The Colt’s safety was already off. There was no round chambered. He would have to cock it. And in the time it would take for him to turn, jack the live round in, find his target and fire, all Snakey had to do was pull a trigger and watch ten bullets go through John’s back.
If you’re blown, run. If you can’t run, deny. When you can’t deny, confess. It will either get you out, get you turned or get you killed.
“I’m working for the FBI, Snakey.”
“Cool. I’m John Gotti.”
“You’ll end up in prison like Gotti, if you don’t put that gun away.”
“You got me shakin’ now, Mr. Fart, Burp and Indigestion.”
“Listen. Six months ago, Holt tried to kill a writer who’d been after him. She’d bad-mouthed Patrick after he got it up in Santa Ana. She bad-mouthed Holt himself. She made fun of everything he stands for, everything he is, everything he does. She ridiculed his politics. She ridiculed Liberty Ridge. She made it seem like what happened to his son and wife had sent him over the top. She tried to say he was a victim of violence, that it had twisted him out of shape—turned him into a vicious old fool and that he was a sign of the times. She patronized him. She ragged on him, then patted him on the head. But she was more right than she knew. He went crazy over what happened to Patrick and Carolyn and he tried to take it out on someone he hated. They’ve matched up shells to one of his guns. They’ve got fingerprints.”
Snakey was quiet for a long moment.
“I’d a shot the cunt, too, for writing that.”
“Jesus Christ, Snakey, he shot the wrong one! He killed a twenty-four year old woman who’d never written a thing about him. Left her in a parking lot with her heart blown to pieces. She could have been your girl.”
“She wasn’t.”
“I know. She was mine.”
Again, Snakey was quiet for a moment.
“Mr. Holt isn’t that stupid. And neither am I. You’re just piling on the bullshit now, thinking I’m dumb enough to buy it. Nice try, faggot.”
“I’m telling the truth now, Snakey. I swear to God, I am. Work with me. Help us take down Holt.”
“Can you beat two grand a week?”
“I can’t pay you a dime.”
“I’m supposed to sell out Mr. Holt for not even a dime?”
“He killed her. If that isn’t enough for you, then you better look after yourself. Because when we take him, you’re going down with him. And Fargo. And Partch. Remember that supervisor who took a trip with you and didn’t come back? They’ll nail you on that, too, unless you help. You’ve got a chance to save our own ass here, and to nail a sick old bastard who killed a girl he didn’t even know. You’re getting a good deal, man. Think about it for about five seconds if you got brains enough.”
“Okay.”
Snakey was silent for about five seconds.
“I’m done thinking. You’re lying. If you weren’t lying, I wouldn’t help you anyway. I’m takin’ you and all your shit back to show Mr. Holt and Lane. They can figure out what to do with you.”
“Listen, Snakey. I’m going to tell you something now. If you help us, you live. If you don’t, you die young. It’s that simple.”
“Pretty funny statement from a guy fuckin’ a tree with a Mac pointed at him.”
“I’m telling you, Snakey. Let me go. It’s the right thing to do. And it’s the only chance you’ve got. I’m begging you, man. I’m begging you.”
“Shut up. I hate beggars. Beat one dead back in Jersey one night, just because he smelled so bad. Used gloves on him. Hate those fuckin’ stinky homeless bums. Felt his face bones breaking. I was drunk.”
John could hear Snakey moving the wooden cover back over the tunnel. He would be kneeling, with one hand on the cover and the other on his gun. John inched his left hand toward his right.
God help me, he thinks.
God forgive me.
“Help me, Snakey.”
“Help your fuckin’ self, man.”
John closed his hand around the automatic then turned and jacked in the shell. He was falling to a crouch while he lined up the front sight with the chest of the still kneeling Snakey.
Snakey had set the Mac beside him to slide back the cover.
He looked at John, then at the gun, then at John again.
John saw a look of determination cross Snakey’s face, a look of pure arrogance.
