Jericho Point (3 page)

‘‘He doesn’t live here anymore,’’ he said.

‘‘Yes, he does. That’s his acoustic guitar by the sofa.’’

‘‘Does he owe you money?’’

Next door the curtains fluttered. I walked over and knocked.

A woman called from behind the peephole, ‘‘Who is it?’’

‘‘I’m looking for your neighbor. P. J. Blackburn.’’

A hand drew back the curtains. I saw cautious eyes and a receding chin. ‘‘He went to a party. Over on Del Playa.’’

‘‘I know. Did he come home?’’

‘‘No.’’ She peered, waiting for me to go away. I didn’t. ‘‘I would have heard him. He hasn’t.’’

Back in the car I slumped against the headrest, listening to the rain. Procrastination wouldn’t make this go away. I took out my phone and called Jesse.

Outside Chaco’s on State Street, wet asphalt shone gold under the streetlights. Palm trees thrashed in the wind. I pushed through the door. Inside, a lively crowd was listening to indie rock, a local band on the little stage, the wispy girl singer tilting her head toward the microphone, eyes shut, deep into it. I scanned the room. Jesse wasn’t here yet. I worked my way to the bar.

The music swelled, drums crashing. But I heard the ocean booming against the cliff. I couldn’t stop picturing her—feeling solid wood slip away from her and seeing the balcony recede. Plunging into bitter waves. Struggling up to reach air. Breaking the surface, only to find herself alone.

The song finished on a minor chord, the airy singer smiling, hands at her side, the crowd applauding. The room felt as if it were rolling.

I rubbed my temples. This wasn’t news you gave over the phone. Besides, when I called him Jesse had sounded up, saying, ‘‘Let’s catch a late set.’’ Hearing enthusiasm in his voice had touched me. Joy, any spark at all, had been missing for a long time. And if it was finally rekindling,I was going to douse it once I told him about the mess in Isla Vista.

Patrick John. Make that going, going, almost gone. He was enrolled at the university, but at twenty-three was nowhere close to graduating. His curriculum emphasized recreational chemistry. He spent most of his time playing guitar, working odd jobs, and nosing around the edges of the music industry.

I glanced toward the door, watching for Jesse. It cut at his heart that his brother vanished when push came to shove. But as angry as I felt, I could never resent P.J., because he had been here for me when it counted.

That day—a gleaming Saturday morning, when the hibiscus in the garden flared red and the scent of jasmine saturated the air, he rang my bell. I saw him through the French doors, a big kid in a baseball cap, wiping a runny nose, his foot jittering up and down. I knew right away he could only be Jesse’s brother, and my bad mood deepened.

I opened the door and stood there with my bare feet and messy hair and burr-under-the-saddle grouchiness, saying, ‘‘Make this a good story.’’

His blue gaze jumped around. ‘‘Jesse asked me to come over.’’

I crossed my arms. ‘‘To tell me why he stood me up last night?’’

My new boyfriend, apparently, was a chickenshit. Wouldn’t you know—star athlete, absurdly sexy, with a blinding grin and switchblade wit. And he had sent his brother to deliver the basket of excuses.

So I thought. I didn’t know that I was standing at the edge of a divide, and P.J. had come to take me across.

He wiped his nose again and met my eyes. ‘‘Jesse’s been in an accident.’’

Now the band started a new number, up-tempo. The singer yanked at the mike and growled and sang. Next to me, a man took a seat on a stool and reached for the peanuts on the bar. He wore an aloha shirt and sweet cologne. The bartender asked what I wanted. I ordered a beer.

I could still see P.J. standing on my porch. Those few last seconds of sunshine and blue jays crying in the trees, the smell of freshly cut grass, my sleepy-headed annoyance, before I grasped it. Accident. P.J. was almost falling over from fear and grief. It was beyond bad. The white noise started in my head.

The man on the stool picked through the peanuts. ‘‘Yeah, this band’s halfway decent. But they could mike the vocalist better. The monitors are wrong, and the mike’s too hot.’’

Evidently he was talking to me. Taking off his glasses, he smoothed his Pancho Villa mustache and hunched against the bar, squinting at me as he chewed. His front teeth protruded—usefully, because several others were missing.

‘‘They play here regular. Like a house band.’’

