“Morning, Joanne,” Dick says brightly as he answers the phone.
He looks at his watch. It’s 8:07. She must have gone to his cubicle first thing to check on him and just found the resignation letter.
“Richard, this is ridiculous. Come back and bring the formulas, and we’ll forget all this nonsense.”
“Forget that you want to cause people unnecessary suffering to line your pockets?”
“Forget that you are in violation of your contract and that, by taking those formulas, you are committing grand larceny.”
“Arrest me.”
“Don’t think we won’t.”
He scoffs, the idea amusing, and he realizes he is relishing this, long pent-up resentment toward Pentco and their indifferent dismissal of him ten years earlier bubbling to the surface.
“You’ll never work in this industry again,” she says.
“That’s okay. I’ve lost my taste for it.”
Her voice turns almost saccharine as she changes tact and says, “Richard, this is silly. What about all the people Freeway could help?”
“I’d rather they were cured.”
The sweetness returns to sour. “So that’s it, all or nothing? We bend to your will, or you walk?”
“I already walked.”
“Richard, come back and let’s talk about this. We’ll start with compound two and revisit four down the road.”
“Don’t patronize me.”
“I’m not—”
“You are,” he says. “You want the formulas?”
“Of course I want the formulas. They’re ours. They belong to Pentco.”
“Set up a meeting with the board,” he says. “I have a proposition.”
“Why don’t you and I meet instead and see if we can figure this out?”
He scoffs again. “Trying to save your hide? No, thanks. The board makes the decisions; that’s who I want to meet with. As a matter of fact, as far as I’m concerned, you don’t even need to be there.”
“You son of a—”
He ends the call before she finishes.
* * *
Dick sets the bag from the electronics store on the counter and smiles when he pulls out his phone to see the voicemail symbol glowing. It took less than two hours for Joanne to call back. Her voice is deliberately slow, and he can hear the effort it takes for her not to scream, which makes him grin wider. The meeting with the board is set for a week from today.
He considers the delay and realizes they’re buying time to see if they can end-run him, get one of the other chemists to unlock the key. He’s not concerned. There aren’t many things he’s certain of, but his unique knowledge of oral anti-allergens is one of them. If there were another chemist who could do it, it would have already been done.
Dick opens his laptop and punches “Diego Gallery, Santa Ana” into his browser. Because of Diego Ramirez’s twisted art, he has moved to the top of Dick’s list.
Breaking News: Famed artist, Diego Ramirez of Santa Ana wanted for questioning in the brutal murder of his past accuser Alison Cleason.
Dick’s pulse races as he reads the article, which includes a photo of a pretty young woman who looks very much like the little girl in Diego’s file from fifteen years earlier. The murder occurred Saturday night, the same night Dick visited the gallery. Alison Cleason was walking back to her car from the UCI library after attending a study group when she was allegedly brutally killed by Diego Ramirez, who was waiting for her in the parking garage. She was found by another student. Alison was twenty-one.
Dick thinks of the Alison painting, his stomach roiling, and he wonders if the blue-haired lady will now be allowed to sell it, and then wonders if the man who wanted it so badly, on discovering its real cost, will want it more or less.
The fury Dick felt earlier after reading Cayman’s post returns, but he doesn’t have the strength to run again, so instead, he sits quiet, trembling with rage and regret for not having done something sooner. If he could line them up—Otis, Shea, Ingall, Ramirez—he’d have no problem running a machine gun across their bodies. It wouldn’t give him joy, but it would give him peace. Alison, Cayman, Germaine, Willy, Jerry, Ed—all of them worth so much more than the parasites that destroyed them.
He whispers a prayer for Alison’s soul, then opens Pepper to consider who’s left. Ingall is stalled until he can figure out a way to infiltrate his life. Which leaves three prospects. PPR2 and PPR3 have equal scores of sixty-five. Dick chooses Ray Hamilton because he’s in Huntington Beach as opposed to Kristian Knott, who lives in Cypress, which is farther away and inland, which means hotter.
