The Prince Of Deadly Weapons Read online

  His beeper went off. He thought it was the old lady trying to invade his privacy with some annoying complaint or demand. But it was Romero.

  * * *

  ON WEEKENDS the General's granddaughters would sleep in the second bedroom of his cottage. Claudia would fix dinner and it gave them all a chance to be together, without Charles.

  Claudia was making her father a cocktail when headlights pulled into the long driveway. She bent up the blinds and tried to squint through an approaching spillway of light. The car parked near Charles' studio and as the driver's door opened she recognized it was Damon Romero.

  "I love having… the girls here overnight," said the General as he wheeled in from the bedroom hallway. "Sometimes, when… you've gone back to the hous e… I turn out all the lights and… I sit… by their door and… listen… to their breathing. I… love the sound. It's so peaceful…" He came up alongside his daughter, tired. "I did that… with you too."

  She looked at her father. The man in the pictures on the wall was gone. He was down to those perverse inches before the finality. His hand weakly gestured toward the window, "Who's out there?"

  "Damon Romero. He must be waiting for Charles."

  The old man's nostrils flushed. Claudia leaned down and kissed her father on the side of his head. The skin around his temple was like poorly colored plastic and the veins a stonewashed blue.

  She handed him his cocktail. He had to hold it with both hands, and even so, the ice kept rattling against the glass. It was heartbreaking enough for her and humiliating, she was sure, for him.

  Another set of headlights pooled at the end of the long dark driveway then turned. Claudia peeked through the blinds and asked her father, "The night Taylor died Romero was here. I saw him on the dock with Charles from my bedroom window just hours after. And Charles only meets him in the most discreet circumstances. Do you know how it is he ended up at Disappointment Slough as a witness?"

  The General still could not bring himself to look at the dead spot on the wall where Taylor's picture hung.

  Claudia felt her father's hesitancy. "I should have listened to you about Charles."

  "Rebellion is one of youth's… prerogatives."

  She turned to her father. "Not just youth, Daddy."

  The General saw a flood of light against the cottage wall, then it was gone. His daughter's stare was his stare, only more femininely applied.

  Claudia let go of the blinds. "The shit's home," she said. She knelt in front of her father's wheelchair and held his paper-light hands. "I know Charles has gone out of his way to humiliate you since you've been sick. But I have to ask about Taylor, in case I need to protect the girls later."

  * * *

  CHARLES GLANCED down at the cottage as he approached Damon, who was standing beside his car. "What's wrong?"

  "Rudd… he delivered that box to the Fenns."

  Charles stopped and leaned against the hood of his car uneasily. "How did that happen?"

  Romero walked over to Charles. "No one knows, he just showed up. But it gets worse." Romero folded his arms and looked down at the ground. "He made the Fenns open the box."

  "He made them?"

  "The kid said he dropped it and just wanted them to make sure everything was all right."

  "And they did it?"

  Romero's head cocked sideways. "What else could they do? They said Rudd didn't see anything but… he was in the hangar and things got ugly between him and Shane."

  The automatic sprinklers went off and they were covered by an expanding swath of droplets so they moved around to the far side of the cars.

  They huddled up facing each other. Charles took Romero by the arm. "What do you mean 'got ugly'?"

  "I got it all in pieces later." Romero was practically whispering now. "From Shane. You know Tommy is a lock box."

  Charles noticed a pale shift in the darkness down by the cottage. "Hold on."

  Romero followed Charles' eye line. A gray silhouette moved past a footlight that sided the driveway. It was Claudia.

  She saw Damon turn away as soon as he noticed it was her. "Maybe I should cover my eyes," she said in passing, "so we don't know we saw each other."

  "Go inside," Charles told her.

  Claudia, ever so quietly, ever so vindictively, said, "Secrets— secrets— secrets."

