Ben walked into the rolled-up garage opening of Big Al’s. Noise reverberated inside the dim interior of concrete walls. Covered in a gray jumpsuit, Big Al hammered at a bar of iron glowing red from a small propane forge. Goggles hid his eyes, and a tattered cap, brim backward, covered his bald head.
Big Al continued to bang at the metal. “Hey, where’s your worker?” Ben shouted to be heard. Big Al didn’t respond.
Finally, Big Al stopped, rested the ball peen hammer on a long wooden table, and pushed up his goggles. His cap fell to the floor. He didn’t smile, speak, or pick up the cap.
“Is your apprentice here?” Ben asked.
“Nope.”
“When do you expect him?”
Big Al brushed thick hands down the legs of his jumpsuit. “Why?” He swabbed his damp forehead with a gray sleeve.
“Did the police question him?” Ben asked.
“They questioned both of us.”
“If the case goes to trial, will he testify?”
Al picked up the ball peen and tapped his palm with it. “I wouldn’t know, Ben. He quit.”
“He quit?”
“This morning.”
Big Al was angry. About what, Ben had no clue. It had to be about more than the kid quitting his job. All Ben knew was that the whole friggin’ case against Dwayne Williams seemed to be falling apart. “Where can I find him?”
“I don’t know. He said he was leaving town.”
“You must have some address on his job application.”
“I don’t go around sharing that kind of information.”
“What’s wrong?” Ben asked.
“Did you read the paper yesterday?” Big Al turned and pounded the wooden table with the tool. A row of crescent-moon dents indicated this wasn’t the first time Big Al had vented this way.
“I read the paper every day,” Ben said, irritated.
Al spun toward him. “Did you see the article about the shooting out at Baker’s?”
“Yes.” He froze. “That was you?”
“Me and my son-in-law.”
Ben’s heart sank. “He got shot.”
“That’s right.” Big Al bit off the words. “Serious injury.” He walloped the table again. “He’s in the hospital. Won’t be out for a while.” His face flushed redder than it had been from the furnace heat. Even his bald dome was pink.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Ben backed away.
“We wouldn’t have been at Baker’s,” Al muttered, “if it weren’t for you.” He pointed the hammer at Ben, “Chasing that burglar like some nut job.”
Vivi scrubbed at the pot she’d used to cook oatmeal. When Ben banged through the door, she jumped. He came into the kitchen, eyes stretched wide and unblinking. “Remember that article about the shooting at Baker’s? That was Big Al and his son-in-law!”
She leaned back against the counter. Ben remained in the middle of the room, spilling his news.
“Big Al blames me. You believe that?”
She wiped her hands on a towel even though they were dry. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“I just talked to him,” Ben said. “He was barely civil. Apparently he went to Baker’s because of our burglary.”
“He’s been through a trauma.” Their own experience was like someone had hurled a rock through their windshield, the craze cracking out from the point of impact. And that was without Ben being shot. In Big Al’s case, someone had been shot. “He’s looking for a place to direct his anger.”
“You’re taking his side?”
“I’m not taking a side.” Anger erupted like primordial lava. Winn would tell her she could choose her feelings, but how could you control a force of nature? “I’m trying to make sense of Big Al’s reaction.” She struggled to keep her voice even. “I understand how you feel, too.”
“Oh, you do? You understand how it feels to have a gun pointed at you and to think you’re going to die?”
“No.” She clamped her lips, but then spoke. “But I know what it is to lose someone you love to a weapon.” The doorbell rang. Luna streaked down the hall.
When Vivi opened the door, the representative from the alarm company bore a serious expression. If a client needed an alarm, it was no smiling matter, she supposed, or maybe he’d heard them arguing. In his charcoal slacks and blue windbreaker, he looked like a retired cop. He skimmed a big hand over crew-cut gray hair and introduced himself as Henry Bilstead.
“Come on in.”
She waved Henry toward the kitchen, wondering if he could sense the tension in the air. For the most part, it had dissipated. That was the weird magic of relationships—you could be irritated with each other and still snap together as a unit within seconds.
