“I’m glad you made it home.”
“Came this close to tripping an IED.” Hicks shows him her thumb and finger, almost touching. “Hid in a pile of trash along the road.”
Gale sees Private Guy Flatly, blown up on a morning patrol not twenty feet ahead of him. The whop, the chunks of flesh and bone blown into the air, the mist of the blood on Gale’s sunglasses, the sudden fire in his own legs and groin. A flash. A moment that became eternal, that reshaped him, that warped his body and his mind and his marriage, and drew him to the bourbon and the painkillers and the antidepressants. Now, with the years, this eternal moment overwhelms him less frequently and with less clarity, and the pills are gone, and the bourbon is almost controlled, but a comment like Hicks’s can be enough to bring the moment back to him.
He feels the pain again. Flatley’s and his own. Then they are gone.
He looks over at the jackhammer men. “Why dig there?”
“Perc test. We’re trying to see if septic is right for Wildcoast, or if we’ll have to go full sewer. Big cost difference.”
“Can I have a look?”
“Suit yourself, sir. Don’t fall in. McNab’s in charge and you’ll have to leave if he says.”
Gale walks toward the clattering electric jackhammers, trading nods with McNab, remembering that Velasquez mentioned him that night at the Grove. As he nears the pit he sees the shovel stuck upright in the ground, the sharp white bedrock fragments and freshly loosened soil thrown from the hole.
He stands over the first test pit, sees the Day-Glo-green-vested man in his yellow hard hat, his shoulders and arms throbbing as the rocks crack and the dirt flies. The pit is almost six feet deep. As if sensing Gale, the digger glances up at him, then turns back to his work and presses on.
The second pit is deeper. Gale stands back in the rubble of broken bedrock and loose soil. A red-handled shovel stands upright, its shadow on the ground reminding him of his three o’clock appointment with Supervisor Kevin Elder.
Then the clatter of the jackhammer stops, and the man looks up at Gale.
“Shovel.”
Gale hands it down. “Hard work. What are you looking for?”
“Gold.”
Gale smiles, remembering the legend of Spanish gold buried near the mission where he was baptized. His great-grandmother and — father were fountains of legend: Dana Point waves so big they blotted out the sun; a monstrous winged rattlesnake that could fly down from the clouds and carry you away; the white grizzly bear and her den of white cubs; the ancient lake that gave birth to the Acjacheme people and still lies just below the earth, where the souls of the Acjacheme rest.
The man, short and stocky, hurls a shovelful of broken rock and dirt over his shoulder.
Gale ducks it and moves to a safer place near the pit.
“Looks too hard to percolate,” he says.
“No perc here.”
The red shovel flashes and another load of rock and dirt clears the hole.
“So you’ll have to go with a sewer system, right?”
The man stops, drives his shovel into the hard earth, and looks up at Gale.
“Sewer. Sí.”
He picks up a shard of bedrock the size of a cantaloupe in his gloved hands and shot-puts it out.
Then another. The next one looks about the size of a truck battery and just as heavy. But the digger gets it up and out on his first try. Three more and his dirt-covered face is running with dark sweat.
He unties a red bandana from around his neck and wipes his brow. Hands the shovel up to Gale.
“Look for crystals.”
“For what?”
“Big crystals. Mucho dinero.”
Gale remembers a dramatic crystal-and-lapis pendant favored by Marilyn. “For jewelry and chandeliers?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is your company a good place to work?”
The worker shrugs, then stoops, choses another big piece of bedrock and heaves it out of his hole.
“Mucho trabajo, pero no mucho dinero.”
“I’m a policeman investigating the murder of Bennet Tarlow.”
Another shrug, then a grunt, and another boulder launched from the pit.
“I don’t know.”
He slaps his gloved hands together and takes up the jackhammer.
“Vaya con Dios,” says Gale.
Checks his watch and hustles back to his plain-wrap.
20
At the wheel of her black Explorer, Daniela follows her son using the TeenShield app on her phone, which is propped up in a console cupholder beside a caffeine-and-sugar-loaded energy drink.
She has recently — and secretly — downloaded the TeenShield software onto Jesse’s smartphone, allowing her to see his emails coming and going, read his texts, watch his social media interactions, and locate him in real time through GPS. It even has a geo-fencing feature that notifies her when Jesse enters a “Forbidden Zone” — an area where Daniela doesn’t want him be.
She’s still getting used to the bizarre power of this kid-protection app, of which Jesse is of course oblivious. And she’s trying to get used to the idea that although she’s protecting him, she’s betraying him, too. She’s terrified that he’ll find out. If he did, it would drive him away, into the very things she’s trying to protect him from.
She’s four cars and a hundred yards behind him.
He’s supposed to be in class right now, thinks Daniela.
Instead, he’s in tart Lulu Vega’s cobalt blue Subaru, eastbound on First Street, headed toward Barrio Dogtown.
Just half an hour ago, Daniela was sitting with Gale in the Moulin Café, having concluded her interview with the annoyingly cool and not-very-credible Norris Kennedy. Talk about a tart, thinks Daniela. A Tarlow tart.
As a strict Catholic, Daniela has a strong dislike of morally loose, privileged women. And respect and affection for the young victims she encountered in Vice, many of them innocent girls.
Virgins once, as she was, and of course was the Holy Mother.
Norris Kennedy, she thinks, to whom Lew Gale showed curiosity and respect and checked out with unsubtle interest.
She looks at Lulu’s Subaru, remembering the look on Gale’s face as Norris Kennedy walked down Forest toward Coast Highway in Laguna. While, according to TeenShield, Jesse was in Enrique’s Liquor, the liquor store closest to her home, with a reputation for selling beer to minors with fake IDs. Definitely a Forbidden Zone.
Now Daniela follows the car south onto Edgar Place, then east on Colton, then right on Victor.
There’s four cars between them now and she can see from her elevated SUV view that Jesse’s driving.
The neighborhood is 1940s, stucco walls and wood-shake-roof one-stories. Twenty years newer than her bungalow a few miles west in Tustin. But the same leaf-strewn magnolias and avocado trees centered in sun-starved front lawns, same grape-stake fences surrounding backyards. Cars on the street and driveways and even lawns. A gleaming cherry red Chevelle lowrider under a blue tarp.
Graffiti on cinder-block walls and curbs, even on the metal phone-company switch boxes.
Varrio DT
Barrio Dogtown, alright.
Jesse pulls right into a driveway, and Daniela glides to a lucky spot three doors short.
She watches them park and get out, cuts her engine.
Jesse’s got his standard black skinny jeans and a black Death Games T-shirt on and his clunky black Doc Martens. A case of Modelo dangles from a skinny arm; from the other his camo gaming duffel, most likely containing his two-part keypad, VR headsets, and a dozen games, all first-person shooter/fighter featuring spectacularly gory gun deaths, sword decapitations, machete dismemberments, grenade mayhem, etc.