by Peter Craig
“I don’t want to die.”
“Good. You shouldn’t. You’re a young kid.”
Lydia sank down onto the floor, staring at the brown threads in the carpet. She said, “I don’t want you to burn down that ranch. That’s what I’m trying to say. It would make me very upset.”
“All right. I promise—no pyromania. If you do something for me. I’m still going to ride back, I’m going to go in armed—I’m going to get our stuff out, and I won’t break a bone—if you do something for me. I want you to go someplace—the only safe place I can think of. Just go and listen. Sit down, have some coffee. Introduce yourself. Talk all about your problems. But don’t get too specific.”
fifteen
Before Lydia’s first AA meeting, at a private home in Yuma, she convinced her father to let her ride his bike in first gear around an empty parking lot beside the Pentecostal church. Link told her she was going to kill herself, but after she begged him, he agreed to let her try, with a worried smirk on his face. A restored 1956 Shovelhead chopper with a suicide shift—he told her that not even experienced riders could handle its power.
He kick-started it and left the bike rumbling in neutral. As Lydia climbed on, she gave a nervous howl and started laughing.
Link said, “Oh boy, are you going to die. And wreck my bike. Okay, okay—squeeze the clutch with your left hand—right there. All the way down, dummy!”
They yelled to each other over the engine.
“Holy shit,” she said. “Okay, I’m ready. I’m going to kick ass!”
“Now put your left foot there on the gear shifter. Right here.”
“You put your left foot in, you put your left foot out—”
“Hey, if you don’t concentrate—”
“And you shake it all about.”
“—you’re picking gravel out of your face.”
“Okay! Okay! What do I do now?”
“Kick it down into first.”
She clicked down on the gear changer, keeping her left hand pinched on the clutch lever.
He said, “You’re a crazy chick, Lydia. I mean that. Now, moment of truth. Give a little tiny throttle with your right hand while you ease up on that clutch—slow. Real slow.”
She hiccuped ahead, screaming at the top of her lungs, straightening out the bike, and she moved forward so slowly that she could barely keep her balance. As the Harley rolled ahead, she kept squealing until she broke into wild laughter. Link ran alongside her, trying to keep the bike upright as she drifted a drunken path across the lot, then began accelerating toward the parking blocks and a retaining wall.
“Stop!” he shouted.
The panic on his face sent her into more hysterics, until she looked up and saw herself approaching the wall at a trotting pace, and said, “I’m going to hit something!”
“Grab the clutch and hit the brake. Your right foot! Your right foot!”
She stopped abruptly against the parking blocks, and Link, racing forward, leaned all his weight into the bike to keep it upright before dropping the kickstand. He couldn’t breathe. Lydia had never seen him look so terrified, but she was erupting with enthusiasm. She leapt off the seat and ran in wide circles on the parking lot, shouting, “That was awesome! Did you see me? I was so fucking sexy on that thing.”
“Yeah, you were a natural, kid.”
“Oh my God. Can I try to get into second gear?”
“No.”
A few minutes later, after he had soared off through traffic, Lydia sat on a foldout chair in the low-ceilinged living room of a woman’s home. On a coffee table there were peppermint candies, and on the wood-paneled walls there were star-shaped clocks and windmills made of sand dollars. After the group recited a speech together—“. . . the strength to accept what I cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference . . .”—a woman in large secretarial glasses read something from a book, and each person was supposed to comment, as the room filled rapidly with smoke. Lydia introduced herself, and she was greeted warmly by a room of stoic-looking women, many of whom tried to tell optimistic stories. One woman was happy that she could now keep her pets alive. Another woman spoke for a long time about her husband and children, her testimony so saturated with apology and self-loathing that people watched her speak as if witnessing an execution. But other women seemed to have a weathered and comic sense of absurdity, and they used their cigarettes to pause and mull ideas, speaking with shrugs, and wistfully telling tales about backing their cars through garage walls or waking up in bedrooms they didn’t recognize with men as ugly as wolverines. Survival alone was an accomplishment. Surviving yourself was a career.
