Last Light in Paradise Chapter 8

Every now and then, a story comes along that refuses to stay put. It lingers on your nightstand. It sneaks into conversation. For us, Last Light in Paradise is one of those stories, and we’re delighted to let it loose, one chapter at a time, in the pages of the Montecito Journal. Well, at least the first six chapters for the time being – then you can purchase the book at one of our local beloved bookstores: Chaucer’s, Tecolote, and Godmothers.

This book marks a first for us… Last Light in Paradise is the inaugural book published by MJ Media Group. Yes, we’re dipping a toe – perhaps a barefoot run – into the world of book publishing, guided entirely by our belief in a novel that is as cinematic as it is soulful, as local as it is timeless.

Set against the luminous backdrop of 1930s Santa Barbara, this is a tale of love and loss, mystery and reckoning, populated by unforgettable characters and infused with the kind of atmosphere that feels both dreamlike and deeply true. We invite you to settle in, turn the page, and join us at the edge of paradise… just as the light begins to change.

Chapter 8

They drove up the coast to Long Road. This bisected the two-lane highway and shot straight up through foothills and on up over the 4,000-foot Santa Ynez ridge. But before it made the journey uphill, it offered an offshoot dirt road that wound through sycamore trees and ended in 127 acres of Chumash Indian reservation. On the long drive, they passed a number of Indians, doing things not readily identifiable. Though the reservation abutted the highway, it remained a stone’s throw from the sea on the other side, an ocean the Chumash had made a living from for thousands of years. Their boats, from local wood and tar seeps, were brilliant, their seashell money among the first coinage of the early world. A long-standing federal ingress left the Indians access to their old fishing grounds but no shore land to live on. Pass through, don’t stay. And now the movie people had subsumed the land for public good and blocked passage altogether. Creek wanted to know if Pony had been any part of the lawsuit the judge had told him about.

“Comfortable with that?” Creek asked, looking at Billy’s sidearm.

Billy nodded. He had grown serious. He didn’t like it here. He turned back to the window to watch the hundred forms of enterprising constructions, games, machinery, and toys that children and old people drummed up on a reservation that had few workers and little money—except for The Talking House, an odd couple of gas pumps, and a motor repair shop.

It was not a wealthy reservation, but it was a tight community, and a very private one, filled with its own fierce pride of ownership and history. Creek knew a woman or two who took cash for trade, but only certain kinds of men wanted it bad enough to venture onto land where paranoia made them think someone might accidentally shoot them.

“You been up here before?” Billy asked Creek without looking at him.

Creek smiled and shook his head. “Many times.”

Now Billy turned and looked at him curiously.

“So, they know you?”

“They do.”

“So, asking if I’m comfortable with my sidearm, like we might need it, that was joshing or serious?”

“Both.”

Billy grinned as Creek wheeled the Ford up to the adobe garage. It was built up against and partly into a steep grassy hill that had a view of the sea. It had tall oak and palm trees beside it, some open pits for mechanics, and a small nation of old tires out back. Big lead-paned windows gave it an iota of sophistication only to be undone by shot punctures in the red-rimmed glass globe with the flying horse that stood atop the gas pump.

Beyond the garage lay a scattering of adobe and wood dwellings, a large well-crafted Tribal Center, and at the end of a winding road, hidden within tall sycamores, the old adobe church, one wing of which was now shared by livelier interests and christened, “The Talking House.”

Outside the garage, a large man with a white ponytail was sitting in a chair beside a steel drum reading a book. He never looked up as the two men stepped out of the truck and walked over to him. Creek pulled up a chair and sat. Billy did the same.

“I read it. It’s a dull book,” said Creek.

“Don’t tell me that.” The man had a resonant, clear voice and a Scottish accent. Billy knew it made folks instinctively want to trust whatever he said next.

“The ‘sage’ ain’t wise, ain’t smart, ain’t clever. And he gets shot at the end,” Creek said.

The man looked up now and shook his head like he was scolding a six-year-old. He held up the book, its title prominent on the jacket.

