“The doctors want to keep you overnight,” he said, looking away politely. “You don’t have a choice about that. Checking yourself out isn’t an option—or you’d just trade this bed for one of ours. Someone will be back in the morning to talk about what happens next.”
I nodded and inhaled to keep a few nasal drips where they belonged. He just watched me for a minute. Trying to suss out my motivations—my guilts or regrets or fears—from a few facial tics and eye movements. Then he said, “Thank you for your cooperation today,” and left with a nearly imperceptible bow, like a waiter who’d finished taking the order.
He’d probably waited his way through the police academy, couldn’t shake the customer service habit. I fell asleep considering the possibility of him slinging shrimp cocktails at the crab shack—not to cut him down or laugh at his expense, but because it reminded me: he wasn’t a bad guy, and there was more to him than I could see.
I was woken by the sound of someone clearing his throat. Dimly, through the sleep-grime coating my eyeballs, I saw Tuitele filling the chair by the bed.
I sat up slowly. I felt weak and well rested, like a geriatric cat. Tuitele wore a light blue collared shirt, sunglasses in the pocket. He was busy resettling himself in the uncomfortably small pine-framed chair. On the other side of the room, Lawrence, in a tan suit, pulled back the curtains and looked out the window at the crenellated roof of the children’s hospital across the way. It was nestled in another sprawling complex of low rectangular buildings, this one full of medical specialists and imaging centers.
“Hm,” I said. “This isn’t a good sign.”
Tuitele shifted from leaning on one arm to the other. The chair creaked in its joints. His heavy-lidded eyes watched me guardedly. “You should know by now,” he said, “that there are worse signs.”
Lawrence turned from the window. His face was a little more readable, though I couldn’t fully trust the polite smile of a midwesterner. He walked slowly to the side of the bed. “Sorry to wake you, Mr. Haines,” he said with his hint of a drawl, which only partly hid the fact that he wasn’t sorry. “We thought you’d be up by noon. But we all have better things to do than sit around and watch you sleep.” Then he sighed and changed his tone. “I’m surprised we’re talking to you again so soon, Mr. Haines.”
“Get in line,” I said. “It’s been one surprise after another.”
That wasn’t exactly right. As absurd as all these events had been, I’d been running toward them—seeking these days or something close enough. That I’d found them was the surprise, but only in retrospect, and only because of my deeper need for disappointment’s comforting smack to the face. “Did you catch the kids who tried to kill me?” I asked. “They’re the ones who killed Mike Padilla.”
Lawrence waved his hand in a gesture of so-so. “We got two young men at the shop. One’s dug in, swearing he doesn’t know anything. We’ll work on him. The other’s confessed. We’ve got to go back through evidence, make sure it’s all solid.”
It was strange to hear about confession in this sense. Not in confidence, like the kind I used to hear, the confessor intent on relieving the burden of sin by asking for Jesus’s intercessionary heavy lifting. This was public confession, entered into the civic record, part of calculating the line between reasonable and unreasonable doubts. Each offered an incomplete truth. Truth could never be fully shucked from its hiding place, only carved out, little pieces at a time.
“What did he confess?” I asked.
“Moving the drugs,” said Tuitele. “Shooting Padilla. You surprised them, the night you walked into the shop. Getting ready for a big drop. Padilla was more aggressive in his confrontation, it seems, and the kid panicked. Says it was an accident—that he was just trying to threaten Padilla, who was coming at him. Still, he doesn’t deny it was his finger on the trigger.”
Knowing this only left me feeling sunken and bitter, like my eyeballs were about to fall back into my cranium and float in the soup. A bad decision, a bad decision, panic, death, guilt, forced remorse. That was the story of this kid now, the story of Mike’s end. It wasn’t a good story—too much accident, no evil cause and effect, no Manichaean black and white—the kind where morality only gets a brief, greased grip on a person as they’re torn out of their own life by the riptide. But as someone who’d once built a life around perfectly formed stories, I could accept this one as the truth of his—ragged, incomplete, unexemplary. Getting to the bottom of it wasn’t something anyone could do.
