39

AN HOUR LATER, Jack and Oscar stood in the Huntington Desert Garden and searched the ground for clues as the boys from the ME’s office took away Paul Wagner’s body on a stretcher.

Oscar ran his massive hands through his hair and shook his head.

“Terrible thing,” he said to Jack. “But I don’t see how Wagner’s death is even remotely connected to Blakely and Hughes. It’s more likely a break-in, a robbery that went bad.”

Jack sat on a bench and felt the ominous shape of a huge saguaro cactus hanging over him. Like the Grim Reaper itself.

He said nothing, but stared down blankly at his feet.

“You guys almost convinced me.”

“About what?”

“Down at Charlie’s the other day. We toasted. The whole thing was on Forrester, somehow. All we had to do was connect the dots.”

“Come on, Jack. That case is closed. This is something else. Paul Wagner was an old guy. He never worked with Blakely or Hughes or us . . .”

Jack looked up at the eerie cactus hovering over him and felt like he was on another planet, one with different physics, too many dimensions for him to fathom.

“That’s where you’re wrong. He did work with them. Wags and Blakely and Hughes and . . . and me, Oscar.”

“You? When was this?”

“A long time ago, compadre. Before I even knew you. In fact, it was one of my very first cases.”

He stopped then, too stunned to talk.

“Maybe you better tell me about it, Jack.”

Jack nodded, then stood up.

“I will,” Jack said. “But in the car. We have to pay someone a visit. Right now.”

Jack drove out the 5 Freeway toward the deep Valley. He looked straight ahead and talked in a voice Oscar hadn’t heard before. His voice sounded like that of a man who has just learned he has a terminal disease. Still technically alive, but emotionally already dead.

“All this started way before we arrested Steinbach. Now I’m sure of it. Yeah, this goes way back.”

Oscar looked at him in disbelief.

“How can that be true?”

Jack bit his lower lip.

“Just listen. You’ll see. On my first big case, I was teamed up with Zac Blakely and Hughes. We reported to the supervising agent, an older guy — or at least he seemed old to me. Paul Wagner.”

“The same guy we just . . .”

“One and the same,” Jack said, as they cut toward Montrose. “See, back then the big thing was bank robberies. Man, some- times there were five a day. And what made it so frustrating is we knew who was the brain behind all the jobs, a guy named Adam Moore. But Moore was smart — very smart — and you couldn’t get next to him. And anyone from his organization who talked found themselves chopped up into pieces and floating in the Hollywood Reservoir.”

“Yeah, I remember that guy,” Oscar said. “A badass. He was running four or five crews at once.”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “A real entrepreneur, Mr. Moore was. But finally we got a break. We busted a guy named Billy Chase, Moore’s right-hand man. He had all the shit we needed on Moore: names, dates, where he invested his money, but he had a good attorney and there was no way he would talk unless we gave him total immunity from prosecution. You know that’s not easy to do, but we went to the DA and we got it for him.”

“Wow, they rarely do that anymore.”

“Yeah, I know,” Jack said, passing a Dos Equis Beer truck. “Anyway, it looked good. Chase started talking, and we were getting all ready to drop the hammer on Moore. But then Billy Chase fucked up — bad.”

“What, he booked on you?”

“No, he was out on bail. In fact, no one even knew he was arrested. That was part of the deal. If Moore had known he was in prison, he’d have had one of the other inmates stick a shiv in Billy. So we had to leave him out. What we didn’t know about him was he was a dope addict. Not heroin, but downers, codeine pills; the guy was a pillhead from the get-go. So he pulls this dumb little robbery to get dope money. Robs a 7-Eleven. He walks in with a gun and holds it on the Pakistani guy behind the counter. Right in West Hollywood, near Barney’s Beanery. The gun was all for show. I don’t think he even had any bullets in it. Anyway, there was this boy in there, a fifteen-year-old boy, Jimmy Gregson. He was this ultrabright kid, sensitive . . . wanted to be a movie director, we found out. You know, the kind of kid like Spielberg might have been. Supersmart, already making his own movies at age nine and ten and winning contests. He’d served an internship at Universal Pictures the summer before. Straight As in school. Just an amazing kid.

