THEN CAME ALMOST THREE WEEKS of Crash talking to me only through Betsy, who was talking to me only through Jeep. Actually, Betsy still talked to me, though just to the extent necessary to extricate me from my legal troubles. All other conversations were, according to my sister, “toxic,” and she was very disciplined about avoiding them.
I consoled myself with the entirely bullshit rationalization that not talking was a form of love, too. I was pathetic. Then Jean found out about Betsy playing go-between for me and Crash, and that ended, too, so I became something worse than pathetic.
The police stopped calling me eventually. Once Laguna Beach PD had control over Colin’s little empire, with a generous cut for the DEA, they stopped worrying quite so much about Mutt’s murder. Colin pleaded to manslaughter, adding more to his already extensive tally of guilty pleas. He did Emma a solid by pretending that the gun was his when she’d actually bought it from a meth dealer in Lake Forest. For that kindness alone, I would visit him regularly in jail. No one was charged for Simon’s death by stupidity. The fact that I had saved the reality-television star from the clutches of the evil drug dealer must have taken the fun out of seizing any of my assets. They couldn’t prove that the money I’d given Terry had been anything other than an expression of love, but when had that stopped them before?
The only question left to me was how the fuck did Terry get so far on the wrong side of things? No, it was bigger than that. The real question was how could he have let his mistakes, as horrible as they were, get in the way of his being there for that beautiful child? It didn’t escape me that it was a good question to be asking myself, too. John Sewell’s prediction that I would drive a permanent wedge between myself and my daughter had come true.
Meanwhile, Sewell seemed to have delivered on his promise to give Cathy her money. She moved to a nicer place in Irvine and was looking into starting an associate’s program for nursing at Saddleback College. I went to see her and Paloma and Danny a few times, but I didn’t ask many questions about Terry. It felt more important to simply be in the room with them. Particularly because I’d avoided diaper duty with Crash, I liked pitching in for Danny. Paloma had a lot of curiosity about my daughter, and I answered all her questions without letting on how much they pained me. Maybe that was more of my penance. While I spent time with the family Terry had left behind, John Sewell was off somewhere beginning the process of replacing me in my daughter’s eyes.
Colin’s downfall soon became just another cautionary tale about basement entrepreneurship in South Orange County. Life went on, and my own role—my failure to help my friend Terry and, maybe more important, a stranger, Mutt—was something I was learning to live with a day at a time. Sometimes I tried to imagine what that would have been like, helping Mutt. I had a track record with pseudo-tough guys; I would have been a good sponsor for him.
When I wasn’t imagining myself sponsoring dead guys, I hid out at my shop. My A.A. family tried to turn me around. I was going to meetings again, and Wade and Troy and Emma used my house and my shop as though both belonged to them. Emma told me that MP—her new sponsor—had given her permission to consort with only two men in A.A.: me and Troy. This made me feel better about the possibility of getting back together with MP until I asked her if I should take it that way. At one point I had convinced her to stay at my house for a few minutes after she dropped Emma off. She drank a cup of herbal tea with me before she said, “Look at the safety you’re giving Troy and Emma. Those two are flourishing. And they owe a lot of that to you.”
I tried to care because MP wanted me to care. “Maybe they’d flourish even more if you lived here, too.”
She finished her tea and said, “You’re not the patient here today.” Then she smiled and left me again. At least she smiled, right?
You’d think it would make me feel better, seeing the new lives that Emma and Troy created in the wake of my disaster. Emma was working the steps with MP like her hair was on fire, and Troy had a plan for the next stage of his life that would have impressed the hell out of me if I hadn’t been so malignantly self-centered: in a matter of weeks, he had become the computer fix-it guy of choice for Laguna Beach A.A., and he was getting himself together to apply for community college.
Troy’s success meant that my house was filled with computers that he was working on. With his help, Emma had also turned one of my bedrooms into a small-scale video production facility from which she was posting to YouTube a meditation on every day of her sobriety. About half the time, the three of us would cook dinner together, and I had to admit, it was more entertaining than talking to myself. The two of them usually avoided doing the dishes by running off to a meeting.
The only thing that came close to comforting me was the hope chest I was designing for Paloma’s quinceañera. In the Mexican culture, that’s a combination fifteenth birthday party and debutante ball, and Paloma had been planning hers since before Terry died. Now that Cathy had been given Terry’s insurance money, Paloma’s quinceañera would be slightly less elaborate than her wedding—if she married the prince of Monaco. I was glad that Paloma could have her party, but I hated that the largesse had come by way of John Sewell.
