Orange County Noir

Black Star Canyon by Robert Ward

Dana Point

It had been a weird year for Johnny Mavis. First off, his pilot Boys in Blue had gotten picked up by TNT and aired to generally favorable reviews, and a good piece of the audience. By the second week, the show was ranked fifteenth and Johnny was a big shot. Because he had never written a pilot before, he wasn’t actually the show runner — and that’s where his problems began. The guy they brought in to actually run the show, Ray Danes, was an old-timer, and a killer at network politics. Within two months Johnny had gotten into serious jackpots with Danes over the show’s “direction.” Danes wanted a lighter tone, and saw “blue skies” and lots of pastels. Sort of old-school Miami Vicean, though not quite as edgy. But Johnny meant the show to have a nasty satirical edge, the Boys in Blue being dirty, bribe-taking hustlers who were grafting all they could, and wouldn’t think twice about offing anyone who might indict them. The problem was, by the tenth week the show had started to lose steam because it was neither a laugh riot with blue skies nor as mean as, say, The Shield. The war between the two producer’s “visions” for The Boys had to be settled by the network, and the network execs decided to go with the horse they knew best (and who had dirt on them all): old, conniving Ray Danes.

Johnny was given a nice payoff and fired from his own show. He could still make money as a consultant, about five grand a week, but consulting is one thing he would never do. He was persona non-asshole on the lot, as they saying goes. Bye-bye, Johnny; B. Goode.

For the next couple of weeks, Johnny moped around his Laurel Canyon home, watched daytime TV, and hated going down to shop at Bristol Farms because he’d invariably run into people from the show. (Johnny, how you doing? Getting something else set up? Oh, not yet? Well, good luck, kid.) What hurt even worse was now that Danes had control of the show, it was soaring to the top. Rated number three in the U.S.A. Critics loved it for being “a breath of fresh air after the fetid waters of its former incarnation.” Probably win a few Emmys and everyone involved would be gold at the studios. Just what Johnny boy didn’t need to hear.

So what the fuck would he do? Write another pilot? Try and break into features? That was a bitch, and they hardly made anything but dumb teenage movies anymore. What was he going to write about that hadn’t been done. ET as a gay hand puppet who gave teenagers crack and blow jobs from another planet? Nah, too dark again. Black humor was out. The new fake earnestness and paens to lost innocence were back in. The lower the market fell, the more people wanted sunshine, kisses, and the deep bliss of special effects.

So not Johnny’s thing.

He needed a break, a goddamned fresh start, a real honest-to-fucking-God epiphany.

And then, one fine sunny day (like all the other fine sunny days in L.A.), he got it.

An obese writer pal, Terry Dills, a semitalented guy he’d help break into the biz a few years ago, suggested that Johnny use his second home down at Dana Point.

“It’s right on the ocean. You go down there, you surf a little, and you chill. I’ll come down on the weekends and we’ll meet some beach bunnies and party. You’ll get the sour taste of the last gig out of your mouth. And bingo, you’ll come up with something fresh.”

Johnny started to say, “I don’t know, man, Orange County?” but then he thought, Fuck it, why not try something off-beat, new? Orange County, on the beach, beautiful girls, fun-loving surf guys. Frankie and Annette, and Harvey Lembeck as Eric Von Zipper, what could be bad?

“It’s great down there in the O.C.,” Dills said. “You even got a great basketball court like three blocks down from my place. Right over the ocean.”

“Really?” Johnny replied. He had always been a hoops guy; back in high school in Maryland he’d been all-state. But since getting into the TV hustle, he’d had little time to go balling.

“It’s just the thing for you,” Terry said. “Stay as long as you want. You’re going to come back a new man. Trust me, pal.”

Johnny smiled and shook his head. Most of his life he’d been lucky. Yeah, there had been ups and downs, but something had always come along. Taking a little break in the O.C. might be just the ticket.

He was out of Laurel Canyon the very next day.

Dana Point was fantastic. The view from the cliffs, the gorgeous waves splashing, hell, even the name of Dill’s street, Golden Lantern... had a magical quality about it. He could even see it being the title of something... a mystery, a thriller, whatever. He had his payoff money and what was the hurry?

Terry hadn’t bullshitted him about the house, either. Man, a ’20s Craftsman, not one of the hideous architectural monsters he’d seen on the way down near Laguna... where every new architect tried to out-Gehry Frank G. No, this was his kind of place, old school, modest, with a cool front porch and even a ’50s red metal glider. He could just sit out here, roll a joint, and listen to the waves — and what could be better than that?

And for the first week that’s exactly what he did. Drove down to the beach, went body surfing with some local kids, sat on his NBC towel, and watched the birds dive for fish and crabs. Oh man, this was perfect. He shopped, cooked lobster, drank good wine, and communed with good old Johnny boy. He listened to his inner voices, and they told him he was on the right path, that he had become blown up, full of the nauseous gas of self-promotion, that he needed to reduce himself, slim down to human size. And for six days he did. He explored the old house, sat on the glider, got stoned, and listened to his old John Hiatt records, and Miles, and Eric Dolphy. He was there, he thought. The right place, the right time.

And this weekend Terry would come down and they’d check out the clubs near Dana Point, maybe find some blond-haired surfer girls. Oh yeah... this was going to be a fine vacation.

Except Terry Dills didn’t make it down. He had a rewrite for a hot new writer/director named Jake Pyne. Pyne specialized in yuppie thrillers. This one was a story of not-so-nice yuppies being attacked by their own greed in the form of a satanic insurance salesman. Very upscale horror. Terry had a Thursday deadline and no time to party.

“But enjoy, Johnny. Everything’s good, right?”

“Oh yeah, great, bro,” Johnny said. “Love this place.”

But in truth, he was feeling a little bit lonely. After all, he wasn’t exactly freaking Siddhartha. A week or so was all he could take of examining his inner being. He had to face it, the inner guy wasn’t all that well developed anyway.

Sitting alone for a few more days might make him go into another nosedive, one even worse than when they’d tossed him off his own show. Christ — what the hell was he gonna do?

Then he remembered something... the basketball court, only a few minutes away. Yeah, he could get down there, shoot some hoops, nothing like the camaraderie of the ball game. Maybe he’d even make a few new friends. People not in the freaking business.

He ran into the bedroom and changed into his Nikes. He had that feeling inside... the one he’d had as a kid. He couldn’t wait, man. Let this old Baltimore East Coast boy show these O.C. guys how to jack it up.

A few minutes later he was running down the street, bouncing his ball. Just like a happy kid. Not a care in the world.

The court, which was only two blocks from the ocean, was just as cool as he’d imagined. The rims were new and they actually had fresh twine up there. When you played street ball back in N.Y.C. or Baltimore, you NEVER had a net up there. Well, that wasn’t quite true. You had one for about five minutes until one of the players decided to take it down and put it up somewhere closer to his ’hood.

Man, these ballers from Dana Point were polite.

But they could play. There were some big white boys, two who wore UCLA letter jackets, and another one — a Czech named Toni — who had started at Pepperdine. They could run and shoot, but they played a West Coast finesse ball. More about speed than rebounds, muscle, or trash talk. All three of the guys were in their late twenties, and in law school. In between plays and during water breaks they talked about making partner at Jones Gray as soon as possible. Turned out JG, as the blond guy Mark said, was paying, “$160,000 for first-year employees.” The other two guys nodded and Toni added, “Why I love America.” They all laughed at that.

All but the fourth guy, a big wide Italian guy named Eddie Ivarone. Eddie wore painter’s pants — not retro painter’s pants that you bought at Old Navy but real ones covered with real paint. This was because Eddie was a housepainter. He was working on a condo unit right nearby, he explained, down near the lighthouse. He didn’t live that close, though.

“My pad is over in Mission Viejo,” he said. “Drive over here to show these yuppies who is really the court king.”

The three law students laughed a little, and one of them, Joel, another blond guy with a space between his front two teeth, patted Eddie on his wide shoulders. “He’s a beast,” he said in a slightly patronizing way.

Right away Johnny liked Ivarone. Even just shooting around, he knew Eddie was the kind of guy who would be a workhorse under the basket, dig out the rebounds and pass to Johnny to pump it back up. Eddie had a friend with him too, a short guy with a bald head named Stenz. Stenz didn’t say much but Johnny recognized the type. Catholic kid who was fast and tough. Maybe the three of them could give the taller, sleeker lawyers a good game.

The first few games of three-on-three half-court ball didn’t start that way. The three ex — college players had obviously played together for a while. Their passing and teamwork were excellent. They played without any noticeable emotion, just efficiently, and effectively. In no time at all the first two half-court games of 15 were over, and the scores weren’t pretty. 15-5, 15-9, and 15–10.

Johnny, Eddie, and Stenz were improving, but not by that much. Then Johnny had an idea.

He called a time-out and brought his team over to the water fountain.

“We’re guarding the wrong guys,” he said. “Eddie should be on Toni. He’s their scorer but you can muscle him outside. If he drives, I’ll give you help. Stenz, you wait in the middle for the kick-out pass. When it comes, grab it.”

The two housepainters looked at one another and shrugged.

“What the fuck?” Stenz said. “I’m up for it.”

They went back on the court with their new defensive lineup, and the results were stunning. With Eddie’s big body on him, Toni couldn’t get underneath. He had to shoot outside, and just as Johnny had predicted he was mostly short with his shots. Without their driving attack the three lawyers started gunning from long range. They missed shot after shot, and lost 15-7.

Johnny felt good about the win, especially his part in figuring it out. But Eddie and Stenz were ecstatic. They trash talked the lawyers, who took it all with a grain of salt, or at least pretended to.

After gulping down some more water, the six guys played again. This time the three grad students worked harder, and came closer. But a beautiful pass from Eddie to Johnny under the bucket, threaded right through two other players, set up the winning score, and Johnny didn’t miss.

Once again, Eddie and Stenz carried their celebration to the extreme, but Johnny got a kick out of it. The lawyers seemed like the passionless guys who would probably end up working in property law or corporate tax write-offs.

So he was happy to win, and even felt better for Eddie and Stenz, working guys who probably spent most of their lives on the short end of the stick. It was nice to see them celebrating, even if Eddie was carrying it a bit over the top.

By the end of the long day, Johnny was happy he had come. It’d been a really good afternoon, and he felt fulfilled.

He started to say goodbye to everyone, when Eddie put his arm over his shoulder.

“Hey, man let’s not break up the team yet.”

Johnny was touched by the bigger man’s obvious affection.

“Sorry, I haven’t played for a while,” he replied. “Gotta watch the knees.”

“No, no, no,” Eddie said. “I’m played out too, but we oughta get us some beers. There’s a place not far away, off Harbor Drive. Called Minelli’s. Great subs, pizza, pasta. Let me and Stenz buy you a cold one.”

Johnny was going to say thanks but no thanks. As much as he’d enjoyed playing with these guys, he wasn’t sure he wanted to spend the evening with them. Still, he didn’t relish going back to Terry’s house and staring at the moon again.

“Okay, I’ll come down for a little while. Can’t stay out too late, though. Got work tomorrow.”

“Yeah, that’s fine, bud,” Eddie said. “A couple of brews and we’re on our way home. Leave your car here. We’ll get you back.”

Johnny was going to say no to that too. He wasn’t at all sure he wouldn’t feel trapped by these people... but what the hell, he didn’t want to be a snob. After all, they had been a great team.

“All right. Why not?’

“All fucking right!” Eddie said, scratching his five-o’clock shadow. “The team endures.”

“The Big Lebowski,” Johnny said. “You guys like that movie?”

“Like it?” Eddie Ivarone said. “We are it.”

They all laughed at that one and then walked over to Eddie’s primered 1971 Dodge Super Bee.

“Hop in the trusty chariot,” Eddie said. “Cause this is the way we roll.”

The pizza place was exactly as Johnny had imagined it, dark, wooden booths, pitchers of beer, and mediocre pizza. There was a pool table and a jukebox, and a small bar with five stools. In short, a dump, the kind of place Johnny had hung out in when he was a kid in Baltimore. The kind of a place he’d wanted to escape from. But today, saved from the agonies of solitude, Johnny decided to embrace Eddie and Stenz, and have a good old-fashioned drinking session, with pitchers of beer and discussions of old-time TV shows, and after a few rounds, a little singing along with the jukebox. It was all great fun, and soon Eddie’s girl came by, an attractive, if slightly sluttish woman named Connie. She had short blond hair, and a long, sexy body which she poured into tight jeans and an Oakland Raiders T-shirt.

She was a waitress at a nearby Denny’s, and when she smiled she showed a little too much gum, but she was fun, warm, and liked Johnny right away. He could tell because when he got around to mentioning what he did for a living, the two men were impressed: a TV producer.

“Whoa, Eddie, do you know what we have here? A real Hollywood celebrity. Man, are we lucky or what?” she teased.

Eddie and Stenz looked at Johnny to see how he would respond to her baiting, and when he laughed and wagged a finger at her, they were relieved, and began doing their little Hollywood routine too.

“Oh, I’ll have the café con leche jamba juice with the cappuccino latte,” Eddie said.

“Yeah, and I’ll have the profiterole with a side of endive gooseberry... whatever,” Stenz added, not quite able to pull off the joke.

“You got me,” Johnny said. “Guilty as charged. Just the other day I ate a fig tart for breakfast.”

“Gag me,” Connie said.

“With a pomegranate smoothie chaser,” Johnny said.

They all laughed again, and Johnny could see that they were pleased by his good sportsmanship.

“That must be great to be a producer on TV,” Eddie said. “But what the heck does a producer do anyway?”

“He gets all the money together, silly,” Connie said.

Johnny laughed but shook his head. “No, no, no. That’s what a movie producer does. But in TV, the networks and the studios put up the money. In TV, the producer is really a writer. All those names you see at the end of the show, Story Editor, Co-Producer, Co — Executive Producer, and Executive Producer, all those guys are really the show’s writers.”

“Ohhh,” Connie said. “So that’s what you are? A writer?”

“Yep,” Johnny replied, taking another sip of beer.

Connie nodded like she got it, but Eddie shook his head.

“Gee, I read in the paper that TV producers make a ton of money. But I never knew they were just writers.”

There was a long silence after that.

Johnny, who had heard this before, and from people much better educated than his current crew, just smiled.

“All that for just knowing words,” Stenz said.

“Yeah, that’s kinda weird,” Eddie said.

“For God’s sake, you guys,” Connie said, starting to feel embarrassed, “you are being so rude.”

“No, it’s fine,” Johnny said. “I think the guys here don’t quite understand. How do you think a script gets done?”

“Well, I never thought about it that much,” Eddie answered. “But I guess like they set up a situation for the actors, who kind of make up the dialogue to fit, you know... that situation.”

“Yeah, they improvise the dialogue,” Stenz said. “Right?”

“Wrong,” Johnny said. “Every word that is spoken on 99 percent of all TV shows is written in the script, and the actors have no freedom to improvise.”

“Yeah, but I seen actors come on Leno and say they wrote their scenes,” Eddie said.

“Yeah, they say it sometimes,” Johnny said. “But that’s not true. They say it because they want the audience to think they do everything. But trust me, most actors couldn’t write a decent scene much less a whole script.”

“Huh,” Eddie said. “So the word guy is the boss, then?”

“Yep,” Johnny said. “But we don’t make a big deal out of it. The audience likes to think the whole thing is real, so we don’t go running around telling them that we did it all.”

“I’ll be damned. And so all the stories and stuff, that’s the writers too?”

“Yep, all that stuff.”

“Hmmmm,” Eddie said. He looked as though he was having a hard time believing it.

“Well, here’s to the word man,” Connie said, toasting Johnny.

Eddie and Stenz joined in but they didn’t look all that happy about it.

Soon the talk drifted to other subjects, though, like who was the sexiest actress on TV, and they laughed and ate pizza and drank beer. By the end of the night Johnny was almost feeling like they could become friends. What the hell, it was only going to be for a week or so anyway.

During the next three days Johnny worked up a routine. First thing in the morning, a brisk walk on the beach, then get back and drink his second cup of coffee and work on his new idea... an idea he had gotten talking to Eddie and the rest for the past few days. It was called Hometown, and it was about a guy who comes back to his working-class hometown, after living in a flashy place like L.A., and once there finds himself getting involved with the kind of working-class people he thought he’d left behind. He even had the log line for it. They say you can’t go home again, but what if home is the only place left go to?

Oh yeah, the networks would love that. It would be a hit... he could feel it. A show with heart, and a lot of the heart would be from Eddie and Stenz and Con. He’d owe them and he wouldn’t forget them when the show made it either. He’d find a way to make them participants in the profits. Not a lot of money, obviously, but not a trifle either. He’d be a mensch and take care of them. Though he hadn’t told them any of this yet. No use starting a feeding frenzy for something that might take awhile to happen.

But happen it would.

Even though he’d been kicked off of Boys in Blue, he’d still created the number three show in the nation. Yeah, he’d have clout for Hometown, and someday (maybe even sooner than later) he’d get it on the air.

Every day after working on his characters, and the pilot outline for the show, Johnny headed down to play ball with his new pals. Since the three of them had become hot as a team, new challengers began showing up at the park to take them on. There were three financial guys from Long Beach, whom they demolished 15-4, and there were three restaurateurs from Newport, rich ballplayers, whom Eddie destroyed almost singlehandedly.

After that game they headed out to Minelli’s and had two or three extra pitchers of beer, and threw in a pretty decent lasagna with the pepperoni and garlic pizza.

It was a hell of a day, and a hell of a good time.

Right up to the moment it wasn’t anymore.

Even after it happened, Johnny couldn’t really remember how it had gone bad.

Maybe Eddie had downed a few too many beers, and maybe it was the Vicodin he had admitted he took just to give the booze a little extra kick. Or maybe it was just one of those days... but somewhere along the third hour of partying, Eddie got a little morose.