“You’re thinking of Sage of the Open Range. Different book.”

“Ah.”

“Riders of the Purple Sage,” the man said.

“Sage ain’t purple.”

The old man spoke to Billy. “Kills him to admit he’s wrong.”

Creek said, “Norman, this is Billy. Langtree sometimes, Ruiz others. My main posse.”

Billy shook hands with the big Scotsman and liked the twinkle in his eye.

The man looked at the uniform and at the gun strapped beneath Creek’s coat.

“Thought you weren’t ever doing that again?”

“Well, John Penbrook asked would I pick up a body. Looked the thing over, tested the wind, was fully ready to write it off as a very bad accident, till the wind shifted, and with it the stink.”

“John in trouble?”

“No. His hand, the lighthouse man, Pony. Found him washed up north of Butterfly Beach yesterday morning.”

Norman stared hard at Creek, stared until the truth of it became real.

“Head hasn’t made it in yet,” Creek said, “nor boat, nor anything makes it an accident other than some blooded wire I found nearby. John wants it to lie like that, an accident out in that storm yesterday. Except the body looks two, three days water-dead, there’s some rough work across the body, and the cut looks like something chomped it. More shark than wire, except the mark on bone doesn’t look like shark.”

Norman was lost in thought for some time.

“Whatever was he doing in a boat?” he finally asked.

“That is a mystery,” Creek said, surprised at how hard Norman was taking this.

“Goddamn,” Norman said. “With his kin gone, I’ve only ever known John and Sonora to be his parents. They loved him in the worst way, like you watching out for him that summer you shagged strays. Him imitating everything about you.”

“Thought maybe someone up here knows something. Saw something. On the other hand, the general mood is to let this one lay, call it an accident. Penbrook included.”

Creek saw the grill of the Packard nearly a mile off, starting up the drive. Similar blue and year as the car by the Biltmore. He followed it with his eyes only. 

“Billy,” Creek said, “Could you go get us a Coke or two? That little hutch over there is the grocery store. Put it on Norman’s tab.”

Billy stood and was about to leave when he also saw the blue car coming up the long drive beneath the sycamore trees.

“I’m staying.”

“Get the drinks, son.”

“It’s that same Packard. Them toughs. You’re going bust those boys. I can feel it.”

“Always give ’em a chance at redemption first. Do what I ask, Billy.”

Creek looked into the boy’s eyes, and the boy nodded and walked off to the grocery. They heard the door slam shut just as the Packard came into the yard and slowly turned in toward the garage. It stopped twenty feet off. The glare on the window made it impossible to see anything. Norman and Creek looked at each other and smiled.

“This damn place just can’t stay out of trouble,” Norman said.

Three doors opened at once. Three men, young and lanky, stepped out and looked over at Creek and Norman, and up at the garage, and then at the wider layout of the place to see who within eyesight was standing where. Only one wore a hat. All three wore suits. Creek wondered who might be left in the back seat, but the glare was too bright to see. He wondered if they had had the suits fitted at the same place, on the same day. Special price maybe, except the savings got erased by shortcut tailoring, Creek thinking how hard it was to take them seriously the way it made them into a rumpled circus act.

They looked to be part boy, part man, mean, thin and misguided, the pimples and Irish blush barely overcome by a lifetime of bad luck that made it easy to stay cold in the eyes and to be hard by practicing the bully they had been raised on.

The driver was tall and skinny and wore a wide, white cowboy hat. As he sauntered toward Creek and Norman, the other two fanned out nonchalantly in a rehearsed order.

Creek saw the smirk forming in the lead man’s face, the sneer that said everybody knew Indians couldn’t fix shit.

“I was thinking first thing I woke up this morning,” the man said, “I need my valves pulled and ground. Look where that thought brung me. To the top-notch Reservation Car Emporium.”

They all looked up and could see the faded letters spelling out “Rez Auto Emporium.” The faded sign standing above so much dilapidation made it easy to laugh, so they laughed.

