Kitabı oxu: «The Timer Game»
SUSAN ARNOUT SMITH
The Timer Game
DEDICATION
For my husband, Alfred Toulon Smith, with love and gratitude – every day with you is a blessing.
EPIGRAPH
Beware the fury of a patient man.
– JOHN DRYDEN, Absalom and Achitophel
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Forty-Six
Forty-Seven
Forty-Eight
Forty-Nine
Fifty
Epilogue
Fact
Keep Reading
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
ONE
Sunday
‘If somebody’s following us, would you know?’
Grace Descanso glanced at her daughter as they squeezed past an inflatable ghost at the entrance to Party Savers. Katie’s dark eyes studied her gravely. She was almost five, small for her age, her honey-colored curls bouncing in two high ponytails under a Padres baseball cap.
‘You mean right now this second?’
Grace kept her voice neutral but her gaze shifted to the salesclerk ringing up a line of customers and a group of teens clustered by a rack of spiders. The store was busy. Nothing jumped out.
‘Why, honey? Do you think somebody is?’ Grace picked up a shopping basket.
Katie shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I finally decided. I want to be a doctor.’
‘When you grow up?’ Katie shifted gears at dizzying speed, and Grace trailed after her, trying to keep up.
Katie slowed at a rack of pumpkin lights and kept moving. ‘No, silly. For Halloween. That way I can wear that thing of yours.’
‘Stethoscope,’ Grace said. She blinked. ‘I’m not sure I can find it, Katie. I haven’t seen it for a long time. You could be a princess. They get to wear sparkly pink.’
The cell phone in her pocket rang and Grace’s first instinct was to ignore it. She’d put it on High and Vibrate and now it whirred in her pocket like an angry bee. It was Sunday, her first real day off in almost a month from the San Diego Police crime lab, and she wanted to spend it with Katie.
Katie cut a look at the phone and walked ahead down the aisle. They shared the same dark Portuguese eyes and angular grace, but Katie was tawny as a golden cat. Next to Grace’s ivory skin and dark hair, Katie always looked sun-kissed and radiantly healthy. Sleeping helped, too, Grace figured. She hadn’t been doing much of that lately.
They were both in shorts; for October in San Diego it was humid, and the store smelled of dust and suntan oil. The phone stopped ringing as Katie paused at a rack of fuzzy bat pencils, picking up one and examining it closely.
Katie’s birthday was coming up Saturday, the day before Halloween, and Grace didn’t have a lot of money to spend on treat bags. It embarrassed her that she was so tight for cash, but she was a single mother with no margin for mistakes, living in the house she’d grown up in, paying off her brother for his half, shoring up the leaky roof and splintery steps, repairing the gargling refrigerator and wheezing car, trying hard not to completely lose her mind.
‘Those are fun,’ Grace offered. And affordable, she added silently.
Katie nodded and put the pencil back in the rack.
The phone rang again and Katie looked at her. ‘You’re not going to get that?’
There was something tight in her young voice, and Grace knew that even at her age, Katie knew how much their fragile security depended on this job, on things going well.
Grace flipped open her cell and recognized Dispatch. She smiled reassuringly at Katie.
‘Grace Descanso.’
A man’s voice crackled over the line, his voice unrecognizable.
‘I can’t hear you.’
In Grace’s ear, the voice was irritable, distracted. ‘Sergeant Treble, headquarters. We got one. Let’s roll.’
‘I’m not on rotation this week.’
She transferred the phone to her other ear, watching her daughter. Katie was counting out seven pink erasers in the shape of porpoises and putting them into the shopping basket, along with a set of fake teeth.
‘Hell you are; you’re secondary after Larry and he’s not answering his beeper.’
‘You’re working the wrong sheet.’
‘I don’t give a rat’s ass, sort it out Monday. You answered the phone, you’re It.’
‘I’m not on duty,’ she insisted.
‘Yeah, but I say you are.’
