appointment, the lady of the house wouldn’t have been so angry, we would have kept our schedule, the boss wouldn’t have called us lazy. But I drove, and Enrique read the map; that was always our arrangement. When he glanced at the street signs and said, Go left, I went left. Another little thing: if I’d taken the Saturday night shift instead of the Sunday night shift at the motel, I wouldn’t have been traveling down the 62 on the night of the accident. I would never have laid eyes on this man, this Guerraoui. I wouldn’t even know his name.
“They’re looking for anyone who might have seen the runaway car,” Marisela said.
“I told you, I didn’t see it.”
“You said it was white.”
“I said it could be white, but really I’m not sure. And even if I was, I’m not talking to the police. I can’t take that chance.”
If I thought that would stop my wife, I was wrong.
“Amor,” she said, nudging the paper toward me again, “it says you can call anonymously. On this hotline.”
I should never have told her about the accident.
Jeremy
At the end of my shift the next day, I found myself at the Joshua Tree jail for another meth arrest, this time a middle-aged woman whose neighbor called the police when he found her sitting on the roof of his shed. While the paperwork was being processed, I went to get some water from the storage room, where canned beans, powdered milk, and bags of rice and pasta were stacked in columns that reached the ceiling. The overhead lights cast an unsteady glow over the gray concrete floors, and the only sound I could hear were metal doors closing somewhere down the hallway. The jail always unsettled me, no matter how often I came inside. I tossed the paper cup in the trashcan and hurried out to the front office, where I found Stratton booking a new suspect. Fierro.
I stepped inside the office. “Lomeli,” I called.
“Yeah?”
“What’s this guy in for?”
“Criminal threats. Destruction of property.” Lomeli adjusted his reading glasses over his nose and looked at the form, running his finger down the page until he reached the appropriate line. “Smashed his ex-wife’s car. Says here it’s a Mustang coupe. Broke the windows, took a bat to the siding, slashed the tires.”
“Jesus.”
“Must’ve been something.” With a glance at the booking counter, Lomeli whistled, whether in admiration or disapproval, I couldn’t tell. Lomeli himself had been divorced three times, a fact I had trouble reconciling with the romance novels stacked on his desk, their spines labeled YUCCA VALLEY LIBRARY. “You know this guy?” he asked.
“We served together in Iraq.”
Lomeli’s eyes widened.
I wasn’t the only vet at that station—Stratton had served in the Gulf War, Villegas had been in Bosnia, and one of our dispatchers had deployed to New Orleans after Katrina—but somehow I never quite fit in with the others. I didn’t go out for drinks with them after work, didn’t forward their chain emails, didn’t find Vasco’s jokes funny. And now one of my buddies was under arrest. I had seen Fierro just the day before, at my sister’s barbecue. He’d seemed fine then, chatted with the other guests, played with the kids, flirted with one of Ashley’s co-workers, a pretty redhead with a freckled face and pouty lips. By the time we left, he was all smiles and jokes. But now, this.
“He’ll be taken to West Valley,” Lomeli said after a minute.
“You can’t keep him here?”
“I don’t have room.”
I stepped back into the hallway and walked up to the booking counter, where Stratton was fingerprinting Fierro. Next to the payphone was a list of bail bondsmen, and underneath it were boxes of blue latex gloves. A notice taped to the far wall said IF YOU THINK YOU MAY BE PREGNANT AND WANT AN ABORTION, TALK TO THE HOLDING NURSE. “Are you on any medications?” Stratton asked, handing Fierro a wet wipe for the ink.
“For what?”
“Diabetes, heart condition, that sort of thing. Something you’re required to take.”
“No, sir.” Fierro’s hair fell in greasy strands