The Triggerman's Dance

by T. Jefferson Parker

  “Well, I’d say the old feet feel good, but they don’t feel at all.”

  “Get your balance first, Mom.”

  “I’ve got that, Val. Ready . . . now . . . okay . . . forward ho.”

  Carolyn Holt’s face went red. Her hands—on the cane handle—went white. Her entire body shivered and her dark eyes focused somewhere in space before her. She lifted up, perhaps one inch, then settled back to her seat again with a sigh. She smiled to herself. She was breathing quickly.

  “Nice try, Mom. Damn nice try.”

  “Whew! What was it that McMurphy said in Cuckoo’s Nest? Warming up? Just warming up? Well, that’s me.”

  Then she gathered herself to the end of the seat again and her eyes locked into space in front of her and her cheeks exploded with color and her hands whitened against the cane handle again and a hissing exhale escaped her mouth as her body lifted from the seat, then lifted more, and she froze there, bent forward like a swimmer prepared to start, all her weight resting on the four small cane feet that now wobbled greatly upon the patio. Her legs quaked. Her arms trembled. And slowly she unfurled herself, like the stem of a new flower. Her legs swayed, then steadied; her torso swayed, then steadied; her head swayed, then steadied as she lifted the ferocious concentration of her gaze from some private point in space to the speechless face of John Menden.

  He was surprised how tall she was. And even with the sedentary months in bed weighing her down, he saw that her frame was once both strong and fine. Composed now, Carolyn looked at him and shook back her hair, as a model might before a stroll down the runway. She exhaled.

  Her right foot moved up, forward, then down. An inch maybe, John thought. One whole inch.

  Then her left.

  Her eyes widened, never leaving John. And in spite of the intensity of her gaze and the rigid determination of her face, the corners of her mouth quivered upward—just slightly—in the most tenuous and fragile of grins.

  John was moved by her courage even more than by her damage. Each confronted him from the single spirit of Carolyn Holt, the battling twins of her being. Each was so clear and strong, so contradictory and unmistakable. The courage fought the damage; the damage fought the courage. He had never seen these essential polarities of the living locked in such close contest. With his heart he willed her forward. With his feet he took two steps toward her, matching her own.

  Then Carolyn focused her willpower again.

  Foot up, out and down. Another inch.

  Foot up, out and down. Another.

  Four steps.

  She smiled at him before collapsing, like a telescope, into herself. Valerie and Joni caught and straightened her, then eased her back into the chair. Through the sweat running down her face and her rapid breathing, her dark eyes still bore into John’s.

  The applause rang clear and dry against the night. Valerie leaned over and hugged her. Joni hugged her, too. Fargo shook her hand, taking it off her lap himself because Carolyn was too dazed to understand why he was standing there. Then John took the hand, just released by Fargo and still airbound, and kissed the back of it. Carolyn’s eyes relaxed as she studied him.

  “Welcome home, son.”

  The only thing he could think of to say was, “Nice to be here.”

  He glanced at Valerie, who beheld him with an expression he could not decipher.

  When John finally turned to Vann Holt, all he saw was an empty chair.

  A moment later he heard the loud roar of an engine starting down on the helipad, then the accelerating swoosh of blades moving through air.

  Holt appeared, apparition-like in the near darkness of the driveway, waving John toward him. Then he vanished back toward the blurred propellor of the chopper.

  “Go,” said Valerie. “He wants you.”

  “Hey, John-Boy,” said Fargo, his eyes glittering deep within the twin caves of his dark sockets. “I found Snakey’s tape recorder in his room. It’s a little log of what he was doing before he disappeared.”

  John looked from the chopper to Valerie, then Fargo. “Then maybe that’s where you ought to be looking.”

  “Right, John-Boy. Good luck with Holt. Shoot straight. Be impressive.”

  “Hey John,” said Sexton. “I’ll give you a call tomorrow. We should talk.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-NINE

  Holt, ensconced within the Plexiglas cockpit of the Hughes 500, watched John Menden trot a radius through the helipad circle and climb aboard the craft. A moment later Holt felt the stomach-dropping thrust generated by the powerful engine. He loved it. He stayed low over the hills until he neared the freeway, then hoisted the craft up into an October night of breeze-polished stars.

