Orange County Noir

Bee Canyon by Susan Straight

Santa Ana Narrows

See, right now, if the phantom was roaming around like he did back in 1977, haunting the freeway and busting up people’s cars, stealing food — damn, he even stabbed a deputy in the neck! — somebody would shoot him. No hesitation. Blow him away. A cop. Hell, a driver. Everybody’s got guns in their cars. The freeway’s a battlezone. People follow each other off the ramps and pull out automatic weapons. People lean out the window and shoot a nine like Grand Theft Auto. People die every day just for cutting each other off or throwing up a finger.

I almost shot the phantom thirty years ago, when he came out of that hole. His hair all dusty and his shirt in rags. I had my gun out. I thought I would have to kill him, but I waited to see if he remembered. If he’d look at my face and shout it out, what he’d seen me do. If he said it out loud, my life was over.

I saw him just before the rock hit my windshield. It was twilight. Strange word. My father always called it ocaso. In school they told us twilight, dusk, evening. Before night.

That’s the only time the phantom ever appeared. A shadow lifted up and twisted for a second, in the center divider of the freeway. I was heading west, toward Santa Ana, and on my left this movement — like when you have a nightmare as a kid and you can’t see the guy’s face, the guy chasing you.

He was small. Compact throw. The rock flew into the glass and the windshield exploded like music. A crazy instrument. Most people panicked and that’s why they crashed. I felt the splinters on the side of my face and neck like wasps stinging me but I kept driving until I could get out of the fast lane and off to the side.

The blood dripped into my right eye. Thick. It stung. The salt. I had an extra T-shirt in the backseat and I held it to my temple. I pulled down the visor. One sliver of glass was stuck in my neck like Frankenstein’s screw. Not by my jugular — higher up, just under my jaw. I pulled it out and not as much blood came out as from my temple. I held the T-shirt to both for a long time before I headed to the call box.

It was darker now, red-smog sunset hanging west, where I was headed to work. But even though I was California Highway Patrol, I had to call this in, stay here, just like all the other people he’d thrown rocks at. People driving out of Riverside and the desert, heading to Orange County.

I’d gone to Riverside to visit my friend Manny, who used to live at Bryant Ranch with me. He and his father gave up picking oranges and went to work in the packing house near Casa Blanca. I’d passed the Prado Dam in Corona, where the big flag they painted for the 1976 bicentennial was getting dusty after a year.

“Where are you?” the dispatcher said.

I’d gone about a mile and a half trying to get over, off the freeway. It was a Sunday. He threw rocks at twilight, and usually near Featherly Park.

I squinted at the hills on the north rim of the Santa Ana Canyon. I knew them better than anyone but him — the phantom. “Bee Canyon,” I said.

“What?” she said. “Bee Canyon?”

Nobody would know that name. I told her the mile marker. Then I hung up. Bee Canyon was already black in the fading light. Like someone had poured tar down the side of the hills. We’d called in a fire there last year.

But I’d been up there just before the fire, when I watched what happened to that girl.

I stood on the side of the freeway, where I’d stood a hundred times before taking reports or writing tickets or hearing about flat tires, and looked back at the center divider. But the headlights went straight into my eyes. Between that blinding and the blood, I couldn’t see anything.

I don’t remember why they called it Bee Canyon. All those little canyons along the Santa Ana Canyon, and the Riverside Freeway winding along the edge. At City College, when I was taking general ed before law enforcement, I had a professor who showed us how all the world was just a big irrigation system. The water fell, the water moved, the water shaped the earth. Bryant Ranch took up a lot of the hills and the canyon because it had water. The perfect place for citrus and cattle. I grew up walking all the arroyos and canyons, since I was born on the ranch. After that college class, I realized it was the everyday water that wore down the dirt.

My dad was born in Red Camp, and my mom in La Jolla Camp. They met at a dance in Sycamore Flats, near Bryant Ranch, and they got married and had me in 1954. All I ever knew growing up was the ranch, the river, the railroad tracks along the foothills, and the canyons.

People think Southern California is a desert, that it never rains here, cause of that stupid song, but in winter rainfall pours down all those gullies and makes them canyons too. When I was a kid, I wondered how they picked names: Gypsum Canyon, Coal Canyon, Brush Canyon, Bee Canyon.

Somebody must have kept bees up there once. Had I seen the white boxes, the ones that always looked like random dumping until you heard the hum swell up like the air was infected all around you?

Bee Canyon was where he was buried. The guy. I thought of his long brown hair. Gone now. He was a skeleton. The girl woke up and tried to stumble away, and he punched her in the face, and he kept coming toward me. Taunting me. “You a wetback? You just come up outta that river, Frito Bandito? You swum all the way here from Tijuana?”

The phantom had seen it all. I heard the noise he made. He’d been living in the canyons for a long time by then. He knocked down some loose granite while I was digging. But then I waited for a long time, when I was done, and it seemed like he couldn’t help himself. He looked out of his shelter, a wall of creosote and rabbitbrush, and I saw his face.

He was darker than me. Small. His hair was wavy and black, but covered with dust, and one eucalyptus leaf dangled like a feather near his ear.

I was off-duty. I knew CHP and Orange County Sheriff ’s Department and Riverside County had been searching him out for a long time. The freeway phantom. But I couldn’t tell anyone I’d seen him, because then they’d see the grave in Bee Canyon.

“He got you, huh?” the Riverside CHP said. Fredow. They pulled over about ten minutes after I called. “Goddamn. That’s thirty or forty this year. He’s gonna kill somebody.”

“That one guy he hit lost his eye,” his partner said. Anderson.

“And you’re CHP? That’s what the radio said.”

“Yeah,” I replied. I pulled the shirt away from my face — my white Hanes looked like one of those tests they make you stare at. The blots. I’d say flowers if they asked what it looked like. Flowers that came out of my skin. My mother’s favorite hibiscus, before she died. How did the blood thicken up so fast? “Heading in for night shift.”

“November 6, 1977. Jerry Frias? F-r-i-a-s? How long you been with O.C.?” Anderson asked.

“Two years.”

“Just past rookie,” he said. Then, “You born here?” and I knew what he meant.

“Right there on Bryant Ranch.” I pointed to the hills. Not Mexico.

“Is that right? I was born in Indianapolis.”

“Wow — the Indy 500.” I tried to be polite. I felt the crusting over on my neck.

“What did he look like? This fucking phantom?” Fredow asked, writing the report.

“I wouldn’t call him that. Makes him sound like a comic book, and this ain’t funny,” Anderson said. “I call him a goddamn idiot. I don’t care if he’s a Vietnam vet. I did a tour in Nam and I ain’t throwin rocks at people in cars. If he chucks one at me, I’ll shoot him.”

Fredow frowned at him. He said to me, “No description?”

I shrugged. “It’s so damn fast,” I answered, and it was true. “You’re doing sixty and he’s just there like a shadow. You know. You turn your head and then you’re past him.”

Twilight. The Twilight Zone — me and Manny’s favorite show when we were kids. This phantom was like something Rod Serling would talk about — He glides through a river of speeding cars as if not afraid, and in his hands, he holds the possibility of death.

“You didn’t want to pull over on the divider?”

“Remember what happened in May? The off-duty saw him in the divider and pulled over, chased him around, and then the guy stabbed him in the neck with the homemade knife?”

“Damn.” Anderson looked at the freeway beside us.

“The deputy he stabbed said he’s a short black guy. Named James,” I said.

“But we got other descriptions too.”

I knew it was him. And I’d seen the reports over the last year — six-two, five-nine, white, Chicano, long-haired, short-haired, huge, thin.

I shrugged again. “A guy with a rock.” I bent over and got it out of the passenger seat. The windshield glass was piled up like some broken mirror in a fairy tale. “A rock the size of an orange.”

Then their radio crackled, and Anderson leaned in to take it. “He just got somebody else. A lady.”

When I got to work in Santa Ana, someone had already told Chuck George about it. He’d been special assigned to the phantom for months.

In the locker room, I felt the bandages over my neck and temple. I had a cut on my right hand that I hadn’t noticed until the tow truck came for my Nova.

Somebody in the locker room said, “Who the hell runs through traffic on the Riverside Freeway?”

“How does he do it over and over and not get plastered, man?”

“Hey, he hit somebody else after he got Frias. Broke five bones in her face and she’s got deep cuts. He’s gonna kill somebody tomorrow.”

“George has the tracker,” I said, over the lockers. “The one from Oklahoma. He wants to talk to me. He says they’re going out Thursday night.”

But all night, driving my route, winding along the 91 and the 55 and the 22 and the 57, back up the 91, the way the engine chugged under me when I went after an idiot speeding near Imperial Highway, the way the exhaust smelled when I was writing the ticket — the tumbleweeds were green and big by November, like explosions all along the frontage road right there, and the guy’s arm dangling in his white cuffed shirt, the burgundy Buick Regal and how he was so pissed — I thought about how long the phantom had already been living in the Santa Ana Canyon, how smart he was, how he slid down the pick he had to have made himself.

“Hijo, what happened to your face?”

I went to see my father almost every day before work. I got my own apartment a year ago, but all I had in there was a TV, a couch, two chairs, and one of those coffee tables made from a burl of wood. The apartment was in Corona, because it was cheap, so I would leave a couple hours early and stop at the ranch to see if he needed me to carry anything for him. He was only fifty-seven, but his shoulders were wrecked, full of loose cartilage. One day he said, “Stand here,” and he moved his shoulders, and the popping was loud. “Sounds like that cereal you always wanted.”

Rice Krispies. We’d had tortillas for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Same as my mother and father had grown up eating.

My cuts were scabbing over, two days later, and they itched like hell.

“The phantom,” I said. “He busted my windshield.”

“Yours?”

“He doesn’t know who’s driving.” I leaned against the tractor. He had it set up to disc weeds. “The tracker’s going out tomorrow with a search party. Tell everybody we’ll be up in Brush Canyon. He thinks the guy is holed up there.”

“We?”

“He told me to come along because I know the area. He and George have been talking to people in the canyon.”

People who lived on the ranches had caught glimpses for more than a year. He’d thrown a rock at one of the workers driving a tractor one day, and my father had called me. Someone had seen the phantom bathing in a stock tank up where the cattle ran. Someone else had been out riding a horse and saw him butchering a goat, but that was last year. “He’s been here a long time now,” my father said, easing himself off the fender. “He’s living on food from the golf course.”

The Green River Golf Club was just to the east. “How do you know?” I asked. We started walking to the shed where he kept the smudge pots.

“I met one of the cooks. He’s seen the guy taking bags out of the dumpster in the back.”

“Oh yeah?” I said. My father stopped and sat on the wooden bench near the picnic table where he repaired tractor parts and pruning shears and whatever else needed fixing. In the open door of the shed I saw the smudge pots lined up like one-armed soldiers.

“Remember when he knocked over every single one a those?” my father said, rubbing his shoulder. “Took us all night to fill ’em back up with fuel and he did it again. I wanted to kill him.”

“Kill him?” I looked at my father’s hand, the wrinkles filled with black rime from the citrus rinds, the dark lines never erased since I’d been a child no matter how hard he scrubbed with cleanser.

“Not kill him,” my father said wearily, glancing up at me. I was a cop now. “I was just so damn tired. And the kerosene was running down the irrigation lines. El fantom — like a mocoso, but they say he’s a grown man.”

Mocoso. A bad little kid. Why would he throw rocks all the time? I said, “Maybe we’ll find him tomorrow.”

I took all the bagged fertilizer off the truck and into the barn. When I walked back to my car, with the new windshield thick and green in the afternoon light, I stopped at the house, like I did every time. Three rooms. I looked inside the front window at the altar for my mother.

I only remembered the cough. I was about five. She coughed all winter. You could hear it in the front room, where I slept, and from inside the trees when we picked the valencias in January. The crows used to wake us up with those raspy caws, and I thought it was them, but it was my mother. Pneumonia.

The altar had not changed since she died that year. Plastic wisteria blossoms arranged all around her picture, and new roses every day in a vase on the little table underneath, with the veladora glowing faint. He left it lit all day, no matter how many times I told him not to. The flame was little, though, inside the glass. Maybe as big as a grain of rice.

He thought I didn’t know about the two babies, but I did.

The long drive into the ranch was lined with pomegranate trees. In spring the flowers were like pink umbrellas hanging everywhere. But now, in November, the old pomegranates were hanging on the branches like dead Christmas ornaments.

There were only about fourteen families left on the ranch. People kept telling my father the owner was going to sell it next year, and someone would build housing tracts all the way up to the hills. “Yorba Linda will be a big city,” they said. “The canyon will be full of people instead of cows.”

I got on the freeway and the center divider was full of trash and bottles.

“Keep on truckin, baby,” the radio said. “You got to keep on truckin.”

By the time I pulled into the station, it was “One toke over the line, sweet Jesus, one toke over the line.”

The words were still in my head when I got dressed. The tracker was from Oklahoma, and his voice was country. They’d hired him from El Cajon Border Patrol and he’d been here off and on since May, when the deputy got stabbed. George and some deputies had been out on a bunch of occasions, sometimes on motorcycles and horseback, and they hadn’t seen anything. So they got Kearney.

He didn’t say much, but I heard him tell someone, “I plain love putting together a puzzle like that.” They’d been looking at maps for weeks. I couldn’t tell what he thought when he glanced at me, so I hadn’t said anything except that I used to hunt with my father in the canyons.

“What you hunt?”

“Rabbits.”

He had a mustache like a black staple turned upside down. A brimmed hat. They called him a sign-cutter and a man-tracker. Some of the other guys in the locker room joked that he was like Disneyland — Daniel Boone or some shit. He’d been working Border Patrol for seventeen years, tracking Mexicans trying to cross.

He looked at me. “Rabbits. Why?”

I looked back. “Dinner.”

Then he nodded. “We ate a lot of rabbits in Oklahoma,” he said. “Let’s go.”

We got there when the sun was in the eucalyptus windbreak, not twilight yet, and hiked toward Brush Canyon. It was Kearney and four other Border Patrol sign-trackers, three deputies, George, and me. La Palma Road went along the canyon, with the river and freeway west, and the train tracks and hills east.

