Living in the Rough. Sucks for you.
But then he departed from the routine of these birthday calls and took a different tone, voice levelling off. And I felt some long calculation arrive at its privileged Frickian conclusion.
Frick said: “Hoss, I’m no brainiac like you. No numbers gimp, badge-carrying International Actuarial Forensics specialist.”
“Former,” I said.
“Former even.”
I said, “Frick arriving at his point.”
“My point being I’m not blind to the numbers,” Frick said. “And the ones I’m seeing now are the money you need, and the job I have that only you can do.”
College buddies. He was the rich kid. I was scholarship, beneficiary of a fund named after Frick’s great-uncle, mother’s side. The geek and the rich kid. We gave each other a reciprocal glimpse of what was wanted most. To be on the inside, to be on the outside.
Twenty years later, Frick was still rich only not a kid. Four decades old himself in a world gone pear-shaped and jowly, where everywhere a new and desperate light glinted from the surface of things, the sun changed with age, flinty and unsure of its own original motives. Solar flares, water shortages, brush fires in the hills. Such was the order of the day, even for the rich. Even for the super-rich living in Sunshine City. Even for the Frick-rich, who had inherited and now owned the Sunshine Cities of this less than brave new world.
Frick’s fiefdom. Lat 38.3228 by long 123.0369. He once put it to me in precisely those terms, the situation of his office to four decimal places. What that meant could be more simply expressed along these lines: waterfront, thirty-six holes, housing development, office complex, shopping mall. And all Frick’s. Every timber, every brick in the super-luxurious executive-style membership cabanas, every introduced bird species and exotic plant. Part of the Tifway Twelve Golf Alliance. Pebble Beach County was maybe more famous. But Sunshine City was more exclusive, with a membership roll including several former international leaders and dozens of once-bigs from the government/ judicial/entertainment complex. And notably—another Frick detail this one, I’d thought about it—Sunshine City was also, by a wide margin, compared to other members of the alliance, extravagantly more of a bitch to play.
I came to this conclusion on my own, surfing the satellite images. Airstrips of golden green. 8200 yards from the tips. Wicked approach play. Evil pin and trap placement. With a handicap of 10, I ghosted some numbers and came up with mean average 4.5 lost balls over 18 holes, nine times out of ten with a confidence of 98%. A monster this nasty enslaved membership, that’s what it did. Frick knew what he was doing. He handpicked the members just like he handpicked the staff. Caddies and greenskeepers were all former convicts whose pardons Frick had personally purchased from local authorities. Thieves and fraudsters made humble by Frick’s benevolence. He knew the algorithm of isolation and loyalty, my long-ago pal. “Gated community,” they used to call this kind of place, although golf republic described it better. A self-reliant social and economic zone all ensconced within its own borders, with guard huts and golf carts scooting along the barbed wire which was hung with tiny bells and woven into the high hedges. Intruders were rare, although anonymous people did fire rounds in from the surrounding hills now and then, just in spite. A .22 shell winging off the fender of a cart. And if a ball were shanked into one of those hedges, then the bells on the hidden barbed wire would tinkle and trigger audio alarms in a hundred embedded earphones, and guards up and down the length of Sunshine City, with their black ball caps, with their zinced-off noses and jackets with patches from defunct private security outfits—Mandrake, Hollis & Tucker etc.—they’d sit a little straighter and adjust aviator frames, scratch their necks and look at their phones, always finding there the same faithful data. Eighty-four degrees, seventy-five feet above sea level. Barometric pressure steady, zero chance of precipitation. All those subcutaneous GPS-enabled member chips reassuring that the head count was the same as the day before.
Until the day before Frick called me, that is.
Ten in the morning. I was forty years old. A geriatric Mojave Desert sun was baking the blue tarp I’d strung between the Vanagon and a couple of beavertail cacti. I awoke in submarine light, phone buzzing under my pillow. My blood, so recently saturated with the tendril ministrations of tetrahydrocannabinol, oozing like glue in my veins while Frick laid out his unprecedented offer. A job only I could do.