“Don’t do it,” he said. But Snakey already was going for his gun.
The two shots from the Colt were through him before his hand touched the gun. John saw the little puffs of dirt kick up on the other side of the fence. Snakey hit the ground like a dropped bag of sand, like a bird shot from the sky, like Rebecca after the second shot, a once-living thing now wholly, immediately and forever emptied of life.
John was on his knees, too, his burning eyes still locked on Snakey, whose funny flat-top waved stiffly in the warm morning breeze.
When John reached him, Josh was on his way to the airport to catch a flight to Washington, so the reception was spotty. He and Dumars had been summoned by Evan, post haste. John imagined them in the Bureau Ford, Dumars driving and Joshua fretting, as usual. He longed to be with them. He told him what had happened, and for a long moment, Joshua was silent. Then:
“Talk to me, John. Please talk to me now.”
“I’ve just murdered an innocent man. I got pictures and drawings and notes. I’m coming out, Josh. I’ve had enough.”
“You did what you had to, John. It was not your decision to make. It was Snakey’s. He made it.”
“I want out. I’m done.”
“John, listen to me. I told you this would happen. I told you there would come a time when you would want nothing but out. And I told you where you would be when you felt this way. Tell me now what I said. Tell me where I said you would be.”
Dizziness.
Sickness.
Swirling images of blood and bones, teeth and hair. The death waltz. The killing ball.
“John,” Weinstein commanded, “respond to me now. Where did I say that you would be?”
He puked.
“In the darkest hour.”
“Was I right?”
“You were right.”
Joshua’s voice faded, then came back strong.
“But what did I tell you next—when is the darkest hour?”
“Some shit about right before the dawn.” He was blubbering now.
“Correct. It was not shit and that is why you are not coming out. You are staying in. If you come out now, you’ll always be in that dark hour, John. It will follow you the rest of your life. Right now, you belong to it. But for it to ever go away, it must belong to you.”
“I can’t do any more.”
“Quiet, John. Listen. I’ll bring you out the second you’re finished. But I can’t do it before you’re finished, can I? Reason with me now. I need time to analyze the documents you found in your cottage. I need time to get a search warrant, if we can get one at all. We will need more.”
“I don’t want more.”
“Oh, yes you do. You want Holt. That’s the agreement, John. Holt. Not Snakey. Holt.”
John tried to gather himself, choke back the ugly sobs that kept breaking into his throat. “That poor dumb Snakey. Jesus. Bring me out.”
“I need you now, John.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“You will stay in, John. You will wait until I can vet the documents. If it’s good stuff, we’ll be close to Wayfarer. Remember, Wayfarer is the only one left on earth who can reassemble your soul. He is the missing part of you. You own him when we take him.”
John heard himself breathing, then a blast of static.
Josh’s voice again:
“Let me ask you something, John. When your parents were recovered from the airplane, you were asked to identify them, right? You told me so. I’ve thought about that since then. It’s a very tragic thing for a nine-year old to be asked to do, and I am
impressed that you could do it. But John, what if you hadn’t entered that building? What if you had stayed out, never gone into that cool, disinfected room and had the courage to confront what life had so cruelly dealt to you? I can answer that. If you hadn’t, John, you would still be there, still a boy, still terrified and confused and angry. If you had never opened that door, you could never have closed it. But you did, didn’t you? And that’s why you are the man you are.”
John said nothing. His thoughts were underwater. Black, deep water. No up. No down.
“Listen to me, John. Months ago, when Rebecca was alive, I went to her house late one night, after work. She was in the pool. It was cold and there was steam coming off the water. She had been swimming for a long time because her breathing was fast and deep and her strokes were slow, and she wasn’t staying in the lane. She was a strong swimmer. I sat down in the dark and watched. Back and forth. Back and forth. Ten more minutes. Twenty. Finally she stopped. She flipped up her goggles and stood in the shallow end a while. Then she climbed out and wrapped herself up in her towel—the red one, you remember, the one with the tropical fish on it. She still didn’t know I was there. She hadn’t looked my way. She sat on the deck and dangled her feet into the water. She was hunched inside that big towel, just the top of her head showing. And she said something to herself. She said, You’ve got to do something. You’ve got to do something. You’ve got to do something, and you don’t know what it is.”
