THE FIRST TIME I TRIED to reach Crash was right after putting Emma into MP’s arms.

We’d been taken to the police station on Forest Avenue, where Clancy and Cardenas and DEA agents and attorneys of different varieties mostly looked us over because they had no idea what questions to ask. Colin was in a world of shit, and what had happened on the beach was only a small part of it. Betsy came by and then Manny came by and then Wade called MP. Which was the thing that made the biggest difference to me, because I knew as soon as I saw her that she could help Emma like no one else could. I cried when I realized that, which must have further confused the shit out of my various interrogators. And so right after Manny and Betsy convinced the cops that I could leave for a while with Wade, I convinced the cops that Emma could leave for a while with MP. After that, I started to breathe again, and I called my daughter. But she didn’t answer.

Fifteen minutes later, I called her again. And then again five minutes after that. Except when she’d been out of the country with her mother, she’d never taken longer than a half hour to return my calls, not since I’d given her a cell phone three years ago. One time Jean had made me sit her down and tell her not to text-message me from the classroom. The absence of her response was like a gaping bloody hole in my chest. Yeah, sure, maybe she was in the dentist’s chair or backpacking in the Sierras, maybe she was taking a practice test for the SAT, but I more or less knew that my daughter was putting a wall between me and her life, and that was about the worst thing I could imagine.

Troy drove my truck and I rode shotgun while Wade leaned forward from the backseat. Wade kept his hand on my shoulder as we drove south. If someone had brought the Preamble, we could have held an A.A. meeting. They took me to dinner at the Penguin because it was the next right thing they knew to do.

The Penguin was an unremarkable, very small breakfasty joint that had been Crash’s favorite restaurant right after my divorce from Jean. One morning when she was about five, we ordered pancakes. Crash started crying because they weren’t silver-dollar pancakes, the kind Jean made. Too many things had changed too quickly. I grabbed a coffee mug and started punching small pancakes out of the larger ones. There you go, sweetheart, silver-dollar pancakes. She stopped crying. At that moment I was the greatest designer in the world.

If Wade had known the same daughter wasn’t returning my calls, he would have taken us somewhere else. Eating turned out to be a good move, though. As we sat down, Yegua called to say that my house was being taken apart by the cops—Cardenas and Clancy were having a hard time letting go. I wasn’t worried that they would find anything. Since I’d been in business with the totally scrupulous Jeep Mooney, she hadn’t even let me cheat on my taxes.

Unfortunately, Wade and Troy had more on their minds than feeding me. Wade thought it would be good if I went ahead and took Troy’s fifth step, right then and there.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I said.

“You told him you would do it,” Wade said. “Frankly, I think it’s a good idea.”

“Frankly?” I said. “Stop acting like some kind of professional A.A. Can’t I just this one time take a break?”

“No breaks,” Wade said. “You’re not the patient here today.”

I studied Wade. He nodded like an old-timer—like he was not only wiser than me but more humble about it.

“I’m not judging you,” he said. “I’m just being your friend. If my life were at stake, you wouldn’t cut me an inch of fucking slack. I love you, Randy.”

Wade started to tear up and, goddammit, so did I.

“I cut Terry too much slack,” I said. “I should have never let him out of my sight.” I was thinking about Mutt Kelly too. He could have been sitting at this table with us. But I wasn’t ready to talk about that yet. Some wounds you have to let fester for a while.

“Don’t go bogarting all the blame for Terry,” Wade said. “Because the wind’s blowing through my guts right now, too.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

I looked up to see Emma standing outside the restaurant, with her face up between the big letters P and E painted on the window. My heart leaped to see her, but then it did a backflip when I saw MP standing beside her. I was up and out of my seat and out the door before you could say “daily reprieve contingent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition.”

Without thinking about it, I threw my arms around MP. But then, wondering if that was kind of selfish, I grabbed Emma and pulled her into the bear hug, too. Maybe it looked like I was going to start crying again, because MP said, “I know, sweetheart, I know.”

I held on to MP, but I didn’t know what to say to her. I had something to say to Emma, though. “I’m sorry I didn’t take better care of you.”

“No worries,” Emma said. “I’m going to train you. After MP gets done training me.”

MP smiled cautiously. “You and I are going to talk. But maybe not today.”

“Today,” I said, “you’ve got your hands full.”

