“I intend to.”
Tim pulled out into the street. When he glanced into his rearview mirror, Rayner was still standing in front of the house, watching him drive off.
13
AS TIM TURNED into his cul-de-sac, he spotted Dumone leaning against a parked Lincoln Town Car at the far curb, arms crossed, like a waiting chauffeur. Tim pulled up beside him and rolled down his window.
Dumone winked. “Touche.”
Tim glanced around to see if any of the neighbors had taken note of them. “Touche yourself.”
Dumone gestured to the backseat with a tilt of his head. “Why don’t you come for a ride?”
“Why don’t you get off my street?”
“I wanted to apologize.”
“For being rude?”
Dumone’s laugh was worn, and it crackled around the edges like an old LP. “Christ no. For underestimating you. That hard-sell, tough-cop bit. At my age I should know better.”
Tim’s lips pressed together in a half grin.
Dumone jerked his head again. “Come on. Hop in.”
“If it’s just the same, why don’t you take a ride with me?”
“Fair enough.” When Dumone pulled his frame into Tim’s passenger seat, he let out a textured groan like a bellows collapsing. He removed a Remington from his hip and a small. 22 from an ankle holster and set them in the center console. “Just so you can listen without being distracted.”
Tim drove a few blocks, pulled into the deserted back parking lot of Ginny’s old elementary school, and killed the lights. Dumone’s chest jerked with a held-in cough. Tim gazed out the windshield so he could pretend for Dumone’s sake he didn’t notice.
“This that school where those three teenagers went on that shooting spree?”
“No,” Tim said. “That was at the other Warren, a high school south of downtown.”
“Kids shooting kids.” Dumone shook his head, grunted, then shook his head again.
For a while they watched the unlit school in silence.
“When you get on in life,” Dumone said, “you start viewing the world a bit differently. Your idealism doesn’t die, but it’s mitigated. You start thinking, hell, maybe life’s just what we make it, and maybe our job is to leave this place a little better than it was when we came in. I don’t know. Could be all old-man disconnect. Maybe that poet was right, that youth holds knowledge and everything we learn as we get older takes us away from it.”
“I don’t read poetry.”
“Yeah. Neither do I. The wife…” Even in the dark his eyes shone jarringly blue, the blue of newborns and summer skies and other things discordant and mawkish. He worked at a hangnail, his head down-bent, skin texturing in rough folds beneath his chin. He reminded Tim of an old lion. “You see, Tim-is it all right if I call you Tim?”
“Of course.”
“To try to find meaning, give meaning, to shape things and people for the better, you have to navigate through a gray zone. And to do so you need ethics. You need to be even and just. You are both.”
“What about the others?”
“Rayner is vain, and dumb in the ways vanity makes you, but he’s also brilliant. And he’s extremely competent at reading people and cases.”
“And Robert?”
“You have a problem with Robert?”
“He just seems a little”-Tim searched for the most displeasing adjective he could conjure-“nonlinear.”
“He’s a great operator. Loyal to a fault. Some of his connections are a touch loose, but he always falls in.”
“He and his brother don’t seem particularly eager to play betas to my alpha.”
“They need to learn from you, Tim. They just don’t know it yet. They felt their operating skills were sufficient. They didn’t see a need for you, but me, Rayner, and Ananberg made clear we weren’t willing to free them up or even review cases without someone like you in place. We need this thing to run not just well but seamlessly. And you’re really the only candidate within our reach who has the skill set to make that happen.”
“How did you determine that?”
Dumone’s lips set in a manner to suggest mild annoyance. “Rayner found you after Ginny’s death-he’d been putting together profiles of all-stars in the L.A. law-enforcement community. Running psych assessments and whatever other mad-scientist crap he gets up to at that office of his. Once he zeroed in, the boys went to work gathering intel as best they could. The more we saw, the more we liked.”
“Who’s to say ‘the boys’ will fall in under my command?”
“Because I’ll tell them to.”
“They’re afraid of you.”
“No. Respectful. Intimidated, maybe. I met them right after their sister’s death, helped them find a way through some of their grief. Not the grief-group couch-lay crap, but the real deal. How I handled it. Cops. How cops deal. You help someone when they’re raw like that, they never forget. They’re always grateful. And they might look up to me a bit more than I deserve. They’re different from you, different from me, even. They need guidance. I keep them close at hand, keep an eye on them.”
“Sounds like a case of keeping your enemies nearer.”
“An overstatement,” Dumone said. “They’re solid men.”
“For what you’re proposing, they need to be more than that.”
“No. They need a leader.” He coughed again, moistly, into a fist. “A new leader.”
“That might not be a role I want.” Tim reached for the keys and turned the engine over.
“I know. That’s why I chose you.” Dumone sighed heavily but without theatricality. “What none of the others understand is that joining the Commission for you would be a sacrifice, not a release. You’d have to be willing to renounce your values, your righteousness. You’d be vilified by precisely the kinds of organizations and individuals you’ve always valued.” He reached over and tapped two knobby fingers against Tim’s chest. “And even worse, you’d feel a hypocrite in your own heart. But in calmer moments, when flag waving and slogans no longer seem quite so weighty, you’ll also realize that you took direct action that had direct results. It’s tough to lead the way when you’re standing on a soapbox, even if that soapbox is platinum or sterling or made of the wood of the True Cross.” He shifted noisily to face Tim, bearing his weight on his hip. “If you do this, there will be fewer girls raped, fewer people murdered. And maybe at twilight, in our final reckoning, that’s all we’ll really have to hold on to.”
It struck Tim that in the respect Dumone so naturally commanded, in his gravity and acumen, resided a deep moral authority, and that any hope for justice apart from and beyond the law resided precisely in such integrity embodied in like individuals.
“When someone is mugged, raped, killed, society is the victim,” Dumone continued. “Society has a right to assert its position. We don’t represent the victims, we represent our community. We can be that voice. What you want to try to accomplish, it can be done here.” He smiled, warmly, and it attenuated the pain in his eyes. “Something to think about at least.”
•“Are you out of your fucking mind?” Dray leaned over the table, her eyes the same cornered-cat intensity they were when she lifted weights or ran. A piece of popcorn fell from the fold in her sweatshirt; she’d just gotten back from a Meg Ryan movie with Trina, the most girlie of her friends and the only one with whom she indulged her occasional appetite for maudlin movies and pedicures and other things she thought unbefitting a POST-certified female range master with a hundred-fifty-pound bench press.