The Late Show

25

By four p.m. Ballard had turned in the city-ride and picked up her van, grabbed lunch, and then driven out to Venice for her dog. She was now on the Pacific Coast Highway heading north toward Ventura. She had the windows down and the sea air was blowing in. Thoughts of the cases were floating in her wake. Lola sat in the front passenger seat with her snout out the window and in the wind.

All of that changed about an hour into the ride and just past Point Mugu when she received a call from a number with an 818 area code. The Valley. She didn’t recognize it but took the call.

It was Trent.

“Hi there!” he began cheerfully. “Tom Trent here. And guess what I am looking at.”

“I have no idea,” Ballard said hesitantly.

“An Arctic white 2017 RDX, fully loaded and ready to go. When do you want to come by the dealership?”

“Uh, you’re there now?”

“Sure am.”

Ballard didn’t understand, since she had called a few hours earlier and been told that he was off. Trent seemed to sense her confusion.

“I’m supposed to be off today,” he said, “but vehicle intake called and said we got the white RDX in, so I came in pronto. I want to make sure nobody else grabs this out from under us. What time works for you tonight?”

Ballard knew she could set up an appointment and then go to his house while he was at the dealership, waiting. But in the hours since she had left the hospital, she had retreated from that line and now was unsure she could cross it. She had also already called her grandmother and said she was coming up for dinner.

“Tonight’s not good,” she said. “I can’t come in.”

“Stella, I brought this in here for you,” Trent said. “It’s beautiful. It’s got the rearview camera, everything. How about you stop by on your way home from work again?”

“I’m not going home tonight, Tom. I’m out of town.”

“Really? You go off surfing in that surf truck of yours?”

Ballard froze but then remembered that she had driven her van into the lot when she had taken the test-drive, and her board had been on the roof.

“No, Tom, I’m not surfing. I’m out of town on business and I’ll get back to you when I return. I’m sorry for any misunderstanding.”

She disconnected before he could respond. There was something about the call that creeped her out — his sense of familiarity based on a test-drive.

“Fuck,” she said.

Lola turned from the window and looked at her.

Her phone buzzed again and immediately a sense of rage built inside. She thought Trent was calling her back.

But it wasn’t Trent. It was Rogers Carr.

“Okay, it was a warrant,” he said. “RHD pulled it from his phone records.”

He was talking about Robison’s phone and Ballard’s calls to it. She was skeptical.

“How’d they get around probable cause? He’s a witness, not a suspect.”

“They didn’t say he was a suspect. They cited exigent circumstances and that the holder of the phone was in possible danger. That’s it.”

“Did you get anything else? Like who else called him and who he called?”

“No, Ballard, I didn’t. I didn’t even ask, because that was not the part of the investigation I was given.”

“Of course not. I mean why go the extra mile when it’s easier to keep your head buried in the sand?”

“Ballard—”

She disconnected and rode the rest of the way to Ventura in silence, barely able to contain her frustration with being on the outside, looking in.

That night at dinner, Ballard’s grandmother tried to cheer her up by making her a childhood favorite: black beans and rice with guacamole and fried plantains. Ballard loved the food but still had little to say other than to compliment the cook. It was the cook who did most of the talking and asked the questions.

Tutu was a small woman and seemed to be shrinking with age. Her skin was nut-brown and hard from years in the sun, first teaching her only son to surf and then traveling to beaches around the world to watch him compete. Still, her eyes were sharp and she knew her granddaughter better than anyone.

“Are you working on a case?” she asked.

“I was,” Ballard said. “It kind of stalled out on me.”

“But you’re working on something. I can tell. You’re so quiet.”

“I guess so. I’m sorry.”

“You have an important job. It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not. I need to forget about things for a little while. If you don’t mind, after dinner I’m going to go out to the garage and do some laundry and wax a shorty to use tomorrow.”

“You’re not going to paddle?”

“I think I need a change of pace.”

“Do what you need to do, darling. After the dishes, I’m going to go up to bed.”

“Okay, Tutu.”

“But tell me, have you heard anything lately from Makani?”

“No, not since Christmas.”

“That’s a shame.”

“Not really. It is what it is. She finds a phone on Christmas and when she needs something. That’s fine.”

