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A chill shot through her. He knew her name. How did he know her name?
‘Don’t you want to know what he’s going to do to you?’
She hesitated a split second and saw the knife winking through the air and she pulled the trigger, kept pulling it, emptied it over and over, until he toppled, the back of his head blown off, and still she kept clicking the trigger, firing some phantom bullet, sobbing.
TWO (#ulink_c2cd7951-c7ba-5592-8f08-db3dae00937c)
Grace couldn’t stop shivering. Dark was settling over Ocean Beach, the sun a fiery ball sliding into the Pacific. Four blocks away the sand on the beach would be cold now, latched in kelp, the good-natured mothers and toddlers gone, the tourists with white legs sucking Diet Pepsi and eyeing the tattooed volleyball players gone, everyone to their own warm rooms and hot baths and Olive Garden dinners. The beach belonged to the skittering creatures of the night pushing Safeway carts and muttering, runaways with studded ears and vacant eyes, the predators. The world she worked so hard to keep away from her daughter.
And now look what happened. Look how good she was. She couldn’t even give the kid a dad, and now she’d almost made the kid an orphan.
Her stomach hurt, acid roiling up. She gripped her knees and bit her lip to keep from wailing. She should be home now, that was the deal, that was the whole thing. Katie had that pen pal assignment she’d been postponing, had to get it done tonight.
‘Did you hear me?’
Grace pulled herself back, looking through the window of the squad car, refocusing. The crime scene glowed yellow in a surreal splash of police car lights, television crews, crime scene technicians. The neighbors were back in force, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, and joking. The two cops on traffic detail pressed the cars forward, gesturing savagely, sweat and weariness on their faces.
Grace chafed her hands together under the thin wool blanket and shifted on the backseat of the patrol car. ‘I’ve already gone through it. I gave my preliminary statement. I’m coming in tomorrow to sign it.’
‘Grace.’ Sid Felcher, her crime lab boss, sighed heavily and swiveled in the front seat, his face oily. It wasn’t his squad car, it belonged to the detective who’d taken her statement, but Sid had climbed into the front seat when the detective had gone inside the meth house, and now he rested his arm along the top of the seat as if he were polishing the leather with his forearm.
‘Another study just released, found it on the Internet, two biggest stressors for supervisors. Causes ulcers, heart attacks, groin injuries.’ He raised his eyebrows and they inched together like furry mating caterpillars. ‘Well?’
‘Sid, I need to call Katie. I need to go home.’
‘We already took care of that, remember? She’s fine, your daughter’s fine. Okay, so the answer is, ta dah!’ Sid waved his hands expansively. His nails were bitten. ‘Two main stressors for guys like me, poor working-class schmos just trying to make a living, is having to discipline, take action, against a subordinate. That means you. Huge stressor, stroke city. Other one is having to deal with the public, explain what the subordinate did that was so wrong we’re going to have to apologize for about a million years and maybe even pay big bucks to get things straightened out.’
This couldn’t be happening. Even with Sid at his most dysfunctional.
‘Sid, in case you forgot, he had a butcher knife.’
‘But he wasn’t swinging it, right? I mean, not at you. Just that little side-to-side thing, you said, but not actually at you.’
She sat back in the seat. ‘Is there something I don’t know?’
‘Grace, be more specific. What you don’t know could –’
‘About what just happened,’ she interrupted. ‘Is there something I don’t know?’
‘Like what?’
‘Like have they ID’d him?’
He hesitated a beat too long. ‘Whoever it was, it was a human life.’
She felt rage surge under the exhaustion. ‘Are you suggesting I did something wrong shooting a man with a butcher knife who had just killed a drug agent, a sergeant detective, and a uniformed cop?’
‘Whoa. I’m not suggesting anything, Grace, I’m just passing the time, sharing a survey I downloaded from Yahoo.’ He grinned. His gums were receding.
‘I need to go home.’ She pressed her fingers into her temples, fighting the impulse to bite him.
‘See, this is what they call a critical incident.’
‘I know what a critical incident is,’ Grace snapped.
A man darted out of the house and under the police tape, Paul Collins from Trace. Bags sagged under his eyes, heightening his resemblance to an aging basset hound on speed. He lumbered toward his car, face grim and an evidence kit clenched in his hands.
‘Thing is, another study.’ Sid unwrapped a toothpick and massaged his gums. ‘Some shooters, they get permanent emotional trauma, they go a little cuckoo, they visit la-la land and never come back.’
He sucked noisily on the toothpick and twirled it. His lips were wet.
‘Supervisors – we’re responsible, I’m responsible – as your boss, like it or not. I mean, I don’t take you in, get your head examined, you could sue me for mondo moola, retire to Florida, you and your kid, how old is Katie now? Two?’
‘Five this Saturday. She’s already in kindergarten.’
‘Even better. Closer to college.’ Sid fished car keys out of his Hawaiian shirt pocket and jangled them. ‘See, the thing is, you don’t have a choice.
Nobody wants to see a shrink, ever, fillet out their personal life, spill their guts to some stranger with a clipboard. I wouldn’t. Who would? You’d have to be crazy.’
He grinned at his little joke.
