The Big Kahuna (Fox and O'Hare #6)(51)

“I’m afraid not.”

“Can I ask you something about the investigation?”

“Sure.”

“How did you find out it was Baker?”

“I told you about my son?”

“Yes. Miles, right?”

“That’s right. I was at the library with him on Saturday, helping him with his math homework, and I noticed their security cameras. The accident took place at the intersection of Highway 62 and Chemehuevi, but the location of the body suggests that the driver took a left turn. If he did that, he would’ve had the option of making a right on Martinez Trail, which runs parallel to the highway and sometimes can be faster. It’s a popular shortcut. But he would’ve been captured on the library’s cameras. Only twenty-eight cars drove by between nine thirty and ten thirty p.m. And just three were silver Fords. It was a matter of checking out each one.”

“So he would’ve gotten away with it if he hadn’t taken a shortcut?”

“But he did,” Coleman said. “And now we have a confession.”

“All right,” I said. “Thank you so much, Detective Coleman. Thank you.”

I followed my mother out of the police station. Neither of us spoke. I was trying to put a name to the feeling that filled my heart now that the driver had been identified, but I found that I couldn’t. It wasn’t relief, though there was some of that. It wasn’t closure, though there was some of that, too. It was a different kind of pain. Outside, the midday sun beat down with such force that a wisp of steam rose from the pavement. I called my sister to tell her what we had just learned, but she didn’t pick up. I left her a voicemail asking her to please call me, that I had some news.

As I drove my mother home, I reviewed everything the detective had said about the murder. That’s how I thought of it now, as a murder. I had feared all along that it would be, and it came to me then that what had made me linger in town past the funeral wasn’t just the fog of grief, it was the presentiment that my father had been killed in cold blood.

“Red light,” my mother warned. “Slow down.”

“Sorry,” I said as I came to an abrupt stop. I turned to look at my mother. “Did something happen recently with Baker?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, something that could have prompted this. They’d been arguing about something or other since Dad expanded, right? So why now?”

My mother thought for a minute. “There was the thing with the Land Rover.”

“What thing with the Land Rover?”

“Green light.”

The story came out in pieces and it took two or three tellings for all of its details to settle into place. Afterward, I pulled into the driveway of my parents’ house. My childhood home, with its little porch and its overgrown sage bush and the screen that never quite fit into the doorjamb. For the first time since I’d heard that my father was dead, my mind began to function again. The aimless fury that had trailed me since I’d left town at eighteen had found a purpose: I would make sure that Anderson Baker was brought to justice. I just wasn’t sure how yet.





Driss




I remember that the park rangers had to put up a sign on the highway warning visitors that campsites at Joshua Tree were booked. The town was packed with hikers, bike riders, families from Los Angeles and San Diego who wanted out of the big city for Presidents’ Day weekend. Business had been a little slow that winter, so I was thrilled to see several parties waiting at the Pantry, spilling out from the entrance onto the sidewalk. A young woman in a bohemian shirt came in to ask if she could order a mimosa while she waited. Not for the first time, I wondered whether I should apply for an alcohol license, try to appeal to the kind of people who had been coming to the Mojave lately. I was working the cash register when Anderson Baker burst in. “Who here has a Land Rover Defender?” he asked. “It’s in one of my spots.”

“Just a minute,” I said. I was making change for an elderly couple, both of them after-church regulars. When I was counting money, I couldn’t talk, and Baker’s interruption forced me to put the bills back in the register and start over.

“It’s double-parked. It’s taking up two spaces.” He raised his fingers in a V, as if I didn’t know what “double-parked” meant.

“Just a minute,” I said again. I counted out the change and handed it to the couple, slamming the register drawer closed with my hip. “Thank you.”

The couple stepped away, and Baker took their place. “Whose Land Rover is that?”

I craned my neck to look beyond his shoulder at the parking lot. From where I stood, I could see only an old, dusty Buick and a blue truck covered with colorful stickers. A parking spot in the corner was still open, and anyway the bowling alley never got busy until after lunch. Before I could say anything, though, he snapped, “Well? Don’t just stand there. Find out.”

I didn’t know what had set him off like this. Of course, we’d had disagreements in the past, but they’d been about serious things, like the noise during the remodeling I’d done a while back, or the smell from the sewer line that broke under the bathrooms of his arcade. Now he was upset about a parking space. His face turned pink as he glared at me, waiting for me to fix a problem I’d had no part in creating. “All right,” I said, trying to calm him down. “Let me find out.”