The hope chest was based on an idea I’d had for Crash—and God knows I was planning on building one for her next. If you didn’t look too closely, it was a regular old, distinctively American hope chest. Made with good wood and better fittings but pretty much the same design that had served young women for centuries. The kind of piece that should live at the bottom of a big comfortable bed.
That was only if you didn’t look closely. When you did, you saw that the chest was bisected on the top and the sides by faint seams. When you tried to open it the old-fashioned way, it wouldn’t: the hinges and the big brass lock were purely decorative. As you felt around, though, you realized that if you exerted a little pressure, those faint seams would separate and the chest would slide open sideways. The top rolled away at either side, like the ceiling of a football stadium, to reveal a warren of boxes. I’d made the boxes as complicated as possible, too. A few of them were large enough for sweaters and prom dresses, but it was the smaller ones that interested me. What would Paloma keep in them? Mementos of her mother? Love letters? Report cards?
If it’s true, as an Art Center professor once told me, that “design is just a fancy word for problem solving,” I’m not sure what problem I was trying to solve. How to show a fifteen-year-old girl that life was complicated but also beautiful? Maybe it was a lesson in how far a man who had lost what he loved most would go to occupy himself? Just figuring out how to rig the hinges took two full days. Good thing I had thrown away my life. I had the time.
One day, as I was finally getting satisfied with how the chest was opening and closing, Emma showed up at my shop. I pretended I wasn’t happy to see her. Troy was away for a few days to visit his father in Seattle. While they were together, Troy planned to make the big amends. His absence meant that Emma had doubled up on the task of trying to distract me from myself. She was riding a moped with cool leather saddlebags.
“You notice anything amazing about me?” she said.
“There’s nothing about you, dear, that doesn’t amaze me. I’m amazed, among other things, that your head doesn’t explode with all the crazy wonderful shit that’s bouncing around in there.”
She smiled. “That’s actually a pretty good answer. Bravissimo, Randy.”
After Emma figured out that she couldn’t get me to focus on how she’d managed to snag such a mod ride, she took a laptop from the saddlebag and opened it on my worktable. I didn’t have any reason to recognize the laptop that Cathy Acuña had given Troy the first time we met her, the one she said her boss had given her. By now, my house was awash in laptops just like it.
Emma said, “Troy would be really mad at me if he knew I was showing this to you.”
I still wasn’t that interested. I was using most of my brain to wonder whether brass hinges were better than platinum hinges, even though the platinum hinges were already a done deal. “Why would Troy be mad?”
“He’s afraid you’ll freak out and do something stupid.”
Now I was interested. “Show me,” I said.
“Promise you won’t do something stupid?”
“Just show me.”
It took forever for the fucking thing to boot up—God, I hate PCs—and once it did, the hard drive made enough noise to convince me it would die at any moment. Emma opened a video file, clicked on play, and immediately a woman who looked exactly like Claire Monaco was having sex with a well-beyond-middle-aged man. The video had those spooky drifting squarish gaps that corrupted video files sometimes get. It was a long video, and Emma gave me a quick tour through the rest of it: lots of positions and plenty of good shots of both their faces. I tried to imagine the circumstances of its filming. The camera was stationary, maybe on the other side of the room. Did these two even know they were being filmed?
“Where did Troy find this?” I asked.
“Right here on the computer,” Emma said, “the one he got from your friend Cathy? Troy says that’s why you should never put anything on your hard drive. We couldn’t figure out why that chick Claire Monaco would be on Cathy’s computer. God, that woman freaks me out every time I see her at the women’s meeting—and I’m the one who freaks everyone else out. Troy remembered that this computer must have belonged to some guy you really hate? The one who’s like stealing your daughter or something? Why don’t you ever tell me anything? You don’t think I want to hear about some guy who’s stealing your daughter? Is this the guy?”
I’d tried hard to keep my Crash problems as far away from Emma and Troy as possible, but not hard enough. It wasn’t John Sewell himself in the video. That wasn’t how he rolled.
Emma kept going: “I was going to ask MP, but Troy said we’d better wait until he got back to town. I guess I thought this was something you’d want to see, that it could be important to you and your kid. I mean, it’s probably some weird random video—I’m so fucking sick of porn—but I couldn’t stand the idea of it sitting there and nobody dealing with it. You know what I mean? Randy?”
Claire Monaco had finished packing her bags and was almost on her way to St. Louis to start a new life with her son. She explained this to me when I reached her on her cell phone at Target, buying a few last-minute items for the long car trip.
