Hard Return

by J. Carson Black

  “Where are we going?” Jolie asked.

  “You’ll see.”

  They drove up into the hills. The sun was lower in the bright blue sky. It wouldn’t be that way for long, though. Already one side of the hill was in deep shadow. The road turned to graded dirt, and then to washboard gravel.

  They turned onto another road, even narrower. It was getting darker all the time. They were only seven or eight miles from his townhome.

  The hills here were covered with manzanita and scraggly trees. The city seemed to come right up against the rural area, like surf up to a beach. Landry always liked it out here.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Almost there.”

  Landry parked in an area that looked like every other, the little trickle of a dry wash meandering through a small valley between chaparral-clad hills, the dirt road bottoming out in it.

  He checked his GPS.

  Here.

  He recognized it. Not far from the trail was a stack of stones. “Ducks,” he said.

  “Ducks?”

  He pointed at the cairn of stones.

  “Oh, ducks. Hikers’ cairns.”

  “You hike?” he asked her.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Hope no one’s coming back from a hike now.”

  It was getting cooler now. The sun was behind the hill that separated them from the city and the ocean. A light wind set the manzanita bushes quivering.

  Landry parked on the edge of the road, making sure not to block other vehicles should they come along, and got out of the car. He walked along the side of the road, which had several small turnouts where people had driven off and parked.

  “What’s this place?” Jolie asked.

  Landry hunkered down at one of the pullouts. The tracks of tires on the dried, hardened road pan. But here there was gravel and dirt on top, a natural indentation in the road that ensured there would be loose gravel. Creekbed sand and rocks. He wiped his hand across the dirt. “It’s a nonparallel ground trap.”

  “A what?”

  “A ground trap. In the military, we called it a mono vault.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s illuminating.”

  “It’s a military drop point.” He reached down and screwed off the lid to the plastic vault. “See? Polyurethane.”

  “What?” She bent forward.

  He heard her gasp. Inside were three assault rifles and several handguns.

  Landry nodded to one of them. “It’s a SIG Sauer. You want it?”

  Jolie said, “Sure. That’s what I use anyway.”

  “A P-226.”

  “Uh-huh.” She rubbed her arms. “It’s getting cold out here.”

  “Like the desert. It’s the breeze, too.” He screwed the top back on after retrieving an assault rifle and the handgun. Handed her the P-226. He took something else for himself: one of two garage-door openers.

  He kicked dirt and rocks back into the shallow pan of the road. Stomped it down some.

  The vault’s cover had been painted like the road, a camouflage job Landry was proud of. Beige, white, gray white, gray, some red-brown pebbled spots. But he always made sure to tamp sand and rocks down on top.

  They drove back to his neighborhood. There was a pullout just above his subdivision (one reason Landry had bought the town house—because he could spy on anyone who might be coming to spy on him). This pullout was a lover’s lane kind of deal. They lay on their bellies and watched the town houses through binocs—like watching paint dry.

  One car drove onto his street. The car turned in five houses away, its headlights throwing their beams on the garage door. Kind of like two spotlights on a stage. The door rose, and the car pulled in. The garage door rolled down.

  They waited. No cars came or went.

  They got back in the car and Landry drove down the hill and turned onto his street and turned again onto the driveway pad. He pointed the garage door opener and the door rumbled up, just as the other garage had opened up for the other car five houses down. They drove in and parked, and the garage door shuttled down behind them.

  “Tomorrow,” Landry said, “we can pick up our own weapons from the post office. But these should be okay for the night.”

  They drew the blinds and ate frozen dinners Landry kept in his freezer for such occasions.

  “So what happens next?” Jolie asked, toying with her Michelina’s spaghetti dinner.

  “I have to find the guy who hired him.”

  “The man who shot up the school? You sure he didn’t do it for himself?”

  “He was a professional.”

  Jolie gave up on the spaghetti and set her fork down. “Maybe he had his own beef with the school.”

  “Possible.”

  “But you don’t believe it.”

  “I think it’s more likely that he was a hired gun. You’re not eating.”

  “I’m not hungry.” She paused. She was beautiful even under the dull glow from the overhead ceiling light. But there were shadows under her eyes. She looked washed-out—he thought that was due to the light.

  “You should eat,” he said. “Keep your strength up.”

  Her chin dipped in a small, tight nod.

  He knew what she was going to say before she said it.

  “I think I should go back.”

  “To New Mexico?”

  “Uh-huh. I think it’s the right thing for me to do. If I want to keep my job, that is.”

  “Do you?”

  She went back to toying with the spaghetti. Stabbed a meatball with her fork but didn’t raise it to her lips. Kept her eyes down. “I think so.”

  Landry wanted to ask her why she’d come in the first place, but suppressed the urge. It was what it was. He hated it when women asked him something like that, and he suspected Jolie would feel the same way.

  She looked at him. “It’s not that I don’t like being here . . . with you, but . . .”

  He waited.

  “I like it there.”

  “New Mexico?”