  * * *

  CHARLES CAME into the house not long afterward and found Claudia sitting at the top of the stairs. The confrontational pose, the hitch to her body as she began to take off her shoes, told him she was lying in wait.

  From the bottom of the stairs he raised his arm and jerked a thumb toward the driveway. "What was all that about?"

  "It's a good thing," she said, "I don't have a grand view of the world, and live only in small personal increments. I look to make sure my kids are happy. I look to make sure they are healthy. And I look to make sure they are safe. But you on the other hand—"

  "What was that comment about… secrets, secrets, secrets?"

  From a sitting position she flung her shoes down the long hallway toward her bedroom. "You're not my father and you're not Nathan, but you're arrogant enough to believe you could rule them or replace them, just run right over them. But Charles, you're not strong enough for what's in your head, not smart enough and not nearly brave enough. And the bodies you keep around you like that Cuban boat salesman with the white patent leather shoes are not strong enough, not smart enough and not brave enough to help you."

  "Do you know who your father and Nathan are? Do you?"

  She stared at him as she undid her shirt's top button, not answering.

  "They ran drugs for the army then sleazed their way up from there. They're the Fenns, Claudia. That's who they are. They are Tommy and Shane and the only difference is your father and Nathan had a better education when they started out; they had a little more money and a few up-end connections."

  She undid the next button. "And that is all the difference in the world." Then the next button. "You're a minor player in all this, Charles. Remember that and you'll be all right."

  "What was that comment outside meant to be?"

  "Strictly background. You're that faceless douche who works for the band, not the band."

  "Answer me."

  She undid the last shirt button and while he stood there holding onto the stairway bannister waiting for her to say something she took off her shirt and flung it down the long hall toward her shoes.

  She sat there squared up staring down on him. Her skin was dark and beautiful, her nipples black against the white bra. He knew she was humiliating him.

  "Since when did you start wearing a bra around your father?"

  The corners of her face pulled back like some dangerous cat's, but before she spoke she let her insides get just calm enough. "When you got busted and my father bailed you out, how do you think you happened to get busted?"

  He did not understand why this conversation had started, or where it was going. The whole night was like one aberrant dream crashing into another.

  "Your father, right? Is that what you're gonna tell me now?"

  "No, it wasn't my father… it was me."

  Obscene numbness as Charles repeated to himself what he had just heard. "This is a lie to hurt me?"

  "I wanted you and I did what I wanted to get what I wanted. Now, here I am. All the poorer for it. A perfect bit of truth, Charles. What I wanted at twenty is useless now. Better I wanted nothing, or better I knew that to begin with."

  "This is a lie meant to hurt me."

  "It's meant to warn you. To give you pause." She stood. "I live in small personal increments. I have no grand view of the world. I will lookout for the girls. I will lookout for my health. And I will lookout for my security."

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  DANE SAT THROUGH the night and watched the slate dark give way slowly through the bay window. He watched the muted tones of dawn edge into the heavy arch of branches beyond the roof line like some soundless mass unti
l it came to rest upon the desk and chair of a dead son.

  Dane walked outside and sat on the stone steps and let the ageless light of the earth rise upon him. This silent invocation, this vision of unknown genius, and the still night waters of Disappointment Slough were soon alive with sparkling tones more golden than any golden silence.

  And there alone with the cold dew upon his breath Dane could imagine all the rich dreams that had moved along its steady course. The smoke of a thousand fires and prayers that had guided its shores. A continent of men and women who had worn the humble seasons and the hard seasons with faulted but honest human determination only to find they had passed on, had passed away.

  And with them all, the flaws and blemishes of evil purpose, the sworn allies of arrogance and greed, the hostile dramas that took an unknowing someone from the back, the sinister motives disguised as a smiling piper, those who worked the shadows of malevolence and murder.

  They were all moving upon him, moving around him, within him. The heartbreaking and beautiful contradictions of untamed and invincible forces and he felt shamelessly inadequate trying to impose his will upon events, upon his own life. He stood, and as he often did, folded his hands behind his back. He stared inwardly out upon Disappointment Slough.

