Swift Horses Racing

by Victoria Kazarian

  “Please keep this to yourself. What you told me today. I don’t want other witnesses to be influenced by your statement.”

  She nodded and stood up.

  “Have a good evening, Mrs. Ruiz. I’ve got to head back downtown before traffic gets bad.”

  He passed the front desk, now empty, and headed out the door to the back parking lot.

  As he started the car and looked behind him to back out, he saw a flash of shiny black hair turn away in the window.

  39

  The day’s light was fading as Ruiz pulled into the parking lot at extended daycare.

  It was on the school grounds, so Jacky walked across the field to the portable classrooms after school. Reyna had interviewed the staff, asking questions about whether there was a time and place for doing homework, and what kinds of educational activities they offered. Satisfied that Jacky would be sufficiently challenged, she signed him up, basically meaning the boy went to school at 7:30 and got out at 5:30—the equivalent of an adult workday.

  Ruiz was conflicted about this. He didn’t remember having to work so hard as a kid himself. Yet he also knew the trouble that he and his brother Mateo had gotten into after school on their own, as kids who wore their apartment key on a chain under their shirts.

  He went in and signed Jacky out at the front desk. As soon as Jacky saw him, he came running, grabbed his backpack from the cubby and met him at the desk. Jacky was doing his bouncing thing, excited about something. His eyes had that twinkle in them, so like his mother’s, when he was preoccupied.

  “Dad! I want to get the new Forest of Nevermore game for my DS.”

  Ruiz snorted. “Yeah, good to see you, too, mijo.”

  “Oh, hi.” Jacky did a reset. He quickly moved into schmooze mode. “Tell me, Dad, how was your day?”

  “I arrested a car thief. And filled out lots of paperwork afterwards. That’s my version of homework.”

  “Well, that sucks.”

  Ruiz flashed him a stern look. “Your mom doesn’t like when you use that language. You know that.”

  “It’s not like I’m swearing or anything. Everyone says that. Most of the kids say ‘shit’ all the time, too. I don’t.”

  Ruiz kept a straight face as they headed outside. It had just started to rain. Jacky ran out to the truck, still in bounce mode. He looked like a cartoon character, gangly twig legs and his mother’s big, round eyes.

  “Your homework done?” Ruiz asked as he clicked to unlock the doors.

  “Of course, it is.” Jacky leaped up into the truck and fumbled for the seat belt. At eight, he’d finally passed the weight limit for sitting in an actual seat without a booster and seemed to take great pride in sitting up in front instead of the truck’s small second row seat. “I finish it first, before I play. They tell Mom if I don’t.”

  They headed down the street to the expressway, which was filling up fast. Ruiz wheeled in to nab a spot in the express lane, which was only slightly less crowded. Lights were turning on everywhere, and Ruiz felt the growing chill in the air through his jacket.

  “So, Dad. The game,” Jacky started in. “Colin and Raj both just got it. So I need it. I have $25 saved. It costs $49.99.”

  “Save your allowance. You’re gonna get birthday money from your lola in March.”

  Jacky let out a long sigh of annoyance. “I need the game now. They’re already playing it.”

  Their budget, which Reyna guarded fiercely, was tight. Living in the valley on their two salaries was getting harder every year. How many fellow cops had moved to the Central Valley in the past year? Every dollar was accounted for. They ate a lot of spaghetti. A lot of specials from the Asian market that Reyna knew how to make, that he hadn’t grown up with. Some of which scared him a little.

  “We don’t have the money for it right now. You’re gonna have to wait.”

  “I can’t wait. I won’t be able to play with my friends.” Jacky began to simmer, his lower lip curling under. “Colin says we’re poor.”

  “We’re not poor.” Ruiz wanted to tell him what poor was like. Going on an empty stomach, waiting for the breakfast his school provided.

  He wouldn’t launch into the lecture about how much harder his life had been. Or the value of waiting for something you really want. Even though those words sat on his tongue, ready to roll out. He wondered when he’d become an old person.