I had taken the computer from Emma and told her I’d see her later at the house. I had started the call as I drove away in my truck. “You forgot to say goodbye, Claire.”
“You think you can forgive me?” she said.
“For what?”
“For all that shit with Terry. For taking your money and doing nothing good with it.”
“That was a long time ago,” I said. “Are you having a good time with Alexander?”
She hesitated before she quietly said, “Yes.”
“You’re pre-forgiven, Claire. I don’t have the strength left to judge you.”
“You in legal trouble because of all this shit with Terry?”
“Not because of that,” I said.
No one on earth was better equipped to understand. “Your wife is trying to take away your daughter.”
“It’s a little beyond trying. I never had custody to begin with, and now it’s even worse.”
“You sound like you’re on the other side of it, though. I mean, in a good place.”
“How do you figure?”
“You sound whipped.” Claire laughed. “Terry used to say that was the best place to be.”
“Terry said a lot of things.”
I heard Claire’s son, Alexander, ask her if he could have a cupcake. It sounded like they were near the checkout. I heard her tell him, “Get some of those animal crackers. You like those.” I was oddly pleased to catch her in a moment of good mothering.
“Can I ask you some questions?” I said.
“About Terry? I don’t know what else to say about him, Randy.”
“Actually, I want to know about you and John Sewell.”
Claire sighed. She was about to enter her own purgatory, the geographic cure. Around A.A., it was common wisdom that moving somewhere else wasn’t going to solve your problems. Still, I kind of liked the idea that she was moving to St. Louis rather than, say, Las Vegas.
“What did you find out?” she said.
“I’ve got some videos of you and Judge Fogarty. On a computer that used to belong to John Sewell.”
“So,” she said, “why are you calling me? You can’t figure that out?”
“I want to hear you say it. To a prosecutor.”
“I have a bad history with prosecutors,” she said. “No prosecutors.”
“Because Sewell is funding this little trip out of town?”
“I’ll tell you,” she said. “But that’s it. Fogarty didn’t just retire. He was encouraged by a friend of ours to retire. I cooperated with that process. There. That’s my gift. Thanks for the money when I really needed it. I gotta go, Randy. My son needs something unhealthy to eat.”
She hung up. Viva St. Louis.
I called John Sewell and asked him to meet me that afternoon at a certain condo in South Laguna that I happened to know was up for sale. I told him I’d found something on a computer that once belonged to him.
It was Terry’s old condo, the one where I worked most of the steps, the one where I paid Claire to leave Terry alone. It had gone on the market a week before, and the administrator of Terry’s estate had called me. It was a simple thing to get a key from the Realtor. Meeting Sewell at Terry’s old place was probably some kind of fucked-up nostalgia on my part. Also, privacy was important.
John Sewell was standing beside a carport underneath the condo, wearing a suit and a tie. After three weeks, his nose had healed, but it was leaning a little to one side. I opened the key box and let us into the apartment. The starkness of the place shocked me. There was nothing in it but some new wall-to-wall carpet that I didn’t recognize: an imitation sisal that I couldn’t imagine Terry ever liking. He was a plush kind of guy, took his shoes off the moment he walked in the door.
It had been a long time since I’d come over. How could I have forgotten there was a fireplace? A nice one, too: a big solid cinder-blocky thing, pushing its way out as if the room had been built for its pleasure. The broker must have started tarting the place up for a showing: there were framed pictures of couples and kids on that generous mantel. It looked like they’d been cobbled together from a few different families.
For lack of a better idea, Sewell stood beside the fireplace. There certainly wasn’t anywhere to sit. He radiated impatience, which was how I realized that I’d been mooning over an empty room from my past. I walked over to him, admiring my remodel of his face. “Did you need surgery?”
“I will.”
“What’d they give you for pain? Percocet?”
Sewell solemnly shook his head. “I keep busy.”
“If I were you,” I said, “I’d get the Percocet.”
“You said you’d found something on a computer,” Sewell said. “Can I see it?”
I held up the thumb drive that I’d brought in my pocket. “It’s a sex tape of Judge Fogarty and Claire Monaco. You don’t have to look at it, you just need to know I have the computer we found it on. I don’t know much about computers, but it seems that erasing something doesn’t actually erase it.”
“If you were smart,” Sewell said, “you’d put this all behind you.”
“Have I done anything that makes you think I’m smart? If it helps me get the video into the right hands, I’ll say I made it myself.”
