The Next Right Thing (12 page)

But when I rolled down Wade’s window to speak with him, he suddenly slammed his Suburban into gear and pounded a
U-turn around my truck in the opposite direction. Maybe he didn’t want to play the staring game anymore.

I gave him a moment to make it up the road. Then I followed him.

It was twilight as we wound our way through the switchbacks into the hills.

“Why are we following this guy?” Wade asked.

“
We’re
not following this guy,” I said. “
I’m
following this guy. You’re my unfortunate passengers.”

“Did he
do
something to you?” Wade asked.

“He’s been parking across the street from my house,” I said. “I told you that.”

“You’re going to beat up some guy whose only crime is parking down the street from your house? Don’t get all Patriot Act on me, dude.”

The ancient Suburban’s brake lights flashed ahead of us. I slowed down.

“Am I allowed to talk now?” Troy said.

“Are you going to say anything that will piss me off?” I said.

“Is there anything that
won’t
piss you off?”

“Good job, Troy. You’ve answered your own question.”

We turned up Oro into the hills as the Suburban slowed down and turned in to a driveway. The house was a boxy one-story that had been tarted up with solar panels on the roof, a stainless-steel garage door, and a Zen rock garden.

I turned off my headlights and parked far enough down the road where my truck wouldn’t be seen. Something told me that he didn’t live here: he wasn’t the solar panel/Zen garden type of guy.

Confirming my hunch, Surfer Jesus knocked on the front
door, then waited. When the door opened, I recognized the face.

“That’s Colin Alvarez,” I said. “Why is this dude going to see Colin Alvarez? The guy who’s been stalking me just drove to a recovery house?”

“I don’t think that’s a recovery house,” Troy said. “I think that’s Colin’s own house.”

At this, Wade dove into my glove compartment for a pen and a piece of paper. He started to write.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Taking the guy’s license plate,” Wade said. “Weren’t you a cop once?”

I was still counting the coincidences as Surfer Jesus spoke with Colin on the front porch. It seemed like a polite conversation, though Colin wasn’t inviting him inside. Eventually, he gave the guy a pat on the shoulder, and Surfer Jesus nodded and walked back to his car. It would have been so easy to intercept him on the way back down the driveway, but I had his license plate, and I was already more pissed off at Colin Alvarez for being the destination than I was at Surfer Jesus for driving there.

I stepped out onto the street and turned back toward my companions. “Don’t even think about getting out of this vehicle while I’m up there.”

The door before me was tomato red and as solid as hands could fabricate. I wanted to bounce it off its hinges and take it home. After firebombing everything else.

I knocked hard on the door, which was almost immediately answered by Colin Alvarez. He was clearly surprised to see me. About an inch or two taller than I was but not much heavier, he
practiced some kind of fashionable martial art. I’d never liked Colin, but fortunately, he’d never liked me, either.

He said, “You started an interesting discussion at Knife in the Head tonight.”

“You have a video link to the Coastal Club?” That bald hipster who worked for him must have been on the phone with the boss before we even left the parking lot. Colin hadn’t asked me why I was standing on his porch. “Why was that asshole posted in front of my house?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Randy, but I wish you would take down your tone.”

“The fucker who was just here, Colin. Why was he watching my house?”

“Mutt?” he said. “Mutt was watching your house?”

That was the sound of Claire’s story clicking into place. “Let me guess, Colin. Mutt wouldn’t happen to be an electrician, would he?”

Colin looked genuinely confused, which wasn’t usually the way he looked. I didn’t trust him. I asked again why the fuck this guy was watching my house.

“I barely know the guy, Randy. He’s looking for a place to live. I was going to help him find a place at one of my houses, but—”

“But what? Do newcomers usually stop by your Zen palace in the middle of the night looking for a bed? Why don’t you cut the bullshit?”

“Because that’s the truth, Randy.”

Some might argue that this would have been a good time to give Colin the benefit of the doubt, regroup, pursue some other avenues toward what the hell was or wasn’t going on. But if my
intention had been to think strategically, that bird was about to fly south with a lot of other good ideas I had ignored recently.

“It
is
a nice house,” I said. “How many newcomers do you need to extort in order to cover the mortgage?”

Colin’s gaze became tight and fixed. Apparently, I wasn’t “taking down” my tone.

“You stroll into meetings when you feel like it,” Colin said. “People see your big truck and they know about your wonderful new life. But where are you going to be when these newcomers are drunk in a ditch? I help people on a level that you can’t even comprehend. I get that you’re unsettled by Terry’s death, and you’re on a bit of a dry drunk. But you should calm the fuck down.”

From down the street, I heard my truck door opening. We both looked to see Wade standing near the end of Colin’s driveway, his arms crossed. Troy waited inside the truck, out of sight.

If Colin wasn’t scared of me, he
really
wasn’t scared of Wade. He got up into my face. “I want you and your crew to get the fuck off my property. Unless you feel like beating another Mexican? How long has it been, man?”

Wade’s shoes slapped up the driveway.

A regular Gandhi, I held up my hands, and I calmly backed away. Fortunately, Colin seemed to have his own anger management issues: he followed me onto the driveway and came a little too close to my face with the sharp end of his index finger. I caught his arm and yanked it back up behind him, driving him down into the concrete. If I’d still been a cop, I could have cuffed him. Instead, I bent his arm right to the edge of popping out his shoulder. By the time he got himself up, I was pushing Wade back into the truck.