  “Need some milk?” his passenger asked.

  Holt was in no mood for laconic humor, John’s or anyone else’s. He looked over at him, then back to the red ribbon of I-5 taillights winding out below. He banked the chopper hard to the left, very hard, which pushed his shoulders against the seat back, then corrected hard right and down, gunning the throttle almost all the way, which made his head feel like it could float off his neck. The helicopter dove like a hawk. What strong joy it was to fly a chopper when he was high on Scotch. But not too high. He’d had three doubles with plenty of ice, and a big dinner. Just right for a visit to the birthplace of it all, he thought. He looked at John, thought again of his son, then turned away.

  “Little Saigon, Mr. Holt?”

  “We’re making a stop first.”

  Holt flew the chopper north, over Santa Ana, then descended in a controlled dive so steep that John, to his right, braced one hand on the instrument panel and the other against his window. Holt felt as if his heart had shot through the bottom of the craft to plummet down on its own. Using a triangulation of his usual landmarks—Charles Keating’s defunct Lincoln Savings Bank on 17th Street, the darkened campus of Santa Ana Junior College, and a water tower that declared this as the “All American City”—Holt easily spotted the bright yellow logo of the fast food restaurant. Even so, the picture was a little blurred, not what it would have been only a year ago. He refused to think about his eyes. Instead, he thought about the rage he was beginning to feel, and the wonderful clarity he would feel after the rage passed. Yes, he thought, if I can make it through the Red Zone then things will become clear. He eased his fabulous rate of descent and spiraled gently down toward the building. The deceleration brought his heart back on board, returning it to his chest.

  “Your gut still with you?” he asked.

  “Somewhere in there.”

  “This is it.”

  Holt looked inquiringly into John’s face. The young man had his usual placid expression, but the pupils of his eyes were big. Over the days, Holt had decided that John’s calm was one of intelligence rather than dullness. And he thinks I’m half crazy, thought Holt, maybe more than that.

  He found room in the parking lot—easy, this late—and planted the Hughes on the ground. Looking through the cockpit glass and seeing the familiar walkway leading to the entrance, the red handrail, the planter alongside it filled with daisies, the cheery yellows and reds of the building, the dancing burger of the logo, the windows filled with posters of discounted combos, Holt felt all the familiar hatred come rushing back into his soul. Easy now.

  He told John to come with him.

  He walked up the ramp, pushed open the door and stepped inside. He looked first to his left at the scattered faces in the dining area, the sea of bright yellow tables with swiveling red chairs, and the immense trash cans paired in each corner. He stared directly into the face of anyone who looked at him, but almost no one did. Inside his face, his eyes felt warm—almost hot—and he could feel the heat in them touch every face they settled on. He saw mostly Latinos. The usual.

  “Look around you, John. This is our republic. View it.”

  “Yes.”

  “The place was full of people that day—the same kind of people you see here right now. Carolyn and Patrick sa
t there, by the window.”

  When Holt pointed, the two girls sitting there looked at him, then down, then back at each other. Holt, through his building fury, was pleased. His eyeballs felt extra warm.

  He motioned John to come stand beside him. He spoke with clarity and force.

  “The shooter was just a kid, born here. He actually had a brain. Did a year at a local JC, worked on the school paper. Wrote some articles with lots of exclamation points about soft flabby white people occupying a California that rightfully belongs to his people. La Raza—The Race. He built a little following. Of losers mostly, as those who follow tend to be. The reason he gunned down my wife and son was because his aunt claimed that Patrick had raped her. That was a preposterous lie, fed and fattened by the media. The murder also lent some credibility to his politics. Politics and hatred, John—bad mix. They were just finishing their lunch. Patrick saw it coming and tried to get between the bullets and his mother. He was successful. The bullet that stopped in Carolyn’s brain went through Pat’s neck first. It was a mortal bullet, but the other three he took were, too. A .32 slug glances around a little before it goes through. They have a relatively low velocity.”