He worked his rounded shoulders back and forth, as if his aloha shirt was itchy. His hair dragged over his collar, the color of compost. He had seemingly fallen through a time portal, direct from the set of
Hawaii Five-0
. He would have played a police informant, a nervous loser known as Gopher.

‘‘But if you’re into chick singers, she ain’t shabby. I see why you like her.’’

Was I really that distracted, or was this guy having an entirely different conversation, one in which I was answering him? My beer came. I put a twenty on the bar and waited for my change.

He grabbed a cube of sugar from a bowl on the bar and leaned toward me. ‘‘You dig all this he-done-me-wrong stuff. I can tell. You got the aura.’’ He squirreled the sugar cube into his mouth. ‘‘But sure, why not, I’ll dance with you.’’

The band hammered away, but nobody was dancing. ‘‘I’m waiting for somebody.’’

‘‘Gotcha, when he gets here it’s adios.’’ He chose another sugar cube, sniffed it, and nibbled.

‘‘Wrong. It’s adios right now.’’ I turned, planning to find a table, and saw Jesse coming through the door.

He smiled, making his way to the bar. I knew I was about to blow that smile away, but as always I just watched him. He was tall and long-legged, with mahogany hair and looks that made me plain crazy. Even when he was smiling, his gaze told people they’d be foolish to cross him. He could be all edge, all fight, and still take me with effortless, athletic fluidity. He had almost taken me to the altar a few months earlier.

‘‘Okay, we can get out of here, but where you wanta go?’’ Gopher said.

I felt his fingers on my arm. They were moist, and were leaving a tacky handprint of sugar on my skin.

‘‘No.’’ I lifted his hand off. ‘‘That’s him.’’

He followed my gaze. ‘‘The guy on the crutches?’’

Jesse picked his way between tables. His gait was slow and careful. The bartender was at the cash register, getting my change. Gopher stared at Jesse.

‘‘What happened to him?’’

Jesse walked up. He took in Gopher and my pinched face. He gave me a deadpan look.

‘‘You disobeyed orders, Rowan. You left them alive,’’ he said.

God, he had perfect timing. It was dialogue from my new novel. Nice to know he was actually reading it.

‘‘Screw orders. Firing into a church is just bad manners,’’ I replied.

Gopher was gaping. I suppressed the urge to smile.

‘‘Now, let me finish my drink, or I might top you,’’ I said.

‘‘Killing over a beer is pretty damn rude, too.’’ Jesse looked at Gopher. ‘‘But people who stare—offing them is a public service.’’

Peanuts dribbled from the man’s hand onto the bar. Inching off the stool, he slunk into the crowd.

I stretched and gave Jesse a fat kiss. ‘‘Score one for sci-fi.’’ Waving to the bartender, I raised my beer bottle.
‘‘Uno más.’’

Jesse shook his head. ‘‘Make it coffee.’’

I looked him over and saw tension along his jaw and tightness in his shoulders. Avoiding alcohol meant that he was maxed on pain medication. He had to be feeling like hell.

A day in the life, when your back’s been shattered by a BMW that was going flat out when it hit your bike. When a training ride up a mountain road killed your best friend and blew your future sideways faster than you could blink.

‘‘I have breaking news,’’ he said.

I took the coffee mug from the bartender. ‘‘So do I.’’

‘‘Me first.’’ He walked to a table, balanced with the crutches, and sat down. ‘‘I had dinner with Lavonne tonight.’’

I gave him an exaggerated head-to-toe. His khakis were ripped at the knee. His T-shirt advertised Santa Barbara’s favorite surfboard product, Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax.

‘‘You missed the class on sucking up to the boss, didn’t you?’’ I said.

Lavonne Marks was the managing partner at Sanchez Marks, the law firm where Jesse practiced. She was half Hellfire missile, half Jewish mother, forgiving of his shaggy hair and pirate earring, as long as he tore opponents apart on cross and ate a nutritious lunch. I sat down.

‘‘She’s going to offer you a job,’’ he said.

The band launched into a new number, the guitarist taking off like a dragster, the drummer hammering on the crash and ride. I stared at Jesse.

‘‘Full-time?’’ I said.

‘‘You’re already putting in twenty hours a week for the firm.’’

‘‘Maybe five at the office, though.’’

The rest involved writing briefs, making court appearances, occasionally serving papers. Full-time meant my own office, with a view over red tile roofs. Health insurance, a retirement plan. Business cards.

‘‘Partnership?’’ I said.

