California Girl (28 page)

“I like it when they’re that age,” said Lobdell.

“Katy’s gonna kill me for leaving that car down there. It cost us almost three thousand dollars.”

“Maybe we can get it back when we come down to see Ynez.”

Nick felt compelled to check his watch and did so. Immediately forgot the time and why he’d wanted it. Shifted again in the seat and felt the deep stab of pain in his guts. Moved the wadded towel and looked down. Seat not blue anymore. Running down the front and into the carpet now.

“I’m not gonna die.”

“There’s the TJ bullring,” said Lobdell.

THE BORDER
wait was long, though Nick had no way of knowing this. He was aware, then unaware, lucid one moment and nearly unconscious the next. Lucky had covered him with a blanket. Nick looked out through the window steamed by his own quickening breath, saw an old man in a white straw hat hold up a purple plaster Buddha bank, kept saying “One dollar, one dollar,” turning it to show the slot where the coins would go. Saw a kid with a bunch of yellow paper flowers big as basketballs. Saw a Tarahumara woman with a weaving of a man running after a stag. Then he felt Lobdell putting something between the fingers of either his right hand or his left, heard Lobdell explaining he was going to light this just before they got up to the Mexican customs guy, and if Nick could take one puff on it and nod, that would really help them out. Didn’t have to say anything or even open his eyes, just take a puff on this cigarette and maybe nod if he could and everything would be cool. Then, Lobdell said, they’d go about fifty yards and have to stop again for the American customs, but Lucky was just going to badge them, say his partner was sick and slide right through. If Nick
could maybe open an eye or take a puff for the Americans, that would be patriotic, wouldn’t it? Lobdell said Bay Hospital in Chula Vista was a good place, had a friend there once for tonsils. Just up the freeway. Then a minute later, maybe an hour, Nick was aware of a burning smell and he felt the cigarette between his fingers and heard Lobdell order him to take a puff. Nick brought the thing toward his head, got his lips around it. Drew in and nodded once and lowered his hand onto the blanket. He heard Lobdell saying something about his friend getting bad lobster in Puerto Nuevo last night. And maybe too much tequila at the Rosarito. Or not enough
menudo
this morning.

“Tequila,” Nick said softly. Took another puff.

“Hey, he’s still alive,” said Lobdell.

“What is in the trunk?”

“Jumpers, a jack, and a spare.”

“Visit Mexico again someday.”

“Be back before you know it.”

Nick was aware of motion.

“One down, Nick,” said Lobdell. “One to go. Swim hard, partner.”

Nick never experienced the brief stop at U.S. Customs. The next thing he knew he was lying flat on his back looking up at the ceiling lights of an emergency room and someone was jabbing his arm and his stomach had burst into flames.

ANDY GOT KATY
and the kids to the hospital in Chula Vista first. Nick was in surgery and the waiting room desk nurse said it might go long.

He took her aside.

“Is he going to be all right?” asked Andy.

“He’s in surgery, Mr. Becker. That’s all we can say right now.”

“But what’s his condition? This is a hospital, you must know what his condition is. If you don’t, who does? Is he going to make it?”

“That’s all we can say right now. Please sit down, or maybe take a walk.”

Andy started toward Nick’s partner, Al Lobdell. Lobdell was standing with a group of what could only be plainclothes cops. He appeared to be explaining something very intense and complex, his hands out for emphasis, his big head forward.

Lobdell broke away and took Andy outside. Told him about the arrest warrant and the tip and waiting for Bonnett at the border. Pulling over his car in National City. Three guys with him. Bonnett making them, the foot chase, gunshots, the knife. Bonnett was critical, too. Shot
up. Nick’s car shot up, too, two blown-out windows. But Lobdell had brought Nick and Bonnett both right here to the same damned hospital in Nick’s car, believe it or not. Faster than waiting for an ambulance.

When Andy had enough for a story he called it in to Teresa from a waiting room phone, dictating from his notes.