“You the head mechanic?” He was looking at the old man. The old man sat very still but kept his eyes locked on the second one moving in his direction.

“Looks like the head ‘nickel,’” said the third backup, a pale and soft-cheeked boy who was both younger and frailer.

“Does, don’t he? Damn straight. Chief nickel.”

“You know who I am?” Creek looked from man to man.

“Not at all,” the leader said. Creek looked over to Norman, shook his head.

“But I know what you are,” the man said. “You’re just a dumb rancher playing above his pay grade.”

“At last, I am addressed by my new profession. But who would know this? And why would they start this bravado without knowing who I used to be?”

“Because they think they can,” Norman said, he and Creek just talking to each other.

“Exactly,” Creek said. “City fathers or Mister Movie Mogul or whoever it is keeps these boys in those store-bought circus suits probably said: ‘Just tell that rancher to drop it, just let it lie.’”

The lead man said, “Don’t be talking like we’re not here. I’m standing right the fuck here telling you to go home.” He flared his coat slightly and waited, and Creek finally looked over and saw glint of metal at his waist.

“Who is it you terrible hombres are taking orders from?” Creek asked.

The one with bad teeth nearest the lead man said, “We work for—”

“Hush up, Duce!” the lead man said. Then to Creek, “I sent myself. I’m enough. Telling you to leave Mister Horn the fuck alone and to stop poking around up here.”

Creek didn’t understand this and said, “Tom Horn? The glove salesman?”

The fair-skinned boy near Norman said, “Like you don’t know who he is.”

“That cowboy guy,” Creek said, “got his picture up on the billboard, big gnat-hole in his forehead some guy put there with his Luger, thinks he should have stuck to selling gloves instead of playacting for the cameras. But why would you bring him up?”

“Why else you up here poking your nose in things,” the lead said. “A man gambles, it’s his own business.”

“So, Tom Horn killed Charlie Russell?”

“Fuck no, he did not.”

“But you think I think that.”

“Why else you up here? Who the fuck is Charlie Russell?”

“Did this over some gambling thing, that it? Or maybe a woman?”

“You’re pushing the river, farmer man. And that didn’t happen. So beat it.”

“Did you kill Charlie Russell?”

“I did or did not is none of your business, because you’re no longer snooping any of it.” He had cold, gray eyes and his pupils were wide. Creek could see his hands had never made or fixed or grown anything but were white and bony and twitchy enough to make him untrustworthy.

“Who pays your way, boys?” Creek asked.

“I’m not tell—”

“Damn it, Patience!” The skinny one looked at the boy near Norman, and Creek saw the boy flinch at his buddy’s bark.

Creek looked at the two men named. “Those your names, Patience? And Duce? I were you, I’d get back in that car and head back down this road before your buddy takes it sideways, makes you sorely wish you’d deferred to your elders.”

“We’ll de-fer de-fuck to you, Buster Brown,” Skinny said. “I’m the one telling you and your wooden nickel grandpa over there to leave the redskin business alone. Word for word.”

“If you’d kept your mouth shut, I wouldn’t have made your boss a suspect. Now I do. Now I will. Tom Horn. All be damned.”

“You shut up. I get any more agitated, I swear I’ll park your ass in the cemetery.”

“So Pony was up here? Maybe gambling?”

“Pony who?”

“And your big cowboy movie star, what, maybe dropped a hand or two, maybe liquored up, got a little piqued, and just went and chopped his head off?”

“Nobody did noth—”

“—and you boys drug him down to the beach and dumped him in the water, make it look like he just washed up. Isn’t that right Patience?”

“Shut up mister!” the skinny one said, and without looking, Creek knew it was Patience who clicked his safety forward.

BAM!

Norman’s bat cracked against Patience’s shins so hard and so fast the other two men stood bug-eyed, watching. The boy screamed, his drawn gun sailing, his legs swiped from beneath him, and the boy falling full force onto one elbow as the other hand went to his leg.

The lead man lurched, but Creek had his long barrel out and pointed at the man’s crotch.

