He clicked off the safety on the birdgun, which was enough, as always, to send his dogs into a frenzy. They careened into the kitchen, sliding on the hardwood floor, yapping. No bird, John muttered, double-checking the safety and leaving the gun on the counter, pointed at the open doorway.
“No bird.”
The dogs took off into the living room, noses down.
He stood where he was, behind the little chest-high bar, resting his finger on the trigger of the shotgun, not moving. He thought of Fargo shooting the video of Rebecca Harris while she took bullets in the winter rain.
Fargo hopped up the steps and into the cabin. It took him a second to find his target—going from sunlight to the shade. Maybe he was distracted by the dogs. But when he saw John standing there motionless in the kitchen he raised his gun quickly and John blew him back out the door, over the railing and onto the bed of sycamore leaves piled high by the wind.
The dogs raced outside. They leapt off the deck and charged past Fargo’s body, looking for the quail. Then Boomer circled back and sniffed the dead man’s face, twice, before backing away and looking up at John with a puzzled expression.
CHAPTER
FORTY-TWO
It is a quiet restaurant off the tourist path in Laguna Beach, given to candlelight, mismatched flatware and locals. John, the nominal guest of honor, lifts his tequila glass to Joshua and Sharon, who face him from across the booth. Their proximity to each other surprises him.
It is five days after Liberty Ridge. Boomer, Bonnie and Belle are snug in the Laguna Canyon home, a place where John has spent many solitary hours in the last five days, trying to decide if he belongs there or not. He has been looking into rooms a lot, as if someone he cares about might be there, as if anyone ever really was. It feels good to return to a place that is, in some small way, his own.
“To the three of us,” says Joshua.
They drink.
It is the second toast of the night, though dinner hasn’t arrived yet. The first was to the three of them also, and John can see that Joshua’s rum and coke has gone straight to his non-drinker’s head.
“What was the worst of it?” asks Sharon.
“Snakey.”
Snakey, of course, has been vigorously forgotten by everyone but John. Joshua revealed to Frazee what had happened to Snakey—one Peter Boardman, originally of Trenton, New Jersey—the day after the shooting of Holt, and Frazee managed to insert the official paperwork regarding his death after the fact.
The questionable circumstances of Snakey’s arrival at the morgue have been tucked into the larger folds of Federal procedure, vagueness and clout. Snakey, it seems, had lived his life as a criminal, and his memory has been treated like one, too.
The food comes and they eat, but John cannot find his way into a celebratory mood. In fact, the dinner seems more an obligation than anything, a business meal with people you have spent too much of your life with as it is. Still, he describes his days on Liberty Ridge to a surprisingly curious Sharon and Josh. Tonight, the tequila offers an anaesthetic touch to his brain. He looks out the window to Coast Highway, slick with the first rain of the fall. Through the cracked window beside him he can smell the sweet aroma of rainwater and asphalt.
“. . . So we’re hiking across Liberty Ridge in the dark, on our way to the tombs, and Josh jumps every ten feet because of snakes. He made me crawl under the table to attach the microphones, because of bugs.”
Sharon smiles and throws back her hair in a way John has never seen her do. He notices that if you traced the arc of Sharon’s arm down from her shoulder you would find her hand resting on Joshua’s thigh. Her high spirits surprise him, because he has learned that she and Josh shot almost simultaneously at Partch, both hitting him with fatal bullets. He was expecting a more subdued agent.
Joshua looks as he always looked, and just as John always pictured him during those feverish minutes when he was with his box of toys by the young oak tree, calling in: pale, hyperfocused, humorless. Even the alcohol can’t dull Joshua’s sharp edges, though it does unleash a little sentiment in him. John looks at his black eyes, his thick curly mop of hair, his big Adam’s apple traveling up and down his throat. And oddly, he sees that Joshua is ashamed of something, embarrassed. It takes John a moment to realize why: Sharon. Not the woman herself, he knows—she’s far too handsome and level and healthy for that—but the idea of a Sharon at all. Joshua, he sees, has finally embarked down the long path away from Rebecca and back into the world. John wonders if Dumars will be able to withstand the test that Joshua will put her through, as he judges whether or not she is worth the journey.
“Good luck,” he says.
“With what, John?” Sharon asks.
“Everything.”
