Betrayal (15 page)

Settling into the front seat, he locked the car doors and fastened his seat belt, lowered the backrest nearly to horizontal, leaned all the way back, and closed his eyes.

E
VAN HEARD THE REPORTS
from heavy rifles, bullets pinging now off the asphalt all around him. He was screaming at Alan and Marshawn. “Get down! Get down! Take cover!”

The barrage continued, a steady staccato as the car was hit and hit again. He turned to look and the second car behind him now was a twisted wreck, the bodies of two more of his men bleeding out onto the street where they’d been thrown from the force of the blast. And then suddenly he was aware that it was dark and that the beam from Nolan’s headlamp was on him, blinding him as he tried to get his Humvee moving from his position up on the roof of it. His hands up in front of his face, he yelled down to the driver. “Kill that light! Now!”

More bullets raked the car, but as the muffled sound filtered into his consciousness, it became more of a repeated thudding, a knocking. When he opened his eyes, the light was still in his face, but this time he recognized it for what it was—a flashlight outside the car. Still shaking from the fear and immediacy of the dream, he took another second or two before he knocked on his own driver’s window, then held his hand up to block the light. He could see enough in the pool of the streetlight above them to make out a couple of uniforms.

Cops. His brethren.

He rolled down the window halfway. “Hey, guys, what’s going on?” He shot a glance at his watch. It was three thirty-five.

The officer with the flashlight moved back a step or two. “Could you please show us your driver’s license and registration, sir?”

“Well, sure. I, uh…” He reached for the door handle and pulled it to open the door.

But the near officer outside slammed it back closed, spoke through the half-open window. “Please stay in your vehicle. License and registration, please. Where’ve you been, buddy?”

Evan stopped digging for his wallet for a moment and sat back, closed his eyes, tried to remember. “Trinity Lanes,” he said at last. The view of a suburban street out his car’s windshield had him disoriented. “I was bowling.”

“And drinking.”

“It would appear so.”

“Which leads to the question of how you got
here.
” But as he opened Evan’s wallet, the officer would have had a hard time missing the badge. “Holy Christ,” he said with disgust, and flashed it at his partner, handing him the ID. Then, back to the car, he said, “You know how you got here from the lanes? Somebody must have driven you, right?”

Evan just looked at him.

“Cause you wouldn’t have tried to drive in the state you’re in, would you?”

But then the second cop butted in. “You’re Evan Scholler?”

This one he could answer. “Yeah.”

Number two said to his partner. “The guy from Iraq.” Then, to Evan, “Am I right, pal?”

“Right.”

“You don’t have your gun on you, do you?”

“Nope. In the glovebox.”

The first cop shook his head in frustration, then said, “You want to get out now, you can.” He pulled open the door. “Smells like a distillery in there, pal.”

“Not surprised,” Evan replied.

“You might want to open the windows, let it air out for the next time you’re driving,” the first cop said. “So, for the record,” he continued, “do you remember who drove you over here?”

By now, Evan knew where he’d gotten to and where he’d parked, although the piece of the puzzle concerning the actual drive over was a complete blank. “My girlfriend.” He pointed to the apartment building across the way. “She lives right up there. We had a fight and she left me in the car to sleep it off.”

“That’s a good story,” the first cop said. “You want to lock up here and go up there now, we’ll stick around till you get in.”

Evan leaned back against his car. He swayed slightly from side to side. “We’re not living together. She won’t let me in. I’ve got to get back to my place.”

The second cop handed the wallet back to Evan. “How you gonna do that?”

Evan took a beat deciding whether or not he should laugh; he decided against it. “Good question,” he said. “
Excellent
question.” He looked from one of them to the other. “I guess I’ll walk. It’s not that far. Thanks, guys. Sorry for the hassle.”

He’d gone about five steps, none of them very steady, when one of them spoke from behind him. “Scholler. Maybe you want to lock up your car.”

Stopping, he turned back to them.

The first cop said, “It’d be a bad idea to pretend to walk until we pulled out and then come back and try to drive.”

“Yeah,” Evan said. “That’d be dumb.”

“Where’s your place?” the second cop asked.

“Just up by the college,” Evan said.

The second cop said to his partner, “Not that far. Only about four miles, all uphill.”