John waited through Joshua’s silence.
Then:
“She couldn’t see a way out, John. She was paralyzed by you. Paralyzed by me. It’s the worst feeling on earth, needing to act but not understanding how to act. She never knew what to do, until she wrote those letters. But by then it was too late. She didn’t live long enough to send them. You, John, have the path. You are halfway down it. You know what to do. Now, you must wait. Learn from what Rebecca didn’t do. Let her teach you.”
John looked again at Snakey’s inert form, the two bloody holes in the back of his shirt.
“For Rebecca,” said Joshua.
“For Rebecca,” said John.
He could feel his heart begin to steady, and exhaustion settling over him. “Think Snakey left the computer message and the bag in my freezer?”
“No. I don’t believe it was Snakey. I believe it was Holt, and that is why I had you bring me the photograph and the sketch, and the notes. We’ll have them analyzed in twenty-four hours, God and the Crime Lab willing. They will prove to be a counterfeit of his handwriting and an altered photo. You will present them to him as a token of your trust and loyalty.”
John said nothing. He felt like lying down in the dirt and sleeping for a week.
“Leave the bag in the box with your tools. Leave Snakey where he is, God rest him. Get a fresh camera and go back. Repair. Wayfarer is due back day after tomorrow. Let yourself come together again. You are scattered. You are losing focus. Show me that you’re the man Rebecca thought you were. Show me she did the right thing by leaving me for you.”
The risen sun was a disc of orange now, throwing heat and light into John’s face. He imagined floating through the sky with the winds, like he’d tried to do at age ten from his uncle’s roof.
“I can’t bring her back to you, Joshua. I would if I could.”
“I told you to never apologize for that. Never.”
“It’s not an apology. It’s the truth.”
A deep, icy chuckle issued from Joshua Weinstein. “I know you wouldn’t bring her back to me even if you could, John. You would bring her back and keep her for yourself, now, wouldn’t you?”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
The first time John Menden ran away from home he was eleven years old. It was not from his parents’ home, of course, because they were elsewhere, out in the big wide open, out in the sky somewhere. It was Stan and Dorrie’s.
He packed up the necessities for life on one’s own: sleeping bag, a pillow case full of food, pocketknife, all the cash he had—twenty-six dollars, a flashlight and a jacket. It was imperative that he bring his box with him. It was a cedar cigar box his father had given him, and it locked shut with a shiny brass hook. Inside it was the accumulated personal wealth of his eleven years: a silver ring with a big turquoise inlay that his parents brought him from Mexico and that was much too large even for his thumb; a piece of tree turned into a rock from the petrified forest of Arizona; pictures; a wristwatch that no longer worked; some sea shells he collected; two arrowheads he found himself; one shark’s tooth he got up in the Mojave Desert and another, black and gigantic, that his mother bought for him; a collection of minerals in separate plastic bags that came with an Audubon Society book on rocks; Stebbins’s Field Guide to Western Reptiles and Amphibians; and a loose rubble of acorns, tiny sand dollars, crab claws, pertinent stones and snake rattles. His latest addition to the box was the plastic bag the Sheriff had given him with the fossilized sea shell and two gold rings. All of this luggage he strapped to his bicycle with Uncle Stan’s duct tape, using the little book rack on his three-speed for the cigar box, sleeping bag and food. He slipped away late one summer morning.
First he went by his old house, which was only half a mile away. He stopped on the opposite sidewalk, leaned his weight onto one leg, and paused there to absorb the atmosphere of the place. The new owners had already painted the outside a dainty yellow with white trim, which John found too girlish. The woman had placed planter boxes under the bedroom windows and spiked them with marigolds and lobelia.
