January Justice

by Athol Dickson

  I stood up and went to the blank wall in back beside the toilet compartment. There I found a row of nail holes high up near the ceiling. I thought it was probably where Alejandra Delarosa had fastened the backdrop she used to film the videos—black fabric with the URNG’s logo in white and red. I searched the rest of the walls and the floor carefully.

  Then I went back outside. I hopped down off the front deck and walked around the side of the shack. I knelt and peered into the space between the hillside and the floor framing. I sighed, thinking of black widows and rattlesnakes, and then I dropped onto my stomach and crawled into the shadows. I found plenty of cobwebs and some evidence of the original construction, bits of lumber left behind, but nothing else of interest. I crawled back out, stood, and dusted myself off as best I could.

  So. There were no bloodstains, no bullet holes, no other evidence of the crime. It had been seven years, after all, but I was still disappointed.

  I walked downhill to the path. I followed it to the Range Rover, got in, removed the handgun, and put it on the passenger seat again. I turned the vehicle around very carefully and then drove back out to the park road.

  Just beyond the first hairpin turn, I nearly hit a white Escalade, which was parked in the middle of the road with its hood up. A man stood by the front bumper reaching down into the engine compartment. He didn’t bother to look around when I stopped. He wore a straw cowboy hat tipped back on his head; a pair of jeans; a red-and-black-striped, western-cut shirt; and a pair of boots. He rose up on his toes and reached a little deeper into the engine compartment.

  I glanced over at the gun on the passenger seat. I thought about slipping it into my holster, but a strange lethargy had settled in. I simply didn’t bother. I wanted the pain to stop. The ache of missing Haley and longing for her touch. The constant sense of being incomplete. I left the weapon where it was and got out of the Range Rover.

  “Need a hand?” I asked.

  “This thing,” he said. “I had to take it back in three times already. Dealer won’t admit it’s a lemon.”

  I walked up beside him and looked down at the engine. “What’s it doing?”

  He removed his hand from where it had been hidden down among the pulleys. In it was a Beretta M9 semiautomatic. He took one step back to get out of my reach, the Beretta aimed at my midsection. Both moves were the kind of thing they teach you at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, what used to be called the School of the Americas. He was one of the guys who had been following me. Not the one with the gold medallion around his neck. The Other One.

  He said, “Okay.”

  I heard a door open as someone got out of the Escalade. Although I couldn’t see him behind the raised hood, when he stepped into view, I saw he was the one with the medallion. He wore his top shirt buttons undone, like before.

  “You guys got a different SUV,” I said.

  “We have lots of them,” said Medallion. He said it in Spanish.

  I switched to that language too. “Who are you guys again?”

  “You know what it means to be disappeared?”

  “I have heard the expression.”

  “We are going to make it happen.”

  “I wish you would reconsider.”

  “We warned you fairly, did we not?”

  “You certainly did. I have no objections about that.”

  “And our friends warned you again yesterday, but here you are.”

  “Those guys are your friends? You should keep better company.”

  “So that is two fair warnings, right? Yet here you are, continuing to do what we have asked you not to do.”

  I said, “Would it help if I promised—” And in the middle of my sentence was a movement behind me, and then they gave me what I wanted, which was nothing anymore.

  24

  Most people believe in the illusion of a clear dividing line between the things inside their heads and the things outside, but I had been cleansed of that mass hallucination by a river of lysergic acid diethylamide, among other substances. If I had actually returned to sanity, it was only because the drugs had taught me not to put my faith in what I thought I knew about the world within me, or without.

  For example, the fact that I was lying motionless offered no clue about anything. Neither did the fact that I was moving. I had no certainty of either fact, if they were facts. But my return to sanity had involved the habit of describing everything that seemed to be around me, in order to acknowledge my own state of being, whether it was actual or not. So in the situation where I seemed to be, I admitted that there might be darkness, and there might be pain, and there might be some kind of connection between those things and the thing that called itself me. And in admitting that these things might in fact exist in ways that remained independent of each other, it became slowly possible to sort them out.

  I most likely moaned. It appeared that I rolled over. I confessed it might be possible that I was me, and I was still alive.

  What was this dark around me? I rubbed my face and felt what moistness feels like on the fingers, if feelings might be actual. And yes, a spike of pain when I apparently touched my forehead. An idea came and stayed long enough to let me think about it. That was progress, surely. The idea was this: blood in the eyes might cause darkness. There was logic in the thought, whether logic was logical or not. I willed my hands to wipe my eyes. It seemed to make no difference. If I truly did exist, it seemed I might be blind.

  Here we go now, moving. Rolling to one side. Pressing down. Equal and opposite reactions. Science. That’s the ticket.

  It seemed I was sitting, and lo and behold, all around me were little pinpoints of light, like stars. Oh no. Not that again. Was I in space again, adrift? But wait, didn’t this mean I was seeing something? Yes. The things that looked like stars. I sat and gazed around and realized it was possible they were stars,

  actual stars in a night sky. The universe outside of me was filled with them, so densely packed above, they looked as though God had spilled the sugar. Of course. This was an image of the Milky Way within my head, what it would look like with no city lights to drown it out. And I thought of city lights far below a cliff, and Haley in midair above them. I remembered and then felt great disappointment that remembering was still possible.