She swallowed her rage. The lab was set up so someone was on call a week at a time. Her week wasn’t there yet; it started Tuesday morning at seven-thirty. She’d been pulling overtime in the lab lately, processing two homicides and a particularly messy frat party that had left one participant with his little toe shot off by a naked, unknown assailant wearing a Bart Simpson head mask. She had been looking forward to this free day with Katie.
On the phone Treble was saying, ‘Patrol responded to a complaint, usual deal. High traffic, bad smell. The duty judge is sending through the warrant.’
‘We don’t process meth busts, you know that. Call the DEA.’ The Drug Enforcement Agency handled cleanup in San Diego.
‘Already ahead of you, Grace. These scrotbags left a bucket of blood in the living room. No body.’
‘And you want to know if it’s enough blood for somebody to have died.’
‘Doesn’t look like a nosebleed.’
He paused, and Grace could hear the scorn dripping from his voice. ‘Or I could just run it by Sid. Your level of cooperation.’
Grace grew very still. It had taken her six months to get back on CSI rotation after an inquiry into slopped samples and falsified data, an inquiry that had cleared Grace but left her feeling vulnerable and defensive, and after five years on the job, needing to prove herself all over again. She didn’t want to find herself stuck again in the lab. CSI meant overtime and that meant money, but she needed to plan things like a general, not be ambushed in the party-favor aisle.
‘You’re really an asshole, you know that?’ Grace said it low into the phone, so Katie wouldn’t hear.
‘Save it, Grace, I’m already married.’
‘Who’s the DL?’ She fished in her purse for a pad and pencil.
‘Lewin. Not a duty lieutenant, a sergeant. Western substation. He’s at the site.’
Katie looked at her, comprehension and resignation flooding her eyes, and Grace realized in that instant how much the day had meant to Katie, too.
‘What’s the Thomas page?’ Grace said into the phone.
Katie blinked and looked away.
It was a shady street in Ocean Beach, with shaggy palms and houses flecked in DayGlo colors, just close enough to the ocean to smell of salt water and kelp. The house stood halfway down the block, cordoned with yellow police tape. A ripped sofa sat in the front yard and trash clotted the tall weeds. Bedsheets obscured the front windows and a faded sticker clung to the front door: NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH! CRIMINAL BEWARE!
A carved pumpkin adorned the junky yard and Grace felt a pang of guilt. Katie had been after her for weeks to buy one. She kept putting it off, and here even unkempt lowlifes living in squalor still made quality time for their kids.
A crowd was starting to gather as uniforms hustled three gaunt men out the door, hands cuffed, and pushed them into waiting patrol cars, followed by a wailing toddler on the hip of a Child Protective Services officer.
Grace pulled into a space vacated by a patrol car and locked up, the list already going in her brain on why this was a better career path than her last choice. You see dead bodies but you don’t make them dead, that’s a big one.
She reached into her trunk, rooted past Katie’s T-ball bag, a dirty soccer sock, and a spilled carton of Legos, and lifted out her evidence collection kit and pearly white Tyvek protective gear. You’re offered shapelier work clothes in attractive designer colors.
The front door opened and Detective Sergeant Vince Lewin emerged, flipping his mask off his face so it dangled on the front of his Tyvek suit. Plodding down the steps, he looked like a scowling Pillsbury Dough Boy. He gripped a cage covered in tight mesh wiring and held it as far away from his body as possible. A large snake banged against the wire, fangs bared. You sometimes get to interact with nature.
‘Show’s over. That’s it. It’s done.’ Lewin handed the cage to a uniform who stowed it in the back of a patrol car.
Lewin was in his midforties, with graying hair and a permanent crease between his eyes, made more pronounced by his scowl. Grace had worked with him maybe a dozen times, and the combative edge he carried into every conversation made her instantly tense.
‘Dr. D. Takes forty minutes to get here.’
Grace took a slow, irritable breath. ‘Thirty-nine. I clocked it.’