  With every sentence of his history, Holt felt his anger heating up, approaching boil. And the anger brought him a little closer to Clarity. But before he felt Clarity, Holt knew he would have to go through the Red Zone.

  He watched the few faces that had been confronting him now turn away. A group of girls twittered. Mothers tried to hush their babies, tried to keep their toddlers from eating the wrappers on their food. The girls started putting on makeup.

  At times like this he just wanted to take out a good submachine gun and kill them all, but Holt knew the rage would pass into something more rational, and more effective.

  In a far corner sat four gangsters, blue bandanas and chinos, dark flannels and black work boots. Holt stared at them for a long beat, guessing their ages: fourteen or fifteen, maybe. He saw three of them conferring—over his presence, likely—while one returned his gaze.

  “This way, John.”

  He walked to the table and stood over it, sliding his right hand in his coat pocket. It was always good to let these people wonder, he thought. By the time he stopped walking, he had entered the Red Zone, where everybody he looked at was outlined in a visible aura of warm infrared. He could actually see it. It was pink more than red, really, and it wasn’t bright and solid like a rod of neon but muted and wavering, like a pink mirage surrounding each human shape.

  Then he felt the very faint, first inkling of Clarity, an icy, intelligent spot way back in his thoughts. He knew it was still a long distance away. He knew it would come eventually, though, piercing through the Red Zone like a beam of light through fog. He craved Clarity and disliked the anger of the Red Zone. He didn’t trust it. Anger was red and it made his heart race and his hands shake, and made him want to do rash things. It made him feel the cells that were reproducing without control inside him. But Clarity brought steadfastness to his vision and his limbs. Clarity allowed his eyes to see and his mind to work. You could ride Clarity, like a good machine, through thickets of confusion and rage, until you came out on the other side, and then you could see—really see—what you had to do.

  “Look at these things,” he said to John, nodding down at the boys.

  When Holt looked at him, John’s hands were folded before him like a pastor beginning a sermon. His back was straight and his clear gray eyes—so much like Holt’s own used to be—beheld unblinkingly the four boys sitting in the booth before them. John was outlined in a warm pink aura.

  So were the four young men in the booth. It felt strange to Holt to confront people so powerless yet so harmful. As a boy, he had killed rattlesnakes by cracking them by the tail like whips. He was smart enough to do this only in early spring or late fall, when the reptiles were chilled and slow. It fascinated him that something could be deadly, yet helpless. Later, at the Bureau, the same wonderment came to him when he made his first arrests. With very few exceptions, the crooks were afraid, confused and overmatched. But they could kill you, too. That was what kept your blood warm, your eyes keen and your hand steady. Any one of those nervous little men might be the one to shoot you dead with a cheap little gun. Many years later, when Holt began to lose respect for his quarry, he knew he had become vulnerable. This was what led him to the more sophisticated game—the subversives, the assassins, the terrorists—because they were manifestly dangerous and they engaged his fear. As he gazed down at this tiny gang unit before him, at the clench-jawed little thing they called a leader, Holt thought: this is deadly vermin. Don’t forget it.

  Deadly, pathetic and outlined in red. One option, he thought again, is just to kill them all and let God sort them out.

  Into Holt’s mind now flashed the image of his wife laboring four steps across the patio. He blinked slowly, leaving his eyes closed for just a moment so that he could see Carolyn without a red halo on her. And his memory took another leap back, but a much deeper one this time, and it landed Vann Holt in a darkened bedroom many years ago with his wife up close beside him and their mouths locked together. He could smell her breath.

  Then he opened his eyes and turned to John. “She was perfect for a while.”

  Holt shook the vision from his head, then focused on the boys in the booth. There they were, little lapsed Catholics wearing red halos. Truculent bastards, he thought, what do they have, maybe twenty-five mustache hairs each? Boys.

