The third floor of Apex looks newer than the first two, with a slightly different shade of brick, and large windows on both of the walls that he can see from here. Through the fabric blinds Billy sees faint movement, someone deep inside, crossing the room maybe. Then none.
He watches the face rippers practicing their form. Eats his still-warm In-N-Out Burger Double-Double, fries, and the chocolate shake, always amazed you can get a dinner like this for less than seven bucks.
An hour later the Apex students come out. There are three men and three women, a variety of shapes, sizes, and ages.
No Bettina, but he didn’t think there wouldn’t be.
Billy wipes his fingers on the thin paper napkins and heads back to Laguna.
Bettina’s Wrangler is in its usual spot in the covered parking.
Billy feels an uneasy relief settle inside. She may not want anything to do with me, he thinks, but at least she’s alive and home and not with the crack-shot, pretty-boy, kill ’em with your bare hands Dan Strickland.
Strickland is still on Billy’s mind later that night, as he sits at the chrome dinette in his tiny, furnished Laguna Beach apartment.
Specifically, Strickland’s distinctive shooting style in the video, which has been running through his Bettina-distracted brain since he first saw it this morning.
Billy’s got his laptop on the table before him, and a Coors Light sweating into a folded paper towel, as he opens the DEA link and again watches Strickland hustling, crouching, and blasting away at the International Practical Shooting Confederation match.
The video is from 2012 when, Billy notes, Strickland was twenty-two and working his brief stint at the San Diego PD. Billy has shot at ranges like this in the Texas Hill Country. Hitting something while you’re running isn’t easy like in the movies, but Strickland makes it look that way.
“There,” says Billy, pausing the video for a still shot of Strickland, his pistol up in one hand, caught mid-stride down a steep, curving slope, about to come into range of a paper bad guy crouching behind a small laurel sumac, gun ready.
I’ve seen this guy, he thinks again.
At the DEA office in San Diego with Bettina, Arnie, Dale Greene, and LaDonna Powers.
But it wasn’t this IPSC video. It wasn’t a video at all. It was a picture — part of Bettina’s forwarded “offer” from El Gordo.
Which Billy calls up from his email and reads again.
The attached photos are of the black-clad gunman and his pale dog in what appears to be a railroad switching yard. He’s got his pistol in one hand, like Strickland in the IPSC “New Talents” video. Felix is out ahead of him, his telltale brown ovals showing clearly, his nose down, his saber tail curving up.
Back to the man. Billy sees the same posture. Same turn of the torso, his hand raised, pistol pointed down. Not a classic shooter’s stance. Not even close. More an improvisation? An efficient, necessary movement — maybe — but there’s something else attached to it. What is it, he wonders. Performance? Celebration? Maybe even joy?
There’s not much more tying this blacked-out, masked man to Strickland at the IPSC match, except for a general tallness, his medium build, and a somewhat long-legged carriage. Billy can’t even tell what race he is, or the color of his hair.
But when he holds the printed dossier picture up next to the paused video he sees the same guy doing the same thing.
Is Strickland the Roman?
It makes no sense, but they sure as hell shoot alike. And, from what he knows of the Roman and of Dan Strickland, they share a keen interest in the dangerous.
Bettina, thinks Billy, what have you gotten yourself into?
36
Two nights later Strickland and Joe are back at work in Tijuana.
Finally, he thinks.
He feels like he’s twenty again. Better. He’s so pumped up to be the Roman, with his Glock 35 and his black tactical clothing and shiny boots and the black ski mask with the R hand-sewn in with indestructible white dental floss — a touch he added just yesterday after his Apex students had left. Joe watched him happily.
It’s his first work since the Furniture Calderón shoot-out a little over seven weeks ago, though, of course, he’s working for a different cartel tonight. Strickland has two employers now — Carlos Palma and Alejandro Godoy — sworn enemies. He knows he’ll be twice as busy as before, will be making roughly twice as much money, and running a higher risk of exposure and death. Twice the danger, and twice the stone-cold, get-her-done excitement.
And he knows that sooner or later, Palma will catch wind of a rival handler and a dog, raiding his plazas in and around Tijuana. He might think they’re knockoffs using his own ingenious methods, but eventually he’ll wonder if it’s Strickland and Joe. At which point Strickland will deal with Carlos, withdraw to his fortress of firearms and self-reliance in San Diego, ending his brief and spectacular career with the cartels once and for all.
To build a new life with Bettina Blazak.
The tactical question is how long can he work for Godoy without being seen by the New Generation soldiers that he, Strickland, will be stealing from?
Well, he’d been at it a year against the Sinaloans, and all they’d come up with were the uselessly grainy pictures of him and Joe in the Tijuana switching yard. If Joe hadn’t been shot at Calderón that night, Strickland would still be just an unidentifiable stranger to everyone but his New Generation employers.
But realistically, how long can he make the big money by serving two masters?
Months he thinks. A year? Maybe, before Carlos begins to hear rumors of another rival handler and a dog.
Strickland doesn’t care if it’s only months. He’s working on his exit plan. He’s building his perfect fantasy with Bettina and Joe. It surprises him that they are no longer Joe and Bettina, but Bettina and Joe.
The Sinaloans are different from the Jaliscans. They’re more rustic and cheerful than Carlos Palma’s militarized New Generation. El Chapo may have built sophisticated smuggling tunnels under the US border, but many of his older men dress as if still in the Sierra Madre: rancheros and vaqueros and poppy growers in their straw Resistols and low-slung jeans and scuffed Tony Lamas. And their yoked western shirts, occasionally French-tucked behind big belt buckles. Crucifixes and mustaches. They drink beer and mutter among themselves as Joe tries to do his old magic.
Strickland and Joe are on airport property tonight, in an enormous aircraft hangar — Aviación Primero — one of several strung along the international runway. It’s filled with airplanes, mostly private jets, some in varying states of repair. The overhead floodlights, high in the steel beams, throw a bright and even light.
Strickland could tell when they came into the hangar with six Sinaloans that Joe not only knew what they were going to do, but remembered what had happened the last time. Strickland had never seen a more honest expression of worry and trust in his life.
“It’s okay, Joe,” he’d said softly. “Find the Drugs. Find the money!”
Joe moves across the polished concrete floor, nose down, ears flopping, in the loose little trot of his that lets him angle left and right quickly, then turn on a dime.
Strickland’s heart floods with affection for Joe, and the way he’s put aside his fear in favor of doing what he loves.
This what you get for robbing me, Carlos, thinks Strickland. You greedy lecher, you and your captive child bride.