Wax was brief and to the point. Stevie had texted his son, Daron, and then they had spoken on the phone. Daron was able to get an address from his cousin and Wax had insisted Daron give it to him. The girl had been in L.A. since she’d left his son. That was all Wax knew. He was passing on the address to Lorena and Waldo, on some street called Cheltenham Drive, and trusting that they would find Stevie safe and sound. Assuming they did, he’d consider their business concluded and then he expected them to leave him and his family alone.
Waldo and Lorena walked from Main Beach to her car, which was parked at a meter near the gallery where Waldo had met with Don Q. The two of them were on the same page at last. They shared a take on the timing of Wax’s call: Amador had indeed reached out to Wax after Lorena shook him up; Wax in turn leaned on his son, who either found out or knew all along where Stevie had been hiding. The ticktock didn’t matter, though. As long as Stevie really was where the Waxes said she was, they’d take it. They’d deliver her to her parents and smooth the meet with Cuppy, and once the family Rose was hooked up with a lawyer they’d extricate themselves as quickly and cleanly as they could.
Lorena started the engine and plugged the address into her GPS. “That little cooz.”
“What now?”
Lorena showed him on the dashboard map. “Look. She’s half a mile from her parents’ house.”
A white-haired woman opened the door, a senior flummoxed by unexpected visitors after sundown. Lorena said, “We’re looking for Stevie Rose. We were told she was staying here.”
“Yes, while her parents are out of town. Who are you?”
“My name’s Lorena Nascimento. This is Charlie Waldo.” The woman, who hadn’t recognized Waldo without the prompt, now couldn’t keep from gawking. Lorena told her that the Roses were, in fact, at home and had hired them to find Stevie. The woman said her name was Marilyn Lambert and that she was Clara’s grandmother, assuming they’d have an idea who Clara was. She said she’d go get Stevie and disappeared into the house without inviting them inside.
Stevie glowered at Waldo and Lorena as she strode past them and out to the street, leaving without a good-bye or thank-you to her friend Clara, who lingered in the doorway, or to Clara’s grandma. Waldo did thank Marilyn Lambert and they followed Stevie.
Waldo and Lorena hadn’t made a plan for getting the girl home in the two-seat Mercedes. Waldo said, “We could walk.”
Lorena said, “You could walk. We’ll meet you there.”
Stevie said, “Yeah, fuck that, I’m not walking. It’s like two miles.”
That torqued Lorena enough to take the hills in her heels. “We’re all walking.” Stevie heaved a supremely annoyed teenage grunt. They started their hike. Lorena said, “So who’s Clara?”
“That girl.”
“Who is she?”
“My best friend. Not that it’s any of your business.”
“I thought Dionne was your best friend.”
“Who told you that?”
“Your parents didn’t even mention a Clara.”
“You talked to my parents? God.”
“They hired us to find you.”
“Figures. Leave it to Paula to turn everything into a great big drama.”
“You’ve been missing for five days.”
“I wasn’t missing. I was right here.”
“You were in Orange County.”
“When?”
“After we saw you at your house. You called your cousin and he came and got you.”
“No. I called Clara, because Clara has a car and I figured you two would snitch on me for being home when my parents were away.”
“Snitch to who?”
“Whoever. The school.”
“You haven’t been going to school. You think they weren’t going to notice?”
“I’ve been going to school,” she said, as if annoyed at their incompetence.
“When’s the last time you were there?”
“Today. I skipped a couple of classes, but I went.”
Waldo knew it was the usual Stevie obscuration but Lorena was treating it like a deposition and letting the girl’s inconsistencies spin her out even more. He could tell Stevie read all that and was relishing the game.
Lorena said, “Oh, really. If we went to your school right now and asked them—”
“It would be closed. Because it’s night?” Stevie said it with such overbearing smugness that Waldo thought Lorena might slug her.
Before she could, he said, “Hey,” and stopped walking. “Do you know that Mr. Ouelette is dead?”
Stevie stopped walking too. “Yes.”
“Do you know that the police want to talk to you?”
Stevie shook her head.
“Your parents are paying us to be on your side, and we’re pretty much the only ones who are. So you need to stop bullshitting us, understand? You need to tell us everything that happened from when we left your house that day.”
Stevie glowered some more, then looked away. Finally she said, “I was just hanging out. I felt like getting high and I was bored. So I called Daron.”
“Why Daron?”
“Because I knew it would piss off Paula and Joel. Especially if I was down there with him when they got home.”
He said, “Why did you want to piss them off?” She hiked a shoulder. “So what did you and Daron do that night?”
“We smoked some weed and stuff and then he started being a dick.”
“Being a dick how?”
“There was some guy he didn’t want me talking to.” It was a pretty soft telling of the drugs and of Marwin Amador and his teardrop tattoos, but at least it was more or less consistent with Daron’s account. “I didn’t need my cousin all, like, telling me what to do. So I left.”
“Where’d you go?”
“Well, then I was shit out of luck, because my phone was dead. I got some guy outside a CVS to lend me his and I called Clara and told her where I was. She’s a senior.”
“And she drove down to Orange County and got you?”
“Yeah. I slept over at her house. The next day we ditched school and went to Venice Beach. And then this other girl Shannon texted Clara about Mr. Ouelette and I was totally freaked out, so I just stayed at Clara’s. I didn’t want anybody to know where I was.”
“Why not?”
