The First Rule of Ten (34 page)

AN EXCERPT FROM….

T
HE
S
ECOND
R
ULE OF
T
EN

Topanga Canyon, Calif.
Aug. 2, Year of the Iron Rabbit

Lama Yeshe and Lama Lobsang

Dorje Yidam Monastery

Dharamshala, India

Dear Brothers in Spirit,

I find myself reaching out to you because my own spirit lies heavy in my chest this evening. A few weeks ago a pair of cops in a city just south of here answered a call about a homeless vandal breaking into parked cars. They arrived on the scene and found the culprit at a bus depot nearby. He resisted arrest. They threw him to the ground, shocking him multiple times with their stun guns. Backup cops arrived, mob instinct took over, and soon six cops had tasered and clubbed him into a coma as he cried out for his father…

… who was at home, mere miles away, oblivious to the unfolding catastrophe.

… who was, it turns out, a retired member of the police force.

Three days later, this heartbroken retired cop took his son off life-support, finishing what his brethren had started. And today’s paper tells me the perpetrators are themselves under investigation by the FBI.

Multiple tragedies built on false assumptions. A homeless young man with a mental disorder, beaten to death by my other brothers, the ones in blue who carry badges. And all because they couldn’t see what was actually in front of them—a suffering human being gripped by paranoia, in need of medical attention. They saw the ground-in grime and ragged filth of the chronic vagrant, and assumed “homeless” meant abandoned and disposable, like trash. Maybe even dangerous. Their preconceived prejudices stripped the victim of all humanity.

His confused brain told him these officers were monsters. They obliged by responding monstrously.

Here’s the thing. As I sit here on my deck, watching the sky darken, I understand. I understand how those officers got caught up in the moment. How the flood of adrenaline swept aside reason and fellow-feeling. How the twitch of an outstretched limb could seem as threatening as a cocked trigger. I want to believe that I am incapable of that kind of delusion, but I know better. As do you, my dear Yeshe and Lobsang, who know the deceptive capabilities, the hidden mines, of the mind better than most.

Lately I’ve been seeing more clearly how I use my false beliefs to deceive myself. I’ll notice self-critical thoughts running through my mind, labeling me as incapable of discipline, when suddenly I’ll realize it was my father who’d always labeled me lazy. Or I’ll look at a beautiful woman and assume she is needy, then suddenly realize it’s my mother’s neediness I’m seeing. It happens in my work, too: I found a missing 16-year-old I was searching for—found her pushed against a wall by a man twice her age, and assumed she was being raped. Nothing could have been further from the truth, but my unconscious assumptions kept me from seeing reality as it was.

So, I’m making a new rule for myself—a reminder, really, of a truth I tend to forget: From now on, I’m going to be on the lookout for unconscious beliefs, the kind I hold so closely I mistake them for reality. As familiar as they are, as safe as they make me feel, too often these convictions serve as blinders. They prevent me from understanding what is actually happening in my life. I’m taking a new vow, to challenge my old, limited models of thinking. To be willing to release them. Their job may be to protect, but more often than not they mislead, and in some cases even endanger. In the split second it takes you to figure out the difference between your perception of reality and reality itself, a lot of bad things can happen. In my chosen line of work, that split second can mean the difference between living and dying.

The lost-and-found teenager, Harper Rudolph, was my latest such lesson in humility. I’m not complaining. The job paid well enough to see me through several lunar months, and I can now report that I am more than holding my own as a private investigator. I’m grateful for that. And I guess you could say I closed the case successfully, though Harper didn’t see it that way. She may have been missing in her father’s eyes, but the last thing she wanted was to be found.

After maybe three minutes of face time with Marv Rudolph, I felt like heading for the hills myself.

But that’s another story for another day. The air grows cool and moist against my skin. An eyelash of moon has just materialized, low on the horizon. Can you see it as well? I like to think so.

I miss you, my friends, even as I hold you close in my heart. Not a limiting assumption. Reality.