“You don’t want to do this,” Sewell said. “It’s only going to cause you more trouble. You’re Alison’s father—she can’t stay away from you forever. If I can get Jean to back down …”
“And Jean’s going to share custody why, because you asked her to?”
Sewell looked at me with the seriousness of God on his face, like I was some poor fool about to be sentenced. “Jean will do what’s best for her family.”
I laughed. “You think you can control Jean, too? How about this? I’ll destroy this video immediately and forget everything I know if you stay the fuck away from my daughter and her mother.”
“Why does your life have to be so hard?” Sewell said. “That’s what I don’t understand. Why do you insist that everyone pay for their sins? The only person who’s paying for his sins is you.”
“Terry paid for his sins,” I said. “So did Simon Busansky. And Mutt Kelly. So is Colin Alvarez. And now you’re going to pay for yours.”
“Look at yourself,” Sewell said. “If you stay focused, in ten years you’ll be worth as much as I am. But you ran around trying to get some kind of vengeance for your friend, and all you ended up doing was hurting more people. In five years, you’ll be dead of a heart attack, and your daughter will be looking up to me. I’m trying to help you here.”
“You want to know why my life has to be so hard?” I said. “Because I want it to be. I want to feel the bite of every goddamn stupid thing I’ve ever done. Some days that’s all I have. The innovation is that now you’re going to feel the bite of every stupid thing you’ve done, too.” I figured that was a good time to walk out the door: dramatic, convincing. I even shook the memory stick at him for effect.
“You’ll destroy that video right now,” Sewell said, “if you want Cathy to get a single cent of insurance money.”
A guy like Sewell never spoke carelessly. “You think you’re going to take that money back?”
“I’m not taking it,” Sewell said. “But with all you’ve brought to light about Terry’s activities, his terribly guilty state of mind before he died, how hard will it be for the insurance company to claim suicide? He was ashamed that he’d become a criminal again, and he chose to kill himself. Am I wrong, or is that not basically the picture you helped draw for the police? That little boy can collect a million dollars when his father dies of a heroin overdose, but he can’t collect anything if his father kills himself with a heroin overdose. That policy would have cost more.”
“I thought she already got the money.”
“I lent her some to tide her over,” Sewell said. “The insurance check hasn’t been issued yet.”
“You motherfucker. You’re going to blackmail me?”
“Blackmail? Please, Randy. There’s a half-dozen attorneys looking for some way not to pay that million dollars. This was your mistake. But I can help you with the life insurance, too. I’m ready to put in a call for Cathy. I know some ways of doing business that you don’t. Let’s give it a good end. We both want Cathy to get the money. We both want Jean to calm down. Why can’t we work together? You and I were bystanders to this mess, but if we resolve our conflict, there’s no conflict left.”
“It’s not enough.”
“I know you’ve had issues with addiction,” Sewell continued, “but you’re not like Alvarez or those others. You’re not even like Terry. You have willpower; it’s just misapplied. There’s nothing wrong with wanting justice; you just can’t insist on it. I’m a judge now, and even I can’t insist on it. Wisdom is about knowing what you can ignore. It’s time for you to leave some of these old ideas behind.”
The thing about the devil, an old-timer named Billy once told me, is that he makes more sense than anyone else in the room. Whenever I thought Sewell was ordinary-smart, he proved himself to be smarter than anyone I knew. He was trying to divide me from the A.A. pack, and he was doing a pretty good job.
But that was something Sewell couldn’t understand: there was no me outside of the me that A.A. had made.
“I need you out of my daughter’s life for good,” I said. “Or I’m going to take this to the district attorney and let him figure out exactly how you got Fogarty off the bench. Make up your mind. You have until I can drive back down to Santa Ana.”
I’d started to walk to the door when Sewell addressed me in a tone of voice I’d never heard. Maybe it was the voice he’d suppressed in order to perfect his will. It sounded so unlike him that I almost didn’t recognize the symptoms of rage.
“Two things will happen before the end of the day,” he said. “First, I will make a case to Alison for why she should never speak to you again. We’ve been taking walks a couple of times a week, just the two of us. I will explain to her the pattern of violence that she witnessed and how it stretches back to an incident when you were a police officer that I believe I’m right in saying she doesn’t fully appreciate. Then I will make certain that no matter what happens, Cathy Acuña is unable to secure a cent of that insurance money. I will prepare a brief toward that purpose that even a first-year law student could follow. These are not threats, Randy. These are promises.”
“Thanks for dropping the pretense,” I said.
“Someone has to stop you.”