The one with the flashlight said, “Get in the squad car with me and he’ll follow us to your place in your wheels. You barf in my car, you clean it up.”

“Got it,” Evan said.

E
VAN WAS AT HIS PARENTS’ HOME
for a Sunday dinner that had become a more or less regular event since he had come back out to California. Once Daylight Saving Time arrived every year, Jim Scholler barbecued almost every night, and on this warm evening in late May he’d grilled chicken, which they’d eaten with fresh spring asparagus, a loaf of sourdough bread, and Eileen’s “famous” tomato-potato salad with cilantro and red onions. Now, still long before true dusk, they were sitting outside, in the Schollers’ large backyard in the long shadows cast by their mini-orchard of plum, fig, lemon, orange, and apricot trees.

Over their last glasses of cheap white wine, and with Evan now reemployed with the police department, ensconced in his new apartment, and with the immediate physical danger from his head wound behind them, at long last Eileen had mustered the courage to ask Evan about his love life.

He dredged up a chuckle. “What love life?”

“You’re not seeing anybody at all?”

“That’s not been at the top of my priorities, Mom. I’m not really looking.”

His father cleared his throat. “What about Tara?”

“What about her?” The answer came out more harshly than he’d intended. “Didn’t I mention that she never answered one of my letters—not one, Dad!—and I wrote about a dozen of them? That said it all clear enough. Plus, last I heard, she had another boyfriend.”

“When did you hear that?” Eileen asked.

“At Walter Reed. In fact, the guy came to see me.”

“Who did?” Jim asked. “Tara’s new boyfriend? Why’d he do that?”

“I don’t know. Guilt, probably.”

“Over dating Tara?” Jim asked.

“Over stealing my girlfriend after I sent him over with one of my last letters to hand deliver to her? And instead he snags her away while I’m half-dead in the hospital? Could a person feel guilt about that? Or maybe if you were the reason a whole squad got wiped out?”

“You mean your boys?” Eileen asked. “Are you saying that Tara’s new boyfriend is the man in your convoy who shot too soon?”

“You got it, Mom. Ron Nolan. I believe I’ve mentioned him once or twice.”

“Never nicely,” Jim said.

Evan slugged some wine. “What’s nice to say?”

“Evan.” Eileen frowned and threw him a quizzical glance. “I don’t think I’d heard before that he was seeing Tara.”

“But wait a minute,” Jim said. “I thought you and Tara broke up over the war. Wasn’t this guy Nolan over there too?”

“Yeah,” Evan said. “Funny, huh? So I guess maybe it wasn’t the war with me and Tara after all. Maybe she just wanted out and that was a good excuse.”

“No.” Eileen’s voice was firm. “That’s not who Tara is. She would have just told you the truth.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think we know who the real Tara is, Mom. Not anymore, anyway.”

But Jim came back with his original question. “So this guy Nolan came to Walter Reed to apologize, or what?”

“That was the spin he put on it. But you ask me, it was to rub it in.”

“Why would he do that?” Eileen asked.

“Because that’s who he is, Mom. He’s a mercenary who shot up that Iraqi car because he wanted to, period. Because he could. And if you want my opinion, he came to Walter Reed, among other reasons, to show me he’d gotten clean away with it. And while he was at it, he stole my girlfriend. This is not a good guy, believe me.”

“Then what does Tara see in him?”

“That’s what I’ve been getting at, Mom. She’s not who you think she is.”

“I still don’t see how you can say that.”

Facing his mother’s implacable calm, her hard-wired refusal to think ill of anybody, Evan suddenly felt his temper snap. He slapped a palm flat down on the table, his voice breaking. “Okay, how about this, Mom? When Nolan told her I’d been wounded, you know what she said? She said I made my bed, I could sleep in it. Her exact words.” His eyes had become glassy, but the tears shimmering in them were of rage, not sorrow. “She just didn’t care, Mom. That’s who she is now.”

For a few seconds, the only sound in the backyard was the susurrus of the breeze through the leaves of the fruit trees.

“I can’t believe that,” Eileen said finally. “That just can’t be true.”

Evan drew a deep breath and raised his head to look straight at his mother. Exhausted and angry, he nevertheless had his voice under control. “No offense, Mom, but how can you know that? That’s what she said.”