  “Why can’t we afford this one thing?”

  “There’s yard work to do. As long as your mother says we have the money for it, we might be able to give you some extra in addition to your allowance.” He was passing this one on to Reyna. She did have a soft spot for the boy. If she felt this game would keep him hanging out with “kids who were a good influence,” like Raj and Colin, she might be willing to give him the money.

  “Really?” Jacky’s mood swung back into the positive. “I can do it. I can rake the leaves. I can help you fix the fence. I promise. I’ll do a good job.”

  Based on the boy’s usual reluctance to help around the house, Ruiz was skeptical.

  “Let me talk to your mother. You have to work hard.”

  “I will, Dad. I’ll do anything. For real. Please talk to her.”

  This could be an opportunity for the kid to learn responsibility—and for him and Reyna to enforce the rules together. Since the beginning of their marriage they’d been two people from different backgrounds, thrown together and trying to make the best of it. They usually worked it out because they had one big thing in common. They loved their son.

  Ruiz turned off the expressway onto Benton and was paused at a light when it happened. Jacky had just reached down to pull something from his backpack.

  He heard a pop then a loud crack.

  The bullet came in through the windshield and out the passenger side window. At the exact level where Jacky’s head had been.

  “Jacky, down!” Ruiz pushed his son’s head down below the dashboard with one hand as he wheeled the car around and into the nearest shopping center parking lot. He pulled the car up in front of a busy Indian market and called 911.

  Five minutes later as they pulled into their driveway, Jacky was shaking and talking fast, jittery from the experience. Ruiz sat back in his seat and took a deep breath and thanked God.

  “Where did it come from? Why did somebody shoot at our car? Were they trying to kill us?” After reeling off the questions, Jacky got quiet and looked over at him from the shadows of the car, his face lit in colors from the Christmas lights still up on the eaves.

  “Let’s go inside. Let me talk to your mother.” Ruiz’s stomach had knotted up and he’d lost his appetite.

  When they got inside, Jacky ran to his mother and wrapped his arms around her. Reyna looked up at Ruiz, her face drained of color, her lips pressed tightly together.

  “Now tell me what happened, Jimmy.”

  “Someone shot at us. At San Tomas and Benton. One bullet through the windshield.” His heart pounded as he remembered it. “Jacky was bending down to get something from his backpack.”

  “Was it related to Karl Schuler’s shooting?” Reyna stroked Jacky’s head.

  Ruiz shrugged. “That’s not an area known for random shootings.” But then neither was the expressway by Karl Schuler’s house.

  Though nobody but Jacky seemed to have an appetite, Reyna brought out dinner. Arroz con Pollo, with a big kale salad that looked as appetizing as a bowl of lawn clippings. When she set down a plate of lumpia, Filipino egg rolls, the boy reached across the table for the plate.

  “Salad first, Jacky,” Reyna snapped. “Then chicken and rice. Then lumpia.”

  Jacky listlessly ate his salad, leaning his head on his hand, as he eyed the lumpia. Ruiz figured the rule applied to him, too, so he piled a heap of the salad on his plate.

  He looked over at Reyna. “I want to meet with Mario Flores after dinner.”

  Reyna looked startled, her cheeks pink. “You’re going to talk about the shooting?”

  Ruiz n
odded. “We could be a target because of what we saw. The killers saw my truck that night. We have to consider it.”

  Jacky cleared his throat. “I ate my salad. I ate my chicken and rice. I can have lumpia now?” From the eager look on his face, he seemed to have recovered from tonight’s shooting faster than his parents.

  Reyna handed him the plate and he took two of the rolls, which looked like small, tightly scrolled diplomas, the kind that they gave out at Jacky’s kindergarten graduation.

  Reyna folded her napkin on her plate and took a drink from her water bottle. She looked over at Jacky, then met Ruiz’s eyes, keeping her voice down. There was a catch in her throat. “Jimmy, he could have been—"

  “But he wasn’t.” Ruiz said firmly. “I want to make sure this won’t happen again.”

