Unfit to Practice

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  Not surprisingly, no one had registered under the name of Cody Stinson. A minor lie involving a special request for service from the girls in number eight that made the manager’s cheeks flame and got him away from his desk briefly meant Paul could check out the register, but no name leaped out as an obvious alias.

  He returned to the car. Wish stood next to it, arms wrapped around himself. “Must be under forty degrees tonight,” Wish said. “You bring an umbrella?”

  “No,” Paul said.

  “Shoot.”

  “Tough guys don’t use umbrellas.”

  They watched from inside the car for a long time, using the defroster and heat intermittently to keep the windshield clear and their bodies from freezing. Cars from the highway below whizzed by, and the lights of the town turned cloudy in the mist.

  Doors opened and closed. People came and went. No sign of Cody Stinson.

  At midnight, Paul told Wish to take a nap. They would need to stagger each other. He had a chart marked, keeping a record of who seemed to belong to what lodging, and by now they had narrowed their field of interest to three doors. He hunched into his jacket and prepared himself for a nightlong wait.

  By three in the morning, all celebrations ceased. The dull roar from the town stopped. No more trains flew by on the tracks below; the cacophony of different musical styles from bars on the main street faded. Wish snored in the backseat. Paul pulled his leather jacket tighter.

  Door number two opened. Paul, half dozing against the steering wheel of the Mustang, first noticed the absence of light. Generally when someone opened a door, they left a light burning in the room behind long enough to see the way out. This time, only a qualitative change in the black of a shadowy doorway showed him someone was standing there.

  Paul reached a hand into the backseat and tapped Wish on the shoulder. “Wake up, Sleeping Beauty,” he said in a low voice. Wish opened his eyes with the immediate alertness of the young and slipped silently out of the car to watch with Paul.

  The door opened wider and a man stepped out into the light rain, long-armed and lean, carrying a brown bag. Cody Stinson.

  They both recognized him. “Now what?” Wish said.

  “We call the cops as soon as he goes back inside.”

  Stinson stretched, and as he approached a pool of light from an outdoor post, Paul saw that he was fully dressed in heavy boots and a jacket.

  “He’s not going out in this,” Wish said. “Not on a bike.”

  But he was. He pulled on goggles and a helmet, mounted the Harley, and, indifferent to the hellish commotion of its engine or, more likely, proud of it, revved a couple of times to warm it up and took off down the hill, leaving a drizzle trail.

  Paul and Wish jumped back into the car. “Should we call the police?”

  “And say what? Tell ’em to go looking for a guy on a motorcycle?” Paul asked, frustrated. “We need him back in his room tucked up tight in bed, or somewhere for more than five minutes so that they can swoop down and grab him without a slipup. Oh, great.” Pea-sized hail pelted Paul’s windshield. His wipers pushed futilely against the onslaught.

  “You’re not supposed to eat in bed,” Nina told Bob, who balanced a bowl of tortilla chips and a plate of salsa on the sheet as he talked into the phone. He wore boxers and a towel draped around his neck.

  Lately he had begun taking half-hour showers. As his teen years bore down on him, he had fallen into the grip of passions that he understood no better than Nina, passions about everything, from a certain kind of cereal to be eaten every morning for three months, to blue shoelaces ordered off the Net. He had suggested that he would like to dye his hair. His attention span for school subjects had dropped to about five minutes, but he could still surf the Net for hours with an intensity befitting a brain surgeon.

  At the same time the blitheness of childhood left him, he began to suffer from a lack of confidence. He believed that he was ugly and socially maladroit, though he was strong and healthy with no particular drawbacks that Nina could see. In fact, she thought he might, with luck and a softening of his lantern jaw, grow up to be an attractive fellow.

  However, there were a few years to go between now and then.

  “So bye,” he said to the phone, and hung up. He dipped another chip, which dripped onto the sheet. He gave Nina a look.

  “Was that a glare?” she said.

  “All I did was look at you.”

  Nina sat down on the bed. “Could I have some?” They ate a couple of chips. Bob wouldn’t look at her. He picked up the remote and an ancient episode of Friends popped up on cable TV. Nina felt the usual pangs. If only she had forbidden TV, maybe Bob would be happy and outgoing and an Eagle Scout.

