The Room of White Fire Read online

  “Do you have any idea where he went?”

  She looked out to the oaks and the distant chaparral. “He said his parents were rich. Own the Family Suites hotel chain, and I know they got one of those down on Hotel Circle.”

  From what had been suggested about his family, I figured the Family Suites might be the last place Clay Hickman would land.

  Sequoia set her can on the table with a tinny knock. “What he talked about was his mission. Which was to bring white fire to Deimos. ‘My mission is to bring white fire to Deimos.’ He said Deimos was the Greek god of terror, which I barely remembered from Miss Benson in high school. Clay—I still want to call him Jason—but Clay said he was almost clear on how to accomplish his mission. And when the meds finally washed out of him he’d see everything perfectly, like he used to. He said that he’d built up resistance to electroshock but the doctors didn’t know it. I didn’t think they did electroshock anymore. Shocking another human being’s brain? No animal in nature would do such a cruel thing to another.”

  I thought of what young male lions do to the cubs when they take over a pride. And weasels in a henhouse. Feuding chimpanzees. But also of a torture basement I’d seen in Fallujah where the loyalists worked over the local Shia. Bloodstains on the walls and floor, several coats. Smell of burned flesh. They had a car battery rigged with cables but it wasn’t for jump-starting vehicles. That got to me, that battery. Humans. Animals. The human animal. Where’s the big difference? Maybe Sequoia had a point.

  “He could have made that up,” I said. “About electroshock.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Good question.”

  She considered me. “He didn’t seem, like, delusionary at all to me. Just . . . excitable. But my mom? She took some heavy meds for depression and she could fool people. I remember how convincing she could be, even when I knew she was making stuff up. To her it was true. That’s a terrible deal, when a mind turns down reality and makes things up instead. Like there’s a little devil up in your skull, directing his own movie for you to see.”

  I got Sequoia’s phone, driver’s license, and plate numbers, and a description of the missing truck—a “trashed” silver Nissan with a lowland gorilla key chain dangling from the rearview mirror. She had not reported it stolen because she didn’t want to get Clay in trouble, but I encouraged her to file the report because if Clay Hickman did anything illegal, then she could be considered an accomplice. And in case he abandoned it, she could get it back. And because the truck was, well, stolen. She agreed.

  She put both of my phone numbers into her phone. An office landline and a cell. I gave her my email address, too. She promised to call me immediately if she had any contact with Clay whatsoever.

  “Hey, can I have one of those pictures of him? The color one? I love his different-colored eyes.”

  I slid the picture back out of the envelope and set it on the table by the empty root beer cans. “I really need that call from you, Sequoia. So does Clay, whether he knows it or not.”

  She studied me. “Maybe he just wants to be free.”

  “Some people can’t handle freedom.”

  “Well. Okay.”

  “Be very careful with this guy if he contacts you again. Your job is to contact me. He has a history of violence. Don’t be alone with him.”

  “I’m nineteen and I can take care of myself.”

  I gave her a hyper-dubious look. “Drunk boyfriend.”

  “You don’t have to bring him up. I learned.”

  —

  I was forty miles from the Family Suites on Hotel Circle. I picked my way down the mountain to the state routes and finally to the interstate and hit the city at rush hour. Hotel Circle is pretty much what it sounds like, a loop of chain hotels set up for San Diego’s tourists. Beaches, zoo, Chargers, Padres, trained killer whales, more beaches. We’ve got it all. A large white charter bus was pulling out of the Family Suites lot as I squeezed in. A group of maybe sixty tourists was checking in but I managed to catch the eye of a tall young man who waved me to the end of the desk and welcomed me to his hotel. His badge said PETER. I showed him the picture of Clay Hickman. He turned it over and read the PROPERTY OF ARCADIA claim, then looked at the face again.

  “He was here Monday evening, say six o’clock. He came in and looked at me, then at Lannie—she’s one of the other night clerks—and I remember it was slow right then and we both said ‘Welcome to Family Suites’ at the same time. Me and Lannie laughed but the guy didn’t. He turned around and hurried out. We joked about him all that shift, how we scared him off with too much hospitality. I remember him because the moment was funny and weird. What did he do?”

