'C'mon, Payne. You never even met the Perez woman. She's nothing to you. But the bastard who killed your son? Jesus! He stuck a knife in your heart.'
Payne fought off the urge for vengeance. Ever since Adam's death, he had felt it as a searing heat, a torrent of molten steel. He had yearned to do what the law couldn't. Kill the man and settle the score.
'C'mere, Payne. I want to show you something.'
Rutledge walked toward three gnarly and shrunken peach trees, Payne trailing. Two feet of sandy loam formed a berm around each trunk, as if someone had lovingly tucked the trees to sleep under a blanket of rich soil.
'Before I was born, my granddaddy planted four hundred Elbertas on this ridge. They're my roots, my family's sweat and tears. No way any of them should still be alive.' He ran a callused hand over a tree trunk. 'But look here. Three Elbertas, still growing, still bearing fruit. Like the three generations of Rutledge men.'
Rutledge reached for a peach-a soft golden orb blushing with red-from the nearest tree. 'Watch now. Just a gentle turn of the wrist so the stem doesn't tear out of the socket. The older I get, the more I learn that brute force is seldom the answer to life's problems.'
He twisted the peach off its stem and bit into it, juice oozing from his mouth and onto his bristly mustache. He radiated a feral bliss as he polished off the fruit.
'Go ahead, Payne. Take one.'
Payne shook his head, thinking of the snake and the forbidden fruit. He didn't quite picture himself as Eve- but Rutledge as a serpent, no problem with the imagery there.
Rutledge moved a few steps toward an enclosure made of railroad ties. Inside was a pile of manure so ripe it steamed in the midday sun. He tossed several handfuls into a bucket, which he carried to the nearest tree. Crouching on his haunches, he used his bare hands to shape a mound of manure around the tree trunk. Clearly, Payne thought, not a man afraid of getting his hands dirty.
'These trees will outlive me,' Rutledge told him. 'The way a son is supposed to outlive his father. So the father can pass on what's his. Knowledge. Property. Tradition. A father who's deprived of that, well, he's got a right to seek justice. Hell, he's got a duty to.'
'I get your point.'
'Last chance, Payne. Are you man enough to do what has to be done?'
Payne's thoughts turned to that misty morning on the Pacific Coast Highway. Pictured Adam, just moments before the crash. Animated, talkative, innocent. Heard the thunderclap as the pickup truck broadsided them, Adam's body crushed against his own. A moment later, the man's head appearing through the driver's window. The tang of liquor on his breath.
Now Payne inhaled the pungent aroma of the manure. He looked at the old trees, listened to the breeze tickle their leaves. He thought of his promises made. To Sharon. To Tino. And to himself.
But every thought returned to Adam and to the endless pain of losing him. His son's baseball bat was in the trunk of the Mustang. If Payne closed his eyes, he could see himself crushing Garcia's skull, could hear the bones splinter, could feel the warm stickiness of his blood.
'Tell me how I can find Garcia,' Payne said. 'I'll do it tonight and be gone by tomorrow.'
SIXTY-SEVEN
Rigney liked his whiskey neat and his women messy.
At the moment, he was sipping Johnnie Walker Red and eyeing a woman with a little too much belly for her outfit, a sleeveless crop-top that stopped a foot short of torn, low-slung jeans. She was bent over the pool table, showing the crack of her ass to three young cops drinking Coronas and bantering with her.
I'd fuck her, but I wouldn't spend the night.
Rigney returned to his Scotch. He was hunched over the bar in a hole-in-the-wall tavern on San Pedro, two blocks from the Parker Center. Considering just how the shitstorm named Royal Payne had so totally fucked up his life.
Rigney had been grilled by Internal Affairs in the hundred-year-old Bradbury Building on South Broadway, and it hadn't gone well. The questions were antagonistic and threatening. The investigators seemed to blame him for Judge Rollins' suicide, Payne's escape, and the layer of smog that blanketed Pasadena.
Officially, he wasn't supposed to be looking for Payne, but he didn't give a shit. He wanted to find the bastard first, crack his head open, make him pay. He'd stopped by Sharon Payne's cubicle earlier today, but she wasn't in. He'd toyed with the idea of bugging her phone or planting a G.P.S. transmitter on her car. But if he was caught, they'd pull his badge and he could share a cell with Anthony Pellicano.
'Hey, Riggs. Don't you owe me a drink?'
A pudgeball named Lou Parell plopped onto the adjacent stool. Homicide. Three years from retirement. If Rigney had to hear about all the marlin the fat bastard planned to catch off Cabo San Lucas, he'd strangle the jerk.
'I don't owe you a drink, Lou. You owe me thirty bucks from poker.'
'You sure?'
'At Schulian's house. You don't remember?'
Parell signaled the bartender and pointed to one of the taps. Bud Lite. As if low-cal beer would take off those forty extra pounds he was packing.
'Riggs, you catch Payne yet?'
Rigney drained his glass. 'Don't bust my chops, Lou.'
'I'm not. Just wondered if you knew you had competition.'
'Meaning what?'
'Some badge from East Bumfuck called Homicide asking about the asshole.'
Rigney slammed the cocktail glass on the bar. 'Who? Who the fuck called?'
'Lemme think.' Parell's light beer arrived, yellow as chilled piss. 'Spanish name. But he didn't have an accent.'
'What'd he say?'
'Asked about Payne hanging around our office last year. You know, when he was planning to go after that wetback who killed his kid.'
'You ask the cop why he gave a damn?'
'Why would I?'
'Oh, I don't know. Maybe because you're a detective, and detectives are supposed to be curious about shit that don't smell right.'
'I figured he had his reasons.'
'Jesus.' Rigney signaled for a refill. 'Did you tell him we had warrants out on Payne?'
'Yeah. He said he'd keep his eyes open.'
'And you don't remember the cop's name or where he's from?'
Parell took a long pull on his beer. 'Said he was the chief of police.'
'Where, Lou? For Christ's sake, where?'
Parell seemed deep in thought, or as deep as he could go without a tutor. 'In the San Joaquin Valley. I remember asking if they have much crime up there. And he said, just some migrants getting drunk and fighting when the peaches are all in and they get paid.'
'Jesus, that really narrows it down. They grow peaches for three hundred miles.'
If he could find the police chief, Rigney thought, he could find Butch Cassidy and the Mexican Kid. The last time anybody saw them, they were in a diner in the desert town of Thermal. What were they doing upstate? And what hell had Payne raised to get the locals on his case?
'A fish pond!' Parell blurted.
'What?'
'The cop said he was eating lunch outside his office, tossing bacon to the fish.'
'Jesus, how do you remember that and not remember where he's from?'
