Killer Swell (5 page)

I opened the sliding screen door to my place just before one in the morning, the smell of jalapeños and nacho cheese immediately burning into my nostrils.

“Honey, you're home,” Carter Hamm said from the sofa amidst a pile of beer cans, plastic wrap, and tortilla chips.

“How did you ever convince me to give you a key?” I asked, shutting the door behind me.

“I didn't,” he said, wiggling his enormous frame into a sitting position. “I stole one.”

“Ah.”

He grinned, looking like a humongous Cheshire cat. “Ah.”

Carter had played center to my small forward in high school, pulling guard to my fullback and juvenile delinquent to my better judgment. Despite our differences—the main one being that I thought the law should be obeyed and he thought the law was a pain in his ass—we had remained surfing buddies, occasional coworkers, and good friends.

He stretched out his legs, the bottom half of his six-foot-nine body unfurling like a damp straw wrapper. His bleached white hair glowed in the dark room, his black eyes shining against his tan skin. The white T-shirt said
DO ME
in big black letters, and long red shorts hung loosely to his knees. His size-sixteen feet were bare, his sandals most likely buried somewhere beneath the tornado of crap he had created on my sofa.

He lifted a paper plate in my direction. “Nachos?”

“No thanks,” I said, tossing my keys on the kitchen counter. I walked to the fridge, pulled out a Red Trolley, ripped the cap off, and drank half of it.

Carter let out a low whistle. “Dude, if I had known we were gonna be drinking, I would've waited for you.”

“We're not drinking,” I mumbled, staring out the back door. The whitecaps in the ocean did nosedives under the moonlight.

I felt Carter's eyes on my back. “You alright?”

“No, not really.”

“Gonna tell me?”

“Not now.”

“Cool. You wanna hit the water?”

I watched the ocean shiver and shake a hundred yards away, empty and navy blue in the dark. I knew that some time on my board trying to decipher and outsmart the waves might temporarily salve my wounds.

I finished the beer and set the empty bottle on the counter.

I turned to Carter. “Let's go.”

There is something mystical about surfing between the darkness of the ocean and the glow of the evening moonlight. It isn't just that you feel dwarfed by the planet in the quiet of the night, but more like you have found the edge of the world and could dive off if you wanted to.

That edge was where I learned to hide when I was growing up.

When I was nine years old, a family down the street was moving out of town and they gave me an eight-foot board that was dinged up and otherwise headed for the trash. I took it down to Mission Bay that afternoon and spent three hours learning to stand on it in the calm, flat water. The next afternoon I took the bus down to Law Street and watched the locals tear up the waves, sucking in their movements and committing to memory how they maneuvered their boards so easily through the water. I waited until about sunset, when everyone else had gone, and paddled out.

On the ninth try, I managed to get myself up long enough to feel like a surfer.

After that ninth try in my ninth year, the ocean became my real home, much calmer than the house in Bay Park. There was no drunken mother passed out on the shoreline, no unknown father haunting me below the surface of the water. I grew up on three-foot, left-breaking sets that you could bounce all the way in to the shore.

The ocean and its waves raised me and I was better for it.

 

Carter and I rode for forty-five minutes, carving our boards into the black mass of the waves as they rhythmically approached and then left us. In the quiet darkness, the noise of the boards cutting the water was magnified, like the sound of two large hands rubbing together.

We were straddling our boards out beyond the break. People who don't surf tend to look at this act as some sort of Zen-like activity that surfers do, trying to become one with the ocean or something like that. In actuality, we sit on our boards because we are too exhausted to paddle in.

“So,” Carter said, running his hands through his soaked hair. “You gonna tell me what the problemo is?”

He looked like a giant buoy sticking straight out of the ocean.

I wiped the water from my eyes. “Remember Kate Crier?”

He pretended to think about it. “Vaguely. She was that girl that you wasted an entire year on, dumped your ass right before she left for college because her parents thought you were trash, and you've pined intermittently for over the years.” He paused. “Yeah, Noah. I remember Kate.”

“I found her today. Dead.”

He cupped his hands, dipped them into the water, and brought them up to his mouth. Carter is the only human I've ever run across who enjoys the taste of saltwater. He swished the water around for a moment like it was mouthwash, then spit it onto his board.

“Well, that's not so hot,” he said.

I glanced at the dots of light along the shore. “No.”

“You found her?”

I detailed Marilyn's visit and how I had come upon Kate.

Carter nodded in the dark, his enormous head moving slowly against the backdrop of the moon. “I'm sorry.”

