by Tyler Dilts
She brought her notepad and sat in the leather club chair I’d helped her pick out at Crate & Barrel, while I went back to where I had been sitting on the couch. It was still warm.
I was afraid of what she was going to say about what I’d done earlier. Only a few days after my breaking protocol had resulted in an incident that put the department on high alert and terrified everyone I cared about, I’d broken the rules again. My right hand was shaking, so I clasped it in my left and lowered them both into my lap.
She sighed and I felt the muscles in my neck and jaw tighten in anticipation of what was coming next. But she surprised me. “I’m not sure if you did the right thing today, but you got the right results.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, trying not to allow too much hopefulness to show.
“Looks like Avram Novak is a bad guy. We don’t think it would have worked out well for Kayla if we hadn’t brought him in today.”
I resisted the impulse to ask questions and forced myself to let her talk.
She started with Kayla. She and Kobe, whose real name was Ryan Wong, had an on-again, off-again relationship that had begun when they’d both worked for Joe’s restaurant, Winter. She’d been hired there as a server, but Ryan convinced her to join him and a few others on the delivery crew because the money was better. She found that hard to believe until he told her the reason why—they weren’t just delivering mediocre gastropub food, they were also delivering pot. Kayla didn’t know the extent of the dealer’s network, but she liked Ryan and she trusted him, so she hesitantly agreed to him and the two others involved in the ring. She was C. Shepard on Kobe’s Post-it note and burner.
When Jen mentioned that, I remembered the Wikipedia page I’d read. Gamers could play Commander Shepard in Mass Effect as either a man or a woman. I wondered if that meant that S. Wise and B. Darklighter were both guys.
The delivery service was a huge success. Ryan told her that even though he was the tacit supervisor of the delivery crew, Joe had set the whole thing up. Customers who wanted more than food would have to type a special code into the Comments section of the Winter website’s online ordering page. To Ryan’s surprise, though, they weren’t successful enough to keep the restaurant afloat. Kayla said that Joe and Ryan wanted to keep things going after Winter had to close its doors. They managed things with the website for a while, but when that became too problematic, Joe had someone create a simple smartphone app that would do the same thing the online ordering system had done for them. That’s where the aliases came from. Ryan got the burners so they’d have a way to communicate independently if they needed to.
Kayla didn’t stay with them for long, though, because delivering a little pot on the side was one thing, and being a full-time drug dealer was something else. So she went back to serving, while Ryan and the others kept at it with the deliveries.
She had still been hooking up with Ryan pretty regularly, until he disappeared. Not long after that, she saw Novak for the first time. She spotted him at the gym. Then at the supermarket. Then on Second Street after one of her shifts. Then in a BMW that passed by while she was riding her bike along Ocean Boulevard. Ryan stopped returning her calls and text messages, so she went to his house and talked to his neighbor, found out he hadn’t been there for days. She tried not to worry. Chalk it up to paranoia. Long Beach wasn’t that big a city, right? You see people you know all the time. But when he showed up at Viento y Agua and it was clear he wasn’t leaving until she did, it got to be too much. She thought about calling 911, but she wasn’t sure it was an emergency. As she sat there longer and longer, she got more and more afraid. So she fished out the business card and made the call.
Jen kept speaking. Maybe it was because it was getting late, or because I was keeping my mouth shut and letting her talk, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that she would rather not be telling me all this, at least not now, and that it was coming more from her sense of obligation than from a desire to address any need on my part. Even so, I didn’t say anything and let her go on.
“You remember the guy Lucinda mentioned? Goran?” she asked me.
“Yeah, Joe’s other investor.”
“Well, his last name’s Novak, too.”
She told me the Organized Crime Detail had a file on him. He was medium fish in the big pond of Orange County, drugs and prostitution, mostly, and he was known to use a number of restaurants in which he invested to launder the income from operations. Patrick was now looking for support for a new theory—that the failure of Winter left Joe so indebted that he was desperate enough to not only try to continue the drug-delivery business but also, eventually, to kill Bill for the inheritance in order to get out from under Novak.
“Novak,” I said. “Is that Serbian?”
Jen shook her head. “Croatian.”
My eastern European geography was rusty. “That’s close, though, right? Could there be a connection to the Serbian crew in the valley?”
“Patrick’s looking into it,” she said.
“Sounds like he’s got a full plate.”
“He does, but he’s getting help from Organized Crime and the ATF guys. He’s on top of it.”
“When is he planning on putting Joe in the box?”
“Not until he knows more. Kayla’s helping us find the other two from the contact list. And Dave’s on board too because we know Kobe’s murder is connected. We’ve got it covered.”
I tried not to read too much into that, but the subtext was clear enough. They were doing fine without me.
She asked about my head and I told her it was fine.
“That’s not what Lauren thinks. Go to the doctor tomorrow.”
I didn’t argue with her. “About Joe, when Patrick interrogates—”
“I already asked Ruiz. You can watch the video feed.”