  “Behold,” he said. “Uneducated, barely literate. Lazy for the most part, due to the Indian blood. Given to binge drinking to replicate the old rites of peyote and mescaline. But a sixer of malt liquor doesn’t give you interesting visions. Just gives you a bad mood. No future to speak of for these guys. They’ve never seen anybody from their streets really make it. What do they have to go on? Television? Isn’t that right, boys?”

  “We make it out if we want, man,” said the leader. “We got roots and we got family here. We take care of each other. We die for each other, if we have to. What’re you anyway, whitebread gringo shitface, a fuckin’ philosopher?”

  Holt looked at John. Still in a red halo. A little more red in it, maybe. But he was pleased to see the impassive expression on John’s face, and the alertness of his eyes. He might be getting this, Holt thought: it actually might get through to him. He’s capable of understanding.

  “And that right there, what he just said, is the shame of it all,” continued Holt. “See, John, these guys have the warrior’s spirit inside of them. Most boys do—twelve to twenty-five or so. They’re full of testosterone, bravery, idealism and anger. Perfect warrior material. He’s not kidding—they’ll die for each other. Do it all the time. Parties. Weddings. Funerals. Any event you can drive past in a car and pop some rounds at. But there’s the rub. Parties aren’t wars and drive-bys are for cowards. No war, no warrior. What you’ve got is a mean little creep with a flannel shirt. A goddamned blue rag wrapped around his puny head. It’s a waste. And it’s a shame and it killed my boy and wrecked my wife.”

  With this, Holt looked down at the boys again. “You remember shooting my wife and boy?”

  “We didn’t shoot nobody, man. That was Ruiz and Ruiz disappear.”

  “But there’s some Ruiz in all of you. That’s the part I’m talking to. I’m in your face right now because that kid was my son and that woman was my woman. Because I don’t want you to forget what I look like. I want you to understand something, boys. I’m watching you. My men are watching you. We know you. We’re here, even when you don’t see us. We would have killed you all a long time ago if I thought it would do any good. But I haven’t. It’s not because I’ve forgiven you, or ever will. Not because you don’t deserve to die. It’s because there are too many of you and I’d have to kill you all. Don’t have the time or the bullets for that. If I did, well, you’d be bleeding on that floor right now, like Patrick did after you shot him. Like my wife did. So don’t ever think you g
ot away with it. You didn’t get away with anything. I’ve got your numbers. I’ll call them in on the day I choose to. I’m all over you. Each and every one of you. I’m in the air, man. I’m the badass gringo ghost and you can’t get rid of me. I’m everywhere. This is my turf. My blood is on it.”

  Holt raised his right hand and aimed his forefinger into the face of one of the boys. The kid had paled.

  “Whose turf is this, son?”

  “It’s yours.”

  With Holt’s finger-barrel aimed between their eyes, the next two agreed.

  Holt saved the leader until last. “Whose turf are you on, homie?”

  “This here is my fuckin’ turf, pendejo.”

  Holt hooked the leader in the nose with two fingers. The boy yelped, then struggled upward out of his seat, scrambled across the table through the junk food and the ketchup, spilling drinks with his heavy shoes, walking on air it seemed as Holt forked his head up high and started across the room. Holt looked like a ventriloquist with his dummy. The boy dangled after him, shoes just barely touching the ground. The kid’s piece clattered to the floor as he clawed at Holt’s upraised hand, to no effect whatsoever. The blood ran down Holt’s arm and dripped off his elbow. At the door Holt let him down, blocked the kid’s wild roundhouse with one hand, then snapped a kick to the chest that sent the leader reeling backwards faster than his heels could go, finally sprawling him over an unoccupied table. Holt kicked away the gun, walked over, yanked off the kid’s bandana and wiped his bloody hand and forearm with it.

  “Whose turf are you on?” he asked.

  “Yours, man. Your fuckin’ turf.”

  “Remember that. The next time someone with blond hair and blue eyes wants to have lunch in here, you remember that.”

  He looked around the restaurant one last time before turning to leave. An ocean of bright red seats and yellow tables, a few desultory faces staring back at him, the brightly clad employees behind the aluminum counter dully agog—and all of it outlined in pulsing red.