“Well, he’s in there, and he freaks when he sees the gun. He tries to run, and Bill Chase panics and starts to grab him. Maybe he gets a little rough with the kid — nobody ever knew for sure. Whatever, the boy falls and hits his head on the edge of the counter, and he’s knocked out. There wasn’t much of a mark on his head, but he’s unconscious. Didn’t seem like that big of a deal at the time. He recovered after a few minutes and seemed fine. And Billy? Well, two LAPD street cops caught him a few minutes later. Looked like no big deal.”

They turned into a gas station and sat there by the pumps, neither one of them getting out of the car. Behind them loomed the San Gabriel Mountains looking serene, majestic. Jack looked up at the golden butte and thought how it would have made a nice moment if his stomach wasn’t tying into knots.

“Then, two weeks later, it happened,” Jack said. “Jimmy went to bed one night, complaining that his head had started hurting again, on the side he’d hit it. His parents didn’t think anything of it. Only when they went to wake him up for school in the morning —”

Jack couldn’t finish the sentence.

“Jesus,” Oscar said. “That’s terrible!”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “It ate me up. Man, I didn’t know what to do. Jesus . . .”

“But it was your first case, right?” Oscar said. “It wasn’t your call.”

“That’s right,” Jack said. “It was Zac Blakely’s call. I didn’t really foresee anything bad happening from it. It sounded like we did a simple trade-up. It wasn’t all that unusual back then.”

“Yeah,” Oscar said. “You couldn’t blame yourself. Anyway, it’s a bad thing, but I don’t see how it has anything to do with this case.”

“Well, it does, trust me. I don’t know exactly how. The thing is, Osc, I knew it was going to come back someday. Even then I knew that case would never die, that someday we were all going to have to pay for what we did. We made a deal with the devil, and he still has to collect.”

“Hey, now, wait a minute,” Oscar said. “Look, this Chase guy: After the accident, did his information help you catch Moore and his crew?”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “From what he told us, we got Moore and his gang. Locked them up for good. They’re still serving time.”

“That’s my point,” Oscar said. “Who knows how many people they might have killed or hurt if they’d been out there taking down more banks? It’s not a science, Jack, it’s a trade-off . You made a call, and basically it turned out for the best.”

Jack laughed bitterly.

“No, don’t you see? Whoever is doing this . . . he’s making it seem like it’s related to Steinbach. That was the deal.”

“But how did he get Steinbach to go along with it?”

Jack shrugged.

“Well, I don’t know for sure. But I bet when we get our answer back from our agents in South Africa, we’re going to find out his kids are missing. That had to be what he was trying to tell me when he was dying. Whoever did this kidnapped his boys.”

“Ah, it’s fantastic,” Oscar said. “After all these years.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Jack said. “When some people lose their child — their only child — time stops for them. How many times have you seen it, people making shrines to their dead kid, keeping his or her room the exact way it was when they were kids, talking to them like they’re still there? There are cases where people waited twenty or thirty years just to get revenge. And who knows, maybe they deserve it.”

“That’s bullshit,” Oscar said. “You couldn’t have known how it would turn out. You’re an agent, a cop . . . not God.”

“Trust me, I know that,” Jack said. “God wouldn’t have made a deal with Billy Chase. But, really, there’s only one way to find out for sure. And it involves going to see someone I hoped to never have to see again.”

“Who’s that?” Oscar said.

“Jimmy Gregson’s mother.”

Jack turned the key and they shot off toward Palmdale. Sweat rolled down his cheeks, and he had a feeling that time had collapsed. The death of Jimmy Gregson hadn’t happened in the past at all. In fact, there was no past.

Because it was still happening all these years later. Still happening right now.