Текст книги "Fangs Out"
Автор книги: David Freed
Жанр:
Триллеры
сообщить о нарушении
Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 19 страниц)
Two
Crissy Walker was in a fish mood. I recommended a cozy seafood place called Hooked at the far end of the municipal wharf where I always ordered the grilled wild sea bass with salsa fresco and a whisper of cilantro. Walker and his wife both went with steamed crab legs. From our table, the street lights onshore were gauzy starbursts, refracted in the mist that had settled thick and damp over the Rancho Bonita waterfront.
“Ask anybody,” Walker said, downing his third Jack Daniel’s and signaling the waiter for another. “My daughter was a knockout. Smart as a whip, too. Second in her class at Annapolis.”
He pulled out his wallet and pulled out a picture of an athletic-looking brunette with strikingly blue eyes. She was wearing Navy whites and flanked by eight other cadets identically dressed, all grinning into the camera and holding hand-lettered signs that said, “Beat Army!” They all looked like they had their whole lives ahead of them, but none more so than Walker’s daughter, Ruth. He was right. She was a knockout.
“That’s what happens when you raise your kid in a Navy town,” Walker said with a bittersweet smile. “She never did want to go the Air Force route like her old man.”
“You did good work, Hub.”
I handed him back his photo. He looked away, out onto the dark ocean, his eyes moist, hoping I wouldn’t notice them.
Crissy leaned her head on his shoulder and stroked his arm affectionately. “I was only her stepmom, which I knew Ruth resented sometimes, but I don’t know how I could’ve loved her any more.”
Nearly a decade had passed, Walker said, since two SEAL team snipers out for a leisurely, ten-mile midnight run found his daughter’s body sprawled in the sandy bluffs behind Coronado beach, about a half-mile from the Center for Naval Special Warfare, where West Coast SEALs do much of their training.
“She died,” Walker nodded, gazing out the windows and into the murk, “on a night just like this.”
I asked if her killer was ever caught.
“They stuck a needle in him out in Indiana about a month ago. Ten years of appeals before he finally ran out the clock. The feds offered to pay our airfare so we could come out and watch, but I was worried I might put the sumbitch out of his misery myself. They put us up in a hotel in San Diego instead and put it on closed circuit TV.”
“I couldn’t watch it,” Crissy said.
“I did,” Walker said, staring glumly down at his drink. “Enjoyed every minute of it.”
Part of me wanted to offer a congratulatory toast. A rabid dog had gotten what he deserved. I’d helped exterminate a few of them myself working for the government, before I burned out, and before Savannah left me. After we divorced, I did some serious soul-searching and went looking for a new line of work. That’s when I found civilian flight instruction and the Buddha, who tends to frown on anything that smacks remotely of the kill-’em-all, let-God-sort-’em-out mind-set with which I’d been leading my life. I wasn’t sure where I stood anymore on the debate over state-sanctioned execution, only that I was glad I wasn’t the one to decide when to flip the tap.
Our tattooed, ear-studded, twenty-something server, who’d introduced himself at the outset of the evening as Gary, arrived with a fresh tumbler of whiskey for Walker. He ignored my empty water glass and tried not to stare at Crissy’s breasts.
“Another wine for the lady?”
“Please.”
The waiter’s lips curled in a leering smile as a thought came to him. “Excuse me for asking, but didn’t I see you in Playboy, like, twenty years ago?”
She raised her gaze to meet his, her eyes suddenly hard like jade.
“You have no idea,” Crissy said, “how often I get that.”
Gary got the hint and swallowed hard. “Be right back with that wine.”
“I could use some more water,” I said, but the waiter apparently didn’t hear me, or pretended not to, as he headed for the kitchen. I thought of going after him, putting him in a wrist lock or an arm bar and making him refill my glass. But that would’ve been bad karma. I’d probably come back in the next life as Gary’s busboy or, worse, his tattoo artist. I excused myself and fetched a water pitcher sitting on a shelf near the cashier’s stand. When I came back to the table, Walker was weeping whiskey tears.
“Losing a child, that’s something you don’t ever get over,” he said. “You wake up with it every morning. When your head hits that pillow every night, it’s the last thought on your mind.”
Crissy rubbed his shoulder and told him everything was OK.
