Jefferson Parker - Storm Runners

‘The parents think he supplied her with the drugs,’ said Neal. ‘They think he did that work on her body. She says no. What do you think?’

‘He probably gave her the drugs. I don’t know what bodywork you’re talking about.’

‘Ask her about it,’ said Neal. ‘Where is he? Where’s Tavarez right now?’

‘I have no idea.’

Neal asked Stromsoe about other friends of Hallie’s, other boyfriends in particular. He asked if Stromsoe had met Mike Tavarez’s parents and the answer was yes, Rolando and Reina, he’d spent some time in their home back in high school, eaten dinner with them on rehearsal nights, and sometimes he and Mike would just hang out there on weekends, shooting pool and drinking sodas, maybe ride their bikes or, when they got older, go for a drive. Stromsoe had always liked quiet Rolando and large, expansive Reina.

He asked if Stromsoe had given Hallie any of the drugs she had ingested last night and Stromsoe told him just the last few drinks.

Neal gave Stromsoe a card and an unhappy stare, then walked away.

‘So I went into the hospital room,’ he told Susan. ‘Hallie was sitting up. She had some color back but her eyes were flat and her face was haggard. I held her hand for a minute and we didn’t say much. Then I asked about her body and she told me to give her some privacy. I faced the door and heard her rustling around. When she said okay, try to control your excitement, I turned back and she had rolled the hospital smock just to her breasts, and pulled the sheet to just below her belly. Her torso was pretty much one big black-and-purple bruise, with a few little clouds of tan showing through.’

Stromsoe now remembered the bend of Hallie’s ribs under the livid skin. He remembered the pert Muzak version of ‘Penny Lane’ that was playing while he stared at her. Susan Doss looked up from her notepad.

‘She’d gotten an abortion a month earlier,’ said Stromsoe. ‘She told him it was her body, her decision, that she was a druggie and not ready to be a mother. There was no discussion. Hallie was that way. She said Mike went quiet, didn’t talk for days, didn’t even look at her. One night they went to a club and Hallie drank some, got talking to a guy. For the next couple of days, Mike drank and did blow, and the more loaded Mike got, the more he accused her of having a thing with this guy while he was away at school. She’d never seen him before in her life. Just when Mike seemed to be calming down a little, he and some of the guys drove her out to the middle of nowhere and the men held her while Mike hit her. And hit her some more. She passed out from the pain. They left her by the side of the Ortega Highway in the middle of the night. Mike flew back to Boston the next morning.’

‘My God.’

Talk on, thought Stromsoe. Tell how Hallie handled that pain. Words, don’t fail me now.

‘She hitchhiked to the nearest house, called a friend to pick her up. Stayed in bed for three days at her Lido apartment, medicated herself with antibiotics, dope, and liquor. She forced herself to make an appearance back home for her parents’ twenty-fifth anniversary, saw my graduation announcement, called my folks, and found out where the party was. By the time the doctors saw her, she was bleeding inside, infected, poisoned by the dope. Three of her ribs were broken and there were internal injuries to her spleen and ovaries. They took one ovary and said she’d probably never conceive. Three years later she had Billy.’

‘What did she tell the cops?’

‘That she picked up the wrong guy one night. They knew she was protecting Mike but they couldn’t crack her. Hallie was tough inside.’

‘Why cover for him?’

‘The beating was five days old, so she knew it would be hard to make a case against four friends with their alibis lined up. And pride too – Hallie thought it was a victory not to go to the law. She also realized he might kill her. The cops busted him from a liquor-store videotape a week after Hallie left the hospital. So, she thought Mike would get at least a partial punishment for what he did to her. Big news, when the Harvard boy was popped for a string of armed robberies in California.’

‘I remember.’

He closed his eyes and could see Hallie as she was in high school, and again as she was on the day they were married, and then as she lay in the maternity ward with tiny William Jaynes Stromsoe in her arms.

But again, as had happened so many times in the last two months, his mind betrayed him with a vision of the nails and his wife and son.

He watched a neighbor’s cat licking its rear foot in a patch of sunlight on the courtyard bricks.

His felt his heart laboring and he admitted to himself that telling this story was far more difficult than he had thought it would be. Where he had hoped to find some moments of fond memory, he found the awful truth instead. The truth he thought would set him free.

Then Stromsoe admitted another truth to himself – he was feeling worse each day, feeling farther from shore. It was like swimming against a tide. Wasn’t he supposed to get closer?

He was astonished again, almost to the point of disbelief, that he would never see Hallie or Billy as they were, only as they had ended.

God put them there for reasons we don’t understand.

‘Maybe we should take a walk on the beach while we talk,’ said Susan.

They came to the ocean at Fifty-second Street and turned south. The sun was caught in the clouds above Catalina Island like an orange suspended in gauze. The stiff breeze dried Stromsoe’s left eyelid and the pins in his legs felt creaky as old door hinges. The skin graft on his left breast tended to tighten in the cool evenings. He pulled up his coat collar and slipped on his sunglasses.

He told Susan about taking Hallie into his little college apartment in Fullerton and getting her off the drugs. And about how he had escorted her into court to testify in Mike’s robbery trial, traded mad dog stares with Tavarez, how Mike’s mother sobbed after the sentencing, and how Mike nodded to them – a courtly, emotionless nod – as he was led back to his cell.

‘Do you mind?’ Susan asked, taking a small digital camera from the pocket of her jacket.

‘Okay.’

She set her notebook in the sand with the pen clipped to the rings, and started snapping pictures. ‘I’d like some candids of you and Hallie and Billy too. From your home.’

‘Okay,’ he said.

Okay, because their story must be told and their pictures must be seen. Okay, because Tavarez can’t take away their stories or their pictures. Or my memories. Ever.

‘I know it hurts,’ said Susan, ‘but face the sun, will you? It lights your face beautifully.’

He faced the sun, his right eye shuddering with the brightness and his left eye registering nothing at all. Susan circled him, clicking away. He turned to face her and he began talking about their wedding and their life while he went through the Sheriff’s Academy, about their attempts to have a child and the doctors and tests and doctors and tests and the sudden presence of another life inside Hallie, detected by a drugstore pregnancy test on what was probably the happiest day of their life together until then.

Billy.

They walked on, then stopped to watch the sun dissolve into an ocean of dark metallic blue. To Stromsoe none of it looked like it used to. He wondered if this would be the last time he’d walk this beach. That would be okay. That’s why he listed the house for sale. The world was large. A new home can be a new life.

‘When Mike ordered the bomb, was it intended for Hallie and Billy, or just you?’

‘Just me.’

‘Why does he hate you so much?’