“So Felix was with you when I came here for the first time,” she says.
“I was part of the conspiracy.”
“To help me believe that my dog had been kidnapped by Godoy.”
“Yes.”
“When in fact Dan had him here all along?”
“He felt terrible about taking Joe from you. He knew how much you love him, because he loved Joe too.”
“His name is Felix.” Bettina reaches down and runs a hand over his fine round head, the doggen noggin.
“Of course,” says Gibbon. “Felix he is.”
“That was the only direct lie he told me, that I know of,” says Bettina. “Him not being the Roman. The rest of his deceits were just errors of omission. Such as Felix not being here at Apex. Such as the women. Such as working for two cartels. Such as letting me believe it was safe to have dinner together in the Gaslamp.”
“He underestimated the time it would take Carlos Palma to find him out.”
“There’s got to be a better word than ‘underestimated.’”
Gibbon nods and sips his beer. “Dan’s fearlessness is what made him a success. And got him killed.”
“Yes.”
“I get that way myself,” says Bettina. “I’ve been reckless, too, in a much less spectacular way.”
“The thrill of the hunt.”
“Felix led Dan to the drugs and money,” says Bettina, still having a hard time believing that he was the Roman. “How often?”
“In the old days, once a week, maybe twice,” says Gibbon. “When Dan played both cartels at once, it got busier.”
“How much money did he make, on a good night?”
“Fifty thousand.”
“So he could take in a hundred grand in a week?”
“Some weeks not. Some weeks more.”
“Was Furniture Calderón the first shoot-out?”
“Yeah.”
“How many men did he kill that night?”
“Three,” says Gibbon. “They were his first, outside of the war. It dimmed some of his light. The men he killed in Sangin, he chalked up to war — he was able to look back on them in a different way than the civilians in Calderón. I’d seen some changes in him over the last year. The crazier his escapades got down in TJ, the more troubled he was. Darker inside. Sometimes it looked like the risks he took for Palma were a way to keep that darkness away. Shoot his way out of it. Like the danger made him free.”
“Why Roman?”
“He thought it sounded noble.”
“Jesus.” She can’t quite laugh and can’t quite cry.
“He told me once that he wanted to be remembered as a legend.”
Bettina finds it hard to believe that this was the man she fell for and loved and surrendered her heart to. How could she have missed him by so far? Looked at one thing and seen another? How could she call herself a reporter when she got the facts of her own story so wrong?
“He loved you very much,” said Gibbon. “In his way.”
All she’s been able to see for the last days is Strickland on the sidewalk in a lake of blood, his throat blown out and his beautiful dead gray eyes drying in the wind.
“I don’t want to hear that now.”
“He was driven by powerful things he didn’t understand,” says Gibbon. “He was misshapen.”
“But in the end, what you do is on you.”
Echoing what Godoy said about Keith. Reminding Bettina that Strickland was on the same side of history as El Gordo, for a time. Which makes her love him less and miss him more: People change, she thinks. He could have become a good man. Couldn’t he? Couldn’t he!
“I agree, Bettina. Dan would too. He liked to say, ‘Wear the crown, wear the target.’”
Sitting at the big desk in Strickland’s penthouse office, Bettina browses the pictures that Gibbon has curated for her. Felix lies in a rhombus of sunlight fading through a western window. Being in his former home has left him spiritless.
Bettina considers Strickland’s birth certificate, issued by Hoag Hospital of Newport Beach.
Then a picture of Strickland as a first grader, bundled up in a preppy sweater, with a big gap in his smile.
And a Daily Pilot article about Daniel Strickland winning a Snowbird regatta at the Balboa Bay Club when he was ten. He looks like Hemingway, posed in the boat with a big smile and the wind in his hair.
There are family portraits in which Dyson’s presidential bearing and Jennifer’s composed beauty seem to drain the energies of their son and daughter.
Prom and beach pics.
A friend named Rupert.
Cage diving with white sharks.
Racing a Ducati into a perilous curve, if that’s him inside the helmet.
Skydiving, solo.
Shooting competitions.
Strickland with unidentified girls — not many — and Bettina wonders if Gibbon has redacted the babe shots in consideration of her.
Sangin, Afghanistan: Strickland kneeling in front of a low mud wall, M16 in hand. He looks exhausted.
Shots of Strickland and his Apex students in action. He looks fierce.
A picture of “Wade and Aaron, Joe’s trainer and handler at Excalibur K-9.” With a proud Felix.
A close-up of a dark-haired woman asleep on a pillow, her face peaceful and pretty, which certainly annoys Bettina until she realizes it’s her, in his bed, right here in this building.
Gibbon has arranged for the SDPD to transfer some of Strickland’s phone pictures from their Mammoth run: ski shots and selfies of Bettina and Strickland and Felix before the condo fireplace, Death Valley panoramas, and them dressed up for dinner at the Oasis at Death Valley.
Enough, thinks Bettina, a hard, painful knot tightening in her throat.
Felix comes over and looks up at her. No limp. Licks her fingers and slides his noggin under her hand.
The letters that Strickland had once mentioned writing to his family are in a file cabinet folder labeled LETTERS, FAMILY.
One each to Dyson, Jennifer, and Allison.
They all say exactly the same thing:
I’m writing to explain to you some of the decisions I have made, and the unusual things I have done since I was a small boy.
And that’s it, just this sentence, this huge promise followed up with nothing.
Bettina closes the folder on them.
She knows she’s missed the truth of Strickland by a mile, and that there will be, in the end, no one else to know it except Charley.
She opens a big brown clasp envelope with her name written in Strickland’s perfect, forward-slanting, all-caps print. It’s been staring at her since she first sat down, and she’s been dreading it.
No letter inside, just packets of new hundreds, packed with paper bands like they do at the bank.
Lots of them.
She and Felix roam Strickland’s bedroom. Felix seems listless and uncertain. Bettina kneels and scratches behind his goofy ears, feels again the terrible responsibility for what has happened to Felix’s former master.
I’ll do anything to protect Joe and you.
“Maybe we’ll all be together someday,” she says.
What a strange thing to believe, she thinks, working Felix’s ears. Not sure I do.
Throat lump and eye burn.
She slides open Dan’s closet, looking for something of his to have. Something she can take home, just a reminder. The clothes hang neatly. There are shelves with meticulously folded sweaters and knit shirts. She finds that dark sweater that Strickland was wearing when they met in the Coastal Eddy office. Takes it.