Lindsey and I had shot cans off rocks way out on the property here a few times, against a hillock, so the bullets wouldn’t fly. She was pretty good against a can. When the target is human, of course, nerves change everything.
More important, I couldn’t be sure that this so-called Caliphornia wouldn’t find her here.
“You’re in the public record of having lived here once,” I said.
“Nobody quoted me.”
“But the Union-Tribune named you as a tenant.”
“One time was all. My name in the paper, once. And I never gave out this address when I was living here. Nobody. This was my secret hideout. Where you helped me put myself back together. Sort of back together.” She wrung her thick ponytail, looking down at the table.
I remembered that night in the Pala Casino, later, when Lindsey crashed onto the stool next to me in one of those thinly peopled, regret-reeking bars found in casinos around the world. She looked like something the devil would eat for breakfast. Or had eaten.
“Welp,” she’d said, curling a long finger at the bartender. “Lost it all.”
“Maybe you should have stopped.”
She had looked at me, eyes skeptical and held steady by force of will. “I’m Lindsey Rakes. You’re obviously Saint Somebody. So the least you could say to someone who’s just lost her last dollar is, ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ Or ‘I go.’ Or however you saints say it.”
After Lindsey Rakes had finished her drink I paid for it, got up, and offered to get her a casino hotel room, a taxi, or a ride home. House security was circling. She took option C. Out Highway 76 she told me she didn’t have a home at precisely this minute, except for her Mustang, which, after a night in the backseat, made a woman her size feel like she’d been sawed in half by a bad magician.
“I didn’t just lose the money,” she had told me. “I’ve lost my son, my husband, my home, too. I can do without any of it except my son. John. Six years, seven months, and one day old. Not being able to see him is like living in a world where the sun won’t rise. What did y’all say your name was?”
I hadn’t, so I did.
“And how did you do at the tables tonight, Rolando?”
In fact, I hadn’t gambled much at all. I’d come to the casino to observe a man suspected of embezzlement by his friend and business partner. They were a two-partner practice specializing in family law. I came to discover that the man who had hired me was in fact the embezzler, and the friend/partner he had “suspected” of the crime — and who had lost about five thousand dollars that night by my loose count — was an addicted gambler but a reasonably honest law partner.
I wasn’t thrilled being stuck with a drunk hard-luck case who had nowhere to go, but I did what I thought was right. I usually do. It’s a blessing and a curse.
“I can take you back to the casino hotel or put you up for the night,” I had told her. “There’s an empty casita on my property and it locks.”
“Empty casita?”
“Furnished. I rent them out.”
She was leaning back against the door of my pickup truck. The hills around us were dark. In the faint moon-and-dashboard glow I could see the pale shape of her face and the glint in her eyes as she deliberated. “Kinda Norman Batesy.”
“Pretty much.”
“You’re big and not real pretty, but you don’t look mean enough to worry about.”
“It’s the little pretty ones you have to watch.”
“Marine?”
“Once upon a time.”
“I was Air Force. Lieutenant Lindsey Rakes. I hate being this drunk.”
I didn’t have anything useful to say about Lieutenant Lindsey Rakes’s drunkenness or hatred thereof. As a man who has overdone certain things in his life, I know that the world won’t change, but you can. Over the six months she lived in my casita, I saw her battle the booze and the gambling and the Clark County Superior Court, which refused to allow Lindsey to visit her son more than one Saturday per month in a county facility adjacent to the jail. Lindsey had done okay with all that. Just barely okay.
Now, two and a half years since I’d first met her, it felt right but also surreal to be making her the same offer again. You could say full circle, but nothing in life is round. “Your old casita is taken, but three and four are vacant.”
“I’ve missed the Irregulars,” she said.
I call my tenants the Irregulars because they tend to be non-regulation human beings. And a changing cast.
“And I remember casita three was always vacant,” she said.
“For times like this.”
“I can’t pay you for protection, Roland. But I can make the rent.”
“Don’t worry about my time until we put a stop to this.”
I set my phone on the table, searched “Caliphornia,” got what I expected:
A picture of Governor Jerry Brown, wearing a mocked-up jeweled turban, “declaring himself caliph and establishing Sharia law in California.” He was actually signing AB 2845, designed to shield students from bullying in public schools.
And:
Caliphornia, a self-published futuristic suspense novel about an Arab Caliphate and runaway global warming.
“Caliphornia,” a song by Box O’Clox.
Barenakedislam.com, a website whose motto is “It isn’t Islamaphobia when they really ARE trying to kill you.”
Counter-jihad T-shirts with various anti-Muslim messages and images.
Such as Koran-Wipes toilet paper made from 100 percent recycled Korans.
Such as Hillary in a hijab.
Etc.
A fool’s parade on the Internet.
Rage and volume turned up high.
Made me wonder how America was going to make it through the next week.
I shook my head, closed it all down. Looked up to find Lindsey watching me. “You still have Hall Pass Two?”
“You bet I do.” My Cessna 182, to be more accurate. One of the older ones with the Lycoming engine and the bass roar of a beast when you punch it down the runway. I fly it for business and pleasure. There is a story behind it.
“And have you been really busy — privately investigating?”
“Just one open case right now,” I said.
“Something exciting?”
“Oxley,” I said, pointing to the poster that was stapled to one of the thick palm trunks that support the palapa. The poster featured a color photo of a hefty gray-striped cat. He looked peaceful. The photo was cropped so the cat seemed to sprawl in the middle of the flyer, as if lying on a cushion. LOST CAT was the headline. The surrounding text explained that Oxley was missing from his Fallbrook home as of a week ago, that he was much loved, and that his owner — Tammy Bellamy — was heartbroken. Oxley had “hypnotic green eyes” and weighed twenty-two pounds. Tammy had given me a stack of the posters, all professionally printed on very heavy and expensive card-stock, to aid my search and post on my travels. Cats could go far, she’d explained. By the time I got my wanted posters, there were already scores of them put up in and around Fallbrook — on power poles, roadside oak trees, stop signs and traffic light stanchions, storefronts, shop windows, walls and fences. I’d stapled this one to the palapa so the Irregulars could keep their eyes out.
“Tammy is elderly,” I said. “And she can’t actually pay me. Except in homemade jam.”
“I’ll bet the coyotes would help her find that cat,” said Lindsey.
I nodded, fearing that the cat had already been killed and eaten. Fallbrook was brimming with coyotes. If they hadn’t gotten him, then a car probably had. On the other hand, cats are great survivors, so maybe Oxley had found shelter in one of our many avocado or citrus groves, or on some relatively secure, fenced property. Or maybe someone had taken him in and knew nothing of Tammy Bellamy’s emotional plea for help.