Crime Scene

Chapter 46

I pulled to the curb, tapped the horn. The front door opened, and Paul Sandek came down the walkway. I lowered the passenger window to return his greeting.

“She said to tell you she’ll be out in a sec,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“Realistically, though, it could be hours.” He leaned in through the open window. “We probably have enough time for PIG.”

I pointed: behind him, Amy had stepped from the house.

“Dammit,” he said.

She was toting a paper grocery bag — “Snacks,” she said — which she stashed in the footwell before sliding in next to me.

“Drive safely,” Sandek said.

“We will,” Amy said.

“As for you,” he said to me, “consider yourself lucky.”

“I do,” I said.

I couldn’t pretend to be familiar with the route, so I had Amy navigate. Google Maps predicted a drive time of two hours and fifty-eight minutes.

We spent the better part of that discussing her, which was fine by me. I wasn’t in a talkative mood, and anyway she had more news to share. A complete draft of her dissertation. A job lined up at the VA clinic in downtown San Francisco. Aside from seeing individual clients, she was to lead the weekly stress reduction group.

“I’m sure I’ll be burnt out soon enough,” she said. “But for right now I’m choosing to be excited.”

The question remained: hunt for an apartment in the city or remain in the East Bay? Convenience or affordability?

“I could probably swing a one-bedroom in the Tenderloin,” she said. “Either that, or I’m going to have to split with five other people. I feel like I’m getting a little old to be labeling my cottage cheese.”

“You could always stay at your parents’,” I said.

“That’s super-helpful, thanks.”

“Laundry service,” I said. “Free food.”

“Unwanted advice. Personal questions.”

“Learn to focus on the positives.”

“You think it’s so great,” she said, “I’m sure they’d be happy to have you.”

She pulled the snack bag onto her lap. “I have egg salad and turkey with Swiss. Oh — but. My mom really wanted you to have this for some reason.”

She unwrapped the sandwich to its waist. Meatloaf.

I laughed and took it.

The route was a straight shot down I-5, offering precious little scenery: monotonous stretches of wrinkled highway, beige hills relieved by farmland. Billboards advertised berries, fudge, antiques — always, it seemed, a bit farther on, a promise infinitely receding.

“In two miles,” the phone said, “the exit is on the right.”

“How’re you feeling?” Amy asked.

I shrugged. “Fine,” I said. “Little nervous.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“That would be the healthy thing to do, wouldn’t it.”

“Only if you want to,” she said.

“I don’t really.”

“Then don’t.”

A green sign loomed.

The phone said, “In one mile—”

Amy muted it.

The last stretch before the exit consisted of citrus groves — row after row of round-topped trees, studded with underripe fruit. It was easy to pretend we were headed someplace fun. A day of U-pick, followed by lunch, a nap, a blanket in the shade.

Then we crossed over a dry riverbed and the terrain sank and withered, becoming a terrible blankness, baked and sterile, only the sandy margins of the road and drooping power lines separating us from oblivion.

It was a vision of hell.

I reached for Amy, and she took my hand.

The prison campus revealed itself in stages. Barbed wire, protecting nothing but empty acreage; bleached green transformer boxes and orange traffic delineators and a duo of blinking amber lights that warned of the upcoming intersection. Low-slung cement structures: a sister facility: state hospital for mentally ill and sexually violent offenders.

The left turn lane stretched for hundreds of yards, as if to allow you time to change your mind.

I put on my signal.

The run-up to the guard booth was long, too, trimmed with agave and rocks.

Amy squeezed my hand. “You do know how to woo a lady.”

I said, “Wait’ll you see what I got lined up for our third date.”

The guard checked my driver’s license, raised the barrier arm. “Ahead on your right.”

I lifted my foot off the brake.

The visitors’ lot was already crowded, slack-faced folks trudging between the cars, like the breakup of some awful tailgate. They knew enough to get here early.

I killed the engine. In an instant, suffocating heat slammed through the windshield.

I turned to Amy. “Ready?”

Easier to ask her than myself.

We got out and she took my hand and we joined the back of a discontented line, shuffling toward the door, out of the sun and into a scratched, boomy concrete room. Clearing the metal detector required that she let go of me, but she was waiting for me, hand out, when I came through, and she held on to me as I approached the booth, the impassive face behind Plexiglas.

I felt her walking close beside me, and I felt her fingers tighten on mine as I formed the words:

Clay Edison, here to see my brother.