The Triggerman Dance Page 8

  "Yes. She's got a better sense of humor than you give her credit for."

  "There you go again, saying what they want to hear, even when they're not around to hear it. You're a smoothie, Menden."

  "Yeah, yeah—you've covered that already, Josh."

  "There was a time, and I'm not sure if it's passed, when I wanted to challenge you. On any and every thing a man is supposed to be. I knew I couldn't beat you at being tall. But at everything else, I believed I'd kick your ass. I still believe I would. I'm a better man than you, by almost any standard of measure. If ever you want to contest that, just name your game and I'll there. I've speculated on the most satisfying way of trouncing you. Really smashing the living shit out of you."

  "And?"

  "It changes."

  "Well, I hope dangling me in front of Wayfarer then dropping me in hasn't entered your mind."

  Weinstein stared at John for a long moment, then shook his head. "That's business. You couldn't find a more conscientious master than me. What I'm talking now is strictly pleasure. And don't forget—I hate Wayfarer more than I hate you."

  "That's comforting, Joshua."

  Weinstein finished half his drink in one gulp, set down the glass and pulled the automatic from his shoulder holster. I looked at it for a long moment, as if searching for some new feature he'd overlooked. It was a 9mm Smith with a blued finish and dark walnut grips. He flipped the safety off, then on again

  "Could be an old-fashioned gunfight," he said.

  "Could," said John.

  Joshua set the gun on the deck, then picked up his drink again. "That scare you—a drunk man with a gun?"

  "It sure does. Aren't you breaking some FBI rule?"

  "You sound like a faggot, whining about rules. Rebecca liked it on the top with me. You, too?"

  "How do you like your chicken?"

  "That's a dumb question. When's the last time someone told you they like their chicken rare?"

  Weinstein picked up the gun again, aimed it at John, flipping the safety off, then on.

  John studied him through the smoke. The idea crossed his mind to kick the barbecue over at Joshua's feet and watch him scramble to keep his wingtips from blistering. John knew that Weinstein wouldn't shoot him on purpose, but he was worried that his "master" was revealing himself to be a genuine hazard.

  Booze and guns were an even worse combination than booze and cars.

  Joshua holstered the pistol, sighed, and drank again. "I'm just blowing off a little steam," he said.

  "Good to know," said John. "Just that light little trigger between three highballs and a bullet in my heart."

  And that was all it took—one mention of a bullet and a heart—to send them both plummeting back down to earth, back down to the tree-shaded deck on which their dinner was cooking, back down to the house which had heard the laughter of the woman they had both loved.

  "I'm a lot more sober than I look. And there's one thing I want to get straight, John. It doesn't have to do with competition. It's just a simple fact that you're going to have to accept. It's a fact that I need to remember. This is the fact—I loved Rebecca more than you did. I loved her more than you ever could."

  John watched Weinstein as he said this, noting the blood rushing into Josh's ears, the bob of his big Adam's apple, the insatiable glow of his eyes behind the lenses. This whole thing, he thought, is a crying shame. Every second of every day since Rebecca died in the cold March rain, just a crying fucking shame.

  "Yes, you did," he said, looking down through the smoke, his eyes burning with more than the smoke.

  "Thank you."

  After dinner they turned off the houselights, sat on the patio chairs and watched the stars come out. The night was clear and the moon rose full and white over the hilltop. It was so bright John could read his watch face without pushing on the light. He looked out into the canyon and thought of the nights he'd slept back there, nights just like this with the moon radiant and the ground warm enough for a lightweight sleeping bag. He remembered the puma he'd seen out here, in the first light of a summer morning, lying on a rock outcropping only a hundred feet away, calmly eyeing him. Puma, he thought. Wayfarer.

  John wondered if Joshua was reading his thoughts.

  "Wayfarer," said Joshua. "You know, we still get to make the code names. Most Fed agencies went computer a long time ago. Wayfarer. I chose it. I'm glad we weren't stuck with barnyard, or crackerjack or evergreen or something. He's fared way beyond the limits, way up river."

  "He's our Kurtz," said Dumars. "And you, John, are our Marlow."

  Joshua looked at her in the darkness, then out to the hills "There's luck in this business, like in anything else," he said "Luck was what brought me to you, John. I spent five month' after Rebecca's death, putting together my file on Wayfarer. A first, it seemed a distant possibility, but then it became not distant at all. I weighed the circumstantial evidence against what I knew of him, and I saw how it could happen. All of this, and still nothing solid, still nothing that could convict. Sure, I could have questioned him anytime. One shot. One time. And if he was lucky which he is, and smart, which he also is—we'd have come away with less than nothing. Less, because he would be alerted— impossible to surprise."

