by Alan Drew
“Hungover?” she said.
“No,” he said. Jesus, Rachel, he wanted to say. People do change. “Not that kind of bad. Not for a long time.”
The assistants hoisted the boy’s body into the back of the wagon and closed the door. It would be cold in the back, antiseptic and cold.
“Listen, Ben. We’ve got to go.” He pictured her at the door, dressed for school, her hand on the door handle, her bag of papers dangling from her shoulder. Off to do the clean work of teaching.
“Yeah,” he said. “I know.” She didn’t even mention the coffee he had made. “Didn’t mean to hold you up.”
He held the Motorola for a minute, listening to the drone of the empty line, and watched the ambulance silently speed away. Phone call. Anonymous tip. Hispanic. There weren’t any phones in the camp, unless someone had run an illegal line. The ambulance passed a shopping center and a lit-up Texaco station on the edge of the field, a phone booth standing on the corner.
“Natasha,” he said when she was back at her van. “Don’t pack up yet.”
—
A SWELL LIFTED Ben ten feet into the air, the water sucking at his torso, dragging his body up the face of the wave. He was bodysurfing at the Wedge down in Newport Beach, a south swell pumping hard. For a moment there was no horizon, the water cutting into the sky, the land pitching sideways. The swell crested, the wind blowing spray off the lip. He turned in to the wave and it shot him toward the beach. His palm carved the glass in front of him, his body rocketing across the face. Then suddenly the wave jacked up against the jetty. He was airborne briefly, before his torso spun back into the water. He cut his hand into the face of the wave and shot the pipe, and just before it closed him off, a second before the slam and grind of the ocean floor, he flipped out the backside into the ebb of the receding churn.
Three hours earlier, he’d followed the body to the medical examiner’s office. He usually stayed away from autopsies. When he was a recruit, his class had been required to attend autopsies to learn what kind of evidence was important to a case, so they didn’t destroy forensic particulars on scene. The day he witnessed, the body was a young woman. He’d kept his stomach through external examination and even through the Y cut from shoulder blades to pubic bone, but when the examiner laid the blade of the electric saw against her ribs, he couldn’t take it. He barely made it to the toilets. Ever since, he avoided it: the smell of the rooms, the dun-colored stains on the floors, the whole stainless-steel cool of the place. But he couldn’t leave this boy; he felt some kind of responsibility toward him.
So he smeared Vicks above his top lip and stood in the corner while Natasha and Dr. Mendenhall removed the body from the bag. He watched as they swabbed the boy’s mouth and cut his nails and placed the clippings in a plastic bag. He watched as they combed his hair around the wound, untangling strands from the comb to keep for testing. He imagined the boy standing in front of a mirror, combing his own hair in the minutes before school, slicking it back into a thick black streak.
Now, in the ocean, three swells were stacked up ahead of him. Out of breath, he freestyled against the tide, pulling himself through rope kelp and sea froth. He dove beneath a breaking wave. The churn rolled over him, a muted rumble on the surface of the water, until he burst out into oxygen, filling his burning lungs with it as another wave crested above him. He turned and caught the wave, carving the swell, feeling its tug and pull, but riding the beautiful clean glass just in front of the break.
He had stayed through the Y cut, though his stomach roiled and he had to hold the Vicks to his nose. Mendenhall unceremoniously carved through the body, intoning medical terms into the microphone. Natasha, though, held the boy’s arm as if comforting him. Ben watched her hands—her fingertips pressed lightly to the boy’s skin, as though afraid to bruise him—as the doctor worked on the ribs. That kept him calm, her soft touch on the body. He watched her hands, too, when she assisted Mendenhall with the first of the boy’s organs, but that was all he could take; he stood in the corner of the examination room, his hands in his pockets, staring at the graying grout that held the tile together.
“We can call you when we’re finished,” Natasha said.
“No. I’ll stay.”
He stared at the wall and listened to Mendenhall call out numbers, medical minutiae, and thought of the boy’s mother sitting in a small, dark room while her son lay here on a stainless-steel table. He would stay until it was done; he would.
