Striking Back

by Mark Nykanen

  “Actually, they’re not our number one suspect,” Warren joined in. “Kruber was taken down at his job with four other employees in the building. Whoever did this tracked his moves very carefully and then killed him quickly. Not your typical, sloppy, impulsive batterer type. We still have to take a serious look at them, though. Obviously, they’ve all got a violent background.”

  “Of course, they’re not the only ones,” Trenton said.

  “Who’s your number one?” Lupe asked.

  “We’re getting there,” Trenton said.

  “Wait. Croce was killed by you guys,” Gwyn said. “And he’s mentioned in the poem.”

  “Maybe we gave somebody an idea when we killed him,” Warren said. “An eye for an eye.”

  “Retribution,” Trenton said in a honeyed voice. “Guy shoots his wife, guy gets shot. Guy chokes his wife, guy chokes to death. Guy gets his wife strung out on smack and pimps her, guy OD’s. So we’re really looking for suspects with a history of seeking retribution. Know anyone like that, Ms. Sanders?”

  The big man sidled closer, then stopped just short of her personal space.

  Gwyn shook her head.

  “Where were you last night at about eleven?” Warren asked, those eyes burning her like acid.

  “I was home in bed sleeping.”

  “Alone, or did you have some company?” Trenton asked it without a hint of salaciousness.

  “That’s my business.”

  Warren wrote on his notepad as he said, “For now it is.”

  “You see . . . ” Trenton leaned in so close Gwyn could smell his dinner. It didn’t smell good. “. . . once burned, twice cautious. You hearing me?”

  Detective Warren looked up, stopped writing.

  Gwyn stared at Detective Trenton.

  “What are you talking about?” Lupe said.

  “She knows, don’t you, Ms. Sanders?” Detective Trenton asked softly. “We know about your father.”

  “Stepfather,” Gwyn immediately corrected him.

  “He raised you, right?”

  “That’s subject to debate.”

  “But he did die under very questionable circumstances when you were sixteen. There’s no debate about that.”

  Lupe glanced at Gwyn, who waited for Trenton to go on. There was more. A lot more. Gwyn knew this better than anyone, felt it coming like an earthquake after the first tremor.

  “That case is a classic,” Trenton continued, as Gwyn knew he would. “Small town sheriff and his deputies bumble into the crime scene, screw up the evidence, and the place ends up with more prints than the waiting room at the DMV. No one’s charged. Just like when the star of that old TV show, Hogan’s Heroes . . . ”

  “Bob Crane,” Warren put in.

  “Yeah, Bob Crane, when he got murdered in Arizona about the same time, local yokels messed everything up. That one made the textbooks, everybody learns about it at the academy. Same thing with your stepfather. Imagine that. Or maybe you don’t have to?”

  Now he paused for a reply. When Gwyn maintained her silence, he shrugged and Detective Warren took over.

  “Here in Los Angeles, Ms. Sanders, we don’t usually compromise cases like that. And when we start seeing a pattern where guys are dying around the same person, even twenty-three years later, we get a little suspicious.”

  “The same kind of retributive murders,” Detective Trenton said, still in love with the word.

  “Even if the victims are total thugs,” Warren scratched his temple, “we have to look real hard at anything that’s relevant, and you, Ms. Sanders, are as relevant as right is to left.”

  “So we’re standing outside your door there,” Trenton edged even closer to Gwyn, “and damn if we don’t hear you say how you wouldn’t mind if one of the guys in your group got himself murdered.”

  “That was me,” Lupe said, “and you know it. I got a distinctive Latina accent, so don’t go saying you thought she was doing the talking. That make me a suspect, too?”

  “You kill your daddy?” Trenton asked.

  “You saying I did?” Gwyn shot back.

  “No, Ms. Sanders, we’re not saying that,” Trenton said in a voice as even as a carpenter’s plane. “We’re just wondering if there’s something you’d like to tell us, because the one thing we don’t buy in this business is coincidence. You see a pattern, you start looking for one set of prints.”

