The Triggerman Dance (32 page)

"People move on, Fargo. You've sure got a rudimentary mind."

"I'm just curious, John-Boy. See, you've been gone six months but you haven't so much as called one of your old drinking buddies? Not
one
of the butts you chased around on Friday evenings after work when you'd all get boozed up? Seems you just dumped them all for no good reason."

"I'm slow to make friends."

"I can see why, John-Boy! What, do you mumble and blush every time someone tries to like you? Or do you act like you're acting now, all defensive?"

"Um-hm."

"Just gave them all up, moved away to tumbleweed city to live in an aluminium box. Just found a trained attack dog that saved little Val's life. Just happened to wander by Olie's that day, like you did in the
Journal
parking lot. Just happened to be packing your piece. Just happened to shoot up a couple of bikers. Funny none of them got a shot off at you. So you go from the skids all the way to Liberty Ridge in one fell swoop, never even losing your hat. You've got good fortune, don't you John-Boy?"

"It seemed better about twenty minutes ago."

"Funny that biker you shot didn't require any medical attention. Looked to me like you blew his ball and socket in half. No gunshot wounds treated that day in Riverside County—no shoulder wounds, that is. Your victim must have guzzled whiskey, bit a bullet and had a redhead named Kitty or Cora Lee pull out that slug with her teeth."

"If I were him, I'd have dodged the doctors, too."

Fargo put the photograph and legal pad back in the folder and closed the cover. He looked at John a little gloomily now, his smile suspended somewhere back in his dark and hostile face.

"Oh, it's all innocent enough, John—I know it is. No, it's really truly heroic. It all fits. A place for everything and everything in its place. I just worry too much. I imagine things. I always wonder why people arrive and depart, why they do what they do. Hey, I'm head of security for the head of a security company. So I'm secure. I'm so secure I see a plot every time the sun comes up. It's just my nature. With Mr. Holt due to leave tomorrow, I thought it would be prudent to get a fix on you. No good having a person of low moral character lurking around here, what with young Valerie so fresh and trusting. Yeah, conspiracies everywhere—that's what I'm paid to see. And to be truthful, it's really kind of a fun way to live."

"Thanks for having my eardrum smashed."

"Just a little pop, John. You won't even remember it twenty years from now."

"Can I go?"

"Of course you can. I'm sorry if any of this got a little heavy for you. Hey, can I tell you something in confidence? I mean, really top secret confidential? A couple of years ago Mr. Holt hired a supervisor for one of the software companies we guard. He was a good super—kept his guards happy and alert and honest. But a year later our company got killed on a bid by a competitor using an awfully darn familiar RAM alignment. It took us almost three months to nail that super for passing the design. But we did. Oh yes, we did."

Fargo slipped the folder into the desk drawer, shrugging.

"So you're good at what you do," said John.

A little smirk again from Fargo, his eyes deepset but alive with light. "The point I'm trying to make isn't that we caught the scumbucket. That's a given. We're not good. We're the best. We're the best fuckin' private security people on earth and we know it. Naw, it wasn't that we caught him. We could have caught that greedy dipshit in our sleep. It's how we handled him. That's the part I'll always be proud of."

Fargo locked the desk drawer and stood.

"Well, I give up. How did you handle him?"

"He went somewhere with Snakey, and Snakey came back."

"That's it?"

"For right now. Have a good day, John-Boy. Keep your dick in your pants when Val's around. I think I'm beginning to like you."

The next day John stands at the front door of the Big House, looking through the glass into the entryway beyond. He opens the door quietly, pushes it an inch or two and leaves it ajar. His heart is pounding against his shirt, wobbling the penlight in his pocket, and his ear throbs slowly from the impact of Snakey's open hand.

"Hello?" he calls tentatively. "Valerie?"

Just one hour ago he saw Holt's Hughes 500 lift into the sky, shivered by the diminishing gusts of the Santa Ana winds. Holt, Fargo and Titisi were on board, and the Messingers.

John can hear the short chips of Valerie's whistle from the meadow down by the lake. He has agreed to meet her there at three o'clock to help train the dogs. It is a quarter to three now. He had gone to the house to see if he might make a quick phone call to Bruno at the
Anza Valley News,
to see if any changes are needed on the article. He had already mentioned to Valerie and Mr. Holt that he wanted to do this.

He pushes open the door, steps inside, and shuts it. The foyer is cool and he can smell the aroma of old wood, candles and adobe. His leather-soled boots are quiet on the tiles as he walks toward the kitchen.

"Valerie? Valerie, are you here?" Then, louder,
"Valerie?"

He stands in the kitchen and looks at the phone, thinking 3-9-9. He picks up the handset, hears the dial tone, then pushes the "off" button. Holding the phone before him like some kind of insulting household mystery, he walks to the stairs, then climbs quickly up to the third floor.

