BERT LOVED HIS LITTLE GIRL. This was the gist of it. From the moment he saw her slip out of Tina, bloody and alien, squalling, helpless, he knew that, if nothing else, his life was now worth something, this something, this miracle-harvested bitter fruit of the killer bitch and the worthless layabout. Only Willa mattered. And he was good to her, unconditionally devoted to her, asking nothing in return because her very existence triumphantly justified his.
He was drunk. Tequila shooters with some of his noncom amigos down at a grimy waterfront dive in the shadow of the Coronado Bridge, no windows, the walls lacquered yellow by smoke. If he’d been single he would have gone home with the Thai chick his lance corporal Kimo was probably spilling into right about now. Instead he took snaking back roads to his own home, alone, buzzing. He knew them by heart, and was pretty sure the city cops would cut him slack when they saw he was Marines, even if he was only a fucking shipping clerk, when you came right down to it. Semper fi.
Tina would be waiting.
He lowered his window to get some fresh sea air and take a little edge off the añejo he knew he reeked of, and that his wife would rag on him for, but not too much because the baby’d be asleep and what could she say to him that she hadn’t said before?
The truck bounced up into the driveway harder than he’d intended and the tires chirped when he stopped it short, and the engine just died.
It wasn’t his fault that he’d gotten shipwrecked in supply. And why should it diminish him? Every man matters, isn’t that what they say? And they’d both thought, when she transferred with him to San Diego, that he’d eventually be the sole provider, medical and pension, she could quit the Feds and be a stay-at-home mom, but then the babies didn’t happen, and she got stir-crazy and stayed with the Bureau and, consequently, started back with field operations and made herself indispensable again and here he was, again, some kind of back-row castrato with his wife singing the lead.
Willa will have it different, he thought, as he climbed from the cab. With the money he was socking away, his baby would be able to do anything, or nothing, be a girl, not a warrior, not a cop, not a stone-cold bitch; learn to dance, wear chic clothes, meet some Mission Viejo USC frat guy with a bright future in finance and a Porsche and beach house and Willa could let him carry the load. Even Tina couldn’t argue with that. Could she?
When he came in the door and she hit him, at first Bert didn’t even feel it.
The hallway was dark, he smelled perfume, her perfume, cut with sweat and something else, gunpowder or dust, and then light exploded on him and he couldn’t keep his balance and his ears were ringing, and, distant, very distantly, he heard a voice calling him a stupid fucking bastard and then she hit him again and it was like a switch got flipped and he felt the shock and the pain and the blood streaming down his chin—Jesus, she could punch, for such a little thing, what was it, footwork? Weight transfer? He’d never been good at fighting in basic, the first of his many failures, spending most of his time on his ass hoping they wouldn’t break his nose, which, he was reasonably proud to say, nobody had, until now.
He swung wildly and clipped her; he should win this, he thought, because she gave away fifty pounds at least, and ten inches (well, seven) (six and a half)—or at least be able to get his arms around her and hold her until she calmed the heck down, but Tina bounced off the wall and back into him and she hit him again right under the ribs, and again, and again until he couldn’t get his breath and his legs went wobbly and he fell on his side, wondering what this was all about, thinking she’d never done this before, never ever raised a hand against him, even that time, after she came back from Cairo and told him about the embassy guard who’d died, Bert couldn’t remember his name, a guy who Bert was convinced she’d been fucking so he’d pulled the gun and waved it at her and she’d stripped it out of his hand so fast he didn’t know what had happened.
But she didn’t hit him that time. She just cried.
Women.
“You’re selling surplus ordnance to contract killers, Bert,” she was hissing at him between tears, sitting on him, thumping on him and her leg with the side of her hand, and crying, sobbing. What was wrong with his arms that he couldn’t just knock her away?
“What have you done?” she wailed. “Oh, Bert, what have you done?” She took something from her pocket and flipped it onto his belly and he fumbled for it and saw that it was the business card he’d given to that fat fuck gun dealer who’d told Bert he was looking to buy some hardware wholesale for his patriot militia group.
Bert’s lips were thick, already swollen, and slick with blood or mucus, he couldn’t tell the difference, and when he ran his tongue across his teeth one of the front ones felt loose. “It’s nothing,” he said, more meekly than he intended. “It’s stuff we’re supposed to decommission anyway. Bust up and throw away.”
“C-4,” she said.
“Crap. Old shit,” he told her. “And I’m putting all the money into a college fund for the baby,” he explained.
“The sunburned guy with the monster truck—”
“Yeah, he’s just some right-wing kook. Survivalists. They buy stuff, they go out in the desert and shoot bottles and blow holes in the ground and pretend the world is ending.”
“You stupid bastard,” she said, crying, but no longer hitting anything, which was a plus.
