The Late Show

8

The hour of overtime she had worked pushed Ballard into the heavy morning traffic moving west toward the beaches. The army of service industry workers advanced from the east side to their minimum-wage-and-under jobs in hotels, restaurants, and neighborhoods where they could not afford to live. It took Ballard almost an hour to get to Venice. Her first stop was to pick up Lola from the overnight caretaker and then they headed to the beach.

The only good thing about the slog across the city was that the marine layer was already burning off by the time she got to the sand, and she could see that the bay was cobalt blue and as flat as glass. She parked in one of the lots by the north end of the boardwalk and went to the back of her van. She let Lola out, grabbed one of her tennis balls out of the basket by the wheel well, and threw it across the empty parking lot. The dog took off after it and had it in her mouth in three seconds. She dutifully brought it back to Ballard, who threw it a few more times before putting it back in the basket. The dog whined at having such a short game.

“We’ll play later,” Ballard promised.

She wanted to get out on the water before the wind kicked up.

Ballard’s van was a white Ford Transit Connect that she’d bought used from a window washer who was retiring and closing his business. It had eighty thousand miles on it but the previous owner had taken good care of it. Ballard kept the ladder racks on the roof for carrying her board, and as in the work car she shared with Jenkins, the rear storage area of the van was compartmentalized with cardboard boxes.

Before exiting Hollywood Station, Ballard had changed into faded jeans and a red hoodie over a tank suit, leaving her work suit in a locker. She now stripped down to the tank and put the other clothes in a backpack along with underwear, socks, and a pair of New Balance trainers. She next grabbed one of the wet suits off a hanger hooked on the inside wall of the van. She squeezed into it and pulled the rear zipper up her back with a short tether. She took a big beach towel out of one of the boxes and stuffed that into the backpack last. She clipped her tent bag to the side of the backpack and put it on over both shoulders.

Lastly, she grabbed a multigrain-and-chocolate energy bar out of an insulated cooler she kept food in and was ready. She closed and locked the van, then pulled her board off the roof racks. It was an eight-foot One World board with the paddle attached to clips on the deck. It was a bear to bring down off the van’s roof and she was careful not to bounce the tail fin on the asphalt. She put her fingers into the center grip hole and carried the board under her right arm while using her left to feed herself. She trudged toward the water barefoot and walking gingerly until she was off the parking lot and into the sand. Lola followed dutifully.

She set up the tent twenty-five yards off the water’s edge. Its assembly was an easy, five-minute routine. She placed her backpack inside to stabilize the tent against any wind and then zipped the entrance closed. She buried the key to the van in the sand by the front-right corner of the tent and then pointed at the spot until the dog took her place there.

“Keep watch,” she said.

The dog bowed her head once. Ballard hefted the thirty-pound board again and carried it to the water. She wrapped the leash around her right ankle and secured it with the Velcro strap, then pushed the board out ahead of her.

Ballard only weighed 125 pounds and could step up onto the board without tipping the balance. She powered through four right-hand strokes with the paddle to get out past the low rollers and then at last was smoothly gliding through what was left of the morning mist. She looked back once at her dog, even though she knew she didn’t have to. Lola sat at attention at the right-front corner of the tent. She would do so until Ballard got back.

Ballard had started a paddling routine soon after her transfer to the late show. She had grown up surfing on the West Maui beaches between Wailea and Lahaina and had traveled to surf with her father in Fiji, Australia, and elsewhere, but she left surfing behind when she moved to the forty-eight to pursue a career in law enforcement. Then one night she and Jenkins were called to a residential burglary in the bird streets in the hills off Doheny Drive. A couple had come home from dinner at Spago and found the door to their $5 million home ajar and the interior ransacked. Patrol officers arrived first and then Ballard and Jenkins were called out because the victims were deemed HVC — high-value constituents — by the station commander. He wanted detectives to roll along with a crime scene team right away.