“It’s not OK, Crissy. It’ll never be OK.” He swiped tears with the back of his hand and looked at me straight. “I want to tell you how she died.”
Not to sound insensitive, but I didn’t want to hear it. We mere mortals prefer our heroes unscathed by the kind of tragedies that randomly befall the rest of us, none being greater than having to bury a child. I didn’t know why he felt compelled to confide the painful details of so substantial a loss with someone he’d known all of one day, but changing the subject was a nonstarter. Hub Walker owned a Medal of Honor. Who was I to tell him no?
“Ruthie was a systems engineer, computers,” he said. “Served on a guided missile frigate after graduation. She didn’t much like sea duty, though. Never got past the throwing-up part.”
After she left the Navy, Walker said, he’d helped her land a job by introducing her to Greg Castle, the president of Castle Robotics, Ltd., a small but upcoming defense contractor headquartered east of San Diego in the hardscrabble suburb of El Cajon. Castle Robotics developed aerial drones for the Pentagon. Walker had done some promotional work for Castle’s company, and Castle was only too happy to hire Ruth as a computer design specialist. It was in that capacity that she met and began dating a cocky young engineer who worked for one of Castle Robotics’ main competitors, another San Diego-based contractor, Applied Combat Systems. Ruth’s new beau came from old money in Marin County. He’d gone to Stanford and boxed middleweight on the university’s intramural team. His name, Walker said, was Dorian Munz.
“They broke up, but not before Ruth got pregnant,” Walker said, blowing his nose with a cocktail napkin. “Munz didn’t want her having the baby. Told her he wasn’t about to be making child support payments the rest of his life. That’s when she told him it wasn’t his baby anyhow.”
Ruth would give birth to a girl she named Ryder. Munz grew convinced that the infant’s father was Ruth’s married boss, Greg Castle, who already had four children of his own. Castle dismissed Munz’s claim as “laughable.”
“Ruthie never would tell me who the real father was,” Walker said, “only that it was her own damn business and nobody else’s. She was a hardhead. Just like her old man.”
“That was Ruthie,” Crissy said, smiling wistfully, “always doing things her own way.”
According to Walker, Munz became suspicious that Ruth was spreading rumors about him: that he’d become fond of cocaine; that he’d developed a taste for high-end hookers. True or otherwise, they were the kind of rumors that can cost a man his top-level security clearance and his career in the defense industry. Dorian Munz would soon lose both. He started threatening Ruth over the telephone, Walker said, then began stalking her. Ruth took out a restraining order. Munz ignored it. He shadowed her to and from work, when she went to the grocery store, on dates.
“Phone records show that Munz called Ruthie the night she got killed,” Walker said. “We don’t know all of what was said, but the FBI thinks he lured her out by offering some kind of truce. She agreed to meet him on Coronado. That’s where they found her. She’d been stabbed.”
Because Ruth Walker’s body was discovered on Navy property, the case was quickly deemed federal. The U.S. Attorneys’ office announced in short order it would seek the death penalty. Munz’s lawyer argued that the government’s decision was influenced unfairly by the fact that the victim’s father was a Medal of Honor recipient. But Hub Walker insisted that his military accomplishments had nothing to do with it.
“The evidence against that miserable piece of filth,” he said, “was thicker than maggots on a dead possum.”
Southern colloquialisms. People are never merely upset. They’re angrier than a pack mule with a mouthful of bees. They’re never simply at a loss for words. They’re as tongue-tied as a coon hound chompin’ peanut butter crackers.
“At least he’s no longer taking up space,” I said, hoisting my glass. “To closure.”
“There’s no such a thing,” Walker said sadly.
He stared into the night, grieving over the loss of an only child, and all I wanted to do was get the hell out of there. I’m the first to admit, comforting others is not one of my strong suits. We’re born alone, we die alone, and in between, with rare exceptions, people invariably disappoint and deceive us. In the end, even in combat, the only human being you can count on is you. But the Buddha is all about understanding, and I’m all about trying to be a more compassionate, understanding human being, no matter how impossible the task might seem at times. And so, reluctantly, I swallowed down the urge to un-ass myself from my chair, and reached over and gripped Walker’s thin arm supportively.
“What’s done is done, Hub.”
