The Next Right Thing (26 page)

“I’m sorry, Randy,” he said. “But I’m going to have to cuff you and walk you back up to whatever you were doing under that house.”

“What I was doing under that house,” I said, “was puking. There’s somebody buried up there, Sean, and I think it might be Simon Busansky. I don’t know who killed Mutt, or why Terry is dead, but I think this is where the bad shit started.”

“You’re not a cop anymore, man. I don’t know what you are, but you’re not a cop.”

“Didn’t you guys check out this house when I gave you the address?”

“My DEA guys have been looking into these houses for weeks. They started getting antsy when Simon Busansky stopped coming by for his chats. If anything, your bullshit slowed us
down. Once you came to me, we had to hold off the raids until we figured out how you were involved. What’s the deal, Randy? You beat the life out of Mutt Kelly off intel that I fucking gave you, and now I’m going to find out that he wasn’t the only guy you put in the ground?”

“What the fuck, Sean? You really think I killed Mutt Kelly?”

“The way you showed up at his house was wrong.”

“Of course it was wrong,” I said. “And you were there to stop it. I heard everything you said, and I never went back. You know who I am. I’m a fuckup, but I’m not that kind of fuckup.”

I noticed that Sean hadn’t lowered his gun. An unlowered gun is a hard thing to miss. “And if I’d known that there was a dead body under that house,” I continued, “why would I be anywhere near the fucking house?”

“I don’t know,” Sean said. “But you’re going to have to explain yourself up the chain of command. Right now I need to redeem myself for letting you go the last time.”

“I caused you some trouble, didn’t I?”

Sean laughed. I lowered my hands a little and moved a bit closer to him. “Believe it or not,” he said, “that fuckup with you doesn’t even make the top five for the week. Your reappearance in my life seems to have precipitated a crisis.”

Now that I took a good look, his skin had the gray puffiness that comes after an epic bender. “You’re hitting it hard,” I said. “Good thing we have a solution for that. We’ll go to a meeting together.”

“First I’m going to arrest you. Assume the position, Randy.”

“You really think I’m involved with this mess?”

“I don’t know what to think. Assume the position, Randy.”

I outweighed Sean by thirty pounds, but that didn’t mean he
was soft. Even a soft guy with a gun in his hand is problematic. I couldn’t figure any smooth moves besides following instructions. I knelt and clasped my hands behind my head. It was the first time in years that I had knelt for any reason. When I first came to A.A., someone suggested that I pray like this, on my knees, because it demonstrated the proper attitude. I never was much for that type of thing. Kneeling there, though, the rocks pressing into my skin, I did pray. It was an awful prayer, but earnest:
Just let me fucking finish this. Please, God?

Hearing the gentle sound of Sean’s weapon sliding into its holster as he carefully made his way toward me, I opened my eyes to stare at a creosote bush about a yard from my face. Which reminded me of hacking around Cleveland National Forest with the Boy Scouts. I remembered Jimmy Crews, who made Eagle Scout only to die in Operation Desert Storm, explaining the best way to escape a grizzly: run downhill. According to Jimmy, “the grizz” was so top-heavy that he would “fall over his own ass” chasing you.

Somehow that anecdote became a plan for action: the moment the handcuff touched my wrist—maybe the moment before—I would slam my body backward into Sean, my skull connecting with his forehead and sending him down the hill with me tumbling close behind.

Sorry about that, Sean.

But then the handcuff didn’t touch my wrist. I waited, probably longer than I needed to, before I turned around to look.

There was nobody there. The goats jeered appreciatively at Sean’s mercy from across the canyon.

I CAME UP OUT OF THE CANYON
a block or so downhill. It was good luck for me that a landscaper I knew named Jorge was putting down sod in front of a great big, achingly-overdesigned-with-way-too-much-glass split-level. I asked him for a ride to Jean Claude’s. I figured it was smart to bypass my truck and my house for the time being—no telling how long Sean’s goodwill would last, or how soon Cardenas and Clancy would stop being scared of my sister. Of course, I didn’t explain any of this to Jorge, who seemed to recognize that I was lying about my truck breaking down, but did me the favor anyway.

I called Yegua on Jean Claude’s phone; my own phone was back in the truck. Jean Claude wasn’t in that afternoon, which was fine with me: without even knowing what I was into, JC would have straightened his mouth and narrowed his eyes, and
I didn’t think I could take his froggy disapproval. Ten minutes later, Yegua and his girlfriend showed up. I told him that I needed a ride to Wade’s and asked him to retrieve my truck from Troy’s recovery house as discreetly as possible. I guess I could have called Wade, but I was a little embarrassed: I was on the run from the cops. I just wanted to get out of the wind for a while. If Wade wasn’t home, I could wait things out with Yegua.

“Bien,”
he said.
“Bien. Muy bien.”
He smiled enthusiastically at his girlfriend as though she, too, needed to be part of his cheerful acceptance of my routinely insane behavior. Juana, a pleasantly overweight thirtysomething with heavily mascaraed eyes and a Rolling Stones T-shirt, smiled with less enthusiasm.

Yegua drove me to Wade’s apartment on the beach side of Pacific Coast Highway, north of Taco Bell. It was a converted motel, and Wade had less than four hundred square feet, but there was a window on the ocean, and for him, that was the whole deal. Wade was home, thank God. Troy was there, too, but it was clear from his grimace that he didn’t intend to enjoy my company.

“Why is he here?” I asked Wade. “And why is he pissed off at me?”

“Because Emma’s been gone since last night,” Wade said, “and you’ve been MIA since this morning.”

