Black Water (18 page)

"Where did that happen?"

"High Rollers, down on Katella. We tried to keep it quiet. That's just a regular bar we were in, not a cop joint."

"Sticking up for me. That's funny."

"Why is it funny?"

"Unexpected, I meant. Surprising."

"A lot of people think Brighton had it coming to him, and God knows McNally's dad did. And your father, well, he was involved and he admitted it. It was one of those rare times when people got what they deserved."

"Some got a little more."

"You got fooled on Mike. You
almost
got fooled."

"That's a generous interpretation of events."

"And Brighton's house needed a little cleaning, Merci. You were the one who did it."

She liked hearing Damon Reese sum things up that way. It put him in a good light and made things seem simple. The truth was a lot more complicated than that, and part of the truth was that she had been fooled into the unfair treatment of a fellow deputy—a man she'd been trying hard to love. She'd believed the worst of him because the evidence had told her to. Some people forgave her and some didn't. Mike had forgiven her as he shut the door of his Modjeska Canyon home on her one very cold night last winter.

Since then she had forgiven herself, but she didn't trust herself. Not all the way. And what good was trust if you couldn't, well, trust it? She second-guessed now, and second-guessed again. It was humiliating. That's what was yanking her chain about this Wildcraft thing she was trying
not
to believe the worst of him even though the evidence was telling her to. Her self-trust was trying to outmuscle her self-doubt but it didn't have the heft and the whole thing was being pushed by what had happened before. What if she was wrong again?" What if Archie's innocence was just another one of her useless opinions?

Shut the fuck
up,
woman, she thought. She sighed, feeling the heat rise into her face. "Thanks for saying that."

"I should have months ago. I figured I was more valuable with my mouth shut."

"Not being a fix-it guy."

"Correct," he said with a smile.

Damon Reese insisted that she take a small cooler filled with ice and a bag of the bass fillets. Then he walked her out. She saw two little boys with scooters standing on the sidewalk not far from her car.

Reese stopped at the planter beside the garage and used his pocketknife to cut a few white daisies. While she held open the lid he set them inside the cooler with the bag and ice.

He shook her hand and looked at her with a calm intensity. "Call if you think of anything," she said.

"I will. I'd call just to say hello and talk, if I thought you'd pick up."

She'd seen the question coming, but the directness of Reese's phrasing still caught her not quite ready. It wasn't the kind of question you had to think about. You knew the answer, whether you could predict it or not.

"I'd pick up."

He touched her cheek very softly with his fingers and brushed the hair off her forehead. She stood still for this, the sensation of his skin on hers much stronger and more exact than she had expected. She could smell fish and ocean and just a trace of gasoline. In the rearview mirror of the Impala she watched him wave goodbye, and without thinking she raised her right hand off the wheel and waved goodbye back. She glanced at the two young boys standing on the sidewalk, silver Razors propped against their legs. Both smiled: gaps and gums, teeth too big for their faces. One blew a kiss at her and they both took off, laughing and furiously pumping away down the concrete
.

_S
aturday’s were usually Merci and Tim time. But with this Saturday cut short by work, all they had time to do was to go to a fast-food kids' place for lunch, then down to Laguna Beach to cool off in the brisk ocean. Tim chased seagulls until he was panting. Merci sat in the sand and let the sun tingle her bare shoulders and her back.

I'd pick up. God, now what?

That night was a typical one in the Rayborn household: a big dinner cooked by her father, popcorn, videos, scotch and water on ice, the police band scanner turned low in the background.

Tim, brandishing a now-stringless bow that Merci had bought for him at an amusement park, wanted to watch
Robin Hood
for the something-hundredth time. Merci put it in.

"Robin Hood is real?"

"Robin Hood is not real. He's a character in a movie."

"Prince John is real?"

"Prince John is not real. He's a character in a movie also."

"He's in a movie also?"

"Correct."

"Oh."

Tim bellowed and gushed tears when the endless coming-to-video clips started, so Merci fast-forwarded it to the feature presentation.

"He's got strong opinions," said Clark.