Now that I’d reached Sewell on the deepest level, I had a fundamental insight. Was he a terrible criminal? No. Was he a bad man? Definitely.
He’d made a mistake, though, by getting angry. That was my neighborhood. I took out my old service weapon from the back of my jeans.
The gun had been stashed in a lock box at my shop—for years it had been stashed in a lock box at my shop—and taking it out today had been like reaching into another decade. I can’t even say why I thought it was necessary. I didn’t think about it again until I was pushing the barrel up under Sewell’s chin. Which is what I did right after I pulled it out.
I quickly recognized that this was what I’d been moving toward for weeks. My whole life seemed to click into place. My heart got very, very calm.
Sewell looked scared, but not scared enough to stop talking. “Are you prepared to destroy your whole life?” Sewell said tightly.
“You tell me,” I said, “how we would fucking know the difference.”
I might have done it. I was that insane. I thought I’d found a way to make the world work. Maybe God didn’t care about John Sewell’s sins, but I did. John Sewell would die against the fireplace I couldn’t remember in the condominium where I’d worked the steps. I was having a temper tantrum, for sure, but isn’t that how most people get killed?
However, if insanity can be defined as doing the same thing and expecting different results, it was insane to imagine I could complete anything, even an execution-style killing, without Troy Padilla having a say in how I accomplished it.
“Randy?” Until he bounded through the front door, I thought I was hearing voices.
When he saw me, Troy crossed his arms, as though that gesture of disapproval were enough to prevent my faux pas.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in Seattle?” I said. I barely glanced at Troy. I kept my focus on the matter at hand.
“Emma sent up the bat signal after you ran out of your shop. I told her not to show you that video until I got back.”
“How the hell did you find me?”
“I called Yegua. He had heard you talking to the Realtor.”
“Since when do you talk to Yegua?”
“Since we both agreed,” Troy said, “that we should keep an eye on you.”
“Awesome,” I said. “Now go the fuck away.”
“This is a permanent solution to a temporary problem,” Troy said. “Give yourself a few more weeks. If you still want to kill him, I’ll help you.”
“What do you know about killing people?”
I did notice that Troy seemed remarkably comfortable with my holding a Glock about four feet from Sewell’s chest. I shook my head. “Go,” I said. “Now. You weren’t even here.”
“Listen, Randy—there’s something I left out of my fifth step, and I should tell you before you end up in jail and can’t be my sponsor anymore.”
Both Sewell and I looked at him. This wasn’t what either of us expected to hear.
“I told you that I lied about being from New Jersey, right? That wasn’t the only lie. My dad actually is the head of a large criminal organization. I just felt like I should tell you this in order to finish my fifth step.”
“Okay, Troy. You’ve told me.”
“You still don’t believe me.”
“My God,” Sewell said. “Is this a comedy routine?”
Troy walked up beside Sewell and inspected his broken nose. “Try to remember that I’m the only other person in this room who wants you to live.” He turned back toward me. “Anyway, my mom’s last name is Padilla. My father’s Ukrainian. His last name is Isanov.”
Sewell recognized the name, too. His back straightened decisively against the fireplace.
“Of Isanov Brothers Construction?” I said.
In the Pacific Northwest, the Isanovs were as big as it got. Road construction, real estate, waste management, racetracks. The feds had wanted to take them apart for decades. I looked into Troy’s eyes for the second time since he’d entered the room.
“So, listen,” Troy continued. “I did what you said. I made amends to my dad, and he dropped everything to hang out with me. We took his plane down today after Emma called. He’s here now.”
“In Laguna?” I asked.
“In the carport.”
Anthony Isanov was a well-dressed man in his fifties. He wore, believe it or not, the same blue Armani sport coat I owned myself. His soft blue shirt and stone-colored slacks were well tailored. Troy later told me he was a triathlete, and he had that sort of coiled strength. Also the most perfectly tended salt-and-pepper hair I’d ever seen, combed back over his head and seemingly trimmed ten minutes ago. He looked like one of those demographic-elevating, middle-aged J. Crew models.
Isanov pulled Troy close as he followed his son into the condo. “My God,” he said. “This is him.”
Like his son, Troy’s father didn’t seem particularly bothered by the gun idling in my right hand, but I stuffed it into my pants anyway. The Isanovs joined Sewell and me beside the fireplace.
“I won’t say how grateful I am”—Isanov shook my hand fiercely—“because I’ll lose it again.”
Troy stood beside his father, and Sewell didn’t move an inch.
“Mr. Isanov, this is John Sewell,” I said.