“You pull, you’re going to hurt,” Creek said. The man brought his hand down. Seeing his eyes dart sideways, Creek swung left and fired and Duce too lost his weapon as the bullet struck his thigh. Creek swung back to the skinny one as Duce struck the ground. Creek saw a thin veil of red dust as the gun slid within sight.

“Goddamn! You said no guns!” Duce screamed. “Goddamn it, motherfucker shot my leg off!”

Creek stood now and backed up to the man he had shot and put the gun barrel to his leg, his eyes still on the skinny one.

“What’s his name, the skinny one?”

“Him?”

“Yeah. The mouth that got you fools into this.”

“Skinny Bones Jones, you dirty dog ass.” He said it and then growled out a misery stuck between a wail and a sob.

“Duce,” Creek said softly, his eyes still on the other man.

The boy looked up woefully.

Creek whispered, “Shut the fuck up.”

The young man put his mouth to his arm to muffle his moans.

Creek picked up the loose gun, pulled up a chair, and sat, his gun still aimed at Bones.

Norman had pulled a shotgun from someplace and sat patiently.

A small boy walked across the yard toward them, into the circle, and up to Norman. He leaned in and whispered something. Norman nodded, then reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out wrapped hard candy and gave it to the kid.

“Run along, Paco. Go into the house.”

Creek said, “Brave little bugger.”

“Implacable. Been like that since the day he was born. Said he’s seen these boys before. That one, Mister Duce, Paco says, goes to his sister. And another man, a city councilman, comes with Duce and goes to the kid’s mother.”

“So, who’s your boss?” Creek asked Bones.

“My boss? I’ll show you my boss. Meet Mister ‘Fuck You!’” The man yelled.

Creek watched Skinny Bones lurch, as if in slow motion from his own ineptness, his knee bending inward, a shoulder dropping, the weird gray of his accusatory and unfocused eyes widening, and his foolhardy hands flailing toward his waist gun. Two lightning bolts ignited almost simultaneously, and Creek saw the first shot punch into Jones’s foot, a burst of fire from the boy’s own gun billowing through his pant leg. The foot and leg jerked airborne and askew, and his body floated outward as a second explosion from somewhere behind Bones grazed his buttocks, rotating his body so that he came down sideways, his lungs pounded airless, and his head bouncing on the hard dirt. Bones remained inert, wordless, and barely able to breathe with his gun pinned beneath his body.

Creek looked over at Billy thirty feet off with the policeman’s Luger boring down straight as a board for a second shot. Skinny Bones Jones didn’t know how to stop the pain, so he arched upward, his ass pointed skyward as he tried to drag himself on the one knee to, out-crawl his pain. He didn’t see his own gun slide to the ground, and Creek nodded toward Billy.

“Pick it up and clear it. Tell him if he makes any more noise, you’ll put a hot one in the other cheek.”

Billy walked into the circle, picked up the gun, and clicked the safety on. Skinny Bones Jones was muttering invectives under his breath, and Billy walked to him, put his foot on the man’s ass and flattened him to the ground.

“Stop squawking,” he said.

Grinning, Creek looked over to see Norman nodding in similar amazement.

“Missy?!” Creek yelled.

A tall, handsome woman came out of the grocery carrying a bucket and some rags and bandages.

“Who first?” she asked.

“Get Wade up here. And an ambulance. You can stop the bleeding in a minute. You got help?” Creek said.

“Betty’s coming,” she said. She didn’t move but stared at Creek for a long beat, her face both bemused and wistful.

“Long time no see, Mister ‘Allatime-Bringing-Rain.’”

“Jesus!” said one of the men. “You shot us!” They looked over at the one hit with the bat. He continued to clutch his leg like someone was trying to take it.

“I need a doctor bad,” Bones said. “Bleedin’ out. Can you hurry the fuck up and call a doctor?”

“That man you insulted, right there, he’s a doctor,” Creek said, nodding at Norman.

“I am that,” said Norman, smiling wide, showing the big gap where a front tooth went missing.

