Good Morning, Killer - April Smith [92]
I threw off the cheap thin blanket from where I’d attempted to burrow into the second bed.
“I’m going to take a walk on the beach.”
To my surprise Andrew said, “I’ll come with you.”
“Are you sure?”
“Unless you want to be alone.”
“No, of course not. Come along.”
And now I was annoyed because I did want to be alone, since I rarely have a whole afternoon to walk by the water and think about all the wrong choices I have made.
Although the beach was across the highway we had to drive to get there. It was not a beach but a nature preserve, where wooden stairs descended to an outcrop of black rock. It was low tide and white surf rose and spilled over the tide pools. There were wooden signs describing the migration of shorebirds. We followed a trail through a pine forest padded with silence and emerged at a lookout from which you could see unobstructed views of the teal-dark sea.
It was too cold to stand there, but we stood there, fingers stiffening in our pockets, letting the wind roar over our ears and stream our hair, pour down our nostrils and chill our lungs, scouring the cells of our blood with fresh oxygen as the brutal tide brought in and took away new life from the small carved worlds of sea anemones and starfish.
“Look how nature keeps everything clean.”
“Imagine what this coast was like a hundred years ago,” Andrew agreed.
“How do the guys in the tide pools hold on? Tons of water falling on their heads, twenty-four/seven.”
“They have suckers.”
“I know, but still—”
“Hey,” said Andrew, shoulders hunched against the spray, “those guys don’t have a choice.”
“And we do?”
“Sure we do.”
“Here’s the thing, Andy.” I turned so my back was to the ocean and tried to put my elbows on the wooden railing but kept getting nudged off by the wind. “You told me yourself. You come off shift, you take a shower. Two showers, sometimes, you said, to get the cooties off—the TB bacillus from the homeless person, the dog shit from the backyard of a methamphetamine laboratory—”
“So?” He ducked his head to wipe a tearing eye.
“My question is, how do you cleanse the soul?”
“The soul?”
“The stuff we were talking about coming up here. Your dad. My grandfather. How do we ever get past it?”
“You’re out of my realm of expertise.”
“No, I’m not.”
I squinted up at him although hair was whipping across my sight. My heels were planted and I really wanted to know how much he knew. Had twenty-plus years of being a cop washed through him, or had it put meat on his bones? Why was I attracted to this unconventional, craggy face and husky fighter’s build that overwhelmed me in ways I did not always like? What was he made of? I could get past the petty disconnects if I knew. We were standing on a platform at the end of the world, and I wanted to know if the trip had been worthwhile.
“You see it every day on the street,” I prompted. “Good and bad. Hell and redemption—”
“It’s not that simple,” Andrew replied. “Black-and-white.”
“What is it, then?”
He shook his head. “It’s a job, stop analyzing. I’m freezing. Let’s get something to eat.”
He took me to dinner in a nicely restored brick building on the main drag. Part restaurant and part retail store, it sold hand-knit sweaters and local jellies and jams, and served up one hell of an olallieberry cobbler, which we shared from a steaming crock, melting with vanilla ice cream. Andrew knew the waitress, a middle-aged teacher who worked two other jobs in order to live in Cambria. She asked when he was going to retire and move up. “It’s just a shot away,” he joked, quoting the Rolling Stones.
I smiled and sipped my decaf. It was clear to me this was Andrew Berringer’s patented getaway