“I only wish.” He looked over at me, fisting tears from his eyes. “After you left the airfield today, your mechanic buddy, Larry, told me you used to work some kind of intelligence assignment. Said he didn’t know much about it. Said the Los Angeles police couldn’t figure out who killed your ex-wife’s husband and you did. That true?”
Where to begin? Yes, it was true that after my fighter pilot days were cut short by a gimpy knee from days playing football for the Academy, I was transferred to Air Force intelligence and eventually to a Tier One Ultra unit within the Defense Department code-named “Alpha,” where operators were referred to as “go-to guys.” We functioned essentially as human guided missiles, hunting down terrorists abroad. That was before the White House got wind of our operations and shut us down for fear of political backlash. And, yes, it was true that I’d reluctantly agreed to assist in the murder investigation of the lowlife my ex-wife, Savannah, had left me for – Arlo Echevarria, my former Alpha commander – but only because her father had offered me $25,000 to do so. I’d subsequently spent most of that money covering an engine overhaul on my airplane, and paying Larry some of the back rent I owed him, which more or less put me back in the financial doghouse. Hub Walker, however, didn’t need to hear all that. So I responded to his question with what I concluded was a brilliantly deflecting one of my own:
“What’s that got to do with the price of eggs?”
“I want you to help prove that Greg Castle had nothing to do with my daughter’s murder.”
I looked at him, not understanding. “Unless I’m mistaken, Hub, you just said the evidence against this guy, Dorian Munz, was ‘thicker than maggots on a dead possum.’ I assume the jury must’ve agreed, or else they wouldn’t have put him on the bus to hell. Or am I missing something here?”
Apparently I was.
As Walker described it, when Munz was asked if he had anything to say before being executed, he said plenty. He had proclaimed his innocence, as he’d done many times before. Only this time, he asserted that Ruth Walker had been murdered after discovering that her boss, Greg Castle, had been bilking the Defense Department out of millions of dollars in fraudulent overcharges. According to Munz, Castle killed Ruth – or paid somebody to kill her – before she could go to the feds with proof. While Munz’s allegations failed to produce the reprieve that he’d hoped for, they did generate widespread news reports in San Diego.
“The press,” Walker said, “lapped it up.”
The result was a public relations nightmare for Castle Robotics and for Castle personally. The company’s chances of securing Defense Department contracts were in jeopardy, as was Castle’s marriage.
“I’ve known Greg Castle for years,” Walker said. “He’s a good family man. Honorable as the day is long. I know he had nothin’ to do with Ruthie’s murder. But that’s not the impression everybody in San Diego has, what with everything Munz said before he died. You spend a week or so snooping around, get me something I can throw the news media, something to show that Munz was talking out the side of his filthy, lying mouth before they executed him, and I’ll pay you $10,000, plus expenses.”
“I’m a flight instructor, Hub, not Kojak.”
“But you did used to work intelligence assignments, correct?” Hub said.
I shrugged.
“Well, that means in my book you were an investigator. And I got an inclination that if you were as good at investigating as you are flying, it’ll be money well spent.”
“Come down to San Diego,” Crissy said. “You can stay with us. We have a very nice place in La Jolla. Bring your wife. I’m sure she’d enjoy a little vacation.”
“I’m not married.”
“Well, you must have a girlfriend.”
I shook my head.
“Boyfriend?” Walker said with one eyebrow raised.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” Crissy quickly added.
“What I have is a cat. And that relationship is definitely on shaky ground.”
“Sounds to me like what you need is The Cat Communicator.”
I looked at her.
“It’s a reality show,” Crissy said enthusiastically. “He’s like The Dog Whisperer, only he deals with badly behaved cats. People call him up when they’re having problems with their kitties. He comes over and straightens them out.”
“The Cat Communicator. Can’t say I’ve ever seen it.”
“That’s because it’s still in development. That’s what I do. I’m a TV producer – trying to be, anyway.”
I wondered how many episodes of The Cat Communicator would involve issues such as retaliatory scratching and urination.
“Here’s the deal,” Hub said, “Larry told me you’re short on flight students right now. We both know you could use the money. Plus, it’d be a way for Crissy and me to pay you back for all that you did for us today, helping us get through that cloud deck and all.”
