TWENTY

Pete McManus was younger than me and bigger. He was also faster. What he wasn’t, though, was schooled in close quarters battle. Like all Air Force Academy cadets, he’d learned basic hand-to-hand fighting. But he had never served on the ground, in a Tier One, direct-action unit. He’d never trained in combative techniques like Israeli Krav Maga, or practiced methods by which to stop an assailant from gaining control of a loaded firearm before you can. I had practiced such methods over and over, and if I’d been taught anything, it was that you don’t worry about the weapon. You worry about the man who can kill you with that weapon.

Could I have shot him with my own gun and claimed self-defense? Sure, but that would have required considerable explaining after the fact, like why I’d been carrying a gun without a concealed weapons permit to begin with. I would have had to explain my background in the intelligence community and that, I feared, might raise questions about what had happened in Prague, and the man I’d shot dead.

I wasn’t going to win the race to the rifle. I didn’t want to. As McManus leaned down and reached for it, I booted him in the head like I was kicking a football, my right foot to his right ear, then pivoted and knocked him into the wall with a hammer fist to the throat. He didn’t get up.

The rifle was now mine.

“You OK, Pete?”

He nodded, grimacing and clutching his throat. I helped him sit up.

“For you to even think that I’d ever hurt Toni or Roy is just . . .” He coughed a small amount of blood into his hand and showed it to me angrily. “Jesus, look at what you did.”

“My bad, but you gave me no choice. You were gonna shoot me.”

“The hell I was.”

I slid the Winchester’s bolt back. The rifle was empty. McManus had apparently unloaded it before I’d walked in. I immediately noticed that the firing chamber was appreciably bigger than what I presumed I’d find on a rifle built to shoot 7.62-millimeter ammunition, also known as .308 caliber. I looked closer: Engraved in steel on the side of the barrel were the words, “Made in the USA, Winchester Trade Mark Model 70, 338 Win. Magnum.”

Roy and Toni Hollister had been killed with a different caliber rifle than the one I was holding.

“What were you planning on doing with this?” I asked McManus.

“I wasn’t planning on doing anything,” he said, angrily pushing my helping hand away as he scraped himself off the floor and sat back on the couch, rubbing his neck. “I just wanted you to leave, that’s all. I loved Toni. I would’ve never hurt her. Whoever did is going to hell.”

“Three thirty-eight’s a pretty sizeable round to be hunting Bugs Bunny with, Pete. Bullet that big’ll put a hole in a cottontail big enough to walk through.”

“It was my father’s rifle,” McManus said, rasping. “The only one I keep up here.”

“Did he ever own a .308?”

“No.”

“Do you?”

“What’s so important about a .308?”

“The Hollisters were shot with a .308.”

“Well, it wasn’t mine,” McManus said, “and it wasn’t me. I’ve never owned a .308 in my life.” He got up and walked back into the kitchen, pulled an ice tray from the freezer, dumped the cubes in a plastic ziplock bag, and held the bag to his neck. “Feels like my throat’s broke or something.”

“If I’d done serious damage, you’d know it.”

He returned to the sofa, holding the ice bag to his neck and wincing.

“You didn’t squeeze off a couple rounds at my place last night, did you, Pete?”

“I don’t even know where you live. Besides I’ve been up here for two days. Goddamn, this hurts.”

I asked him about the BMW he was driving. At first he insisted that Toni had merely let him borrow it after the transmission blew out in the rattletrap Buick Regal he’d inherited from his father.

“Your wife told me otherwise,” I said. “The ragtop wasn’t a loaner. It was a gift.”

“Call it whatever you want. I really don’t care.” McManus rubbed his neck. “And I really don’t see how it matters. Toni had money. She’d been salting it away for years. She even wanted to leave me some. That’s how much she cared about me. As much as I cared about her. If you think I killed her, you’re nuts.”

“Toni wrote you into her will?”

“I didn’t want any of her money. I told her that. I don’t want any of it now. I just want her.” He began to blubber, burying his face in the crook of his arm. “I miss her so much,” he wailed.

If you’re a man, little is more uncomfortable than watching another man weep, especially if you only know him in passing. A part of you wants to comfort him and assure him you know what it feels like. Another part, however, wants to tell him to stop being such a weenie, shake it off, and get back in the game. If you choose to neither comfort nor condemn, the only options left are to sit there mutely, hoping he stops crying, or get up and leave.

I exercised the latter.

NIGHT HAD descended by the time I headed down out of the mountains and turned south onto the Golden State Freeway—directly into what can only be described as a traffic jam of biblical proportion. Some eighteen-wheeler had jack-knifed up the road, or a car had overturned, or the CHP had pulled over somebody for speeding and everybody else had slowed down to look, as if they’d never seen anyone get a ticket before. What specifically caused the delay didn’t matter. It never did when you were stuck in the infuriating, ever-worsening impasse that is Southern California’s freeway system. Ranting and changing lanes, I told myself, would get me through motorist purgatory no faster than if I calmly sat back and endured it.

The logjam only reinforced my belief that the drive up to see Pete McManus had been a bust. His demeanor and body language were hardly those of a murderer. As for whoever had taken those potshots the night before at my garage abode and, indirectly, at me, that wasn’t him either. The hunting rifle of a different caliber, McManus’s disposition, his genuine grief at Toni’s death. None of it was an exoneration or proof of innocence by any stretch, yet all of it left me convinced that I’d gone down a rabbit hole and come up with nothing.