I rolled onto one elbow, reached for my smokes. I got sparked. I spoke through wreaths of grey that sloped off in the direction of the laundry line hanging near the back of the van, underwear and socks, listless in the light. I said: “I don’t suppose this is Griegson-related.”
Frick repositioned himself in a distant chair, aware—uncomfortably and all at once—that I knew something about what had happened already. Like maybe his drama up there wouldn’t already be making the rounds. Sunshine City member down from gunshot wound on the 14th green. I wasn’t working in the field anymore. I might have been a gimp on a graphite-titanium compound peg leg. But I still heard the rumours. And based on what I was hearing, Sunshine City was shaping up to be a good one.
Another sniper in the hills? These incidents did occur. They had precedent and a degree of likelihood greater than zero. A distant prick of light, a thin crack in the air and a low whine off the flagstones. A window shattering in the back of the clubhouse. A hole appearing in the drink vending machine at the turn, sprouting a rivulet of cola, just like in the gag in that old movie.
But the shoptalk wasn’t tending in that direction this time. Someone had actually died this time. One shot from somewhere with intent. A body in a sand trap and a caddy for once without rejoinder. Oh yes. Early speculation had it going a different direction this time. Early speculation among the pros was that this time Sunshine City had itself an inside job.
The Jerk. That was the movie with the gunshots and the spouting cans. Frick was still talking, but I starting giggling as the scene came back. Steve Martin pointing at the cans of engine oil, racked near the gas pumps.
It’s the cans! He hates these cans!
‡ I did Guilt Probability before the crash. I mean the global crash, yes, but the personal one too. The global one, you know about. The personal one, well, in sports they call what I got the yips. Focal dystonia, if you’re in a medical frame of mind, a spasmodic response to moments requiring high degrees of coordination and concentration. But the bottom line for those who get the yips is knowledge that you were able to do a particularly difficult thing one day, and not the next. Bernhard Langer forgetting how to putt. Charles Barkley suddenly unable to sink a free throw. They sometimes call the yips the “Steve Blass Disease” after the Pirates pitcher, whose story is a good way to keep yourself awake at night. Try it sometime. Try thinking about winning the World Series in 1972 with an ERA of 2.49, being runner-up for the Cy Young Award, second in the voting for series MVP behind Roberto Clemente. Then suddenly being unable to get the ball over the plate. Walking eighty-four batters in eighty-eight innings. Crashing into the minors, then out. It took Blass three years to go from the top to retirement. My fall took three weeks, but the idea is similar.
But before I lost it, like Blass, like Langer, like all of them, I really did have it. Senior Analyst, International Actuarial Forensics. IAF. People said it like: Eye-Aff. I’d never seen a case of Frick’s particular kind, but I knew why he was calling me, coaxing me out of retirement for one last try. I could have told you cold that member-on-member violence was very bad for business in the golf republics. Shaken confidence among the dues payers can’t be valued. Then you have the shit-fight between insuring companies that would surely scorch the earth. Frick could see himself caught in the middle. Sunshine City in the liability crosshairs, paying out all directions. Calling me was Frick’s smart move. That was Frick being proactive.
IAF. Good times. Powerful times full of morning energy and a sense of purpose. IAF was the biggest and meanest actuarial expert witness co
nsultancy on the planet in its day. We lived in an insured world, payouts crossing the planet daily based on the outcome of every event and sub-event, criminal or civil. All this money flowing in response to probable lines of responsibility. In a court system backlogged with an estimated ninety-seven years of caseload, you could either start cloning judges and lawyers, start building jails on the moon, or you could settle guilt using the magic available. Surrender to the quantum likeli-hoods that whirred within us all at the particulate level. Beyond a reasonable doubt. Well exactly. It had always been about probability. Why had we ever paid for more certainty than the universe found necessary to govern the spin of its googa-guan-deco-magra-peta-pentillion spheres?
So we did the whole guilt/innocence thing a new way. We evolved. Lawyers still had their chance to argue the old-fashioned way. Call it regulation time with sudden death. Then it went to probability penalty shots. And here the IAF specialists unpacked their spreadsheet souls in a thousand courtrooms, unfurled their cold grids of risk data, their seventy-factor pivot tables. We rolled the reality bones. Guilty nine times out of ten, 93% of the time, your honour. End of story. Send them away. We were minor gods, all Brioni and Vuitton. Ruthless well-tailored Shivas.
