Cactus Garden

by Ward, Robert

  He pulled her to him then, half expecting her to resist, but she let him do it and threw her arms around his neck. Her mouth was moist, and she smelled like the sea.

  “You think you can do whatever you want with me, don’t you, Jack,” she said.

  He felt the heat coming off her, passion rising in him in waves. He could hear Zampas’s words, “never, ever fuck somebody you’re working,” … but the voice seemed remote, like a commercial you’ve heard so many times that it becomes syllables mumbled by an idiot.

  All he knew was that he wanted her, had wanted her from the first moment in front of Mann’s Chinese, and now they were somehow walking back to the house, arm in arm, and the heat coming off both of their bodies was almost comical in its intensity. Only Jack wasn’t laughing. This was dead wrong; he knew it … and he had to find a way to stop and intended to, even as they went back into the house and didn’t make it into the bedroom, but instead, sank down on the blue rug. Then she was burying herself on top of him, saying his name again and again … and he was starting to take off her blouse, when she stopped him, pushed him away.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  She said nothing but seemed suddenly shy, and Jack understood her reluctance to get naked in front of him. There were bruises on her left breast and a larger purplish one just below it, which ran all the way around her side.

  “Buddy do this?” Jack said.

  She bit her lower lip and shook her head.

  “No,” she said, but she shut her eyes as she spoke.

  “Then how?”

  “It happened the other night, when we were trying to get away from those guys up at Tahoe. Falling down the hill … I guess.”

  “Sell me something else,” Jack said.

  She looked at him fiercely, eyes wide open now.

  “That’s what happened. I’m telling you. Come here. I don’t want to waste time talking.”

  She reached up and pulled him down on her and kissed him hard, and Jack felt the heat rising from her again, felt as though they were melting into one another. Then he had her pants off, and he was entering her, and he was riding above and she was so tight, yet incredibly soft inside, like wet satin, and she was saying, “Jack, Jack … Jesus, Jack,” and he watched her face, straining with pleasure, and gave everything he had to her, freely, and he didn’t care anymore what anyone said, or how many codes he was breaking, fuck the codes, he wanted her. Wanted all of her. Now.

  Afterward she fell into his arms, and they lay still, hearing the crashing of the sea.

  They slept for a while, in the middle of the floor. Somehow she ended up curled in his arm, and when he finally awoke, it was with a shudder. There were those thirty seconds of sheer terror … he had no idea where he was. Then he heard the roar of the surf again and saw the sliver of moon over Malibu and looked at her face, tanned and sweet and childlike. He brushed her blonde hair away from her cheek, and he felt something overtaking him, some tenderness that he hadn’t expected, but now that he recognized it, there was no escaping or denying it.

  His mouth was dry, and he disengaged himself from her, felt a little chill coming in through the screen windows, and walked to the couch to get a quilt for her. He picked it up, started to spread it over her sleeping body … and saw the bruises again. Gently, Jack turned her over on her stomach and saw older, yellowish-green bruises on her back. There was no way they could have come from their scramble in the brush.

  No, she had been beaten, with fists or perhaps with a blunt instrument.

  He sat down, cross-legged, next to her and stared down at the bruises, then noticed more on the back of her calves. Someone had kicked her there. He remembered the story she had told him about Buddy Wingate saving her from the slob in Texas and the look she had given him when he had asked her, “And how does he treat you?” Now he had his answer. Jack thought of the way Buddy had talked to Jules Furthman, of Zampas’s warnings. He had heard it all, but somehow he hadn’t really been listening. Because right up to this very second, Jack had still taken Buddy for some kind of goof.

  Now he knew that Buddy Wingate was something else entirely. He beat her, beat her badly. Jack ran his palm across her cheek and thought of Buddy Wingate’s huge, calloused hands. She was Buddy’s property. He felt he could beat her anytime he wanted … because she lived in fear—fear that she would lose the houses at Tahoe and Malibu and the candy-apple red T-Bird. Jack thought of her smile, her quick wit and of her sweetness that had taken him by surprise, and it occurred to him that he was lost, because now he knew for certain what he’d only suspected before. Buddy-boy was a particular kind of monster, and there couldn’t really be an adequate jail term for him—not even if he drew seventy-five years.