She got up and headed toward the hall. She wasn’t looking at me when she said, “Good night.”
I hadn’t gotten a decent night’s sleep—unless I counted my twelve hours of unconsciousness in the hospital—since the explosion, and I was feeling the dull weight of insomniac exhaustion pressing down on me. Sleep wouldn’t come for hours, though. My mind was racing with all of the new information Jen had shared with me. There’s a rush that comes with a big break in a case, and, even though I was not technically a part of the investigation anymore, I still felt it. I wanted to sit down with my notebook and start writing, trying to trace the connections between everyone involved in the investigation. I wanted to make lists and outlines and diagrams to make sense of it all. I wanted to do my job.
In the kitchen, I poured myself another glass of Grey Goose and orange juice and texted Julia. You still up? Sitting at the table, I sipped slowly and watched my phone, waiting, hoping for a message or a call. None came.
The I Was There Too theme song found its way back into my head.
Napalm smells best in the evening
It’s not worth believing what you heard . . .
Without even trying, I’d somehow managed to memorize the lyrics.
Hoping to chase it out of my head, I went back into the living room and opened the Spotify app on my laptop. I clicked on the “Discover Weekly” tab, looking for something new to distract me. Nothing really caught my attention, though, and I thought of the old playlist I’d made a few years ago while I was recovering from my injury and trying to climb up out of my depression. In the haze after my concussion, I had remembered Songs For My Funeral, and it had been floating around in the back of my mind ever since. Switching to iTunes, I scrolled down until I found it.
As I looked at the list, I felt an unexpected sense of relief wash over me. I couldn’t really explain it, but somehow looking back and remembering the darkness I’d been drowning in when I created the playlist seemed to make the darkness now less overwhelming. The hours I’d spent laying out the tracks, then revising the choices again and again, and the days I’d spent listening, still tweaking things, making adjustments here and there, had been a
kind of boon for me, a way of figuring out how to climb out of the hole I had been wallowing in.
I could still remember the look on Jen’s face when I’d accidentally left it open on the desktop. The concerned sadness in her eyes when she thought I might be contemplating suicide. I’m not sure if I had been at that point. I don’t think I ever seriously considered it. Though I had thought it might not be that bad to die. But once I saw how deeply finding the playlist affected her, I stopped thinking that way. I knew it wasn’t just myself I was hurting, it was her too. It wasn’t that I didn’t realize my death would affect her, of course I did, but looking at her then made me feel it in a way I never had before. She tried to joke it away, but I knew. And that knowledge, more than anything else, was what gave me the strength to fight my way back.
After a bit of consideration, and knowing that I was likely to wind up changing it anyway, I decided to start the new, improved version off with Tom Waits. And I changed the name in case anyone saw it. I didn’t want to have that discussion again with Jen or anyone else. Songs for My Funeral became Come Twilight.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
DON’T THINK TWICE, IT’S ALL RIGHT
On the way to the hospital, Lauren asked if Jen had given me any news about the case when she got home. I gave her a brief rundown.
“Looks like things are coming together,” she said.
“It does,” I said. “Looking forward to getting back to regular duty?”
“Are you kidding?” she asked. “This is the most fun I’ve had since I got out of the academy.”
“I’ll try to get kidnapped and assaulted more often, then.”
She grinned. “You know what I mean.”
“I do.”
“How long did it take you to make detective?” she asked.
“It seemed like a thousand years.”
“That’s not what I heard.”
“I beat the average by a year or two,” I said, “but I had a couple of lucky breaks on big cases that sped things up.”
“Never heard that before. Everybody always talks about how hard they worked for it.”
“Well,” I said, rubbing the scar on my wrist, “if you’re able to work hard, you’re pretty lucky.”
The neurologist’s office was in a separate building across Atlantic from the main hospital. The doctor who’d evaluated me wasn’t available, so they’d squeezed me into the schedule of one of his partners, an Asian woman who seemed surprisingly happy to see me.
“Hello, Detective Beckett,” she said. “I’m Dr. Lee. You probably don’t remember, but I saw you in the ER.”
“Oh, hi,” I said awkwardly. “I don’t remember. I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right. You’re several days early for your follow-up. What brought you in early?”
“My colleagues are telling me that I don’t seem to be behaving normally.”
“Do you think you’re behaving normally?”
“It seems like it, but I don’t know.”
“What do they say you’re doing?”
I didn’t know exactly. Jen didn’t tell me what Lauren said to her. Was I being more talkative? Less guarded?
“Well, I didn’t argue with my partner when she suggested I come to see you.”
Dr. Lee chuckled at that. “What else?”
“I guess I’m talking more, being more open, less resistant.” As I spoke, it occurred to me that maybe what was really happening was that I was being less of an asshole, but I didn’t mention that.
“Any other symptoms you’re noticing? Confusion? Dizziness? Mood swings? Forgetfulness?”
“No,” I said. “I still have a headache.”
“Let’s take a look, okay?”