Isanov turned to offer his hand. “Anthony Isanov. Happy to meet you, sir.”
It wasn’t possible for Sewell to be any stiffer, but Isanov’s presence gave him at least another inch of broomstick up his ass.
“Whatever you need”—Isanov pointed at me—“I’ll make it happen.”
Such a gangster thing to say, but I believed him. He thought I’d returned his son to him, and maybe I had.
“I’d like to show Dad your houses later on,” Troy said. “Randy builds beautiful houses.”
“You told me that, buddy. I’m looking forward to it,” Isanov said.
The pressure inside Troy must have been huge. His eyes bounced from his father to me. And then back to his father. And then back to me.
Isanov filled the awkward silence. “You used to dream about building houses when you were still, ah, on the police force?”
“No, sir. That was too big a dream to admit. I doubt it even crossed my mind.”
“After you stopped drinking,” Isanov said, “you started to dream?”
“I started to dream when I had no other choice.”
Isanov laughed. “Sometimes the bastards have a boot on your neck and you can’t do anything but enjoy the view.”
Sewell looked like he had to pee. Badly.
“A friend of mine who recently passed told me that sometimes you have to take success and happiness like a punch in the face,” I said. “You have to be a man about it.”
Isanov laughed again. “Troy told me about him, too.”
Troy beamed. If we’d been in my shop, I would have asked him to make coffee. Given him something to do.
Instead, I said, “Can I buy you a cup of coffee, Mr. Isanov? Has Troy told you about Jean Claude’s? It’s not Seattle, but it’s an institution.”
“That’d be great, Randy.” He smiled his big smile. When it became clear that I wasn’t moving on yet, Isanov said, “And then, maybe later, you’ll let me buy you a meal. I’m staying at the Ritz-Carlton. We can eat there and then bring some cigars to the beach. Troy says you like cigars?”
Looking into his eyes, I said, “How about I catch up with you in a half hour?”
Maybe I imagined that the same pleasant denial which allowed the two of them to ignore the gun would extend to excusing me for a few minutes while I shot John Sewell. That I was completely insane at the moment was indisputable.
Isanov held my arm and gently drew me away from the fireplace, far enough so he wouldn’t be heard, but I never took my eyes off Sewell.
“Can I be blunt with you, Randy?” he asked.
“Blunt is good,” I said.
“Troy wants you to calm the fuck down,” Isanov said, “and he brought me here to help you accomplish that.”
“No disrespect, Mr. Isanov, but my being calm is none of your business.”
“Bullshit, there’s no disrespect. You use that gun, you disrespect everything you’ve achieved with my son.”
Looking over at Troy, I had to give it to his father: this wasn’t my finest day as a sponsor.
“You’re a moron and my son is moron,” Isanov continued. “But that’s God’s blessing on you. Maybe you’re an artist, like Troy says. But don’t make a mistake, Randy. The world is full of people like me, who live in the hell of not being morons. Please give me that gun.”
I gave him the gun. The truth will set you free, but first it will really piss you off.
“Now,” he said, “let’s talk about this ugly business you’re involved in. First let me tell you that if you get my son mixed up in something like this again, I’ll kill you. Do you understand?”
“Whatever I do, Troy’s going to make this life hard for you. It’s his special skill. I know you think you’re up for it, but trust me, you’re not up for it.”
“Do you understand?” Isanov repeated.
“Yes, I understand,” I said. “Do you understand?”
“Better than you know,” Isanov said. “Please take my son outside so I can fix this for you.”
Troy and I walked around the side of the building, which was high above PCH. The ocean was blue like the blue on a map and oddly static—like if you threw yourself against it, you would bounce right off.
“What’s he doing in there right now?” I asked.
“His thing. Which is good for you, because I don’t think he’s going to be doing his thing too much longer. We had a long talk today.”
“Did I just put a judge in Anthony Isanov’s back pocket?”
Troy laughed. “You really want me to answer that? All you need to know is that it’s out of your hands now.”
“I would be happily on my way to prison,” I said, “if you hadn’t forced me to do your goddamn fifth step.”
“That’s a beautiful thought. Me, I wouldn’t have to make something out of my life.”
Troy’s father joined us on that pretty hill above PCH. “Judge Sewell won’t bother you anymore.”
“Thanks.”
“Can you give Troy a ride to my hotel?” Isanov said. “I’ve got a few details to iron out before we have dinner.”
I looked around the building to see if Sewell was still there, but his car was gone. Isanov got back into his rented Navigator, and he drove away, too.