understand. You may want to handle this personally. Go another round, in the style of Rolling Thunder Ford.”

  I didn’t respond to that. My thoughts were clear but my mouth unwilling.

  “Next,” said Burt. “One Penelope Rideout came to your downtown office early this morning, while we were having our desert adventure. A helpful Dublin Pub barista directed her here. Through the front-gate intercom, Rideout told Dick she was looking for you, that she’d hired you to find her sister. That you weren’t returning calls and her sister was still in the wind. An unsatisfied customer. Through the intercom, Dick took her numbers and ran her off.”

  I forced my memories into sluggish words. Told Burt about Mrs. Rideout coming to my office, yesterday morning
about this time. About Daley, Nick Moreno, Adam Revell of SNR Security. About climbing the fence, the date farm, the ATVs. I felt completely disembodied, and my voice seemed to be someone else’s, but my mind seemed sharp. I was under the impression that if I moved anything more than my lips I would break some spell that had been cast over me.

  “So while Liz and Violet were picking the gravel out of your back, I called Penelope,” Burt continued. “She’d settled down enough to tell me that her sister had called her early this morning. Very early. Daley said she’d cut school with friends, driven up the coast with them. Partied on the beach at San Onofre. Heard that Nick had been shot dead. Decided her friends weren’t such good friends after all. No details. Ditched former friends, hitched a ride into San Clemente, and called her sister from a pay phone because friends had taken her smartphone. Penelope couldn’t get you, so she called your cop friend Walker in Encinitas, who was out of jurisdiction but called confederates in San Clemente. Penelope made it to the San Clemente 7-Eleven in less than an hour, but the sister was gone. San Clemente deputies were on scene. The clerk told Penelope the same thing he’d told the San Clemente deputies—that the girl had been there until less than half an hour ago. She’d bought candy and an energy drink and talked on the phone outside. Then two guys drove up and they all argued. She got into a silver SUV with them, and off they went. About five minutes later the cops pulled up.”

  I felt like my body had vanished. Like I was just a brain having thoughts. “Nothing since, from Daley?”

  “Nada.”

  “Amber Alert?”

  “Declined. Mrs. Rideout pressed the deputies, but they told her it was for the most urgent cases only. That a truant ditching school to party with friends and getting into an argument made this less urgent. They offered to call in a county BOLO on the SUV, told her it was the best they could do.”

  I had a frozen memory of Penelope Rideout’s anger at me for not returning her calls during my Monarch Academy interviews. Of her almost trancelike control of that anger, her clenched eyelids and balled fists and the silent prayer or spell or curse. I’m ninety percent lover and ten percent killer.

  “How are you feeling, Roland? Warm yet?”

  “Just a little.”

  “Then you’ve been in long enough. You’ll feel like a new man once you thaw out.”

  “I look forward to that.”

  “I’ll be damned,” said Burt. “Champ, this may be troubling news, but based on Dick’s description of Mrs. Rideout’s car, I’d say she just drove up to the gate again.”

  “Yellow V-Dub ragtop?”

  “None other.”

  A numb lifting of my head. Some of the ice bags slid off. “Ring her in and help me get into the house, Burt.”

  10

  ////////////////////////

  AS the shivering tapered off, I felt better. Dried my tight pink skin, got on workout pants and a zippered hoodie, and arranged my hair above my crime-scene face. Then went back down to the patio, where Penelope Rideout paced heavily in the shade of the palapa.

  “Why can’t I get you when I need you? I will not be ignored. I will not be—oh. Oh my God. Look at you.”

  “Do I have to?”

  “What can I . . . I mean, what should . . . just, what?”

  “Sit and I’ll tell you.”

  We faced each other across the big picnic table. I gave her the pond view. I started with Alchemy 101 and ended with my ice bath. She looked back and forth from me to the bathtub on the cinder blocks near the water. I kept my saga brief and to the point. Tried a cryogenic smile, but it hurt. She wore a yellow summer dress and white gladiator sandals and Jackie O sunglasses.

  “I just raised your pay,” she said softly.

  “Not necessary. Tell me about Daley’s call, everything.”

  She gave me a more detailed version than she’d given Burt over the phone. Daley called just after three a.m. She was in San Clemente. She had gone to the beach at San Onofre earlier with friends. She was almost hysterical over what happened to Nick. Angry at her friends, who didn’t know anything about it except he was dead but they would protect her. She said the beach looked weird because there were armed guards everywhere. She refused to say which friends she was with. She’d split and hitched a ride to 7-Eleven with a creep. Daley was terse and vague.

