The Prince of Venice Beach

by Nelson, Blake

  Digital Galley Edition

  This is uncorrected advance content collected for your reviewing convenience. Please check with publisher or refer to the finished product whenever you are excerpting or quoting in a review.

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Blake Nelson

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  www.lb.teens.com

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  First ebook edition: June 2014

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Nelson, Blake

  The prince of Venice Beach / by Blake Nelson.—First edition.

  pages cm

  Summary: Robert “Cali” Callahan, seventeen, gets swept up into the private-investigator business and must deal with the ramifications of looking for fellow runaways who may not want to be found—and with falling in love with one of them.

  ISBN 978-0-316-23048-3 (hardcover). ISBN 978-0-316-23047-6 (e-book)

  [1. Runaways—Fiction. 2. Homeless persons—Fiction. 3. Private investigators—Fiction. 4. Venice (Los Angeles, Calif.)—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.N4328Pri 2014

  [Fic]—dc23

  2013012248

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  RRD-C

  Printed in the United States of America

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ONE

  They came from Minnesota and you could tell by the way they walked onto the court that they’d heard about Venice street ball. This was the big time, and they wanted to try their luck, to test themselves, to see how their midwestern white-boy game measured up in the palm-tree jungle of Southern California.

  They were tall, with big shoulders and straight white teeth in their farm-boy faces. You could feel that midwestern pride, you could sense their focus and competitive spirit. For God and country and apple pie. Their unselfish, “team-first” approach probably won them the high school championship up in Lake Nahaka or Dingle Falls or wherever they came from. Ol’ Coach Wankershank up there had taught them how to compete like men, how to buckle down and play defense and control the paint.

  Now they found themselves on the legendary street-basketball courts of Venice Beach. Their first opponents of the day being: me, five feet nine, surfer white-boy, in old Vans and cutoffs… Jojo Hendrix, five feet eight, homeless and quite fragrant black dude of unknown age or origin… and Diego Rodriguez, six feet one, 235 pounds, the “Mountain of Mexican,” who had just turned fifteen, and who desperately needed a belt to hold up his pants.

  This was gonna be fun. Even the guys standing around the other courts could see what was coming. They gathered around to watch.

  The Minnesota boys took the ball out first. They ran a play, a cross screen. One guy blocked out Diego; the other guy cut to the hoop. One quick pass and they scored an easy lay-up.

  Jojo smiled and congratulated them. That’s because Jojo loves everyone and wants each of us to self-realize and be the best person he can be, and also to find Jesus Christ if possible and be saved by his love, and ultimately disconnect from all this earthly stuff, like money and pride and even basketball. Jojo is like that, full of love and forgiveness and the Lord. He’d give you his last quarter, except he probably already gave it to somebody else.

  The Minnesota boys were unsure how to respond to Jojo. They maintained their focus. They took the ball out again and ran a different play and got another layup. I suggested to Diego that he move toward the middle, because he’s big and strong and unmovable, and at least they wouldn’t get any more easy buckets.

  The Minnesotans countered this strategy by shooting jump shots. With their practiced technique and perfect ball rotation, they hit four in a row. Jojo, meanwhile, was busy telling someone in the bleachers how beautiful a day it was, how it was “God’s day.” Diego, on his side of the court, struggled to hold up his pants.

  It was 7–0 when they finally missed a shot. Diego wrestled away the rebound. He passed it to me. I passed it to Jojo. He passed it back. The Minnesota boys positioned themselves to play defense. They were grinning to each another, thrilled with how well this was going. They weren’t just beating the locals, they were dominating. They tugged on the bottoms of their shorts and adjusted their sweatbands. You wondered if they wanted it to be harder. There was almost a feeling of letdown, of this being too easy.

  “Jojo,” I said, passing the ball back to him. “We’re behind. We need to score.”

  So Jojo snapped out of whatever spiritual experience he was having. He dribbled once, sliced through the Minnesota boys, and elevated over everyone. The ball rolled off his fingers and into the hoop.

  The boys’ mouths fell open. Where did that come from?

  They exchanged looks of wonder, but before they could react, I’d checked the ball and shot a bullet pass to Jojo, who was already in the lane. He went airborne and dunked it, right over their tallest guy.

  That’s right, he dunked it.

  We took it out again. I passed it to Jojo, and in a blur of quickness he knifed through their defense, hung in the air for an impossible amount of time, and laid it in the basket.

  The boys began looking at each other. How did you stop this? What strategy could they use?

  I passed the ball to Jojo again, who faked a drive to the basket. All three Minnesotans scrambled backward in wild panic, two of them falling on their asses on the concrete.