A quote from Thoreau bubbled up from the tar pits of my brain, an artifact from my Air Force Academy days. The first time I’d heard it was during my doolie year, when a fourth-year cadet upbraided me in a hallway after I deigned to point out that being a military pilot afforded certain privileges, not the least of which was earning a livable wage. Leaning in close, his nose squishing mine, the upperclassman reminded me that one joins the armed forces of the United States to serve his country, not to service his bank account. “Money,” he seethed, “is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.”
Maybe not. But money is required to cover the bills, of which I unfortunately had plenty.
Hub Walker jotted down his cell phone number on his wife’s cocktail napkin and slid it across the table. I said I’d sleep on his offer and get back to him in the morning.
* * *
Kiddiot, THE world’s dumbest cat, sniffed his dish as if the chow I’d just served him had been stored in a Cold War-era fallout shelter.
“Ten million cats starving to death in China, who would all kill for a can of Savory Salmon Feast in Delectable Gravy, and you act like the health department’s gonna come barging in here any minute and arrest me on code violations.”
Kiddiot flicked his orange bottlebrush tail like he was annoyed, which was his default state, and climbed out his cat door, departing the converted two-car garage apartment that was our home. I couldn’t much fault his disinterest in the plat du jour. My eighty-eight-year-old landlady, Mrs. Schmulowitz, a retired elementary school P.E. teacher, frequently served him chopped liver with fresh Nova Scotia lox – on fine china, no less. I probably would’ve turned up my nose at canned Savory Salmon Feast, too, gravy or no gravy.
I showered and shampooed, flossed and brushed, trimmed my beard, eased into bed, and turned off the light. Mindful of my breathing, I tried to relax my mind, to reach that elusively transcendental state of enlightenment that real Buddhists are always clucking about, the one I’ve never come close to reaching, the one that would’ve allowed me to consider Hub Walker’s offer of employment with complete, objective clarity. That was the plan, anyway. I was asleep before I knew it, dreaming about the only man I ever stabbed to death.
He was toking on a hash pipe, standing outside the alley entrance of an Amsterdam brothel where two Algerian brothers, both al-Qaeda financiers, were enjoying an evening out. To eliminate the brothers, my Alpha team members and I would first have to dispatch their bodyguard. I drew the job. My heart pounded in my ears as I eased in from behind and crooked my arm around his chest to stop him from reaching his shoulder holster, then thrust the tip of my blade into the side of his neck, slicing outward to hopefully avoid the blood spray and prevent him from shouting out. I was lowering his limp body to the ground when my cell phone rang me awake.
“You asleep?”
Groggily I glanced at the digital clock sitting on the wooden orange crate that doubled as my nightstand. It said 3:30 A.M.
“Who sleeps at this hour, Savannah? I’m out clubbing. I’m dancing the rumba.”
“You don’t dance, Logan. If dancing were any easier, it would be called football. Isn’t that what you told me once?”
“Possibly.” I rubbed my eyes. “You doing OK?”
“Fine.”
“Then why are you calling me at 3:30 in the morning?”
“Just to talk.”
“We talked all weekend.”
“That wasn’t talking, Logan. I believe that would be defined as ‘heated debate.’ ”
“I stand corrected.”
Our weekend together, in which we’d agreed beforehand to sleep separately in the exquisite villa Savannah’s father bought for her high in the Hollywood Hills, most certainly had its moments. We smiled over tender memories. We exchanged a few soulful gazes over candlelit dinners at her kitchen table, the kind that can prod a man’s glands to action without it even dawning on him that he has glands. Our hands brushed. We may have even come close to kissing once or twice. But mostly we bickered, hurling accusations and occasional insults at each other like so many pie tins.
You left me for another man.
You left me no choice. You checked out on me emotionally long before I ever packed my bags.
Gum surgery would have been more pleasant.
Nearly seven years had lapsed since the end of our marriage. Not a day had gone by since when my stomach did not grind over the realization of how big a mistake I’d made, letting her go as easily as I did. Savannah Carlisle Logan Echevarria was intelligent, compassionate, and indisputably beautiful. There were times when I could not look into her depthless mahogany eyes for fear that I was not worthy of such a view. Plus her wildcatting oilman father was obscenely wealthy. She was, in other words, the ultimate catch, the proverbial total package.