  “She leaps before she looks,” said Penelope. “I told her that I’d just been through forty-plus hours of worried hell over her, and she told me to come get her and make it snappy. Now she’s gone again. I was so close to getting her.”

  “Who are Connor and Eric, and why is she with them?” I asked.

  “I told you yesterday I don’t know them.”

  “Do you know SNR Security?”

  “I do not.”

  “Adam Revell doesn’t ring a bell?”

  Penelope stared at me from behind her dark glasses. I could see her eyes through the darkness. “I don’t like your tone of voice.”

  “I don’t like getting jumped by six goons, following a lead I got from you.”

  “You’re very suspicious.”

  “Part of my charm.”

  “I fail to see it.”

  “Do you know this Cathedral by the Sea?”

  A dismissive exhale. “I don’t approve of it.”

  “Explain.”

  “I read about it when they opened their doors. It’s in a funny-shaped building. Some of Daley’s friends go there.”

  “Does Daley?”

  “Yes, once. With two girlfriends. Just a few weeks ago, the last Sunday in August. He came at her aggressively.”

  “‘He’?”

  “The youth minister. I forget his name.”

  “He came at her?”

  “Recruited her for the youth group. For the Cathedral by the Sea rock band. For a cycling trip to Mammoth. After one visit from Daley, they had her booked up every weekend for a month. I had a bad feeling about him and the church.”

  “Did Daley?”

  “She thought the church ‘had promise.’ Her words. So I forbid her from attending again, and recommended St. Mary, Star of the Sea, in Oceanside.”

  “Because—”

  “It’s Catholic and I heard good things about it.”

  “Were you raised Catholic?”

  “I’ve never set foot in a Catholic church. Or any other, in recent memory.”

  “Help me with your reasoning,” I said. “You attend no place of worship. You won’t let your sister go to one she’s interested in. So you send her to the Catholics, though you know little about them.”

  She pulled off her sunglasses and set them on the table, her blue prying eyes locked onto mine. Eyes that told a story. A hard one. Beautiful but chilling.

  “Only faith lasts,” she said. “It can’t be broken or taken away.”

  I wasn’t sure of that, but my sureness wasn’t the point. “And Daley’s faith is supposed to conform to yours?”

  “She’s fourteen years old, Mr. Ford. I’m not only her sister but her guardian. Every decision I’ve ever made has put Daley first. That’s my job on earth, and I take it seriously.”

  I’d seen overparenting, so why not oversistering? Considering what had happened ten years ago on that stormy night outside of Eugene, Oregon, maybe it was understandable. Maybe commendable.

  But more important to me than Penelope’s attempted management of her teenage sister was that Daley’s world had just grown larger. Nick. Alchemy 101. The Cathedral by the Sea. Paradise Date Farm. All linked by SNR Security. By Adam Revell, Connor, Eric, and the six helmeted warriors who had easily laid waste to Roland Ford, PI. Why had they done that? Because I was snooping after Daley Rideout? Maybe, but they had been in some control of her, chaperoned by Connor and Eric. What threat was I? A leap, but an easy one: the sign on the silver SUV that Scott Chan had
failed to read was that of SNR Security. They had her. I’d suspected that much when I saw the SNR emblem on the ticket booth at Alchemy 101. The attack at Paradise Date Farm confirmed it. If my beating was not to keep me away from Daley, then what?

  I looked at the tub of ice melting in the sun. “Mrs. Rideout—”

  “Penelope, please.”

  “Penelope, exactly what did Daley say about San Onofre?”

  “Just that it was surreal and the old power plant looked like something from a science-fiction movie. Armed guards everywhere.”

  I knew the San Onofre nuclear power plant well. Almost every Southern Californian did. I’d driven by it thousands of times, in and out of Orange County.

  I felt stumped by Daley Rideout’s behavior. Wasn’t even sure how to describe it. Erratic? Careless? Reckless? Quite a wake of damage her actions had left in the last two days, from Nick Moreno to me.

  “Has Daley gone to San Onofre before?” I asked.

  “Not that I know.”

  “For all your security efforts, there are sure a lot of things you don’t know about her.”

  “You can ridicule me but not my efforts or intentions,” she said. “I do feel terrible about what they did to you. But I hope I can still count on you as an employee and an ally.”

  Behind me, a cloud drifted across the sun. The daylight diminished and Penelope Rideout’s blue eyes turned gray. A breeze pushed some of her curls onto her forehead.

  “There’s no Second Marine Aircraft Wing at Miramar,” I said. “No Colonel Richard Hauser at Miramar, either. Never has been.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Pretty damned.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I believe you.”

  “Okay? Then who’s that in the picture on your refrigerator?”