Winter Tides

by James P. Blaylock

  “And drinking bad coffee out of dirty cups while you run up pathetic little 1040’s for Mexican aliens. Se habla español, eh? You can talk the talk. Very profitable talk. What do you get for that, about forty bucks a pop?”

  “It’s an honest living, Mr. Dalton.”

  “I’d pay five percent to a good man.”

  “That’s generous.”

  “It beats a hundred bucks.”

  “Yes indeed it does. It’s a tempting offer.”

  “Look at this deed for a moment. This piece of property is out in Fountain Valley. A good-sized vacant lot down near Brookhurst and Ellis. It was assessed last year at three hundred K. Five percent of that is fifteen thousand dollars, Ray. I’m talking cash here. Nobody on earth has to know that you took a dime. That’s a hell of a commission for inking up that little rubber pad.”

  “You wouldn’t be paying for ink, Mr. Dalton. We both know that.”

  “That’s very true. I’m paying for your expertise, and I’m asking you to involve yourself in fraud, legally speaking. Ethically speaking, of course, there’s no fraud involved. And where’s the risk? As long as my father’s alive, nobody knows whether he signed the deed or not. He’s not going to cause us any trouble. If there’s no injured party, then there’s no real problem, is there?”

  “No, I guess there’s not. Unless these deeds call attention to themselves.”

  “This is the county, Ray. Nobody pays attention. People who pay attention work someplace else.” Dalton gestured with both hands, as if what he said stood to reason … which it did. “So, what do you think? Half the money up front? Right now? Call it seventy-five hundred? Give me six months to unload the property, and I’ll pay you the rest. If I can’t sell it, I’ll pay you anyway. If it sells for more than the assessed value, I’ll throw in a percentage. And I’ll tell you what. Here’s a fail-safe. If you want out, or if you come up short for money at any time, I’ll cash you out at half of the second payment, so that you don’t have to wait the full six months. So for early retirement you get seventy-five percent of the total cash value. How’s that sound?”

  “Like three-quarters of a pie.”

  “Look,” Dalton said, “all I want is a man that’s solid and committed.”

  “Sounds like maybe you want a lawyer.”

  “To hell with lawyers. Speaking of lawyers, did you hear that they’re using them as laboratory animals now?”

  “Is that right?”

  “There’s some things rats just won’t do.” Dalton winked and grinned big, and Ray laughed out loud. “I don’t trust lawyers. They cost too much, they’re slippery bastards. I just don’t need a lawyer. Do you think I need a lawyer?”

  “I guess not. Not if you’re careful.”

  “That’s what I want. Just what you said. A careful man.”

  Ray shrugged.

  “And I’m fairly certain you’re a careful man, Ray. Do you know why I say that?”

  “I guess I don’t.”

  “Because a mutual friend of mine told me something about you, Ray. He told me that you’ve got a soft spot for Mexicans. He told me that back in the old days, if I wanted to bring in a truckload of illegals, I’d want to talk to Ray Mifflin first. Ray Mifflin would know when it was safe, this guy said. Ray Mifflin had contacts in the INS. He had the inside word on the checkpoint down the Highway south of San Clemente. Kick fifty bucks a head back in Ray’s direction, and you’d bring your people through.” He sat staring at Ray, grinning faintly.

  “Your friend’s full of baloney,” Ray told him.

  “That’s just what I said to him. I didn’t believe a word of it. I didn’t believe what he told me about the drugs, either, about how they’d offer a discount to the mojadas if they’d carry a little bundle of white powder across the border. Somebody turned a profit on that scam, I guess. I’m relieved to find out it wasn’t you, Ray. Obviously the idea’s just too fantastic. And anyway, it’s ancient history. A couple of years ancient, anyway. You’re not a CPA, are you, Ray?”

  “Nope.”

  “Somehow I didn’t think so. Tell me, then; what the hell do you have to lose? Five percent is good money. No smuggling, no sweat, just a pen with ink in it. It could be your ticket out of this dump. And from my perspective, it’s a hell of a lot less than I’d pay a lawyer. No insult intended.”

