The Last Good Guy Page 5

  I lowered the glasses and thought about my first professional boxing match, Trump 29 Casino in Coachella, 2005. It was less than a year after Fallujah. Back then I was Roland “Rolling Thunder” Ford, a United States Marine Corps vet, weighing in at 210 out of San Diego, California. My opponent was Darien “Demolition” Dixon, a veteran not of war but of the ring.

  I knew before the first round was over that I was outmatched. But when he knocked me down in the ninth, I refused to surrender. I got myself off the canvas and nodded to the ref and commanded my legs to move, and Darien promptly knocked me unconscious. I still remember seeing my mouthpiece sailing out through the lights. Next thing I knew I was on my stool, dazed in a not unpleasant way, seeing myself from the outside at the same time I was looking out at the crowd. I was learning something I’d never learned as a college student or a Marine: defeat. In that moment I became mortal. I’ve fought again since then, but never in the ring.

  So my question is: Is it better to fight a fight you can’t win or to give up and take the loss so you can fight again?

  I found a stand of tangled greasewoods to watch over my truck. Spooked an owl that fell into flight when I opened the door. Worked the paddle holster into place inside my waistband, pushed the gun in snug, and snapped the strap. I loaded a small backpack with the binoculars, a compact thirty-five-millimeter camera with a great zoom, and a bottle of water. Pulled on some gloves. Chugged an energy drink from the cooler, locked up, and deployed.

  7

  ////////////////////////

  THE desert floor was flat, the sand packed hard for stretches, then softly rippled in the dunes. Lumps of creosote and brittle bush and scattered stands of mallow. A hundred yards away from the gate I climbed the fence, gloves a blessing but boots treacherous on the chain. Felt exposed as a moth on a wall. Easier going down.

  A straight trot toward the ridgeline. Light good enough to see the rocks and dips and cacti. A breeze kicked up. Between the intermittent gusts I heard the far-off sound of a beehive, which reminded me that bees are commercially raised in the Imperial Valley but reminded me of other things, too.

  Took me just fifteen minutes to make the ridgeline. Closer, but steeper than I’d guessed. The soft glow still came from beyond it. When I reached the top I took a knee, breathing deep and steady. Looked out at the date palms—acres of them—tall and droop-topped and elegant in the moonlight. Spacious rows for easy harvest. Medjools. I knew them from Iraq.

  In the middle of the palms was an agricultural compound that looked more Mexican or Middle Eastern than Southern Californian. Low-slung, boxy buildings in a loose circle around a packed-dirt campus. Built decades ago for the heat. The main house was a white two-story stack of rectangles, large and sprawling and flat-roofed. It looked added-onto over time. There was a packing house and a large corrugated metal hangar from which floodlights blanched the grounds in bright, buggy light. And a stately red barn with white trim, American-style. Three long bunkhouses stood on one side of the barn, facing one another in a horseshoe. On the other side stretched a row of eight squat cottages—white plaster, flat roofs, and hard edges. Various metal sheds for equipment and tools. A helipad.

  Through the night-vision glasses I saw that not one but three silver SNR Security vehicles were parked in front of the main house, along with two late-model pickup trucks and two GM sedans. Parked within the bunkhouse commons were more passenger cars and vans and trucks. Eight in all. And three more outside the imposing metal hangar, the vehicles dusty in the downlights.

  I heard the bees again, buzzing in the west and above me. Turned and lifted my binoculars skyward but saw nothing. Drones are hard to see at night. The breeze kicked up and covered the sound.

  Tall ladders leaned against the walls almost everywhere I looked. The grounds were littered with wicker baskets, wound ropes, wooden boxes and bins. I glassed the palms and saw that some of the fruit was still wrapped in bags against rain, sun, birds, and bugs until harvest. Many of the dates had already been picked.

  Suddenly, the roll-up door of the big metal hangar noisily clattered up and three all-terrain vehicles squeezed under it into the bright barnyard. Then three more. The dust swirled and the roll-up clanged to a stop and the ATVs circled and whined. The drivers wore silver helmets. They sped between the rows of the date palms, spread six abreast, as if practiced. When they hit the desert their headlights bounced more wildly and their engines groaned louder as they headed straight at me.

