The nose of the Jeep was upturned, facing me, one broken headlight still bright, one out. The glass in the windshield had broken out entirely. Both airbags had deployed, so I couldn’t see Carlyle or his passenger behind the massive balloons.
And it was scalable. Steep at one point, but I could get down there without a rope.
Was the Jeep going to burn? The hood was steaming, but I didn’t smell gasoline, and I didn’t see smoke. Carlyle was luckier than he deserved.
I turned and ran back toward the parked Winnebago, waving my arms. The driver had climbed out, a portly woman wearing a fishing cap in hunter’s camo.
“Oh, my goodness!” she said. “I just saw them go over—”
“Do you have flares?” I said.
“Of course I do.” She sounded almost offended by the question.
“Put them out—we need to make sure nobody else goes over,” I said, then I pointed out my Beemer, which was unrecognizable from twenty yards. “Make sure nobody hits that car. My dad’s in there. He can’t walk.”
“Oh, my goodness!” she said again, in shock. Her cheeks flushed bright red.
I turned to run back toward Carlyle’s Jeep.
“Could he still be alive?” the woman called after me.
“Flares!” I said. I wanted her to keep her mind on my car and my father.
I half slid, half climbed down a few choice rocks to make it to the ledge that had prevented Carlyle Simms from exploding at the bottom of the ravine. Now that I was closer to the car, I thought I might smell smoke. I should have brought the fire extinguisher out of my trunk, I realized. Except that Carlyle smashed your trunk into an accordion, so I guess that’s on him.
The Jeep had reached a secure berth, I realized, its rear nestled firmly between boulders that weren’t going anywhere. It didn’t look like I was in danger of tumbling down with him.
I reached the driver’s side first, and my illusions were lost.
Carlyle’s empty eyes stared from a bloody mess of crushed flesh and bone. His head lolled at an angle damned near perpendicular to his spine. The driver’s-side front window was spiderwebbed, cratered, and splattered red. Someone hadn’t been wearing his seatbelt. So much for his interview.
I heard a groan. Another glance at Carlyle’s face reminded me that the groan wasn’t from him. I squeezed between the hood of the car and the rocks to make it to the passenger side.
Lee Quarry was groggy but alive. Not surprisingly, his seat belt was buckled. His face didn’t have a scratch, but when he saw mine, his eyes went wide. I tried to forget how he had put his hands on Chela, but suddenly I was pissed about my car again. And my father’s breathing.
Lee’s head was already lolling, but his eyes widened with panic as they focused on me.
“Naw, man, wait—” He tried to wriggle away, but he was trapped behind his airbag and too disoriented to free himself from his seat belt.
“Let me see your hands,” I said.
“Shit, man—my arm’s broken!”
“Carlyle’s neck is broken. Something really bad could happen to you before the ambulance gets here. Why’d you try to kill me?”
Lee raised his arms over the airbag, within my sight. His left arm was misshapen, dangling lower, but he kept it raised with gritted teeth. They weren’t called Heat for nothing.
“Man, that was Carlyle,” he said, fighting a sob. “Is his neck really broke?”
“Let’s just say you’ll save a stamp this Christmas,” I told him. “Answer my question.”
Lee fought to compose himself, blinking several times as he stared into my eyes. He knew his life was in my hands; if he’d been in my place, he would have killed me already.
“OK, man, look…” Lee said. “Carlyle said he was gonna follow you, that’s all. I never thought that crazy motherfucker would try to crash into you. Shit—he almost got me killed!”
Funny how the survivor is always the innocent one.
“Why’s Carlyle following me?” I said.
“He said you were trying to trash T.D.,” he said. “Trying to get all that shit with Chantelle stirred up again.”
“Did Carlyle help T.D. kill Chantelle?”
A light flared way back in Lee’s eyes. “Man, I don’t know,” Lee said. “I wasn’t there.”
“But you know they did it. As close as you guys were? You’re full of shit. Even if they didn’t say a word, you knew as soon as you saw them. You could see it.”
Lee stayed firm, his features hardening. “Like I said, I do not know. I was not there. Can you let me out of this damn car before we blow up?”
“Did Carlyle kill T.D.?”
