Mission Canyon (6 page)

‘‘Things are fine. Things are sublime. Choirs of angels sing me to sleep at night.’’ She brought her glass up, stopped. ‘‘Wait. Are we talking about my sex life?’’

‘‘Yes.’’

‘‘It’s status quo. Shit flambé.’’ She drank her champagne. ‘‘I have as much of Cassie as she can give me, and that’s just the way it is. It’s . . . what does Jesse call it?’’

‘‘An FFL.’’ Fucking Fact of Life.

‘‘You got it, sister.’’

I didn’t know Cassie, Harley’s lover. I knew only what Harley told me: She played on the women’s tennis tour, and was fearful of coming out as a lesbian. From the light in Harley’s eyes when she spoke Cassie’s name, Harley was hooked.

She said, ‘‘Talking of FFLs, how’s your boy handling Brand showing up?’’

‘‘He’s focused. And he’s not a boy, Harley.’’

Her eyes quieted. ‘‘Sorry, you’re right. He’s twenty-seven, and older than most men are at fifty. My fault. I think of my biz-law students as kids, even years later.’’

Harley occasionally taught an undergraduate class at UCSB. Jesse had taken it, and, I gathered, so had Cassie— for extra credit.

She was pouring herself another glass of champagne when the door opened and Kenny Rudenski walked in. Scratch that. Kenny paused in the doorway, giving everyone in the bar time to admire him. He was wearing a motorcycle jacket, khakis, and heavy boots. The outfit was straight out of
The Great Escape
. He held a motorcycle helmet under one arm. He smiled and strolled to the table.

‘‘Harley.’’ He beamed at me. ‘‘Gidget.’’

He spun a chair around backward and sat down, straddling it. He set the helmet on the table as if it were a war trophy. Bring me the head of Steve McQueen.

He leaned my way. ‘‘I owe you an apology. The other night, I didn’t know you had a thing going with Jesse Blackburn. Sorry if I made things uncomfortable for you.’’

I looked at Harley. Had she set this up? She was staring at her champagne.

I said, ‘‘Thank you. But Jesse’s the one who deserves the apology.’’

‘‘Loyalty. I like that.’’ He pressed his thumb against a knot in the wood of the table and massaged it. ‘‘Anyway, I didn’t mean to get so hot.’’

‘‘All right.’’

His thumb worked the wood. He saw me looking at the helmet.

‘‘Old love. Raced motocross in my wild youth. You like motorcycles?’’ He nodded out the window. ‘‘Mine’s parked up the street. You want, I’ll take you for a ride. I’m perfectly safe, no bike crashes, I promise.’’

I stared him straight in the face, thinking, Did he just say that?

I said, ‘‘I’m taking a poll. Why do you think Franklin Brand has come back?’’

‘‘To clear his name? What do you say, one spin around the block? I bet it’s been a long time since you were on a bike.’’

‘‘You’re still hawking the line that Brand didn’t do it? Who do you blame, the Mossad?’’

Harley looked up. ‘‘Don’t answer that, Kenny.’’

‘‘Why shouldn’t I?’’

I said, ‘‘Yeah, why shouldn’t he?’’

‘‘Evan’s a legal journalist. That’s how she met your father, interviewing him for a magazine article.’’

He said, ‘‘She’s not interviewing me. We’re just jawing. ’’

She set down her glass. ‘‘All communications with the press are to go through my firm. I’m not kidding.’’

He grinned. ‘‘You like to strap on real clangers, don’t you, Harley?’’

Her cheeks pinkened. ‘‘Save it for the locker room, would you?’’

The grin spread. ‘‘Hey, it’s okay. Don’t get your jock-strap in a twist.’’

I stared at him with bewilderment. Were these jibes meant to tease Harley about her sexuality, or about lawyers? Were they meant to impress me? Or were they a mental tic, equivalent to Kenny grabbing his genitals to make sure they were still there?

He got up from the table, saying to Harley, ‘‘If she’s a writer, it means Blackburn has unlimited bandwidth to tell his side of the story. Maybe it’d be good to let me even things up.’’ He winked at me. ‘‘Last chance for that ride.’’

‘‘No, thanks.’’

‘‘Your loss. Catch ya later, Gidget.’’

He took the helmet and headed back through the bar toward the restaurant.

My mood had dried and curled up at the edges. ‘‘Harley, what was that all about? Did you set it up for him to stop by?’’

Her hand went through her hair. ‘‘I thought it would be a good chance to cool down the rhetoric, let Kenny get back on the right footing.’’

