The Next Right Thing (19 page)

Wade shrugged, turned away from me. He looked up at a wall crowded with tools: drill press, band saw, rotary saw, and more specialized woodworking gimmicks than I would ever use. I couldn’t see his face but I kept going: “Working out a deal for you is one thing. Working out a deal for someone like Busansky?
That puts Terry in a totally different league. That’s a business. You should have fucking told me. It wasn’t the kind of thing he should have been doing.”

“Why?” Wade turned around. “Because you would have fixed it? Because you would have done what I couldn’t do? Protected Terry from himself? You give yourself a lot of credit, dude.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe I just don’t want to feel like I was excluded.”

“You weren’t excluded,” Wade said. “You excluded yourself.”

“I was falling in love. I was building a career. I have to hang out in coffee shops with you two for the rest of my life?”

Wade looked at me. He didn’t shrug, he didn’t turn away. At that moment, a bicycle bounced up from Laguna Canyon Road into the parking lot that I shared with three other shops. A cute little bicycle bell rang three times. Emma was on the handlebars, and Troy was pedaling. Troy stopped, straddling the bike a few feet from Wade. Emma rang the bell one more time. Then it must have become obvious to them that Wade and I had reached some kind of climax, because neither of them spoke, and the bell didn’t ring again.

To his credit, Wade smiled before I did. “Yes,” he said, “I was hoping you two would hang out with me at coffee shops for the rest of our lives.”

Troy seemed upset to have missed the joke. He shaded his eyes from the sunlight in order to see into my shop. Emma got off the handlebars and, without a moment’s hesitation, got up into my truck. She closed the door and then closed her eyes. Locked both doors, too. Troy lifted the front wheel of his bike and let it clatter to the pavement.

I sat down on the worktable that held the crib. Wade sat on the worktable against the wall.

“You want to know what happened to Terry?” On the bench beside him, Wade pushed a pile of sawdust together into a mound. “He got interested. You remember the way Terry got interested? After he steered me out of trouble, he made a study of how the grow-ops worked. I didn’t think he was getting involved. I thought it was like, you know, Betsy’s model trains.”

“Grow-ops?” Troy said. He was on the other side of the shop trying to figure out my planer by sticking his hand into it. “What’s a grow-op?”

“It’s a hydroponic pot farm,” Wade said. “Under your house. That’s what they call them in Vancouver. It was a stupid idea to import the concept to California. In Canada, they write you a parking ticket. In the States, well, things are more complicated. If you have a license for medical marijuana, that’s one thing. If you don’t …”

“You get arrested?” Troy asked.

“It’s a federal felony,” I said. “I thought you were a criminal mastermind.”

“Okay,” Troy said. “I just thought things were lightening up, at least as far as pot goes.”

“It’s hard for things to lighten up,” I said, “when everyone’s still making money from them
not
lightening up. If the cops find one of these illegal grow-ops, and there’s money behind it, it’s a big payday for them. The drug assets become law enforcement assets. Buys a lot of surveillance equipment and coffee machines and overtime. Back in the day, we would have killed to split something like this with the DEA.”

“They don’t even have to convict you,” Wade added, “in
order to confiscate your related assets. Make it easy for them to get what they want, and you can avoid jail entirely.”

“Fucking feds.” Troy crouched to inspect the table saw. “It’s piracy, is what it is. It’s like my dad always says, there’s no difference anymore between cops and criminals.”

Wade and I looked at each other. Where the hell did we find this guy?

“Anyway,” Wade said, “by the time I was back on my feet, Terry seemed to know everyone. I figured, he’s a lawyer. Lawyers know criminals, right?”

“Like Simon Busansky?”

“Like Simon Busansky,” Wade said.

“Here’s what I don’t understand,” I said. “Why did the DEA let Busansky sell his houses to Colin? Why not just take them?”

“The reason you don’t get that,” Wade said, “is because you don’t have a mind for this shit. It’s a
relationship
. Simon probably said something like, ‘Hey, you guys could take my houses and a lot of my money. But let me sell a couple of houses off first.’ ”

“It wasn’t Simon who said that, right?”

“No,” Wade said. “It was probably Terry.”