Lydia suspected that most of these women were probably not much older than her mother—but some looked ancient. Their voices were raspy, throats made of smoke and weak coffee, and their laughs turned quickly into coughs. Lydia got the impression that they all knew each other well, as if they had been in this room, in this exact semicircular formation—like a Tupperware party for felons and fugitives—since they were young. One woman said that she trusted this group, “Because you people got me into this mess.” It was a beleaguered camaraderie at best, but Lydia found herself swayed by it. They could have been patronizing to a young kid, but they were motherly in a way she had never experienced. They seemed to accept her by virtue of the fact that she was in trouble like they had been, and they respected her for coming, as if by sitting quietly she had given them added resolve.
Lydia had passed initially, but soon she wanted to talk. She told them that the only reason she was here was because her father had forced her. She had been sober for almost two days altogether, after sneaking bumps of crystal, smoking buds and drinking. She was craving speed badly; it felt like a thirst for salt. She didn’t remember ever feeling this hungry for anything else—and a woman told her that it would never go away entirely, especially not if she’d started on the needle. She’d have to learn to accept these cravings, let them wash over her, view them as emotions as chronic as loneliness or heartbreak.
It was just over a week since the man in Topanga had slapped her on the inside of the elbow, found the vein—since she had met Cully by the freeway sound barrier in the middle of the night. She started to cry, sitting by herself, stooped and contained: She was thinking of the strange pact with Jonah, which she had never understood; and she was filled with shame and heartbreak. In his old El Dorado, she had returned to Jonah that night, higher than she’d ever been in her life, believing that she would see on his face some indication that he loved her, that her discoveries that night were simply part of a chemical-induced paranoia. She had opened the gate herself, tiptoed into his room, and found him going through paperwork in his closet. He jumped when he saw her; she was a ghost in his doorway. As she told him about the dealer in Topanga who had refused to pay, Jonah recovered a phony expression and told her, “Beautiful work, Lydia.”
Lydia was not sure why she was breaking down now, in front of these women, but she told them it was because she was tired of watching her life unfold like an unavoidable car accident. What she wanted to say was that murder truly was a marriage: Over and over, she saw herself pulling that trigger; she saw Jonah sagging down against the stairs. And she couldn’t escape the feeling that he was waiting for her. There was a shadow now that she’d never outrun.
Everyone rose for the end of the meeting, said the final recitation, hugged and said good-bye, and Lydia waited in the middle of the empty room. The owner of the house asked if she was all right. She nodded at the floor and asked, “Can I just wait on the porch for my dad?”
A few miles away from the turnoff to Preacher’s ranch in the foothills, Link pulled to the roadside to study a twist of smoke blowing in an eastward slant. It could have been from a bonfire of excess garbage and weeds, but Link’s attention was drawn to it because it was so black against the dingy white sky.
When he turned up the hill, he smelled heavy clouds of rubber and chemicals. The wind had strengthened all day, and
a mixture of sand and smoke now formed a low haze over the shacks. Link stepped off his bike and walked to a clearing beyond the hangar, where he saw the ground littered with bottles, tire tracks, and shell casings. The adobe walls of old huts were freckled with bullet holes, the desert was pocked with detonation holes from Preacher’s old munitions; and beside Link, a fire still smoldered with a blackened tangle of chair legs, steel furniture, and tires. Some papers blew freely, partly charred—pictures of Lydia, posters and fliers.
He circled around the pile. On the other side he came upon a human arm reaching out from underneath the flames, blackened but not yet devoured.