  Jack looked at the bruises on Charlotte Rae’s body, and knew that he would have to make Buddy pay, personally. He would have to take it out in flesh. Nothing else would do.

  He laid the quilt over her bare, tanned shoulders, kissed her lightly on the cheek and walked out to the porch to stare at the moonlit beach. He had to get himself under control, but even the calming, rhythmical surf couldn’t push her bruises from his mind.

  Chapter 10

  Bob Valle wondered if he was being followed.

  He’d gotten on the Hollywood Freeway at Sunset and noticed a blue Trans Am not far behind him. It might be paranoia, he thought, especially given the meeting he was going to. Just because the guy was out there on the road at quarter to midnight, just because the guy had been a couple of car-lengths behind him at Highland and Sunset and had then gotten on the Hollywood Freeway when he did, didn’t mean a thing.

  Still, you couldn’t be too careful.

  Valle crossed lanes, headed to the Pasadena Freeway, then looked into his rearview mirror.

  The blue Trans Am was still behind him, lying back there, two cars between them. It still didn’t prove anything, of course.

  Valle saw his next exit come up quickly, Hill Street. He turned right, went around the cloverleaf, and downshifted as he came to Chinatown.

  He looked behind him. The blue Trans Am was still there, fifty feet back.

  A little sweat broke out on Valle’s face. The guy might be a tail, a tail who’d gotten wind of what Valle was up to, prying into locked files … asking questions of the wrong people.

  Now to his left Valle saw a sign for the Ozawa bakery, famous for its elaborately decorated cakes. Inside, he could see a young man and woman standing next to a five-foot high wedding cake. The girl was giggling and the man held her close, while a baker squirted icing curlicues on top of the cake. Watching this little tableau, Valle felt a surge of anger and envy.

  He imagined the lovers were innocents, young and hot for each other and for the life they were to lead together He envied them for it. Though he was only forty-one, Valle had long ago lost any remnant of his own innocence.

  The innocent were slaughtered in this world. That was one thing he knew for sure.

  He turned the corner sharply and quickly pulled his ‘89 Subaru into an available parking space.

  If the Trans Am turned the corner as well, Valle would pull out and be behind it. He didn’t want to play games, however, just lose the tail.

  Now he waited, looking tensely into the rearview mirror.

  A car was coming around the corner, but it wasn’t the Trans Am. It drove by him without incident. Valle waited, looked. The Trans Am was gone. Must have turned off another street.

  It was okay. He was pretty sure now the guy wasn’t following him after all.

  He turned the key and pulled out of the parking space. He thought of the kids in the bakery again. They’d learn … he thought bitterly. Eventually, everyone learns about betrayal.

  And once that happened, Valle thought, you didn’t care about joy anymore—didn’t care about laughter or, God help you, friendship or honor or any of the other bullshit ideals you used to live by.

  What you really wanted was knowledge, knowledge about your enemies, knowledge tha
t you would use to destroy the cocksuckers.

  Valle turned into the underground parking lot for the Empress Pavilion Restaurant. That was fitting, given his black mood, for it was the restaurant where he and Walker and some of the other agents used to come in the old days, when they had just begun their careers. As he took his parking ticket from the automatic teller, he thought of the fun they used to have drinking Chinese beer and eating the terrific seafood dishes in the Empress. They were like a gang of college kids. The Four Musketeers. And wasn’t that two lifetimes ago?

  Valle drove up to the third floor and parked in space 23, as he had arranged. He sat and waited for his man to show—and felt envious of the whole fucking world, which was in bed, happily asleep.

  Poindexter showed twenty minutes later. He was a round little man who wore old, battered safari jackets and Eddie Bauer flannel shirts that he never bothered to press; he had a dirty little professorial mustache and drove a dirty little rented Honda. He reminded Valle of a once-promising English teacher who’d gone to seed at some small-cow college. Poindexter parked four spaces away and blinked his lights twice. Valle was intensely irritated by this. There was nobody around in this godforsaken place, so why bother with all the spy-craft? But that was Poindexter. He went by the book, and he loved any chance to make things dramatic.

