Laguna Heat

by T. Jefferson Parker

  In the clearing, Shephard stopped and listened. His legs were heavy and he couldn’t seem to breathe fast enough to keep his lungs full. Silence. He waited, studying the pale trunks of the eucalyptus trees, every one of them large enough to hide a body. Then, scanning the scene in front of him, he walked slowly forward, waiting for his game to break cover. This is the place to hide, he thought. The closely bunched trees blotted out the light from the moon. Still no other sound than of his own rapid breathing. Doesn’t the sonofabitch breathe too, he wondered? Too many cigarettes. Ahead of him the trunks sprouted like a regiment of towering soldiers, each a slash of bone in the blackness. Then a quick wisp behind him, head-high; no, he thought, and began to duck, but he was just beginning when the steel slammed into the back of his head and dropped him abruptly to his knees. Take a vacation, fucker—later Shephard was sure he’d heard the man say it—take a vacation because you’re going to need it. Then the swift and wind-robbing jolt of a shoe in his stomach and his face pressing into iceplant.

  The last thing he remembered was thinking how much iceplant tasted like blood.

  FIVE

  He awoke to a well-lit acoustic ceiling. The holes shifted and swirled, the squares stretched into rectangles and back again; a Beatles tune dripped from a speaker, watered down to almost nothing. He lifted his arm and read his name off the plastic bracelet. Spelled wrong. When he tried to raise his head, it erupted with a pain so severe it overwhelmed his mind like a tsunami and sent him floating back into unconsciousness.

  Sedated dreams: gray forms looming with terrible size, slow-motion horses snorting from widened nostrils, mute women with perfect bodies, fires, voices, clouds. And later, when the sedatives began to wear off, he found himself in the dreams, an onlooker in a shadowed world of murmurs and mood, like an ego-less baby seeing events around himself, trying to understand them, understanding nothing.

  When he finally regained consciousness, his father and a man he didn’t recognize stood over him. Wade looked stricken. Shephard groaned, testing his pain, then propped himself up on his elbows. “Hiya, pop,” he slurred.

  His father was dressed tennis, little white shorts and little white shirt. So was the man who was with him. “Take it easy, son. You’ll rip your stitches.”

  “My serve. Love-fifty. Little white shoes, pop; Nikes?” His words were escaping without thought. “Get me a Scotch,” he heard himself say.

  “That’s the spirit,” said Wade’s friend.

  “Tommy, you remember Joe Datilla? The Surfside?”

  Datilla stepped forward and smiled. He looked gray, handsome, fit. A sailboat tan and a health-spa body, Shephard thought. “Haven’t seen you in years, Tom. I was with your dad when he got the news, so I thought I’d come along. I’ll forgive you for interrupting our tennis.” Shephard tried his best to focus. Joe. Of course.

  “I ’member old Joe. And the health spa—the Surfside.”

  “Well …” Datilla smiled pitiably.

  “It’s the ritziest sun club north of La Costa,” Shephard blurted. Wish the room would quit swimming. “I ain’t no dummy. How are ya, pop?”

  “You know how I am, Tom. How are you? And what happened?”

  “Someone had a party on my head, but it’s okay, I feel great. Know how hangovers make you feel profound? That’s me. One big hangover. I’m going to become a poet.…”

  Wade and Datilla laughed heartily, but his father stepped forward and ran his fingers across Shephard’s face. He laid back down and touched his head, getting only bandage.

  “Again, Tommy. What happened?”

  Shephard offered a concussive narrative. It ended abruptly when he felt exhaustion coming over him like a warm blanket. “… So that was my night. You do anything fun?” He settled back into the pillow.

  “Did you get a look at him, Tom?” Datilla asked.

  “How old a man?” asked Wade.

  “One at a time, boys.” He closed his eyes at a sudden crack of pain. “Yes, and forty. Give or take five years. Pretty damned dark out. Bring me the phone, will ya?”

  Wade put his hand on the telephone and moved it away from his son. “A boy found you in the hills,” he said. “When they brought you here, they called the department. The chief knows you’re here, so don’t worry about business right now. Just give my prayers a chance to work. Please.”