  How could anything he felt that huge be scaled or mastered? How could anything that vast and high be overcome or escaped? And what truth was hidden beyond its end?

  He remained that way a long time, although it was only minutes before the sun streamed across his face. He then walked back to Taylor's cabin to call Nathan.

  * * *

  NATHAN SAT in the drape closed bedroom while Ivy slept. He looked to the clock on the table beside his chair. The Sunday morning shift at the yacht club had arrived by now. Sidewalks were being hosed down, the dining room vacuumed, brunch prepared.

  The frightful monotony, those sleepwalking time-in, time-out hours the servile live through suddenly had a great deal more pull when compared to the pollutions of uncertainty he was going through.

  In the living room his phone rang and he rose silently to answer.

  * * *

  NATHAN ASKED Dane to meet him in Lathrop, at the property which was ordained to be the medical center. The site was an abandoned 5,800-acre farm that bordered an easy turn in the San Joaquin River at the end of Dos Reis Road. Nathan said he needed to talk and that he would be alone.

  * * *

  NATHAN SAT on the treads of a huge yellow bulldozer that had cut the first crisscross of roads for the trucks to follow. He drank a beer and looked out over this rugged expanse toward the great whale-backed outline of Mount Diablo rising in the eastern distance.

  With all that confronted him one thought-plaguing ache stood out. Had Taylor truly felt so much like a failure that it brought him to the brink of suicide? Or could it point more clearly to the fact he had found out before his death who Nathan Hale Greene was behind the pretense?

  Why all last night and all this morning the same thought-plaguing ache without conclusion? Even after Ivy had confessed to him what she knew. And then, he saw why.

  * * *

  IT WAS a brusque, dry wind that kicked up the bone dry dirt along the main road that led to where Nathan sat on the treads of a bulldozer and saw a cavalry line of climbing cake dry earth begin to snake its way cautiously toward him, rising and falling with the broken contours of the land, disappearing behind swales of tall brush only to appear again through brittle acres of thicket, moving toward him slowly, cautiously, finding its way through that maze of pitched and rugged half cut bulldozed pathways and pulling that column of rising dust along through which he could begin to make out the black hood of Dane's Rampage.

  Yes, he saw now why all last night, all this morning that thought plaguing ache. Here was another boy who might well have discovered who he really was. For a moment Nathan felt as if his own son's ghost was coming to have the talk that he dreaded would some day surface and he would have to admit who and what he really was.

  The day was beautiful and clear. The world wide open and warm. Nathan was a man who had committed atrocities and would again if need be for his survival, no doubt about that he knew, he knew as he watched the pickup come down a short ravine facing and into the open flats where the bulldozer was parked. He knew, yet why at this very moment, why did he feel vulnerable, in need of protection from a force, a feeling, that seemed to be within him?

  * * *

  THE PICKUP came to a stop. Nathan was framed within that filthy windshield. He waved, and held up a beer. He smiled, but Dane could tell it was only a creation.

  Dane looked all about him to see if they were truly alone. He made sure the gun couldn't be seen in the pocket of his black suede coat, if it got down to that.

  Dane waved back, then he stepped out of the truck.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  BESIDE NATHAN ON the bulldozer treads was a paper bag that Dane could only see in part. As he approached, Nathan reached either into that bag or toward something out of Dane's view. Dane stopped and his hand went to the pocket with the gun, until Nathan extended an arm. He was holding a can of beer.

  "Are we celebrating, or commiserating?"

  Nathan breathed a stray huff. "Somewhere in between probably."

  Dane's hand moved from the coat pocket and took the beer. As he opened it and drank Nathan looked down a long wash toward the San Joaquin. It was eleven o'clock in the morning. The winter-brown brush and branches on the few standing trees between them and the river flagged with wind.