  Valle blinked his own lights twice, then both men got out and walked toward each other.

  “Hello, Bob,” Poindexter said. His breath smelled of gin.

  “How’s your health?” Valle said, feeling an even greater irritation. He wanted to drop the code, but he knew that Poindexter would walk if he did. Poindexter was terrified of being overheard and even more so of being recorded.

  “My health is not as good as I would like,” Poindexter said.

  “No?”

  “No. I saw my doctor and he told me that I should take his advice and stay where it’s sunny.”

  “He sounds like a very cautious man,” Valle said.

  “He is a very sensible man,” Poindexter said. He took out a gold toothpick and worked on the yellow teeth below the nicotine-stained mustache. “And quite successful. His motto is, let the others become specialists. He’s happy right where he is, as a good old-fashioned internist. At which he’s doing very well.”

  “That’s fine for him,” Valle said. “But I want to know his diagnoses just the same.”

  Poindexter rubbed his bottom lip. He put the toothpick back into his shirt pocket. When he spoke again, his eyes pinched together.

  “He said that the situation is critical. That the best course of action is to let the game run its course.”

  Suddenly, Bob Valle’s patience ran out. He reached over and grabbed the startled Poindexter.

  “Cut the shit. We’re talking a major betrayal here. You owe me, and I want to hear a name.”

  Poindexter may have looked like a rat, but he had survived a long time. He coolly grabbed Valle’s hand and pulled it from his throat.

  “You’re a fool,” he said. “What’s done is done.”

  “Tell me. You owe me,” Valle said.

  “The disease is in the family, just as you thought,” Poindexter said. “And nothing can be done. You understand?”

  “Yeah,” Valle said. “I understand. But it stinks.”

  Poindexter rubbed his hand over his shirt, straightening out what Valle had roughed up.

  “You used to be a good agent, Bob,” he said. “And as such, you must remember that in many cases the wisest thing to do is to do nothing. Let the disease run its course. Good night. And be well.”

  Poindexter turned and walked to his car. Valle watched him slide his big, satisfied belly under the steering wheel, slam the door, and drive away down the ramp….

  And envied Poindexter his calmness….

  But not his attitude. There were serious things going down here: betrayal, pure and simple. He’d already lost out once; how many more times would he have to lose before he did something about it?

  Well, at least he knew what he had come to find out. Now he would have to decide what course of action to take. He knew Poindexter was right about one thing. Any course was dangerous.

  He went back to his own car and pulled away. When he was safely down the ramp, a black man of about fifty stepped out from behind the concrete pillar to his right. He was dressed as a workman, but in his hand was a mini-tape recorder with a powerful, ambient microphone. He clicked it off, stuck it in his pocket, and walked back up the ramp to an exit on the fourth floor. He had to hurry. His contact man in the blue Trans Am was due to pick him up outside at 12:15, and he couldn’t afford to be late.

  Chapter 11

  Jack drove his black Mustang down a dirt road deep in the deep heart of the Valley. His head was throbbing, and he felt a violent pressure in his temples. Outside on the sunbaked, dusty road, it was 110 degrees, and his air conditioner was barely working. The combination of the heat, which crept through the windows like some insidious gas, his memories of Charlotte Rae’s beautiful but bruised body rising to meet his own, and the voice of Assistant Director Ted Michaels made him feel as though he was drowning in a whirlpool of slime.

  He had wakened this morning at Buddy’s beach house and told himself that he wasn’t going to make love to her again, that this was only a one-time thing, something he had to get out of his soul, that he was blowing it big-time … and he felt now that he might have resisted, but she had done something he had found irresistible. Half awake, she had put her head on his chest and begun to cry softly. Against his will he found himself softening and stroking her hair, more like her father or big brother than a lover. It was the same feeling he’d experienced the night before, a species of tenderness that surprised, even shocked him.

  Before he had wanted her, dreamed of her. Now there was something else going on, something far more dangerous. He was beginning, he knew, to care for her … because beneath the wisecracks and the blonde hair was somebody who needed and responded to his own throttled tenderness, and when they made love this morning, there was a sweetness that engulfed them both and that, he now knew, was undeniable.

