Obedience (23 page)

“You told Mr. Brandstetter,” Pham said. He and his helper were hustling Dave along toward the door. The boys hiked Cotton out into the dark. Dave was next. He was in shirtsleeves, and the night air was chilly, but he didn’t think it was any use to ask for his jacket. Pham slammed the heavy door behind them and pushed Dave ahead of him. “It’s a shame after you have been of such help to me to have to kill you.” Dave wasn’t moving. Pham grabbed his arm and dragged him. He grunted the words out. “You would add luster to my enterprises. But I couldn’t trust you.”

Now they were passing the shingled end of the dark front building. They were in the narrow front area where the Jaguar stood, overhung by ragged tree branches. Then they were up on the crackled, potholed tarmac of shadowy Horseshoe Canyon Trail. And helmeted L.A. police with rifles stepped at them from every side. One of the doll-boys yelped and fired his Uzi wildly. For about half a second. Then he was on the pavement and lying still. The other doll-boys dropped their guns, and fell to their knees. Don Pham let go of Dave and raised his hands high.

“Don’t shoot,” he bleated. “I surrender.”

Daylight was gray at the windows. Dave got up and switched off the lights in the cookshack. He opened the door to change the tobacco-smoky air. In some treetop, a mockingbird sang. Dave brought the coffeepot from the big stove and filled the mugs again. At the deal table, Ken Barker yawned, a wide and noisy yawn. He stretched. “Other men get cautious with age. You get more and more reckless. What if Tracy Davis had said the hell with you?”

Dave shrugged, tilted more brandy into his coffee mug, lit another cigarette. He was woozy from lack of sleep and the brandy made him woozier. “Then she wouldn’t have rung up your department, and the cavalry wouldn’t have ridden to my rescue, and I could stop wondering what I’m going to do with myself for the rest of my life.”

Both men were beard-stubbly and bleary-eyed. Barker had plainly got a kick out of leading the swat team up here in the dark dead of night. He’d long grown weary of sitting at a desk while younger men saw all the action. When these same younger men had bundled Don Pham and his imps of hell off to Parker Center downtown to be booked, photographed, printed, and at least temporarily locked up, when Dave’s and Cotton’s depositions had been taken, and Cotton had hitched a ride in a patrol car to the loving arms of Lindy Willard on the
Starlady
at the Old Fleet marina, when Horseshoe Canyon Trail was its quiet self again, asleep and at peace—Barker had been keyed up and wanted to talk. And the two old men had sat here drinking coffee and yarning for hours. Maybe they hadn’t covered every case they’d locked horns on in the long past they’d often grudgingly shared, but they’d covered a good many.

“It’ll take some getting used to, retirement will,” Barker said. “Hell, they’ve even got counseling services for it now, therapy groups, support groups, like for drunks and people who can’t stop eating.”

“God forbid,” Dave said.

“If you keep letting the Tracy Davises of this world talk you into just one more job, you’ll never give it a chance.” He slurped some of the hot coffee, and pushed back his chair. “I’ve got to go back to work.”

“Lucky bastard,” Dave said.

“If I don’t keep an eye on everything, they could make a mess out of it.” Barker heaved his bulk up off the stiff chair with a grunt. “It’s a big case, it’s all over the fucking place. San Pedro County, Orange County, L.A. County. France, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Burma, who knows. A cast of thousands. The language barrier.” He buttoned his shirt collar at his thick throat and pushed up the knot of his tie. “And these organized crime types like Don Pham are slippery.” He took his suit jacket off the back of the chair and put it on. His massive shoulders strained the cloth. “And their lawyers know every technicality in the books. Flores says nobody’s ever been able to convict Don Pham of so much as spitting on the sidewalk.”

“Warren Priest will turn state’s evidence. With that, I doubt Cotton and I will even be needed. But, listen, about Flores”—Dave got dizzily to his feet—“he’ll try to grab all the credit. Keep it, if you can, will you?” He walked with Barker to the door. “He’s not a crooked cop, but he’s incompetent, and he’s already too far up the promotion ladder for the safety of the rest of us. All right?” Dave worked the latch, and pushed the aluminum screen door for Barker to go out. “And thanks for saving my life.”

