Vivi drummed her fingers on the kitchen counter. “I could be wrong,” she said when Ben hung up the phone.
He clicked a pen in and out in rapid succession. “Well, good thing I moved the money.”
“That’s a relief.” They could have absorbed the loss, but with only pensions now, everything was budgeted. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know.” He jabbed the pen into a mug holding a bouquet of writing implements. “Everything is whirling around now. It’s hard to think straight.”
“When did you move it?”
“Yesterday.”
“Yesterday everything wasn’t whirling around.” Annoyed, she followed him into the office. Ben opened the file drawer and extracted the bulging envelope. The day before, he’d pulled it from the dresser drawer and counted bills into Frank’s grout-splotched hands, payment for the first half of the job. Sometimes paying cash meant a better deal. The money had to be on hand, though. Contractors didn’t want to cool their heels while you ran to the bank.
Ben returned the envelope to its new spot.
“If the burglar had come to the office,” she said, “which seems like the logical place to me, he would have found the money.” The fact firmed her suspicion of an inside job. “Why did you move it? Did you suspect someone would do this?”
“No.” With his leg, Ben nudged shut the file drawer. “I just thought they’d seen its hiding place, and I didn’t want to leave any temptation.”
The doorbell chimed. Ben rushed down the hall. She followed close, stepping on the back of his shoe and giving it a flat tire.
A county sheriff’s deputy stood on the porch. Behind him, traffic clogged Beverly Lane—parents headed to a driveway that wrapped behind the regular school to a charter school. The White School, Vivi called it.
“I’m Deputy Hashimoto.” His uniform was crisp and his hair cropped close to his skull. “We’ve apprehended a suspect in your burglary. We need you to make a field identification.”
Over Ben’s shoulder, she asked, “You arrested someone?”
“We’re holding a person of interest.”
Ben stooped to fix the back lip of his shoe. “Do you want both of us to come?”
“Just you.”
The closing door puffed an old, familiar feeling around Vivi, one of staying with her mother while her father and her five brothers piled into the pick-up. Even if the guys were headed toward a grunt job like hauling fence posts, they bumped against each other and, loudly joking, jockeyed for who got to ride shotgun. Her brothers could be crude and mean, and yet, as the truck trundled down the driveway, spitting gravel, Vivi felt left behind. Left out.
As much as she treasured those quiet times with her mother—making jam or walking to the library—she envied the men rolling off in that pick-up, moving into the world, connecting with all that energy and force.
Inside the sheriff’s cruiser, Ben’s heart thumped with excitement and anxiety. He hoped they’d nabbed the right guy. It has to be him.
As soon as Deputy Hashimoto turned from Beverly Lane onto La Paz, he slapped a little card on his dash and rattled off a statement to Ben: “You are going to be shown an individual. This may or may not be the person who committed the crime, so you should not feel compelled to make an identification. It is just as important to clear innocent people as it is to identify possible perpetrators.”
Other than the deputy droning on with the canned policy speech, the cruiser was eerily quiet, and Ben realized the deputy had turned off the radio. The little computer-like screen on the dash was a dead gray-black, too. To avoid prejudicing him, Ben supposed.
He couldn’t concentrate on Hashimoto’s words. If they had picked up someone, it was the shithead who felt entitled to invade his home, who’d pointed a gun at his head, who’d threatened to kill him. Twice!
Deputy Hashimoto turned onto Scenic Drive, a meandering corridor that corralled the communities of Playa Maria County against the Pacific. The inland side of the road quickly rose into parched foothills and, beyond that, forested mountains.
Hashimoto looked too young to have had encounters with Ben’s son Art before he got straight and moved away. Ben was glad of that. Sunshine beat through the cruiser’s windshield. The inside of the car was stifling.
Ben tapped a rhythm on the seat, trying to focus on the here and now. Despite everything with Art, he’d never been inside a cruiser. He pointed at the rifle beside him. “I didn’t know you guys had weapons like this.”
“That’s an AR-15,” Hashimoto said. “We take those out for stops with weapons involved. If they have a weapon, we want to have a bigger one.”
Good luck with that.
As a former traffic engineer, Ben knew this long sloping stretch of Scenic Drive intimately, had, in fact, designed parts of it, but he felt like he’d never seen the section of highway before. Staring past Hashimoto’s profile, he scanned the commercial buildings on the developed side for places the burglar might have hidden. How had he lost sight of him so quickly?
Ben twisted in his seat. A riparian corridor, a wooded ravine, dipped down on the other side of the road. The thief must have escaped across Scenic Drive and disappeared into the brush.
“Kind of interesting,” Hashimoto said as if uncomfortable with the silence. “The scene of the crime—your house—is county, but by the time the thief started dumping your things, he’d reached city limits. It’s a long, spread-out crime scene.”
Two agencies could only complicate matters. In his work for the county, Ben had coordinated road projects with the city, and if you wanted a real nightmare, throw in the state, too. “Will that have an impact on the arrest?”
“Let’s just see if the person we’re talking to has anything to do with the burglary,” Hashimoto said.
They’d traveled down the long slope of Scenic Drive and up the hill. Ben’s body thrummed with adrenaline. Hashimoto turned right into a residential neighborhood spreading toward the foothills.
The image of the black gun barrel rose up before Ben, the tiny hole ready to swallow his life. His breath stopped.
As though inside his thoughts, the deputy said, “The gun is the big deal. Without it, we may be looking at catch and release.”
“Catch and release? He could go free?”
The deputy clamped his lips like he’d said too much. He made another turn onto a tree-lined street that ran parallel to the freeway. He drove to a collection of patrol cars, two dark-green county sheriff’s vehicles facing one way, a California Highway Patrol car across the street, and two Playa Maria police cruisers behind that.
So much manpower expended for one shithead. His head pounded and acid roiled in his empty gut.
Hashimoto stopped behind the CHP car and spoke into his radio. “We’re ready.” He cracked his car door, and Ben started to open his. “Stay put.”
Crisp air flowed into the cruiser, reviving him. The accompanying growl of freeway noise marred the image of a quiet tree-lined street.
Hashimoto stood outside his open door. A heavy-set deputy climbed from the front sheriff’s vehicle, opened the back door, and pulled out a handcuffed man who landed awkwardly on his feet and shrugged away from the deputy. The officer nudged him forward.
Hashimoto leaned into the car toward Ben. “Is this the guy?”
He took in the sweaty young man—not wearing the jacket or the pack.
“That’s him.”
“How certain are you?”
“One hundred percent.”
The thief stared at him. A trace of a smile flicked his lips.
The insolence, so like Art’s. The beefy deputy clasped the suspect’s bicep and spun him back toward his vehicle. The young man’s head swiveled as though he had something to say, but before he could think of anything creative, the deputy pressed him back down into the cruiser.
Hashimoto climbed into the patrol car.
“I don’t know if you’re allowed to say,” Ben said, “but do you know the suspect?”
“We’re familiar with him.” Hashimoto executed a tight U-turn.
On the trip back, the deputy asked, “Could you describe the gun?”
“Black and silver. Not very big. No spinning chamber. The kind where you load a magazine.”
“A semi-automatic?”
“Yeah. A semi-automatic.”
“Did it have an orange tip?”
He searched Hashimoto’s profile, the high cheekbones and unblinking eyes. It was hard to concentrate on that moment when he thought he’d die. “No. I’ve never seen a gun with an orange tip. What does that mean?”
The deputy shook his head. He’d said all he was going to say.