Marine’s high-n-tight haircut. “Know what, you little runt? I was hitting this town when you were playing with Legos, eating Apple Jacks and watching Saturday morning cartoons.”
“Runt? Who you callin’ a runt? Check out these huge guns—even through my sweatshirt!” Karl flexed his biceps. “You wouldn’t be able to call me a runt if I wasn’t just five six.”
“But ’ch are, Blanche, ya’ are!”
“Who the fuck is Blanche?” Karl asked. “And what’s she got to do with anything?”
“Oh my God,” Eddie said as he and Don looked at Karl in dismay. “We’re failing our child. Next rainy weekend, I’m hosting a Bette Davis and Joan Crawford marathon at my house.”
“Sounds like a party that’d be too wild for me.” Karl rolled his eyes.
“Come on now, princesses, be nice.” Don was glad to see Eddie energized and having fun. Today had been a good day for him—for all of them—and maybe tonight would be even better. “Think about it during dinner. On me.”
“Great!” Karl rebounded quickly from his pouting. “You paying for me, Uncle Donnie?”
“Why should tonight be different from any other Saturday?” He and Karl hopped in the jeep.
“Just kidding,” Karl said. “I’ve got my own money tonight and I think it’s time I treated.”
Don placed his arm across his chest, feigning a heart attack. “You got paid over twenty-four hours ago and you still got money? What the fuck?”
Ignoring Don, Karl asked, “Hamburger Mary’s?”
“Is there any other place?” As Don turned the key, he noticed Karl counting twenty-dollar bills in his wallet and he became curious as to how a Marine corporal could have that much cash. Karl came from a poor family, though, and money was a delicate topic so Don kept quiet. He secretly suspected that Karl was always broke because he sent money to his mom in Idaho.
Don rolled to a stop at the park’s exit. He checked over his left shoulder for traffic on Sixth Avenue when something across the street caught his eye. Two men sat in a car just inside the entrance to the park. By itself, this wasn’t a show-stopping scene but the face of the younger guy grabbed Don’s attention and the look in his eyes stopped Don cold. Although they stared at each other only briefly through two automobile windows forty feet apart, Don sensed the other man’s intensity. He wasn’t sure if the man’s passion was from fear, anger or lust—or a combination of the three—but it was certainly in overdrive.
“What are you doing, Agent Gared? There’s no regulation against a Sailor or Marine playing volleyball without a shirt in a public park.”
“I know, Ollie. Just to be safe, I’ll check the system Monday to see if they have a record.”
“Fine. But we’re calling it a day.” As the jeep pulled out of the lot, Jay quickly wrote down its license plate number. He’d been at his new job for less than a month but he already knew that these seven alphanumeric characters were all he needed for the next step in an investigation. Using the military’s vehicle registration system, he had access to information on every automobile on file with the Department of Defense in Southern California, such as name, address and military unit.
That was all the information on the jeep that Jay needed to make its owner’s life a living hell.
5
After renting a car and checking into a cheap hotel, Patrick ventured to Hillcrest—according to Chris, San Diego’s most gay-friendly neighborhood. He stumbled into the Obelisk, a gay-and-lesbian-themed bookstore, a type of place he hadn’t known existed. After Patrick had browsed novels, memoirs and magazines for hours, the manager recommended a dance club called the West Coast Production Company. He advised Patrick that WC’s started late, which Patrick assumed meant ten o’ clock. After a quick bite at a diner, he followed the manager’s directions to the bar.
“Holy shit!” he exclaimed. Less than two hundred yards separated the main gate of the Marine Corps’s recruit training base from the entrance to the gay dance club. Patrick drove around the industrial neighborhood, almost deciding the proximity was too dangerous. But he’d arrived a day early for the sole purpose of checking out San Diego’s Saturday scene and WC’s was the only place he knew to go. While weighing his options, he drove aimlessly around the dark warehouse district. If he stayed, his choice was between parking on the well-lit street or in a back alley. He chose the latter, risking muggers rather than military investigators.
“ID?” Patrick’s military ID was hidden in the rental car with most of his cash. As he waited for the bouncer to search his Illinois driver’s license, he faced the building to protect his identity from drivers heading to the base. “You just missed the free cover period before ten,” the man said, “but you’re from out of town. You can slide this time.” The burly guy gave Patrick a friendly jab on the shoulder, saying, “Welcome to San Diego, Patrick. Have a good time.”
“Thanks.” The doorman’s friendliness partially allayed his anxiety. Nodding politely, he hurried through the door away from Marine motorists. A short hallway led to the club’s interior.
“What can I get you?” asked a bartender.
Patrick scanned the mostly empty space. “How about some men? Where are they?”
“You’re early.” The man flashed a devilish smile. “Have a drink—on me—while you wait.”
Jay studied the naked form staring back at him in his bathroom mirror. He looked good for thirty-three. Every year on his birthday, he paid the exorbitant cost and measured his body-fat percentage at a water-immersion tank, the only sufficiently accurate method. He smiled. The percentage of his body weight attributable to fat was a healthy nine percent, a half-percentage point lower than a year ago. More importantly, he’d added four pounds of pure muscle onto his lean form, a personal record and quite a feat for a man who’d been a skinny kid.
Youth had once been Jay’s only asset, and losing it had terrified him. He’d replaced youth with discipline, and to his surprise, he looked better than ever. He’d been born with average looks but now, after fifteen years of daily workouts, healthy diet and abstinence from alcohol and drugs, he’d been rewarded with the stunning physique standing in front of him. As his self-confidence had improved, so had his looks.
“Don’t forget why you’ve been blessed,” said a voice Jay recognized painfully well.
“How can I?” Jay asked as he toweled himself dry. “You won’t let me.”
Helicopter pilots are brooding introspective anticipators of trouble. They know if something bad hasn’t happened, then it’s about to. Leonard recalled the quote from a speech the late Harry Reasoner had given to senior military aviators. Reasoner’s message had been right on point. Helicopter pilots and jet pilots were as distinctive as their respective airframes. Propelled by rearward thrust, a jet’s wings glided effortlessly, relaxing on top of nitrogen, oxygen and the other air molecules. A jet was supposed to fly, and barring an unforeseen accident—or as Reasoner deftly observed, an incompetent pilot—it would. Jet pilots approached life as their aircraft went through the sky—they were astounded when things didn’t go well.
Helicopters were different. They flew by sheer force of will. Rather than soaring like a plane, a helicopter’s rotor blades, says an old joke, beat the air beneath them into submission. According to the laws of physics, helicopters—like bees and hummingbirds—weren’t supposed to fly. Somehow, they remained aloft but the process required a lot of attention, work and tender loving care. Thoughtless incompetents like Sledge weren’t up to the task. Leonard’s drive from Camp Pendleton to his house in La Jolla was long but it gave him the solitude and time to process the day’s problems. Sledge, as the cause of many of his headaches, had consumed much of his car time over the last eighteen months.
At