Barker stood on the uneven, leaf-strewn bricks, looking up at the big, old spreading oak, the sky growing light beyond it, and breathing in the fresh morning air. He didn’t turn to Dave to say it, but he said, “I wish I didn’t think you were deliberately trying to throw it away.”

“Am I?” Dave frowned to himself. “Jesus, maybe I am.

“Think about it.” Barker started to lumber off. He stopped. “Friends coming.” Dave stepped out of the cook shack door to see. Cecil came on, tall, gangly, looking solemn and reproachful. Amanda walked beside him, not as tall as his shoulder, neatly made, pretty and clever, Dave’s father’s widow, young enough to be Dave’s daughter. She looked worried. They’d heard reports of last night’s doings here on the radio news, didn’t they? No television news this early. Seeing them, Dave thought he didn’t want to throw his life away. Barker nodded to them, and trudged on toward the trail where his driver waited in a city car, probably asleep. “Goodbye,” Barker called.

“Goodbye,” Dave said.

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F
OG MADE SHAPESHIFTERS OF
the trees. It lay milky in the hollows and crept in tattered strands along the ridges. Brush crackled. Crouching figures in helmets and belted coveralls flitted through the fog, guns gave muffled pops, the figures dropped or dodged behind tree trunks. Voices clamored, far off. Someone yelped, “I’m hit.”

“I didn’t see any fog on the way here,” Dave said.

“It ain’t real,” Roy Saddler said. “I bought the machinery off a movie studio that closed down.” He hitched up his army fatigue pants. His heavy belly pushed them down again. He said proudly, “Only the Combat Zone gives you ground fog for your action pursuit games.”

“Paintball,” Enid Saddler said. She had a flat, prairie face, crinkled around the eyes, a flat, prairie voice. She wore a plaid cotton shirt and blue jeans. Her hips were skinny. She crossed her arms over flat breasts. “Paintball games,” she told Dave. “That’s what we’ll be calling them from here on.”

“Maybe you,” Roy grunted. “Not me. Fancy-ass word. Shaves all the hair off it. Men don’t play ‘paintball.’” He sneered. “Men play action pursuit. Search and destroy. That’s what men play.” He coughed, hard, racked by the cough, bloated face turning red. He dropped his cigarette, stepped on it. “‘Paintball games.’” He wheezed. “Shit.”

“It’s not gonna get popular if folks think nobody comes but gun-crazy survivalists and soldiers of fortune and them,” Enid said. “You heard that advertising man from the magazine—there’s a real future for us if we can get people past the idea this is for roughnecks. It’s healthy, wholesome outdoor recreation. Upscale, Roy—we got to go upscale.”

“Sissified.” Roy looked back toward the tall gateway framed of castoff telephone poles. Near this, among parked RVs, pickup trucks, and motorcycles, gangly, black-skinned Cecil Harris, beside a gleaming new Channel Three News van, held a microphone toward a bearded man with a beer can in his hand. Curly Ravitch, a balding youth in a droopy red sweat suit, trained a shoulder-mounted TV camera on the bearded man. Onlookers stood around, hip deep in fog. Roy said, “That killing done us more good than a million dollars worth of advertising in that asshole’s magazine. After tonight’s TV news and the morning papers, the Combat Zone will be the most famous outdoor recreation place in Southern California.”

“If it don’t close us down,” Enid said.

“Don’t talk crazy. Is it our fault a stray shot from some cockeyed deer hunter way up yonder in the hills hits one of our customers? Accident, like the cops said. Can’t put us out of business. State’s fault, not ours.”

Enid opened her mouth to argue, but a young man came tramping out of the woods, looking dejected. “Got a cup of coffee for a dead man, Enid?” Pink fluorescent paint had splashed his military camouflage suit. For a moment, Dave mistook the gun that hung from his hand for an Uzi. It wasn’t an Uzi. It was a toy. He pulled off a helmet that had a curved transparent face mask attached to it. Black makeup smeared his face.