Shortly after arriving, Jenkins was supervising the crime scene techs at the point of entry while Ballard surveyed the home with the lady of the house, trying to determine exactly what had been taken. In the master bedroom they entered a massive walk-in closet. It was hidden behind floor-to-ceiling mirrors and not seen when the first patrol officers to arrive had checked the house. On the floor of the closet a fur coat was spread open. Piled in the center of the coat’s silk lining were a mound of jewelry and three pairs of high-heeled shoes with red soles that Ballard knew cost more than a thousand dollars apiece.

At that moment, Ballard realized that the burglar might still be in the home. At the exact same moment, the intruder jumped from behind a row of clothes on hangers and tackled her to the ground. The lady of the house backed up against a mirrored wall in the closet and stood there frozen and mute as Ballard struggled with a man who had almost a hundred pounds on her.

The intruder grabbed one of the red-soled shoes and was attempting to drive the spiked heel into Ballard’s eye. She held his arm back but knew he was too strong to hold off for long. She managed to call out for Jenkins as the spike came closer to her face. She turned her face at the last moment and the spike dragged across her cheek, drawing a line of blood. The intruder pulled it back to start another go at her eye, when he was suddenly hit from behind by Jenkins wielding a small bronze sculpture he had picked up on his way through the bedroom. Ballard’s attacker collapsed unconscious on top of her. The sculpture broke in two.

The intruder turned out to be the couple’s schizophrenic son, who had disappeared from the home years earlier and was presumed to be living on the streets in Santa Monica. Ballard ended up with four butterfly stitches applied to her cheek at Cedars-Sinai, and Jenkins and the department got sued by the couple and their son for using excessive force and for damaging an expensive work of art. The city settled the lawsuit for a quarter million dollars and Ballard took up paddleboarding to increase her upper-body strength and clear her mind of the memory of the spiked heel inching toward her eye.

The sky turned gray as the sun slipped behind the clouds, and the water turned a dark, impenetrable blue. Ballard liked turning the paddle blade sideways and watching it slice a thin line down through the water until the white tip on it disappeared in darkness. She would then turn the blade and power through a full stroke, the board and paddle making barely a mark on the surface as she moved. She called it stealth paddling.

She made a wide loop that took her at least three hundred yards offshore. She checked her tent every few minutes and saw no one approaching or disturbing it or the dog. Even from a distance she could identify the lifeguard in the station seventy-five yards down the beach. Aaron Hayes was one of her favorites. He was her backup to Lola. She knew he would be watching over her things and would probably visit her later.

Her mind wandered as she worked and she thought of the confrontation earlier with Chastain in the detective bureau. She wasn’t happy with herself. She had waited two years to say what she had said to him but it had been the wrong time and place. Ballard had been too consumed with his betrayal to remember what was important in the present — the murder of five people, including Cynthia Haddel.

She turned the board and paddled further out. She felt guilty. It didn’t matter that Haddel was a peripheral victim — Ballard felt that she had let her down by putting her own agenda with Chastain first. It went to the sacred bond that existed between homicide victims and the detectives who speak for them. It wasn’t Ballard’s case but Haddel was her victim and the bond was there.

Ballard bent her knees sharply and took several deep digging strokes as she tried to move on from the Chastain loop she kept playing in her head. She tried to think about Ramona Ramone instead and about Officer Taylor saying that she had been at the upside-down house. Ballard wondered what that meant, and it worked on her, becoming the new loop that played in her head.

After an hour on the water, Ballard had a layer of sweat building between her skin and the wet suit. It kept her warm but she could feel her muscles tightening. Her shoulders, thighs, and hamstrings ached and it felt like the point of a pencil had been pushed into a spot between her shoulder blades. She turned back toward the shore and finished with a sprint of deep, long pulls on the paddle. She came out of the water so thoroughly exhausted that she tore the leash off her ankle and dragged the tail of the board in the sand all the way back to the tent. Even as she did it she knew she was violating the first thing her father ever taught her: “Don’t drag the board. Bad for the glass.”

