CHAPTER SIXTEEN

It took us more than three hours to properly destroy the gear I had liberated from the house.

We worked methodically, using the tools Hans had in his garage. I ran every disk through a crosscut shredder while Hans removed the motherboards and hard drives from the battered computer housings. He crushed them between the steel grips of a table vise, tossed the flattened parts into a metal garbage can and doused them with lighter fluid.

I emptied the contents of the shredder into the can, and we doused the whole pile again. I scraped a wooden kitchen match along the strike-strip of the box and dropped it in.

A blue flame danced inside the container while we watched it all melt into a blackened, malodorous lump. Hans opened the garage door to clear the air as it burned itself out. The stink of burned plastic lingered in the space, and we stepped outside into the late afternoon.

Hans drew a cigar from his pocket, trimmed the end and tucked it into his mouth, unlit.

I phoned Valden and told him it was over.

A few minutes later, Hans and I went back inside, thoroughly stirred the burned shards inside the can with a hardware-store yardstick, and divided them into two equal piles. This we placed into a pair of black plastic garbage bags, talking little during the process, each of us intent on seeing the evidence of Valden’s indiscretion rendered useless and scattered to the wind.

I took Mie’s car, and Hans drove his own. We departed his house in opposite directions, stopping every five minutes or so to scoop a handful of computer debris from the trash bag we each carried and dumping it into a different public garbage receptacle.

Hans was already home by the time I returned, so I parked behind him in their narrow driveway and brought the keys inside.

“I started without you,” he said. He was sitting alone at their kitchen table drinking an Amstel from the bottle. The pistol I had liberated from Ken Harrison lay there like a centerpiece. “Help yourself.”

I grabbed a beer from the refrigerator, cracked it on the under-counter bottle opener, and took a seat in the chair across from him.

I slipped the Stoeger from the holster at my hip, dropped the clip and ejected the one in the chamber, and placed it all on the table. Hans didn’t even give them a glance.

“When’re you heading back?” he asked me.

“Soon as I can,” I said. “Tomorrow morning, if possible.”

Hans nodded pensively, trying to put something together in his head. He frowned and looked out the window over the sink.

“You had my back today,” I said finally. “I appreciate it, Hans.”

He sat there for a moment, shrugged. “Like old times.”

We stayed there like that for a little over an hour, polished off a six-pack and watched the evening slide away. He offered to take me back to the Lennox estate to retrieve my car, but I called a taxi instead.

The valets were gone, tents and tables folded and trucked away, the gathering long over. Soft lights illuminated the trees and the ivy that climbed the stone walls of the house. I stepped up the stairs to the front door and rang the bell. Half expecting a servant of some kind, I was surprised to find J.R.—still wearing his tan Armani and carrying a drink—there to answer the door.

“Aah, Mike Travis,” he said. His smile had been loosened with the assistance of an extra cocktail or two.

“Evening, J.R. I’m sorry to bother you, but I left my rental car here. I just came to pick it up.”

“So you’re the culprit. My father was afraid we might have an intruder, an interloper, you know.” He said it with a hint of mockery, a twist of sarcasm on the rim. “We were about to set out the dogs.”

The November sky was clear, long since having faded from gray to black. A vague halo of city lights bleached the distance, and blotted out the stars that floated above the heart of downtown. Around the compound, more landscape lighting began to flicker on inside the foliage.

I looked at J.R. Lennox again and saw what might have become of me. I was overwhelmed in that moment with a need to be home, aboard Kehau, with the sun-warmed deck beneath my bare feet. I needed to feel Lani’s warm skin against mine, and the roll of the sea beneath us. I wanted nothing more to do with meaningless collections of people and artifacts, estates and politics, illicit desires and greed.

I was silent a moment too long, and J.R. cleared his throat. “I’ll go see about your keys.”

I turned and studied the rows of floodlit cypresses, and listened to the indistinct drone of traffic. A moment later, J.R. returned to the door, made his way down to where I waited. He stood there for a few seconds, following the slow progress of a jet passing across the sky, then handed me my keys.

“Still have my card?” I asked him.

He patted his jacket, his pants, then dipped into his shirt pocket and came up with the one I’d given him.

“Take care of yourself, J.R.,” I said.

He smiled in a far-off way, looked like he was about to say something, then thought better of it. He shook my hand before I turned to collect my rented Pontiac, and I saw him walk back into that big, empty house with the stiff-legged gait of a semi-inebriated man, a man who had been pressed into service to bear burdens that belonged to someone else.

Valden was seated on the couch in my suite when I opened the door. His tie was pulled low from an open shirt collar, his suit jacket thrown casually over the back of the sofa. Three airplane bottles of Chivas sat empty on the coffee table beside his stocking feet.

“Surprise you?” he asked.

“Rarely.”

Ice tinkled in his crystal tumbler as he watched me shed my coat and lay my empty holster on the bar. The beer I’d had at Hans’s had given me a headache, so I poured myself an Absolut on the rocks and let it chill while I went to the bathroom for an aspirin.

“You gonna say it?” Valden called to me from his place on the couch.

“Say what?” I called back from the bathroom.

“That I’m fucked?”

I walked back into the sitting room and picked up my drink before I answered. “Okay. You’re fucked.”

His eyes were glazed, but he kept his focus on my face. His slack expression went hard momentarily, followed by an equally rigid smile.

“My brother, Mike,” he said. “Such a comedian. Such a wiseass.”

I looked at him sitting there, spread out on the sofa, feet resting on the table, dim overhead lights reflecting off his shiny face. We drank at the same time, neither of us taking our eyes off the other.

“You can thank Hans Yamaguchi next time you see him,” I said. “He hung his ass way out in the wind for you.”

“Hans Yamaguchi hung his ass out for you.”

“Valden, when you hear yourself say shit like that, don’t you just want to grab those words and jam them back in your mouth?”

It took an extra few ticks to sink in, but he chose to ignore it and move on. His face morphed into a mask of victory.

He pumped his clenched fist in the air, splashing a dollop of expensive whiskey across his chest. “It’s over.”

For a brief moment I thought he was going to hug me.

“I’m leaving tomorrow on the early flight,” I told him.

“The hell you are,” he said. “I’ll send you home in the Gulfstream.”

“You need to go now, Valden,” I said.

He sat his glass on the coffee table with exaggerated care and approached me, working his expression into something like sincerity. I moved toward the door and reached for the handle as he placed a hand on my shoulder. He gave me one of those political handshakes, all firmness and eye contact and honesty, like you’re all that matters in the world.

“We did it,” he grinned. “We fucking did it!”

A fog of Scotch vapor hung in the doorway as I watched him navigate the hallway to the elevator, pumping his fist like he’d just made the Final Four.

And I wondered who the hell he thought “we” were.