Enid Saddler glanced at a watch on her bony wrist. “It’s Licorice Luke, ain’t it?” she said, and moved away toward a shacky building that was half catering counter, half supply store, beside which other young men and women in camouflage sat on fallen logs, drank out of cans or paper cups, ate, talked, laughed. “You didn’t last long today. Sick or something?” She took his arm and they strolled together across lumpy, leaf-strewn ground toward the shack. Those already there looked up and jeered good-naturedly.

“Boy-howdy.” Saddler chuckled and rubbed his hands together. “Build us barracks here, showers, mess hall, a real kitchen, serve real food. Be no stopping us after this.”

Dave said, “The police report says nobody knew him.”

“He was pretty new. He come regular, but always alone,” Roy said. He gestured at the grubby group around the coffee shack. “You take most of these—they come three, four, five together. Teams. Know each other, know how to play the game together, tactics, strategy, which one is best at this, that, the other, quickest, smartest. But this here Vaughn, he never come with nobody. Just showed up, paid, bought paintballs if he had to, hung around till enough singletons come, or a team that needed another player. Wasn’t long till they seen he was good, and he didn’t have to wait.” Roy pinched a short cigarette from a shirt pocket, lit it with a wooden match that he scratched on the seat of his pants, coughed. “Thing about him was—it wasn’t a game to him.” He cocked his head toward the laughing crowd. “Most of ’em that come don’t take it all that serious.” He looked into Dave’s eyes with his bloodshot ones. “But this little Vaughn kid—he treated it like it was real combat, a matter of life and death.”

Dave said, “That’s how it turned out, didn’t it?”

Roy shook his head, snorted. “Freak accident.”

Dave pointed. Shaggy mountains loomed beyond the woods. “That’s National Forest land, up there?”

“Full of fucking deer hunters,” Roy said.

“Maybe you should close down for the season,” Dave said.

Roy glared. “Don’t go giving nobody else that idea.”

Dave watched the foggy woods again, where the shadowy make-believe jungle fighters crouched and scurried, the funny guns popped, voices called near and far. “It’s all lighthearted?” he said. “All in the spirit of fun?”

“Overgrown kids playing war,” Roy said. He looked Dave up and down. “Cowboys and Indians in your time, right?”

“Cops and robbers,” Dave said. “All my life.”

Dave didn’t really give a damn about this case—if it was a case. He was going through the motions because Cecil had asked him to. Cecil was worried about him. Dave was taking Max Romano’s death too hard. Hell, Max was eighty when he died. The old restaurateur had had a long, cheerful run for his money, had certainly eaten and drunk his fill. Maybe it was surprising he’d lived so long. In the forty years Dave had known him, he’d always carried a lot of weight around. He’d only been thin once, a couple of years ago, when he’d tried to follow a diet on doctor’s orders. He couldn’t keep it up. It made him too miserable. Better to die fat and happy. Dave guessed Max had, if anybody ever did. At least it had been sudden. And in the surroundings Max loved best—his restaurant, laughing behind the bar.

But Dave hated his being dead, and hated what was about to happen to the restaurant. He couldn’t tally how many meals he’d eaten at Max’s down the years, how many friends he’d shared them with—some of those friends no longer living. Max had always kept a table for Dave in a far, quiet corner. Dave was having a lot of trouble picturing life without Max’s. He’d be lost. The bright-eyed young nephew from New York had told him on a parched-grass cemetery hillside after the funeral that the restaurant’s dark paneling, padded leather, stained glass were to be ripped out, in favor of white paint, beige carpeting, chrome-and-cane chairs, high walls of curved, clear glass. The rich foods and sauces were going too, to be replaced by the half-raw vegetables and pale, tasteless meats of nouvelle cuisine. The prospect made Dave shudder.

And this last week, in the hours when Cecil was away at the television station, Dave had slouched emptily around the house in the canyon, trying to read but staring blankly at the page instead, putting on tapes and when the music stopped not even noticing the silence, trying to watch old crime movies on the VCR and not seeing or hearing them. Forgetting to eat. Remembering to drink. Too often. Too much. Which was why Cecil had touted the strange death of Vaughn Thomas to him. To busy him with work. It was the best cure for grieving. Dave had learned that long ago. How Cecil knew it, young as he was, Dave couldn’t say, but he was grateful to him, and now he was out here in the ugly world again, trying to pretend what he was doing mattered.