“And then Terry turns around and puts Busansky together with Colin and, I’m sure, takes a cut off that end, too.” I thought of my sponsor’s smile in the grocery store at the mention of recovery houses. “And if the DEA lets Busansky do this,” I continued, “it means that he’s in their debt?”

“That’s right,” Wade said. “And the wheel keeps turning.”

“So you’re telling me Terry went into business with Busansky?”

“If you’re asking me whether Terry got involved in anything
that was illegal, I don’t know. He’s over there at the recovery house, talking to newcomers like Troy, sure”—Troy looked up as though surprised to hear his name—“but he’s also romancing the idea that maybe he doesn’t have to spend so much time talking with newcomers like Troy. Because maybe it’s more fun to trade war stories with a guy like Simon Busansky. Simon was swimming around in this world where you could run grow-ops, get busted for them, and have enough money left over to eat nice meals and not get a job.”

“Terry wasn’t trying to help him get sober?”

“Maybe that’s what he was doing. After my own thing, I couldn’t hack it. Simon made me uncomfortable. When Simon was around, I wasn’t.”

“What about Colin?”

“Colin’s a Boy Scout,” Wade said. “He always thought A.A. was like, I don’t know,
Go and sin no more
. Terry hooked him up with Simon in a deal that allowed him to cheaply expand his business or his mission or whatever he thinks it is, but I’m sure he didn’t like this shit any more than I did. And there’s no way I can buy him knowing about any porn. Colin threw people out of the house if he found a dirty magazine under the bed. Right, Troy?”

Troy nodded. “He says it’s demeaning to women.”

My hands were throbbing, but so was my spirit. “Terry had just had a fucking baby, Wade. His dreams had come true. Why would he end up in a motel in Santa Ana?
Thirty-six fucking hours after the child was born
. Something must have set him off. This guy at the hospital said Terry was ranting about a business partner. I think that’s Busansky. And not even the DEA knows where he is. So how the fuck do we find Busansky?”

All of us at once looked at Emma in my truck. Her eyes were still, eerily, closed. We turned back. “I’m going to get to her in a minute,” I said.

“I don’t know, Randy,” Wade said. “But I think you’re missing the big picture here.”

“What’s the big picture, Wade?”

“This guy.” Wade pointed at Troy.
“This guy.”

Troy withdrew his attention from an investigation of the motor beneath the table saw. He seemed to be in the process of memorizing my shop, although I was also sure he heard every word. It took me a moment to recognize what Wade was saying:
Troy is the patient today, dude
.

“Troy’s fine,” I said.

“I’m not worried about Troy.”

“You think I’m going to drink if I don’t sponsor Troy?”

“How should I know?” Wade said. “I’m the one who dropped the ball on Terry, remember? All I know is that without this guy, we’ve got nothing.”

As Troy joined us between the worktables, I thought about the two days since I’d met him in that other garage. How did we get from there to here? In our dysfunctional little A.A. family, we’d traded Terry for Troy.

“Tell him,” Wade said to Troy.

“Tell him what?” Troy asked.

“Tell him that you’re done.”

“Done?” I asked. “Done with what?”

“Oh,” Troy said. “My fourth step.”

What separated the men from the boys in A.A.: the moral inventory. Basically a list of resentments, it also ended up being
a list of sins and fears and the chronology of an entire stupid life. A good sign, too, that the kid was serious. The fifth step should be the very next thing, in which you shared that list with another person. People sometimes called it the end of isolation. I myself thought of it as the beginning of my new life.

“You finished the whole funky resentment-list thing?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Troy said.

“What about the sexual inventory? Did you write down all the people you hurt by your selfish pursuit of sex?”

“Yeah.” Troy laughed and looked at Wade. “It was a short list.”

“How about your fears?” I asked. “You write down your fears?”

“Relax, man. Wade wouldn’t let me get away with shit. He went through the book page by page. It was old school.”

“When are you going to do your fifth step?” I said.

“This is the question,” Troy said.

Waiting to do a fifth step after finishing the fourth is a bad idea: like waiting to replace your skin after it’s been peeled from your body. Terry had canceled half a day to hear my list of resentments and fears, woes and missteps.

“You should do it with this man.” I pointed at Wade.

