South by Southeast (9 page)

Dad patted my back. “Is what it is,” he said. “Least . . . you gave me a grandchild.” He smiled for the first time all morning. Thoughts of Chela always had that effect on him.

I chuckled. “Never saw that one coming, did you?”

“Damn right.”

We laughed, but the laughter didn't last. I remembered breakfast and found a pan to cook the eggs. I didn't have an appetite, but I needed the ritual.

“You did . . . good with that girl, Ten. Real good. That was
God's work. We started rough, but . . . glad to see how you turned out.”

I wanted to reject the admiration in his voice. “If you say so.”

April was on the tip of my tongue. Maybe his, too. But neither of us spoke her name.

“Why you up so early?” Dad said.

“Bad dreams. Spider.”

Dad sighed, nodding. I'd told him all about my encounter with the knife man in graphic detail, as if it were an action scene from some damn movie.

“Not surprised,” Dad said.

“Hell, that was a long time ago. Didn't bother me before.”

“Dead's dead forever,” Dad said. “He'll stay with you. Sneak up . . . on you.”

I felt a surge of anger, remembering. “The bastard had it coming. I'd do it again.”

“Sure,” Dad said. “Don't mean . . . you don't wish it hadn't come to that.”

I'd expected to be arrested. To see my name in the headlines as a killer. But my Double-O-Marsha had wiped Spider away as if he'd never existed, and no one knew my sins but me and Dad. Nothing about it seemed right.

“Ten, you 'member me tellin' you 'bout back when . . . I was in patrol? That crash?”

I'd expected a Vietnam story, but Dad rarely talked about the war. This was a cop story Dad had shared with me only in the past three years, since he left the nursing home. He'd been alone in his patrol car, on his way home, when he'd seen a Buick weaving in and out of the lanes, the driver drunk or high. He'd flipped on his flashers to pull the car over, but the driver had panicked and sped away. Bad move.

“That drunk who wrapped himself around a pole off La Cienega?” I said. “I remember.”

“More to it,” Dad said. He handed me a can of nonstick cooking spray, and I greased the pan. He waited a moment, and I realized that Dad's clipped words and growing pauses were allowing him catch his breath. Dad went on. “See . . . he was headed for that intersection . . . no sign of slowing. I knew . . . he was gonna plow over someone, or broadside 'em. He didn't care. Wasn't just . . . running. He was . . . ready. Didn't care who else he took with him.”

Dad took a breath. “You don't have time . . . to think. You just are . . . who you are. So I sped up . . . saw the pole. Saw my chance.” Dad gestured with his hands, a sharply turning steering wheel. He had deliberately side-swiped the driver into a pole. “I . . . coulda died, too. But only one of us did.”

He'd never told me that part of the story.

“What'd your bosses say?”

Dad shrugged. “Went through the motions. Then it was over. I was promoted.”

I wanted Dad's story to solve my uneasiness after dreaming about Spider, but it didn't.

“Like you always say, Dad, you reap what you sow.”

“One thing . . . kept bothering me,” Dad said. “Why? Why not stop and take the ticket? Turned out . . .”

“He was a fugitive,” I finished, guessing.

Dad nodded. “Warrants on a double. Would've got the gas. Life at least.”

“So it was suicide by cop instead.”

“He chose . . . his time and place.” Dad sounded as if he respected the notion.

A long silence followed, and I wanted it to last. I already knew I wasn't going to like anything either of us might say next.

“We're . . . selfish,” Dad said. “When people die . . . we really don't think about them. It's only about us. Makes death real. Too real. Death . . . might let you wander away. But never far. Never . . . long.”

My heart sped as I cracked the eggs and heard the sizzle. I'd planned to scramble them, but I'd forgotten to get a spoon.

“My whole adult life . . . only three things mattered,” Dad said, and I noticed he had slipped into past tense. “God first. You know that. My . . . family. And . . . my work. Maybe not even . . . in that order. Trying to fix the world . . . make it right.”

“That's a big job.”

Dad nodded. “It's God's charge to us. And when I can't work . . . at least there's family. Sometimes that's enough. But when I was in that place . . . staring at those walls . . .” He shook his head. He didn't have to finish. I'd hated putting Dad in a nursing facility, but I hadn't had a choice. Even with a full-time staff to treat him, he'd developed a bedsore on his lower back like a winking, weeping eye. It had healed, but I'd never seen a wound yawn open that way in anyone's flesh. A horror.

“You won't go to a place like that again,” I said. “You'll be at home.”

Dad shook his head. “Same thing, Ten. Doing . . . nothing. Being . . . no one. Can't do that again. If it comes to that . . .”

I needed a spatula to make some kind of effort with the eggs, but I didn't move to get one. Breakfast was burning.

“I get it, Dad,” I said. “No machines. No feeding tube.” We might have been discussing the day's weather forecast.
Next subject, please.

“Not just that, Ten,” Dad said.

I prayed that my father wasn't about to ask me to shoot him before he got sick again.

“Then what?” I said.

Dad fell silent, deep in thought. He patted my back again. “You'll know,” he said.

“Maybe it won't be like you think,” I said. “You might just fall asleep one night.”

“Maybe,” Dad said. “Or I'd want to be doing something that mattered. Making the world right. God's work.”