“He crosses the damn river every time he hits the freeway,” someone said. “How the hell does he do it? He fords the river, fords the traffic, all to throw a rock?”

The tracker had seen where he entered the river, and where he left, and he thought the guy was living in Brush Canyon.

We moved up toward the foothills. We were going to stake out the mouth of the canyon and the trail he used lately to get to the freeway or the golf course.

I scratched the cut on my neck, under the bandage. I could smell the cooking fires from the ranch. How many times had the phantom watched my father, or me?

Did he remember my face from when I dug the hole, when I pushed the body into it after I checked for the bullet?

My service revolver was on my hip. I was fifth in line and the foothills loomed up like they had all my life, in fall, the rocks smelling cool, not like summer. The brittlebush and creosote giving off their scent. The animals stirring in late afternoon.

“First camp was Bee Canyon, right?” someone said. “That’s where he lit the fire last year.”

“What was he doing?”

“Cooking. In a coffee can. Musta got out of control.”

“He was camped in Coal Canyon after that. But that one’s been empty a long time.”

Kearney frowned. No one talked after that.

Kearney was sure it was Brush Canyon. He said the tracks kept leading us away from there — that’s what any animal does when it wants the hunter to stay away from the nest or den.

We’re just animals, my father said. Except our souls, the priest said. The phantom was a man, but he’d been living like an animal for years. We moved up past the railroad tracks and the rocks smelled of sulfur along the embankment.

He had a knife.

If he saw my face, if he moved toward me, if he started shouting, I would shoot him. He had a knife. He was armed. Justifiable.

I knew the rules. I’d known them last year when the guy kept walking toward me.

Kearney studied the ground every step of the way. He figured the phantom had to leave Brush Canyon on the trail he’d been using for days, and we each had a place to hide. I kept looking up, since Kearney was looking down. Brush Canyon was a jagged arroyo, steep sides and then slopes studded with granite boulders that turned pink now with the sun fading. A few rogue pepper trees, like in every canyon, and no other green because winter rain hadn’t started yet.

Was he watching us, all this time? He was a crazy little kid, my father said. Was he laughing? He wouldn’t throw a rock down here, because we’d find him then, but he’d stand in the center divider of the 91 where hundreds of people could see him for a few minutes, until he launched it like a Little League pitcher.

The air was purple now, the railroad tracks ran red and shiny as Kool-Aid. This was the time my father used to say I had to head home. “When the silver tracks turn red, or the rocks turn pink, or the river turns black, you better be close to here. Or La Llorona will get you.”

We were fanned out on the possible trails, about a hundred yards from the canyon. I lay behind the boulder Kearney had pointed to. The others kept going.

I listened to their footsteps move away.

They knew nothing about La Llorona. She was a beautiful woman who had killed her children over a man, and now she roamed the riverbank searching for them, or for some other kids to replace them. That’s what my mother had told me, before she died. She was lying in her bed, and I was six, and she didn’t want me wandering.

She didn’t know I’d watched in the night after the two babies came out of her, with the old woman from up the ranch to help. My mother was very sick. The babies were born too small, the size of small puppies. They were wrapped together in a white cloth and then my father took the bundle outside to the rose garden and pomegranate tree my mother loved.

They couldn’t have been babies yet, with skeletons and hearts, or they would have gone to the priest. But my mother was crying and coughing, and the old woman said in Spanish to my father, “No mas.”

And my father said to her, “Don’t tell anyone. No one. Those Hernandez women keep saying she’s got the evil eye.”

By the time I was eight, my father didn’t care if I wandered off, as long as I did my work. We’d go up to Brush Canyon, the ranch kids. We dug a deep mine, with hammers and picks and shovels, looking for gold. We found piles of mica — fool’s gold we thought we could sell.

The darkness fell completely, and I waited for my eyes to adjust. I heard nothing.

In Bee Canyon, I’d had nothing to dig with, to bury the guy.

I hadn’t gone up there to shoot rabbits. I’d been CHP for about a year then, and I’d come to my father’s house on my day off to help him take out two dead lemon trees. Gophers were bad that year.

I was covered with sweat and dirt and crumbled roots that flew up when we finally pulled out the stumps. We chain-sawed the branches and trunk for firewood, and then I piled the green wood on the south side of the house so it could dry out for my father to burn in winter.

I told him I had trouble with the service revolver. It wasn’t like the rifle I’d been shooting since I was a kid. “The kick is weird,” I said. “And the way you have to look at the target. They keep messing with me at the range. Their favorite word is wetback. Go back to a hoe if you can’t handle a gun.” I felt the rage rise up in my chest like hot coffee swallowed the wrong way. “I want to tell them I’m not used to shooting something that ain’t alive. But I can’t say shit. Hueros.”

“You been shooting all your life,” he said. “A gun’s a gun. Go up there in the hills and find something to aim at.”

I put my T-shirt back on, even though my skin was sticky, and then my shoulder holster. I grabbed a flannel shirt to cover the holster. I was still sweating when I left the grove.

I walked a couple miles that day, along the river where the wet sand smelled like aspirin from the willows, and then I turned toward the hills. The cattle grazed up there, three thousand acres or so. We had three hundred acres of citrus.

I remember I was already thinking about the phantom when I crossed the tracks, because he’d thrown rocks a couple of times by then and downed the smudge pots. I’d seen a bridge made out of vines and cable over the arroyo under the train tracks, but everyone said that was old, from a Vietnam vet.

I figured I’d get far enough into Bee Canyon so no one would hear me shoot at beer cans set up on a rock.

I found tall Coors cans in the shade under a little pepper tree, like I knew I would. In high school, lots of people came up here to drink beer. Always Coors and Marlboros and weed. The cans were old and faded. Perfect to shoot.

I stuck four fingers into the four sharp tab holes and kept walking. A car was parked in the dirt at the mouth of the canyon. But maybe the people had gone back toward the river. I listened. No laughter from the canyon. It was dim up there now.

I kept going, and then I heard a huffing — huh, huh, huh. Breath like a hammer. Huh, huh, huh.

Then I heard, “What the fuck! What the fuck you lookin at? What’s a nigger doin up here in Orange County!”

I dropped the cans in the sand. I was off-duty. I didn’t go on for two hours.

I kept walking, up past a flat section of sand near the deep scour where the rainwater poured down, and then around another boulder.

A white guy with long brown hair hanging down his bare back was straddling a girl. He looked up the canyon. He hadn’t seen me. But he stood up.

She looked dead. Dried blood dark under her nose. Denim skirt hiked up around her waist, her legs open, black hair there, her feet black on the bottom. He hunched over and zipped up, the muscles in his back jerking like snakes, and then turned and saw me.

“What the hell?”

My CHP voice came out before I could think. “Sir, I need you to tell me what’s going on here.”

“You speak English?”

My face burned. “Sir, is this—”

“You’re not dark enough to be that nigger’s brother. He was right up there. Watching. Freak.”

“What’s wrong with the young lady?” I hadn’t moved. Felt like my feet were sinking into the dirt.

“Young lady? Why you talkin like you’re on TV?”

“I’m law enforcement, sir.”

“No you’re not. You’re just nosy.”

“Is she okay?”

He laughed. “She was supposed to do a slow ride. Take it easy. But the stupid chick OD’d. Couldn’t handle the trip. Couldn’t handle the ride, man. Like it’s your fuckin business. Wetback.” He pushed his hair behind his ears and started walking toward me. He must have been about thirty-five, forty. His skin was lined around his eyes like birds had clawed him deep.

Was he another phantom? Shit. Was he the vet who’d built the bridge?

The girl hadn’t moved. What if she was dead? I made my voice louder. “I need you to turn around and walk over to that rock and put your hands on the rock.” I didn’t have handcuffs. I might have baling wire in my pocket.

“You need to go back to Mexico.”

“Sir.”

I didn’t move. There was no sound except his feet on the sand. Soft like ground corn.

“Sir.” He was close enough that I could see his eyes were green.

People said the real phantom was a guy who still wanted to live in the jungle. Maybe if I brought up the war he’d know I respected him.

“Are you a veteran, sir?”

“Fuck Nam. I don’t need to be a Vietnam vet to kill somebody.”

He was about ten feet from me now. Kill her? Kill me?

Then the girl made a noise. She coughed. Her throat rasped like it was full of sand. He grinned at me and said, “Hey, kid, you just get here from Tijuana? You swum all the way up that river and this is where you made it?”

I looked past him. The girl raised up on one elbow and tried to stand. She scrabbled against the boulder and he turned back fast and covered the ground. He said, “I’m not done with you.”

He drew back his arm and punched her in the face. Like she was a man. The sound of her nose breaking. A popping. Then an animal moan — like a coyote, full in the throat — but not her. From above us. The phantom. He moaned again, like he couldn’t stand it when the girl fell.

I pulled my service revolver from the shoulder holster under my vest. It was silent now above us. The girl lay still, but her breath was in her throat like a saw blade in wood.

He wouldn’t shut up. He just kept talking when he came back toward me. “What the fuck are you gonna do with that? You steal that from a cowboy, Frito? From an American? Ay yi yi yi — you think you’re the Frito Bandito?” He was three feet away and reached out his hand. A turquoise ring on his finger. “You better give that to somebody who knows how to use it, chico.”

My mother called me chavalito. When I came in at night smelling of the river.

I shot him in the chest like he was the silhouette at the range. But he didn’t move sideways. He fell straight back.

No sound from above. The girl pushed up again, on all fours, like a dog. She crouched and swayed and stared at my face, squinting, the blood crusting like dried ketchup under her nose and mouth. Like a movie. I went over to the guy and stared at the hole in his chest. The blood running down his ribs. Different blood.

I looked up to say, “Miss, I’m gonna call—” She ran sideways past me, bumping past the rock.

Then the car started up at the bottom of the canyon and the tires popped over the gravel like firecrackers and I jumped.

I must have stood there for a while, because five flies landed on his chest, green as fake emeralds moving slowly over his blood. I would lose my job over this asshole. I would go to prison.

His shoulder was sweaty and hot. I grasped it to see if the bullet had gone through. It was gone. Went into the soft sand that smelled of animal waste and creosote roots. I’d never find it.

I put the shoulder back down. I didn’t look at the open mouth. I didn’t have time to go back to the ranch for a shovel. I found a stick and started trying to dig in the damp sand where the water had pooled long ago. Deep enough to keep him from coyotes, was all I thought.

A scraping above me, and granite pebbles falling.

A pick slid down the steep hillside and landed a few feet away. Homemade. Metal wired to a piece of crudely sanded wood. Like someone had thrown an anchor overboard.

Once it was all the way night, I thought that if he came my way, down this trail that led to the east, to the golf course, I would grab him, take the knife, cuff him, and keep my face down. It was dark. He wouldn’t see me.

But he never came. He knew exactly where we were and what we were doing.

I’d slept, off and on, hearing small rustlings of rabbits and birds in the darkness. Twice I heard metal scrape against rock. One of the other men.

The phantom hadn’t gone toward the river, or the freeway, or the golf course. He was probably watching us, even now at daybreak, when the sun rose over the Chino Hills and the brush glittered with dew like glass shards.

Kearney and George and the others came down the trail and I fell in. We drank some water and ate some stuff they’d packed, and then we fanned out to look for fresh signs. Footprints in the moisture, broken stems, all the things Kearney had used for years to track Mexicans on the border. Mexicans trying to swim up the rivers and walk over the desert. Beaners. Wetbacks.

I was out of breath. Hungry. Bending down so far my back hurt, remembering the short-handled hoe my father kept — the one he’d brought from Red Camp and propped in the corner of the porch so he wouldn’t forget it. He was awake, a few miles away, brewing his coffee in the dented aluminum pot, making sure the veladora was lit, looking out the window at the pomegranate tree. He didn’t know I was here — so close to him.

“Hey!” one of the deputies called softly.

Fresh tracks.

We followed for two miles, but we ended up at the mouth of Brush Canyon. Kearney said he knew it all along. He and two guys started up from the bottom, and George circled up and worked his way down. I was behind him, and then one guy hollered out, “There he is!”

We looked down the steep canyon slope. A head popped out of a heap of brush. Black curly hair covered with dust. He was moving.

Everybody drew their guns. I had mine aimed at his back. His shirt was so tattered and patched it was like a weird quilt. He had a knife. He had the pick. I’d left it there when I was done. I’d wiped off my prints with my flannel shirt. His shirt was even worse in front when he turned to see the rest of us.

Don’t look at me, I was thinking. Don’t do it. Don’t look in my eyes and then start yelling about what happened.

He was hunched over. I saw his face. He wasn’t some little mocoso. He was a grown man. But the sound he’d made, up in Bee Canyon, when he heard the punch. The bones breaking. He’d been beaten. I’m not through with you. That sound.

But he had a knife. I couldn’t move toward him, but if he saw me and shouted, “No! I didn’t kill him! He did it!” I’d have to shoot him. Justifiable.

My gun was pointed at his face.

“I quit! I quit!” he screamed, his eyes on the ground. He wouldn’t look up.

Kearney holstered his gun. “Come on out, James. We aren’t gonna hurt you.”

The phantom. He was about five-seven, slight, but it was his face. A little kid. He bowed his head. “I quit,” he said.

I holstered my gun and turned around. It felt like someone sitting on my chest, hammering at the bone running down the middle of me. Like I always felt when I’d done something wrong. I looked out over the canyon. Down there were bones, and skeletons, everywhere under the dirt. The babies. The guy. My mother’s bones, in the churchyard. The Indians who lived here first. The cows and coyotes and rabbits. The skulls rolling down the arroyos if it ever rained for forty days and forty nights.

They questioned him for a long time.

He was James Horton Jr. He’d been born in Keithville, Louisiana. He was forty-two. He’d been riding the rails since he was twelve.

I pictured the arm throwing the rock at my Nova.

“When I was little, I never had no time to play. I never had a chance to get into mischief, like Dennis the Menace. That’s what I was doin with the rocks.”

But why throw them at cars?

“The cars were going so fast. They made me mad, because they were going so fast.”

Why did he live in the canyons?

He didn’t want to be around people.

He ate black walnuts in fall, lemons and oranges, the goat he found dead, and food from the trash.

“You coulda killed someone,” one of the deputies said, and I felt the hammering again, lighter, but still there.