Ten

C
HAPTER
1

I flipped the envelope over, rechecking the address in Dharamshala, making sure I had it right. But of course I did. How many letters, over how many weeks and months and years, had I mailed to my friends in just this way?

The original postmark was still there, stamped and dated months earlier. Yeshe’s and Lobsang’s names were x–ed out.
Return to sender!
blared across the envelope in black ink, with a slash of arrow pointing to my Topanga Canyon address.

I recognized the handwriting. I had grown up with it, the jagged letters gouged into small index cards summoning me to the monastery headquarters once or twice a week, so that my father, or should I say my father the Senior Abbot, could chastise me for yet another infraction. His stiff, angry scrawl was permanently etched in my brain. I would know it anywhere.

I refolded the letter and slipped it back inside its paper pocket. A low sigh escaped, originating deep in my chest. Now that I knew Yeshe and Lobsang hadn’t received my latest letter, I felt a little lonelier than before. Nothing had changed, yet everything felt different. The sweet feeling of clarity I had been savoring, the one that often lingers after a deep afternoon meditation, was clouded now by a sense of loss.

I allowed it in.

In the distance, the ocean was quiet and majestic, the lights of distant boats just beginning to twinkle in the fading dusk. I took a sip of green tea. It had cooled in its cup as I sifted through my mail, turning tepid as I mulled over this unexpectedly returned letter. I cast my mind back.

Marvin Rudolph and his daughter Harper. What a pair.

I felt my lips purse with taut disapproval, and I forced myself to relax into a half-smile. Whenever my mouth tightens in judgment like that, I look a lot like my father. That tells me I’m thinking like him, too.

I tried to recall the case, which had turned equally tepid in my mind after all this time. I closed my eyes and opened my other senses. Sometimes I have to let them do the remembering for me.

An acrid scent filled my nostrils.

Bad breath and potholes, that’s how it started….

“Find her. She’s just a kid.” Marvin Rudolph leaned close, wheezing from the effort of walking the ten yards from his car to my living room. I wanted to recoil from the fetid combination of sushi and cigar smoke. My feline housemate, Tank, darted under the couch, probably for the same reason.

“Don’t you mean, find her again?”

“Whatever.”

Marv had already filled me in on his elusive daughter Harper—at 16, a newly converted connoisseur of the seedy and the derelict. Six months earlier she’d made her first escape, bolting the family mansion to savor the dark side, in this case Adams Boulevard, near Skid Row. He’d discovered his daughter hunkered in a downtown loft with a drug dealer named Bronco Portreras.

Marv handed over a photograph. I studied it. Harper must have gotten her looks from her mother. Dark wavy hair framed a heart-shaped face dominated by huge gray eyes.

“How did you know where to find her?”

Marv settled back in his chair. His belly billowed over his jeans, encased in a black linen shirt one size too small.

“Good story. We were open-casting for a dope dealer when in saunters Portreras. Think early Banderas meets Robert Pattinson, plus tats, minus the fangs.”

I must have looked as baffled as I felt.

“Hot,” he clarified. “I’m just sayin’. He nailed the reading, too. Anyway, the insurance company balked, because it turns out it wasn’t an act. He really was dealing dope. Everybody wants to be a star, know what I mean? A week later, when Harper didn’t come home from school, I logged on to her Facebook page. Bingo. She’d put a link to Bronco’s audition on her wall, posted it on YouTube, too. He’d already gotten like twenty thousand hits….” Marv’s voice grew wistful, probably envisioning yet another gilded statuette that got away.

“So you tracked her down?” I prompted. It was almost ten o’clock at night. Way past Tank’s bedtime.

“Yeah. He’d given his contact information to the casting agent. A crack dealer, leaving his digits on file. Dumber than a stick, right? I found Harper and him in his loft downtown, high as kites on weed, coke, maybe a little E. I threw a coupla grand at Bronco to shut him up, dragged her sorry ass home, and cut off her allowance until further notice.”