Ben shook Henry’s hand and spoke about installing alarms after burglaries.
“That’s the way it usually works,” Henry said dryly. “I installed an alarm system a couple of months ago for a woman after she’d had her firearm stolen. But that doesn’t mean this is frivolous. You’d be surprised how often people are hit a second time. A thief robs you, waits a month for you to replace everything nice and new, and then returns.”
“Our guy is in jail,” she blurted.
“Sometimes they have buddies.”
A fat lot of good Dwayne’s incarceration did then.
The three of them pulled stools around the butcher-block table. Henry accepted a glass of water, opened a glossy blue folder, and continued his pitch—smooth and practiced. A pro, Vivi thought.
By the time he reached his grand finale, Henry had moved to home invasions. “You may have heard about that case in Los Gatos—a couple came home from a dinner and were accosted in their driveway by two thugs with guns. One of the robbers was a friend of their son.”
Henry’s gray eyebrows quirked in inquiry—did they have anything like that to worry about? She glanced at Ben. His son Art had left his cocaine-fueled indiscretions in the past. He’d met a nurse in rehab, married, and had worked his way up to manage a top restaurant in Santa Barbara. For all the strain between him and Ben, Art would never have anything to do with something like that now. Would he?
“How does the alarm work with a home invasion?” Ben asked.
“If they force you inside—those kids up in Los Gatos had a sawed-off shotgun—and coerce you to turn off the alarm, you enter a second, special code instead of the usual one. That will alert us, and we can deploy our personnel.”
“What if on a normal day, we confuse the two codes and punch in the wrong one?” Vivi asked.
“When you use your special code, we call to see if you used it on purpose. You won’t be able to say much if you have a gun to your head, but what we do is agree upon a password.”
“Like the name of our cat,” Ben offered. “Luna.”
“That would work. You insert that word into the conversation. Like, ‘Everything is okay. Luna jumped and triggered the motion sensor.’”
They wrapped up and Ben stopped on the porch with Henry to review all the information—make sure he had it right. She left them to it and returned to flip open the blue folder and then slap it shut, tired of everything it represented—the invasion of their home, the fracturing of their lives, this business that capitalized on crime. Each day plunged them into more fallout, and she couldn’t, now that the burglary had stirred up memories of Hollywood, find a good time to confide in Ben. She put the water glass in the dishwasher.
When Ben came back to the kitchen, she plucked up the folder and dropped it back to the table. “We’ve been slimed. Was that meant to scare us or what?”
“That’s how to sell alarms.”
“Just what we don’t need.”
“You’ve changed your mind about getting one?”
“No, I mean we don’t need an extra dose of fear about thugs waiting for us with a sawed-off shotgun.”
He stood at the table, head bent, thumbing through the contents of the folder. “Expensive, too.”
“Didn’t those kids in Los Gatos kill that couple? Would a deployed rent-a-cop have stopped them?”
“In that situation, the company would contact the police.”
“Even so, the couple would have been dead.”
“Yeah. You’re right.” He closed the folder.
Now that the salesman had gone, Luna ventured back into the kitchen and raised her head for a reassuring pet. After obliging, Ben glanced up. “The rep was trying to upsell us.”
“We don’t need all those bells and whistles.”
He stood, knees cracking. “Some people just put up an alarm company sign.”
“Maybe more than that. An actual alarm might have scared Dwayne Williams away.”
“You’re right,” he said again.
“Wow, a record.” She smiled. “Right two times in one minute.”
He started down the hall to get his gym bag, and she followed, making her case. “All we need is an alarm to go off. The burglar won’t know what services are attached to it.”
He added a fresh towel to his duffel bag. “At least this meeting clarified what we want. I’ll make an appointment with another rep.” He grabbed his Phillies cap from the closet and put it on.
The bedroom phone shrilled behind them. Luna raced under the bed again. After the talk about people being shot in their homes, she felt like joining the cat. Vivi snatched up the receiver. Outside the bedroom window, the pelargonium bush swayed in a stiff breeze.
