Chapter 26
ISAAK
Ifind out my wife was stopped on Las Virgenes from Lev, not from her, which is how I learn she's started lying to me.
He comes to the study with his face doing nothing, which on Lev means a great deal.
He sets down no coffee. He doesn't turn a coin.
He just stands there until I look up from the screen, and then he tells me, flat, in the voice he saves for the numbers that don't move no matter how a man feels about them.
"Your wife had a sheriff in her car today. Las Virgenes, around two. The man on her tail watched the whole thing from a turnout." A pause. "She didn't mention it."
I go very still. The kind of still I learned young, the still that comes before I do something a room remembers.
"Tell me all of it."
"Lost Hills captain. Wade Hutchins. He pulled her over on a fake taillight, searched the vehicle without cause, spent eight minutes in the back seat going through her things.
" Lev's voice doesn't change, but he's gone still by the desk, his eyes steady on me, ready to move if I do.
"He wasn't looking for contraband. He went straight for the cargo space.
He found her prenatal vitamins, held them up, said some things, and then he let her go.
My man couldn't hear it all. He heard enough to know it was a threat, and he heard the word pregnant come out of the cop's mouth. "
The screen in front of me has stopped existing.
The study has stopped existing. There is only the single fact, turning over and over, that a man put his hands in my wife's car, his eyes on her body, the word for our unborn child in his mouth, on an empty road, where I wasn't. Her driver had a dentist, and I let her go without me because she asked me to trust her.
"She came home and told me about a gelding with bad hocks," I say.
"Yes."
"She sat in my lap and told me the drive was nothing." My own voice has gone somewhere I don't take it in front of people. "She looked me in the eye and lied to my face so I wouldn't do exactly the thing I am about to do."
"Yes." Lev lets a breath go. "That's the only reason I came to you instead of letting it ride.
She made a decision to protect you from yourself.
I am choosing to override it, because a man hunting your pregnant wife is past the point where her feelings about your temper get a vote.
" He looks at me steady. "What do you want done? "
And here is the thing I have spent a marriage learning, the thing that makes this so much worse than it would have been two years ago.
I know exactly what I want done. I have always known.
The old me would already be in the car. A man doesn't put his hands near what's mine and keep his hands.
The rule has been simple and certain my whole life.
It's roaring in me right now, hot and clean.
But there is a woman upstairs who lied to me out of love, and there is a child the size of a fist. The simple rule has stopped being simple. If I do the obvious thing to a sheriff, I go to a cage. A man in a cage can't stand between his wife and the dark.
So I don't go to the car. Not yet. I make myself sit, and I make myself think instead of move. Every cell in me fights it.
"Who is he?" I say. "Not the badge. The man. Who does Wade Hutchins answer to? Who does he owe? What does he want badly enough to drive forty minutes out of his county and threaten a pregnant woman over a box?"
"Working it. He's dirty, that part's easy, a captain doesn't run his own freelance shakedowns for fun.
Somebody's paying him." There's an edge in Lev's voice I almost never hear.
"It's the same shape as everything else.
The grant, the cash in the clubs, the man asking who got the Calloway contents. Hutchins is a hand. He's not the head."
"Same actor. All of it. The grant, the fence, the cop."
"My read as well." He turns the coin in his pocket, once.
"The cargo space wasn't instinct. Hutchins was told what to look for.
The Calloway box has been a question in three different places over the last six months, before the fence went down, before the grant disappeared.
Someone was tracking those contents before your wife was in this building. "
I look at him. "There's nothing in that box."
"She may not know that herself." A pause. "It's possible she hasn't been all the way through it."
I hold that for a moment. My wife has been driving around Los Angeles with a box she inherited from her dead father, and someone has been looking for it since before I married her. The shape of this is very clean. Something that clean has been running for longer than six months.
"Find me the head."
"There's a name circling in material adjacent to the cash trail. Not an org man. Someone who moves money and knows how to lose it. I don't have enough to bring you yet."
"Bring me when you have a syllable."
"And the cop in the meantime?"
I get up. I go to the window, where six weeks ago a cut fence first told me somebody was testing my walls. I look at the spot on the ridge where the state park begins and the lights stop, and I make a decision Lev has already argued me out of. I'm going to make it anyway.
"I'm going to talk to him," I say. "Hutchins. Face to face. Once."
"That's a mistake."
"I know what it is." I keep looking at the dark.
"I'm not going to touch him, Lev. I'm going to stand in front of him close enough that he understands what I am, and I'm going to tell him, in small words, that the next time he comes near my wife is the last morning he wakes up a free man or a living one, his choice.
And then I'm going to let him go, to watch what he does, because a frightened dog runs to its owner.
I want to see whose hand comes down to pet him. "
"And if he doesn't frighten?"
"Everyone frightens. I've never met the exception.
" I turn from the window. "Set it up. Somewhere public enough that he can't disappear me and quiet enough that he can't pretend it didn't happen.
I want him alone, off duty, no badge between us.
Then I'll go home to wait, and whoever he calls, that's the man I actually want. "
Lev studies me a long moment. Something crosses his face I almost never see on him, which is worry, real and undisguised.
