Holland and Deuzler got out of the Suburban, green-limned figures in the unlit lot. Holland opened the rear lift gate, handed his companion the key, leaned in and backed out with the big box in his arms.
Gretchen shut the door with the fob and the two of them walked to the bungalow.
Where, outside to hold the door open, stood Harris Broadman, spectral in white.
And beside him: Natalie Strait.
She was dressed in desert camouflage and combat boots, her black-green hair alive in the desert breeze.
Brock Holland carried the box in, followed by Gretchen.
Broadman followed Natalie back inside.
Then he came back out and looked around the lot as if he’d left something behind. Stared out in my direction while my heart thumped a steady rhythm.
Finally went in.
I’d found my missing person. And no matter what had happened to her, or whoever she had become, she was about to be mine.
Thirty-Four
In the darkness I hunkered down in a nearby stand of yuccas to watch unseen. Really observing for the first time, I saw that bungalow nineteen was different from the other units. It was slightly larger. The front door was arched and there was a grated security window built in. It stood farther apart from its third-row neighbors. It was the sole seventh unit on the three legs of the Bighorn horseshoe. Added on?
Waiting there, watching. So much like Fallujah. Not only the hot, dry desert but this nervy lead-up to engagement. In Iraq it was the long waiting for dawn — the insurgents rarely fought at night — when you couldn’t sleep and couldn’t think and couldn’t do much more than stare up at whatever happened to be above you, listening for the waking sounds of a war that would soon come reaching out to take you. Wondering why you had come here. Why your father and forefathers had obligated you to this bloody fight with peoples in strange lands thousands of miles away. When in fact your father and his father hadn’t. It was you. Wanting to hit back. Wanting to show them what you could do and why you were not to be fucked with. Wanting to get it over with so you could say you did it. I didn’t know my war was a bad war when I signed up. I was twenty-two when the towers fell. I didn’t see falsehood on the sellers’ faces when they pitched that war to me on TV. I wasn’t cynical enough. Only later.
The breeze moved through the yuccas, their knifelike spines moving in unison. The sliver of moon threw its insignificant light.
I tried to shake off my hauntings from Iraq, but cheerful thoughts found no traction in the desert night. Instead, my brain down-hilled to last year’s beating by armed “security guards” wearing helmets. They’d used a little drone to spot me. They seemed like an army. Later, I’d gotten some revenge, though not enough. Now, staring out at the faintly lit unit, I touched the .45 tucked into the small of my back.
I circled deeper into the desert for a view of the back side. The curtains were drawn but there was movement inside, shadows on the move. Purposeful. Approaching in the soft sand of a wash, I found the bank and took a knee behind it. Brought up the night vision binoculars again. Saw the neat little patio behind the casita, a low wall. Potted flowers and a small fountain turned off for the night. A shimmer of water in the tray. Saw the parabolic mic mounted to the roof tile, with a security camera next to it, their indicators blipping red in the dark. Felt the ugly surprise at being seen and heard. The light still showed from inside but no movement.
I moved back around to the front, squatted again and brought up the glasses. There was a low wall as in the rear, and a small porch. Potted cacti and bougainvillea, decorative boulders. A yellow bug light on the wall. The front door was darkly finished wood, with a small window protected by an elegant wrought iron grate.
Nothing moving inside.
With my boots I cleared a small circle of sand and settled down cross-legged. The sand had trapped the heat a few inches down. I sat still with the binoculars around my neck, silently chiding myself for having blundered into the well-monitored back side of the unit. Would they be watching the camera feed this late at night? Would they have the microphone speakers turned up? How sensitive was that mic, really, with the constant desert breeze? Much more to the point, what were they doing?
Life is waiting. I wait therefore I am: a private eye, making an hourly wage not yet collected from a California assemblyman who had recently been indicted for campaign financial misdeeds. While running for reelection and blaming his wife. A woman who, two weeks ago, had been plucked from her life as a committed partner, a good mother, a successful seller of luxury cars, and a capable manager of political campaigns, only to be transformed into… what? Who are you now, Natalie Strait?
Breeze cooling, my Rolling Thunder Security windbreaker earned its keep.
Nothing is slower than time.
Or louder than silence.
Every few minutes I lifted the binoculars to the same scene. Lights still on. No movement, no change. As if four people had frozen in place at the sight or sound of me watching them from the desert.
An hour became midnight then early morning.
I saw the front door crack open but when I brought up the field glasses I realized I was seeing things. Hopeful, untrue things.
I allowed myself to think of Tola Strait, so thoroughly imploded by the deaths of Kirby and Charity, and her employees up in the Palomar Mountains. Tola, shivering in the spring cool of my bedroom, wrapped in a blanket, her face a tragic mask in the firelight. As she spilled out good childhood memories of her older brother. Only the good ones, of course, empowered by his death.
“I apologize for putting you into the middle of all that,” she’d said.
“I asked for it.”
“All you did was say yes to a few bucks,” she said. “And to a fool playing with people’s lives.”
“It was the fool who drew me, not the bucks.”
“I owe you.”
“Nothing.”
Through her tear-and-makeup-streaked mask she’d given me a blank stare.
“This is my lowest valley,” she said. “My bottom. I can do better. I’m going to do better with everything I touch in life. In the future. I promise.”
I smelled her tears and the musky sweet scent of dope in her hair.
In the first faint light of morning, no more than a blurring of the darkness in the black Borrego sky, I gave up my pretense of secrecy and walked to the front door of bungalow nineteen.
Looked through the grated window at the sofa and chairs covered in bird-of-paradise upholstery, the small desk and coffee table, the wall-mounted TV. It looked like the motel room it professed to be. Except for the large telescope mounted on a tripod before the big picture window.
I pushed the doorbell button, heard the faint chime. Waited, then rang again. And once more.
Door locked, of course.
I picked the lock in less than a minute and stepped in, closing the door with my back.
Heart thumping, eyes clear, adrenaline high: Go.
See, don’t think. Long steps, all angles, no frontals. Room to room.
I drew the .45 and cleared the place swiftly: two bedrooms, two baths, closets and cabinets.
No one there and no evidence that anyone had been there recently. The kitchen and bathroom sinks were clean and dry, the refrigerator empty, beds neatly made. Two TV remotes on the coffee table squared side by side over the satellite guide.