They were all still partying, and then Eddie said it, the thing that had been there all along in the back of his mind: “Here’s to our Hollywood buddy. May he remember us when he heads back to la-la land and starts hanging with the big shots again.”

That stopped everyone cold, and then Johnny realized all eyes were turned to him.

“Hey,” he said, “I wouldn’t do that. You guys are my buds. I mean, yeah, I gotta go back to work, but you guys will come up and we’ll play some of the celebs who practice at the Hollywood Y.”

Stenz made a fist and said, “Yeah, right!” but Eddie only looked over at Johnny with a cynical leer.

“Hey, Mr. Big Shot, you think we bought that bit you told us about coming down here to get a little R & R before you started working again? Well, you must think we’re nuts. Cause we saw a bit on Entertainment Tonight about you, how you were kicked off your own show, and how you came down here to get away from the tabloid reporters.”

“Jesus, Ed, why you gotta get all judgmental all of a sudden?” Connie said. “We don’t care why Johnny came down here. He’s still our friend.”

Johnny managed a tortured smile at Connie, who reached over and patted his hand.

Johnny thought maybe the attack would be over then, but Eddie was just warming up: “Say what you want, Connie, but Johnny’s down here slumming. You think we’re ever gonna hear from this guy again once he gets back to Latte Land?”

Stenz stared down at his feet, and Connie just shook her head.

Johnny let out a long breath, and slid out from the booth.

“Okay,” he said. “I better go. Seems like things are getting a little too unpleasant.”

“No, Johnny,” Connie said in a panicky voice. “Don’t go. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

Eddie turned his head and stared blankly across the room.

“No, I think he means it. I don’t want to bum you guys out. So — take it easy.”

He started to walk toward the front door, when Connie ran up behind him and grabbed his wrist. He turned to see tears on her face.

“This isn’t really about you,” she said. “He’s really furious at me.”

“Why?” Johnny asked.

“Cause I’m pregnant.”

“Oh,” he said. “And you want to keep the baby.”

Connie nodded. “Yes, more than anything in the world.”

Eddie came staggering up behind her, mean-drunk.

“Yes, more than anything in the world,” he said in whiny mimicry. “Oh, I have to have a little baby with me at all times. So I can play kootchie-kootchie-koo with it. Fucking bitch. She put a hole in my rubber, man. This is like entrapment. Well, I’m not having it, see... I’m not. And you’re not either, bitch.”

He reached out and grabbed her arm and jerked her toward him. Johnny grabbed Connie’s other arm and for a few seconds they battled one another in an absurd tug of war. Until Johnny let go, and Connie fell into Eddie. They were both off balance and went down, upsetting a table and a pitcher of Sam Adams.

The owner of the place, Dan Minelli, came running toward them, his hair a great frizzy mess, like Larry Fine’s.

“You make a huge mess,” he said, “you gotta pay. You all gotta pay for this.”

Johnny waved a twenty at him and headed outside as quickly as he could. Thanking God he’d brought his own car, he trotted over to his BMW, opened the door, and hustled away.

Later that afternoon, he sat on the front porch smoking a joint.

This was better, way better. He’d been crazy to get involved with those people. It was all about his sentimental attachment to people from his old hometown. When he was dealing with the sharks in Hollywood, guys who would throw you off your own show, he sentimentalized working-class people, the kind of people he’d grown up with in row-house Baltimore. They were more lively, had the ability to appreciate simple things, would be your friends through thick and thin... all the best qualities of working-class existence.

But when you met them again — or people just like them — you started to realize that there was a reason you’d left your old hometown. The people were too coarse, too selfish, too rude, and mainly just too fucking dumb to make it in the larger world.

It wasn’t that he didn’t like them, no... because he did. It was just too much to deal with.

But what of his new idea, Hometown? Did his new hostile understanding nullify the whole project?

No, not at all. Instead, it made it all the more interesting. The guy who comes back home wants kindness and Hallmark card simplicity, but instead finds out life in the adult world of the working class is tough too.

Yeah, maybe that would make the story even richer.

So maybe he wasn’t nuts to hang with these people after all.

No, the thing to do was keep hanging out with them but look at them as a scientist looks at his specimens. Eddie was dead-on right. He’d never actually be friends with this crew but just the same... he could learn a few things, and in the end he’d throw them a bone once the day of principle photography began. A nice little piece of change.

It was good to finally get the thing sorted out. He was a camera, and they were his subjects, and from now on he would be there, play ball, maybe even go for a beer, but no more buddy-buddy. That was over. Totally.

After a couple of glasses of red wine, Johnny went to bed. Everything was going to be fine. He had his priorities straight and he would soon head back to the Hollywood Wars refreshed and renewed by his time in the O.C.

He’d been in a restless sleep for about three hours when the doorbell rang. Half out of it, Johnny got up and made his way through the hallway to the front room.

“Who is it?” he said, without opening the door.

“It’s me, bro,” came a sad voice. “Eddie.”

Johnny thought about telling Eddie to bag it and head home. Looking over at Terry’s clock, he realized it was 3 a.m. Jesus, this was the last guy he wanted to deal with now. But what the hell, Eddie’s voice sounded kind of high and pathetic. He unlocked the front door and let him in.

Eddie looked like he’d actually shrunk. His shoulders were all hunched up, and his eyes were cloudy. “I’m sorry to bother you,” he said. “But I just need to talk to you, man. It can’t wait.”

“Why not? It’s 3 a.m.”

“I know, bro, but after that scene tonight, things got worse. Connie’s gonna leave me, man. I can’t make it without her.”

“Well, where is she now?”

“Out at her sister’s house. Out in Black Star Canyon. I gotta go there but I don’t want to go alone cause I might lose it. Man, I know it’s a huge thing to ask, but would you drive out there with me?”

“Black Star Canyon?” Johnny loved the name of the place! Jesus, this could be a whole episode, or better, a three-parter for the series. Maybe it was even the name of the series, cause it was like a ton better than Hometown.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll do it, Ed, but you have to promise me that if I come you won’t start anything. How do you know she’s even awake?”

“I know. I just talked to her on the cell. She can’t sleep either. Man, it’s so great of you. You’re a real bud.”

“Let me get dressed,” Johnny said. “I’ll only be a minute.”

They drove inland in silence through Cook’s Corner, with its ugly little houses, greasy food joints, and a scummy-looking bar called JC’s Place. There wasn’t even a sign at this joint, just a gold star and the letters JC on the door. Johnny shuddered at the thought of the kind of men who hung out in there.

They stopped at a barren crossroads and he saw a falling-down house with a collapsed screen porch and a Naugahyde couch lying out front of the place. It was all just a little too real for him. The toughest place he’d been in the last three years was Barney’s Beanery, the old Jim Morrison hangout. And all the “tough guys” who hung out there were actors playing Jimmy Dean.

Next they came to two-lane Santiago Canyon Road, and as they drove through steeper and steeper hills, and Johnny looked at the brush and chaparral, and thought of what might be coming toward them from the other lane. Terrible people with bad yellow teeth who had never even heard of sweeps week.

They drove faster and Eddie started talking about Connie and how she and her sister had always dissed him. “She laughs at me, bro. She thinks I’m nothing. She wants a guy... a guy like you. She said that to me, bro. It’s funny man, cause what you do ain’t even real.”

“What do you mean?” Johnny replied. He felt a fury building in him. All his writing life he’d had to put up with morons who talked about his talent for “words” with that certain nasty little inflection, as though words were just a cover for cowardice.

“What do I mean?” Eddie said. “Well, you look at the big mansions in Newport Beach, I painted all of those places. When you see a house there and talk about how cool it is, it’s because you see my paint on it. That’s real, man. But words, what you do, making up little stories you put on TV. Even if you do make all the actors say the stuff, it’s still not real. But look how much money you get for it. Look how many women would fuck you for it. You see, that ain’t right, is it?”

Johnny had a desire to reach over and throttle Eddie. Take him by his throat—

“Depends on what you value,” Johnny said. “Words are imagination. People have always valued imagination, Ed.”

“No, well, I can see people liking a director or an actor, but a guy who uses words? I mean, be honest, how do you get those jobs, John? Aren’t they all about who you know, or screwing some big suit’s daughter or something?”

“No, not really, Eddie. You need to have talent. And if you think writing scripts is so easy, then try it sometime. What the hell, why aren’t you doing it right now? Why do a tough job like house painting when you could easily be making millions using shitty little words?”

Eddie bit his lip and looked over at Johnny in a sorrowful way. “Hey, no offense. Just always thought people who could do something, you know, like did it. People who can’t do nothing, they trick people with words. But maybe I’m wrong, bud. Maybe I’m wrong.”

“Yeah, maybe you are,” Johnny said.

They drove on through the night hills, and then turned down a road that seemed to stretch to the yellow moon.

“This is it. This is where she is,” Eddie said. “Black Star Canyon. Just down the road.”

He turned left down what looked a like a road made of dust. They made another turn and the back end skidded a little, and then they were suddenly pulling up in a dry gulch — ridden place, with no houses in sight.

“We’re here, bro,” Eddie said.

“Where’s the house?” Johnny asked, looking out at the barren hills.

“The house? Her sister’s place? Oh, it’s back in Mission Viejo. Just a few doors down from ours.”

Eddie reached into his door well and pulled out a snubnosed .38.

“Get out, Johnny.”

“What?”

“Get out. Now!”

Johnny felt like something was crushing his heart. He got out of the car, and stood in the whirling dust. Eddie did too.

“Now look in the trunk, bud,” Eddie said. Reaching inside, he popped the trunk.

Johnny walked around to the back slowly, very slowly... already knowing what he would find.

And there she was, Connie, lying crumpled in the trunk, blood all over her face and dress.

“You see how it is, Johnny boy,” Eddie said. “I don’t want no baby. I’m just not cut out for managing the Little League. And maybe now you can understand how I don’t have much patience with mere words. What you do — let’s pretend — that don’t quite make it. What’s lying in there, that would be the real thing. If you know what I mean.”

“You know you can’t get away with this.” When Johnny said it he almost laughed at himself. It was one of the lines all TV writers hated most. So corny, so hackneyed. So Barnaby Jones.

But given his messy situation, so appropriate.

“Oh yes I can,” Eddie replied. “My girlfriend gets pregnant by a slick guy from Hollywood. She demands that he takes care of the baby, and when she refuses to have an abortion he brings her out here to kill her. But lo and behold, they fight and kill one another instead. Stenz is going to swear he heard you two fighting. Connie dumped him last year. Unlike you, asshole, he’s a real pal.”

Johnny felt the fury whipping through him again, but worse, he felt a cringe-inducing embarrassment. “Did you have this in mind all the time?” he asked. “From the first day?”

“That’s right,” Eddie answered. “From day one. See, Johnny boy, you ain’t the only sharp guy in town. I betcha I could write those scripts with their twists and turns even better than you. Now you stand right over there.” He pointed out into the night desert.

Moths fluttered through the moonbeams. They were really beautiful, Johnny thought. He started to walk out to the lonely patch of ground, to his own little doom, but instead found himself walking right for Ed.

“Not this way,” Eddie said. “Out there. Back up.”

But Johnny didn’t back up. “No, I know what you want. You want to turn me into a thing that you shoot. But I’m not going to let you do it. You have to shoot me in the face.” He felt a wild panic inside but also a kind of demented hilarity. He had seen this scene in a crime movie from the ’40s a couple of years ago. He was pretty sure he had quoted the lines verbatim.

Eddie suddenly seemed less confident. “I will shoot you right in the fucking eye. I fucking will. Now get over there.”

He gestured with the gun. But Johnny smiled and kept walking toward him.

“In the face, Ed. In the face or in the balls, but in the front. You got the cojones?”

“Back up,” Eddie said. “You don’t get it.”

He started to say something else, but Johnny leaped on him, and put his hands around his throat. Eddie screamed and fell back, and Johnny choked him down, tightening his grip.

“What’s the matter, Ed, you think I just deal in words? Motherfucker!”

The whole thing was over in about thirty seconds. Eddie lay in the sand with his tongue hanging out. His face was purple under the moon. The gun was now in Johnny’s hand.

He started back to the car.

When suddenly an apparition stood in front of him.

Blood-spackled Connie was up out of the trunk, like a zombie from the B’s.

Johnny made a funny shrieking sound, and aimed the gun at her. But she ran by him and threw herself on Eddie’s body.

“Ed, oh Christ,” she said. “Oh, Ed.” She turned, bloodied and manic. “It was a joke,” she said. “He wanted to show you he was a good idea man. I tried to talk him out of it. But he wanted to show you... So when you went back up to Hollywood you wouldn’t forget him.”

“Very funny,” Johnny said. He walked back to the trunk of the car and saw the oilskin with the car jack and tire iron in it.

She got up and followed him there. He looked at her dumb mouth and blood-splattered cheeks. And felt a tremendous disdain.

“What are you doing?” she said. “We’ve got to go in to the police and report what you’ve done.”

“I knew you were going to say that. So you’re not even pregnant?”

“No, of course not.”

“Too bad,” Johnny said.

He held the iron over his head and looked down at her with real sorrow in his eyes.

“Johnny, you can’t do this. You’re not a murderer. You’re a writer.”

Johnny smiled.

“No,” he said. “Up to now I’ve always been a wordsmith. But I think maybe Ed was right. The real thing. It’s a lot more exciting than fucking words.”

He brought the tire iron down on her head, crushing her face with one mighty blow. Under the pig’s blood, human blood began to flow. He hit her a few more times, and felt even more refreshed than he had on the front porch. Power slammed through him like two thousand volts.

Connie fell behind the car.

Johnny looked inside the well-stocked trunk and found a small shovel. It would be a lot of work, but with all the adrenaline coursing through him, he was up to it. Besides, it was great being out here in nature, digging like a real man, under the lunatic moon.

He strode out into the desert like some kind of Karloffian monster, and started to dig.

Then he remembered Stenz.

A week later, Johnny was back in Hollywood and sold Hometown to NBC. He’d learned his lessons well from Boys in Blue. Hometown was full of sentimental types: the good buddy with a drinking problem; the old girlfriend who had been a hooker but had a serious heart of gold; Mr. Mooby, the kindly janitor who was secretly a Nazi. Problems that the hero, Dave, could solve, because Dave, unlike his creator, was smart, and good. It was shot in a sunny, blue-sky way and sold to Hallmark in a flash.

CBS gave him an overall deal at two million a year.

The bodies of Eddie and Connie were never found.

Johnny only went back to the O.C. one more time. To hire his new assistant at a salary of two hundred thousand a year. Stenz was delighted with his new digs in Hollywood, and turned out to be the most loyal employee Johnny ever had.

The following season Johnny had three new series on the air. Leonardo Stenz was Co — Executive Producer on all three.

And whenever interviewed, Johnny still maintains that none of his good fortune would have ever happened if he hadn’t taken his two weeks to renew himself down in the laidback and beautiful O.C.

The Performer by Gary Phillips

Los Alamitos

A very Randolph finished the stretched-out riff of Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are,” hoping his playing covered the flat notes coming out of his mouth. He’d meant to take his voice up in pitch during the last chorus, not down. The throat was the second thing to go. There was polite applause from the Seaside Lounge crowd, and Randolph nodded slowly while noodling the keys.

An aging couple, both in bright attire, their matching sterling-gray hair arranged just so, walked by the piano, hand in hand. The woman, peach-colored lipstick gothically enticing in the bar’s subdued lighting, dropped a five into the large brandy snifter for tips. She smiled. Randolph smiled. The man gave a quick wave to a short-haired woman at a table near the window, and the two headed for the door. The man let his hand glide down to briefly and tenderly flutter against the woman’s backside.

“This is for Emily,” Randolph announced, and began a leisurely intro into “Straighten Up and Fly Right.” He channeled Nat “King” Cole’s artful syncopation, letting it build while several patrons bobbed their heads and tapped their feat to the rhythm.

“Cool down, papa, don’t you blow... your... toppppp,” he finished in the key he meant to, and this time the applause was more heartfelt. He stood and bowed and blew a kiss to Emily, the woman the guy had waved to, sitting at her usual spot next to the window overlooking the medical center down below. For sixty-three, Randolph reflected, she looked good, handsome in her dark blue dress and diamond brooch, an ever-present martini glass near her steady blood-nailed hand. She lifted her drink and toasted him with a sip and a toothy grin.

Randolph finished his set with an instrumental rendition of Fats Waller’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” adding, “Don’t forget the sand dab special, folks, Rene swears they are to die for.” That got a few chuckles and he offered a wave en route to the bar. Sitting at one end of it was a National Guard trooper in his camouflage, a combat service badge dully gleaming over his flapped breast pocket. He was drinking a beer from a pint glass and was having an animated conversation on his cell phone. He turned his body away and hunched over some as Randolph approached the opposite end of the bar.

Carlson, the head bartender, came over with his Jack and Coke. “You tinkled them good tonight,” he commented, setting the squat glass on a napkin with the establishment’s name on it.

“Thanks, man.” Randolph watched the logo become distorted by the wet bottom of the glass, then took it to his lips.

“I guess you have to go easy on that stuff, don’t you? Or does it help your playing?”

Randolph looked over at the woman who’d just sat down beside him. She was young — that is, younger than him. In her late twenties, he figured, jeans and some kind of loose fauxsuede top. Not too much makeup, Rite Aid earrings. Pretty, but not overwhelmingly so. He sized her up as the wife or girlfriend of some soldier or marine over in Iraq or Afghanistan. Lonely. Bored. There was a lot of that in Los Alamitos.

“Everything in moderation,” he replied to her. He didn’t offer to buy her a drink, making sure he kept his eyes on her face and not down on that alert swell beneath the shirt’s fabric. The bare arms, though, impressively toned.

“I used to play guitar in high school,” she said. “Even had us an all-girl band for a while. But you know how it goes.” She elevated a shoulder.

“Not the next Bangles, huh?”

She frowned.