  He needed her. Not only that, he wanted to save her … though he almost laughed at the sheer hopelessness of the idea. When the time came, he was going to have to take her down. But maybe, maybe if she helped him, if she flipped on Buddy, he could get her reduced time. He laughed bitterly. Yeah, he could get her five to ten, and he could get conjugal visiting rights.

  Christ, it was like a fucking True Detective headline: “Our Love Survived the Big House.” Who the fuck was he kidding?

  He slammed on the air conditioner again, felt the heat strangling him, and thought of Michaels. What if Michaels learned that he was sleeping with Charlotte Rae? Michaels was already pissed at him anyway. In the debriefing this morning, Michaels had taken him apart. According to Michaels, Jack had acted irresponsibly and foolishly in shooting back at his pursuers at Echo Lake. What Jack should have done was simply outrun them. Jack had pointed out that it was extremely tough to outrun bullets, but Michaels still insisted that he’d compromised the undercover. Michaels had been more intractable than ever, which made Jack think that he had some other agenda, that he wanted to put the screws to the whole operation. Which he very well might pull off, if he knew about Jack and Charlotte Rae.

  Jack drove on, trying to put her out of his mind. Why had Wingate asked him to come out here into the deep Valley anyway? This wasn’t the Valley that East Coasters he’d met liked to make fun of—the home of goofy Valley Girls who actually squealed, “Fer sher” and “Oh, ma gosh!”—nor the Valley of endless glittering shopping malls, swimming pools, and expensive German cars. This wasn’t white-people-Encino-and-Woodland-Hills-land but farther out, past all that, Sun-land, a place where rednecks lived in little adobe houses, with maybe a horse trailer hitched to the side of the carport.

  Looking at the directions he had scrawled on a Publishers Clearing House envelope (CONGRATULATIONS JACK WALKER, YOU�
�VE QUALIFIED TO WIN 5 MILLION DOLLARS ! ! !), Jack turned left on a dirt road and saw cows grazing. What was Wingate doing out here anyway?

  Jack turned left down another dirt road and within forty feet saw a wooden house, a kind of cowboy bunkhouse, with logs and a cedar-shingle roof. Suddenly Jack heard the sound of gunfire. He felt his pulse race, and he pulled the car into a parking space, snapped open his glove compartment, and got out his nine-millimeter handgun.

  He opened the door, crouched down, and heard five more shots go off. The sound came from maybe twenty feet away, in a clearing. Then Jack heard laughter, the unmistakable high-pitched cackle of his host, Buddy Wingate.

  “Son of a bitch,” Buddy said. “You are fucking amazing, Canyon.”

  Canyon? Had Jack heard the name right?

  He walked from the car now, around a stand of sweet-smelling eucalyptus trees, and found himself at a firing range. There in front of him under a shingled gazebo was Buddy Wingate, dressed in Western garb—white ten-gallon cowboy hat, plaid cowboy shirt with pearl buttons, ridiculously tight Levi’s, which accentuated his sagging gut. The topper was a handsome beaded-leather belt and holster, which held a still-smoking six-gun. Standing a few feet away from Wingate was a grizzled, wasted-looking old man, replete with sagging jowls, a T-shirt that said Springdale, Arkansas, Rodeo, Southwestern Champ 1978. Unlike Wingate, the old-timer looked to be the real McCoy. The face was drawn and wasted, but there was life and sprightliness and a light that sparkled emerald green in the eyes. Suddenly, Jack felt that he had known this man before, in some past life. Even his gun seemed familiar, a pearl-handled Colt .45 six-shooter.

  “Well, well. Look who has graced us with his presence,” Buddy Wingate said. “Young Jack McKenna. And holding a nasty-looking pistol, nonetheless. Well, you can’t use that here, hombre. This here is the Wild fucking West. We don’t even acknowledge such weapons, ain’t that right, Canyon?”

  “You got it, hoss,” the other man said.

  “You wouldn’t happen to know who this cowpuncher is, would you, Jackie?”