Till the Butchers Cut Him Down

Thanks also to
Marcie Galick, for organizing me Jerry Kennealy, for bringing McCone into the computer age Suzanne Rampton,
for yet another piece of her life Patricia Wallace, for fine-tuning on Nevada Collin Wilcox, again, for his aviation expertise

Oh! didn’t he ramble ramble?

He rambled all around

In and out of the town,

Oh didn’t he ramble ramble.

He rambled till the butchers cut him down.

From
Oh, Didn’t He Ramble

by Will Handy

Touchstone

July 4

I made the best decision of my life on a high meadow in California’s White Mountains, where I’d gone to watch for the wild
mustangs.

At least watching for mustangs was what I planned to do when I declined to ride into Big Pine with Hy to pick up some supplies.
But now that I was nestled in a drift of dry wheat-colored grass at the base of a dead-looking bristlecone pine, I realized
that once again my sight had turned inward. Decision time, I thought. Middle-of-your-life crossroads, important stuff. Make
the right choice and it’s golden; make the wrong one—

I didn’t want to think about that.

Lately too much thinking had been my chronic ailment. Sixteen days of relaxing about as far from civilization as I could get
should have cured me, but instead I’d picked and prodded at my current problem—charging it from one side, sneaking up on it
from another. All to no good purpose; the problem remained a stubborn, inert lump in the exact center of my psyche.

I burrowed down into the grass, sniffing its bitter fragrance. It rustled around me and tickled my face. Above me the pine’s
branches creaked in a light breeze; I glanced up and saw bursts of green at their very tips. Not dead, just faking it.

Lulled by the whisper of the tall grass, I leaned against the pine’s rough trunk. Closed my eyes. And began obsessing some
more.

Decide, I told myself. You’re going home in a few days. For God’s sake, just make your decision.

When I opened my eyes some moments later, I was looking a wild mustang straight in the face. He stood not five feet away,
pale mane blowing in the breeze, head down, long roan neck stretched to its limits as he studied me. His soft brown eyes met
mine, and he blinked. Clearly I was the most curious animal he’d ever come across in his meadow.

For a few seconds he continued to stare, nostrils quivering. Then he snorted, as if to tell me that he found humans not nearly
as impressive as we find ourselves. With a shake of his head he wheeled about and ran, kicking up his hooves, tail and mane
streaming proudly—a shining, free creature.

And then the solution to my problem came so clearly that I jumped up, wheeled about, and ran too. Ran through high grass,
kicking up my heels; leaped over fallen branches, laughing. Ran till I was breathless and fell on my back, panting. Lay there
and laughed some more—really giving the mustang something to tell his herd about.

* * *

When Hy got back to our borrowed cabin some two hours later, I was sitting on the raised hearth, my hands wrapped around a
glass of wine, a big grin on my face. My lover set the box of groceries on the rough pine table and studied me, stroking his
droopy mustache. He’d pretty much stayed off the subject of my decision these past sixteen days—as I’d stayed off the subject
of some plans he was making—but now his curiosity got the better of him.

“You decided,” he said.

I nodded.

“You’re going to cut loose and go out on your own.”

I nodded again.

“Good choice.”

His words swelled the happy bubble in my chest. I grinned more widely, deciding not to tell him just yet about the part of
my scheme that made it perfect.

Hy took a bag of ice from the grocery box and began dumping it into the cooler. “You must’ve known I’d like the idea.”

“Well, yes. But it’s good to actually hear you say so. Your opinion’s kind of … an acid test for me.”

“I call it a touchstone. Black siliceous rock. Metallurgists use it to test the purity of gold or silver.” He hesitated, arranging
beers on top of the ice, then added, “You’re my touchstone, too.”

There was an uncharacteristic shyness in his tone that made my eyes sting. I blinked and busied myself with lighting the fire
I’d earlier laid on the hearth. When I finished, I turned and asked, “So, Ripinsky, this decision of mine—is it silver or
is it gold?”

Hy raised a beer bottle in a toast. “It’s gold, McCone. Pure gold.”

Part One

San Francisco

August

One

“Are you sure this’ll clear the bank?” Ted Smalley, All Souls’s office manager, held the check that I’d just handed him up
to his desk lamp and squinted at it.

I folded my arms and tried to look severe.

“Do I know this person?” he asked himself. “She looks like the old Sharon, in spite of the haircut. She talks like her, too.
But McCone Investigations? A separate business checking account? Rent for an office suite? Pretty strange stuff, if you ask
me.”

“Not nearly as strange as what’s going on upstairs in those rooms that you dignify with the word ‘suite.’ “As if to support
my statement, an enormous crash resounded at the front of the big Victorian’s second floor. I winced.

Ted rolled his eyes toward the ceiling.

