“Nothing. Just relaxing.”
“I made a picnic with my son and I’d like you to meet him.”
“Sure. Why don’t you guys come down here. We could eat at the beach.”
Stanton gave his address and then went to put the sandwich in the fridge. When he opened the fridge door, he was embarrassed of what was inside. There was deli meat, bread, mayonnaise, ketchup, an old container of pesto sauce, and a few bottles of juice. Nothing else. Melissa used to do all their grocery shopping and going to the store made him uncomfortable.
Twenty minutes later a silver Volvo pulled to a stop in front of his apartment. He walked down and met them. The boy was handsome with long eyelashes, and fully involved on his Iphone.
“Hey,” she said as she walked over to him. Instinctively, without a thought, she pecked him on the cheek. “Sorry. Habit.”
“No worries. Who’s this?”
“This is Andrew. Andrew, say hello.”
“Hello,” he said without looking up.
“He’s a real talker as you can see.”
Stanton looked down the beach and saw surfers coming back for a lunch break. “We should eat at the beach. Has he ever surfed?”
“Once or twice.”
“Hey, Andrew, do you like surfing?”
“Yeah,” he said, finally looking up.
“Well I happen to have a board just your size. You wanna head down with me?”
“Sure.”
They went upstairs to the apartment and Stanton changed into a bathing suit. Mathew had a few suits here and he got one that would fit Andrew. They picked up two surfboards from the apartment storage room Stanton rented for a monthly fee and some surfwax and headed onto the beach.
The water appeared blue and clear; a soft breeze blowing over it and causing ripples. Jessica set up a blanket and began preparing sandwiches out of a basket she had brought with her. Stanton and Andrew were closer to the water, going over the basics of paddling and keeping your balance on the board. When Andrew felt ready, they ran into the water.
It was warm today and Stanton was glad he didn’t have to wear a wetsuit. He enjoyed the feel of ocean against his skin and the salty taste as it splashed up onto his lips. Morning was best, when no one was out here and the sun was just beginning to rise. It would sometimes reflect off the water so fiercely the entire ocean looked like it had been dyed orange. Night surfing was second best. It was occasionally so quiet Stanton could hear the cries of whales farther offshore.
They paddled out far from the beach and Stanton yelled a few instructions to Andrew before they caught their wave. Stanton lay flat for awhile, letting the wave dictate where he went before hopping to his feet. He glanced at Andrew and he was still lying on his belly. Stanton motioned with his hand for him to rise but he shook his head.
They surfed only half an hour before Andrew said he had had enough. Toward the end he attempted to stand once and immediately fell over.
As they walked back onto the beach Andrew said he didn’t like surfing.
“You have to get used to letting the ocean be in control,” Stanton said. “We’re used to guiding ourselves everyday but it’s not like that out there. You have to give yourself up completely to the ocean. Once you do that, you’ll become just an extension of it and instead of fighting it you’ll be part of it. Some of the top surfers even say they can predict where the ocean will go, how it will move, just by feeling.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
They ate sandwiches and drank Perrier until the afternoon. Andrew talked about school and his friends, about he and his father’s trip up to Alaska to fish, and about all the other things that were going on in his life. His mother grinned the whole time and Stanton knew he wasn’t normally like this. The ocean had that effect on people.
When they finished and were saying good-bye near Jessica’s car, she loaded Andrew in and gave Stanton a quick kiss on the lips. It was dry, but there was a sweetness and familiarity to it that Stanton had missed.
As they drove away he stood and watched, the image of Tami Jacobs in her bed pushed out of his mind.
21
Stanton went into work early on Monday. Their unit meeting was scheduled for ten o’clock and he wanted to get a few hours of work in before that. The floor was empty except for a few offices that had their lights on and he found the silence relaxing as he went to his office and booted up his computer. While he waited for the monitor to warm up, he looked out to the passing traffic and was grateful he had the window.
He logged into the SDPD intranet using the password the administrator emailed him and went to the human resources tab. He found the file for Francisco Hernandez.
Francisco’s life was a story Stanton had heard before. He had grown up in a gang and had a record as a juvenile that he had gotten expunged. At nineteen he had pulled himself away from his gang life and joined the police department to help clean up the degradation of his neighborhood he must’ve seen. He didn’t graduate high school but finished his GED later in life and then an associate’s degree in criminal justice at a local city college when he was twenty-two.
His third year on the force, he was involved in a shooting. A young Mexican kid tried to shoot him when he had pulled him over for speeding. Francisco managed to fire two rounds before being run over by the car. After any officer involved shooting, it was standard procedure to have a visit with the precinct psychiatrist and have him write a psychological profile and clear the officer for duty. Stanton searched for the profile, but didn’t find it. It was confidential and wouldn’t be in the HR file.
He rose and went to Tommy’s office.
Tommy had his feet up on the desk and was talking softly on the phone. So softly in fact that Stanton had thought he wasn’t in. He sat down across from him and waited. Tommy made a motion of one minute and then continued to speak. He appeared to be placing an order for something but when the conversation was done he said, “Love you.”
“I need a favor, Tommy.”
“So soon?”
Stanton threw an envelope with five thousand in cash on the desk. “That should buy me one favor I think.”
“What happened?”
“I saved the department some scratch. Like I said, I think it buys me one favor.”
“Depends what the favor is.”
“I need the psych profile for a detective.”
Tommy stared at him a moment and then burst out in laughter. “Can’t you ever ask for a credit card to buy gas or a new gun or something like that?”
“I don’t need those things. I need a psych profile.”
“Why? Oh wait, let me guess, you can’t tell me?”
“I could but I prefer not to.”
“Well, indulge me, Detective. Please.”
“I want to find something I can use to convince the detective to give me the information I need.”
“You mean blackmail?”
“No, I don’t. Just something that can give me some insight into him.”
“That’s out there. Even for you. What’s going on?”
Stanton looked out the window. The building across the street had construction crews on the roof and they were standing around in the morning sunlight, two of them hard at work and the others laughing and joking.
“I can’t get this girl out of my head, Tommy. She came here looking for a new start because her life back home was so messed up. What she found instead was the grim reaper waiting for her in her apartment one Wednesday night. She was twenty-three, a kid, and she went through just about as much pain as a human being can go through before she died. She deserves something for that, Tommy. She deserves me to get this guy.”
Tommy thought about what he said and then straightened up in his chair. “You’ve always had a way with words. Who’s the detective?”
“Francisco Hernandez. He’s in Vice.”
“We could both lose our jobs for this. You know that, right?”