  “He’s on the run.”

  “A criminal?”

  I pictured Sequoia Blain’s trusting face, and remembered that Clay had pistol-whipped someone before being committed to Arcadia. “Not yet.”

  I left Peter my card with both numbers and a twenty, and he said he’d call if he saw Clay Hickman again.

  Hotel Circle is too big to walk so I drove from hotel to hotel, all the way down, across the interstate, then all the way back up on the other side. Those bloodhounds and me, down and up, then up and down. I saw no trashed silver Nissan pickup with a gorilla key chain hanging from the rearview in any of the lots.

  4

  I live sixty miles northeast of San Diego, fifteen miles from the coast. The property is oak woodland and has been in my wife’s family for almost a century. Twenty-five acres, nearly perfectly square on the plat map. The main structure is a 1922 adobe-brick house that holds the high ground, and downslope are six casitas built around a spring-fed pond. There’s a barn and a paddock. It has a name, possibly pretentious: Rancho de los Robles—Ranch of the Oaks. The nearest town is Fallbrook.

  The entire rancho became a wedding gift to Justine and me—just a little something to get the newlyweds started—and when she died a year later I tried to give it back to the Timmerman family because it seemed like the right thing to do. But they said no—I was family and it was mine now. It was one of several Timmerman properties in the American West. Two years now since Justine’s death. I feel both surrounded by her and abandoned by her, a form of torture familiar to anyone who loses someone they love. To all of us, sooner or later.

  Oaks and sycamores, sage and grasses, and dramatic outcroppings of granite boulders. No neighbors for miles. It’s potentially good farmland—avocados and citrus do famously well in Fallbrook. But no one in the Timmerman clan, certainly not us newlyweds, could ever muster the time or energy to tame this place. Justine and I were much too busy being young and ambitious. She was five years younger than me, a public defender. She had a good moral compass, an impressive memory, and was born to argue. I was three years into private investigations after resigning from the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department. I had a gift for finding people and was doing well at it. She owned a Cessna 182 when we first met, which she had painted pink and named Hall Pass. She taught me to fly Hall Pass, too, and we soared all over the Southwest for that one perfect year we were married.

  Our plan was to live forever or die trying, and we thought we could pull it off. We were bullish. Timmerman brains and Ford brawn. All four grandparents alive on both sides. Sky the limit and no end in sight.

  We all make assumptions and that’s where we go wrong. Sometimes they crash. As did Hall Pass, with Justine alone at the controls. Into the Pacific, off Point Loma. Mechanical failure. She was celebrating a little plan we’d hatched, and I had stayed on the ground because I had work to do. Work. I could never say no to work back then. Still can’t. That day, I had been thinking of her up in the great blue, at just about the time Hall Pass went down. My thoughts had been pleasant ones—not a premonition among them. Picturing myself as a dad someday. I was a trusting soul back then. That day is the river that divides my life. A river, or a wall topped with broken gl
ass. If it’s anywhere close, I can recognize the throaty rumble of a 182 in the sky.

  A year after her death I bought another Cessna, same year and model as Justine’s plane, and christened it Hall Pass 2. I fly it now and then for business but mostly for what is supposed to be pleasure. To remind me of her and those few fine days. Sometimes memory is a blessing and other times it’s a curse. On a given morning you won’t know which it will be.

  —

  The truth is that Rancho de los Robles was in need of serious work when we first moved in. Still is. Foundation splitting faultlike. Adobe bricks of the main house cracking and crumbling. The twice-updated electrical prone to overload. Plumbing startlingly loud and undependable. Roofs leaking. Outbuildings dilapidated. The drought had killed off most of our fruit trees and pretty much every species of plant that hadn’t been established here five hundred years ago. At certain times of the day, in certain light under certain skies, the property looks like it blew in from the Dust Bowl.

