Bone Music

by Christopher Rice

  “I don’t exactly have their ear, Marty.”

  “Still, ambitious young man like you, you might one day. You see, it’s real simple. There’s a couple miles of copper wire out there, along with about six AC condensers, too many sheets of drywall to count, and enough uninstalled insulation to line most of the road back to town. And if they leave it out there, it’s gonna rot before I can install it in the women’s shelter over in King City, or the recovery center down in McKittrick, or a bunch of other places that actually help people who don’t have rich and powerful friends.”

  “I see. So you’re a social justice looter.”

  “Your words, kid,” Marty says with a smile. “Not mine.”

  Luke should walk now. The warning’s been given. He can tell the sheriff he handled his first uncomfortable duty of his first week on the job. But he doesn’t. Instead he looks Marty dead in the eye and says, “You steal any more stuff from up there, you’re gonna get arrested. I don’t care if you install it at the Vatican. And I’ll run all your men, too. See how colorful their pasts were before you taught them the Serenity Prayer.”

  When the brittle sarcasm starts to leave Marty’s expression, Luke turns his back on the man.

  “This isn’t the way to do this, Luke.”

  “Don’t tell me how to do my job, Mr. Cahill.”

  “I’m not talking about your job,” he says. “I’m talking about your homecoming. We remember who Luke was, even if Deputy Prescott would like us to forget.”

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  Against his will, Luke turns. His fingers get cold, and he realizes he’s resting his hand limply on the door handle.

  “It means you were a bully is what it means. And you were a bully before your mother died, so don’t go blaming it on that, either.” There must be something in Luke’s expression that suggests outrage, because Marty nods and continues with more force. “I remember what you put Luanne’s granddaughter through. Never letting anyone in school forget where she came from, what happened to her. Everyone remembers. So pardon us for being a little on guard now that someone like you’s got a gun and a badge.”

  Whatever reaction Marty was expecting, it’s not the one he’s getting. His stance softens, and he cocks his head as if he can’t believe Luke isn’t going to take a swing at him. And maybe Luke should. Maybe it’s weakness not to.

  But just the mention of Luanne’s granddaughter, Trina Pierce—Burning Girl, he thinks, the words freezing his gut briefly—and the memory of the baffled, wounded expression on her face that day in class when he’d decided to go after her, has hollowed him out suddenly.

  “Just don’t call me kid,” Luke manages. “Call me whatever else you want, Marty. Just don’t call me kid—that’s all.”

  Before he says something even more pathetic, Luke gets in his cruiser and spins out onto PCH.

  His gun and badge suddenly feel as insubstantial as the napkin Marty used to clean his hands, his decision to return home the worst mistake he’s ever made in his life.

  When he reaches the spot on 293 where cell service comes back, he calls his new boss, Sheriff Mona Sanchez.

  Any embarrassing incident requiring him to reference locals by their full names should be kept off the radio. She gave him this order first day on the job. Word on the street is Dan Soto, the guy who runs the Gold Mine Tavern, got a scanner from his daughter for Christmas. And because police activity is so rare in Altamira, he just leaves it on in the background whenever he has friends over to play cards.

  “I don’t know what he thinks is gonna happen,” Mona had added. “Maybe he’s waiting for some of the McGregors’ horses to get loose again. I guess that’d be fun to listen to.”

  Altamira’s recently elected sheriff is an old friend of Luke’s mother. The two women met at Fort Doyle down valley, where his mom was working as a secretary and Mona was an enlisted woman a few short months away from leaving the military for a career in law enforcement.

  In the past few days, he’s learned more about his mom’s old friend than he had in all those years of her dropping by for dinner or helping take care of his mom after she got sick.

  For starters, she’s not a lesbian, as he’d always assumed. In fact, she’s had the same boyfriend for ten years. Like her, the guy’s half Chumash, and he’s spent the last few years working on the legal team defending their tribe’s casino in Santa Ynez from a never-ending series of legal challenges brought by its neighbors.

  “Yep,” she answers the phone.

  “It’s done,” Luke says.

  “You realize I told you to warn him, not kill him, right?”

  “Just trying to take my job seriously is all.”

  “Maybe a little too serious.”

  “Is it my tone?” he asks.

  “That and the wording, yeah.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No need. So did he cop to it?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Give you any grief?” she asks.

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  Mona falls silent. Over the past few days, he’s learned that when Mona falls silent, it’s his job to fill the silence.

  He’s descending toward town now—a small grid of sloping rooftops in the midst of a Mediterranean-looking valley, protected from cold Pacific winds by the mountains he’s just passed through.

  To the east the hills are low, rolling, and golden, and on either side of the road the scrubby coastal woods give way to more golden grasslands dotted by stately lone oaks. It’s the kind of landscape they like to use in car commercials, and if his hometown was a smidge closer to either Los Angeles or San Francisco, it’d probably be overrun with tourists. But most of the road trippers coming up from the south don’t feel the need to go much farther than San Simeon and Lake Nacimiento.

