Mission Canyon (12 page)

‘‘Brand tracked you down,’’ I said.

"Exactly. But how the hell did he know where to find us?"

‘‘Let me get the chair,’’ I said.

He started to protest, but, perhaps seeing sweat on my upper lip, acquiesced. He transferred to the driver’s seat and I put the wheelchair into the back. I barely got in before he jammed the car in gear and pulled out.

‘‘Brand tracked us. He hunted us down.’’ He drove uphill, looking for a place to turn around. ‘‘How? Did Isaac mention we were going riding to people at work? Maybe Brand called Firedog and they told him.’’

The road twisted upward for a quarter mile and dead-ended. He turned around.

‘‘He must have watched Isaac leave work, and followed him. He waited until we cleared downtown, until we got into the hills, when nobody else was in sight.’’

His voice was returning to normal, but he was now consciously ignoring the callousness of the facts: Brand knew all along that Jesse was riding with Isaac, and didn’t care.

‘‘And there’s a big piece of the puzzle I don’t understand. ’’ He gave me a stark look.

I gave it back. ‘‘The woman.’’

‘‘You got it.’’

Mystery number one. Who was the woman in the car with Franklin Brand?

‘‘What did she do after the crash? She certainly didn’t leap out and try to help us. And what does that tell you?’’ he said.

It hit me. ‘‘That she was Brand’s accomplice.’’

‘‘From the start.’’

That’s when his cell phone started ringing. It was in the glove compartment. I got it and answered, ‘‘Jesse Blackburn’s phone.’’

‘‘Jesse Blackburn’s boss,’’ Lavonne Marks said. ‘‘Jesse Blackburn’s late.’’

I cringed. ‘‘Hold on.’’

‘‘No time. Tell him to get his keister into the office, pronto.’’

I ran out to the curb in front of my house with clothes for him: a button-down shirt, a sport coat, and a tie. He was two hours late for work and didn’t have time to drive home, didn’t even have time to get out of the car and come inside to change.

I saw him pulling off his T-shirt. My neighbor Helen Potts, watering her plants with a handheld sprinkler, gave him the gimlet eye. When I opened the driver’s door and she saw him bare chested, the sprinkler veered wildly. Maybe she thought his jeans were coming off next.

I handed him the shirt. He whipped it on and started buttoning it up.

‘‘Lavonne’s going to kill me.’’ He stretched his neck to do the top button on the shirt. ‘‘Tie.’’

I handed it over. He looked at it, said, ‘‘Tweety Bird?’’

‘‘The alternative was a happy face. With a bullet hole through its forehead.’’

He started knotting. ‘‘You’re confiscating my joke ties?’’

‘‘As a public service.’’ I handed him the jacket.

He threw it on the passenger seat and fired up the engine. ‘‘I’ll call later.’’

The tires squealed. I watched him go, thinking that Lavonne would understand. She would grumble at him, because Sanchez Marks was her pride and passion, built up over two decades from the sole practice she started as an ungainly girl from Philly, barreling her way into Santa Barbara’s genteel legal fraternity. She demanded excellence from everyone at the firm, most of all herself. But she wouldn’t kill Jesse for being late, not today, for beneath her brisk intensity lay a soft spot for his heart and tenacity.

I ran my fingers through my hair. A grab bag of fears rattled in my mind. Biggest was the thought that Brand had confederates. If he was working with Mickey Yago, and if they wanted to intimidate Jesse, how far would they go?

I turned toward my garden gate. As I did, a sports car cruised up the street, honking and flashing its headlights. It was a little red Mazda with Oklahoma plates. An arm poked out the driver’s window, waving.

I stood rooted to the sidewalk. She’d already seen me. It was too late to run, and if I dove into the hedge, Helen Potts would rat me out.

The car pulled up and a woman jumped out, squealing, ‘‘Evan!’’

It was my cousin Taylor Delaney Boggs. She skipped toward me, arms extended, shivering her fingers like a Fosse dancer. Her nails matched the red paint on the Mazda.

She said, ‘‘Hello, darling.’’

That’s
darling
, rhymes with
marlin
.

And she was on me, gym-strong arms rocking me back and forth, one-two, like a metronome. Her Talbots ensemble was crisply pressed. Her honey brown highlights rose above her scalp like solar flares riding a trail of hair spray.

Her nails gripped my shoulders. ‘‘Look at you, Californian to the last inch.’’ She smoothed a lock of hair away from my eyes. ‘‘This is such an adorable little hairstyle. It looks like you . . . jumped out of a plane.’’