It seemed to me that Marv was better equipped to deal with his daughter than I was, and I told him so.

“Not anymore,” he said. “She’s blocked me. Fuckin’ privacy settings. My wife and I can’t get on her page. And she won’t answer her phone.”

Marv’s mouth twisted, and for a flash I saw the ruthless producer whose reputation for intimidation, especially when crossed, was legendary, even in an industry known for bullies. Then it was gone. His face sagged. With his grizzled day-old beard and loose jowls, he looked like a disappointed mastiff.

“Please,” he said. “She needs to come home.”

“Why not go to the cops?”

“Are you on crack? This whole thing would go viral before the cops even left the building.”

I had one last question.

“How did you get my name?”

“I talked to one of your buddies down at police headquarters.”

I immediately thought of my ex-partner, Bill. He was always worrying about my finances.

“Bill Bohannon?”

“Who? Nah,” Marv said. “The Captain. Told him I needed a private detective, someone discreet. He told me you’re more than discreet. You’re some kind of Buddhist monk. Tight with the Dalai Lama and all. That right?”

“Something like that,” I said.

“So, you into poverty, then?” Marv’s expression grew shrewd.

“Five grand a day, three day minimum,” I said. “Plus expenses.”

He wrote me a check then and there. Three days, prepaid.

With that kind of discretionary income, you’d think he could afford mouthwash.

Whump!
Tank—all 18 Persian pounds of him—thudded onto my lap, startling me out of my reverie. He draped his chunky body across my lap. I scratched under his chin, and he made a deep, gentle
prrrttt
sound. He tilted his head and eyed me, lids half closed, as if to say, “Don’t let me stop you.”

“Where was I?” I asked Tank. He flicked his tail like a whip.

“Right. Potholes.”

Devouring contraband mysteries every night, hiding under the covers of my monastic pallet in Dharamshala, I tended to romanticize the life of a detective. I’d open Raymond Chandler, read “Down these mean streets a man must go,” and picture dark, smoky alleys with music drifting out of open windows, and beautiful women leaning in doorways, their long legs toned, their eyes glinting at me. I say “me,” but in my mind I wasn’t a skinny Tibetan teenager living in a Buddhist monastery, with a shaved head, maroon robe, and sandals. I wasn’t Lama Tenzing Norbu. In this fantasy version of me, I lived in a big city. I solved crimes. I was armed, and I was dangerously good at what I did. Fedoras were involved, as well as a sexy car and sexier gun. My street handle was “Ten.”

A lot like my current life, come to think of it, though I don’t own a fedora.

Yet.

Anyway, the mean streets in my imagination didn’t have potholes the size of garbage cans threatening to break my Toyota’s axle and hijack one of my kidneys, like the ones en route to finding Harper Rudolph that night.

After Marv left, my first and only call had been to Mike Koenigs. It was late, close to midnight, so he’d be having breakfast right about then. Mike is my personal “information security contractor”—according to Mike the word “hacker” is now considered passé, if not slightly insulting. I helped him out some years back, keeping him out of federal prison for dabbling with someone else’s data. In return, he was my go-to man for digital matters, big and small.

“Can you get past Facebook blockades?” I asked.

“Boss, where’s the love? Where’s the respect?” he replied. “Name?”

I gave him Harper’s name.

Pause.

“Okay, I’m on.”

I waited.

“Hunh. She’s posting as we speak. Whoa. Some serious partying pictures.” Mike let out a long, low whistle. “Is that Keith Connor?”

“Keith who?”

“Ten, even you must have heard of the guy. Ex-rocker-turned-actor? Bad-boy heartthrob? Daily fodder for TMZ?”

Oh.

“She says, and I quote, ‘Keith’s place is off the hook.’”

I heard light tapping.

“Yeah, and guess what? He’s about to start work on a film produced by Harper’s daddy, Marvin. Seven-digit salary. No wonder he’s gigging it up.”