She gave me a full neurological exam, checking my eyes, my reflexes, my balance, and my memory, and a doing bunch of other stuff that I didn’t really understand the purpose of. When she was finished, she said, “Everything looks okay.”
“That’s good,” I said.
“Tell me about how you’re feeling. You said you didn’t object to coming in today. That’s something you’d normally be hesitant about?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I usually feel like I know what’s best for me and I don’t like people telling me what to do.”
She chuckled again. “Well, that sounds normal. What’s different today?”
“You know I was abducted before the assault, right?”
Dr. Lee nodded.
“Well, I did something very careless when I knew I shouldn’t have. If I hadn’t done it, the attack wouldn’t have happened.”
“You shouldn’t blame yourself.”
“I’m not, but my partner is. It did a lot of damage to our working relationship and I don’t think she’s going to let me off the hook.”
“You had a serious injury and you’re reevaluating the actions that contributed to it. You’re behaving differently, but I don’t think it’s because of the injury. If I gave you a referral to psychiatry, would you use it?”
I might as well have told her about the playlist I’d worked on all night. “Yes,” I said.
The visit had taken less time than I expected, so Lauren wasn’t back to pick me up yet. I sat in the lobby and called Jen.
“What did the doctor say?”
“She said everything seems okay physically. I don’t need another CT scan or anything. Told me I should get more rest.”
“You didn’t go to bed until after four last night.”
It surprised me that she knew how late I’d been up. I was certain she had been asleep when I finally turned in. “I was thinking I might take a sick day today.”
“That’s a good idea.”
“Let me know if you need me for anything, okay?” I said.
“Of course. I don’t think we will, though. Have a good—”
“Patrick still looking at tomorrow to go at Joe?”
“Yeah, or maybe the next day. A lot of things are panning out.”
“What about Novak?”
“He lawyered up.”
“That’s not surprising. I knew the assault beef wouldn’t hold—”
“Danny.”
I stopped.
She let the silence hang for a moment. “The Glenlivet bottle in Denkins’s apartment? The third set of prints was Novak’s.”
“You sure you don’t want something to eat?” Julia asked.
“No, I’m okay,” I said. It was past lunchtime and I’d skipped breakfast to get to the doctor on time. “Why don’t I call down to Michael’s and order a take-out calzone for you? I can go pick it up.” We were sitting at her table drinking French-press coffee that I was too agitated to appreciate. She had her hair pulled back casually, with a few strands hanging loose. The way I liked it. There was an assortment of flowers in a vase on the table that looked a few days past their prime.
“She wasn’t even going to tell me.”
When Jen had ended the call in the lobby of the medical building, I was still stunned that there had been such a major development in the case and that she’d thought it better to withhold the information than to share it with me. I tried to see it from her perspective. But I couldn’t. I called Julia and asked if she was busy, could I come by and see her. I think she lied when she said she wasn’t. Lauren drove me downtown, parked in a loading zone, walked me into the lobby of Julia’s condo building, and told me she’d be waiting when I was ready to go.
“She was right not to,” Julia said.
“What?”
“Look how upset you are.” There was a level calmness in the sound of her words. I imagined it was her therapist voice, the one she’d used in her old job when she counseled people or led support groups.
“That’s not why. It’s because she was intentionally trying keep me out of the loop. I worked that case. It was mine.”
“But it’s not yours anymore. There’s nothing you could have done today except stay home and worry or go to the
station and get in their way. I know it feels shitty. But wouldn’t you have rather had a day off and gotten some rest instead of feeling like you do right now?”
“You’re on her side.”
She laughed at that and I got even more angry. “You think that’s funny?”
“No,” she said. “I think it’s sad.”
That shut me up.
“There’s only one side, Danny,” she said. “And everybody’s on it.”
“What side is that?”
“Yours.”
After I finished the calzone, Julia told me she needed to get back to Trev’s gallery to continue planning the workshop she’d told me about. “Why don’t I come to Jen’s tonight?” she said as we rode down in the elevator.
“I’d like that.”
We said good-bye in the lobby, where Lauren was finishing a slice of pizza.
“Where’d you get that?” I asked.
“Your girlfriend bought it for me. She’s good people.”
In the car on the way back to Jen’s, Lauren said, “So, you think Novak did it?”
“Not my call,” I said.
“But you’re thinking about it.”
“You want to be a detective,” I said. “You even went to law school. Do you think he did it?”
“His prints on the bottle put him in the apartment along with Joe. They both had similar motives. Collect money from Denkins to square the debt. So unless one of them left before the murder, they’re both culpable.”
“Right,” I said. “But how do we find out which one pulled the trigger?”
She thought about the question. “If they’re acting in concert, it doesn’t really matter.”
“True, but that’s weak. What would happen if it went to trial? Would the jury buy that?”
Lauren knitted her eyebrows and checked the cross traffic before turning off of Broadway onto Ximeno. “Maybe.”
“Is ‘maybe’ good enough?”
She didn’t need to answer that one. “So it comes down to the interrogation?”
