Power Slide (8 page)

“Maybe he got sick and knocked on the door of one of those houses across the street and—” I knew I wasn’t making sense.

“When he had a phone? And his car’s right here?”

“But if he was really sick—”

“He’d call 911.”

“And they’d come and take him to the hospital and that’d explain his car here.”

“You can call the hospitals while we eat breakfast.”

“I’m not leaving here!”

My brother sighed. “Suit yourself. But . . . look, I’ve been at hundreds of scenes like this. I could get backups and techs here, but the only thing they’d do would be to walk around in the half-dark and trample any clue that might be here. If you want to walk around the lagoon again, I’ll go with you, but I’m telling you now, it’s not going to make any difference.”

He was right. But I couldn’t just leave. I didn’t know what to do. All at once, I felt empty and exhausted. I stood on the sidewalk, grimly looking back at Guthrie’s car on the grass. I could barely bring myself to say, “We should pop the trunk.”

“You’re absolutely positive it’s his car?”

I shone the light down on the license plate. A blotch of mud covered the first number. I moved in closer, squatted. “Omigod!”

“What?”

“Feet. Look.” I raced to the front of the car and aimed the light underneath. This time the white shape was no stone. What I saw was a pale white scalp with a fringe of brown hair around it.

“Guthrie! Are you okay? Damon! Answer me! You don’t need to move, just grunt. Or something. Anything! Please, Guthrie!”

I shoved myself under the bumper.

Something was pulling me back—John.

“We’ve got to get this off him.”

Sirens cut the air. My brother said something.

“Help me!” I screamed at him.

The car was so low. The grass was wet, the wheels sunk down into it. The undercarriage had to be pressing on Guthrie. And he wasn’t answering me. “The side. We can lift the side of the car and flip it. Come on, here!”

John’s arms were around me, imprisoning me. I shoved but I had no leverage. Brakes squealed, doors slammed, shoes hit the sidewalk.

“Backups,” my brother said. “We’ve got three more nearby. Do you hear the sirens? In a minute we’ll be able to lift this car up off him. In just a minute . . . you tell him that, okay?”

I bent, face against the grass, reached in, and took his hand in mine. I didn’t dare shine the light in his eyes. Was he breathing? I couldn’t tell from his chest. His hand was cold. I pressed his finger between mine, the way we’d done in the trailer yesterday. “It’ll be okay,” I reassured him just as he had me about the burns on my hands. “We ought to have some of your magic burn cream, huh?” My voice was cracking. I had to swallow, but there was nothing but dryness in my throat. “Just another minute. Backups are coming. Hear the sirens? You know my brother’s a cop. He’ll have the whole force here to get you out.” I wriggled under the chassis. My head was near his shoulder, but I couldn’t hear his breathing, couldn’t see anything. Somewhere I’d read that people in comas can still hear. “I’ve got your hand. Don’t let go. Hang on. Guthrie, I love you. I love you.”

“You gotta move, Darcy. They’re going to lift the car.”

I slithered back, but I didn’t let go of his hand.

I didn’t dare.

THE FIRST TIME I saw Guthrie’s face was when they plugged him into the ambulance. His cheek was streaked with grease and soot, and his nose had been mashed down to the side.
How can he breathe?
I lunged toward him, but someone was holding me back.

“You’ll be in the way.” My brother’s voice was shaky. “You gotta listen to me.”

“His shirt’s sooty, but I didn’t see blood, did you?”

“Uh-uh.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?”

“Hard to say.”

I stiffened.
Hard to say because you don’t want to hear?

Sirens were burping off; flashers battled red; squeals echoed at each other and the guys guarding the scene were yelling at civilians to stay on the far side of the street. Guthrie’s car had been halfway across the grass, but the scene supervisor was closing off the street and the entire park.

Across the road, lights had come on in the houses. People in bathrobes were standing on a front lawn.

A cab pulled up just as the ambulance shot off. I leapt in. I wasn’t surprised the driver was Webb Morratt, the cabbie John used for personal and off-label runs. I tried to interpret his appearance as positive, that John
called him for me because he knew Guthrie was headed to the hospital, not the morgue. He squealed off through the fog-dense and empty streets and caught the ambulance at the third intersection.