The wave closed out and broke all at once, grinding him into the sand, dragging him head over feet across the ocean floor. His body was the ocean’s for a few moments, and he let himself be raked across the pebbles and broken shells, his rag-doll limbs useless against the churn. Then he was up into the air, his lungs expanding with oxygen, the sun glancing off the water.
He dove beneath the kelp bed, into the dark below. He swam the bubbling silence, his shoulders aching as he tugged himself against the tide. The weight of the water pressured his ears, but his body felt weightless now, and for nearly a minute he forgot about everything except the rush of water slipping down his limbs.
When the medical examiner finished, Natasha placed her palm on his back.
“Waiting for this?” she said, the disinfected bullet in her hand.
He didn’t know what he was waiting for, but, yeah, he guessed that was it. Evidence. His job. “Yeah,” he said, taking it in his hand. She gave him a plastic bag and he slipped the slug inside.
“You okay?” she said.
“Yep,” he said. “Just fine.”
He had run the revolver and the bullet over to ballistics and spent an hour at his desk, typing up the death investigation form on one of the new Macintosh computers. Case number: 12-00443-UI. Decedent name: ____________. Decedent DOB: __________. Decedent address: ____________________. Location of body: Strawberry field, Junipero and Serrano Canyon Roads. Cause of death: Homicide. He got three more lines down the form before he realized which box he’d marked. He returned to the cause-of-death line and let his hand hover over the erase key, the green cursor flashing at him. It didn’t look like the work of a serial killer, but maybe he was wrong, maybe he was missing something. He stared at the X in the box for at least a minute, his finger hovering midair, before Lieutenant Hernandez leaned over his desk, the air around him spiced with aftershave.
“What’s the deal with this?” he said. “Bad fucking timing to have a body turn up.”
Ben gave him the lowdown while Hernandez bent over the monitor, reading glasses on the tip of his nose, and scanned the screen.
“Mayor’s got investors in today,” Hernandez said. “They want to build a ‘campus’ with upscale houses for employees. Some computer-software crap. Want the city to have a ‘family feel.’ ”
“And we all know nothing bad happens in families,” Ben said.
“Homicide?” Hernandez said. “Unless you got something not listed here, you’re getting ahead of yourself, Wade.”
“Things don’t line up for self-inflicted,” Ben said.
“They line up for murder?” Hernandez said, standing up now. He wasn’t a tall man, but he had the broad shoulders of a wrestler. A couple of years back, Ben had seen him pin a six-foot-five perp freaking on PCP against a bus-stop bench, until Ben and two other officers could handcuff him to the bolted-down legs.
“Not yet,” Ben said.
“When they do, you can check that box.”
When the lieutenant was gone, Ben stared at the flashing cursor. Something about this was all wrong, suicide or murder. This one was going to be shit; he could feel it. Finally he pressed the erase key and marked the box that read Unknown.
Now the surfers were out, boys with arrow-like Plexiglas boards. They straddled the boards between their legs while they waited for the swells and talked about getting laid or getting loaded or about new punk bands who threw keggers in garages in Huntington Beach. These losers were taking over the whole South Coast. They swooped
down on you, ran you over, cursed you for getting in the way of their “shredding.” Surfing was a lesser sport, as far as Ben was concerned, like riding waves with a life raft. Another set came in, and even though the second wave was bigger than the first, Ben caught the smaller and rode it to shore, the world coming back to him as his feet touched sand.
A Juan Nadie, a pistol, and handwriting on a small slip of paper.
4
EMMA WASN’T LOOKING FOR HIM this afternoon. Usually she stood on the steps and waited for his cruiser, but he was early. Her back was to him, her hand resting on the chest of a boy he’d never seen before. The boy’s arm was looped around his daughter’s waist, his hand sunk into the back pocket of her jeans. She was fourteen, barely six weeks into ninth grade, the last year of junior high. He remembered dinner and a candle in a pink cupcake just last spring. He sat in the cruiser, the engine idling, the radio scratching out 10-codes—non-injury traffic accident, missing elderly, check for record—and watched, trying to tell from her body language how far this had already gone. She kept her hand on the boy’s chest and she didn’t turn around to look for him, not a glance, even when he got out and slammed the door, climbed the cement steps, let the lapel of his coat hook on the butt of his .40 caliber, and stuck his hand out for the boy to shake.
