Don Winslow - California Fire And Life

First real estate, then the furniture. People can't make their mortgages, they're not going to buy George II side tables, so what was an investment becomes a collection. Nick gets his ego wrapped up in it. The damn furniture become his possessions. Even on the rare occasions when he gets an offer, he won't part with them.

And they need the money, they're so stretched out.

He mortgages the house, at God knows what psychic cost.

Prime interest and his balls.

He takes it out in coke and fucking, Letty says. The money goes up his nose and out his dick.

Pam becomes the quintessential lonely South County wife and starts to drink. First it's liquid lunches; after a while she's already primed by the time lunch rolls around. Sobers up in the afternoons for the kids, gets them dinner, bathes them, puts them to bed, then drinks herself to sleep.

"Letty…," Jack says.

"I know," Letty says. "But I'm telling you she was sober."

"Maybe not that night," Jack says. "You know, Nick has the kids, he's going to divorce her…"

Letty shakes her head. "She was divorcing him."

"Oh."

Pam finally gets tired of it, Letty tells him. Tired of his fucking around, his coke, his lying, his smacking her when the real estate deal falls through or when she objects to him buying a five-thousand-dollar sculpture with money they don't have.

Tired of herself, too. Tired of the way she feels and looks. And horrified that she's starting to see her kids through the long-distance smoked lens of pills and alcohol.

So she checks herself into rehab.

I don't know what went on in there, Letty says, but Pam went in a faux princess and came out a real woman. She must have dealt with stuff there, because she comes out, she's different. More real, somehow. Warmer.

She starts calling, inviting me over. Even introduces me as her half sister. We speak Spanish together, which makes Nick crazy. I spend time with the kids — take them to the beach, take them to the country "What do you know about the country?" Jack asks.

"I live there now," Letty says. "I bought a little place up along the Ortega Highway, Cleveland National Forest. Are we talking about me or Pam?"

"Pam."

Pam comes out of rehab warmer.

And strong.

Gives Nick an ultimatum: Straighten up or the marriage is over.

She hauls him into counseling. That works. Three weeks later she comes home to find him in their bed with some coke whore from Newport Beach. She tells Nick to pack his bags and get out.

Nick storms out and comes back an hour later with a head full of blow and beats the crap out of her. Princess Pam would have taken it, but this Pam goes into court the next day and gets a restraining order, throws his ass out.

He runs to Mommy. She calls Pam and tells her that she'll never, ever get the kids. She's an unfit mother. The Vale lawyers will take her apart.

You'll take my kids, Pam says — get this, Jack — over my dead body.

Set on fire, Jack thinks, melted into their bed, cremated again and scattered over the ocean.

"He was terrified of a divorce," Letty says. "He's already up to his ears in debt and she's going to take half. And the house, and the kids…"

Daddy says Mommy is all burned up.

"You have motive," Jack says, "but-"

"He told her he was going to kill her," Letty says. "He'd break into the house when she was gone and take things. Leave her threatening notes. Call her on the phone late at night and tell her he was going to kill her."

"Jesus Christ."

"She called me the morning before she died," Letty says. She starts to cry as she's telling this.

He came over to pick up the kids, Pam had said. And he whispered in my ear, I'm coming back tonight. I'm coming back and I'm going to kill you.

"I begged her to come out and stay with me that night, but she wouldn't," Letty says. The tears pour down her face now. "I should have made her. I should have come and stayed with her. I should have-"

"Letty-"

"He has the kids, Jack," she says. "That rotten bastard and that bitch are going to raise her kids."

"Looks like it."

"Over my dead body," Letty says.

Then she starts to cry. Breaks down right there and would maybe collapse except he holds her. Asks her, "Do you want to come home with me?"

She nods.

As they're pulling out of the driveway, Jack notices a car parked on the street.

Two guys stand by the car.

Same guys who were in the church.

Nicky's hired security.

Jack lives in your basic Southern California neofascist "gated community." A walled-in cluster of tile-roofed condos and town houses sitting like a castle on a shaved-off hill on the corner of Golden Lantern and Camino Del Avion.

"When did you move from the trailer?" Letty says as she gets out of her car in the Guest Parking slip.

Jack says, "When they tore the park down to build condos I couldn't afford. So I bought this place."

This place is a one-bedroom condo on the top floor of a three-condo unit. There are two units below him, sort of out and away as they slope down the hill. As a matter of fact, the two units get a little more out and a little more away every day because they're literally moving downhill.

Jack explains, "They built this back in the boom days in the '80s when they couldn't throw this shit up fast enough. Everybody and his uncle was a contractor all of a sudden and there was big money to be made, so they cut corners with a chain saw. They were in too big a hurry to compact the soil properly, so every building pad is on shifting ground. The whole damn complex is slowly sliding downhill. The homeowners association is trying to sue the contractors, but they're long gone in the recession. So now the association is suing the contractors' insurance company. And so on and so on… Anyway, the complex is heading back toward the ocean."

"I thought that was only supposed to happen when the Big One hits," Letty says. The Big One being the Earthquake, the apocalyptic event that everyone in So-Cal jokes about and dreads.

"It won't take the Big One," Jack says. "See those hills behind us? Those are about the last undeveloped hillsides on the south coast. There's another stretch above Laguna, and another one above San Clemente.

"It's fire season — hot, dry, windy — and those hills are covered with brush. One spark on a windy day and we'll be fighting the fire from the beach again. It'll blow down these canyons, surround all these complexes, some will burn down, others will make it.

"After fire season comes the rainy season. We haven't had a serious one in a few years, but we're due. So say we get a big fire and the brush is burned off those slopes. Then the rains come…

"The mother of all mudslides. All these hillsides that they shaved off and built this crap on, they're all coming down. All these condos and town houses built on shifting soil? They'll collapse from the bottom up because the ground will literally give out beneath them. We'll slide down the hill in a flow of cheap materials, bad construction, and mud.

"First Mother Nature burns it, then she flushes it."

"You'd like that, Jack, wouldn't you?"

They're standing in the street by his garage. Beneath a row of condo buildings that are all exactly identical.

Jack says, "Maybe I would."

Maybe then they wouldn't get a chance to ruin the Strands.

There's a note on his garage door.

Owners of one-car garages are expected to park their vehicle in that garage, not in parking slots on the street. The garages are intended for vehicles, not surfboard workshops.

— The Homeowners Association

"Surfboard workshop?"

"I have a couple of old boards in there," Jack says. Because of the cantilevered design of the building, Jack's garage sits directly below his kitchen. He pushes a remote button on a handheld clicker and the garage door opens with a metallic groan.