Lorena said, “You could walk. We’ll meet you there.”
Stevie said, “Yeah, fuck that, I’m not walking. It’s like two miles.”
That torqued Lorena enough to take the hills in her heels. “We’re all walking.” Stevie heaved a supremely annoyed teenage grunt. They started their hike. Lorena said, “So who’s Clara?”
“That girl.”
“Who is she?”
“My best friend. Not that it’s any of your business.”
“I thought Dionne was your best friend.”
“Who told you that?”
“Your parents didn’t even mention a Clara.”
“You talked to my parents? God.”
“They hired us to find you.”
“Figures. Leave it to Paula to turn everything into a great big drama.”
“You’ve been missing for five days.”
“I wasn’t missing. I was right here.”
“You were in Orange County.”
“When?”
“After we saw you at your house. You called your cousin and he came and got you.”
“No. I called Clara, because Clara has a car and I figured you two would snitch on me for being home when my parents were away.”
“Snitch to who?”
“Whoever. The school.”
“You haven’t been going to school. You think they weren’t going to notice?”
“I’ve been going to school,” she said, as if annoyed at their incompetence.
“When’s the last time you were there?”
“Today. I skipped a couple of classes, but I went.”
Waldo knew it was the usual Stevie obscuration but Lorena was treating it like a deposition and letting the girl’s inconsistencies spin her out even more. He could tell Stevie read all that and was relishing the game.
Lorena said, “Oh, really. If we went to your school right now and asked them—”
“It would be closed. Because it’s night?” Stevie said it with such overbearing smugness that Waldo thought Lorena might slug her.
Before she could, he said, “Hey,” and stopped walking. “Do you know that Mr. Ouelette is dead?”
Stevie stopped walking too. “Yes.”
“Do you know that the police want to talk to you?”
Stevie shook her head.
“Your parents are paying us to be on your side, and we’re pretty much the only ones who are. So you need to stop bullshitting us, understand? You need to tell us everything that happened from when we left your house that day.”
Stevie glowered some more, then looked away. Finally she said, “I was just hanging out. I felt like getting high and I was bored. So I called Daron.”
“Why Daron?”
“Because I knew it would piss off Paula and Joel. Especially if I was down there with him when they got home.”
He said, “Why did you want to piss them off?” She hiked a shoulder. “So what did you and Daron do that night?”
“We smoked some weed and stuff and then he started being a dick.”
“Being a dick how?”
“There was some guy he didn’t want me talking to.” It was a pretty soft telling of the drugs and of Marwin Amador and his teardrop tattoos, but at least it was more or less consistent with Daron’s account. “I didn’t need my cousin all, like, telling me what to do. So I left.”
“Where’d you go?”
“Well, then I was shit out of luck, because my phone was dead. I got some guy outside a CVS to lend me his and I called Clara and told her where I was. She’s a senior.”
“And she drove down to Orange County and got you?”
“Yeah. I slept over at her house. The next day we ditched school and went to Venice Beach. And then this other girl Shannon texted Clara about Mr. Ouelette and I was totally freaked out, so I just stayed at Clara’s. I didn’t want anybody to know where I was.”
“Why not?”
“Because of what I did with you guys, hiring you to mess with him. I didn’t want to get in trouble.” She told them that starting the second day, Clara would drop Stevie off somewhere on her way to school and Stevie would hang out alone at Fashion Square or the Galleria. “It was probably stupid,” she said, “but I was, like, too freaked out to deal. Do they know who killed him?”
Waldo said, “How did Daron find out where you were? Did you call him, or did he call you?”
“I didn’t call him. I texted him, like, on the first day, from Clara’s phone.”
“Why from Clara’s?”
“Because I was keeping mine off so I wouldn’t have to deal with this,” meaning anyone coming to get her.
“Why did you text Daron, then? What did you say to him?”
“Just something normal. You know: ‘It’s Stevie, friend’s phone, OMG my teacher got killed,’ or whatever. But he was still all weird about that guy down there and I stopped answering.”
“How did he get Clara’s address?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he texted her and she snitched me out. Apparently I can’t trust anyone for shit.”
“What about Amador?”
“What’s Amador?”
“The guy you called. Marwin.” Stevie shook her head like she didn’t know what he was talking about. “The guy you bought the coke from.”
She stepped back, thrown. “Oh. Yeah. I thought his name was, like, Marvin.”
“You called him after you left Daron’s.”
“No—I called him while I was at Daron’s. While we were fighting. To piss him off.” It was a versatile motivation.
“Daron didn’t tell us that.”
“Maybe he doesn’t remember. He was pretty fucked up.”
Waldo ran it all through again in his head, then said, “Let’s walk.” They started again toward the Roses’.
He believed Stevie was telling something in the vicinity of the truth. Too much matched what they’d heard elsewhere, with no obvious inconsistencies. Still, one thing didn’t feel right. “You knew your parents were back from Hawaii?”
“I guessed they were. They were supposed to be.”
“Ouelette was murdered, you were scared . . . why didn’t you call them?”
“You don’t get it. You don’t know Paula and Joel.” Her voice had a different tinge, something that sounded darker under the teenage sneering. Waldo looked over at Lorena to see if she heard it too.