‘‘Figure three years down the line.’’

And a chance to work down the hall from the man I loved. Fifty hours a week of togetherness.

I looked at him in the amber light. ‘‘Lavonne asked you first, to see if you’d object.’’

‘‘I don’t.’’

Full-time. Dark suits. Panty hose. Good-bye to free-lancing. No more legal journalism. Back to writing fiction when I could grab an hour on weekends.

‘‘I just got the galley proofs for
Chromium Rain
,’’ I said.

‘‘You write at night. That won’t stop.’’

‘‘But . . . the biography. That would be a big project.’’

‘‘You aren’t going to write that. Jax and Tim’s files have been sitting in your safe-deposit box for six months.’’

And those files were just about all I had in the bank right now.

‘‘I’ll think about it,’’ I said.

But instead I thought about Jesse. We had postponed our marriage shortly before the wedding. Traumatic events had driven a wedge between us: the hit-and-run driver was fighting, violently, to keep from going to prison. I’d discovered parts of Jesse’s past that I didn’t want to face. And he began to fear that because of his spinal cord injury I saw myself as a self-congratulating martyr, staying with him out of pity. We got angry. So we decided to step back from the brink and start over.

I had felt tangible relief and a new lightness of heart. But all his losses slammed down and tipped him into an emotional crash dive. He seemed to be sliding away not just from me but from everything. And I didn’t think my working alongside him could solve that problem.

He wrapped his hands around the coffee mug. ‘‘It’s a job, not a jail sentence.’’

‘‘Of course it is.’’

‘‘So why do you look as if you’re about to make a run for the border?’’

See—starting over wasn’t truly possible, because he knew me too well. I was about to make a smart remark when a shadow crossed his face and he dug his knuckles into his lower back. He bit his lip, trying to ride it out. I waited. There was nothing I could do.

‘‘So what’s your news?’’ he said.

My dad has a saying:
God save me from people with good intentions.
In the days that followed I would repeat it to myself again and again, but right then, watching Jesse lose his fight with the pain, I decided to be kind.

‘‘It’ll keep.’’

The bartender took her break at midnight, stepping into the alley behind the club. The rain had stopped. Her ears were zinging from the music. Propping the door open a few inches with a brick, she lit a cigarette and tipped her face up to the night sky. The sound leaked through the crack in the door, but out here at least she could hear herself breathe.

She could also hear a man at the pay phone inside the door.

‘‘It’s Merlin,’’ he said. ‘‘She’s at Chaco’s. And she ain’t alone.’’

The bartender took a drag from her Winston, watching the tip redden.

‘‘She banged on apartment doors in Isla Vista, then drove downtown. When I come in the club she’s standing at the bar drinking a Heineken.’’

The bartender paused, the cigarette an inch from her lips. Private investigator? she wondered.

‘‘She was waiting for this dude on crutches. He called her Rowan,’’ the man said. ‘‘I don’t know what’s wrong with him; he coulda got kneecapped.’’ Pause. ‘‘ ’Cause of stuff the Rowan woman said to him. Listen, they weirded me out big-time. Talking some crazy shit.’’

The bartender took a drag.

‘‘Yeah, but only ’cause she started talking to me first. Wanting me to dance with her. But . . . No. Course not. . . . ’Cause of this guy with her, didn’t I just say that? He comes on like a major badass. I think, like, he could be made.’’

The bartender lowered the cigarette to her side and stood very still.

‘‘Oh, sure, I’m imagining it. It’s all just a mind-fuck. Hello, are you here? Did this dude get in your face?’’ Quiet for a moment. ‘‘Whatever. We’ll take care of it tomorrow. I’m going home. My eyes itch.’’

The phone clanged down on the receiver. The bartender dropped her cigarette and ground it out with the toe of her shoe. The night felt clammy.

She counted to fifty, slowly, before pulling the door open. The hall inside was empty. Good. All she needed was Mr. Easily Bamboozled to start jawing her ear off. She knew who he’d been talking to, and, if he was that stupid, he could mess his own nest.

Bartending. The stuff you heard.

Gray. Sky, light, water. By five a.m. the rain had stopped, but wind and tide had the surf running high. It roared onto the beach, almost to the cliffs. The sand was heaped with kelp. Visibility was poor. To the west, the Goleta Pier stuck into the waves. Beyond, the university campus faded into the mist.