The Triggerman Dance

"John. Call Susan Baum tomorrow and tell her you want to meet with her. Tell her you're interested in working for the paper again. She's afraid, I hear. Not going out much in public. Moving between her home and an apartment in Santa Ana. Ask her t see you as soon as she can. You're hard up—need the steady paycheck again."

"Why?"

"I want to talk to her on Liberty Ridge."

"But how are you going to talk with her, if she's meeting me somewhere?"

"You will bring her back to the Ridge with you. Simple. You can handle her, can't you?"

John was quiet for a while.

"Sir, after what she did to Pat, and you, why talk to her?"

"Justice, John. Simple justice."

Holt took the Hughes through a sudden shower of meteors falling all around him. The eyes again, he thought: all stars are falling, all lights liquid, all moons melting. He could see the lights of Liberty Ridge below and to the south. They were his destination, his immediate goal. But so far as his larger desires went, Holt felt for the first: time in many months that he could accomplish them. He felt that the whole tragic circle of his life was about to complete itself become whole. And he now believed that soon, very soon, justice would be done and he could rest.

CHAPTER 32

John's dogs rumbled toward him as he walked across the meadow in the generous white moonlight of two a.m. A cool breeze puffed in from the ocean and rippled the lake. He heard the barking of Boomer, Bonnie and Belle, then the heavy pounding of their feet on the ground. Boomer crashed into him as he always did, then jumped up and put his rough paws against John's stomach. He stood there and rubbed the big Labrador’s ear with one hand and fingered the videotape in his coat pocket with the other.

He let the dogs into the cottage with him. They sniffed around the dining table legs, then looked guiltily at him, not used to the privilege of being inside.

Looking down at the computer screen, he keyed up his mailbox messages and read:

PLAY IT, CUTIE-PIE . PURE OSCAR MATERIAL .

John looked out the picture window at the inhospitable silhouette of Lane Fargo's darkened packing plant of a home. He gazed toward Laura and Thurmond Messinger's church, noting the faint light in the bell tower. In the Big House he saw lights on the second floor—Holt's rooms, Valerie's, Carolyn's? Who's leading me to Holt, he wondered. Which of you would betray him? Or is this only a test?

He went into the living area and slipped the tape from his pocket into the video player. He hit rewind but it was already rewound. All three dogs lined up, sat, and watched him.

He pushed the play button and waited.

The screen filled with gray light, then static, then an image— taken from the observation deck of the Big House—of the hillsides and the Pacific being pelted by a steady, heavy rain. The camera panned to record views in all four directions. There was no sound at all, just a mute storm.

Then the camera simply held, facing north, to capture the acres of orange grove beneath the gray and troubled sky. John couldn't tell if it was morning or evening or sometime in between. The orange trees shivered in the wind and the rain heaved down in slanting torrents. It turned the irrigation ditches into flat brown ponds with surfaces that popped and roiled. It looks like March, he thought, the month of all the rain, the month Rebecca died.

Three minutes. Five.

John looked at his watch: 2:12 a.m.

Seven minutes, then eight. A storm that never ends, he thought. He reached down to press the fast forward when the image shifted from the dripping Valencias to a long shot of a building. He took his finger off the button and felt a surge of blood hit his eardrums. The Journal.

The camera held on the lobby as a woman wrapped in a raincoat makes her way through the doors. She wears a hat cinched down over her blond hair. She hesitates at the edge of the entryway overhang and looks skyward.

Rebecca, John thought. Rebecca the beautiful. Rebecca the unmistakable. Rebecca.