“I quit, I quit,” he said again softly.

They tested him for insanity, and he pleaded, and I never heard anything about him again.

My father had a heart attack in 1979, and we buried him next to my mother. Our house was empty for a year and then it burned down. They said transients were living there, but Bryant Ranch was already sold by the grandson of the woman who’d built the place and planted all the pomegranate trees.

Last week I saw an ad in the newspaper. Executives Prefer Bryant Ranch, it said, with pictures of huge houses. Close to Brush Canyon Park, Box Canyon Park, and Golf.

I left my apartment in Santa Ana and drove up there in my old Nova. I’m in the Old Farts Car Club and we restore classics.

I drove along La Palma. The river was much calmer now because of flood control. I used to imagine the phantom in some locked room in a mental ward. No river in his sight. Back then, I kept thinking Louisiana — he must have grown up beside the Mississippi. Huck Finn and shit like that — Dennis the Menace. But I looked up Keithville, and it was near the Red River.

He must have spent years looking out a window somewhere, waiting until he wasn’t insane. No rocks. No water. No hiding except under a bed, when people came and scared you and said, “I’m not done with you yet.”

I drove up to Bee Canyon, but it was just a scar in the hills. There were bones in every canyon of the world.

The big gray and beige and rust stuccoed houses, the roads and sidewalks and the same plants over and over. Purple agapanthus, society garlic that stunk up the median, and fountain grass, which my father always thought was a weed. The only people walking were two women in workout clothes with iPods.

It was late morning, and I still worked the evening shift, so I drove as close as I could to the Santa Ana River, off and on the freeways. The water was wild and free in the canyon, and then corralled with cement banks, tamed by the time it got to Newport and emptied into the ocean.

I drove around Fashion Island, and the South Coast Plaza. No island. No coast. Just rooms. Big rooms. Asphalt like black carpet around them.

On the way back, I drove up into Santiago Canyon, Modjeska Canyon, and I ended up in Santa Ana. The canyon turned into flatlands covered with rooms. My three rooms. The same number my father had.

I didn’t want people around me either.

I liked working at night.

I partnered with Carl McGaugh for the last three years. He was only twenty-five. Didn’t say much. His dad was Irish.

I drove. Driving the freeways was like swimming in the river, the currents and the way you had to move. But the freeways were choked with traffic all the time now. The phantom wouldn’t have any trouble getting onto the median. He could walk through the stopped cars easy. But if he stood up with a rock, somebody would shoot him. In a heartbeat. Because what people cared most about was their vehicles. Their Beemers and Hummers and Acuras. Their property. No room for mischief when someone would pull out a semiautomatic weapon from the passenger seat for any reason at all.

Down in Capistrano by Robert S. Levinson

San Juan Capistrano

Ondel Cream, the chief deputy working the overnight shift at the Orange County Central Men’s Jail in Santa Ana, owed Judge Oliver Wendell Knott a favor, which is why the judge was able to slip in after hours without a security search or a need to sign the visitor’s log, a phony Vandyke beard and wraparound sunglasses sheltering his identity from the security cameras.

“Least I can ever do for you, Your Honor,” Ondel said for the third or fourth time while guiding the judge to one of the second-floor Module-R conference rooms reserved for pretrial maximum-security inmates and sexual predators, where he’d stashed Quentin Lomax twelve minutes earlier, wrists cuffed to the anchored cast-iron table, ankles secured to the castiron chair.

Ondel said, “What you went and done for my baby brother Marcus, a righteous act not another judge woulda done,” his hoarse baritone echoing in concert with the squeak of his rubber-soled combat boots along a dimly lit corridor that reeked of a disinfectant not strong enough to entirely eliminate the layers of prisoner sweat insulting the judge’s nose.

Judge Knott smiled benignly, wished the deputy would shut up, but he knew better than to destroy the mood or otherwise disrupt the bond that grew between them after he’d sized up the deputy as somebody he could manipulate to his advantage and dismissed the drunk driving charge hanging over Ondel Cream’s brother.

He said, not for the first time, “Marcus struck me as a young man who deserved a second chance more than a third strike,” and, adding a fresh bit of friendship massage, “especially given an upstanding, God-fearing sibling like you to keep him grounded on the road to good citizenship.”

“Amen, Judge, sir, amen to that, and you seeing it for the truth. Marcus, he ain’t had nothing hard to drink ever since, but only once where I needed to slap him around some to keep a shot-a the hard stuff from cursing his lips.”

They reached the conference room.

Before turning the key in the lock, Ondel assured him, “You’ll be safe as my own son in there, Judge, what with Lomax secured tighter than a virgin’s precious jewel. It’s a precaution worth taking, since no telling what all could happen if that murdering cuss was crazy enough and free enough to go for your jugular.”

“Lomax hasn’t been tried and convicted yet in my courtroom, Ondel, so fairness dictates we withhold judgment until all the evidence is in and a jury renders its verdict.”

“What you say, Judge, but you might sing a different song if you saw him up close here, days in and out, and listened to his mouthings. Ain’t for no reason at all he’s kept in solitary, in the block reserved for the worst of the worst. And even the worst of the worst, they scared of Lomax just being so close to themselves. Mark my words, no jury is ever not gonna escape seeing that... Fifteen minutes, you said you need?”

“Maybe twenty, but certainly no longer.”

The deputy raised his wristwatch to his eyes and squinted after the time. “Need to get Lomax back where he belongs before the next bed check, so that works out fine. I’ll be outside keeping guard, so knock if you finish up your business early or need me any reason at all, Your Honor. A shout and I’ll come running.”

Quentin Lomax eased back as far as the security restraints allowed and studied the judge through deep-rooted black eyes fired by a mixture of curiosity and contempt. They seemed a mismatch with the oversized features of his pockmarked face and a wrestler’s body stretching the limits of his orange jumpsuit.

“I don’t know you from spit or why you’re here all dressed up like it’s Halloween, thinking the beard’s fooling anybody,” he said. “Trick or treat or whatever in hell’s going on, you’re getting not a word from me without my lawyer, so who in hell are you anyway?”

The judge stroked his fingers over the Vandyke to strengthen the spirit gum holding it in place, removed the sunglasses and parked them inside the breast pocket of his jacket.

He flicked a smile and said, “If you’re a praying man, I’d be inclined to say I’m the answer to your prayers, Mr. Lomax.”

“And if I ain’t?”

“I’d say the same thing.”

“That sort of gag goes with the whiskers... or you on something, mister? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Of course you do, Mr. Lomax. We both know the murder you’re about to stand trial for was not your first murder, only your sloppiest. A particularly bloody crime you won’t slip out from under, the way you have more than a few times in the past.”

“Hurry this up, will ya? I gotta piss real bad.”

“Your lawyer, Mr. Amos Alonzo Waldorf, will be up to his usual courtroom stall tactics, but in the end they’ll all be struck down, one after the next, and, it follows, justice will prevail. You’ll be judged guilty and sentenced to death by lethal injection. Appeals will keep you alive for some years. They’ll be struck down one after the next, and in time your mother will cry over your grave, but—”

“Leave my mother out of this!”

Lomax’s face turned a fiery red. He pushed up from the chair and, shouting curses, aimed a headbutt at the judge, falling short by two or three feet because of the cuffs and leg irons. He dropped back into the chair, struggling for breath, his eyes promising some future menace.

Knott, who’d stayed still as a statue through the attack, answered him with a smile. “May I continue?”

“Screw you. I want my lawyer.”

“As I was about to say, it doesn’t have to be like that, Mr. Lomax. You take my offer seriously, you’ll be a free man before you know it, out from under the shadow of prosecution. Back to making regular visits to your mother at the Sunny Acres nursing home. All your other habits, good and bad.”

“Who are you to talk? My judge?”

“Yes. Your jury and executioner as well, if it comes to that. Are you ready to listen?”

“What the hell. Spill it.”

When the judge was finished, Lomax said, “That’s all of it? I send him sailing over the edge, this Arthur Six guy, and—”

“Exactly, Mr. Lomax. Arthur Six dies, you will go free,” Judge Knott said, making it sound like an elementary exercise in justice. “The Arthur Six jury made a mockery of my courtroom when it bought into the so-called Unwritten Law invoked by his crafty lawyers, who cloaked Six in sympathy, laid the blame on the victims, and convinced enough of the jurors to cause a hung jury.”

“My legal beagle’s no amateur, so maybe I take my chances with a jury. They vote my way — what then? It becomes my turn. You set me up for a whack, send me sailing over the edge?”

“You keep your end of the bargain, Mr. Lomax, I’ll keep mine.”

“How much time I got before you need my answer?”

“Until I reach the door and call for the guard,” the judge said, rising.

At Central Justice Center in Santa Ana later that week, the judge flipped through some legal paperwork before he spit a little cough into his fist and announced, “Allowing that the defendant has never been tried, much less convicted, of the multitudinous crimes the district attorney maintains were of his doing, the court denies the prosecution’s motion to remand the defendant to custody. Bail is set at...”

Lomax missed how much he’d have to fork over for his freedom, too busy bear hugging his attorney, like it was Amos Alzono Waldorf who’d pulled it off, at the same time thinking how Judge Knott had delivered on his part of their deal, how now it was Quentin Lomax’s turn.

He already knew where to find Arthur Six.

The judge had seen to that.

Six was down south in San Juan Capistrano, at the mission, working as a gardener and handyman in exchange for room and board in the friars’ quarters; hiding his history as an accused murderer under an assumed name, John Brown; Lomax chuckled every time he thought about it on the train ride down, trying to figure how much imagination it took to come up with an alias like John Brown, as in not very much imagination at all.

Stepping off the Amtrak at the station, he considered what name he might pick for himself, it ever came to that, not all that convinced he’d want to give up Quentin Lomax, mainly because that would also mean giving up the rep he’d worked damn hard to achieve over all these years with clients who paid top dollar to get the kind of contract service that would never track back to them.

Even that last friggin contract.

A fluke he got caught, but no way he’d let it go to touch tag with the people who’d put their confidence in him, paid him the cash money.

One of the reasons he gave in to Judge Knott, to prevent something being said in open court that would implicate them.

Sail Arthur Six, a.k.a. John Brown, over the edge?

A cheap price to pay for the privilege.

Lomax fell in with the tourists window-shopping the antique stores and souvenir shops along the main drag leading to Mission San Juan Capistrano. He bought himself through the gate for seven bucks and split from the pack to go looking for Six, confident someone who couldn’t do better than John Brown for an alias was no master of disguise.

He found Six after fifteen minutes of wandering around what the tour brochure said was ten acres of gardens. Six was on his knees, pulling weeds and puttering around inside a vegetable garden. Except for the Charlie Chaplin — Hitler kind of mustache sitting slightly crooked under his eagle beak of a nose and dirt smears on his forehead and cheeks where he had been swiping off sweat with his muddy gloves, he looked exactly like his mug shot.

“Growing tomatoes, looks like,” Lomax said, starting up small talk while heading toward Six from the sheltered archway, a distance of about twenty feet along the adobe path.

In no hurry.

Checking his bomber jacket pocket for the switchblade he planned to exercise on Six’s throat.

Saying, “Always taste better off the vine; what other vegetables?”

“Fruit,” Six said, sizing him up. “Tomatoes are a fruit, not a vegetable. Nothing a lot of people realize, but they are.”

“I learn something new every day... Sounds like you know your fruits,” Lomax said.

“And vegetables. Over there, peas. There, carrots. Two favorites of the friars. This is their private garden, where the flower gardens, the bougainvilleas, and the water lilies floating in the Moorish fountain center of the patio area are also meant to be enjoyed by one and all, the visitors like you.”

“Corn?” Lomax searched over his shoulders for signs of tourist traffic.

Nothing.

He fingered the switchblade, figuring to have Six sailing over the edge in another minute, minute and a half, himself out and gone, back to the Amtrak station and waiting for his train to L.A. before anyone stumbled into the body.

Six said, “The brothers eat store-bought corn now, after growing it for a while a lot of years ago. They love it, but don’t like the way the stalks grow and, they say, distract from the beauty, the peace and solitude of the mission.” He planted his trowel in a water channel and, rising, brushed himself off and stashed his gloves in his overalls.

There wasn’t a lot to him, maybe 120 pounds stretched over two or three inches less than six feet. A strong breeze might be able to carry him to the Pacific, Lomax decided.

Only a few yards from him now, he tightened his grip on the switchblade, saying, “I thought I’d see the swallows they’re always writing about. How the swallows been coming to Mission San Juan Capistrano year in and year out, every year, for hundreds of years.”

“That happens in March, not this time of year,” Six replied. “And it’s not happening so much in March anymore, either, though no one knows why they stopped coming.” He held out his left palm like a traffic cop, adding, “And you can stop right there, no funny moves, you know what’s good for you.”

He raised his other arm to give Lomax a better look at the .22 caliber automatic he had aimed at him, its blue steel barrel reflecting the bright sunlight.

“What’s that all about?” Lomax asked, hanging onto his cool, fishing for time while his mind raced after a way to do Six before he could squeeze the trigger, the look on Six’s face telling him the poor schnook was working on a different unwritten law here, the law of survival, and would have no problem adding a third corpse to his count. “Some kind of joke you like to play on strangers who stray off the guided tour?”

“Nothing personal. A matter of life and death. Quentin Lomax dies so that Arthur Six can go on living. Simple as that.”

Right then, hearing Six speak his name, Lomax recognized that Judge Knott had played him for a sap. Set him up. He said, “You know who I am.”

“Yes, and don’t move another inch, or else. I know how to shoot this thing. See? The safety is off and all.”

“You were expecting me.”

“I was. You take a pretty nice picture, by the way, although your smile leaves a lot to be desired. Braces growing up, they would have helped.”

“Braces cost money... So, you also know what brought me down to Capistrano?”

“A ruse. The judge said you’d be real easy for him to trick. He was right as rain.”

“Who are you? Einstein? Thinking no one will ever come along and see through that stupid mustache you grew like a vegetable, raise a holy stink about you being here, Mr. Arthur Six with that dumb-ass John Brown name?”

“The law says I’m innocent until I’m proven guilty. Besides, I’m in a place where kindness, love, and forgiveness are the rule.”