“My God, Andy. Is he going to make it?”

“They won’t tell me anything.”

“Are you okay? Are you coming home tonight?”

“It might be a couple of days. I’ll call you later tonight.”

He sat with Katy on a yellow sofa. No expression on her big pretty face. Willie and Stevie on either side of her with their feet swinging back and forth. Katherine sat on the carpet finding the hidden pictures in a
Highlights
magazine.

Andy had never seen them this quiet.

DAVID CAME
into the waiting room half an hour later with Max and Monika.

Andy thought his brother looked pale and thin but somehow strong, too. Like rope. Like a man who had gone through bad things and survived.

His mother wore a hopeless expression. His father stared at the other people in the waiting room as if daring them to give him bad news.

Just then a doctor pushed hurriedly through the back doors and waved the adults into a prayer room. He shut the door.

“I’m sorry but Nick has died.”

Andy felt his body tilting back into the earth. Sensed the deep black hole into which he was falling. Stared into the doctor’s pained brown eyes, and opened his mouth but couldn’t speak.

“I need to see him,” said David.

“You can’t.”

“Of course I can. I’m his brother and an ordained minister. Take me to him immediately.”

Andy saw the strength gathered in his brother’s eyes. The same strength Andy had always seen there, but it was focused now. It was narrow and intense. Not broad and radiant. Looked more like fury than love. Ferocious and irresistible.

The doctor nodded, turned, and led the way.

DAVID’S WORLD
tunneled down tighter with every step. He knew that his God and his faith and his brother would be salvaged or destroyed in the next minute.

He had never been in an operating room. The light was dim. He could sense that a fierce battle had just been lost here. Nick was under a bloody white blanket. A surgery nurse with her back to him was clanking implements from a stand into a stainless steel tray. The heart monitor showed a steady green horizontal line unbroken by life. A man in green scrubs and rubber gloves bloody to the wrists padded in, saw David, immediately turned and walked back out. The nurse folded back the blanket and revealed Nick’s face. David’s heart dropped and kept dropping. He touched his brother’s forehead. Not warm, really, but not yet cool.

David closed his eyes. Felt nothing of his own body now except for his hand on Nick’s head. Heard the clink of tools in the tray. Heard the human murmur outside the room. Heard the hum of lifesaving machines and waiting room music sneaking through the ducts and airwaves. He silently told his God that now was the time to answer his prayer. Now was the time for God to reveal Himself in a visible and useful way. Now was the time to break the indifferent silence. A miracle was required. This modest miracle would be a declaration of His being and His caring. Simple gratitude, not to all mankind but to one man and his family. A way to acknowledge the bottomless love that David had always felt for Him, his God, who had remained reluctant and unavailable for so long.

Your humble servant, David.

Amen.

David heard the breath catch in the nurse’s throat.

“Oh my God,” she whispered.

Opened his eyes and followed hers to the rhythm on the scope. Then the pulse within the rhythm.

ANDY SPENT THE NIGHT
and half of the next day sitting with Nick. Watched the monitors and the rise and fall of his brother’s chest. Thought about what David had done. Or God. Or a miracle of medicine.

When he couldn’t sit and think one minute longer, Andy trudged to the waiting room. Bought coffee from the machine. Asked about the condition of Cory Bonnett. Critical. No change. No change. He wandered the floors and finally came to Bonnett’s room, easily identified by the uniformed San Diego sheriff’s deputies standing outside. They turned him away ten feet from the door and gave him no information whatsoever.

Back in the waiting room lobby Andy poured dimes into the pay phone trying to get information on the car chase and the shoot-out. The more calls he made the less he understood what had happened.

He couldn’t locate a single witness. He found no reports except one—Lobdell’s. Bonnett’s friends had allegedly sped away in a stolen pickup truck, but Lobdell hadn’t been able to get the plates. There were no stolen vehicle reports taken that night in National City. Nobody knew where Nick’s “shot-up” Country Squire wagon was. Or why he
had driven his personal car to arrest an international fugitive at the border. Andy began to understand that Lobdell was lying.

