She’ll learn it all.
“Okay, look,” I say, and Arlo catches the answer in my voice and leans back, clasps his hands together in a restrained triumphant gesture. “When we catch a case, Ms. Paige, you can go ahead and ride along beside me. Okay? And you can… I guess you’ll just pay attention and everything, but try not to get in the way. Okay?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Is that what you’re after, Mr. Vasouvian?”
“I want you to do whatever you feel comfortable with, Laszlo.”
Paige begins, “And can I just say, sir—” I hold up a hand.
“You don’t have to call me ‘sir,’ okay?”
“Okay, sir. If you don’t mind, though, I would like to. It’s a sign of respect, sir. You’ve earned it.”
“Stipulated,” I say. “But I’m just as happy for you to call me Mr. Ratesic.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Hey Laz,” Alvaro hollers from the board. “Got something for you. Maybe a good one to break in the new kid. If you’re taking her on. Are you taking her on or not?”
I look at Paige. I hiss through my teeth, “Yeah,” and I extend my hand and Alvaro puts the piece of paper in it. “I’m taking her.”
Arlo slides off my desk, pats me gently on the shoulder, satisfied, as well he should be, having gotten exactly what he wanted.
We head up Vermont Avenue from downtown toward the scene, a simple scene of death on a lawn in Los Feliz.
It’s not clear from the report, but what it sounds like is that there is no specific anomaly, just the regular police requesting the presence of the Service, just to be certain. You get that a lot. When there’s a body, they want to be double sure all the facts are in good clean alignment.
I could take the 5, of course, a nice straight northbound shot, if I wanted to, and it might have bought us five minutes, but the stress of the highway isn’t worth it right now, not when I can give myself the pleasure of the surface streets, the pleasure of looking out the windshield at the various and beautiful Golden State rolling by. You get the streets and sidewalks of downtown, all the usual crowded midmorning bustle, the stop and start at the downtown intersections when you’re moving north and west around the administrative buildings and State services buildings that fan out from the Plaza. And then you escape the hive, pass under the highway and into the borderland, where you see the acres of industry, the factories and warehouses with their solar panel roofs winking back at the sun. And then, just north of that, the miles of farmland, lettuce and avocados, olives and all the rest of it, and then, just like that, you’re whipped back into the neighborhoods, the hip urban districts that line Vermont Avenue like a series of colorful beads: Echo Park, Los Feliz, Silver Lake.
There’s a place in Echo Park, actually, a quarter mile off Vermont, that sells some very solid crullers, some of the best in the State, but there’s no time for a cruller just now, not with a scene of death waiting for us uptown.
“Sir? Mr. Ratesic?”
“Yeah?”
Ms. Paige is looking at me avidly from the shotgun seat, but I am definitely not looking at her; I’m looking at the road. But I can feel her emotions in the shotgun seat, feel her anxiety and excitement, young Paige’s first-day jitters a living thing in the car with us.
“So should I just, like, jump right in?”
I scowl. “Jump right into what?”
“What?”
I feel her deflate. I feel it emanating from the shotgun seat, the crestfallen silence of someone who had a whole speech ready to roll out.
“Jump into my—oh, I mean—just, like, my life story. When I first knew that I had the sense and everything. How I decided to go into the Service. The whole… I just meant… I don’t know. Sorry.”
She wants to tell me about when she was nineteen years old, or fourteen, or twenty-two, whenever it was that she first saw something in the air, first realized what it was that she was feeling. She wants to tell me how she ignored it at first, because acknowledging and indulging this dangerous feeling would mean abandoning her desire to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or an architect, or whatever, but how she eventually realized that she had a calling, a responsibility, that she could cultivate this new facility, this instinct, bring it up and bring it out, because then she could serve the State and it would be selfish not to, and it was, after all, the least she could do…
And then I would tell her my own version of the story, so similar, I’m sure, to hers, with the only additional complication being my father, and then my brother, Charlie, him having done it all first, sensed it first and followed it first, his brilliance like a sun casting a shadow over my own career.
My mood, which has already been spoiled by the encounter at Terry’s, by the unexpected burden of taking on a junior, is further clouded by this unexpected memory of Charlie, both welcome and unwelcome, a sudden flood of feeling: Charlie and what happened to Charlie. I can feel the smile slide off my face. Just then we pass the House of Pies, another favorite diner of mine, on the northern edge of Los Feliz; I am tempted to pull over, tell Ms. Paige to wait in the car, and get myself a piece of blueberry pie or something to take the edge off the day.
But I don’t. I keep going. We’re almost