“And killing me, they’ll love and forgive you for that?”

“The way it looks — got attacked by this loony, speaking gibberish and pointing a gun at me for no reason at all. We got to fighting, the gun went off, and—”

“John!” A friar in a hooded cassock called for Arthur Six from across the courtyard, distracting him.

Lomax leaped forward, barreling hard into Six, wrestling him to the ground.

Six bear-hugged Lomax as they rolled in the dirt, knocking over the seed packages on sticks set in the ground to spot the lima beans, the potatoes.

Lomax was too strong for him.

He broke free and forged possession of the .22, gripped it by its pearl handle, and stuck the automatic under Six’s chin. Said, “You want to keep your head attached to your body, say whatever it takes to make Friar Tuck go away, unless you want me using him for target practice.”

“Then what?” Six struggled for breath; barely able to get the question out.

“What do you think?”

“You look surprised to see me, Your Honor.”

“Surprised to see you inside my home, Mr. Lomax, enjoying the comforts of my bar,” Judge Knott said, his face a study in irritation and no small amount of concern; eyes blinking furiously.

“French windows. You should remember to always shut and lock ’em up tight if you’re going out. Otherwise, they’re an open invitation to burglars, or worse... The mixed nuts on the stale side; you might want to do something about that too, next time you go grocery shopping.”

“Full of handy hints. A regular Martha Stewart, are you?”

“Hardly. Martha Stewart, she served time, not me. Prison’s not where I’m heading, if your word’s better’n your bowl of mixed nuts.”

“Given this unexpected visit — shall I assume that you’ve upheld your part of our arrangement?”

“Days ago.”

“I’ve seen nothing about Arthur Six reported on the news.”

“Or John Brown, dumb alias he picked. And you won’t, never. I taught him the Jimmy Hoffa trick.”

The judge half-smiled, nodded understanding. “Excellent,” he said. “Then you’re free to assume your case will be fast-tracked by me out of my courtroom and the charges dropped by the district attorney once and for good. My early congratulations to you, Mr. Lomax.”

“How many strings you pulling to make that happen, Your Honor?”

“Mr. Lomax, do I ask you how you conduct your business?”

“No offense. Only curious. Wondering if it’s as many strings as for Arthur Six.”

“For Arthur Six? Precisely what is it you think you know, Mr. Lomax?”

“Only what Six thought he knew and was saying to me before words failed him along with everything else.”

“Care to share?”

“Six told me you got him a hung jury, not his lawyer, by the way you kept shutting down the DA’s people and holding onto his leash through intimidation; said you told him you would keep the DA from following through on retrying his sorry ass if he was game for doing something for you in trade.”

“Did he say what the trade might be?”

“Nah, like it was some giant, friggin state secret between you and him, but he said he wrote it all down and gave it to someone he trusted to pass on to the news bloodhounds if it ever turned out you broke your word to him and didn’t make the charge blow away for good, or if something happened to him, like it was about to.”

“Such poppycock. Who would take the word of an absent, accused murderer facing a retrial for killing his wife and her lover over that of a distinguished jurist, an Orange County Superior Court judge who has served with honor and distinction for twenty-four years?”

“I suppose anybody who decided to run against you in next year’s election, figuring a little scandal is good for the ballot box, but I can see by looking at you that ain’t gonna be the case, right, Your Honor?”

Judge Knott gave Lomax the reassurances he wanted, several times, Lomax putting the question to him from different directions until, professing satisfaction, he allowed their conversation to dwindle into small talk. He poured himself another scotch, picked his way through the nut bowl, and left the same way he had entered, making a show of shutting the French window and testing the safety lock. A conspiratorial wink and an animated thumbs-up became the last the judge saw of him before he disappeared into the moonless night.

The judge spent a motionless minute before he blew a fat breath across the room and followed it to the bar.

A tall vodka helped him collect his nerves; then another before he reached after his cell phone and had the service connect him with Mission San Juan Capistrano; asked the birdlike soprano who answered the call if he might speak with John Brown.

No, sorry, she said.

Dear John disappeared earlier in the week without notice.

No telling when he might be back, if ever, God bless him.

The judge’s next call was to the district atorney at his private number.

It was time to collect on a few past favors due.

He wanted the book closed on Six, wanted Six out of his courtroom as well as his life, should the media ever come around asking embarrassing questions, like why so many postponements on a trial date or why no bench warrant issued for the arrest of a defendant who’d obviously fled. And he had to make good on his deal with Lomax, construct a wall of comfort between them until he could make other arrangements.

“Spence, it’s Ollie Knott here,” he said into the phone, and after some pleasantries, “Spence, I need a little help from my friend...”

A week later, Lomax was in the courtroom with his impeccably groomed showboat of an $800-an-hour lawyer, Amos Alonzo Waldorf, Esq., exuding a cocky confidence from a back row seat as the judge mechanically breezed through the first call on a morning calendar bursting with the usual run of motions and pleadings until Mary Rose Treeloar, the greenest lawyer on the DA’s staff, rose to request a dismissal.

A sleepy-eyed, overweight brunette in a cheap pinstriped suit that told everything there was to know about her pay grade, Mary Rose was facing the judge for the first time.

Her stammer betrayed her unfamiliarity with the Arthur Six case as she alternated reading from her yellow pad and fumbling after documents in a modest stack of manila file folders with twitchy smiles for Judge Knott that seemed to beg for his understanding.

The judge made a show of asking tough questions, an interrogation that soon had the young, inexperienced DA on the edge of tears. He had bet himself he would have her crying outright before second morning call, at the same time lamenting the sad quality of the lawyers being turned out nowadays by even the highest-rated universities. She wasn’t the first to be put to his test. She wouldn’t be his last.

He scored earlier than expected.

He had the tears spilling over her cheeks shortly before he eased his reign of terror, accepted the DA’s decision against retrying Arthur Six, and removed the trial date from his calendar, saying, “I am similarly convinced the lack of any additional evidence against Mr. Six suggests we would only be tossing substantially more good money after bad and wasting valuable time that can be put to better use by this court.”

Turning contemptuous eyes on Fix’s preening lawyer, who was smiling and nodding approval as if he had brought about this happy turn, Judge Knott observed for the record, “I didn’t entirely buy into your shoddy excuse for your client’s absence, sir. His face was not one I needed to see again and further delays would have changed nothing, but I strongly urge you to never again let something like this occur in my courtroom.”

Next, the judge moved up hearing a dismissal motion from Amos Alonzo Waldorf to just before his toilet break, instead of waiting until after lunch, where it was listed on the day’s calendar.

This threw Mary Rose into a mild asthma attack.

When she finished gasping for air, she requested that the matter be delayed until after the lunch break, as scheduled, or, that failing, second call.

She said, “I got assigned only this morning, the absolute last minute, Your Honor,” her voice an exercise in fear. “I haven’t had enough time as of yet to completely review the Lomax files and compile my notes and—”

Judge Knott shut Mary Rose down with a school crossing guard’s gesture, looked at her like he was examining a wart. “All interested parties are present and accounted for, Miss Treeloar. Request denied, and I suggest in the future you work longer and harder on your preparation skills.”

He struck a pose, his elbows on the bench, hands forming a pyramid, as Waldorf marched forward, adjusted his $3,000 Armani suit jacket, fussed a bit with his understated silk tie and matching pocket handkerchief, and launched into a catalog of reasons and citations for dismissing the murder charge against his client, the put-upon and wrongfully accused Mr. Quentin Lomax, making a crown jewel of every word he spoke.

Mary Rose stammered and stuttered through a set of responses that earned frequent yawns from the judge. He knocked them down, one after another, before hammering her quiet, declaring, “Miss Treeloar, Mr. Waldorf’s persuasive arguments coupled with your ineptness oblige me to find in his favor. Motion to dismiss granted.”

Mary Rose promptly suffered another asthma attack.

Lomax pulled Waldorf to him and planted a fat kiss on the lawyer’s mouth.

A few nights later, the look on Judge Knott’s face reminded Lomax of that girl lawyer he had turned into hamburger, the poor kid in a zombie-state and sucking up the oxygen, her skin the color of chalk when the paramedics rolled her out of the courtroom. Knott looked scared, wearing his nerves like a heavy-duty aftershave, like he knew what had brought Lomax uninvited into his home again; like he knew it wasn’t just for another taste of his expensive hooch or another trip through the nut bowl.

“Glad to see you did something about the locks on those French windows, Your Honor, but you shouldn’t-a stopped there,” Lomax said. “This place is easy pickings even for an amateur; easier to crack than an egg.”

The judge, his composure back in harness, replied, “Having concluded our business, I did not expect another visit from you, Mr. Lomax.”

“Not exactly concluded, though. Some loose ends.”

“How so these loose ends?” He soldiered across the den, maneuvered behind the bar, helped himself to a vodka, and offered a pour to Lomax.

“Stickin with the scotch,” Lomax said. “I don’t ever mix my liquors, any more than I ever mix business with pleasure... Cheers!” He clanked glasses with the judge.

“And these loose ends of yours, are they business or pleasure, Mr. Lomax?”

Lomax blew out an untranslatable exclamation. “You got me there, Your Honor. Now I think about it, a little-a both. You call it. Which you wanna hear first?”

“You choose,” Judge Knott answered, circling back around the bar and settling in one of the leather recliners facing the giant plasma TV screen occupying most of the paneled wall across from the stone-faced fireplace. He used the remote to turn on the picture and mute the sound.

“That old movies channel, huh? Me too, whenever I got time,” Lomax said. “The flick where Jimmy Cagney’s in the joint, listening to his boyhood chum, the priest, trying to talk him into something. Never get tired of watching that one whenever it’s on.”

“Pat O’Brien.”

“As the priest, yeah, sort of like you’ll be now, while I need to confess something to you.” Lomax moved his eyes away from the judge and focused on his drink. “It’s like this, Your Honor — what I said to you before about Arthur Six telling me he gave a letter to a friend, for the friend to make public if you didn’t square your deal with him?”

“Go on.”

“Was a lie I invented. Insurance you would go ahead and square your deal with Arthur Six, get him off the hook on the murder-one charges. You came through with flying colors, so points for that. Any man who finds himself with a cheating bitch of a wife, he deserves all the sympathy and understanding he can get.”

The judge couldn’t hide his annoyance. “That was definitely none of your business, Mr. Lomax. Our agreement called for you to deal with Mr. Six in a forceful manner that would allow me to unburden you of a trial and conviction of murder. Not Arthur Six, Mr. Lomax. You.”

“Except you made it my business, Your Honor, which gets us to my second lie, where I said Arthur Six didn’t tell me what the deal was he made with you? He did, though. How he was supposed to kill me when I caught up with him down in Capistrano? How you had it all arranged with him? That wasn’t a very nice trick to play on me, Your Honor, not so very nice at all.”

The judge sprang to his feet, fists clenched and pounding the air, his head spinning out of control. Shrieking, “There are lies and then there are damned lies! That’s a damned lie Six fed you, Mr. Lomax, clearly to save his own skin. Our deal involved a reasonable sum of money to be paid me for my cooperation in the courtroom, on Arthur Six’s promise he would kill no more, never again. Were he here now, I would call him a liar to his face.” He sank back into the recliner.

“Why not?” Lomax said. He pointed to the archway that led to the central corridor, calling, “C’mon out and show your face, Artie.”

Arthur Six materialized to the invitation.

Judge Knott groaned.

Lomax laughed. “What say, Artie? Which one of you’s been playing the truth for a sucker?”

“You heard it all already, Quentin. That answer’s in my checkbook. A big fat goose egg for a balance, not a golden goose. What little I had all went for lawyers already, why I was going to need a public defender if a new trial came about.”

“Him, Judge Knott, having you send me sailing over the edge?”

“An answer to my prayer, the judge’s offer. Before I knew you, Quentin, or I never would’ve gone along in the first place.”

“This is so much damned nonsense,” the judge said, rising. “What’s done is done. You’re both out from under, free men, and that’s what should matter most to you.”

“Until when?” Lomax said. “For how long? Until you can line up your next patsies, who’ll come after me and Artie so you can protect your precious reputation?”

“I’ll give you my word,” the judge said.

“Why’s that? Run out of two dollar bills?” Lomax advanced on the judge with the open switchblade he’d held out of sight until now. “You let me down, so I gotta put you down like the dog you are.”

He flew the blade across Judge Knott’s neck, opening a river of blood that the judge covered with both hands seconds before his legs gave out. He dropped to the floor, knees first, then over into a fetal position.

“And that’s that,” Lomax said. “We’re outta here, Artie.”

“Not exactly,” Six said. He had pulled his .22 automatic from somewhere and was aiming it at Lomax. “Fair’s fair, Quentin. The judge ultimately honored the arrangement he and I had, so I would feel less of a man, truly guilty, if I were to ignore my responsibility toward him. It would be a sin I’d carry into the confessional, and with me for the rest of my life.”

“Jesus, Artie, you wouldn’t, would you?”

“What do you think?” Arthur Six said.

Diverters by Rob Roberge

Tustin

The day had started out with me shitting blood. A little later, I was shivering in Doc’s passenger seat under the warm July California sun, asking Doc about the blood while we were on the way to Tustin to see this friend of his who was supposed to help us get some morphine.

Doc and I called each other friends, but we both knew without saying that we were drug buddies. That if I didn’t have the five hundred bucks in my pocket to pry this hospice-care friend of his from her ethics long enough to give us some terminal cancer patient’s painkillers, Doc would be in this car alone, or with some other human ATM machine. He had the connection, I had the money — and this made us, however temporarily, partners in the world.

I was worried the blood could be an ulcer, maybe something more serious. Lately, I hadn’t been able to get much more than Vicodin for my habit, and it had been corroding away at my stomach, a million tiny pickaxes mining the walls of my guts, so I figured it had caused an ulcer, caused me to rip and bleed into myself and leak slowly away from the inside out. But, too, my mind slid easily to thoughts of cancer and that I could be dying, at least dying faster or in a different way than from addiction. I’d asked my girlfriend Amber and she figured it was nothing. So I asked Doc, “Is blood out of your ass always bad news?”

“It’s never good news,” he said. “I didn’t ask if it was ever good.”