“Emma’s dad,” Ben said.
“God, Dad,” Emma said, her hand on her sternum now. “You scared me.”
“Emma’s friend,” the boy said, pushing the sun-bleached hair out of his eyes and shaking Ben’s hand. No muscle in it. Not trying to impress. Trouble.
“Lance,” Emma said, her face flushed. “Dad, this is Lance.”
He was older, maybe sixteen or seventeen. The high school was adjacent to the junior high school, a mistake in master planning if you asked him.
“You surf?” Ben said. “Newport? Thirty-second Street?”
“Yeah,” the boy said. The kid’s pupils were dilated, black saucers yawned open to the emptiness of his cranium. Stoner. He didn’t recognize the kid, but he knew the type.
“Break’s better down at the Wedge.”
“Dad likes to bodysurf,” Emma explained.
“You work the parking meters?” the kid said.
Ben smiled. “Robbery, assault, homicide.” Punk kid. “Drugs.”
“Radical, man,” the kid said, squinting into the sun.
Then another kid, dragging a skateboard behind him, slapped Lance’s hand. Emma blew the punk a kiss goodbye, and finally she was sitting in the passenger seat next to him.
“Geez, Detective,” she said. “What’s with the interrogation?”
She was wearing a hoodie, not one of hers. It held the faint sweetness of marijuana. He didn’t like that one bit. That was ownership, the boy marking territory.
“I haven’t heard about this kid.”
“Mom knows.”
Of course she does. What else was Rachel keeping from him? Em must have understood his silence, because she shape-shifted back into herself, the girl who used to allow him to tuck her into bed at night.
“Shoot anyone today?” she joked.
He watched Lance on the steps: his hair falling in his face, his corduroy pants and Vans two-toned shoes, his surfer cool and the goofy hand gestures he and his friends signed at one another, the secret language of all teenage groups, guns or surfboards.
“Not yet,” he said.
—
“I’M NOT CRAZY about the looks of this kid,” Ben said to Emma.
They were up on Moro Ridge, the horses dipping their noses in an old cattle trough, a cut-open oil drum filled with rainwater from last week’s storms. Rachel had a faculty meeting today, so Ben got an extra ride in with Emma. The two of them sat in the shadow of a scarred black oak, its limbs twisted east from the coastal breeze. Below them, Crystal Cove cut a crescent out of the hillside, and beyond that the Pacific curved blue all the way to Asia.
“You don’t even know him,” she said.
“I’ve been around enough kids to know the good from the bad.”
“Well, who would you like, Dad?”
She had a point. He couldn’t think of any type of hormone-addled teenager he’d like zeroing in on his daughter. A serious problem considering she was a year and a half into puberty and seemed to enjoy making herself a target. Button that blouse. No way you’re walking out that door in those shorts.
“How long’ve you been seeing this boy?”
Now she leaned on her bare arms—thankfully she’d left the kid’s sweatshirt back at the house—her elbows hyperextended and fragile-looking. She wouldn’t look at him, just stared at the swells stacked and rolling in.
“Not long.”
“A week, month?”
“God, Dad, you make me feel like a criminal.”
“And you make me feel like a cop.”
In third grade, Emma had been identified as “gifted,” a genetic blessing Ben was certain had been passed down from Rachel. He was proud of Emma’s intelligence and the accelerated classes she took, but he wasn’t crazy about what the school psychologist called a “propensity for precociousness in the gifted student.” Precociousness, as far as Ben was concerned, was simply a “propensity” to let curiosity get you into hot messes. When she was five, inspired by a painting she’d seen on a school trip to the L.A. County Museum of Art, Emma painted the wall opposite her twin bed full of acrylic sunflowers. After they’d moved here, she got it into her head to perform an “experiment” with matches and gunpowder extracted—unbeknownst to him or Rachel—from old shotgun shells she’d found in the barn. “Curiosity killed the gifted student,” Ben had said after they put out the small brush fire with the garden hose. Her precociousness now had mellowed into a general artistic pretentiousness concerning “post-punk” and “New Wave” British bands, a mostly benign affront to Ben’s ears. But “boys” and “precociousness” were two words he didn’t want used in the same sentence.