“Ah, goddamn!” the man said, despairing. Creek just stared at him in silence.

“Just looking for a job, right?” Creek said. “Times are rough, and you’re just happy for a paycheck, right boys?”

“Why not let it go, mister?” Duce said. “We don’t know shit. Cops said it was a fishing accident.”

Creek walked to Patience and put his boot sole across the man’s cheek, pinning him to the dirt. He pulled up his shooter, opened the cylinder and spun it. The clicking hung in the air as the men stayed silent, tucking in and frightened. The spinning stopped. Creek replaced the spent cartridge with a fresh bullet, locked it closed, lifted his boot and drew down on the man’s other leg.

“What is your full name Patience?”

“Meriwether. Patience Meriwether.”

“That is some name.”

“They were church people. Mormon. Too many to raise, so they let me go. It’s how I met Bones. At the home.” The boy’s two front teeth, crooked and long, compounded his oddness.

“Who killed the Indian, Patience?”

“None of us. We got nothing to do with it, mister. I swear it.”

“You came up here armed, a place where children live. Drew weapons with intent to harm. I’m an officer of the law, but I will, by God, let you boys bleed out. You want this witch-doctor medicine man to fix you up, tell me who killed Charlie Russell and dumped him on the beach.”

The wounded looked around and saw the desolate nature of the yard, wild boys and dogs and some women smirking. Even the gunshots had not attracted a crowd.

“None of us!” Patience squeaked. “We serve the council. Nobody wants bad press while the movie is in town. I swear to Christ.”

Creek looked up to see Missy standing nearby. She shrugged.

“For real?” he said.

She nodded, said, “Some of us gonna be in it.”

“This about a movie?” Creek was dumbstruck.

“Nobody wants a picture of a headless Indian on the front page,” Norman said. Creek moved away from the boy.

“All this because it’s bad publicity for a movie picture?”

“Please, mister! We’re shot. Goddamn it!” Duce said.

“I call them now?” Missy asked. Reluctantly, Creek nodded. Missy signaled to a girl over at the porch store, pointed her index finger at her and pretend-dialed. The girl hopped up and vanished into the store. The boy beneath Creek was speaking.

“We were just told to ask you. Bones gets caught up sometimes, balls before brains. He’s just protecting us.”

Creek looked over at Billy, who still had his pistol out.

“Put it away, Billy. You played it right.”

He turned to Patience, looked at his buckteeth and his bloody pant leg.

“Rasmussen. He the one brought the votes in on the coast movie-land deal?”

“Jesus Mary Joseph, will somebody fix my damn derrière?!” Bones was crying now, his rear airborne, rocking in place to make the pain go away.

Duce growled, “Don’t let no quack work on you. Wait till the ambulance comes.”

The others looked at Norman, then at Creek.

“Really. A doctor?” Patience said.

“Harvard,” Creek said. “But the shit he plucks out of these hills will heal you faster than anything the Ivy Leagues ever taught him.”

“Oh God, mister, I don’t want to be no cripple,” Bones said.

“Then quit whining and let the woman clean it out and the medicine man stitch it up. Should have done worse to you for bringing live guns up here.”

Creek began pacing. He started to walk away but couldn’t. He turned back on them.

“You squealing fools think a few steel guns and enough of you, and you’re good to stand up to this man, who rode with Teddy Roosevelt! Think it’s all right to drag your dirty shoes on these people’s land because you’re white and they’re not.”

He pulled his shooter out and stabbed it down at the ground just feet away from Duce and pulled the trigger. At the explosion and the spray of dirt, the boy jackknifed, head buried in his hands at the imagined wound.

The sound of the gun hung loudly in the air, shocking and abject and final. Creek shouted down at the man: “How dare you threaten a man like this, a Harvard doctor! No matter you got no idea what that means.”

“Settle down, son,” Norman said, “Settle down. Just a bunch of mischief is all. Three for three now, and my pride is wholly intact. Get us some whiskey. I’ll stitch them up.”

