Page 21

CHAPTER 21

I LIMPED BACK TO the Muscle Beach camp, lugging the backpack and favoring my strained tendons and angry joints. A sea of red and blue lights greeted me. Baby was talking animatedly to a trio of homeless men but came over when she saw me. I told her I’d handed the teen over to the cops who’d responded to the campfire scene.

“How’s the uncle?”

“The EMTs seemed to think it wasn’t that bad,” Baby said. “The dude’s stabbed people before, I’m guessing. Knew how to put him down without killing him. Got him in the belly fat. Missed the liver.”

Together, we watched the street cops question camp dwellers about the incident. My sister’s face was sharp and angular in the light, her eyes narrowed with thought. I felt a quiet rush of pride. One night, this kid was clobbering gunmen with a tire iron to save her own hide, and the next, she was front row for random stabbings on LA’s mean streets. Almost any other sixteen-year-old would have been a weeping mess by now, but not Baby, which was undeniably cool.

Then I questioned the pride I felt, turned it over. It was our father who had hardened Baby like this. Made her strong, resilient, streetwise. But Earl had done that by completely obliterating healthy boundaries. He’d taken her along on stakeouts even when she was a little girl. Brought criminals into their house. Paid for her school lunches with shakedown money. Was my making Baby a partner in the PI agency just a continuation of all that? Shouldn’t my job as her big sister and legal guardian be to stop the danger at our doorstep, not chase after it?

I didn’t have time to pursue those thoughts. Baby broke out of her own reverie and grabbed the backpack from my shoulder.

“Let’s do this thing,” she said.

We walked away from the camp, sat on a low wall, and opened the backpack. I was braced for disappointment, figuring the weasel who had stabbed Oliver Maloof might have sold us a bag of bricks or trash. But the first thing my hand fell on was a torn wallet, inside of which was a driver’s license belonging to Jarrod Maloof. A thump of adrenaline hit my system. I’d do a more thorough examination of all this when we got back home, but for now I took a preliminary glance through the bag’s contents, the detritus of Jarrod’s life. Baby pulled out a battered notebook bound with elastic bands as I picked through candy wrappers and sweat-stained clothes.

“Ugh.” She pushed the back of her hand against her nose as I worked. “The smell is foul .”

Another jolt hit me. Not as sharp as before; something half recognized, darker.

“What?” Baby sensed it.

“The clothes,” I said. I lifted the nearest item, a pair of shorts. “They’re all filthy. They reek of cigarette smoke. Body odor. Even the wallet stinks.” I sniffed it, which awakened the nausea the run had given me.

Baby brushed cigarette ash from the notebook pages as she flipped through a mess of notes and sketches. The notebook was stuffed with random scraps of paper — parking tickets, takeout menus, concert flyers, and water-warped postcards — all of them doodled on. “Dude had no home,” she pointed out. “Hard to score a shower out here. Laundry’s a special occasion.”

“Right,” I said. “So where did that nice clean football jersey in the trophy box come from?”

We sat quietly. I thought about the jersey that had been rolled up tightly and tucked into the plastic zip-lock bag. It had been spotless, pristine. Had it been washed before it was placed in the bag? Preserving that memory of the missing youth without letting the street-life stink infect the rest of the collection? Was that the reason for the zip-lock bags? I was about to share this theory with Baby when she tapped my arm.

I looked over. Baby pointed to a sketch in the notebook that sprawled over two pages, a streetscape of the alley where we sat.

I saw the Muscle Beach camp’s lean-tos and the souvenir shops they nestled behind. I saw a telephone pole with dark, deliberate lines reaching from it that seemed to depict wires sagging in the heat. A sharply etched figure of a repairman in a harness hung from the pole, working on the wires.

I looked down the alley and saw what seemed to be the pole from the drawing. Twenty feet up, a Public Utilities Commission box was bolted just beneath the crossbar, the shiny new steel gleaming in the red and blue lights.