Page 3 of The Alibi Club

Nathan Dodson was standing behind a very pregnant woman who was swathed in pink linen and basking in his adoring gaze. He was smiling broadly, without even a hint of the smirk he was famous for. He looked relaxed. Joyful. About to be a father.

Tears sprung to her eyes at the memory of how good it felt to be in his glow. How much she wanted to make him happy back then. Which was closely followed by the searing pain of how devastating it had been when she found out the truth of how duplicitous he was, how calculating, how cruel. She had heard waves crashing in the distance when she called the hotel in Grand Cayman and a female voice picked up, destroying her dreams with a lilting, “Hello.”

“Nope.” She caught herself giving in to the rush of tortured memories and then briskly brushed the tears aside like an emotional windshield wiper. “Not going down that lane.” She cleared her throat and looked at the post with a more forensic eye. There did seem to be something forced about the expression on the woman standing next to Nathan, something she recognized. It was the look of someone who wasn’t quite sure if she was in a dream or in a trap.

She did acknowledge, however, that the woman looked effortlessly beautiful, as if standing under the colors of her own rainbow, the tramp.

Jamie glanced in the mirror at her own reflection and realized grimly that she looked like someone recently revived by a shot of Narcan. She didn’t touch drugs, but she did have a wine hangover.

She sat down with a heavy sigh and did a deep dive on herself. Single. Forty-one. Unplucked, unshaved, and unloofah-ed over the past few months, nearly completing full transformation from woman to forest ogre. Possible Chardonnay addict. Eternally scarred by rom-coms from the ’90s where the flawed, plucky girl gets the guy in the end. But, she recalled, rather unhelpfully, none of those heroines were forty-one.

And Nathan was going to have a baby.

Tears welled again and then quelled as Jamie poured out her cold coffee and poured in last night’s white wine.

She gloomily scrolled through the rest of the photo stream of Nathan, his new wife, his new life. All evidence of her scrubbed from his socials long ago. Had it really been five years? Had life really changed that much?

She was knee-deep in her pity pool when she heard a sharp rapping on her door. She knew the sound of those bony, heartless knuckles. It was followed by a voice that made the hair on her arms stand on end and a perilously high dose of cortisol shoot through her bloodstream.

“Jamie? Open up. It’s your mother.”

CHAPTER TWO

Old Dog. New Tricks.

CLIFF

The crunch of gravel under his feet was his first sound of freedom.

Cliff Weston exited the barbed wire fencing as armed sharpshooters gazed down at him from their perches. He passed through the last barrier exiting the prison. He was dressed in his original clothes: a pair of jeans, a long-sleeved black sweater, black Converse. He carried a small prison-issue plastic bag that carried all his earthly belongings. An Italian leather wallet that held eleven bucks, an expired ID, an old broken watch that had belonged to his father. A smartphone that hadn’t been charged in seven years. A check for $2,000, his compensation as a prison cook to “reduce recidivism,” the business card of his parole officer, and the key to a rental unit above a garage in Manhattan Beach.

The two guards escorting him to the exit didn’t say a word until he was on the gravel, officially out of prison.

“Thanks, boys. Been nice knowing you.”

The older guard, Frank Dodge, chubby in the middle, thick mustache, the last of his wispy blond hair slathered down and feistily holding on, said gruffly, “Weston. Do not do me the displeasure of returning. Find a woman or a purpose. Or better yet, both.”

“I’ll miss your jailhouse wisdom, Frank. Keep up the chess. Game of kings, you know.” With this small acknowledgment of their shared mutual respect, the older guard nodded but before he turned back toward the gate, he handed Cliff a business card and said, “I know you’re headed to Manhattan Beach, my old stomping grounds. This place has the best burger in town for a free man.”

Cliff flipped the card over. It read OB’s Pub and Grill, with a cartoon of a buxom waitress hoisting a mug of beer in one hand and a cheeseburger in the other. He smiled at the kindness of it. First nights out of the joint were notoriously difficult for parolees, as if a man could forget how to behave without being ordered by a guard or a guided by a set of prison rules. Frank was trying to give him a soft landing. “Will do.” Frank turned on his heel and walked back to the confines of the prison gate.

The younger guard, wiry and amped up on an unclear contraband, who had a reputation for jabbing prisoners with his club just because he could, said, “See ya, lowlife. I’ve got a crisp hundred-dollar bill that says you’ll be back here within ninety days.” He produced a folded-up bill between his fingers and waved it at him, then added with a sneer, “Once a scumbag, always a scumbag.”

If this were any normal circumstance, say on the civilized streets of Los Angeles and a young punk like him pulled this move, Weston would have delivered a swift pop to the guard’s throat and a clean kick to the balls. But, knowing bored snipers with itchy trigger fingers were a scant fifty yards away, he opted for pulling the guard in for what looked like a rough handshake wherein he liberated him from his hundred-dollar bill in one quick move. Weston whispered, “Careful, Freddie. I know things about you that could do you harm.” He let the guard’s hand go and smiled. The guard turned pale and scurried back toward the gate into the safety of the prison.

Cliff turned back toward the parking lot; the morning sun was rising over the rolling hills of Central California. He checked his watch, which wasn’t working, glanced in both directions of the long and empty road toward San Luis Obispo, and took one deep breath, raising his face to the sky.

No one was picking him up. So, Cliff started walking.

He had been nameless until he reached that gravel. Up until that moment, he was Prisoner CA10607. He had been unwilling to step inside his old self until he was out from behind bars. He wanted to separate himself from the convict who had been incarcerated and spent seven years locked up to the free, principled man he wanted to be. This was his chance, and in some ways, it felt like his last. The crackling sound of gravel was the sound of a new beginning, one in which he would strive to be more. More than the sum of his youth. More than what his father had turned out to be. More than what prison told him he was: a thief, a filthy yegg, a criminal.

Yet, the word rang in his ears from the punk guard again and again: scumbag.

As he walked toward a town in the distance where he could catch a bus going south, it started to rain. Cliff turned up his collar to the wind and hoped the rain might wash away the residual filth of prison, the stench of his cell, the stain of rage that scars the heart of the incarcerated man. He hoped the ugliness hadn’t seeped too deep inside him. He hoped the rain might be the baptism he needed to start again on this, his brand-new day of his last chance. He hoped.

But rain can only wash away so much before you start to drown.

Ten hours later, Cliff was standing naked at the open bedroom window of a small apartment in El Porto, the northernmost neighborhood of Manhattan Beach, watching a spectacular mid-September sunset. Smoke from the fires burning in Malibu had been blown out to sea. Brilliant red and orange streaks were emblazoned across the evening sky. Fire season and the Santa Ana winds were a nasty power couple, but they made a pretty horizon. A radio was playing low in the background.