"Hang on," I said.
I put the van in park and hopped out, brushing aside a thorn covered branch with my bare hand. A thorn or two snagged my skin and drew blood. By the time I reached the gate, my hand was already healed.
Cool beans.
A thick chain was wrapped around a rusted pole driven deep into the ground. The chain was padlocked with a heavy-duty lock. I often wondered who carried keys to these random city and county locks. Somewhere out there was a guy standing in front of some obscure park gate with a big wad of keys and going crazy.
This lock was a big one, and heavy, too. As I picked it up, the chain clanked around it. I turned my back to Stuart. I hooked my finger inside the lock's rusted loop and with one quick yank, I snapped the lock open.
"We're in luck," I yelled, letting the lock drop. "It's open."
* * *
We were now in a clearing at the edge of a ravine, where a small river flowed twenty feet below. The gurgling sound of it was pleasant. The chirping of the birds was even more pleasant. Darkness was settling over what passed as woods in southern California, which amounted to a small grove of scraggly elderberry trees, deformed evergreens, beavertail cactus, and thick clumps of sagebrush and gooseberry, and other stuff that wasn't taught in my junior college environmental biology course.
We were in a sort of clearing, surrounded by a wall of trees. My sixth sense told me that this place had been used before, for something else, for something physically painful, but I didn't know what. My sixth sense was sketchy at best. Still, I heard the crack of something breaking, perhaps bone, and I heard the crash of a car. I walked over to the edge of the ravine and looked down. Sure enough, deep within the soft soil around the lip, I saw deep tire tracks. Someone, at sometime, had taken a nose-dive off the edge here and down into the river below.
I turned and faced Stuart. "This is where I will bring him."
Stuart had walked to the center of the clearing, and was taking in the area, perhaps envisioning himself fighting a crime lord to the death in this very spot. Like gladiators in an arena.
"It's a good place," he said, nodding. He looked slightly sick.
A bluejay shot through the clearing, flashing through the shadows and half light, disappearing in the branch high overhead, reminding me of the old George Harrison song, "Blue Jay Way", about fogs and L.A. and friends who had lost their way.
I stood in the clearing with a man who had lost his way, too, his life completely derailed by pain and grief and the burning need for revenge. He stared up into the darkening sky, which filled the scattered spaces above the tangle of trees. His bald head gleamed dully in the muted light.
We all lose our way, I thought. Some of us just for longer than others.
Perhaps even for all eternity.
"A part of me doesn't believe you can get him here," said Stuart, still looking up, his voice carrying up to the highest, twisted branches.
I said nothing.
"But another part of me believes you can. It's a small part, granted, but it believes that you can somehow, someway, deliver Orange County's biggest son-of-a-bitch to me."
I was quiet, leaning my hip on the fender of the minivan, my hands folded under my chest. A small, hot wind blew through the clearing.
"So then I ask myself, 'What will you do if he does show up? What will you do if Samantha Moon really can deliver him?'" He lowered his head and looked over at me, his face partially hidden in shadows. I could mostly see through shadows, but I doubted he could. I'm sure to him I was nothing more than a silhouette. A cute silhouette, granted. "But that's the easy part, Sam. If you deliver him to me, I will hurt him. I will do everything within my power to make him feel the pain he has made me feel. But first I will play my wife's last message to him. I want him to hear her voice. I want my wife's voice to be the last thing that son-of-a-bitch hears."
A single prop airplane flew low overhead, its engine droning steadily and peacefully. A bug alighted on my arm. A mosquito. Now there's irony for you. I flicked it off before I inadvertently created a mutant strain of immortal mosquitoes, impervious to bug spray or squishing.
Stuart went on. "But I'm going to give him a fighting chance, more than he gave my wife, the fucking coward. I'm not sure what sort of fighting chance I will give him, but I will think of something."
We were quiet. The woods itself wasn't so quiet. Tree branches swished in the hot wind, and birds twittered and sung and squawked. A quiet hum of life and energy seemed to emanate from everywhere, a gentle combination of every little thing moving and breathing and existing. Sometimes a leaf crunched. Sometimes something fast and little scurried up a trunk. A bird or two flashed overhead, through the tangle of branches. Insects buzzed in and out of the faint, slanting half-light.
Stuart was looking down. A bug had alighted on his bald head, threatening its perfection. He casually reached up and slapped his head, then wiped his palm. Whew! Disaster averted. Stuart, I saw, was crying gently, nearly imperceptively.
I waited by the van. He cried some more, then nodded and wiped his eyes. His whole bald head was gleaming red.
"Let's do this," he said, nodding some more.
"You don't have to do this," I said.
"No, this is the best answer. This is the only answer, Sam. I want justice, but the courts won't give it to me."
"Jerry Blum is a professional killer. He's going to know how to fight. And he's going to kill you the first chance he gets."
"I have been taking boxing lessons these past few weeks, since our last talk."
"Boxing lessons where?" I asked.
"A little Irish guy. Says he knows you. Says you're a freak of nature."
"Jacky's always exaggerating," I said.
"Says you knocked out a top-ranked Marine boxer."
"The top-ranked Marine boxer had it coming to him."
Stuart looked at me. The red blotches that had covered his head were dissipating. He looked so gentle and kind and little. I couldn't imagine him taking on a crime lord single-handedly. "You are a fascinating woman, Ms. Moon."
"So they say," I said, and decided to change the subject, especially since the subject was me. "Stuart, there's a very real chance you aren't walking out of this grove alive in a few days."
That seemed to hit him. He thought about it. "Well, this is a good place to die, then, isn't it?"
"You don't have to die, Stuart," I said.
"No," he said. "I suppose I could always just shoot him before he knows what hits him. Or have a whole array of weapons at my disposal."