The Triggerman Dance

"But what made Orange County most interesting was Vann Holt. This was his office. He was a legend here—he'd gotten almost every commendation, award, citation and pay raise the Bureau has to offer—and he was still fairly young. I was very young then—twenty-six—I never really spent much time around him. I can't even tell you if he knew I was here. But I admired him because this guy—I'm telling you, John, this guy was absolutely possessed with the idea of crushing bad guys. He breathed it. He took a bombing case all the way from Santa Ana to the Gaza strip and back—and he identified the three bombers who took out an Arab gentleman right here in Santa Ana. Vann gutted a white supremacist cell that had serious plans to murder Coretta King. He just mashed the local operations of the Aryan Brotherhood, Kahane, the White Alliance—anybody with a race or holy war to wage. He found something here at the Bureau that very few people ever find—autonomy. Somehow, he rose above the sheer bureaucracy we operate under. He didn't break the rules so much as just, well, levitate above them. His results justified it, and his sense of personal honor enabled it. He was a mystery to everyone—and that is one very difficult thing to maintain in a Federal world. Vann Holt did it by holding the Bureau up to his standards. Back in eighty-six, he got the highest award the Bureau can bestow—the Director's Distinguished Service medal. It didn't seem to mean much to him."

Weinstein went quiet and looked away, allowing himself a pause for introspection.

John wondered if Weinstein had learned his intensity and his humorlessness from Vann Holt. He looked at Weinstein's profile and noted the clench of jaw, the hungry eyes, and the morose lines around his mouth.

And suddenly, John understood.

It appeared to him all at once, seemingly from nothing, like an oncoming vehicle through rain. The names, the stories and the setting all coalesced, and he knew.

"Puma," he said.

Joshua didn't react. He just swallowed and continued t stare at the wall. Finally, he looked back at John.

"I thought you might appreciate Holt's situation. You both lost someone very close to you to violence. A murdered son, murdered lover. You holed up in the desert and tried to forget, he holed up in Liberty Ridge. You two have a lot in common. What you don't have in common is this: Puma did something He tried to kill an enemy. You've done nothing but withdraw."

"And what have you done?"

Joshua raised his hands expansively. "Why, this, John. This, My work. I've spent a thousand hours trying to solve Rebecca murder. It practically took a papal dispensation to get assigned to it. But I prevailed. After all, I was not married to the victim. After all, they saw I wouldn't stop, no matter what they did. So they gave me a charge number and cut me loose."

"Why am I here?"

Joshua ignored the question. He leaned forward in the chair now, rested his forearms on the desk before him, and again aimed his unforgiving gaze at John. "You've begun to understand the power of loss, haven't you?"

"I believe so."

"And the hatred that fills a heart when love is removed?"

"That, too."

"Loss and hatred don't just go away, you know. They fester and curdle and grow and they will eat you alive if you let them. The cure is the act. You must do something about them."

"I know that."

"But you don't know what to do, do you? You can't drink your life away in Anza fucking Valley, now can you? No. So now what?"

"I don't know, yet."

"But you feel . . . willing, don't you? Inspired? All suited up for the big game, if you could just find the court?"

"Yeah, Weinstein, that's how I feel."

"Funny feeling. I know. I spent a lot of time like that—it was called training."

"Why am I here?"

The pale agent smiled his death mask of a smile. "Vann Holt murdered the woman I loved and wanted to marry, and I want

you to help me take him down. For me. For Rebecca. And for yourself."

"How?"

"You would have to learn how, John. You would have to learn to act and to think. You would have to learn to take steps. One step, then another. I can open the book for you. I can help. And finally, what you learn will be tested, and tested very hard. When it's over, no matter how it ends, you will never be the same again. That's the only promise that I can make.

CHAPTER 7

John Menden's secret education begins two days after his visit to the Bureau office in Orange County. They use his trailer and the open desert around it for basic instruction in self-defense, small arms skills, micro-camera photography, mnemonic memory assistance and lockpicking.