MY HEAD HURT WITH TRYING
to understand whatever I’d just stumbled into. The electrician named after a dog, it turned out, was more than a figment of Claire’s imagination. His name was Mutt, he’d been prowling around my house, and he reported to Colin Alvarez. If Mutt had been with Terry when he died, how did that connect to Alvarez? And why was Alvarez checking up on me? I’d also learned that Colin had some weird things going on in his recovery houses—amateur pornography, for one. Somewhere in the middle of this was my sponsor, Terry, dead in that motel room in Santa Ana.

We headed back to the Coastal Club, where Wade had left his car.

“What did you mean,” I asked Troy, “when you said that this
amateur-pornography rumor made sense out of some things you’d heard? What did you hear?”

“There’s a guy,” Troy said. “A guy I don’t like. He used to hang out at the house.”

“Does this guy have a name?”

“Busansky,” Troy said. “Simon Busansky.”

Never heard of him. “And why do I care about this guy you don’t like?”

“Because he’s a pornographer. And a scumbag.”

“He’s in A.A.?”

“No.”

“Then why was he hanging out at a recovery house?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Why do they call these places recovery houses,” I asked, “when there’s so little recovery?”

“It’s not all like that,” Troy said. “But yeah, it’s sort of like that. I think that when a lot of people are getting better, maybe sometimes it attracts a lot of people who aren’t getting better.”

“Did Terry know him?”

“I heard that they were friends. I didn’t want to believe it, though. Simon’s already messed with one person I like.”

“Who did he mess with?”

“Emma.”

“The sniper?”

“You know how you asked me if she was my girlfriend? Actually, she was
his
girlfriend. But this guy … he’d make her do things. I’ve got a bad feeling that this porn they’re talking about has something to do with my friend Emma.”

It was my first moment of truly liking Troy. It had to happen
sooner or later. He said “my friend” like he was drawing a line around her and you’d better not cross it. I checked Wade to see if he’d caught Troy’s brave inflection, but he was turned away from me, looking out the window.

I slapped his arm to bring him back to us. “You know this guy? The scumbag Busansky?”

“No,” Wade said. “I don’t think so. Terry was definitely becoming friendly with Colin, though. He maybe wrote some contracts for him. He was around the houses sometimes, hanging out with the newcomers, like always. That’s how he met Troy.”

Which told me nothing that I didn’t already know. Which made me wonder why Wade had bothered to say it.

When we got back to the Coastal Club, Wade closed the door behind him and walked back to his own car. I assumed that he wouldn’t be joining us for the “meeting after the meeting.”

As we pulled out of the parking lot, I asked Troy if he’d eaten anything recently.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean how long has it been since you put food into your body?”

Troy looked at his hands as though the answer might be hidden there. “I can’t remember.”

Newcomers were always going psychotic with low blood sugar. “Sometimes you think you want to commit suicide,” Terry used to say, “when what you really want is a bacon cheeseburger.”

I took Troy to Wahoo’s Fish Taco, where I ate a basket of mahimahi tacos and Troy ate two baskets. Afterward, we strolled the boardwalk. I smoked a cigar. Being around Troy was surprisingly
low-maintenance. He talked about himself exclusively, and mostly he answered his own questions. Up to a point.

“How do you save for retirement?” he asked. This was as we passed the art deco lifeguard station that appears in most Laguna Beach postcards.

“How do
I
save for retirement?” I said. “Are you asking me specifically or in general?”

“Both,” Troy said.

“I make a lot of money,” I said. “But I spend most of it. I guess I figure I’ll keep moving into nicer houses, and that’ll be my retirement.”

Troy stopped walking. He tapped the filter on his Camel Light with his thumb. I took a hit off my cigar and wished I still smoked cigarettes.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” I said.

“Because that’s not going to work,” Troy said. “You can’t save for retirement like that. Did you miss the part where home values dropped something like thirty percent?”

“If you know the answer,” I said, “why did you ask the fucking question?”

“I
don’t
know the answer,” Troy said. “But I guess I know what’s not the answer.”

That was enough foreplay for me, so I asked him again what had happened that last night with Terry.

“Is that why you bought me fish tacos?” Troy asked. “To ask me a bunch of cop questions?”

“I just want to know.”

“Do you know what the topic at the online A.A. meeting was today? It came from The Big Book. It was so good that I printed it up.”

Troy actually turned out his pants pockets before he found a piece of paper. It didn’t surprise me that there was no cash or keys to impede his search. “Here it is.” Troy silently read his piece of paper to himself, nodded, then looked off toward Japan.

I took exactly two puffs from my cigar before I couldn’t stand it anymore. “What was the fucking quote?”

“Oh.” Troy once again hoisted the piece of paper. “ ‘Sometimes they hurt us, seemingly without provocation, but we invariably find that at some time in the past we have made decisions based on self which later placed us in a position to be hurt.’ Isn’t that awesome?”

“From Chapter Five,” I said. “And what does that mean to you, Troy?”

“Terry told me the same thing: it’s an inside job. I spent most of today asking myself why you would want to hit me, and then I read this—I must have done something that put me in a position to be hit.”

“Maybe I’m just homicidal. Did you consider that?”

“I’ve gotta do a fifth step. You wanna do my fifth step with me? At first I thought Wade was insane, but now I think it’s a good idea.”

Taking Troy’s fifth step, a process in which he read to me his “moral inventory”—a catalog of his resentments, fears, and misbehavior—didn’t necessarily mean that I was his sponsor. But that’s what it meant to most people in A.A. If you trusted someone enough to share with him your inventory, he might as well be your sponsor.

“You want
me
to be your sponsor? This morning I almost beat you.”

“My dad hit me once, too,” Troy said. “In many ways, I admire him more than anyone.”

“Just hold that thought,” I said, “and tell me, at least, how you met Terry.”

“If you’ll consider being my sponsor, I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

“Have you even done your fourth step, Troy?”