‘I expected Larry.’
‘Yeah, well, I had better things to do, too, Vince, but they rescheduled my kidney dialysis so I could come.’
‘You’re kidding, right?’
She pulled on her Tyvek suit and looked past him toward the house. ‘What’d you find?’
‘A shitload of nasty. Two pit bulls, assault rifles, six snakes – big ones.’ He gestured toward the cage. ‘That guy was booby-trapped to the kitchen cabinet. Missed him the first time around.’
‘That inspires confidence.’
‘I’m not paid to hold your hand, Grace.’ He was still grumpy about the dialysis joke. Too late, she remembered his mother-in-law had died of renal failure.
A balding man in his midtwenties detached from an assistant DA in the crowd and trotted over. He was wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a Tyvek suit in a muddy tan color that signaled he worked for the DEA. Agents apparently hadn’t gotten the memo about looking spiffy. The suit looked a size too small.
‘You guys met? The new DEA chemist Chip Page; Chip, Dr. D.’
‘Grace Descanso,’ she corrected pleasantly. She pulled on a bootee.
‘Yeah, fine. Grace Descanso. She’s been a police forensic biologist for – I don’t know, what?’
‘Five.’
‘Five years. Sol retired early and moved to Florida so we got Chip,’ Lewin answered her unasked question and tapped his clipboard, as if the small effort at pleasantry exhausted him. ‘Set to live here the next few days?’
‘Sure,’ Grace lied.
‘Then welcome to amateur hour. These guys didn’t go to the Cordon Bleu.’
A taco van turned onto the street and the driver grinned at Grace and gave a jaunty thumbs-up as if he knew her. She took a good look at him as she pulled on the other bootee.
He had a narrow face and glassy eyes and a thatch of black hair and seemed to be about her age, thirty-two. The taco van veered – he’d been staring at her rather than the road ahead – and the uniform on crowd control bellowed at him to move it along. Things could be worse. She could be driving a rancid food truck, trying to stay one step ahead of the Department of Environmental Health.
‘Heard some bozo blew up a trailer park in Reno drying down acetone in an oven.’ Lewin pulled on a second set of gloves and passed the box to Chip. ‘They found body parts in trees. Chip, any questions, ask. Don’t want to send you home in a box. Several.’
Chip blanched and Lewin looked away, satisfied. Grace smiled at Chip in what she hoped was a reassuring way.
‘You were really a doctor?’ Chip asked. It was a blurt. ‘What happened?’
‘Double glove, Chip.’ Grace passed him the box again, her good humor gone.
The crowd drifted off and stationed themselves in nearby yards, talking quietly. Vince Lewin turned back to Grace and Chip, all business.
‘Chip, you got residue but nothing exciting, no pounds of product. Grace, work your magic. There are enough spatters in there to keep a busload of Rorschach head shrinks happy for a year. The house is sealed and it’s going to stay that way. We’re clear on phosgene. We’re gonna dust, collect. Be smart and stay alive. Ready?’
Grace cinched the hood of her suit and attached her bug mask – an air-purifying respirator – and followed him up the stairs, Chip lagging behind her. Grace let him go past her through the door. An armed patrol officer stood at the door, feet spread, another one at the perimeter, and Grace remembered hearing how they’d once busted somebody who’d wandered into a meth house after the task force had secured it. He’d come to do a buy, realizing too late that Joe and Jim and Rudy were already downtown rolling their fingers across ink pads and that the nice man inside with the wide smile wasn’t selling anything except a felony conviction.
The interior was dark, windows covered in duct tape and sheets, and it took a moment for her eyes to adjust. A dark stain saturated a sliver of ratty carpet and spattered a nearby wall.
‘Chip, don’t come near this, okay?’
She squatted down carefully out of reach of the stain and roved her flashlight beam over the wall. The drops curled like exclamation marks in a hurry, which meant that whoever was bleeding had been moving. Or blood had scattered from a weapon that was moving. Or maybe it had been an earthquake and the wall had been moving. Something had moved, and whatever it was, it meant work on her end, and a lot of it.
