NINETEEN

Payne imagined swinging Adam's baseball bat.

Smashing Manuel Garcia over the head. Crushing bone to splinters, tissue to mush. Luxuriating in each crack and squish. Reveling in the blood, feeling no more guilt than a kid stomping a grasshopper.

But could he really do it? Thinking about killing was one thing. Watching the life seep out of a man was another. That was the debate raging inside him.

Payne had left Sharon at the restaurant, her face pale with worry. She had buckled him into the front seat of his Lexus, as if he were a child, giving him a little peck on the cheek. A charity kiss, to be sure.

His body aching from his run-in with the protect-and-serve crowd, Payne headed west on Wilshire. He had a notion about stopping at the La Brea Tar Pits. He used to take Adam to the museum there. All boys love dinosaurs and fossils. Adam would spend hours drawing pictures of the mammoths and saber-toothed tigers, whose remains have been preserved in the tar.

A few minutes into the drive, Payne saw a Home Depot, and by instinct, swung into the parking lot. Two dozen Hispanic men in dirty jeans, T-shirts, and ball caps squatted on their haunches or sat on the curb, smoking, talking, hoping for an honest day's work. Keenly appraising the shoppers exiting the store with lumber, plywood, paint. Offering their services in an eager Spanglish.

"Buen trabajador."

"Puedo arreglar todo bien rapido."

"?Barato!"

Not a green card in the bunch, of course. A good deal for the homeowner too scared to clean his own roof gutters, too cheap to pay a licensed contractor.

The odds were great that Manuel Garcia wasn't within five hundred miles of here. But didn't Payne have to look, anyway?

Garcia was the driver of the blazing red Dodge Ram truck. An SRT-10 with the 500 horsepower Viper engine. Not the rusted-out Chevy pickup you'd expect an illegal immigrant to drive. Garcia was a solid citizen… of Mexico. Without papers, he'd landed a job on a sardine boat on the Monterey docks. He stayed out of trouble, manned double shifts, and with overtime was paid more than most schoolteachers. He sent money home to his wife and kids. He made a down payment on the Ram truck three weeks before driving to L.A., when the sardine boat went into dry dock for maintenance.

So it was by chance that, on a gray and misty Saturday morning fourteen months earlier, Jimmy and Adam Payne crossed paths with the hardworking and hard-drinking mojado. A man who would flee on foot from the crash, leaving behind his new truck and a dying boy.

Eight weeks after Adam's funeral and one day after the cast came off his leg, Payne drove upstate and waited for the sardine boat to return to port. He stood on the dock, a copy of Garcia's driver's license photo in his pocket. He watched the boat, Fish Reaper, enter the harbor, a blizzard of cawing gulls tailing it. Garcia was not aboard. The crew hadn't seen him. The boat's skipper said he'd been a solid crewman, nimble with the nets. Never missed a day's work. Never gave anyone any problems, not even when he put away a case of beer on a Sunday night. A clerk at the cannery said Garcia had not picked up his last paycheck.

Payne drove inland and found Garcia's trailer in the little town of Spreckels.

No one home.

Payne broke the flimsy lock. The place clean, the air stuffy. Clothes folded. Small TV on a table of cinder blocks. Letters from his wife. Payne copied down the address from an envelope. The city of Oaxaca in Mexico.

For the next month, Payne haunted the Parker Center downtown. Each day, he'd drop in, taking the homicide detectives to lunch, following up with tips, rumors, ideas. The police couldn't find Garcia. A friend in Homeland Security got Payne a meeting with the regional director of the Border Patrol. No record of Garcia coming in or going out.

Payne carried Adam's aluminum baseball bat in his car. Each evening, when he should have been sitting home with Sharon, holding her, consoling her, he drove through the barrios of East L.A. One night, in Boyle Heights, he thought he saw Garcia walking out of a 7Eleven. Payne yanked the car into the parking lot and jumped out, waving the baseball bat. "Remember me, asshole? You killed my son!"

The man froze, eyes blank with fear, as if Payne were insane. When he got close, Payne realized it wasn't Garcia. Didn't even look much like him. By this time, several bare-chested, tattooed young men in baggy pants had streamed out of the store. The gang known as K.A.M. Krazy Ass Mexicans. Payne jumped into his car and burned rubber, gunshots peppering his trunk.

Payne figured Garcia had returned home to avoid arrest. He called local police in Oaxaca. No help.

"I'm going to Mexico," he told Sharon three months after they had buried their son.

"Why?"

"To find Garcia."

"And then what?"

He didn't answer.

She begged him not to go. She needed him. She sobbed, shoulders heaving, even after there were no more tears. Jimmy stayed.

His grief formed its own universe, created its own gravity. Grief parched him, drained him of blood and filled him with dust. Grief encircled him like leather cinches on a madman, squeezing the breath from him. He was of no use to Sharon. Whatever she needed, he was unable to give.

A lapsed Catholic, Sharon sought peace in the stillness of Our Lady of Angels downtown. For hours, she sat alone in the sanctuary, sunlight streaming over her through alabaster mosaic windows. With its fifty-foothigh cross and its sunbaked concrete walls, the church was built to withstand an earthquake, but did little for heartache.

Sharon asked Payne to accompany her to Mass, just to hold her hand, just to feel his presence beside her. To the extent he believed in God at all, Payne preferred the pissed off curmudgeon of the Old Testament. That bearded sadist who delighted in flood and famine, plague and pestilence. Payne told Sharon that if she really believed the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost routine, maybe she should have prayed before Adam was killed.

It was just one of many thoughtless comments. Was he trying to salve his own pain by worsening hers? He had no idea.

Sharon seethed with anger. Payne wondered if she blamed him for the accident. She never said so, but the silent accusation hung in the air, enveloping them like a poisonous fog. He wanted to scream out:

"Jesus, Sharon. The bastard ran a red light."

But could Payne have avoided the crash? Was he driving too fast? If only he hadn't looked away-

She'd always told him to slow down, to be more careful. He resented her anger. She resented his resentment. They were divorced six months later.

But now, sitting in his car in the Home Depot lot, his son dead, his marriage over, his career ruined, Payne knew precisely what he had to do. This time there was no one to stop him, and no reason to stay.

He had to go to Mexico. He had to find Manuel Garcia. And he had to kill him.

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