  No way to outrun them, but I tried anyway. I was less than halfway back to my truck when the ATVs skidded into position around me. Headlights bore into my eyes, exhaust puffing into the night. Four in front of me and two behind.

  The closest driver raised his hand and six engines went silent. Silver helmet and goggles. An M4 slung over his shoulder. His buddies exactly the same, except they had their guns pointed at me.

  He lifted his visor. “Drop the pack.”

  I did.

  “Who are you?”

  “Roland.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Bird-watching.”

  “How goes it?”

  “The sun went down and I got lost.”

  “So you climbed our fence.”

  “Panic does funny things.”

  “Are you armed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Toss it. Carefully.”

  I brought the gun from my backside, set it down on the pack.

  “Are you the law?”

  “I pay my tickets.”

  “If you can be honest with me, I might be able to help you. What kind of birds are you looking for out here?”

  “Just one. Daley Rideout. I’ll pay good money if there’s been a sighting.”

  An indecipherable moment. Silence and a gust of breeze. The sound of the drone close overhead. My interviewer slowly unslung the rifle off his shoulder and pointed it at me. Remained seated. Raised a hand, head-high. The others dismounted their ATVs and drove their weapons into scabbards affixed to the roll bars. All of them looking at me. Young faces. Confident and knowing. Eagerness in their eyes behind the goggles.

  “Roland,” he said. “Get ready to suffer.”

  The five swarmed. I caught the first one with a left uppercut to the stomach, and down he went. Drilled another with a right cross to his solar plexus, and he went down, too. Three to go.

  I swiveled left, fists up and chin tucked, but two men climbed my blind side and clamped my arms as the one in front pummeled away. The leader flew in on the headlight beams, jamming me high on the forehead with his rifle butt. It was the weight from behind that brought me down. Into boots and grunts and more boots and the metal stench of blood. I threw them off and struggled up as a smaller man swirled in, punching and kicking, a martial blur against which I launched a straight left jab that caught the bottom of his helmet instead of the throat I was hoping for. Felt my hand go wrong. You cannot win a fight against six determined men wearing helmets. Blood in my eyes and the crack of blows I couldn’t see coming. Rising whoops and snarls. Wondering if they’d stomp me out. Someone tackled me at the knees and I was down, really taking it now, trying to lift my face from the ground, sucking the sand in with my breath as the kicks landed. Saw the combat boots right in front of me. They did a little hop, then one of them came at me like a freight train from a tunnel. Same boots as ours in Fallujah. Funny the things you notice before the world gives you up.

  Stars above, jumping in my eyes. Slow bump of my shoulders on sand. Arms and back and butt dragging, boots off the ground and legs taut. Grumble of engines pulling me.

  Can’t be real. Close your eyes and it will go away.

  Real. Very real. Bright lights. Motor hum and the slide of metal. The thick railings. Wall or gate. Yes. I believe I saw a gate earlier. Feel my back on harder ground, then the painful bounce of my head over what I guess is the gate track. Fe
et plop to the ground, legs contract. Above me sway the branches of a greasewood plant. I see the flank of a truck. My truck. My Ford. Roland Ford.

  He kneels over me. A buddy or a ref or a corpsman or a priest. Helmet and goggles still on. Eyes blue and calm, floodlights streaming from behind him.

  “Answer a few questions and you’ll be free to hop on down the road. How does that sound?”

  Move my head.

  “What business do you have with Daley Rideout?”

  A croak: “To find.”

  “Your basic, hardworking PI.” He holds my wallet up for me to see, drops it on my chest. He has a snarling lion tattooed on his palm. “Who hired you to find the girl?”

  I shake my head no. Crunch of ground. “No.”

  “Come on, PI. You’ve already half died in the line of duty. The crazy sister? Just nod that hard head of yours if I’m right.”

  I nod. Half dead is still half alive. And willing to stay that way.