“Before your time,” Carlson piped in. A not so subtle reminder that Randolph was probably a decade and a half older than the woman. Randolph resisted a remark. Goddamn Carlson was older than he was but worked out on the weights, and had bragged about getting pectoral implants. So I can pick up pussy more easily, he’d cracked to Randolph and Rene Suarez, the chef.

“Can I have a gin and tonic?” the woman asked, looking from Carlson back to Randolph.

“Yours to command,” the bartender said, and went to prepare her drink.

“What do you do now?” What the hell, no sense making it easy for Carlson. Besides, Randolph was just making chitchat, no more, no less.

“Work at the PX on the base. Original around here, right?”

Carlson returned with her drink. “Me lady.”

“Shit fire,” the soldier down the bar snapped, then threw his cell across the bar top. It landed in another customer’s glass, the drink’s owner glaring at him.

“Aw, hell, here we go. Another old lady done told her hero boy bye-bye.” Carlson, himself a vet, double-timed to cool out the service man.

“Your husband on his second or third tour?” Randolph asked the woman. They both watched Carlson putting an arm around the shouldiers of the soldier, who dropped his head, mumbling words of self-pity.

“He was killed, about half a year ago. Roadside bomb hit their convoy coming into Paktika Province.” She drank some. “Jeff was Army then. After he rotated out, he wanted to do something about what he’d seen over there. Something different.” She shook her head. “Jeff’s a... sweetheart. He worked for CARE International delivering food and relief.” She put the gin down quietly.

“Damn. Sure sorry to hear that.”

“Lori. My name’s Lori.” She offered her hand and he shook it, smiling crookedly at her.

He told her his name and for several minutes they sat side by side in a shared silence. Carlson returned after escorting the soldier outside.

“Sorry, folks, I’m back,” he announced, and moved behind the bar to fulfill his enabling duties.

“Hey, look,” Randolph said, “let me get your second G and T, okay? I’m not, you know, trying anything funny.”

“Thanks but no thanks, Avery.” She’d swiveled her body toward him slightly and was touching his arm. “I better get going. Inventory tomorrow, so I’ve got to be in early.”

The young widow got off the stool and strolled out of the landlocked Seaside Lounge.

“You get her number?” Carlson asked when he came back over to Randolph.

“Kind of,” the piano player answered, looking off, then readying the order of songs in his head for the next set.

A week later, Randolph was finishing off a loud and fairly incoherent sing-along version of “Volare” when Lori returned to the bar. She was wearing a modest skirt, a shirt and sweater top combo, and earrings that sparkled in the low artificial light. Randolph banged the keys with his heel à la Little Richard for the climax, everyone clapping and laughing. He stood, breathing heavy, pumping both fists in the air to more acclaim. A patron shouted, “Right on, baby,” above the din.

“Glad you came back,” he said to her. She lingered at the side of the piano, her purse atop the instrument. Normally he’d say something about that but he didn’t want to break the mood — his at least. People came by and gave him pats on the back and shoulders. The brandy snifter was brimming with bills tonight.

“Want to go somewhere, have a sandwich or something? I’m hungry.”

She leaned in closer to him. “Hungry for what?” Her smoke-colored eyes remained steady on him.

“There’s a little hole-in-the-wall place over on Cerritos,” he answered neutrally, but not breaking his gaze from hers. “They have great vegetarian burritos with fire-roasted peppers. Magnifico.”

“But I like meat.”

They grinned at each other like overheated teenagers as Randolph collected his tip money. Over in the corner at her customary table, Emily Bravera sipped her martini carefully as if testing the stuff for poison, watching the couple above the rim of her glass.

Randolph and the woman descended the outside stairs of the Seaside Lounge, which was lodged on the second floor of an aging ’80s strip mall. Down on the parking lot asphalt he became aware of a familiar odor and glanced up to see Carlson the bartender taking one of his Camel breaks. He leaned on the railing, the unfiltered cigarette smoldering in his blunt fingers. Lazily he looked at them. The two men then nodded briefly at each other. Randolph walked the woman to her eight-year-old bronze Camry that had a dark blue driver’s door. He gave her the directions to where they were going, standing near her and pointing off into the distance.

“See you there.” She gave him a peck on his cheek, her fingers holding onto his upper arm. Her hair was freshly washed and smelled of blueberries and mint.

At Agamotto’s Late-Nite Eatery and Coffee Emporium, they ate and talked. Lori McLaughlin was originally from Buffalo. She’d met her late husband Jeff, a local boy from Long Beach, when she’d come out to Southern California four years earlier, winding up with a job at a dog food manufacturer.

“That’s a trip,” Randolph remarked. “Like big vats where the meat and whatnot is all mixed together?”

“This place, Emerald Valley, is like the Escalade of dog food makers,” she said, biting into her barbequed meatloaf sandwich. She then pointed at her food. “Good cuts of meat like this, natural ingredients, grains — they make a high-end product for trendy pet stores in West L.A. and further down south here in Orange County like Newport Beach and Lake Forest.”

“But not for us peasants here in Los Al.” They both chuckled. “You have family back in Buffalo?” Randolph asked.

She sipped some of her beer and dabbed a napkin to her mouth. “Let’s just say there’s a reason I came out here, putting as much distance as I could between me and that socalled family.” Still holding the napkin, she squeezed his hand. “Okay?”

“Okay.”

A lanky youngster in a stained apron behind the counter gave the couple a grunt as they departed. He returned his attention to a news item on the small TV he watched, an image of Long Beach cops leaving a burglarized condo in Belmont Shores earlier that day.

Back in Randolph’s car, after she had him pull behind a closed liquor store, they made out. There was a bare bulb streaked with an oily substance over the metal back door of the establishment, and slivered fractions of the light filtered into the car’s interior and over their grasping forms. Randolph had his hand over her sweater, cupping one of her breasts as they kissed. He moved his thumb across her hardening nipple. She placed one of her hands on his zipper and rubbed.

“That feels good,” he murmured.

“This’ll feel even better.” She tongued his ear and unzipped him. Involuntarily, he sucked in his stomach. “I didn’t catch any hairs did I, Avery?”

“No. Lightheaded is all.”

“Mmmm.” She worked his shaft and then bent down. Randolph leaned back, eyes fluttering, noting that he needed to clean his headliner. Try as he might to fixate on prosaic matters to prolong the sensation, he soon wheezed, “Hey, careful, I’m... I’m about to come.”

She gave him a lingering lick along his penis, returning to the tip. “Uh-huh.” And then she let him climax in her mouth.

“Sweet mother of mercy!” Randolph exclaimed, grinning like a goon.

From her purse Lori McLaughlin produced a half pint of Jack Daniel’s, broke the seal, took a swig, and handed it across.

“Remember your motto,” she said as he had a taste. “Everything in moderation.”

“Most assuredly,” he retorted.

She took something else from her purse and presented it to him. “Because you’re not through, piano man. You have encores tonight.”

He took the offered orange tablet of Cialis. “I’m not that old, you know.”

“I know, darling.” McLaughlin had pulled up her skirt and, using her middle finger, was touching herself. He stared and said nothing. She continued this for several moments, then slipped off her light blue panties and pressed them to his face. He breathed in deep and popped the Cialis in his mouth, not bothering to wash it down with the booze.

Two hours later, at her three-and-a-half-room apartment not far from the joint-forces base, Randolph pulled on his cigar-smoking Woody Woodpecker boxers and went into the kitchenette in search of juice or cold water. He spotted a past-due notice from SoCal Edison on the counter.

On a book ledge crowded with knickknacks, he noticed a picture of a square-jawed, handsome lance corporal he took to be the late husband. He picked up the photo to see it better by the moonlight. The confident look of the soldier reminded him of his father, a decorated combat captain who died in Vietnam. A man he never met and only knew from Polaroids and letters his mother kept. He sighed inwardly, set the picture down, and traipsed to the refrigerator.

Inside he found an open can of Diet Pepsi. One hand on the door, the light from inside the refrigerator casting its glow about the compact kitchenette, Randolph glanced at a print of a leafy country lane hanging on the wall. It wasn’t anything special, more like the kind of mass-produced image demonstrating the virtues of the frame.

Guzzling the soda, looking sideways at the lane, cold air blowing against his lower legs, he suddenly felt a massive, pulsing erection.

“Magnifico,” he said, proudly stalking back into the bedroom, moving his hips to let his member swing from side to side. He hummed “Rocket Man” and sent up a prayer of thanks to the horny bastard who’d cooked up the orange tablet wonder.

In the morning Randolph stretched, scratched his side, and rubbed his whiskered face. In the other room he could hear Lori McLaughlin talking on the phone.

“... No, you listen to me, Karen, that’s not going to happen, you understand? I won’t stand still why you try that kind of shit with me.”

He got up and used the bathroom. When he stepped out, McLaughlin was sitting on the edge of the bed in her cloth robe, hunched forward, arms across her upper thighs like a player waiting to get called back into the game. He sat next her her, putting an arm around her shoulders.

“Can I help with anything?”

She made a sound in her throat. “I could lie to you and tell you it’s nothing,” she began, “but you might as well know now.” She regarded him for a moment. “I was talking to my wonderful ex — mother-in-law. A woman who would make Big Bird slap the shit out of her.” She chuckled scornfully.

“This involve a child?” he asked, having also noticed last night an assortment of toys in a cardboard box in a corner of the living room.

“Yes. My daughter Farley.”

“Farley?”

“Jeff had a good buddy who lost his legs over there. She’s just two and a half and, well, you can see I’m not exactly living the O.C. lifestyle.”

“Who is around here?” He gave her a squeeze.

She jutted her chin in a westerly direction. “Over in Rossmoor they are. Them and their wall.”

“Screw ’em,” Randolph said. “They think they shit gold.”

She snuggled closer to him, putting a hand on his thigh. “Jeff’s mother, Karen, has recently stepped up her alleged concern about how tough it is for me to feed and raise Farley on my own. How she can provide for her and all that. Her third husband, not Jeff’s father, owned a firm that supplied some kind of guidance system for missiles. Anyway, he dropped dead of a stroke and left her sitting pretty in a mortgage-free McMansion in Irvine. That’s where Farley is now.” She rubbed his thigh and, eyeing him, continued, “I didn’t plan on seducing you, Avery. But Karen suddenly showed up yesterday when I went to pick up Farley from the sitter after work. And, well, she demanded time with her granddaughter. She lords it over me, what with her paying for the child care and other things for Farley.”

She scooted over to her pressboard nightstand, opened a drawer, and took out a digital print. She handed it across to Randolph, who smiled at the photo of a bright-eyed toddler held aloft by her beaming mother. She took it back, lingered on it, then returned it to the drawer.

“So I was just a way for you to blow off steam? A revenge schtupp aimed at your mother-in-law?”

She shoved him playfully and clambered on top of him as he lay on his back, wrapping her in his arms. “How observant of you, Dr. Phil.” They kissed eagerly as he undid her robe.

On a Thursday evening several days later, they lay in bed in Randolph’s apartment near the racetrack. Intermingled yells of delight and disappointment could be heard through a cracked sliding window over the bed as the last race finished.

Randolph dialed the radio from the news on the rock station Lori had put on to the jazz station from the college campus in Long Beach. “Suddenly,” a McCoy Tyner number, was in midplay. Randolph let his mind drift as the pianist-composer did his thing.

“You bet much?” she asked, laying partially on top of him. His finger gently followed Tyner stroke for stoke on her shapely butt.

“Now and then I go over there, but I play the ponies like I know poker, not too damn good.” He began kneading her flesh, getting aroused.

She nuzzled his neck. “What if you could make about thirty thousand on a sure thing?”

“You know a horse doppler?”

“I know where to get sixty, maybe seventy thousand taxfree dollars. Half for you and half for me, Avery. Between your couple of nights a week at the Seaside and substitute music teaching, you’re not exactly living la vida loca either.”

He stopped rubbing and focused. “What are you talking about, Lori?”

“Remember I told you about Emerald Valley?”

“The dog food company.”

“The owner, Brice, he’s an old hippie, still smokes marijuana, gives his money to saving the rain forest and all that crap.”

“Okay. But I’m not comprehending.”

“He has a safe in his office. He’s still down with the people, don’t trust the system, so he’s always kept cash around, different places, you see? One of them is his office cause he’s always got some burned-out acid head or old surfing bro falling by for a touch.” She paused, placing her hand firmly on his chest. “Even gives it up to an ex-employee or two. I had to go see him for a loan and he’s always had a thing for me. Gave me a handful of those Cialis pills, saying to leave a trail of them through the forest and he’d find his way to me. Laughing and having a good time.” Her tone had frosted.

“This about keeping Karen at bay?”

“She told me she’s going to initiate, her words, legal action. If I just show her I can afford a lawyer, she’ll back down. I know how her wormy mind works. She’s cheap in so many ways.”

“Why not ask Brice for a loan? Sounds to me like he’d do it for you and not sweat when you could pay him back. The good fight and all that.”

She pulled slowly on his limp penis. “Because he’d want something in return, Avery. Brice is a freak, get it? He’s been in trouble in the past for beating off in his office in front of females. He’d want me to do kinky things to him regularly for repayment. Do you want me to do that?” She started to stroke him slowly. His breath got short as he grew hard. “I might be willing to be a thief, but I’m no ho.”

She continued with her handjob. “Unless you’re going to bitch up. Turn your head when I have to shove a studded dildo up his ass and hear him scream ‘Mommy.’ Make like I’m not your woman.” She took his balls in her hand.

“Not likely,” he groaned, as he put his fingers to her throat and applied pressure. She gasped and he leveraged her under him.

“Fuck me rough, baby,” she demanded — and he did.

The plan wasn’t elaborate. It was straightforward and textbook efficient. Emerald Valley Premium Dog Foods was in a 17,000-square-foot, one-story landscaped building in a cul-de-sac off an industrial park not far from a 605 Freeway off-ramp. Lori McLaughlin had made a Sunday after-hours rendezvous to get the money from a thrilled Brice Hovis. McLaughlin told Randolph he’d insisted that she think of the loan as a long-term investment in her and her daughter’s futures, and to come by the office to finalize the deal.

She knew the layout of the factory, and once she got Hovis wound up, she’d explained with a sneer, she’d leave a side door to the parking lot, used by employees when they had to work overtime, unlatched.

Dressed in overalls obtained that day from a thrift store and wearing rubber dishwashing gloves, Avery Randolph gained access to the facility at the appointed time. Inside, he quickly spotted the thin strip of light coming from the office door at the far end the plant. He eased forward on tennis shoes also purchased at the thrift store. His outfit would be burned afterward.

Randolph passed belt feeders, tall stainless steel devices with large conical vats atop them, automated packaging stations, and heavy machinery bolted to the concrete floor with drive shafts that led to partially encased circular rotors he assumed were used to chop and grind the meat Emerald Valley turned into dog food. Stilled circulation fans were set at various strategic locations in the ceiling.

McLaughlin had explained to him that the business, like a lot of pet food manufacturers, bought rendered meat from elsewhere that was shipped to them, along with grains and cereals from other suppliers. Randolph was pleasantly surprised that the air smelled like cheeseburgers.

Coming to the end of a large boxlike machine on stout legs — a dryer, he could tell from its stamped label — he approached the office. He halted, shutting out all distractions, getting it together for his performance. It’s all about the in-between, man, a jazz guitarist reminded him at a recent studio gig.

He heard Hovis moaning between whaps. The tang of marijuana cut through the burger aroma.

“Goddamnit, yes, oh yes, doctor.”

Randolph stepped into the light to see Hovis leaning over his desk in a stripper/nurse costume, short skirt up over a thong, with high heels and a red wig lopsided on his bald head. McLaughlin, in her underwear beneath an open lab coat, was holding a dog hairbrush, the kind with short wire bristles. She’d been using it on the man’s tenderized rear end. There was a strap-on dildo and a plastic enema bottle filled with clear liquid occupying the paper-laden desk.

Hovis straightened up and stammered, “Who... What is this?” There was a good-sized alligator clamp dangling from his penis over the thong.

By then Randolph, trying not to giggle too much, had covered the distance between them and squirted liberal amounts of pepper spray into the man’s eyes.

“This is not safe,” the dog-food man blurted, hands grabbing at his face while he did a run-in-place dance of pain in his night nurse uniform.

McLaughlin slugged him over the head with a smoking bong, shattering it. Hovis ran and crashed into a tall filing cabinet, knocking it and himself over.

“Don’t either one of you fuckin move,” Randolph blared. He quickly tied a handkerchief around the downed man’s tearing eyes and McLaughlin made sounds like she was being manhandled. Randolph tied Hovis up with cord he’d brought along and fixed a ball gag around his mouth. The man writhed and whimpered on his side, then lay still.

“Where is it, bitch?” Randolph growled, giving it his best Steven Seagal guttural rasp.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She slapped her thigh for effect and grunted.

“We’ll see about that. Come here, let me show you what me and that dildo are gonna do to you.” He marched her out and returned after a suitable period to begin tearing up the office. He knew where Hovis kept the money, but had to sell the search.

He kicked over a surfboard leaning in a corner. Above that, in a compartment Hovis had installed, the cash was hidden in the ceiling. “Well, what do we have here?” He walked over to Hovis and kicked him, eliciting a stifled yell. “Clever cocksucker, aren’t you? Your girlfriend held out, but it’s a good thing for both of you I got eyes.” He slid a chair over, stood on it, and pushed up on the acoustic tile, revealing a large fishing tackle box. He pulled it down, assessed the contents, and exited the office.

Hovis wasn’t aware that McLaughlin knew where he kept the money. She’d spied on him once when she was working there. Though naturally he’d suspect her, she would aim his suspicions toward a fired employee. Or so she’d told Randolph.

On the darkened factory floor, he removed his disguise of a bushy Afro wig, false goatee, and a Halloween rubber nose. McLaughlin, in her bra and panties, stilettos off so as not to make noise, came over and gave him a passionate kiss. He rubbed his hand between her legs.