“I won’t see him again,” Bert promised.
“No, you won’t,” Tina said. “You’re stopping this, now.”
“Okay,” he said.
The baby was crying.
“Swear to me, Bert. I mean all of it. Selling.”
“I swear.”
She sat back and peeled her T-shirt off and pushed it against his face and nose. “Hold this. Pressure.” He didn’t hurt, really, everything was just numb. There was a massive bruise on his wife’s chest that Bert had never seen before, but he hadn’t seen her with a shirt off in a while. He wanted to ask about it, but she was already up and in the kitchen. He closed his eyes and heard ice going into a plastic bag, and then felt it, cold against his chest as she lifted and placed one of his hands on it and then rose and walked back into the house to deal with Willa.
“Read her a story,” Bert called out. “She loves the one about the hungry worm.”
There was no response.
It wasn’t bad, lying down, on the floor. It felt, was so solid. You really couldn’t fall any farther down.
—
KEY IN THE DOOR, it opened, but the chain held. Kirby, puzzled, outside, called through the gap. “Tina? Baby, the door’s bolted.”
Footsteps, light, shoes. Not Tina’s: The door swung shut, there was a rattle of the chain unhooked, then Kirby took a step in and found himself tilted off-balance, shoved violently forward and down, catching himself with his hands before he slammed to the floor. A glint of metal and the cold blunt scrape of a gun barrel against the side of his face, his head pressed into the carpet and a knee in his back and a free hand frisking him, patting him down, while Kirby barked at the interloper, scared, “We don’t carry guns! We don’t carry guns!”
“Oh.”
Nick Mahrez rocked back and rolled Kirby over but left the gun barrel resting between Kirby’s eyes like an accusation. “Why not?”
“We’re armed with the law.”
Mahrez stared at him, unamused. “I’m tired.” Mahrez looked it.
“We got the guy who killed your girl. Died in a shoot-out this afternoon.”
Mahrez nodded, disinterested. “Who told him to kill me?”
Kirby chose his words carefully. “Flavian. It was Flavian hired him for the hit. Ten grand.”
Kirby picked up on the hesitation: “Flavian.”
“Yes. Your—”
“—I’m aware who he is. Was. Who whacked Flavian?”
Kirby didn’t know. He thought maybe it was Blanco, but wanted to see where Mahrez would take this. “Who do you think whacked him?”
Mahrez yawned. He hadn’t shaved, and smelled faintly of seaweed and salvia, like he’d been living outside. “I didn’t know Flavian. I had no idea Flavian was dealing drugs, so I wasn’t a threat to Flavian. Flavian had no reason to fear me, or try to kill me. You know this.”
There was a cool offshore breeze from the balcony. The sliding doors were open; somehow Mahrez had breached the lock and come in that way.
“So I ask again, who told Flavian to hire a guy to kill me?”
Kirby said, “Let it go, man. Don’t make this into—”
Mahrez continued talking over him. “—I’ve been out of the business for so long, I’ve had to take a crash course the last couple days in what’s going on, what’s current, you know, latest trends, retail, wholesale, new faces, lotta research, lotta recon. Colombians have raised the bar, huh? Back in the day, what we did was so, I don’t know, romantic. Me and Vic, we were rebels. Ministers of the great enlightenment, it was . . .” His words trailed off. He looked lost. “Now it’s just ugly out there, isn’t it? War on Drugs. Sad and desperate and violent and ugly.”
“Back in the day?” Kirby said, “What: Ten, twelve years ago? You talk like it was another lifetime. No. Blink of an eye. And don’t kid yourself, Stix, it was ugly then, you were just on the party-hearty side of it.”
Mahrez appeared to think about this. “Vic always used to say, in a properly managed drug deal there was no risk of arrest. Because, in order to catch you, the cops—or Feds, or Joint Task Force, take your pick—needed to know the place and the time of the exchange. That was where trust figured in. Trust was the most important thing. Because if two people knew the place and time, and they trusted each other, no one else would ever know.”
“But that’s just it,” Kirby said. “Trust. Who can build a world on trust?”
Mahrez fell quiet.
“Walk away. You can still walk away. Take what’s left.”
“Nothing’s left.”
“I don’t believe you, but—”
“—It was Blanco, ordered the hit, wasn’t it?” was how Mahrez cut Kirby off, and he said it as if he already knew the answer, and didn’t seem to care if Kirby confirmed it. There was something else he was looking for. “That’s what everybody’s thinking.”
“There is no everybody. There’s just you and me, we’re the only ones who give a shit.”
A longer hesitation. Again, Kirby measured his words. “Even if it was, we . . .”
“. . . You can’t touch him. The end.”
Kirby shrugged apologetically.