“This is Assistant District Attorney Cheryl Smith.”
She mouthed the words although Ben was pressed close and had probably heard the booming, confident voice. The call surprised her. Their friend, a public defender, had cautioned them that the justice system was overburdened. “Don’t expect to hear from the DA’s office for a week,” he’d said.
This Cheryl Smith must be on the ball.
Ben pulled the phone away from her, so like her competitive brothers. Or maybe like the entitled only child he’d been. She hovered to hear the conversation.
“The arraignment for Dwayne Williams has been set for tomorrow,” the attorney said.
“The two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar bail should hold him until then.” Ben’s statement lilted up at the end like a question.
“Two hundred and fifty thousand?” the ADA said. “Where did you get that number?”
“The paper.”
Cheryl Smith chortled. “You can’t believe everything you read.”
“What is it then?” Ben asked.
“The typical twenty-five thousand.”
“So he would only need twenty-five hundred to be out?”
“Believe me,” the lawyer said, “you don’t have to worry.” The voice was clipped now, signaling that she did not plan to elaborate.
“I want to go to the arraignment,” Ben said.
“That’s not necessary. It’ll be over in five minutes. It’s just a time for Dwayne Williams to formally hear the charges and for the court to decide the bail.”
“Didn’t you just say it was twenty-five thousand?”
“That’s a schedule amount.” Before they could ask what that meant, she said, “Because of the gun, we’ll be pressing for robbery.”
“What’s the difference between burglary and robbery?” Vivi asked.
Ben repeated the question into the mouthpiece.
“Robbery involves physical force or the threat of physical force. Longer sentence, typically.”
“Good,” Ben said.
“I want to prepare you, though,” the assistant district attorney continued. “After the arraignment, given Dwayne’s age, and the overcrowding in the jail, and the fact he didn’t shoot you, and we can’t prove the gun—yet—they may move him to River House in South County.”
“But he’ll be locked up.” Ben’s voice insisted at the same time the timbre again pitched upward in question.
“Yes. But River House is for non-violent offenders. They offer various release programs.”
“What does that mean?” Ben choked on the question like he had food stuck in his throat.
“It means with good behavior inmates are allowed outside the facility to do things.”
“Things? Like what?”
“Clean up along the freeway, that kind of thing. Under supervision, of course. The facility also has a strong relationship with a local church.”
From behind, Vivi circled Ben with her arms. She didn’t blame him for being nervous. The alarm rep, Harvey Bilstead, who looked like a former police officer, had spent the last half hour in their kitchen spinning worst-case scenarios of home invaders with shotguns.
“They can go to church?” His voice tightened.
“Don’t worry. It would be extremely unusual for the defendant to come for you,” Cheryl Smith said. “Actually, they’ll probably hold him in the jail until after the prelim. Make it easier for the court and the defense attorney. River House is twenty miles from here.” The lawyer’s voice emitted crisply from the handset. “I do want to advise you, though, that sometimes relatives or friends show up at hearings.”
“Is that a danger?” Vivi asked, loud enough to be heard through the receiver. This ADA was about as reassuring as the alarm rep.
“Dwayne’s brother Wesley is locked up.” The ADA paused. “Although his release could be about now.” She stopped again. “I’ll have to check on that. But when we get to the prelim, if you go—”
“Oh, we’re going!” Ben said.
“Be mindful,” Cheryl Smith said. “I’m sorry that I have to cut this short. In the meantime, be careful whom you talk to. If someone comes out and identifies himself as ‘with the DA,’ be on the alert. That is the oldest trick in the book. He’s not exactly lying, but he means DA as in defense attorney.”
“That’s sneaky,” Vivi inserted over Ben’s shoulder.
“It’s part of the game.” Cheryl Smith’s voice contained a smile, as if the ADA relished the contest before her. That kind of energy might be beneficial for their case, Vivi thought, but she didn’t like it. Nothing about this seemed like a game.