“Isn’t this what she does?” I asked Troy. I wasn’t convincing myself, either.

“This is different,” Troy said. “She’s been watching you running around being the Lone Ranger, and now her self-delusion has gone into the red zone.”

He didn’t look at me when he said it. I swallowed the five Excedrins that Wade had brought me and told them what I’d
unearthed under the house. Before we could get started on what it meant or what the fuck we did next, Wade’s cell phone started ringing. He handed it to me. “It’s Colin Alvarez,” he said.

I took Wade’s phone with a big sense that my life was about to change for the even worse.

“You really fucked me,” Colin said. “Do you have any idea how much you’ve fucked me? Every asset that I have in the world has been frozen since this morning. Every place that I could possibly go is being watched by the cops.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess it was my idea to start growing pot under recovery houses and then bury my partner.”

That shut him up for a moment. “They found Simon?” he finally said.

“I found Simon,” I said. So it was Busansky under the house. “What were you idiots thinking? What happened? Were you the one who buried him?”

“I’ll tell you about that when I see you. Right now I need your help. I’ve got a Mexican passport, and I need to get across the border while it’s still good to me.”

“Fuck you, Colin. I don’t know how you managed to suck Terry into this, but if you think I’m going to—”

It was just then that my life got worse than even worse. The phone was jostled, as though Colin were struggling with someone. I heard a voice I recognized say, “Don’t you fucking dare touch me, you fake fucking Mexican bastard.”

“Colin?” I said carefully. “Why is Emma with you?”

“Why is she with me? Three or four agencies can’t fucking find me, but she shows up this afternoon with crazy to spare. Get as much money as you can and get your ass over here, Randy.
Before this girl wears me down to nothing but my desire to shoot her.”

He gave me an address and hung up. I gave Wade back his phone.

There were three surfboards leaning in a corner of Wade’s apartment—one long board that angled out into the room at nearly forty-five degrees and two short boards that were almost vertical. I threw a folding chair at them all, and the fiberglass made a thunderous clatter as it fell to the floor, sounding like the inside of my head. The tip of one of the short boards broke clean off.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Wade said.

“Thinking.” I told them what Colin had said.

“Where are you supposed to meet him?” Wade asked.

I looked at the address scribbled on my palm. “He’s got a house in Emerald Bay?”

“I heard about that,” Wade said. “His new idea. Colin was going to bring folks down from Hollywood, start a celebrity recovery house. He was going to call it the River Phoenix Recovery Home.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I glanced at Troy, who was looking wild with this new information, angry at me or himself, I wasn’t sure. “How come the feds don’t know about this place?”

“I guess his plans got sidetracked,” Wade said, “by the dead fucking body under his house. Maybe he doesn’t even own it yet. Colin must have killed Mutt, too. At least the cops won’t be looking at you anymore, Randy.”

“All I’m thinking about is Emma,” I said. “I gotta get her out of there.”

I grabbed the keys to Wade’s BMW. Wade inserted himself between me and the front door. “Take a deep breath,” he said. “You keep making the same mistake. You have to chill for a minute.”

“Troy’s right,” I said. “I’m the reason Emma’s been wandering the county trying to find Simon. She was imitating me. She bought in to the idea that we could figure this out. I got my rocks off playing detective, and she’s the one who’s going to pay.”

“I’m not signing on to that,” Wade said. “You gotta call Manny, at least. You gotta call Manny or someone. You can’t do it by yourself.”

I had to admire my friend: he was willing to go to the mat, but it wasn’t going to be a big mat, and it wouldn’t take long to get there. I shoved him hard, maybe even harder than I had intended.

I was about to discover, though, that my cop instincts had slowed to a crawl. How often had Manny and I walked into a domestic disturbance where we knew that the biggest threat in the house wouldn’t be the drunken husband but the ready-to-defend-him wife? Or the ten-year-old son who’d found a gun or a baseball bat to protect his family? A dog was a detail you couldn’t afford to miss. How many times had I sat at the bar after a shift, smugly telling younger cops: the one thing you don’t pay attention to will be the one thing that kills you.

In this case, I didn’t pay attention to Troy Padilla. Before I knew it, he had his arms up around me in some crazy maneuver that felt like a full nelson but didn’t respond to anything I knew about getting out from one. I flopped around like a fish in a gill net.

“You know what Krav Maga is?” Troy spoke quietly into my ear.

I grunted. “A sort of martial art?”

“A retired Israeli hit man taught me. Let me know when you’re ready to calm the fuck down.”

“I was expressing frustration.” I struggled against his arms. Even I could hear how feeble my excuse sounded.

“Wade and I are tired of your frustration. Isn’t that right, Wade?”

“That’s right, Troy.”

“We love you,” Troy said, “but no more frustration.”

“If you knew Israeli kung fu”—I gave up and relaxed into the hold—“why didn’t you use it when I threw you up against the truck?”

“Back then,” Troy said, “I thought you were some kind of A.A. legend. I was intimidated.”

“I guess I’ve cured you of that delusion.”

I didn’t think I had been about to hurt Wade, but—Troy was right—once you’re on that train, you can’t say where it stops. Waiting as Troy tried to gauge my spiritual fitness, I didn’t notice at first as his hold loosened and then disappeared.

I turned around to face him. “Thank you.”

I don’t think Troy quite knew how to handle gratitude coming from me. He managed to nod.

Turning back to Wade: “I’m sorry, Wade. I’ll replace the surfboard.”

“With a better one,” Wade said. “First, go find our girl.”