Striking Back

by Mark Nykanen

  He was stretched out on a straw mat in surf shorts. She had no idea if he was looking up at her because, sensibly enough, he was wearing dark glasses. The sun, playing its standard-issue peek-a-boo till noon, had finally peeked for good.

  She’d planned on blading down the boardwalk, but would happily shelve those plans if talking to Harken would clear up the confusion she felt about him. Trust your feelings, she reminded herself. You’ve got a really good sense of intuition, the best goddamned gut of anyone, as Lupe had put it.

  Harken still hadn’t stirred. He could be looking right at me, she realized. That’s when he waved. As if he’d read her mind.

  She nodded, mouthed, “I’ll come down.”

  He was standing with his mat all rolled-up by the time she strolled on to the sand. Go get a beer?” He gestured to a dive bar down the boardwalk.

  “I’d rather drink kerosene than go in there. It’s a biker bar. Would you settle for juice? There’s a juice bar up thataway.”

  She wasn’t inviting him upstairs. He was still Harken, not “Hark.”

  As they started out, she said nothing. Let him take the lead now that he’d chased her down. But he, too, remained silent as the two of them all but marched up the boardwalk. After he paid for the tropical fruit smoothies, they sat under the juice bar’s palm-fronded palapa. Harken had just cleared his throat to talk when a baby scorpion dropped down next to Gwyn’s drink, stinger curled.

  She jumped from the table as if spring-loaded, and raced back out to the boardwalk. “Jesus, what is this shit?” She brushed her shoulders, neck and hair frantically, shivering with the feeling of creepy-crawly creatures on her skin.

  Harken grabbed the drinks and joined her as the minimum-wage fruit-squasher shrugged her shoulders as if to say, “Scorpions? Yeah, we got ’em,” with eyes glazed as glass.

  “The beach?” Harken handed Gwyn her drink.

  “The beach,” she replied. Scorpions weren’t dropping from the sky, least not yet. Unless you were reading the Left Behind series.

  Harken gave his straw mat a precautionary shake before spreading it on the sand. He turned to her as soon as they sat. “Look, I came back here because this morning I said I couldn’t go through this again, but then I realized I really care about you and want you to know my side of the story. The whole thing.”

  “I don’t want you to feel like you’re on trial.”

  “But I want you to hear this.”

  He started off by saying the cops had never produced any physical evidence.

  “Not a shred. Let’s just look at my boat for a second. There was all this crap about how I supposedly used it to take Sofia’s body out to Point Concepcion. That’s absurd. Forensics had it up in dry dock for three weeks and went over every inch of it. Nothing.”

  He pointed out that another surfer had died at the same spot under similar circumstances four years ago. “His name was Paul Alders Anderson. Google it, please.”

  Then he asked whether she’d seen the Times piece on Sofia’s sister. She shook her head.

  “You’ve got to read it. It’s important because it points out that she and her kids had lived with us for several months before Sofia died. She and her husband were having problems. If anybody was going to know if our marriage was in trouble, it would have been Andrea. You’ve got to read that piece because she’s very strong in rebutting all of that . . . that crap.”

  “What about the fight at the Newport Yacht Club?”

  “Total bullshit. We didn’t even belong to it.”

  “So why didn’t you sue these people?”

  “Lots of reasons. I didn’t want to look like I was protesting too much, for one thing. It also would have taken a lot of energy and anger that I really didn’t have while I was still going through all that grief. And I sure didn’t need the money. Not to mention that I was in the middle of med school and it would have taken an enormous amount of time to shut up what were basically a bunch of magpies, all the while throwing gas on the fire. Better to spend it on p-r, which is exactly what I did. I’ll tell you what else I did, and I’ve never talked about this publicly. I gave half of my inheritance to Andrea, because even though she also had a trust fund, she had three kids and a total deadbeat husband who’d gone through most of her money.”