Lorena rolled her eyes.
When they got to the Roses’, Stevie unlocked the door but paused before opening it. “This is going to suck.” She turned to Waldo. “Could you go in and talk to them first? Like, soften them up or something?”
Lorena said to her, “I’m waiting out here with you.”
Stevie said, “Don’t worry, Lorena,” again the put-upon, superior teen. “I’m not going to run away.”
“Fucking A, you’re not.”
Waldo shook his head and opened the door, glad for the brief respite from their hostility. He started to call for Stevie’s parents, but before he could make a sound the beast was upon him—a brown bear, right in the house, lunging out of a darkened hallway, fangs first.
Waldo raised his right hand at the last second to protect his face and throat; powerful jaws clamped his forearm and the creature’s flying weight slammed him into a wall. The back of Waldo’s head shattered a mirror.
On the ground now amid the shards, the bear champed his arm without letup. Waldo screamed and clubbed at its snout with his other hand, to no effect.
Then the world went red and his brain exploded. Every muscle seized at once, a full-body paroxysm, agony like nothing he’d ever conceived of, so excruciating that he completely forgot there was a beast trying to slaughter him.
And then it was over.
The pain. The attack. Everythin
g.
Waldo leaned against a wall and started breathing again. He tried to get his compass back, to make sense of what had just happened. The bear was sedate too, lying on the ground a few feet away. Lorena knelt beside it. Stevie was running into the darkened hallway. He heard a door slam.
Waldo closed his eyes, concentrated on drawing a breath as slowly and deeply as he could. He let it out and did it again.
Then Lorena was pulling him to his feet and out the front door. The pain flooded back into his arm. Lorena pulled the front door shut behind them.
Waldo leaned against the doorjamb and said, “Where the fuck did these people get a bear?”
Lorena broke into a laugh so convulsive that she actually fell down. Seated on the ground, she said, “Fuck, that broke the tension. Oh, that’s good.”
“What?”
“It’s not a bear. It’s a Presa Canario, I think.”
“What is that?”
“It’s a dog. It’s banned in a couple countries.”
“What did you do?”
“Tased it. Couple times. I might have caught you on one of them. It was a little tight. Sorry.”
“Oh.”
Lorena said, “Was it good for you?”
He almost chuckled. “My arm’s pretty messed up.”
“We should get you to a hospital.”
“Yeah.” He started down the driveway.
“Where are you going?”
“To your car.”
“Uh, no. Ambulance.” She was already dialing.
“We’ll get to your car faster.” She wasn’t hearing of it and waved him off. He said, “You just don’t want me bleeding all over your Mercedes.”
“That’s why I love you, Waldo: you understand me.” She gave the address to the 911 operator and came over to take a better look at his bleeding arm in the light of the Roses’ motion detector security lighting. “Yeah, that’s pretty bad. Let’s get you sitting down.” She guided him to a cedar porch glider.
Waldo worked his good arm out of its sleeve and wrapped the shirt around the wound, applying what pressure he could. Lorena said, “You want me to do that?”
“Nah, I got it.”
Lorena put her arm over the back of the seat and stroked his hair, a rare moment of chaste affection. They waited quietly for a few minutes, rocking gently. At one point she said, softly, “Where’d these people get a bear?” and they both smiled.
The door opened and Paula Rose took three furious steps in their direction. “What—” she said, “did you do—to my dog?”
Lorena said, “I tased it.”
“What is wrong with you? What kind of person does that to an animal?”
Lorena said, “Shut the fuck up. Now. Or I’ll shoot the fucking dog, and tase you.” Paula gasped. “And by the way,” said Lorena, “your daughter’s home.”
EIGHTEEN
He didn’t feel like a lucky man, certainly not the lucky man the doctor in the St. Joe’s ER kept telling him he was. She was tall, this Dr. Baggett, over six feet, given to hunching to downplay it, and also given to repeating herself. “You are a lucky, lucky man,” she said, her eighth and ninth “luckys.” He knew they were the eighth and ninth because Lorena was trying to distract him from his pain by counting them off discreetly on her fingers. The searing puncture wounds were an infection risk, but the dog had chomped the meaty end of his forearm and Waldo had gotten away without either the lacerated flexor tendon or fractured ulna Dr. Baggett feared. The dog had had all its shots, too; the first thing the doctor did was tell Lorena to step outside and call the Roses to ask. Paula, incredibly enough, had been snippy about it.
The X-rays, the MRI and the rest of the attention kept them there past midnight. Arm in a sling, Waldo was finally released with detailed instructions for keeping the wound clean and prescriptions for both oral and topical antibiotics and Percocet for the pain. He could live with counting all the medication as one Thing, but the sling had to be a second, and he had few Things in L.A. to shed. He silently resolved to discard his two pairs of underwear and go commando until his arm healed, if he didn’t come up with a better idea before bedtime.
They had waited until they were through at the hospital to call Cuppy and let him know that they had Stevie in hand and could bring her in to the station for a conversation tomorrow. “No way,” the detective said to Waldo. “I’m talking to her tonight.”
“Give her a break. She’s been through a lot.”
