Killer Swell

by Jeff Shelby

She opened the door enough for her to step into the opening. “I didn’t know you were coming over.”

  “I didn’t either. I was just at the hospital and thought I’d come by.”

  She tried to smile, but it came off as more nervous. Her hair was tousled and her cheeks flushed. She blinked several times. “Oh, um, how’s Carter?”

  I became keenly aware that she was not inviting me in. “He’s okay. Better anyway.”

  She almost glanced over her shoulder, then caught herself, the look on her face telling me what I had already guessed.

  “Bad timing,” I said.

  “Uh, yeah,” she said, laughing quickly. “You could say that.” She paused. “I’m sorry.”

  I held up my hand. “Nothing to be sorry about. I should’ve called.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s just…I don’t know. I’m not getting this out.”

  “You don’t have to,” I said, backing up. “I’m on my way.”

  She opened the door wider. I could see she was wearing a man’s dress shirt over a pair of khaki shorts. She must’ve noticed me looking at her clothes because she looked at herself and blushed.

  “Noah,” she said, then stopped. “It’s my ex. The almost husband.”

  “Em, you don’t owe me an explanation,” I said, feeling the warmth in my cheeks now.

  She started to say something, then looked harder at me. “What happened to your face?”

  I waved a hand. “Nothing. I’ll tell you later.”

  She looked like she wanted to say something else, then stopped. “Okay. I’ll call you.”

  I hustled down the stairs and waved at her over my shoulder so she couldn’t see the rising tide of embarrassment on my face.

  43

  I managed not to squeal the tires of the Blazer as I left Emily’s condo, but when I turned out onto Camino Del Mar, I floored it.

  It wasn’t that I felt that Emily and I had established some sort of relationship. We hadn’t. I had avoided any discussion of a relationship on purpose, and our guilt had prevented us from doing anything else.

  Seeing her, flustered and embarrassed, had rattled me, but not in the way that I would’ve predicted. I wasn’t upset or jealous, which is what I would’ve expected. Instead, I was relieved. Emily and I didn’t belong together, and our awkward meeting had confirmed that. Maybe I’d been trying to replace Kate with her, which was screwed up on so many levels that I didn’t even want to think about it. She didn’t deserve that.

  And as I sped through the dark curves on Torrey Pines Road and down into La Jolla Shores, something that had been riding around in my head started to get a whole lot clearer.

  I stopped at a bar in PB, already packed with an early-evening crowd, and downed a beer and a shot of tequila in about fifteen minutes. I stood at the bar, listening to Tristan Prettyman’s soft voice coming from the speakers in the wall, contemplating doing something that I couldn’t believe I was even giving serious thought to. I didn’t want to go home and be alone. I felt like I’d been on my own all day. Before I could talk myself out of it, I left the bar and drove south.

  Coronado is a small island west of the downtown area, dominated by the Naval Station and the expensive beachfront hotels, most notably the red-roofed Hotel del Coronado. Most of the families that live on Coronado have been there for years, and just about everyone seems to know each other, giving the island a feeling of having never left the fifties. The streets are narrow, the lawns are immaculate, and the view from any location—house, hotel, or restaurant—is phenomenal.

  When I turned off the big blue Coronado Bridge, I dropped the windows in the SUV and let the cool evening breeze sweep across the bay into the car. My mood lightened as the island’s tree-lined streets enveloped me. The hurried pace and congestion of the downtown area felt miles away, even though I could see the lights sparkling on the skyscrapers across the water.

  The street I was looking for curved back with the body of the bay, and I pulled up at the curb across from the last house on the block, the bay waters lapping quietly at the retaining wall just a few feet away from me. I shut the engine off.

  Many of the homes reminded me of brownstones on the East Coast, just not as tall. Straight up and down, rectangular, with flat roofs that served as decks. This particular home was whitewashed brick. A tiny walk split the emerald green lawn, with precisely trimmed rosebushes running along the front of the house. Four windows, two up and two down, dotted the face of the house, flower boxes underlining the two lower windows with bright pinks and yellows.