  Wade the Reverend, still thinking like Wade the Cop, Shephard thought. “Welcome back to the hometown,” he said finally. “It’s changed.” He could hear Wade and Datilla chuckle, which mingled with the piped-in music and throbbed through his head.

  “Won’t be so bad,” Datilla was saying now. “As soon as you’re up and around, I expect to see you out at the Surfside. Come by any time. We’ll have a drink, maybe go for a sail. You play tennis?”

  “No. Could never figure out how to keep score.”

  “I’ll teach you. I can think of a few ladies out there who might be intrigued by a detective.”

  “Yes. I’m an intriguing man.”

  “You’re just a tired, beat-up man right now,” said Wade. He stepped forward again, pressing his hand against Tom’s shoulder. “We’ll let you rest, son. Let’s have lunch just as soon as you feel up to it. I haven’t improved any as a cook, but you grew up on it, so it shouldn’t kill you now.”

  “Leave that to the pros,” Shephard said.

  “What’d the sonofabitch look like, anyway?” Datilla said.

  “Just a big guy with curly hair and no respect for the law.”

  “Well, I hope to heaven you find him.”

  “Amen,” said Wade.

  He was pronounced mildly concussed, but was released that afternoon to Pavlik. The crime scene investigator took Shephard to the Hotel Sebastian to get his car, driving carefully while Shephard slumped in the seat and watched Laguna Beach slide by the windows. Pavlik’s voice seemed to slip past his brain without contact, Shephard hearing only snippets. Grimes picked a good time for a nap … got Hardy there now … watched the hotel for an hour myself … got the key … when I went in, everything was the same, same crappy old place … get some rest … got the stakeout myself tonight.…

  The climb up the stairs to his apartment was endless, the steps somehow multiplying in front of him. He stopped halfway when he heard his neighbor’s voice booming from the doorway below.

  “Hey, Shephard, wanna grind?” He turned to focus on Sal.

  “Just ate, Sal.”

  “What’s that shit on the back of your head, man?”

  “Just a little ding.”

  “You mean she closed her legs too fast.” Sal bellowed, enjoying his joke immensely.

  Shephard grinned, but a jolt of pain shot through his head. “Fishing the rocks tonight?” he managed.

  “Up too late, bro, I’m in the coffin after the grind.”

  Sal roared a friendly insult to a woman passing on the sidewalk, and Shephard confronted his stairs for the second half of the journey.

  Before he reached the porch he could hear Cal’s quiet whining coming from inside. Shephard stopped by the door and listened … a long whimper followed by another, the dog catching his breath, then starting in again. The muffled thumps of struggle, then nothing. Shephard slid his key into the lock with one hand, brought the Colt Python from his holster with the other, and stumbled through the door.

  Cal was flopping in the middle of the living room floor, hog-tied and gagged with masking tape. Shephard stepped past the dog, the pistol held in front of him, and moved slowly into the bedroom, where he saw that the covers had been slashed lengthwise with something very sharp. He went into the bathroom, then back out to the living room and the struggling mutt. He beheld his apartment

  The stereo speakers were smashed, the turntable arm twisted obscenely upward, the plants dumped from their pots onto the carpet, the lampshades crushed, his art collection—a single print of Hopper’s Nighthawks—pulled from its frame then torn to small bits that were scattered across the floor. The boxes had
been toppled and gutted, the sofa overturned, a photo album mangled and thrown atop the heap of what had once been a growing dieffenbachia. He was trembling.

  He untied Cal, who fled to the bedroom as soon as his legs were free. The dog was still whining when Shephard found him on the far side of the bed, scooped him into his arms, and brought him to the kitchen. Cal shivered as Shephard set him on the drainboard and tried to cut the tape from around his mouth with scissors. Back on the floor, Cal lay down and worked his paws over his nose, fly-style, trying to pull off the sticky bands. Shephard finally rubbed some vegetable oil into the dog’s hair, lifting the tape gently and pouring a slender stream of oil as he went. Cal’s right eye, puffed and bloodshot, regarded Shephard with unabashed terror. The other was swollen shut. Shephard’s head throbbed as he worked bent over his dog.