“Help him, Billy,” Creek said. He turned and started toward the grocery shack, then stopped. The blue Packard parked in the yard, three doors still opened wide, and the sun blinding on the windshield gave him a bad feeling. Creek stared at it. Three boys had come out of the front seat.

“Norman?” Creek said, and Norman had the shotgun in his hands, had it up and aimed at the Packard. Creek took out his badge, held it up in one hand and pulled and pointed the Colt pistol with his other. He walked out of the sun slowly toward the car.

“Missy, beat it.”

Missy ducked into the garage.

Creek moved within ten feet of the car, stepping sideways out of the window glare. He saw their cowboy hats in the back seat, then their faces—wide-shouldered, big men, shotguns standing in their hands, butts to the floor. He came to a place where he could see their faces. He saw nothing good in them and knew what they were. The two men stared back in silence as Creek deliberately lowered his gun.

“You their parents?” Creek asked. They looked at his gun hanging toward the dirt. Creek knew the big one with the pocked skin would speak, and he did.

“If I were, you’d have heard about it.”

“Sure. Like all your gunfire, you hiding in the back seat, right?”

“Greenhorns got to learn the ropes, Daddyo.”

Creek stared at them, so angry he felt unable to stop his hand from rising as he aimed his gun at the two men. As if not in his body, he heard the big metal ratchet when he thumbed the hammer back and the cylinder ticked a bullet into place.

“You, with the fat neck,” Creek said, “you get in the front seat and drive this car off this land. Don’t ever come back here. Do this now, and I won’t blow your heads off for letting three boys do a job they got no skill for.”

The man stared at Creek for a long moment. Neither man moved.

BLAM! The gun fired, and the back window punctured as both men lurched sideways. Creek brought the hammer back and held his aim.

“Breech your guns.”

As the ringing lessened, they sat up. They cracked their guns, and Creek saw the shells pop loose. The one who had spoken leaned his shotgun to the other man, opened the door, stepped out, closed it, and got into the front seat.

Creek raised his gun at the man in the back seat and said, “Toss them.”

The man threw them out his open door.

Creek waited, and both men reached over and closed the doors. The driver, taunting and ugly and holding Creek’s glare, stared for a beat then started the car and drove slowly out of the lot and down the road.

Creek looked back at Norman, nodded thanks, and continued into the grocery shack.

Billy collected hardware and frisked for extras, then went to help Norman. Norman saw that he kept his hand on his holstered gun.

“Always like this, after,” Norman said. “Ones he loves, he loves. God help the people who cross him.”

Billy wondered at this as he watched Norman, then said, “Your friend can shoot.”

“So can you. Not many people fast as Creek. Put it away and help me with this tourniquet. Sometimes Creek likes to leave the lead in ’em.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not. When they really piss him off, he likes them to remember.”

• • •

Later, an ambulance and two police assistants drove up, took stories, loaded the boys, listened as Norman explained the wounds were clean, that the boys would be walking soon, and drove away. Creek watched for the second time in as many days as an ambulance drove away from something he had sworn never to be involved in again.

Wade never showed. A crowd gathered, and Tribal Chief Charley Sweden bought Cokes for everyone. Creek learned from Sweden that the Penbrooks’ Indian ranch hand had no part in the lawsuit, that movie star Tom Horn had been up to The Talking House several times late at night, and that he drank too much, womanized, had a mean temper, and was, apparently, a hell of a card player. But if anyone had seen Pony at the tables, they hadn’t told the chief. Creek knew that would be a breach of the game’s honored rule of anonymity. Horn’s behavior explained why they made an exception in his case. Bad manners at the table weren’t tolerated.

Creek walked to Norman and said, “You have any way of learning if Pony made it up here on the sly to play some cards? Stirred up something that could get him into trouble?”

“Meaning, will Missy talk out of school?”

“Well, her. Or anyone,” Creek said.

“Me and Missy live up the road a ways, Creek. It’s okay you visit here, twice, I think. But we live there. I only come here to mend the troubles too much idleness gets some of these characters into. Missy hears a lot, and if she thinks it’s important, she will tell me, in her time.”

