“Yeah, well, I wasn’t able to do that, Dad, until they took you off the big case.”
“No. It’s not about what happened to me. It has nothing to do with the case or what you saw in the news. You just need to understand how important a son like you is to a father like me. You’re everything your mother and I have. This hit us like a ton of bricks. We never saw it coming.”
The crowd explodes in cheer. Touchdown. For one team. At this point, they’re not following the game. They’re following each other, watching intently, waiting for the next move.
“So, do you ever think you guys are going to forgive me?”
Alex smiles and offers a laugh. “Your grandfather used to say, ‘The law punishes. People forgive.’ He used to say that to make sure I knew the difference between a father and a prosecutor. He would reprimand me when I was wrong, and he would take away privileges when he thought I betrayed his trust, but forgiveness was in his heart the entire time. It was something I always knew. It’s something I want you to always know.”
Trevor nods and fidgets the way a teenager does when confronted with parental love. “Thanks, Dad. But I know you never screwed up as bad as me.”
“That’s irrelevant. I want you to think about what your grandfather said.”
“Okay,” Trevor says.
They turn back to the game and watch. Central is ahead by twenty. Despite the absence of their legendary coach.
Gus walks Billie and her sister to their car. Halfway down the path from Beatrice’s house, Billie turns to him and grabs both his hands in hers, as if she’s asking him to dance. “It was a great night,” she says.
Gus nods shyly. “Yeah. We should do it again when you get back from LA.”
Her eyes bounce as if she’s seen an apparition. “How’d you know I was going to LA?”
“You mentioned it at dinner,” he replies.
“No, I didn’t.”
He laughs. “Sorry. I guess I just got a feeling.”
“Well, Mr. Parker, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t the least bit enchanted with your powers,” Billie tells him.
“It’s not a reliable power, I should warn you.”
“It’s just stunning,” Miranda gushes.
He watches them drive away, Miranda behind the wheel, the rock and roll star in the passenger seat, her eyes gazing at him even as the car swings away from the end of the driveway.
On the way home he dials Chase.
The detective answers on the third ring and says he wants to meet with Gus to go over the Theodore Smith files.
“When?” Gus asks.
“Tomorrow.”
He thinks for a moment. He doesn’t want to meet with anyone tomorrow. He wants to take Ivy to the dog park. He wants to do laundry. He’s thinking about taking a stealth mission to Prescott just to feel for vibes. “You know, I think Sunday would be better,” he says to Chase. “Is that all right with you?”
Chase lowers his voice, as if conspiring with an informant, and says, “Yes. Sunday would be great. I’ll call you at 0800.”
33
Gus pulls into the cul-de-sac. There’s a car parked in front of his house. It’s not a white pickup. It’s a white Mercedes. Zen, he tells himself. Zen. As he turns into the driveway he sees her. Bridget Mulroney is sitting on the small step to his front door. Her face is in her hands. He parks instead of pulling into the garage.
She looks up as he approaches. “I’m sorry, Gus.”
Ivy is howling inside.
“You gotta stop showing up like this,” he tells her.
“I didn’t break in.”
“That was considerate of you, Bridget.”
“Can I come in?”
He folds his arms across his chest and studies her. He intuits a desperation, or maybe that’s just the madness in her eyes. “It’s late.”
“I said I’m sorry,” she begs. “I just don’t know where else to go.”
“Are you packing chopsticks tonight?”
She laughs, then bursts into tears. He watches her gulping nearly to the point of hyperventilation, and then he reaches to her and pulls her to her feet. “An hour,” he tells her. “You can stay an hour.”
They’re in his office. Ivy’s head is in Gus’s lap. The dog is softly growling.
“She doesn’t like me,” Bridget says from the futon where she’s sitting with her legs up, crossed.
“Would you like you if you were her?”
“I need help, Gus.”
“I know.”