  Ray nodded. His head buzzed. He could guess who Dalton’s big-mouth friend was. Ray was being threatened, of course. Still, this was way better money than he had anticipated, which was a red flag if there ever was one. He thought about the other little pissant deals he’d cut recently—a hundred here, a fifty there. There had been a hell of a lot more money smuggling illegals, money on every conceivable end. Even the owners of garment shops in L.A. would pay you for employees. That deal had gotten too hot and complicated, though—partly because of the dope connection—and he had dropped it. He wasn’t going to do serious jail time for a few more bucks.

  “This is the tip of the iceberg, Ray. My father holds the deed to acreage down on the cliffs in Dana Point that’s worth so much it’s almost criminal. As long as he stays alive, we’re both on the gravy train. If he dies …” Dalton shrugged. “Then it’s too damned late, isn’t it? For you, anyway. I’ll still do all right. How old are you, Ray?”

  “Fifty-six,” Ray said, making up his mind.

  “And you’re still living on coffee and junk food. Maybe it’s time to take a little chance.”

  “Maybe it is,” Ray said.

  9

  ANNE AWOKE IN THE SEMIDARKNESS OF A SHUTTERED room, and for a moment she didn’t remember where she was. It was her own chenille bedspread, with its pink and blue flowers, but the room itself was disorientingly strange: it was too small, and the windows were wrong, and there were boxes stacked in the corners….

  Then the sleep drained away and she remembered. She had been in the apartment for four nights now—sooner or later it should start feeling like home. On Monday she had looked at the place and impulsively signed a rental agreement, and on Tuesday she had moved in. The landlord, Mr. Hedgepeth, was incredibly fat and had wheezed going up the stairs into the apartment and then had to sit down and catch up with himself before he could show her through the other three rooms. He had carried a stick that he pointed at things with—the view of the ocean out the living room windows, the old Catalina tiles over the bathroom sink, the walk-in closet with red cedar cabinets built in and a window for ventilation.

  There was a connecting door in the closet, too, which was locked tight, and which opened into the law office that she shared a closet wall with. Mr. Hedgepeth had the key. He offered to put a lock on her side of the door, too. It wouldn’t be a problem, just a hasp and a little Master lock. She could keep the key to that one if she wanted to. She had the idea that someday, if she stayed there, she would rent the law office, too, which had a pair of good skylights. She could open up the connecting door and use the office as a studio. But here she was already thinking years ahead. What was there for her here, except an obliging landlord and a funky old apartment with charm?

  Mr. Hedgepeth had offered to carpet the painted wooden floor, which was clean but foot-worn, but she had talked him into leaving it. He had told her then that she could go ahead and splatter paint on it, because the whole thing would either have to be carpeted or repainted next time anyway, so it didn’t matter. His wife had painted pictures, he had said, before she died, and he welcomed an artist into the place, as long as she didn’t have some kind of artistic temperament. Anne had assured him that she didn’t, that her temperament was inartistic, nearly boring.

  She flopped back down onto the bed now arid stared at the ceiling. How far was she from home? Fifteen hundred miles? Two thousand by the Coast Highway, with all its twists and turns? She hoped it was far enough.

  The drive south from Victoria had taken her a long damned time—lots of Sleepy 8 motels and farmhouse B and B’s. In Port Angeles she had driven west and then south on 101 instead of eas
t to Highway 5, and so instead of a two- or three-day run down into southern California, she had spent eighteen days on the Highway, stopping at likely-seeming galleries and walking on foggy, driftwood-littered beaches. She had set a hundred-mile-a-day limit—no more than a couple hours or so on the road—and somewhere above Eureka, when she was about halfway done with the journey, she had considered slowing down even more.

  Someone had told her once that if you set out to cross a street, making each step half the distance to the opposite curb, you would never reach your destination, but would be walking across that street eternally. The same thing could be said for traveling: if you worked it right, taking your time, you could drive south on the Highway forever, with your shadow racing along the rocky edge of the road and the gray Pacific shifting and crashing on the rocks far below….