  Clothes and CDs covered every surface including the floor. She tried not to notice. Her run-in with Kevin had left her fuse short and her nerves shaky. “Was that Nikki?” she said in what she hoped was a casual tone.

  “Uh huh.”

  “How’s she doing?”

  “Fine.” When she waited for more and the silence grew oppressive, he broke, adding, “Working on the Web site for that hard-core band from Sweden.”

  “Will you be seeing her soon?”

  Bob didn’t answer.

  “Is she still doing home-schooling?”

  “What do you care? Is that a problem for you?”

  “I was just asking.” She had many questions about Nikki but didn’t dare ask them. She would have to find out somehow for herself without trampling further upon this mine-filled earth.

  Bob munched on another chip. Hitchcock roamed over to his side of the bed and he patted the dog’s back.

  “So how’s the band?”

  “Defunkt.”

  “What?”

  “That’s our band name. Nikki finally came up with it. Like it?”

  “It’s kind of unusual,” Nina said. “Hard to spell. But-”

  “Defunkt with a k. Aw, you don’t care. Admit it. You don’t care about the band at all.”

  “I do want to encourage your interest in music.” But not your interest in Nikki, she had to add to herself. “Any luck finding a bass player?”

  “We’ll find one. Why are you cross-examining me? I confess, I did it to Colonel Mustard in the library. With a drumstick.” He scowled. “This isn’t court, Mom.”

  “Bob, all I was trying to do was-”

  Bob rolled off the bed. Hitchcock jumped up to meet him. “Think I’ll take a shower. Lay there as long as you want, Mom. Eat all the chips you want.” Mockery lurked in the words.

  Why, you’re getting damn disrespectful, she said to his back as he disappeared into the bathroom. But she didn’t say it out loud. A bad influence was at work, no question, and this bad influence was cute, and maybe she’d be famous someday like Courtney Love, but Bob wasn’t going to be part of Nikki’s band much longer. Defunkt would soon live up to its name, she decided.

  Hitchcock took a running leap onto Bob’s bed and the salsa did the merengue all over the sheets. Nina pushed the dog off. She wadded the sheets up into a dirty ball and tossed them into the hall. As she remade the bed, Bob whistled in the shower “The Little White Duck.” The children’s tune must have stuck in his brain from Andrea’s baby party.

  She followed along with the whistling. The white duck on a lily pad, visited by a green frog, and then a buzzing black bug.

  And along came the hissing red snake to frighten the other critters away.

  What snakes were they turning up?

  Unable to answer that question, she went back to whistling the innocent children’s song with its ominous undertone. Opening Bob’s window, she looked out into a late-night storm. Hail battered the roof like falling pebbles.

  Paul gripped the wheel, struggling in vain to see something through his windshield. “We have no enemy but winter and rough weather, and man, those are serious enemies.” The hail splattered down like a million shards of breaking glass. He could hardly hear himself shout above the racket.
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  Wish shrugged. “When you live up here, you get used to it. It’s almost always sunny, except when it’s a blizzard.”

  “Look, Cody’s motorcycle has just the one dim light fading into obscurity up ahead of us. He doesn’t care if he lives or dies, and that’s a dilemma, because I’d like to go on living at the moment. Where are we?” He gave the wheel a swift tilt to the right, narrowly avoiding a swimming pool in the middle of the road.

  “Well…” Wish considered, then peered out the window to place himself. “We’re headed east on 267. He skipped a couple of side roads and seems to be going fast-”

  “No shit!”

  “-so he’s probably not planning to stop anytime soon. Anyway, there’s no major place to turn off after Northstar for miles. He’s heading for the lake.”

  “If I can stay up with him past the Northstar turn, we’ll have a breather, maybe,” Paul said, pushing the accelerator down. “Then if he gets ahead, I can catch up without committing suicide.”

  “Don’t you just love a solid V- 8,” Wish said, smiling, approving of the Mustang’s speed.

  The speedometer crept up, and Paul used all the old tricks to keep himself from skidding off the road, two hands in proper formation on the steering wheel, cold sweat left unwiped on his brow.