  The main house is too big to keep clean. I barely even knock down the cobwebs. Lizards get in under the doors, but at least they eat some of the spiders. This home still contains much of its original, very old furniture—all vaguely Franciscan and not quite comfortable. There are rough-hewn oak tables, chairs, and trunks; crude wooden chandeliers; dark velvet drapes; heavy cushions. Dusty now, and hushed. You half expect Father Serra to come down the hallway with a tallow candle. Justine and I had happily romped and partied amid all this history, two randy cherubs making hasty plans to modernize our home when the excitement cooled a little, if it ever did. But how could it?

  Sometimes I wander from room to room, each with its own history and climate. Outside I can see the rolling oak savanna and distant groves of oranges and avocados. By night I can see stars and the scattered lights of Fallbrook. But generally I leave the drapes drawn. Though it may have been a gift, this house feels assigned. Everywhere I look I see a wisp of Justine—a flash of red hair, the hem of a favorite dress vanishing around a corner. Never the whole her. And I hear her voice, its rhythm and timbre, hidden under the groan of the plumbing or the drone of the air conditioner or the rumble of the Camp Pendleton artillery in the distance. Never a whole sentence.

  I try hard to remember, and to forget.

  I locate people for a living, but the person I want to locate most is the one I will not find.

  I work when I’m needed, but there’s not always enough work that pays. The six casitas: I rent them out to add to my unpredictable income. I haven’t touched Justine’s life insurance money. Like I haven’t touched the clothes in her closet. And the things on her dresser. Can’t touch, can’t let go.

  —

  Near the center of the property, in the large shaded barbecue area between the pond and the casitas, I’ve posted rules for my tenants:

  GOOD MANNERS AND PERSONAL HYGIENE

  NO VIOLENCE REAL OR IMPLIED

  NO DRUGS

  NO STEALING

  QUIET MIDNIGHT TO NOON

  RENT DUE FIRST OF MONTH

  NO EXCEPTIONS

  Interesting crew. I call them the Irregulars.

  In casita number one, Grandpa Dick Ford. On the opposite end of the pond, in casita number six, Grandma Elizabeth. Liz. They don’t get along often, but they raised three children and spoiled six grandkids to the best of their abilities. Their son—my father—is traveling the world with my mother now, in well-deserved retirement.

  In casita number two is Lindsey Rakes, a former Air Force lieutenant and drone pilot. A Reaper sensor ball operator, to be exact, flying missions in the Middle East from a trailer at Creech AFB outside Las Vegas. CIA stuff, of course, secret missions, twelve-hour days, six days a week, both good and bad kills. Drove her bats. She’s unemployed just now, with a gambling problem and too many local Indian casinos for her health. The night I met her she was too drunk to drive so I offered her a ride to her home and on the way she broke the news that she didn’t really have a home. She’s trying to get shared custody of her young son from her ex-husband. The boy is five and I question the wisdom of her being more involved.

  In casita number four is eighteen-year-old Wesley Gunn, scheduled for an eye surgery that might leave him blind. Tumors in both eyes—retinoblastoma. Six weeks from now his left eye will have to be removed. The doctor will try to spare the right eye as he removes the tumor that, if left untreated, will spread and kill Wesley. There’s a ten percent chance that the surgeon will need to take that right eye, too, but he won’t know until he gets inside. Wesley is a local kid, a high school senior and all-conference quarterback. Then the blurring vision and diagnosis. I offered casita four to him for free because that’s what you do for a young man who, it turns out, has a rotten home life and is facing blindness. He’s an outdoorsy guy, wants to spend his last few sighted weeks where he can watch nature. Plenty of birds, bobcats, coyotes, cottontails, ferrets, squirrels, reptiles in these hills. Right now—spring—is the time to see them. Wesley spends lots of his waking hours back in the arroyos with little more than water, binoculars, and a camera. I used to barely keep up with him when I tagged along. But he’s slowing down.

  Casita five is Burt Short, a fifty-something man I know almost nothing about. He read my ad in the Fallbrook paper and filled out an application listing his occupation as “outside sales” and offered to pay rent in cash. Told me he grew up locally but told Lindsey Rakes he was raised in Alaska. Where he worked most of his life as a fishing guide. But I overheard him tell someone on his phone—sounds carry easily through the barbecue area because of the pond—that his arbitrage days are over. And Burt Short is short, and built like a bull. Top-heavy and powerful, a big head. Smile that shows bottom teeth on one side. Mischief or derangement. His hair is dark and cut close. He’s the only one who pays on time and in full, first of the month.