  I got out of the car and tried to remember the last time I’d been here. It didn’t come to me as I walked across the street and up the front walk into the glare of the porch light.

  The front door was shut behind a slim screen door, and before I could think about it, I knocked.

  No answer.

  I knocked again, but I heard only silence in return.

  I walked backward down the stone walk, looking up at the roof.

  “You up there?” I yelled. “It’s me, Noah.”

  I heard the scraping of an aluminum chair and hollow footsteps.

  Liz looked over the edge at me. “I’m here. What’s going on?”

  I could see her only from the waist up, the edge of the brick rising a few feet higher than the roof. She was wearing a navy jogging tank.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  She pulled the dark hair away from her face. “I take it you wanna come up.”

  I shoved my hands in my pockets. “I guess. But if you’re busy…”

  She stared at me for a minute, clearly wondering what I was doing on her front lawn.

  “I’m not talking business,” she said, holding a beer up in her hand. “I’ve had enough for today.”

  “Fine with me,” I said.

  “Door’s unlocked,” she said, disappearing from the edge.

  So I went in.

  44

  She was stretched out on an old chaise lounge. White shorts with a Nike swoosh matched the jogging tank. Her dark hair was flying in several different directions. Her feet were bare, running shoes and socks in a pile next to her. Two empty beer bottles stood below the armrest of the chair.

  She pointed to the tiny fridge on the corner of the deck. “Beer’s in there.”

  Four chairs dotted the deck, and a small office refrigerator sat in the corner, next to a tiny wooden table. The barbecue sat in the other corner. With no other houses to get in the way, the view of the bay and the downtown landscape was striking.

  I grabbed a Dos Equis out of the fridge. “Thanks.”

  “I don’t want to be rude,” she said, looking at me. “But what the hell are you doing here?”

  I sat down on the upraised brick wall that jutted above the deck, my back to the bridge and the South Bay. “I honestly don’t know.”

  Liz studied me for a moment, then shrugged. “Okay.”

  We sat there in silence, drinking our beers. I felt awkward and out of place. When we had dated, we’d spent a lot of nights on the roof, drinking, eating, and talking. Arguing a lot, too. Our relationship had moved back and forth between easy affection and irritation.

  “You go see Carter again?” she asked, sitting up in the chair.

  I nodded. “Yeah. He’s better.”

  “Take a lot more than a couple of bullets to kill that elephant,” she said.

  “I think of him as more of a giraffe.”

  “Rhino fits, too.”

  “Yeah, it does.”

  We both laughed. She set her bottle down and pointed at the fridge. I reached in, grabbed a full one, opened it, and handed it to her. She took a long drink.

  “Still running, I see,” I said, the silence digging into me.

  “About five miles every night,” she said. “If I’m not worn out.”

  “Which you probably are more often than not.”

  She pursed her lips and tried to look indifferent.

  “Wellton said some nice things abo
ut you today,” I told her.

  Her lips curled into a small smile. “John’s a good guy.”

  “Said you take a lot of shit for partnering with him.”

  “I do. But screw them, you know? He’s a good guy and a good cop. He probably takes shit for having a woman as a partner.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  We drank our beers and watched the lights shimmer on the harbor.

  “Being around you again is weird,” she said.

  “How’s that?”

  She tilted her head. “Well, when things ended, it was kind of bad between us.”

  Our breakup had occurred outside a restaurant with each of us screaming at the other. I couldn’t recall what that specific argument had been about, but the force of our words left no doubt about the finality of it all.

  “Just kind of?” I said.

  “Okay. Really bad. And then, with all this,” she waved her hand in the air, “you’ve pretty much been the irritation equivalent of, say, a nail in my eardrum.”

