The Timer Game. Susan Smith Arnout

city. Other one is having to deal with the public, explain what the subordinate did that was so wrong we’re going to have to apologize for about a million years and maybe even pay big bucks to get things straightened out.’

      This couldn’t be happening. Even with Sid at his most dysfunctional.

      ‘Sid, in case you forgot, he had a butcher knife.’

      ‘But he wasn’t swinging it, right? I mean, not at you. Just that little side-to-side thing, you said, but not actually at you.’

      She sat back in the seat. ‘Is there something I don’t know?’

      ‘Grace, be more specific. What you don’t know could –’

      ‘About what just happened,’ she interrupted. ‘Is there something I don’t know?’

      ‘Like what?’

      ‘Like have they ID’d him?’

      He hesitated a beat too long. ‘Whoever it was, it was a human life.’

      She felt rage surge under the exhaustion. ‘Are you suggesting I did something wrong shooting a man with a butcher knife who had just killed a drug agent, a sergeant detective, and a uniformed cop?’

      ‘Whoa. I’m not suggesting anything, Grace, I’m just passing the time, sharing a survey I downloaded from Yahoo.’ He grinned. His gums were receding.

      ‘I need to go home.’ She pressed her fingers into her temples, fighting the impulse to bite him.

      ‘See, this is what they call a critical incident.’

      ‘I know what a critical incident is,’ Grace snapped.

      A man darted out of the house and under the police tape, Paul Collins from Trace. Bags sagged under his eyes, heightening his resemblance to an aging basset hound on speed. He lumbered toward his car, face grim and an evidence kit clenched in his hands.

      ‘Thing is, another study.’ Sid unwrapped a toothpick and massaged his gums. ‘Some shooters, they get permanent emotional trauma, they go a little cuckoo, they visit la-la land and never come back.’

      He sucked noisily on the toothpick and twirled it. His lips were wet.

      ‘Supervisors – we’re responsible, I’m responsible – as your boss, like it or not. I mean, I don’t take you in, get your head examined, you could sue me for mondo moola, retire to Florida, you and your kid, how old is Katie now? Two?’

      ‘Five this Saturday. She’s already in kindergarten.’

      ‘Even better. Closer to college.’ Sid fished car keys out of his Hawaiian shirt pocket and jangled them. ‘See, the thing is, you don’t have a choice.

      Nobody wants to see a shrink, ever, fillet out their personal life, spill their guts to some stranger with a clipboard. I wouldn’t. Who would? You’d have to be crazy.’

      He grinned at his little joke.

      ‘So the way it comes down, the department policy is, you have to go whether you want to or not.’

      ‘You haven’t answered my question.’ She shifted in the seat.

      ‘Which was?’

      ‘Who’d I shoot, Sid?’

      Sid looked out the window and stared at the sky. Grace saw it seconds before she heard it, the heavy whup whup of rotor blades. A helicopter.

      In Guatemala, they’d brought the girl in on a stretcher, off a helicopter. Same sound.

      The wind was picking up and it hurled loose trash across the yard. A palm tree tilted crazily back and forth like a metronome.

      ‘Yeah, actually. They have an ID. Eddie Loud. Mean anything?’

      She shook her head.

      The helicopter circled and landed delicately in the flattened grass. Grace stared at the man in the passenger seat.

      It was a California U.S. senator. Albert Loud looked older than his pictures, haggard, the lines around his mouth deep grooves, his nose hooked and ridged. He stared at her without comprehension.

      ‘I’m getting you out of here. Sit tight.’ Sid raised his voice over the roar of the blades. Senator Loud was crouching and running away from the slowing rotor blades, toward the meth house, a phalanx of officers crowding around him, keeping the press at bay.

      ‘Why is he here?’ Her head felt light. ‘What’s going on?’

      In front of her on the lawn, the reporters turned, eyeing her. It only took a split second. They wheeled, lunged at her.

      ‘Holy shit.’ Sid pulled her out the other door, gripping her arm in the blinding flash of lights and clamoring reporters. ‘Head down!’ he screamed. ‘Head down.’

      She ducked and he pushed her through the tangle of cords and microphones.

      ‘He’s here, Grace,’ Sid barked, as they burst onto the street and ran for her car, ‘Senator Albert Loud is here because it was his son back there. You killed his son.’

       THREE

      She pulled into the driveway and her headlights revealed her house in pitiless relief, like in a police lineup. Hers was the ratty one in the middle, squeezed into a row of minimansions.

      The house on the right belonged to a retired osteopath and his wife. Blocky pink stucco, gated and electronically locked, with a metal fence spiking into iron bulbs every few feet. Nobody came in or out of that house. Even the mailman used a cement slot built into the fence.

      The house on the left cascaded in white cubes amid designer palms. A stoop-shouldered attorney Grace’s age lived there, with a blond wife and two kids in private school uniforms. She’d hear them in the back sometimes through the natural barrier of high succulents that separated their properties. At night, the motor in their swimming pool gargled like an old man.

      On her house, the dormer window flaked, the front door bulged with moisture, the second step leading to the door splintered and sagged. Even the trees looked bad. Leathery and overgrown, they shed gray leaves like molting birds onto the green tar paper roof of the garage clamped onto the left side of the house.

      She watched as a squirrel darted across the front yard and sprinted along the splintery picket fence, diving into a shrub under the bay window. The bay window hung over a yard she was too tired to tend, the window made of cramped squares of glass leaded and soldered, looking as if it had been assembled by some parsimonious contractor cousin of Dickens – please, sir, may I have one more pane of glass, sir, a little larger, if you please, oh, you’re too generous – flanked by two narrow windows that actually opened, providing some relief in the summer when she sat in the living room and contemplated her life.

      Not much relief, considering what she had to work with. Cramped, untidy, spilling with dog hair and scraps of paper, vagrant Cheerios and missing shin guards wedged under sofa cushions. Home.

      Not that she could complain. From the street it looked like a broken-down fire hazard, but inside, her home held an amazing secret. She had no illusions about ever being able to afford a new roof or granite countertops in her lifetime. It was enough, plenty, more than enough that the house sat on an actual beach in a section of San Diego in Point Loma called La Playa, and that the back of the lot faced out over the harbor and gently tilting sailboats, while across the water the glass and chrome towers of downtown San Diego twinkled on the horizon like small crystal boxes.

      Only thirteen homes shared the beach that had once been a staging area for seamen melting tallow. They were whalers, Portuguese immigrants transplanted from the Azores, sturdy soldiers of fortune who rode the seas and started a tuna empire. They’d all lived together; their kids had gone to Cabrillo Elementary and they’d