  … Except that her stuff had been due to arrive in Huntington Beach at the Bekins storage warehouse on the first of April, and she was uncomfortable letting it sit there, especially the paintings. And, even more to the point, something had happened when she had crossed the Golden Gate into San Francisco. It had begun to feel to her almost as if the car were rolling downhill toward an inevitable destination, as if she were some sort of sea creature that had come unmoored from its rock and was adrift on an outgoing tide, swept on a current toward some farther shore. And maybe this was it—this apartment she had rented from Mr. Hedgepeth. Maybe this was her destiny.

  Feeling suddenly lonely, she sat up and pulled the curtains open. Judging from the noise and the traffic outside, it was late in the morning. There was still fog in the air, but the spring sun shone faintly through it, and within another hour or two it would burn off. The street outside was lined with old houses, mostly wooden bungalows with big front porches and cracked sidewalks. There were camphor trees along the curb, and the branches arched entirely over the street. It was worth living there for the trees alone, although that hadn’t been what had drawn her to Huntington Beach. There had been plenty of trees in Victoria.

  What had drawn her here? she wondered suddenly. She wasn’t sure that she believed in tides and destiny. Why not Laguna Beach? It would have been simple to have Bekins truck her stuff farther down the Highway. She had looked at three nice apartments in Laguna, including one with a studio that had better light than this apartment in Huntington. Rents weren’t all that much higher in Laguna, and six of her paintings were hung in Potter’s Gallery on Oak Street. It didn’t make any sense, her driving twenty miles back up the coast to find a place to live. Of course she had also found a day job at the Earl of Gloucester, the old theater props warehouse here in town, but considering what it paid, she would have made more waitressing in Laguna, which was packed with upscale restaurants. On the other hand, the job at the props warehouse looked like potential fun, and now that her mother was no longer living, she didn’t need the money anyway. That hadn’t sunk in yet; neither of those things, her money or her mother’s death, seemed quite real to her.

  And any college psychology student would have an opinion on what she was doing in Huntington Beach. She looked into the dresser mirror, which stood against the wall at the end of the bed. Her long dark hair was a fright, pushed around by sleep. In the dim light of the bedroom it looked jet black, although in the sunlight there were shades of auburn in it. Yesterday she had turned twenty-eight years old, and she had celebrated alone, eating a burger and fries at the Longboarder and then bringing a slice of cake home to her room. She had only eaten half of the cake before her walk on the pier. There was something about eating her birthday cake alone that had ruined her appetite.

  And yet right now she didn’t feel half as dismal as she had the right to feel, and even the loneliness that she had felt a few minutes ago had evaporated almost instantly. She had been in the apartment for only four nights, but somehow this morning, despite waking up stupid, she finally felt moved in. What she had seen last night on the pier, or thought she had seen, had been nothing but a trick of foggy lamplight and runaway imagination, a fragment of a bad dream that had followed her south from home. And of course, speaking of lamplight, there hadn’t been nearly enough of it for her to have seen colors. Red would merely have looked dark gray.

  Actually, the leftover cake sounded good to her right now. There was nothing wrong with cake for breakfast. Marie Antoinette had recommended it. Of course the food police had cut her head off afterward, but that just made her a martyr to the cause of starting the day with dessert. She climbed out of bed and went into the living room, which doubled as a studio. It was a big room—nearly twenty by forty—in a building that was mostly office space. Hers was the only actual apartment in the building. Her front door opened onto a long interior corridor some ten feet wide and with five other doors similar to hers, most of which led into one-room offices. At the top end of the corridor was a bathroom shared by the rest of the tenants—two fairly pitiful law firms (bankruptcy and divorce) and a record company called Doctor Slim. The other two offices were empty, and, because she could afford it, she had briefly considered renting one of them to use as a studio, except that the living room in this apartment was nicer—big windows looking down toward Main Street on the east and south sides both, and she didn’t have to cross the hall to work. Outside, there were stairs from the bottom end of the corridor down to the street, where there was a door that was kept locked after business hours—officially five o’clock. Mr. Hedgepeth had warned her against leaving the street door unlocked. He made random checks, he said, at all hours, and it was written into the rental agreement that failing to lock the street door, as well as keeping pets, was cause for eviction.

