Chapter Fourteen
After six days of misery, Vish felt well enough to visit Troy. He tried calling first and she didn’t pick up, so he decided to take a chance and stop by unannounced. She might not even be home, but Troy’s Saturdays were generally leisurely, especially now that she wasn’t working. If he could just see her…
He took a bus down the coast to Hermosa. Inside a paper bag in his lap rested the excuse for his visit, a pair of cobalt ballet flats she’d left at his apartment. He felt awful—still weak, still sore, still headachey—but he hadn’t vomited in over a day, and thus he must be on the mend.
He made his way down to the beach and wandered along the Strand until he found the right house. There was no doorbell, so he rapped on the sliding door.
A figure approached from inside. Vish’s heart beat faster, until he realized it was Lola. She stared at him through the glass, then slid the door open a few inches.
“Hey,” she said. “She’s not here. She’s at an audition.”
“She left these at my place,” he said. He held up the flats.
Lola stared at them. Vish expected her to take them and close the door, but instead she opened it a bit wider and craned her head outside. She looked around in both directions, then ducked back and slid the door fully open. “Go ahead and come in,” she said.
Vish stepped inside. Lola closed the door behind him and pulled the drapes across it, blocking the view of the beach.
“She’ll be gone all morning, probably, but I don’t need the neighbors telling her you stopped by.” She nodded at the shoes in his hand. “Keep them or throw them. I’m not taking them, because she’ll know you were here, and that’s a conversation I don’t want to have.”
“I don’t understand,” Vish said. “Do you know why she broke up with me?”
Lola stared at him. She looked like she had just woken up, all tangled hair and puffy eyes. “You’re not going to cry, are you? I can’t deal with a crying man today.”
She padded barefoot over to the kitchen. She wore only a threadbare black sweater, barely long enough to function as a dress, her legs pale beneath it. Cobwebs of purple veins covered her skinny white thighs. She yanked open the refrigerator and stared inside. “You want water or something?”
“No. Thank you,” Vish said. “Can you tell me why Troy left me?”
She straightened up, a water bottle clutched in her hand. She looked exasperated. “Because Troy is a goddamned flake,” she said.
She slammed the fridge shut and walked over to the couch. “Sit,” she said.
Vish perched on the edge of a cushion, the unwanted shoes balanced on his knees. Lola plopped down beside him. She rolled her eyes. “I mean, she’s a friend and I love her, but she’s always been a flake. And it’s cool for the most part, but I think you got screwed in the process.”
“What do you mean?” Vish asked.
She exhaled. “Here’s the situation. Appreciate this, because Troy would be pissed at me if she knew I was even talking to you. And if it ever comes out you treated her wrong or were a jerk to her in any way, you know I’ll have your balls, right?” She shrugged. “But you seem like a nice guy. Not Troy’s normal thing at all, but I have to say, she was better with you. Nicer to people, less swept up in her own personal drama. Less of a bitch, I guess is what I’m saying.”
She settled back on the couch and took a swig of water. “So a week ago, she comes home in the morning, and it’s the same goddamned Troy back. She’s in tears. I thought you might have done something shitty to her, but she told me you hadn’t. But…” She stopped.
“But what?” Vish asked. “Why did she leave me?”
“She said you must have somehow tricked her into dating you,” Lola said. “She thought you might be evil. That’s a quote, by the way.”
Whatever Vish was expecting, that wasn’t it. “What?”
“I don’t know, so don’t go asking me to explain it. That’s pretty much all she said, and when I pressed her, she didn’t give specifics. Just cried a lot.” Lola shook her head. “And that, my love, is a whole lot like the Troy I know.”
Vish stared at her. “Funny,” he said. “Because that’s nothing like the Troy I know.”
Lola shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you. Either you brought out something different in her, or she was putting on an act to impress you. Or maybe you just saw whatever you wanted to see in her.”
“So what do I do now?”
“I don’t really care, as long as it doesn’t involve Troy.” At his expression, something in Lola’s face softened. “Look, she doesn’t want to see you. She’s not going to meet with you or take your calls. Move on. Whatever you thought about her, you have to accept that it’s over, because there’s nothing you can do about it.”
There was nowhere to go from there. He could argue that no, he knew the real Troy, and Troy loved him, or was fond enough of him that she’d never claim he was evil, for crying out loud, but there was nothing to be gained by it. In the end, he just left.
He couldn’t face the bus, so he walked north along the shore, sticking close to the water’s edge through the vast industrial void of El Segundo. He trudged along the grassy stretch of Dockweiler Beach while low jets roared overhead from neighboring LAX, then detoured too far off his course through the maze of docks in Marina Del Rey. He considered stuffing Troy’s shoes in a trash can, but they were in good shape and were probably expensive, so he left them on a bench. Maybe someone could use them.
He kept walking. Found his way back to the shoreline. Didn’t run into many people. It was a weekend, but it was a foggy fall day, and nobody wanted to spend it at the beach.