My thoughts kept returning to Congressman Pierce Walton. The Buddha once said there are three things that cannot be hidden for long: the sun; the moon; and the truth. The truth was that it was Walton who had more to lose than anyone if the true nature of his relationship with Roy Hollister were made public. It was Walton who would’ve had abundant reason to fire a warning shot across my bow—or paid somebody to do it for him—to get me to back off and to send a message to the White House that he was not to be trifled with. Paying the congressman another visit was definitely high on my agenda.

Southbound traffic came to a complete stop. I heard on the radio that there was a big accident somewhere ahead of me near Castaic. The Highway Patrol had shut down the freeway to bring in a medevac helicopter. With no off-ramps for miles in either direction and going nowhere fast, I joined every other trapped motorist and turned off my engine. People got out of their cars to stretch and walk their dogs. Some climbed over the metal guardrails to relieve themselves in the brush below. Stopped directly ahead of me was a big, boxy camper truck with Iowa plates. The driver, a stooped and wizened geezer in oversized shorts and a plaid, button-down, short-sleeve shirt, climbed down with great effort and hobbled back toward my truck. He waved in a friendly way and offered me a Fig Newton.

“We’re not going anywhere for a while,” he said. “Gotta maintain our strength.”

“Very kind of you, sir. Thank you.”

I helped myself to two.

He was one of those old-timers who, without prodding, was only too willing to share with strangers his personal history, unabridged. I listened politely for nearly an hour, nodding in all the appropriate places, while he told me about growing up on a pig farm outside Sioux Falls and trying to join the service during World War II, only to be classified unfit for duty because of a punctured eardrum. I learned all about his career as a high school math teacher and track coach and his five surviving children and eleven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, and how he was on his way to Long Beach to visit his youngest daughter, and how his wife had passed away a week before last Thanksgiving. They’d been together sixty-five wonderful years, he said, the most beautiful woman he’d ever known. Then word filtered back that the road ahead had been cleared. People began piling back into their vehicles and firing up ignitions. It was time to be moving on. He asked me my name. His, he said, was Warren. We shook hands. I wished him luck.

“Luck’s got nothing to do with it, young man,” he said.

Though I couldn’t have known it then, I would nearly have to die before fully grasping the wisdom of his words.

IT WAS close to midnight by the time I pulled into Rancho Bonita. I was hungry. Rancho Bonita may be a world-class destination and a great place to call home, but it’s not exactly known for its late-night dining. Most restaurants stop serving after 2100 hours. I pulled into the McDonald’s on Majorca Street, in what passed for the bad part of town, and ordered a Filet-O-Fish sandwich, if only to delude myself into believing that I was eating healthy. I don’t know what species of fish they put in those things. I didn’t especially care. You slather enough tartar sauce on anything, all you taste is the sauce. I sat in my truck and tried not to make a mess.

Kiddiot seemed happy to see me, though it’s always hard to tell with him. Normally he’d be hanging out with Mrs. Schmulowitz, enjoying her cooking. But with her still in the hospital, he seemed off his game. He even cuddled in bed with me, purring at my feet—for a couple of minutes anyway. What I remember before drifting off was the rubber cat door flapping in his wake as he left. I’d been asleep less than an hour when my phone buzzed.

“Yeah, hello?”

“Am I not pretty? Do I not have a fine ass?”

That sultry voice. That Czech accent. She sounded stoned. I was suddenly very awake.

“You’re very pretty, Nina.” I said.

“Did you even look at my ass? Other men do, you know. All the time. At the mall. At the gas station. They compliment my ass. They tell me it is smoking hot. Do you know how to say ‘smoking hot ass’ where I come from?”

“No.”

She muttered something in Czech.

“Why are you calling me, Nina?”

“Why don’t you want to sleep with me?”

“I don’t need any more complications in my life right now.”

“Are you gay?”

“With my taste in clothes and personal grooming habits? I doubt they’d have me.”

“You have a wife, yes?”

“No.”

“You can tell me, Logan. It’s OK. Many of my clients are married, like a certain congressman who represents the good, law-abiding people of Rancho Bonita.”

“Is this why you’re calling me at”—I checked my watch— “two in the morning? To ask me personal questions?”

“First, you have to tell me you like my ass.”

“OK, I like it.”

“Good. Because it likes you. A lot.”

“Thanks for sharing. So why are you calling me?”

She said she’d spoken with her friend, the call girl, who’d snapped that incriminating airborne sex party photo with Congressman Pierce Walton and Roy Hollister. The friend was willing to speak to me in confidence about what she knew of the murders, Nina said, but only if I agreed in advance to two conditions.

The first condition was that our meeting would take place at a location of her choosing.

The second was that I would have to be naked.

I laughed. “Your friend must have a scar fetish without even realizing it.”

“This is not funny, Logan. She needs to know you are not wearing one of those . . . listening devices under your clothes.”

“A wire, you mean?”

“A wire, yes. She is afraid.”

“Of Emil Sokol?”

“This you must ask her yourself. All I can say is, if you knew what she knows, you would be very afraid too.”