Sneak looked terrible in the morning light. She sat on the stool on the other side of my kitchen counter, her chin on her folded forearms, watching me top up the gopher’s food. I rinsed out the bottle cap we were using for his water bowl. There were big, dark circles under Sneak’s eyes and a bloody crust at the side of one nostril, probably from a night spent snorting bad coke, I thought.
‘We need a better arrangement for the gopher,’ I announced, shifting the little animal from one side of the box to the other so I could take away the shredded mound of paper towel that served as a bed, and replace it with fresh stuff. ‘There are scrapes and scratches inside the container here as if he’s been trying to chew his way out.’
‘Hmm,’ Sneak grunted.
‘It’s cruel, him being in a container all day, where he can’t see out. Must be like being in a padded room in an asylum.’
Sneak looked at the coffee I’d made her, but didn’t touch it.
‘Did you hear me?’ I asked.
‘Is Dayly dead?’ she responded. I picked up the gopher and held him in my palm. The animal took up a seed stuck to my thumb and pushed it into its furry mouth, sat crunching happily.
‘Sneak,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how to answer that.’
‘I’d have heard something by now if she wasn’t dead,’ Sneak said. ‘I’m not her favourite person in the world, but she wouldn’t leave me hanging like this. Is she dead or not?’
‘I can’t give you an answer,’ I said.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I just need to say it out loud. It’s been three days. The question keeps rolling around in my skull. Is she dead? Is she dead? Is she dead? If I don’t say it out loud it’ll be me in the asylum.’
There was a knock at the door. Sneak sat upright on her stool. ‘Who’s that?’
‘I don’t know. I’m not expecting anyone.’
I saw the badge immediately when I opened the door, hanging on a chain around her neck. County of Los Angeles Probation Dept. The image seared into my eyes like a blast of sunlight. I didn’t get a look at the woman. The clipboard and the badge hit me, left me blind, stunned.
This is what you wanted, isn’t it? a voice inside me said. You wanted it all to be over. You wanted to go home. Well, it’s happening now.
‘Blair Gabrielle Harbour?’
‘Oh god,’ I said.
‘Not god.’ The woman smirked, flipped the badge on her hefty chest. ‘Jasmine Bahru, Probation. May I enter the premises, please?’
I held the door open, my limbs already seizing with terror and dread. When I turned, I saw that Sneak was gone from the stool by the counter. She’d disappeared like an apparition; her bag had vanished from the couch. I listened but heard nothing at the back of the apartment. There was no way out that way, no back door into the shared courtyard like other apartments had.
‘I’m here to conduct a routine inspection of your living arrangements, Blair.’ Jasmine dumped the clipboard on the coffee table and went straight into the kitchen. ‘Could you please sign here to indicate that you’ve permitted me access to the property?’ I’d had routine inspections from parole officers before, but never an unannounced one, and never one so straightforward and determined. Usually there was small talk. An almost apologetic stroll around the kitchen, the offer and refusal of coffee. Jasmine started pulling open cupboard doors, shifting aside bottles and cans. She peered into my refrigerator, bent to see what was on every shelf.
I signed the document on the coffee table without looking at it. ‘There’s alcohol in the freezer. A bottle of vodka. Alcohol is not one of my restrictions.’
‘I’ll check up on that,’ Jasmine said. ‘Is there anyone else living here in the apartment?’
‘No, just me.’
‘So why are there two coffee cups here on the counter?’
‘One’s from last night. I haven’t done the washing-up yet.’
Jasmine lifted my empty coffee cup and held it in her palm, testing its temperature. We stared at each other. An icy tension rung in the air, the unspoken knowledge that she had come here to get me, and that I could do nothing but allow it to happen, roll over like a dog and let her put her teeth around my throat. I wiped my sweating palms on my jeans.
‘Anything you want to know?’ I asked.
‘Everything I need to know is right here.’ She gestured to the apartment. ‘What’s with the birdseed?’
I went into the kitchen. The gopher’s box was not on the counter. My tongue felt heavy in my mouth.
‘I like to feed the birds. At the park.’
‘You feed them dried grass?’ She picked up the container on the windowsill.
‘Some birds like that,’ I wheezed, thumped my chest. ‘Pigeons?’
‘It’s a public nuisance to feed pigeons.’
I swallowed. ‘Is it illegal?’
‘It’s a municipal code thing. Depends on where the park is. Where’s the park?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘You don’t know?’
‘I don’t remember.’
She stared at me for a while and then went into the bedroom. I winced as she opened the cupboards. I expected she’d find Sneak there, crouched behind a row of Pump’n’Jump polos. I stood in the doorway while Jasmine conducted a thorough search of my drawers, my dresser. She looked under the mattress, in the hall cupboard. I silently thanked past-Blair for refusing Ada’s gun. In the bathroom doorway she took a plastic cup from her bag and handed it to me.