  Jojo stared at them a moment, refocused on the hoop, and shot an effortless jumper. Swish.

  The local guys were cracking up. Someone in the bleachers offered directions back to Minnesota. Other comments were slightly racist but also pretty funny. The white boys were trying. They were learning. They’d had the cojones to come down here at least, you had to give them credit.

  I
passed the ball to Jojo again, who slipped a perfect underneath pass to Diego, who gently bounced the ball off the backboard and into the hoop.

  Then I shot a jumper and made it. Then Jojo shot a jumper and made it. Then a quick pass to Diego and now we were the ones getting the easy layups.

  The Minnesota boys stood staring at us in shock. They had never seen someone like Jojo up close. His talent level is, I would guess, somewhere around NBA starting point guard. Sure, he spent most of his time giving praise to the Lord or communing with the angels on a higher plane, but when he did come down to earth, he had special powers: mainly the ability to fly.

  Jojo dunked on the Minnesota boys one last time to end the game. The three of them stood, baffled and humiliated in the middle of the court. A new team came on to replace them. There were no kind words. No one complimented them or said “good game.” This wasn’t the YMCA.

  Still, their best guy came toward me. He was gonna say something, shake hands, whatever. But I just nodded like: Don’t say a word. You guys showed us what you got, and it wasn’t bad. Really, you did all right. But whatever little suburban bubble you live in is just that, a bubble. This is Venice. This is the real stuff.

  Later, though, I did shake his hand. I guess I have that midwestern sense of honor in me too. Guys like that, I look at them and I can’t help but think: That could have been me….

  TWO

  By noon, it was too hot to play. People wandered off. Diego and I stood around, lazily shooting jump shots in the sun. That’s when I noticed a guy standing at the edge of the court. He wore sunglasses and a coat and tie. It was an odd look in a place where most people wore board shorts and flip-flops.

  Diego shot some free throws. I stood under the basket and tossed the ball back to him. I watched the guy. He was looking for someone. He kept checking out different people on the courts.

  Then he settled on me.

  He waited until I went to the drinking fountain and casually strolled over. “Excuse me,” he said. “I’m looking for a young man named Cali.”

  I glanced up at him but said nothing. He’d have to take the sunglasses off if he wanted to talk to me.

  I went back to the water, which tasted like chlorine. You needed bottled water down here, but that cost money.

  He took off his glasses. I straightened up and wiped the water off my chin with the back of my wrist. “What do you want him for?” I asked.

  “I need help finding someone.”

  I followed him back to his car. He pulled some papers out of a briefcase and spread them on the hood.

  “This is him,” he told me. He handed me a picture of a high school kid, probably seventeen. He looked like the Minnesota boys: clean, suburban, straight teeth. In the picture, he was wearing a red hoodie and a baseball cap hanging sideways off his head.

  I didn’t look very long, just a glance, really. I handed back the picture.

  “And you are?” I asked the guy.

  “My name is Bruce Edwards.”

  “Why are you looking for him?”

  “I’m a private investigator,” he answered. He handed me a business card. He also showed me an official-looking photo ID and then reached into his car to get a license from the state of California, which he kept in his glove compartment.

  “Who told you about me?” I asked.

  “A cop friend. Darius Howard.”

  I nodded. Darius Howard had busted me when I first got to California. Well, actually, someone else busted me, but I ended up in Detective Howard’s office in the Venice precinct. I hadn’t done anything, I’d just been stopped on the boardwalk and had no ID.

  Darius had understood my situation. I’d been a foster kid my whole life, back in Nebraska. At fourteen, I’d struck out on my own. I’d landed in Venice and made a little life for myself, off the grid, of course. But I was doing okay and I wasn’t causing any trouble for the police. So Darius had let me walk.

  “His name is Chad Mitchell,” said Edwards, showing me some more pictures. “He’s from Seattle. Nice family. Good school. According to this, he should be in the area.”

  He handed me a printout of credit-card charges. You could follow it like a trail. Seattle… Seattle… Seattle… then a gas station in Portland, Oregon… a mini-mart in southern Oregon… a gas station in California… food and a motel outside San Francisco… and then Santa Monica, where he’d bought some sandwiches at a grocery store.

  His last purchase—a six-pack of Mountain Dew and a bag of Doritos—was from the Beach Mart half a block from where we were standing.

  “Darius said you know what goes on down here,” said Bruce Edwards. “He thought you might be able to help. There’d be a little money in it for you.”

  I nodded and looked at the pictures. I could always use a little money.

  “His parents are very concerned,” said Edwards. “Needless to say.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll keep my eyes open.”

  “Let me give you my number,” he said, getting out his phone.

  I took his number.