‘So the way it comes down, the department policy is, you have to go whether you want to or not.’
‘You haven’t answered my question.’ She shifted in the seat.
‘Which was?’
‘Who’d I shoot, Sid?’
Sid looked out the window and stared at the sky. Grace saw it seconds before she heard it, the heavy whup whup of rotor blades. A helicopter.
In Guatemala, they’d brought the girl in on a stretcher, off a helicopter. Same sound.
The wind was picking up and it hurled loose trash across the yard. A palm tree tilted crazily back and forth like a metronome.
‘Yeah, actually. They have an ID. Eddie Loud. Mean anything?’
She shook her head.
The helicopter circled and landed delicately in the flattened grass. Grace stared at the man in the passenger seat.
It was a California U.S. senator. Albert Loud looked older than his pictures, haggard, the lines around his mouth deep grooves, his nose hooked and ridged. He stared at her without comprehension.
‘I’m getting you out of here. Sit tight.’ Sid raised his voice over the roar of the blades. Senator Loud was crouching and running away from the slowing rotor blades, toward the meth house, a phalanx of officers crowding around him, keeping the press at bay.
‘Why is he here?’ Her head felt light. ‘What’s going on?’
In front of her on the lawn, the reporters turned, eyeing her. It only took a split second. They wheeled, lunged at her.
‘Holy shit.’ Sid pulled her out the other door, gripping her arm in the blinding flash of lights and clamoring reporters. ‘Head down!’ he screamed. ‘Head down.’
She ducked and he pushed her through the tangle of cords and microphones.
‘He’s here, Grace,’ Sid barked, as they burst onto the street and ran for her car, ‘Senator Albert Loud is here because it was his son back there. You killed his son.’
THREE (#ulink_e2516b4a-44ce-5695-aca5-b795dbd71c56)
She pulled into the driveway and her headlights revealed her house in pitiless relief, like in a police lineup. Hers was the ratty one in the middle, squeezed into a row of minimansions.
The house on the right belonged to a retired osteopath and his wife. Blocky pink stucco, gated and electronically locked, with a metal fence spiking into iron bulbs every few feet. Nobody came in or out of that house. Even the mailman used a cement slot built into the fence.
The house on the left cascaded in white cubes amid designer palms. A stoop-shouldered attorney Grace’s age lived there, with a blond wife and two kids in private school uniforms. She’d hear them in the back sometimes through the natural barrier of high succulents that separated their properties. At night, the motor in their swimming pool gargled like an old man.
On her house, the dormer window flaked, the front door bulged with moisture, the second step leading to the door splintered and sagged. Even the trees looked bad. Leathery and overgrown, they shed gray leaves like molting birds onto the green tar paper roof of the garage clamped onto the left side of the house.
She watched as a squirrel darted across the front yard and sprinted along the splintery picket fence, diving into a shrub under the bay window. The bay window hung over a yard she was too tired to tend, the window made of cramped squares of glass leaded and soldered, looking as if it had been assembled by some parsimonious contractor cousin of Dickens – please, sir, may I have one more pane of glass, sir, a little larger, if you please, oh, you’re too generous – flanked by two narrow windows that actually opened, providing some relief in the summer when she sat in the living room and contemplated her life.
Not much relief, considering what she had to work with. Cramped, untidy, spilling with dog hair and scraps of paper, vagrant Cheerios and missing shin guards wedged under sofa cushions. Home.
Not that she could complain. From the street it looked like a broken-down fire hazard, but inside, her home held an amazing secret. She had no illusions about ever being able to afford a new roof or granite countertops in her lifetime. It was enough, plenty, more than enough that the house sat on an actual beach in a section of San Diego in Point Loma called La Playa, and that the back of the lot faced out over the harbor and gently tilting sailboats, while across the water the glass and chrome towers of downtown San Diego twinkled on the horizon like small crystal boxes.
Only thirteen homes shared the beach that had once been a staging area for seamen melting tallow. They were whalers, Portuguese immigrants transplanted from the Azores, sturdy soldiers of fortune who rode the seas and started a tuna empire. They’d all lived together; their kids had gone to Cabrillo Elementary and they’d shopped at family-run stores and eaten at small restaurants clustered along Rosecrans, the main thoroughfare. Now the fishermen had moved a few blocks inland, and real estate along La Playa beach had skyrocketed.
She’d never sell, despite increasingly clamorous offers from Realtors and sometimes people just out for Sunday drives. The view always calmed her, but it wasn’t only the view that made Grace fight so hard to stay there. The house was all she had left of her dad.
Thoughts crashed. She turned off the ignition and sat in the dark. Once, her dad had taken her alone to Lake Morena to catch fish. He made his living doing that, in deep waters, but this was vacation, and he was spending part of it with her. She’d crawled eagerly into the boat. Six years old, still small enough so the wooden sides seemed high. He’d heaved the boat into the water and jumped in after her, her hands clamped around a tin can of worms. That was her job, he’d said, keeping the can safe while he climbed into the boat. He plunged his hand into the black soil and pulled out a worm. It glistened plump gray and magenta, pulsing in his hand. It was the most magnificent thing she’d ever seen. Her dad’s other hand flashed into his tackle box and in the same fluid motion pierced the creature with a hook. Blood spurted and it thrashed, trying to get away. Her throat closed in fright. It was alive just like she was. It had blood and it hurt. She burst into tears and begged him to take her home. She didn’t mean for it to die, she whispered.