‘Let’s go.’ She gestured to the toilet. I sat and urinated into the cup in full view of her, as I had a hundred times before in front of parole officers, police officers, prison guards and a variety of other law enforcement officials. She slipped a drug-test strip into the cup on the counter and I watched the colours turn in my favour. The corner of her mouth twitched, red lipstick on dark brown skin. She headed for the door.
A rustle. Jasmine turned towards me. I fixed myself and stood, my face burning.
‘So that’s it, then,’ I said.
She pushed past me to the bathroom vanity and wrenched open the doors. The gopher’s ice cream container rattled as she threw it on the counter, seed spilling inside.
‘What the hell is in there?’ she asked.
‘A gopher,’ I said grimly. She peeled a corner of the container up and peered inside, shut it tightly.
‘Right.’ She sighed and left the room. In the living room, I watched her snatch up her clipboard.
‘Having pets is not one of my parole restrictions,’ I said, my throat tightening.
‘No,’ she said. ‘But maintaining steady accommodation is. This building is rent-controlled. Pets are prohibited. I’m putting it in your report that you have deliberately sabotaged the conditions of your parole.’
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Look, it’s not my—’
‘There’ll likely be a review of your circumstances following this revelation, Ms Harbour.’ She wrote something on the paper with a flourish. ‘You can expect a call from the department within the next twenty-four hours.’
This is what you wanted, I thought. A mixture of dread and sweet, sweet relief flooded over me, warm honey sliding down my neck and shoulders. This is what I had been playing at all along, creeping softly into dangerous territory, following Sneak’s siren call. This was why I had let a possibly wanted lifelong criminal sleep in my house, sit on my couch and do drugs. Why I had gone with her to visit a crime lord. Why I had accepted dirty money and a gangster car from that crime lord, why I continued to pursue a dangerous investigation that was none of my business. It was this moment, the instant it all came crashing down. The fall. The backwards plunge. I’d felt it when I was arrested, the sickening ease of knowing my life and freedom were no longer in my hands. My job was gone. My child was gone. My friends were gone. In a few days I’d be back in Happy Valley, where nothing mattered, where I was required to do and think and be nothing.
You don’t have to jump off a cliff. You just have to lean back, put your arms out, and let the gravity take you. Float away.
I found my fists clenching as Jasmine walked to the door and closed it behind her.
Give up, my mind said.
‘Fuck you,’ I said aloud.
I went to the bedroom and ripped the sheet back from the mattress. They always look under the mattress, but they never pull off the sheets. The stack of notes Ada Maverick had given Sneak and me was fanned under the spot where my pillow would rest, some slipping down the bed. I gathered a handful and folded it as I ran to the front door and out across the lawn.
Jasmine Bahru was sitting in her red Kia, writing more words on her clipboard. I knocked on the window and she wound it down.
‘Don’t hand in that report,’ I said. She stared at me. I steadied myself against the car with one arm, my hand hanging down in Jasmine’s view, and let a couple of the notes fan from my fingers. Jasmine looked at the notes, then at me.
‘Are you offering me a bribe, Ms Harbour?’
‘You came here to fuck me,’ I said. ‘That much was clear from the moment you walked in. The gopher in the bathroom is a stretch, and you know it, but you were determined to catch me on something. I don’t know what you’ve got against me, but let me try to even things out.’
Jasmine sat, watching me. I stood on the kerb with nothing to lose. She could see it. The emptiness, the wildness. She reached up and took the notes from my fingers, counted them. Eight hundred bucks. She peeled the page off the clipboard and handed it to me. I watched her drive away, feeling tremors start in my fingers and feet.
‘Sneak?’ I called when I got back to the apartment.
‘Help!’
I rushed to the bathroom. Sneak’s legs and ass were hanging out of a manhole in the ceiling, her skirt caught on the edge of the opening. Rippling cellulite, white butt in a purple G-string. I grabbed her legs and did little to help her flop to the ground.
‘How the hell did you get up there?’
‘I’m a gymnast,’ she reminded me. ‘And a drug addict. The easy part of both jobs is getting up. It’s coming down that’s hard.’
I pondered the deeper philosophical meanings of that while I examined the paper Jasmine had given me, sweat-damp and smeared from my hands. It was filled out in full. She had been citing me for breach of efforts to maintain stable accommodation, as she declared she would.
I was familiar with parole reports. What I was looking for was not the report’s breach contents, but a line close to the top of the page. I usually did little to arouse the suspicions of authorities. I lived a good, clean life. There was a box that normally remained empty. But this time, there was a name in the section that read ‘Recommending officer’, the space to record the police or prison authority who had called the parole office, recommending someone check up on me.
‘Detective Al Tasik,’ I read, touching the page.
My phone rang. I went to the counter and picked it up. An unknown number. Ada Maverick’s voice was unmistakeable.
‘I’m gonna give you an address,’ Ada said. ‘Meet me there.’
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Is everything okay?’
‘I got your boy here,’ she said. I heard a whimpering sound in the background, like a dog makes when someone treads on its toes. ‘Dayly’s boyfriend. Come help me play with him.’