He rereads Hamilton’s file—three convictions, but the first was plead down to a misdemeanor for fondling a fifteen-year-old boy when Hamilton was nineteen. His crimes aren’t violent, but all the other criteria fit. Packing up his laptop, he grabs the electronics bag, and heads out the door.
* * *
Huntington Beach was reborn from a sleepy beach town of surfers and oil wells into a tourist haven of Starbucks and chain stores a decade ago. It’s easy to find Hamilton’s complex. It sits on the Coast Highway across from a large expanse of beach.
Dick parks his Volvo near Hamilton’s assigned spot, which is occupied by an old silver Nissan pickup, circa 1970 something. It’s almost noon, and Dick is hungry, so he opens the Wendy’s bag beside him and pulls out his taco salad.
The first forkful doesn’t make it to his mouth.
Hamilton walks toward his truck mostly unchanged from his most recent photo—chin-length gold-blond hair, bronze skin, and a jaunty gate that belies his age of forty-two. He climbs into his truck and pulls onto the Coast Highway.
Dick follows, and they end up in an industrial part of town. Hamilton turns into a driveway between an auto salvage yard and corrugated barrel buildings with rollup doors. Dick drives past, then doubles back and pulls into the driveway. The first barrel houses a furniture refinishing company, the next is a custom-art framing business, and the third has a small sign above the open door that reads, “Hamilton Signature Boards.”
Dick parks beneath a eucalyptus tree beside the furniture refinisher and watches from a distance as Hamilton works on a surfboard. He wears a backward baseball cap and a respirator mask. Eighties rock and roll plays from a boom box, and Hamilton bobs as he uses what looks like a large sanding block to smooth a board that lies on two sawhorses inside the bunker.
Dick returns to his lunch, content to watch Hamilton work. He admires Hamilton’s meticulousness and skill. Every few minutes, Hamilton takes a gauge from the table beside him to measure a particular dimension, then documents it into a computer. It reminds Dick of working in the lab.
Hamilton’s been at it almost two hours when an old red Volkswagen bus, the kind with highlights in the roof, pulls up beside the shop. A curly-headed, golden-haired kid in his midteens hops out, and the van drives away. Hamilton comes out of the shop with two bright orange surfboards under his arms. He throws them in the bed of his truck as the kid pulls down the rollup door.
Dick follows them to a parking lot near the Huntington Beach pier and watches as they grab the boards and trot into the water.
Dick walks to the pier and, as he watches the pair swim out on their boards, wonders if surfing is the Holy Grail. Hamilton is three years older than Dick but looks a decade younger—his body lean and muscled, his gold skin kissed by the sun and unwrinkled.
Like his expertise in the shop, Hamilton is impressive in the water. Powerful and efficient, he gauges each swell, lines himself up before taking a few powerful strokes to join its momentum, then pops to his feet and cuts back and forth effortlessly as if it’s no more difficult than breathing.
An hour later, the waves starting to die down, Hamilton gives a shaka symbol to the surfers around him, catches the next wave and rides it toward the shore. When it dissolves to whitewater, he squats, grabs the rails of his board, and flips upside down to ride the rest of the way on his head.
The beachcombers stare and point, and he emerges to a small ovation. Taking it in stride, he offers a humble smile, tucks his board under his arm, and walks farther onto the beach.
A few minutes later, the kid joins him. The two knock knuckles, and the kid hands Hamilton his board. He takes off on foot as Hamilton walks toward his truck. Dick considers following Hamilton but decides instead to follow the kid.
It’s much more difficult following someone on foot, and Dick finds himself needing to double back half a dozen times. Finally, a mile from the beach, the kid turns into a neighborhood of tract homes and, two blocks after that, walks into a tidy blue home with white shutters. Dick makes a note of the address and returns to his apartment.