Gregg Hurwitz - Prodigal Son

“This isn’t my concern,” he said.

“I don’t owe her anything,” he said.

The bottle did not respond. The liquid gazed demurely back at him, delightfully clouded, impatient. He didn’t know what was more pathetic, that he was picking a fight with vodka or that he was losing.

He shoved out of the freezer, cursed, and headed for the front door.

19End of the Line

Sitting in the back of the police car, Evan watches the free world roll by outside his window. His cheek is swollen. Blood works its way down his slender neck, mingling with panic sweat. He feels sticky all over. His clothes cling. In his twelve years, he has never known this kind of terror, this kind of total dislocation.

As they drive, the cops up front banter, arguing about how much the Orioles suck. Another day, another bust.

But for Evan it’s the end of the line.

And yet it makes no sense. Why go to all this trouble for a simple frame-up? The puzzle pieces don’t fit no matter how many ways he turns them in his head.

They pull off the interstate at a deserted rest stop, and he assumes one of the cops has to take a leak. But then the rear door opens and he’s yanked out onto the curb. The bigger cop sidles behind him, hands low.

“Wait,” Evan says, panic rising. “Wait.”

But the cuffs fall free with a clink. A knee bumps his kidneys, and he stumbles onto the little patch of browning lawn beside the restrooms.

The cop circles back to the driver’s side, and the squad car takes off.

Evan stands there alone, a breeze cooling the sweat on his back. The air smells of cleaning solution, exhaust, and sewage. Blood hardens on his cheek. He watches the cars zoom by on the interstate below and has absolutely no fucking idea what to do next.

A familiar dark sedan turns off and climbs the slow arc of road to where he stands. The windows are tinted. All of them.

It stops before him.

The passenger window slides down, accompanied by an electronic purr.

Evan cannot see the driver, not across the passenger seat and the dark interior.

The voice that calls across is as smoky as a pilfered swig of bourbon from Papa Z’s liquor cabinet.

“My name is Jack,” it says. “Are you ready to begin?”

20Bad Company

Duran’s old apartment complex had gone to hell in the months since he’d laid eyes on it. He lurked in the darkness beneath the sagging carport of the meth house next door, a black wave of guilt roiling through him. How could he let his Sofia live like this? How could his ex-wife not have told him how bad the neighborhood had gotten since he’d left?

He knew the answer to that already.

Because he was unreliable. Because he hadn’t shown up. Because he couldn’t do much to help aside from mail most of his measly paycheck to her every month.

Because he wasn’t good for much and never had been.

It was colder than L.A. had any right to be, even at night, even in December.

He stared at the window of Bri’s apartment. A halogen floor lamp illuminated the living room, giving him a decent vantage through the security screens. That old-timey travel poster of Paris still hung on the wall. Bri had always dreamed of going to France but hadn’t gotten any farther east than Phoenix once for a human-resources conference. Among other laundry a pink sweatshirt rested over the couch back, which was the closest he’d gotten to seeing Sofia in one year, five months, and thirteen days.

She’d been so little when they’d moved in. Back then the apartment smelled of fresh paint, new carpet, and promise. When he’d get home from work, she’d toddle out and hold her arms up to him. She’d put her bare feet on top of his shoes and they would dance in the kitchen, and the stove would smell like fresh tortillas and spiced beans, would smell like home.

His throat was closing up, and he looked down and blinked till the ground stopped blurring. How far the fall from grace, from that kitchen filled with life to a rickety not-to-code room in El Sereno. One night, lubricated with a pint of the cheap stuff, he’d drawn a sketch of his daughter, re-creating her features one by one, each line a love letter, every curve a memory etched into his brain. He kept it tacked to the wall as a comfort and a punishment, a reminder that he’d left a mark on the planet but had been too flawed to build on that foundation.

His thoughts pulled to the smooth, smooth taste of rum and the feeling when it hit the blood, how it eased the cramps in the chest and loosened his focus so that for a few precious moments everything seemed warm and touched by grace. Even him.

He reached for the mantra, worn threadbare from repetition in his mind: An alcoholic alone is in bad company .

There was a crash from the backyard behind him. In trying to stand up, one of the meth heads had knocked over a barbecue. The man had a beard and no visible lips, an unsettling effect, as if his wiry facial hair had sprouted teeth. Red charcoal lumps dotted the concrete of the backyard and the six or so broken spirits stared down at them as if they were tea leaves prophesying the future.

The party unfroze, the people rumbling back into motion. The bearded man hit a pipe and then let a wasted girl shotgun the smoke right out of his mouth. She slumped back against a torn lawn chair, a sack of bones topped with straw hair. The other tweakers did hot rails of crushed meth, snorting it off what looked like an amputated tennis racket handle, eyes rolling white, hands jittering, tongues poking Morse-code patterns in their cheeks.

It brought Duran back to his childhood, where he’d seen a lot of things kids weren’t meant to see and some stuff beyond that. It had been like a tour of duty, his childhood, a state of mind to be endured. His senses had been alive then, that was for sure. So much unrealized potential, so many dreams of who he could be and what he’d do when he got there.

And here he was hunted and terrified, hiding under the cover of a meth house, looking at the apartment where his lost wife and daughter lived, a zippered pouch in his back pocket holding ninety-nine dollars and change.

How was it possible to fuck up this badly?

The cat-piss and paint-thinner scent of meth was making his brain hurt. He stepped out from beneath the carport, leaning against a decrepit oak tree, its bark cracked like the skin of a wizened elder.

A car rolled past, deep bass bumping, the headlights illuminating a rusty knife discarded in the gutter amid scattered squares of aluminum foil. Each square had a dark patch in the middle, heroin residue staring up like a cyclops’s eye.

Duran wanted to cry. He wanted to vanish through his shoes into the dirt and never come back. He wanted to see his daughter and say good-bye before they—whoever they were—caught up to him.

He hadn’t dared to go to his house, holing up in the off-the-books sublet. And he knew he shouldn’t be here either. But he couldn’t help it. He didn’t want to go out without looking Sofia in her deep brown eyes and telling her that having her as a daughter was the one true thing this life had given him.

A flicker of movement caught his attention, and he looked across into the apartment. Sofia spun into view holding a basket of laundry, approximating a ballerina’s pirouette. Her dark hair whipped across her face. She hoisted the basket onto a hip the way Bri always did and vanished through the front door into the hall.

Duran had forgotten to breathe.

Eleven years old and still a kid. A few inches taller, sure, but her face had barely changed. Her features hadn’t yet started to shift with the run-up to the teen years. Beautiful round cheeks still padded with baby fat. Those long eyelashes. That awkward child’s grace as she danced, fluid and unbalanced all at once, a glorious spinning top that could capsize at any second.