National City Police were evasive. Chula Vista Police spent three hours “confirming” his employment at the
Orange County Journal.
The San Diego Sheriff’s public information line rang, then went dead over and over. The Orange County Sheriff’s was just as cool and uninformative as they’d been since the day Andy had criticized his brother in print as ordered by Jonas Dessinger.

Nick drifted in and out of consciousness. Andy sat with Katy and the kids. Had lunch with them in the cafeteria. Max and Monika, too. Max tender with the grandchildren. Monika tense as a plucked guitar string.

After lunch Andy saw Sharon Santos crossing the lobby to the desk. Another miracle, Andy thought, that Katy and the kids were in with Nick right then. He headed Sharon off and told her Nick was going to make it. Told Sharon that if Katy saw her she’d put two and two together in about one second. Walked Sharon back to her car.

David had left the night before as if his mission was completed and his skills needed elsewhere. He appeared stoic and unsurprised. Resigned. This mystified Andy, who had hoped to write with insight about the miraculous recovery of his brother. But there wasn’t much to see into. All he had to go on was David’s brief narrative of what had happened in the operating room after Nick had died.

God brought him back to life.

The doctors and nurses were as puzzled as Andy, but vibrantly pleased. All said this kind of thing happens. Some suggested that the heart monitor was somehow at fault.

No one answered David’s office or home phones.

Just after two that afternoon Jonas Dessinger demanded by phone that Andy file a more detailed story than last night’s “prick teaser.” He wanted it by 5
P.M.
for tomorrow. And he wanted to know why none of the San Diego County papers had run a story about the hero Nick Becker. Maybe the story from Lobdell was bullshit. Maybe he was covering something up.

Dessinger ordered Andy to get Cory Bonnett’s side of things if the suspect didn’t croak first.

Teresa’s secretary told him that she had gone home sick. Andy let the phone at their house ring for over a minute but nobody answered. She had sounded fine when he talked to her late last night. Although loaded. Kept asking him when he was coming home. Their wine-and-pot nights often left Andy wobbly in the morning, but Teresa usually popped right out of bed like an Olympian in training. Maybe she’d picked up a flu bug.

Andy had just hung up when he saw a red Country Squire station wagon roll past the smoked lobby windows. Thick layer of tan dust on it. A side window frame crusted with blown-out safety glass. Lobdell with one hand on the wheel and the other dangling a cigarette out the window.

Andy intercepted him halfway to the lobby.

“How is he?” asked Lobdell.

“Okay. Serious but the vitals all steady.”

“We gotta talk,” said Lobdell. Face and shirt and glasses caked with tan dust.

“I think so.”

“Let’s sit in the wagon.”

Lobdell gave him the Mexico story just once. Wouldn’t let Andy take notes. Wouldn’t let him interrupt. Wouldn’t let him ask questions. But Andy listened and the story held tight, made sense from the friend named Cortazar to the white-handled switchblade, and Andy knew the truth when he heard it.

“You can’t print one word of it,” said Lobdell. He was sweating profusely and smelled bad. “It’ll ruin Nick and me. Make deep trouble for the sheriff, maybe even the U.S. government. Probably get Bonnett off. You gotta go with the story I told you last night. Play it down and let it go away. Stop pestering the cops and the deputies down here. They’re with me for now, but any pressure and they can’t cover. This isn’t any of your business. Nick and I got our man. The public doesn’t care so long as justice gets done. You stay out of it.”

“I understand.”

“You have to more than understand it, Andy.”

Andy stared down at the dusty dashboard of the Red Rocket. Noted the thin, sticky blood on the seat between his legs. Turned to see the two blown-out side windows. Looked out the smeared windshield at the bright October day.

