The Program (8 page)

Tim rested a hand on Bear's shoulder. "It's good to be back."

Bear studied him, his face shifting into a smile.

They rose to go, Tim readjusting the .357 in his waistband, Bear humming the theme to Baretta as they passed through both security doors into the tiled corridor outside. The wall abutting Cell Block hid a foot of concrete and reinforced steel.

The snickering approach of a few deputies soured Tim's mood. A prisoner between them, Thomas and Freed eyed Tim as they stopped to slide their weapons into the gun lockers outside the Cell Block entrance.

"Hey, Rack?" Thomas's voice was edged and nasty. "I seem to have misplaced my Charles Bronson video. Maybe you've seen it. It's --"

"I know," Tim said. "Death Wish. Why don't you two go sit in Isolation Three and see if you can work up some fresh material?"

Their prisoner, a heavyset Latino in wrist and ankle cuffs, sniggered as the court security officer buzzed them through. Thomas mumbled something to Freed as they steered the suspect brusquely through the door.

Tim and Bear continued down the hall in silence. Bear punched the elevator button a little too hard. The car arrived, and they stepped on. Bear's face kept its pissed-off cast for a few floors, then loosened. "I would have gone for The Stone Killer myself."

Seated in Bear's Dodge Ram in the parking lot, they watched Reggie at the motel front desk. As Bear had promised, they'd found him on shift, elbows on the counter, fists shoving his cheeks skyward. He was entranced by the hatchetfish and platies circling listlessly in the fifty-gallon aquarium next to the blotter. Gray bags rimmed both eyes, raccoon-defined against his sallow skin. A flannel shirt, standard red and black checks, hung over his rail-thin frame, his wrists poking from the sleeves. Had Tim not known Reggie's age, he would have put him near forty.

Bear said, "Tell me why you like this guy?"

"A new friend, maybe from Tramine's time in the cult."

"You don't even know it's the same cult as Leah's. Just because Tramine was recruited off Pepperdine..."

"He did freak out when I mentioned the Teacher."

"The shape he's in, he might have freaked out if you'd mentioned the Pillsbury Doughboy."

"No, he actually responded warmly to the Pillsbury Doughboy."

"Oh," Bear said. "Well, that's cheering."

They climbed out together. Bear took up a post outside, and Tim entered, the top of the door smacking the obligatory dangling bells. Reggie tensed up. His eyes, mud brown and piercing, darted constantly -- he took in Tim with abbreviated sweeps and climbs. Tim stayed focused on Reggie's right hand, out of view beneath the counter.

"Help you?"

Tim stepped up to the counter. "Are you Reggie Rondell?"

He worked his gum a few chews, then swallowed hard. "Yeah."

"Friend of Ernie Tramine's?"

"Never heard of him." His forearm tensed, indicating his hand had just grasped something.

Bear had run Reggie, and he'd come up clean, but there was no telling what crime he might have just committed, what visits he was fearfully anticipating.

"Listen. I'm only here to ask some questions about a cult --"

The hand pulled up, gripping a metal flashlight. The instant the silver handle cleared the counter, Tim's vision tunneled, the scene slowed. Tim shuffled back two steps, the .357 up and sighted on Reggie's chest before the flashlight finished its arc.

Reggie swung the shaft into the aquarium. The glass popped and avalanched down, the water holding its rectangular form for an instant before following suit. Reggie shot around the counter. He threw the door open, but instead of daylight there was just Bear's hulking form all but filling the frame. Reggie hollered. Bear spun him effortlessly and proned him out on the carpet, his cheek pressed to soggy gravel, fish flopping next to his face.

Reggie had frozen up. "Don't kill me, man. Please don't fucking kill me. I won't say anything. I won't talk to anyone, I swear."

Tim crouched, helping Bear frisk Reggie. "Be careful of the glass."

Short of a wallet holding the same license that had graced the Cell Block computer monitor minutes earlier and a bulky ring of keys, Reggie's pockets were empty. Bear hoisted him to his feet and leaned him against the counter. "You gonna be cool?"

Reggie's eyes widened a bit as he took in Bear. He nodded.