The fire was flapping and ruffling in the wind, between snarls of mesquite as kindling, popping with resin and casting up sparks. As Link stepped closer, he saw that the body was Cherise, her features and hair scorched away from her face, and only the bloody, darkened sheath of a damp robe remaining around smoldering bones. Higher up on the stack, Preacher had been burned on top of the tires, and his remains looked like brittle chicken bones, steaming and reeking of iron and hair. One hand was still intact upon a broken table, fingernails looking as if they were alive and grappling.
All around this fire there were bottles and footprints ground into the light dirt, and Link could tell that the murderers had paced in circles, drinking and watching. It had been a party. They had made no effort to rush away or cover their tracks.
He put his hand over his mouth when the winds shifted. The smoke had a ripe human smell. He was surprised that anything in this life could still scare him, but as he looked at this twist of wreckage and bodies, a cluttered sacrifice, he understood that he was just a common brawler, incapable of anything close to this display. Gangs didn’t do this—kids from barrios needed to be prodded by the Mexican Mafia just to stop and get out of their cars. Preacher’s charred head tipped back as if his throat had been cut open first—a Colombian necktie—and Link knew that there weren’t many people willing to kill with their hands anymore. Maybe they had intended to keep Cherise alive. From the way she was haphazardly thrown into the mess, sprawled like a murderous afterthought, Link thought she had panicked trying to defend her old man.
By the books, this was a cartel assassination. If it wasn’t the Tijuana cartel or Guadalajara, it was someone who had studied them and followed the recipe. But how had they found this place? How had they managed to get so close onto Lydia’s trail?
He kept his wits and climbed back onto his bike, and ten minutes later he pulled up to a gas station, where he made a collect call. The voice on the other end sounded slightly out of breath. The automated operator asked if she would accept the call, and there was a long pause, until she clearly articulated: “Yes.”
Link said, “Ursula.”
She didn’t respond.
He said, “I’ve got her, she’s safe. Everything is okay, but listen to me.”
She only caught her breath in the receiver. She had been exercising maybe, or running up the stairs.
“Listen real good. Get your family together, and get out of that house. Drive up the coast, don’t tell anybody where. Lydia is in some serious shit, and it’s much deeper than I thought.”
“John, the police have been all around here. They’re looking for you.”
“I know. But you either need to go to them for protection, or you need to get out of there. I mean it. I know you don’t want to talk to me, but just listen. She had some boyfriend, and I thought he was just another punk. But he was into some serious shit. I don’t know how they keep coming up with so much information, but they do. They might have my files from the shop, and if they do, you’re in them. And these people will come after you. They’ll come after anything Lydia cares about.”
Ursula didn’t speak for a while, and then she asked, “What makes you think my daughter cares about me, John?”
“Ursula—get over the insults for a second and just get to a safe place. I can take care of Lydia. Will you just do that for me?”
“She was involved in a murder, John. You have to go to the police; this isn’t a game anymore. They’re going to catch her, and they’re going to catch you.”
He looked out at the dust blowing in giant plumes off the road, the lumpy horizon of obscured hills, swaths of colorless sky and salty earth, and he said, “They’ll catch me. But I’m going to give the kid a push in the right direction.”
An hour later, pulling to the curb across the street, he reached the Craftsman-style house in Yuma where Lydia’s AA meeting had just let out. When Lydia saw him from the front porch and rose up with her satchel, running with such animation across the dried-out lawn, her loose sweatshirt sleeves unrolling over her hands, her long arms and clumsy legs—such a big and goofy kid, her face coloring with relief upon seeing him—Link realized that he had never loved anything or anyone so much in his life until now.
For decades he had lived it up with nothing to live for, had tried to kill himself without a cause worth dying for; and during the thirty-some-odd strides his daughter made down the cement steps and across the empty street, he was convinced that he would endure any suffering or make any sacrifice to put things right again. He felt neither sadness nor hope, but all the weight of his own history, as if every highway he’d raced down, every day he’d squandered, every bad idea he’d chased down a dead-end road, in one single, swelling moment, could finally have a purpose.
sixteen
What I can’t get straight,” said Link, sitting across from his daughter in the booth of a chain restaurant, “is how they’re so close behind you, whoever these guys are.” “Maybe Preacher called the cops,” she said. “Maybe they have moles in the police department? I mean, what you say about that kid up at the slabs, the way they did that—that’s got to be Jonah’s bosses, right? They’re probably connected all over the place.”