  Then I heard breathing, and it wasn’t mine.

  I looked down—looking now as if what I was seeing was really happening, beginning to believe the things I saw—and I saw more stars a little lower, and much larger. They were yellow, two pairs of them, each pair close together. Then they vanished for a millisecond, gone and back again in the blink of an eye, and a word entered my brain. “Coyotes.” And another word came after that, and it was “move.”

  It took about an hour to get back up to the road. Once I reached it, I probably sat there in the dirt another hour, gathering my strength. Then I got myself up on my two legs, and I began to walk. Who knows how long I walked? Certainly not me. I believe I fell a few times, but always I got up. I was getting better at that all the time. Falling. Getting up.

  The road ahead of me grew brighter, and I wondered if the sun was rising, but then I realized it was an unnatural quality of light, pale and otherworldly. Then I realized it was headlights. A vehicle coming from behind me. The men who made my disappearing happen, returning to do it right this time. I willed myself to turn toward the downhill side of the road. I willed myself to go down into the darkness. But my feet got tangled as I turned, and I fell on the road, and though I did consider getting up again, and would undoubtedly have done so given enough time, there simply was no time.

  The headlights came too close. They stopped. I heard the sound of two doors opening behind the headlights, but staring toward their glare had only left me blind again. One of them approached me from the right. One came from the left. They were flanking me again. I wouldn’t let them take me alive. I would take them with me. Oorah.

  They laid hands on me together. They lifted me, and
I stood up.

  “Are you quite well, sir?” came the voice of one of them, and I knew who it was, and I let them bear my weight, and I said, “Don’t call me ‘sir.’”

  “Yes, Mr. Cutter,” said Simon.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” said Teru.

  The doctor at the Hoag Memorial emergency room, where Teru and Simon took me, had a few things to say about how lucky I was. It turned out Medallion and the Other One had sapped me, shot me in the chest three times, and then rolled me down the hill beside the road. To add insult to injury, they had also taken Haley’s Range Rover.

  It was the Kevlar vest that saved me, of course. All three slugs had flattened themselves against it. I had three cracked ribs, a goose egg on the back of my head where they had coldcocked me, a bad gash across my forehead near the hairline, and assorted bruises and small cuts from my unconscious tumble down the hillside, although it was hard to tell which of those had come from the beating in Pico-Union and which from the attack in the mountains.

  The doctor believed if I had been conscious, I might have broken many other bones, but the flexibility of my limp body had allowed all of my muscles and joints to go with the flow as I fell, so to speak. “I’ve seen this before,” he said, “in people who were sleeping in a car when it got in a wreck. It also explains why drunk drivers usually cause more damage to the other guy than they do to themselves.”

  He wanted to hold me for twenty-four hours for observation, because of the risk of a subdural hematoma. I got a private room. It seemed that Simon and Teru hadn’t eaten since lunch, so Teru went out for takeout while Simon remained sitting beside the bed. My head still felt as if someone was in there beating on my brain, but otherwise I felt strangely alert and interested in everything. It was a kind of emotional high I had noticed before, after surviving other near-death experiences.

  When Teru left the room, I said, “Can I ask something personal?”

  Simon said, “One may always ask.”

  “How old are you?”

  He didn’t seem surprised at the question. “Let us say that I am older than I feel.”

  “Well, you move like you’re in your thirties. Mind telling me what you bench?”

  “Bench?”

  “Bench press. You know, weight lifting.”

  “I understood your reference, Mr. Cutter, but why do you ask?”

  “Just making conversation, really.”

  “Ah. Well, in answer to your question, about fourteen stone.”

  I did the math. Fourteen stone was two hundred and eighty pounds. I said, “How many reps?”

  “Two sets of eight, twice a day.”

  “What do you do for cardio?”

  “Miss Haley allowed me to swim in the early mornings. I have taken the liberty of continuing that regimen since her passing.”

  “Do you run?”

  Simon shook his head slightly. “One’s knees.”

  “How about keeping up with hand-to-hand?”

  “I visit Abernathy’s on my days off.”

  Abernathy’s was a boxing gym in LA. It had been around since the 1940s. I said, “You have a regular sparring partner?”

  “Jack Rolls and I are old friends.”

  I looked at him. “You spar with Jack Rolls? Seriously?”

  “When he’s good enough to find the time.”

  Before Jack Rolls retired and bought Abernathy’s, he had been a World Boxing Association light-middleweight world champion. I said, “I’m impressed.”

  Simon shrugged.

  “Listen,” I said, “I hope I didn’t offend you the other day by asking about your work before you were a butler.”

  “Not in the slightest. One would enjoy a conversation about it with someone of your background. Unfortunately, there is the Official Secrets Act.”