  “It says a lot about you that a nail in your eardrum would be only an irritation, rather than excruciatingly painful.”

  She smiled. “I’m tough.” She pointed the beer bottle in my direction. “But, now, I’ve gotta admit…” Her voice trailed off.

  “Admit what?”

  She clutched the bottle in both of her hands. “I’ve gotta admit I don’t hate that you’re here.” She looked at me for a moment, then drained the beer, setting the empty bottle down next to the others. “But maybe I’m drunk.”

  “I’m not sure how to take that,” I told her.

  She swung her legs over the chair, sitting on the edge of it. “Well, neither am I.” She looked at me. “Why are you here, Noah?”

  I rolled my empty beer bottle between my hands. A horn blew out on the harbor from a distance, echoing softly across the water. The thought in my head that had rattled around as I left Emily’s was this: if Liz had answered the door in another man’s shirt, I would’ve been jealous and upset. I couldn’t explain why, but I knew it as surely as I knew anything at that moment.

  “I didn’t want to be alone and I kept thinking of you,” I told her. “Carter’s in the hospital. Who the hell else do I hang out with?”

  “Ernie?”

  I grunted. “Not anymore. I put him in a bad spot and I feel like shit for doing it.”

  “He’ll forgive you,” she said.

  “Maybe, but it’ll be a while.”

  “Probably, but he will. Everyone does.”

  I looked at her. “Everyone does what?”

  She shook her head, a faint smile on her lips. “Forgive you, Noah. Everyone does—eventually. You screw up, you do dumbass things, but in the end, you get it right. You just have to do some stupid things before you get to the right things.” She paused, her blue eyes staring me down in the shadows. “It’s just your way.”

  I gazed back at her, wondering if she realized that might have been the kindest thing she had ever said about me.

  “You are drunk,” I said.

  She stood. “A little.” She walked over to me and held out her hand. “Come on.”

  I grabbed her hand and pulled myself up, stifling a groan as my ribs protested that I should remain seated. “Where are we going?”

  “Inside,” she said, taking me with her.

  “Why?” I asked, even though I had a pretty good idea.

  She didn’t look back. “Because I don’t feel like being alone, either.”

  45

  I felt the early-morning sunlight on my face and woke up, squinting at the beam pouring into the room through a sheer curtain.

  I turned over to find Liz awake, looking at me. “Hey.”

  She had her hands tucked between her cheek and the pillow, her hair spilling around her shoulders. “Hey.”

  I twisted the rest of my body around to face her and grimaced, my ribs and back knotting up in pain.

  “A little sore?” she asked.

  “Try a lot.”

  “Carter took four bullets. He makes you look like a sissy.”

  “I am a sissy.”

  She laughed. “You said it, not me.”

  “Actually, you did say it.”

  “Whatever,” she said, rolling her eyes, a loopy grin on her face. Then her smile faded. “Remember how last night I said it was weird being around you again?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This is even weirder.”

  I nodded, agreeing with her.

  “I didn’t come here to…for this,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. “If I thought you had, I would’ve kicked your ass off the roof.”

  “No doubt.”

  She rolled over onto her back and sighed. “But this is weird.”

  She had the sheet pulled up over her chest and tucked under her arms. Her shoulders were tan, probably from the running.

  “So now what?” I asked.

  “Little picture or big picture?” she asked, staring up at the ceiling.

  “Your choice.”

  She turned her head to me. “I choose little picture because I have no desire to draw the big picture.”

  “Fine with me.”

  “And little picture says, what’s for breakfast?”

  “Am I invited to stay?”

  She reached over and placed her hand lightly on my chest. “Those are hideous.”

  I peered down at the dark purple bruises that decorated my upper body. “Wish I could disagree.” I put my hand over hers. “Gonna answer my question?”

  Her eyes lingered on the bruises for a moment before she looked up at me. “Since you’re already here, you can stay. But since you’re the guest, you get to do the cooking.” She gave a tiny grin, slid out from under the sheet, and stood. “I’m going to shower. The food better be ready by the time I’m out.”

