I slowly stooped over and placed my cup of coffee on the ground, then held out my hands with all fingers showing. I had been busted for possession upon returning stateside in 1973. I knew the drill.
“Good morning,” I said.
“DEA,” said the lead guy. “We have a federal warrant to search the domicile of Benjamin Bridger.”
“That’s me. What are you looking for?” I asked. “Maybe I can save you some time.”
The man gave me the same hard stare I had once given the Pathet Lao. He flashed papers as his team moved into my house, doing their dance of dash, take cover, inspect, present weapons, move in, all very Foxtrot Tango Delta. I would have been impressed if my blood hadn’t taken a chill.
“Anybody inside?” he asked.
“Just me. My wife died—”
“Shut up,” he said.
Agents lifted two happy beagles from the back of one truck. The dogs had their own little black bulletproof vests. They lolled their tongues and whined while their boss turned the handle on my garden spigot and filled two red plastic bowls marked “DEA.” The dogs lapped eagerly, spun about, and went to work.
They were looking for cocaine, guns, marijuana. Whatever. The sheriff’s deputies were looking for child porn. They had a warrant, too, though they were surprised and a little awed by the presence of the feds.
Not one of them was polite.
28
JUNE 10–11 • SAN DIEGO/EL CAJON
My sense of irony doesn’t run very deep.
I was in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown San Diego for three days before all the charges were dropped. No explanation, and nobody apologized.
My lawyer cost me a good half of my savings, money from Janie’s retirement account that I had not wanted to violate. The lawyer, a large woman in a dark green suit, explained that she had me out on a writ of habeas corpus but there wasn’t going to be any case. Informants had waffled, sources had literally gone south, a bunch of solid leads had turned into string cheese rather than a rope, and they can’t hang you with string cheese.
I was lucky they hadn’t seized everything I owned. The county still had my computer. They could take weeks to analyze what I had peeped at on the World Wide Web.
I had overnight become a suspected drug dealer and child molester. My neighbors had probably picked up the story, and the local press, too. Nobody is careful with reputations these days, especially the reputation of an ex-Marine, a Vietnam vet, retired on disability and probably addled with Agent Orange. Who knows how many kids he bayoneted?
I felt filthy and guilty without having broken a single law.
I went home and stared in numb admiration at the mess they had made. Walls had been kicked in, holes punched in the ceiling, and old brown insulation pulled down. Family photos had been dumped in the living room and walked over with dusty boots. All my electronic equipment—VCR, old Kenwood stereo, Sony Trinitron, Akai tape deck, CD player—was piled by the door, cases roughly unscrewed and pulled back.
The videotape was gone.
They had even taken a backhoe, dug up my fiberglass septic tank, and bashed it open. The whole property smelled of sun-ripened shit. Yellow police tape lay in curls along the drive and all around the house.
At least they had locked the doors when they were done.
I picked up broken furniture and a shattered toilet in the front yard and piled it in the garage to sort out later.
They hadn’t even left me a pot to piss in.
Janie had made me sell my Colt and my shotgun and all my knives years ago. I was grateful for that. A: I had gotten some money for them and B: I hadn’t posed an immediate threat to the guys in armor and jackboots. I could have died.
Imagine my surprise when I found a Smith & Wesson thirty-ought-six planted conspicuously on top of a stack of four of my books. My own books, in hardcover, author’s copies, sitting in the middle of my small office. Something I would be sure to look for.
The rest of my library had been dragged from the shelves and tossed around the room.
I tried to make sense of the pistol. It was old. Its grip was wrapped in what looked like white medical tape, gone gray with use. Someone had left it behind, just in case I might need it. I considered calling the sheriff’s department, then decided that doing anything without a good think was sure to be counterproductive.
I had been staring at that damned gun for maybe five minutes when the first phone call came. I picked up but heard only a click, then a long and faraway silence. One of those operations, I assumed, that computer-dials a hundred folks at once but can only respond to ten or fifteen.
The second call was from Janie. A cloud seemed to drift over, and the house got darker. She asked how I was doing.
“Not too well,” I said, and began to cry, hearing her voice, missing her so and feeling utterly and devastatingly useless, empty as a discarded doll.
Janie’s words began to fill me up.
I took a pee in the side yard and catnapped in the chair. The sea breezes came and went, then the stars. The canyon air was still and I heard the owl in the backyard but couldn’t see it. Finally, I pulled the slashed queen-size mattress outside, shoved it onto the stiff high grass, flung a sheet over it, and lay down.
The next morning, I sat on the front porch again, this time with a beer in one hand and the tape-wrapped Smith & Wesson in the other. I was entertaining the notion of checking out of this shitty old motel called life. I could be with Janie in the flash of a muzzle.
I didn’t think about Rob Cousins until he turned up at eight with another man. I recognized Banning from his dust-jacket photos, foppishly handsome. They cast long shadows as they walked up the driveway.
“You all right, Ben?” Cousins asked.
Banning stepped over a strip of yellow police tape and waved at me like a professor on holiday.