“It’s not ever good,” he said.

I took a deep breath. I had the start of what would be full-blown dope sickness in a few hours. The metallic taste at the back of my mouth, the chills. Soon there’d be sweats. Then puke and diarrhea and my body making a tortured fist of itself. I needed exactly what we were going to get. While, of course, realizing it was what we were going to get that caused this. Every day becomes the same cycle of desperate need met with desperate opposition and sickness. I couldn’t tell today from tomorrow anymore than you can tell the sea from the horizon in a marine-layer fog. It all just blurs together.

“But is it always bad?”

“Not always,” he said. “But it’s never good, so disavow yourself of that silliness right now.”

I looked at him.

He said, “This is your ass and your blood, I’m guessing?”

Sometimes things are simple. Doc was called Doc because he used to be a doctor. Maybe he still was — I wasn’t sure, but I knew he wasn’t allowed to practice medicine, at least not in California. He wrote some bad scripts, and he ended up losing his license. I think it may only have been suspended. But if anyone official was checking on him, he wasn’t living too cleanly. He’d been able to hook me up until the day before with a pretty steady flow of Vicodin, but that only kept me going and didn’t really make me high anymore. Without it, I was sick — a shivering noxious presence to all who had the bad luck or bad sense to enter the debris field I’d made of my life. With it, I could function, more or less, get to another day of clawing myself through the hours, wishing the next day would be better, but not seeing any reason it would be. I looked out the window at the towns under the 22 freeway. We’d left Long Beach maybe twenty minutes before and now we were passing the cluster of suburban sprawl of north Orange County, flashing by under an army of tall palms, blown by the offshore winds. It was a beautiful place, even from the freeway. Roof-tops of homes glided under us to the right — to the left, a series of car dealerships in Garden Grove, and just east of them, out of sight from the freeway, a series of Vietnamese pho joints and body-piercing parlors in strip malls.

I met Doc when he was still able to get OxyContin, eighty milligrams for a while and then forties, but eventually his source dried up. Oxy was a dream for a newly off-the-wagon user like me — a time-released chemical equivalent of heroin, without the messy, sloppy, desperate need to fix with needles. Crush a couple of eighty milligrams to start your high right off, and then top them off with a couple of unbroken eighties for the time-release, and you could live your life in comfort and at something resembling peace. But as they always do, the drugs had stopped working and then, worse, they dried up and the mirage of beauty and ease they gave, they took away with them.

Right now, though, Doc had talked about an old friend he used to work with who could hook us up with some morphine and maybe more in Tustin and was I in? I heard morphine and said yes and committed my last five hundred bucks from a poker win a few nights before. Normally I need a lot more info, but most of Doc’s friends, even the addicts, were very white collar. They were all liars and cheats, but generally not as dangerous as street dope fiends. Plus, we were talking about morphine. The risk-reward was too good and I just jumped without a second thought, quick as a seismograph at ground zero.

Doc said, “You and Amber been, you know, doing anything?”

“What?”

“From what I hear, strippers like to strap one on now and again.”

Amber did, in fact, like to strap one on now and again. And that had caused some blood, but only a little, and only right after. Not for days at a time afterward. “Dude, that’s a stereotype,” I said.

“I’m your doctor.”

“You’re not my doctor.”

“Well, I’m a doctor,” he said.

“Are you?”

“Nevertheless,” he said, “I have been an internist. I have a certain amount of experience with insertables. I’ve seen an astounding amount of things up guy’s assholes. And women’s assholes. You can tell me. Plus, I need to know the facts to know if this blood is an issue. “

“Okay, fine,” I said. “Yes, she has fucked me with a strap-on. Happy?”

“Don’t get so defensive, man. I’m your doctor.”

I let it slip that time.

Doc said, “When was the last time?”

“For the blood?”

“No,” he said, smiling. “When you let your pervert girlfriend sodomize you.” I looked at him and he smiled and laughed. “You need to lighten up.” He was driving and not looking at the road much as he hunted for his smokes in the backseat. I gripped the door handle and flashed visions of car wrecks and blood. Being a passenger scared the shit out of me — if I had any, I would have taken a few Valium before getting in the car. He said, “Everybody loves something up their ass during sex.”

“Really?”

“It can sure as hell seem that way when you work the ER.”

“I can’t talk to you at all, man.”

“C’mon,” he said, “I’m trying to help. When was the last... penetration?”

“Weeks ago.”

“Okay,” he said. “And this blood?”

“The last few days.”

“Today?”

I nodded.

“Well, it’s not that,” he said. “Are you shitting blood? Or is there blood in your stool?”

“What’s the difference?”

“Color.”

“What?”

“It’s an issue. What color is the blood?”

“Red,” I replied. “Blood colored.”

Doc nodded. He put in a CD — Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers’ Rockin’ and Romance. He cracked the window and lit an American Spirit, then offered me one.

I shook my head. I had quit smoking almost ten years before. One of the hardest things I ever did. Doc had quit for years and only recently started again since his divorce. I really would have liked one then, but I held out. “Shit causes cancer, dude.”

“Media hype,” Doc said. “And red isn’t the only color blood can be. Especially on the inside.”

“So is red good?”

“Nothing is good,” Doc said. “No blood in your shit is good. That’s our goal. Our vision. An America with no blood in our shit. That’s the ticket I’m running on. The no-blood-in-your-ass ticket.”

“Red is less bad?”

“That is true,” he said. “Red is much less bad. If the blood in your stool is a greasy-looking dark red, almost black, that is a major and immediate concern.”

“And this?”

He shrugged. “Probably nothing. How many Vicodin a day are you taking?”

I was, until a week ago, taking about thirty, but I was stealing, when I could, from Doc’s stash, when he had a stash, so I went with a low estimate. Our supply had run out five days ago and I’d halved my intake from twenty, to ten, to five, to only three the day before. My eyes felt like sandpaper and the suffocating heat in my head made every pump of my heart throb painfully all over my body. Like every nerve ending burned with Fourth of July sparklers. “Ten to twenty if I can. Less, lately.”

“That’s probably it right there,” he said.

Jonathan was singing about his jeans and how they were a-fraying as I looked out the window at the blur of objects racing by.

I knew I couldn’t continue on the way I was going. My short-range plan involved the morphine and, after that, a meeting with this guy Leroy Marcus about some pot he wanted me to sell. The morphine was supposed to be my last for a while — the plan was to use it and slowly wean myself off, taking Vicodin when I had to, in order to detox as painlessly as possible and start clean. Go back to meetings. Be humble and start over. I’d done it before. I could do it again.

I had, at that point, quit various opiates somewhere between thirty and fifty times in my life. Which meant thirty to fifty intentional detoxes. Withdrawals that made you sorry for ever being born — which sometimes seemed the point of the whole thing. The self-loathing burning hot enough to make the sorrows you suffered from withdrawal seem something like justice for the liar and cheat you’d allowed yourself to become. The twisted core of wrongness at your center everywhere you went was something that made suffering seem valid and just, in some way.

“I can’t drop all five hundred on the morphine,” I said.

“You have to.”

“I can’t. I need at least a couple hundred for tonight.”

Doc said, “You got a game?”

I shook my head. “You know Leroy Marcus?”

“That ’roid rage guy?”

Leroy had an earned reputation as a guy you didn’t want to fuck with. He’d been a boxer and had ended up recently with an ultimate fighting obsession. Leroy liked violence — seemed to like getting hurt as much as he liked hurting people, which made dealing with him an uneasy proposition at best. Someone who’s not afraid of getting hurt, someone who actually welcomes the pain and raw savagery of the fight, is not someone you want to face off with. My dad told me when I was a kid, you never throw a punch unless you’re willing to kill the guy — because he might be willing to kill you. Leroy probably got the same lesson somewhere along the line. But he threw punches and I didn’t.

“That’s him,” I said.

“What the fuck do you have going with that beast?”

“A pot deal,” I said. “I need at least two hundred to sell some medical-quality shit he has.”

“You smoking pot?”

I shook my head. “Pot’s dollar signs to me. I’m trying to make some money.”

“Pot’s legal now, dude.”

“Not legal,” I said.

“More or less. Any fuck off the street can get a script for it. How you going to make money?”

“Buying a couple hundred off him and selling it to a buddy in Long Beach for about double. Quick cash. No risk.”

“You can’t trust Leroy. There’s plenty of risk just walking in his door.”

That was true enough. “I need money,” I said.

Doc smoked the end of his cigarette and rubbed it out on the outside of his door — the side of his car was streaked with the ends of his butts. He’d pinch out the tobacco and let the filters pile up at his feet.

“We’re scoring morphine — a real fucking drug — in Tustin,” he said.

“Are we?”

“We are.”

I felt the sickness overcoming me. “We better be.”

“My point is,” Doc said, “we’ll get enough to make some money off it, if you want.”

I had tried over the years to make money with heroin, with Dilaudid, with OxyContin, and a variety of other opiates. All I ever did was end up doing them all, either fast or slowly. But they never made it, for me, from intent to deal to ever actually dealing.

Doc said, “What if we spend your whole five hundred bucks on the painkillers?”

“Then I’ll do them.”

He looked hard at me.

I said, “I’ll do half of them.”

“Right, but what if you let me tuck a couple hundred aside and deal that.”

“For both of us?”

“Of course for both of us, man,” he said. “Who you going to trust to make a buck? Me, or Leroy Marcus?”

Neither of you, I thought. Leroy’s a brutal beast of a businessman and you’re a dope fiend. But given the choice, I answered honestly. “I’d rather be in business with you.”

Doc merged off 22 onto 55 South, where it splits going to Riverside one way and Orange County the other, and we were headed toward Tustin, just a few miles away. We seemed to have reached some tacit agreement about the extra two hundred and the profit on the deal.

“So, tell me about your connection,” I said.

“She’s a hospice worker with a terminal case.”

“And?”

“She’s a diverter. She’s helping us out.”

Diverter is the medical term, and the narc term, for a medical professional who diverts pain meds from the people who need them. The language of distance and euphemism. They’re thieves, and people like me and Doc pay them to steal from people in pain. I try not to have any more illusions about what I do. I used to be able to lie about it — to others, to myself. But after seven years clean, it’s hard to see this as anything but a hideous failure for me as a human being. My next drug possession case puts me at what’s known at the SAP pits, SAP being short for Substance Abuse Program. I can’t do this much longer — one way or the other.

“How terminal?” I asked him.

“What?”

“How terminal a case?”

“There aren’t degrees of terminal,” Doc said. “Trust me, I’m a doctor.”

“I mean how close to dead is this person?” I don’t know why it mattered to me, but it did. As if the closer to dead they were, the less I’d be ripping them off, somehow.

“Close enough to be designated terminal and have 24/7 hospice care,” Doc said. “That’s usually pretty late in the game.”

I nodded.

Doc said, “And it usually means a lot of pain meds.”

The drug talk, along with my system being weaned off meds the last few days, started to make me feel cravings that hurt. But they were cravings with hope — that tingle when you’re close to the drugs, in both time and distance. “Any chance for Dilaudids?”

Doc shrugged as we reached the two Santa Ana/Tustin exits for 17th Street. The second exit heads south toward Tustin, and we took that one. “Hard to say,” Doc said, lighting another cigarette. “Pain-management theory these days shies away from Dilaudids. But we should get plenty of morphine.”

When I still shot up, which I hadn’t done in this last slip from sobriety, so it had been over seven years before, Dilaudids were like gold. Generally, they’re about five to eight times more powerful than morphine, and you don’t need to cook them — you can do what’s known as a cold shake. Which is pretty much what it sounds like. You put a pill in some distilled water and shake it until it dissolves, and you’re ready to put it in the cotton and up the syringe and go.

“Listen,” Doc said, “there’s something difficult we might have to do.”

“Difficult how?”

“It’s a relatively new procedure. I haven’t asked Sandra if he’s on it or not, but this guy may have a permanent morphine vial implanted near the base of his spine.”

“Lucky bastard,” I said, and I sort of meant it.

“It’s the wave of the future. Going to hurt people like you and me. Pills and shit like that are going the way of the horseless carriage.”

“I don’t follow.”

“All drugs are going to be time-released,” Doc said. “Soon, they’re won’t be any pills to steal.”

“You said there’d be morphine at this place, right?”

“Right,” Doc said. “But, worst case scenario, you are going to have to cut the vial out of this guy.”

“I thought cancer patients had IV drips and patches and stuff.”

“They do, but in addition to that, depending on how far gone he is, he might have this semipermanent vial.”

“Why do I have to cut it out?”

“Well, no one’s saying for sure it’s there.”

“If it’s there, why the fuck am I doing the cutting?”

Doc shrugged. “Because I don’t want to.”

And that was that — his connection, his call. “But he may not have one of these, right?”

“He may, he may not. But you might want to wish he does — concentrated morphine drip.”

“I’m not cutting open some poor fuck who’s about to die,” I said.

“Well, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. I was just warning you about some of the potential difficulties.”

I shook my head and looked at the faces of the other people driving out on the freeway. I wondered what they were talking about. What they were thinking they might have to do in the next half hour and how sick they made themselves.

As we got off the freeway, I realized how tense I was, realized I hadn’t been taking regular breaths, realized I’d actually been holding my breath. I tried to take in a few deep breaths while Doc swung across four lanes of 17th Street.

“Be careful,” I warned.

“It’s important to blend in,” Doc said. “Cops pull over people like you and me when they’re doing the speed limit. People drive like maniacs here. So should we, if we want to be left alone.” Someone honked and Doc gave them the finger.

I turned around and looked at the WELCOME TO TUSTIN sign behind us... This side was for the people just leaving Tustin and it read: Work Where You Must But Live and Shop in Tustin!

“Ah, yes,” Doc said. “Rustin’ in Tustin.”

“You from here?”

“That I am. And a more dull town, you’d be hard pressed to find.”

“Good punk scene here,” I said. “Wasn’t there?” I was from the East Coast and most of my knowledge of the West Coast scene had come from fanzines like Forced Exposure and Flipside.

“True,” Doc replied. “The old Safari Sam’s in Huntington Beach saved our lives. But before that it was strip malls and before that it was orange groves.” He pointed out the window at the strip malls, banks, and yogurt shops that tumored all over state roads from here to Florida and back. “Thirty-five years ago, when I was a kid, this was ten miles of orange groves.”

