“And you’ve got a new one.”
“I’ve got a tape of the payments you made to Hy. I’ve already made copies,” he lied. “I’ve packed them and addressed them to the networks, the attorney general, and the president. And if anything happens to me, or Li, or my family, the lawyers will get them out of the safe deposit boxes and mail them. Anything. If my father has a car accident, I’m going to blame you. If my mother gets mugged in a shopping center some night, I’m going to blame you. If Li has people following her around Little Saigon, I’ll blame you. If I wake up in a bad mood, I’m going to blame you, and the tapes go out. I never want to see your face again, DeCord. Or hers, except when she brings the prisoners home.”
DeCord glared at him, then nodded hopefully.
“The alternative is I can call the cops right now and they’ll take Lucia down for conspiracy to kidnap, murder, fraud. Your deal with Hanoi will go straight to hell.”
“Don’t let that happen, Chuck,” said DeCord. “It’s all ready. I know a lot of things have gone—”
“And I want a prisoner named Michael Strauss to be the first one off that plane, if it ever comes in. That’s what I want out of all this.”
Lucia nodded.
DeCord stood. “You’ve got your deal. I promise we’ll forget about you and what you know. I’ll have our attorneys put it in writing, and yours can approve it. I promise the U.S. government will use its power to protect you and Li under any circumstances. But those promises don’t mean a thing if we don’t bring the POWs home. Don’t send out those tapes, Chuck. Don’t write about this. Just let me and Lucia get this thing done.”
Frye stepped forward, put the shotgun barrel under Paul DeCord’s chin, and eased him back down onto the sofa. DeCord closed his eyes as Frye pressed the weapon harder against his neck. The two MIA Committee workers — an eager young man and a pretty woman who had permed her hair to look like Lucia’s — hustled into the living room from the sliding glass door. They froze, lips open and eyes wide. With the barrel of the.12 gauge, he pried DeCord’s chin toward them. Frye looked at the volunteers and Lucia, then at DeCord’s watering eyes, then down at his blood-splattered T-shirt.
“You’ve got your deal, Chuck,” DeCord slurred.
Frye pushed the weapon harder into his neck. “I’d rather have my brother.”
He stepped away, took the briefcases, and backed out of Lucia’s house into the warm Laguna night.
Frye parked along Coast Highway at Main Beach and walked along the sand to the old blue apartments. He could feel his heart breaking. Above him were sky and a fractional moon that plainly didn’t care.
Cristobel met him at the door. “I hoped you’d end up here sooner or later.”
He looked at her. She may as well have come from another planet.
When she held him her arms were good and strong, and he could feel her body shaking against his own.
“They killed him.”
“I know.”
“They killed him.”
“Chuck.”
“Don’t let go of me now.”
“No, I won’t.”
He came apart.
Chapter 31
A few days later, Edison captained the Absolute out of Newport Harbor, followed by a Coast Guard escort and a flotilla of little boats with photographers on them. Edison promptly lost them all when he got outside the warning buoys, gunning the twin diesels to thirty knots and heading west, Frye stood next to his father as they sped to sea, the sun hot through the black wool of his suit coat. Looking back to the deck he saw Hyla and Li and Crawley: three dark figures sitting amidst the polished teak and gleaming white of the ship.
Far out, Edison cut the engines, then he and his father joined the others. Hyla read from Psalms and Matthew. Crawley added something he had written. Edison wept. Li tilted the urn, and Bennett finally mingled with the ocean he had once loved, wisps of dust consumed by a gray Pacific.
Frye sat in the cottage with his father that night. Edison poured two big snifters of brandy that neither of them touched. He began, several times, to say something, but after each start he seemed to lose interest and stared instead at the dead fireplace. Edison’s favorite dog sat at his feet. Finally he looked at his son, then around the room. “You’re in line for all this now, son. We should talk about it. Do you even want it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You said you wanted back in.”
“I want in. I don’t want the stuff.”
“Big job, running Frye Ranch.”
“I’m not the one to do it. But I’d sure like to feel I was welcome.”
“There hasn’t been a day in your life you weren’t welcome here.”
Frye thought back. “It was a good place to be, Pop.”
Edison looked at his brandy. “I know there were things I could have done differently. What I thought was best might not have been. I made some mistakes. Can you forgive me?”
“You never did anything that needs my forgiving.”
His father breathed deeply. “I know I locked you out, son. Bennett was always so easy — I’d just point him the way I thought he should go, and he’d take right off. It’s an honor when a son listens to a father. It made me feel... like what I’d done was worth something. Like I had something to offer that was good. Debbie was my only daughter, and I let her wrap me around her little finger. I loved being able to spoil her. But you, Chuck, you had your own notions. You kind of scared me. You made me doubt myself, and I’d never done that before. I blamed you for her, I admit that. Deep inside, I did. And every step you took away from what I wanted you to be, I felt like it was a step away from me. If there’s anything I should have done differently, it was to realize that my job on planet Earth wasn’t to make you into a little Edison Frye. I guess a part of me wanted a couple of sons to be just like me. Maybe I figured if you were like me, you wouldn’t see what a hard-headed unforgiving old bastard I really was.”
“That’s one of the things I loved about you, Pop. Running against you was like running against an ocean. It made me strong. I love you for it.”
Frye watched his father battle back the tears. His chin quivered, then stilled. He drank the brandy in one gulp. “Thank you for what you did, Chuck. For the Paradiso.”
“Let’s start over, Pop.”
“I’d really like to do that son.”
“Do one thing for me. Love your wife instead of somebody else. She could use some right now.”
“I know. I will. I do.”
Long after Edison had gone to bed, Frye sat up with his mother in the big house. They made a fire because neither of them could seem to get warm, and finished off the bottle of brandy. It was the first time Frye had ever seen Hyla drunk. For some reason, they kept remembering little stupid things that were funny. All of those things had happened a long time ago. The silences between their quiet laughter were longer than the laughter itself, and Frye knew that neither of them was fooling the other.
He lay in his old room the rest of the night, staring out the window.
There were official matters, though the first of them hadn’t seemed very official at all. Paul DeCord and three men in coveralls had showed up at the cave-house just after he returned from Cristobel’s. They bagged Burke’s body. They removed the blood stains from the cave with a light blue organic solution, the plastic bottle of which actually said FDA APPROVED. One of the agents noted that it was great on melted surfboard wax. They used a portable vacuum with incredible suction to remove trace evidence. They washed and waxed his hardwood floor. When everything was just as it had been, they used a small bellows-like article to apply a fresh layer of dust in the disturbed places. Frye gave him Cristobel’s gun, which DeCord assured him would be destroyed forthwith.