I PUNCHED IT TO GET BACK to Bluebird Canyon, hoping to catch said cholo before he took off again. I told Wade that Yegua had seen the guy parked by my house and that I thought it might have something to do with Terry.
Wade said, “Dude, you think you’re being watched?”
“I start asking questions about Terry,” I said. “And now there’s some guy parked in front of my house. Don’t tell me I’m paranoid.”
“Whatever,” Wade said.
“Don’t fucking whatever me, Wade. Pornography? Thirteenth stepping? I didn’t even know Terry hung out at those houses, and now I’m hearing that it was some kind of fuck festival over there?”
“What are you talking about?” Wade said.
“T-Bone said Terry was a thirteenth stepper. He said he was hanging with girls at the houses who were doing amateur porn.”
“It’s news to me, too.”
“Bullshit, Wade. There’s nothing around this town that’s news to you. When a bird falls from a tree outside an A.A. meeting, you hear about it. You want me to believe you didn’t hear about this?”
“I didn’t hear about this,” Wade said evenly.
I turned back to Troy, figuring he was the one I really should have been interrogating. “You’re living in one of those houses. You didn’t know about this, either?”
“I knew about it, but I also didn’t know about it.”
“Explain that to me, please.”
“It makes sense of some things that I heard.”
As much as I wanted to know what that meant, just as we came up Bluebird Canyon, I spotted a battered old Suburban across the street from my house. The driver seemed pretty convinced of his invisibility until I passed my driveway and pulled up beside him. I leaned on my steering wheel and stared through Wade’s window. No more than thirty, the guy looked like a refugee from 1969, with his unkempt beard and authentically dirty long hair. He might have been handsome, in that old-fashioned Protestant-surfer-Jesus way, but his attitude was too grim for that. He stared back at me with sharp, angry eyes.
He didn’t confront me the way I thought he might. Nor did he cower. Those sharp, angry eyes just kept it up. How’s a stalker supposed to look at you anyway? Defiantly? This guy seemed pissed off, all right, but he was also contained.
But when I rolled down Wade’s window to speak with him, he suddenly slammed his Suburban into gear and pounded a U-turn around my truck in the opposite direction. Maybe he didn’t want to play the staring game anymore.
I gave him a moment to make it up the road. Then I followed him.
It was twilight as we wound our way through the switchbacks into the hills.
“Why are we following this guy?” Wade asked.
“We’re not following this guy,” I said. “I’m following this guy. You’re my unfortunate passengers.”
“Did he do something to you?” Wade asked.
“He’s been parking across the street from my house,” I said. “I told you that.”
“You’re going to beat up some guy whose only crime is parking down the street from your house? Don’t get all Patriot Act on me, dude.”
The ancient Suburban’s brake lights flashed ahead of us. I slowed down.
“Am I allowed to talk now?” Troy said.
“Are you going to say anything that will piss me off?” I said.
“Is there anything that won’t piss you off?”
“Good job, Troy. You’ve answered your own question.”
We turned up Oro into the hills as the Suburban slowed down and turned in to a driveway. The house was a boxy one-story that had been tarted up with solar panels on the roof, a stainless-steel garage door, and a Zen rock garden.
I turned off my headlights and parked far enough down the road where my truck wouldn’t be seen. Something told me that he didn’t live here: he wasn’t the solar panel/Zen garden type of guy.
Confirming my hunch, Surfer Jesus knocked on the front door, then waited. When the door opened, I recognized the face.
“That’s Colin Alvarez,” I said. “Why is this dude going to see Colin Alvarez? The guy who’s been stalking me just drove to a recovery house?”
“I don’t think that’s a recovery house,” Troy said. “I think that’s Colin’s own house.”
At this, Wade dove into my glove compartment for a pen and a piece of paper. He started to write.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Taking the guy’s license plate,” Wade said. “Weren’t you a cop once?”
I was still counting the coincidences as Surfer Jesus spoke with Colin on the front porch. It seemed like a polite conversation, though Colin wasn’t inviting him inside. Eventually, he gave the guy a pat on the shoulder, and Surfer Jesus nodded and walked back to his car. It would have been so easy to intercept him on the way back down the driveway, but I had his license plate, and I was already more pissed off at Colin Alvarez for being the destination than I was at Surfer Jesus for driving there.
I stepped out onto the street and turned back toward my companions. “Don’t even think about getting out of this vehicle while I’m up there.”
The door before me was tomato red and as solid as hands could fabricate. I wanted to bounce it off its hinges and take it home. After firebombing everything else.
I knocked hard on the door, which was almost immediately answered by Colin Alvarez. He was clearly surprised to see me. About an inch or two taller than I was but not much heavier, he practiced some kind of fashionable martial art. I’d never liked Colin, but fortunately, he’d never liked me, either.
He said, “You started an interesting discussion at Knife in the Head tonight.”
“You have a video link to the Coastal Club?” That bald hipster who worked for him must have been on the phone with the boss before we even left the parking lot. Colin hadn’t asked me why I was standing on his porch. “Why was that asshole posted in front of my house?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Randy, but I wish you would take down your tone.”
“The fucker who was just here, Colin. Why was he watching my house?”
“Mutt?” he said. “Mutt was watching your house?”
That was the sound of Claire’s story clicking into place. “Let me guess, Colin. Mutt wouldn’t happen to be an electrician, would he?”
Colin looked genuinely confused, which wasn’t usually the way he looked. I didn’t trust him. I asked again why the fuck this guy was watching my house.
“I barely know the guy, Randy. He’s looking for a place to live. I was going to help him find a place at one of my houses, but—”
“But what? Do newcomers usually stop by your Zen palace in the middle of the night looking for a bed? Why don’t you cut the bullshit?”
“Because that’s the truth, Randy.”
Some might argue that this would have been a good time to give Colin the benefit of the doubt, regroup, pursue some other avenues toward what the hell was or wasn’t going on. But if my intention had been to think strategically, that bird was about to fly south with a lot of other good ideas I had ignored recently.
“It is a nice house,” I said. “How many newcomers do you need to extort in order to cover the mortgage?”
Colin’s gaze became tight and fixed. Apparently, I wasn’t “taking down” my tone.
“You stroll into meetings when you feel like it,” Colin said. “People see your big truck and they know about your wonderful new life. But where are you going to be when these newcomers are drunk in a ditch? I help people on a level that you can’t even comprehend. I get that you’re unsettled by Terry’s death, and you’re on a bit of a dry drunk. But you should calm the fuck down.”
From down the street, I heard my truck door opening. We both looked to see Wade standing near the end of Colin’s driveway, his arms crossed. Troy waited inside the truck, out of sight.
If Colin wasn’t scared of me, he really wasn’t scared of Wade. He got up into my face. “I want you and your crew to get the fuck off my property. Unless you feel like beating another Mexican? How long has it been, man?”
Wade’s shoes slapped up the driveway.
A regular Gandhi, I held up my hands, and I calmly backed away. Fortunately, Colin seemed to have his own anger management issues: he followed me onto the driveway and came a little too close to my face with the sharp end of his index finger. I caught his arm and yanked it back up behind him, driving him down into the concrete. If I’d still been a cop, I could have cuffed him. Instead, I bent his arm right to the edge of popping out his shoulder. By the time he got himself up, I was pushing Wade back into the truck.