Creek felt the shade of reproach in his words.

“I know where you live, Pop. I’m sorry I haven’t been up to visit. It’s not about Missy. Just slow to settle on things. Just thought you might have heard something.”

“I haven’t.”

Creek looked over at Billy, nodded, and walked off toward the car. As he followed, Billy watched how the crowd stared at Creek, at his way of walking, at his pistol and the loose rope of a body some knew held ghosts in it. Billy knew some of those watching were wondering how Creek took no shit from any man, was able to shoot so fast and straight, and could drop three white men to the ground and not be lynched, dragged unconscious, or jailed for it.

Later, as Billy and Creek drove Long Road through the bands of shadow and sunlight from tree rows, the yellow poplars reminded Creek of the first time he had shot a man. It was in France, in a field like the ones they were passing. He had been sick after.

Billy was quiet beside him. No nervous chatter or boasting. No presumed camaraderie. It was barely noon. The whole incident had taken less than an hour. Maybe Billy would feel it all tomorrow. Maybe he needed to talk about it.

Creek asked, “Thinking about how it went?”

“Yes.”

“He must have had those car door hinges oiled,” Creek said.

“Or you would have heard it open?”

“Like to think.”

“You still might have swung on him.”

“Only if he were a bad shot. Most men are after ten feet. I don’t wish to speculate. If you hadn’t dropped him, I might be hovering up there somewhere, watching all this.”

He drove on, finally hit the coast road, and turned south.

“Listen, Billy. I thank you for what you did. Quickness matters. Accuracy matters, but you did shoot a man. You will think about it for a long time, remember it when you least expect it.”

“It’s not my first,” Billy said.

This boy is something, Creek thought, but he only nodded.

“My ol’ man come home one time—one more time—reeking of liquor and lit into Mom. I warned him, but he wouldn’t listen.”

Creek waited but nothing more was offered.

“Where’d you shoot him?”

“Rump.”

“Another?”

“Yup.”

“How old?”

“Twelve.”

Creek tried to imagine it. The kid had style.

“Twice now,” Billy said. “Gonna get known for it.”

“‘The posterior shot,’” Creek said, “by professor Billy Ruiz Langtree.”

Billy grinned and looked out the window at the calm, blue sea.

“You think it was an accident?” Billy said.

“Pony? I might think that, except for the people acting like it isn’t. Chief said they’re selling lots up by the project. Said this is about bad press and nervous investors. Said he doesn’t want the movie to go away, but he doesn’t want them telling the Chumash they can’t come watch. Diamond said they’d put him in the movie if he dropped the suit. Chief said there are old burial grounds out there, so he can’t drop the suit. But this, this shooting, he said it will be bad for the movie. I think he’s pissed at me.”

“I don’t know anyone,” Billy said, “doesn’t think this movie’s going to bring a major payday.”

“You’re saying I’m pissing off a few people by stirring the beehive.” Creek was grinning, and Billy grinned back at him.

“Like several thousand citizens, off the top of my head. Especially when it makes the newspaper.”

“They won’t print anything till they sort out what happened. By then, nobody will be talking, and nobody will be printing. You ever see a great white shark, Billy?”

“Why? I don’t swim.”

“Something more savage than a wire took Pony’s head. But it’s not so unlikely a shark would leave the body untouched. Sometimes they strike once, see they misjudged the meat, swim off. Point is, my nose tells me that soft-headed boy dragged his game leg into something he shouldn’t have. The town squires are telling me to stop investigating because they are hiding something. Those boys felt entitled to bring weapons, were itchy to use them. That’s disproportionate violence for a mere accident. ‘We’d really like to keep this out of the papers, so as not to scare off the money.’”

“So, there’s more coming. Trouble,” Billy said.

“If I make it my business. Problem is, it kind of is and kind of isn’t.”

“Won’t be mine either, if Wade has any say. But I guess you know that.”

CLICK HERE for Chapter Nine of Last Light in Paradise.