He could lie for Nick. Probably get it past Dessinger if he created a source or two, manufactured a few quotes, maybe got Katy to say why Nick and Lobdell had taken down the family car. Bury Dessinger in details, invented or not. Yes, he could probably get away with it, for now. It would be an act of bravery. The same as the rumble by the packinghouse when he was a kid, jumping Lenny Vonn. But Andy knew he wasn’t a child anymore and this lie would not be a child’s thing. It might cost him his career. It would surely lump him in with the politicians and police and businessmen and bureaucrats and thieves and hustlers and murderers he wrote about. With anyone who put what was practical ahead of what was true. It would finally make him a part of the corruption that had always stabbed his sense of right and wrong.

And what would happen to the truth? You couldn’t treat it like that. It was too big to go away. Too strong. It would never stay down, no matter how high you piled the lies on top. It would bust loose someday, huge and furious, and it would bite off and spit out the heads of everyone who had tried to keep it down. And how would he explain why he had done such a thing? So a couple of cops could break the law they had sworn to uphold?

“You and Nick mess up and I’ve got to toss eight years of honest reporting to cover you.”

“It’s a real pile of shit, Andy. There’s eight dead men. Eight! How many widows and fatherless children does that make—thirty or forty? I don’t even know.”

“You saved Nick.”

“He’d have done the same,” said Lobdell. “It’s just reflex. It doesn’t mean anything.”

Andy wasn’t sure he understood this. “I’ll go with your story,” he said.

“You’re doing a good thing even if you don’t see it.”

“I never thought lies were good,” said Andy.

“You change when you get older.”

“I feel older now. Feel like I learned something I don’t want to know. I feel like hiding.”

“Same shit Adam went through before God kicked him out of paradise.”

“I feel thoroughly kicked out.”

“Me, too,” said Lobdell. “I can’t even remember what it looked like. How old are you?”

“Twenty-six.”

“Get married and have children. It’ll distract you.”

Andy sighed and looked back again at the shattered windows, the layer of dust on the camping gear. “I want some pictures of this car for the
Journal.
”

“Worth a thousand words.”

“You ditch the surfboards and shoot out the windows and spill some chicken blood before you drove it back?”

“Hamburger. Just for you.”

ANDY MADE
his desk by four and started writing. He was tired but his thoughts were clear and his fingers flew over the keys of the Selectric. He watched the whole chase and shoot-out unfold in his mind. Saw Bonnett swing the knife into Nick’s body. Watched Lobdell struggle Nick and Bonnett into the Country Squire. Heard the big station wagon burning through the streets of Chula Vista on the way to Bay Hospital. Saw the monitor in Nick’s hospital room start to blip. Saw the quiver of fresh life in his eyelid. Heard the catch of breath in the nurse’s throat. Saw the stupefaction in David’s face. He finished the story at 4:55. Triple-spaced, eighteen pages. Thrilling as a movie, he thought, and about as true.

Tried Teresa at home again but no answer. Noted that Chas Birdwell
wasn’t in his cubicle. Called the hospital and got an upgrade to “serious condition” for Cory Bonnett.

Went into Jonas’s office and said he had a totally bitchin’ story. It had bullets, blood, and a hero who died and came back to life. A murder suspect in critical condition. It was even true. All he’d need was ten more minutes to double-check a few facts and corroborate an eyewitness account of the shoot-out in National City.

“It really went down like that?” asked Dessinger.

“Wait till you see my pictures of the car.”

Dessinger eyed him. Hard suspicion versus publishing a great story. Andy stared back with all the blankness he could muster.

“Sit down,” said Dessinger.

Andy sat but the associate publisher remained standing.

“Becker, the Laguna cops have a suspect in the Boom Boom Bungalow murder. They don’t have enough to arrest him yet. But they’re doing a lineup tomorrow for a witness who was there. Ten in the morning. Nobody knows this but the cops, the Sheriff’s, and us. What I figured was, you could shoot the suspect coming into the jail. Hit him with some questions. It’ll be our last chance if they arrest him after the lineup. I enjoy those pictures where the guy tries to squeeze through a doorway before the photog nails him. Or they hide behind a coat or briefcase.”