I shrugged, listening to the waves die up ahead of us. “Her dad wants me to find out what happened.”

“Same guy that banned your car from his driveway because it looked like it might leak oil?”

“Same guy.”

Carter snorted. “I hope you told him to fornicate solo.”

I chuckled softly, shaking my head.

“But of course you didn't,” Carter said, knowing the answer.

I leaned back on the board, my head floating on the surface of the water. The sky looked like a black piece of crepe paper that had been poked with several needles, bright beacons of light streaming through the holes. I hadn't seen Kate in over eleven years, but now I felt as if a piece of me had disappeared.

“Well, at least they've got money,” Carter mumbled, patting the top of the water with his baseball glove–like hands. “So we know we'll get paid.”

“We?” I asked.

He leaned forward and flattened himself onto his board, his long arms looking like small windmills as he began to paddle away. “Well, hell, I can't have you sulking like one of my ex-girlfriends until you figure it out. I'll be Hutch to your Starsky.”

I sat up and smiled. “Awesome.”

“Yeah, I am,” he said over his shoulder as he moved toward the shore. “Plus, Kate was my friend too at one time.”

I nodded to myself and wished that she were still alive to hear Carter say that.

I crawled out of bed early after our late-night surfing expedition, nursed my small hangover with a glass of orange juice, and headed out in the early morning traffic.

I took I-5 up to the eastern edge of La Jolla and then went east on Highway 52, a concrete artery that bisected San Diego County through the narrow, brush-lined canyons of University City and Clairemont Mesa. The highway had been nothing more than a dirt valley when I was growing up, but as people moved farther and farther to the east in order to still call San Diego home, the 52 became the newest freeway to connect the outer reaches of the county to the coast.

The medical examiner's office was out in the wasteland of business parks known as Kearney Mesa. A triangular area surrounded by three different freeways, the region had slowly transformed itself over a period of about ten years from dusty vacant lots to low-slung white and gray buildings that housed every conceivable type of industry and business. It was nearly the geographical heart of San Diego, but seemed devoid of life or character.

The ME's building was off Ruffin Road, and I parked in the lot out front. The office smelled like lemon, and I wrinkled my nose as the glass doors swung closed behind me. The area was small and compact—a chest-high counter, two desks, couple of filing cabinets, a radio on top of a television and VCR in the corner. A hallway disappeared off the back of the windowless room.

I rang the metal bell on the desk and fifteen seconds later James Minton emerged from the back hall and made a face like I'd forgotten to put pants on.

“Fuck you want, Braddock?” he asked, his voice a mixture of gravel and whine.

“Good to see you, too, James.”

The face remained. “No it ain't. What the fuck you want?” He held up his pudgy hand before I could respond. “Know what? Don't care what you want. Go away.”

I laughed. “I've missed you.”

His hand shrank to a middle finger.

Minton was medium height, with a gut that was anything but medium. He had on a white coat over a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt that barely contained his girth. A thin dark mustache snaked over his upper lip. The dark hair on his head was thinning, a fact he tried to cover up by buzzing it short. Dark gray eyes stared me down.

“I'm serious,” he said. “I don't have time for you. Go away.”

“Can't.”

“Door's right behind you. Turn around and put one foot in front of the other. You'll get it.”

I looked over the counter at him. “Why so bitter?”

He folded his arms across his chest, reminding me of a fat, angry Buddha. “Last time I saw you, I found you in the back, having moved a body and copying some records. Then that big asshole that follows you around picked me up and pinned me in the corner of the room until you were done.” He pointed a finger at me. “You fucked the whole thing up.”

“You didn't answer the bell and I was trying to do my job.”

He waved a hand in the air, beads of sweat appearing on his forehead. “Whatever, Braddock. You pissed me off and I don't like to be pissed off.”

I smiled. “Me either. But I'm not leaving.”

Minton stared at me for a moment, then rolled his eyes. “Two minutes.”

I nodded. “You get a DB last night?”

He pulled a clipboard off the wall behind him, looked at it for a moment, then nodded. “Yep.”

“Kate Crier?”

Minton looked again, then back at me. “Yep.”

“Cause of death?”

“Still to be determined.” He glanced at the clock on the wall. “One minute left.”

“Looked like strangulation from what I saw,” I said.

His left eye twitched. “Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

He gave a small shrug. “Couple other things I need to look at.”

“Like?”

Minton thought about it for a moment, then looked at the clock again. “Like your two minutes are up.”

“That wasn't two minutes,” I protested.

“Was in my world.”