“Because of what I did with you guys, hiring you to mess with him. I didn’t want to get in trouble.” She told them that starting the second day, Clara would drop Stevie off somewhere on her way to school and Stevie would hang out alone at Fashion Square or the Galleria. “It was probably stupid,” she said, “but I was, like, too freaked out to deal. Do they know who killed him?”
Waldo said, “How did Daron find out where you were? Did you call him, or did he call you?”
“I didn’t call him. I texted him, like, on the first day, from Clara’s phone.”
“Why from Clara’s?”
“Because I was keeping mine off so I wouldn’t have to deal with this,” meaning anyone coming to get her.
“Why did you text Daron, then? What did you say to him?”
“Just something normal. You know: ‘It’s Stevie, friend’s phone, OMG my teacher got killed,’ or whatever. But he was still all weird about that guy down there and I stopped answering.”
“How did he get Clara’s address?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he texted her and she snitched me out. Apparently I can’t trust anyone for shit.”
“What about Amador?”
“What’s Amador?”
“The guy you called. Marwin.” Stevie shook her head like she didn’t know what he was talking about. “The guy you bought the coke from.”
She stepped back, thrown. “Oh. Yeah. I thought his name was, like, Marvin.”
“You called him after you left Daron’s.”
“No—I called him while I was at Daron’s. While we were fighting. To piss him off.” It was a versatile motivation.
“Daron didn’t tell us that.”
“Maybe he doesn’t remember. He was pretty fucked up.”
Waldo ran it all through again in his head, then said, “Let’s walk.” They started again toward the Roses’.
He believed Stevie was telling something in the vicinity of the truth. Too much matched what they’d heard elsewhere, with no obvious inconsistencies. Still, one thing didn’t feel right. “You knew your parents were back from Hawaii?”
“I guessed they were. They were supposed to be.”
“Ouelette was murdered, you were scared . . . why didn’t you call them?”
“You don’t get it. You don’t know Paula and Joel.” Her voice had a different tinge, something that sounded darker under the teenage sneering. Waldo looked over at Lorena to see if she heard it too.
Lorena rolled her eyes.
When they got to the Roses’, Stevie unlocked the door but paused before opening it. “This is going to suck.” She turned to Waldo. “Could you go in and talk to them first? Like, soften them up or something?”
Lorena said to her, “I’m waiting out here with you.”
Stevie said, “Don’t worry, Lorena,” again the put-upon, superior teen. “I’m not going to run away.”
“Fucking A, you’re not.”
Waldo shook his head and opened the door, glad for the brief respite from their hostility. He started to call for Stevie’s parents, but before he could make a sound the beast was upon him—a brown bear, right in the house, lunging out of a darkened hallway, fangs first.
Waldo raised his right hand at the last second to protect his face and throat; powerful jaws clamped his forearm and the creature’s flying weight slammed him into a wall. The back of Waldo’s head shattered a mirror.
On the ground now amid the shards, the bear champed his arm without letup. Waldo screamed and clubbed at its snout with his other hand, to no effect.
Then the world went red and his brain exploded. Every muscle seized at once, a full-body paroxysm, agony like nothing he’d ever conceived of, so excruciating that he completely forgot there was a beast trying to slaughter him.
And then it was over.
The pain. The attack. Everything.
Waldo leaned against a wall and started breathing again. He tried to get his compass back, to make sense of what had just happened. The bear was sedate too, lying on the ground a few feet away. Lorena knelt beside it. Stevie was running into the darkened hallway. He heard a door slam.
Waldo closed his eyes, concentrated on drawing a breath as slowly and deeply as he could. He let it out and did it again.
Then Lorena was pulling him to his feet and out the front door. The pain flooded back into his arm. Lorena pulled the front door shut behind them.
Waldo leaned against the doorjamb and said, “Where the fuck did these people get a bear?”
Lorena broke into a laugh so convulsive that she actually fell down. Seated on the ground, she said, “Fuck, that broke the tension. Oh, that’s good.”
“What?”
“It’s not a bear. It’s a Presa Canario, I think.”
“What is that?”
“It’s a dog. It’s banned in a couple countries.”
“What did you do?”
“Tased it. Couple times. I might have caught you on one of them. It was a little tight. Sorry.”
“Oh.”
Lorena said, “Was it good for you?”
He almost chuckled. “My arm’s pretty messed up.”
“We should get you to a hospital.”
“Yeah.” He started down the driveway.
“Where are you going?”
“To your car.”
“Uh, no. Ambulance.” She was already dialing.
“We’ll get to your car faster.” She wasn’t hearing of it and waved him off. He said, “You just don’t want me bleeding all over your Mercedes.”
“That’s why I love you, Waldo: you understand me.” She gave the address to the 911 operator and came over to take a better look at his bleeding arm in the light of the Roses’ motion detector security lighting. “Yeah, that’s pretty bad. Let’s get you sitting down.” She guided him to a cedar porch glider.
Waldo worked his good arm out of its sleeve and wrapped the shirt around the wound, applying what pressure he could. Lorena said, “You want me to do that?”
“Nah, I got it.”
Lorena put her arm over the back of the seat and stroked his hair, a rare moment of chaste affection. They waited quietly for a few minutes, rocking gently. At one point she said, softly, “Where’d these people get a bear?” and they both smiled.
The door opened and Paula Rose took three furious steps in their direction. “What—” she said, “did you do—to my dog?”
Lorena said, “I tased it.”
“What is wrong with you? What kind of person does that to an animal?”
Lorena said, “Shut the fuck up. Now. Or I’ll shoot the fucking dog, and tase you.” Paula gasped. “And by the way,” said Lorena, “your daughter’s home.”