Don’t get me wrong. The total package was not without its flaws. At forty-three, Savannah could be strong-willed beyond all reason and argumentative just for the hell of it. There was also that small matter of her having dumped me for my former Alpha team leader, Arlo Echevarria. True, as she complained, I’d grown increasingly distant back when I was working for the government; I was no longer “there” for her and Echevarria was. That alone should’ve canceled out all of her awesomeness in my memory. And yet, somehow, it didn’t. I kept hope alive that someday, maybe, we would find ourselves together again. My desire to recapture what we once enjoyed was a feeling to be both savored and loathed all at once – savored because it reminded me of a time in my life when I was never happier; loathed because it was a time in my life when I was never more vulnerable. The yin and the yang. I wondered if Savannah didn’t suffer the same ambivalence.
“I’ve been thinking it over,” she said, “and I think I know what our issue was this weekend.”
“I happen to dislike bananas and you love them?”
“Not bananas.”
“Fruit should be round, Savannah, not shaped like phallic objects. I’ll just let it go at that.”
“I’m trying to be serious here, Logan.”
“OK, what was our issue?”
“Location. We were in my house. I used to live with someone else in this house. So, naturally you were going to be on edge, which put me on edge. By reenacting our perpetual relationship gridlock on an unbalanced stage, we fell into antagonistic patterns of communication. Clearly, it was a recipe for disaster.”
“That’s very impressive psychobabble, coming from a fashion model.”
“I don’t model anymore, Logan. I told you. I’m a life coach.”
“A life coach. How does that work exactly? You send off for some mail-order certificate that gives you license to tell people how to manage their lives?”
“I didn’t send off for some certificate, Logan,” she said, the rising agitation in her voice hard to miss. “I earned a master’s degree in psychology from UCLA. I’ve also done extensive postgraduate reading.”
“I could check out every book at the library on rocket telemetry. It wouldn’t make me Wernher von Braun.”
Cold silence filtered from the other end of the line. I’d overstepped. Yet again.
“I’m sorry, Savannah. I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“Like hell you didn’t. That’s always been your problem, Logan. You think you can say anything to anybody and get away with it. Is that who you are deep down? Somebody who enjoys hurting people for no reason?”
“Not usually. Having a reason helps immeasurably.”
“You’re so full of crap, you know that? I don’t even know you anymore. I’m not sure I ever did.”
“You knew me.”
“Nobody knows you, Logan. They only know what you want them to know. You put up walls. You let no one in. We were married for eight years, eight years. I never even knew what you did for a living, what you and Arlo really did – and I was your wife, for god’s sake.”
“We’ve been over and over this, Savannah.”
“Have you considered seeing a therapist? Therapy would do you a ton of good.”
“Pay some guy two hundred bucks an hour so he can tell me my problem was that I wasn’t breast-fed? Thanks, I think I’ll pass.”
“You have trust issues.”
“I have trust issues. Gosh, Savannah, do you think it could possibly have anything to do with my wife having dumped me for my best friend?”
She said nothing. There was nothing to say.
Check and mate.
I’d undergone regular psychoanalytical assessments as a member of the military. When the government of the United States authorizes you to kill other human beings, it wants to be assured that you’ll be reasonably selective when doing so. Sitting across the desk from a military shrink, you learn quickly what answers he or she is looking for, how to game the exam, because you both know that too much has been invested in your training, and that you’re too lethal a weapon to be shelved. I kill because it’s my duty, Doctor, not because I’m addicted to the hunt. Do I see them in my sleep, the dozens whose lives I’ve extinguished, some more gruesomely than you could ever imagine? Sometimes. But who doesn’t have an occasional nightmare? Nature of the beast, right, Doc? I passed every mental evaluation I ever took. But that didn’t mean I didn’t give serious consideration to Savannah’s suggestion.
Though she didn’t know it, I’d actually gone to a psychiatrist when our marriage was foundering. I’d selected him randomly from the Yellow Pages, a corpulent, middle-aged man who maintained his practice on a houseboat in Sausalito and whose hands trembled all the time, like he was living atop the San Andreas Fault. He spent forty-five minutes asking me how I felt about having been abandoned at birth by my heroin-addicted teenaged mother, and how I felt about having been brought up mostly by strangers, bounced among more foster homes than I cared to remember. I told him I was fine with all of it. You can’t change the past, I said. All you can do in life is move forward. The shrink recommended we commence twice-weekly counseling sessions immediately. I never went back.
