Relentless (29 page)

More than an hour later, past Santa Rosa, at four o’clock in the morning, Milo woke, said he could go another hour without peeing, and rummaged quietly through his gear until the backseat brightened with an unusual pale blue light.

Hoping not to wake Penny, I asked softly, “What’s that?”

“This thing,” Milo said, matching my quiet tone.

“What thing?”

“This thing that makes it happen.”

“Makes what happen?” I asked.

The dog sighed, probably with pity for me, and Milo said, “What nobody would believe could happen.”

I said, “I might believe it could happen. Try me.”

“Oh, man,” Milo whispered, impressed by something he had just seen, “this is radical.”

“I’ve got a strong and limber imagination,” I reminded him.

“Not this limber.”

“Come on, tell me.”

“It’s too complicated to tell,” Milo said.

“I love complicated.”

“Dad, you don’t have the scientific background to understand.”

“If you don’t tell me, I’ll turn on the radio.”

“So turn on the radio.”

“I’ll find a fire-and-brimstone preacher station.”

“Then I’ll blow up the car.”

“You won’t blow up the car.”

“Try me,” Milo said.

“You wouldn’t hurt your mother.”

“I could blow up just the driver’s seat.”

“That’s a fake-out. You can’t blow up just the driver’s seat.”

“Try me.”

“Come on, Milo. Driving hour after hour is boring. I need some mental stimulation.”

“All right. Which came first—the chicken or the egg? Think about it.”

“That’s bogus. There’s no answer. It’s a paradox.”

“There’s an answer.”

“So tell me the answer,” I challenged.

“If I just tell you, that’s no mental stimulation.”

“I don’t want to know about chickens and eggs.”

The blue light pulsed in the backseat, and Milo said, “Wow.”

“I want to know about the
thing
that makes it
happen.”

“Makes what happen?” Milo asked.

Fresh from her nap, Penny said, “Remind me—which one of you is the genius with the IQ they can’t measure?”

“That would be Milo,” I said modestly.

“Not from the evidence of this conversation,” Penny said.

Milo said, “Ouch.”

“She nailed you, dude,” I said.

“And which of you,” Penny asked, “needs to set an example of mature behavior?”

I said, “That would be Lassie.”

“Good one, Dad.” The blue light pulsed, Milo said, “Holy-moly,” and he began muttering equations to himself.

“There he goes back into his cocoon,” I said. “I almost broke him, almost learned about the thing that makes it happen what nobody would believe, then you woke up.”

“Yeah, right. Which came first—the chicken or the egg?”

“Paradox. No answer.”

“The answer is the egg—it’s time for breakfast.”

At another truck stop, after fueling the Mountaineer, we had breakfast in a window booth at dawn, as the first golden sunlight made visible on the big sheet of glass all the fly specks that a backdrop of night had concealed.

We had to leave Lassie alone in the SUV, but we parked where we could keep an eye on her while we ate. The dog could keep an eye on us, too. From a backseat window, she withered us with the dreaded Stare of Accusation.

After we brought her a grilled hamburger pattie to augment her kibble, we were heroes in her eyes once more.

California is a huge state, bigger than most countries. The drive from Boom World in Orange County to Smokeville was over 850 miles, and we still had at least five hours to go.

We could have flown north, but not with all the I’ll-blow-up-the-car-if-I’m-not-allowed-to-take-it gear that Milo needed, not easily with Lassie, and not without showing up on a passenger list that the apparently omniscient Shearman Waxx would peruse within nanoseconds of our takeoff.

Having slept over four hours before breakfast, Penny took the wheel for the next leg of our journey.

I felt rumpled and grimy, my beard stubble itched, I already had acid-indigestion from my poblano-chile omelet, and I knew I would not sleep in the glare of daylight. Nevertheless, I told Penny, “When the highway comes back toward the coast, up where it gets lonely, wake me. We’ll find an isolated spot, you can give me gun instruction.”

Perhaps half a mile farther, I fell asleep.

When Penny woke me two and a half hours later, we were no longer on U.S. Highway 101. We followed a rutted, weedy dirt road with the sun at our back. Still stiff and dry from the heat of summer, the weeds bristled in front of us and lay broken in our wake. No one else had come this way since at least the previous spring.

The road descended through a pine woods to the coast. Waves broke onto a short slope of pearly sand. The sand feathered into a wide expanse of shingle: a deep bed of small waterworn stones and pebbles smoothed by centuries of tidal action.

Penny parked on the shingle, at a place where it was backstopped by a bluff.

When she switched off the engine, I said, “If you’re worried that a gun is too complex a machine for me, that I’ll shoot off my nose, I want you to know this is different now. I can do this.”

“A shot-off nose, I can handle. Let’s just not have anything like the vacuum-cleaner incident.”

“I’m serious, Penny. I can do this.”

She put a hand against my cheek. “I know you can, sweetie. You can do anything.”

I didn’t realize that before I learned to shoot, I had to learn how to stand, which involved not just the feet but the entire body through the arms to the position of the hands on the gun. Penny favored the Weaver stance for some situations, the Isosceles stance for others. All this was easier than learning how to waltz, but harder than I expected.

Milo and Lassie remained in the Mountaineer. I’m sure that Milo continued to be sufficiently engrossed in weird science that he paid no attention to the spectacle that I made of myself. But every time I glanced at the SUV, the dog was watching and appeared to be laughing.

