CHAPTER SIX

I walked to clear my head.

My mind was vibrating with pent-up energy, my bloodstream like electric currents running in every direction, seeking ground. So I walked, it didn’t matter where, to find traction for my scattered thoughts.

The sun was shining brighter now, beating back the last of the thin gray sheet overhead, but the onshore wind was picking up, growing colder as it blew in from the west, from the coastline where it gathered strength and a bone-dampening chill from the Pacific not far away.

I found myself several blocks from where I had parked to meet with Vonda. Across the street, a wide-shouldered man wearing a Seattle Seahawks jersey and a black apron swept the sidewalk outside a bar whose Open light he had just switched on. The banner over the doorway advertised five-dollar pitchers for the game that afternoon. As for me, it was already the fourth quarter. I was third and long on the opponent’s fifteen, down by six and no time on the clock by the time my brother had brought me into a game I hadn’t even known was on the schedule.

I had two plays left: a balls-out run up the middle or a Hail Mary for the end zone. I flipped my phone open and placed a call that would set the Hail Mary in motion, and if that didn’t work, it was straight up the gut. That’s it. That’s all there was.

Rex Blackwood had been on his third tour as a Navy Seal when he had his skull caved in by the Vietcong during a firefight that took place in a village that had long since been reclaimed by an overgrowth of philodendrons and elephant grass, five hours’ hump through dense jungle from the nearest LZ. He awakened in a military hospital in Saigon days later, where he endured seemingly endless hours of physical and psychological testing by US government spooks before being whisked back to Virginia and assigned to an NSA operational team tasked with missions so black that they had their own gravitational pull. He bore a tattoo that hinted at the nature of his activities, and suffered only periodic nocturnal visitations of phantoms, but when they came, they would linger beside him for days.

We had become friends after my retirement from LA Homicide, and I had moved my yacht to Catalina Island, where Rex also had sought refuge as a boat captain. He had crewed with me on my trans-Pacific escape on the Kehau from California to Hawaii, stayed in the islands long enough to see me take the better part of a poorly aimed shotgun blast to my shoulder—a shot that was meant for my skull—at the hands of a meth-dealing junkie who later died of wounds sustained by return fire from my Beretta. Rex returned to Catalina shortly after I was released from the hospital, but not before another body had dropped. It had been an eventful trip.

The phone rang three times before he picked up.

“Go,” was all he said.

“It’s Travis. I could use a little help.”

“I’ll call you from a landline at the hotel. Fifteen minutes. Use it to find a pay phone.” The line went dead.

I crossed the street and stepped into the bar with the five-dollar pitchers. The place was empty, but for the guy in the Seahawks jersey who was now wiping down the counter. Classic rock blared from dusty speakers while muted television sets displayed a trio of former pro athletes in designer suits having an animated discussion about the relative merits of the replay rule.

“You got a pay phone in here?” I asked.

“Get with the program, man, it’s 2004,” he said without looking up from his work.

“That was a yes or no question.”

He stopped wiping and eyeballed me for a second before answering.

“I think we still got one that hasn’t been torn off the wall yet.”

“What’s your business number?”

“Why?”

“Your phone number. What is it?”

I knew he was weighing how much trouble I was worth as he studied me again. He gave me the number.

“Anything else?”

“Beer.”

“What kind?”

“Cold. And I’m going to need change for a dollar.”

I glanced at my watch, had seven minutes to wait before I would hear back from Rex Blackwood. I leaned on the bar, one foot on the rail, and looked out the window toward the foothills. I pictured Rex motoring his way across Avalon bay in his skiff, heading toward the pier where he would tie off and jog the short distance to the hotel lobby. Though he never told me outright, I had cause to believe that Rex had been a part of the remote-viewing operation that the NSA has persistently denied ever existed. I had further cause to believe that the spooks had never completely let him go.

“Pay phone’s in the back?” I asked, hooking a thumb in the direction of the bathroom sign painted on the wall with an arrow pointed down a narrow hallway.

“Yeah,” he said, his back to me as he drew my beer. He turned slowly, his face slack, and I could read him like a highway sign. His pupils were dilated and his throbbing pulse clearly visible in the vein that stood out on his neck, a heart rate fueled by adrenaline. He was measuring the distance between himself and the aluminum bat or cut-down twelve-gauge tucked away beneath the bar.

“Relax, pard,” I said. “A phone call, and I’m gone.”

He knew what I knew. It’s not like the movies. Real-life violence is rarely presaged by bellicose behavior, verbal threats and wild gesticulation.

“There’s not going to be a problem, here, right?” he asked.

Instead, mayhem is most often visited upon you from unexpected quarters; a couple eating a quiet dinner in the corner whose conversation slowly escalates until it ends with a fork being jammed into the other’s eye socket. Or random rifle shots fired from behind the concrete balustrade of an overpass or from the rolled-down window of a passing car.

“It’ll be like I was never even here.”

I made my way across the room, down the hall, and found what I was looking for. I jotted down the number off the pay phone, writing it on the palm of my hand with a ballpoint, and returned to a seat on a stool in front of my beer.

Exactly fifteen minutes from the time I had first reached out to Rex, my cell phone rang. I answered with the number the bartender had given me and hung up. Less than thirty seconds later, the bar phone rang. The bartender answered, and passed the receiver to me without another word. Rex read me a thirteen-­digit number and killed the connection. It was an old code arrangement: the first two numbers were to be disregarded, as was the last.

It was a lot of cloak and dagger for one fucking call, but it was the only way that could defeat the wiretapping capacity of the NSA on the fly. We would keep it as brief as possible. Not even the super geeks at the puzzle palace would be able to arrange a trap on our conversation in so little time.

I scooped four quarters off the bar and hustled back toward the pay phone again. I punched in the number Rex had given me and he picked up immediately. I gave him a brief rundown on the blackmail situation without mentioning any names, Rex’s and mine included.

“So,” he said. “You need a name.”

“Yes. Like, five minutes ago.”

The line was briefly silent, but I thought I could hear him breathing.

“You know there’s no guarantee that the server is in the same location as the guy who owns the domain, right?”

“I’m banking on this being a very closely held operation. All things considered, it’s a small amount of money they’re asking for. It doesn’t have the smell of organized crime with a capital ‘O.’”

“I think I have a guy.”

“I’m out of time.”

“Call me in four hours at this number. Use a different phone.”

“Copy that,” I said, but the line was already dead.

The bartender stood behind the bar when I came back out, failing in his attempt to appear as though he wasn’t tracking my every move. One of his hands aimlessly worked a rag along the countertop, and the other out of my view below. My beer glass had disappeared.

He tensed as I reached into my back pocket.

I slowly withdrew my wallet, dropped a five in front of him and rapped my knuckles on the wood.

“Like I told you,” I said. “As though I was never here.”