‘‘When did you get in?’’

‘‘Night before last, drove from Oklahoma City.’’ She stared at me with eyes the color of blueberry pie. ‘‘You don’t sound surprised to see me. Who told?’’

‘‘Brian.’’

She stamped her foot. ‘‘Spoilsport.’’

Jesus, Rapture me, I thought.

‘‘Ed Eugene’s working seven-on, seven-off on one of y’all’s offshore platforms. It’s amazing you can see them from the beach. After all this time with him commuting to the North Sea, now I can go and wave to him.’’

She tilted her head. Waiting. ‘‘Well? Aren’t you going to ask me in?’’

I felt myself gesturing toward the garden gate, heard my voice inviting her in. I was trapped. Whatever I said, whatever she saw, would be reported to my family within twenty-four hours. But I had no reason to refuse. When I was seventeen, I’d told her I had leprosy. So I’d used that excuse right up. She was the nosiest, talkiest woman west of the Mississippi, and she was moving onto my turf.

Walking along the path, she pointed at the Vincents’ house. ‘‘Who lives there?’’

‘‘My college roommate.’’ Telling myself, Don’t volunteer information. Name, rank, serial number, soldier.

‘‘How sweet,’’ Taylor said. ‘‘And she lives in that big old place all by herself?’’

‘‘With her husband and baby.’’

She nodded, storing the fact away, saying, ‘‘Speaking of babies, Kendall’s only five months along and she’s gained forty pounds.’’ Kendall was another cousin. ‘‘But you know what Aunt Julie says. When Kendall’s pregnant, buy stock in KFC.’’

She paused for breath, smiling at me. ‘‘And what about you?’’

So there we had it, a new record: from
hello
to
when will you breed?
in under two minutes. I opened the French doors and ushered her inside.

She clapped her hands. ‘‘Well, isn’t this just as cute as can be?’’

Here was the trouble with Taylor: While she was the world’s biggest gossip and buttinsky, she had a witchy ability to shield her own life from scrutiny. There were no scandals in her past, no teenage peccadilloes, no story about her barfing at Grandma and Granddad’s fiftieth-anniversary picnic. No, that would be me. She had gotten straight As. She starred in school plays. When she came out, it was as a debutante, not a lesbian. She had a church wedding, and if her husband had a hick name, so did my male cousins, and if his job left grease under his fingernails, well, honk if you love the oil business; that’s what made Oklahoma great. Taylor had no flip side. Nobody told stories about her. We had a gossip gap.

She stopped near the kitchen, examining an Ansel Adams print. ‘‘It’s kind of stark. Real outdoorsy. But you always were a tomboy.’’

She continued perusing the room. I felt my angst meter rising, and I scanned the room too, trying to stay ahead of her. No anarchist literature lying around. No
Star Trek
stemware. What else . . . ? Argh, the wedding mound. I couldn’t let her get hold of my wedding plans. I stepped in front of it, but the thing had grown so large I couldn’t block her view. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d touched it. I was at the point where I dreaded reaching into the center of it for fear I’d let oxygen in and it might spontaneously combust.

She looked toward my bedroom door. ‘‘Ooh, let’s check out your boudoir.’’

What could go wrong there? What couldn’t?

But she was already through the door. She stopped, said, ‘‘Oh.’’

She was staring at my bed. It was made. No socks hanging from the bedposts, no drool on the pillow.

‘‘It’s Grandma’s quilt,’’ she said. ‘‘You have Grandma’s quilt.’’

‘‘Yes, she gave it to Mom, and Mom gave it to me.’’

She looked at me with an unusual expression on her face. Her lipstick was cracking. ‘‘I told Grandma I wanted it. She knew that. Everybody knew that.’’

‘‘Taylor, I—’’

She looked away, waved her hand. ‘‘Never mind. It’s just a shock, is all.’’

Over a
quilt
?

Spinning on her sandals, she hurried back into the living room, and that’s when she saw the photos on the mantel. There was one of Brian, smiling from the cockpit of an F/A-18 Hornet, and another of me hugging Luke. And one of Jesse, a great shot, a close-up of him in the sunset, grinning. She picked it up. And here we went, on the Tilt-A-Whirl.

‘‘Is this your fiancé?’’ Her forehead crinkled. ‘‘Why . . . he’s very handsome.’’

‘‘I think so.’’

‘‘My goodness. But he’s . . .’’