  The Lodge, perched at the tip of Altamira’s lone finger to the sea, was supposed to change all that, of course. The investors were even in talks to widen 293 in hopes of bringing more folks to town. But it wasn’t to be, and now most people in Altamira feel the place is hemorrhaging promise, thanks to the wounds inflicted by shady investors and an ever-shrinking army fort to the south.

  “Luke?” Mona asks.

  “You could say he got a little personal.”

  “How so?”

  “Brought up something from my past. That’s all.”

  “I see . . . but things didn’t escalate?” Mona asks.

  “Not really, no.”

  “Define ‘not really,’ Luke. This is Altamira.”

  “He claimed the moral high ground. Said he was installing the stuff he stole in women’s shelters and recovery homes. I said if I caught him, I’d arrest him and run all the guys in his crew.”

  Mona takes a sip of something. “I see. Anything else?”

  “I asked him not to call me kid.”

  “Small town. There’s gonna be a lot of that.”

  “A lot of what?” he asks.

  “You had a mouth on you, Luke.”

  “So I was a prick is what you’re saying.”

  “Yeah. Pretty much.”

  “And you hired me anyway?”

  “Sometimes pricks do well in law enforcement.”

  “Do we?”

  “If you put yourself on the right side of things. Absolutely.”

  “Well, OK then.”

  “Was he right?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Martin Cahill. Whatever he brought up, this thing out of your past, was he in the right?”

  Burning Girl, he thinks again, remembering how he’d used the words as a kind of whispered slur.

  “Yes,” he answers.

  “Well, you got some clarity about it, at least.”

  “You don’t even know what he brought up,” he says.

  “Do I need to?”

  “Did you even care that Marty and his crew are looting the Lodge?”

  “Hell, no. Fuck those Silver Shore assholes. I got five
businesses on Center Street closed this month because of the mess they left this town in. Bastards went all over the state, drawing new businesses here, the whole time they knew their funding was all spit and vinegar. They want to protect all the stuff they left out there like trash? Let ’em hire private security with the money they never had. Marty’s crew can strip that place to the studs for all I care. I just wanted us to look like we’re doing our job. And you needed something to do,” she tells him.

  “Well, all right then.”

  “Sounds like you’re far away.”

  “I actually just pulled up to the station.”

  “No, I mean in your head.”

  “Oh, well. There’s that.”

  The sheriff’s station is a small redbrick building on the corner of a block containing some of the empty frontage left by the ruined businesses Mona’s still angry about. On the opposite corner, a couple of army girls from the fort sit at the cast-iron tables out front of Katy’s Coffee, sunning their bare arms.

  The sight of them stirs something in him, but it feels more like acid indigestion.

  It’s been a while since he’s been with a woman. Nothing since that drunken bar hookup a few nights after the disaster that was his final FBI interview. He can’t even remember the girl’s name now. Only that she worked in tech, seemed a little less drunk than him, and appeared as disinterested in chitchat as he was. Wham, bam, don’t bother leaving your number, ma’am. That’s never been his style, so thinking of it now makes him feel creepy. Some of the guys he went to SF State with, they could do that kind of stuff every week. But he’s a bigger fan of actually getting to know a woman, and relieving himself with porn until the time’s right to hop into bed with her.

  But even a date now seems like an insurmountable task. Like something only a younger, more vigorous version of himself would be capable of.

  Which is nuts because he’s twenty-five.

  “Hey. Look up.”

  He follows the sheriff’s order, sees his boss waving at him from her office window. She’s a stout woman, but much of it’s solid, the kind of body former gymnasts get as they age, although in her case, she’s got the rigors of her military service to thank. Today, as always, she wears her jet-black hair in a tight bun against the back of her neck.

  “Put the Jeep in park,” she says.

  He thought he had.

  “I’m just going to say this. Every day at four o’clock, Marty has a slice of pie at the Copper Pot before he heads over to the AA meeting at the clubhouse.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because you know he was right, so I figure you’ll keep it civilized. You know, when you go and apologize for whatever it is you did. In the past. But four o’clock’s a couple hours away, and I got plenty of paperwork for you to do until then. So turn the Jeep off and come inside.”

  He does as instructed, because sometimes that’s the only thing you can do.

  His mom used to love the name of Altamira’s most popular diner.

  She’d been a big fan of that TV movie they made about Martha Stewart, the one where Cybill Shepherd played her like a fire-breathing dragon. There’s a scene where Cybill Shepherd chases her business partner down the front walk of her house just so she can hurl a piece of cookware at her before screaming, “Every good cook deserves a copper pot!” It’s a nasty repeat of words she had said to the same woman earlier in the movie when they were first becoming friends, and every time his mother watched the scene again, she howled with laughter.

  And even though the movie hadn’t been released when Abe and Dinah Crane first opened the place, his mother repeated the line, complete with a mimed pot toss, every time she set foot inside.

  Luke can hear her saying it even now as he scans the mostly empty booths along the street-facing windows.

  It’s the lull between the lunch and dinner rush, a time when the other three restaurants on Center Street lock their doors and mop the floors. But the Copper Pot’s pie case is so popular customers dribble in throughout the day. Customers like Marty, who’s sitting by himself in the farthest booth, talking into his cell phone in a voice so low as to be inaudible.