“I don’t know, Lydia.”
To the waitresses and diners, they must have now seemed like any average father and daughter, sitting in the far corner, facing the cloverleaf exits off the interstate. Lydia had gone shopping. Her hair was short but stylishly ruffled, and she wore overalls with a white blouse beneath. Link wore a button-up workshirt and stiff new jeans. On the booth beside them were Lydia’s ideas of disguises: shopping bags, new suits, and dresses in the shrouds of transparent wrappers.
Lydia was shaken by the news about the ranch, and she tried to tell her father everything she remembered about Jonah. Frankly, she didn’t know who he had worked for—he had never told her, and she had begun to get the impression that they were capable of anything.
“But he was a Realtor?” asked Link.
“No, no—he wasn’t a Realtor. He developed, like, canyon properties and things like that. And he was a slumlord. And he had this other business, on the side, where he found stash houses. They’d store money and drugs in these houses, and he’d take, like, a percentage, I guess. Problem is—he was taking more than that.”
As they drank coffee and shared a slice of key lime pie, Link drew a sketch of Lydia on the back of the place mat. He asked her what Jonah was taking, and she told him everything she knew up until the night before the deliveries.
“I got back to his place that night,” said Lydia to her father, her elbows on the restaurant table, “and he looked up at me with just—total shock. That was his confession to me right there. I wasn’t supposed to make it. I could tell by the look on his face.”
“If I had this kid in front of me right now,” said Link.
“Then he tried to cover it up. He asked me if I’d made the delivery to this guy Cully, the last on the list, and I told him that I’d gotten so tired, and that the place was so dark that I chickened out. He smiled, told me what a great job I did. I was still in that mode, Dad—like Jonah was everything to me now, even if I loathed him. I had to please him, I had to say the right thing. So I talked to him about the house in Topanga, told him about the problems there. I told him they’d broken the contract; I said they were threatening to tel
l the other suppliers what he was doing, maybe his bosses. There was still this part of me that thought I could show him I was strong enough. The only way I thought I could survive was by convincing Jonah that I deserved to.
“He wasn’t mad at all; he didn’t even seem worried—and I just knew I’d had it. He was talking to me so sweetly, like he was trying to trick me into a corner. And he said we’d head back the next day, shake down the people who’d insulted us in Topanga. I just knew that was it: I wasn’t going to get away. That kid in Canoga Park, he’d been coming to the house all along. He’d been there, he’d drifted in and out. The next day, when we were all driving to Topanga, he just came along, this dude Cully—as if Jonah was saying, I know—you figured me out. And I just played along until the last possible second, thinking I deserved it. Thinking it was all I could do.”
Her father leaned back in the booth, staring out the window and tapping the fork out on the table. Finally Link said, “So he was skimming out of all his houses? He’d send this kid in to steal, or somebody else, pass the blame onto the tenant.”
She said, “Yeah. He’d do some version of that, go to some tenant, give them this whole story about how they were finished because something was missing from the house. Then he’d use them to steal more out of the house—like I did. Cut the stuff, sell it cheap. Then he’d cut the person loose, kill them, leave them someplace—pretend that the tenant had been skimming off the top. After all, they were just drifters. Illegal aliens, runaways. Idiots like me. He found people that wouldn’t go to the cops, and people he thought he could control and people who would believe him. He just put them in the middle, right between him and the money. Turned them into these go-betweens.”
“And he had you pegged from the beginning?”
Her mouth dropped at the edges and her eyes dampened, but she contained herself by staring out the window at the flow of cars under a steady, dirty wind. “I guess so.”