  Joshua had by now graduated from highballs to black coffee. He sipped it, then poured more from the thermos he'd brought up to the deck. "Yes, I looked at you. My curiosity was not connected to Wayfarer at all. It was a way of understanding what had happened to me and Rebecca. I just wanted to see what she had chosen. What I lacked. Your name on the envelope helped quite a bit, so far as ID went. I tracked your grief, your resignation from the Journal, your little sailing trip down in the South Pacific, your purchase of the trailer and your move out to Anza Valley. I observed you at Olie's more than once before our meeting, as you pointed out. So what did I have, except a suspect I couldn't arrest, and a mourning suitor who was disengaging himself from the world? Nothing. Nothing until the luck came in. Then, I had something to work with."

  "What was the luck?"

  "Oh, it was you, John. But that wasn't apparent at first. I wasn't apparent until I was poring over some Wayfarer intelligence late one night, nothing hot, just the usual kinds of thing! we collect about people who might prove dangerous. And there saw the connection. The luck hit. My ears got warm and my lip: quivered and I began to see the design of things. There is a design of things, John—it is up to us to discern it."

  "And you discerned."

  "Oh, did I ever. There it was, right in front of me, finally. A little window. I'm reading about Wayfarer. His habits and hobbies. His patterns. Wayfarer sails the Newport to Ensenada yacht race every year. Wayfarer spends every New Year's Eve at a party in Washington, D.C. Wayfarer makes a trophy hunting expedition every spring with two of his friends from the Boone and Crockett record book. Wayfarer flyfishes the Metolius River in Oregon every summer. Then, this oddment: Wayfarer hunts the quail opener every year down in the desert with his friends and daughter. He used to take his wife and son, of course, but no longer. They fly the company helicopter into the Lake Riverside airstrip. He brings his dogs. Dog, dogs, dogs—made me think of you and yours—dogs everywhere I looked. He's got a little home there in Lake Riverside Estates—thirty-five hundred square feet, right on the water. They spend the night, then set out in his Land Rover just after sunup. They hunt the morning, head into town for lunch and a beer at two, then go back out for the afternoon shoot. Every year for ten straight seasons. No variation. Like a clock. On goes my little light. What town do they go to? Anza Valley. John Menden's ground. Oh my, I think—oh my! Is John my luck? Is John my man? My miracle?"

  "I've been called a lot of things, but never a miracle," said John.

  Dumars laughed along with him, but Joshua did not.

  "So I start thinking of you two together, in a way I never had before. You and Wayfarer on the same ground at the same time. Synergy. Lots of synergy. I know by then that you're, well ... at loose ends. I
wonder if you might need some vengeance for Rebecca. I wonder if he might like you, might have a use for you if you earned it. You two have very similar backgrounds, you know. You two are frighteningly alike, in some ways. So I see that if I could just get you two together—you and Wayfarer—it might be the start of a beautiful friendship. And here he is, scheduled to invade your desert on October fifteenth. That is when I came to you, John. To see if you were cut from the material I needed. You are. So here we sit, approved from on high, waiting to move. October fifteenth is less than two weeks away."

  Joshua drank again from his coffee cup, then set it on the ground beside him. He stretched his legs and looked up into the night sky.

  "You are going to be Wayfarer's hero," he said. "But you are going to be my Trojan Horse. My eyes, my ears. I'll get you close enough to Holt for you to smell him." John took another long drink of the Herradura. It was beginning to make him feel that all things were possible, which he knew by experience was a dangerous way to feel. He had begun to feel that way with Rebecca, just before she died. He had fell that way before his mother and father lifted off in their little Piper for the last time.

  He felt the deep rumble of satisfaction moving inside himself. He sensed the action that he had so longed for, becoming clear. Looking ahead of him, he saw the challenge of justice for Rebecca, the one thing he could offer her.

  Looking backward, though, he had the sense that something terrible was gaining on him.

  "Wayfarer will be ours," said Joshua.

  "And I'll be his," said John.

  "I'd like the ring back now."

  John brought it from his pocket, the modest diamond that Rebecca had worn in honor of her pledge to Joshua.

  CHAPTER 10

  The next day, Sharon Dumars met Susan Baum for lunch at Romeo's Cucina in Laguna Beach. Baum had been calling the Bureau office for almost four months now, trying to corner someone into a meeting. Sharon had politely dodged her at first, not wanting to destroy a possibly friendly media contact. Then suddenly, Norton's green light pending, Josh realized how much they needed her. He gave her back to Sharon.

  Baum was much harder to reel in than Dumars expected. The columnist agreed to meet with her, although Dumars was not technically the agent-in-charge. Baum refused to settle on a place for the meeting until half-an-hour before it was to take place. She ran Dumars through three changes of venue before settling on Romeo's. On the phone, Baum's voice was terse and hushed, as if she was being listened to.

  The restaurant was large and very bright, with windows that focused the October sunlight onto oil paintings that Dumars found pleasant because of all the yellows. The interior woodwork was curvaceous and smooth—not one hard angle—and Dumars found this pleasant too, though she wondered how they made the sweeping, dramatic cuts. The lamps were fashioned from paper stitched together with thick string, which Dumars didn't like because they made her think of skin. So much pretty in the world, she thought, and so much ugly. Amazing that people did not know the difference. She slid her briefcase under the table.