“Fuck you, man. Carlyle loved T.D.”
“Then who killed him?”
“Shit, if I knew that, he’d be on the news. Let me the fuck out of here, man.”
“What do you know about Wallace Rubens?”
“Who?”
No light in Lee’s eyes that time; the name didn’t mean anything to him. But Wallace Rubens had meant something to Carlyle—his face had told me that when he came to my house.
Dammit. Carlyle might have been my best chance to find out who killed T.D., and the son of a bitch had just made me kill him. That might not be exactly what happened, but that was the way it felt. The smell of Carlyle’s blood made me feel sick to my stomach.
I opened Lee’s door and helped him out of the Jeep.
Above us, the police were waiting.
I was relieved when Melanie picked up her phone. “You got something?” she said, anxious. Melanie sounded desperate for me to finish it, somehow. Make the pain stop.
The rain was back to a drizzle. A trickle of traffic passed as a Ventura County sheriff’s deputy officiated from the center lane. By then, the Winnebago was long gone. I watched as my father’s gurney was lifted into the back of the Lifeline ambulance that was parked as close to the shoulder as it could get. Dad lay staring straight up at the sky, full of resignation. He looked smaller than he had seemed in my car. We hadn’t expected to have to talk to doctors today.
“Bad news,” I told Melanie. “I’d tell you in person, but I don’t want you to hear it on TV.”
Melanie’s line filled with silent dread. Her silence was a torrent of questions.
I told her Carlyle was dead, and how he’d attacked me and my father on the road.
“No!” she said. “Ten, no.” A plea to confess I was only joking.
“It doesn’t mean he killed your cousin, but it sure doesn’t look good,” I said. “We knew this might be coming, Mel.”
The wheels to my father’s gurney rattled across the ambulance floor. The white-shirted attendant waved at me to climb in behind him. The only thing worse than taking Dad to a doctor was riding with him in an ambulance. I climbed in, swinging myself inside with the handrail with one hand, on my phone with the other. I knew the drill by then.
Chest pains don’t mean it’s a heart attack, I wanted to say as I stared down at Dad’s face, chiseled tight as he tried not to sink into fear. If I fussed over Dad, it only scared him. I thought it might be better for Dad if I stayed on the phone. Casual. Just a routine trip to the hospital.
“Maybe you should call his girlfriend,” I told Melanie. I remembered how protective Alma had been of her home; the honor-roll bumper sticker on her car. “In case Lee doesn’t.”
“Oh, God,” she said, her realization deepening. “Alma and the boys! And these kids. He’s Uncle Carlyle to them. They just saw him at their father’s funeral yesterday.”
“We’ll talk more about this soon. I’m on my way to the hospital.”
“I’m sorry—are you all right?” Melanie sounded deeply concerned. “Your dad?”
“We’re lucky to be alive, so we’re fine. I’ll call you later. I’m really sorry, Mel.”
“God, I’m sorry, too,” she said, soothing me. Somehow, Melanie and I couldn’t keep from crashing into each other. It was starting to bruise.
In the Ojai Valley Community Hospital e
mergency room, the doctor sounded certain that the chest pains were only Dad’s recurring angina, not a heart attack. Sure enough, after my father got a dose of nitro, the pain went away. Still, it reminded me too much of waking in the middle of an old, ugly dream.
Marcela arrived with Chela by five o’clock. Marcela conferred by phone with my cousin Reggie and agreed that Dad should stay overnight for observation. It pays to have medical experts close to the family.
Since Dad wanted to go home, he wasn’t speaking to us before long. In some ways, the episode on the road with Carlyle Simms was buried by its aftermath at the hospital. Marcela sat beside Dad’s bed, holding his hand openly, maybe for the first time, but he was so angry that he barely looked at her. Dad’s face was drawn and weary. He hated hospitals. To me, he looked like a scared old man again. Even Marcela’s chiding and Chela’s cooing couldn’t loosen up Dad’s face.
For once, the television was turned off. The news isn’t as entertaining when the top story is about you. For dinner, Chela, Marcela, and I ate burgers from the cafeteria—hospital cafeterias generally have fast food to give patients and staff alike comfort from stress. We stayed in Dad’s room until nine, when he head nurse insisted that regulations required us to leave.