“Better get going. I’ll meet you back at my place, Avery.”

“I like it when you say my name,” he whispered back.

“I know.”

He punched her hard, twice, in the face, while she held onto him for balance. Like a boxer clearing her vision, she shook her head, and then she broke off one of her heels. She put the shoes on and wobbled into the office while Randolph turned back toward the way he had come in.

“Brice, Brice, are you all right?” she screamed, running into the office. McLaughlin’s face rearranged itself from feigned concern to icy resolve. “Briiice,” she drew out, hand beside her mouth but barely saying his name. “Briiiice, my demented shithead, can you get up?” She guffawed and removed a sharp letter opener from a pen caddy on the desk. She sauntered over, cut Brice Hovis’s legs loose, and removed the ball gag and handkerchief. His hands remained bound.

“Oh my God, are you all right, Steph?” His eyes were red and wet. He looked from her to the open ceiling and back.

Her fingers trilled the tip of the letter opener. “I’m fine, Brice. Real fuckin good.” She flicked the blade and nicked his thigh. Crimson ran behind the black mesh stocking material. “Hey,” he gasped, backing up, “this is no time for that. Untie me, would you?”

Swaying her body she stepped closer, waving the letter opener around like a drunk musketeer. “And what if I don’t, Brice? What if I go too far this time?” She took another nick out of him, this time from his chest.

Brice looked about, panicked, while backpeddling in his heels and skirt. “Quit fucking around, Stephanie.”

“I’m serious as a fever, Bricey. Come on, beg for your life.” She placed her hand on her mound. “It makes me wet.” She lunged forward and tackled Hovis, then straddled him.

Down on the floor, he squirmed and bucked but ceased when she put the tip to his throat, letting it sink in a centimeter.

“Why?” he pleaded. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because I can, cunt.” She made another cut and Hovis’s eyes went wide.

“Yo, Steph — is that your real name?”

The woman looked up to see Randolph, his disguise back on, standing in the doorway. She chortled. “Yeah, so? What’re you gonna do about it, homeboy?”

“This,” he said calmly, shooting her in the mouth as she laughed at him.

The woman’s body tumbled off of Hovis, her heelless shoe landing across his leg. Randolph tied up the terrified, bleeding exec again and walked out of the office.

“There’s something like ninety thousand in here,” a woman’s voice said behind him. He turned to Emily Bravera, who was dressed in slacks and a striped shirt. She was hunched on one knee, having counted the contents of the tackle box. She relatched the lid.

“Not bad,” Randolph said. “Plus, Hovis can’t squawk to the law since he was hiding it from the IRS.”

“Well, he does have some explaining to do in that get-up of his and two bodies sprawled out.” Her arm in the crook of his, he holding the strong box, the two strolled out to the parking lot.

Laying dead under dim lighting on the uneven asphalt was the bartender, Alfonso Carlson. He’d been in wait for Randolph, to ambush and kill him. But Bravera, a one-time investigating officer with the Criminal Investigation Command of the U.S. Army, had done the bushwhacking. Inside was the bartender’s daughter, Stephanie Carlson. The Command’s motto was: Do what has to be done.

Before they departed, Bravera put her face close to Randolph’s, squeezing his cheeks in her blood-nailed fingers. Her tan was prominent against his burnished-copper skin. “You liked fucking her, didn’t you?”

“Only doing my job, cap’n.”

“Just remember, Thelonious, I know how to use a rifle with a scope.”

“I keep that information uppermost in my mind.”

“See that you do.” She kissed him deep and long.

At the Seaside Lounge, Avery Randolph began a mournful rendition of “On Green Dolphin Street.” At her table by the window, Emily Bravera sat and drank sparingly, appreciating his handling of the tune. The two had been working this area for more than a month now, pulling off several lucrative burglaries in Long Beach and south along the Orange County coast. Jewelry, a few spicy homemade DVDs, cash, and even gold bars horded against the next meltdown. For it wasn’t only old hippies like Brice Hovis who failed to report all their income.

The front they’d constructed involved Bravera posing as a general’s widow living in Rossmoor. Real estate being what it was these days, the realtor was happy to rent to the widow on a month-to-month basis. She was personable, knowledgable on a variety of subjects, worked out at the local gym, and managed to get herself invited to this or that soiree or club event — thus being able to scope out various domiciles.

Bravera had knowledge of security systems and Randolph knew a thing or two about safes. For him, tumblers and electronic lock sequencing were merely different sets of notes to master. Tomorrow they were going to take down the beach house of the matching-hair couple. Yes, they agreed, the two of them had one sweet hustle going.

When the alleged Lori McLaughlin had come on to him, the possessive Bravera did some checking and turned up that she was Carlson’s daughter. Randolph and Bravera didn’t know what the pitch was, but figured the two were setting him up for an Oswald — be the fall guy. The piano player had hinted to the bartender that he’d beaten a dope charge in Baltimore. That was a lie, just part of the dodge, like his funky apartment near the track. But the Carlsons must have figured a footloose brother hiding out in Orange County, wanted on a criminal charge elsewhere, was a good fit for a robbery-murder here in town.

Randolph and his older lover and partner, not wishing to pass up an opportunity for enrichment, had let the scheme unfold. In another month or so, not so foolish to push their luck, they’d move on.

“Like Duke explained, man, you gotta play with intent to do something,” the pianist said sotto voce, then hummed and teased the keys, ending his extended version of “On Green Dolphin Street.” There was sustained clapping and several patrons rose and dropped large bills into the snifter. Before the tune, Randolph had announced he was taking up a collection to bury father and daughter. Bravera put in a fifty, smiling at him. He lifted the glass with both hands, bowing slightly to the gathered from his piano seat.

The Happiest Place by Gordon McAlpine

Anaheim

The happiest place on the entire planet, my ass... Derek called me into the office, his voice an out-of-tune reed instrument in my earpiece, just as I was herding a dozen sunburned tourists and their jabbering children off the teacup ride, which had broken down for the third time in a week. “Carl, we need to see you immediately,” Derek said. “Headquarters, now.” He acted as if being a security day-shift lead made him Batman, or at least Commissioner Gordon. Sure, he had military and a little police experience on his resume, and since 9/11 that was all anybody valued in security. The downing of the Twin Towers changed everything at the park — not because terrorists have ever shown up on Huck Finn’s Island or among the mannequin pirates on the splash-splash boat ride, but because the new security hires all thought they were better than the rest of us, especially me. My twenty-three years of experience counted for nothing to them. All that mattered was that I’d been hired during a “kinder, gentler” period of American history, sans military or police experience, when former school teachers like me were considered adequate for the job of herding tourists off broken-down attractions, managing crowd-control during the fireworks display, or busting preteens for smoking cigarettes on the sky ride. I knew the new breed thought of me as a middle-aged, hefty embarrassment, particularly after I became literally the last of the “old guard.” I knew how much they wanted to put rat ears on my head, shove a tail up my ass, and send me out the main gate forever. But I always did my job and there was nothing they could do to get rid of me — at least, not until the day Derek called me away from the teacups.

When I got to the security office, Derek wasn’t even involved in the inquiry.

It was Jeffrey, the department head, former FBI, who asked me to take a seat in the conference room, which I’d visited only once before, in ’98, to help plan a birthday party for one of the secretaries. The room hadn’t changed. Dozens of large, framed photographs of the park’s long-dead founder lined the walls. Two grim Anaheim city policemen entered, their handcuffs jangling on their polyester pants and their boots echoing across the linoleum floor. They sat at the long table, accompanied by a lawyer from corporate, a stenographer, two interns, and a video technician. Excepting the cops, everyone wore standard employee name tags — first names only. Bob, Tom, Steve...Friendly, huh? But how else would you expect employee relations to be at the world’s happiest place? The video technician made final adjustments to a small camera pointed in my direction, then indicated we could begin.

“We’re videotaping for legal purposes,” Jeffrey said, his smooth delivery more like that of a weatherman than a topcop. He was weatherman handsome too. All he needed was a name like Dallas Raines or Johnny Mountain and his toothy grin would have been on TV screens instead of here in my face.

“What’s this all about?” I asked.

“We’ve had a complaint,” Jeffrey said, indicating a manila folder on the desk. “A female guest in her teens filed a report that says you followed her around the park, leering at her.”

“What?” I recalled no particular young lady. How could I? Every hour of every day I saw thousands of girls in their teens walking around the park (just as I saw thousands of sour-faced, divorced fathers scrambling to keep up with their children, thousands of overwrought mothers toting handy-wipes and pushing strollers, thousands of obese tourists reeking of sweat and tanning lotion, thousands of school-age boys and girls who moved like flocks of birds from one “land” to the next, thousands of retirees in souvenir T-shirts and sun visors, thousands of foreigners in baseball caps, thousands of chattering children in pirate hats, thousands and thousands and thousands of everything...). “One paranoid guest files a complaint and you call me in for this inquisition?”

Jeffrey smiled. His manner remained friendly but coldblooded, doubtless a technique learned at Quantico. He turned his chair to face me directly. “Need I remind you that here at the park we do not tolerate dissatisfaction in any form from any of our guests.”

“Sure, but one report—”

He interrupted: “Are you suggesting that following only one young woman around the park, bothering her with unwanted and aggressive sexual attentions, is acceptable?” He straightened in his chair, his expression growing stern.

“Aggressive sexual attentions?” This was outrageous. The others at the table averted their eyes. At first, I assumed they were embarrassed to be part of this kangaroo court. But after a moment I realized they were embarrassed for me, as if I’d actually done something wrong. “Look, I don’t even talk to guests, male or female, unless they talk to me first. So even if I happened to be following an attractive young woman, it would only have been out of boredom, nothing more.”

“Is following an attractive young woman ‘out of boredom’ a part of your job description?” Jeffrey asked.

“I was speaking hypothetically.”

“But if one actually did such a thing?” he pressed.

“Well, no. Obviously, it’s not part of my job description, if I did such a thing.”

He nodded, smug, and turned to the video technician across the table. “Run the video, please.”

Every square foot of the park is covered by cameras, primarily for the legal department’s use in defending lawsuits (as opposed to the stated purpose of busting criminals or terrorists or nine-year-old boys pocketing souvenir pencils from the gift shops). The particular time-stamped surveillance footage compiled for our viewing showed me walking directly behind a nubile park guest who wore a revealing halter top and very short shorts. From the angle of the camera it appeared that I may indeed have been staring at her ass. But one angle proved nothing. Unfortunately, they had more than one angle — the video cut to another camera that picked up where the first left off, capturing the two of us moving in single file through the Land of Clichéd Yesteryear to the Land of Harmless Adventures and on to the Land of Saccharine Fantasy, the footage from all the cameras edited together to form a single, incriminating sequence. I didn’t remember the girl, though for a few minutes of a particular day she had undeniably engaged my attention. It was not pleasant to observe — the security guard uniform made me look heavier than I actually am (and everyone knows video adds ten to twenty pounds to anyone’s appearance); additionally, I was old enough to be the girl’s father and my attentions toward her, isolated and edited in this manner, were humiliating.

Jeffrey turned to the stenographer. “Will you please read back to us what Carl said after I asked him if following young women ‘out of boredom’ was part of his job description?”

“There’s no need for that,” I interjected.

The stenographer looked from me to Jeffrey, awaiting direction.

At last Jeffrey indicated to the stenographer to remain silent.

I’d had enough. “Okay, fine. I won’t follow any women around the park, ever again. Okay?”

Jeffrey was not satisfied. “Why don’t you tell us why you left teaching?”

“That’s irrelevant... it was in the late ’80s, for God’s sake.”

Jeffrey pulled a paper from a file. “On your application here you indicated that you resigned from your teaching position.”

“I did.”

“We dug a little deeper, contacting the school district, and discovered that you were pressured to go. Why don’t you explain?”

“Look, I never touched anybody.”

“No one said you did. Please answer the question.”

“One of the girls needed a little watching over. She was just a freshman, a lonely kid. My concern was only for her safety. Would I be in this uniform if I didn’t take an interest in the welfare of others?”

“You ‘maintained surveillance’ on this girl after school hours?”

“Well, that’s generally when the bad things happen...”

He nodded. “Bad things, indeed.”

“Look, I’m not some kind of stalker, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

Jeffrey shrugged. “It’s not me who suggests it. It’s you, Carl. It’s your behavior.”

The silence and averted eyes among those gathered around the table suggested they concurred.

In this manner, the security department had its way with me.

Over the next half hour we arrived at a settlement that reduced my retirement benefits by 50 percent. The lawyer had all the paperwork ready. He was very friendly. I merely had to sign at the places he’d marked with colorful, sticky arrows. A child could have done it.

“Why now?” I asked as the inquisition came to its inglorious end. “After all these years?”

Jeffrey nodded. “You’re right, it’s our oversight. We should never have hired you. But at least we identified the problem before any serious harm was done.”

Harm? I never touched anybody — not in all these years.

Happiest place on the planet, my ass...

So you can imagine my surprise when five weeks later I got a call at home from none other than supercop Jeffrey.

“How’ve you been?” he asked, exuding his weatherman charm.

“Fine,” I said, though I’d actually not been so good. It’s funny, but that overpriced, overcrowded, oversanitized amusement park, known the world over for its fairy-tale castle, which is actually made of plaster so thin that on that last day, as my former colleagues marched me across the park on my way out forever, I was almost able to punch my fist right through it... well, despite all that, the place gets into your blood. The truth is, I missed the park as one misses a lover. Hell, more than one misses a lover. It’s been three years now since Mandy went back to her old job in Bangkok, where I’d met her on a humid night, paid her bar fee, and then won her heart with my tales of foiling the amorous antics, petty thievery, and juvenile pranks of park guests (everybody the world over has heard of the park, and being in its employ is almost like being a celebrity). The first gift I ever gave Mandy, the first acknowledgment of my deeper-than-mere-business feelings for her, was my spare name tag from the park, which I’d brought along on vacation in hopes I might indeed meet a young woman worthy of wearing it. So, sure, I suffered sleepless nights after Mandy left me. We’d had a good eighteen months and I really thought she loved her new country and our little apartment. Nobody likes losing a lover or wife or whatever. But losing the park proved harder yet, almost enough to make me start drinking again. There’s no place like it, unless you count its iterations in Florida and overseas.

“I want you to know I didn’t enjoy doing what I had to do, Carl,” Jeffrey said over the phone.

What did he want from me, sympathy?

“It’s the bitch end of the job, let me tell you,” he continued.

I’d be damned if I’d let him know how bad I’d been feeling. “Well, I’ve been great, Jeffrey. How’re things at the park?”

He laughed. “As if you care anymore, right?”

I pretended to laugh too. “Right you are, Jeffrey.”

It didn’t make matters easier for me that my garden apartment, which I’d only recently cleared of the last signs that Mandy had ever inhabited it with me, was barely a mile from the park’s front gate. Every night at 9:30, when the fireworks display started, the sounds of explosions would jerk me away from whatever TV show I’d been employing as distraction. Boom, boom, boom! I felt every sonic reverberation in the deepest part of my chest. I’ve always loved fireworks. Most nights I’d still walk onto my tiny patio to watch them — gunpowder flowers blossoming over the park, red, white, and blue. Boom, boom, boom! When that became too painful, I’d close my eyes. But even then I couldn’t help picturing the thousands of guests lined along the park’s main avenue or along the banks of its circular river, their eyes turned heavenward, a scene I helped supervise for years. Afterward, the quiet on my patio was even more painful than the display itself — silence and the drifting away of the smoke clouds into the night sky. Who wouldn’t miss a place like the park, a place that offers to all (except me, now) a simulation of life designed to surpass the real thing. Losing it had made me almost angry enough to want to hurt somebody. But I’d be damned if I’d let Jeffrey know how I felt about these things.

“Carl, can you meet me tomorrow morning for breakfast?”

The head of park security, former FBI, wanted to eat with me?

“Carl, are you still there?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Yeah you’re still there, or yeah you’ll meet me?” he asked.

“Why do you want to have breakfast with me, Jeffrey?”

“Look, I know you were good at your job, Carl.”

I did my job but I don’t know that I was actually good at it. I only know that I showed up every day.

“Have you found employment yet?” Jeffrey asked.

“I’ve got a lot of irons in the fire,” I said, a lie.

“I may have a job for you, Carl.”

“Me? Why?”

After a moment of silence: “Maybe I feel a little guilty about the way it went down with you, Carl.”

Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t.

What the hell did I have to lose?

We met the next morning at a Carl’s Jr. across the street from the main library on Harbor Boulevard and Broadway, three miles north and a world away from the park. He chose the place. Fast food didn’t seem like much of a gesture toward reconciliation. Was the Carl’s Jr. a play on my name? There were plenty of tourist joints around the park that served better breakfasts. And there were restaurants near the stadium and diners and cafés farther east in Orange or Tustin where park employees often went to escape the crowds and to enjoy food that was less generic than tourist fare. I asked myself what Sherlock Holmes would have made of Jeffrey’s wanting to meet here and I arrived at this: the Carl’s Jr. at Harbor and Broadway was a place we’d likely not be seen by anybody who knew either of us (most of the patrons and some of the employees didn’t even speak English). Only three miles from the park, we were virtually guaranteed of being strangers to anyone we might meet.

In this, I was right.

But it was the last time I’d be right for a long while.

I parked my Camry next to Jeffrey’s SUV.

He sat at an inside booth, nursing a coffee and browsing the morning paper. He grinned when he saw me and extended his hand to shake without sliding out of the booth to stand. “Morning, Carl.” He was dressed “resort casual,” khakis, loafers, monogrammed golf shirt. The face of his expensive wristwatch was black and of a width and diameter about half that of a hockey puck. I’d come in my suit and tie, which felt ridiculous in a Carl’s Jr. But this was a job interview, wasn’t it? And my Aunt Janice always said that one can never be overdressed, either for church or for a business meeting.