  “But you haven’t found them, or you wouldn’t be here,” Lupe said, “talking this trash. And she doesn’t have to give you any goddamn prints, either.”

  Detective Warren nodded. “You’re absolutely correct, but we don’t need them. We have her prints from twenty-three years ago. They haven’t changed.”

  “The question is,” Trenton stared at Gwyn from less than two feet away, “have you?”

  Once again, Gwyn refused his question with silence.

  “It’s your right,” Warren added, “not to say anything, especially anything that might incriminate you. I will tell you, though, that we’ve pulled your stepfather’s case files. There’s no statute of limitations on what happened to him.”

  “So if there’s something you could say to explain this ‘coincidence’ we’re seeing, we’d love to hear it,” Trenton said, the last of his dinner still warming the air.

  Gwyn couldn’t stop staring at them, and she couldn’t speak.

  Lupe put her arm around her and said, “You guys are done.”

  “Are you ending this interview, or are you some kind of psychic, Ms. Sandoval?” Trenton appeared amused.

  “I’m no psychic, I grew up in the barrio, and I know your bullshit. So you make an arrest, you can talk till your tongue falls out. Otherwise, there’s the door. Don’t let it smack your big ass on the way out.”

  Trenton’s smile faded fast, but Detective Warren beamed for the first time and said “Remember, Ms. Sanders, once burned, twice cautious.”

  I remember, Gwyn said to herself, but she doubted her memories were what they had in mind. Memory, she had learned long ago, could be as selective as the most premeditated murder.

  “If you want to talk to us, give us a call.” Detective Warren offered his card.

  “Or wave,” Detective Trenton said in parting, “we’ll be watching.”

  As they shut the door on the darkening night, Gwyn crumpled up Warren’s card and dropped it to the floor, remembering the feel of other cards falling from her hands, and the sound of other detectives closing doors, only to open them again.

  Chapter 4

  Gwyn woke right as her alarm sounded on Saturday morning. Six o’clock and alert in an instant, jumpy and anxious even in bed. Horrifying enough to have awakened for the past two months to the grim memory of Al Croce, but now she’d become a murder suspect . . . again.

  Her jitters weren’t greatly eased by her surf date in sixty minutes. Maybe she should have cancelled it. Yes, she found Doctor Howard Harken appealing, but the timing couldn’t have been worse. Any day now he, along with millions of other Angelinos, was bound to hear that L.A.P.D. was investigating her for the grisly murders of two men in her group, and that detectives were once again trying to determine her role in the bizarre slaying of her stepfather twenty-three years ago.

  She threw on her robe and made her way into the kitchen with caffeine-hungry eyes, not that her over-amped system really needed coffee.

  As she filled the kettle, she turned on an old Philco and caught the mellifluous voices of NPR reporting tragedies of the first order. Today, however, she needed the slummy side of the dial, the tabloid AM news, to see whether the killings of Dan Kruber and Rick Santini had been connected, or tied to her. With Detectives Trenton and Warren questioning the men in the group since Wednesday night, she fully expected the story to leak. Then she’d have to brace herself for another rash of reporters, as Doctor Harken, presumably, fled in the opposite direction.

  Local bulletins came and went in an obliging two-minute burst with nothing more about Kruber’s murder, dumped
after a single news cycle. As for Santini’s doped-up demise, that had warranted no attention in the first place. His name would hit the headlines only after the links—and his memorialization in that poem—became known.

  Satisfied that the case remained quiet, at least for the moment, she poured herself a cup of coffee, settled at the counter, and checked out the live surf cam on her laptop.

  There is a God.

  A five-foot swell had rolled in overnight and Pacific Palisades was pumping. That was the hitch about a first surf date. You plan to meet somewhere, but in your heart you know that if the place is burping up berries, and farther up or down the coast the really big melons are breaking, you’d be pining for the Promised Land the whole time you’re paddling out and coasting back in. Chit-chatting when you really want to ride.