Lola had not moved from her position as sentry at the front of the tent.

“Good girl, Lola,” Ballard said. “Good girl.”

She put the board down next to the tent and patted her dog. She unzipped the entrance and grabbed a treat for Lola out of a pocket on the inside flap. She also pulled her backpack out. After feeding the dog the treat, she told her to stay and walked across the sand to the row of public showers behind the paddle-tennis courts. She stripped off the wet suit and showered in her bathing suit, keeping a wary eye out for the homeless men who had started to wake and move about the nearby boardwalk. Her late start put her on their schedule. She was usually finished paddling and showering before any life even stirred on the boardwalk.

When she was sure she had all the salt out of her hair, she cut the water and dried off with the large beach towel she removed from the backpack. She pulled the straps of her bathing suit down over her shoulders, then wrapped the towel around her body from armpits to knees. She dropped the wet bathing suit to the concrete and brought her underwear up her legs and under the towel. She had been dressing on beaches this way ever since she used to surf before classes at Lahainaluna High School. By the time she dropped the towel, she was dressed again in her jeans and hoodie. Using the towel to dry her hair, she went back across the sand to the tent, patted Lola on the head again, and crawled into the nylon shelter.

“Easy, girl,” she said.

Lola dropped down into a resting pose but maintained her spot on top of where the key was buried. Ballard got another dog treat out of the pocket on the tent flap and tossed it to her. The dog ripped it out of the air with her teeth and then quickly returned to her stoic pose. Ballard smiled. She had bought Lola off a homeless man on the boardwalk two years earlier. The animal was emaciated and chained to a shopping cart. She had open wounds that looked like they had come from fighting other dogs. Ballard had simply wanted to rescue her but a bond quickly formed and the dog stayed with her. They took training classes together and soon it seemed as though the dog had a sense that Renée had saved her. She was unfailingly loyal to Ballard, and Ballard felt the same way.

Ready to sleep, Ballard pulled the zipper on the tent flap down. It was eleven a.m. Normally she would sleep until it was almost sunset but this time Ballard set her phone to wake her at two p.m. She had plans for the day before starting her official shift at eleven.

She hoped for three hours of sleep but barely got two. Shortly after one o’clock she was awakened by the low growl Lola projected when someone invaded her no-fly zone. Ballard opened her eyes but didn’t move.

“Come on, Lola. You don’t love me anymore?”

Still coming out of interrupted sleep, Ballard recognized the voice. It was Aaron Hayes.

“Lola,” she said. “It’s okay. What’s up, Aaron? I was sleeping.”

“Sorry. You want some company in there? I got my lunch break.”

“Not today, Aaron. I’ve gotta get up soon and go in.”

“Okay. Sorry I woke you up. By the way, you looked good out there today. Like you were walking on water. Good, long strokes.”

“Tired myself out, but thanks, Aaron. Good night.”

“Uh, yeah, good night.”

She heard him chuckle as he walked away in the sand.

“Good girl, Lola,” she said.

Ballard rolled onto her back and looked up at the roof of the tent. The sun was high and so bright she could see it through the nylon. She closed her eyes and tried to remember if she had been dreaming before Aaron woke her. She couldn’t remember anything but thought there was something there in the gray tendrils of her sleep. There had been a dream. She just couldn’t remember what it was. She tried to retrieve it, to slip back in, but she knew that a standard sleep cycle was about ninety minutes. To go back to sleep and get a full cycle would take longer than she had. Her alarm was going off in less than an hour and she wanted to stick to her plan of getting up and going in to work on finding out who had used brass knuckles to assault Ramona Ramone in the upside-down house — and then left her for dead in a Hollywood parking lot.