When I got back to the table, I checked my phone. Crash still hadn’t called me back. I looked at Troy. “Let’s do it.”

When I did my own fifth step with Terry, I was as insane as I’ve ever been in my life. Six months of not drinking will do that to you. We shared a pizza at a mall in Laguna Niguel in the late afternoon. He told me he needed to do some shopping before we got down to reading my inventory. He’d been invited to a charity ball by a vascular surgeon he was dating, and he wanted a new tuxedo shirt. I said no problem.

Two hours and four malls later, we hadn’t found the right shirt. Terry was the kind of guy who was fastidious about grooming and clothes. The ruffles on this shirt were too big. The collar on this one was too spread. “Will you look at those cuffs?” he said. “That can’t be right.” He asked my opinion on each shirt, and I said something like “Looks great to me,” but mostly, he wasn’t listening. I made up my mind to walk out six or seven times, take the fucking bus back to Laguna if I had to, I didn’t want to do this fucking inventory in the first place, before he finally found a shirt at Barneys in South Coast Plaza. It looked a lot like the first shirt we’d seen at Saks in Laguna Niguel.

But as we drove back toward Laguna—he had told me we would do the fifth step in his living room—he started asking me specific questions about my drinking. How bad was it? Had it always been bad? Did I think it would maybe ever get good again? As much as he hadn’t been paying attention to me for the last three hours, suddenly, his attention was absolute. I have never been listened to so completely or well. Just after we passed Jeffrey Road in Irvine, he asked me point-blank whether I was an alcoholic.

“Let’s just clear that up,” Terry said, “before we do anything else. Make sure the foundation is solid.”

I could show you the pavement his Cadillac was driving over. I remember the exact spot.

“I mean, really,” Terry said. “Are you an alcoholic? Are you powerless over alcohol?”

The most naked question anyone had ever asked me, and I felt like I had to tell the truth.

“I mean, I’ve got problems with alcohol,” I told him, “but I don’t know if I can say that. I want to be honest with you. I need help, but I don’t know if that makes me an alcoholic.”

Saying it, I felt like a dog on a leash. Something was holding me back, but I had no idea what it was or how to unhook myself.

Terry nodded. I still had his absolute attention. “Let me put it another way,” he said. “Is there anyone on this whole planet who has a better life when you don’t put alcohol into your body?”

It took under a second to make the list: Jean. Betsy. Manny. Who was I kidding? The citizens of Santa Ana. The citizens of California. Cops everywhere …

“It’s a long list,” I said.

“More than one?” Terry said. “Name for me just one.”

“Crash,” I said. “Crash would have a better life if I didn’t put alcohol into my body.”

“Crash?” Terry said.

“My daughter, Crash,” I said. “Alison.”

He nodded again. It felt like my life was hanging in the balance.

“You’re an alcoholic,” Terry said. He turned and held my eyes. “You don’t ever have to wonder about that again.”

From that moment, I never did.

I let Troy drive us toward Aliso Beach. Until today I could count on two fingers the men I had allowed to drive me anywhere in any vehicle during my adult life: one of them was dead of an overdose, and the other was Manny.

Troy looked skeptical as I instructed him to pull off PCH into the neighborhood above Victoria Beach. He parked in a space where we might be able to see a sliver of sunset. Where real estate was this precious, the houses were even tighter than the rest of Laguna.

“We need to pray first.” I got out of the truck to look for someplace to kneel. There was a wooden bench above the beach access. Terry and I had prayed beside his couch, but a bench would work just as well.

Troy hesitated at the curb. “We’re on the street.”

“First of all,” I said, “nobody gives a shit what we’re doing. Second, do you think praying is the weirdest thing anyone’s done on this bench?”

Troy slowly got to his knees. We said the Serenity Prayer together, the way Terry and I had, and then I asked God to help us grow toward Him, to become better members of A.A., and to become better friends. I said this last part because Terry had said it with me.

Troy quickly got back into my truck. He had about fifteen pages in front of him: laser-printed, infinitely less dog-eared and more orderly than my own. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“Okay,” I said. “Start reading.”

By the time Terry had driven me back from South Coast Plaza, the air in Laguna was cool and clear. A good afternoon to doze near the beach but not a good afternoon to sunbathe.

