You were driving the car.'
Payne's head throbbed. Boulders careened down a mountain slope, crashed into one another, shook the ground.
Still cupping his face, she wouldn't let him look away, even as his eyes moistened. 'Why torture yourself this way? Why torture me?'
A boulder landed on top of him, crushing his skull, grinding him into dust.
Tears tracked down her face. 'Our little boy is gone, Jimmy. It doesn't mean we should forget him. But we can't pretend he's still here. Do you understand?'
A tremble ran through his body.
'Jimmy! Answer me!' Her voice sharpening, a finger poked in his eye.
'I understand.'
'Do you? Because it's not enough just to say it.'
What is enough?
Nothing he could think of.
He'd visited therapists, studied the motel artwork on their walls, listened to their New Age music, all flutes and zithers. Answered their questions as they tiptoed around the stages of grief. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Blah- blah-blah.
'Do you have suicidal ideations?'
'I have homicidal ideations.'
'You want to kill the other driver? The illegal alien.'
'Didn't matter he was illegal. He was drunk. And he ran.'
Another shrink touted the 'healing placidity of Zen.' Oddly, the guy had nervous, fluttering hands with nicotine-stained fingernails. He told Jimmy a parable about a man being chased by a tiger. The man leaps off a cliff and grabs a vine. Looking down, he sees another tiger, waiting to devour him. Terrified, the man notices a wild strawberry growing out of the cliff. He swings on the vine and plucks the strawberry from its bush.
'Oh, how sweet it tasted!' the shrink burbled.
'I see the tigers,' Payne said. 'But where's my fucking strawberry?'
Now Sharon gently ran a hand through his hair. When she spoke, her voice was strained, a dam holding back a flood. 'You have to accept our losing Adam. You have to move on, Jimmy. If you don't, you won't make it. You'll die.'
SEVENTEEN
Payne drives a vintage Pontiac Firebird, gold as the setting sun. Just like Jim Rockford in the old TV series.
Growling at 60 on a straight stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway, north of the Palisades. Gray, misty morning, onshore breeze ripping at the sand, two fun boards lashed to the roof rack.
Adam says something about the waves looking small and mushy, and if it's not a good day, maybe they can leave early and play catch at the park. Payne saying, fine with him, the water looking cold as steel.
Nearing Malibu, Payne's eyes flick toward the beach, appraising the waves, watching gray terns scavenging the shorebreak.
The blink of an eye, a flash of red to his right, the mere notion of a color, nothing more.
A pickup truck runs the red light at Topanga Canyon, slashes at them from the passenger side. Never braking, just plowing into the Firebird.
Payne instinctively reaches across Adam's chest to press him into his seat. Even belted, Adam is thrown sideways, his head whipping left and right, a rag doll, the crack and snap of vertebrae lost in the explosion of steel and glass. The Firebird catapults across the highway and smashes into a concrete barrier.
Adam doesn't cry out. Just a whoosh of air from his lungs, a gurgling from his throat.
Payne blinks to clear his eyes, hot rivulets of blood streaming from his scalp. He's pinned between his son and the driver's door, which itself is jammed against the concrete barrier. Then the pain. It hits Payne so hard he cannot isolate it, cannot tell torso from limb, but he is reasonably certain his right leg is twisted into an unnatural position. He cannot see his son, though he feels the dead weight of him.
'Adam. Adam, can you hear me?'
A man's voice from outside the driver's-side window. 'Lo siento mucho.'
'My son,' Payne says. 'Can you see him? Is he okay?'
The man leans through the open window. Leathery skin as creased as an old belt. The rank odor of tobacco and beer overladen with a fishy smell.
'El chico. El chico.?Dios me perdone!'
Suddenly, he is gone, his smell lingering. Footsteps, the man running along the pavement, the sound fading. Payne hears ocean swells, but when his eyes close, his mind pictures not the surf, but waves of blood pounding a black sand beach.
EIGHTEEN
Lying facedown under a palm tree, Tino's chest was on fire. Moments earlier, Rey and his two idiot friends had ripped off the duct tape, removed the bags of cocaine, and dumped him.
Tino touched his chest, ran a finger around his back. Red and blistered, the tape shredding his skin. He felt dehydrated, disoriented, hungry. It seemed to be midday, the sun high in the sky. City noises. Traffic. Horns.
Where am I? Where is my mother? What is this place?
He got to his feet, blinked against the glare. Used hypodermic needles were scattered on the ground. The sound of splashing water. A large pond, a lake really, with a shooting fountain. He scrambled to its edge, drank from the water, which tasted of rust and algae. On a nearby path, two black women in nurses' uniforms stared at him, eyes alarmed, as if they'd just seen a mouse in the cupboard.
He tied the drawstring of his torn sweatpants and got to his feet. Not far away, towering skyscrapers gleamed in the sunlight. The tallest buildings he had ever seen. He must be in the United States, but where?
He wanted to get moving. What if Rey and the other two came back? What if La Eme was looking for him? Or the Border Patrol?
Stiff and aching, he walked along a path that ran past a row of palm trees. A filthy, bearded man in ragged clothes lay snoring alongside a metal shopping cart filled with junk. The man smelled of piss and vomit. Hands folded together on his chest like Tino's abuelo in the funeral home. Between the man's knobby fingers, an open bag of potato chips. Tino carefully pried the bag from the man's filthy hand. A grunt, a snort, and the man opened runny eyes that seemed to look in different directions.
'Fucking little greaser!' The man reached for a broom handle under his cart and swung wildly.
Tino ran.
Wherever he was, it was a scarier place than La Rumorosa with those narcotraficantes. Running along a path, he saw a boathouse at the edge of the lake. A park, he realized. A park in the middle of a city. He came to an intersection of two busy streets and read the signs. Alvarado. Wilshire.
He chose Wilshire. Ran past a sign for Westlake Avenue, another for Bonnie Brae. Kept running. Past big buildings and parking lots. Burlington. Union. Loma. Feeling stronger with each block flying by. Believing if he ran far enough and fast enough, he could find his mother. Knowing the foolishness of the thought almost before it was formed.
He heard a noise overhead and looked up. A helicopter with police markings. So low and so loud he was certain it had come for him. The Border Patrol? Or the F.B.I.? They knew about the cocaine. He saw the markings on the helicopter: L.A.F.D.
Los Angeles Fire Department.