They ask about Baum and he tells them. She has called him every day since it happened, with a truly transparent mixture of curiosity and sympathy. She simply cannot hear enough about John’s time on Liberty Ridge. She is concerned, deeply, with his welfare. He can hear her computer keys clicking as they talk. Her five-part series about Vann Holt’s death began just yesterday, and is set to run over the next week. Baum has asked him, confidentially, if he would be interested in consulting with the producer she has chosen, or possibly using her agent. She has also arranged for the Journal to begin publishing his “Sporting Life” columns again if he should wish to write them, with the caveat that the Journal actually knows not enough people in the country are interested enough in fishing, hunting and camping to justify the space. She explained that the cost of newsprint has gone up sixty percent in six months and Orange County now is, for better or for worse, an urban environment.
“So basically, my articles wouldn’t be worth the paper they’re printed on,” John explains, “Though for me, the Journal was willing to waste the paper.”
Joshua looks at him blankly and Sharon giggles. “What did you say?” she asks.
“I said yes.”
Joshua describes his new status at the Bureau, a status borne of the fact that he came awfully close to an internal investigation for the shooting. In the end, he explains, it was easier to endorse him than to question him, and he’s now up a pay grade, with a promotion pending. The fact that he was the agent who took down the once-great Holt has left him with admirers as well as detractors in the Bureau ranks. He explains to John that the ranks are split, of course, by age.
Joshua leans back and sighs, smiling. It still isn’t much of a smile by joy standards, thinks John. For every angel at Joshua’s side, there’s a demon on the other.
Josh leans in close. “By the way, John. My ear inside the DA’s office says they’re not going to press the Fargo matter. Open-and-shut case of self-defense, is what they’re thinking.”
“Well, that’s what it was.”
The silence becomes uneasy. “Tell me, Joshua,” John says, “When you had Holt in your sights, and he had his revolver aimed at my brains, what made you shoot?”
Joshua shook his head quickly, either needing no thought to answer, or unwilling to entertain thought. “The knowledge that he’d kill you if I didn’t.”
“And what if he had?”
“I no longer live in the world of what-ifs. Rebecca taught me that.”
Johns thinks: Holt. Snakey. Baum. Cost of newsprint. Pay grades. Some guy named Frazee. Open-and-shut. What-ifs.
Who gives a shit? In the beginning there was Rebecca and now she can begin to fade from our memories. Is that all we were in it for?
“To Rebecca,” says Josh.
John again remembers the night on the deck of his canyon house when Josh was drunk and convinced that he had loved her more than John ever could. He remembers conceding this point as a way of offering some small victory that Joshua seemed to need far more than he did. In the same spirit he reluctantly raises his glass and considers a toast that to him demeans her memory as much as anything else they might do.
“I can’t say that now.”
So he puts down his glass
and walks out.
By the time he gets to the Canyon house it is raining, hard. John can’t remember ever getting this much rain before Thanksgiving and wonders if a record winter is coming. Good for the quail, he thinks.
Inside he takes off his coat and hat and places them over the couch. He goes straight to his answering machine to check messages. He’s gotten a total of nine calls since coming back here—five from Baum, three from Joshua and one stranger asking him to subscribe to the Journal.
The message light is on and he wonders if it is a call from Valerie.
He goes back outside and stands in the rain for a long while, letting it get down under his clothes and against his skin, all through his hair. It’s softer than tap water, he thinks. Good stuff. The dogs slide around like seals on the wet grass. He thinks of Rebecca in the rain, and then he thinks of only the rain.
Back inside he plays the message. It isn’t from Valerie, but someday, he knows, it could be.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
T. Jefferson Parker is the author of 20 crime novels. He was won two Edgars for best novel, one Edgar for best short story, as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His first novel, Laguna Heat, was made into a movie by HBO. He lives in California.
CONNECT WITH T. JEFFERSON PARKER ONLINE
Website: www.tjeffersonparker.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/tjeffersonparker
OTHER BOOKS BY T. JEFFERSON PARKER
Laguna Heat
Little Saigon
Pacific Beat
Summer of Fear
Where Serpents Lie
The Blue Hour
Red Light
Silent Joe
Black Water
Cold Pursuit
California Girl
The Fallen
Storm Runners
L.A. Outlaws
The Renegades
Iron River
The Border Lords
The Jaguar
The Famous and the Dead
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