“What if we met on neutral turf next time?” I told Savannah. “Some place that doesn’t remind me so much of Arlo.”
“Somewhere that doesn’t engender ingrained resentments. That’s an excellent idea, Logan. Any place in particular you have in mind?”
“What about Costco? I’m running low on cat food. We could meet at the one in Burbank. That’s pretty close to your house, is it not?”
“You want to talk about reconciliation at Costco. Can you be serious, Logan, please, for once in your life?”
“I am serious. I don’t feel at all resentful at Costco. In fact, I usually feel pretty great at Costco, especially when they’re handing out lots of samples. You know the expression, ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch?’ Whoever said it has never been to Costco.”
“I’m hanging up now, Logan.”
And she did.
I tried going back to sleep but I couldn’t. The fog had dissipated, giving way to a dinner plate moon that bathed Mrs. Schmulowitz’s small, perfectly tended backyard in a creamy luminance no mini-blinds could filter out. The coyotes were yipping up in the hills above town. Sometimes, they ventured down to prowl Rancho Bonita in search of four-legged midnight snacks. I debated going out and trying to convince Kiddiot to come inside, but I knew he’d only blow me off.
We’d first met one morning when I went outside to get the newspaper and found him curled asleep on the hood of my truck. When I tried to pick him up to put him on the ground, he growled softly without bothering to open his eyes. So I left him there. He was doing no harm, I figured. I came back out a half-hour later to head up to the airport and he was gone.
That evening, I was reading – Bertrand Russell, if I remember correctly – when something banged loudly against the wall of my converted garage apartment. I put down my book, grabbed my revolver, flung open the door, and found Kiddiot sitting there in all of his oversized orange glory. He trotted in as if he owned the place. I poured a little milk into a mug and offered him part of a leftover chicken burrito. He approached, sniffing them like they were both radioactive, then hopped up on my bed, stretched out, and went to sleep on my pillow with his tongue hanging out. He wouldn’t leave after that.
I posted “cat found” notices around the neighborhood, but no one ever called. Where he came from, I couldn’t say. I dubbed him Kiddiot because he seemed unwilling to comprehend anything, including his new name, even though I am certain he understood everything I ever said to him. Mark Twain once said that a man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. I learned that Kiddiot didn’t give a damn what anybody thought. He led life on his own terms, wholly and unapologetically. You’ve got to admire that.
He’d be fine, I told myself.
I punched my pillow and flopped from my left side to my right, trying to find a comfortable position, but sleep eluded me. My insomniac thoughts swirled around Savannah, as they always did. Maybe on neutral turf, we could work toward something approaching what we once had. I thought about the temporary employment Hub Walker had offered me. Getting paid to roam around San Diego for a few days while getting reacquainted with Savannah? The idea grew on me.
I called her back.
“Forget it, Logan. I’m not going to Costco with you.”
“OK, forget Costco. What about San Diego? I’ve been offered a gig down there. Should take less than a week. We could hang out.”
“Could we go to SeaWorld? I’ve never been there.”
“If that’s how you want to spend your time.”
“What’s wrong with SeaWorld?”
“Who said anything’s wrong with SeaWorld? SeaWorld’s fine.”
“It’s just that you don’t sound too excited about the idea of going.”
“Did you not just hear what I said?”
“If you don’t want to go to SeaWorld, Logan, tell me. It’s not like you’re going to hurt my feelings. I just thought it would be something fun to do together, that’s all. See Shamu. Pet the dolphins.”
As evenly as I could, I said, “I’m in.”
“When are you planning to go? I’d probably need to reschedule a few clients.”
“As soon as I find out, I’ll let you know.”
“Fine.”
“Good.”
Awkward silence.
“Sweet dreams, Logan.”
“You, too, Savannah.”
The line went dead.
I lay back, my hands behind my head, feeling pretty special about the aspiring Zen me. There are three fundamental rules in Buddhism. The first is that nothing is fixed or permanent. The second is that change is possible. I’d exercised the first rule by my willingness to shelve whatever lingering resentments I harbored toward my divorce, and the second by proposing to Savannah an alternative path toward reconciliation: we would go to SeaWorld. But as I closed my eyes, trying to get my brain to call it a night, I forgot all about the Buddha’s third tenet: Actions inevitably have consequences.