And now she’d put a bullet through a man’s skull. Several bullets. There had been a fence next to Eddie Loud, and the force of the gunfire had splashed it with bits of brain and flesh and blood. The raw stink of fresh meat had hung hotly in the night air.
Now she couldn’t seem to get that smell out of her nostrils. Heavily, Grace stepped from the car and locked the door. She could hear them inside as she went down the service alley on the right side of the house. Helix banged against the porch screen door, whining.
She unlocked it and Helix bounded toward her clattering on his fake leg, tail wagging in a frenzy of doggie devotion. He was a mix, a mongrel stray, part shepherd and collie, hit by a car as a puppy and left to die. Grace had rushed him to the vet, who’d informed her that fixing him up would cost the equivalent of a small developing country’s entire gross national product. Grace had made the mistake of going into the death chamber to say a weepy good-bye. Five minutes later she was scheduling the operation that had saved his life.
‘Some alarm system.’ Grace scratched him behind his ears, and he rolled over and yipped. She rinsed off her Tyvek suit and filled the sink with water and bleach, spying a discarded pizza carton tucked behind the wastebasket. Helix followed her through the kitchen, his doggy nails clicking across the linoleum like a flamenco dancer.
The calamity of being a parent was that there was no off switch, no time-out for personal disaster. Schoolwork still called, lunches had to be packed, reprimands administered. Her head pounded.
In the family room, Katie was belting out a country western song, standing on the piano bench wearing a pink flowered nightie, Mickey Mouse ears, and cowboy boots, almost dwarfed by the Gibson she was strumming. Her fingers were so tiny she only played the bottom string of the chords. Lottie stood crouched over the piano, banging the rhythm, her silvery blond head moving in time. She was wearing orange vinyl hot pants and white go-go boots with tassels and a vest with beads that shimmied as she moved.
‘No, honey,’ Lottie interrupted, ‘that’s a C chord you’re playing; it’s a G.’ She broke into song, demonstrating, ‘We don’t share the same time zone …’
Katie focused, nodding, tried it again, her voice clear and treble. ‘We don’t share the same time zone … you’re not my phone-a-friend … and all the special features I like best you never do intend …’
Lottie nodded, banging out the chords with force. ‘That’s right, kid, milk it, honey.’
Helix bounded across the carpet and skidded into Lottie. He still had trouble stopping properly.
‘For Pete’s sake. How’d he get out …’
Grace smacked the empty pizza carton against her thigh and Lottie snapped her mouth shut.
‘Busted,’ Katie said.
Lottie guiltily banged the lid down on the piano. Katie turned toward her mother to plead her case. She froze on the bench, staring.
‘Mommy, are you okay?’ Katie’s voice was small, and too late, Grace remembered her face.
At least Katie hadn’t seen her on TV. Lottie’s idea of television news was watching psychic pets find missing jewelry.
‘I’m fine.’
‘Your jaw is all purple.’
‘I just had a little accident, but I’m fine. That’s not what I want to talk about. What I want to know is …’ She lifted the pizza carton as if she were signaling the ships in the bay beyond the sliding glass door. ‘What is this? Lottie?’
Grace waggled the carton at her and Lottie sneezed.
‘You know I’m allergic to that dog.’
‘Answer the question.’
Other people had mothers who wore suits and went to the Wednesday Club, where they drank tea and listened to lectures on Quail Botanical Gardens. Grace’s mother was still in her midfifties, with a smooth, unlined face, stuffed into a pair of hot pants so tight that her rear looked like two cantaloupes squeezed into a plastic bag.
‘You weren’t supposed to see that pizza carton,’ Lottie said.
‘You know she had pizza for lunch. Lottie, you promised you’d fix her a real dinner. Something with vegetables in it.’
‘It’s rude to call your mother Lottie,’ Lottie said. ‘It’s not respectful. Is that what you want your daughter to call you when she grows up?’
‘Latte?’ Katie squealed. ‘You want me to call Mommy Latte?’
‘Sure, like one of those coffee drinks,’ Grace said.
‘It’s not like you’re a Roller Derby queen.’ Lottie’s eyes traveled over Grace’s face. ‘A mud wrestler. Look at you. What did you do? Walk into a wall? You know, you can’t spend your life running through jobs like they were a pair of hose.’
‘We’re not talking about my face or career choices. We’re talking about dinner.’
‘Jeez, Grace, lighten up,’ Lottie said.
It was like having two kids, only one of them could drive and order take-out. ‘Where’s your homework, Katie?’
‘A four year-old child –’
‘Five,’ Katie said. ‘I’ll be five on Saturday.’
‘A five-year-old child in kindergarten shouldn’t be expected to do homework,’ Lottie said. ‘You should change schools. I bet you’d like more recess, wouldn’t you, honey?’
‘So where is it?’ Grace repeated.