  The telephone rang. Shephard worked his way through the littered living room and picked up the receiver, saying nothing. A wonder it still works, he thought.

  “Shephard?” The voice was muffled and low. He waited, realizing now why the phone hadn’t been pulled from the socket. “Yeah, it’s you, Shephard. I left the phone alive so I could call and ask you if you got the picture. Get it?” Shephard said nothing. “You get it. Do yourself a favor and beat it for a while. You’ll make me very happy. How’s the dog? Worthless in a pinch, you know.” The man hung up.

  Shephard went back out to the kitchen, poured a Scotch, and went back downstairs. He found Sal reclined on a sofa, balancing an ashtray on his stomach while he fiddled with a joint.

  “Don’t bust me, Shephard. I’m a good guy.”

  “You were up late?”

  “Like you. Have a lady up there last night?”

  “No, why?”

  “ ’Cause the fuckin’ stereo was blasting for an hour. I figured you didn’t feel like filling up the neighborhood with moans and groans.” Sal’s conversational voice was concert-pitch. It seemed to ricochet from one wall of Shephard’s skull to the other.

  “What time?” Shephard asked. The moans and groans were Cal getting kicked and his apartment being ransacked, he thought. That’s why the bastard turned up the music.

  “Little after one. You ought to …” Sal understood. He got up from the sofa, set down the ashtray, turned off the television, and shut the door. “What happened?”

  “I had a visitor last night. Did you see him?”

  Sal seemed to diminish in size and become more alert, edgy. “Yeah, I saw him,” he said quietly. “I told you I was up. The door was open, I see everything that comes and goes around this ghetto. Tall and thick, good build, so I figured he was a cop. He came by the door about one, then the stereo. Back down a half hour later. The sonofabitch was driving a Carerra and I wondered how a cop got the dough for one of those. Midnight blue, right under the street lamp in front. Everything okay up there?”

  Dark blue, and Michael Stett shiny, Shephard thought. “No.”

  Sal eyed him warily. “Shit, Shephard. I’d have come right out with it but I wondered if you two were … well, shit, you know Laguna.” Sal’s hand fluttered on a limp wrist.

  “He was alone?”

  “Alone and not in a hurry from the way he walked. I had him pegged cop all the way. Sorry, bro.”

  Shephard helped the vet hold Cal’s head still while the X-rays were taken. The doctor, a thick and docile man named Gillson, shot Cal with a long needle and told Shephard his dog would be all right. By the time the X-rays were processed, Cal was asleep and slobbering contentedly on Shephard’s leg. His skull was fine, Gillson said, and the swelling would go down in a day or two. After that he wanted a look at the eye.

  The doctor closed the door of the examination room and asked how it happened. Shephard told him it was an accident. Gillson sighed and lit a cigarette. “Plenty of good shelters in town if you’re tired of your pet,” he said.

  Back at his apartment, Shephard carried Cal upstairs and set him down on the couch. Standing amidst his degraded home, he knew that there would be no fingerprints or significant evidence, none of the careless calling cards left by youngsters, junkies, amateurs. Nothing was missing. He was in professional hands. And the act of violation was complete: his knees were still shaking, his tongue felt thick and dry. He noted the roll of masking tape tossed into the corner.

  The quiet of the evening heightened his sense of aloneness as he stared down at the literal ruins of his life. Outside he heard a car moving down Thalia Street toward the highway, the far-off dialogue of a television, a peaceful breeze in the trees outside the house. The disgust he felt as he kicked the ruined Nighthawks frame wasn’t so much for the possessions in the house as for himself. Keeper of the peace, he thought. The keeper who can’t keep his wife, the keeper who can’t protect his home, can’t prevent his own dog from having the shit kicked out of him. And with the disgust came anger. The healing waters of action, he thought. He poured down a Scotch and made another. He smoked three straight cigarettes, lighting the last with the embers of the one before it. He paced the kitchen, and stood looking out from the balcony.

