Page 6 of Heartbreak Bay

Like Kez, I want to know.

Whether the mother of those children is abducted or a killer, she still needs to be found.

3

KEZIA

The tow truck takes its sweet time getting here, but it finally arrives. I hate the sound of it, the shrill beep as the muddy old wrecker backs up. I know it doesn’t make any damn sense, but I wish it were a clean truck. This one is caked in weeks of filth. The driver of the truck is a tired-looking, big white man with a greasy trucker hat on, and he gives Deputy Dawg a hearty hey, but completely ignores me and Winston, the coroner. “What you want me to do?” he asks the deputy, who looks over at me. I step up.

“We need to get that car out of the pond,” I tell him, as if that isn’t completely obvious. “Carefully as possible. It’s evidence in a crime.”

He doesn’t like getting orders from me. Too bad. I hold his stare until he nods and looks away. “Gonna take a while,” he says. “Hope you like the cold. I damn sure don’t.” He pulls out a pair of hip waders from an equipment box on his rig and jams them on. “Could’ve waited for goddamn morning. Gonna need that car moved off down the road, far as possible.” He points to my unmarked sedan. I’ve already moved it to what I thought was a safe distance.

“It’s mine,” I say. “I’ll get it out of the way.”

“Wellthank you, Officer,” he says. There’s a lot of sass in that, and I’m tempted to respond. I don’t. The South has never been friendly to my particular shade of folks, and bad things happen out here in the dark. I’m wearing a badge and a gun and I still feel it, like an ache in your bones when the weather shifts.

Last thing I need to do is start something. I need to focus on what’s important: those two little babies, and getting them justice. Ignoring another Klan-adjacent asshole is just part of the rural landscape.

I realize that I’m not being completely rational about this. That I’m prickly in all the wrong ways, noticing things too much and giving the normal way too much power over me. I don’t know if that’s hormones, or just awareness of the world I’m bringing a little miracle of a child into. Our child will be loved, at least. But safety is a long way off.

I move my car and drive it to the side road I spotted on the way in; I park it and leave the portable red strobe light on top, in case someone comes barreling down from up-mountain. I walk back. The tow truck operator, cursing under his breath, has already waded into the pond. “Gonna get that brain-eating amoeba shit being in here,” he says. I don’t tell him that he wouldn’t notice much of a change. Even if I don’t care for the man, he does seem to know his business; he attaches the chains, grimacing when he has to crouch down and immerse himself in the pond. He curses as devoutly as most people pray. He scrambles up the bank, and the deputy offers him a hand when he slips. We’ll have to document that shit, too, but there’s no help for it. The driver gets a dirty towel from his truck and dries himself off, not that it helps the green gunk clinging to him. He gets to the controls and starts the work.

He’s good at this. He balances the slow, careful drag against the weight of both car and water. Gears grind. I grit my teeth and have to bite the urge to tell him,Treat that car like your own babies are in there. I don’t even know what that would mean to him. I want some damn reverence in this nasty process.

My cell phone buzzes. I grab for it and check; it’s Javier. I let out a little sigh of relief as I accept the call, and then feel the weight of this place crush that relief flat. “Hey, Javi. I love you.”

Javier Esparza’s warm baritone voice glides through me like waves of summer heat, so welcome right now in this cold place. He sounds husky. “I love you too. You okay?”

It’s in my voice, the creeping dread. Must have been for him to ask. I make an effort to shove it away. “Yes,” I say. It sounds convincing. “Is it late for you right now, or early?” I don’t know where he’s deployed for his weeks of Marine Corps reserve training; I often don’t. Safer for him that way. He’s in the hands of the marines right now. They could have taken him anywhere.

“Querida, where I am, it’s late morning already. I forgot it would be so early, but this is my slot. We don’t get a lot of choices.” He’s been gone only a few days, and I already miss him so bad I feel he’s been gone a year. “Everything okay there? You sound like you’re outside.”

“I’m on a case,” I say. “I—”Tell him.But I’m weirdly reluctant now that he’s on the phone. I feel fragile and out of control and he feels so very far away. I glance at the deputy, who’s taken shelter again in his cruiser with the heater running. The coroner, standing by. I take a couple of steps away as the tow truck cranks gears again, metal on metal. My gaze fixes on the slow emergence of the car from the pond. The back bumper breaks the surface, and the roof of the car. Ripples flow sluggishly. “I need to tell you something,” I say. I walk off a little bit, farther from the noise, farther from the ears. “I’m not sure it’s the right time, but ... I don’t want to wait. Javier ... we’re pregnant.”

The time lag feels like it has extra weight this time. Like he’s speechless, not just far away. “Wait, what? We’re—Kez! Oh my God!” The delight in his voice fills me up, drives away the cold and the desolation. I feel it like I’m standing in sudden sunlight. “Kez, baby. We’re going to have a baby.” His voice goes shaky on that last bit. Big strong marine,reduced nearly to tears. “You okay? Really? Damn, I wish I was there. I wish I could justbe there.”

“You will be,” I tell him. “I’m okay. So’s the baby. I’m setting up a doctor’s appointment in the next couple of days. I’ll send the sonogram to your phone so you can see it when you get to turn it on again.” For now, his phone is off. Safety reasons, again.

“Kez.” He sounds more somber now. “You don’t sound that happy. Are you? Happy?”

“Very,” I say, and I hear the emotion in the single word. “I want this so much. It’s just ... it’s a bad one, this case. It’s hard to be completely happy right now like I should.”

“Sweetheart. I’m sorry. You do what you gotta do, Kez. I love you. Always.”

“I love you too.” I let the silence run a bit, warm and sweet, then see the tow truck’s finally got the right tension, and the back wheels of the car are starting to come up the slippery side of the pond. “Be safe, Javi. For me and the baby.”

“Yoube safe too. Get some rest if you can—” The connection drops in the middle of the last word. I’m used to that; communications from some of the places he goes are difficult. I’m just lucky he was able to connect at all.

The predawn morning is colder with him gone. I exhale slowly, trying to avoid that ghostly puff of mist, and watch the tires as they roll up the bank. The sedan is finally out of the water. The tow truck driver is better than we probably deserve to have, out here at this hour. He manages to get it completely out, on the road, and then unhooks and backs his rig away. “You want me to wait?” he asks. Not me, of course. The deputy.

“Please,” I say. “If you don’t mind.”

He shrugs. “They pay me by the hour.”

Water cascades from open windows and runs in streams from the door seals. All four doors are shut. I force myself not to look in the backas Winston adjusts the lights around the new site, and I focus on the exterior. It’s not a new car, but it looks well kept. No damage. It’s a pale beige, a color most people avoid these days, but maybe I’m unkind—maybe it’s more of a light gold. Hard to tell in the work lights, which are harsh for a reason.

The deputy and coroner both look at me. I step up and help Winston unroll a clean blue tarp that we position on the driver’s side so it’ll catch anything that comes out; he gives me paper foot covers I snap on over my shoes. I glove up and approach the leaking bucket that was once a vehicle.

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