  “Yes. New Mexico. My place. It’s the first home I’ve had in a long time.”

  “So it’s not me?”

  She gave up on the spaghetti and pushed the cardboard container away. Looked at him. “Oh, it’s you, too. You’re a killer.”

  “So are you.”

  “But I’m a cop.”

  He shrugged. “Same thing.”

  “No, it’s not. But you look like you want to argue about it. So, say it: You were a Navy SEAL. You had permission.”

  “I was a Navy SEAL. I had permission.” He leaned his elbows on the table. His dead mother wouldn’t approve, but he had become lax in his table manners over time. He had to view his mannerisms in the light others might see him. He couldn’t afford to stand out in any way. “What’s all this leading to?”

  “Remember you told me about the safe house. Your team. When we were on the island? You said they were all dead.” She turned her eyes full on him. “Did you kill them?”

  He dabbed at his lips with a linen napkin. “Yes, I did. I think I told you that.”

  “The kid—I read about him. He was nineteen.”

  “Soldiers are nineteen. They die all the time.”

  “No one knew who did it. But I thought it was you. Was he on the team coming to kill us?”

  “Yes.”

  Jolie’s great-uncle, the former attorney general of the United States, had gotten himself in trouble with some bad people. Bad people in the form of Landry’s boss, Mike Cardamone, who ran Whitbread Associates. Whitbread Associates was one of many government contractors that popped up like mushrooms after a rain. The rain, of course, was Iraq.

  But Landry’s relationship with Mike Cardamone ended in a firefight on a private island off Cape San Blas.


  Landry had had to choose sides. He’d elected to fight on the side of the angels. He’d known that to survive, he would have to disable the threat before the enemy had a chance to kill him—he’d had to strike first. That was his mantra. And so he had killed the three other unsuspecting members of his team in a suburban house in Port Saint Joe.

  It was the right thing to do, but he’d made a mistake. One of their team was a younger man. Really, he was a kid. He was an operative but he was in over his head. His name was Green. Landry had planned to kill him quickly—an icepick to the base of his skull—but the pick had slipped and Green fought back.

  It was bad. Ugly.

  Landry held Jolie’s eyes with his own. “Why did you think I killed them?”

  Jolie shrugged. “You’d have to. You’d be the only one who’d have access.”

  “I did it to save you, your cousin, and the two girls.”

  “I know.” She kept her eyes steady on his. Her serious gray-green, gray-blue eyes. Only in this light they were gray yellow.

  “No need to thank me.”

  He realized he sounded like a prim schoolteacher with her nose out of joint. He reached out for her hand and trapped it under his own big paw. She looked at him.

  “Let’s eat,” she said.

  She slept in the guest bedroom. He understood, laid out fresh towels on the bed, turned down the covers, made sure the room temp was cool enough for sleeping. He would have laid a mint on her pillow if he’d had one. His condo was now a hotel like any other.

  In the middle of the night she came into his room. He awakened instantly. Just a sound outside his consciousness, a whisper of a sound, would wake him.

  She stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the hall light, arms crossed around her chest, hugging herself. “I have to go.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want to be who I am when I’m with you.”

  He said nothing. But in whatever soul he had left, his heart crumpled, just a little, at the edges.

  He wished he had the tears.

  But he did not.

  CHAPTER 21

  He was up early, three a.m. early. He needed to be outside in the dark; he needed to walk. The house had cameras to the outside from every angle. Landry checked all of them. Nothing stirred. Standing in the dark, he looked out the windows. No strange cars. No cars at all. All of them in this neighborhood were buttoned up in their garages.

  He dressed in dark clothing. Jolie was out like a light, beautiful in sleep. She snored slightly. Landry figured she would be over what they’d talked about last night. She was strong and she was smart.

  And she’d killed enough to understand what he’d done.

  They would be all right. If there was a “they.”

  He would have to figure that out, and soon. Jolie meant a great deal to him, but he loved his wife and daughter. He loved his family. He wondered if going to look for Jolie, and finding her, and having her take off with him—if those actions had been a way of saying good-bye to his wife and his daughter.

  Gary could be right, that he had been gone for three years and they believed he was dead and he would never get them back now.

  He had not wanted to face this possibility before, but in the dark, in the morning, after his talk with Jolie about the things he had done, he wondered. Was he delusional? Would Cindi take him back, the way he pictured she would?

  He decided it wasn’t the time to think about it, not now.

  He went out into the cool dark morning and walked up behind the townhomes into the hills. There was a dirt road beyond, leading up into chaparral and a little place where he could look down on the city.

  This was a time not to think, but to be. To take in anything and everything that drifted in through his transom. It was important, at times, to be empty. To try and drop thought, so that new ideas—fresh ideas—would have the room to come in.

  But his thoughts were all snarled together. He tried to make his mind a blank, but something intruded.

  Something had changed.

  It was a tiny alteration on an invisible scale. Negative and positive ions switching places, maybe.

  Some people might describe it as the hair rising on their arms. Landry felt it in his jaw. Tightness. Like some people might feel before an incipient heart attack. The feeling would start there and then ping off every part of his body. Like a tuning fork.