Mahrez nodded. “Blanco,” Mahrez said finally, “isn’t nearly smart enough to be Blanco. Do you hear what I’m saying? This is what nobody understands, or has ever understood, but that’s just par for the course, isn’t it? In the drug biz. Where we wage war on an enemy that is ultimately ourselves.”
Kirby stared at him, unsettled suddenly. He had come to like the other Mahrez, the one who still had Rose. This one was changed. Or changed back, he thought. “I’m not sure I understand.”
“No,” Mahrez agreed, then asked, “You a Padres fan?”
Kirby had no idea what Mahrez was talking about. “No. Chargers. Kind of. If I had to choose.”
“Chargers, kind of. Perfect. San Diego native?”
“No, I was—my parents weren’t—I lived all over, but originally L.A.”
“Originally anywhere,” Mahrez said. “Also perfect.”
Still confused: “I don’t—?”
“—This place, this city. Everyone’s an import. Military, aerospace, or just floated in on one of those yachts nobody ever uses and drank the Kool-Aid. Mutant spawn of Jarheads and Shredders. Losers. No commitment. Everybody always in a ‘kinda’ mood.” And then, as if reading Kirby’s bewildered look, explained: “This Arcadia. Where we live. San Diego.”
“No, I got that, it’s just,” Kirby said, “four years ago weren’t the Padres in the World Series?”
“Get up.” Mahrez hauled Kirby to his feet, surprisingly strong, the gun still a vague threat.
“What is it you want?”
“Walk into the bedroom. Don’t look back at me.”
Kirby did so, moving gingerly, feeling a hitch in his hip where Mahrez had landed on him; held his hands shoulder-high, like a stickup victim. “Think. Think it through, man. Right now, there’s no case against you—you’re clear, clean—all the charges were dropped. Stay that way, let it go. Start over. You did it once. I know it’s hard, I know you’re hurting, but, I mean, life is—” Life is what?
He stopped.
Felt an emptiness behind him, turned.
Mahrez was gone. The balcony door open, drapery blowing. A soft mist had tucked in against the coastline. The front door wheezed in, unlatched.
He felt the chill.
—
KIRBY WAS IN HIS OFFICE early the next morning, stacking books, packing up his stuff, emptying his desk drawers, putting it all into a box on his desk. Diplomas, citations, the one photograph of Kirby and his ex-wife, happy, a tropical vacation somewhere he barely remembered. He’d put a call in to Damien Belasco, although he still wasn’t sure what he’d say if Belasco proved interested in helping Kirby make the move to the other side. But he was done with this one.
“What in the world are you doing?” Colter breezed in like some pep-squad captain, coffee mug trailing steam.
“I put my resignation letter on your desk,” he said simply.
“Yeah. Hmm. I didn’t find it, though,” she sang. “Strangely.” But there was his letter, in her hand, in fact, and she made a production out of dropping it into the wastebasket before she sank down in his desk chair, swiveling this way and that. “Your chair. Is choice.” Choice. It sounded like she’d been practicing saying it, and waiting for the right moment.
“Herman Miller.”
“Who?”
“The designer. You can have it now, I got it five-finger discount from the city attorney’s office one slow night, carried it up seven flights. They ordered a whole bunch of them for staff. Ergonomic. Ours are terrible.”
She twisted her mouth, coy, assessing him. “Now, that suit I like a lot. Prada?”
Kirby just stared at her. “I can’t work for you. I can’t work with you. I’m through. I’ve contacted a couple people, see what my options are in on the client side. Worse case, I can do federal public defense, pro bono.”
“Yeah,” she said slyly, unable to resist the dig, “I guess going corporate is out of the question.”
Kirby didn’t take the bait.
“It’s the weather,” she decided then.
“What is?”
“This June gray. It’s got you down.”
“June gloom,” Kirby corrected. “May gray.”
“Whatever. It makes everybody so mopey.”
Kirby assured her it wasn’t the weather, he’d been thinking about this for a long time.
“Since I took over,” Colter guessed. “So not really.”
Crossing with the loaded box to leave near the door, Kirby reached into the trash can on his way and fished out his resignation letter and dropped it into Colter’s lap.
She ran a finger along the envelope’s edge. “I’ll wait a couple of days in case you change your mind.”
“I won’t.”
Kirby let an awkward pause grow until Colter relented and gathered to leave before he did. “I will miss our little chats.” Kirby didn’t answer, and she took it as encouragement. “We have a certain chemistry,” she said. Kirby couldn’t deny it.
“If I’d agreed to let you go after Blanco, would you have stayed?” she asked.
Kirby said, “Yes.”
She laughed. “Okay.” It was a tired variation on a very old joke, but she seemed to revel in it: “Now we’ve established what you are, so, really, as they say, we’re just negotiating a price.”
She walked out.