Makani was Ballard’s mother. As far as Renée knew, she was alive and well and living on remote ranchland in Kaupo, Maui. She had no phone and no Internet. And she had no inclination to be in regular contact with the daughter she had let go to the mainland twenty years ago to live in the home where her dead father had grown up. Even when Ballard had returned to her native Hawaii to go to the university, there was no connection. Ballard always believed it was because she was too strong a reminder of the man Makani had lost to the waves.

Ballard stayed in the kitchen to help with the dishes as she always did, working side by side with her grandmother at the sink. She then hugged her and said good night. She took Lola out to the front yard and looked up at a clear night sky while the dog did her business. Afterward, she walked Lola to her dog bed, then went to her room to retrieve the drawstring laundry bag she had brought in earlier from the van.

In the garage Ballard dumped her dirty clothes into the washing machine and started the cycle. She went over to the board rack that ran along the rear wall of the garage. There were eight boards arranged in slots according to size: her life’s collection so far. She never traded in boards. There were too many memories attached to them.

She pulled a short board out of the first slot and took it over to an upside-down ironing board she used as a waxing and cleaning stand. The board was a six-foot Biscuit by Slick Sled with pink rails and a purple paisley deck. It was her first board, bought for her by her father when she was thirteen, and chosen for the vibrant colors rather than the surfing design. The colors were faded now by years in sun and salt but it still made tight turns and could pound down the face of a wave as well as a newer model. As she got older, more and more it seemed to be the board she pulled from the rack.

From day one with it, Ballard had always liked the process of cleaning and waxing the board and preparing for the next day’s outing. Her father had taught her that a good day of surfing started the night before. She knew detectives at Hollywood Division who spent hours shining their shoes and oiling their leather holsters and belts. It demanded a certain focus and concentration and took them away from the burden of cases. It cleared their minds and renewed them. For Ballard, waxing a surfboard did the same trick. She could leave everything behind.

First she took a wax comb out of the toolbox on the nearby workbench and started stripping the old wax off the deck. She let it all flake to the concrete floor to pick up later. The last step of the process was the cleanup.

Once she got most of the old wax peeled off, she grabbed the gallon jug of Firewater off a shelf over the workbench. She poured the cleaning solvent onto a rag and wiped down the board’s deck until it held a shining reflection of the overhead light. She stepped over and hit the wall button that opened the garage door so the chemical smell of the cleaner would dissipate.

She came back to the board, dried it with an old terrycloth robe, and then grabbed an unopened cake of Sex Wax off the shelf. She carefully applied a base and then a thick top coat to the deck. She had always surfed goofy foot — right foot forward — and was sure to double down on wax on the tail section, where she would plant her left heel.

Every surfer was particular about how they combed their wax. Ballard always followed her father’s lead and combed front to back, leaving grooves that followed the waterlines.

“Go with the flow,” he would say.

When she was finished, she flipped the board over on the stand to finish the job with the most important part of the whole process: cleaning and slicking the surface of the board that would meet the water.

She first leaned down and studied the integrity of an old fiberglass patch near the nose. The board had gotten dinged in a surf bag on a trip to Tavarua Island in Fiji. In twenty years it had been all over the world, and her father’s patchwork was the only blemish. She saw that fibers from the patch were beginning to fray and she knew she needed to take the board into a glass shop soon. But it would be good for at least one more day at the beach.

She next grabbed a surf key out of a can on the bench and tightened the keel fin. Finally, she poured more Firewater onto the board and cleaned the entire surface. She dried it, and it was good to go. It was so slick and shiny, she could see herself in it when she tilted the board up to move it to her van.

She also saw sudden movement coming from behind her. Before she could react, a black plastic bag came down over her head and was pulled tight around her neck. She dropped the board and started to struggle. She grabbed at the plastic and the hands that held it tight behind her head. Then a thickly muscled arm came around and formed a vise on either side of her neck. A forearm was driven into the back of her neck, pushing her further into the V hold. Locked in the vise, she felt her feet come off the ground as her attacker leaned back and used his chest as the fulcrum upon which to lift her.

Soon she was kicking at air, and her hands could find nothing to grab on to.

And then the darkness took her.