  She set down her java and bolted to the shower, eager to get out the door. A five-foot sea meant at least a ten foot wave face; in short, seriously overhead conditions.

  As quickly, she fixed herself a fruit smoothie with rice protein and vanilla yogurt. A coffee for the road and she was all set.

  Her boards were lined up in a tall locker in the rear of the parking garage. She looked with the purest nostalgia at the six-four, narrow-nosed slash ’n’ burn wonder she’d used for most of the contests in her twenties. Back then her long legs had worked like pistons as she bottom-turned up and down the steepest faces, and executed the most radical off-the-lip aerials and re-entries to slash the wave to watery ribbons.

  But those days felt ancient now. Several years ago she’d turned to long boarding, going for grace and polish and aplomb, sang-froid in the wildest seas, at times hanging ten toes off the tip of her board, which always left her with the palpably real yet mystically removed sensation of walking on water.

  She strapped the stick down on the CR-V’s roof rack and headed up to Harken’s, a trip almost entirely unencumbered by traffic. L.A. at this hour on a Saturday morning slept—Pra-raise Jesus—and that made rising early its own reward.

  Not to understate the added pleasure of spotting Harken standing on the edge of the parking lot in a wetsuit, striking an appealing pose with his arm around a long board. Nice smile. The waves looked good too: way overhead, double overhead, with only a handful of riders. Could be epic.

  “Good morning, Miss Sanders.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Harken. Or shall I call you ‘Doctor Harken?’”

  “How about Howard?”“

  “Howard it shall be,” she said, relaxing with the gentle repartee.

  “As long as you don’t call me ‘Howie.’”

  “You don’t strike me as a Howie.” She retrieved her two-tone blue wetsuit from the back of the CR-V.

  As she tussled with the neoprene, they parried about names. He noted that there wasn’t much you could do to mangle Gwyn, and she said she’d always been grateful for that, diminutives often destroying the comeliest appellations.

  She pulled out her bar of Sex Wax—now there was shameless and successful marketing in a name—and rubbed it over the board’s surface, freshening the grip for her hands and feet before locking up the car.

  “How long have you been surfing?” he asked as they traversed the sand and the sound of the waves grew.

  “A while.” She smiled, not giving him the curriculum vitae of her career in waves. Some guys could be . . . intimidated, and while she generally crossed them off the short list right away, she didn’t want to have to do that to Harken yet. Besides, the news reports would soon cross her off his list.

  “So that’s not too big for you?” he said as the ocean appeared to erupt in geysers of whitewater. “Because we could always head down to Seal Beach. It’s a lot smaller there today.”

  “No, not too big.”

  They were standing beside half a dozen older guys and two younger women, all in wetsuits. One of the women pointed to where a man had just been eaten by a wave. It hadn’t spit him out yet. They’re deliberating, Gwyn figured, less on his fate than theirs.

  “How about you?” she asked Harken as the surfer’s arms flailed up through the foam only to be pummeled by another monster.

  Harken just smiled.

  “Okay, let’s go.” She raced out into the boiling whitewater, launching her board, feeling the swift glide over the suds, smelling the ocean, that first intimate breath in the morning that excited every cell in her body. She looked ahead and saw those ten, twelve-foot faces breaking fifty yards away, and felt their thunder even here, the undertow drawing her toward the explosive power of those waves as much as her own arms.

  As she paddled, her shoulders and back muscles came alive, and she arched her neck to better eye the breakers. Timing was everything now. She wanted to shoot up the face of the waves and down their backs. But if she was off even a second or two she’d have to use her hands to force the board, along with her body, under these crushers, and then fight a dark, vicious turbulence that could rip the stick right out of her hands and spit her ragdolling through the rinse cycle.

  Slowing down slightly, letting one more wave break. “Now,” she said aloud.

  She pressed her fingers tightly together to form efficient paddles and worked furiously. The wave rose before her and she worried that she might have been a half beat slow in her take-off. She had a moment when she thought how foolish she’d look to him if she got caught inside, but this concern was dwarfed by the pulsing fear that comes from the prospect of paddling almost over the lip of a giant wave only to have it launch you backward into the momentarily calm water below, which she once dubbed the “plate” because it always served you to the next omnivorous green monster in line.