“I’ll be back in the morning, Dad,” I told him, standing over his bed.
“Foolishness,” Dad said, just to make sure his point had been made. He wanted to sleep in his own bed. He didn’t want to be alone. The way Dad refused to look me in the eye cut more than it usually did, but I understood. My ear buzzed, at the same instant I remembered the sight of the ravine spinning past my windshield.
“I’m sorry about all of this. Truly. I love you, man.” As if I said it every day.
Dad looked straight past me, so I gave up and headed for his door. Finally, Dad called after me. “LAPD will…call. Nelson. Be…careful.”
Dad’s way of saying I love you, too.
And he had a point. In Ventura County, I was only a witness in a traffic fatality. There was no point in pressing attempted murder charges against a dead man, so I let it go as road rage. But to Lieutenant Rodrick Nelson, I was suddenly a fly in his ointment. A loose end in the T.D. Jackson case. Nelson knew my number; I was surprised he hadn’t called me already.
As I was walking out of the door, I got a text message. CAN YOU COME BY UNCLE EM’S TONITE? NO MATTER HOW LATE? Melanie. Shit. It was late, and I was miles beyond tired.
“We better watch out,” Marcela muttered suddenly. “Reporters ahead.”
She was right; a gaggle of paparazzi with huge cameras were making their way down the hospital’s hall, trying to catch a glimpse of the people who had walked away from the accident that killed Carlyle Simms. Lee was in a nearby room, too, so the entire cast was in place.
“Leeches,” Chela said, as if she’d been a starlet all her life.
“This way,” I said, and we ducked into an elevator.
A long way around took us to the parking lot. I searched for my car under the lights, until I realized it was on its way to the scrapyard, except for a few things I’d saved from the trunk. My car was gone. I’d driven that car for fifteen years, and she’d always made me happy. If I hadn’t already been numb, I would have felt grief. Compared to the memory of my lost car, Marcela’s Rabbit looked puny and sad.
“Hey, Ten.”
The voice behind me was friendly, but I didn’t have any friends nearby. Besides, I knew that voice well; I had just heard him on CNN that weekend.
“It’s late, Lieutenant Nelson,” I said. “I thought supervisors don’t get paid OT.”
Lieutenant Rodrick Nelson hadn’t come straight from his office, because he was wearing only a black pullover and khakis, not his usual Brooks Brothers routine. Still, with his badge and gun in plain view, Nelson stank so badly of cop that Chela practically dived into Marcela’s car. Marcela climbed into her driver’s seat, wary, too. But she didn’t start the engine.
“Maybe you can answer a question for me,” Nelson said, standing about an inch beyond acceptable personal space. He had two inches of height on me. “Why does your name keep coming up in my cases?”
“What cases, Lieutenant?”
“Afrodite. And T.D. Jackson.”
“His suicide?”
“Don’t be too smart, Hardwick.” It seemed to hurt his mouth to use my father’s name in reference to me. He leaned close enough for me to smell his dinner. Men only stand that close to each other when they’re ready to fight, and you can’t win a fight with a cop: They have too many beefy, armed brothers and sisters and cousins in blue, all waiting to pile on.
“If you think I’m gonna believe that you and your dead homeboy just happened to be hanging out in Ojai today, you’ve confused me for someone with his head up his ass,” Nelson said. “Lee’s a shitty liar. What were you and Carlyle doing up here?”
“Just taking a drive with my father, Lieutenant.”
He smiled at me, almost a leer. “If there’s a word that describes Richard Allen Hardwick, it’s forthright. I watched him shoot his career in the balls every other week because he never mastered the art of bullshit. So I’ll go see what Preach has to say about your drive.”
So far, Dad had been spared a police interview because of his health, and I’d hoped to convince him to corroborate my version of the crash. Lee and I had come up with a simple story of bad tempers, with Carlyle at fault. Would Dad lie to his own protégé’s face? I wished I could explain to Lieutenant Nelson that his old mentor had just suffered a hell of a day and didn’t need the aggravation of an interrogation, but that would only prod him on. Nelson’s tenacity was what Dad had loved most about him.
