Which led me from the buzzing of my phone to the latest words from The Chaos Committee, streamed live on my Emergency Alert app:
Dear California… only the People can overthrow this system… only the People, armed with chaos, fear, and terror can drive the power brokers, moneylenders, and the godless technocrats from our collective temple. THROW THEM FROM OUR TEMPLE! We will provide the protection of anarchy, fear, and terror for the restoration of God’s one true nature.
Which made me wonder: Who’s going to throw out you?
Dalton called. It was barely noon and he sounded drunk.
“She’s chained to a wall. Real shackles, like in a dungeon,” he slurred. “They sent me a self-destructing video. An ephemeral message. It only lasted maybe five seconds.”
“When?”
“Just now. She had on a bathrobe like a prairie girl would wear. Buttoned up and long. Looked out of it, Roland. Didn’t say anything. Just looked at me. My heart’s pounding out of my chest right now. Maybe somewhat a little drunk. I’m getting my gun and going out looking. All the places she might be.”
“You stay put, friend. Where are you? I’m on my way.”
I found him in a bar in Escondido, not far from Natalie’s dealership.
Managed to get him home, where he poured vodka from the freezer into a large tumbler.
“Sit with me awhile,” he said.
“Where’s the gun?”
“Up in the nightstand. Don’t worry. I’m in no shape to go hunting right now. You shoulda seen how sad she looked. So afraid. But the worst part was, she wasn’t resisting. Like she’d given up. Like I feel.”
“You don’t give up until you talk to the cops. Hazzard’s on his way,” I said. “Your sheriff friend. I’ll make some coffee.”
Nine
In the Marine Corps I boxed and never lost a match. I was a tall, lanky heavyweight who could punch and get out of the way. No big talent, but good reach. I could keep cool and land punches unexpectedly. I had one professional fight after discharge from the corps, as the newly minted pro Roland “Rolling Thunder” Ford. Late in the fight and tiring, I was hit hard by a superior ring journeyman known as Darien “Demolition” Dixon. I saw my mouthpiece arching through the overhead lights. I saw the ref above me. I was helped to my stool, where I was able to look out at the mostly empty arena. And I could also see myself from above, sitting way down there on that stool, looking out. I was myself, then outside myself; me then not me. I’d seen the punch coming but didn’t have the reflex left to slip it. It landed on my forehead and left a scar that still itches and heats up and annoys me from time to time. Usually, at a time when something bad is about to happen. I never fought again. It wasn’t that I’d been knocked out, or even that I’d lost. Nothing to do with shame or pain. I quit the ring because I didn’t want things shifting around upstairs. More concisely: I never wanted to get hit that hard again. I understood that I’d lost this fight but I would find another.
But throwing punches is still a violent pleasure, something I’m good at, and I do it most days in my barn.
After talking to Lark that afternoon, I finished my sit-ups and the jump rope, breathing hard, stomach tight, and arms already heavy. I prowled around the drafty old space, shadowboxing with my back to the spring light that poured through the wide barn doors. Then I attacked the speed bag for three rounds of boxing action. Panted deeply on a barstool for a minute, listened to the pigeons cooing in the rafters before starting in on the heavy bag. I wear ankle weights and extra-heavy gloves.
When that was over I stripped off the weights and gloves and ran for it. Across the barnyard and around the big pond behind the main house, then along a narrow trail leading into the rocky hills of the rancho. This property is called Rancho de los Robles — Ranch of the Oaks — founded in 1894 by immigrants from Germany and later sold to the Timmerman family, originally from Boston. The Timmermans owned several properties in the West, and occupied the rancho only briefly before leasing it out to a thoroughbred breeding consortium that ran it for nearly fifty years. When they moved their operation north into less expensive country, the Timmerman family sold off the bulk of the acreage but kept twenty acres, the structures, and the spring-fed pond. The rancho had fallen into general disrepair by the time Justine Timmerman and I received it as a wedding gift. Our little fixer-upper. I offered Rancho de los Robles back to the Timmermans after her death, but they would hear nothing of that idea: family was family.
Leaving me suddenly rich, free to climb on the backs of the poor. I don’t feel rich. I make a modest amount of money. My tax bite is low. Electricity, water, and propane are high. The property is still in general disrepair. I rent out the casitas down by the pond for income and company. I donate generously to the Food Pantry, the Animal Sanctuary, the Land Conservancy, and the Boys & Girls Clubs of North County. Sometimes I walk through my large adobe house, rich in personal history but also in histories larger than my own, looking into the theatrically draped rooms and out the old sagging-glass windows. Always, somehow, I’m a guest here.
I churned my way up a rise, braked on the steep decline, startled three coyotes way out in the meadow; they froze and watched me with sharp-eared caution. Looped around the far, unfenced perimeter of the property, down into an oak-shaded arroyo with a tiny creek winding through it. I thought of Dalton Strait clomping into my office, hiring me to find his wife. I pictured Natalie shackled to a wall. Thought of him telling me that Natalie’s car had been found abandoned but he was stuck in Sacto. Could I deal with it? I thought of Natalie Strait writing her SOS in lipstick on the back of her BMW seat. Then of her sister, Ash, clobbered by worry for her sister. Thought of Virgil Strait’s luminescent scorpions and his stubborn surrender of grandson Kirby as a person of interest in Natalie’s disappearance. And his granddaughter Tola, so assured within herself, so blithe an echo of Justine.
I ran off-trail toward an outcropping of vertical sandstone boulders tall enough to make shade in the late afternoon. Here they stand in a loose ring, used for various purposes by the native Luiseños, Spanish explorers, Franciscan padres, rustlers, bandits, prospectors, drifters, bikers, hippies, and migrants. There are metates — grinding spots — up on the sunny surfaces, and the earth between the boulders once held arrowheads, pottery shards, and the remains of native woven baskets. I can still find them if I dig deep enough, and in the right places. I found a Spanish doubloon once, very deep. And pieces of ironware and a small wooden cross misplaced by a priest or perhaps discarded by one of the doubtful natives. The sheltered space within the boulders is pocked and scarred by decades of fire rings and open-pit cooking stations, benches and tables made of slate slabs rounded by the elements and blackened by fire. The walls are littered with five-plus centuries of drawings and messages and inscrutable designs left by rock, stick, knife, and paint. A deer jumping over the sun, far up and hard to see, is my favorite.
I picked my way through the boulders, around the fire pits and stone furnishings, then over the buried treasures to the other side. My ribs and legs ached from a spectacular beating I’d taken a few months earlier from some bad men in a bad place. I skidded down an embankment of loose rocks trying to be light on my feet — impossible — then strained up a sharp, short rise and picked up the trail that would lead me home.