This might be a bad idea, walking around. He felt weak and dizzy. He inhaled too much of the chilly ocean air and erupted into a coughing fit, and his nose turned into a spigot of mucous. Great. His chest had been tight ever since he’d talked to Lola. Maybe it was from his illness, or maybe he just needed to have another good cry, because now he knew he’d lost Troy for good.
The attack came right when he’d reached the south end of Venice, just beyond the fishing pier. Someone slammed into his back with enough force to knock the breath out of him and tackled him to the ground. He choked and coughed, his tortured lungs unable to get enough oxygen. His assailant pressed against the back of the head and forced his face into the sand.
He twisted and bucked and tried to push himself up off the ground. He turned his head to look at his attacker, and an elbow slammed into his temple. Before his vision exploded into white light, he caught a blurred glimpse of tanned arms and a brightly-patterned shirt.
Someone kicked him in the side. Pain burst throughout his ribs. He rolled onto his hip and tried to scramble away, but another kick caught him between his shoulder blades, then another to the back of his head.
Multiple attackers. The band of surfers. They were on him, four of them, snarling and spitting, feral in their aggression. They hit him and kicked him, no sense to any of it. Vish tried to raise his hands to defend himself, tried to curl into a protective ball, but the blows came too fast from too many directions.
One of them said something, but he couldn’t catch more than a general sense of the words: “He can’t reach you here.” Something like that.
“This is too public.” That was the one he guessed was the leader, the dark-haired one with the handsome features. “Get him out of here.”
One of the surfers grabbed both his wrists and yanked on his arms. Another went for his ankles, but Vish kicked for all he was worth, lashing out at bare legs and kneecaps. He tried to shout for help and erupted into another coughing fit.
“Hey! Hey!” A male voice, loud and angry. The surfers paused their attack and looked up. Vish broke the slackened grip of the one holding his wrists.
“Get away from him! What are you doing?” Vish looked up. A guardian angel in a white t-shirt and red shorts sprinted across the sand toward him.
The surfers scattered in all d
irections. Vish saw the dark-haired one running across the sand toward Ocean Front Walk. The kid in the red shorts took a couple of tentative steps after him, then stopped. He sank to his knees in the sand next to Vish. A tanned face, young and clean-cut and earnest with concern and outrage, stared down at Vish.
“Are you okay?” the kid asked. His hair, which was probably naturally brown, was bleached to a pale beige by the sun; dark freckles stood out across his nose and forehead. “Are you hurt? Don’t move if you’re hurt.”
“I think I’m okay.” Vish started to sit up. The kid looked like he was going to tell him to keep still, then slipped his arm around Vish’s back and helped him. His white t-shirt had a red cross on it. Ah. The kid was a lifeguard.
“Who were those guys? Why were they beating you?” the kid asked. He was maybe nineteen or twenty, California-handsome and adorably earnest. “Did you break anything? Do you need an ambulance?”
His chest hurt, but that was as much from the week of nonstop coughing as the kicks he’d received. The surfers had worn sandals, which hadn’t inflicted all that much damage. He’d be bruised all over, but everything considered, he’d gotten off lightly. “I’m fine,” he said.
He tried to stand. His arm still around Vish, the kid helped him to his feet. “Did they mug you?”
Vish touched his back pocket. His wallet was still there. “No. Maybe they didn’t get around to it.” He looked at the kid. “Thank you for saving me.”
The kid grinned. “My job,” he said. He pointed a short distance ahead to a squat beige structure on the sand. It was topped by a short tower with a glass-walled observation deck that ran along all sides. “That’s the lifeguard HQ. Can you make it there? There’s a medic on duty, and I want him to look at you.”
“That’s not necessary,” Vish said. “Thank you, but I’d rather just go home.”
“I have to file a report.” The kid looked abashed. “It’s part of my job. And you should have someone check you out. I’m not kidding. You had four dudes whaling on you.”
Vish hesitated, then nodded. “Okay. Sure.” One of these days he was going to learn how to put his foot down and take a stand against all these kind, considerate people who kept wanting to send him to doctors.
The kid took his arm and led him up the beach, like a good-natured grandson taking his doddering grandfather for a stroll. “Do you know why they jumped you? Did they say anything?”
Vish shook his head. “I think I’ve seen them before, though. Once around here, by the shops, and once down in Hermosa.”
“I’ve never seen them on this beach. They’re not regulars, at least.”
They made it to the building. Inside, it was roomy and clean. The kid guided him to a small white examination room and gestured toward a padded cot. “Have a seat, okay? I’m going to see who’s around.”
Vish stared at the laminated CPR posters taped to the walls until the kid returned a couple minutes later. He was accompanied by an LAPD officer. She looked young and grimly competent, with her dark hair pulled into a smooth bun. In spite of the chill in the air, she wore a short-sleeved uniform shirt paired with shorts. Her utility belt sagged under the weight of its load: holstered gun, walkie-talkie, handcuffs, mace.
“We radioed for the nurse. He’s treating someone at the north end of the beach right now, but he’ll be here soon as he’s done,” she said to Vish. “I’m Officer Guerrero. Kip said he saw you get attacked?”
