Carter’s car, if that’s what you’d call it, waited for us at the far end of the parking lot. He’d arranged for the Tate brothers to deliver the beast.
Carter owned a 1985 Dodge Ram Charger, a monstrosity of an automobile that sat high off the ground on tires the size of carousels. He had cut the top off because he decided it was easier to throw his surfboards in that way. The seats were torn in different spots, the yellow foam oozing out from beneath the duct tape he’d used to try to cover up the tears.
The 4x4 had originally been painted bright red, but Carter is anything but bright red. So he’d painted it all black, then added white stripes on the sides and back. Sort of a zebra hybrid look. Save for the giant skull and crossbones he’d stenciled on the hood.
Carter’s car.
We drove without talking, the wind slapping around us loudly and urgently as we made our way up the freeway, before exiting and taking the bridges over the southern edge of Mission Bay, past the Bahia Resort Hotel and onto the small isthmus of land between the bay and the ocean that was Mission Beach.
I wasn’t as worried as I should have been about Costilla. I wanted to be anxious, to be nervous, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Kate and where her life had taken her. I figured the panic would set in later. Like when I found Costilla waiting for me in my house or something.
Carter pulled to a halt in front of my place, but the motor under the skull kept humming.
“You could’ve told him you’d drop it,” he said.
I nodded. “Could’ve.”
“Didn’t figure you would, though.”
I opened the door and dropped to the ground, my chin barely over the seat cushion. “You are a think tank.”
He ran a hand through his bleached hair. “Want my thoughts?”
“No.”
He gave them to me anyway. “She was dealing or she was a mule. Why else would she have had contact with Costilla? You don’t buy just a weekend’s worth from him.”
I smoothed a piece of duct tape on the seat. The same thought had crossed my mind, but I couldn’t get it to work for me. I couldn’t picture any thirty-year-old woman from a filthy rich background operating in the heroin trade, and I couldn’t even begin to think that Kate could’ve been involved in something that dark.
Carter gripped the steering wheel. A giant in his giant car. “So she either had her own business going or she delivered for him.”
“Neither makes sense,” I told him.
“We’re not trying to make sense. We’re trying to make a connection.” He stepped on the accelerator, the engine revving like a jet plane. “Gotta go. Got some things to do.”
With Carter, it’s hard to tell. He could’ve meant grocery shopping or he could’ve meant hunting down Costilla.
I didn’t ask.
“Okay,” I said, stepping back and shutting the door. “The service for Kate is tomorrow.”
He nodded. “I never miss a party.”
“Not much of a party.”
He nodded again, stepped on the gas, and peeled out in the alley, smoke trailing behind him as he disappeared.
I went inside my house, more cautious than usual. After I checked in the closets, under the bed, and in the freezer, I settled out on the patio with a beer under the late afternoon sun, watching a few stragglers on the water try to make something of waves that were amounting to nothing.
In college, I had developed an affection for late afternoons on the water. Between my classes during the day and waiting tables at night, it was the one part of the day that I had free to surf. The waves were usually awful, but it never bothered me much. The professors and the restaurant customers couldn’t touch me out there, and I used that time to enjoy myself and keep my head clear.
I sipped at the beer, thinking about how Kate could’ve been connected to Costilla. It became a pointless exercise because I realized I probably didn’t really know Kate anymore. The girl I remembered was gone the second I left Catalina Island, and she had vanished somewhere along the way in the years since I had last seen her.
“Some things never change,” a voice said from behind me.
“I don’t think I ever gave you a key, Liz,” I said, without turning around.
Detective Liz Santangelo came around and sat on the patio wall, her back to the sun and sea. “You didn’t. Door was open.”
“I’m so careless.”
“Might want to change that,” she said, folding her arms across her black blouse and crossing her legs, the white cotton of the capri pants wrinkling at the knees.
I looked past her down to the shoreline. The waves were small and slow, and I knew I wasn’t missing anything out there, as the stragglers gave up and looked back at the water, shaking their heads, wishing for better things from the ocean.
“Yesterday,” I said finally. “I shouldn’t have said what I said.”
“No, you shouldn’t have,” she replied.
I knew that Liz took enough grief from her colleagues about being a woman in a man’s job. I didn’t need to make it tougher for her. I’d been pissed off and out of line.
“So I’m sorry,” I said. “Really.”
She nodded. “Thanks.”
The ocean hitting the shore filled the silence between us. I thought maybe she was surprised at my apology, but I wasn’t sure.
“Were you down at the border earlier today?” she asked.
I drank some more of the beer and squinted at her. “Not that I recall.”
She tilted her head to the left, her eyes narrowing a bit. “Little shoot-out down there this afternoon. Alejandro Costilla and a few of his friends were seen fleeing. One guy dead. Two other guys were seen leaving the outlets.”
“I’ve never cared for outlet shopping. Seems like cheating. Dangerous, too, apparently.”
“Witness says they left in a convertible. A big, God-awful-looking convertible.”
I shook my head. “Convertibles are tough on my hair, Liz. And you know how vain I can be.”
She watched me for a moment. I stared back. I was actually staring over her shoulder, watching two seagulls battle for a hot dog bun in midair, but I didn’t tell her that.
“What the fuck are you doing messing around with Alejandro Costilla?” she finally asked.
“I would have to be an idiot to be messing around with Alejandro Costilla,” I said. “Detective.”
She nodded in agreement. “Yeah. You would have to be an idiot. And most of the time you are.”
I finished the beer and pointed the empty bottle at her. “That was rude. After I apologized and everything. I think you should leave now.”
She stood and sighed deeply, her annoyance with me evident. It was a sigh I’d gotten used to hearing when we’d been together.
“This is bigger than you, Noah,” she said, her voice softening. “Trust me.”
“Trust you?” I said. “What’s bigger than me? Tell me what I don’t know.”
“I can’t,” she said, shaking her head.
“Then if you can’t trust me, why would I trust you?”
“Because I’m telling you to.”
The fact that she wouldn’t tell me what she knew bothered me more than her attitude. Our relationship had always been rocky, personally and professionally, but we’d always been straight with one another. Our paths had crossed professionally over the last couple of years, and while we weren’t best friends, she’d never asked me to get out of the way.
“That’s not enough, Liz, and you know it,” I said. “You knew it before you said it.”
She looked at me for a moment, and I thought maybe she was going to tell me what I was missing. But it passed quickly, replaced by an expression that said she knew better than I did.
“Noah, whatever you’re doing,” she told me, walking by me toward the house, “don’t. Because as good as you think you are, Costilla is better at being bad. Much better.”
I heard the front door close. One of the seagulls gave up the fight for the bun, flew toward me, and landed on the wall, his beady eyes bearing down on me.
No one was on my side.