  40

  Karl Schuler’s Journal

  Human beings love certainty. Give them a groove to fall into and they will. They will become calm and happy when the thinking’s done for them. It’s as simple as falling in line next to someone else and marching, one foot after another. As simple as singing the same song with repetitive words. That is what we did in Hitler-Jugend. There is a big comfort in seeing that everyone around you is doing exactly the same thing.

  Look, we are all doing it. It must be right.

  The more I have worked with teenagers who have felt lost and depressed, I realize that the Nazi plan was brilliant. Keep the youths busy as much of the time as possible, keep them marching and feeling they are part of something bigger, and you will have their souls.

  Since I was older, my HJ group was older and the training more intense. It was late in the war, and the supply of soldiers was dwindling, so we were being trained to be the next wave of soldiers for the Reich. The next fodder for the war machine.

  I would be destined for a different machine.

  Duke Sorenson had just settled in to read the next entry in Karl Schuler’s journal. He’d been staying up for the past couple of nights reading it. Karl had written this over the month of December. In his own neat, tidy print, with dates from December 14 through December 30. Karl’s printing grew shakier as he’d progressed. Had he known he was going to die?

  Anyone who’d reached the age of ninety-two had to sense that death wasn’t far off, but Karl’s writing had an urgency in it, as if he had to get something out of him because his end might come very soon.

  As he read on, he’d read not only Karl’s story, but Aggie’s. He thought of the many times he judged Agnieszka Schuler for her coldness, how she’d seemed to keep everyone at a distance. Duke had felt cut out, judged by her reserve sometimes. He understood her better now.

  He heard the doorbell ring and audibly groaned. He slipped the book under the cushion of the couch and got up.

  Kathleen, his oldest child, stood at the door, wrapped in a huge red scarf. Her eyes burned with indignance.

  “You are here. Dad, I haven’t heard from you in three days. I’ve been worried sick. You’re not answering your phone. Or text messages. Do I have to show you how to text again?” She looked past him into the house, as if suspicious of what he might be concealing.

  “I haven’t forgotten how to use it. I’ve just been busy.”

  She bustled past him to get inside, stripped off her gloves and set them down on the foyer cabinet. Then she went into the kitchen as if it were her own and began making coffee in his coffeemaker. He followed her in, though he wished she’d keep her visit short so he could get back to reading.

  “When I don’t hear from you, I worry about you. I worry you aren’t eating. That you aren’t taking care of yourself. It’s been almost two years since Mom passed, and I worry that you’re all by yourself.”

  “You don’t need to worry, hon. I have my friends. I’ve been helping Karl Schuler’s daughter go through fifty years of stuff in his house.”

  Kathleen was well meaning, but he couldn’t help but feel that he was her pet; she had to spend a certain amount of time with him, take him for a walk and make sure his dog dish was full of water and kibbles.

  He enjoyed his kids best when he could just have adult conversations with them.

  After spooning coffee into the filter and flipping the switch, Kathleen turned to him, her eyes wide.

  “Dad, I’m so sorry, I forgot about Karl. How is Rose? How’s the family?”

  The Schulers and the Sorensons had spent time together as families, starting from the days Duke and Karl worked together. Kathleen and her sisters and brothers had come to think of Rose and Christoph as aunt and uncle, and Karl and Aggie as grandparents.

  “I saw everyone at the service yesterday. Rose and Christoph, the grandkids. Rose is trying to work as hard as possible at cleaning out his house. Probably so she doesn’t have to think about losing him.”

  “Sounds about right,” Kathleen said briskly. She poured cups of coffee for each of them and brought them into the living room. “I’m not sure how I’d react if I lost you. Mom was hard enough. But Karl—I can’t imagine Rose dealing with the fact he was murdered.”

  Duke didn’t need coffee, especially not this late in the afternoon. But it seemed important to Kathleen to make it for him, and he was grateful he had children who wanted to spend time with him. He settled into his seat on the couch and reached for the mug.