  “Most people don’t go out on nights like this,” Wish observed, arms folded calmly, “even if it isn’t three in the morning. More roadway for us.”

  His nose as close to the windshield as he could get it, Paul cursed. “We lost him on that last curve. So quick-decision time. Turn right at Northstar or keep going toward King’s Beach?”

  “I don’t gamble,” Wish said, “not much anyway, but somehow I can’t see any friend of his living at Northstar. Too ritzy. I bet on passing.”

  “Okay,” Paul said. The sign indicating the Northstar ski resort area swept by in a blur. Paul stomped down again, the car swerved right, then left, then straightened itself on the road.

  Wish flicked the radio on. A static howl filled the car.

  Paul flicked it off. “Are you nuts?” he said. “I’m doing sixty on a dark wet road in the middle of a blizzard!”

  “I just thought we’d see if there was a weather report on,” Wish said reasonably. “Anyway, we have nothing to worry about. There he is.”

  Sure enough, there he was.

  “Ooh,” Wish said, as the hail stopped suddenly and a beautiful starry night materialized like magic. “I just got my first good look. It’s a 1960s Arlen Ness chopper, customized in the seventies, I’d say. That’s a California streetdigger or lowliner, if you’re in the market. No wonder it’s noisy.”

  This time, Paul jumped hard on the motorcycle’s tail and didn’t let go.

  Once Cody Stinson’s motorcycle reached King’s Beach, he slowed down, scrupulously following the speed limit. They followed him through King’s Beach to Tahoe City, expecting him to stop, but he never did.

  “The scenic route around the west shore,” Wish said. “He’s heading around the lake the hard way.”

  “He’s nuts. He must have a death wish to take 89. A road designed by Lucifer,” Paul murmured, following as close as he could up and down the narrow, curving roadway above Emerald Bay, invisible a thousand feet below in the predawn. “He’s going all the way back to South Lake Tahoe.”

  Stinson passed through the Y intersection at the bottom of the lake, riding along the boulevard.

  “Where could he be going?” Wish asked.

  “No idea.” By now, Paul had been without sleep for a good twenty hours. His mind simmered grayly, like overdone pot roast. “What I know is, Nina wants us to find him and get the police on him, so that’s what we’ll do the minute he stops for more than ten seconds.”

  “Uh oh,” Wish said, straightening up. Wish, a local, knew the streets better than Paul. Paul knew only that they had made a turn up the highway toward the bright lights of the casino district, wherein sat Caesars, wherein was his bed, a warm place he liked. What he did not know was what subtle confluence of geography in the small town that constituted South Lake Tahoe had prompted Wish to utter those portentous words, “Uh oh.”

  “So?” he asked as they turned off Lake Tahoe Boulevard toward Regan Beach.

  “I thought Nina said this place was really, really private. Somewhere nobody knows about.”

  “What place?” Paul asked, turning to follow Cody down a small, dark, empty street on the left.

  “I mean, he’s definitely not the type I would expect to know,” Wish said, voice heavy with disapproval.

  “Know what?” Paul said.

  “Maybe a girlfriend told him or something.”

  “Told him what?”

  “About the shelter.”

  There wasn’t any way to head Cody Stinson off before he got to the women’s shelter, so Paul continued to follow.

  “He must know I’m right behind him.”

  “If he does,” Wish said, “he doesn’t care.”

  This seemed accurate. Cody stopped the chopper dead on a side street near the shelter, setting off on foot.

  Paul and Wish did likewise, ditching the Mustang at the corner of Berkeley and Alameda. Paul, who hated mobile phones for completely unoriginal reasons, had bowed to necessity and bought one. He flipped it open and turned it on. The phone began its start-up routines.

  Hurrying up the street, he heard himself huffing. Every time he came up here, he had to make the adjustment to the impossibly high altitude. He was tired of feeling red-faced, dried out, and oxygen-deprived. He wanted Nina to land in Carmel with him, in the richly oxygenated air at sea level. He wanted her to evacuate from her mountains, her frenzy of trouble, her daily trials, and move into a place where there was the placid calm of ocean and good healthy light.