"We're not here to kill you," Tim said. "We're deputy U.S. marshals, investigating a cult."

"Lemme see your badges." Reggie crossed his arms and squeezed them to his chest. "I'll know if they're fake." He was trying to play cocky, but his tremulous hands gave him away.

Tim and Bear laid out their stars, and Reggie took them, holding them under the dim desk lamp as if checking for watermarks.

"They check out there, Mr. Ashcroft?" Bear asked.

"Okay if I look back here?" Tim asked. Reggie nodded, and Tim walked behind the front desk, making sure there were no hidden weapons.

One of the hatchetfish quivered on the counter, drawing Reggie's attention. He watched it, head cocked like a dog eyeballing a squirrel. A good thirty seconds passed.

Bear's blue dress shirt wrinkled over his crossed arms. " 'Scuse us."

Reggie started, as if he'd forgotten they were there.

"Done with the badges? Or are you waiting for forensic analysis?"

Reggie blinked, concentrating hard. "Right, right." He leaned away from Bear as he handed him his badge. Bear started to say something, but Tim shook his head slightly.

"I...I don't know anything about a cult."

"Sure you do," Bear said. "You were in a cult with your buddy named -- What's his name, Rack?"

Tim opened a cabinet, revealing a tray full of key rings. "Ernie Tramine."

"We'd like to --"

Reggie held up his hand, fingers spread, his face drawn. "Wait a minute. Wait. I can't do this with him here. You. I'm sorry. You're one of my triggers."

Bear's finger went to his chest. "I'm one of your...what?"

"A trigger, you know. A trigger. Like the queen of diamonds in The Manchurian Candidate. Something that triggers the mood they put into you during indoctrination. A paired stimulus. Three blasts of a trumpet. It puts you back, right back in it. One of my triggers is big fucking muscle. Like you. It takes me out. I can't..." Reggie rocked autistically, squeezing his right pinkie in a fist.

Bear's scalp shifted with his expression of disbelief. "You shitting me here?"

Tim said, "It's fine."

With his eyes and hands, Bear made a stage-worthy appeal to heaven before exiting.

"Did your cult have big guys guard the doors?"

Reggie recoiled, lost in memory, a snail shrinking from salt. His voice came like a child's whisper. "All the time. You couldn't leave the room during meetings or Oraes."

"Oraes?" Tim asked. But Reggie was scurrying around the small office, shoes crunching gravel, peering out the windows and closing the blinds. Pausing from his search of the drawers, Tim watched him closely. "Are you more comfortable talking to me with my partner gone?"

"I'm not talking to anyone. If I cause any trouble, they'll find me. What if you were followed?"

Light seeped in between the slats, cutting the shadows into wafer-thin planes. The dying fish flopped and shuddered, the delicate crunching of gravel encroaching on the silence. It sounded like thousands of insects feeding.

"We weren't followed."

"It's too dangerous. Why should I stick my neck out?"

The hatchetfish flipped itself over on the counter, staring up with one bulging eye.

"I'm trying to help a girl get out of a cult. I believe it's the same cult you and Ernie were members of. She's a young --"

"I don't give a shit. I've made my peace. Moved on. Put it behind."

Inside the last drawer sat a brown paper bag, top crumpled over. Tim set it on the counter and opened it. He grabbed the top orange bottle, reading the handwritten label. Xanax. His eyes skipped to the ten or so other bottles in the bag -- peeling labels handwritten in Spanish and English. Klonopin, Valium, Ativan.

"Okay, great. So I've got some Tijuana meds. You gonna use them to leverage me?" Reggie slapped his forehead with his hand. "Fuck. I knew I shouldn't have let you back there."

"No," Tim said. "I'm not."

"No?" He tugged on his pinkie. "Look, I'm not gonna relive all this for you. I just can't do it."

Tim felt the hard edge of instinct rise -- the need to squeeze an informant, to press an unwilling speaker -- but he seemed to have misplaced the strength to resist empathy. His own pain this past year had softened him, blunted his imperatives. Too old to be headstrong but still well short of wise, he merely nodded.

He remembered Dr. Bederman's cautions about the fragility of cult members. He'd have to give Reggie his space. For now.