  She unlocked the chain lock and the dead bolt and opened the front door now, looking out into the corridor. The old building was silent, musty-smelling, and dim. Today she would switch the low-wattage bulbs in the overhead lamps to something bigger. Mr. Hedgepeth could charge her another couple of bucks a month if he wanted to. It was Saturday, her first weekend day in the building, and so, as far as she knew, none of the offices were open. The place was hers on the weekend. She could bowl in the corridor if she wanted to.

  She closed the door again and moved to the other side of the living room, where she opened two windows to let in the morning air. Then she looked for the paper plate with the other half of her cake on it. The plate was gone, disappeared from the table it had sat on next to the stuffed chair. She glanced around the room, looking for the cake, which, she told herself, she must have moved somewhere else absentmindedly. But she was certain that she simply hadn’t put it anyplace else; she remembered distinctly having left it on the table. Was it still on the table when she’d gotten home from the pier late last night? She couldn’t remember. She hadn’t been in any mood to be thinking about cake. But the door had been bolted while she was gone; that much she remembered.

  10

  DAVE HEADED DOWNSTAIRS NOW, OUT THE SIDE DOOR AND around the back of the warehouse, where he found Collier on the side porch of the bungalow, drinking his doughnut shop coffee that he had decanted into a ceramic mug. There was the sound of a television from inside the house—Sesame Street characters singing about the neighborhood. Jenny was a Sesame Street regular, still young enough at five years old to think she was living in some remote corner of it. With any luck she’d have a couple more years of thinking so before the world changed her mind for her.

  Jenny’s parents had died three years ago in a car wreck. She had been two at the time that Collier had gotten custody of her, and he was the only father she remembered. His son had owned a condominium in Anaheim, which had gone to Jenny, except that it turned out to be worth less than her parents had paid for it. Stuck in the middle of a decaying neighborhood, half the condos in the complex were empty, the owners disappeared. Collier had paid the mortgage with his son’s bank account, thinking at first to hold onto the condo as Jenny’s legacy, but with each month that passed, the account shrank and so did the value of the condo, and after five thousand dollars had evaporated th
at way, Collier had done the same thing that all the other tenants were doing—he gave it back to the bank by simply walking away.

  There was some money left in Jenny’s account—money that Collier wouldn’t touch. It wouldn’t change his life in any way he cared about, but some day, he had told Dave, it might change hers.

  Collier had pulled his chair over to the edge of the porch, and he sprinkled water onto his garden over the top of the porch railing. He had onions and sugar cane going, along with a half dozen tomato vines in cages. He nodded at Dave and gestured with the hose, nearly squirting him down.

  “You should have hollered,” he said. “I’d have bought you a cup of coffee.”

  “I’ve had enough,” Dave told him.

  “Well, sit down. You work too much. I see that light come on at dawn and go out at nine or ten at night. A person would think you owned the place. Either that or you’re trying to avoid something.”

  “I like work.”

  “That doesn’t make it healthy. Work can be a disease just like anything else. You find more workaholics than any other kind of holic.”

  Dave sat down on a painted metal chair and looked out into the foggy morning. Across the little patch of grass that was the bungalow’s lawn, the back of the Ocean Theater rose three tall stories, its rear windows hung with heavy black drapery to keep out the sun during matinees. It was built of the same redwood clapboard as the Earl’s, but it was considerably older, with arched, Gothic-style windows and lot of interior woodwork that gave it atmosphere. It had fairly recently been painted white on the outside, and from a distance it looked good, but the window putty was falling out, and the old rear porch and most of the sills had been worked over hard by termites and weather. Casey, the Earl’s younger son, had applied to put it on the Historic Register, which might save it from the wrecking ball, in the event that Casey’s older brother Edmund gained control of the business and the property.