STOCKTON
He’d known where Polly was for a while—when she’d surfaced in Stockton, it had made the news, of course, and if he’d still been on the force he would have been one of the battalion of cops who interviewed her. But he didn’t go. Not for the month he spent on medical leave, or the six months after that he took to get himself out of the police force with a good chunk of his pension.
All told it was a year after that desert night when he’d driven up to Stockton. He’d gone to her cousin’s house first, a beer-fat man who gave Park a mean look that he dropped as soon as he understood who Park was. He remembered him from the news stories, and he told Park where to find her. Park could see on the man’s face that he was scared of something, and that something kept Polly treated right.
Park drove to the strip mall the cousin sent him to, found the martial arts studio, and walked into a kids’ grappling class. He joined the parents watching from the side of the mat. On the mat pairs of kids in T-shirts and shorts wrestled. Their sweat dripped. No sounds but scuffles, grunts, gasps, the occasional slam. The teacher, a wiry young man with a Brazilian accent, coached kids from one corner. Park looked over to a line of duffel bags resting against one of the walls. A familiar brown head poked out from one of them.
Polly’s cherry hair, same as it had been in the desert, made her easy to find. She’d grown three inches. She’d gotten ropy. She wrestled with a bigger boy who wore a boy’s downy mustache. She got the boy’s back. She scrambled for the choke. The boy muscled out of it, turned around so he was the one on top. He tried to twist an arm behind her back. The boy, stronger, pushed her arm higher, but she fought it off. She didn’t win but she didn’t lose either. The coach blew his whistle. The fight ended. Polly and the boy slapped hands. She laughed. Her eyes were so blue. Not like a lake. Like rivers.
The coach called for a break. Polly moved to the side of the mat and scrubbed her face with a towel to sop up sweat. Park walked to her. She saw him from the side of her eyes. She turned to him quick. Her animal instincts were fine-tuned.
“Hey,” she said. Waiting for him to make the move.
“You have a home,” he said. “How is it? Everything okay?”
“It’ll do,” she said. “It sort of has to, you know?”
“What about Charlotte?”
“Still in L.A.,” she said. “She offered, like we could stay together, but she didn’t mean it. I could tell. It’s okay.”
“What about your dad?”
“He went down south,” she said. “To Perdido. He can’t ever quit hiding. He’s a cop killer, right?” Her eyes said we have a secret.
“Yeah,” Park said. “But from what I hear he isn’t hiding. From what I hear he’s down in L.A.”
She smiled like oh yeah?
“I heard your dad ripped off an NDP drug house in Santa Cruz last month. I got that from two different friends in the department.”
“Huh.”
“So did he?”
“If they said he did, he did.”
“But you said he was down in Perdido.”
“So then that’s where he is.”
“They found the body of a man named Aaron Carter. Goes by the name A-Rod. From what I’ve put together, you two had a couple run-ins with him. A bad hombre. They found his body a week ago. He didn’t die good. Word on the Aryan Steel grapevine was it was your dad who did it.”
She looked at him like so what?
“But you know what I think?” he asked.
She shrugged like tell me.
“I think Nate’s dead.”
“You just said he killed a guy. How’d he do that if he’s dead?”
“I think he’s dead. I think he’s just the rumor now. Like Robin Hood or the Boogie Man. A legend.”
She didn’t say anything. He nodded to one of the gym bags against the wall. The bear’s head poked out of it.
“I see he pulled through.”
“It’s the best part of not being real,” she said. “It means he can’t die.”
Park didn’t ask who she was talking about.
“And you’re safe?” he asked her instead.
“As long as Dad’s alive and people are scared of him, I’m safe. And he’s alive. So I’m safe.”
“What if they find him, Polly?”
Her tough-girl face broke a little. In the face underneath he could see shovels, hard earth, a long night for Polly and Charlotte.
“Yeah,” he said. “Right.”
The silence thickened between them.
“Maybe I can help you,” Park said. “Get you into a good school. Get you headed toward a normal life.”
She smiled like she was the adult and he was the kid.
“Normal life? I don’t get to have one of those. But I get to have something else. That’s okay. I never was normal anyway. I’m from Venus.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
The coach blew a whistle.
“I got to go,” she said.
“Right,” he said. He fumbled for words. He didn’t know why he’d come all this way. Just to see her? Make sure he hadn’t imagined all that in the desert?
She turned back to him.
“Hey. Thanks for looking for me. It made me feel good that someone cared.”
“I didn’t care,” he said. “Not when I hunted you. I did it for my own reasons. But I do now.”
“Weird,” she said. “Later.”
He watched her for a while. Watched her roll on the mat, watched her fight and lose, fight and win.
“Cooldown,” the coach said. Polly and the other kids started stretching, shaking the fight out of their system, drinking water. The parents stood.
As Park headed for the door, someone started some music, something with bass in it, something wild and alive and free. Park didn’t know what it was called, but he thought it suited the girl just fine.