  He stares down at me. Twenty-something. Thirty. Pale, thick pink lips, the top one upturned by the goggles. Good teeth. White shirt with blood. Mine.

  “Your partner killed the crazed Negro gentleman in Imperial Beach,” he says.

  I vaguely remember that. Back when I was someone else.

  “I followed the story,” he says. “And all the others like it. Your partner did the right thing and you threw him under the bus. One of your own. Making you just one more shit-lib.”

  Slaps me across the face, hard. Feels like a mallet. The wallet slides off my chest.

  “But back to Penelope. She’s reported Daley missing, I assume? Filed all the reports?”

  Another sandy, crunching nod. I want to wipe the taut dried blood off my face, but it’s too far to reach. Can feel the burn of an eyebrow gash. A split lip. An open forehead where the gun butt hit. Sand in all of it. Going to be a tough cleanup. Don’t want to be there for that one.

  “When I talk to my superiors, can I say that we’ll never see you here again, Mr. Ford?”

  “Back early tomorrow.” A whisper. I try to laugh. Brings a wad of grainy debris into my throat. The cough is agony. A rib.

  “Shame,” he says. “We could use a man like you. And we believe we can change the world one man at a time. One woman, too.”

  Another whisper. “By date farming?”

  “Hey, those Medjools blue-ribboned at the San Diego County Fair this year. Isn’t easy. See, Ford, your takeaway here is, don’t come back.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you don’t tell the Imperial sheriffs. We have a good relationship and we’ll deny even seeing you.”

  I grunt.

  “I thought you’d see the light. This thing still has a charge and two G’s—even way out here. I’d call a friend if I were you. Trying to drive yourself to the ER might be a little counterproductive right now.”

  He drops the phone to my chest. Slides off on the wallet side.

  Then the howl of ATVs. Close my eyes, feel the sharp rain of sand on my face.

  I take his advice and call a friend.

  Will be a bit of a wait. But water in the backpack, which they leave beside me.

  Water of life.

  Burt on the way.

  8

  ////////////////////////

  MORNING. Home. Neither had ever looked better.

  After two hours of poor sleep, the Irregulars got me onto one of the padded chaise longues on the patio, in the shade of a large palapa, with a view of the pond and the rolling hills beyond. My place for convalescence. Liz put a formidable bloody Mary on the table beside me. Dick ordered me to drink it. This in lieu of the pain pills from the ER, which in my jarhead stubbornness I had refused to take.

  But I hadn’t been able to refuse the El Centro Regional Medical Center diagnosis and treatments: a cracked lower rib, three stitches on the right eyebrow, four above the left ear, two more inside my lower lip, plus cuts, contusions, and abrasions galore. In the mirror I saw a swollen, half-blinded primate. Notes of plum and cherry. My insides ached, but no internal bleeding. The rib felt like a broken-off knife. Worse were the hamstrings and knee joints, well stretched by the ATV dragging, and my desert-flayed back. Ankle burns where the ropes had been tied. But worst of all was the stark humiliation of being reduced to this. Not just defeated but slaughtered in all but the dictionary sense of the word. It’s sobering to realize how poorly defended you really are. What a joke your well-being really is. How little your life means to some people.

  What entertained the doctors most was not my injuries but my non-concussion, which they couldn’t square with the pronounced swelling of my head just above the hairline, courtesy of the fearless leader’s rifle butt. Now topped by a bristling five-stitch railroad. My explanation of an unusually hard head, coupled with a boxer’s ability to take a punch, meant little to the doctors. I didn’t mention the occasional moments of wonder I experience since being knocked out by Darien Dixon. During these moments I feel exactly as I did sitting in my corner on the stool: dazed but somehow content, too. Post-KO wonder. The El Centro ER doctors asked me to check into their hospital for observation and I declined, and was eventually driven home by the capable Burt Short.

  Now my tenants were fussing over me on the patio. I call my tenants the Irregulars because they are not ordinary people. Then again, is anyone?