‘‘Rhetoric? That was innuendo, and it was rough.’’

‘‘It’s okay. If you haven’t noticed, nothing in life ever goes right for more than ten seconds at a shot. It’s why lawyers earn such a handsome living.’’ She held out her glass. ‘‘Pour me some more champagne.’’

When I left the Paradise, I drove to Jesse’s house. The sandstone on the mountains glowed gold under the sun, and thunderheads burled into the sky. The inland valleys were getting lightning.

Jesse lived on the beach, down a drive that curved between Monterey pines. The house was pale wood and glass, with a cathedral ceiling and a wall of windows facing the surf. When I drove up, Adam Sandoval’s Toyota pickup sat in the driveway. I found Jesse and Adam sitting outside on the edge of the deck, wearing surfer swim trunks, warming their feet in the sand. Breakers frothed up the beach.

From the back, from a distance, Adam and Jesse looked similar. Swimmers’ shoulders, rangy limbs, California skin tones. Only closer could I notice the differences— Jesse’s scars, and the stillness in his legs. The injury had taken almost all the movement and sensation on his right side, and about half on the left. He could walk, barely, with braces and crutches. He got to the water by scooting backward on his butt.

I crouched down behind him, slipping my arms around his neck. His skin was hot from the sun. He tilted his head back and I kissed him.

He said, ‘‘Adam’s been showing me his new dive gear.’’

He nodded toward a mask, fins, and a spear gun. Adam was accomplished at spearfishing, did it free diving. He cooked the catch pretty well too.

Jesse smiled. ‘‘The diving off Kauai is spectacular. There’s still time for you to get your scuba certification before we go.’’

I kissed him again. ‘‘Good try.’’

‘‘Honestly, you’d love it.’’

‘‘No, you love it. Bottom line, I’m not spending my honeymoon in flippers.’’

‘‘But flippers are my favorite turn-on.’’

Adam stood up. ‘‘You kids.’’

Jesse said, ‘‘Adam agrees that my porn outbreak at the office was probably caused by a computer worm.’’

‘‘Charming experience, isn’t it?’’ Adam said.

I said, ‘‘Explain to me exactly what a worm is.’’

‘‘It’s malicious computer code, similar to a virus. It replicates itself and spreads without your control. It might delete files, or send documents on your hard drive to random addresses it generates.’’

‘‘So Jesse’s computer may simply have had an unlucky address?’’

He found his crucifix and slipped it around his neck. ‘‘Could be.’’

‘‘Then let’s hope that’s the end of it.’’

‘‘Yeah,’’ Jesse said. ‘‘Except our IT guy couldn’t find any evidence of a worm on my machine.’’

The breakers crashed and ran toward us, hissing over the sand.

Adam picked up an envelope of snapshots. ‘‘Look what I found. Photos Isaac took. I hadn’t seen them before.’’

I leafed through them—casual shots of Isaac at the beach, and with girls in bikinis, and at the computer start-up where he worked. They looked prosaic, full of sunny normality. Right before the light snapped off.

‘‘They’re great,’’ I said, handing them back.

With care, he returned them to the envelope. ‘‘I finally started going through his things. Boxes his colleagues packed up from work. Until now, I just couldn’t. . . .’’

Pain pinched his face.

Jesse pulled the wheelchair close. Hands on the edges of the seat, he hoisted himself up.

‘‘Tell her the rest,’’ he said.

Adam rubbed his fingers across his forehead. ‘‘I found something perplexing. Notes Isaac made about a problem at work.’’

Isaac had worked at Firedog, Inc., an Internet firewall company. He was a programmer, an athlete-geek like Adam, and when he died, Firedog lost its scrappy spirit. Eventually, the market imploded, they sold their technology to investors, and closed up shop. One of those investors, I recalled, was Mako Technologies.

‘‘Going through Isaac’s things, I found a scratch pad with Mako’s phone number and notes about a hassle of some kind. It sounds like Mako was on his back about some missing paperwork.’’

In the back of my mind I heard Harley Dawson.
This incestuous town
. Everybody knowing one another, dealing with one another, hurting one another.

‘‘But it seems like more than paperwork, it seems like . . .’’ He looked at Jesse.

‘‘Missing records,’’ Jesse said.

Slowly, I turned toward him. He didn’t look perplexed. He looked grave.

‘‘And it took you five minutes to tell me this?’’ I said.

That’s when the doorbell rang. It was the police.

I opened the front door. ‘‘Hello, Detective.’’

Chris Ramseur, Santa Barbara PD, looked surprised. ‘‘Evan. Long time no see.’’