  The women’s shelter came into sight, Cody Stinson making headway up the steps.

  “What’s he going to do?” Wish asked, astonished. “Just knock?”

  He did knock. Nobody answered. He wasn’t brandishing a handgun, at least.

  Paul punched 911 with great deliberation. “If some lamebrain woman has it in mind to answer the door,” Paul said, “we take him out.”

  “Did you bring a gun?”

  “No, I did not bring a gun,” Paul said. He had, in fact, left his gun behind in the glove compartment. It was the mistake of an amateur, and it made him worry about his edge and lack of sharpness, but by now four in the morning was creeping up, and Paul did not feel at his best. He knew he could take this guy if necessary. He had thirty pounds on him, height, superior physical training, and a will to succeed, he reminded himself.

  “How do we take him out, then?” Wish whispered.

  “Any way we can,” Paul answered.

  Cody, at the door to the shelter, had started yelling. “Please, somebody let me in,” he called pathetically, pounding loudly. “It’s so cold out here.”

  “Where are these people?” Paul said, giving attention to his inattentive phone. “Why don’t they answer?”

  “ 911,” a bright voice piped.

  He gave brief details, starting right in with the fact that Cody Stinson was a wanted man.

  “We’ll be there asap,” the lady said, asap all one word.

  “They’ll be here asap,” he told Wish.

  But by now, Cody Stinson, impatient with the lack of response, had decided to take matters into his own hands. He wandered back out into the yard in front of the shelter, picked up a loose limb, held it high in one hand, and broke the front window. “What does it take to get you women’s attention, anyway?” he yelled.

  A woman holding a rifle appeared in the window. Andrea Reilly.

  “The police have been called,” she yelled. “If you don’t leave, you’ll be arrested and charged. Leave now.”

  “I’m not here to cause anybody any trouble,” Cody Stinson whined. “I just want to talk. Are Brandy and Angel here by any chance? I heard they might be.”

  Paul made his move. He ran up swift
ly and quietly behind Stinson and pulled him down. Stinson didn’t resist or say a word as Paul straddled him and searched his pockets. Wish came over and said, “We got him, buddy!” and Paul heard the welcome siren of the South Lake Tahoe police at his back.

  “Drop the gun!” the police ordered Andrea. “You there, freeze,” they advised Paul. He froze, the full weight of his body pressing down on Cody Stinson.

  15

  A FTER SOME PALAVER, the police arrested Cody and escorted him away, deaf to his protests. “I wasn’t doin’ nothin’! Hey, I got a right to come here, same as anyone else! Big deal about the freaking window! I said I’d pay for it!”

  Back in his hotel room at Caesars, Paul left a message for Nina at the office, deciding not to wake her. He and Wish caught six hours of precious sleep, Paul on the bed, and Wish all over the easy chair. Then they got back into the car. After all the time they had spent driving recently, the Mustang felt about as comfortable as a camel. They wended their way six thousand feet lower in altitude to the city of Fresno, where the Vangs had recently moved, arriving just after the morning rush-hour traffic.

  After the Gold Rush, not much had happened in Fresno for about a hundred and fifty years, except that tracts of ranch houses sprouted in place of orchards these days and strip malls lined the once-lazy country roads. Over the years immigrants from many lands had adopted Fresno. They found the pickings good in the agricultural central valley of California and didn’t mind the long series of hundred-degree days from August to October. They came mostly from Mexico and Central and South America, as always; they came from Bosnia and the Ukraine; and they came from the villages of Asia, the brave and the desperate, to stoke California’s goliath agricultural engine.

  The Hmong had arrived during the mid-1970s and after, jettisoned by the war in Vietnam, which had spilled over into wars in Laos and Cambodia. When Laos went Communist, the Hmong went resistance. Preferring their traditional village systems, they distrusted the increasing centralization of power in the lowlands and generally became thorns in the side of the Pathet Lao government. After the U.S. lost the war, many Hmong fled to refugee camps on the Thai border and from there dispersed to new lives in California. Their people mostly practiced Buddhism, Paul knew. Hard-working and intelligent, they had been brutally rushed into the twenty-first century.