A Vons slid by on our right. I took nervous breaths and felt my heart beat like a rabbit’s in my chest. A church with a high-peaked roof stood on our left with an announcement out front: WHY DO THEY WANT US DEAD? What the Bible says sbout Islam.

Doc said, “Almost there.”

I nodded and made several more attempts at a deep breath.

He took a left on Mauve and a sign reading NOT A THROUGH STREET greeted us as we headed down to the second-to-last house on the right. There was a Toyota in the driveway and we pulled up next to it, blocking one of the garage sides. I pointed, said, “What if someone needs to get out?”

Doc shook his head. “No one needs to get out. Look. This is a call I only get a couple times a year — the situation has to be perfect. We are going into this house and we are going to score, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Like I said, this is rare. The patient is alone, they probably don’t have much family, they may have none. My connection pretty much has the run of the place. It’s like an opiate candy store in there and we are here to clean them out, understand?”

It was starting to sound too good, but it also had a momentum that I couldn’t pull against. Plus, I needed to get high pretty soon or I’d be a wreck. I wasn’t in a position to argue.

“Give me the money,” Doc said.

I reached into my front pocket, took out a rolled wad of moist bills, and gave them to him.

Doc said, “Dude, you carry your money like a ten-year-old.”

“Sorry.”

“You have to stop apologizing for everything too.”

“Uhm... sorry?”

He counted out the bills and folded and rearranged them.

“Tell you what. After we make a few bucks here — will you use a fucking proper billfold if I buy you one?”

“Is that like a wallet?”

He shook his head. “The way you carry money, no one’s ever going to take you seriously.”

“People take money seriously — they don’t seem to care how it’s folded.”

“You’re wrong,” Doc said. He lit a cigarette, took a deep drag. Then a second. Then he put the cigarette out. He turned to me. “If anyone asks, you are my assistant.”

“Who’s asking here?”

“Inside. There should only be Sandra, my friend. But if someone is here... family, friend, whatever. I am a medical professional Sandra called for an opinion and you are my assistant. Got it?”

I nodded, looked down at my torn jeans and Chuck Taylors held together with electrical tape on the right toe, and thought, Yeah, medical assistant.

“Great,” Doc said. “Let’s do this.”

The place looked like the Brady Bunch house. Midcentury modern blighted by a 1970s renovation and then left to domestic ghost town since. Doc’s friend Sandra met us at the front door. She wore blue scrubs, with one of those infantilizing tops that nurses and hospital workers all wear these days. The shirt was loitered with Cookie Monsters and Ernies and Berts and some Muppet I didn’t recognize that I figured might be Elmo. I shifted my carry bag to my other hand.

“He’s asleep,” Sandra said quickly, and before I knew it we were in the house, the quiet suburbia of Tustin a whisper of lawn sprinklers and muffled TVs behind the closed door.

Doc introduced me and we shook hands. Sandra wore a stethoscope draped over her shoulders the way people do in movies. I wondered when they stopped wearing them with the earpieces around their neck, the way they did when I was a kid and my mom was an ER nurse. I used to spend the midnight-to-7 a.m. shift with her on nights she couldn’t get our neighbor Doris to watch me and my sister.

The house smelled like the ERs of my childhood — the vague mix of cleaning fluids and urine and medicine and latex and rubbing alcohol. The latex and alcohol gave me the start of a hard-on and I thought about Amber and her latex nurse outfit. Doc grabbed two lollipops out of Sandra’s pocket and gave me one.

“Sandra and I have some business to attend to.”

She gestured upstairs. They headed up, with Doc telling me to wait for them.

“Is there a bathroom down here?” I asked.

Sandra told me to go into the living room and keep going to the right and back.

Which would have been fine, except the living room was where her patient happened to be. I was alone in a room with a dying stranger. The poor bastard. I walked into the room slowly, afraid to startle the guy. There was a stairwell to my right, where Doc had followed Sandra upstairs to wherever they were now, their talk muffled behind walls and hard to distinguish under the gentle drone of an oxygen machine.

As I walked forward, the main floor opened to a kitchen on the left and a huge sunken living room to the right. He was on a hospital-type bed in the middle of the room, facing away from me and toward a big-screen TV that was tuned to some talking heads, but the sound was muted. The oxygen machine droned on, interrupted by the beeps and peeps of a series of diagnostic indicators reading out numbers that were completely meaningless to me.

The man was on his back, his head turned painfully to the side. A tube ran into his mouth. He was motionless, except for a mindless chewing of the tube. His eyes were open, but he didn’t seem to register that I was there. His catheter bag seemed dangerously full and I made a mental note to mention that to Sandra when she came back down. It looked like it was going to spill onto the floor.

I walked by, careful not to step on any of the various wires and tubes on my way to the bathroom.

I closed the door behind me and searched the medicine cabinet. This, too, was mostly a time capsule from 1972. There was a container of Alberto VO5 hair treatment. A glass bottle of Listerine. A jar of Brylcreem. There didn’t seem to be much of anything worth taking, or anything from this century, aside from a bottle with two Xanax that I emptied on the spot. I took a couple of deep breaths and felt the candy Doc had given me in my pocket. I took it out, realizing it was a fentanyl lollipop.

It was supposed to be cherry, but it was really just some odd vaguely red flavor. I licked it for about ten seconds before chewing it to pieces, sliding it down my throat, and waiting for whatever relief it might offer. I sat on the closed toilet lid and read through a series of forgettable New Yorker cartoons. I closed my eyes and let the back of my head rest on the cool tile and waited for the drugs to unclench me. Soon, soon, soon, I told myself. I tried to take deep breaths, and before long I found myself breathing in synch with the oxygen apparatus out in the other room. I opened my eyes. The bathroom was small and dusty. The tub was filled with cobwebs. There was a door that led to a side yard and, out of habit, I made sure it was locked. I took some more breaths and waited for the drugs to have some effect. I left the bathroom, hoping that Doc and Sharon would have returned to save me from being alone with the dying man.

This is where drugs and straight people’s image of drugs tend to part ways: in rooms where life and death are at center stage. This guy, mind-numbed and clearly on his way out, probably would have cut a deal with whatever he believed in just to get a few more days of life — of a life like mine. That’s just fact. It’s not to make me think — think about how wrong what I’m doing is, think about the various paths we follow in life, think about what a stupid man I am for allowing this blessing of life to drift so far away from me. It simply IS.

My life was shit and I’d been there before. All my yesterdays and all my tomorrows were lining up the same — that’s what drugs do to you. They give you this illusion of control. I’d been through it enough to know it was fake. Any decent track record of clean time fucks your relapses. It’s hard to see them as anything but the worst idea you’ve grabbed onto in quite a while.

The guy on the bed would have cut any deal with any devil in the world to trade places with me. The sick thing, and I knew it was sick, was part of me would have traded with him for that steady morphine drip, quietly escorting me out of this life and into something quiet and peaceful, maybe.

He had no chance. I had, depending on the studies you read, probably about a 2 to 3 percent chance to clean up if it was court-ordered, maybe a double-digit chance if I went in myself. I was the walking dead, but that was a lot better than him there in his living room, mindlessly chomping on the sad, gummed tube.

I could still hear Doc and Sandra upstairs — they seemed to maybe be fucking, or at least in a conversational intimacy that suggested fucking. This brought my loneliness crashing down. I hate being left by myself in rooms, being alone where I don’t know anyone. But it could have been worse — at least the dying guy couldn’t talk. And this was a true blessing — he couldn’t move those wet, sad eyes of his to focus on me. If, for a second, I thought he could see me going through his meds, going through what was left of his life so I could get high, I think one of the last things he might have seen was me killing myself. At least I hope it would have been.

On a tray next to the bed was a box that looked like it had scripts in it. Score. They were fentanyl patches. The box had been opened, but there were several others under the bed. I grabbed five boxes. I tried several times to carry a sixth, but I dropped them all when I added one more, so I went with five and brought them back to my carrying bag.

Like so much crap in America, the packaging was obscene and unnecessary. The boxes held six patches each. I tore open the boxes, trying to be quiet, as I wasn’t sure if this was part of the deal with Sandra or not, and neatly stacked the patches until I had thirty of them ready for my bag. I would have taken more — would have taken every single one I could find — but I didn’t want to fuck up our connection for the future. I’d love to be able to say I was thinking about the dying guy — and it does happen, the groundswell of a decent human surfacing in me from time to time, often enough to not seem like a miracle — but the truth is, in that moment, I’d forgotten about him and his need for his own painkillers. He didn’t exist to me.

I chewed another of the fentanyl lollipops I found. They seemed pretty useless. I wondered if they’d put this guy on Oxy or anything good, pillwise, before they had him on the patches and the pops.

Inside the kitchen, next to the coffee cups, I discovered a cabinet filled with bottles of pills. The usual useless suspects — Advil, Tylenol, gaggles of vitamins, and, scattered inside the cabinet, the snake-oil desperation of shark’s fin and whale cartilage and shit like that. I pocketed a bottle with about ten ten-milligram Vicodin and kept scrambling through the cabinet until I found something worthwhile in a near-full jar of eighty-milligram OxyContin. I felt myself smile. I took two of the eighty-milligram tablets, crushing one and allowing the other to slide down my throat and release itself over time.

There was nothing else of value in the cabinet. I swapped the contents of the Advil and OxyContin bottles and kept the Advil in my pocket.

Back in the living room, I looked closely in the guy’s eyes. Nothing registered. He was alive — that’s what the machines seemed to be saying — but there wasn’t much going on. I wondered, again, if I could cut him to get that vial out. I supposed I could — people could do all sorts of things they didn’t want to do in life. Just not think about it, and get it done. It didn’t have to be any more complicated than cutting into a steak, so long as you turned your brain off.

I sat on the couch and looked through a TV Guide. I had no idea about any of the celebrities or shows — that’s another thing dope does. The outside world of news and talk just goes away. You can’t tell anyone a single current event, even if they offer you a million dollars. The world fades and recedes. I glanced around. There was an antique musket over the fireplace. Everything about the house felt old. Murder mysteries piled up by the end table. This guy, or maybe Sandra, really liked mysteries. There had to be a hundred new hardcovers in that room alone. There was Luna’s great Penthouse CD open on the stereo — so, evidence of someone not old too. I suspected the CD was in the machine and I really wanted to hear it, but I didn’t want to do anything wrong, so I didn’t hit play.

I listened more to what Doc and Sandra might be doing. If they were fucking, they were being fairly quiet about it. I fingered the fentanyl patches in my pocket. I wanted to ask Doc how much longer we’d have to wait. I was starting to get nervous. We’d been there for twenty-five minutes and I had no idea if this guy ever had visitors and, if he did, when they might be coming by.

In any event, all this was Doc’s call. I was just along for the ride. I went back into the bathroom, still feeling vaguely sick. Not dope sick anymore — the fentanyl and OxyContin had trickled some help into my blood and brain — but sick from the familiar nerves of being somewhere I didn’t belong. The fear of being caught pressed on me like a vice. The fear of having to cut that guy open to get the morphine vial. But if I had to do it, I would.

I started running the bath. When the water first came out, it was rust brown, and then slowly started to clear. The fentanyl patches work better if you’re warm. I put one on my right arm and one each on my right and left thigh. I took some deep breaths and made the temperature as hot as I could stand it and lowered myself in. Then I took two more eighty-milligram OxyContin.

Twenty minutes later I was nodding off. It felt so good, a warm waking dream, that I was worried I might be close to overdosing. I felt this incredible warmth inside me — it was like my heart was a glowing road flare and my bones were hollowed-out bird bones. Balsa wood. I could have weighed ten pounds, the way I felt. Behind closed eyes I had firework displays blasting in slow motion. My head rolled from one side to the other and it didn’t seem connected by anything thicker than dental floss.

I heard the voices out in the living room. Yelling. A man’s voice I didn’t recognize.

“I said, who the fuck is this?” he screamed.

I heard Sandra’s voice. “He’s a doctor I’m consulting, Rick.”

And I thought, Rick? Who the hell is Rick?

Rick yelled, “Consulting? Is that what the fuck you were doing? Consulting?”

She started to talk again, but the man named Rick said, “Get the fuck downstairs — do you understand?”

I stood on legs that could barely hold me up and banged into the towel rack and knew instantly the noise was too loud — Rick had to hear it even over his yelling. My bag was in there with me, along with twenty-seven patches and the bottle of OxyContin I’d taken and my clothes. I had a few lollipops. I thought about Doc, but didn’t figure I could help him any. It was one of those situations where my presence could only add to the trouble.

Behind that door. Rick. Doc. Sandra. The dying man, helpless to do anything about the anger that swirled around him.

And what would adding me do to the situation? It couldn’t make it better.

I got dressed as quietly and as quickly as I could, without drying off. My clothes stuck to me and I held my arm out to the wall to keep myself upright. I double-checked my bag and made sure I had all the drugs.

The guy kicked the door in as I was trying to reach for it.

“And who the fuck is this wet fucking junkie?”

I closed my eyes for a moment.

“Back in the fucking room, junkie.” Rick had a gun.

The three fentanyl patches clung wetly to me and itched under my clothing. I looked at the side exit and noticed the doorjamb was all but destroyed by termites; it didn’t look like anybody had used the door in a while and it didn’t look like I’d be using it now, either.

I came back into the living room. Rick had Doc and Sandra in front of the TV and told me to stand with them.

“Dude, you took a bath?” Doc said.

I nodded, not wanting or feeling much need to explain.

Rick pointed with his gun hand at Doc. “So, you’re a doctor?”

Doc nodded.

Rick said, “So am I. And THIS,” he said, waving the gun around, “is my hospice connection.” He looked hard at Sandra. “Or did someone forget that?”

“I’m sorry, Rick.”

“Shut the fuck up!” he yelled.

He wasn’t on dope — he paced and chewed his lips and had picker scabs. All speed and meth shit. I can’t take speed freaks — they pounce on everything, darty and unpredictable as bats at sunset.

He walked back and forth. “Yeah, I’ve done fucking seventy-two-hour fucking shifts sewing up idiots like you, you careless fucks. Fucking zombies. You BUY this shit from me, you don’t take it, is that understood? You better believe that’s motherfucking understood.”