‘Lovely.’ She’d never see Katie again.
Grace stood up. Already her arms inside the Tyvek were damp as boiled hot dogs. The suit sealed her like a deli chicken. Too bad she hadn’t wrapped herself first in secret herbs and cellophane; she could lose six inches in an hour. She wondered if women losing inches in a spa wrap suddenly exploded like a hot sausage the instant they drank a glass of water. She had to stop thinking about food.
‘Any ideas?’ Lewin stood at her elbow.
‘Yeah, Vince, somebody bleeding was in here once.’
‘Ha-ha, very funny.’
She turned her attention to the rest of the living room. The floor was littered with asthma inhalers, so thick it looked like an army of oversized, hard-shelled insects. Bedding lay tangled across a stained mattress. A child’s dump truck climbed a hill of fertilizer. A meth pipe tilted out the toy cab of the truck. Matchbook strips, ripped down to the red phosphorus, were scattered across a table, along with boxes of diet pills and stiffened coffee filters. Red, as if they’d been dipped in blood.
‘What do you think?’ Lewin looked at Chip. His voice was tinny in the mask.
‘Nazi method,’ Chip said, thinking it was the same cooking the efficient Germans had used during the war, to keep the troops awake and ready.
Lewin made a buzzer sound. ‘Wrong.’ He looked at Grace.
‘Red phosphorus reduction method,’ Grace said. She turned to Chip, shrugging it off. ‘Nazi method’s lithium and ammonia gas; it’s white powder.’
Lewin looked disappointed that she’d gotten it right. He turned toward the kitchen, motioning them to follow. Under his mask, Chip’s face was a pasty gray and dots of sweat sprouted on his upper lip.
‘You okay?’ She stopped walking. ‘Chip?’
‘Claustrophobic. Always have been. Even when I was a kid.’ Chip’s voice was muffled in the mask. He shrugged, embarrassed. ‘Don’t tell Sergeant Lewin.’
She nodded. She could tell by the way his hand kept going to it that Chip carried a gun. Most criminalists opted against it; it was bulky and unnecessary. Police controlled the scene and afforded protection, but occasionally Grace ran across a wannabe cop. They always carried.
Her bootees made a snicking sound on the filthy floor. Pyrex pans littered the stove, and a jug of what looked like denatured alcohol lay on the grimy table. The cabinets were empty except for lighter fluid, Drano, duct tape, and a half-opened box of Froot Loops.
Chip was swallowing, his face shiny with sweat. ‘Okay to take off my mask?’
Lewin’s head shot up from inspecting residue in a pan. ‘You mean safe? Yeah, but –’
The rest of the sentence died as Chip tore off his mask and screamed. His eyes bulged and he shoved Lewin out of the way and raced for the paint-blistered kitchen door, yanking it open and pelting down the steps into the backyard. They could hear him taking great shuddering gasps.
‘Stupid kid,’ Vince said.
Grace shrugged, looking around. ‘He’ll learn. They don’t call it cat for nothing.’
Methamphetamine cooking smelled like cat urine, if the cat were as big as a town car and the box hadn’t been changed in months.
Outside, Chip uttered a sharp strangled cry that cut off abruptly into silence.
‘I’ll check out the other rooms. Leave the sheets up. I’m going to document the blood spatter.’
‘Have at it.’ Lewin put down the search warrant, along with the hazardous-waste forms. ‘I gotta go babysit.’
‘Hey, Vince – he’s a chickie. Go easy on him.’
Lewin grimaced through his mask and stepped out the kitchen door. Grace looked around. It was going to cost the state a bundle getting it cleaned up.
Something large slapped against the house and slid to the ground. It was a sound like a piece of rotten fruit hitting clumsily and hard. She straightened, listening. Silence. A thin, reedy whistling grew in the silence, followed by a muffled moan.