She got out of the tent, packed and folded it up, and then returned to the van. She restowed everything and placed the wet suit on its hanger. The board was harder to put back on the roof racks than it had been to take down. Ballard was five foot seven and had to open the side doors and stand on the sill while she secured the straps. The second strap cut across the One World logo on the underside of the board. It showed the black silhouette of a surfer riding the nose, his hands and arms up over his head and thrown back like he was flying down the steep face of a monster wave. It always reminded Ballard of her father and his last wave. The one that took him and left her running up and down the beach, unsure of what to do or where to go, and howling helplessly at the open sea.

She and Lola walked down the boardwalk to the Poke-Poke window, where Ballard ordered the Aloha bowl with added seaweed for herself and a teriyaki-beef-and-rice bowl for the dog. Lola drank from the dog bowl under the window as they waited and the man behind the counter handed Ballard a treat for Lola as well.

After lunch she took the dog back out on the sand and threw the ball a few more times. But Ballard’s mind wasn’t on it. The whole time she was thinking about work. She was officially off the Dancers case but couldn’t help thinking about Cynthia Haddel. Ballard had the name and digits of the distributor who, according to her parents, had put her into the club to deal drugs. If RHD wasn’t interested, then the buy-bust team at Hollywood Division would take the tip and do something with it. She made a mental note to drop by the unit when she got back to the station.

From the beach Ballard drove back to the critter sitter to drop off Lola. She apologized to the dog for the short day but promised to make it up to her. Lola bowed her head once, letting Ballard off the hook.

On the way into Hollywood, Ballard checked the Los Angeles Times feed on her phone every time she caught a red light. It had been barely twelve hours since the shooting at the Dancers, so the newspaper had scant reporting on it. Ballard was still ahead of the media curve with the limited information she had gathered on her shift. The Times did say, however, that there were no arrests or suspects in the mass killing as of the latest update from the LAPD. The story went out of its way to reassure readers that the police were not looking at this as a possible terrorist attack like those seen in other nightclubs domestically and around the world.

Ballard was disappointed that the newspaper had not by now gotten the names of the three men shot to death in the booth. That was the angle she was wondering about. Who were they? What went wrong in that booth?

After checking the Times feed, she also checked her e-mail and saw nothing on return from Lieutenant Olivas about the reports she had submitted. Apparently her paper had been accepted, if not gone unnoticed. Either way the time stamps on the e-mail she had sent would protect her from any complaint from Olivas about her failing to file her reports in a timely fashion.

Using the van’s Bluetooth connection, Ballard called Hollywood Presbyterian and asked for the duty nurse in the surgical intensive-care unit. A woman who called herself Nurse Randall answered and Ballard identified herself, right down to her serial number.

“An assault victim named Ramona Ramone was brought in last night. I was the responding detective. She underwent brain surgery and I am checking on her status.”

Ballard was put on hold, and when Randall came back, she said there was no patient in the hospital named Ramona Ramone and that Ballard must be mistaken.

“You’re right,” Ballard said. “Can you check a different name? Ramón Gutierrez. I forgot that’s the victim’s actual name.”

Randall put her on hold again but this time came back more quickly.

“Yes, he’s here, and he’s stable after surgery,” she said.

“Do you know if he’s conscious yet?” Ballard asked.

“That’s information you will need to get from the patient’s attending physician.”

“Is that physician available?”

“Not at this time. He’s on his rounds.”

“Nurse Randall, I am investigating this crime and trying to find out who attacked Mr. Gutierrez. If the victim is conscious, I need to drop what I’m doing and come talk to him. If he’s not, then I need to proceed with the investigation. There is a very dangerous individual out there responsible for this. Are you sure you can’t help me by answering that simple question? Has he regained consciousness?”

There was a long pause as Randall decided whether to break the rules.

“No, he hasn’t. He is still in an induced coma.”

“Thank you. Can you also tell me, have any family members or friends come in to check on her? Him, I mean?”

“There is nothing here about that. No family listed. Friends would not be allowed to visit in ICU.”

“Thank you, Nurse Randall.”

Ballard disconnected. She decided she was going straight into Hollywood Station.