“You saw that last night, didn’t you, Colonel?”
The boy looked at his father, then straight ahead at the road.
“Yes.”
“What she really needs is rest.”
Behrani looked like he wanted to say something, but was content to wait for hours.
“She’s had a change of heart about the house.”
“What does this mean?” The colonel glanced back into the mirror.
“It means you can keep it.”
Behrani’s eyebrows went up, two thin snakes springing out of nowhere. “She does not wish the sale to be rescinded?”
“Yes and no. Only she wants to be included in the transaction this time. No county, just a private deal.”
“I do not understand.”
“Between the two of you. You take the county check and sign it over to her. When the county returns ownership to Kathy, she’ll just let you keep it and she gets some rest.”
They were entering a small business district, passing a clothing boutique, a golf supply outlet, and a video store and sandwich shop. Behrani’s eyes were back on the road, his face expressionless. “She will produce the proper paperwork for this amount? It will be in writing the bungalow belongs to me?”
“Yes.”
Up ahead was the turnoff for Skyline Boulevard and the Junipero Serra Freeway. Lester usually took El Camino Real, but the freeway would get them there faster.
“Are we agreed, Colonel?”
Behrani glanced into the rearview. “Once the county bureaucrats have written the property in my name, I will give to her the money.”
Lester took a deep chest-wavering breath and let it out. That could take days. “Take the Skyline, please.”
The colonel took the turn slowly. He had just agreed to sign over the check, but why the somber, doubtful tone in his voice? It was the circumstances under which all this was happening, Lester was sure of it. It was the colonel’s pride. Lester thought that maybe he should apologize, just explain that he hadn’t known what had happened to Kathy, that he’d overreacted and now would like to put it all behind them if he could. But then he would be offering the captive colonel his bare throat, and a new fear was beginning to move coolly through Lester’s ribcage; the county tax office was fifty yards from the Hall of Justice building in Redwood City, so he would have to let the colonel go in alone and hope he was sold enough on this new proposition just to sign his papers and leave without an extra word to anyone. And what about the boy? If Lester let him go with his father, then Lester would be a lone target on a shelf if Behrani concluded he was better off calling in the wolves than keeping his end of the agreement. And what wasin it for Behrani to stay in the deal? He already owned the house. All he would be getting in return is what he already had, that, and Kathy and Lester off his back, which he could also get if he called the department from the county tax office and a half-dozen deputies descended on Lester sitting in the colonel’s Regal. No, Lester thought, this was no time for false hopes; the thing to work on was getting back to Corona with the county check, then taking a reading on things from there. And he was going to have to reconsider the tone of this whole exchange; the only thing Lester still had going for him was the fact he hadlost his temper last night, that he was still armed, and for all practical purposes was moving the colonel and son against their will and they still did not know what he was capable of, which meant Lester was going to have to keep the boy in the car with him once they got to Redwood City, keep the boy as some kind of human collateral, a thought that sent a tinge through Lester’s shoulder and neck. He rotated his head once but his muscles were too tight for anything to crack.
He looked out the window. Skyline Boulevard ran along the spine of hills that divided the ocean side of the penninsula from the bay, and when he first began to patrol this territory, Lester had been taken by the absolute contrasts in vegetation on either side. The land to the west, from the hills to the beaches of the Pacific, was locked in fog and rain and so was thick with forests of live oak, digger pine, madrone, and Douglas fir. And south of Half Moon Bay the farmland was planted right to the shore, wide-open artichoke fields that were such a sustained green, Lester found it almost too much to take in while driving. Lawns came in thick and coarse, but green.But in towns to the east, from San Bruno to Palo Alto, the grass looked parched and yellowed. Even the watered grounds of estates in Woodside didn’t have quite the same chlorophyll-rich look as those to the west. Lester’s own lawn in Millbrae was too dry and coarse to sit on without a chair. And it was yellow at the roots. Instead of tall evergreens, the bayside towns were filled with dry shrub of manzanita, piñon, and toyon, plant life that did well in eroded soil.
Soon they were on the freeway and the colonel was driving at a normal speed. An eighteen-wheeler began to pass on the left and Lester could see only the spinning chrome of its wheels through the window. He lowered the pistol between his knees and placed it on the floor at his feet. On their left was San Andreas lake, the start of the fish and game refuge, the water catching the bright gray of the sky. Lester closed his eyes to it a moment but then opened them just as quickly. He still had that hum inside him and it was not unfamiliar; his limbs felt light, as if vapor moved through them instead of blood, and everything he saw had a new clarity to it: the small dots of lint in the gray fabric of the Buick’s headrests; the colonel’s profile whenever he would glance to the left or right, the way Lester could distinguish easily between each eyelash; the boy’s hair, as black as a Mexican’s, his pink scalp barely visible between thick strands, just the hint of smooth brown pigment. It was adrenaline but more; it was adrenaline that had stopped coming in amateurish gushes and instead shifted into a slow feed, the whole body on a sort of molecular alert. Lester had known this feeling from the births of both his children; he’d known it with varying degrees in his work; and now it seemed to come with the territory of leaving one’s wife, with stepping so far over the line to do it Lester felt sure he was about to come up with a pan full of gold or else get swept down the river altogether. And you couldn’t really call it a bad feeling. It occurred to him now it was probably how felons wanted to feel all the time.
The sun had burned through the cloud bank and was warm on his skin through the glass. He was thirsty and wanted a bottle of cold spring water, but he couldn’t send the colonel or boy into a store to get some, and he couldn’t chance all three of them going in either. In the lane in front of them was a municipal van full of Chicano kids, ten or eleven years old. Most seemed to be moving about in their seats laughing and shouting at each other. But sitting sideways at the rear window was a teenage boy wearing a white helmet, his mouth open, his chin wet with saliva, and he kept rocking back and forth, looking directly at the Buick, at all three of them, it seemed. The colonel slowly changed lanes to pass, and the boy began to rock faster in his seat, his eyes following the Buick as it began to pull out of his sight, his mouth nothing but a dark wet hole in his face.
F OR A LONG TIME AFTER LESTER LEFT WITH THE COLONEL AND HISson, I just stood in the bedroom and listened to Mrs. Behrani quietly cleaning up out in the kitchen. I didn’t like being left alone with her. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do and I wished I hadn’t volunteered to stay. Lester had told me to think of someplace sunny we could go to, but all I could think of was my family, my brother Frank and my mother, their faces when they found out I not only sold Dad’s house without telling them, but that all I got was an auction price for it before I fled town to spend it. And then they’d get the whole story: my drinking, the gun, the pills, Lester and the family he took hostage. My brother would roll his eyes at me one last time, then write my name permanently on the expensive side of his internal cost/benefit sheet. My mother would just curse me for good. I felt queasy, like an important organ inside me wasn’t attached all the way. My front shorts pockets were heavy with Lester’s bullets.