Frick’s proactive idea was bringing in the Guilt Probability geek beforehand. Before there was a hearing, a judicial finding. He was preparing himself. Frick needed odds run. He needed a friendly brain in a hurry. He offered me a wagonload of money. Water. A new van, if I wanted to do it that way.
“Or, the nickel just dropping now for my oldest true friend Hoss,” Frick said. “Limited time offering, Sunshine City membership. Scholarship class.”
I swallowed. I butted out the reefer.
I drove up. It took three days. Driving the highway, passing the groaning pickup trucks and loaded trailers. One thing about the Rough little appreciated if you weren’t in it: everybody was constantly on the move. Finding better spots; looking for water, or work. I passed the caravans of travelling smithies and shoemakers, doctors and fortune tellers. I kept changing my mind about the whole thing and pulling over, smoking and sleeping under the van. I’d wake up thinking about the pensioned life, time remaining measured in boxes of energy bars and garbage bags of pot dragged down from the hills. Then I’d get back on the road again, point the Vanagon northwest. I washed myself up in a Jack in the Box men’s room a couple miles down the road from the Sunshine City main gates. I could smell deep-fryer grease and a trace of sea breeze.
After the guard punched me up on screen and talked to someone in a control room somewhere, they drove me in-complex on a golf cart with little aircon nozzles pointing up out of the dash. I felt myself exit the Rough, crossing a lightly perfumed perimeter line from struggle to repose, from rough to fairway. And I thought about the years gone by, watching a transport helicopter trace the ridgeline opposite, inbound to Harry Zitman Airforce Base. The machine transmitted a faint rumble that shook the ground as it rotored and belched off over the hills and disappeared.
They showed me through a lobby and up some stairs, down a teak-lined corridor and into the sitting room outside Frick’s office. When he came out the door—insect legs, thin smile, white hands spread wide in false amazement—his first words spoken into shared air in twenty-odd years were: “Hoss, goddamn it. You’re lean. You’re fit. You look like you still get it regular. Welcome to 38.41 by 123.23 and change. Now stand up and hug me before you say a cynical word.”
So I stood, and we hugged. And Frick hummed a tune from college days in my ear while I looked over his shoulder down a long view corridor towards the sea.
Griegson had been lining up a ten-foot birdie. Almost routine, I would have thought. Griegson’s top-five ranking on the Sunshine City leaderboard confirmed as much. But then, he had been having a bad day of subtle shades. Seen drinking heavily the night before. More on that later. The worst part of his day was a 7.62mm round that struck him in the C2 vertebra squarely from behind. Bad outcome given he’d just planted a five-iron on the top tier below the hole. Based on handicap and the fact that he was facing away from the rising sun, facing the sea breeze and stroking the ball out of the calm of his own shadow, I’d say that putt was a better than 90% shot. On the 14th hole and assuming no significant variance in play, that implied Griegson was on track to shoot two under over 18 holes. A nice day, if you live.
As it was, he pole-axed into the sand trap. Very little entry wound. Very much exit wound through the front of the throat.
“Body?”
Morgued until the law arrived, as per resort bylaws governing the death of members.
They had a morgue. “You have a morgue?”
Frick traced a swirl pattern on the arm of his chair. He said: “They do die from time to time. Membership mean age is sixty-eight up here. At forty you’d be a low outlier—although there is some layable skirt in the fifty-five- to sixty-year age bracket. Anyway, the cops are backed up like usual. Not due in until the weekend.”
“And you’d like me to be waiting for them,” I said to Frick. “Ready to give them a story.”
“Not a story, the story,” Frick answered. “In compelling IAF language. Yes I would.”
They had no tape of the incident. Frick knew I wouldn’t be impressed by this detail. Security cameras down. I stared at my old friend. He raised his eyebrows, held up his hands. The camera server power-cycled once every year, standard memory maintenance. They’d cycled the year before at the same time, to the minute, to the second. That’s what happens when something is in the master maintenance schedule run by a computer cluster doing twenty petaflops in a quake-resistant room three stories under the ground.