"Wonder where he gets those."

Still blubbering and clutching his bow, Tim climbed into his grandfather's recliner—his new favorite place to sit. Merci stretched out on one of the couches, taking most of it up, nothing but shorts and a tank top in the hot August evening, her hair up in chopsticks. She balanced the cocktail glass on her stomach, which soon made a ring of sweat on the material.
I'd pick up.
She looked down at her legs, and her big feet propped one on top of the other on the arm of the sofa. She wondered if her legs were good ones. She'd been told they were good ones, but that was back in college.

She browsed the newspaper but found no good crime stories. She checked to see how the Angels were doing: fair. She had no interest at all in baseball but felt obligated to follow them because so many of the deputies did. She checked the stock page for B. B. Sistel's Friday performance: up a buck and a half.

She watched Robin Hood and Little John outrunning the sheriff's cartoon arrows. Merci didn't approve of entertainment that glorified lawbreakers, but her father had shown Tim the animated movie one day while she was gone and Tim had glommed onto it like something holy. It was too silly to take seriously, and the actors reading the parts were funny.

But she didn't really watch the movie, and she didn't really listen to the dialogue, or even to the police band scanner on the shelf just behind her. She thought instead about Archie Wildcraft and Gwen Kuerner. And their parents. And Julia and Priscilla and making two million dollars in six months on an investment of twenty grand. And what it must be like to lie in a bed knowing your wife was murdered two days ago, and that you have a bullet in your brain. That you may be a suspect. To ask for another picture of
your own wife
, for Goodness-sakes, because one wasn't enough to jog your bullet-riddled memory. She felt her blood pressure rise, cooled it off with a swallow of scotch.

"The Sheriff of Nottaham is bad?"

"Yes, he's bad."

"The Sheriff of Nottaham is good?"

"No, he's bad."

"He's good?"

"You know what he is, Tim."

Dinner was good and it left her feeling heavy and warm and a little restless. She watched Tim watch
Robin Hood again
and sipped her third drink.

Around nine, Gary Brice from the
Journal
called, something he been doing on most Saturday nights for the last couple of months. At first she had just let the machine pick up, but then she started answering because Brice amused her. He'd been trying to date her for almost a year now, and she'd always said no. No because he was flip and a womanizer and ten years younger than she was and she didn't find him attractive other than as an intriguing form of male energy. The calls started off as chides about her being home on Saturday nights, then escalated into crazy invites to join him,
right now
, at what ever club or lounge he was drinking in. Or join
us
right now. Gary had "tons" of friends, both female and male, and had guaranteed her she'd like
somebody
in his circle. She wondered why she just hadn't told him to quit calling, but the answer lay at the heart of her Saturday nights and she wasn't sure she wanted it.

"I don't hear drunks and bad music in the background," she said, "Did you take your date to the morgue?"

"I'm at the office. I've got a Sunday 'Lifestyle' piece that needed sudden attention. Our heroine, fighting an inoperable lung tumor but living life to its fullest by counseling psychotic bums—I mean mentally disordered homeless persons—just went into sudden cardiac arrest. Doesn't look good."

"So your article will either get a little longer or a lot shorter."

She wondered at how easily Gary Brice's glib pessimism rubbed off on her. And his curt delivery.

"Yes," said Brice. "These 'Lifestyle' articles are tough sledding. I loathe the upbeat do-goodism of this paper. But I love the police beat, Give me a petty scammer or a psychopath instead of someone trying to make society better. Any day."

"You comfort the afflicted, but finance the articles with ads for liposuction and plastic surgery."

"Precisely. You should have been a cynical reporter instead of cynical cop."

"I can't write," she said.

"Come have a drink with me. We'll meet somewhere you'll feel safe."

"I always feel safe around you."

"Then it's settled. We'll drink single malts at the speed of light, then, when you can't resist me anymore you can take me into your car and have your way with me. That big Impala would be perfect. Or you can take me to a nice hotel."

"Do you actually have sex as much as you talk about it?"

"Almost. There's no refractory period between sentences."