She swallowed. ‘Vince?’
The whistling escalated, the sound wickering through the air like a broken electrical circuit, and the hair on the back of her neck pricked. She moved silently to the kitchen door and down the stairs, yanking off the breathing mask, her head light without the weight.
It was a small yard with rusted cars up on blocks, obscuring the alley. She stared blankly. There was supposed to be a uniform out back protecting them, just like there was out front, but if he was there, she couldn’t see him.
From deep in the yard came a bubbling sound. She’d only heard that rattle in ER and it didn’t sound any better now. She eased around the hulk of a car. Chip Page lay clutching his throat, his fingers slick with surging blood. He stared up at her mutely, his eyes wide and terrified, his glasses askew.
She could see into the alley now. A uniformed officer lay facedown in a pool of blood, his legs at odd angles. Blocking the alley was the taco van, its motor running.
Her throat closed and she dropped to her knees. Chip’s windpipe had been sliced. His mouth opened soundlessly. Establish an airway. Make sure the victim is breathing. His eyes flicked to a spot behind her and she looked over her shoulder.
Pain exploded across her jaw as she was broadsided by a fist and yanked to her feet. It was so unexpected all she felt was a dazed terror and blinding pain behind her eyes and a shooting fire down her arm.
‘You lose.’
He was taller than he’d looked in the taco van, pulsing as if he’d been hot-wired. His breath smelled minty fresh. In his other hand, he held a butcher knife.
He jerked her higher, dragging her backward toward the house, his arm gripping her throat, closing off her airway. Her lungs roared and pricks of light exploded in her eyes. He stumbled, cursing, and she stepped down hard on something mushy.
It was the partially severed head of Detective Sergeant Vince Lewin. The mask had cracked off and lay to the side. His lips were gray, eyes wide, startled. The butcher knife had cut through his Adam’s apple and it lay, like a small oyster, in a bed of blood.
On the ground, Chip feebly pointed his finger like a gun. His eyes had started to film. A gun. Dying rookie Chip Page was trying to remind her that he carried a gun. She banged her elbow hard up into her attacker’s throat and slammed her boot back into his shin, and for an instant, he loosened his grip and she wrenched free and stumbled over to Chip, ripping open his Tyvek suit and scrabbling his gun free. It was a Glock 30, slippery with Chip’s sweat and blood, unbelievably heavy. She lunged to her feet, bringing the gun up as she chambered a round and pointed it in a blur of motion fueled by terror and a primitive rage.
‘Freeze, asshole. If you think I won’t squeeze it, you’re wrong.’
He blinked once, refocused on her face. ‘He’s coming for you,’ he whispered.
‘Shut up.’ Sweat leaked into her gloves and she tightened her grip.
‘He’s the Spikeman. He transmits orders from outer space through the wires in my brain.’
‘I said shut up.’
‘I came to save you, warn you. He’s after you, the Spikeman. You need to run, Grace, now, before it’s too late.’
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
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
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.
Katie said brightly, ‘Grandma’s taking me to Disneyland for my birthday.’
‘You’re having a party on your birthday,’ Grace said. ‘You’re not going to Disneyland.’
‘Not right then,’ Lottie said. ‘Of course, not then. I have to miss her party, I told you. Terrell and I are going out of town.’ She leaned down toward Katie and cooed, ‘And that’s why I’m taking my sweet little sweetums to Disneyland upon my return. I personally know one of the dancing dwarfs, who’s prepared to give us a behind-the-scenes tour of the Magic Kingdom.’
‘Goodie,’ Katie cried.
‘You did make her do her homework, right?’ Grace pressed a finger against her temple. A vein throbbed.
Lottie pulled on her lip.
‘The one thing I asked you to do.’
Lottie shot her a wounded look and fiddled with her hair. Her bracelet clanked. It was fake turquoise that looked like gobs of used chewing gum. ‘We were getting around to it.’ She opened her mouth, threw back her head and sneezed. ‘That dog. I mean it.’
