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‘Why cover for him?’
‘The beating was five days old, so she knew it would be hard to make a case against four friends with their alibis lined up. And pride too – Hallie thought it was a victory not to go to the law. She also realized he might kill her. The cops busted him from a liquor-store videotape a week after Hallie left the hospital. So, she thought Mike would get at least a partial punishment for what he did to her. Big news, when the Harvard boy was popped for a string of armed robberies in California.’
‘I remember.’
He closed his eyes and could see Hallie as she was in high school, and again as she was on the day they were married, and then as she lay in the maternity ward with tiny William Jaynes Stromsoe in her arms.
But again, as had happened so many times in the last two months, his mind betrayed him with a vision of the nails and his wife and son.
He watched a neighbor’s cat licking its rear foot in a patch of sunlight on the courtyard bricks.
His felt his heart laboring and he admitted to himself that telling this story was far more difficult than he had thought it would be. Where he had hoped to find some moments of fond memory, he found the awful truth instead. The truth he thought would set him free.
Then Stromsoe admitted another truth to himself – he was feeling worse each day, feeling farther from shore. It was like swimming against a tide. Wasn’t he supposed to get closer?
He was astonished again, almost to the point of disbelief, that he would never see Hallie or Billy as they were, only as they had ended.
God put them there for reasons we don’t understand.
‘Maybe we should take a walk on the beach while we talk,’ said Susan.
6 (#ulink_aa9e87d0-e430-5ca6-83ba-89fe4f6330ca)
They came to the ocean at Fifty-second Street and turned south. The sun was caught in the clouds above Catalina Island like an orange suspended in gauze. The stiff breeze dried Stromsoe’s left eyelid and the pins in his legs felt creaky as old door hinges. The skin graft on his left breast tended to tighten in the cool evenings. He pulled up his coat collar and slipped on his sunglasses.
He told Susan about taking Hallie into his little college apartment in Fullerton and getting her off the drugs. And about how he had escorted her into court to testify in Mike’s robbery trial, traded mad dog stares with Tavarez, how Mike’s mother sobbed after the sentencing, and how Mike nodded to them – a courtly, emotionless nod – as he was led back to his cell.
‘Do you mind?’ Susan asked, taking a small digital camera from the pocket of her jacket.
‘Okay.’
She set her notebook in the sand with the pen clipped to the rings, and started snapping pictures. ‘I’d like some candids of you and Hallie and Billy too. From your home.’
‘Okay,’ he said.
Okay, because their story must be told and their pictures must be seen. Okay, because Tavarez can’t take away their stories or their pictures. Or my memories. Ever.
‘I know it hurts,’ said Susan, ‘but face the sun, will you? It lights your face beautifully.’
He faced the sun, his right eye shuddering with the brightness and his left eye registering nothing at all. Susan circled him, clicking away. He turned to face her and he began talking about their wedding and their life while he went through the Sheriff’s Academy, about their attempts to have a child and the doctors and tests and doctors and tests and the sudden presence of another life inside Hallie, detected by a drugstore pregnancy test on what was probably the happiest day of their life together until then.
Billy.
They walked on, then stopped to watch the sun dissolve into an ocean of dark metallic blue. To Stromsoe none of it looked like it used to. He wondered if this would be the last time he’d walk this beach. That would be okay. That’s why he listed the house for sale. The world was large. A new home can be a new life.
‘When Mike ordered the bomb, was it intended for Hallie and Billy, or just you?’
‘Just me.’
‘Why does he hate you so much?’
‘I loved Hallie and spent my life trying to put him in a cage.’
There was Ofelia too, and what happened to her, but that was not something he could tell a reporter.
‘You accomplished both,’ she said. ‘You won.’
Stromsoe said nothing.
They started back across the sand toward the houses. Stromsoe looked at the beachfront windows, copper in the fading light.
‘Thanks for everything,’ she said. ‘For telling me your story. I know it hurt.’
‘It helped too.’
‘If you need a friend, I’ll be it,’ said Susan Doss.
‘Oh?’ He glanced at her and saw that she was looking down. ‘I appreciate that. I really do.’
‘What I mean is, this is me. This is what I look like and this is what I am. And I think you’re wonderful and brave and loyal and I’d be proud to be your friend. Maybe more. I’m sorry to be clumsy and insensitive. I think my moment is right now and if it passes I’ll never see you again.’
He looked at her, not knowing what to say.
‘Plus, I get four weeks’ paid vacation, great medical, and good retirement. I’ve got good teeth, strong legs, and an iron stomach. I’m relatively low maintenance.’
He smiled.
‘And I only look clean-cut.’
‘I can’t.’
They came to the street and headed toward Stromsoe’s house.
‘I talk too much at the wrong time,’ she said. ‘It’s a problem.’
‘Hallie was the same way.’
‘You’re a beautiful man.’
‘You’re a beautiful woman but I can’t.’
‘I understand, Matt.’
Susan lightly held his arm until they came to the house. She waited in the living room while Stromsoe chose a framed picture from the spare bedroom wall: Hallie, Billy, and him on the beach, not far from where he had just watched the sun go down, smiling back at the stranger they’d asked to take the shot.
She looked at the picture then at Stromsoe. ‘You’ll find all this again. Somewhere, someday.’
He wanted to tell her it was impossible, but saw no reason to belittle her opinion.
One thing Stromsoe knew for certain about life was that things only happen once.
Later that night he packed and loaded the car. It didn’t hold much, but he got his bare necessities, the bag with Hallie’s jewelry, and the one with Billy’s things.
He cooked canned stew and drank and limped through the house again as the memories collided with one another and the waves roared then hissed against the beach.
He signed a power-of-attorney form down-loaded from the Web and left it on the kitchen table with a check for five thousand dollars, made out to Dan Birch.