As he watched, two little boys about his age charged from the house and started up a game of stickball against the garage door. John looked on as they proceeded to use the very same strike zone that his father had painted there for him. The tennis ball thudded against the wood. One of the boys looked at him for a moment, then spit into the street. John leaned back onto the bicycle seat, strained his legs full-length to reach the pedals and headed off down the sidewalk.
Down Fourth all he way to the Marine Base, west along the chain link of the military property, past the guard house to the freeway, down the frontage road and old Coast Highway to a gravel path that led through a saltwater slough and into the gentle but wild foothills of the Rancho del Sol and a short three hours later John was on the place that would someday be known as Liberty Ridge.
He pushed his bike as far as he could into the brush, toward the lake. When he couldn’t push it any farther he unstrapped his belongings and left it hidden under a lemonadeberry tree. It took him almost an hour to cross the ridge of foothills and reach the lake. He could see the old mission house far on the other side, up on a rise where it commanded a view of the countryside around it. The roof tiles were orange in the summer light and the walls were white. He found the old boat in its usual place, tucked up under a sandstone ledge not far from shore, with bunches of tumbleweeds to hide it. The oars were lying inside the hull.
“Who are you?”
He reeled behind him, toward the voice. A dark-skinned boy stood exactly where John had walked just a moment before. John was impressed that anyone could move that quietly. He was more impressed with the long, slender-bladed knife in the boy’s left hand. He was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and a pair of sandals. He was probably a teenager.
“John.”
“That’s my boat.”
“Okay.”
“You stealing it?”
“I want to go to the island.”
“That’s my island, too.”
“Okay.”
“I live here. My whole family works for the Holts.”
“I rode my bike.”
“Then where is it?”
“In the bushes. Way back that way.”
“I’m Carlos and this is my lake. I could skin you with this knife and take your bike.”
John was trembling and he knew his legs wouldn’t get him far. He tried to imagine what his father would say.
“Carlos,” he said. “What do you say we
go over to the island and bullshit a little?”
The dark boy glared at him, then bent his knife in half and slipped it into his pocket. “I’m gonna row.”
It didn’t take long to get to the other shore. John helped Carlos drag the boat into the cattails that lined the south edge of the island. The air filled with blue dragonflies and every few seconds he could hear a frog plop into the water.
“Ever seen the cave?” Carlos asked.
“I slept in it.”
“Find my magazines?”
“Just bugs and the spring.”
“Those are my magazines with the naked pictures.”
“‘My dad has Playboy.”
“I got Playboy too. You wouldn’t believe this one where the girl’s in a hammock eating an apple. It’s Miss December.”
They walked through the brush and into trees growing close together near the center of the island. They went into the cave. It was a big cave, with a mouth wide enough to drive a car through, thought John. As soon as he went in he could hear the warm water gushing up from the earth and echoing off the walls and he remembered how easy it was to sleep with that sound next to you. Carlos lit a lantern.
John set his things on the damp rock cave bottom. He walked to the deepest part and looked down between the rocks at the water coming up. It looked black. It was warm when he touched it and had a soft, silky feel. Carlos showed him the fold-out of the girl in the hammock eating the apple. The seam between the pages was soft and broken in places. John felt that sweet little tickle in his stomach, the same feeling he got once in an elevator with his mother and used to get all the time in the station wagon when his dad drove fast. Stan didn’t drive fast enough to make it feel that way.
He and Carlos walked through the woods to the other side of the island. There was a small beach of dark sand just beyond a thick stand of California lilac. They crouched down in the bushes and looked toward the big mission house.
“Don’t let ’em see us,” said Carlos. “I’m not supposed to be here.”
John peered over the bush tops like a spy. He could feel the dampness of the ground seeping into the knees of his jeans. He felt a sudden affection for Carlos.
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