I slid into the booth across from Jeffrey. “So what’s this all about?”

“Maybe you want to get yourself a coffee and a roll before we get started,” he said, folding away his newspaper.

I was hungry (after all, this was supposed to be breakfast) so I did as he suggested.

“Well, that ought to fill you up,” Jeffrey said when I returned with my tray.

A coffee, orange juice, jumbo breakfast burrito, and side of hash browns... Why not? This wasn’t a Weight Watchers meeting! But Jeffrey looked at my tray like it was piled with fresh, steaming shit. He couldn’t resist putting on superior airs. I’d seen it in my days at the park. Fine, he was Ivy League. Then Quantico. Good for him. But what kind of former undercover agent is constitutionally unable to conceal his smugness at least some of the time?

“I’d like to engage your assistance,” he said.

“What?”

“It’s about my wife.”

I put down my breakfast burrito.

Jeffrey leaned toward me over the Formica tabletop. He smelled of expensive cologne, which mixed strangely with the greasy odors from the breakfast foods. He pushed my tray toward the napkin dispenser against the wall and tapped his fist on my forearm, a “man’s man” gesture of intimacy. I fought the impulse to pull away.

“You’re a good man, Carl,” he said. “I knew it even when I was letting you go, but I had no choice.”

“Yeah?”

“Look, I know damn well that corporate policy and fear of litigation should never trump a man’s twenty years of good service,” he continued. “But you’ll have to trust me that I had no choice. Do you trust me, Carl?”

It was actually twenty-three years, but I didn’t correct him. “Would I be here otherwise, Jeffrey?”

“Good.” He leaned back into his side of the booth.

I picked up the breakfast burrito and took a bite, unsure of what else to do.

“I want to employ you as a private detective,” he said.

Once again I put the burrito down. “Me?”

He nodded.

“Why?” I asked.

“I need you to shadow my wife.”

“Oh? I see. But still... why me?”

“It’s a delicate job, Carl.” He lowered his voice. “Look, I’m well known in law-enforcement circles. You understand that. Every city in this county has its own little chief of police, but just as there’s only one park, one citadel, there’s only one me. So I can’t go to a regular agency. You know that the park expects only the most respectable behavior from its top employees. And also from their wives...” He looked to me for some kind of response.

“Oh, right.”

“I need to know the truth about her. But I can’t allow anything unsavory to ever get out. Understand, Carl?”

“Sure.”

He looked around the Carl’s Jr. When he was sure nobody was paying us any attention, he removed from his front trousers pocket a roll of cash held together with two rubber bands. He set it on the tabletop and then slid it across like a shuffleboard disc into my lap. “It’s two grand, all in twenties,” he said. “It’ll get you started on the job.”

I hadn’t held so much cash in my hand at one time since my vacation in Bangkok (where cash passes out of your hand instead of into it).

“I need your help, Carl,” he said, his expression suddenly strained.

They sure as hell didn’t teach this at Quantico, I thought. It turns out the bastard was as pathetic a human being as the rest of us. (Or so I believed at the time.) Anyway, I admit I enjoyed his muted anguish. But I was clever enough not to show it. “Okay, Jeffrey. I’ll help you.”

He removed a reporter’s notebook from his back pocket and gave it to me. “You got a pen?”

I patted my shirt pocket. No pen.

He gave me a Bic.

“You might want to note down what I’m about to tell you,” he said.

“Right.” I flipped the pad open. Just like that I was a private eye.

Jeffrey’s wife Melinda was thirteen years his junior. They had no children together, though on weekends Jeffrey’s four young daughters from two previous marriages occasionally visited their home, which was located near the golf course on a quiet cul-de-sac in Anaheim Hills. It was a million-and-a-half-dollar property. Melinda held no job, but kept busy with volunteer work at the children’s hospital in Orange. She worked out on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at a Pilates studio on Imperial Highway and on Tuesdays and Thursdays with a private trainer (female) at the twenty-four-hour fitness club. Her body was well toned. She drove a two-year-old, leased Mercedes E-class and her blond hair was just the right shade for her skin color, just the right length for her bone structure. She got her manicures, pedicures, and facials at a salon on Lakeview that was run by a Vietnamese woman named Tran, and she shopped for groceries at the Vons Pavilions in the Target shopping center on Weir Canyon Road. She rarely ventured off the hill to the flats of Anaheim, which were generally too seedy for one of her refined sensibilities. In conversation at the tennis club she poked fun at the park and all it stood for, assuming a position of cultural superiority, even though it was the park that provided her husband with the means to keep her in luxury. She seemed a predictable third wife for a man like Jeffrey. No surprise there. What’s funny is that you might not suspect a woman like her would also appeal to a man like me, but after shadowing her for just a day or two, I found myself becoming very fond of her, despite her superficialities, her arrogance, and the fact that, quite literally, she didn’t know I existed.

“She’s seeing another man,” Jeffrey had told me at Carl’s Jr. that first morning.

But I discovered nothing that suggested infidelity. Not in the first week, nor in the second, nor the third. I faithfully kept at it, every day and every night. Melinda took conversational French classes at Fullerton College on Tuesday and Thursday nights from 7 to 10 and enjoyed a few happy hour margaritas every Wednesday with her girlfriends, some of whom were actually as well groomed and physically fit as she was.

Otherwise, she was rarely out of the house after dark. Further, I can say with certainty — because I’d snuck into the backyard to peek through a window — that there was nothing illicit about the two consecutive afternoon visits from the plumber; also, the Latino gardeners and the Polynesian pool boy merely did their jobs, unlike the stereotypical shirtless lotharios you find filling their professions in porno films. Melinda wasn’t seeing anybody and nobody was seeing her (except me, of course). Even Jeffrey saw little of her, working long days that often stretched past midnight. I thought Melinda must be the loneliest woman in the world, poor thing. But I kept my notes and my increasing faith in her goodness to myself. Jeffrey had instructed me never to contact him, which was just as well as I’d lost my cell phone a few days before he hired me as a PI and hadn’t had time to replace it since I’d started shadowing his wife.

Actually, I was glad to be rid of my cell phone.

It felt good to be cut off from everyone in the world — except Melinda.

Of course, I did speak in person to some of those in her life. For example, I used one of the hours when Melinda was in the Pilates studio to visit her dry cleaner, who occupied the same strip mall. I initiated conversation with him by pretending to be one of her neighbors. He agreed with me that she was always very friendly. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get details from him about the particulars of her cleaning and laundering needs (such as whether he’d ever been asked to work out unusual or incriminating stains on either her outer- or underwear). Believe me, I took the job seriously. I was thorough. Melinda’s French teacher at Fullerton College, a sixtyish woman called Madame Juliette, who I’m not sure believed that I was a visiting professor from Cypress College, told me only that Melinda had exceptional pronunciation and above-average vocabulary skills. When I met Melinda’s supervisor at the children’s hospital in Orange, a small man in a wheelchair, I claimed to be a reporter for the O.C. Weekly who wrote the “Volunteers Among Us” column. He told me Melinda had a wonderful way with children and lamented the fact that she and Jeffrey were childless. The receptionist at the Anaheim Hills Tennis Club told me, after I’d slipped her a series of twenty-dollar bills, that half of their married members cheated on their spouses, often hooking up with their mixed-doubles partners, but that Melinda was in the faithful 50 percent, a paragon of marital constancy.

The woman was an angel.

Why would I ever want to murder her?

But wait, I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

Approximately three and a half weeks into my surveillance, Jeffrey called me at my apartment at 2:30 in the morning. The lateness of the hour was not as distressing as it might seem; after all, I was only ever home between midnight and 5 a.m., otherwise always shadowing Melinda, and so the middle of the night was the only time I was available for communication.

“You’re a hard man to reach, Carl.”

This was the first I’d spoken to Jeffrey since Carl’s Jr. Now, in the background of his call, I could make out the sound of light traffic, as if he were phoning from the side of a freeway. “I’ve been on the job, Jeffrey.” My answering machine was empty so he obviously hadn’t tried that hard to reach me.

“Good man,” he said.

I liked being called that. “I’ve compiled copious notes about your wife’s every move these past few weeks,” I said. “That notebook you gave me is just about full. And I’m pleased to report that, to date, my observations indicate—”

“That’s fine, Carl,” he interrupted. “We’ll discuss your observations later. Now, I want you to just listen to me.”

“Oh, okay.”

“Tomorrow I want you to take the day off. Get a haircut, go to a movie, wash your car, whatever. Just stay away from Melinda. It’s critical that she not suspect she’s being watched.”

“Oh, I’ve been very careful about that, Jeffrey.” Or had I left more of a footprint that I thought? Maybe talking to a few of her neighbors the day before hadn’t been such a good idea.

Jeffrey continued: “Now get this part right, Carl. At 11 o’clock tomorrow night, not a moment later, not a moment sooner, I want you to park your car in front of my house. Bring your camera. I’ll see that the front door is unlocked and the silent alarm turned off. Just quietly walk in.”

“Now wait a minute,” I said. “I’m not so sure about breaking and entering and—”

Again, he cut me off. “It’s my goddamn house, Carl. You won’t be ‘breaking and entering’ because I’m inviting you to enter, understand?”

“Oh, right. But why?”

“Because tomorrow night the other man will be there, in bed with my wife.”

What other man? I thought. “How do you know, Jeffrey?”

“Trust me, I know.”

“Well, what do you want me to do about it?”

“Take a picture of them together. That’s all. Then get out. The master bedroom is at the back of the house.”

This was an ugly business. But it was a little exciting too. And while I still privately doubted that the Melinda I’d observed these past weeks was actually having an affair, the prospect of seeing her naked and in flagrante delicto (and photographing it!) held an undeniable appeal. I didn’t know if I wanted to be right or wrong about her. I’m sure you understand.

“Any questions, Carl?”

“Where will you be during all this, Jeffrey?”

“Don’t worry about me, buddy. I’ll be all right.”

I hadn’t been worried about him.

“I’ll call you at this same time tomorrow,” he said.

I slept little that night and the following day passed at a snail’s pace despite the fact that I followed Jeffrey’s advice by getting a haircut, washing my car, and seeing a matinee. After eating a hamburger for dinner at the Carl’s Jr. where Jeffrey and I had breakfasted (call me sentimental), I returned to my apartment to watch Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, and three CBS sitcoms. I left my apartment only after the fireworks ended at the park. I cruised up and down Harbor Boulevard for forty minutes, casually observing the tourists on the sidewalks outside the motels. They were all shapes and sizes, though I’d guess they tended a little more toward fat than the national average. At 10:30 I turned off Harbor and headed east on Katella Avenue past the Angels’ stadium to the 57 freeway, then I took the 91 to Imperial Highway and headed up Anaheim Hills Road almost as far as the golf club. I parked in front of the darkened house at 10:56 p.m. (I know the exact time because I jotted it on the last page of my reporter’s notebook.)

At 11 p.m. I pushed open the front door, which was ajar, and went inside.

Darkness. Silence.

There seems little point in my describing the interior of the house except to say it was what you’d expect in such a neighborhood — stylish and neat. I didn’t take it in much beyond that. Interior decorating is not my thing. Besides, my mind was elsewhere. I flipped on my flashlight. The hallway that led to the back of the house was lined with framed photographs of Melinda and Jeffrey smiling together in various locations, such as Japan, France, Florida. I turned a corner and saw the closed double doors that led to the master bedroom. Still, no sound from within. Surely, no sex. Melinda was likely just sleeping inside, alone. That’a girl, I thought, only half-disappointed by what I was not going to get to see.

Of course, I still had to open the bedroom door and look inside just to be sure. It was my job.

I wish I hadn’t done it.

By the light of a reading lamp burning beside the king-size bed, I saw Melinda sprawled on the rumpled bedspread, her vacant eyes open and askew. Most of her clothes had been ripped off her body. I knew right away she was dead. Poor Melinda. There were red marks at her throat and blood on one of her swollen lips. She’d been knocked around and then strangled and then, you know... It was ugly. Even twenty-three years of working security at the park doesn’t prepare you for something like this. At first, I didn’t know what to do. Had Jeffrey been right about a lover in the house, a lover turned murderer? Had I arrived only a few minutes too late to save poor Melinda? Or might the killer still be hiding in the house? I turned and looked around the room.

But I was alone.

At least, I was alone until the police arrived just three or four minutes after I’d entered Melinda’s bedroom.

Jeffrey hadn’t shut off the silent alarm, the bastard.

“Officers, officers!” I shouted as they burst into the bedroom. “I was just about to call you!”

They pressed around me, their automatic weapons pointed at my face, and shouted for me to show my hands and to lay spread-eagled on the floor, which I did. My training in security prepared me for such treatment; they were only taking proper precautions.

Still, I tried to explain: “The killer may still be in the house!” I shouted. One of them wrenched my arm behind my back to apply the cuffs. They weren’t interested in what I had to say, though one of them recited my Miranda rights. “Look, you’ve got it all wrong, guys! I work for Jeffrey, I’m private security!”

Somebody hit me hard with his elbow in the back of my head. My face hit the floor and I tasted blood.

Then he hit me again.

The next thing I knew I was in the back of a patrol car.

“Just shut up!” the driver said every time I tried to explain.

It was not until an hour later in the police interrogation room that I realized how completely I’d been set up. Should I have seen it coming? Maybe, but I possess a trusting nature. And Jeffrey is a formidable enemy, particularly when you don’t know he’s your enemy. The interrogator told me that “poor, distraught” Jeffrey had managed to communicate through his tears that he’d had no contact with me whatsoever since the day he fired me from the park. No phone calls, no meeting at Carl’s Jr., no private investigation.

He’d lined it all up: The videotaped testimony from my hearing at the park suggested I had a history of “stalking”; my subsequent firing suggested I had motive to get revenge on Jeffrey (by taking away the love of his life, just as he’d taken away the park from me); my reporter’s notebook, confiscated at the time of my arrest, indicated I’d been following Melinda for weeks, noting her every move; my interviews with some of her neighbors and so forth reinforced the idea that my attentions had been “obsessive”; my being in the house at roughly the time of her murder, and the broken lock on the front door... well, that seemed to speak for itself. Not good, any of it.

Obviously, Jeffrey killed her. Surely, you can see that. My part, as patsy, just made it a “perfect crime.”

But nobody wanted to hear that.

The staff at the Carl’s Jr. did not recall Jeffrey and me ever having eaten there, but why would they as it had been almost a month previous? The calls from Jeffrey to my home phone, the most recent of which had occurred the night before the murder, proved to have been placed from my own lost cell phone, which Jeffrey must have stolen from my apartment before initiating his plan.

My attorney advised me to cop a plea.

I told him to go to hell.

When the DA started rooting around in my past, things got no better. I still don’t know how they thought they’d ever locate Mandy in Bangkok. She doesn’t exactly work a desk in an office — besides, she’s probably going by another name these days. That’s how it works there. Just because immigration has no record of her ever exiting the U.S.A. doesn’t mean she didn’t go back, for God’s sake. There are a million ways for girls to get around bureaucrats! I’d never have hurt Mandy, however much she hurt me. And who’d have guessed that the student I took such an interest in during my last year of teaching was shortly thereafter murdered? My sixth sense alerted me to her need for special protection. I was right! Do I get no credit for that? If the school district hadn’t gotten in my way all those years ago, she might be alive today. Any inference now of my having killed her is ridiculous. Look, whose past wouldn’t reveal unseemly coincidences if put under a microscope? Yours? I doubt it.

Maybe I’ll cop a plea after all.

But let me ask you this: after all my years working in park security (which is a branch of law enforcement, after all), do you think I’m fool enough to commit a murder and leave every clue pointing to me? Of course not! Any true detective of the Sherlock Holmes ilk would understand that the vast number of details that seem to incriminate me, actually exonerate me! Besides, if I did kill poor Melinda, then much of this report is a pure fiction. Talk about fantasy-land! And knowing what you know about me, do you honestly believe I’m capable of making something like this up?

Dark Matter by Martin J. Smith

Balboa Island

I should have left the minute I gave it to him, should have just tossed the eviction notice across the doorstep and onto the cracked tiles of the old mansion’s foyer. A smarter man would have hoofed right back to the Sentra and caught the car ferry off Balboa Island. Me? I stood there like the wideeyed fan I once was, rooted to the front steps of his formerly grand palace at the island’s southern tip. I’d specifically asked for this delivery, just for the chance to meet somebody I once idolized. Now I was staring into the face of a faded nobody with the saddest eyes I’d ever seen. When he answered my knock, he looked like someone peering up from the bottom of a well.

“Been ’specting you,” he said, slurring a bit.

“Wheels of justice don’t turn so fast, but now you’ve got the paperwork. Court order came down yesterday.”

I resisted the urge to apologize. I’d read everything ever written about him, including the entire bankruptcy file. He could only blame himself for this latest bit of unpleasantness. He’d never stopped living like the star he once was, even if the money ran out years ago. It showed. The fenders on the Porsche out front were rusted through and the canvas top was ripped in three places. The house was the choicest piece of real estate on this tony Newport Harbor refuge, but pretty run-down. His ex, the third, owned it now. The judge gave him twenty-four hours to vacate.

I looked at my watch. “Anyway, the sheriff’ll be here this time tomorrow morning.”

“Splendid.”

He cinched the belt of his robe, raised his highball glass, swirled the ice, and took a sip of something thick and amber — something completely wrong for 9:40 in the morning. His bony chest was unnaturally tan, almost orange, the hair on it white.

“Question for you, sir,” he said. “Know anythin ’bout dark matter?”

I’d seen my share of people in denial. I serve eviction notices for the Superior Court of Orange County, California. I am a $15.50-an-hour destroyer of worlds, the death messenger of the American Dream. Nothing surprises me — guys with guns, screeching women, unleashed dogs. It’s why I carry pepper spray in a little holster on my belt. But this, this was the worst of it. I’d just delivered a final curb stomp to somebody who’d once meant a lot to me, somebody who’d obviously given up. What was I thinking when I asked to handle this one?