  I watched her walk to the bathroom, and despite not wanting to, I smiled.

  I got up, found my shorts and shirt, and headed to the kitchen. It was small but sunny, the light from the west not nearly as blinding as it had seemed in her bedroom. I found the skillet where I remembered it to be, some eggs, cheese, and mushrooms in the fridge, and threw together two omelets.

  I was sliding them onto plates when she came out.

  “Wow,” she said, her dark hair still damp. She wore a pair of black cotton shorts and a gray T-shirt with UCSD written across it. “You were fast.”

  I pointed to the coffeepot. “Even got that going.”

  She grabbed a mug out of the cabinet. “You still averse to caffeine in the morning?”

  “Yep.”

  “Your loss.” She poured a cup from the pot, and we sat down at the table in the corner of the kitchen.

  We ate in silence. Most of the time, when I’m quiet at a meal, it’s because I’m uncomfortable. With Liz, it felt normal and right.

  She pushed the plate away from her when she’d finished. “So. What’s your plan of attack today?”

  I wiped my mouth and set the fork down on my empty plate. “Got a couple of ideas.”

  “Like?”

  “Like working on that Charlotte thing you gave me.”

  “I didn’t give you anything,” she said, looking at me over her coffee cup.

  “Right. Like working on this Charlotte thing I found.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yes. Tell me something. Have you guys looked at Randall much with this?”

  “Kate’s husband?” she asked. She gestured with the coffee mug. “Sure. Doesn’t seem to be anything there, though. He wasn’t in San Diego when she died.”

  “Doesn’t mean he couldn’t have been involved, though.”

  “No. Why?”

  “He was a user, too.”

  She nodded. “I know. We ran his record. He’s on probation.” She looked at me, puzzled. “Why would that make him wanna kill his wife?”

  My thoughts flashed on my conversation with Ken again, but I pushed them aside. I didn’t want to pu
t the idea that Kate had covered for Randall out there until I thought I could get Liz to take it seriously.

  “Isn’t there some statistic about husbands being the most likely suspects in the deaths of their wives?” I said.

  “Sure. I don’t know what it is, but it’s high. But you’ve usually got motive and some sort of evidence.” She shook her head. “Randall’s run clean so far.”

  I tried a different track. “Emily thought he was having an affair.”

  “Emily?”

  I hesitated, feeling like she was asking me something different than what she’d intended.

  “Yeah. Saw her at the funeral. She told me that he was screwing around,” I said.

  “Wellton interviewed her, and I know it came up then, too.” Liz spun the mug on the table with her pinky finger. “But his alibi’s tight. Hospital verified him being there for the last week. No way he was here.”

  “Just doesn’t feel right, that’s all,” I said.

  She looked at the clock on the wall and stood, grabbing the plates. “I’ve got to get moving. I’ll look around some more, Noah, but I’m still not sure how he’s connected to Kate’s death. He may be an asshole, but that doesn’t make him a killer.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” I said as I pushed away from the table and slowly coaxed myself upright.

  She dropped the dishes in the sink and walked over to me.

  “Of course I am,” she said. “I’m a homicide detective.”

  I smiled. “Yeah, you are.”

  She poked me in the chest. “I’m not gonna let this get awkward. I have no idea what this is right now.”

  “Me and you?”

  “Yeah, me and you,” she said. “And to be honest, I don’t want to think about it. So, no good-bye kisses, no googly eyes, none of that crap.”

  “Googly eyes?” I asked.

  “Yes, most likely from you,” she said, trying to keep a smile from hitting her mouth. “So here it is. I’m glad you came by last night and I’m glad you’re here this morning. But let’s just see what happens. No promises. Alright?”

  “No,” I said.

  She looked surprised. “No?”

  “I’m kissing you good-bye,” I said as I leaned over.