I couldn’t bear to think of Guthrie in the vehicle ahead, charging up the steep rise of Divisidero that made even Morratt downshift. Instead, I focused on the black convertible. Someone had driven that car over him. Carefully, so it covered his body. Someone had laid him on the grass when he was unconscious and then driven his car over him. In the dark. In a place it would be discovered as soon as it got light. Therefore they must have wanted him to be found before long. It made no sense.

“I spent a lot of time sitting around there,” Morratt was saying.

“The park? For John?” The ambulance raced over the top of Pacific Heights, through the intersection on the red light. Morratt followed. He must have been doing 80.

“Maybe.”

A city park with tree-shaded nooks. “Drugs, fights, kids, and liquor?”

“Sure.”

“What else?”

He hesitated. “Cars boosted, burglaries. Cat burglaries.”

“Huh?” We hit the congested part of Divisidero. The ambulance slowed. I leaned over the seat, peering through the windshield, willing the ambulance faster. Now it was behind a bus.
Go around, dammit!
If only Guthrie’d been driving! I squelched a sob—wanting him here to laugh at the irony.

We were closing in on the hospital. The ambulance cut into the ER. Morratt started after, hit the brakes.

I jumped out and ran inside. A clerk handed me clipboarded papers with questions I couldn’t answer. His address? I’d only called him, never
written. Date of birth? Close to fifty years ago? Next of kin? I’d never given it a thought. Insurance? Probably, if he’d been paying union dues.

In way too short a time, a doctor motioned me in through the double doors.

I didn’t need to wait for words; I could read his face. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Yes.”

The air went thick. My words sounded like they came from someone else. “How can that be? It was just his nose. There wasn’t even any blood on his shirt, was there?”

He hadn’t seen the shirt, I could tell that, too. He was saying it didn’t matter. But it
did
matter, how could he not get that? “His shirt was fine, just dirty. There was no damage to his chest, was there?”

Doors whished open; metal rattled. People muttered, moaned, screamed. A woman was yelling into her phone, “Just get your lazy ass over here.” The walls—beige or that shade of pale blue or green or yellow that’s the same as beige—evaporated. Nothing made sense. “It’s just a broken nose! How can he be dead of a broken nose!”

More words. They made no sense. Then I heard, “Do you want to see his body?”

His body!
I longed to see
him
, not his body, his empty body. I nodded and was led down the hall and into a curtained-off slot, the kind of place Guthrie would hate. Like a work cubicle in an office—a death cubicle with curtains.

He lay there, his face cleaned now, his nose caved in to the right, his head propped up on a pillow in mockery of his last hours. I had to fight not to think about sitting with him in the cab of his truck talking about my burns, or in the trailer, leaning against that shoulder that now stuck out from the sheet, bare, already dry-looking, but with every muscle still
visible. I wanted to reach forward, to rest my hand on his skin, but I just didn’t dare. Barely audibly, I said, “How?”

The doctor lifted Guthrie’s shoulder and turned him on his side.

The back crown of his head was caved in as if it had been hit with a pipe. Blood matted his hair and the bleeding had spread down his neck onto his back. It looked like his head had exploded inside.

WHEN MIKE DISAPPEARED I went into a funk that only eased back to normal years later. Now, I could tell that Gracie and John and, particularly, Mom were worried about how I’d deal with Guthrie’s death.

But one of the things I’ve learned is that you can grieve wholly when you sit zazen. No interruptions, no one cheering or offering ineffectual comfort, nothing between you and every memory or hope, every pang that leaves your chest hollow and cold. Leo offered to sit with me, and we sat period after period. In normal zazen we let go of thoughts and come back to the breath. But this time I let the thoughts linger, memories of the set outside San Diego where we’d met doing car gags, the time I’d run into him at an opening and barely recognized him in a tux, the nights and luscious afternoons together in the truck, the plans he and I’d just started making. The feel of his body against mine.