“Dark. Matter,” he repeated, working hard to enunciate.

I knew all about his eccentricities. Guy was one of the kings of cock-rock when he was, like, nineteen. So big even a teen dork like me played his first album to death. He was white-hot after that first record, the swaggering lead singer of the ’70s band. Life was good. Spent millions on anything that moved — cars, horses, women. For years he kept exotic animals as house pets, and claimed some mystical connection to them — right up until Animal Control took them away after his panther killed a neighbor’s dog.

Nothing lasts. The second album rose briefly, then sank to oblivion. The third? It was over. The band broke up. That was more than thirty-five years ago, half a lifetime of autograph shows, Behind the Music cameos, and the occasional Japanese royalty check. The passing harbor tour boats used to point out his house, but that stopped years ago. No one even called him for session work anymore, because of the drinking. I have this friend who works at TMZ, the celebrity scandal show. She said that during his latest divorce, his ex was shopping a videotape that showed him butt-naked on a lawn chair, pasty and late-life saggy, getting blown by a Goth-looking high-school sophomore. Its release actually might have helped his career. But my friend told me the show had passed on the tape.

The executive producer didn’t even recognize his name.

What do you do when you peak at nineteen? You move to Balboa Island, that’s what. You fall down a well.

“Dark matter?” I said.

He stood up straight and squared his shoulders. “Astrophysics. Cosmology. C’mon, you know.”

He swayed and bumped against the doorframe and motioned me closer, like he was about to share a secret. I stood my ground, but leaned in a little, near enough to smell the booze but far enough to cut and run if he was as drunk and nuts as he seemed. I also caught a whiff of something that made me think of a dirty litter box.

“Can’t see dark matter,” he said, “’s invisible. But it’s there.”

“Where?”

“All ’round us. Most of th’ mass in th’ observ-a-ble universe?” He grinned. “Dark matter.”

“I’ll be damned. And you can’t even see it?”

That brought a somber shake of his head, still crowned by that goofy hair-metal cut, improbably black. “But y’see what dark matter does.”

I took a small step backward. His breath was toxic. “Which is?”

He lit up. Perfect rows of bright white teeth split the weathered skin of his face. “Changes things. Affects things. See, mass has weight, and weight creates grrra-vi-ty.” Took his time pronouncing each syllable of the word. “And grrra-vi-ty doesn’t lie, man. Doesn’t lie.” Another wink. “C’mere. I’ll show you.”

With that he turned from the open door and scuffed down the hall, the soft soles of his UGG boots making a schik-schikschik as he moved away. For some reason, don’t ask me why, I followed. Say what you will about celebrity, but there’s definitely something magnetic about it. Seductive. Dangerous. No one’s immune. Maybe that’s what he was talking about? Anyway, as soon as I stepped across his threshold I was thinking, Dude, you really gotta ask for that raise.

More than eighty rehab facilities dot the Balboa Peninsula within a mile of this exclusive island; Southern California’s celebrities like to dry out in tidy, well-appointed luxury, and by the beach. I’d never been inside one of those, but this place struck me as probably the exact opposite. Piles of stuff everywhere — books, clothes, newspapers. One side of the hall was just drywall, installed but never plastered or painted. The other side was ’70s-era flocked wallpaper hung by an amateur. A classic Fender Strat with a snapped neck lay at the base of a stairway leading to a second story, its looping strings holding the pieces together like thin steel ligaments.

“Mind your way right here,” he called back over his shoulder, sidestepping something. It looked like a mound of shit the size of a football.

When I got closer, I realized it was a pile of shit.

“Whoa,” I said, and stopped.

“Cheers,” he said, lifting the glass again as he moved off down the hall. “Best to let it air-dry a bit.”

He waved me on, turning left toward a sun-filled room facing the harbor’s main channel. “Right in here.”

My father taught me caution in all things. He lived life by the Law of Worst Possible Consequences and communicated it to us daily. An unbuckled seat belt would lead directly to death. So would a carelessly placed skateboard, improperly inflated tires, or an incautious remark to the wrong cop. To be honest, it’s probably why I gravitated to a career wreaking legal vengeance on people who live too close to the edge. Still, something irresistible was pulling me around the corner into the unknown, into a room filled with cast-off dorm furniture.

The space itself was a realtor’s wet dream. Vast windows overlooked the main channel of Newport Harbor. Electric Duffy boats slid past, and the mast and mainsail of an enormous passing yacht briefly dominated the view. Here was a daily parade of all that the Good Life could offer, no longer within reach from this ringside seat.

No matter how ramshackle this castle, the thought of losing it must be torturing the king.

“Sweet,” I said, crossing between a battered couch and a shredded La-Z-Boy recliner, which lay on its side in the middle of the room. It looked like a toy tossed aside by a giant child.

I joined him at one of the windows. “You’ve lived here a long time, right?”

He drained his drink before answering. “Three albums. Three marriages.”

He turned away from the view and headed for the bar across the room. That’s when I noticed her.

She was stretched out in a claw-footed tub, gray and glassy-eyed and naked except for a pair of strappy red-stiletto heels. Maybe early forties, with the look of a tired old groupie. She had stringy, damp blond hair on her head. The dark roots were the same color as the fluffy patch between her legs. He’d half-filled the tub with party ice he must have bought last night or early this morning at the 7-Eleven on the peninsula. A dozen crumpled plastic ice bags were piled at one end. Best guess: she hadn’t been there long; for an ongoing obsession, he’d be using dry ice.

I tamped down my clutching fear. I’d never seen a dead body before.

“Sh-she may need help,” I managed.

Absurd, I know. My other option was to just crap myself and run.

“Who?” he said, his back to me, pouring himself another drink.

I pointed to the tub even though he wasn’t watching. “Her.”

When he turned around, he was stirring his drink with the index finger of one hand. He did that for a long time without saying a word, without even looking at the chilling body in the middle of the room. Suddenly, he seemed to notice her.

“Hoo boy,” he said, cheerful, as if he’d simply neglected to introduce her. “Dam’nest thing, that.”

“She definitely doesn’t look okay.”

“Oh no. She’s definitely not.” He took a sip. “No par-medics necessary, ’m afraid.”

Time to go. I sidestepped toward the hallway.

“Wait,” he said. “Her... this... tha’s not what I wanted to show you.”

“Dude,” I said, “this is seriously fucked up.”

“I know!” he said. “She comes by th’ house to party, then overdoses. Self-control’s sush a problem with some people.”

She didn’t look like she’d been killed. No blood. No bullet wounds or knife holes. No bruises at her throat. Just the waxy gray corpse of a woman who’d stopped by to party.

On ice.

“When, um...”

“Lass night. She found my coke and jus’... overdid!”

“Jesus,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Me too! Terrific talent, that one.” He winked. “Not a kid anymore, but she sure knew how to work it.”

I struggled for words. “Sorry for your loss.”

“But now y’see what I mean ’bout dark matter?”

I sidestepped again toward the hallway, quietly unsnapping the plastic holster of my pepper spray as I did. “Not really.”

He reached into the pocket of his robe. When he pulled it out, I saw something black in his hand and swallowed hard. Who carries a gun in their bathrobe? Nobody sane. He seemed as surprised as I was to see it. He slid it back in and fished into the robe’s other pocket. Whatever he pulled out of that he pointed across the room toward me. The widescreen beside me blinked to life.

A TV remote.

“DVD,” he said, “’s a Science Channel thing on the cosmos or some such, ’bout dark matter. Been watching it all mornin’, tryin’ to sort this out. All this shit slidin’ toward th’ center, t’ward me. I mean, where do I go from here? M’whole comeback thing?” He nodded to the dead woman. “This’ll complicate plans a bit.”

A bit?

“You said it was an accident. I can’t imagine they’d—”

He waved my words away like gnats. “So I’m listenin’ to this show, about how dark matter’s invisible, but y’know it’s there cause it has gravity, ’cause it pulls things into its orbit. All sortsa things. And I’m thinking, see, how I’m sort of like dark matter.”

I said nothing. He sensed my confusion.

“Shit happens, you know? To me. All the time. I always seem to land right in the middle of it. And I had this...” He paused to enunciate. “... epi-phany. I just wanted t’show somebody.”

I looked at my watch again. Made a point of doing so. “Really gotta get back.”

“Won’ take long. Wanna drink?”

“Can’t.”

“I told you to stay.”

Those final words were hard and sharp enough to cut glass, scary, the dopey-drunk voice completely gone. I stared at him until something flashed in the corner of my eye. My first glance to the left registered nothing. The second registered something that didn’t compute at all. Why would a full-grown Siberian tiger be standing in the doorway, right between me and the only way out of the room?

Things started to add up. The giant shit pile in the hall. The suffocating litter-box smell. Even the shredded La-Z-Boy, which I suddenly realized was just an overworked scratching post.

“Really need to get going,” I said.

“Pussy, sit!” he called out.

The tiger didn’t move, just kept its intense yellow eyes fixed on me. It filled the door frame.

“Sit!” he commanded.

I sat back on the window ledge, just in case he was talking to me. Slowly, the tiger sat. Head level. Ears back. Gaze steady.

“That’s Pussy!” he said. “Raised ’er right here. Took ’er in as an orphaned cub, had ’er a year.” He wandered across the room and scratched the tiger between the ears. “Harmless old bird now. Mostly. No sudd’n moves, though. Big cats never lose those instincts. Don’t want ’er thinkin yer a threat. Y’sure don’ want her thinkin’ yer wounded.”

My body was flushed with primal juices. Every nerve was on fire. “It lives here?”

He shook his head. “Refuge. Up in Ventura. Snuck ’er out yesterday and drove ’er down in my panel van, brought ’er in after dark.” He gestured grandly around the room. “We lived here together once. Happy days, y’know, and I jus’ wanted her to see the place again, b’fore... well, you know.”

“I see.”

“Figured we’d spend a li’l time together before the big move.” He held an index finger up to his pursed lips. “Don’ tell the neighbors.”

“Not a word.”

“Nice people, but they’d go apeshit. Always do.” He tipped his glass toward the bathtub. “Course, now there’s this situation.”

“Complicated, like you said.”

“I still generate a lot of grav’ty, even if I’m invisible.”

“I’m sure you do.” I don’t know why, but I added: “I played AniMosity to death when I was a kid. Great album.”

“Thanks.”

I’d kicked into some weird survival mode, desperate to say anything that might get me out of this. He hadn’t threatened me. I didn’t think he was capable of violence. On the other hand, I was in a room with a dead groupie, a live tiger, and a desperate armed man who was drinking heavily before 10 a.m. Things were beyond weird already.

“I even liked the second album.”

I instantly regretted my phrasing, but he smiled. “Beastiary?” he said. “More mature, don’ you think? Record company hated it. After that, they just bailed on the third record. No support a’tall.”

“Bastards,” I said. “For what it’s worth, though, I bought Zoology too. Got all three.”

“Appreciate that.”

“You guys ever think about a fourth studio album? Reunion tour, maybe?”

“Never been that desp’rate.”

“I’d love to see that. Lot of people would.”

He drained the rest of his drink during the awkward silence, dumped the ice into the tub, and set the glass gently on the dead woman’s pubic mound. When he turned back toward me, the look he gave me had the same edge I’d noticed in his voice.

“So I guess we have a l’il situation, then?” he said.

“Meaning?”

“You barged into m’house like some stalker-fan. You and this woman.”

“You invited me... Wait. Me and this woman?”

The wheels were coming off this bus pretty fast. Could he hear how loud I swallowed?

“’s a big house,” he said, picking up the empty glass again. “What were you two doin’ upstairs all night, anyway?”

An alibi wouldn’t be a problem. I was at dinner with five friends until midnight. Which was completely beside the point. Nothing mattered now except the moment. And with this guy’s loose grip on reality, I was in no position to argue.

“My lips are sealed,” I lied. “You can handle this any way you want.”

“You’re in my house.”

“Yessir, I am.”

“You followed me in.”

“You told me to.”

“The hell I did.”

“I’ll just go then.”

I’d taken about three tentative steps toward the door where the tiger sat when the highball glass exploded against the window frame just beside me. Heavy crystal ricocheted off the back of my head. When I touched the spot, my fingers came away bloody.

Straight ahead, Pussy leaned ever so slightly forward.

Which would be a more pathetic end to my life? Death at the hands of my teen idol — now an aging, drunk rocker — or death by tiger attack in the rocker’s Balboa Island rumpus room? Either way, I imagined snickering at my funeral.

“You’re pretty upset, I can tell,” I said. “It’s a bad time...”

He walked halfway across the room, his chest heaving. Either he was working himself into a rage, or he was out of breath from throwing his glass.

“Don’t patronize, you little prick.”

“Never.”

“You have no idea what this is like for me.”

“I can’t—”

“To lose a home? To see everythin’ taken away? What tha’ does to a man?”

I knew. “This won’t help, but doing what I do, I know there are a lot of people out there going through exactly what—”

“Christ!” He swept an arm across a scene littered by the debris of his reckless life. “You think I’m a credit whore, doncha? You think tha’s what this’s about? I earned all this.”

“Of course you did. You rocked.”

He took a deep breath. “Don’t mind me sayin’, but it takes some big-ass cojones to come into my house, tell me I’m just like all those assistan’ credit managers and den’al hygienists and Roto-Rooters who couldn’t pay the mortgage on some—” He spat the next word. “—tract house. You thin’ they have a clue whaddit means to lose somethin’ like this?”

A home is a home. Square footage and harbor views can’t measure pride or pain. I wanted to tell him about the family in Santa Ana I’d evicted just last week, immigrants who’d worked two decades to buy a teeny two-bedroom. They raised six kids there and kept it immaculate right up until the father was deported during an INS sweep at the taquería where he worked. This guy needed to hear that story. I wasn’t about to tell him.

“I have to go,” I said, eyeing Pussy.

“Shit storm’s comin’,” he slurred.

“Please don’t blame the messenger.”

That’s when he started clenching and unclenching his fists. He dropped his eyes to the floor, looking for some last chance to snatch his fantasy life from the swirl as it all circled the drain. He spoke quietly. “Don’ go. I’m just... need a few hours t’get m’head together. All this dark matter. You c’n do that for me. Ya gotta do that for me.”

I tapped my watch. “If I don’t check in soon, the office’ll come looking for me. It’s policy.”

“Tha’s bullshit.”

“It’s really not.”

“I said i’s bullshit.”

“I know you did. Doesn’t change policy, though. They keep a pretty close eye on us.”

He thought about that for an uncomfortably long time. “So you’re saying I’m fucked.”

“I’m not saying—”

“This’s really happenin’?”

He was losing his tenuous grip. My situation wasn’t exactly improving, either. I edged another step closer to the door. I’d watched him scratch Pussy between the ears. That was good enough for me. I’d take my chances with the tiger.

“Instincts!” he reminded, his voice rising.

When I hesitated, he stepped around the upended La-ZBoy, and in three quick steps was halfway across the room, coming directly at me. His groped into his pocket and the robe fell open, exposing his chest, his remarkably flat stomach, and the withered manjunk of a still-breathing fossil.

“Meaning?”

“They crush th’ windpipe, but it takes minutes to die. No sudd’n moves, now.”

He pulled the gun out almost casually. There was a tremor in his hand that I hadn’t noticed before. He stopped about twenty feet away, swaying. Even so, the barrel looked awfully steady, pointed right at my head. “I ask’t you a favor, tha’s all. One little favor.” He stepped slowly forward.

“You’re trying to make it look like I had something to do with this,” I said. “I can’t let you do that.”

“You two broke into m’house, you and partygirl there. Y’got into my thin’s. I saw all that.”

“You know that’s not true. The cops will know it too.”

He was maybe ten feet away, but still coming. I retreated until my back hit the corner where the window met the wall. Nowhere else to go. I went for my belt.

“See this?” I said, holding up a tiny canister.

He wobbled, trying to make sense of the sudden change in my voice. He came two steps closer, but it wasn’t a hostile advance. He lowered the gun and squinted at my hand like a man who wished he’d brought his reading glasses. That’s when I hit him with a jet of forced-cone pepper spray. Nailed him right in the eyes.

The gun fell to the floor as both hands shot to his face.

“Christ!” he screamed. “Y’prick!”

He staggered, shrieking as he backpedaled. Behind him, Pussy rose into a crouch. Her ears lay back against a head the size of a medicine ball. She twitched her whiskers, missing nothing.

“I was kidding!” he screamed. “Christ Jesus, it burns!”

The La-Z-Boy was right behind him, and he hit it in full backward stride. The impact sent his feet straight into the air and he came down hard on his back, robe fully open. He tried to leverage his momentum into a backward somersault, but tipped to one side and fell hard against the edge of the couch. It knocked him back to the floor, where his head thumped the hardwood. His hands never left his chem-scorched eyes even as one of his flailing legs caught Pussy square on the jaw. The big cat snarled, hackles up.

“Gaaaaaaa!” he screamed.

Pussy was on her blinded prey in a single bound. The roar that announced her attack was brief and deep, all business, the sound of heavy equipment at full throttle.

“Pussy! No!”

The animal didn’t stop. She batted him with her powerful right paw, almost playful, and the blow sent him reeling. He regained his balance, but her claws had opened wide gashes along his left shoulder. His orange skin hung in ribbons as he groped blindly with one hand for the source of the pain. Desperate to orient himself, he tried to open eyes that were all but welded shut.

I edged closer to the hallway door.

Pussy’s shoulders rose, her head dropped. When he fell to his knees, she lunged.

“Yaa—” was the only sound he made before she clamped down on his throat. She held him to the floor with giant fore-paws as his skinny legs thrashed.

By then I was racing for the front door. Behind me, the same sound of savagery I’d heard on all those National Geographic specials. They never ended well. My heart was pounding as I jerked open the heavy front door and stepped back into the cramped serenity of Balboa Island. I pulled the door shut, muffling Pussy’s roar.