  Gwyn immediately wondered whether the money to the sister, and the sister’s kind words to the Times, were a quid pro quo; but she also knew there would always be questions if you wanted to ask them, and that sometimes the question you really needed to ask yourself was why you kept asking questions. What purpose did it serve? The avoidance of intimacy?

  “Another thing,” he said, “that slimy D.A. you read about was planning to run for Congress and would have implicated Mother Teresa if it would have bought him a vote. He lost and returned to the obscurity he so richly deserved.”

  All of this was comforting to hear.

  Because it’s what you want to hear.

  “Now I have to ask you an awkward question,” he said as he put aside his smoothie. She realized she’d forgotten all about hers. “Have you seen this morning’s Times?”

  Another nod from Gwyn. She’d known this was coming.

  “So what did happen to your stepfather up at Big Bear?”

  “Now you want to know if I killed him?”

  “Yes, something like that,” he said gently.

  She looked off to the surf, saw the schools of skimboarders and the towers where the lifeguards kept watch over them. “I did not kill my stepfather.”

  He killed himself. But you always say that when you deny it.

  She’d learned long ago that if you could find kindness in killing, you could find honesty in deception. “You’re just going to have to accept that,” she added.

  “You wanted a lot more from me.”

  You had more to give.

  But she didn’t say this. Instead, she admitted that it wasn’t fair.

  “Why don’t you look at me when you say it?”

  So she did, took off her sunglasses and squinted. He matched her movements. “I did not kill my stepfather.”

  “Can you tell me anything else?”

  “Not now.”

  “Ever?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “I’ll hold you to that.”

  “It’s not much to hold on to.”

  He put his hand on her bare knee. She sensed his longing and trusted his restraint. She needed time to sort through the shifting sands of her suspicion.

  “There’s one other thing I wanted to talk about,” Harken said. “I know this is skirting the bounds of professional behavior because of our personal relationship, but I’d like to sit in on your group as soon as possible. I’ve had a lot of experience with psychopaths and I might see something.”

  “Like the killer?”

  “I’m not saying that, but sometimes psychopaths slip up and exhibit very transparent behavior. And whoever’s doing this is definitely a psychopath.”

  “It’s going to be a zoo Wednesday night. It’s not even my co-leader’s group, but she’s going to take the lead running it, because I’m expecting a lot of resistance from the men. And tension.”

  “Maybe it would be good to have me there then.”

  “You mean for protection too?”

  He nodded.

  “Not that kind of zoo, and there’ll be two cops right outside the door.”

  “But if—”

  “You’re right, this raises some issues.”

  “These are extraordinary circumstances.”

  “I agree, but it would be completely improper for me to make this call. I’m going to give you Lupe’s number. See what she says. One thing I can tell you is I won’t be making it to your next lecture. The last thing you need is notorious me coming in with my rabid media escort.”

  She walked him to his car where he jotted down Lupe’s number. An all-new awkward moment passed before he said, “I missed you. I missed you the moment I started drivin
g away this morning.”

  I missed you too.

  Say it, she ordered herself in a stern voice. But she couldn’t. Managed a nod. That’s all. And when he kissed her, she didn’t kiss back, though she wanted to.

  Her legs felt shaky on the trip back to her condo, so she took the elevator and leaned against the mirror, soaking up its cool surface after so much sun.

  She settled at her laptop and ran the searches he’d suggested. Unsurprisingly, everything she read supported what he’d said. Sitting back, she knew she desperately wanted to give Hark another chance. Give herself one, too, at something she hadn’t experienced for a long time. “If ever,” she whispered to herself.

  She rose to pour a glass of hibiscus tea from a pitcher in the fridge when she thought of another search she’d been meaning to do. Sitting right back down, thirst unquenched, she typed, “Barr Onstott, Chatsworth Quake.”

  By the time she returned with her tea, seventy-three pages of entries on the quake had appeared, with fifty-nine separate stories about the 183 people who’d been injured, and the two who had been killed. But what struck her as most peculiar was the utter absence of a single mention of Barr Onstott. Or a fire. Quake or not.

