Hard Return

by J. Carson Black

  Cam could feel the eyes of the crew on him. The moonlight gleaming off the planes of their blackened faces, their eyes glittering.

  If you knew what I knew.

  But even his guys, even the ones he’d always depended on, were looking at him differently.

  They’d turned on him in an instant. Their eyes gleaming like shiny bug carapaces. All of them.

  Hating him silently.

  Which wasn’t true at all. He’d commanded respect and appreciation from his men, even though some of them were psychopaths and killers.

  A whistling sound. Someone yelled “Duck!” and—

  Something tickled his bare foot. Cam burst out of sleep, his heart chugging under his breastbone like a locomotive.

  “This little piggy needs to get up right now,” Duncan said, wriggling Cam’s big toe.

  Cam snatched his leg back. “Dammit! I wish you wouldn’t do that! It’s morning already?”

  “Rise and shine. Those calls aren’t going to make themselves.”

  They were in a hotel room that looked like every other hotel room. For a moment Cam forgot where he was.

  Florida, wasn’t it? Yes, Florida. Tampa, Florida.

  Duncan had gone into the bathroom. He was already running the shower.

  Cam sat up in bed and stared out the window of the hotel room. All he could see from this vantage point was dark sky through the sheer drapes.

  Still sweating. Shaking. His heart revving.

  So many bad things had happened. Terrible things. He closed his mind to them now. He couldn’t let the past drag him down.

  Steam billowed out from the bathroom. Room service knocked on the door. The day would be the same. Another state, another city, but the same. Another marathon in a string of marathons.

  No end in sight.

  The only thing keeping him going was the fact that he wanted it so badly. He wanted it more than he hated it.

  He needed it. It burned him up like a candle but he would go through hell to get there, because he knew he was destined for greatness.

  “You have enough Nicorette to get you through the day?” Duncan called from the bathroom.

  “Kelli says she has a shitload in her purse.”

  “You two could get separated.”

  “I’ll cadge some, don’t you worry.”

  His body man ducked his head back into the bathroom, and Cam’s mind went back to Iraq.

  His men, their eyes glittering in their hollowed-out sockets.

  The hatred in their eyes.

  After all he’d done for them.

  CHAPTER 18

  James Schaffer, 17: James was your average high school kid. He had two brothers and a sister. Jim made friends easily. He loved skateboarding, parties, and hanging out with his friends, listening to groups and popular artists ranging from Robin Thicke to 2 Chainz. He loved to play practical jokes. Chances were you would see him on his skateboard more often than not. Everyone liked Jim, and his teachers will miss his impish smile. —“In Memoriam,” Special Section, the Los Angeles Times

  Landry flew back to El Paso and called Jolie Burke from the airport. “How’d it go?” he asked her.

  “I got nada.”

  “That’s because you were trying from a distance.”

  “It was impossible.”

  “You want to go to San Diego?”

  “What’s in San Diego?”

  “Devin Patel’s old school. He’s the only kid not originally from the school district. There might be something from his old school—his life in San Diego.”

  And so they flew to San Diego and checked in to another hotel downtown. Landry liked to keep moving, and when traveling, he never stayed in one place more than a night or two.

  He didn’t know why Jolie agreed to come with him, and he didn’t ask. They got along well, giving each other space and treading lightly. Even so, she was a cipher to him. Usually he was the cipher. For one illuminating moment on the plane ride to San Diego, when she’d gotten up to go to the restroom, he realized that this was how he must appear to other people. He really didn’t know what she was thinking, and found himself wishing he did. He knew that was how people regarded him. Early in their marriage, Cindi was always asking him what he was thinking. She’d wanted him to express himself, and he’d dutifully done so. But it always came out by rote, because the truth was, most of the time he didn’t feel like he had anything to say. After a few years Cindi stopped asking, and it all seemed to work out okay. Better than okay.

  Since he went off the grid, he’d slept with a few women—like Barbara Carey. But this time around it seemed like the woman he was sleeping with didn’t need him any more than he needed her.

  This had the effect of keeping him off balance—and he liked it. He didn’t know where he was with her. He didn’t know how long this would last. Obviously, the endgame was to get back with Cindi and Kristal, but he wanted to enjoy their relationship for whatever it was.

  After all, Cindi was seeing the comptroller.

  Devin Patel’s family had moved to Torrent Valley from El Cajon, a valley along the Interstate 8 corridor—part of the sprawl inching its way out into the desert to the east.

  Landry had looked up the El Cajon school system on Wikipedia. The Grossmont Union High School District consisted of thirteen high schools.

  Interestingly enough, there had been two separate school shootings in El Cajon. In the first instance, on March 5, 2001, fifteen-year-old Charles “Andy” Williams shot and killed two students and wounded thirteen others at Santana High School. This was in Santee, near El Cajon. He was sentenced to fifty years to life in prison. Apparently, Williams had been bullied and was suicidal. He’d used a .22.

  Three weeks after that, there was another school shooting. An eighteen-year-old boy named Jason Hoffman used a .22-caliber handgun and a twelve-gauge shotgun to shoot five people—two teachers and three students—at Granite Hills High School. He was inspired by Columbine, had severe emotional problems, and had been turned down by the navy the day before the shooting.