  The waiter was tall, dark and ponytailed, and eyed her with a tip-upping mix of respect and desire. She wanted to find him annoying but she could not. "May I offer you the Chardonnay today?"

  "Iced tea, thank you."

  The columnist entered. She marched across the floor toward the table with her signature limp, which did nothing to diminish the sense of pure determination she exuded. She was dressed in long, flowing, dark blue and green geometrically patterned dress that appeared to be made from complex layers of silk. It was gathered at the waist by a gold lame sash, and as Baum cut across the floor her oversize cuffs billowed. She wore round, costume earrings bedecked by what had to be faux jewels, and which looked to Sharon like something from the Arabian Nights. Her shoes were bright white athletic high-tops with a fancy black zigzag across the ankle; her hair a salon-tortured halo of dry gold. Susan Baum, Sharon decided, was her own entourage.

  "Thanks for coming," she said breathlessly, dropping a large and apparently heavy leather bag onto the chair beside Sharon and sitting across from her. She cast a look back toward the doorway. "God, I had to park eighty blocks away. Iced tea, please."

  "Special Agent Sharon Dumars—I'm happy to finally meet you, Ms. Baum."

  "Call me Susan, Special Agent. But please, could we possibly change places?" Her voice was brittle and she looked again at the door. "I've got a full-blown phobia of doors now. I need to be able to see them."

  "Of course."

  They traded seats. A palpable air of reassurance radiated from Baum now, but her voice was still reedy and tight. "Food here any good?"

  "I've never eaten here. It was your pick."

  "I pick for safety."

  "You'll be safe here, Ms. Baum."

  Baum removed her immense white-framed sunglasses and looked into the menu. "Trendy, I hear. Strange how all these new Italian places refuse to make spaghetti and meatballs. What you bet it isn't on the menu?"

  Sharon, who had perused the menu, confirmed.

  "I lived on canned spaghetti and meatballs when I was a cub reporter. I wasn't much of a home economist. Still am not. First time I heated up Chef Boyardee in college I spooned some noodles, sauce and all, onto the kitchen wall because I'd heard that's how you tell if it's ready. My mother never let me forget that one."

  Sharon laughed, looked into Baum's green eyes, then away again. "Maybe they'll make some up for you."

  "I suppose. This is on me, by the way. On the Journal, actually."

  "It's a little easier for me if we just pay separately. You know how gifts to the government are looked at these days."

  "Well, then you tell that ponytailed hunk of a boy you want separate checks. He thinks you're pretty, you know."

  Dumars wondered how such a distracted, frightened whirlwind of a woman could notice so much without seeming to notice anything. "It's his stock expression."

  Baum studied the man, who was leaning over a nearby table. "I'm really so glad I'm not young again. I've been married for thirty years, and I can't say it's been all beer and skittles, but to be put out in the world again, looking for a date, or a mate? Gosh. You're single, I take it."

  "Yes."

  "What's it like?"

  "Like being single."

  "Never been married?"

  "No. You're not profiling Special Agent Single Sharon for the Journal, are you?"

  "No, not at all, though I'd love to someday. I apologize. I'm just so overwhelmingly nosey. And I know so many young, eligible, very attractive men. Jewish mother, Jewish mother—I know."

  Sharon couldn't help but laugh again, half from Baum's self-deprecation, half from the relief at being let off the hook. "Then what are you doing, Ms. Baum?"

  "Susan."

  Baum smiled. Sharon noted the nice whiteness of her teeth and the overall pleasantness of her face.

  "I've come for an explanation."

  Involuntarily, Sharon blinked. "Of what?"

  "Of what you've found out, of course."

  "You cut right to the chase, don't you?"

  "I detest bullshit. Always have."

  "Then lose the Special Agent stuff. Sharon's fine."

  "Sharon. I've always loved that name." Dumars looked directly into Baum's face, riled at being flattered, baited and probed. One of the things that had drawn her to the Bureau was that you could comfortingly vanish into the correct side of the law. She had worked too hard for privacy and dignity to put up with this kind of crude intrusion. She was not paid to be on display. She gratefully noted the din of the lunch hour in this restaurant, thankful that no one around could possibly follow their conversation.

  "Look, Sharon, I'm willing to get off on any foot you want here. I'm the supplicant. I'm the one in the dark. I'm the one who almost got my guts shot out."

  "Maybe you should just go ahead and ask your question: then."

  Let her shoot her wad, Joshua had said.

  "Good idea. Would you go
with the ravioli or penne?"

  "The ravioli."

  They ordered, gave the waiter their menus and simultaneously reached for their glasses of tea.

  Baum looked at her unabashedly. "It's been six months. No arrest. No suspect. Precious little communication with me for the last five. What gives?"

  "What gives?"

  "Bluntly, what have you found out?"

  "I can tell you that the investigation is ongoing. That we're interviewing, reviewing and collecting information. You should know that it's never been Bureau policy to go public with thing until we really think it will yield results."

  "Well, with all respect, your flak could have told me the same thing. In fact, he has—several times."