by Daniel Pyne
Rose had swept that all away. Reconnected him with the exquisite suffering of existence and gave him back his soul.
He fought back tears.
A chill wind blew in from the ocean, and the yard lights came on automatically. The little dogs grew tired, or bored with their ear-grab, and circled closer to him, scratching at the lawn and shaking their fur full.
He scooped them up; he could hold them both in one arm, snug against his side, their breath quick and their bodies trembling as he walked back inside, through the house he’d built and had expected to live in for the rest of his rescued life.
Mahrez found a canvas sports bag in a closet and folded a towel in it, and put the poodles in the bag. They calmed right down, as if being carried around was their point and purpose. Staring up at him with empty brown eyes. He left the front door open when he walked out with the dogs. Flicked the chrome lighter he’d been given by his father, the lighter etched with an OSS insignia that his father said a quiet regular customer had left on the bar at Musso & Frank’s up in Hollywood, where his father had worked for thirty years. A quiet regular who, his father said, had come in one time with a black woman jazz singer of modest fame. This guy’d been some kind of spook during World War Two and Korea and was headed that same night to Vietnam as an adviser after working as a gumshoe and problem solver for Paramount, Metro, and Fox. A quiet regular whose flight to Saigon, his father learned a few days later in the Times, had gone down in the South China Sea, no survivors. Mahrez’s dad had kept the lighter under the register in case the jazz singer ever came back for it, because he was convinced they were in love—doomed, though, he said, because, black and white. When Mahrez later told his partner Vic of the strange radix of the lighter, Vic was of the opinion it was a flat-out lie. But it was a story his father liked to tell, because it involved mystery and romance and took place far from the beautiful, balmy, languid lassitude of San Diego.
Which his father had come to call Losertown.
God, how Mahrez hated it now.
The lighter had an excellent flame.
Mahrez turned and tossed it back through the front doorway, and it ignited the solvents and the hallway filled with flame. He backed away with the bag of dogs, watching the fire bloom.
The headlights of the Aston Martin curled out of the driveway, Mahrez at the wheel, leaving his burning house behind. He was two blocks away when two cop cars came flying around the corner, bubbles ablaze. The Aston Martin pulled dutifully to the curb, and the police blew past, drawn to the end of the street by the surging smoke and flames of his self-erasure.
8
“LEBANON. That’s where I got scared for the first time.” Tina Z. was confessing to Fish. “The crazy Stone Age villages in the shadow of skyscrapers and all these chic, Eurotrash beachfront hotels. Skinny, wide-eyed young studs jacked on nicotine and religion. All these women covered up in those crazy tent dresses, whatayacallum, chadors, head to toe. Floating down the streets like black ghosts.”
She knew Fish had little interest in things thousands of miles away, but talking kept her mind off Bert.
“The fuck were you doing in Lebanon?”
“Legal attaché thing. Investigating the embassy bombing.” She said, “Lemme just tell you, Hazel, the Middle East, what we’re doing there? Is not a sustainable thing. This whole Iran-Contra mess? It’s wrong. We’re in over our heads. And you know what? Sooner or later a hard rain’s gonna fall.”
“Here or there?”
Tina just shook her head: wherever. Maybe Bert’s meeting with Van Houten was just some crazy coincidence.
“I don’t know,” Fish said. “Reagan got the hostages back. I gotta believe he knows what he’s doing.”
Tina Z. was well aware of how Fish stood on the subject, and didn’t care. “I was billeted right next door to the Marine barracks when they blew. Did I tell you that?”
“No way.”
“Yeah. They put me and this other girl up separate from the guys because, you know: woman.”
Fish nodded, mostly missing her sarcasm. “That must’ve been insane.”
“Knocked us out of our beds,” said Tina. “We ran out into this storm of dust and smoke. A couple snipers were shooting down from the tops of buildings, luckily they were shitty marksmen, we kept hearing the pop of the missed shots, and the chipped cement spitting around us. And then this weird roaring hush. It went on for a while, before we figured out what it was: hundreds of voices, yelling for help.”