  "What did you want to talk about, Nathan?"

  "I was going over the architectural renderings this morning and we are just about on the spot where the main building for the center will be. The hospital suites, recovery rooms." He pointed toward that skin blue roadway of water. "What would you have said if you opened your eyes the first time after surgery and saw that?"

  Dane looked to the San Joaquin and beyond, where black fields were being turned by a tractor whose huge wheels created two pillars that moved along in perfect unison then spiraled skyward together.

  "I know what I did say." Dane turned to Nathan. "I promised the person who had willed me their eyes that I would try and see the world more clearly and well, from then on."

  "Yes," said Nathan, "yes." His tone ached with understanding.

  From beyond a swale came the sound of children. Then a boy riding a bike rose in silhouette on the peak of a short ridge maybe a hundred yards from that bulldozer and shouted to unseen friends.

  Nathan stared in their direction. If anything violent had been set to happen it was now a simple impossibility and Dane was left to wait.

  In his taupe silks port coat, blue silk shirt, gabardine pants, and simply beautiful shoes which Nathan wore with no socks, contrasted by the poor boy beer and his dusky movie theater looks that stared out from a bulldozer throne and into a landscape of perfect western proportions, it was not hard to imagine Nathan as a portrait of existence from almost any quarter of life. A man capable of defending any conclusion, of capturing any dream, of destroying whatever was inconvenient.

  At that moment and in that man Dane saw himself more clearly than he ever had. And he saw Nathan more clearly than he ever had.

  The boy on the bike was joined by two smaller silhouettes running. One was a girl, the other a boy holding a kite who began to sprint the length of the weedy ridge top trying to give that paper bird the air it needed to fly.

  Nathan glanced at Dane, who sipped his beer. Nathan wanted to read Dane's eyes but he could not as Dane was wearing the sunglasses he usually did to protect them.

  "What do you want…?" asked Nathan. Dane did not answer, forcing Nathan into an uncomfortable pause, so he fleshed out the thought a little more with…"Out of life, I mean."

  "Are you asking what I want my life to be like?"

  "Define it any way that's meaningful to you."

  Dane stepped into the shadow of that huge monster bull of a ground mover. He leane
d against the blade and grinned. "I want to be God," he said, "without all the legwork."

  Nathan looked across the short distance between them and he had to cover his eyes to see against the sun that Dane was, in fact, smiling.

  "On the chance that choice has been reserved," Dane said, "I'll settle for the chance at a life successfully achieved."

  "Could you live here, in this place, make this world, our world, your home?"

  On that Dane turned away and followed the fleeting and lithe voice of that small girl on the ridge top with his eyes. She had the kite now and was cheering it skyward as she ran.

  She was taller, her legs longer, and she could run faster than the smaller boy. The kite was airborne and the wind stronger now and the red black span of wings kept breaking upward in fluted spurts then would fall back, and the girl tried to run faster and overcome those stays of wind, and the boy on the bike wheeled in and around her and the littler boy had all he could do to keep up.

  "Who wouldn't want a place this beautiful to call home?" said Dane. He went to say more, hesitated, drank some beer, watched those kids on the ridge top. And as he did, Nathan saw Dane's mouth and cheeks pull back and crease as if contesting the taste of a thought.

  "But I wonder, Nathan, does anyone ever truly feel at home and happy? Even in a place like this?" Dane emptied his beer. Then he squeezed the can till the metal skin crinkled inward. "Or does anything this beautiful leave us homeless in some way? Disappointed in some way? Because we can't measure up to it?"

  "What do you mean? There's people here that care for you, that want you to be happy. Essie… the Carusos… Ivy… and don't forget me. I want you to be happy."

  Nathan put his head back and killed the last of his beer. He tossed the empty toward the brush. "You're coming off a few hard years." He reached into the bag and pulled out two more beers. "And you're young. And youth is such a fuckin'"— he stuttered the word—"killer."