I didn't want to push it because if I was going to learn anything about Kate's death, I would need his help. I pulled a card from my wallet and placed it on the counter. “I'd appreciate a call when you know more.”

“Well, hell,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “I'll get right on that, Mr. Private Dick. Emphasis on Dick. Just for you.”

I smiled. “Got two tickets behind the plate for Friday's game. Dodgers are in town.” I opened the door to the hallway. Minton was the biggest baseball fan I knew. Great seats were his weakness. “Yours, if I get a call by the end of the day.”

He muttered something under his breath.

I turned around. “What?”

His mouth curled into a disgusted frown, most likely due to the fact that I knew he would never turn down great seats.

“I said,” Minton replied, spinning on his heel and heading toward the back hall, “fuck off.”

Minton's statement about a “couple of other things” rang in my ears as I walked back to my car. I tried to remember what else I'd seen when I'd opened the trunk of the car, but the only thing I could recall with any clarity was Kate's face. I knew there would be no shaking that.

I was pondering that thought when I saw a guy sitting on the hood of my Jeep. He was twirling my radio antenna like a baton, watching it very closely as if he wanted to perfect the move. Another guy was leaning against the white Lexus parked next to the Jeep, watching him.

The guy with the antenna looked up. “You Braddock?”

“No,” I said. “Me Tarzan.”

He dropped the antenna on the asphalt and looked at his partner. “Funny, you think?”

His partner rotated his head in my direction, squinting into the morning sunlight. “Very.”

The guy on the Jeep slid off the hood and tilted his head to one side, cracking his neck. He was about my height, with a square head and more fat than muscle. His face was dotted by acne scars, heavier around the chin. His black hair was slicked back off his forehead, so tight it looked like it hurt. He wore a white tank top, black cotton sweats, and construction boots.

He looked again at his partner. “So. We gonna do this, Ramon, or what?”

Ramon was shorter and dressed a hell of a lot better. He wore a gray silk shirt and black linen slacks, expensive leather huaraches on his feet. His black hair was cut short, long sideburns creeping down his cheeks. A gold hoop dangled fashionably from his left ear. His eyes were flat and cold, like steel.

He held out a hand to his partner. “Easy, Manny.”

“Yeah, Manny. Easy,” I said.

Manny scowled, and I doubted that anything came easy for him.

Ramon looked at me. “Can I ask why you are here, Mr. Braddock? Visiting the medical examiner?” He spoke softly with a heavy Hispanic accent.

“You can ask. Sure.”

Ramon eyed me for a moment, then a small smile crept onto his lips. “But you won't answer?”

I shook my head and wrinkled my nose. “Don't really feel compelled.” I looked at Manny. “Sorry. Big word.
Compelled
means ‘gotta.'”

Manny continued to scowl. “Dude, you are not funny.”

“Guys,” I said, preparing for the confrontation. “Sorry, but I can't hang out with you anymore. Things to do, places to be, you know the deal.”

Manny stepped in front of my car door and smiled.

I returned the smile. “In about ten seconds, Manny, you are gonna wish you had chosen breakfast instead of me this morning.” I looked at Ramon. “Unless you have any more questions, I'm going to kick his ass.”

Ramon shrugged, then nodded at Manny. Manny lurched at me and swung. I stepped inside the swing and thrust my right palm up under his chin. His teeth cracked together, his eyes slammed shut, and he took a step back. I moved to the side, lifted my leg up, and jammed my foot into the side of Manny's knee. A muffled scream emerged from the broken teeth and blood in his mouth as he crumpled to the ground.

I stepped back and looked at Ramon. “You next?”

He didn't look impressed, which concerned me. He cocked his head to the side. “Mr. Braddock. Do you know the name Alejandro Costilla?”

I watched Manny curl into a tight ball on the sidewalk. Alejandro Costilla. My life had suddenly become a lot more complicated.

I looked back at Ramon, trying not to show him anything. “No.”

Ramon let the same small smile I'd seen earlier crawl back on his lips. “You are a liar, Mr. Braddock.”

I picked up my antenna and got into the Jeep, the window already rolled down. “I've been called worse.”

Ramon nodded, shoved his hands in the pockets of his expensive pants, and leaned in the window, so his eyes were at the same level as mine. “Yes, I think you are a liar, Mr. Braddock. But that is your choice.” He turned to Manny and offered him a hand, but Manny was busy hugging his knee to his chest and bellowing in pain. Ramon shrugged and looked back at me. “I believe Mr. Costilla will have an interest in speaking to you about your visit this morning.” He winked. “So I'm sure I will see you again. Soon.”

I drove off before he could really scare the crap out of me.