She stopped.
Tina stared out the window at the sunbaked sweep of high desert, and the bleached cinder-block- and clapboard-clad shop that was Gun Heaven, two hundred yards distant. Fish didn’t say anything. The car broiled, despite the air-conditioning, forming little thermals where the cool air swerved and settled at their feet, while the tops of their heads felt like they were in an oven.
“You have nightmares about it?” Fish asked after a while.
“I started meditating on the number forty thousand. Which is how many children die every day from easily preventable illnesses,” Tina said. “Forty thousand. Recognizing reality leads you away from the self-centered into a more, you know, transcendent realm.” She glanced at Fish; he nodded soberly but probably had no idea what in the world she was talking about.
“Where going with the flow is the only option,” Tina added, helpfully.
“How’s the baby?”
Tina didn’t like thinking about Willa while she was working. “Good. Fun.”
Luckily, Fish was terrible with small talk that didn’t involve off-roading, football, or porn stars. They fell quiet. Tina drowsed, sleepy, and wondered if she could risk taking a quick nap. But Fish finally found the courage to ask the question that for the past couple of hours she’d been worried he’d ask. “Hey. So. Are you and Kirby . . .”
Tina Z. looked at him. He was looking straight ahead, out of the car, his face a little red. “No,” she lied.
“Oh.” Fish kept staring out the windshield. “Good. I mean, I didn’t think so. It’s just sometimes, when we’re all together. All that shit with the suit.”
“No,” she lied again. “Jesus, Hazel.”
“Yeah. Sorry. I . . .”
It was awkward. Tina’s eyes softened. Fish had a crush on her, she knew it; she couldn’t reciprocate. Couldn’t, or wouldn’t, or both, it didn’t matter. Life was weird and complicated, and ultimately, she had decided, long ago, a matter of managed disappointment. She wished Hazel could just be a friend, she needed friends.
Gun Heaven was closed. No cars parked out front. Windows empty, door double-bolted with a security gate pulled across it. Nothing moving.
Dust devils gyred through a yard of rusting barrels.
Their police scanner crackled: “Stand by.”
Fish squirmed in his seat and tugged at his jeans. Tina mused: Standing by was the organizing principle of her career.
—
“YOU LOST HIM?” U.S. Attorney Colter’s face warped with irritation, and Kirby got a glimpse of how hard she’d look middle-aged: “You lost him. I don’t understand. How could you lose him?”
Air-conditioning blew stale waves of respite over Kirby and Colter in the Federal Building cafeteria, with the furniture that looked like some second-rate Danish designer had unloaded all his bad ideas for teak laminate. They sat across from each other at a little table surrounded by twenty matching empty table-and-chairs sets.
“He burned his house down,” Kirby explained to Colter, slow and deliberate, as if she hadn’t heard him before. “We found his car abandoned on a side street in La Jolla.”
“And where were we? You didn’t have eyes on him?”
Kirby stared at her, dumbfounded. “You wouldn’t approve it,” he said.
“I wouldn’t approve protection. I didn’t say you couldn’t have somebody watching him.”
<
br /> This was said with a mother’s scolding tone and there was no irony in it; Kirby was beginning to wonder if she had a sense of humor at all. He looked away and let a silence rise. A lone craft service employee was counting cash from the register drawer and putting it in the bank deposit pouch for later.
This was the room where Kirby had first made love with Tina Z. On this very Danish modern table, after hours, dark, the door locked, her lean, strong legs up over his shoulders like bolsters.
And now the evil queen.
“I want him back,” Colter insisted.
“We don’t need him.”
“You’re not listening to me.”
“He’s broken. We broke him.”
“I don’t care.”
“Probably going to ground.”
“What?”
“Seclusion. Hiding.”
“I don’t care.”
