The hallway was the toughest, his heart thumping his ribs, a vertigo at the edge of his vision. In his mind the room had become a sort of pale cell, hot and airless. He stood in the doorway and forced himself to look at it—the double bed, the quilt embroidered with sailboats, the throw pillows propped against the oak headboard. The sea-green walls. Was this room the same? He had no idea, had no recollection at all of the comforter, the sheets, the color of the wall, only of what happened here. Suddenly he smelled the man—his Drakkar Noir cologne, the chlorine in his pores, the tinge of vodka, and he spun around to find the hallway empty. Wakeland was with him in the room now, though, Ben could feel him, a tingling disgust on his skin. He remembered being pressed into the bed, his face crushed into the detergent-scented sheets. And then there it was, the painting; he found it on the wall. It was smaller than he remembered, the print faded and yellowed, the lone tree clinging to the rock against the crashing ocean, and he put himself there in the water, beneath the roiling surf, down into the deep cold of ebbing tides.
Ben understood the impulse to obliterate yourself, to destroy the body. He’d almost jumped from the Vincent Thomas Bridge when he was seventeen. He wanted out, out of Wakeland, out of his body, out of everything. It was his senior year, a couple of months after sleeping with Rachel, and he and Wakeland drove up to L.A. to meet with the coaches at UCLA, USC, Pepperdine, to swim for them in their Olympic-sized pools, to have them weigh him, measure his arm span, gauge the strength of his muscles, the capacity of his lungs. The first night there, Ben had woken next to Wakeland in a hotel room sweltering with forced-air heat, the sweat on Wakeland’s skin pungent. Since Rachel, Ben had realized what his body wanted, realized that everything that happened with Wakeland fought against his desire. It was as if she had knocked everything into alignment—his head, his heart, his body—and the thought of the man’s skin curdled his stomach. He slipped out of bed, lifted Wakeland’s car keys, and snuck out of the room. He tore off in the Mustang, pulling onto the 405 Freeway, veering west onto the 110 toward the ocean and down into the harbor until suddenly there was the bridge, brightly lit and arcing green over the inlet. It wasn’t until he rode over the bridge the first time that he knew what he wanted: He wanted to go into the darkness below the bridge, into that cold oblivion. He U-turned it six times over the span, each time his body telling him to pull to the side and leap over the rail, but each time the thought of Rachel stopped him. He couldn’t do that to her, no way in the world. The next day he swam for the coaches at USC, shattering his personal record.
“You talked to someone.” The voice snapped Ben out of himself. Wakeland was there now, standing in the hallway. “I thought we had an agreement.”
“We never had any agreement,” Ben said.
“My silence for yours.”
“That was a threat,” Ben said. A sixteen-year-old threat that bought sixteen years of mutual silence. “Not an agreement.”
“Who’d you talk to?” Wakeland said sharply. “A woman came to the pool today.”
“What woman?”
“She didn’t tell me her name,” Wakeland said. “I’ve left you alone, never bothered you after you came home. I’ve lived up to my end of the deal.”
“There was no deal,” Ben said, his voice rising.
“Then who was this woman?”
Natasha, Ben knew. It was Natasha.
“I haven’t said anything,” Ben said.
“Good,” Wakeland said, relief in his voice. He leaned against the hallway wall, cutting Ben off from the rest of the apartment. “I didn’t think you would. Not you.”
“Get the hell out of the way,” Ben said.
Wakeland stared at Ben for a few moments, stretching out time, and then elbowed himself off the wall and walked the other way.
When Ben made it to the living room, Wakeland was sitting in the recliner, his legs crossed, his hands clasped over his knees as if he were tied in a knot. Ben stood next to the couch, the glass coffee table separating them. Age had taken hold of Wakeland’s face. Now that he was close, Ben could see it. The man’s eyes were rheumy, the skin rimming them puffy and bluish. In the soft-white light of the side-table lamp, Ben could make out the bones beneath his skin. There was a time when the thinness of Wakeland’s face made him look fit, handsome even, but now he looked underfed and ill.
“You want a drink?” Wakeland said. “We can catch up.”
“No.”
“I knew we’d sit down with each other again,” Wakeland said. “Knew it as soon as you came back to town.”
“Coming back to town had nothing to do with you.”
“You sure about that?”
No, he wasn’t sure about that. Maybe he had come back because of Wakeland, some sort of gravitational pull, a lot of unfinished business. Maybe he thought being here would keep Wakeland in check, as though Ben had been hired as a security guard instead of an investigative detective. Maybe—and this, Ben thought, was the most likely—he had come back because he had the two panicked notes, the one mistake Wakeland had made, the one thing Ben possessed that made the man vulnerable. Ben came back because he had the power, and he knew that every time Wakeland saw his cruiser parked outside in the high school lot, each time Ben made the newspapers for an arrest, each and every time he rolled past Wakeland’s house in his patrol car, Coach Lewis Wakeland trembled a little.
“I know what happened to Lucero.” Ben unfolded the slip of paper he’d taken from Lucero’s body and set it on the coffee table. Wakeland glanced at it but he didn’t move, just kept one leg over the other, one hand on his knee, the other on the arm of the chair.
“Maybe you misunderstand things,” Wakeland said. “Maybe you’re not seeing them clearly.”
“I know what happened to Tucker, too.”
“You have been talking,” Wakeland said. He stood up, went into the kitchen, and made himself a drink.
“He took a bottle of aspirin because of what you did to him,” Ben said.
“What I did to him?” Wakeland spun around in the kitchen, drink in hand. “His father beat him with a leather belt. He was failing out of school, was about to be sent to the alternative school, not to mention juvie for possession, before I met him.” He huffed disdain. “What I did to him!”
He took a sip of the drink and topped it off with more vodka from the bottle that was sitting on the kitchen counter. “You boys,” Wakeland went on, shaking his head. “You’re so selfish. Every one of you. I give you so much, so much of my time, my energy.” Another sip. “I didn’t hurt you. You never said no, you never told me to stop.”
That was the problem; that had always been the problem.
“Who is the she in that note?” Ben said, pointing at the paper on the table. “She’s Lucero’s mother, right?” Ben said.
“You seemed to enjoy the attention, if I remember correctly.”
“You were jealous,” Ben said. “Jealous that Lucero had a boyfriend. You threatened to tell his mother about him being gay.”
Silence.
“Or maybe you shot Lucero,” Ben said. “Maybe you were jealous enough to do that.”
Wakeland took a seat in the recliner again.
“Maybe Lucero called your bluff,” Ben said. “Maybe he was smart enough—brave enough—to do that. Maybe you figured he was illegal and no one would care.”
Wakeland stared at him, his eyes narrowed. “No, you know that’s not it, Benjamin. You—or someone,” Wakeland said, shaking his head, “would have arrested me already if you had that kind of evidence.”
“Evidence can be made to prove a lot of things,” Ben said. “A witness says you were the last to see Lucero alive. This witness says you two were having an argument. Says there was someone up at the camp at Loma Canyon just before Lucero was shot.”
There were beads of sweat now on Wakeland’s forehead. “That boy,” Wakeland finally said. “Neil, yes?”