“No,” she says. “You don’t. Mills is going to turn everything into the State. They’re going to come after me and my dad and everyone. At this point I don’t give a fuck about my dad. He can burn in hell with the rest of them. But why should I have to pay for his crimes?” Her speech is accelerating, like a child searching for an alibi. “I wasn’t a willing participant. I wasn’t. You’ve got to believe me, Gus. When this thing breaks open it will be the biggest scandal to hit the valley in years, maybe ever. And everyone will know my name. And I’ll never work again. And who will ever love me? I might as well move to fucking Siberia.” She rolls into the fetal position, fighting the mattress with repeated punches. A meltdown, a tantrum, and the woman is every bit as abandoned as she imagines.
“Bridget, stop,” Gus says. “Catch your breath. And just sit there. Quietly.”
She looks at him, dazed. The dog barks.
“And, you,” he says to Ivy, “you hush! I mean it. Hush!”
The dog lowers herself to the floor and snorts. Gus lights a candle and then shuts off the lamp. “Stay quiet,” he warns both of them. He closes his eyes. He falls easily into a trance, as if it’s his only refuge. There he sits at the edge of the ocean thinking he can control the tides. He lifts his hand, and the waves roll backward toward a distant shore. The water peels away, exposing the sandy, rocky floor, and Gus watches a desert emerge. In that desert there are cacti blooming and flowering Ocotillo blowing in the brisk, dry wind. And there are no cops. And no bodies. And no blood. And there never has been anything here but life. Here the petroglyphs are masterpieces. They speak to him. They tell him stories of families and happiness, of love and protection. They also tell him of battles, and he can hear a distant war. Most of all, they tell him about survival, of people who lived to tell, who wrote down their notes, who could all teach us a lesson. Gus sees that this is the way it was meant to be, a kind of Eden; he sees this as a personal sanctuary, that everyone has his or her own sanctuary. This woman will find hers. He knows this intuitively. He opens his eyes.
She’s looking right at him, a bird who’s lost her way.
He doesn’t blink. He hopes she can truly see the map of life in his eyes. Shadows of the candle flicker against the wall behind her. There’s a code in those shadow flames, he believes.
“What are your choices, Bridget? Let’s talk about those.”
“My choices? Well, I can take off, but they’ll come after me as a witness. Or I could cooperate right now and have Daddy’s thugs at my doorstep.”
“Or we could protect you,” he says.
“Huh?”
“Alex will protect you. I’m sure he’s told you so.”
“But—”
“Let him protect you,” Gus insists. “That is your sanctuary for now.”
“I don’t get it,” she says.
“I’m telling you to trust him. In the end, it’ll be worth it. In the end, you will stay here and live here and people will understand.”
She stands up and extends a hand. Gus looks at it curiously. Suddenly, she’s all business, and for that, Gus is glad, as well. He takes her hand and completes the gesture, and then, in a gust of a second, he feels as if he’s hurling against the wall, but he’s not; he just sees something that strikes him like a wallop against his chest. He rebounds from the surprise and says, without accusation, without judgment, “You’re sleeping with Timothy Chase?”
Bridget gasps. “Oh my God,” she whispers. “Oh my G
od. No one knows this.”
Gus looks down and studies the floor. “I didn’t either. Until now.”
“Well now I know about you,” she says with a lilt in her voice.
“Know what?”
“That you’re for real.” She turns to leave the room. Gus follows her to the front door.
“You’re going to have to untangle yourself from him.”
She laughs. “Oh, please, it’s been less than a week. Hardly a tangle.”
“I’m just saying you do not need the complications right now. You have to concentrate on other things. He’s got a big case. And you have a big challenge. I don’t see this going anywhere good.”
“Neither do I,” she says and walks out of the house.
“Seriously,” he calls to her. “I don’t really know the guy. But it’s not about him. It’s about you.”
“I get it.”
“Do you? Do you really believe me?”
She looks at him one more time before lowering herself to the car. “I do now. I absolutely do. And I think I know what I have to do.”
“Do you?”
“Yeah. I’m going to Alex. This weekend.”