"You deserve someone racier for your Saturday-night calls."

"This isn't about sex, Merci. It's about degradation and suffering."

She smiled. "Whose?"

"Merci, let's experience those beautiful things
together."

"You ever try the phone sex numbers?"

"You're cheaper."

She smiled again. "What's new in the news?"

"I can tell you what isn't."

She stiffened a little, felt it coming.

"An arrest in the Wildcraft killing," she said.

"Correct. My editor asked about it. The
publisher
even asked about it. Believe me, by the time my bosses think of something, a lot of other people have too."

"And what are they thinking?"

"They see a guy making fifty grand a year as a deputy, his wife not working at all, and they live in a million-five cottage in Hunter Ranch. He's got a temper and an earnings cap. He's got a new Porsche. She looks like a movie star and wants more pretty things. He can't pay the bills or take the pressure, and he's sure enough not going to let her divorce him. Wham—he ends it for both of them. Or tries to. But he flinches at the last second and wounds himself. Three days later, no word of a suspect. No talk of a motive, not even the aforementioned obvious. Awfully damned quiet in the Sheriff's Public Information Office. So people do what people do—they start to wonder, are the cops trying to protect one of their own?"

"I can't talk to you on the record. Not before an arrest, you know that."

"So he
is
a suspect."

"We're questioning everyone who knew her."

Brice was quiet for a moment.

"You really think there's a chance he didn't do it—off the record?"

"At this point, the evidence is pointing away from him," she

"You must have fingerprinted the weapon by now."

"Inconclusive."

"It wouldn't happen to have a registered owner, would it?"

"Stolen from a gun shop in Arizona," she lied again. "And this all absolutely off the record, Gary."

"Sure. I've never burned you, Merci."

"I understand that."

"So if there's evidence pointing away from him, what evidence is it?"

"I can't tell you that, Gary. You know I can't go into the particulars."

"Even off the record?"

"Even off the record."

"But you've got them?"

"Don't call me a liar, Gary."

"I'm not. But you can make mistakes. You can see things that you want to see things. I mean, we all—"

She had felt the need for a little levity on this, a hot summer night. She did not feel the need to be reminded of things that she'd wrong about and had paid for with flesh, blood and spirit. Was paying for.

She hung up on him and didn't pick up when he called right back. When he called yet again, she picked up on the first ring and Brice started in again.

"Okay, I have a big mouth and a small brain. I'm sorry. You're the best investigator they've got and you know it. I love you always will."

"Good night, Gary."

"Cuddles."

She clicked off, shaking her head.

Tim jumped up on the seat of Clark's recliner, bow in hand, defiant gleam in his eyes. "Wicked Prince John is good!"

"He's wicked. And guess what, beautiful little man? It's bedtime."

"Is not bedtime?"

After reading him three stories and carrying on a long conversation about who is real and who is a character, Merci fell asleep on the floor beside her son's bed. At midnight she awakened to find a pillow under her head and a light sheet over her. She gathered them up and took them to her room.

She lay down on her own bed, the door open to the hall and the distant light of the kitchen. She thought about Hess and wondered what they would be doing now if he'd lived. Who knew? She thought of him asleep in his chair in his Thirteenth Street apartment, the moonlight hitting his face and how she'd wanted so badly to touch the little white wave that grew in the thick gray of his hair. She thought of that hair later falling out in big handfuls and how she'd tried to put it back, tried to keep him from knowing. She thought of what she'd done next: made love to him, having convinced herself that it was a way of breathing life back into him but knowing it was mostly for herself, because she wanted every bit of him, from the twinkle in his eye to the cancer in his cells. She thought of him in his box in the ground now, an image she couldn't shake from her mind no matter how many times she banished it. Out.
Out.
She thought too of Paul Zamorra, lost in his Kirsten tonight, no doubt. And of Archie Wildcraft listening to the beeps of the monitors and the thumping of his heart. Of a fisherman's hand on her face. And of Tim, too, as always. Tim, connected to all of them but with little idea how, the youngest player in this minor history, a pure light in a world of shadows