  Casita three is vacant but listed.

  I’m a landlord because I need the money. Can’t remember a single time when all of my tenants—not counting Wesley Gunn—paid their rent on the first of any month.

  —

  At any rate, this was home and I was happy to be there. I poured a large bourbon on ice, wiped a lemon wedge around the rim of the glass, gave it a squeeze and dropped it in. I like alcohol as much as I like tobacco, which means I have to say no to myself a lot. I’m fair at that. I nuked some good barbecue leftovers that probably Lindsey Rakes had put in the fridge for me.

  I fully reclined in the living room reading chair with Clay Hickman’s file on my chest. Judging by weight, Paige Hulet had done a good job on the file. Maybe used all the time she saved not dancing. She’d assembled not only a detailed treatment history at Arcadia, complete with Hickman’s long formulary and notes from her sessions with him, but also his DoD service record and medical charts subsequent to his discharge from the Air Force. Plus, a good accounting of Clay’s run-ins with the law, via police reports and court records.

  I tore through the bio all the way to where Clay Browne Hickman was born to Rex Gayle Hickman and Patricia Browne Hickman on October 7, 1988.

  When my phone rang deep in some uneasy dream, I read the time as I answered it: 3:55 a.m.

  “Mr. Ford, it’s Sequoia. My truck just drove up so I think he’s here. I better go.”

  5

  I made good time, turning from the state route onto Sequoia’s dirt road in the dark of five in the morning. I cut the headlights and clipped right along, the rocks rapping the underside of the truck like small-arms fire. The first two years after my tour of duty I heard those pops everywhere I went, even in my dreams. Less now.

  Coming around a bend I saw the Lazy Daze sign lit from below by one weak floodlight. Beyond the sign stood the squad of Airstream trailers, faintly luminescent in the trees. A light was on inside Sequoia’s trailer but there was no small silver pickup truck in sight. What looked like Sequoia’s sister’s car waited in the faint porch l
ight downslope, beside another Airstream.

  I turned slowly into Lazy Daze and picked my way past the unlit manager’s residence. I parked and zipped my jacket against the mountain cold. Things felt nervy and wrong. Scar on my forehead was tingling, never a good sign. Clay Hickman had apparently come and gone and . . . done what? I was responsible for Sequoia Blain, and it was on me if Clay hurt her. Or worse. She was a free-spirited girl and he was a physically fit psychotic male with a history of violence. She’d quickly allied herself with him against odds and logic, as only a free-spirited nineteen-year-old would do.

  In the rearview mirror I saw a pale SUV cruising slowly down the dirt road from the direction I’d come, raising a little cloud of dust behind it. Ten seconds later a bulky, dark muscle car—looked like a Chrysler—followed through that diminishing cloud, leaving one of its own.

  I crunched across the pine needles and down a short pathway to Sequoia’s deck. Took the steps quietly and stood close enough to the trailer to feel the cold coming off its body. Heard nothing inside. The door handle turned freely and the door opened: small dining area, light shining softly down. Empty table, bench seats. Down the short hallway to my left, the bedroom door was open. I looked behind me to the parking area and the dirt road beyond it, then stepped inside the Airstream.

  Smell of coffee and dish soap. “Sports fans? Just your friendly neighborhood PI here. Sequoia? Clay?”

  Stone silence, so I walked two short steps down the hallway, felt the whole trailer rocking with my weight. Turned on the bathroom light, saw little, then took another step and squeezed through the bedroom doorway. Found the light, picked up the faint scent of laundry soap and bleach. Closet open: two pairs of green cargo pants and two tan short-sleeved blouses with Wild Animal Park emblems on the sleeves. Parting the window curtain slightly, I looked out to the manager’s cabin, where a light was now on. No movement inside. Dirt road, pines against the gray sunrise.