Gus nods. “Good. I’m glad,” he says. Then he raises a hand to wave good-bye.
A little later that evening—shit, it’s almost midnight—Gus hears the chirp of a text message and grabs his phone reluctantly because he could use a little sanctuary of his own right now.
The message reads, “Detective Psycho closes the case! Trevor’s coach arrested. You nailed it, Parker!”
He looks at the message about a dozen times, and later, a bit ashamed at the overt sense of vindication, he realizes he can’t get to sleep because his smile hurts so much.
34
Saturday.
Ten thirty in the morning.
Kelly Mills looks at her husband with this beneficent smile; she’s just beaming. Waving the newspaper and its giant headline about the arrest of Coach Hadley, she says, “There are no words for this relief.”
“You can thank Gus Parker.”
“All he did is tell you about his vibe or his vision, or whatever he calls it. But you took it from there. You went out on a limb.”
Mills shrugs. They’re sitting in the family room, their feet up on the coffee table. They’re sipping coffee and watching CNN. They’re not really watching; the TV is on, and they’re in no hurry to move. Trevor is still asleep.
“I wouldn’t call it a limb,” Mills tells his wife.
“Whatever it was, I’m glad it’s over,” she says, her voice melodious, her exhale mighty.
Mills offers her forehead a kiss, but he’s not thinking about the drugs, or the coach, or about Trevor, for that matter; he has a vague sense of something else that he needs to do. He senses some kind of slow, rising revelation, like an epiphany dragging itself out of bed in the morning. All Gus did was tell him about his vibe. And Mills took it from there.
“Honey, let’s take a drive to Prescott tomorrow.”
Sunday.
Two minutes past eight in the morning.
Gus Parker’s phone erupts like a flock of birds startled from their nest. It’s chirping, then shrieking as it dances across the surface of the nightstand. He groans and reaches for the device, doesn’t recognize the caller, and rolls back over. Ivy licks his face. He’s suddenly thinking about Billie Welch, the way he sometimes finds himself thinking in non sequiturs as he awakes. The phone rattles again.
“Yeah?” he says deep in the middle of a yawn.
“Wake up, Mr. Parker.”
“Who is this?”
“This is Timothy Chase with your eight o’clock wake-up call.”
“Oh.”
“You don’t remember?” the man asks.
Gus tosses in the bed, the phone cradled at his neck. “I remember you said you’d call.”
“Great,” the detective says. “I was beginning to wonder if psychics sacrifice their memories because they dwell so much in the future.”
“That’s very eloquent for eight o’clock in the morning,” Gus tells the man, pulling himself up to lean on the headboard.
“I’ve been up since five.”
“So, what’s the plan?”
Chase tells him he’s on the way over now. “I’ve got the file. Get your ass out of bed and let’s go for breakfast.”
Gus’s first inclination is to negotiate for another thirty minutes, but before he can say anything the detective is gone. So he rushes Ivy out to the backyard where she can pee, poop, whatever, and then he drags her back inside where he leaps into the shower. He can’t think straight. He forgot to put on the coffee. He scrubs his scalp with vigor. Still nothing. He towels off and heads naked, straight to the coffeemaker. “Hurry up,” he tells it and then scavenges for clothes in the bedroom. There’s a clean T-shirt, good. He pulls his last clean pair of shorts from a drawer, great. He eyes the flip-flops at the bottom of the closet, but a voice inside says, no, you need to be sturdier on your feet today, so he reluctantly grabs a pair of boots.
Ivy is all hyped up sensing the energy of her dad. She’s bouncing everywhere.
“Oh, girl, I need to get out of here in a hurry,” Gus tells her. “I’m so sorry.”
Ten minutes later there’s a knock on his door.
“I’ll be right out,” he calls.
He’s dressed, and he grabs a mug, pours the coffee, opens the door, and almost runs down Timothy Chase who’s hulking in the frame.
“I said I’d be right out,” he tells the detective. “You’re lucky I didn’t spill hot coffee all over you.”
“Smells like some fancy stuff.”
