“That’s stupid.”
“Right now,” the coach said. “At this table. Forgive yourself.”
It was confusing. If it wasn’t his fault, why did he have to forgive himself?
“Say it.”
“I forgive myself.”
“Say it again.”
“I. Forgive. Myself.”
Wakeland finally bit into his burrito, and Ben, getting his appetite back, joined him.
“I want you on the swim team next year,” Wakeland said.
“Yeah, all right.” He wanted to be on the swim team, but he wanted to sound cool about it.
Wakeland smiled. A boy, maybe Ben’s age, started hacking away at the meat on the counter with a chopping knife.
“Third,” Wakeland said, “when we’re done here, I’m calling your mom and stepdad and taking you home.”
“I’m not going.”
“You’ll go back, because there’s nowhere else to go,” Wakeland said.
The stark goddamned truth.
“Your stepfather might be a jerk,” Wakeland said, “but see it through his eyes. Every time he looks at you, he sees the face of the man who loved his wife before him. That’s not easy for a man. Besides, he’s paying for that roof over your head, for the food you eat, for the clothes you wear, and it sounds to me like you’re being a pain in the ass in return. Some people might call that ungrateful.”
A man in the back called in Spanish to the boy behind the counter, waving a finger at him. The boy stopped chopping the meat and the man came over, taking the boy’s hand in his so they sliced the meat together. Ben felt a lump in his throat watching it.
“They don’t give a shit about me,” Ben said.
“Part of being an adult,” Wakeland said, “is dealing with things that make you uncomfortable. The only way you’ll make anything of yourself is by learning to do that.”
Wakeland took two more bites of his burrito and then said something in Spanish to the man behind the counter.
“Sí,” the man said, and pointed to the phone on the wall.
“What’s the number?” Wakeland said.
Ben glared at him but then rattled it off and watched Wakeland talk to his mother on the phone, reassuring her that everything was fine, that Ben was safe.
“She was in tears,” Wakeland said. “I don’t think you have any idea how your mother feels.”
When they got back into town, Wakeland swung a left at Junipero. Ben told him he was going the wrong way.
“I want to show you something.”
Two minutes later, they were idling in front of a condominium.
“This is my place,” Wakeland said. “The next time you need to get out, you come here and cool off. You got it?”
The condo was painted off-white, the shrubs clipped into rectangles; a basketball hoop dangled over the driveway.
“Yeah,” Ben said. “I got it.”
And then Wakeland drove him across town, into the waiting arms of his mother. When Margaret took Ben inside, Wakeland and Voorhees stood outside in a pool of streetlight, talking. Ben had no clue what they said to each other, still didn’t all these years later, but when Voorhees came back in he didn’t lay into Ben, just looked at him and said, “Let’s get you to bed. You must be exhausted.” A minor miracle, and the beginning of a sort of truce between Ben and his stepfather.
Now waves of heat were rising from the hood of the truck, the sun rust orange in the smog. He watched his mother, on her knees in front of the grave. Man, he’d been a pain-in-the-ass kid—though knowing that didn’t warm him to his stepfather’s memory. Seven cholos, dressed in wifebeaters and inked with gang tats, jaywalked Katella Avenue, forcing cars to hit their brakes. Yeah, tough guys. He couldn’t sit here anymore; serial murderers didn’t take breaks on the weekends.
When he got to his mother, she was holding her right hand up to her ear. “What’s that sound?” she said.
“The freeway, Mom.”
“It’s so loud.”
Midmorning traffic, hordes daytripping to the beach. It’d take an hour to get her home.
—
AT 12:47 THAT afternoon, Ben got a call from Rutledge, the high school AP. They met at the Orange Blossom coffee shop in the strip mall adjacent to the school complex. Inside, Rutledge had his face buried in the paper, a plate of chorizo and eggs in front of him, untouched. A firm handshake and Ben sat down.
“I took the liberty,” Rutledge said, gesturing to a cup of coffee. “Figured you might have been out late last night.”
Ben drank the coffee black.
“You figured right.”
It would be his fifth cup of the day, plus the couple of NoDoz to get the morning rolling. He’d barely slept all week. It didn’t help that he had been chasing ghosts since dropping his mother off at home—strange cars parked in the street, suspicious-looking men walking the sidewalk, unusual noises from the next door neighbor’s, a Mexican orange picker napping in a greenbelt. Santa Elenans didn’t bat an eyelash about a dead strawberry picker, but when they thought something was coming for them, they banded together like a tribe fighting a common enemy. The television news cycled and recycled the images of the Santa Elena house; they plotted the path the suspect must have taken on a freeway map of the basin. People woke to the news, coffee mugs in hand, their windows still slid open, the rush of the freeway in the near distance. The killer had stalked past them while they slept, when they were most vulnerable. It was only luck that separated them from the woman strangled last night.
“Scary stuff,” Rutledge said. “My wife closed up the house this morning, shut all the windows, locked the doors. And we don’t have air-conditioning.”
Rutledge was in his early sixties. He wore a California Angels baseball cap that half-hid his rheumy eyes. Ben remembered his political science class from junior year, the man skewing all of modern American history to prove that liberals were the downfall of civilization. It was total crap, but the class had been full of political fire and brimstone and it kept Ben awake, which was really all you could ask out of high school.
“Open an upstairs window,” Ben said. “The serial’s not climbing. Not yet anyway.”
“Makes things feel fragile, you know?”
“That’s not what’s on your mind, though, is it?”
Rutledge hesitated before folding the paper over. There was Lucero, smiling in front of a crushed-blue studio backdrop. Ben hadn’t seen the paper yet this morning. It looked like a yearbook photo. RANCHO SANTA ELENA STUDENT FOUND SHOT IN STRAWBERRY FIELD. The story was on page two, near the bottom of the page—the front page dominated by the bold headline about the Night Prowler—and nobody would pay attention to a dead Mexican kid.
“Did Lucero kill himself?” Rutledge asked.
“Could be,” Ben said.
“Any chance this serial did it?” Rutledge said.
“The ME hasn’t made a final determination.”