According to Yash, Daley had been wearing skinny jeans with high cuffs, flip-flops, and a black hoodie that read “I’m not as stupid as I look” on the front. She had had a black backpack slung over one shoulder.
Yash said that Daley bought an energy drink and three candy bars — the same ones I’d seen evidence of in her home wastebasket.
“When she paid, she was distracted,” said Yash. “And maybe angry. I asked her if she was having a good morning and she said it was none of my business. She paid and put the drink and candy in her backpack and zipped it up quickly. I had been reading a fantasy novel because the graveyard shift is slow, and she saw it and said, ‘Why read that? Real life is weird enough, isn’t it?’”
Then Daley walked out, and that was when Yash had seen the punchline of the joke on the back of her hoodie: “Are you?” Daley was halfway across the parking lot when a silver SUV pulled in and a man got out and started arguing with her. He was approximately thirty years old, an Anglo, dressed in chinos and a white dress shirt. He seemed to be ridiculing her, and she “got in his face” and defended herself. There was no physical contact, just words and gesturing. Then he opened a back door and she took the backpack off her shoulder and climbed in.
Yash said that the vehicle had writing on the driver’s-side door, but he couldn’t read it with the headlight beams coming through the store windows. The SUV pulled onto El Camino Real and headed south.
The police arrived five minutes later, asking Yash if he’d seen a girl who matched Daley’s description. They described her accurately. It was three thirty-five. The officers didn’t seem particularly concerned about the girl, and they bought coffee before they left.
They were sitting in their car when a yellow Volkswagen Beetle skidded into the 7-Eleven parking lot, went straight into the handicapped-only slot, and a “curly-haired woman came flying into the store. She was maybe twenty-five. Small and pretty.”
Then the officers came back in and got into a three-way argument with the woman, and she broke away from them and started asking Yash questions about the girl. She said her sister was in trouble and she criticized him for not helping her, then she “verbally attacked” the officers for not getting there sooner, and they physically escorted her to their car and locked her in the back seat. Yash could see her, her face a blur behind the glass and the metal screen inside. Two more police cars arrived shortly. Their lights were flashing but no sirens.
They let the older sister out of the cruiser, and after a “ten-minute discussion,” the police let her come back inside the store. Yash answered her questions politely and hoped she wouldn’t start screaming at him, too. But she had calmed down by then, and Yash saw that she was not drunk or deranged at all but was very worried. She wrote her name and number on a complimentary snack napkin and ordered him, politely, to call if he saw her sister again.
I thanked Yash and handed him a business card. Told him the same thing Penelope had told him. “Or if you remember something that might help me locate her,” I added. “But call the police first.”
“Yes, of course.”
The three of us shook hands.
“You forgot something,” said Burt, looking up at Yash with his odd smile. Some of Burt’s bottom teeth show a little when he smiles, and if he’s looking up at you — which is often, because he’s short — the smile looks half jolly and half diabolical. I might know Burt well enough to say it’s mostly jolly, but I really might not. He has a strangely persuasive effect on some people.
“What did I forget?” asked Yash.
“Everyone forgets something,” said Burt.
Yash frowned down at Burt, brow furrowed, as if trying to take the man and his question seriously.
“She asked if we sell burner phones,” said Yash. “The younger sister. I just remembered that.”
“And?” asked Burt
“No, we don’t,” said Yash. “I told her to try Walmart.”
“Glad I asked.”
“And I always remember everything,” said Yash, looking puzzled. “There’s nothing else to do with a job as boring as mine.”
14
Burt and I walked south down the beach at San Onofre, past the prime surf breaks — the Point and Old Man’s and Dog Patch. I’m almost a foot taller than Burt — I was six-three and two hundred ten pounds as the heavyweight Rolling Thunder Ford — and I take long steps. But I was moving slowly that day and Burt had no trouble keeping up with me over the rock-studded beach.
I told him I’d struck out with Pastor Reggie Atlas, but that he appeared to be worried for himself and his family. Burt took that in short stride.
“Any clear reason why?” he asked.
“Nick Moreno. A missing girl who had possibly visited his church not long ago. My face.”
“Preachers know more secrets than shrinks.”
“One long confession,” I said.
“He’s hiding something.”
Which is what I had figured, too. “Aren’t we all?”
“True,” said Burt. “But trite.”
The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station shimmered in the sun up ahead of us, its two nippled domes rising like enormous concrete breasts from the sand. Thick black power lines laced the sky above the structure, lines that once carried rivers of electricity up over the Camp Pendleton hills and deep into Orange County.
No more. No more plumes of steam rising into the air. The station had been closed for six years now, following the failure of suspect Mitsubishi steam generators. The plant operator, Southern California Edison, claimed that the generators were defective and had failed years ahead of schedule. Mitsubishi disagreed and refused to replace or repair them. Which left rate payers on the hook for the plant closure and decommissioning, buying more expensive electricity elsewhere, and, most important, the four-billion-dollar cost of storing the waste.
No one in their right mind wanted it here. Not in our state. Not with Nevada and New Mexico offering to take it off our hands for a fee. Much the same story as other nuclear power plants across our land.
Now, as Burt and I approached, a mere eighteen hundred tons of deadly radioactive waste waited in limbo in temporary cooling pools and storage canisters buried somewhere down near the shoreline. All subject to time, design flaws, maintenance oversights, monitoring failures, leaks, earthquakes, tsunamis, and terrorist explosives.
But on a beautiful September afternoon like this, no one was thinking about such lethal surprises. Clear skies, mid-seventies, four- to six-foot waves and a mild offshore breeze to hold them upright. Pale green cylinders, thin-lipped and top-dusted. Crowded, as California breaks almost always are. I surfed until I went to war and never since. I don’t know why.
We came to Old Man’s, long the home of the San Onofre Surfing Club. Mom and Dad were active members back in the sixties and I joined myself as a college kid at SDSU. Ground zero of the club is the shack, which is just that, a rudimentary, unwalled frame of lumber for propping up longboards, holding up tarps for shade, providing a hint of cover for the occasional beer. Nearby, trees and tables and outdoor showers.
Surfers, mostly young, were hanging around the shack, some sprawled in the sand for warmth. Beyond the skeletal structure, the waves rolled in in near perfect symmetry. I talked to some of the boys, but only a few had been here on Wednesday afternoon, and none had seen a girl who looked like the picture on my phone.
Finally, one of them, barely a high schooler by the look of him, had been here late last Tuesday afternoon — the day after Daley Rideout had left Monarch. Yes, he said, he’d noticed a girl and two men who weren’t club members or locals. He peeled off his wetsuit, teeth chattering and hair dripping, looking at my phone screen as I swiped through the pictures of Daley Rideout for him. He nodded.