Then we got down to business, Terry sitting in a rocking chair and me sitting on his couch. It must have been the same old shit. I’ve heard a few fifth steps since, and nobody reinvents the alcoholic wheel. Every so often there’s a guy who starred in gay porn movies, or guarded the president of a South American country, but usually it’s the same litany of resentments and rationalizations and fears. He did this to me and therefore I can’t have that. She said that to me and therefore I feel this. Dad lied. Mom left. We twist our lives into the shape of our anger.

Terry asked questions to make sure he understood. This was your first girlfriend? How old were you? Had Jean filed the papers yet? For the most part, though, he nodded and said, “There you go again, clamoring for justice.”

Which was funny, because I was a cop, but it was also true: I was always looking for some wrong to be righted. It had been that way since before I could talk.

Clamoring for justice again, Randy? Is that it?

When I shared the shameful parts of my sexual inventory, Terry sometimes shared an incident of his own or a dark thought he still entertained.

I came into the deal thinking I was the biggest scumbag in the world. I left thinking maybe Terry was.

But I felt better.

Troy had lied, cheated, stolen. He didn’t like the world the way he’d found it, so he’d tried to bend it to his will. He hated his parents for not helping him with this project. For the same reason, he hated every woman who’d loved him.

Someone had once described it to me as driving a car with concrete tires and insisting that the world be paved with rubber.

Troy’s sexual inventory was pretty bland. He’d slept with a half-dozen women, the kind of sweet girls who get mixed up with idiots like Troy. He was their project. I told him about Jean Trask, how I was her project.

By the time Troy finished his resentment list, sex inventory, and list of fears, we’d been talking for a couple of hours. My coffee was gone.

“Anything else you want to tell me? This is the time to get it out. Not just sex but anything.” I wanted to make certain there were no monsters under the bed. In an alcoholic, festering secrets can kill.

Troy thought about it. He was still at a place where thinking took tremendous effort. “I’m worried about one thing I left out.”

“This is like a confessional. It’s not going beyond the cab of this truck,” I said. Aching to go to Jean Claude’s for another cup of coffee, I checked my glove box for any fugitive Excedrin extra strength. The massive headache that had been postponed by The Penguin was getting back on schedule. “Unless it’s funny, and then I’m going to tell everyone.”

“You know how you’re always saying that I should shut up about my father being in the Mafia?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I think my exact words were ‘Shut the fuck up about your father being in the Mafia.’ I’m sorry about that, Troy. I’ve been a little edgy lately. I could have been kinder. I want to be kinder from now on.”

“I’ve got a couple things to tell you,” Troy said. “I’m not from New Jersey—I’m from Seattle. I’m sorry I lied about that. But I think I know why I talk about him so much, why I’ve made him into such a …”

“Legendary figure?”

“Yeah, that. I guess I want to believe that he’s such a badass because it makes me feel better about what happened.”

I waited.

“The last time I lived at home,” Troy continued, “about two years ago, we got into a fight. I honestly don’t like what he does for a living. I got mad about something, and I said that if he were a real man, he’d find a different line of work.”

I nodded. Troy stared down Victoria Street toward a scoop of the Pacific Ocean that was worth about 150K to my client Bill Trembly, who happened to live beside it.

“He agreed with me. He fucking agreed with me, Randy. That’s what I couldn’t take.” Troy started crying, something I’d seen him do before, but this time I was glad for it. I moved my hand to the seat behind him.

Troy continued, “I hit him in the face. He didn’t defend himself. It was like he wanted it. He just stood there. I hit him again, too.”

From where we sat, I should have been able to see more of the ocean. A great big eucalyptus tree blocked my view. I thought about mentioning that to Bill Trembly, who could add even more to the value of his house with a smaller tree. Fuck eucalyptus trees anyway.

Troy said it again: “He wanted me to do it.”

“Can I tell you something,” I said, “that I’ve never told anyone but Terry? I think maybe it will help.”

So I told him.

I saved it for last. I didn’t know if I was going to share it at all. Around the time I came into A.A., a young man in San Diego had been successfully prosecuted for murder based on testimony from another A.A. member. In a blackout, he’d killed a couple living in his parents’ old house. When his sponsor was forced to testify, it was ruled that there was no privilege between members of a self-help group.