After a few periods of zazen, thoughts start to arrive more slowly and they’re easier to see. The back and forth between the thoughts and the cold hollow in the chest becomes clear, each beholden to the other. In its starkness the pain is easier to face as what it is—fear—and feelings in my chest that I wanted to call grief or regret but that were in fact just feelings there. I might have loved Guthrie, but I hadn’t known him. What I loved was the acceptance we had each allowed that preserved our own secrets.

If he’d kept his secret, would he still be alive?

I went to bed exhausted, slept till ten, and then got the streetcar out to Mom’s house and picked up Duffy for a walk on the beach, one of the places Guthrie and I had never been. I think of Duffy as my dog even if my mother thinks otherwise. He, I’m sure, figures he has many servants. A Scottie, he’s not a beach dog. The slap of the waves on his low-slung stomach irritates him, but he trotted along the sand and when we came to the grassy dunes beyond the Great Highway, he was in his element, barking and burrowing. Later I ate some of Mom’s beef stew and was back in bed in shortly after sunset. I felt like I could sleep forever.

The next morning I woke up angry. Now all the energy someone else might spend in grief surged into fury. In zazen I could barely sit still, barely wait till the bell rang me free. I wasn’t through mourning, but I was done with moping. Dammit, I had to
do
something. I could have gone for a long run. Instead, I sat on the steps between Leo’s room and mine and called John.

“What did the medical examiner say about the wounds? That bruise? What’s the report on the crime scene? Did the neighbors see anything?”

“It’s not my case any more.”

“Couldn’t you even—”

“Not my choice.”

“But you have to be running it. No one’s in a position to know as much about Guthrie as you are. I can give you inside stuff, the people to talk to, tell you what makes sense and what’s just blather. Gracie talked to the ER docs and she—”

“Right. But here’s the irony. After the last Lott-related blowup—the one
I
orchestrated—the department’s got new rules.”

“That’s crazy! None of us is going to be as free with a stranger—”

“She won’t be a stranger long. She’s probably on the horn to you this minute.”

He was right. The instant I hung up, the message light blinked.

Half an hour later an unmarked car disgorged a thick white woman in a blue slacks suit. She had blonde hair pushed behind her ears, but it was too short to stay put. Clumps hung in front of her ears like surviving trees in a clear-cut forest. She strode across the zendo courtyard to the bench where I was drinking an espresso. There was something familiar about her.

“Darcy Lott?” She had one of those voices that isn’t loud but cuts through all other conversations. She stared down, assessing me in a guilty-till-proved-otherwise way.

Now I recognized her. Remembering a trick I learned in an acting class, I thought of a pineapple,
saw
the pineapple with its rind mostly green though beginning to go to yellow at the top, its leaves thick and healthy. My face showed nothing when I said, “You’re an inspector now, Higgins?”

“Damon Guthrie. I need to know everything you know about him. You were his girlfriend?”

“I guess.”

“You don’t know?”

“Girlfriend is such a kid term.”

“You tell me what your relationship was, then.” She pulled a notebook out of her purse. “Is there a more private place?”

“No.” Quickly, I added, “This is very private.” I could have asked if she’d like me to get her coffee. But, no, I couldn’t. The most I could manage was not to take a swallow of my own. Higgins had been on guard at an apartment when I’d used my police connections to push past her and chat up the detective in charge. And when she left I’d sneered—to myself, I’d wanted to believe—at her large, square, and sagging butt. I’d figured her for a rookie, but either she’d flown up through the ranks, or I’d erred. Maybe my sneer had had an effect. She had the look of not only having
lost weight but of going the all-out gym route. She’d lopped off her pony tail and bleached the remains. I wondered how much she recalled of our encounter. Too much?

“You know the deceased through stunt work?”

The deceased!
How could that be Guthrie? “Yes.”

“How long have you known him?”

“Ten years, give or take.”

“And you’ve been intimate how long?”

I made myself respond. “Six, seven years.”

“The address on his driver’s license is no longer valid.”

“Why is that?”

“He doesn’t live there. Ms. Lott, where does he live?”

“I don’t know.”