  He was twenty-five pounds overweight and had a skin condition.

  Landry looked at the photo of Devin Patel. Overweight. Pasty complexion. Dead eyes. It would be easy to think that Devin Patel would consider Jason Hoffman someone he could look up to.

  But that was where it broke down. Devin Patel was the victim, not the shooter.

  Had he gotten in with the wrong group? Were the Juggalos really violent, or were they pretenders?

  There were probably plenty of both types, just like anything.

  Landry and Jolie found the list of GUHSD high schools in El Cajon on the Internet, and between them called the offices of each school. They varied their spiel. It was either very good news or very bad news. They posed as police, calling to say that Devin’s father had been in a car accident and was at Sharp Grossmont Hospital in San Diego, and that his mother was coming to pick him up. Or that Devin had been suspected of stealing a bicycle and had lied about which school he’d gone to. Or that Devin’s mother had just given birth and she wanted her son to come to the hospital. Jolie was very good at this. She had the cop stuff down. She was believable. Of course she was.

  On the ninth try, she hit pay dirt: the receptionist at Desert Hills High School in El Cajon told Jolie that he had transferred out the previous semester, that he’d moved to the Los Angeles area.

  “I’m surprised you don’t have his current address,” the receptionist said. She gave it out. “He lives in LA.”

  Jolie had used the car-accident ploy. “This is the address we have on file.”

  “That figures,” the receptionist said. “But we don’t have his current address or phone number.”

  “Can you give us his old street address and phone number? Maybe his neighbors have that information.”

  Th
e woman paused. “We’re not really supposed to . . .” Then she changed her mind. “Okay, here’s the address and phone.”

  “Thank you.”

  The neighborhood where Devin had gone to school was about ten years old, and looked a lot like Landry’s own neighborhood: a maze of tan stucco houses with red Spanish-tile roofs, broad streets, plenty of cul-de-sacs, a few lawns, a few trees, and almost no cars parked on the street. Most of them were in their garages.

  Landry had grown up at racetracks, and he’d loved the life—even though it was messy and they’d often lived hand to mouth on the low end of the spectrum. When he was twelve, his parents bought a house in a neighborhood just like this—no more living in a fifth-wheel. He’d grown up watching TV shows about kids who lived in neighborhoods, and finally he lived in one, too. He’d liked the broad, quiet streets. He’d liked the walk to the park to play softball with his friends. Landry had realized that he liked order; he liked these cookie-cutter neighborhoods.

  But he loved the backstretch of the racetrack, too.

  They went to Devin Patel’s old address.

  A young woman answered. She looked to be about nine months pregnant. She had an open, friendly face, and didn’t seem to think twice about answering the door on a bright, sunny weekday morning.

  But she knew nothing about the previous occupants. Literally, nothing. They knocked on the doors of the houses on either side of the house and across the street, but no one answered.

  They went to the school and caught his English teacher, Max Caulfield, eating lunch in his room. The teacher uniform hadn’t changed since Landry was a kid, at least not in this case. Max wore a short-sleeved button-down shirt and a tie and Dockers. He looked like a mix between white collar and blue collar, and it was hard to tell just what category he thought he fell into.

  Landry experienced an instant dislike for him because he looked a lot like Cindi’s fiancé, Todd.

  Between mouthfuls of food, Caulfield told them what he knew about Devin Patel.

  Devin wasn’t big on hygiene. This seemed to be the thing that bothered Caulfield the most. He said it three times. “The kid had body odor. The others would tease him, leave deodorant in his desk, things like that.”

  Caulfield talked with his mouth full. Pot, meet kettle.

  Jolie said, “Is there anything else that stands out? Did he have friends?”

  “Friends? I never saw any.”

  “What kind of clothes did he wear?”

  “The usual. Really, he was just kind of a lump here in class. The kind of kid who never did anything one way or the other, except for his personal habits. That’s how I think of him: a lump. His grades were middling to poor. Everything about him was unremarkable, except he wore the same or similar clothes every day. Never any color. Just black. He just took up space.”

  “Was he a Juggalo?”

  “A what?”

  “Juggalo,” Landry said. “They dress up like clowns and follow a group called Insane Clown Posse.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that. All I know is he wore black from head to toe. Always.”

  “No friends?”

  “He might have had, but as I said, I didn’t see any.”

  “It’s like he didn’t exist,” Jolie said.

  “He existed,” Landry said. “But somehow he didn’t register. Like he flew under the radar.”

  “No friends.”

  “At least not at school.”

  They managed to talk to three other teachers.

  The last one, his math teacher, a woman named Nora Gill, who was cute, small, blond, and looked a little like a doll in her pale chiffon blouse and pencil skirt, said she felt sorry for him.

  “He was good at math, but I think he tried to play it down because he didn’t want to be in the spotlight. So I was really surprised when I saw him dressed up like a clown.”

  “When did he do that?”

