Traps (10 page)

She unlatches the porch door and steps out, holding the gun low
but ready at her side as she had seen Lynn do early that morning facing the shadow of her own car. Then she raises her arm and sights along the sleeve of her borrowed coat. She can see the post in the distance with the cans below it, and she wonders if Lynn stood back here this far, and how good it would be to know you could shoot something you aimed at from this distance. She puts up her other hand now, because her arm is shaking, and she squeezes one eye shut, and she thinks she can see it right there where the barrel points—the series of holes Lynn made in the post when she herself was trying to learn.

Vivian lowers the gun and goes inside, hurrying a bit, and puts the pistol back where she found it. She closes all the box tops, patting them, as if they might pop open on their own, and slides the carton back in. She tips her head this way and that as she arranges and rearranges the boots in front until she is satisfied. She closes the door.

In the kitchen she takes Lynn’s breakfast drink out of the refrigerator. It has thickened a bit, into something almost solid. She takes a spoon from the drawer and stirs it. Then she sits down at the table. Her yellow backpack is still open, and her things are still spilled out around it—her wallet with no money in it and the zip purse full of cigarettes she will not smoke until later, outside, because this house is not her own—and she draws the
People
magazine toward her through the sea of tissues and picks up the sparkly pink phone. She skips the first three messages to play the last, sitting perfectly upright as she listens:

Vivian sets the phone on the scarred wood table. The little rhinestones catch late morning light through the dog yard window. She reads the article about movie-star mothers now. It’s just pictures mostly. Pushing their babies in swings and smiling. Or crouching to point at ducks in a park. All of them pretty, and the captions say things like “Uma Plays Mama,” and “Jessica Jokes with Jaya.” Vivian studies each one before she turns the page. She doesn’t read anything else. She closes the magazine and rolls it up and opens the cupboard under the sink where Lynn keeps a garbage can, and she slips it in among the skins of the avocados, and then she takes all her old tissues off Lynn’s table, heaping them in on top in three loads, and shuts the cupboard door with almost no sound.

She drinks the smoothie finally, doing it all in one long series of gulps, leaning back. Her eyebrows knit together as she adjusts to the strange flavor. Then she wipes her lips as Lynn did, forefinger and thumb, and she rinses the glass in the sink, and soaps it too, and rinses it again and sets it in the drying rack beside the old woman’s.

I
t is still dark out when Dana pulls up to the big gate in her white Jetta. She rolls down her window and presses a four-digit code into the keypad on the pole, and the big black iron halves swing open slowly and she eases through, past the white Spanish housefront and through an arch, past the garage bays in back and down a little hill to a small pea-gravel parking area where two black Suburbans are parked beside a little cottage with a terra-cotta tile roof, its shuttered windows bleeding seams of light. Behind her in the car, her dress with the peach-colored flowers hangs inside a clear bag for the wedding. She shuts her engine off.

She shoulders her backpack and steps out, and she looks up at the house. The lower floor is dark, and up above are two bright squares, and then two with the sort of soft blue glow that night-lights make in a room. The rest is dark.

Dana walks the path to the cottage, her feet crunching in the gravel. Crickets chirp and sprinklers hush against the thick green leaves of the camellia bushes that hem it in. She presses her code into a keypad on the wall, and when the door swings open, the room is empty. Just a wall of folding tables laden with computers and monitors partitioned into grainy black-and-white quarter-screen views of the property. On
the fourth monitor she can see a blurry figure heading uphill toward the house, and then in another quadrant crossing into view next to the tennis court, and then on screen three opening the door to a shed next to the greenhouse. “Hi, Larry,” she hears through a speaker on the table. “Dana just keyed in at the gate. I wanted to go over a few things with you before I check her in.” She reaches to turn one of the volume knobs down.

There are still sounds in the small room after she does this. Street noise from one of the speakers: the passage of a car in front of the gate. She can also hear the cricket noise she had heard in the yard, and the hush of the sprinklers, and she leaves these on, setting her backpack on the floor with her eyes on the screens, and sitting down in the empty chair in front of them.

She looks at each quadrant in turn. The long rectangle of a covered swimming pool. A play structure with a tube slide beneath a tree. Hedge lines and fence lines. Street and gate. Tennis court. Greenhouse. And finally a fish-eye view of the front doorstep to the house, four small sneakers lying jumbled beside the mat.

She begins the sequence again: swimming pool, play structure, fence line, hedge line, street, gate, tennis court, greenhouse, door.

The sound of a jogger comes over one of the speakers: heavy steps on pavement; a cough. Only his shadow appears in the screen shot of the gate itself, but then finally he appears on screen two, in the shot of the north approach up the street.

The door opens behind Dana then, and she stands. A bald man in a black knit shirt and tan pants like her own.

“Little change of plan,” he says. He sits down in the chair and looks up at her. “Today’s detail switching to travel duty. Principal One is taking a road trip to Las Vegas. Length uncertain, but up to two nights likely. I can get backup to drive there and swap with you midday if you can’t extend beyond your scheduled shift. If you have another commitment.”

Behind Larry on the screens every part of this small personal world they have been asked to monitor for dangers holds still; nothing moves.

The moment between his question and her answer stretches out in Dana’s mind, although she does not allow it to last more than a few seconds. Already she has tried out and discarded the private pretense that the urge to say yes is born of professionalism. Dana is not a woman who fools herself. She will say yes because weddings make her uncomfortable anyway; because the news she planned to tell Ian in the chapel parking lot is bad; because she prefers to lose him over the phone, from a motel room. On the floor something inside her heavy backpack settles suddenly, tipping it to rest against her leg.