  If it came to that she’d bail, thrust her board to the side and curl up protectively for the thunderous thrashing.

  But she made her last few powerful strokes up the face, and the nose of the board finally leaped over the lip. Less than a second later, as she paddled two more times, she felt the sudden descent of the ocean as the wave exploded only feet behind her, the seism sending shudders through her board to her body.

  She paddled over two more waves, each one easier to summit now that she’d cleared the break zone, and then she straddled her board alongside five other surfers, including one woman.

  Where’s he gone?

  She scanned the water, waiting for him to pop over a wave at any moment, turquoise board, blond hair.

  “It ate him.”

  She turned toward the voice, a man about her age. “You sure?”

  “He watched you take off but he waited too long. You snooze you lose.”

  She turned back in time to spot Harken, soaked and smiling, cresting a swell. She waved and wondered if he’d be weirded-out over not making as smooth an entrance as she.

  He paddled up, straddled his board, and spun it around to face her. “It got me,” he said sheepishly, but with another smile.

  The tips of their boards bobbed close to each other, as if engaged in their own tête-à-tête. “I missed that.”

  “That’s okay.” He laughed.

  She liked his good-naturedness. Mostly matter of fact about it, as he should be. Everyone gets eaten.

  “Surfed here before?” he asked.

  “Not for a while. I’ve been up the coast mainly. Topanga, Malibu.”

  Mr. Snooze caught a big wave, and as soon as he started down the face he disappeared from view. When it’s double overhead, they all became ghost riders.

  The sea stirred and she spied another huge swell. Without a word she started paddling, noting a guy four positions away from her trying to drop in. She would have yelled at him to back off but she could tell he was starting late.

  And then she felt it, the moment when the swell jacked up. It lifted her and forced her forward, raising and propelling her quickly to the lip, to the point where she could have reached out to the empty space in front of the wave because the ocean’s carpet had rolled right out from under her.

  She sprung to her feet, left foot forward, as h
er board pointed almost straight down. The rush of speed, blood, the sea—all things liquid—consumed her.

  The waves were breaking right, and as soon as she started down she knew she’d be riding in the tube. The barrel formed perfectly and she moved swiftly, smoothly, to the ever receding circle of light at the end of this perfect tunnel.

  About a foot of the board’s nose pointed out of the green room, and from the beach she knew her body appeared as a silhouette behind the scrim of water.

  She trailed the fingers of her right hand lightly over the face, the feel of the tips running over the water a silky complement to the delicate work of her feet.

  The wave peeled and peeled and she knew nothing would go wrong with this one. It was a wave she’d feed off of for days, maybe weeks. Maybe even a wave she’d remember for years. Some of them were like that, coming back to her with their salt and smells and taste—yes, even their taste—as she pored over stress logs or accountability letters.

  She looked ahead and saw the wave closing out, so she leaned on the outside rail and took the board down the face a few knots faster, shooting out of the tube into the spectral light of a coastal morn. She descended into an abbreviated bottom turn—a quick comma—before carving sharply all the way back up the face and shooting off the big fat lip like she’d sprung from a trampoline.

  Board and body separated happily in the air behind the wave, linked only by the umbilical cord of her ankle leash. She landed joyfully, kerplunk in the water, and took a breather before starting to paddle back out, glancing over in time to see Harken starting down his first wave.

  A little ungainly, no Laird Hamilton, but then again, who was? Hey, the doc’s got game. Not too many people in the world can go out on a nine-foot piece of styro and catch a twelve-foot wave. He rode it conservatively, no theatrics, but cleanly. Didn’t spend any time in the tube, but Gwyn didn’t make it there on every ride, though as she waited for Hark—there! she’d named him; better than Howard, much better than Howie—she knew she’d find it again and again this morning. There were days when you didn’t seek the flow, it found you.