She peered hard at the photo, and actually tipped it up and down. I knew she was trying to imagine what the rest of him looked like. I had an urge to clutch the photo to my chest, protecting it. She was going to say it; I knew she was. . . .

‘‘But isn’t he handicapped?’’

I felt like screaming. ‘‘He has a spinal cord injury.’’

Illumination. ‘‘So he wasn’t born that way.’’

‘‘No, he—’’ I stopped myself from saying
had an accident
. ‘‘He was hit by a car.’’

‘‘And you’re fixing to marry him anyway.’’

‘‘Yes. No. I mean, not ‘anyway.’ ’’

She looked at me, and I knew without a doubt that back in Oklahoma she had speculated about me, and my wedding plans, at length. She and my girl cousins, Kendall, Cameron, Mackenzie, a bunch of successful women whose names sounded like counties . . . and how had the discussion run?
What is up with Evan? Did she hit thirty and turn desperate?

She touched my arm. ‘‘Bless your heart. You are really a special lady.’’

‘‘I’m lucky. He’s a great guy.’’

‘‘Listen to you. I’ll bet you just give him the courage to keep on living.’’ She examined the photo again. ‘‘But getting married. Have y’all checked it out with doctors and everything?’’

It
. Don’t respond. . . .

But her blueberry eyes looked eager. ‘‘You know.’’

She’ll take your words and repackage them as ammunition. . . .

‘‘Hon, I’m talking about marital relations.’’

I lost it. ‘‘You mean, can he do it?’’

‘‘You don’t need to put it that crudely.’’

‘‘But that’s what you mean.’’

‘‘Why are you so touchy? It’s a perfectly understandable question.’’

‘‘Really.’’

‘‘Everybody naturally wonders—’’

My blood pressure shot up so fast, I’m surprised my eyeballs didn’t burst out and smack her in the cheeks.

‘‘Tell everybody that we do it ten times a day. I have to guzzle power drinks to keep my weight up. We keep a fire extinguisher beside the bed so the freakin’ sheets don’t catch fire.’’

The look on her face was both shocked and lascivious. ‘‘Well.’’

That’s when the phone rang, rescuing me. Or so I thought. It was Harley Dawson.

‘‘I just got a call from Mako Technologies,’’ she said. ‘‘Adam Sandoval’s at their office, causing a riot. Get over there and help calm the situation down, girl.’’

I pulled into Mako Technologies in Goleta, hoping I wouldn’t find a fistfight in the parking lot. I knew Harley had called me hoping a friend could convince Adam to leave, rather than having security guards drag him away. And she thought getting Jesse over there would only add fuel to the flames. I was still sputtering about Taylor’s remarks, the lurid glow in her eyes. . . .
Everybody naturally wonders
. Her curiosity was ravenous. Even as I rushed her out of the house, she asked, ‘‘Who was on the phone? Who’s in trouble? Is it Jesse?’’ And as I jumped in my car, she said, ‘‘We’ll talk. I’ll take you to lunch tomorrow. Someplace nice, so spruce yourself up.’’

I ground my teeth together.

Mako’s headquarters spread across several buildings in a business park. With their mustard-colored walls and exterior struts painted white, they looked like shoe boxes held up by slide rules. The parking lot shone with new cars.

No fight. So far, so good.

I pushed open the door to the lobby. The walls were decorated with posters advertising Mako’s products— ‘‘Tigershark: security against hacking, viruses, and insider threats’’ and ‘‘Hammerhead: protecting your infrastructure against intrusion.’’ Photos portrayed Mako’s history: men with slicked-back hair standing next to electronic boxes, surrounded by cabling and by other slick-backs in lab coats or military uniforms. There was none of the trendy aspiration of Diamond Mindworks.

However, behind the desk was something directly out of Cal Diamond’s company: the receptionist. It was the girl with the pudgy cheeks and unruly black hair, who had been crying on the phone the day Diamond suffered his heart attack. She was drinking a Slim-Fast shake and eating a glazed doughnut. Her HI, I’M AMBER GIBBS plaque sat next to a Beanie Baby frog.

I said, ‘‘I’m looking for Dr. Adam Sandoval.’’

‘‘The professor guy? Okay.’’ She started punching buttons on a phone console. ‘‘But I don’t think you’ll have to go looking. You can follow the noise.’’

My teeth started to grind again. Past the front desk I saw a security door with a keypad. It had a window, and down the hallway on the other side I saw secretaries at their desks and men chatting by a vending machine. Amber spoke on the phone and hung up.