In the long-unused cubbyhole next to my office, a Pacific Bell woman was installing lines for my new phone, fax machine, and
computer modem. Jack Stuart, the co-op’s criminal law specialist, and Hank Zahn, my former boss, had just gone up there to
remove my chaise longue and place it in Jack’s van. I wasn’t sure whether the crash had to do with the chaise, which Jack
had agreed to transport to my house, or my forty-seven-hundred-dollar Apple computer and laser printer, but if one had to
be sacrificed, I’d just as soon it was the well-loved but not nearly so costly piece of furniture.

Before I could run up there and check, Jack’s blue-jeaned posterior appeared on the stair landing; he was hunched over and
gripping the chaise as he inched backwards. In spite of my anxiety over the crash, I took a moment to admire the coop’s acknowledged
hunk from this vantage. Ted, the sly devil, noticed and winked. I winked back.

Next Hank appeared at the other end of the chaise, red-faced and scowling. Halfway down the stairs he began performing a series
of odd maneuvers that looked as though he’d developed a severe case of Saint Vitus’ dance. I watched in alarm, then realized
he was trying to push up his thick horn-rimmed glasses, which had slipped dangerously low on his nose; as he passed Ted and
me, I reached out and returned the glasses to their proper position. Hank smiled gratefully.

“What fell?” I asked.

“Not to worry.”

“What fell?”

Jack said, “One of those stupid rabbit bookends you keep on your desk. It broke.”

“Oh.” I swallowed hard. The “stupid rabbit bookends” had come from Gump’s and cost a minor fortune, even five years ago when
a former boyfriend had given them to me for Christmas. Well, I still had one. …

A little over a month ago in that high mountain meadow, my plan to establish my own firm and rent office space from All Souls
had seemed a stroke of genius—a way of turning down a slightly expanded job as head of their newly formed Investigative Services
department while maintaining my connection to the people who for me were more like an extended family than coworkers. But
now after weeks of negotiations and reams of legal documents and licensing and bonding applications, to say nothing of a steady
stream of outgoing checks, I was beginning to think I’d been quite mad. Still, I was sure that once established, I’d be better
off independent of the coop and certainly better off keeping my distance from Renshaw and Kessell International, the high-tech,
ethically bankrupt security firm whose offer of a lucrative position as field investigator had been my other alternative.
I’d always have a soft spot for RKI, however: the cash bonus they’d given me last July, prompted by my saving them from a
disastrous situation, had put McCone Investigations in business.

I glanced at my watch. Nearly eleven. The chaise was out of my office in time to make space for the new sofa and chair that
were to be delivered any minute.

Ted must have sensed that I felt a little down, because he said, “I bet I can glue the rabbit back together so you’ll never
notice it’s been broken.”

“Thanks.” I smiled fondly at him. He’s such an odd combination of aesthete and hardheaded administrator—a goateed gentleman
who favors old-fashioned dress and quotes Latin in the course of routine conversations and who also controls a staff of close
to a hundred and keeps northern California’s largest legal-services plan on track with seemingly effortless efficiency. And
now he was laying claim to a talent for repairing broken treasures.

“By the way,” he added, “somebody’s waiting for you in the parlor.”

I glanced over there, saw no one. “Who?”

He checked a scratch pad on his desk. “T. J. Gordon. Said you know him.”

The name wasn’t familiar. I moved closer to the archway and peered into the room. A man in dark blue business attire stood
in the window bay, hands clasped behind him as he contemplated the street.

I blinked. Sucked in my breath. “Suitcase,” I said softly.

“What?” Ted asked.

I shook my head, staring.

T. J. Gordon—Telford Junius Gordon, according to his driver’s license—had gone by the nickname Suitcase for as long as I’d
known him. I hadn’t given him so much as a thought in more than fifteen years.

Those years hadn’t changed him much. His five-foot-seven frame was still scrawny; his narrow shoulders still slumped; his
dark brown hair, now shot with gray, still rose in a cowlick at the crown and flopped limply onto his high forehead. The expensive-looking
suit might have been tailor-made, the watch that he now glanced impatiently at might have been a Rolex, but something told
me that not too far beneath the civilized facade lurked the Suitcase Gordon of old.

As I stepped into the parlor, he heard me and turned. His gray eyes moved shrewdly over me, and he nodded, as if my appearance
matched up to some private expectation. His sharp-featured face was relatively unlined; when he smiled, I found he still reminded
me of a friendly rodent. He bent and picked up a handsome leather briefcase that sat on the floor next to his equally handsome
shoes, and the past came rushing back to me.

In the old days on the U.C. Berkeley campus it would have been a suitcase he picked up—one of the ancient brown-striped cardboard
variety that went everywhere with him. It would have been crammed full of whatever he was peddling at the time: marijuana,
term papers on an infinite variety of subjects, amphetamines, false identification, purloined copies of upcoming exams, blank
airline tickets, manuals of legal tips for protesters, lists of safe houses for revolutionaries. He’d billed himself as an
itinerant purveyor of prefab scams, schemes, and perhaps even dreams, with something for everyone in the shabby suitcase that
had earned him his nickname.

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