  Chapter 8

  Gwyn gunned her CR-V down the second exit ramp for Pomona, taking it far faster than the posted limit. Not caring, either. Good old Cassie Cannon had huffed and puffed that a media “caravan” was gathering at the Lutheran church where the men’s group met, and while Gwyn was by no means eager to parry with reporters, she reasoned that the sooner she arrived, the fewer their number.

  As she pulled up to a stoplight, she checked the rear view for Trenton or Warren. No sign of them, though at the moment she was frankly less concerned about what trailed behind her than what lay ahead.

  As soon as she turned toward the church, she gasped. In her updates, Cassie Cannon had failed to note that TV news vans stood bumper-to-bumper along the entire block on which the sun-bleached church moldered, and that more vans were crammed onto a side street. Black cables snaked across the brittle golden grass, and at least half a dozen reporters were delivering “live-ers” for early evening newscasts or standing in front of cameras awaiting directors’ cues.

  Gwyn searched for a parking spot on a sycamore-shaded side street, brightening when she found one only half a block away in front of a charming little house. Then she spotted a pit bull in the front yard straining hard on the end of its chain.

  She stared at the dog, the chain, the stake. The latter two looked like they’d hold.

  She grabbed her briefcase and pulled out her pepper spray, opening the door slowly and looking around. Sure, she knew the reputation of pit bulls had been hyped by the same media hounds who were waiting for her at the church, but that didn’t prevent fear from lodging in her limbic brain with reptilian resilience.

  A shudder seized her spine as she started down the street, eschewing the sidewalk until she reached the corner where she felt comfortable enough to pocket the spray. Even at this distance she could hear the dog trying to choke himself to death.

  She headed straight across the crunchy grass, aiming to cut time and distance . . . and the opportunity for reporters to punish her with their presence.

  The caravan had turned into a circus. A predictable one, too, based on what she’d seen and heard over the past few days. Yesterday, and again this morning, the Times had placed stories about the murders on their front page, using photos of her for the first time. Their coverage appeared to have launched “The Men’s Group Murders” into network orbit, appearing last night on CNN, as well as on CBS, NBC, MSNBC and FOX. This according to Hark, whom she’d invited to spend the night after giving herself two days to consider what he’d said at the beach. He’d arrived bearing roses and champagne, and been obliging enough to monitor the broadcasts, which she could not bring herself to endure.

  So now all the true crime fans in the world had been served numerous opportunities to learn about her ties to “a string of grisly murders,” as the Times referred to them.

  As she neared the church, she found herself engulfed by camera crews and reporters firing inane questions. “Did you kill them?” Like she’d confess to them. And, “Would you appear live on our morning show?”

  “Ms. Sanders,” a reasonably sane looking woman in a blonde bob held out a small digital recorder, “I’m Lynne Votars from the Times. I’ve been trying . . . ”

  Elbowed aside by a sound man grunting, “We’re live.”

  Lynne Votars winced, but boy could she push back, and she continued without pausing for more than a beat, “. . . to get ahold of you. We really want to hear your response to the allegations being made against you.”

  “Yeah, Gwyn, what’re you thinking? Give us something good. We came all the way out here for you.” Blanche. Who else? She wielded her long mike like a stiletto. “I got someone I want you to meet.”

  No, Blanche, I don’t think so.

  “What’s the rush?” Tall black reporter. Handsome, smarmy. “You’re acting all guilty.”

  That’s it. If that tiny Times reporter could push back, so could she.

  Gwyn spotted a crack of light between two crews and leaned her shoulder into it. A cable stretched across her midsection, and she heard shouts of “Stop-stop, the micro—“before it popped off the end of the cable. Just as she thought she’d break loose for a clear sprint to the church, the media’s Maginot line held. That’s when she spotted Blanche waving over a guy about six-ten, three hundred pounds. The cable queen was pointing to her, and the guy started forcing his way through the barrier of bodies.