"You're not yourself," he says. "You've got the child in your eyes.
It's making you reckless, and you've never been reckless, it's why you're alive.
" He doesn't move to leave. "The smart play is to do nothing visible.
Tighten the walls, find the head, take the whole thing apart from underneath where no one sees your hand.
The minute you put your face in front of a sheriff, you've handed a man who's already on someone's payroll a reason and a record. You know this. You'd tell me this."
He's right. Every word of it's right, exactly what I'd say to any man who worked for me, and I hear it.
It doesn't move me at all. Lev has never had a single thing in his life he couldn't put down and walk away from.
I have two, upstairs, asleep. One is the size of a lime and the other lied to me today to keep me out of a cage.
Somewhere out there a man held my child's existence in his hand and turned it in the light to watch me from a distance I couldn't close.
"Set it up," I tell him.
He holds my eyes one more second. Then he nods, once, the nod that means he thinks I'm wrong and will do it anyway because that's the job. He goes to make the calls.
I stand alone in the study a long time after the door shuts.
I stand at the window and look at the lit-up dark of the valley beyond.
I think about a man who spent forty minutes today in my wife's car.
He said the word for my unborn child out loud like it was something he had a right to hold.
He chose to do it on a road where I wasn't.
I think about the rule I have run my life on. A man puts his hands near what's mine, he doesn't keep his hands. Twenty years. Not once a gray area. Before tonight the rule had never needed to be anything more than that.
But I didn't go to the car.
I stand there a while longer, long enough to think through what Lev said about the box.
Six months is a long time to track something.
Six months ago Nora was still at Ardenhope, before the debt, before the fence, before me.
Whatever is in that box was worth watching for before I was in the picture.
I don't know what that means. It isn't good.
I add three men to the overnight rotation.
I check the gate log. I send Lev two words. East perimeter.
Then I go upstairs to lie to my wife.
She's awake when I come in. I can tell from the doorway, from the careful evenness of her breathing, the same tell I caught at the lake, the one that means she's lying there working something over and doesn't want me to know it.
"You're up late," she says, soft, into the dark.
"Couldn't sleep." I undress in the dark and get in beside her.
She turns into me, fits her whole length along my side, her cheek on my chest, one cold foot hooked over my shin.
She's warm the way she runs warm now, always a few degrees above what she used to be.
She smells of the lavender soap she orders in multiples because she decided once to like it and never reassessed.
Her whole body is against mine. I want her.
She's afraid and I'm not going to do anything about either of those things tonight.
I put my arm around her and feel how tight she's holding herself under the calm, the slight stiffness through her shoulders that her body can't iron out even when her voice goes soft.
"Everything okay?" she says. "You've got the work voice."
"Florist drama." The lie comes easy, worn smooth, and it's vile in my mouth now in a way it never used to be. "Nothing that can't wait for morning."
"Mm." She doesn't push it. She's got her own thing she's not pushing, I can feel it, the secret sitting in her the way mine is sitting in me, and we lie there in the dark, two people each guarding the other from a truth, each sure the silence is a kindness.
Her heartbeat is too fast for a woman about to sleep. So is mine. Neither of us says so.
The room is quiet. The dark outside the window is the same dark it always is, the canyon going black below the ridge. Nothing different about it. Everything different about it.
She drifts eventually, or pretends to. I hold my wife and I don't sleep.
I think about a woman who looked at a cop with a badge and a grudge today, who decided the bigger danger was me, my temper, my freedom, my life, who chose to carry it alone rather than risk losing me to a cell. She lied to protect me. Nobody has ever protected me. People hire me to protect them.
The fact that she got it backward, that she put herself between me and my own worst instinct because she'd rather face a sheriff alone than bury me, takes something out of me that I don't have a word for. I don't want one.
I have been, for forty years, a man who knew the price of everything including himself.
I have invoiced, collected, waited. Every protection I have ever given came with terms attached, understood by both parties, no sentiment, no confusion about the arrangement.
What she did today has no number. She paid it out of something else entirely.
Touch what's mine, you lose what you touched with.
That rule has held for twenty years. The new fact is that "what's mine" now has a heartbeat separate from mine, in a room inside the woman I'm holding, and the rule is louder for it, not quieter.
If anything it's turned into something I can barely manage, a thing with teeth, and the only reason Hutchins is still breathing tonight is that a dead cop is a war on my front door the week my wife is four months along. Not mercy. Not restraint. Arithmetic.
I'm going to get into bed beside her and not tell her I know, because she needs to believe the lie held, because if she knows I know she'll know I'm going after him. She'll try to stop me, and I can't be stopped, not on this, not with a man's eyes still on her in my head.
So I'll lie too. We'll lie to each other in the dark, both of us sure we're doing it to keep the other one safe. Tomorrow I'll stand in front of Wade Hutchins and find out whose dog he is.
It's the worst decision I could make. I make it anyway, because there is something in this world I would rather die than fail to protect, and a man who would rather die for a thing has already lost the only fight that ever kept him careful.