Eileen reached out across the picnic table and put a reassuring hand on her son’s arm. “And when was this?” she asked.

“When was what?”

“When she heard that you’d been wounded and said you’d made your own bed and you could sleep in it.”

“I don’t know exactly. Sometime in early September, right after Nolan got back home, about the time I got to Walter Reed.”

“No, that’s not possible.” She told him about meeting Tara just before Christmas in the supermarket. “I may be terminally predisposed to seeing the good in people,” she said, “and I know that sometimes I’m wrong. But there is no possible way that she had heard about your being wounded before I told her. And that was in December.”

“If that’s true, why didn’t she call me then? Just to see how I was doing? Wish me luck? Some—?” He stopped abruptly, suddenly remembering the reindeer on the wall across from his bed, and that her call to him at Walter Reed—when
he’d
refused to speak to her—had been just before Christmas.

Or, if his mother was right, within a few days of when Tara had heard for the first time that he’d been injured.

Eileen patted Evan’s arm. “She didn’t call you because maybe she was already going out with this Nolan man by then. Maybe she felt guilty about that, or maybe she just thought it would be too awkward. But my point is, she certainly didn’t know back in September that you’d been hurt. And it really doesn’t sound like her to say you’d made your own bed.”

“But then why would—?”

Jim, who’d been listening carefully to the debate, suddenly couldn’t keep the enthusiasm from his voice. He knew the answer before Evan finished asking the question. “Why would Nolan come all the way to Walter Reed to tell you a lie? Could it be so that you’d get to hate Tara so much that you wouldn’t be tempted to call her when you got back?”

Evan’s flat gaze went from his father, over to his mother, back to his father again. “You know, Dad,” he said, “you’ve gotten pretty smart in your old age.”

T
HE SUN WAS JUST SETTLING
in behind the foothills as Evan ascended the outside steps at Tara’s apartment building and rang her doorbell. When there was no answer, he walked down to the kitchen window and peered inside, where the lights were off and nothing moved. He should have called first and made sure she was home, but the determination to go directly from his parents’ house and talk to her had come as an impulse, and acting on the impulse—he was mostly sober, well-rested, recently showered and shaved, there’d never be a better time—he’d told his parents good-night, jumped in his car, and driven down.

Since she hadn’t been with Nolan at the bowling alley, Evan had more than halfway convinced himself that her relationship with him was over. And if that were the case, he’d talk to her and see once and for all if there was any trace of a spark left to what they’d had, in spite of everything. At least they’d be dealing with the truth.

He’d parked not in the building’s parking lot, but out in the street, in the same space his unconscious had apparently picked the other night. Now he went back to the car and got in. Taking out his cell phone, he began to scroll down to her numbers, both cell and home, but then stopped. If she was still going out with Nolan, or worse, if she was out with him at this moment, the timing would be disastrous.

He turned on the car’s engine for a minute so he could roll down the driver’s window, and saw that the clock on the dash read nine-fifteen. One of the inviolable rules of Tara’s life while they’d been going out was that she wouldn’t stay out too late, or party too hard, on a school night. And Sunday was a school night. Setting his seat back down a couple of notches, but to where he could still see above the ledge of the window, he turned the engine off and settled down to wait.

It didn’t take long.

There was still a trace of natural light left in the day when a yellow Corvette, top down, turned into the lot. Tara was in the passenger seat and still with Nolan, all right. He got out and came around and opened her door and they walked, casually familiar, hand in hand, across the parking lot and up the stairs. She opened the door and they both went inside and Evan felt the blood pulsing in his temples. He put his hand gently over the area when he’d been wounded and imagined that it felt hotter than it had been.

In the apartment, the kitchen lights went on in the front window. A shadow passed into the frame, occupied it for a moment or two, then moved out. The room—and the entire apartment—darkened again.

Evan placed his shaking hands on the steeering wheel and tried to get some physical control back into his body. Swallowing was difficult. Sweat had broken on his brow and down his back.

What was he going to do?

“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” he said to himself. But it was an empty imperative with no meaning. Seeing them together, knowing that they were in fact a couple, rendered unimportant the day’s discovery that perhaps Tara hadn’t cruelly ignored his injuries. What did that matter if she was sleeping with Nolan? If he was in her life, and Evan wasn’t.

