Page 6

JULIA

The helicopter is leaving at dawn from a pad at Long Beach. Tonya’s going to drive me so she can hang onto Black Beauty, but she’ll take an taxi on Saturday because the cost of parking overnight is not a joke.

Tonya slams the tail gate shut. “I need you to be careful,” she says while holding the gate to make sure it’s latched.

“Yeah. No prob.” I start toward the cab, but she doesn’t follow.

“Don’t play with me.”

“I’m not playing.”

She doesn’t move.

“What?”

“I’m not trying to be that way.” She lets go of the gate. Holds her hand over it. The latch holds.

“But?” I join her in the back.

“I stayed up late and looked up that house, just to get a bead on the scope of work.”

One of the two of us has to be the brains of the operation and it’s not me.

Jobs have a way of expanding, and sometimes you can tell right off if one is going to go long.

It can be a habitually sloppy contractor or an expected chain of renovations on a property that hasn’t been upgraded since the Reagan years.

That means extra hires not included in the original proposal or a reschedule of everything for the rest of the quarter.

“Do you think it’s going to be a lot?” I ask.

“Yes and no. It’s a compound, and just…” She takes a deep breath and puts her hands in her pockets. “The address showed up in a lawsuit.”

“And? That’s not the weirdest.”

“The bad kind of lawsuit.”

“As opposed to?—?”

“Don’t freak out,” Tonya says.

“I won’t freak out.”

“Swear?”

“No. Tell me anyway before you make me late.”

“It was a civil suit by a woman who went to a party at that address. When she was fourteen.”

“Ah.” No more explanation is necessary. She didn’t want to tell me because of what happened to my sister when she was around that age. I appreciate her handling it delicately, but I wish she didn’t have to. “Did she win?”

“Out of court settlement, so?—”

“So she got money but not justice.”

“Something like that. Anyway. The place was sold to a shell company out of Delaware.”

“Who’s behind it?”

“No clue.”

“Do you think I shouldn’t go?” I ask.

“Do you think you shouldn’t go?”

As I pause to think about it, the tail gate flops down. It’s just a bad latch, but it’s only the most visible thing wrong with our Beauty.

“On the one hand, I don’t think I have a choice.” I reach into the cab for the bucket of tightly arranged bungee cords and pop open the lid. “On the other, I’m too old for people like that.”

I hold the bucket out to Tonya and she plucks out a cord.

“The vibes though.”

“Vibes never hurt me.” I grab another cord. Together, we bungee the tail gate shut then drive out to Long Beach.

We get to the helipad just in time and discover the Duke name plastered onto the side of the helicopter.

“Fuck,” I sigh.

“His name didn’t come up on anything I looked at last night.”

“But I should have known.”

We get out. Tonya unloops the bungee so the tail gate can drop. She gets up in the cab. I scan the helipad platform. Empty. Just the copter and two pilots drinking coffee. No limos with American flags waving from the hood. No bullet-proof SUVs with douche-concealing tinted windows.

“I don’t see him.” Tonya pushes forward the small case with the power tools. We lift it down and pop out the wheels.

“It’s fine. Carol probably borrowed it to give me the ride.”

“You ever been on a helicopter before?” She hands me my toolbox.

“Nope.”

“It’s fun. Just pretend it doesn’t have that nastiness painted on the outside.”

Tonya wasn’t born rich, but she was born beautiful, and that was enough to get her all kinds of experiences. College, for one—paid for by a man who had a job that couldn’t be put on a resume and a heart too hard to care that she left him the day she graduated.

I put my father’s toolbox on top of the wheelie crate and give her a goodbye hug.

“Go, already,” she says, bungeeing the tail gate.

“Carol said she’d bring you over when you’re done.”

“I’m taking a boat. I won’t be caught dead in that thing.”

Can’t say I blame her.