I prayed my thanks there on his doorstep, waiting for my breathing to slow. Before I moved toward my car, I looked around. The cottages and mansions of Balboa Island were bathed in brilliant midmorning sun. The sails of passing yachts bobbed along the harbor’s main channel. Nothing was changed. Life went on. But behind me I felt a real and unmistakable force, like the gravitational pull of something dark and invisible.

On the Night in Question by Patricia McFall

Garden Grove

When the first letter arrived, Fred Mackie was standing just inside his front door. He didn’t know or care if the mail carrier saw him through the curtains as the envelope slipped through the slot, bounced off his right shoe, and glided across the floor tile until it stopped. He’d had a feeling today would be the day, and he savored being right. Like with a lot of items he’d order from unreliable dot-coms, Fred was never sure whether or not anything would arrive. But this wasn’t some item he’d ordered. It was a connection that he hoped would transform his life. Way too shy to approach a pretty woman, he was well past thirty without every having a real being-in-love relationship.

He’d made a New Year’s resolution that he wouldn’t be alone after this year.

In California, people doing time weren’t allowed to have e-mail. But there were websites like InmatePlaymate.com that exchanged people’s snail-mail addresses for a reasonable fee. Playmate number 403, with her long blond hair, sparkling blue eyes, and mysterious smile, had taken him on.

He picked up the pale-yellow envelope and turned it over. The flap illustration showed three kittens in a wicker basket, playing with a ball of pink yarn. California Frontier Institute for Women was stamped diagonally across the image. Turning the envelope back over, he observed the old LOVE stamp and some one-centers to update the postage. The postmark was February 14 — Valentine’s Day. She’d written his address in childish handwriting, the “i” in Mackie dotted with a little heart. Smiling and shaking his head, Fred went to the kitchen to get a steak knife, and slit through the paper flap with precision. There was a single sheet inside. He sniffed, but it wasn’t scented.

Fred liked that last part — so affectionate. He was careful wording his reply, wanting his first letter to be eloquent. He hammered at the keyboard, glancing every few minutes at the color image of Angel’s website profile lying beside his desktop. He’d Photoshopped the image to put himself there, behind her, grinning like a mega-lotto winner, hands resting on her shoulders — actually, pretty close to the swell of her chest. He wrote how glad he was to hear from her, how much he’d already thought about her.

He didn’t mention anything about her being in prison. That could wait. In a way, it was beside the point. He wanted to help her think about the future and forget her troubles. Instead, he asked if she had a boyfriend. I bet you have a boyfriend, he wrote, but if not, consider me a candidate! He added a smiley-face icon, something he thought he would never do, but here it just seemed right. Fred told her about his life and where he lived in West Garden Grove in a remodeled home, well maintained but in need of a woman’s touch. He hoped that wasn’t too forward. He didn’t want to scare her away; that was why he left out his picture. He wrapped up by asking her to please write back ASAP.

Going over his letter, he polished it up. He took out the part calling himself a shy geek, also the mention of how many cops lived in his neighborhood. He got rid of his horrible childhood, how he escaped his hateful parents by moving from the upper Midwest to California and hadn’t seen them in years, what he secretly called his “witness self-protection program.” He called himself single instead of never married. Why be negative?

Fred printed it, signed it, sealed it in an envelope, and drove to the post office. He used the automated machine to send it express. He didn’t need some snotty clerk snickering at Angel’s prison address. They might even throw it in the trash — after they ripped it open and read it, the creeps. Someone should go postal and rip them open.

After the first exchanges, things moved pretty fast even if the mail didn’t. Then Angel wrote that even though he couldn’t call her, she could call him collect. Fred did a solitary endzone dance and demanded in his reply, Why didn’t you mention it before? Call me any old time! He gave his home number, but not the cell or office. Too distracting.

Fred worked at a nationwide income-tax preparation company. After ten years, the job was routine enough for him to sneak online and daydream — that’s how he’d found InmatePlaymates.com. In his free time, he’d toss back a few Coronas with his cop buddy and across-the-street neighbor Manny Delgado, maybe go to a Ducks game, whatever.

These days Fred was interested in working off a beer belly, not drinking it. Since Angel had soon asked pointedly about a picture, he dug one out taken at a workmate’s wedding a few years earlier. Fred was quite a bit thinner back then — but he knew he’d be at least down to that weight by the time he could go on a visit. If he laid off the energy bars and bottled Frappuccino and used the stairs at work, he’d be back into his old clothes in no time flat. Old clothes, nothing — he’d buy the new ones he’d budgeted for. During tax season, he couldn’t get away. He’d be working long hours including weekends, so he and Angel would have to wait awhile. Besides, they hadn’t even discussed a visit yet.

In the picture, he’d taken off his glasses and held them behind his back. He wore dark slacks, a white shirt, and a narrow black tie. Now he smiled, realizing that to her he might look like a slightly plump Mormon on bike patrol. He could have altered it electronically to include sunglasses so he’d look more like John Belushi as a Blues Brother, but changing an image for his own entertainment and deceiving her were two different things.

He wanted Angel to see how he was and think he was still okay, so her next letter was a huge relief. She even said something that gave him a hot shiver of anticipation:

Bare or bear, either was fine with him.

That next week was a blur of work: run home and see if there was a letter, eat something “healthy” from the microwave, take a quick walk, go to sleep, and get up to do it over again. Fred had explained to Angel about tax season but began to take work home so he’d be there in case she called. Soon the letters were pouring through the door slot. Twice they passed in the mail because they had so much to say. He was getting pretty good at flirting and double meanings, if he did say so himself. In fact, he’d never felt better, like on a high, full of energy, smiling. He was rocketing through the tax forms. He told Angel to call him, and soon. Her next letter said, Thanks for the offer, I will call you March 1st Friday so, dont go on a date just kidding lol!

Did she really think he’d do that to her? With everything she’d told him about the abuse and terror her parents and ex-boyfriend had made her endure, all he wanted to do was protect and care for her. He didn’t expect more than gratitude, at first, but he knew she would want to show it, someday, when she had the chance.

Friday arrived. Because he didn’t want to get stuck in evening rush-hour traffic, Fred left work early and undetected. He kept his cool on the freeway. There was the usual nasty honking and flipping off, but he drove just under the speed of traffic and in the slow lane, thwarting any thug who tried to use it to pass on the right. Pretty soon, he was almost to the intersection he secretly called White Trash Corners at the southern edge of his neighborhood. Twice every workday, Fred’s freeway shortcut took him through the four-way stop.

Uh — glee! The first house had gray paint, gray trim, a never-watered grayish tan lawn, and a gray fence that looked like it was put together without nails in a wind tunnel, leaning this way and that. Not to code. The old guy who lived there with a mousy little wife often put up handwritten screeds in his window about politics or the Bible. Fred didn’t bother reading them.

The second house had peeling, dirty white paint and trim. The residents were a guy and his two grown sons. It seemed all they did was watch over their beer cans as the original asphalt driveway cracked, separated, and disappeared under the thatchy so-called lawn, where a truck and two cars were parked. The truck never moved.

The third house took a woman’s touch to be bad. In front, right on the corner, were three stumps of what had probably been palm trees. The lady there decorated those stumps for every holiday, small and large, and usually left them up until it was time for the next holiday. Just so you wouldn’t forget her fat ass, she had a country-style garden decoration, really just some painted plywood, that showed the back view of some damn woman bent over, probably picking up dogshit decorations.

The last house was the kind that even solicitors would pass by. The cinder-block wall running along the street was disintegrating a brick at a time, especially since the kids in the area started helping them. All covered with ivy up and over the roof. Big security-alarm posting by the front door. Never a sign of life; someone could be dead in there for all anybody knew.

It was like the four houses were in a worst-yard contest, like the opposite of those shows that told you how to make your place look good. Fred decided he’d push back. He picked up some business cards at a home-improvement store and went around the corners late one night — tree trimming, painting, driveway repair, landscape, masonry — even an autoshop card under the truck’s windshield wiper and a therapist’s card for the religion nut jammed behind one of his window screens.

Whenever he left that place, Fred felt glad he lived in West Garden Grove, which was totally safe. He liked coming up his street, with its parkway trees controlled by regular severe pruning. Of four models in the tract, his was the Alpine, which he kept nice with maintenance and inventory schedules for everything from A/C filters to Ziploc bags.

His neighbor Manny Delgado, who had just made sergeant at the GGPD, liked to joke about all the old farts working the west end just before they retired — because nothing ever happened there.

Kind of true. It was a strange city, like somebody said about Oakland, no there there. Only a mile or so north to south but stretched out west to east, Garden Grove was sandwiched between other cities like a slice of cheese. He wouldn’t want to live in midtown, which might as well be Westminster and its Little Saigon, where teenage Asian gangs roamed. The east end, same thing, but with Latino gangs. He’d been meaning to ask Manny what it took to qualify for the police, be part of the solution to crime. He felt ready for a change, and he was getting in shape. Of course, Angel might not like it, but he’d talk to her.

Fred hurried home, unlocked the front door, and looked for a letter, finding instead the visit application Angel had sent. Man, he could feel it now. It was really happening. No phone messages except for a gym manager returning his call. Parking the cordless phone on the toilet tank, he took a quick shower and changed into loose-knit pants and a comfy old Angels baseball shirt. He switched on the TV, grabbed a diet cherry soda from the fridge, and opened a cabinet to get some microwave popcorn — but then he heard the weird twangy intro music for Cold Case Files and hurried in to see if he could outguess the detectives.

Somewhere, his cordless phone was ringing.

Fred stared for a split second at the remote in the palm of his hand. He shook it and put it to his ear before he grasped the problem. Running down the hall to get it before it went to message, he snatched up the phone atop the toilet tank and, trying not to sound breathless, gasped, “Angel?”

There was a pause, then a click. A mechanical voice said, This is the California State Department of Corrections with a collect call from — pause, and another voice saying, Angela May Winkler, then the machine again, Please choose from the following options...

The first option was to take the call and accept charges, so he waited no longer and pressed that number.

Another pause. Then a real voice silky as butter dripping and slithering down between kernels of fresh popcorn: “Hey, Fred, this is Angel. Are you there?”

He took a breath. “Oh, yeah, I’m really here. How’s Daddy’s little Angel girl?”

Some weeks later, Angel sent Fred his approved visitor’s permit. Even though the phone calls had given him a sense of what Angel would be like, he wanted to be face-to-face, touch her, feel her touching him.

Mother’s Day Sunday, Fred got up at dawn because he couldn’t sleep. The prison had a whole load of restrictions on visitors, and he’d skimmed the booklet — but they were guidelines, not ironclad laws, right? Most sounded like they made sense — no medicine, even over-the-counter. No hats. No tobacco or alcohol. No food; you had to buy it from their vending machines. No chewing gum? That one made him wonder. You couldn’t go in there dressed like an inmate, like in a movie he saw where two guys switched places. He laughed out loud at the rule that said women who set off the metal detectors with an underwire bra had to go in without it.

Fred showered and weighed himself, proud to be ten pounds and one belt-notch smaller than before, and put on his new khakis, loose Hawaiian shirt, and Brand X huaraches — the finest sandals made in Mexico, according to Manny.

Glad he started early, he joined the slow-moving line of cars leading into the prison, showed his pass at the gate, parked in the visitor area, and followed the obvious path — they weren’t taking any chances on somebody wandering away. Everything was drab, institutional, painted government green, but the lawn and flower borders were surprisingly well tended, the windows spotless.

The path ended in a slow-mo line of people and a sign that read:

Fred got in behind a granny with two little girls maybe four and six, who ran around on the cracked, dusty asphalt and ignored her yelling their names every few minutes. She finally gave up, peering down at what looked like birth certificates. Maybe she was embarrassed how they disobeyed her. He’d have suggested she pop them good once in a while instead of calling them, but he didn’t know any Spanish. Amazing how often people could miss the obvious solution to their problem.

Right behind him, someone did that ahem kind of throat-clearing, so he turned around to see a grim-looking, scrawny, straight-lipped redneck nodding at the candy-shop bag Fred was carrying.

“You must be a first-timer,” the man announced. “They don’t let anybody take in gifts like candy. Afraid of contraband.”

“I know,” said Fred, trying not to sound defensive. “I read the guidelines, and it isn’t candy. Thought maybe I’d take in a few women’s magazines — Mother’s Day and all.”

The man smiled, and his lined face — more sandblasted than chiseled — seemed surprisingly kind. “Mama’s contraband is still contraband. If I was you, I’d go back to your car and send ’em through channels, because those guards will just toss ’em.” Know-it-all was still sort of smiling.

“Well, maybe they will and maybe they won’t,” Fred muttered and turned away. Guy was probably right, but Fred wasn’t about to lose his place in line.

He was closer to the front now, everybody getting out their IDs, women carrying see-through plastic pouches instead of purses, watching what they said but trying to act friendly. Visitors with kids produced birth certificates. A few teen girls buttoned up their blouses, smoothed down their skirts, and covered their stomachs. Not because they respected good old Mom; it was the rules. He remembered Angel saying that whenever a guard didn’t like what girls had on, they got to cover up in old baggy thrift store clothes, or leave. “This place, all they want to do is control everything you do. Everything. Even when it makes no sense — hell, ’specially then — just to show you how they can. Shit.” He wished she wouldn’t swear, but those words came straight from the heart.

She’d added that having so few choices was why it was important to keep money in her canteen account since they couldn’t have cash. “Thanks, sweetie,” she’d said after he sent a couple-hundred transfer to her with the usual bureaucratic hurdles. “With a little canteen account, now I can get myself shampoo, deodorant, makeup — girly things. I’m so lucky to have you.”

Poor kid, so alone. His eyes had watered a little then. He knew what it was like to be lonesome. After numerous humiliating ordeals called “dates,” Fred took his sex life private, getting along with toys and DVDs. Cheaper and safer.

Fred went through a metal detector like at an airport, then finished the check-in routine at the desk, where a guard counted his money, stamped his wrist, looked closely at the pass and his ID, and confiscated the bag, saying, “Nothing from outside comes inside, nothing inside goes out.”

Inmate visiting was in a big boxy room with picnic tables, walls punctuated by vending machines behind heavy yellow stripes on the floor. Prisoners weren’t allowed to handle money, he remembered. He sat, twisted sideways on the assigned bench, since his seat faced the back wall and he wanted to watch Angel come out. A guard unlocked a door and brought out a group of women, but none of them could be Angel, so he calmed down and waited.

About fifteen minutes later, another group came out and he spotted her. She looked like her picture — a little shorter, maybe. She was dressed like a nurse, scrubs the same color as the tired green buildings, some painfully white new running shoes. He stood and watched as she approached. Angel didn’t wait, just said, “Aloha, FRED!” threw her hands around his neck and kissed his cheek hard, saying in his ear, “Sorry I can’t give you a lei.” He didn’t hesitate and kissed her on the mouth, carried away to another place, blissed out, breathless and trembling and ready to keep right on going where it led, and to hell with everyone else.

Angel pulled back, whispering, “Guards don’t like you to overdo it, even if I do. No matter how much we want to, we can’t hug or kiss again until you leave.” She looked up, beaming into his face. “Well, what did you bring me?”

“Uh — well, I tried to bring something but they, I mean the guards, wouldn’t let—” He gestured back the way he’d come.

“I know that. Just a little joke. We have to sit across from each other. It’s okay to hold hands on top of the table.”

They sat playing together with their hands; she smiled at him and he smiled back, but from time to time her eyes flicked to the side as someone came or went. Not paranoid, but vigilant.

Fred thought it made her seem vulnerable, a good person stuck in a bad place. Finally he managed, “I knew you’d be just as beautiful and sexy as your picture.”

“Thank you — sure don’t feel like it in these clothes.”

“Don’t worry. I can get past your clothes.”

“I wish you could.”

He tried to picture her naked. He could tell she had a good body. Not perfect, nobody was perfect — but she was so pretty, even better than he’d hoped.

The room had filled with visitors, the majority women with kids. Mothers, sisters, friends? Their own kids or the inmates’? Almost all of them looked poor. So what if the atmosphere wasn’t romantic? This was a little bit of paradise with only two people in it. And the most intoxicating thing was that he could tell from everything Angel said and did that she felt exactly the same way. He couldn’t get enough of that way she looked at him, like he was a big fat birthday present.

He wanted to talk and said the first thing that came to mind. “Why don’t they let you bring in chewing gum?”

“I dunno. So you can’t use it to stick things together and make a weapon?”

“Amazing what people will think up, huh.”

She smiled indulgently. “What the fuck else they got to do with their time, squeezy bear?”

Fred didn’t want to talk yet about her cleaning up her mouth, so he asked if she wanted anything from the vending machines. “I don’t want to ask for a Slim Jim. You might think I was ba-a-a-a-d,” she said, tucking a bit of hair behind her ear. “Maybe some beef jerky. Surprise me.”

He stepped over the yellow line and bought the jerky, which came in a cellophane sleeve and looked about five-to-twenty-five years past its pull date, and some peanut M&Ms. He wasn’t hungry himself, so he got a cup of sour-smelling machine coffee and a bottle of water.

Fred returned and tossed her the jerky lightly.

She pointed at his other hand. “What else you got there, squeezy bear?”

“Squeezy bear, huh? I kind of like that name.”

“I thought you might. That’s how I always think about you, just a big ol’ huggy squeezy bear.”

“I won’t deny it. I don’t need any other name for you, though, cause Angel fits just right. I got this for you too.” As he held up the bag of chocolate candies, he couldn’t help grinning.

“Ooh, I’ll take dessert first!”

“Okay, but I get to feed ’em to you.”

“Uh-uh. We can’t touch.”

“See, we won’t be,” he said like a spy setting up a meeting. “I’ll give ’em to you one by one. I’ll hold this side of the candy and you get the other side with your teeth.”

“Can’t — a guard can terminate the visit for that kind of shit, and they do.”