  I rent out the six casitas that face the pond because I enjoy occasional company, and because good affordable housing shouldn’t go to waste. I inherited this hacienda from my wife, Justine Timmerman, who died four years and five months ago. She was thirty-one. The estate was a wedding gift from her family. It has a name, Rancho de los Robles—Ranch of the Oaks. The main house is two stories of adobe brick and rough-hewn timber, and well over a hundred years old. Needs some work. The surrounding twenty-five acres are oak grassland.

  The Irregulars are a changing cast. Three of the originals are still here. Some of them are forthcoming about themselves, while others reveal little. I post the house rules, laminated in acrylic, on one of the palapa uprights for all to see:

  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

  Liz, my grandmother, lives in casita six. Grandpa Dick lives in casita number one, as far from his wife as possible. Yet close. Dick is mid-eighties, Liz younger. They spend most of their waking hours together. Tennis. Travel. They bicker incessantly and sometimes fight, fueled by alcohol and decades of marriage. I used to think they were textbook examples of how to erode a relationship, but now I’m not so sure.

  Burt Short lives in casita five. He actually is short, with an open face and a swatch of auburn hair that looks like a toupee but isn’t. Merry eyes. He’s built like a bull, big-shouldered, small-footed. Comments about his size activate him. A passionate golfer. He came up my drive in a huge red top-down Eldorado three-plus years ago, my first tenant, with a likable cool and a preference to pay in cash, which he always has. His past comes out in occasional bits and pieces—various employment, travel, fluency in languages, and arcane violence—though most of it seems subject to change. There are few facts about his past that I can bank on. But Burt helped me out of a very bad predicament not long ago, which left one man dead and another terrified—I hope—into silence. Burt and I became something to each other that night, though I’m not sure what. More committed than friends. Closer than partners. We refer to the event sometimes but have never discussed it in depth. I’m half of a secret organization that has no name or charter, and only one rule: loyalty. Sometimes he calls me Champ and sometimes I call him Shark.

  Now, lying on the chaise longue with a view of the pond and the hills, I turned my aching head to
the sound of Burt pushing a wheelbarrow full of ice cubes across the barnyard toward us. I’d been listening to him and Frank—the youngest Irregular—over the last ten minutes, breaking open the store-bought bags of ice piled high in the trunk of Burt’s magnificent red Eldo, and dumping the clanging cubes into the wheelbarrow. The ice has formed a glittering mountain. Burt powers it across the barnyard. Now and then a few jewels slide off and land in the green late-summer grass.

  Burt has a trauma remedy that he claims to have had great success with while helping to manage a stable of young boxers out of a gym in Oxnard. One of those men is now a WBC super-lightweight contender. Burt, Frank, and I watched him on ESPN last week. Driving me back from the El Centro hospital just a few hours ago, Burt said the ice bath wasn’t his idea at all but an old-school English treatment for a boxer’s broken bones, cuts, bruises, and—most important—spirit. He’d seen it work near miracles.

  I was not looking forward to it. Rotated my swollen face in the other direction to view the antique claw-foot bathtub that Burt and Frank transported out here in the front loader of the Bobcat. It was already half full of ice, slowly melting in the September heat. One cold bath that was going to be.

  Back to the Irregulars: the aforementioned Frank is one Francisco Cuellar, an eighteen-year-old Salvadoran boy I discovered early this spring, living down in a tree-shaded arroyo near the western edge of the property. A friend and I had been bird-watching and decided to follow some quail tracks from a wash down into a streambed. When we reached the bottom, fifty determined quail launched into the sky between the oaks and another fifty stormed into a thicket of wild buckwheat and prickly pear. Which left my companion, Wynn, and me and a skinny boy with a homemade quail noose in one hand facing each other wordlessly while the birds tore away.

  “¿Quién eres?” I asked, as the feathers softly zigzagged down.

  Frank—Francisco let Dick and Liz anglicize his name—has gained twenty pounds since coming out of the arroyo to live in casita two. He works off his rent one day a week, and I pay him a fair wage for another two days a week. With twenty-five acres, an aging ranch house, six casitas, outbuildings, and a pond, there is always work to be done.