He had the face of a jaundiced English teacher, thoughtful and canny. His tie and oxford shirt made him look weary. I ushered him in.

‘‘I have news.’’ He stared at Jesse and Adam coming through the patio doors.

‘‘Chris,’’ Jesse said.

Ramseur gazed unblinking at Jesse’s chest, as though looking at his legs might be dangerous, like Lot’s wife taking that fatal glance back at Gomorrah.

He said, ‘‘I wanted to tell you in person. We got him.’’

Jesse looked as though the floor had dropped away beneath him, clear to China. Adam put a hand on his shoulder.

‘‘Brand was arrested after a fight outside Harry’s. And you’ll love this: He tried to bluff his way out of it with a fake diplomatic passport from British Honduras.’’

‘‘Belize?’’ I said.

‘‘Yup. Anybody can order one of these out-of-date passports online and use it to impress women at cocktail parties. You just can’t claim diplomatic status with it.’’

Jesse still looked dumbfounded. I took his hand.

‘‘So now his lawyer’s bitching that the officers arrested him while he was arranging to turn himself in,’’ Chris said. ‘‘He’s ranting about the statute of limitations, habeas corpus. Oh, and that Brand’s innocent.’’

Jesse said, ‘‘When’s the arraignment?’’

‘‘He’ll be in court tomorrow. Are you up to it?’’

This time his gaze did go to Jesse’s legs, and jerked away.

‘‘Up to it?’’ Jesse said. ‘‘You couldn’t stop me with a bullet.’’

We celebrated, drove to the harbor and hit Brophy Brothers. Jesse took his graphite crutches so he could get up the stairs to the bar, and we sat on the balcony while the music hopped and the crowd jostled, waitresses swerving between the tables. Below us in the marina, the commercial fishing fleet rocked on water gone purple with shadow. Beyond the breakwater the ocean shimmered in silver light.

Adam got drunk quickly, a light drinker knocking back tequila shooters. I didn’t ask him any more about the missing paperwork, because his mood had lifted to sweet heights. He started talking physics with intoxicated passion. But I knew what Jesse was thinking: There’s no such thing as coincidence.

Adam was explaining time dilation using a shot glass and a saltshaker. ‘‘Accelerate toward the speed of light, and time passes more slowly.’’ He held the shot glass like a spaceship. ‘‘You hit light speed, you’re going so fast through space, you have no speed left to move through time.’’ He looked at us crookedly. ‘‘See? At light speed, time doesn’t pass.’’

He turned the glass to reflect the sunset off Jesse’s hand. ‘‘Light never ages. Look at it,
jefe.
That shine there, it’s eternity.’’

When we got up to leave he hugged me and put his hand over his heart.

‘‘Maybe this rock will go now. This stone that sits in my chest.’’

‘‘I hope so,’’ I said.

Jesse got to his feet, pushed up, and set the crutches. He was six-foot-one and I loved to see him tall. Loved it when he leaned against me. It felt like dance time, a Hollywood hold, and its rarity gave me a pang. Adam wasn’t fit to get behind the wheel, so I drove his truck home for him, and rode with Jesse back to the beach house. In the car, I asked him about Isaac’s notes.

He said, ‘‘I haven’t seen them, but they say something like, ‘What shares?’ and talk about double-checking that everything had been sent to Mako.’’

‘‘What do you make of it?’’

‘‘Mako invested in Firedog the way they did in a bunch of start-ups. Angel funding, cash in exchange for a chunk of stock. It sounds like Mako couldn’t find the Firedog stock certificates and Isaac was trying to figure out where they were.’’

‘‘And you’re thinking what I’m thinking?’’

‘‘That it isn’t a fluke. But I don’t know what it is.’’

The tires hummed over the road. I said, ‘‘Why does Adam call you chief?’’

‘‘
Jefe?
A play on my name, I guess. And because I captained the team.’’

He wouldn’t say the obvious: and because Adam looked up to him.

At his house I put music on, Marvin Gaye. Jesse took a Viagra, which, if it wasn’t a miracle, came close. It had given him back a reliability in lovemaking that he thought he’d lost because of the spinal cord injury.

We went to the bedroom and turned off the lights. Jesse knew what I wanted and let me have it, standing by the window, moonlight hard white across his face. I unbuttoned his shirt, pulled my own shirt over my head, and wrapped myself against his smooth skin. He swung an arm around my back. His eyes were dark, a smile on his lips, his mouth coming down and kissing me, a long, hard, old-fashioned kiss. My heart hammered and my loins ached.