He sighed. “Another rule. Okay.” So much for the fantasy of watching her lick chocolate off his fingers.

She ripped the bag open, tilted it to get a mouthful of candy, and wolfed it. Then she started on the jerky, chewing more thoughtfully, still glancing around. She looked like a sweet little puppy learning to guard her dish.

He tried to ignore the helpless gesturing of the people around them, their crying diluted by quiet attempts to laugh, sing sweetly, or pray with confidence. Everyone tried desperately to have a private visit in an exposed public place. One table over, an inmate asked, “Don’t you think I know what’s going on?” The visitor said, “You don’t know what it’s like,” and muttered about how hard he had it. When she whispered into his ear, he shot up out of his seat and said, not quite shouting, “You too, bitch!” He raised a hand swiftly, but it was to signal a guard.

The whole room went silent, waiting, all the guards intent as one of them took the inmate away and another led the guy out. A few seconds later came several tentative whispers, shifting on benches, footsteps, the clinking of coins in machines.

Fred looked across at Angel, softened inside when he saw how relieved she was, and swore he could hear his happily beating heart. Love lifted him to a different plane from other people.

She smiled and said, “All it takes is one asshole to stop everyone’s visit, but not this time.”

They chatted about Fred’s job and his house and his plans to buy a new car, when a crackling loudspeaker announced that Inmate Visiting had filled to capacity and that the first-in, first-out policy would apply. Several pass numbers were called, none of them Fred’s, and the guard broadcast, “Say goodbye to your inmate.”

Angel looked stricken.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Fred said. “I don’t have to go right now, do I? I was at least ten people from the front.”

“Not that — I wanted to tell you some good news. My counselor gave me a release date—”

“When?”

“June 1. Time off and early release to relieve overcrowding.”

“Great! You’re saying—”

“I’ll be free. I go live my life again, report to my parole officer, and don’t reoffend.” Angel rolled her eyes. “As if I would.”

Fred stroked the palm of her hand. “Look, I’ve been wanting to ask how you got to be here...”

She answered in a whisper, leaning in. “Sure. I got nothing to hide. These two so-called friends—” she spat the word “—asked me to drive ’em someplace. Then they tell me to wait in this strip mall and they go in a jewelry store? So I wait, but then a few minutes later I hear like a lot of sirens, and I’m freaking, I’m panicked, I start the car and go.”

“You poor kid. And the cops?”

“Busted ’em. These guys, Mitch and Dan, tried to say I left them there on purpose and even that I set up the whole job. I didn’t do anything, but you know the way things work...” She paused to wave at the surroundings. “I had to take a plea and testify against them. At least they’re going to be down for a long time, and I only have two more weeks. Can’t wait!”

“Angel, honey,” he said with concern. “Can you wait? Do you think you can handle it until you get out?”

She laughed. “After a year and a half, I can do two weeks standing on my head.”

He squeezed her hand. “What then? Do you have family—”

“My folks don’t want me, squeezy bear. They pretty much disowned me. My brother Gordie would help if he could, but they’ve already got a full house. Anyway, don’t worry about my problems. I’ll be fine. At least I’ll be free.”

That called for a definitive move. Fred sprinted to the edge of what could be a cliff and jumped off, saying, “You can stay with me, Angel. We can be together.”

He heard the loudspeaker again — his pass number with some others, then, “Say goodbye to your inmate.”

“I’ll come back next weekend and—”

“No, don’t. Another rule, you know. We can go over all the details the next time we talk. Oh, I can’t stand to let you go!” She stood up, popped the last of the beef jerky into her mouth, and then, laughing, spit it back into the wrapper it came in. “I know that’s gross, honey, but there’s just no damned way you can chew it but slow. Now come over here and say goodbye.”

It was a great kiss, even if it tasted bad.

On the day of her release, Angel didn’t want Fred to pick her up and said she’d stay with her brother Gordie Bacon’s family until the weekend, and then she’d move over to Fred’s for a while, if that was okay with him. Sure, he said.

On Saturday morning, Gordie backed a small rental van into the driveway with the “few things” Angel mentioned. He jumped out of the driver’s seat and opened the back. As Fred went outside, he looked at Gordie. Buff, but not too. Outdoor tan. The kind of guy who always looked like he needed a shave, which some women unaccountably found attractive.

They shook, Fred saying, “Hey, good to meet you, man. Give you a hand?”

“No need, but I tell you what. Angel’s dying to show you her new hair,” he warned, gesturing with his head.

Fred trotted around to the passenger side, and out stepped the new Angel, with jet-black, straight, chin-length hair and a black-and-brown checked sundress. She flew straight into his arms. “Squeezy bear, I sure hope you like—”

“There’s nothing about you I don’t like,” he murmured into her new hair, which smelled like flowers, and confidently began their long and satisfying first real kiss. He heard the front screen door slam behind her brother. Fred, who had managed to lose another 2.7 pounds, was feeling pretty wonderful with Angel right there in his arms. He wasn’t really into making out in public, but when he heard a mower switched off, by instinct he opened one eye, amused to see his cop pal Manny had stopped cutting his lawn across the street to openly gawk, grin, and give him a thumbs-up, which Fred stealthily returned behind Angel’s back. One arm around her shoulders, he steered her into her new home.

Gordie had helped himself to a beer — at 9 a.m. He had one of the ESPN channels on. He could have asked or apologized, but instead said, “Either of you want one?” like he was the host and they were the strangers.

When the beer ran out hours later, Fred did end up helping with the few boxes, which Angel said to leave in the garage because she couldn’t deal with them yet. One was light like clothes, another clinky like dishes. There was also a rusty stationary bike and a hibachi with cobwebs on the grill. She’d brought a traveling bag with her for the first few days, she said.

Gordie, with an exaggerated leer, wished the lovebirds goodnight.

That night, Fred offered Angel the guest bedroom, not wanting to push too hard, but she let out a musical giggle and started to undress him. They made love, and it was amazing how she enjoyed it and came so much and had so many ways to keep him going. The next morning she insisted on preparing scrambled eggs and toast for him. She was bright and perky, but he was pleasantly spent, wanting to go back to bed, rest up, and start again. He knew she wanted that too.

Over breakfast, he swallowed a big bite of eggs, wiped his mouth with the paper towel she’d put by his plate, and said, “Mind if I ask you a personal question?”

“Oh, baby, I don’t have any secrets from you. I’m fallin’ in love with you. That’s my secret, and now you know.”

Fred forgot what he’d meant to ask and sat frozen, amazed, the paper towel hanging from his hand.

Fred took ten days off that first month, and nobody at work bothered him with calls or e-mail. He’d never felt better.

Things were still good with Angel, even if it was tough sometimes to train her where to put things away, do cleaning in the correct order, or understand that energy-conscious people turned out lights when they left rooms and set their thermostats at seventy-eight degrees. Though the summer sun beat down and the nights were warm, Angel didn’t like going outside, day or night. Backyard barbecue was fine, but no walks or errands. At first he thought great sex had turned her into a homebody, but one evening when they were watching TV, a car backed into the driveway to turn around, and instantly she was very still, like she’d been on Mother’s Day. A morning or two later, she’d gone into the bedroom when the UPS guy came.

“What’s the matter, my angel? Is something—”

“Nothing, I’m just weird. Not used to being free yet, I guess. Just ignore it.”

But the way she said it, Fred knew she was frightened. He needed to talk to her about it soon.

The next weekend, Angel came in while Fred was on the Internet and caught him looking at engagement rings. She just bent over and kissed him, getting into it, and drew him away to bed. He didn’t even have time to pop the question. She wanted to get married soon, and to take his name.

“Speaking of names,” he sighed contentedly, remembering the flaw in his happy life, “you’ve never been married before, right?”

“Not me. I was waiting for the right one.”

“So how come you’re Winkler and he’s Bacon?”

She paused. “That’s because he’s my stepbrother. We have different fathers.”

“You mean half-brother?”

“Yeah, that’s what I meant.”

“Now that explains why you don’t look anything alike, huh.”

If they were getting married, he had to lay down the law about Gordie, their constant guest since his wife Fiona started working nights. Fred hadn’t even met her, after a month! Gordie, being drunk most of the time and lazy all of the time, ended up on the couch — a lot — and left in the mornings after Fred went to work. He was a conceited asshole, but worse, a cheapskate who never once brought anything to share until Fred cut back on the Bud supply and ran out of beer twice in a row. Even though Gordie had to walk to the supermarket and pay for more himself, he kept missing the point. Angel and Fred hardly had a minute alone. Gordie was a nuisance.

On Monday, Fred went to downtown Santa Ana to pick up the form for a marriage license. While he was there, he decided to look up the transcript of those guys’ trials. He remembered their first names, Mitch — probably Mitchell — and Dan/Daniel, and he had Angel’s full name and inmate number. He gave this information to a nice middle-aged woman with a motherly need to help him, bless her. She ticked away at her keyboard for a while, found the last names, and looked them up.

“Looks like they pled out after the preliminary hearing.”

“But Miss Winkler told me she testified against these guys.”

“She must have meant the prelim, hon, and that’s a good thing. Every prelim has a transcript. Would you like me to get you the file?”

As he sat and read the transcript, Fred understood why Angel was so frightened, why she changed her looks, why she wanted his name. She’d even hinted about buying a new house, and that fit too. It was her witness self-protection. But why hadn’t she told him?

On the night in question, according to her testimony, Mitchell Hoffman and Danforth Green asked her for a ride but gave no indication that they planned to rob a jewelry store. “At the strip mall,” she said, “I saw both of them leave the car carrying guns. I overheard them agree they wouldn’t hesitate to shoot — including me, if I got out of line.” She’d been terrified, and when she heard shots from inside the store and saw them running out with their guns, she fled for her life. No, she said, “I didn’t know an old man was in there that got shot and he would have made it except for the heart attack it gave him.”

No, she didn’t know what became of the guns when the men ran from the store and when they were apprehended hiding five blocks east thirty minutes later. Yes, she understood that both claimed — immediately after being taken into custody, in separate interviews where they could not collaborate — that the whole thing was her idea, that she’d put them up to it and given them the guns, and that she’d driven away and left them high and dry. Well, the only explanation she could think of was that those interviews must have come from “them cooking up some story ahead of time to pin it on me if it all went sideways.”

After the prelim, Fred learned, the two men had taken pleas rather than face trial, each getting twenty years for the death of the jeweler, including enhancements for their previous criminal records and for the guns used in commission of a crime.

Fred let out a low whistle. Sometimes the safest place to be was in prison. Those guys could have friends and family outside settle the score. Even though Angel told the truth, had knowingly done nothing criminal, and had to serve time, she’d made mortal enemies.

But maybe they didn’t know about her early release yet, and there was still time.

Fred went straight to a sporting goods store to buy ammunition and a cleaning kit for his dad’s old revolver.

As soon as he got home, he told Angel that he had found out what she was scared of.

She looked at him blankly, guarded and waiting.

“First, sweetheart, Gordie coming over here all the time is dangerous. He’s making a perfect beeline to you. All anyone has to do is follow him. Gordie has to start hanging out at his own place. We need to list the house, and as soon as we’re married I need to get some life insurance, that’s for damn sure, because I may have to defend you.”

“I can’t believe how brave you are.” Angel’s smile was hard to read.

Fred went to a shooting range. He hadn’t been in a long time. The manager didn’t give a shit, just showed him how the targets worked, gave him the earphones, and left him alone.

Fred started with a bull’s-eye target and practiced, aiming carefully before each shot. The first two went wide, one not even hitting the target surface, the other making a neat hole in the upper right corner. Some internal pressure shot up, a kind of embarrassment where he didn’t feel like a man should feel when he was learning how to protect his home and wife-to-be. He took a deep breath and started over, adjusting his stance, checking to see if the desk guy was watching, but he was looking at his computer screen.

Fred shot again, and hit the outermost circle. He shot again without moving, and hit just above the previous shot. He liked the heavy feel of the handgun now. He was learning.

The manager changed the target to a graphic, a large line drawing like a poster that depicted a bad guy using a terrified, busty hostage as a shield, holding a big butcher knife to her throat.

Now this was the real deal. Defend and protect. He adjusted and readjusted his aim, finally squeezed one off — and hit the girl’s shoulder. Just a graze, but still, what a dumb shot. Fred’s knees quivered a little when he got ready again, but something stopped his hand. The week before, he’d been explaining to Angel that the salad/dessert forks and the dinner forks were to be neatly stacked with tines facing the back, in the two adjacent sections of the wooden silverware tray in the drawer by the dishwasher. He pointed out that if she would only load them into the dishwasher in the correct baskets, the rest of the job would be foolproof.

She’d given him a sharp watchful stare much like he’d seen on Mother’s Day, but back then he’d thought it was cute. This time it was anything but — hard, he’d have to call it — like she was thinking, Foolproof? Who are you calling a fool, fool?

She’d said, “Maybe I know a way that’s even better than yours. Maybe you can learn something from me.” He’d let that go, just pointing at the drawer again and then leaving for work without kissing her.

He stood there with the gun in his hand. What about the prelim transcript, when the two guys’ stories matched completely? Fred watched those crime shows all the time, and he knew that cops said — Manny had agreed with this view — that it was always easier to tell the truth because you just said what happened. When you lied, you had to make stuff up as you went along, and then you’d forget what you’d put into one version and screw it up the next time. Each version would be different. The truth was always the same.

He needed to ask her directly why the guys’ stories didn’t vary, how that could have happened, just to stop this nagging feeling. At last Fred aimed and squeezed, and the bullet flew just over the villain’s head, so he immediately lowered the aim a fraction and shot again. He gasped.

He’d shot her through the heart.

This terrible doubt was interfering with his concentration. He needed to get home where he could talk it out with her, be sure she wasn’t lying about anything, and if she was, find out why, get her to share her fears and let him help.

As he pulled up, Fred muttered Son of a bitch when he saw Gordie’s truck parked in his driveway. He couldn’t even get to his own garage.

What was that asshole doing here in the late afternoon, anyway? Fred had made it clear to Angel that it was dangerous — and here the truck was, like a big neon sign pointing right at her for anybody with a grudge. In fact, who knew what else might be in there? He could be walking into a firefight. He parked at the curb, got out, retrieved the gun, and stuck it into the back waistband of his khakis. He was supposed to take out the unused rounds but he had been so anxious to get home that he forgot. Or so he told himself.

Fred turned his house key silently, glad that his maintenance schedule included quarterly lubrication of door hardware and locks. The afternoon sun came from the side of the house, so at least there would be no silhouette or illumination through the glass. He turned the knob and slowly opened the door. The living room and the kitchen — what he could see of them — were empty.

Then he heard Angel whimper. God, was it possible that Gordie was one of the bad guys? Or that they’d both been taken hostage? Why would Angel let them in? He had to do something. The sound was coming from the end of the hall, where the home office and master bedroom were. He tiptoed soundlessly on the soft carpet. The next thing he heard came from the master, the unmistakable rhythmic thumps, the squeaky bedspring syncopation.

She spoke tensely. “Did you hear something?”

“No,” said Gordie. “Don’t take forever, darlin’, or I’ll pretend I’m Fat Fuck Freddie again.”

Fred didn’t move or breathe, though his pulse beat in his ears. The squeaky noises started up again. He crept to the edge of the open door — they hadn’t even thought to close it! — and slowly moved far enough over to see. Gordie was on top, and she was kicking her feet and snorting like an animal. On the floor not far from Gordie’s reach was a handgun.

Fred backed up several steps, his legs trembling. What could he do? He reached around to get the weapon. His shaking hand jerked, loosening the waistband, and the revolver fell down his pants leg, making a dull thud on the carpet. Not loud. Almost silent.

That’s when she started to scream.

Gordie didn’t get it, saying, “What is this? I thought you liked this— Hey, what are you—? That hurt, bitch.”

“Help,” she shouted, “he’s raping me!” And kept screaming as Fred picked up his gun and returned to stand in the doorway.

Her stricken face peered over Gordie’s shoulder. “Oh, thank God! Fred — help me, he’s hurting me—”

Something changed as Fred recognized the first honest emotion he’d ever seen on her face: sheer terror. She’d just noticed the gun in his hand. She dropped flat in a split second, out of the line of fire.

Gordie started to get off her, but Fred took two quick steps and fired at his naked back. Flipping over, face red from exertion, Gordie stared at the gushing red coming from his well-developed right pectoral. He winced as the pain came and said something, although the shot had made Fred temporarily deaf. Then he heard Gordie babble:

“Don’t do it, man. Please. Just don’t do it. Ain’t what it looks like here — we’re just — it don’t mean nothing. And this,” he clutched his left hand over the blood on his chest, “why, this is just a flesh— Aw, shit!”

It must hurt pretty bad. Maybe the man had learned his lesson. Fred glanced over where Angel was still hiding under the covers — just like her to do something that immature, like if she closed her eyes, nobody could see her instead of the other way around.

Except for the noise Gordie was making about his wound, saying “Oh, shit” over and over, it was quiet. The man wasn’t even thinking enough to reach for the handgun only inches from his drooping hand — maybe his muscles weren’t working right.

Thank God the situation was contained. Fred grabbed Gordie’s gun and put it out of his reach on the dresser.

Then he followed Gordie’s gaze to where Angel lay.

Fred walked over and pulled back the bedclothes. The bullet must have gone through Gordie and straight into her heart. Almost no blood. She looked scared and beautiful. It couldn’t be. Fred couldn’t have done this. Not to her.

Gordie’s feverish voice cut in: “Fred? It was an accident, right? Everything will be okay—”

Everything okay?

Fred turned and shot him twice in the chest. Gordie hit the headboard and remained sitting until his head slumped onto his hairy chest and he fell to one side.

For a long time, Fred stood there in a world gone blank. Finally, he felt the gun in his hand. He set it down and walked out of the room, down the hall, out the front door, and across the street. What was he going to tell Manny?