I must have looked glum. Tuitele punched me in the shoulder with something like a smile on his face. “Hey, bonus is while we were there, some bikers came by and then tried to keep cruising like they were out for a Sunday drive. They had some interesting stuff in their saddlebags, and in the false gas tanks and exhaust pipes, too. Some organized Easy Rider shit. Maybe it doesn’t mean so much to you, but we might be starting to figure out how these drugs are making their way across the border and around the county. Not bad for an unemployed security guard.”
I didn’t smile. Later I would read in the paper about a border tunnel task force that would find an entrance in the floor of another motorcycle machine shop. This one was in Otay Mesa. You could throw rocks from the roof over the fence between the United States and Mexico. The hatch led not just to a room but to a full tunnel, dug twenty feet down and lined with a set of small-gauge rails to run drugs from one side to the other. They’d been using moving trucks to move the stuff on the US side, but those had been getting seized. The new scheme used a running stream of modified motorcycles. Moving the drugs in smaller batches minimized the risk, allowing them to be sent to probably a dozen or more distribution points around Southern California—places like Sammy’s house or the machine shop in Carlsbad.
Having a part in any of this was never my plan. No plan had deliberately gotten me involved in it either. But still, these coincidences—how the drug smuggling intersected with Sammy, how Sammy had used Emily, how Emily led back to Lambert, and Lambert to Gustafsson—they got my mental flywheel humming, the way they had in the bunker. The velocity was lower this time, though, like my hand was dragging on its surface, the way it does on the face of a wave as I slowed my speed.
“What about Sammy’s house?” I asked tentatively, knowing it was crazy—that some part of my rotten noodle still believed these thin connections were a bridge strong enough to step out on. The cops finding a smuggling operation was a little taste, and I could sense how my brain started jonesing for the buzz of epiphany. Apophany was more likely, a longing for links in a chain where there was only a series of unexpected collisions within a finite, closed system. But the knowledge could only do so much to stop me. “Is this stuff part of Sammy’s operation?”
Lawrence pursed his lips. “We’re not ready to make that leap yet,” he said with a slight defensive edge, picking up the hint of desperation in my tone. “We found a hidden storeroom in his garage, like you reported. With the amount of drugs inside, Gans is in custody and won’t be out of it for a good long while. And none of your prints were in the place, so good news for you, too.”
That they’d found the garage gave my nervous system a warm surge, got it rubbing up against its own little pleasure centers. It certified some of the conspiracy I’d worked up. In my chest I felt a wave of certainty, though I was present enough in my mind to call it what it had to be: wishful thinking. Still, I couldn’t entirely give it up. I was like the older kid who’s pretty sure Santa Claus doesn’t exist but won’t commit because of the prospect of lost presents.
“The kids you arrested—are they connected to him?” The one in the welding mask had sworn he didn’t know Sammy. “Sammy had done something at my old church, after I was gone, and gotten some of the youth-group kids dealing prescription drugs for him. These kids looked like the type, and Emily was in a church like that, too, and”—I heard myself saying it, though I was already regretting it—“Tom Gustafsson, he owns that church, and he owns Carlsbad Palms North.�
� I stopped myself there, before I tried to connect all these dots for them in Sharpie ink and made a bigger fool of myself.
Tuitele grimaced frankly. Lawrence didn’t look away this time.
“Gustafsson was advised about the situation,” he said curtly. “But he’s aboveboard as far as we know. He doesn’t need a side job running illicit drugs. He’s richer than the pope. I have no reason to believe the young men we have in custody had any interaction with Mr. Gans, let alone Gustafsson, and their religious affiliation has so far been irrelevant to our investigation. When it comes down to it, San Diego is a small town.” He lowered his gaze. “Too small, in point of fact, for you to run around pretending to be a cop.”
My skin flushed with shame—shame at tipping my paranoid hand, shame at being found out.