He’d call Dan from wherever he was tomorrow, explain the situation.
He slept in his bed for the last time.
Early the next morning he gassed up and headed east toward Arizona. By two that afternoon he was in Tucson, where he called Birch and talked about the selling of his house. Dan was unhappy about Stromsoe’s plans but said he’d handle the sale and have the money deposited in the proper account.
‘I want you to call me,’ said Birch. ‘I’m not going to let you vanish.’
‘I’ll call, Dan. I don’t want to vanish.’
‘What do you want?’
‘Forward motion.’
By midnight Stromsoe was outside of Abilene, Texas. He parked in a rest stop, unloaded boxes from the backseat, and slept. At sunrise he was on the road again.
He began drinking in Jackson, Mississippi, ten hours later. In the morning he took a city tour by bus for no reason he could fathom. He threw his cell phone into a trash can on Gallatin Street, then gassed up the Ford and stepped on it.
Mississippi became Alabama, then, troublingly, Indiana. He aimed south again, got a motel for the night, but by then it was morning. Georgia was humid and Florida was flat, then suddenly Miami was wavering before him like the Emerald City itself. He rented an upstairs apartment on Second Avenue, not far from the Miami-Dade College campus. Once he had the boxes upstairs he sold the Ford for five thousand and opened a checking account with fake ID from his undercover days with the Sheriff’s Department. He got a new cell phone but never told Dan the number. The restaurant below his apartment was Cuban-Chilean and the food was extremely hot. Lucia the waitress called him Dead Eye. He ate and drank, drank and ate. Months later he flew back to California to testify against Tavarez. Other than that one week, he didn’t get farther than walking distance from his Second Avenue apartment. Downtown Miami swirled around him, a heated closed-loop hallucination featuring Brickell Avenue, Biscayne Bay, and the ceiling fan of his small, box-choked room.
Two years later Stromsoe woke up to find Dan Birch hovering over him. A potful of cool water hit him in the face.
‘It stinks in here,’ said Birch. He dropped the pot with a clang. ‘There’s cockroaches all over your floor. Get up, Matt. No more of this.’
‘Of this?’
‘Get the fuck up. Then we can talk about it.’
PART II The Heart of the X (#ulink_d967204f-3bf5-5bba-a947-c784583b810a)
7 (#ulink_104cb63f-2100-5033-876f-a97cba7f0e19)
Stromsoe sat in Dan Birch’s Irvine office and looked out at the clear October morning.
It was thirty-two days since Miami and the pot of water in his face. He had come back to California with Birch, completed a month-long detox program in Palm Springs, then taken a furnished rental in downtown Santa Ana, not far from where he had grown up. He’d started jogging and lifting weights during his detox, with arguable results. Everything hurt.
Today, Monday, he sat in his friend’s office with a cup of coffee, like any other guy hoping for a job. He could hardly believe that over two years had passed since he last talked with Birch in his haunted, long-sold home in Newport.
‘How are you feeling, Matt?’
‘Good.’
‘Drinking?’
‘Lightly.’
‘You idiot.’
‘It’s under control.’
Birch tapped his desktop with a pen. The office was on the twelfth floor and had great views southwest to Laguna.
‘We got a call last week from a woman down in San Diego County,’ he said. ‘She’s a weather lady for Fox down in San Diego – Frankie Hatfield is her name. Nice gal. Seen her on TV?’
‘No.’
‘I hadn’t either, until last night. She’s good. A year ago I did some work for one of the producers there at her channel. Frankie – Frances Leigh is her full name – told him she had a problem. The producer recommended me. I recommended you.’
Stromsoe nodded as Birch stared at him.
‘Up for this?’ asked Birch.
‘Yes, I am.’
‘You would be an employee and representative of Birch Security Solutions,’ said Birch. ‘I use the best.’
‘I understand, Dan.’
‘The best control themselves.’
‘I can do that. I told you.’
Birch continued to look at his friend. ‘So, Frankie Hatfield is being stalked. Doesn’t know by whom. Never married, no children, no ugly boyfriends in the closet, no threats. The last time she saw the guy, she was doing one of her live weather broadcasts. They shoot live on location, various places around San Diego. He might be an infatuated fan – some guy who follows the Fox News van out of the yard and around the city. I’ve got some letters and e-mails she’s received at work but I don’t see anything to take seriously. She’s caught glimpses of this guy – dark hair and dark complexion, medium height and weight – three times. Twice on her private property. She filed a complaint with SDPD but you know that drill.’
‘They can’t help her until he assaults her.’
‘More or less.’
Birch tapped his keyboard, adjusted the monitor his way, and leaned back. ‘Yeah, here. She’s seen this guy outside her studio in downtown San Diego, on her residential property in Fallbrook, on her investment property in Bonsall, and possibly following her on I-5 in a gold four-door car. She hasn’t gotten plate numbers because he stays too far back. He takes pictures of her. He has not spoken to her. He has not called. He has not acknowledged her in any way except by running away from her.’
‘She’s tried to confront him?’
‘Confront him? Hell, she photographed him. Check these.’
Birch flicked four snapshots across the desk to Stromsoe. Stromsoe noted that they were high-pixel digital images printed on good picture paper.
‘Frances is not a fearful sort,’ said Birch.
Two of the pictures showed a sloping hillside of what appeared to be avocado trees. In a clearing stood a tapered wooden tower of some kind. It looked twenty feet tall, maybe more. In one picture a man stood beside the tower looking at the camera, and in the next three he was running away. He was dark-haired and dark-skinned, dressed in jeans, a light shirt, and athletic shoes. He looked small.
‘That was taken on her Bonsall property,’ said Birch.
