Watching them enter the little village of shops and galleries that surround the Cliff, Dan sees that the Cowboy and the reporter don’t know each other very well. The guy is as attentive as a butler, while she has the straightforward economy of movement enjoyed by people who know what they want. The man is also alert and protective: cop-like.
Strickland walks past the jewelry shop and the art galleries and the bead-and-necklace boutique and the classic longboards shop. He keeps plenty of distance because if Joe smells him, he’ll likely come charging over, and that might be a little difficult to explain. Bettina leads Joe and her date to the far end of a long communal table that overlooks the swelling black sea.
Dan sits at the bar behind the diners, in the very place where he’d kept an eye on the congressman and his wife. Those were his protection days — Strickland Security.
Dan has a rear view of Bettina and her suitor. Joe is in the darkness under the table. Dan can see that they’re in a meaningful conversation, and again, from their postures and the cant of their heads, don’t really know each other. They’re a little formal. Getting to know each other, Dan thinks. The lucky Cowboy.
He lays his phone on the bare table and cues up the Felix video again. Mutes it and watches Bettina Blazak on-screen, kneeling before a cautiously appreciative Joe, scratching his chest, smiling at the camera, and talking to her viewers. Dan likes the way she touches Joe. She’s been around dogs.
Something odd now stirs in Dan Strickland. He hasn’t felt it before and he’s not even sure what it is. With women he has always accepted what is given, and over his thirty-plus years, he has been given much. But he has never given back; neither his nature nor his nurture seems to allow it. He’s not really sure how you do that. Now, this odd feeling of generosity. Wanting to give her something good. It’s new. Bettina on the screen is still talking, as Bettina here at the Cliff shakes her shiny hair and turns to look in Dan’s direction.
He sweeps the screen to cut the light on his face, and looks down.
Dan tails them back south on Coast Highway, still plenty of highway between him and Joe, and plenty of pedestrians for cover. Joe, Bettina, and the Cowboy go down steps to the parking garage under the Coastal Eddy building. A moment later the Cowboy comes out on foot and continues on south down the sidewalk, sizing up the world around him. Definitely a cop, Dan thinks. Notes the lump under the frumpy, practical coat.
A red Jeep comes up the ramp and waits while the gate arm rises through the headlight beams. Dan can see Joe in the front seat, face observant, and Bettina’s long look down Coast Highway before making the turn.
He gets into his car and follows the Jeep three cars back to Broadway, which becomes Laguna Canyon Road and will lead inland, Dan knows, to the freeways. But soon Bettina signals and turns right on Stan Oaks, into a small retail village tucked beneath towering eucalyptus. Dan slows and turns in without a signal, parks in front of an antiquarian bookseller, keeping an eye on the Jeep as Bettina ferries Joe through the lot. At the far end, she heads up a narrow drive leading to Canyon View Apartments — says the sign — built on caissons along the steep flank of the canyon.
Through his good Leicas, Dan watches her take one of the covered stalls that run beneath the back of the building. Bettina does whatever it is that takes women so long to do before leaving their vehicles. She and Joe finally get out, climb the stairs, and disappear, Joe perfectly fitted at her left calf, no chance he’ll pull or drag her into a fall. Dan watches, wishing he were Bettina Blazak, leashed to his beloved Joe — and wishing he were Joe, leashed to Bettina Blazak.
In his rearview he sees the police radio car turn into the little shopping center. Dan slides the binoculars under the seat and takes up his phone. Watches as the cop car slowly makes its way along the shops, all closed, and only a few vehicles here this late.
It stops behind him, and Dan, phone to his ear, watches the spotlight seize his dashboard and flash off the mirror. He tells the phone he sure hopes this fucking cop will buzz off.
A moment later, the light vanishes and the radio car moves along, loops the lot, and exits onto Laguna Canyon Road, headed back to town.
Dan gets a room at the Laguna Montage for a week, where he’ll blend in with the affluent tourists. From what he’s seen of Bettina’s work and living arrangements, it might take some time to steal Joe without getting caught.
He stands in his stupidly expensive room overlooking the twinkling black Pacific, wondering what it would be like to meet Bettina Blazak. What it would be like to be close enough to really see her.
And when she wasn’t looking, of course, jack the dog.
10
Bettina and Billy Ray step around the potholes on Coahuila Street, where the bloody cartel shoot-out took place over a month ago.
Leading them is Luis, an old man they’ve just met, who knows the family of Fidelito Camacho, the boy who took a wounded dog to an animal hospital one night last month. He’s well dressed and walks with a sprightly limp.
In the Coahuila barrio, he says, everybody knows everybody.
Luis speaks little English, so Bettina explains in Spanish that she and Billy are researching a story for a small newspaper in California, Coastal Eddy.
“I will protect Fidelito,” she says. “But I need to tell his story because it matters, because that boy risked his life for a street dog.”
“Fidelito will not talk to you, because the dog maybe was shot by the cartels,” Luis explains in his native tongue.
“I will not use his real name. I want to talk to him privately, where we won’t be seen.”
“Everything is seen. They will see me talking to you, but I am old and without value and I do not fear them.”
“We don’t need pictures or video,” says Bettina. “Only to hear his story.”
“I will explain this to his father and mother, but they are pious and proud. They won’t let you inside.”
“Please tell them we are honest reporters who believe in God,” says Bettina with a guilty current of sacrilege coursing inside her.
A Tijuana Municipal Police cruiser rolls by.
A street dog who looks like Felix hustles across the street in front of it, well out of range.
Luis tells Bettina to stay here while he talks to Fidelito’s mom and dad.
“Wait,” she says. “If Fidelito’s parents won’t let him talk to me in person, maybe they’ll let him talk by phone.”
“Maybe,” says Luis. At Bettina’s suggestion, Luis accepts her number on a small scrap of her notepad paper. He gives her a conspiratorial look.
Bettina and Billy watch from a small zócalo featuring a leafless sycamore tree and a flock of pigeons competing for food from an old man on a bench.
Luis knocks on a side window of a squat pink house on a dirt road intersecting Coahuila. The glass slides open and Luis talks to the screen.
A moment later Luis disappears around the back of the house.
Five minutes come and go, then Bettina’s phone rings with a number not in her contacts.