Whatever reaction Marty was expecting, it’s not the one he’s getting. His stance softens, and he cocks his head as if he can’t believe Luke isn’t going to take a swing at him. And maybe Luke should. Maybe it’s weakness not to.
But just the mention of Luanne’s granddaughter, Trina Pierce—Burning Girl, he thinks, the words freezing his gut briefly—and the memory of the baffled, wounded expression on her face that day in class when he’d decided to go after her, has hollowed him out suddenly.
“Just don’t call me kid,” Luke manages. “Call me whatever else you want, Marty. Just don’t call me kid—that’s all.”
Before he says something even more pathetic, Luke gets in his cruiser and spins out onto PCH.
His gun and badge suddenly feel as insubstantial as the napkin Marty used to clean his hands, his decision to return home the worst mistake he’s ever made in his life.
When he reaches the spot on 293 where cell service comes back, he calls his new boss, Sheriff Mona Sanchez.
Any embarrassing incident requiring him to reference locals by their full names should be kept off the radio. She gave him this order first day on the job. Word on the street is Dan Soto, the guy who runs the Gold Mine Tavern, got a scanner from his daughter for Christmas. And because police activity is so rare in Altamira, he just leaves it on in the background whenever he has friends over to play cards.
“I don’t know what he thinks is gonna happen,” Mona had added. “Maybe he’s waiting for some of the McGregors’ horses to get loose again. I guess that’d be fun to listen to.”
Altamira’s recently elected sheriff is an old friend of Luke’s mother. The two women met at Fort Doyle down valley, where his mom was working as a secretary and Mona was an enlisted woman a few short months away from leaving the military for a career in law enforcement.
In the past few days, he’s learned more about his mom’s old friend than he had in all those years of her dropping by for dinner or helping take care of his mom after she got sick.
For starters, she’s not a lesbian, as he’d always assumed. In fact, she’s had the same boyfriend for ten years. Like her, the guy’s half Chumash, and he’s spent the last few years working on the legal team defending their tribe’s casino in Santa Ynez from a never-ending series of legal challenges brought by its neighbors.
“Yep,” she answers the phone.
“It’s done,” Luke says.
“You realize I told you to warn him, not kill him, right?”
“Just trying to take my job seriously is all.”
“Maybe a little too serious.”
“Is it my tone?” he asks.
“That and the wording, yeah.”
“Sorry.”
“No need. So did he cop to it?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Give you any grief?” she asks.
“In a manner of speaking.”
Mona falls silent. Over the past few days, he’s learned that when Mona falls silent, it’s his job to fill the silence.
He’s descending toward town now—a small grid of sloping rooftops in the midst of a Mediterranean-looking valley, protected from cold Pacific winds by the mountains he’s just passed through.
To the east the hills are low, rolling, and golden, and on either side of the road the scrubby coastal woods give way to more golden grasslands dotted by stately lone oaks. It’s the kind of landscape they like to use in car commercials, and if his hometown was a smidge closer to either Los Angeles or San Francisco, it’d probably be overrun with tourists. But most of the road trippers coming up from the south don’t feel the need to go much farther than San Simeon and Lake Nacimiento.
The Lodge, perched at the tip of Altamira’s lone finger to the sea, was supposed to change all that, of course. The investors were even in talks to widen 293 in hopes of bringing more folks to town. But it wasn’t to be, and now most people in Altamira feel the place is hemorrhaging promise, thanks to the wounds inflicted by shady investors and an ever-shrinking army fort to the south.
“Luke?” Mona asks.
“You could say he got a little personal.”
“How so?”
“Brought up something from my past. That’s all.”
“I see . . . but things didn’t escalate?” Mona asks.
“Not really, no.”
“Define ‘not really,’ Luke. This is Altamira.”
“He claimed the moral high ground. Said he was installing the stuff he stole in women’s shelters and recovery homes. I said if I caught him, I’d arrest him and run all the guys in his crew.”
Mona takes a sip of something. “I see. Anything else?”
“I asked him not to call me kid.”
“Small town. There’s gonna be a lot of that.”
“A lot of what?” he asks.
“You had a mouth on you, Luke.”
“So I was a prick is what you’re saying.”
“Yeah. Pretty much.”
“And you hired me anyway?”
“Sometimes pricks do well in law enforcement.”
“Do we?”
“If you put yourself on the right side of things. Absolutely.”
“Well, OK then.”
“Was he right?”
“Excuse me?”
“Martin Cahill. Whatever he brought up, this thing out of your past, was he in the right?”
Burning Girl, he thinks again, remembering how he’d used the words as a kind of whispered slur.
“Yes,” he answers.
“Well, you got some clarity about it, at least.”
“You don’t even know what he brought up,” he says.
“Do I need to?”
“Did you even care that Marty and his crew are looting the Lodge?”
“Hell, no. Fuck those Silver Shore assholes. I got five businesses on Center Street closed this month because of the mess they left this town in. Bastards went all over the state, drawing new businesses here, the whole time they knew their funding was all spit and vinegar. They want to protect all the stuff they left out there like trash? Let ’em hire private security with the money they never had. Marty’s crew can strip that place to the studs for all I care. I just wanted us to look like we’re doing our job. And you needed something to do,” she tells him.
“Well, all right then.”
“Sounds like you’re far away.”
“I actually just pulled up to the station.”
“No, I mean in your head.”
“Oh, well. There’s that.”
The sheriff’s station is a small redbrick building on the corner of a block containing some of the empty frontage left by the ruined businesses Mona’s still angry about. On the opposite corner, a couple of army girls from the fort sit at the cast-iron tables out front of Katy’s Coffee, sunning their bare arms.
The sight of them stirs something in him, but it feels more like acid indigestion.
It’s been a while since he’s been with a woman. Nothing since that drunken bar hookup a few nights after the disaster that was his final FBI interview. He can’t even remember the girl’s name now. Only that she worked in tech, seemed a little less drunk than him, and appeared as disinterested in chitchat as he was. Wham, bam, don’t bother leaving your number, ma’am. That’s never been his style, so thinking of it now makes him feel creepy. Some of the guys he went to SF State with, they could do that kind of stuff every week. But he’s a bigger fan of actually getting to know a woman, and relieving himself with porn until the time’s right to hop into bed with her.
But even a date now seems like an insurmountable task. Like something only a younger, more vigorous version of himself would be capable of.
Which is nuts because he’s twenty-five.
“Hey. Look up.”
He follows the sheriff’s order, sees his boss waving at him from her office window. She’s a stout woman, but much of it’s solid, the kind of body former gymnasts get as they age, although in her case, she’s got the rigors of her military service to thank. Today, as always, she wears her jet-black hair in a tight bun against the back of her neck.
“Put the Jeep in park,” she says.
He thought he had.
“I’m just going to say this. Every day at four o’clock, Marty has a slice of pie at the Copper Pot before he heads over to the AA meeting at the clubhouse.”
“Why are you telling me this?”