Gus hadn’t noticed, the aroma is routine to him, but he does, for an instant, smell something distant burning in the air.
They’re in Chase’s Jeep, now, making their way east. They drive in silence, just the way Gus would have the morning, the way the sky sneaks up on you on a golden desert day, unfolding at your window, offering you Zen that probably won’t last through the day. But he’ll take it. This is where he is. Riding east, with a man who seems difficult but determined, a quiet guy who sneaks up on you like a coworker to push you aside, a guy who gets results and who sleeps with a woman even though she’s damaged. Or maybe because she’s damaged. He studies Chase now, tries not to imagine him fucking Bridget Mulroney, and senses this guy, this so-called profiler, knows damage when he sees it.
Alex Mills and his wife are loading up the SUV with a cooler of drinks and sandwiches. Kelly grabs his arm. “Are you sure you want to leave him?” she asks.
“He’s learned a lot this weekend, Kel.”
“I know, but . . .”
“And he can have a day of freedom. We’ve got to show him there’s a payoff.”
She stares at him, and he can’t look away. There is fear in her eyes, worry across her face. “I think we at least have to tell him to stay around the house,” she says.
“He’s earned some of our trust back.”
“I don’t want any of his friends to pick him up and take him driving all over making trouble.”
Mills shakes his head and says, “What is it you’re not seeing about this?”
“Huh?”
“This is a big deal for him, Kelly. This is huge.”
She looks at him defiantly. “I know that, Alex. Don’t condescend to me. Why don’t you just ask to get back on the case so we don’t have to go sneaking around? They have no reason to keep you off it now.”
He shakes his head. “No. I’m not going to grovel at this point. But, fuck it, maybe we shouldn’t go,” he tells her with a sigh of disgust. “Not with all this drama.”
Abruptly she turns away and walks toward the open garage.
“I’m sorry, Kelly,” he calls to her. “Hey, I didn’t mean that.”
She’s saying something from the dark box of the garage, but Mills can’t hear her because a car is squealing down the street.
“What?” he yells to her.
/> She waves her hands and yells something back.
It looks as if they’re fighting, but they’re not. They’re deafened by the hysteria of the approaching car. Mills is halfway up the driveway when he looks back and sees a white Mercedes barreling toward the curb in front of his house. The tires issue a final scream as one wheel slams into the sidewalk. From the driver’s side door emerges Bridget Mulroney, her arms flailing.
“Where are you going?” she begs.
He might as well be scratching his head, but he just narrows his eyes and says, “Bridget?”
She races toward him. “Protect me please. Alex, please.”
“Huh?”
“I’m cooperating!” she cries. Then she looks at the open hatch of his SUV. “Are you leaving town, Alex? Where are you going?”
He can’t refrain from shaking his head, much the way people can’t help but laugh at the absurd, the painfully absurd, and here it is, or rather here she is, and it bewilders him. “On a road trip,” he replies. “To Prescott.”
She starts to shake, addled on caffeine or panic, or both.
“Bridget, are you all right?” he asks, aware, of course, that she’s not.
“Please don’t leave,” she says in a whisper. “I’m scared.”
“There’s nothing to be scared of,” he assures her, though he knows he can’t assure her. It’s just what you do with crazy. He’s done it before a million times with suspects, with victims, with whomever hits the curb of life and comes bouncing at him like a ball whacked out of bounds.
“You don’t know,” she says.
“I don’t know everything. But I know you’ll be safe. I’ll be speaking to the sergeant tomorrow, and before we move forward there will be a plan for you.”
She puts a hand to her chest. Her mouth opens, and from it comes a voice that’s a roiling cauldron. “Don’t leave me! Please, Alex. I’m begging you.”
He’s not sure if he buys her hysteria. Not sure if she’s playing or suffering, if this is really Bridget or one of her many charades, but he doesn’t have time to investigate her motive, so to speak, or the patience to think out the transaction, which is why he so quickly says, “Get in the car.”
Desert Remains Page 32