Suddenly, rocked with self-loathing and hatred, he allowed a steely calm to wash over him. Like most off-duty cops, he kept his weapon available for emergencies. His .40 semiautomatic was locked in his glove compartment, and now he took it out. Checking the chamber and the safety, he took a breath and then opened his car door, tucking the gun under his Hawaiian shirt into his belt.

He stepped out into the street.

E
VAN SAT AT ONE
of the computers at police headquarters. There wasn’t much call for accessing the Department of Motor Vehicles database with his work in the DARE program, and this was the first time he’d actually had occasion to use the department’s software. So far, it hadn’t gone as quickly as he would have liked. In a perfect world, he could have already been in and out and nobody would have seen him, which would have been his preference.

But his world hadn’t been perfect for a long time.

And sure enough, suddenly, at nine-thirty on a Sunday night, when the whole station should have been all but deserted, somebody called out his name from the doorway. Straightening his back, he hit the “ESC” button and jerked his head to the side so quickly he felt a crick in his neck as he looked over to see Lieutenant Spinoza from the Totems now coming toward him. Breaking a casual smile, he said, “Hey, Fred, what’s going on?”

“People keep killing each other, that’s what. So we poor public servants have to burn the midnight oil and then some.” He gripped Evan’s shoulder. “But, hey, how are you feeling?” he said. “I didn’t like the way that dizziness came up on you all of a sudden the other night.”

“No, I’m fine. I don’t know what that was. My brain whacking out on me again.”

“Well, whatever it was, you looked like you got hit by a train, and I mean that in the most flattering possible way.” He pulled around the chair next to Evan and straddled it backward. “You’re aware, I hope, that when you’re not feeling good, you can call in sick. Everybody knows what you’ve been through. You don’t have to push it. Nobody’s going to bust your chops if you need a little time off. Plus, the major issue, just to keep life in perspective, we need you sharp for the game next Tuesday, rather than frittering away your energies trying to convince kids not to smoke dope.”

“I’m all right, Fred. Really. I don’t need to take time off.”

“Obviously, if you’re down here now. What’s so important on a Sunday night?”

Evan gestured vaguely at the screen in front of him. “Honing up on my computer skills.” He crossed his arms over his chest, all nonchalance. “But why are you here?”

“I’d say the usual, but it’s not.” Spinoza had clearly put in a long day already. “Does the name Ibrahim Khalil mean anything to you?”

“Should it? Is that an Iraq question?”

The response slowed Spinoza down. “No,” he said, “but where you’re coming from, I can see that’s how it would hit you. But no. Mr. Khalil lives—lived—in this mansion in Menlo Park. He owns about half the 7-Elevens on the Peninsula. Owned. He and his wife don’t own anything anymore, though. If it is him and his wife….”

“What do you mean? You don’t know?”

Spinoza shook his head. “Well, we know it was their house. And we know there were two bodies in it. But it’s going to be a while before we can put the pieces back together.”

“The pieces of what?”

“Their bodies.”

Evan digested that for a second, then asked, “Did somebody cut ’em up?”

“No. Somebody
blew
’em up, like with a bomb or something. Which of course set the house on fire and burned half of it down around them. So we won’t for sure know much of the details for a while. But the neighbors all heard an explosion and then the fire.”

“Somebody trying to get rid of the evidence.”

Spinoza broke a small weary smile of approval. “Not only does he bowl,” he said, “he also thinks. I think I see a detective badge in your future, my son.”

“Let’s get me out of DARE first.”

“That’s a good idea. How much longer you on that?”

“Well, after school’s out.” Evan let out a tired breath. “I can handle it if I can just keep from strangling any of the kids.”

“Yeah, don’t do that. Parents get all upset.” Suddenly Spinoza’s gaze went to the computer and he clucked in a schoolmarm fashion a couple of times. “This, boys and girls, is a bozo no-no.”

“What is?”

“‘What is?’ he asks. I’m sure. You think I’m an idiot?” He spoke in an exaggerated stage whisper. “We—and by ‘we’ I mean the department—we officially frown upon this method of meeting pretty young women.” He lowered his voice further. “But really, privacy issues, don’t go there. If you got busted, it wouldn’t be pretty.”