Free The Crime Writer by Gregg Hurwitz Page A

likely to approach—but these quiet, kind exchanges more than made up for the drubbing I’d received from my favorite morning-talk-show hosts.
    My cell phone rang.
    Chic said, “What are you doing?”
    I picked an almond from a fold in my shirt, popped it into my mouth. “Writing.”
    “How ’ bout some bar-bee- cue ? Get your mind off the human fucking condition.”
    “No thanks.”
    “I’ll pick you up in twenty minutes.”
    “Sure,” I told the dial tone, “that’d be swell.”
     
    Chic drives a cherry red Chevy pickup, so big that riding in it you feel like a Playskool figurine. I’m officially six feet tall, ever since I fudged the extra inch at the DMV when I turned sixteen, but Chic looms over me. And requires more vehicular headroom.
    Onetime first baseman for the Dodgers, he’d made the All-Star Team two years running, but that was before The Pop-Up. After that, he opened a chain of rib joints, which he’d named Chics Stics. He forgot the apostrophe and went without the k, and it took off from there. Branding genius, homegrown.
    On the Chevy’s tailgate is an elaborate sign, CHIC’S STICS, featuring an apostrophe I added with a Magic Marker one day while he was distracted by a flat tire. That his truck still bears a Dodgers license-plate frame says more about the man than I ever could.
    His driving—slow and steady—matches his personality. Chic has not a smugness but the relaxed, found-his-priorities demeanor of a recovering alcoholic. Someone who’d lived hard and found it not to work, who now knew what mattered and what was a waste of energy. We’d met in those rooms five years ago when I’d hit “reset” on my life, and we’d gravitated to each other immediately. Despite almost running his marriage into the ground a time or twelve, the requisite string of away-game affairs, the massive swings in fortune, he was still with his high-school sweetheart. He wasn’t overwhelmingly handsome, except when he smiled. And he had a sweet, soft laugh, the kind that drove the road girls wild. At least before The Pop-Up.
    He’d played as the nineties rolled in, just before athletes started making tycoon money. And though he was sure of his talents, he’d be quick to tell you that he hadn’t started either All-Star Game in which he’d played, that he’d crumbled with his best years ahead of him. Aside from the infamy, he now led a peaceful life with his family in Mar Vista, a bedroom community tucked between Santa Monica and Venice. Close enough to the beach for the salt erosion but too far for a view, it had, like much Westside real estate, gone from middle class to upper in a hurry over the past decade. When his restaurants had taken off, Chic could’ve upgraded to a place in Brentwood or the Palisades, but instead he’d bought his neighbor’s house, torn it down, and made a giant yard for his eight kids, complete with a mini baseball diamond.
    Angela met us at the door, baby clasped to her side, sobbing toddler clinging to her leg, three or four various-size kids flashing in and out of view behind her as they circled the kitchen table playing chase or death tag. “Drew, Drew, Drew, Drew, Drew, Drew, Drew. ” She angled a cooking spoon, wet from baked beans, to the side and offered up a delightfully smooth cheek for me to kiss, which I did gladly. “Boy, we prayed for you till this here floor got tired of our knees.”
    A few of the Baleses spun off from the typhoon and collided with my knees, shouting my name. I rubbed their heads. “Ronnie, you grew.”
    “That’s ’ cuz I’m Jamaal.”
    “Where’s Ronnie?”
    “Over here.”
    “I thought you were Keyshawn.”
    “Ain’t no Keyshawn in this house, Drew.”
    And so the game went.
    Somehow juggling three children and a platter of fried boneless chicken thighs—if this were fiction, I’d wimp out and make it something else, but chicken it was—Angela hustled us through to the side door. We sat at the picnic table in the middle