And as I said, I’ll give back the $10,000. I’d offer you more but I don’t have any more.
I love Felix and I want him back. You told me you were a man of peace. Please do the right thing and return this dog to his rightful owner.
Sincerely,
She hits Send, knowing full well that El Gordo will probably not give Felix back to her for $10,000 and a Coastal Eddy story and video.
And that her editor, Jean Rose, will certainly frown upon a video interview with one of the most violent cartel traffickers on earth in her slick, puffy, paradise-flaunting Coastal Eddy.
And that Billy and her DEA handlers will feel betrayed.
She feels like she’s betrayed everybody around her except Felix and Strickland. Felix she trusts. Strickland, close to.
Bettina, she thinks: these are the least of your problems.
Fortune favors the bold.
Sanity optional.
She stares across her home office at her beautiful blue swallowtail surfboard, can practically hear it talking to her.
Felix’s abduction has kindled the spark that makes the flame that becomes the fire that now chews through her. Her wild. Jason Graves stood no chance against it, and neither will El Gordo or Jean Rose.
Or the March storm-swell that’s pounding the Laguna coast right now in advance of the rain, the water a bitter 56 degrees and the wind whipping whitecaps into her face as Bettina drops in on a large and chaotic wave that encloses her in its spitting maw before dashing her into the water like a bathtub toy.
The guys in the water hold up, bobbing on the chop and watching her.
She takes another wave.
Back home, her teeth chatter and she’s so tired and cold she can barely get out of her dry suit and thermals. It’s five thirty and there’s a light rain falling.
She looks at Felix’s crate and starts bawling again. Takes a scalding bath, heats a frozen pizza, downs three neat fingers of bourbon, and falls asleep.
35
While Bettina snores, half a mile away, Billy Ray Crumley reads the “Inter-Agency Informal Dossier” on Dan Strickland, attached to Arnie’s email.
Billy’s in a Laguna Beach PD conference room with his laptop hooked up to the good department broadband, already in uniform for his Bike Team patrol downtown.
He’s worried sick about Bettina: last night she left him a very strange text message about being haunted by a man. She’s not returning his calls. But as of half an hour ago, at least, her Wrangler was parked in her Canyon View spot, right where it belongs.
It more than worries him that last night, Bettina was “about to square things” with this fellow who’s been haunting her for years. Years? He feels her heartache, fear and anger as if she’s sitting right here in the conference room beside him. Makes it hard to concentrate.
Billy reads that Daniel Knowles Strickland is thirty-three. He owns the apparently successful Apex Self-Defense school in San Diego.
Strickland has a rapid-fire past that includes some college, military service, law enforcement, and a now defunct private investigation company, Strickland Security.
An action figure, thinks Billy. A rugged war hero. It pisses him off that three days ago, he was with Bettina all evening and half the night. He’s not the man haunting her, is he? What is he doing to her? Hustling her into hiring him to protect her and Felix? If so, then a lot of good that did. Was he just trolling for business — trying to convince a pretty young woman to take his course at Apex? Maybe just trying to get friendly with her? Billy Ray would love to ask her but he probably never will.
DEA hasn’t included much in the way of pictures or videos of him, but there’s no doubt this is the man he talked to at the Havana Café, and saw coming from Bettina’s apartment. There’s a high school yearbook picture, and a shot of Strickland receiving his Silver Star in 2011. There’s a poor-quality picture of a young Officer Dan Strickland of the San Diego PD.
And a brief International Practical Shooting Confederation website video of a “Young Talent” shooter — a much younger Strickland — loping through a woodsy, two-minute course, nailing paper silhouettes with a Glock as he runs and fires, reloads, runs and fires. Billy notes that when Strickland is close enough, he shoots with only one hand — right or left — holding the gun a little higher than necessary, trading an easy sightline for Hollywood. Which is crazy in competition like this, he thinks.
But, as a cop who has to qualify with his sidearm every year, Billy can see how well this guy shoots. Crazy, maybe, but crazy good.
In the video, Dan Strickland reminds Billy of someone he knows, or maybe has seen before. A faint memory at best. Something about the way he swings his weapon on the move, the ease of gait and turn of torso. Like he’s after style points. Trying to look graceful. Billy has shot on the run, in ranges such as this. They’re difficult and this guy makes it look easy.
Billy thinks he might be remembering one of his fellow cadets in training. Why does that seem so long ago? Something to do with Lorna and their public secrets in Wichita Falls, no doubt. Too bad Bettina seems 100 percent not interested in going further. Because of Dan Strickland? Or is it just me?
He replays the IPSC video again, can’t connect Strickland to anybody in his past. He’s remembered dreams more clearly than this vague whisp of a memory. Maybe a memory. Or it might be a dream, for all he knows.
Billy can’t get his mind off Bettina, but it’s dangerous to be distracted when you’re patrolling a crowded city on a bicycle. With a gun on your hip, no less. When the traffic is bad you have to dismount every other minute, cut between the cars, go another block maybe, then dismount again. When traffic is light the vehicles are moving fast enough to kill you and half the drivers are either looking out their windows at the pretty little city, or on their phones.
Billy soldiers through his beat, dodging the puddles from last night’s rain. He checks the outdoor dining on Forest, going strong for March.
Gives directions to tourists; stops in at Bushard’s Pharmacy and Tuvalu and Coastal Eddy, even though Bettina’s car isn’t in the parking garage.
Chats with Crazy Larry outside the Wells Fargo entrance, tells him to quit panhandling the bank customers on their way in and out. “But this is where the money is!” says Larry, his standard reply, and Billy usually thinks it’s funny, but this morning it just gets on his nerves.
“Move along, Larry,” he says. “You smell bad.”
“Headed for the laundry right now, Captain. Got any quarters?”
In fact he has three, which he drops into Crazy Larry’s very dirty hand while Larry stares at his gun, which always makes Billy nervous.
After work he changes into his civvies and drives to Apex Self-Defense, on Cedar in San Diego.
It’s not easy to find, tucked into a labyrinth of squat brick industrial buildings, looming steel-and-glass concoctions and metro tracks, all webbed tight by telephone poles and power lines. The Apex building is a three-story brick structure with an address half-hidden in ivy and no ID other than the long-faded San Diego Sandblast sign above the front door.
Billy sits in his pickup truck on the uncovered roof lot of A-1 Parking, giving him a great view through his binoculars.
No Bettina.
No Strickland or green Quattroporte, no customers coming or going. But he sees motion through the small first-story windows. There’s a hand-to-hand combat class going on behind one window, real nasty stuff, maybe Krav Maga. Everybody is in street clothes, practicing eye-gouges and throat rips in slow motion. No contact. The instructor — who looks shorter and wider than Strickland — wears a fencing mask with a full throat bib.