When the lieutenant was gone, Ben stared at the flashing cursor. Something about this was all wrong, suicide or murder. This one was going to be shit; he could feel it. Finally he pressed the erase key and marked the box that read Unknown.
Now the surfers were out, boys with arrow-like Plexiglas boards. They straddled the boards between their legs while they waited for the swells and talked about getting laid or getting loaded or about new punk bands who threw keggers in garages in Huntington Beach. These losers were taking over the whole South Coast. They swooped down on you, ran you over, cursed you for getting in the way of their “shredding.” Surfing was a lesser sport, as far as Ben was concerned, like riding waves with a life raft. Another set came in, and even though the second wave was bigger than the first, Ben caught the smaller and rode it to shore, the world coming back to him as his feet touched sand.
A Juan Nadie, a pistol, and handwriting on a small slip of paper.
4
EMMA WASN’T LOOKING FOR HIM this afternoon. Usually she stood on the steps and waited for his cruiser, but he was early. Her back was to him, her hand resting on the chest of a boy he’d never seen before. The boy’s arm was looped around his daughter’s waist, his hand sunk into the back pocket of her jeans. She was fourteen, barely six weeks into ninth grade, the last year of junior high. He remembered dinner and a candle in a pink cupcake just last spring. He sat in the cruiser, the engine idling, the radio scratching out 10-codes—non-injury traffic accident, missing elderly, check for record—and watched, trying to tell from her body language how far this had already gone. She kept her hand on the boy’s chest and she didn’t turn around to look for him, not a glance, even when he got out and slammed the door, climbed the cement steps, let the lapel of his coat hook on the butt of his .40 caliber, and stuck his hand out for the boy to shake.
“Emma’s dad,” Ben said.
“God, Dad,” Emma said, her hand on her sternum now. “You scared me.”
“Emma’s friend,” the boy said, pushing the sun-bleached hair out of his eyes and shaking Ben’s hand. No muscle in it. Not trying to impress. Trouble.
“Lance,” Emma said, her face flushed. “Dad, this is Lance.”
He was older, maybe sixteen or seventeen. The high school was adjacent to the junior high school, a mistake in master planning if you asked him.
“You surf?” Ben said. “Newport? Thirty-second Street?”
“Yeah,” the boy said. The kid’s pupils were dilated, black saucers yawned open to the emptiness of his cranium. Stoner. He didn’t recognize the kid, but he knew the type.
“Break’s better down at the Wedge.”
“Dad likes to bodysurf,” Emma explained.
“You work the parking meters?” the kid said.
Ben smiled. “Robbery, assault, homicide.” Punk kid. “Drugs.”
“Radical, man,” the kid said, squinting into the sun.
Then another kid, dragging a skateboard behind him, slapped Lance’s hand. Emma blew the punk a kiss goodbye, and finally she was sitting in the passenger seat next to him.
“Geez, Detective,” she said. “What’s with the interrogation?”
She was wearing a hoodie, not one of hers. It held the faint sweetness of marijuana. He didn’t like that one bit. That was ownership, the boy marking territory.
“I haven’t heard about this kid.”
“Mom knows.”
Of course she does. What else was Rachel keeping from him? Em must have understood his silence, because she shape-shifted back into herself, the girl who used to allow him to tuck her into bed at night.
“Shoot anyone today?” she joked.
He watched Lance on the steps: his hair falling in his face, his corduroy pants and Vans two-toned shoes, his surfer cool and the goofy hand gestures he and his friends signed at one another, the secret language of all teenage groups, guns or surfboards.
“Not yet,” he said.
—
“I’M NOT CRAZY about the looks of this kid,” Ben said to Emma.
They were up on Moro Ridge, the horses dipping their noses in an old cattle trough, a cut-open oil drum filled with rainwater from last week’s storms. Rachel had a faculty meeting today, so Ben got an extra ride in with Emma. The two of them sat in the shadow of a scarred black oak, its limbs twisted east from the coastal breeze. Below them, Crystal Cove cut a crescent out of the hillside, and beyond that the Pacific curved blue all the way to Asia.
“You don’t even know him,” she said.
“I’ve been around enough kids to know the good from the bad.”
“Well, who would you like, Dad?”
She had a point. He couldn’t think of any type of hormone-addled teenager he’d like zeroing in on his daughter. A serious problem considering she was a year and a half into puberty and seemed to enjoy making herself a target. Button that blouse. No way you’re walking out that door in those shorts.
“How long’ve you been seeing this boy?”
Now she leaned on her bare arms—thankfully she’d left the kid’s sweatshirt back at the house—her elbows hyperextended and fragile-looking. She wouldn’t look at him, just stared at the swells stacked and rolling in.
“Not long.”
“A week, month?”
“God, Dad, you make me feel like a criminal.”
“And you make me feel like a cop.”
In third grade, Emma had been identified as “gifted,” a genetic blessing Ben was certain had been passed down from Rachel. He was proud of Emma’s intelligence and the accelerated classes she took, but he wasn’t crazy about what the school psychologist called a “propensity for precociousness in the gifted student.” Precociousness, as far as Ben was concerned, was simply a “propensity” to let curiosity get you into hot messes. When she was five, inspired by a painting she’d seen on a school trip to the L.A. County Museum of Art, Emma painted the wall opposite her twin bed full of acrylic sunflowers. After they’d moved here, she got it into her head to perform an “experiment” with matches and gunpowder extracted—unbeknownst to him or Rachel—from old shotgun shells she’d found in the barn. “Curiosity killed the gifted student,” Ben had said after they put out the small brush fire with the garden hose. Her precociousness now had mellowed into a general artistic pretentiousness concerning “post-punk” and “New Wave” British bands, a mostly benign affront to Ben’s ears. But “boys” and “precociousness” were two words he didn’t want used in the same sentence.
“It’s only been a few weeks,” she said.
“As in three?”
“Five or six.”
Jesus.
“He’s nice.”
“Guys aren’t nice until they’re thirty.”
She leveled the lay-off look—her chin lowered and her eyes, rimmed in black eyeliner her mother had started letting her wear, two stabbing darts.
“He buys me lunch, made a mixtape for me…” She counted them off with her fingers. “He’s got good taste—the Clash, Social Distortion, Minutemen. Good taste matters.”
Mixtapes? Buying lunch? A high school boy’s tickets to admission. Next he’ll be telling her some sob story about how he’s ignored by his father.