“So let’s just be clear,” I went on. “You need the story to be about a sniper in the hills.”
Frick made a rotational gesture with his head. That meant: maybe, probably, yes of course.
“And we start with the odds that a shooter opens up from the hills during the exact five-minute window your cameras are down,” I said. “Five minutes over half a million annually. Call it one chance in a hundred thousand. I’m laughing here. Inside.”
“You’re doubling,” Frick said. “Members don’t golf in the dark. Five minutes out of a possible 262,500 hours of daylight is one chance in 52,500.”
I said: “Frick catching my mistake, having worked things out in advance.”
“Hoss,” he said, leaning back, tracing a finger along the lip of a bookshelf behind his desk. “Just talk to the witnesses.”
He called in his executive assistant, whose nickname Salary Betty had been shortened over years of service to SaBe. Said like a breath of menthol cigarette smoke released to thrum back out over the vocal cords: Sah-Bay. And there you had it, the name and the woman. Mid-thirties. Black hair, mint green eyes. Pinstripe suit pants dropping in a long taper to a roll of soft cuff. White blouse open at the base of an olive-toned throat.
SaBe said: “Mr. Frick?”
Frick said: “Meet Hoss.” Creaking back in his leather chair and drawing her attention to me with a thin hand, trembling at full extension. “Bet you can’t guess how he got that name.”
SaBe looked me over. I felt the menthol. She said: “Cowpoke?” “SaBe,” Frick said, moving on. “Hoss is doing look-see on the Griegson incident.”
“Police?” SaBe said.
“IAF, retired. This is a friendly.” I produced one of my old cards. “Frick says you saw the whole thing from your bedroom window.”
SaBe didn’t answer right away. She was still looking me over, caught on something. So I looked her over in return. And I saw some things about her. She was single, no kids or possibly one. There was a guy somewhere, ten states away, crossing borders, lines of longitude clicking under his heels. She hadn’t thought of him in a while before that moment. But something had triggered, standing there, looking at me. Not because I look like him, you can be sure. I’m an amputee, a one-legger. And you don’t have the money to bet the odds on two monopeds in SaBe’s life.
; “Named Hoss, as in you’re very well endowed,” SaBe said.
I pegged over and shook her hand. And we were co-conspirators, just like that. I said: “So what exactly did you see?” Then I plunked down onto the leather sectional and patted the cushion next to me. It sighed, taking her weight. And as Frick left the room, I slid without effort into the deep listening phase of things. Which is not unlike addressing the ball, I would imagine. There is a certain value to waggling in place, waiting for things to balance up just right. Waiting for the settle. For the distribution. For the cosmic intake of breath that nods at the arrival, all at once, of powerful form.
SaBe drove me over to the Sunshine City security centre, where they had a six-drawer morgue in the basement. I was thinking about what she’d told me in our short interview. A woman of few words, she got it all out in sequence and without unnecessary adjectives. Standing at the window, she had seen a puff of smoke in the hills. A lick of flame. She was iffy on the exact sound. Like a thump or a crack. But she remembered a phone ringing somewhere. Just before the shot, or whatever in fact it was.
Now we were carting over to the morgue in the brutal light and I was watching her. Wondering about her. Did I know she was withholding some detail? Yeah, I knew. But such was the stuff of hunch and faith. There wasn’t a number in it.
“Was Frick with you when you saw the flash?” I asked her.
She breathed out through her nose, a single sharp exhalation. She said: “How could that be, Hoss? That would imply Mr. Frick was in my bedroom.”
“You’re single?”
She nodded.
“But not always.”
SaBe looked back at me, again sharp. She said: “What about you?”
I stammered. I managed: “I haven’t been lucky that way.”
She turned back to the road. Gave it several seconds, then said: “His name was Scott. He died March 31st seven years ago. He was kidnapped with a couple of other doctors near Mexico City. Shot during a botched rescue. I’m not sleeping with Frick, no.”
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