The sound was truly thunderous.
Suddenly I was blinded by a thick white smoke from the burned gunpowder and its sulfurous smell.
El Diablo landed on me, but I broke his weight with my strong warrior legs, abandoned the gun, and with my hands hurled him off me to the ground.
I felt his claws slash my chest and arms.
He landed on his side but then righted himself and his legs shook and found no strength or coordination and his mouth was open still and with his tan eyes tearing into me I could see, from my now standing position, the great empty hole in the back of his head, a gaping, brainless cave.
He whirled in circles in the dirt like a drunken dancer, three circles one direction; three the other.
Then he stopped.
Bernardo jumped in and placed an arrow in the lion’s heart.
El Diablo’s tail tapped once and a spasm quaked his body and he went still.
31
Forty-eight hours after his intake at Orange County jail, Vernon Jeffs is released.
Undersheriff Elke Meyer calls Gale.
“Lew, what kind of an arrest was that?”
“Jeffs played Knox like a fool.”
“Sounds like he played you and Mendez like fools. Button down, Lew. I need an arrest clean and fast. Not dirty and weak. Kersey needs it.”
After seventeen hours of questioning, District Attorney Chris Knox has decided the people can’t arraign on conspiracy and murder for hire based on Jeffs’s recanted and comically flimsy story involving two men he’s barely seen and can’t identify.
Jurors won’t believe it and neither should you, Knox told Gale and Mendez.
Whom — much to their disappointment but no real surprise — have found exactly no money and no Halliburton on the Jeffs’s property, or the Bear Cave, or a small storage unit up on Bolsa, just two miles from his Huntington Beach home. The DA seems surprised that the detectives arrested Jeffs in the first place. He says all he can do is order Jeffs to keep his fat ass in Orange County or risk a flight charge. Maybe he’ll produce Steve and Curtis, he says, on the off chance they do exist.
Now, very late on this Saturday night, Gale and Mendez stake out the parking lot of the Bear Cave from across the street.
This is the first time they’ve been here since recording Act I of Jeffs’s conspiracy confession, days ago, when the white Lincoln Navigator allegedly appeared here in this lot.
And the first night the big, limping red-haired man Vern and his small skinny wife have been back to work.
Gale and Mendez have good views of Jeffs’s white Econoline and the rear kitchen door, closed in the cool night. A coastal fogbank has locked in above them, smudging the streetlamps and the blue neon Bear Cave sign.
Just minutes ago, Gale surreptitiously affixed a magnetized tracking device on the rear chassis of the white van and synched it to his smartphone, propped up and facing him in a console cupholder.
“Glad we get overtime for this,” says Mendez. “I could be home with my son.”
“Put the money in Jesse’s college fund.”
She looks at Gale as if he’s just said something absurd.
She continues staring at him, the silence long and uncomfortable for both.
“Jesse is surrounded,” she says. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to talk about it. No, second thought, I want to talk about it. I want to talk about it.”
So Mendez unloads, her voice soft and fast: Jesse is under Lulu’s sway; Lulu’s tight with the Barrio Dogtown Vatos; both Jesse and Lulu are consorting with Bishop Alfredo Buendia, a reformed La eMe kingpin now running Camp Refuge for troubled boys.
“Like there’s such a thing as reformed eMe,” she says. “God knows what he’s putting his camp boys up to.”
She tells Gale about the drone and the phones that Jesse and Lulu collected from various gangland haunts and stashed in the trunk of Buendia’s sweet 1955 aqua-on-white Bel Air.
“The hell do you think of that?” she asks.
“I’m pondering.”
“Maybe the phones and drones are just plunder, and they’re fencing it off to the bishop?”
“That comes to mind,” says Gale, thinking back to the drones they used in Sangin. Not the big armed ones hurling missiles to earth, flown remotely from Texas or California, but the smaller, quieter ones for surveillance and target acquisition. The kind that helped him kill the old opium user with the hunting gun and the Cheetah athletic shoes.
“Always a market for phones,” he says. “Drones, I guess if you know the right people.”
“Yeah,” says Mendez. “Reformed eMe, they know all the right people. Hopefully they didn’t steal the swag. What can I do, Lew? Confront Jesse? Show him I know some things? Play dumb and hope he makes good choices?”
“I could talk to him,” says Gale. “That way he’ll think it’s the Sheriff’s Department shadowing him as part of an investigation of Buendia. That way you’re not blown. Right department, wrong deputy.”
Silence then, as Daniela consults her phone. “At least he’s home now,” she says. “Hopefully alone. Lulu’s last text is two hours old. I know what you’re thinking, Gale. And yes, I do feel like a scumbag, spying on my own son.”
“I might do the same,” he says, getting that sense of wonder — grown fainter by the years — of what it would be like to have a child or two, be a dad, have a family.
“Mom from hell?” she asks.
“Not at all.”
“I lied to him about his dad,” she says. “I’ve lied to everyone about his dad since before Jesse was born. His dad didn’t die. His father is still very much alive. I can’t tell you more than that, regarding his, Jesse’s... nativity.”
Gale tries to solve this mystery, fails.
“Then that’s who should be talking to Jesse,” he says.
“That is impossible for reasons you will never know.”
“Oh boy.”
“Yeah,” says Mendez.
“Have to let this one cook.”
“I’ve been cooking it for nineteen years, Lew.”
“I’ll talk to him if you want me to.”
“You are a kind and generous man,” says Mendez. “I wish you were his father. No, sorry. I don’t mean it that way, literally, I mean. Just, you know, like as a theory. Shut up, Dani, shut your mouth and cut your losses. Do your job and earn your overtime. For your son’s college fund.”
They watch Jeffs throw open the kitchen door and limp toward a dumpster with a bulging white bag. He’s got on the same baggy shorts from days ago, and his knee bandage is noticeably smaller.
He throws open the lid with one hand and slings in the trash, the heavy lid clanging down.
“Do you still think he did Tarlow?” asks Mendez.
“Yes, you?”
Mendez shrugs. “I can’t figure out if he’s dumb as he looks, or if he’s a crafty pro and a great liar. The more I think about the white Lincoln and Steve and Curtis, the less I believe them. Photographic memory, especially for voices? Come on.”
“We didn’t find the money because he put it somewhere else,” says Gale. “Steve and Curtis aside, I think he took the job from somebody, got paid, and killed Tarlow as contracted.”
“Then why implicate himself in murder for hire?”
“He’s just sending us after phantoms.”
“Well, he sure played that one cool. Cool enough to convince our district attorney that a jury won’t convict.”
Gale watches Vernon Jeffs swing open the kitchen door, take a long look at the parking area, and go back inside.
An hour later, at the Bear Cave closing time, Jeffs and Mindy cross the lot hand in hand, Jeffs with a stylish wooden cane. He climbs into the passenger seat.
Gale at the helm gives them a two-minute head start, then pulls onto fog-shrouded Yorktown Avenue.