He handed Reggie his card, complete with penned-in cell-phone number. "This girl's in trouble."

Pausing at the door, he faced Reggie.

"I'm sorry for what you got put through. I bet it was horrible."

He walked out, and the door clicked quietly behind him.

Chapter
seven

When Tim arrived home, Dray wasn't at the kitchen table or on the couch, her usual postwork sprawls, and the house was dead quiet. If it weren't for her Blazer in the driveway, he might have thought she'd decided to clock a P.M. after her morning shift.

He called, and she answered from down the hall. She was sitting on the floor of Ginny's old room, back against the wall. Same flowered wallpaper, same Pocahontas night-light. In the middle of the room sat a heavy-duty garbage bag, stuffed with diminutive clothes from the closet. Hangers scattered the floor.

Dray's face was blank, her forehead unlined -- the impassivity of shock relived. "Sorry I didn't wait for you. I know you've been ready" -- she gestured to the empty closet -- "for a while now. I just wanted to...I guess with my reaction last night at the door, it made me realize...maybe it's time to move through it, like you've been saying."

He bobbed his head.

She blew a wisp of hair off her forehead. "It's so damn exhausting. It shouldn't be, this stuff, but it is." She extended an arm, and he pulled her to her feet. They kissed, Dray wrapping her arms around the back of his neck. She hadn't been as demonstrative or as emotional before Ginny's death, though Tim didn't mind the change a bit.

She moved to the bed and began pulling off the sheets -- Powerpuff Girls flannels that had been dutifully washed weekly for over a year. Ginny's motifs were relics in the fast-paced world of children's trends. They'd grown outdated and unhip, an ignominy Ginny would never have permitted. Tim had learned, step by step, how to live again without a daughter, but he still missed toy stores and zany cartoons and Olivia the naughty pig. There was a time he could distinguish Beauty and the Beast songs from those from The Little Mermaid. He thought of Bederman's diatribe about the Christmastime ploys of toy companies and realized he would do anything to be conned into buying the latest and greatest girl's novelty right about now.

He started to help, emptying the desk drawers into a fresh bag, careful to handle Ginny's former belongings with care. When he realized he was treating a SpongeBob pencil eraser with reverence, he let go and started scooping and dumping. Dray's voice pulled him from his thoughts. "I don't even know if this makes me sad. Or guilty." She held a tiny T-shirt in each hand; they drooped like dead kittens. "We see so much of this shit, this heavy symbolic shit, in movies, on TV, but maybe this isn't the time and place for it." Her voice was flat like her eyes. "Maybe we should try not to think and just get this done."

At the end of the hour, Ginny's possessions -- the sum total of her physical grasp on the world -- were bound up in seven Hefty bags bound for the Salvation Army. Tim hauled them to the porch, then took apart her bed and her desk -- doing his best not to let the crayon marks, the Kool-Aid stains, the glittery Dora stickers reduce him to uselessness. Once the furniture also made its way outside, he came back in, sweaty and hot in the face. Dray was standing in the entry, looking out at the sad assembly of goods on the front walk, a broken-down convoy.

Dray said, "I think I'm going to cry now."

Tim started to say okay but caught her as her knees buckled. He held her, stroked her hair. He pressed his face to her head, rocking her on the floor, her legs kicking and sprawling. He worked to control his own reaction, because the unspoken deal they'd arrived at through trial and error was that they'd only let go like this one at a time.

The crying stopped, then the tight sobs accompanying her inhalations. Her hair, normally razor straight and straw-colored, stayed pasted to her sticky face in brown swirls. Her eyes -- honest and strong and magnificently green, as always. She coughed out a brief, exhausted laugh. "Guess I figured out what to feel, huh? Hell."

"Let me take you out. How about Nobu?"

"Nobu?"

"What the hell, I'm making the federal bucks now."

They'd been only once to the upscale Japanese restaurant, located over the canyon from their Moorpark house. On their post-Ginny wedding anniversary, a grim evening in May, they'd sat stiffly among second-tier movie stars and Malibu divorcees, pretending not to notice the three well-groomed girls at the table to their left or the empty chairs at their own four-top.