Lawrence smiled at my body’s response. “That settles it was you, I suppose. I wouldn’t recommend pretending it wasn’t. After all this, if your only crime is getting a little overzealous, I think a slap on the wrist could be arranged on the impersonation charge. Only a misdemeanor anyway. Maybe some community service would be good for you, eh? Obviously, you shouldn’t make a habit of interrogating pastors while pretending to be us. But we know you were just trying to find the girl.”
The thrum of anxiety that ran through me made the light in the room seem to dim and waver. “Have you? Found her, I mean?”
“No,” Tuitele said flatly. “Her prints were all over Gans’s storage room. She was involved down there, though he isn’t saying how—isn’t copping to more than a short-term hookup. We’ll see.”
“You should know, though,” Lawrence said, “that Ed Lambert, the pastor, he asked us to go easy on you. Said he could tell from talking to you that the deception was well intentioned, that you were trying to help someone they all care about. Call me old school, but I tend to defer to the wisdom of gray-haired, godly men.”
I wanted to call him something other than old school for making that kind of mistake. But if Lambert said to go easy on me, and it was only about pretending to be a cop, then he hadn’t told them how I’d stormed into his house and roughed him up. He probably hadn’t filled them in on giving Emily some cash from the collection baskets either. He was an hour away, doing whatever the fuck he was doing, and yet here he was, somehow, still making a deal, bargaining with me. One secret for another.
I could refuse it. Maybe he’d press charges. Maybe it meant I’d get to add an assault rap to my record. But it would also mean pulling Daniella into this. Maybe her sweet little marriage would go poof when the story came out. She didn’t have anyone looking out for her either. Even though she’d gone one way and Emily the other, she was still trying to help her friend. As much as I would have loved to be the cause behind some bad press for Lambert and his church, I didn’t want to hurt Daniella any more than she’d already been hurt. And if Emily was going to reach out to anyone after the dust settled, it wasn’t going to be the cops, and it wasn’t going to be me. It would be Daniella again. Still, I wanted Lambert to sting. I didn’t want to let him off the hook—not easily, not at all.
“Don’t look so green,” Tuitele said warmly. “You’re okay. A little probation, a little community service. Maybe some counseling on the California taxpayer’s dime. Then you’re golden. You can take a new lease out on life, man. A good idea, since you were pretty damn close to breaking your old one down in that bunker—breaking it several times over.”
Lawrence interjected: “I don’t know if he really—”
“I’d want to know,” Tuitele replied. They watched each other a minute, and then Lawrence nodded, relenting.
Tuitele turned back to me with relish. “You were about this close,” he said, holding his hands two inches apart, “to burning your damn self alive.”
“Excuse me?” I felt a few fingers of bile creep up my throat. It wasn’t exactly a bad feeling. I was pretty sure I’d almost asphyxiated, that I’d somewhat narrowly dodged getting shot. But fire wasn’t anywhere in that grim laundry list. “Is that supposed to be some kind of metaphor?” I asked.
Tuitele shook his head. He was smirking like a Halloween pumpkin carved by a kid with vertigo. “There were two sets of lights in that little bunker. Two switches, back behind the first row of shelves. The second switch would turn on the lights, every other bulb in the place. The other set of bulbs had been cut open with an acetylene torch, filled with gasoline, and then sealed up with putty. If you’d found the first switch and flipped it—boom.”
My father had prayed, until the day he died, that the fire of God would rekindle in me. This was different, but of a kind. Just knowing I’d made it through a needle’s eye with my own demise all around it disturbed the comfort I’d felt since getting to the hospital. Several needles’ eyes, a needle factory’s worth. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. I hadn’t liked being in the dark, the idea of dying blind and thirsty like a lost gopher. Going out in a gas bomb in an enclosed space wasn’t a better option. And I’d been looking for the switch. If I hadn’t passed out—not from lack of oxygen, a doctor would tell me, and much more likely from a panic attack, hyperventilation—I would have found them eventually. That would have been a kind of poetic completion to the story of me. I’d survived by nothing other than chance.
Lawrence motioned to Tuitele with his head, toward the door. Tuitele braced his hands on his knees and stood with a groan. Must have been a former football player, I guessed—had the size for it, and the aching joints.