Kip. Vish almost smiled. The lifeguard looked like a Kip. “Yes. I was out walking, and four guys ambushed me from behind.”
Officer Guerrero took a small notebook and a ballpoint pen out of her back pocket. She leaned against the wall. “So you don’t have any idea why they attacked you?” she asked. She sounded completely neutral, like she neither believed nor disbelieved him, and yet Vish felt himself striving to sound more convincing.
“No, ma’am,” he said. He thought she winced at the “ma’am.” “Like I told Kip earlier, I think I’ve seen them around before, but I don’t know why they’d beat me up.”
“Where was this?”
“Once in the South Bay, once around here. I was just out walking with my girlfriend both times. The first time, they said something to me, but we pretty much just ignored them.”
“Yeah? What’d they say?”
“I don’t remember exactly. One of them said something about how I was a dead man. ‘Dead man walking.’ Something like that.”
Her brows raised. “Well, that seems significant.”
“Yeah, but it didn’t sound like he was threatening to kill me. It wasn’t like he was angry at me or anything. He and his friends were just hanging out, and I think he wanted to get under my skin a little.”
“Yeah, well, mission accomplished.” Officer Guerrero scrawled in her notepad. “Your girlfriend know them? Maybe had some kind of problem with them that you don’t know about?”
“She said she didn’t know them,” Vish said.
Guerrero looked at him and her expression sharpened. She’d zeroed in on his words, pinpointed his uncertainty. “That might’ve been what she said, but did she?”
Vish shook his head. “I don’t think so. They weren’t the type of people she’d know.”
She stared at him, unblinking, for far too long. Vish fought an urge to fill the silence with nervous chatter. Finally, she flipped to a blank sheet and passed her notebook and pen to him. “Give me her name and info,” she said. “We can check with her.”
Vish hesitated. “Do you have to?” he asked. “We broke up recently.”
This earned him another unblinking stare, this one laced with a blast of ice. “Her name and number, please.”
With a sinking feeling, Vish scribbled down Troy’s name and her cell number. Maybe Troy would repeat what she’d told Lola about thinking Vish was evil. That’d go over well with grim Officer Guerrero.
He handed the notebook back. She jotted down his vague, jumbled physical description of the surfers, copied his personal information from his drivers license, asked a few general questions about the incident.
“Sorry you had that experience,” she said. “Haven’t heard of any similar problems lately, but we’ll be on the lookout.”
“Thank you.”
She hesitated. “Your girlfriend… Any chance she could be behind the attack? Maybe carrying a grudge about something?”
“No,” Vish said. “It’s not in her nature. She wouldn’t do anything like that.” Guerrero nodded thoughtfully.
The nurse arrived as they were wrapping up. He was a burly man with massive forearms bulging out from a tight white polo shirt. He gave Vish a once-over, shone a bright light in his eyes, made him flex his arms and wrists and legs, and gave him the all-clear. “You’re good,” he said. “You got anyone to drive you home?”
Vish shook his head. “I’m just a few blocks from here,” he said, or tried to say. He erupted into a coughing fit mid-sentence. The nurse gave him a whack on the back with a beefy hand.
“Sounds like you got what everyone’s got. Bad strain of flu going around,” he said.
“Getting over it,” Vish said.
“Lucky you. Most people are just catching it now,” the nurse said. “If it keeps spreading like this, it’ll knock out the whole city.”
Vish walked home. He felt newly exposed after the attack, frightened by the wide expanses of sand and water around him. He felt better once he was on the street, sheltered by the upscale, sprawling apartment complexes and oceanfront hotels that dotted the area. What had they said? He can’t reach you here.
He shouldn’t expect that to make any sense. He was a random victim, or mostly random, someone they’d slotted into some sort of paranoid fantasy that drove them to attack him.
Maybe they hadn’t said “he”. He’d been with Troy both times when he’d seen them before. “She can’t protect you”—now that Troy wasn’t around, maybe he was fair game? Was that a completely bizarre thing to think, that somehow Tr
oy was involved in this?
Sparky Mother had warned him about Troy, or about someone at least, and then there’d been that explosion, and then immediately after that Troy had vanished from his life. And now he’d been attacked. Random events, or was there some connection he was missing?
Troy was a dead end. He could try ambushing her at her duplex again, but she’d just refuse to see him. Sparky, though… maybe he could find Sparky again, and maybe Sparky held some of the answers in this.
It was a relief to get home, to pull the blinds shut, to flip the double bolt and put the chain lock on the door. He pulled Sparky’s business card out of the junk drawer in his kitchen where he’d stashed it a couple weeks ago. That logo, the stupid cartoon tiger with the firecracker.
He dialed the number again.
Again, no connection. No ringing, no dial tone, just an electronic void. A rising and falling pulse, a series of far-away clicks, like an electronic echo. But Sparky had known he’d called before…
“It’s Vish,” he said into the dead line. He felt like an idiot. “I’d like to speak to you.”
The void didn’t respond. He listened to the echo for a few seconds longer, then hung up, feeling foolish and oddly scared.