Andy felt a sudden childlike satisfaction in lying hugely to this man and getting away with it.

“You know where they bring them in and out for a lineup, don’t you?” asked Dessinger.

“If they haven’t arrested him, they’ll bring him in through the professional visits entrance. Where the lawyers come and go.”

“Be there.”

“We don’t usually do that, Jonas. We don’t go public with a simple questioning. Not unless an arrest is made.”

Dessinger smiled. “But I have a good feeling about this one.”

“Who’s the suspect?”

“You’ll love this. A Tustin High School football coach and history teacher. Howard Langton.”

Andy was always impressed that Jonas actually kept sources and got good information. Hard to believe anyone would trust him.

“I interviewed Langton a couple of weeks ago by phone,” Andy said. “Janelle Vonn lived with him and his family back when she was in high school. He was her civics teacher.”

“I know.”

“What if Langton wasn’t at the Boom Boom, Jonas?”

A trace of confusion crossed Dessinger’s face, then passed. “Hell, Becker, what if he was?”

As he walked back to his desk, a vague but unpleasant sensation spread inside Andy. A feeling that something horrible had just been brought closer to his understanding. Family man Howard Langton questioned in the murder of a man in a gay motel? On the same night a girl who used to live with him was decapitated? Going to put a nasty rash on Langton’s reputation, even if the witness is wrong and Janelle was a coincidence. Stink sticks.
High School Football Coach Questioned in Boom Boom Bungalow Murder.

Chas Birdwell’s cubicle was still empty. One of the other reporters told him that Chas had called in sick that morning but had sounded pretty damned healthy.

ANDY FILED
his story with Jonas and banged out a brief rewrite. Filed the rewrite, locked up his desk, and headed across the parking lot to his Corvair.

The evening was cool. Just a soft hiss from the palm trees along Newport Boulevard, almost lost in the louder hiss of car tires on the asphalt. Sleeplessness hit him like a drug.

But he mustered the energy to swing by the Seven Seas Motel in Newport. It was a sun-faded old place that advertised “Free TV and Refrigeration.” He’d seen it a thousand times in his life, maybe more, on his hitchhiking trips from Tustin to Newport Beach as a boy. With its
silhouette of a blue sailboat against a full white moon, it had once seemed romantic. Maybe that was why it stuck in his head a couple of weeks ago when Teresa joked about it with Chas on the phone. Her good buddy Chas, who couldn’t do a rewrite correctly, let alone an original newspaper article.

Andy pulled into the Seven Seas parking lot and followed it around back. Stopped and looked up. The window to 207 upstairs was open. Thin blue curtain puffing in and out. Teresa’s new black Mustang directly below it and Chas Birdwell’s restored yellow Porsche Speedster taking up two spaces in the far corner of the lot. The ocean breeze had blown Chas’s car cover into a heap on the lee side of the Porsche.

Clever, thought Andy. Seven Seas time. Fooled me.

He drove home. Packed a few things. Loaded his manuscripts and typewriter into the Corvair trunk and locked it. Drained a large glass of scotch. Then another.

Called Lynette Vonn.

Andy’s heart beat fast with the velocity of counterdumping Teresa. This was Mutual Assured Destruction. He’d never done anything like it.

“I thought I could take you to dinner tonight,” he said.

“I’m working the Bear. Jesse Black’s playing. I can’t get you in free but I can get you a good seat.”

“I don’t want to get in
free.
”

Andy was surprised by his own tone of voice. By how damned mad he was.

“It’s your scene, man,” said Lynette.

Andy slammed the front door and walked to the Corvair. Looked back at his and Teresa’s place with the giant bird-of-paradise and plantain trees in front. Looked different now. Shabby, not cute. She’d probably fire him. Save her cousin the trouble. Good. He’d go to the
Times
or the
Register
. Goddamned Chas Birdwell. IQ of what, fifty?