“I tried to kill that guy,” I said. “If Manny hadn’t shown up, I’m sure I would have. I was drunk, but no more than a lot of times.”

Terry knew what I was talking about. He just listened.

“In my head, I was thinking he was a worthless fucking drug dealer. He’d run away from me, and he’d punched me, and I’d had all I could take. I started whaling on him, first with my nightstick, and when my nightstick broke, I punched him until my hands were bleeding. I was completely insane. I didn’t care what happened to either of us. I wanted to die, but I wanted to kill that motherfucker first.”

I looked at Terry. It felt like ten minutes passed while I waited for him to speak.

“What was his name?” Terry finally asked.

“Balthazar. Balthazar Bustamante.”

Terry shrugged. “You’re lucky the guy lived.” That was all he said for a long time.

I’ve never been in a purgatory worse than that moment. Terry stared off out his window, and I stared at Terry. I was feeling more fucked than ever when he turned back toward me, smiling. Then he said something else. You have to understand, that’s how Terry was. Just when you couldn’t believe that he would pull it out, he pulled it out.

“How big do you figure God is?” Terry asked.

“Jesus, Terry, I don’t know.”

“You figure He’s bigger than you and me?”

“I hope so.”

“You think He’s bigger than Orange County?”

“Sure.”

“How about almost killing a man? You think He’s bigger than that?”

My brain was pea-sized back then, but I thought I could see where we were going. I nodded wearily. Reading the menu, I thought I’d eaten the meal. Holding the hammer, I thought I was living inside the house.

“It’s like this,” Terry said. “There’s a part in The Big Book where it says, ‘Either God is everything or else He is nothing. God either is, or He isn’t.’ And then it asks us to make a choice. Everything or nothing? God or no God? A solution or the hell that you know by heart? What’s your choice, Randy? How big do you want God to be?”

I’d read The Big Book twice, but I didn’t remember that. It was in a chapter called “We Agnostics,” which I looked up as soon as I got home.

“What’s it going to be, Randy? This is where you get to say.”

“I’m voting for a very big God,” I said. “Because I fucking need one.”

There were no white lights, and I didn’t fall off a horse, but I think someone heard me.

After that, Terry told me that he loved me, that we would be friends for the rest of our lives because of what we’d just done together. I had a hard time believing that, too.

“One more thing,” Terry said.

“What’s that?”

“You’re going to have to make amends to that Mexican guy,” he said. “Face-to-face.”

“You think?” I asked.

“Only if you want to live.”

I never did—surprise, surprise—make amends to that Mexican guy. About seven years ago, Manny found his address for me, but Manny also told me that I didn’t need to meet him, that it would cause more harm than good. Manny meant well, but he wasn’t an alcoholic. Colin Alvarez had been right: it was unfinished business, and I had never felt completely free of Santa Ana because of it. I had never stopped seeing myself as that bad cop.

Of course, my failure to make amends didn’t stop me from telling Troy that he would have to make amends to his father.

Troy just nodded.

“Did he ever do anything nice for you?” I asked.

“He did nice things for me all the time,” Troy said. “That’s not the point.”

“That’s exactly the point. He loved you the best he could, and you’ve got to let him off the hook. Are you still taking money from him?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, do assets that were in his account show up in your account a few days later for reasons that have nothing to do with you selling him a product or rendering him a service?”

“His office sends me a check every month.”

“That’s gotta stop, too. You’re going to get a job. Either that or go to school. Now let’s get some more coffee.”

I felt a bit hypocritical, having no immediate intention of making amends to Balthazar Bustamante, but that’s one of the cool things about A.A.: it is possible to walk another person toward “the sunshine of the spirit” while still keeping your own head firmly implanted up your ass.

The uncool thing about A.A. is that there are other people in it.

“You going to make amends to that guy in Santa Ana?” Troy said.

“What makes you think I haven’t?”

Troy looked at me.

“Get out of my truck,” I said. “It’s my turn to drive. If you’re fast, you can get to the other side before I lock the doors.”

Troy stepped cautiously into the street. When he met me by the tailgate, he seemed totally unprepared for the hug that I gave him. I even kissed him on the neck. “I love you,” I said. “Doing this thing we just did means I love you.” They were the same words Terry had said to me, and probably the same words that DUI Dave had said to Terry. I was shocked to discover that I was telling the absolute truth.