“It’s only been a few weeks,” she said.
“As in three?”
“Five or six.”
Jesus.
“He’s nice.”
“Guys aren’t nice until they’re thirty.”
She leveled the lay-off look—her chin lowered and her eyes, rimmed in black eyeliner her mother had started letting her wear, two stabbing darts.
“He buys me lunch, made a mixtape for me…” She counted them off with her fingers. “He’s got good taste—the Clash, Social Distortion, Minutemen. Good taste matters.”
Mixtapes? Buying lunch? A high school boy’s tickets to admission. Next he’ll be telling her some sob story about how he’s ignored by his father.
“You meet him at the record store?” Ben asked. Emma and her friends hung out at Viral Records, and sometimes he did drive-bys just to check up.
“Strike one,” she said. “He lives over in El Camino Real. Hangs out at the skate park near Alta Square.”
“School, then?”
“You are a detective,” she said, wagging her finger at him. “Gray!” she said suddenly, sitting up and pointing out to sea.
The plume, maybe a half mile out in the ocean, fanned in the wind, and then the heavy arch of the whale’s back broke the surface.
“Must be one of the first,” she said. Emma was standing now, her hand shadowing her eyes, an excited little girl again. His daughter’s childhood was measured by the same topography that had measured Ben’s, and sometimes he had the strange feeling that they were living their childhoods simultaneously, as though the hills were some fold in time where their youths intersected. Ben and his father would catch their breath here on long rides, when his father was still running cattle for the ranch. The land was being gnawed away even then, and his father knew it—Leisure World terraced into Cherry Canyon, UC Med School cantilevered above San Joaquin Wash—and they stopped here often, his father staring at the ocean as though developers would fill it in with gravel and pave a parking lot over it. Ben’s father never lost his wonde
r for the Pacific, from the moment he first saw it, azure and sun-starred, out the window of the coast-to-coast Greyhound, until the afternoon of the day he died. The man never swam in the ocean, not even a toe dip in it, but he walked the edge of it, pressed his boots into the damp sand to snatch seashells from the salt; he watched it, too, from his perch on his horse, talked about the swells coming all the way from Korea, where his brother, Everett, had been killed a decade earlier trying to take Pork Chop Hill. He pointed out plumes of whale breath as the animals lumbered the shallow coastal waters in the fall, shielded his eyes to watch pelicans swoop the ocean’s surface. He knew where to find tide pools when the ocean ebbed, knew the names of the animals clasping tidal rocks—the rockweed and gooseneck barnacles, the wavy-top turban and dead man’s fingers.
It was only a single plume, and Emma sat back down.
“Mom’s talked to you, right?” he said.
“We talk all the time,” she said.
“I mean…” He hoped to God Rachel had taken care of this. “Talked to you.”
“About sex?”
“Yeah,” he said, clearing his throat.
“Geez, Dad.” Her cheeks reddened a bit. “Yeah, she’s talked to me.”
“I hope she said something like, Don’t do it or I’ll kill you.”
She laughed. “I think she mentioned bamboo sticks under my fingernails.”
“Good,” he said. “You know, no one talked to me about it. It made things confusing.”
“You can stop now.”
A gust of wind rained oak leaves down around them.
“How old is this kid?” Ben said.
“Sixteen,” she said. “But he’s only a freshman. They held him back a year.”
Great. Fucking great.
“Why?” He tried to take the detective out of his voice, tried to soften it.
“He’s got an abusive relationship with math,” she said. “He’s an artist.”
Jesus. An artist! A pot-smoking, surfing artist. Graffiti probably.
“It’s not what you’re thinking,” she said.