  “He and some of his friends were on the sidewalk at the street fair we have every year—this was last fall—and they all had painted faces. You know, like white greasepaint? I knew him, though. He always wore the same big hiking boots. He was so big—he towered over me, even more than most. It was kind of scary, but he was harmless.”

  “What did the face paint look like?”

  “He had these weird black triangles painted over his eyebrows. And under his eyes, too—those were upside down. I think he was stoned, too. The way he looked right through me.” She shuddered. “And now he’s one of those kids who got shot and killed in that school shooting. Unbelievable.”

  Jolie nodded sympathetically.

  “We’ve had our share in this district,” Nora said. “I had a bad feeling about him. I didn’t think he’d live very long. He just seemed to walk around with a cloud over his head. So he was killed in that mass shooting?”

  “Yes, ma’am, he was.”

  “I missed that. I didn’t want to know the names of those kids. Didn’t want to even think about it. Not after the shootings we’ve had here.” She paused. “So his family moved up there and this is what happened as a result. I guess that’s fate.”

  Using cash, Landry bought a car at a used-car lot in El Cajon. It was a cheap, white, 1997 vintage Kia. He followed Jolie to turn in the other vehicle at the rental place, and then they headed to Torrent Valley.

  They drove past the address they had for the Patels. It was in a down-at-the-heels apartment in a down-at-the-heels neighborhood in the low-rent end of town. A cars-on-blocks kind of neighborhood. The Patels lived in the Riviera Apartments, two one-story redbrick buildings and a parking lot in the front. Four units to each building, eight units in all. A pocket courtyard lay between the two buildings. The courtyard consisted of turquoise gravel and a bedraggled dwarf palm.

  Jolie had made some phone calls to cop friends in the area and she learned that the Patel family now consisted of a mother, her sometime boyfriend, and Devin’s fourteen-year-old sister, Willow.

  “You think she’s in high school yet?” Jolie asked Landry.

  Landry shrugged.

  “They’ll be in mourning,” Jolie added. “This is not going to be fun.”

  They drove past without slowing, parked the Kia two blocks over, and walked in. They followed the walkway up to the third apartment on the left and rang the bell.

  A girl answered. She was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved tiger-print top. Pretty, in an elfin way. Slender and delicate.

  Hard to believe she was Devin’s sister. Devin was big.

  This girl was beautiful.

  Landry looked at Jolie. Wrong house?

  “We’re looking for Mrs. Patel.”

  The girl stood on one foot, stork-like, looking diffident. “Mom’s at work.” She started to close the door.

  Landry put his foot between the door and the jamb. “We want to ask you about Devin.” He nodded at Jolie. “This woman here is Jolie Burke, a detective with the Playa Sheriff’s Office.”

  On cue, Jolie produced her badge.

  The girl looked confused. She bit her lip.

  Landry withdrew his foot. He was a big guy and he knew he looked threatening, so he gave the girl some space and let Jolie take the lead. The girl seemed to respond to that a little, now looking at them with something akin to interest. They were so busy watching her face that they weren’t watching her hand on the doorknob until she slammed the door shut.

  They heard the rattle of the chain. Looked at each other. Now what?

  Jolie knocked on the door. No answer. Landry tapped her shoulder and nodded to the car. They walked back down the cracked sidewalk past the turquoise gravel and dispirited palm tree and walked back to their car. They were parked on a low knoll beside a pocket park. The neighborhood was old and the park had seen better times. Now it was just grass and a couple of picnic tables, no restrooms, a few palm
s, and a couple of shade trees. A man was out with his dogs—he’d let them loose to run around the small patch of green.

  They sat in the car facing down the hill toward the street the Riviera Apartments sat on. This was low-tech surveillance in the extreme: sitting there peering around the car’s crinkly silver sunshade.

  An hour went by. The windows were down but it was hot in the car. They were in the valley, after all.

  Landry stretched his legs, squinted around the shade.

  Took a drink of water.

  Jolie was still. He was amazed that she didn’t fidget. She was quiet. There was a calmness to her.

  From where they were, if they used the binoculars, they could see the door to the Patel apartment.

  Surveillance was boring. Landry had done it countless times, and he always had to work to keep his mind from wandering. He clamped down on his thoughts and concentrated on the ten-foot-square area around the front door of the Patel apartment.

  Two things: There would be a back door, a kitchen entrance. The other: Why wasn’t she in school?

  “School’s still in session, right?”

  Jolie agreed that it probably was.

  “Then why is she home?”

  “Who knows?”

  “Her mother working?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They didn’t know anything about the Patels. Did the mother work? Probably. Most likely, since she was obviously not wealthy.

  “She could be on disability.”

  It was as if Jolie read his mind.

  The door did not open. Maybe the kid was inside doing what kids did. Probably on her smartphone. With these kids today, who knew?

  There were a couple of people in the pocket park. One was a woman walking her dog. The dog seemed to want to poop on everything—he stopped at every bush. Landry wondered if the dog might have some issues with his bowels. The woman was reed thin and appeared anxious. As if she were waiting for someone, and the dog was just an excuse. Landry said to Jolie, “What do you think of the woman with the dog?”

  “She’s meeting someone.”