He enters Holt's library, again calling for Valerie. Outside, the sun is just past its zenith and the tall windows gather the light and hoard it down into the room. He looks up toward the shelves of books and watches the dust motes lifting in the hard, specific light. He takes twelve steps to cross the room and let himself into Vann Holt's inner office. He leaves the door open. He stands before the huge mahogany desk like a man waiting to be asked to sit. Then he takes a deep breath, walks around the desk and settles into the comfortable chair behind it. He puts the phone on the wood, noting the way the finish shines between the mahogany and the plastic unit, separating them like a sheet of glass. He studies the material on the desk top: in and out boxes (both empty); a telephone and fax machine; a blotter (fresh page, clean); a short crystal canister containing ten freshly sharpened pencils (points up); a computer and keyboard; a simple office-issue desk calendar turned to today's date (Wednesday, October 19); a clean crystal ashtray with the image of a flying pheasant etched onto the bottom; a framed picture of the Holt family taken perhaps ten years ago.

Most interesting is the copy of yesterday's
Journal,
featuring the pictures of Mark Foster on the front page, and the story that the FBI is seeking him for questioning in the murder of Rebecca Harris. The edition is folded neatly in the middle, with the masthead and the headline:

FBI PROBES NEO-NAZI GROUP IN JOURNALIST'S MURDER

Joshua's diversion, he thinks: the trail that leads nowhere.

John looks out over Liberty Ridge and pretends that he is Vann Holt, surveying his kingdom, making his plans. Fifteen hundred Holt Men scurry about the county beneath him. Another thousand represent him around the globe. They are trained loyal, vigilant. They have their own networks of friends, acquaintances and sources. They have their own spheres of influence And the networks spiral back to a common point, just as the spheres all intersect a common plane. The point and the plane are Vann Holt. And this desk is where Vann Holt sits. So, where would he put the drawings of the
Journal
complex, the notes or Susan Baum?

Nowhere—why keep them?
Where would he put the rifle?
At the bottom of Liberty Lake.
What about the engraving tools used on the cartridges?
Back in the tool kit.
What else does he need to destroy?
Everything that can link him to Susan Baum.

John turns and looks at the massive stainless steel safe. He stands, takes the penlight from his pocket and shoots four exposures of the box. After each shot, he rotates the penlight head to advance the tiny spool of film inside. On the back of the stainless cabinet he finds the manufacturer's number and takes two pictures of it. Maybe Joshua has a way of getting the combination from the number, he thinks. Wouldn't the manufacturer cooperate with the FBI? Of course they wouldn't. He tries the shining circular handle but it hardly moves. He wipes off the handle with a tissue from his pocket, then sits back down at the desk. He checks his watch—five minutes until three.

The top left drawer of the desk slides open on near silent rollers. Inside are two metal rods running perpendicular to the drawer face, over which rest the metal hooks of perhaps ten green cardboard files. John pulls out the second and third drawers on the left side of the desk, and finds another ten or so cardboard files in each. Every file folder is labeled inside a raised plastic window.

As an agent, Wayfarer committed little to paper, less to disc. He was hyper-organized, exceedingly neat. When I think of his desk, I see a large blotter pad of graph paper with not a single mark on it except for the grids. He kept his tapes and interview transcripts in the Bureau safe.

The labels are perfunctory and uninformative. In the three left-side drawers are a total of only thirty file folders, the first twenty-six labeled A through Z, in alphabetical order. The remaining four are all labeled MISC. Some appear to have substantial contents, some appear empty.

John pulls the C folder and sets it on the empty blotter. It contains a single sheet of good quality, high-rag writing paper, 8V2 by 11 inches, and one newspaper clipping. The sheet of paper has a date handwritten near the upper left corner, and below the date only one word, also handwritten:

Anita

Across from the name is what looks like a seven-digit telephone number.

The newspaper article is from the
Journal
and is dated roughly one year ago. It is a large, "County Section" story about an 18-year old girl found murdered. The girl's mother is named Anita. The family's last name is Carpenter.

John returns the folder and pulls another, then another. Each contains a similar sheet of high quality paper with sparse, handwritten notes, but no news clips. The "S" folder holds ten pages of notes—mostly just first names, and an occasional phrase:

"Hus. Karl capped . . ."

"Locate Sean,
son ...
Mex surf?"

"Help in I.D., location and ? of perp."

John closes them and returns them to their rod holders. Sparks, he thinks, just little jump-starters for Wayfarer's closed-system memory. Access codes is what they are, like PIN's for an automated teller. Anything vital is in his head. Anything incriminating. Anything private. Everything secret. He pulls the B file and searches it for any hint of Baum. He replaces it, then scans the H file for some scintilla of information about Rebecca. It is a waste of time and he knows it.

John sets the folders back in place, then looks at his watch. It is three o'clock. He can still hear the muted trills of Valerie's whistle from down in the meadow, between the dull pounding in his ear.