The Big Kahuna (Fox and O'Hare #6)(90)
It was there, standing at the hotel-room window talking to my mother, that I made up my mind to go onstage that night. I can’t say that I wasn’t intimidated. The venue, the audience, the acoustics—all these were on a grander scale than I had been accustomed to in California. Walking across the stage to the piano, I had to resort to the technique I’d been taught in middle school: pretend you’re playing for only one person.
Jeremy
It’s hard for me to describe the weeks that followed. My heart was broken. What else is there to say? No one had told me that love could crack you open, make you bare your deepest self, then disappear and leave you defenseless. Years have passed since, and yet I haven’t forgotten that feeling. At the time, I tried to drink it away. My insomnia came back, worse than before. Some nights, I would spend hours looking for traces of Nora online, either on Facebook or on one of the music sites she visited, or else I’d scroll through my phone for the few pictures I had of us. My favorite was a selfie we’d taken at Willow Hole, our faces flushed from the long hike, our eyes squinting in the sunlight, our arms around each other. It was like looking through a forgotten history, trying to convince myself that it had really happened the way I remembered it. What we had built together was so frail that it had collapsed at the first sign of trouble. I tried to tell myself that maybe it was stronger, all she needed was a little time, but as the days passed I found it harder to believe this—she’d met all my attempts to talk to her with a tenacious silence.
The only thing that kept me going during those tough days was work. Vasco had unexpectedly lost two deputies, one to a police department in the San Diego area and the other to early retirement, and when he asked me to take on a few more shifts in August I’d gladly said yes. One morning, while I was nursing a hangover, I decided to drive down to the Starbucks in Yucca Valley for an iced coffee. It was ninety-five degrees in the shade that day, and the temperature was still expected to rise to one hundred and two. I forced myself to keep my eyes on the highway as I passed the Pantry—a realtor’s FOR SALE sign had appeared outside the restaurant some weeks earlier, and I was trying not to think about what this meant in the long run. So I didn’t see the red GMC truck trying to exit the parking lot from the side of the bowling alley, and I had to hit the brakes hard to make room for it. At the wheel was A.J.
The GMC was a late-model truck, with chrome door handles, gleaming paint, and high-performance tires, like those I’d been wanting to buy for my Jeep. On one side of the back window was a yellow decal that said SUPPORT OUR TROOPS, and on the other was a red, round sticker with the logo of the bowling alley. Still, for all the bells and whistles on his truck, A.J. didn’t take good care of it. Black smoke came out of the tailpipe, which meant the engine was probably burning too much fuel. A.J. must have spotted my cruiser in the rearview mirror because he had his hands at ten and two on the steering wheel and he drove just a couple of miles under the speed limit. After another quarter mile, he turned on his signal and changed into the right lane, but I didn’t pass. I changed lanes too, and continued to follow at a distance. I have to admit, I was enjoying making him sweat a little.
Of course, excessive muffler smoke was a minor offense, and besides, it was a job for the Highway Patrol, not the Sheriff’s Department. But why not practice a little interagency cooperation? I turned on my siren lights and pulled the GMC over. The license plate check returned only routine information. The truck was a 2012 model, registered to a Helen D. Baker. A.J.’s wife, presumably. Their address was on Sunnyslope Drive, the kind of neighborhood where homes had a circular drive ringed with trees and a stone path around the back that led to a deck and a hot tub. Everything always came up roses for this guy. Even back in high school, his performance on the wrestling team regularly earned him easy grades or reprieves from the punishment he should’ve received for his bullying. I stepped out of the cruiser, approached the truck from the passenger side, and knocked on the window.
It lowered with an angry hiss. “Is there a problem, Officer?”
“Morning. Your muffler’s letting out excessive smoke. I need your license, registration, and insurance.”
“It is?” A.J. glanced at his side-view mirror and unbuckled his seat belt.
My hand tightened on the weapon in my holster. “Stay in your seat.”
“Sorry, Officer. I’ll get that muffler fixed. I hadn’t noticed it was doing that.”
“License, registration, and insurance.”
A.J. locked eyes with me and suddenly I felt aware that I needed a haircut, my sunglasses were cheap knockoffs, I had sweat stains on my shirt. It was like looking at myself in the mirror of a gas-station bathroom: it picked up every fault, every blemish. A.J.’s gaze shifted to the name tag on my uniform, and a look of relief fell across his face. “Gorecki. Jeremy Gorecki? We went to high school together, man. Don’t you remember me? I’m A.J. Baker.”
“Sir. License, registration, insurance.”
“You were on the baseball team. You guys won regionals one year.”
“For the last time, license, registration, insurance.”
He leaned across the passenger side to reach into the glove compartment. His arm had a tattoo of intertwined roses and on his ring finger he wore a patterned gold band. “I’m pretty sure we had some classes together,” he said, pulling out his registration and insurance. “Biology, I think it was. Or maybe algebra.”