He rambled on for a bit, not even looking at us, just screaming, while the oxygen tank and the machines did their job.

“You want to know something about our fucking insides?” Rick said. “My first day in ER they tell me to sew this guy up. They needed to get at the liver and you know what they fucking do to get at a liver? They take the fucking twenty-five feet of your guts and they put them in a silver tray next to you. Upper, lower intestine, all out and throbbing in a bowl, still connected to you but outside your fucking wrecked body, while the doctors fix you idiots. And then they tell me to put it back together and you know how we do that? We just motherfucking DUMP the guts back in, all thirty, forty feet of guts, any old place, and sew the fucker up. It takes about five days, and they’re all back to where they’re supposed to be.”

I was still kind of nodding, having real trouble seeing where the guy was headed with all this. He was reading in my brain like those poetry magnets that kids put together on fridges. Words not adding up to anything. He seemed careless and floppy with the gun and I thought about my dad, a state trooper who had killed at least one man, who I saw kill my dog when he was mad at me when I was a child. Shot my dog in the head and made me bury it as punishment. I thought of that man whose toxic blood ran through my veins and I tried to remember if you rushed guns or knives, and I figured it had to be guns because you’d run away from a knife, for sure.

Rick was in front of the dying man’s bed, now pointing the gun back and forth at all three of us like carny ducks he was getting a bead on. “And you motherfuckers want me to put you back together after you rip me off?”

I still had no idea what he was getting at, but I figured, I’ll try to get this gun and if he kills me, that’s cool. Maybe this is where I die. Everything slowed down. My blood felt like roofing tar. All I saw was that gun and the hands that held it and everything else went away. I figured if I was going to let this fucker shoot me, well, so what? I just didn’t care.

That’s when I jumped into his chest, head down. I slammed him over the side bar of the dying man’s bed and started punching his sides. I know I hit Rick, but I also hit the bed rails, and I hit IV tubes, and I punched the dying man’s chest, and one landed hideously on his ventilator tube. Rick clawed at my back. I felt that he had both hands on my back, which meant he didn’t have the gun. I smelled piss from the catheter bag spilling to the hardwood floor, and a moment later Rick and I were sloshing in it, the dying man’s bed rolling off sideways like a drifting luxury liner, me still punching at Rick’s guts, because that’s where you hurt a man. Idiots punch heads. I’m not tough, but I know that much. I kneed him in the balls repeatedly until he was making sounds like a little kid and spit bubbled slowly from his mouth. I did it hard enough for my knee and thigh to start hurting.

By the time Doc pulled me off of him, I think I was ready to kill the guy. I never saw that coming. I was willing to let him kill me, but I hadn’t anticipated the savage rush I was still feeling. I was briefly sickened by the notion that my father, in all his animal brutality, would have been, for once, proud of me. I felt like puking in a corner.

Doc held the gun and Sandra busily tried to reattach the tubes and wires I had ripped out of her patient, whose machines, I now noticed, were all going faster and louder than before. I didn’t know if the guy was worse off, or if I was just in some adrenaline-fueled space where noises were louder. Rick was at my feet clutching his balls in a puddle of the dying man’s piss. I was drenched from the piss, from the tub, and from sweat, which flowed out of me like my pores had tripled in size.

Doc said, “Sandra, we’re going to take what we came for.”

She nodded. “What about Rick?”

“We could call the cops after we leave,” I suggested.

Sandra shook her head. “If he talks, cops are going to start asking me questions.” She paused. “And then they’ll talk to you.”

We should kill him, I thought. This is not a thread to leave loose. My father would have killed him.

I said, “Maybe you don’t know us as well as you really do. When Rick wakes up, you tell him we’re strangers.”

Doc turned to me. “He’ll come looking for us.”

I said what I was thinking: “It’s that or we kill him. And the biggest idiot cop on the planet would connect the dots to us in one interview with her.” This was when it occurred to me that if we killed Rick, we’d have to kill Sandra. But that would still leave way too much connective tissue from us to this scene. And I couldn’t believe I was even thinking about it. I at least had enough sense to pull back. Rick rolled around semiconscious on the floor. Doc kicked him in the thigh. Then again.

“Fucker.” Doc shook his head. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

I got my bag. Doc put the gun in his pants and started to collect more of the patches and pills from Sandra, who I’m guessing already had the money, or else she was too scared to ask about it.

Regardless, I went out the side door I’d noticed earlier. Doc followed me. I walked by the recycling and garbage cans and out the side yard gate. The driveway had a newer Lincoln next to Doc’s car. Rick’s car, I logged, in case I ever saw it again. I stopped, glanced left, away from the dead end and toward 17th Street, my hair still wet and the sun warming me as I peered down the street and then walked toward Doc’s car, trying hard to look like what I was. A man stepping into the passenger side of a car on a beautiful day.

We got in. Doc took a deep breath and then another and had both hands on the wheel without starting the car. He lit a cigarette and said, “Dude, you were a fucking hero in there.”

I didn’t look in his eyes. Lawn sprinklers whirled on at the neighbor’s house. He fired the ignition and we pulled out of the driveway, away from the Lincoln I hoped to never seen again in my life.

Doc said it again. “Dude, you are fucking heroic.”

And this time, just to shut him up, just so I’d never have to hear it again, I said, “Yeah.”

A Good Day’s Work by Nathan Walpow

Seal Beach

Rae was Hank’s daughter. She had it and she flaunted it, and though some of it was starting to sag, when you’re on the downside of your sixties and living in Leisure World, you can let stuff like that pass.

So when Hank suggested walking to the pier, and that Rae — who’d been staying with him for a month or so — would pick us up and have lunch with us and drive us back, I couldn’t say no. Sheila was still my world, but a guy can have fantasies. So I told Hank yes and we met at the giant metal globe out by the guard gate and crossed to the other side of Seal Beach Boulevard, by the Naval Weapons Station. We figured they were up to something diabolical over there, like in that movie The Mist that Hank got on Netflix, where the military types open a rift to another dimension and giant insects show up and eat everyone. We thought it would be fun watching three-foot dragonflies chasing down the ladies from the quilting club.

Someone coming the other way might’ve thought we were brothers. It was more than just the old-white-haired-man thing. Our faces were the same shape and our eyes the same watery blue and our mustaches were like caterpillars from the same batch. Every once in a while we’d catch someone looking. I’d never had a brother, and it was kind of fun having at least a pretend one.

Maybe a quarter mile along some moron had taped a campaign sign to the fence that kept the riffraff out of the naval base and the overgrown cockroaches in. The senatorial election propaganda had started showing up lately, on bumpers and stuck in lawns and stapled to light poles. I planned on voting for Roger Elliot. He wasn’t much of anything, but his heart seemed in the right place.

The other guy, Tim Swift, was a right-wing maniac better suited for a turn-of-the-century hanging judgeship than the U.S. Senate. Which was how he’d gotten elected to Congress for eleven terms in Orange County. But I guessed it wasn’t enough for him, because since he’d gotten himself nominated for senator, he’d ramped up the Neanderthal stuff. Truth be told, the guy scared me, especially after that reporter got roughed up. Swift was playing for keeps.

The sign taped to the fence was his. A Real American, it said, like Roger Elliot was only playing one on TV. I muttered, “Goddamn politicians.”

Hank looked at the sign. Something started to come over his face, but he got hold of it before I could figure out what it was. I said, “What?” and he said it was nothing and that we should pick up the pace.

Things were a little off the rest of the way down the boulevard and onto Electric Avenue, like I’d stepped over some line I didn’t know about. But just before we hit Main Street he looked at me and said, “Sorry I got weird. Some shit I’m dealing with.”

I almost asked if it was about what had happened back in ’92. Which he didn’t know I knew about. Instead I said, “Want to talk about it?”

“Nah. No big deal. Getting-old shit. If it ain’t one thing it’s another.”

“You can say that again.”

We turned the corner. More foot traffic there on Main. Lots of kids out of school for the summer, yelling and screaming and running around like wild Indians. Lots of young ladies with skimpy outfits. We dodged the kids and took in the view. Just a couple of old coots out for a walk.

After a while we passed the Jack Haley Community Safety Building and stepped onto the pier. My back was hurting a little and my legs a lot, but I didn’t mind. It seemed right. Pain I’d earned, as opposed to the gallbladder I was missing through no fault of my own.

About a third of the way to the end we were suddenly surrounded by kids. Dozens of them, ranging from maybe eight to twelve, boys and girls, all wearing blue bathing suits. All shapes, all sizes, though a few of the girls were starting to develop and looked sort of out of place. There were a couple of adults mixed in, hollering instructions. The whole kit and caboodle swept by us and moved on down the pier. Then they stopped, gathering round one of the adults, listening in varying degrees to what he had to say, and we caught up.

One of the boys caught my eye. He was bigger than the rest. Taller than most, and fat. He had a big stomach and creases in his sides where the top half of his flab met the bottom. He was gingerly walking barefoot along the planks where all the other kids were scampering carefree. He had a little friend, a skinny kid, urging him along. “You’re gonna have to,” the friend said, and the chubby one shook his head. Poor kid. His parents signed him up for swim camp when he wanted nothing else than to sit in his room eating Fiddle Faddle.

We moved on to where most of the fisherman were stationed. Then there were splashes behind us. The kids, bless their hearts, were climbing over the rail and jumping into the water. “Feet together, arms at your sides!” one of the adults yelled. They continued leaping, at least fifteen feet down into the depths, boys and girls, in ones and in twos, some slicing right in and some splashing. They’d pop up and shriek and bob in the water, and they’d look up for their buddies and urge them in.

Over on the other side of the pier, the fat kid’s friend was pulling on his arm.

“Hey!” It was Hank.

I turned back to him. “Yeah?”

“Come on. Let’s grab some coffee.”

There was a Ruby’s at the end of the pier. Assembly-line Americana. We went in and came out a couple of minutes later with our coffees. Passed the fishermen again. Got to where the kids had gathered. Most had jumped, and were paddling in toward the shore. The stragglers were making a big show of leaping in, acting like they were about to and pulling back at the last minute.

The fat kid was still there too. He’d been deserted by his little friend. One of the adults, a guy in his twenties, was eyeing him, like he knew he had to deal with him but was hoping he’d disappear first. Then he sighed and meandered over. “Chuck!”

The kid looked around, like maybe there was another Chuck to take the heat. No luck. He turned to the grown-up. “I don’t want to.”

“We went through this yesterday. You have to. Look, it’s easy. All those little kids did it. All those girls did it. You’re not going to let them show you up, are you?”

“Nope.”

“Then get your big old butt over there and jump on in.” Chuck took a step. Then another. Two more, and he was even with the counselor or lifeguard or whatever he was. He stopped and said, “Do I hafta?”

“Yes, you—”

“No, you don’t,” I said, inserting myself between Chuck and the grownup, whose name, according to his badge, was BILL JAMISON.

“I’ll handle this, sir,” he said.

“You’ve been handling it, and you’re doing a miserable job of it.”

“Sir, please. We’re trained in—”

“Shaming kids into jumping way down into the ocean by saying the girls do it? That doesn’t sound like very good training to me.”

Chuck detected a possible reprieve. He shuffled sideways toward the shore.

“Chuck Pemberton, you stay put,” Bill Jamison ordered. To me, “Look, they know they have to do this when they sign up. It’s no big deal, really. All the kids do it.” A sick little giggle. “I haven’t lost one yet.”

“That supposed to be funny?”

“Shit,” Hank said. “I’m gonna call Rae. Get our asses out of here before you get us arrested.”

Bill Jamison had his hand on the whistle around his neck like he was going to call time-out. “Sir,” he said, “these children are none of your business. And I don’t think it’s right for you to be hanging around like this.”

“Hanging around? Hanging around? Are you playing the child molester card?”

“Well, I... Shit.”

Mission accomplished. Chuck was in full flight toward shore, his chunky frame bouncing along like a cartoon character. Bill Jamison tossed me a truly fine dirty look and took chase.

I turned to Hank. “And that is a good day’s work. Call Rae.”

We’d lived in Seal Beach before, around 1980, when Sheila’s job at the bank took her to Orange County. We moved to Laguna when things got good, and then to Garden Grove when they got not so good. But she always talked about moving back to Seal Beach. Which was a fine ambition. Nice little beach town, clean air, tucked into the armpit — and I mean that in a good way — of Orange County.

First time we lived there, I was friends with Ralph O’Brien. Who got mixed up with a girl half his age. I saved him from his wife finding out, and he owed me one. After we moved I’d still see him a few times a year, and when we came back it was a lot more than that. He’d gotten himself elected to the city council, which meant I learned a lot more than I needed to about Seal Beach politics. He was also still married to the wife, so I figured he was right about still owing me one.

I called him and said it was time I collected. He said, “Anything,” and I told him what I wanted. He said I was out of my fucking mind. Then he said if anyone ever found out where I’d gotten the address he’d cut my balls off. And that he’d call back within the hour. Ralph knew about Jody. Knew that was what was driving me.

He called back as promised and half an hour later I was at a house on Balboa Drive. It had signs for Roger Elliot all over the place. Stuck in the lawn, in the front window, stapled to the mailbox post.

I rang the bell and a man answered. He had what we used to call an Ivy League look, hair cut short, button-down shirt, khaki pants. He looked me over and said, “Yes?”

“You Chuck’s father?”

“You from the swim camp?”

“Not exactly.”

“Look, I already talked to him about it. He’ll do as he’s supposed to.” Then he realized I was a little old to be from the swim camp and his eyes narrowed. “Who are you?”

“I’m the guy who let your kid get away with not doing as he was supposed to.”

“What—”

“Look, Mr. Pemberton, you don’t know me from Adam, and I’m fine to keep it that way. But I’ve got something to say, and I’m going to say it, and if you care about your kid you’ll listen. Don’t make him do things he’s scared to.”

“You’d better get out of here before I call the police.”

“I’ll be gone before they get here. Now listen. The kid doesn’t want to do something dangerous, something scary, don’t make him.”

Some maniac was on his stoop, with no one else around. “Sure, sure,” he said. “Whatever you say.”