  Then it all became clear.

  By eleven he had piled everything from his past—letters from Louise, pictures of Louise, pictures of himself and his wife together, the books she’d given him, anything that tugged from the past rather than called him toward the future—into the middle of the floor. To this he added the boxes wholesale, and the ruined possessions that lay scattered about. His head was killing him. By twelve he had tied it all up in the slashed bedding and dragged the heavy bundles across the street, where he hefted them into the dumpster of St. Michael’s Church. It took several trips. There, he thought. In emptiness will be abundance.

  He called Louise. A man answered politely and asked if he could say who was calling.

  “Her ex, fuckhead. Put her on.”

  “Gladly.”

  Then she was there, Louise, he thought: lovely, bored, drifting Louise. “Hello, Tom,” she said. He could hear the new life in her voice, its sweet assurance. “Robert here is giving me a funny look. Did you say something bad to him?”

  “Absolutely not. Scout’s honor. I’m just calling to tell you I’ve got a new life, a grand one. I know you felt a lot of guilt about me, but I want to let you off the hook now.”

  “You’re drinking again, aren’t you?”

  “Sober every night for the last month. Got any movie parts yet?”

  She paused. He could hear her breathing. “I’m not really at that level yet, Tom. Shampoo commercial, maybe.”

  “Get Robbie on the ball. He’s big time.”

  She let the comment go. Don’t be an ass, Shephard, he thought. That’s not the point.

  “How ’bout you?” she asked. “Are you seeing anybody?”

  Shephard felt the Scotch hitting him, a stupid confidence. “In fact I am, Lou. Karen’s her name. Does some acting up your way. Karen Smythe … was in the last Reynolds pic, you know, Burt Reynolds, forget the name of it, though.”

  “Well, that’s fine, Tom. I’m really happy for you.”

  “Don’t be. It’s all a lie.”

  “I know.”

  “I moved back to Laguna.”

  “You should be happy there.”

  “Like to see you sometime, Lou. I think about you.”

  “Maybe, Tom.”

  By two he was asleep, and not long after accosted again by the imminent nightmare in which Morris Mumford pitched over dead on the grass while a cop tried to keep his own insides from spilling on the sidewalk. In the dream, as it had happened in reality, Shephard stood and peed his pants while his ears rang and the pistol in his hand grew too heavy to hold up any longer.

  SIX

  Early the next morning Shephard called on Jane Algernon. Her house was on Laguna Canyon Road a half mile west of her father’s stables, tucked under a massive willow tree that cast shade over the entire front yard. He smelled the strong odor of fish and heard croaking sounds as he approached. There was a chain-link pen
in front of the house containing a cement pool, a slippery animal of some kind, and a young woman wearing thigh-high rubber boots over her pants. She was bending toward the animal, offering a tidbit. Shephard guessed fish. The animal slipped into the water and the woman turned. She was large and pretty, and her dark hair was pulled away from her face.

  “Seal?” he asked.

  She looked at him like he didn’t particularly matter. “Sea lion. You must be police.”

  “Detective Shephard.” The sea lion surfaced and croaked. She tossed a fish into the air and the sea lion surged to meet it. “Can we talk?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Shephard felt a chill, and it wasn’t just the shade of the willow. “I’m very sorry. You have my condolences. Did your father live alone?”

  “My mother died twenty-six years ago of cancer. He lived alone.”

  “What kind of man was he?”

  She flipped another fish toward the animal and smiled when it was caught again mid-air. The smile froze when she turned back to him. “I don’t know. He ignored me, I ignored him. I’ll tell you I loved him as much as any daughter can love a father. It was just better done at a distance, that’s all.”

  Shephard lit a cigarette. “Frozen fish?”

  “Fresh frozen.”

  “Of course. So, you can’t tell me what kind of man he was?”

  Jane Algernon sighed and put her hands on her hips. “A gambler and a drinker,” she said. “That’s how much I can tell you. Those are the kinds of things you need to know, aren’t they?”