‘When, Lottie? It is now after eight on a school night and all you’ve done so far is pump up my child on caffeinated soda and yellow grease.’
‘Grace, you’re just not fun anymore. You need to work on your people skills.’
‘I want you to sit, Katie.’ Grace’s voice was icy calm. ‘I want you to sit at this desk and not move until you finish your homework. Is that clear?’
Katie stomped to the desk.
Grace yanked open a drawer and got out Katie’s stationery. It was pink and orange and had psychedelic ponies gamboling. She positioned a purple crayon in her daughter’s limp hand.
‘This is fun,’ Grace said. ‘We’re having fun learning about the mail. You send this to somebody, you get something back. You’re going to like it.’ It sounded like a threat.
Katie started to whimper. ‘You can’t make me.’
‘Oh, for Pete’s sake,’ Lottie protested.
‘I don’t have anybody to write to!’ Katie burst into tears and put her head down, dampening the stationery.
‘Write to Clint, honey,’ Lottie said, ‘he’d be happy to have you –’
‘She is not writing to Clint,’ Grace said, and Katie wiped her eyes and raised her head, interested at this turn of events.
‘Who’s Clint?’
‘She’s not writing to some hick singer who shellacs his hair until it’s the size of a turkey rump.’
Grace couldn’t believe she was having this conversation after the day she’d had, except that it was with Lottie, so it made sense. In the kitchen, the phone rang.
‘Hick!’ Lottie said in a hushed, stricken voice. Her unnaturally violet eyes brimmed with tears. ‘I want you to know Clint’s hosted the first hour of the Grand Ole Opry seventeen times, and I mean the first hour that’s broadcast, too, not the one that warms everybody up. Not even George has done that.’
‘She’s not doing it,’ Grace said.
‘How do you spell Clint?’ Katie asked.
‘Katie, enough. And Lottie, would you please get that phone?’
Grace waited while Lottie stalked out of the room, muttering about personal maid service.
‘Remember that girl Mommy told you was her friend when she was in high school?’
Katie shook her head.
Grace reached around Katie to rifle through the desk.
‘We haven’t gotten a pumpkin and you promised. We never do anything.’
Novels made it look easy. Heroines, they had a kid, they had problems, the kid got farmed out for long stretches, just dropped conveniently out of the story, while the heroine – always taller and skinnier than in real life, too, it wasn’t right – got herself out of trouble in some plucky way and came back to the kid and the kid was relaxed and happy and clueless about how close her mom had come to being turned into roadkill.
‘Nothing fun. I’m just a little kid. I’m supposed to have fun.’
‘You’re having a party Saturday.’
From the kitchen, Lottie sneezed and trilled into the phone, ‘Hello? Helllooo?’
‘And no goodie bags ready yet either. None. Not one.’
‘Oh, good, here.’ Grace pulled out her address book and started thumbing through it. It was slow going. Somehow, she’d mixed up the R’s with the S’s. ‘Well, Mommy had a friend named Annie and she grew up and got married, and they had a kid and he lives on a farm in Iowa and that’s who you can send your drawing to. And you can tell me what to say, if you want, and I’ll write it down.’
‘And a costume. You said you’d make one this year. You promised.’
Grace had. Months ago it sounded like a fine idea, she just couldn’t remember why. In the kitchen, Lottie banged down the phone, cursing.
‘You promised and you forgot. Just like you forgot to take me to see the panda baby at the zoo.’
‘The panda baby was sleeping, Katie.’
‘You promised and we didn’t.’
Katie had the instincts of a pit bull. She just lunged and clamped hold, dragging Grace back over every thing she’d promised and failed to deliver. Grace would be on her deathbed and Katie would kneel and clasp her wizened hand and stroke the purply veins, lean in close and murmur, ‘You promised popcorn and we were out.’ Then Katie would pull out a list of wrongs, and it would be on one of those long computer paper rolls, and she’d settle in for a nice, long chat.