“The bomb was meant for him; people from his past want to kill him for fear he’ll rat them out, thanks to us. Or Poole, take your pick. But both, really.” Kirby stood up, agitated, and walked away from the table, and came back. He put his hands flat and leaned down. “Everything he cared about is gone, you haven’t got any leverage over him anymore.”
“Not me, we.” Sabrina Colter scoffed, “And he’s still a material witness in a major Justice Department investigation—”
“I’m thinking the gun dealer, Van Houten, is gonna give us our Mexican drug connection. I’m focusing on that.”
“I will not run this department on hunches and guesses.”
“You’re not running anything, you’re an errand girl for a bunch of Washington ideologues.”
She narrowed her eyes and showed teeth. “Gilbert, don’t push me. I can have you transferred to the fraud desk, you’ll wither and die under an avalanche of actuarial tables before you see another criminal case.”
“It’s not a hunch. We get Van Houten, we can roll him on whoever ordered the hit on Mahrez, find out who is flooding our region with weasel dust, and call it a very good day. You’ll probably get your first citation for meritorious work.”
“And Mahrez?”
“You mean Poole, don’t you?” Before she could answer, Kirby said to her, as if to a child: “This case is about cocaine coming across the Mexican border to some unknown in-country wholesaler. And murder-for-hire.”
“People who do drugs deserve their fate. We’re at war. I want Mahrez,” Colter said petulantly.
“No. You and your cronies want to upend a rising progressive Democrat who’s threatening the conservative hegemony in San Diego County.”
She was unruffled. “It’s all of a piece: your part, my part. Why can’t we both have what we want?”
“What you want has already caused the death of an innocent woman and her bodyguard.”
“Nobody is innocent!” she exploded. “Not her! Not the Guatemalan rent-a-cop! Not this morally corrupt, leftist, welfare-spreading mayor who tells people whatever they want to hear!” She took a beat, calming. “Not Mahrez.” And then, looking fiercely, accusingly, at Kirby. “Not you.”
Kirby thought: You have no idea.
But then, as he stared at her longer, and she said nothing, just stared back, he understood, and it scared him: Oh, shit. Maybe she does.
—
“I GUESS MY POINT IS, you spend a little time out in the real world, it makes you appreciate coming back to a civilized society.”
“Middle East is the real world?”
Tina said that it was, now. She was sweating like a warthog, felt warm rivulets of perspiration running under her tactical vest.
“What about the Soviet fucking Union?” Fish said, and she could tell he was still raw from asking her about Kirby. “Or China. Stirring all that shit up in Salvador, right on our fucking doorstep? Middle East is a bunch of camel jockeys a million miles away, I mean, tents and carpets, right? And oil, but. Meanwhile a thousand nukes are pointed our way by a population of raging, first-world communists just itching to blister our free-loving butts the minute we take our eye off the ball. Thank God for Ronald fucking Reagan.”
He was serious. Tina burst out laughing. She couldn’t help it.
“What?”
Eyes watering, her bladder aching from warm Diet Pepsi, she tilted against the armrest and laughed. Fish wasn’t smiling. He looked hurt.
“What?”
The radio crackled, a spotter barked “Suspect incoming,” and moments afterward a high-water Chevy pickup truck with huge tires and decals and a blue-chrome roll bar came thundering into the dusty gun shop parking lot, made a wide circle like a dog settling down, and parked facing out.
The gun dealer, Van Houten, dropped two-footed out of the cab like a little kid dismounting a high swing. For a moment Tina thought of Bert again, and the potential shitstorm coming, then pushed it from her mind. It was a coincidence, she wanted to keep telling herself. She watched as the fat man hitched up his jeans, unfurled a jangling snarl of keys, and started to unlock the door.