  “The fellow who saw it happen—James Ruiz. He’s a police officer. A real nice guy. He and his wife, they said the SUV waited on the side of the road for Karl to pull out, then sped ahead of them and shot him.”

  “There’s a lot of crazy people out there on New Year’s.” Kathleen took a sip of coffee, got a sour look on her face, then went to rummage through his fridge for creamer. He got the feeling she wasn’t crazy about Costco bulk coffee.

  “San Jose is getting more dangerous every year. Could it have been a group of kids? The news said something about gang activity.”

  Duke shook his head. “I’ve been thinking about this all week and haven’t come up with anything.”

  Kathleen unwound the scarf from her neck and settled into the armchair as if she were here to stay. “It’s hard for me to see why anyone would want to kill a man like Karl.”

  Through the cushion on the couch, Duke felt the firm shape of the journal under his thigh.

  “You can’t know everything about someone.” He wondered if he should tell Kathleen. He felt the need to take the burden off of himself by sharing what he’d read. “People don’t share all of their stories.”

  Kathleen’s eyes narrowed and she leaned forward in her chair. “What an interesting thing to say. Do you know something about Karl you’re not telling me?”

  He didn’t know if he should tell her. What would Karl have wanted? Karl’s journal entries could be misunderstood. Maybe they were why he was dead.

  “I found something Karl wrote. I believe he wanted it to be found. About his early life in Germany, in Hitler’s time.”

  Her face brightened. She was obviously eager to hear more. “I always wondered if that Uncle Hermann of his was a Nazi.”

  “Karl saw a lot of things working with Hermann. He wanted to talk about them, but I think he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Maybe that’s why he waited so long. Maybe he was afraid he’d be thought of as a Nazi, too.”

  “What if he was a Nazi?”

  Duke frowned. “Karl? Would that change your opinion of him now?”

  Kathleen looked down into her coffee. “My husband is Jewish. My kids are half Jewish. They’re still finding old men who worked as guards at the concentration camps when they were young. There are organizations who hunt them down, and I think that’s right. What they did was mass murder. There has to be a consequence for these things. Or it will happen again.”

  Duke started to feel queasy. It didn’t make sense with what he knew about Karl Schuler—a good man as long as he’d known him—that he would have willingly participated in any of the activities of the Third Reich.

  “He was young then,” Duke said, tryin
g to imagine the teenaged version of Karl in the journal. I can’t imagine it—“

  Kathleen set her coffee down. She sounded firm, as if the matter was settled. “Karl had a life before he came to the U.S. He’s responsible for his actions.”

  Duke reached for his coffee and noticed his hand was shaking. If it was true that Karl had been a Nazi, like his uncle had been, somebody may have come looking for him. But had that someone known all that Karl had done—all the lives he’d touched for good?

  “What about forgiveness.” His voice came out sounding raspy, dry. “What good would it do for Karl to be punished for something he might have done seventy-five years ago?”

  He wouldn’t give up the book now. He couldn’t show Kathleen. He’d wait till she left. He had a few more entries to read.

  If Karl had changed into someone who could do evil in his youth, couldn’t he change into someone who could do good as an adult?

  Duke needed to know the whole story of Karl Schuler.

  41

  After returning to the station and writing up his notes, Flores put in a call to Crime Scene, to see if they’d managed to find any prints or salvage any of the items found in the burned SUV.

  Nobody answered. He left a message.

  Time was ticking. He had one more day to find Schuler’s killer. Or hand the whole thing over to Jesperson.

  Feeling desolate and unusually introverted, he decided to grab some food then drive down the expressway to check the area where Karl Schuler had been killed.

  In the dusk, streetlights were turning on. He drove back to Willow Glen. Lincoln Avenue was still lit by white Christmas lights wound around the trees along the street. When he saw the fronts of familiar restaurants, he realized how hungry he was.

  It was Thursday evening, an early start to the weekend. Parked cars lined the street bumper to bumper. He found a spot on a residential side street and parked the Prius. Then he headed back to Lincoln Avenue to see what he could find without too much of a wait.