Death would be a relief. Grace kept looking through her address book, ignoring the expletives coming from the kitchen. ‘He’s nine. A Cub Scout, I think.’
Her finger stopped. ‘There. Here it is. His name is Dusty Rhodes. He’ll enjoy getting a lovely drawing from you.’
‘No, he won’t. He’s a boy.’
Nobody ever told her it would be this hard. This constant and this hard. ‘They have animals and he has a paper route and he’s nine,’ she repeated. ‘Or ten. Anyway. That’s who you can send your letter to.’ She block-printed out the address onto the envelope.
‘I could write to Daddy.’ It hung there. Grace looked at her. Katie stared at her hands. Katie tried lots of things to get out of what she didn’t want to do, but never the trump card, her dad.
Grace had created this longing in this small, beautiful girl, this empty space that nothing filled. She’d promised herself she’d be better than Lottie, and she’d turned around and created the same ache in Katie that she’d had, growing up.
‘We’ve been through this, honey,’ Grace said gently. ‘Remember? Daddy died before you were born. It has to be a real letter. Not one to heaven.’
‘Tell me again.’ Katie stood up and Grace settled into the chair and pulled her onto her lap.
Katie’s eyes were a rich brown, a Portuguese color that spoke of sailing ships and rough seas and High Mass said in lonely places.
‘We loved each other very much.’
‘Uh-huh. Jack. You met him at a Padres game. They were playing New York.’
‘Right. We got pregnant and were going to get married, which is not the right order to do things in, and I don’t want you doing it that way either, but I’ll still love you no matter what.’
‘Only there was a car crash. That’s what happened.’
‘That’s what happened. And he would have loved you, honey.’
‘A lot.’
‘Over the moon. That’s what he would have been, having you as his daughter.’
Lottie appeared in the archway. ‘Wrong number. He hung up.’
‘You’re sure it was a he?’
‘I could tell just the way he breathed it was a he. I know how men breathe, Grace.’
‘So this Dusty kid,’ Katie said. ‘That’s a silly dilly stupid name.’
Grace glanced uneasily toward the phone, her thoughts elsewhere. ‘What? Try and leave that part out, Katie.’
An hour later, Lottie mercifully gone, Grace finished the carton of yogurt she was eating standing up. She bent down and kissed her daughter on the forehead.
Katie’s hair was a curly cloud on the pillow. Her favorite doll nestled in her arms, a Katie doll built to look like her, an extravagant birthday present Grace had given her for her fourth birthday. It had a recorder inside, so that Katie’s voice came out in short staccato sentences that Katie periodically changed. The voice was so lifelike that Grace sometimes thought it was Katie herself and dropped whatever she was doing to answer, much to Katie’s great amusement, which made Grace want to permanently injure the Katie doll’s vocal cords in any one of a number of unfortunate accidents.
Katie’s eyes were closed, along with the doll’s. They were dressed in matching pink nighties, caramel-colored hair tangled in wild manes, dark long lashes against pink cheeks. On the vanity lay the drawing, smudged and crinkled with violent splotches of color. It appeared to be a giant smiling orange head floating over a pink and orange lake. Katie had dictated a short message to go along with it.
Dear Dusty: How are you? I am fine. This is Cinderella who is riding in a big pumpkin. She is inside. That is why nobody can see her. Mommy says you came to our house and broke your arm. You need to write me back right away so I can pass kindergarten. Sincerely, Katie Descanso.
Impulsively, Grace ripped a piece of paper out of a wide-lined notebook she found in Katie’s bookshelf and added a quick note of her own:
Dear Annie: We missed hearing from you at Christmas. Hope you’re okay. I know this is a lot, but could you prod Dusty to answer this right away? Katie’s had this pen pal assignment looming over her for weeks. Of course. Love you, thanks. G.
‘We get to play the Timer Game tomorrow, right?’ Katie’s voice was blurred with sleep.