“Certainly,” she says.

“Fantastic.” He picks up a stack of tabbed folders from the table behind him. “She’s shooting for leaving at six thirty. She wants to drive herself, and she’ll be picking up a dog from her father’s house in Summerlin and then visiting him at Summerlin Hospital. Velasquez went ahead a few hours ago to do reconnaissance and reserve rooms at a motel that takes dogs. I’d like you to follow her on the drive up.”

He holds out one of the folders. “Maps from here to house, house to motel, hospital to motel, motel to hospital.”

Dana reaches out to take it.

He says, “Velasquez sketched out an internal map of the hospital. He says they check identification and restrict movement inside, so he scheduled contingency doctor’s appointments for both of you.”

He hands her two more folders.

Then he picks up a clipboard and takes a pencil from beside his keyboard. “Okay. Protective Asset Inventory. You ready?”

Dana crouches on the linoleum at his feet and unzips her backpack.

He looks down at his checklist. “Current company-issued first-aid kit?”

She withdraws a red zippered pouch and sets it on the linoleum floor.

“Satellite phone?”

She lays one of these on the linoleum as well.

“Flare gun?”

She pulls out a black plastic case.

“Fire starter?”

She takes out a ziplock bag containing a box of waterproof matches and a green disposable lighter.

“Emergency food rations?”

Four vacuum-sealed pouches of silver foil.

“Pepper spray?”

A small orange canister.

“Camera?”

A Nikon D3 and a telephoto-lens case.

“Duty weapon?”

From under the hem of her shirt she withdraws a SIG Sauer 229 9mm pistol and lays this on the floor as well.

“Have you consumed any alcohol in the last twenty-four hours?”

“No, sir.” She begins repacking her supplies.

He makes a checkmark. “Have you maintained your contractual commitment to abstain from use of nicotine and recreational drugs?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you in good health?”

“Yes.”

“Any recent fever, unusual fatigue, vomiting, or other signs of illness?”

She looks up at him, one hand on her open backpack. “I vomited twice yesterday, sir.”

He looks down at her from his chair.

She says, “I was able to complete my Stress Inoculation Training with an improved score. I don’t have any concerns about my ability to accept this detail and perform to my highest standards.”

“But what about getting your protectee sick?”

“I won’t, sir.”

“How can you know that?”

“It’s not contagious.”

He rocks back in his chair. “How the hell can you possibly know that?”

The room is really no more than a shed’s width, so small they are almost touching. “I’m pregnant, sir.”

He puts a hand on top of his bald head like a yarmulke.

She says, “It’s just morning sickness, and I can control it.”

“I’ll be damned.”

“I felt nauseated before I even put my bite suit on yesterday, and I put on my equipment, completed the test, left the yard, went inside to the bathroom, closed the door, and took off the helmet and suit jacket before I vomited.”

“Jesus, Dana.” He forces his hand back to the desktop. “I mean, congratulations.”

“Thank you. Although I should point out that it’s not news I would otherwise share since I don’t plan on completing the pregnancy.”

“Oh. Well, okay. Let’s see.” He looks down at his clipboard again. He has lost his place. Over a speaker on the monitoring table they can hear the sound of a door opening and shutting. On the upper right-hand quadrant of screen four a dog streaks by the play structure, and then, a second later, an older dog limps past, and then another second later, a smaller dog with its hindquarters dragging behind on a wheeled platform.

Larry says, “One more on the list: ‘Have you experienced any recent emotional challenges that would compromise your concentration on this mission?’ ”

“No, sir.”

“Because I could understand if, um … if that kind of decision …”

“It doesn’t, sir.”

“Tony is on backup call this morning. He has his bags here.”

“I hope you’ll trust me on this.”

He scratches his chin.

She says, “If I might be bold here, agents have stressors all the time that they keep private if they feel they’re below a certain threshold of distraction. That’s what I would have done in this case had it not been for my honesty about the vomiting question.”

He purses his lips, considering. Dana lowers her head and continues repacking her backpack, taking care with the things inside. Finally she zips it and stands, lifting the hem of her shirt to holster her gun.

He reaches for a set of keys on a hook on the wall. “This one has a full tank,” he says, handing them to her.

“Thank you, sir.”

She picks up the briefing folders, the last thing she needs for this journey, and she steps out into the purpling dawn.

The black Suburban is beyond her own car, in the deeper dark of the shade cast by an avocado tree bearing a swing made of a tethered tire. She walks toward it, past her own car with her dress for the wedding hanging in back, past a tricycle and an empty milk crate, past the litter of fallen fruit, to stand in the narrow space between the swing and the door of the car. The swing is little used, it seems, the rope frayed, and inside the circle of black rubber hides something inanimate and invisible save for a pair of white plastic eyes that reflect back the first bit of light clouding in below the tree. Dana does not touch it, but she stares a moment, standing among the fallen avocados, her eyes adjusting, until she makes out the shape: a dark-cloaked action figure holding a sharpened pike.

Dana turns away then, toward the pale shine of chrome keyhole and door handle standing out in the heavy shade. She unlocks it and gets in, closing the door on the noise of sprinkler and crickets, setting her backpack and folders on the seat beside her, and she sits there in the quiet. The clock on the dashboard reads 6:15.