“You’re too short, too old, and too slow.”
Jim looked at Raymond now, but what he saw was Raymond at the age of sixteen, on the basketball court at Newport Harbor High. He wasn’t tall then, and he still hadn’t lost all of his baby fat. Raymond wasn’t fast. But his results were astonishing, especially on defense. An opposing guard would bring the ball down court, angle left or right to set up a play, make his first pass, and... there would be Raymond, easing across the court in seeming slow motion, gathering the pass midair into an outstretched hand and turning toward his own basket. If there was a loose ball, Raymond would come up with it. He couldn’t jump, but he knew when to jump. His passing was so cunning and anticipatory that he’d bounce beautiful leads off the heads of teammates too slow to realize an assist was coming their way. Raymond seemed to play the game in some time zone of the near future, while everyone else scrambled helplessly in the contested present.
Ray sunk another jump shot. “Maybe I’ll play the Italian league. They love Americans over there.”
“That doesn’t make you any taller, younger, or faster, Ray. I think you’re better off as a cop.”
Jim took an imaginary pass; bounced it back. He watched Raymond out ahead of him a step and thought again how Ray’s anticipation spilled over into his work as a cop. Jim remembered the dozens of times he and Ray worked Sheriff patrol together, when Ray would just seem to know. They might answer two different alarm calls in the same hour. On one, Ray would sigh, get out of the unit, saunter up to a door, let himself in, and turn off the nerve-jangling security system. On the next, he would study the building from behind the windshield of their car, get this bright, eager look in his eyes, suggest that Jim take one entrance, then slip around to the other. Sooner or later — usually sooner — Ray would come marching out with some hapless junkie handcuffed to himself, or some terrified kid just then finding out that crime doesn’t pay. Ray would smile like a fisherman with a great catch.
Anticipation, thought Weir. Ray always had called it just luck.
“Or maybe Mexico,” said Raymond. “Forget basketball. Go to a village, become a fisherman, marry a Mexican girl who’ll have ten of my babies.” Ray stopped, touched his toes, straightened, and took a deep breath. “It’s weird, Jim — you spend your life on the treadmill and when it shuts down and you can do anything you want, all you can come up with are dumb clichés. I really want to live in a Mexican village, don’t I? With the pigs and chickens running loose and everybody sitting around a TV in the cantina watching soccer and ‘Starsky & Hutch’ in Spanish.”
“I can think of worse things.”
“You know why that scene appeals to you? Because you’re basically lazy. Who else would quit the Sheriffs on his way up to section head, so he could boat around the Pacific and look for other people’s treasure?”
“If I listened to you and Becky, I’d be sitting in some county cubicle nine to five, trying to catch bad guys I don’t care about. I’d still be drinking a sixer a night to put an edge on the boredom. No thanks.”
“True. You’d be an actual adult.”
“It felt pretty adult — my ass in jail.”
“Maybe I’m dumb, but I’d rather be putting dopes in jail than sitting in one myself.”
“I’ll opt for neither. How’s that?”
Raymond smiled. “Good for you, James. I give you shit but you know I’m pulling for you. Just remember that sometimes you have to stay and fight it out.”
“Noted.”
“Becky missed you a lot, I think.”
“I missed her, too. It surprised me.”
Raymond looked at Jim, a little knowingly. Ray had always billed himself as a step ahead in matters of the heart. It was also a backhanded compliment to Jim, with Ray being married to his sister. And Jim had always envied them a little. He had found himself, long ago, aspiring to the simplicity of Ray and Ann, but there was something in the marriage contract that on the most basic of levels scared the hell out of him. His deepest instincts told him that nothing between two people is ever really simple at all, especially if one of them is a Weir. Fact of the matter, he thought, is that people change. Is that good or bad?
A mullet splashed somewhere beside them, invisible but disclosed by its graceless plop.
Raymond waited a few steps ahead now, frozen, looking over the seawall to the narrow strip of sand below. Jim caught up and followed his gaze. A pure white heron stood not ten feet away, its tapered head housing an intense brown eye that beheld them without moving. A breeze touched its feathers. It stepped toward the bay with one stilt leg, its neck essing out, then freezing. The perfect eye locked onto them again.
“I didn’t do it,” said Raymond.
“What, Ray?”
“Didn’t think about Ann for ten minutes.”
Weir knew how much his sister had loved the herons. She had caught up with one as a girl, suffering a punctured shoulder for her trouble, later making a necklace from the feather she’d retained in her pudgy girl’s hand.
“Annie,” said Ray.
“I know.”
“Everywhere I look, man. She’s everywhere I go.”
Chapter 11
A late-evening breeze picked up, pushing flat-bottomed clouds west along the horizon while a pale white sun dropped into the Pacific. A palm tree rattled silver as Jim parked under it, across from Dale Blodgett’s house in north Newport. He was on the upper peninsula, Sixtieth Street, not far from where the mouth of the Santa Ana River forms the northern limit of the city. He’d passed three NBPD units on the short way here, wondering how the crooks had a chance in this town. Whoever took Ann had made it look easy.
Jim cut his lights and compared the mug shot of Blodgett with the face of the man who now bent in his driveway, lowering a trailored thirty-foot Chris-Craft into place behind a new Ford pickup. It was Blodgett, his face lit theatrically by the utility light that hung from the fore gunwale of the boat. The Chris-Craft, Duty Free, was set up as a sportfisher, Jim saw — a live-bait tank, two fighting chairs, a harpoon plank extending from the bow. Sixty thousand dollars’ worth of toys, he thought. Not bad for a police sergeant with a family who likes to work alone.
Jim got out, walked across the street, and started up the driveway. He’d gone only two steps when the air filled with a huffing sound undercut by a metallic whine, and a shining black shape shot toward him from his right. Weir hunched down and brought up his hands as the whine spun higher and the shape hurtled faster.
Blodgett’s voice was so loud, Weir could feel it hit his chest. “KNIGHT... DOWN.”
The dark rocket dropped as if shot. It lay growling up at Weir, a hypnotic collage of fangs, lips, furious eyes, flattened ears.
Jim’s heart was in his throat. Only now did he sense the weakness in his legs, feel the cool surge of panic breaking into his face.
Dale Blodgett looked at him from under the utility light. He was a tall, heavy man with a strong neck and a flattop haircut grown long at the sides in the manner of fifties tough guys. His face was a veteran: A thin scar ran perpendicular to his lower lip; a fighter’s mass of tissue clung to each brow. The left eyelid was heavier than the right, giving him an expression somewhere between sleepiness and sly humor. He had a barrel chest and a wide belly that didn’t look soft. “Do you have some business here, son?”
“I’m Jim Weir. Ann Cruz’s brother.”
“Knight,” he said warmly. “Friend.”
The change was instant: Knight’s muscles loosened, his tail thumped the cement, the snarling mouth closed, and Knight looked at Weir, then to his master, ashamed.