  “So there is. Can you tell me why you changed careers?”

  “Cashiered, I’m afraid. Frightfully unfair matter of age restrictions. Didn’t care to enter management, so to speak, which was the only other option.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Over two decades have passed, more’s the pity. If they had only seen things properly, I had many good years left to offer.”

  “You still do.”

  “Very kind of you to say so, Mr. Cutter. One serves queen and country, little thinking there will be an end to it, except perhaps in the honorable way at the hands of an enemy, and then suddenly they mention that it might be best to carry on elsewhere. Not because one failed in any way or because one no longer functions adequately, but simply because one managed to survive a day too long as measured by a calendar. One knows about policy of course. Still, one does not seriously expect such things to be determined strictly by one’s own age. But there was no exception made. Bit of a surprise at first. Caught off guard.”

  “What made you decide to become a butler?”

  “Several factors. My father was valet to the eighth Marquess of Berkleyshire, so I was raised with a thorough understanding of life in service. And I believe I may say without fear of overstepping that my work for Her Majesty’s government involved similar skills at times.”

  I said, “Congressman Montes implied that he met you on some kind of diplomatic mission, so I think I can guess what you mean. I spent a little time working out of our embassy in Khartoum. The head of housekeeping was actually section chief for the CIA.”

  “Regrettably, I must avoid comment. However, it did occur to me that butlers often continue to serve until they are well advanced in years, and after my discharge, that concern was on my mind. So…” Simon shrugged, folded one leg over the other, and straightened the perfectly creased fabric of his slacks.

  I rubbed my temple, trying to manage the pain as we sat in silence for a few minutes. The ability to be together without talking was one of my favorite things about Simon.

  After a while I said, “It’s all relative. Some of the younger noncoms in my last company called me ‘Pops.’”

  “Oh, of course, Mr. Cutter. One does not object to aging itself. Most natural thing in the world. And one must admit the eyesight, reflexes, and strength may not be quite what they once were. But nature in her wisdom provides certain compensations, does it not? One learns a bit here and there as one goes along, and when confronted with certain difficulties, one begins to feel a stratagem based on experience is so very often preferable to the type of rash solutions favored in one’s youth. It seems frightfully foolish not to recognize this, and frankly, quite unjust. It is the injustice that continues to annoy.”

  “Why not take what they offered in management?”

  “That was not where one’s strengths lay. One was more… hands-on. And it seemed a rather dismal prospect to end one’s days behind a desk in some office staring as the Thames rolled by.”

  I yawned and rubbed my temple again. I must have slept a little, because the next thing I knew, Teru was in the room, He and Simon sat beside each other eating hamburgers. Only Simon’s fingertips touched his sandwich, as if he wanted to remain as far from it as possible. Teru was wolfing his down with gusto. I smiled, then went back to sleep.

  Sometime after dawn I rolled over and opened my eyes. It took a moment to realize that Tom Harper was sitting by the bed.

  I said, “Tom.”

  He stood, looked down at me, and said, “How you doing?”

  “Pretty much good to go, I think.”

  “Good. Mind if we talk about why you’re here?”

  He asked a lot of questions. I told him everything I could without giving up Vega’s name and whereabouts. I didn’t like to identify my clients to the authorities. Not even to Harper. It was bad for business.

  Once I had Harper filled in, he said, “What are you not telling me?”

  I said, “I gave you everything I know.”

  “Come on, Malcolm. You get a bomb thrown through your window and claim you don’t know why. I have to he
ar from the Newport cops about a couple of guys tailing you. They ran the plates on that Suburban, by the way. They were stolen. Why don’t you tell me about these things?”

  “I don’t know who threw the bomb. And what would I mention the two guys before now? It’s not against the law to follow people. I only told the Newport cops because they asked. I don’t like to bother you that way. I figure you’ve got enough real crime fighting to do.”

  “We’re buddies, Malcolm. You should’ve at least mentioned they were out there.”

  “Bicycle theft. Speeding tickets. Pirated Duran Duran CDs.”

  “I’m serious, Malcolm.”

  “What are you gonna do, blame the victim now?”

  Teru was sitting in a recliner on the other side of my bed. Harper looked at him and said, “Do you understand this blockhead?”

  “Who can understand the wind, grasshopper?” replied Teru.

  Harper looked back at me. “What’s he talking about?”

  “Beats me. My friend is inscrutable.”

  “Okay. You guys have your fun. Meanwhile, I’m just, you know, kind of assuming there’s been a crime committed here, and I was toying with the idea of going out to catch the bad guys.”

  “What else can I say? It was two Latinos in a white Escalade. The same two who were following me before in a black Suburban. I didn’t get the plates this time because one of them was standing in the way. One of them wears his shirt unbuttoned to show off a lot of bling. They both move like professionals. They both carry M9s.”

  “Yeah, but what do they want?”

  “Based on the bullets and everything, my guess is they want to kill me.”

  “But why, Malcolm? Why is the question.”

  “If you figure out an answer, let me know.”

  25