“So now you want your visit?” I said with an acid smile. “Took you a minute, considering how much you owe him. But better late than never, I guess.”
Nelson’s face told me I’d drawn blood. I’d been waiting a long time to tell Rodrick Nelson what I thought of his cowardice; he hadn’t visited my father once. Nelson and I barely knew each other, but we knew where to land the punches. Dad was our best weapon.
“How were you involved with T.D. Jackson, Ten?” Nelson said, his voice softening as if to say Tell me now so I can help you out of this. Nelson tried to be both good cop and bad cop. It wasn’t a good fit for him.
If I’d really fucked up, Nelson had some kind of evidence to arrest me for something bogus. If not, I wasn’t going to stick around. I climbed into Marcela’s car, closed my door, and rolled my window down. I nodded to Marcela, and she started the engine.
“Let him get some sleep, Nelson. They call it a hospital for a reason.”
Nelson is one of the biggest assholes I’ve ever known, but he somehow gives the impression that if you dig deep enough through the granite, you’ll strike a vein of warm flesh. He knew better than to bother Dad that night. But it would depend on how important he thought it was.
When Nelson leaned close to the window, I heard Chela shrink back into her seat. Cool it, girl, I thought. To him, you look like Marcela’s daughter. I’d been avoiding official scrutiny on the matter of Chela for more than a year, and Nelson would be scrutiny of the worst kind.
But Nelson barely glanced at Chela or Marcela. They were invisible. He had eyes only for me, his hand clamped to my door. “You better come see me at 10 A.M. sharp, smart-ass, or I’m slapping you with obstruction. For every ten minutes you’re late, I’ll find something else to charge you with. I can get very fucking creative.”
Marcela looked taken aback. She sat frozen, as if he was addressing her. Nelson wanted to humiliate me in front of my family. My philosophy is that you can’t humiliate a man without his permission. But I kept my thoughts to myself.
“And you’ll back off Dad tonight?” I said.
“I didn’t say that. This wasn’t a negotiation.”
I would have said Fuck you before Yessir, so I opted for silence. Shit. My life was messy enough without cops. Nelson was as a better interrogator than I was an actor, a
nd his instincts were usually sharp, just as Dad had always said. I didn’t fool Nelson, somehow. Besides, depending on what Dad told him, I might be charged with obstruction no matter what. I didn’t think Dad would sell me out, but he was tired. And he was Dad. He might make a mistake.
I definitely had.
Marcela backed out of the parking space, careful to avoid Nelson, who stood there like an oak watching me, trying to figure it out. I wondered how long it would take.
There was stone silence in the car as we pulled out of the hospital driveway. Marcela kept checking her rearview mirror, as if she expected police lights to flash behind us. I held my breath every time her eyes left the dark, curvy road.
“Slow down,” I said more than once. I almost asked her to let me drive.
We didn’t talk about Dad and his angina. We were telling ourselves we were sure he would be fine by morning. We never discussed getting a hotel room in Ojai overnight. Dad would be fine. We worked it out in our own heads as we left him behind.
I couldn’t wait to get to bed, but I dreaded the morning. The last time I’d met with Lieutenant Nelson, I’d been handcuffed in an interrogation room. A cold one. I’d been lucky to walk back outside again.
“Ten?” Chela said quietly after we were on the road. “Is that cop gonna arrest you?”
Telepathy. An optimistic lie came to the surface first, but then I remembered that I was trying to tell the truth whenever I could. It’s a harder habit.
“He’d like to,” I said.
“That’s nonsense,” Marcela said. “That man came to your house. Tried to kill you today!” I wondered how much Dad had told Marcela after Carlyle’s visit Saturday. The circle of people who were privy to my business was getting larger and larger.
“There’s a little more to it than that, Marcela,” I said.
“Ten’s on a big case,” Chela explained with pride. “But you can’t talk about it.”
“T.D. Jackson?” Marcela’s voice was needlessly hushed.
I only nodded and looked at my watch, too tired for conversation. I was sick of T.D. Jackson’s name. It was after nine, and we still had a long drive. It would be late when we got home, but my second car was waiting. I had to make another trip. Alone.
In the Night of the Heat Page 26