  “Dan Kruber was my brother,” he shouted. “They’re saying you killed my brother.”

  The crews, reporters, sensing a promising assault on his intended target, stepped aside to let him through, parted like the Red Sea for a mad Moses. And there he stood right in front of Gwyn, huge, oafish, ugly with anger, nothing between them but the steamy August air and the tang of vengeful violence. He raised his arms, as if to block any thoughts she might have of escape. His hands looked big as baseball gloves. Everyone with a camera, mike, or notebook gave them ample room to make their headline moment.

  In the quiet that appeared to precede the storm, Gwyn heard Blanche’s hurried voice saying, “In there. Go on, get in there,” and spied a short woman with a buzz cut and denim jacket forcing her way through the circling media.

  Gwyn lost her when she looked back to the giant, who loomed over her furiously and looked eager to “pull a Kruber” and start choking her.

  But the woman with the buzz cut jumped between them, rose up on her toes, and shouted in the giant’s face, “Your brother tried to kill my sister. You take one more step and I’ll cut your balls off.” She snapped out the blade from a fold-up hunting knife, and the silence that ensued could have been the cool yammer of cold steel.

  “Janet,” the giant said to her in a voice suddenly full of false reasonableness, “Dan had his troubles, I know—”

  “You don’t know shit. You hear me? Not shit! My sister had troubles—she had that piece of shit brother of yours for a husband. He almost choked her to death. Crushed her larynx, so don’t talk that shit to me.”

  “I wasn’t going to. I was—”

  “Goddamn right you weren’t. Get inside,” she said to Gwyn over her shoulder.

  Gwyn hustled to the steps leading to the church basement.

  The crews ignored her departure, what with a butch dyke with a blade facing down the brother of a murder victim on live TV. Didn’t get much better than this, even in L.A. And here come the cops.

  “What a mess,” Gwyn said aloud as she threw on the lights in the basement room. And she wasn’t referring to her drab and immediate surroundings.

  “You all right?”

  Startled, she turned to find Detective Warren in the doorway behind her.

  “What do you care?” she fired back, sounding more petulant than she felt. “They’re here because of you.”
>
  He slipped inside, closed the door. “If you think L.A.P.D. can orchestrate what’s going on out there, then you’ve completely overestimated our powers.”

  “So you’re saying there’s no connection out there to what you guys started? That was then and this is now?”

  “Pretty much. You make CNN, you’re in another league. But we’ll have those cops outside like I told you. We’re keeping an eye out for you.”

  “Don’t make it sound like you’re doing me a favor. You said those cops would make the men feel safer around me.”

  “That too.” He smiled behind his rimless glasses. “But we also need witnesses who are alive.”

  He was reminding her of the power they held over her as a material witness. He might also have been invoking the statement she’d given investigators up in Big Bear. It would be in the case files, the script she’d always have to follow, the one she’d drummed up in seconds on a sweltering day like this one while bees buzzed around her head and sweat burned her eyes and the smell of pine sap soured her on forests forever.

  Warren turned to leave, and she figured she’d better tell him what she’d learned. No reason to hold back. On this point, if no other, they were on the same side. Or should be. “Barr Onstott?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “The burned-up guy. What about him?”

  “He wasn’t burned in the Chatsworth Quake.”

  “That’s what he’s saying?”

  “You mean he hasn’t said that to you?”

  Warren shook his head.

  “What’s he told you?

  Warren chuckled humorlessly. “Let’s just say it was a fire, but it was his screw-up, not Mother Nature’s.”

  “Look, it’s not just what he told me. It’s in his records. It’s probably the same story he told his P.O. and the judge.”

  “There’s nothing about Chatsworth in the records we have. You sure?”

  “Yes.” She’d read his records before the intake, and then he’d repeated his story during the interview. “If you’ve heard something different, tell me, because what I know doesn’t add up.”