  He even had a name for it, taken from a childhood book he’d loved, and the Shakespeare line that had inspired the title. “By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.”

  He went back to the house, crept into the bedroom, and shook Jolie’s shoulder. “Wake up.”

  She did.

  “Get dressed, now. We’re getting out of here. No sound.”

  She didn’t argue. She pulled on her clothes and grabbed her small duffle and stuffed her purse inside. Strapped on her weapon. All fast, all quiet, as Landry did the same.

  Over the years, especially in tense military situations, Landry knew when he needed to tighten himself up. When he needed to be ready. He heeded the firing of molecules in his jaw, the ache in his teeth, its connection to the electric grid of his body. The grip he needed to keep on his bowels. Through umpteen combat missions and close to twenty covert operations he had trusted it. And the only person he could trust completely was himself.

  Jolie filled up bottles of water and grabbed a fistful of energy bars and fruit while he checked the street. All quiet, still dark. Landry didn’t know how much time they had, or who was ranked against them, or how it would come. But he knew it would be soon.

  “What’s going on?” Jolie whispered as they rounded the Kia and opened up the Econoline van.

  “Something’s changed,” Landry said.

  “Changed? What about the Kia?”

  “We leave it.”

  Jolie looked at him. “This is serious.”

  He loaded two motorcycles into the back of the van. One was a Honda. It was a recreational motorcycle. The other was a Harley chopper. Landry had clothing for each of them. He looked completely different depending on which bike he chose to ride—a different person. He had his cotton balls for his mouth and his pin-on ponytail, his leathers, his man-on-the-street casual clothes. All stashed in a good-sized duffle. His eyeglasses and sunglasses and caps and hats and boat shoes and motorcycle boots.

  Jolie said, “What is this? Summer stock?”

  “You could say that. If we need to get away in a hurry, you okay riding the Honda?”

  “I’ve ridden a motorcycle before. Don’t you worry.”

  But she sounded only half-believable.

  The garage door rumbled open. They backed out, and the door lowered after them.

  They encountered no cars, no dog walkers, no one at all as they drove under the orange sodium-arc lights of the neighborhood. Just another anonymous townhome on an anonymous block in an anonymous housing development in an anonymous neighborhood.

  They hit the freeway driving south.

  “What happened back there?”

  “Something changed.”

  “What changed?”

  “Something.”

  Jolie said, “What? What changed?”

  Landry said, “I told you. Something’s turned against us. I don’t know what it is, but I know we had to get out when we did.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Someone may know about the town house. Hard to figure out how. But someone’s coming for us.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “I know.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  Landry said nothing.

  “I should go back to New Mexico. My job is on the line.”

  “That’s where we’re headed.”

  “To New Mexico?”
>
  “No. To the airport. You’re flying back.”

  She said nothing.

  “You said that was what you wanted to do.”

  She said nothing.

  He said nothing, either. Not for a few miles. Then he said, “Take a look at my iPad. Look for up-to-the-minute news.”

  She powered up and looked. “I don’t know the channel here.”

  “Look it up. Just do it.”

  She found CNN. “I don’t know what you’re looking for . . .”

  “Just keep looking.”

  “It might not be news.”

  “Fifty-fifty,” Landry said. “Worth a try.”

  They zipped along the freeway from pool to pool of orange sodium-arc lights, the night still dark but a blush showing above the mountains to the east. A woman anchor was speaking—reading the news.

  “Turn it up,” Landry said.

  Barbara Carey wasn’t paying attention to the little television set in the tack room. She was too busy trying to keep the two-year-old from biting her. His official name was Mia’s Fotobomb but she called him Dummy, because he was the dumbest horse she’d ever known in her life. He was obsessed with the flowers on her T-shirt. Even cross-tied, he gave her fits. Resentment in every bone of his body, stamping his feet, trying to rear up, pulling this way and that, pinning his ears back and snapping at her. You did not turn your back on Dummy because he would take a chunk out of you.

  So when she decided to leave him there for a while to think about it, and she stepped into the tack room for a gulp of Coca-Cola and a handful of tortilla chips (her breakfast), she had only half an ear tuned to the TV. She kept it on CNN all the time, because of the school shooting.

  Although at this point she had begun to second-guess herself about Joe Till’s involvement. There could have been a number of reasons he took off. If she were truthful with herself, she’d cop to the fact that she’d been expecting him to take off. She knew the type. He was a rolling stone. She’d seen enough of them to know. It was like they all thought they were in the old-time westerns on Turner Classic Movies, the ones where they kissed the girl, got on the horse, and rode off into the sunset. She’d come to the conclusion that a lot of men had somehow or other been brought up on westerns like that, no matter how young they were, and reveled in the idea that they were independent and free. Always yammering about “wanting their space.” That’s what her boyfriends would say when she was in high school and even her two years of college. “I need my space.” And Joe Till was single, as far as she knew, so he was probably used to pulling that kind of crap.