Once April had accused me of riding the chaos. I'd inherited the urge honestly.

I nodded. “Me, too.”

Dad reached for his cane. He'd been leaning on the countertop, but he used his cane to turn around and walk away. “Better flip those eggs . . . 'fore they turn brown.”

“Yessir.”

Halfway to the living room, Dad stopped and turned. “Free tomorrow? 'Bout noon?”

“I think so. Why?”

“Was talking . . . to Marcela last night. We're goin' to the courthouse today, sign the papers and whatnot. Decided not to wait. Tomorrow, we're getting married.”

I WAS ON
the phone with April at ten thirty telling her about the wedding when Chela burst into my room without knocking.

The frantic look on her face scared me. When I'd seen her only fifteen minutes earlier, she'd listened to Dad's news with dreamy teenage bliss.

“What is it?” April's voice said in my ear.

“I'll call you back,” I said. “Chela just came into my room.”

April gave a short, hot sigh. Our relationship had been dancing around Chela from the beginning, with Chela trying to block her at every turn. “Ten, you need to teach her boundaries.”

“I know. I will,” I said, my familiar promise. Wishful thinking. I hung up.

Chela held her iPhone out toward me, and I noticed her hand trembling. “Maria's missing,” she said.

“Who?”

After Dad's talk, I had forgotten who Maria was.

“My friend!” Chela said. “I just got a call from a girl I met at the club. They found Maria's purse and her phone. I was one of the last numbers on her phone, so a girl with a voice like a mouse called me to ask if I know where Maria is. They have her picture of her daughter.”

I stared at Chela blankly. “Maybe . . . she dropped her purse?”

“That's not like her,” Chela said, certain. “Maria is too together for that. She wouldn't drop her purse.”

“Everybody makes mistakes.”

Like me, letting you go to that damn club with her
. People like Maria are present even when they're gone. My covert lady friend was like that, and there is no such thing as an easy escape. I wondered if I had underestimated Maria; she might have orchestrated her “lost purse” to keep her hooks in Chela. Good one. My own Lady M could do no better.

“Take a deep breath,” I said. “Why are you so worried?”

Chela pursed her lips and glanced behind her, closing my room door. Her face looked gray. “I didn't tell you everything the other night,” she said, and cold foreknowledge stole over me again. Of course she hadn't told me everything. “Maria's friends said some freak is out there killing working girls, so everyone was on the buddy system. A girl named Lupe washed up on a beach. They say she hated the water. I was supposed to be Maria's buddy, but I left early. Nobody's seen her since then. It's all my fault, Ten!”

I felt my eardrums pop, as if I were in an airplane racing to thirty thousand feet. My fist curled with anger I could direct only at myself. “What are you talking about?”

She repeated what she'd said almost word for word. The implied agreements and associations made me wonder what she'd been doing for the few hours she was gone.

“Tell me everything,” I said. “Right now.”

My phone vibrated as April called back, but I ignored it.

“Nothing happened while I was there. We got the IDs and went to Phoenixx, just like I said. We danced, and this guy Raphael bought us drinks. He tried to play me, but I blew him off. That's when I decided to leave. But Maria's friends told me about this killer guy. They were all freaked out about this dead girl. They
think a murderer is out there faking drownings. I have to find Maria and make sure she's okay.”

Slowly, relief unclenched my fist. Chela had run into a gaggle of hookers with overactive imaginations. Someone was watching too much
Dexter
.

“If they think she's missing, they should go to the police,” I said.

Chela planted a hand on her hip and gave me a poisonous look.

Right.

“What do you want from me, Chela?” I said

“That's the best you can do?” Chela said. “I thought you were a detective.”

She was wrong. I'd pretended to be a detective for a while, but I'd had the urge beaten out of me. I didn't have time to indulge panicky streetwalkers or Chela's guilt for finding a different life. I summoned my acting abilities to assure Chela that everything was fine, that Maria's friends were probably imagining things.

I don't think I calmed Chela down much, but she finally left my room.

“Why is everything the end of the world?” April said when I finally called her back and explained that Chela had manufactured another teenage crisis.

Why, indeed?

The
Freaknik
cast and crew partied harder than any I'd ever worked with—including my costars in a
Beverly Hills 90210
rip-off called
Malibu High
a million years ago. My costars back then had played their roles as if they were perpetually sixteen, but they were all older than twenty-one and determined to prove it. Sometimes I'd hung out with them just to get my face exposed to the hordes of paparazzi who trailed them, but bars have never been my scene.
Freaknik
had
them beat, as if we'd gotten a memo warning us to squeeze in every ounce of living before the Zombie Apocalypse.

Louise Cannon, the producer, was Mommy over a cast gone wild. I tried not to be one of her problems, but she treated me as if I were a lawsuit waiting in the wings.

My sexual harassment settlement from Lynda Jewell was never made public, but Louise Cannon always kept me at such a distance that I wondered if Jewell had told her about it at a Pilates class or a Hollywood party. Small town. Cannon took a step back when I approached her, averting her eyes and folding her arms the way the girls had in junior high school when they were trying to hide a crush on me. I violated her
do not approach
force field to corner her at the catering table, where workers were laying out seafood from Crab Shack.