Fish had already turned the ignition and dropped the car into gear when Tina Z. put a hand on his because the radio crackled again with “Stand by.” Sure enough, a filthy Land Rover had followed the pickup into the Gun Heaven yard and now slotted in beside it. Two sturdy white women in high-collared, ankle-length prairie dresses and Marie Osmond hairdos emerged, the younger one, a teenager, visibly pregnant. Van Houten barked at them from the shop doorway, then disappeared inside.
Tina sighed. “Dammit.”
“Well, this just got complicated,” the radio concurred with her. “Over.”
A third car rumbled in: Japanese four-door, Accord or Acura, Tina noted, or something equally generic, even Fish couldn’t tell the difference from distance. It eased up directly behind the truck, and a pair of spry sixty-somethings climbed stiffly out and stretched, a bronzed silver fox and his pinkish wife, tennis shorts and sundress, respectively, twitching nervous energy as they watched Van Houten’s women get to work. The hot wind off the Anza-Borrego badlands barely trembled the teased mullets of lacquered tresses made more hat than hair; the pregnant one climbed up into the truck bed and fired up an air compressor while the older woman popped the trunk of their car, then collected an air wrench the teen handed down to her and started powering off bolts holding the sedan’s rear quarter-panel in place.
“Surreal,” Fish remarked.
Van Houten reemerged from Gun Heaven with an armload of automatic weapons cocooned in Bubble Wrap.
“What are those,” Tina wondered, “M16s?”
“No, it’s that Soviet commie AK piece of shit.”
The quarter-panel was off the sedan. Van Houten and the pregnant teen packed and duct-taped the guns into some dead space above one wheel well, then moved to the other side to do the same with more Kalashnikovs while the older woman began to power-bolt the first fender back in place. The retirees just waited, chattering like it was a church picnic.
“Snowbirds are looking at eighteen months in Lompoc,” Fish said.
“Do these old people even think?”
“Not to defend them, but it ain’t easy living on a fixed income. Inflation. Social Security and a maybe pension that got skeezed in the savings and loan scandal. Someone tells them you can make easy money driving a car across the border, don’t ask questions. Couple thousand bucks for a few hours, maybe time even to stop at a dog track, two-dollar frozen strawberry margaritas and a boxed trifecta.”
“Still.”
Fish was gesturing. “Well, hey, lucky day: Here’s your weapons case all wrapped up with a bow, Tina Z.”
The radio hissed, “Agent Z., you want to bust the snowbirds, too? Over.”
Tina took the radio mic out of its cradle, toggled the button. “Negative. Not here, okay? Let them drive away. Tail ’em and take ’em down at the border. Over.”
/>
“Copy that.”
“I’m going to feel like I’m arresting Gramma and Grampa,” she said to Fish.
All done, the trunk slammed shut, Van Houten handed to the old man in the tennis shorts a fat white envelope of what could only be cash, they shook hands, and the geriatric mules got back in their car.
“Guys, let’s also try to isolate the target from the women,” Tina said on the radio. “I don’t want the pregger teen subject to any potential Second Amendment nonsense when the primary realizes what’s coming down on him. Over.”
The radio just clicked its affirmative.
The Japanese sedan pulled out and hurried away, raising dust. Van Houten struck a pose, hands on hips, watching it go, engaged in some kind of discussion with the two women. He kissed them both on the mouth.
Tina winced. “Ew.”
Fish grinned. “Yeah, baby.”
Van Houten’s women opened the doors of the Land Rover to let the interior heat clear, and the gun dealer strode back to the shop door to lock up.
“Okay, showtime.”
Fish punched the accelerator to join a cavalry charge on Gun Heaven, half a dozen police and federal vehicles bearing down on the suspects in a pincer move.
Their Rover trapped, the two women tried to make a run to the building, but law enforcement was on them too fast, splitting them from Van Houten, who, defiant, had lurched into his shop and was struggling to bolt the door when Tina Z. and Fish, out of their car, hard on his heels, approached yelling, “FBI! Keep your hands away from your body! Get down on the ground! Get down on the ground!”