She’d forgotten about the Timer Game. ‘Right.’
‘Good.’ Katie shifted and licked her lip, eyes closed. ‘You’re wrong about one thing, Mommy.’
‘Only one?’ Grace sealed the letters in an envelope and dropped it on the dresser. She opened the drawers.
‘He’s not dead.’
‘Who?’ She pulled together shorts and a top and underwear. There was a long silence, and Grace thought Katie had dropped off to sleep.
‘Daddy,’ Katie muttered. Her lips went slack. She breathed in through her nose.
A prick of unease darted through her. She put down the clothes. ‘Honey. Katie.’ Grace touched her shoulder gently. ‘What are you talking about, sweetie? With Daddy.’
‘He visits me sometimes.’ Katie shifted under the covers, punching the pillow down, trying to find a comfortable spot.
‘Visits you?’ Grace shifted her weight. She adjusted the quilt. They’d bought it on sale at Penney’s, small pink squares of pink and white rosebuds.
‘Uh-huh. I’ll wake up. He’ll be there, at the end of my bed. He talks to me, too.’
‘What does he say?’
‘Stuff. Just private stuff. He’s coming back for me.’ She yawned hugely. ‘Night, Mommy.’
‘Night, sweetie.’
‘Wait till I sleep?’ Katie’s voice was faint.
‘Sure.’
The room faced out over Scott Street. In the dark, the soccer and T-ball trophies on Katie’s bookshelf were indistinct soldiers. The half-opened window was a small black square hanging over the eaves slanting down to the front porch. The dotted Swiss curtains moved gently, caught in an invisible breeze.
Grace stroked her daughter’s hair. ‘Katie? You do know he doesn’t do that, right? Sweetie, you do know that?’
Katie’s mouth opened into a slack O. One small foot hung out of the pink quilt. Grace cradled it in her hands. It was warm and delicate as a shell.
She kissed the arch, tucked it back in, and gently eased the window shut.
Across the street, a shadow moved. Grace tensed. It was a dog, nosing in the trash. Screens. She had to spring for screens.
Helix was dreaming on the braided rug when she entered her bedroom at the end of the hallway, his fake leg spasming the air. From her bedroom sliding glass window, the harbor spread out before her, glittering with boats tethered in black water. She pulled the sheer curtains and locked her bedroom door. She could feel her heart banging dully in her chest as she went to her closet and found it.
It was a small hard box made of enamel and she kept it on the top shelf under her sweaters. She was breathing through her mouth now and Helix cracked an eye open to look at her blearily before settling back into sleep. She lay down on the bed and put the box on her chest and felt its small cold heaviness, and her finger slid into the crack of the box and she sighed deeply and opened it.
The phone rang.
Helix jerked out of sleep and growled once deep in his throat. ‘It’s okay, boy, it’s okay.’
She stared at the machine, wondering if this was going to be another night where she was plagued with hang-ups. She heard Jeanne’s voice leaving a message, and she put the box aside and rolled over and picked up. ‘Hey.’
‘My God, I can’t believe what you’ve been through.’
‘Did you call earlier?’ Grace sat up. Helix stretched and got up, taking a few steps and flopping down next to her ankles, his ear cocked, watching her.
‘What? No, why?’
‘I keep getting hang-ups. Never mind.’
Her eyes strayed to a group of photos on the wall and found the one of a beaming nun holding the hand of a shy Guatemalan kid who looked to be about ten. She frowned and reached down to scratch Helix behind his ears. He made a small sound of pleasure and his tail thumped the wooden floor.
‘Are you watching the news?’
‘What channel?’
‘All the channels, kiddo.’ Jeanne’s whiskey-ravaged voice dropped into a phlegmy rattle and Grace could hear her sucking on a lozenge. ‘They’re withholding your name for the time being, there’s that at least. Some wild man in a Hawaiian shirt’s pushing you out the squad car and screaming at you to duck.’
Pulsuz fraqment bitdi.
