“Where you been?” Shotgun asked me.
Yes, where had I been?
“Navy Reserve,” John D said. I straightened my shoulders. I was tempted to try out a salute, but that might be pushing things.
Shotgun shook his head. “That wouldn’t work for me. I get seasick.”
I could think of other problems that might interfere with Brother Nehemiah’s navy career as well, but I didn’t want to go there.
We turned to leave.
“John D,” Nehemiah said, “how come you ain’t never joined us for a service? We must’ve invited you a dozen times. It’s where the Real Word is being spoken.”
“You mean to tell me the rest of those words I’ve been hearing my whole life ain’t even been real?” John D’s eyes twinkled.
“Yes sir, that’s right.” Nehemiah’s voice grew fervent. Apparently, irony is no match for a brain washed clean by the Real Word.
John D smiled. “Well, Brother Nehemiah, you are a man of conviction. I respect that.” Nehemiah preened a little at that.
“You take care now,” Nehemiah said. He strolled back to the fence and walked off whistling.
John D looked over at me and grinned. “What do you think, son?”
“I’m impressed,” I said. “Where did you learn to fib like that?”
“I used to be in law enforcement, just like you,” he said.
Which explained his quick draw.
“I worked for the Sheriff’s department for a few years when I was just out of high school. Till I was old enough to take over for my daddy.” John D waved his arms at the dead and dying trees around us. “Good thing Nehemiah there don’t know squat about almonds. He woulda realized nobody’s gonna grow nothing on these trees.” The lines in his face deepened as he surveyed the ghostly grove. “Well, I’d best be off.”
“Want a lift back to your place?”
“I wouldn’t say no,” he said. “My knee’s tore up something awful.”
We got in my car and lurched our way back to the gravel. He directed me onto a second dirt road, just off to the left.
“Let me ask you something,” I said as we bumped up the drive. “What kind of interactions have you had with the Children of Paradise?”
“They never give me trouble,” John D replied. “’Bout the only time I see them is when I’m out walking my land. They’ll be down there singing or doing some ritual or other. I wave to them. They wave back. End of story.”
“Have they been your neighbors long?”
“They moved in maybe a dozen years ago. This other guy was their leader then-don’t recollect his name either-but he died a few years back. The new guy, I’ve just met him the one time, when they were having problems with the hog farm.”
“They were stealing power, right?” I said.
“Yeah, but they’ve always got some kind of fight going with the hog farmers. The Children of Paradise don’t eat meat, and when the wind blows the wrong direction, they get a face full of hog stink.” John D punched my arm lightly. “Hey, I’m not exactly a fan myself. When the wind blows southeast, I smell it all the way over here. Some L.A. outfit owns it, prolly the Mob, and like most business owners, they don’t have to deal directly with the stench they create.”
The Mob again.
He caught my look. “Don’t you know a lot of the big pig farms are owned by the Mafia?”
What I didn’t know about the Mob was clearly a trough-load. “Tell me more.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “The Eye-talians got into garbage collection a hundred years back. Nobody else wanted to haul waste. They saw the need, so they took it over. If you’re in the garbage-hauling business, why not pig farming, too? One hand feeds the other, you know? Pretty dang smart, you ask me.”
I didn’t know whether this was true or just the ramblings of an old man’s imagination.
An image flickered through my mind: Ostrich loafers mincing up a dirt road with a basket of gourmet goodies, and a contract that stunk as bad as this hog farm apparently did.
I tucked the vision away for future reference. The correlation seemed far-fetched, but at this stage I was still just gathering dots-I’d start connecting them later.
The dirt road ended in the front yard of an ancient wooden one-story ranch structure set within a small cluster of trees. A dim light glowed on the porch. The rest of the house was steeped in shadows. It looked like a very lonely place.
“Care to come in?” His voice was casual, but I knew better.
“Sure.”
I followed him inside. His house was clean and sparsely decorated; a big recliner and a flat-screen television dominated the main room. A few family photographs decorated the mantel. John D gestured me to sit on a small leather sofa pushed against the wall, and disappeared into the kitchen.
He came back with two icy-cold beers. I knew I liked this guy. He sank into his recliner with a contented grunt. We sipped in silence.
The room seemed to darken a little.
I glanced over at John D.
He was deep in thought, and that thought was making him sad. I just waited. None of my business. He turned to me.
“I wasn’t lying,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“I wasn’t lying, not completely. I did have a son called Charlie, and he was in the Navy Reserves.” I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I said nothing.
“Little bits of him are all over some godforsaken road in Al Asad,” John D continued. “The rest is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. He got blowed up, making the world safe, at least that’s what I used to think. Now I don’t know what to believe.”
I felt the ache of his loss, resonating deep in my own chest. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“So am I, son. So am I.” Then John D folded the grief tight and tucked it back in, wherever it was he stored it.
“So, Ten, you never did tell me what our robe-wearing friends did to get you to come all the way out here. Anything I oughta be worried about?”
I told him my Barbara Maxey bedtime story, taking my time. I was curious to see what he thought. He mulled it over, frowning as he drew the same conclusions I had.
“You’re thinking they might have sent someone after her,” he said. “Maybe kilt her because she broke away?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “I don’t have any evidence to support that scenario.”
For the second time tonight, a vivid image invaded my cerebrum.
Flat, spatulate thumbs, pressing, squeezing, crushing the life out of Barbara’s fragile neck as she stared up in horror at a hirsute face and crazy, leering eyes.
I shuddered. Maybe my brain didn’t know enough yet, but my gut sure did.
“You figure something out?” John D was watching me.
“No. Maybe. I don’t know.”
We lapsed into a second silence, lost in thought.
“You ever see things?” I asked John D. “You know, with your mind’s eye?”
He thought about it. “Sometimes I see these streaks of light, like ghosts. Floaties, I call ’em. That what you mean?”
“More like actual visions,” I said.
“Can’t say that I do. Why? Do you?”
I was too far down the road to turn back. Anyway, for some reason I already trusted this man.
“Before I was a cop, I spent a lot of time in a monastery.”
“No fooling. You were a priest?”
“Not that kind of monastery. A Buddhist one. In India. My father’s a practicing monk over there. Anyway, my teachers encouraged me and my fellow novices to notice any pictures that sprang to mind-you know, visualizations that arose without even trying. The more I noticed them, the more they seemed to happen.”
“You talking about ESP?”
“It’s more like staying attuned to what’s happening beneath the surface, and somehow picking it up in visual form.”
“Like dowsing for water,” John D said. “Only it’s your mind that’s bent like a branch.”
“Exactly. One time, I was maybe seventeen, I was called to the bedside of an old monk. My father thought it would be instructive. The monk was somewhere around eighty-he didn’t know exactly when he was born-and deep in his final passage.”