  He’s changed clothes and showered. He looks ready for a nice night on the town. But if Mona’s correct, only his sober friends will be treated to the sight of his pressed long-sleeve denim shirt and his snowy mane, which he’s brushed out over his back and shoulders like some knight from a medieval fantasy epic.

  Nothing in Luke’s life at present feels worth dressing up for the way Martin Cahill’s dressed for his AA meeting, and this realization stabs him with envy.

  Finally, Marty sees him lingering inside the front door.

  When Luke points to the empty bench seat across from him, the man ends his call, then gestures for Luke to come over. Changing out of his uniform was probably the right call, Luke thinks. Otherwise Marty might’ve shot out of his booth and demanded they talk outside.

  “You here to arrest me?” he asks once Luke sits. There’s no edge to his tone, and Luke feels as if he’s being parented all of a sudden. And it’s not such a bad feeling.

  “You just make up that stuff about the women’s shelter and the recovery home?”

  “We on the record?” Marty asks.

  “Record’s for journalists. But I’m off duty, if that answers your question.”

  “You wearing a wire?”

  “Over a bunch of AC units left behind by some jackasses who took the whole town for a ride? Hardly.”

  “Silver Shore’s got powerful friends.”

  “Altamira Sheriff’s doesn’t have wires, Marty.”

  “Good to know. What are you doing here, Luke?”

  “I’m here to apologize.”

  “For what?”

  Fat chance Marty’s letting him off the hook, more like asking him to put it in his own words.

  “I might have come down a little too hard on you today,” Luke says.

  “Maybe so.”

  “Maybe so?”

  “I don’t know. If you thought I was stealing . . .” Marty sips his coffee, stares out the window. The elm tree on the corner sends stained-glass windows of dusky-orange sunlight across the sidewalk. Altamira’s version of rush hour consists of a pickup, a minivan, and a PT Cruiser taking their time deciding whose turn it is at the four-way stop that marks the intersection of Center Street and Apple Avenue.

  “Threatening to run your crew—that was out of line,” Luke says.

  This gets Marty’s attention. He’d like to think the guy’s impressed, but he can’t be sure.

  “You’ve always done good work. Always helped people. Everyone round here knows that, same way they all know I . . .”

  His heart races. Should he slow down, try to do this in stages? He’d sure like to get it over with, but what he’s trying to do is bigger than this one conversation, and he knows it, so what’s the damn rush?

  “Well,” Marty says quietly, “maybe it was out of line to bring your mother up the way I did.”

  “Maybe.”

  “That look you gave me, though.”

  “What look?”

  “Before you drove away, I just . . . it felt like I’d shoved an old lady or something.”

  “You calling me an old lady?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Not sure I do.”

  “The fight had gonna out of you. Not sure what it means exactly, or if it’s good or bad. But I could see it in your eyes . . . you aren’t that little jerk I wanted to strangle when you were in high school. Or at least you’ve lost hold of him for now.”

  “Thanks. I guess.”

  “None of it’s a load off my back, Deputy Prescott. But it might be helpful information for you.”

  “Thanks . . . I guess.”

  “Mona tell you to come over here and make this right?”

  “She didn’t have to.”

  “Would she say the same?” Marty asks.

  “No. Probably n
ot.”

  “There’s a reason she’s sheriff.”

  “Yep.”

  “And there’s a reason you’re one of her deputies now and not working for the FBI, from what I hear.”

  Well, that was a turn, Luke thinks.

  “Oof. Got you there, didn’t I?” Marty asks.

  “I got to go to some kind of class for my face.”

  “A class for your face?”

  “So I can keep it from giving everything away.”

  “I imagine that’s probably important for a career in law enforcement. Even if it’s not the career you planned.”

  “You’re good, man. Real good. Those drunks aren’t gonna get anything by you.”

  “Takes one to know one.”

  “I’m not a drunk.”

  “I wasn’t talking about you,” Marty says.

  “So what’d you hear?”

  “About what?”

  “About my career, or lack thereof?”

  Marty’s jaw tightens. “Heard you rolled all your chips on a job with the FBI. Even got yourself fluent in a couple different foreign languages ’cause you heard all they want is linguists now. But it didn’t work out, apparently.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Is it?”

  “Is that all you heard?” Luke asks.

  “Yes.”

  “You lying?” Luke asks.

  “You gonna take me in if I am?” Marty asks.

  “I told you I’m off duty. Don’t even have my cuffs.”

  “You might be able to take me bare-handed if you tried real hard.”

  “Fight’s gone outta me. Remember?”

  “Yeah, it’s all I heard. It’s not like you kept in touch with anyone from here. Up until you called Mona asking for a job. But, you know, thanks for letting me know there’s more to the story.”

  Luke grabs for the first thing he can think of to change the subject.

  “Trina,” he says. Her name comes out sounding like a grunt. “Trina Pierce.”

  “What about her?”

  “How is she?”

  Now Marty’s the one struggling to hide his reaction. He brings his coffee mug to his lips, looks out the window as if he’s suddenly planning the route he’s going to take to the recovery house. “She’s fine.”