“This is a lot to take in, I’m sure,” Lawrence said to me. “Take a little time. Get some rest. You made it. Must have someone looking out for you.”
“I don’t know about that,” I whispered before I found my voice. “More like dumb luck.”
I wasn’t the only one in this mess. No one had been looking out for them, not when it mattered. No one had been looking out for Emily, or Daniella, or even Sammy, who’d had a decent shot at making a clean life not all that long ago but was heading to jail, or the kid who’d shot Mike, or any of these kids—young, reckless kids. It left me furious, but I felt pathetic about it in my pale hospital gown, these baby-soft, overwashed bedclothes pulled up to my waist.
I hated that all this was true, and I hated how much of what I’d wanted to be true was false. But most of all I was filled with despair—after living it for how long?—over how I’d made a dogma of hate: hating myself, hating others; hating God, hating being without a god; hating the world, hating the lack of anything but the world.
38.
THE NOVA WAS STILL OUT AT THE INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX. THIS TIME I GOT A ride, in the back seat of Tuitele and Lawrence’s cruiser. It had a steel-mesh cage between me and them. It wasn’t the first time I’d ridden in that kind of seat, but I’d never done it sober. I hadn’t realized how uncomfortable the seats were, hard and vinyl clad, cramped. Designed to pin and subjugate and then make it easy to clean up the shit and piss afterward with a fire hose. It had been someone’s job to think that through. Or was that everyone’s job? To think through, guard against, plan for, and attempt to control the actions of assholes? Most days that seemed true, today more than most. But it was a tall order. As I considered it, I felt sober in every sense. My thoughts moved like reptiles in the snow. The tension that had been building in my mind seemed to have passed now. Maybe I could get back to my old life.
Parking my mother’s old Nova in the driveway of my house, though, I knew the old life had slipped the reins. To even get home, I’d had to ask Tuitele to use the cruiser to push the Nova fast enough to bump-start it. He’d done it, but he and Lawrence looked glad to be rid of me by the time the old motor got running—about as well as a heart undergoing cardiac arrest. Then I was stepping out in my driveway, still wearing my father’s shirt and pants, which stunk of my own human grease and, under that, sagebrush. The wooden heels of the saddle shoes clacked on the concrete like they were daring me to Fred Astaire it up to my front door, taunting me with the impossibility of anything other than a col
lapse in the dead yellow grass. The house was the same as it ever was, on its slow decline into condemnation. The bougainvillea scratched against the window like a cat to be let out.
I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to deal with the wreckage inside. I didn’t want to try to reorganize the chaos into a version of how my house had been before—before it had been ransacked, before Emily had stayed there—didn’t want it back to any version of it I’d ever had. I wanted—could feel it floating throughout my mind like cirrostratus clouds, filtering all the available light—my old apartment, and all the life that came with it, as gone as it was and would remain. But the air was cool, coming from the west. There was a hint of a chill in it and a whiff of sea air, a relief after the hot, dinning wind of the Santa Ana and presaging the mild onslaught of fall and winter beyond that. That could be enough of a future, for now.
I’d started to walk up the driveway when a weak car horn sounded behind me. My heart scraped along my vertebrae, clacking like a frog-shaped guiro of dread. In my gut resounded a sick and unwanted sense of déjà vu—a feeling that everything I thought I was clear of wasn’t clear of me. I stopped but couldn’t bring myself to turn, to see what was coming. Then I heard her:
“Mark,” a warm voice called.
It seemed to wrap around me on its route to my ears, and my body shuddered minutely with relief. I turned around to see Esme and her little white Civic across the street. She shut the car door and walked to where I stood. I knew I should say something, should fill the silence of that walk. But I just watched her—didn’t think any thoughts about what I saw, but just saw her: Her black hair was down again, not glossy now but dry, with looping frizzes like the tracks in images of atoms colliding. She wore a simple gray hooded sweatshirt and white jeans. Her black sandals set off painted toenails, purple. She looked tired but relieved, bags under her eyes but no rush in her gait. She stopped a couple feet away and gave my sorry state a frank appraisal, coming in well under Blue Book.
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