The metal cases we brought from Boom World contained shoulder rigs for carrying our guns under jackets, spare magazines, ammo, and the same .45-caliber pistol for each of us: a Springfield Armory Super Tuned Champion, which is a customized stainless-steel version of the Colt Commander.

On this lonely part of the coast, the nearest house must have been at least five miles away. A light offshore wind would blow some of the sound of the gunfire to the sea.

The first twenty or thirty times that I squeezed the trigger, the pleadings and the screams of victims came back to me from that far September and seemed as real as the crack of the pistol and the crash of the surf breaking behind us.

At that time of year, the northern coast was cool, yet soon I stood sheathed in sweat. The mind is a trickster with an infinite repertoire,
and mine transformed the odor of gunfire into Tray’s sour breath precisely as it had been that long-ago September night.

Learning, I fired a hundred rounds of Federal Hydra-Shok .45 ACPs, and I would have needed five hundred if my instructor had not been so capable and so patient. At the end of the session, I was not a marksman by any standard, but I understood recoil and how to manage it. If events required close-range self-defense, I might not make a complete dead fool of myself.

We had used large-leafed plants on the bluff face as targets. Some marked for shredding were unscathed, although a satisfying percentage were now cole slaw.

As Penny showed me how to clean the gun, we sat together on a large rock where the shingle met the beach.

The time had come, and so I steeled myself and said, “You know I never lie to you.”

“It goes both ways.”

“I deceived you by omission when I told you I was taking Milo to Roxie’s for lunch but failed to mention Waxx would be there.”

“I made note of it in my little book of your crimes.”

“I didn’t know you kept a diary of my crimes.”

“It’s titled
His Transgressions and How He Will Pay.”

“Sounds kind of medieval.”

“What can I say. I’m a very fourteenth-century girl.”

The offshore breeze and the sun did not disarrange and parch her hair, but groomed it into greater beauty, as if Nature considered her its special child.

“Well,” I said, “I hope you have some pages left in that diary.”

“Another deception by omission or a flat-out lie?”

“The former. It goes all the way back to when we were dating. It’s something … so dark I didn’t want it hanging over you, over our life together. But now I think maybe I should have told you.”

“Does it concern just a stripper or is there a llama involved?”

I took a deep breath, blew it out. “Aunt Edith not only raised me but also adopted me. My born name isn’t Greenwich.”

“Couldn’t be Hitler, you’re not that old. Anyway, it’s Durant.”

I could not have been more surprised if she had shot me. “How do you know that? How long have you known?”

Cleaning her pistol with the same expression of affection that brightened her face when she brushed Lassie’s coat, Penny answered the second question first: “Since shortly after we were married.”

Only one explanation occurred to me: “Grimbald. He wanted to find out everything about the man his daughter was marrying. He’s the kind who would know a private detective.”

“What kind is that? A Boom? But it wasn’t Daddy. It was your aunt Edith.”

I could not have been more surprised if, after having shot me once, she’d shot me again. “Edith died four years before we met.”

“Cubby, when a good woman knows an important thing needs to be done, she won’t let death prevent her from doing it.”

Penny clearly enjoyed teasing me with this revelation, which I supposed was a good thing, since it must mean she wasn’t angry.

“Edith suspected you might keep those events secret out of guilt or shame—or modesty. She knew the story revealed what a brave and decent boy you were.”

“Not brave,” I disagreed.

“Oh, yes. Very brave at six. And she thought it was a miracle that you were spared,
the way that you were spared
. She believed a wife should know her husband had some special destiny. So she wrote it all in a long letter, which she entrusted to her attorney.”

“Johnson Leroy.”

“Yes. He kept track of you at her request. When he learned of the marriage, he sent me her letter.”

“And you never told me.”

“She asked me not to tell you. She wanted you to have a chance to tell me of your own volition, sooner or later.”

I had dreaded recounting the hideous details. Now, fourteen years after her death, Edith lifted that weight from me.

“She must have been quite wonderful,” Penny said.

I nodded. “I think she was very like her sister. So … in a way, I didn’t entirely lose my mother when I was six.”

“I memorized the opening line of her letter. ‘Dear nameless girl, I know that you have a kind heart and a good soul and a lovely laugh, because Cubby has chosen to spend his life with you, and Cubby values all the right things.’”

For a moment, I couldn’t speak. Then: “I’d like to read that letter.”

“I’ve saved it for you,” she said. “And one day, for Milo.”

“Oh, well, I don’t know….”

“Of course you know,” Penny said. “Eventually Milo should read it. If there was a miracle, let’s not pretend we don’t know why you were spared. Without you and me, there would be no Milo. And if I know one thing for sure, it’s that someday, somehow, the world is going to be a better place because Milo’s in it. Don’t you think?”

I met her eyes, that double-barreled gaze of truth. “I think. Yeah. I think.”

Finished cleaning her pistol, she said, “You know another thing I’m sure about?”

“If there’s a big surprise in it, I can’t handle another one.”

“I’m sure, you’ll never again have a problem with a tool or a machine. No more hammered thumbs, no vacuum-cleaner catastrophes.”

“That’ll take a second miracle.”

“Because all that clumsiness was never anything but an elaborate excuse not to have a gun, not to learn how to use one.”

“Where did you get your psychology degree?”