“You don’t sound like you mean it.”

“Who are you?”

“A concerned neighbor. Remember. No scary stuff if he doesn’t want to. No man stuff if he doesn’t want to.”

I did a one-eighty and went down the walk and I heard the door close behind me. I was guessing he was still just inside it. Thinking about what I’d said. That was all I could ask for.

Jody was eleven when he went to sleepaway camp. He didn’t want to go. He said the woods and the animals scared him. But I thought it was time he learned to deal with his fears. Sheila wanted to let him stay home. I compromised. Said if he felt the same way after three days, I’d let him come home. It only took two for the bee to find him. We didn’t know he was allergic to bee stings.

Thirty years on, I’d never really gotten over it. Sheila’d done better, far as I could tell, and she kept me together for all those years I acted like a prick. Supported me when I couldn’t keep a job.

Eventually we bought the apartment in Mutual 14 — they call it a co-op, but an apartment’s all it is — and there we were, sixty-six apiece and in a retirement community, and I finally started to let it go. Being there with all those old folks, with my own mortality looming, I’d been able to put things into a little perspective. The thing with Chuck’s father was my first episode since we’d been there.

When I got home Sheila knew something had happened. She asked if I wanted her to stay home from her painting club. Leisure World had a wagonload of clubs. Dance clubs, hobby clubs, nationality clubs, religion clubs, about six dozen fucking clubs.

I put on a happy face and said I’d be fine. She didn’t believe me, but she knew not to push. So she went to her club.

But I wasn’t fine. I was eating myself up from inside. Making myself sick. I went outside for some air. Before I knew it I’d wandered down the road to Hank’s.

He let me in and went for a couple of beers and when we were all arranged in the living room he said, “Something eating you?”

Before I knew it I’d told him the whole Jody story. When I was done, I guess he felt obligated to reveal something to me. He said, “I’ve got something to tell you too.”

“I know,” I replied.

“Know what?”

“What you’re about to tell me.”

“Since when?”

“First time I met you.”

“How?”

“Because when you were in the news everyone told me I looked like you. So I had your face in my head. When I saw you—”

“No one here knows.”

“At Leisure World.”

He nodded. “Except Rae, of course.”

“No reason that should change. Hell, I doubt more than a few even heard of you. The timing. How’d you manage that?”

“Pure dumb luck, I guess.”

The timeline of Terry Bouton’s — that was Hank’s real name — arrest and trial for killing Allison Lopez Bouton, his second wife, pretty much paralleled that of the cops who beat the shit out of Rodney King. The case against him was sloppy, and he got off. It would have caused a lot more of an uproar were it not for the timing. His verdict came in an hour after the cops’, and there was no room on the news for Hank, not with L.A. in flames.

Life and death were on my mind. “Did you do it?”

He leaned back, leaned forward. Took a long pull on his beer.

“Stupid question,” I said. “Forget I asked.”

“It was an accident,” he said.

“Look, let’s just let the last minute or so—”

“I found her with another guy.”

“Hank—”

“But when I busted in... he was... hell, my wife, for Christ’s sake. I just...”

“Look, I—”

“I nearly shot him too.”

“How come you didn’t?”

“Because the bastard jumped up and said neither one of us wanted people to find out what happened there that night. He said he knew a lot of lawyers. He said if I didn’t bring him into it he’d be sure I got off.”

“And you believed him?”

“Didn’t have anything to lose. I got a fair trial, they’d’ve fried me.”

Sounds at the door interrupted. It was Rae. She came in, put down her purse, looked at the two of us.

“He knows,” Hank said.

“I thought he might,” she replied. “What’s he going to do about it?”

“Ask him.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“Nothing.” To Hank, “Nothing’s different.” I stood up. “Thanks for the beer.”

I went home and waited for Sheila to arrive and make everything better.

I didn’t see Hank the next day, or the one after. The one after that, not until 10 at night. There was a bang at the door. I figured it was him. Most people at Leisure World knock politely if they have the gumption to show up unannounced that late.

I pulled the door open and he rushed past me, with Rae in his wake. They waited until I closed the door, then Hank gestured toward the bedroom.

“Out,” I said. “At a play. With the theater club.”

“He tried to kill me.”

“Who did?”

“The guy we were talking about the other day. Had someone try and run me over. In the parking lot at Spaghettini’s.”

I turned to Rae. “That how you see it?”

“Asshole came out of nowhere and nearly clipped him.”

“What kind of car?”

“It was dark. How do I know?”

“It was a big old Lincoln,” Hank said.

“Deliberate?” I asked.

“Could’ve been,” Rae said. “Could’ve not.”

Back to Hank. “Were you loaded?”

“I had a couple of drinks.”

“Four,” Rae said. “You had four.”

“Probably nothing,” I said. “A drunk driver. There’s a million of ’em out there.”

“What if he sends someone else?” Hank said.

“He’s not going to send someone else. I don’t think he sent anyone in the first place. Just lock your doors. I’m sure everything’ll be fine.”

“You don’t understand.”

“What don’t I understand?”

“It’s Tim Swift.”

“What is?”

“The guy, for Christ’s sake. The one who was with Allison. He’s running for Senate now. You’ve seen what a whackjob he’s turned into.”

I remembered watching Channel 6. What that reporter looked like after the little “misunderstanding” at the Swift news conference. “Can’t argue with that.”

“He can’t afford to have me floating around. I’m a loose end.”

Key in the lock. “That’s Sheila,” I said. “She doesn’t need to know about this.”

The door opened. In came Sheila. She took in the three of us. “What’s happening?”

“Hank’s got a gas leak. He came to borrow a wrench.”

She didn’t believe me and knew she wasn’t supposed to. “Did you leave all the windows open to let the gas out?”

“No,” Rae said. “Come on, Dad. We should get back there and make sure the windows are open, before we blow ourselves all to hell.” She grabbed his arm and hustled him out of there. The door shut and I locked it and turned around.

“He forgot his wrench,” Sheila said.

“Damn.”

“You want to tell me about it?”

“Not sure. Let me sleep on it.”

I woke at first light, with a sick feeling in my gut. Like I’d had too much caffeine without any food to absorb it.

Something was missing.

It took me a minute. The crows. That time of morning, they ought to be cawing their damn heads off. But they weren’t, and none of the other birds were on duty either.

I slid out of bed, pulled on some clothes, slipped out the door. It was only a few steps before I rounded the curve and saw Hank’s place. There were three cop cars. Two LW security vehicles. Paramedics. A couple of neighbors standing around gawking. Across the street, someone’s visiting grandbaby was squalling its fool head off. The kind of thing living at Leisure World was supposed to eliminate.

Rae was talking to a couple of cops. She spotted me and ran over. “They—”

“What’s going on?” I said, real loud. “What’s the matter?” I put my arms around her, whispered, “Act dumb.” She stared up at me. “You don’t know anything. Got it?”

Nothing.

“Rae. I need you to focus. You don’t know anything. It’s important. One of the cops is coming over. I need you to get it.”

She straightened her spine. “I got it.”

The cop came near. He was young and he had a mustache and he thought he was hot shit. I asked, “What happened, officer? Is Hank all right?”

“Who are you?”

“A friend.”

“Well, friend, why don’t you just step over there and wait. We’ll get to you soon enough.”

“Certainly, officer.” I put my hands on Rae’s upper arms. Squeezed. “You going to be all right?”

A tiny nod. “Uh-huh.”

“Okay, good. You need anything, you know you can count on Sheila and me.”

“Sir...”

“Right. Over with the others.” I stepped away and began to concoct some useless information to share with the police.

Someone had managed to get past the guard gate and jimmied Hank’s lock and shot him twice. He’d evidently used a silencer, because Rae, sound asleep in her room, didn’t find him until some time later.

It wasn’t going to be long before the police figured out who Hank was. I figured I had a couple of hours head start.

Rae showed up a little after 9. “Last cop just left.”

“Good.”

“We have to get the son of a bitch.”

“And we will.”

Sheila poured her coffee and we sat at the little table in the kitchen. When Sheila’s back was turned Rae gave me a look. “She knows everything,” I said.

“I’m very sorry,” Sheila said.

“Thank you,” Rae said.

“And now I’m going to leave you two to... to do whatever you’re going to do.”

Once she was out the door Rae said, “First, you need to know this. Allison. She stole him from my mom. So I hated her. She deserved what she got. But Dad didn’t kill her. She was dead when he got there.”

“Swift killed her?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Dad never knew. But Swift had been drinking. Maybe it was an accident. Or maybe she was going to declare her love to the whole world, and Swift couldn’t have that.”

“Then why did Hank stand trial?”

She took a deep breath. Looked away. “Blackmail.”

I thought about it. Took a few seconds before things fell into place. “He was willing to shut up for a big chunk of cash. But without a presumed murderer, the cops would’ve dug deeper. They would have found out it was Swift.”

She turned back to me. “Swift says to him, yeah, I’ll give you the money, but you have to let the cops think you did it. Then I’ll make sure you get off. Which I guess he could do. He had people in his pocket. And while the heat was on Dad, he covered his tracks.”

“Swift could have double-crossed him. Let him stand trial, not interfere, and get him convicted.”

“If he had, Dad would’ve told the real story.”

“Who’d have believed him?”

“He had a picture.”

“He just happened to have a camera with him?”

“He was done with her. He was going to divorce her and get back with my mom. He was going to take a picture of them together, and then he was going to use it to get a divorce, and if she complained he was going to let everyone see Swift fucking around. Which Allison didn’t want, because she’d gone and fallen in love with the asshole.”

“But he didn’t get back with your mother.”

“It didn’t work out.”

She slumped in her seat and stared at me with eyes half open. “You don’t seem surprised.”

“About your dad blackmailing that shit Swift? I’m not. Not really.”

“How come?”

“You’re not going to like it.”

“Tell me.”

I stood up. Went and leaned on the kitchen counter. “I thought he’d done it. Gotten away with murder. Up until you told me different a couple of minutes ago. So if I was ready to think him a murderer, then what’s a little blackmail?”

“You thought he did it, but you palled around with him anyway?”

What was I supposed to say? That I still figured I’d killed my son, and I felt some kind of weird kinship with someone who’d killed his wife? She didn’t need to hear that. “I liked him. I got past his past.”

Did she believe me? Maybe she did. It didn’t really matter.

“So now what do we do?” she asked.

“What happened to the picture?”

“He sent it to Swift after he got off and got the money. The negative too.”

“How honorable.”

“That’s the kind of guy Dad was.”

“That’s the kind of guy I am too. But...”

“But what?”

“But self-preservation. If you’re dealing with straight shooters, you shoot straight. If you’re dealing with scum...”

“You think he kept a copy?”

“I would have.”

“Then let’s go look.”

There was nothing in the bedrooms. Nothing in the living room. We moved into the kitchen. “There a junk drawer?” I asked.

She pointed. “Top one on the right.”

It looked promising. All sorts of crap. Take-out menus, pieces of string, toaster instructions. Little bits of plastic that had broken off things. Random tools, including a utility knife. Which I discovered when the blade sliced my pinkie open. I jerked my hand out and wailed and bled all over the counter.

Rae hauled me into the bathroom. She put pressure on and washed the finger and poured hydrogen peroxide over it. After a few minutes the flow turned to an ooze. She went into the medicine cabinet for bandages.

“Just like mine,” I said. “Pills for everything.”

She bandaged me up. Stared at my hand. Then at the medicine cabinet. Tried to retreat from the reality in which her father had been murdered. “I guess we won’t be needing these anymore,” she said, grabbing a bunch of the prescription bottles and tossing them at the wastebasket. But she took too many. One fell to the floor. Another into the sink. As she bent for the one on the floor my eyes went to the one in the sink. Which didn’t have pills in it.

I grabbed it and struggled with the childproof cap until Rae saw what was up and snatched it from my hand. She flipped it open and poured the contents into my palm.

A key. A safe-deposit key.

“Where did he do his banking?” I said.

We tore open a box of canceled checks and I practiced his signature. My cut finger made it harder. But I didn’t think it had to be really close. Who’s going to expect one geezer was trying to get into another’s box? Especially when the first geezer looks a lot like the photo on the second’s driver’s license? Which we grabbed before we headed for the bank.

I was right about the lack of scrutiny. The kid manning the safe-deposit station barely looked at the license or the signature. Two minutes later I was sitting in a little room, alone with the box.

I pulled out some thin gloves I’d found under the kitchen sink. Sooner or later they’d figure out someone had gotten into Hank’s box a couple of hours after he left the planet. I didn’t want them to know it was me. Good thing I watched CSI.

The photo was in an envelope under everything else. A much younger Tim Swift standing next to a bed on which a body lay. You could see the face.

Perfect.

I had Rae make the delivery. The man at its destination would remember me, and I’d be in Seal Beach for a while. Sooner or later he’d run into me, and questions might be asked. I didn’t need them. But he hadn’t seen Rae before. And I was certain she’d be leaving town soon.

But I watched from across the street. When she knocked on the door, Chuck answered. He had a package of CornNuts in his hand.

She asked him something and he shook his head. So she said something else and handed him the envelope with the photo. She spoke again. He nodded. She left.

When she was back in the car she said, “Daddy’ll be home in a bit.”

“Then our work is done.”

I’m guessing some of the Elliot people wanted to let it out immediately. Cooler heads prevailed, and it broke just in time for the evening news cycle. By 8 that night Tim Swift was in custody.

He was out the next morning. His campaign spokesman got on TV and whined about photo manipulation and smear campaigns. The local news people and the cable networks went bananas. Implication and innuendo filled the air. A former staffer came forward and said she’d had an affair with Swift six years back. The TV people all went hysterical.

By late that evening the Swift for Senate campaign had been suspended.

There was no service for Hank. We never saw Rae again, at least not in the flesh. I did spot her a few weeks later on TV, the day Tim Swift gave up his House seat. A reporter asked her how she felt about it and Rae gave him a look that would curdle milk.

Two months later we sold the place at Leisure World. Rented an apartment a lot closer to the water. The sea air is good for us, and so are the younger folks in the building. One couple has a boy of ten or eleven. In the right kind of light, at the right time of day, he reminds me of Jody. And that, I’ve been pleased to discover, makes me feel just fine.