“I love coming over here,” he says. “I miss you both. And Lew? I’m sorry we don’t get along and your anger does hurt me. Again, for the thousandth time, I am sorry for what happened to you, though I have no idea what it is. All I know for sure is that I am not responsible.”
“You’re off the hook, Dad,” says Gale. “Except for abandoning your wife and sons.”
“A genuine pleasure to meet you, Geronima Mills. You are native strength and beauty at its finest. I wish you all the best. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”
Edward heads out the door, Hulk growling along behind him.
Minutes later, Gale parks a few houses down from Geronima’s driveway. The early night sky is moonlit and salted with stars. With his infrared binoculars, he glasses the ’hood — a jumble of old houses built close together. Notes the ice pink hibiscus on Geronima’s porch. Sees the lights in the windows, the cars in driveways and along the street, a young couple getting into a sedan. Hears the doors clunk shut.
Then the rooftops, always the rooftops.
Watching for the shooters watching you.
He’s systematic about it, a left-to-right one-eighty, then back the other way. Notes the air conditioners, the sagging telephone lines and ceramic insulators, the occasional solar panels, the exhaust vents, the skylights, the satellite dishes and coaxial TV cable, the bougainvillea and rocktrumpet climbing the tiles.
“It’s not too late to change your stubborn mind on this, Geronima.”
“I’m not going to a hotel when some giant badass is trying to kill you. He’s not after me. You might need backup. Consider me your Mendez. Who I happen to like and respect but why isn’t she here with her partner?”
“She’s staking out Jeffs’s home and workplace.”
“I understand. I’m all in with you, Lew.”
Gale pulls on to, then off the street, and turns in to Geronima’s driveway.
A Sheriff’s Department radio car glides past in Gale’s rearview.
“Keep Hulk on the leash and both of you moving along,” says Gale. “Have your key ready and don’t touch the tracker. Leave the lights off. I’ll be a few steps behind you.”
“Got it, sarge.”
“I was a private.”
On the porch, he pockets the GPS tracker and slips it into his coat.
Inside, Geronima locks the security screen door and the windowed main door.
Gale cracks the bright serape-print drapes, turns on and mutes the TV. Wants the place to look occupied.
They sit at opposite ends of the couch, facing the living room windows. Geronima sets her tiny rose-colored .22-caliber handgun on the steamer trunk.
Hulk between them sitting upright, button-eared and alert.
“Is he always like this?” asks Gale.
“When he’s not tearing his toys apart. He’s a natural-born guard dog.”
“Perfect.”
“He knows that we’re on the lookout for trouble,” she says.
Hulk turns to look at each of them, knows they’re talking about him, too.
“I took in a street dog when I was ten and he was like that,” Gale says. “Sparky. Mom and Dad didn’t like him much. But I fed him and cleaned up after him and housebroke him. Taught him basic obedience, and he won them over. He was about half-feral when I got him, but he grew out of it. Took years, though. He was like Hulk, always on guard. Always looking for the enemy.”
“Good for you. Good for Sparky.”
Silence as an old VW hippie van putts down Via Acjacheme. Gale likes the yellow-on-white paint job, visible in the mission-bell-shaped streetlights.
Then another sheriff’s cruiser going the other way.
Eat that Rivian alive, thinks Gale.
“Very cool of Sally to harbor us gunslingers,” says Geronima. “But I really wanted out of there.”
“I knew your hair was on fire.”
“I didn’t want to embarrass you.”
“He’s clueless and mean-spirited,” says Gale. “Sexist and vain.”
“Make America Great Again.”
“That’s him. He’s trying.”
The hippie van backfires and suddenly, Gale’s in Sangin on that steep, rocky path leading from the FOB down into the river valley, Guy Flatly on point.
Then, just as suddenly, he’s back in Geronima’s darkened living room.
“You okay, Gale? You flinched.”
“I used to a lot. Now, not much.”
The hippie van has made a U-turn and is now coming back toward them, one headlight canted up, the other down.
“Doesn’t seem like Vernon Jeffs to drive a car like that,” says Geronima. “From what you’ve told me about him.”
“I doubt it. They put out about forty horsepower. It’s a good disguise though.”
The van crawls down the road toward the mission and Ortega Highway.
“Do you think he’ll come tonight?” she asks.
“The tracker is broadcasting to his phone right now,” says Gale. “He’ll come here when he’s ready.”
“So it’s a question of when.”
“He’s got choices. He might not try the pickup truck again because we’d see it coming. He could come up on foot.”
“Use the twenty-two he used on Tarlow?”
“Maybe, but it’s hard to get up close to a target who’s watching and ready. A rifle is best. Jeffs sniped in Bosnia. Hush-hush CIA stuff. Claims ten kills. He has a Barrett, like mine. Keeps it behind the bedroom door.”
“Are you afraid of him?”
“Yes. I’m afraid of rattlesnakes and killer mountain lions, too.”
“I remember you talking about it in the interview, how with a rifle in your hands time speeds up, your heart slows down, and you can sit still for hours, all night or all day sometimes. Take your finger off the trigger and fall asleep right where you’re lying. Then wake up and do it again. Eat from your pack. A bucket for a pot.
“I’m really sad you shot the wrong guy, Gale. But you shot a lot of the right ones, too. So maybe if they tally up the good things and the bad things at the end, maybe you’ll come out ahead. I’ll never forget that picture of you in your dress blues. Absent. Broken down.”
Gale nods, watching through cracked blinds as moths tap against the porch lights. “I don’t like to remember any of that.”
“Shitcan the bad memories,” says Geronima. “Play the good ones, over and over.”
Gale pinches the bandage, his nose bruised but the swelling down a little.
“I remember, before the war, when I got married to Marilyn I thought I was going to die because I was so happy. Die of a heart attack or a stroke or an aneurysm. Something launched from inside me, not a car wreck or a bullet. But something my happiness had caused. Death by happiness.”
Those were the happiest days of my life, he thinks, that old Pretenders song drifting through his brainpan.
Silence then, as Gale sees a big pale owl winging by above them through a skylight. One of Tarlow’s obsessions? He wonders. Very rare, so what are the chances?
Conspiracies, coincidences, connections, he thinks.
“Gale, I’m brain dead.”
“Get some sleep. Hulk and I are on watch.”
She stands, picks up her gun. “I’ll leave my door open so the dog can get in. That goes for you, too.”
Gale considers. Contemplates the dull eternity of not being able to be a man in that way.
“Just sayin’, Lew.”
“Thank you. I brought Verdad to keep me company,” he says.
“I love Luis Verdad.”
Gale makes coffee and turns the lights off except for the slender, flexible reading light on the end table next to him.
A few minutes later Geronima comes from her room, still in her jeans and Western shirt, but she’s traded her red sneakers for shearling moccasins.
She sits at the opposite end of the couch again, sets her rose-colored pistol on the trunk, leans back, and crosses her feet next to the gun.