Т Паркер - Pacific Beat

Jim stood beside his brother-in-law down by the shore. Raymond shook violently, and in the first faint light of morning Jim could see that his face was white. His breath came fast, sputtering on the inhale. Jim knew the signs.

“Let’s go back to the car and sit down, Ray.”

“I’ll stay here.”

“We’re going back to the car.”

Raymond made it three steps before his knees buckled | and he crumpled down and sat in the dirt with his legs out like an infant. His face was ice. Jim got a blanket from Bristol and told him to call the paramedics. Raymond was slipping into shock by the time Weir got back to him. All he could do was lay him out, cover him, and try to talk him through it.

Jim told him about Zihuatanejo, the dreamy blue water and white sand, about languid descents to eighty feet, the first perilous giggles of rapture of the deep, about the dives that didn’t yield even a shred of the Black Pearl, the setup with the drugs, his days in jail. Weir felt himself slipping away to Mexico, because being here was a hell he never knew existed on earth, until now.

Raymond’s teeth chattered and his body twitched intermittently, as if electrified. His eyes were wide and unblinking. Jim talked on, a port of words in this storm, gazing all the while across the beach toward Ann and the strobe flashes that blipped her pale body in and out of focus like some cheap disco gimmick. For a moment, Weir had the sensation of standing alone on the bow of a ship, steering a course from the blackness of one shore to the blackness of another. I promise you, Ann, in the name of this moment, that I will find him. It was the most dismal commitment of his life, and Weir knew it.

By the time the medics finally got there and took Raymond away, the fog had battled the sunlight to a gray standoff. Jim sat on the beach with his arms crossed over his knees and watched Ann Cruz, age thirty-nine, borne upon a stretcher by two men she had never met, one red shoe peeking from beneath the blanket, heading for the first of several checkpoints she would need to pass before crossing the last border into her grave.

Back at Raymond’s car, he got the tire iron out of the trunk, then walked a hundred yards down the beach and found something vertical. It started out as a NO DIVING sign, but when Jim was too tired and his hands too blistered and bloody to hit it anymore, it was basically just scrap metal and splintered wood. He screamed his curses to the yawning sky, aiming straight for the face of God. He screamed things that actually scared him.

Then he went back to Raymond’s car and threw the iron in. He walked to the coroner’s van. “I’m riding with her,” he said.

The driver said sure.

Raymond was already in the chief’s office when Weir walked in at two in the afternoon, three days later. The chiefs secretary shut the door behind him. Raymond, unshaven and still pale as the walls, looked up to Jim and said nothing.

Sitting slightly off to the side of the big metal desk was a man that Weir had never seen before. His legs were crossed primly, his back erect, his dark straight hair gelled away from his forehead to reveal a sharp widow’s peak. His nose was a larger version of the peak: abrupt, pointed, assertive. His suit was proudly European. He looked at Jim through rimless round spectacles, then stood.

Brian Dennison, the interim Newport Beach police chief, stood, too, offered Jim his hand and said, “I’m sorry. I’m so deeply sorry, Jim.”

Jim had hardly slept or eaten; he had not, in fact, truly done anything since seeing Ann’s still body on the dark earth of the bay. He had simply gone through motions: answering questions from a series of cops, bumming a ride back to Ray’s car, telling Virginia what had happened, holding her rigid body close in a long embrace that he wished would impart comfort but he knew didn’t. It was impossible to get away from himself. He could not adjust to this stark new order of things.

The big house had served as a fulcrum for family sorrow in the days following. Virginia’s brother had stopped by for an afternoon and spent two nights; Poon’s sister had done likewise; a large contingent of Cruzes had materialized and spent their nights in sleeping bags strewn about the Eight Peso Cantina — Raymond’s parents’ bar — which they had closed for mourning. Funeral arrangements were made, pending the autopsy. The house filled with floral arrangements and the individual scents of family, which for Weir formed an invisible, suffocating cage. Just as he was about to break — break into what, he wasn’t sure — Virginia mobilized and threw everyone out, gathered up most of the flowers and tossed them into the dumpster behind Poon’s Locker, then retreated into the grim efficiency that was her nature. Jim spent some long hours with her, just sitting in the living room, wordless passages of time unfolding with a paralyzing slowness. Virginia would seem ready to speak, then change her mind and descend again into herself to do private battle with her demons. Weir had executed his responsibilities with what dispatch he could muster. In his moments alone, often as he lay in bed and waited for sleep to release him, he shed tears that did less to reduce the mass of his grief than to reveal fresh exposures. At these times, he felt as if his body had been turned inside out, and that every nerve and organ was exposed to the abrasions of the air, the bed, the terrible rawness of a world without comfort. Twice, Raymond had begged Jim to take him down into the sea, and twice they had suited up at Diver’s Cove, lumbered through the shore-break, and floated out to the rocks, where they finally descended into a world of silence and oblivious sea creatures that somehow helped to underscore the breadth of life that, with or without Ann, would go on.

“Thanks,” was all Jim said to Brian Dennison.

Dennison was a barrel-chested man with a strangely animated face and an attempted sense of decorum. He’d put on some weight since Jim had last seen him. He introduced Widow’s Peak — Lt. Mike Paris. Paris was Community Relations officer, a job, Weir knew, only for the lame or the administration-bound. Paris nodded and shook Jim’s hand with the intimacy of welcoming someone to a secret, exclusive club. “You have the sympathies of this department.”

Weir sat down next to Raymond and looked at him again, a glance from one private hell to another.

Dennison strolled behind his desk, sat down, looked at each of the three men before him, then stood and went to the window. He cradled an elbow on his chest, resting his chin in the upraised hand, then turned to Jim. “We’ve got...” he said, but didn’t finish the sentence. He exhaled audibly, then looked out the window again, regrouping.

Jim occasionally had run across Brian Dennison during his ten years with the Sheriff’s, mostly at parties and law-enforcement symposia. He was a smoothly aggressive type, who could bang heads on the street and kiss ass at the station with equal aplomb. He had always seemed to Weir to be the archetypal Newport Beach cop. Dennison was popular among the movers and shakers because his department patrolled their neighborhoods with a visible ferocity. The everyday folk believed that Chief Dennison — like his predecessor — was arrogant and heavy-handed, and there was a long list of brutality and harassment suits to support their view. Most of the trouble happened on the peninsula — Jim’s neighborhood — where the blue-collar people blow off steam and the tourists can behave like swine.

Dennison’s official title was Interim Police Chief because the former chief had died suddenly of a heart attack seven months ago — a few weeks before Jim left for Mexico. Weir had followed the stories in the papers: Dennison was moved up from captain on a temporary basis, awaiting a final decision by the city council. But with the mayor’s seat up for grabs in next month’s election, the appointment of a new chief had been postponed when Dennison — suddenly and without the usual rumor and speculation — announced his candidacy for mayor.