“I’m not his sponsor,” Wade said.

“Then why were you helping him write the inventory?” I said.

“It takes a goddamn village,” Wade said.

“I explicitly told him why I wouldn’t become his sponsor.”

“I know,” Wade said. “Because you can’t stand the sight of
him, and you’re such a badass that you might punch him at any moment. So maybe you feel about him pretty much the way Terry felt about you?”

I looked at Troy. “Is tomorrow morning soon enough?”

Troy pointed at his borrowed bicycle. “Like I’ve got someplace else to go?”

“I’m still not your sponsor,” I said. “This is a one-off, never to be repeated.”

“Everyone gets that,” Wade said.

As I contemplated a future that included knowing Troy Padilla’s darkest secrets, I looked up at Emma. At precisely that moment, she opened her eyes and stared right at me.

I walked around to the passenger side of my truck, which was parked in front of the bay door that opened my shop. Emma popped the locks, and I got in. Then she locked them again. Troy said that Simon had hurt Emma, which was another way of saying they were in a relationship. I guess I already knew that she was here to tell me something. The trick would be getting her to tell me in a language I could understand.

We sat quietly for a minute while Wade and Troy vacillated between watching us from outside the truck and fixing more coffee. I pretended for a moment that I was the kind of good A.A. who practiced meditation. I began to count my breaths, but by the time I got to four, I wished that I had a cigar in my mouth to enhance the process. Still, there was something about sitting next to Emma, feeling her try to contain her restless energy. I had to admit that I already loved her—and Troy—a little bit more than they annoyed me.

“I’m not going to talk to you about him,” Emma finally said.

“Then I don’t want you to,” I said.

“Oh,” she said. “You
want
me to.”

“Maybe,” I said, “but I’m taking that desire and putting it in a box buried deep in my mind, and then I’m going to find out what happened to him whether you help me or not.”

She turned to me, smiling.

“Isn’t that what a recon marine would do?” I said. “Put those unquenchable desires and unanswerable shames into deep storage? And still complete the mission?”

“Which makes me want to tell you everything. You’re a real mind-fucker, aren’t you, Officer Chalmers?”

“Not really.” I softened my voice. “I know you want to tell me, Emma. You’ve been circling around it since we met.”

“I do,” she said. “I really miss him.”

“This is Busansky?”

“Simon.”

“Was he your boyfriend?”

Emma laughed. “Not that
he
knew it.”

“But you loved him?”

“The way that you love a guy who spends half his time trying to convince you to do weird shit on video, yeah.”

“You want to tell me about that?”

“It was supposed to make me feel free, but it didn’t make me feel free. Recon makes me feel free.”

“Did you, ah, do weird shit with my friend Terry, too?”

“Did I fuck him, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re not ready for the answer to that question, Officer Chalmers. You gotta walk a few more miles in this marine’s boots.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“I loved Terry,” she said. “Not the way I loved Simon.”

“Which is your sweet but fucked-up way of telling me you didn’t sleep with him.” I sure hoped so.

“Maybe,” she said.

“Okay, Emma. But if you really care about Simon, you need to answer some questions. And I don’t want you to fuck around. Fuck around about everything else, but I want straight answers to these next few questions. Okay?”

She nodded.

“Did you know that Simon sold all those houses to Colin?”

She nodded again.

“When was the last time you saw Simon?”

“About a month ago. He took me to this swingers club in San Diego. He wanted me to—”

“I don’t need the details of that right now,” I said. “But when he brought you back home, to the house, was that the last time you saw him?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“Is it weird for him to be gone this long?”

“He goes to Mexico sometimes, but he’ll send me an email just to keep me on the hook, you know? He doesn’t want me to wander too far, if you know what I mean.”

“What do you think happened to him, Emma?”

“I think he’s dead, but I don’t know
how
he’s dead. Or why he’s dead.”

“What makes you think he’s dead?”

She stared at me frankly, and I knew I was missing something.

“If you had a woman as smart and pretty as me,” she said,
“who was willing to do anything that you asked, how long would you disappear?”

I was relieved when she started to cry. This was a girl who needed to cry. I put my hand on her shoulder. If it hadn’t been for my bucket seats, I would have hugged her. “Okay,” I said.