“Tonight, or it won’t be a chat, it’ll be an arrest.”
All Waldo wanted was one of those Percocets and some sleep. He wasn’t getting either soon. “Meet you at the Roses’ house in an hour. Stevie’ll be there.”
Cuppy said, “Forty-five,” and hung up.
Waldo didn’t want Lorena on the phone with Paula again, so he dialed Joel’s number himself and told him.
Lorena said Stevie deserved whatever trouble Cuppy was about to bring down but Waldo still felt protective and talked her out of finding a twenty-four-hour pharmacy and getting the scrips filled first. As recompense he let Lorena, who was beyond fed up with the Things at this point, win both halves of the argument about exempting the new ones: he agreed to treat the medicine as he’d treat food (that is, intrinsically not a Thing), and the sling as he’d treat a cast (that is, a temporary bodily extension and thus not a Thing either), even though the latter was a blatant cheat.
* * *
• • •
Lorena pressed the button on the Roses’ call box and the gates opened right away. At the top an unfamiliar blue Lexus was parked where the EMTs had tended to Waldo hours before. Joel Rose stood in the doorway. Lorena said, “What’d you do with the puppy?”
“In the laundry room. He’s useless now.”
Lorena said, “Good,” and walked past him and toward the living room.
Joel muttered, “That was a three-thousand-dollar dog.” To Waldo he added, offhandedly, “Sorry, by the way.”
It was past midnight and everyone else looked rumpled and exhausted, but the woman in the living room with Paula was fresh as a sun shower and dressed like she’d stepped out of a window on Rodeo Drive. Waldo’s heart sank. This was Fontella Davis, the celebrity lawyer, whose collaboration on the Pinch case he’d enjoyed only slightly more than tonight’s with the Presa Canario.
Joel told Waldo, “Fontella and I are on a couple of boards together: City of Hope and Esperanza.” Waldo recognized these as a chain of cancer hospitals and an immigrant rights group, respectively. “We thought it would be smart to have an attorney here.”
“Hey,” Waldo said, “you’re looking for someone to handle a dog-bite case, you couldn’t do better.”
Paula said, “That’s not—”
“I know what she’s here for.”
Davis said, “Delighted to see you again, too.”
Joel was thrown by the tension. “Is there a problem?”
Waldo and Davis measured each other. Waldo shook his head and Davis said, “No.” Then she said, “We should talk to Stevie before the police get here.”
Lorena spoke up. “Wait—first this dog thing.”
Joel said, “We bought him yesterday. He was just supposed to be a barky dog. “
“It’s fucked up.”
Paula said, “I know—we should have gotten a rescue dog instead of buying. But they didn’t have anything this big at the shelter we went to. We’re offsetting it with a contribution to Dogs Without Borders.”
“I don’t give a shit about that. I’m talking about Waldo could have been killed. What are you doing with a big fucking monster like that?”
Joel said, “Paula’s been a wreck since the thing with Stevie’s teacher. She’s been terrified to stay in the house alone.”
Waldo said, “You might be safer with a gun.”
Paula a
nd Joel exchanged an eye roll. Paula said, “I’d think a former law enforcement officer would be aware of the statistics.” She spelled it out for him. “People purchasing guns ostensibly to defend their homes, only to end up with the wrong person getting shot?” She left the room to get Stevie.
Lorena said to Joel, “Are you on any boards about domestic violence?”
“No. Why?”
“Because I’m thinking, if you hit your wife, I won’t have to.”
Waldo said, “O-kay.” When the time was right he’d also suggest Lorena try not to threaten the clients, either.
By way of apology, Joel said of his wife, “She’s distraught. All this with Stevie . . .”
They let the thought hang and stood there awkwardly with Joel and Fontella Davis until Paula returned with her daughter. The latter was wearing loose gray shorts and a little pink tank top, probably what she’d changed into for bed. She was saying to her mother, “Nobody gives a shit what I’m wearing.”
Paula said, “This is the police.”
Stevie gestured at Paula’s own wardrobe. “Oh, is that who you dressed up for? With that stupid dashiki thing, and those beads? What are you going for—like, ‘I wish it was still the seventies so I could blow up a post office’?”
Paula said, “Fine. Maybe he’ll arrest you for looking like a hooker.”
“Maybe he’ll arrest you for wearing batik.”
Joel stepped in. “Stevie, this is Fontella Davis. She’s going to be your lawyer.”
“Hi, Stevie.”
Stevie didn’t answer. She looked at Waldo’s injured arm and rolled her eyes to tell him the whole exercise was yet another way her parents seemed intent on embarrassing her.
Davis said, “We only have a few minutes. Why don’t we sit down, and you tell me about the day you ran away.”
“I didn’t ‘run away.’ God.” She said to her father, “This is my lawyer? I am so fucked.” She flopped onto one of the sofas. Davis sat on the opposite one.
Joel said, “Let me get a couple of chairs,” and left the room.
Davis stared at Stevie until the girl offered a better answer, albeit with an attitude that made clear how much this was inconveniencing her. “All I did was call my cousin and go hang out with him, and then my girlfriend picked me up and I slept over at her house. It’s no biggie.”
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