  Cool as I acted, I was excited for this opportunity. Several months before, Darius Howard had asked for my help in another case, a local kid who stole bicycles. He’d steal them and throw them off the pier for fun. I didn’t get paid or anything, but I did help find the kid. Darius had been impressed.

  So maybe this could lead to something. A part-time job. Helping find people. I noticed people anyway. It was like a hobby. Especially kids my own age. Tourist kids, surfer kids, homeless kids: I’d check them out. I’d try to guess where they came from, what their deal was.

  Ever since the bike stealer, I’d hoped Darius Howard might ask for my help again. And now, in a way, he had.

  That afternoon, I cruised on my skateboard up and down the boardwalk, checking in with different people, not asking anything specific, more just dropping the name.

  “Dude, this guy Chad’s in town….” I said to some local skateboarders. No response.

  I told some other people about a Seattle guy named Chad who was gonna buy my surfboard. Had anybody seen him? No one had.

  I cruised around. I thought about where I’d gone when I first arrived in Venice. But that didn’t help too much. Chad Mitchell had a car, he had money, he wouldn’t be sleeping in storm drains like I did.

  Still, he had to be somewhere. And he’d bought Doritos at the Beach Mart. It was likely he was close by.

  That night, I went home to Hope Stillwell’s. She was a local woman who let me live in a tree house in her backyard. She also let me use her computer sometimes, which was what I did now.

  I found Chad Mitchell on Facebook. He seemed like a normal kid. His parents were well off. He had nice clothes, an amazing bedroom. He liked skateboarding, snowboarding, video games. He’d taken surf lessons on a recent vacation in Hawaii. “Surfing is the best,” he wrote under a picture of himself, standing awkwardly on a baby wave.

  He also liked to party. And goof off. And do what he wanted. “I got a bad attitude!” he wrote under another picture of himself flipping off a mall security guard whose back was turned.

  Since he wanted to be a surfer, I rode the bus to Malibu the next morning and got off at Surfrider Beach. There wasn’t much going on, the waves weren’t great. Still, there were people out. I watched for anyone with rental boards or taking lessons. I showed the guy at the rental booth a picture of Chad. He hadn’t seen him.

  I walked down to Malibu Plaza. I checked out the grocery store, the surf shop, the frozen-yogurt place. I showed my picture to some girls who worked at a sunglasses store. Nothing. I rode the bus home and microwaved a burrito and sat in my tree house and thought about Chad Mitchell. Where did guys like that hang out? What would they do at night?

  Before bed, I rode my skateboard the length of the Venice boardwalk. It was dark and quiet, and the homeless people were settling in for the night. They had their dogs, their packs, their shopping carts. Some of them were just starting off their life on the stree
t. They still had decent clothes and clean sleeping pads, and their hair wasn’t all gnarly yet. I sniffed around the newer people as best I could.

  “You guys from Seattle…?”

  “I’m lookin’ for my buddy Chad…?”

  “Any new people around…?”

  But nothing came of it

  The next day, I called Bruce. I told him where I’d been, what I was doing, and asked if anything new had turned up on his end. Nothing had. He seemed impressed with my activity, though, and told me to keep at it. He offered to send me a check for my time and expenses, which I told him to make out to Hope Stillwell.

  When the check came, I told Hope to keep it, since she didn’t charge me rent. She was psyched and went to Trader Joe’s and made a big vegan feast and had a bunch of her woman friends over. Afterward, they had a little dance party in the backyard. They cranked up the music and I danced with Hope’s friend Olivia, who’s just about the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. She’s thirty-two, though, and I’m seventeen, so she just laughs when I try to talk to her. I’m not really on her radar. Hope’s friends think of me as a street kid, a charity case. I’m like their pet. I’m their good deed.

  On Saturday a new southwest swell came in, so everyone went surfing. I had a new wet suit, which I was eager to try. I’d found it in the alley and cut off the arms and legs a few inches to make it fit.

  I grabbed my board from Hope’s garage and met Diego at the breakwater. The waves were big and we picked our way out through the gaps in the surf. Diego and I both got up on the same wave. Diego’s a good surfer, but he’s so big on his tiny board he looks more funny than cool. We started bumping each other, pushing each other, goofing around. But there were so many people I was afraid I was gonna hit someone. Or get hit.

  That’s a constant fear, when you’re off the grid: getting hurt and ending up in the emergency room. Or worse, the dentist. One runaway kid I knew broke a bunch of teeth at the skate park, and while the dentist fixed him up, one of the nurses ran him through a national database.

  Two hours later, all Novocained up and with a mouth full of fake teeth, he walked into a waiting room full of cops and social services people. That was the end of his ride. Back he went to Pennsylvania.