Chapter Text
Southern California sprawls out from its beachfronts like a great aged dog on summer-warm linoleum, ribcage hills gone dusty under the wide gold ribbon of the setting sun. Cities light the coast in fits and starts, bunching up against the Pacific like a gather of sucklings, each with its own personality and measure of development; each graduating from the litter to sprawl its population across the bare linoleum, kicking up dustbunnies and leathered bits of dropped roast.
Each city to grow and spread, to host its own litters of neighborhoods and districts, its own frenzied sprawl exuberant with struggle, this record store chewing on the ears of that hotel, this gas station shoving that convenience store aside for a go at the revenue teat. The people in California played the same role as any dog-owner; grooming the streets, feeding the economies, cutting out the burrs and burning off the ticks.
'Dog groomer', Healy liked to joke, when the parents at the school parking queue wandered near enough to ask. He sure as hell wasn't a walker or a feeder, no; nowadays he mostly eliminated fleas, pulled the bloodsuckers out and either let them drown in the wash of the criminal justice system, or squished them himself.
("I didn't think you even liked dogs," Holly had protested, only once. "It was cooler when everybody thought I had a body guard."
"Kidnappers are less likely to shoot your dog groomer," Healy had argued softly, and that had been the end of that.)
"Daaad," Holly's protest drawls through the popcorn-thick air. The Pier had just lost its sunlight, bright now under the moth-dotted neons and waxy orange streetlamp, faded color-bulbs blinking down the side of steel-beam rides and weathered plyboard booths. People in bikini tops and sarongs, board shorts and flopsweat shuffle slowly along the Pier's circuit, ambling in various states of drunk or sleepy or stoned, down the sawdust paths, arms full with children or lovers or stuffed prizes or swimming golden glints in colored cellophane bladders, frozen-chocolate-this and deep-fried-that.
Jackson Healy, leaning against the still-warm wooden fence rail of a ferris wheel, recognizes that voice through the crowd and glances up from his cigar to watch the small family traipse past unawares.
Holland March, single parent and seasoned Detective and doe-eyed nerd, does not walk beside his teenaged daughter so much as stumble ahead and/or behind her, 'scuse-me-sweetie each time a green tennis shoe is unlaced or unheeled by his nervous loafers. In March's hand is a thin, bright piece of plastic twisted into a flower shape, that had been sold in a styrofoam cup of iced lemonade Holly now drank from without the hazard of the straw.
"Don't drink while you walk," March chides, reaching over his daughter's blonde head to coax the cup away from her face. "You're gonna trip."
"You're the only thing that's tripping me," Holly protests, laughing at the game of snatch-back over the drink as her father pauses to sample the cup. "Daaad," Holly drawls again as March plants his entire hand over her face to keep her an arm's distance while he bites another mouthful of shaved ice free.
"Wot," March mumbles around the mouthful of berg, chin up like a pelican. He relents the cup and straw, hooking his arm around Holly's neck to kiss the top of her head, their step resuming that clumsy amble toward a square of picnic tables sprawled between the Pier, for the open dirt field that served as parking overspill.
Jackson Healy, eyes glinting with intelligence behind a halo of cigar smoke, crosses his heavy arms like a gargoyle retiring its granite wings, and returns his attention to the rest of the crowd. Wearing a dark blue security polo same as the woman beside him, he doesn't suppose he'll be recognized, and doesn't fancy a conversation with Holland March, his very recent business partner, either about the disparity between their casework and his enforcement rates, nor the sentiment that went behind treating his old lineup of regular clients as if nothing in his career path had changed at all.
Man gets to a certain age, it's hard to make new friends if he didn't like bowling, or golf, or politics; and besides that, Healy was trying to save for retirement and he'd be fucked if he was gonna ask a widower, with a kid to put through college, for a raise.
Which also went into the whole squirming pile of things Healy was not going to discuss with March, because Holly's education or overall welfare wasn't exactly any of Healy's goddamn business.
"Can you stub that thing out?" Griers snaps, shifting her weight.
"I could," Healy amends, turning his chin to vent the next mouthful of smoke away from her, gathering in a cloud that swings limp and foggy in the still beachside heat. "Keeps the bugs off, though, don't it."
"I have some spray for mosquitoes," Griers offers amicably. "It's in my car." On cue, she reaches down to slap at a round brown calf. "Fuck, getting eaten alive."
"Make it quick," Healy offers, arm open and head tilted. "Pick up that Aspirin you said you needed earlier, too."
"Okay," Griers steps from her post, glancing up at the ferris wheel. "Five minutes, tops. You want your jacket?"
"Nah. Forecast said it's gonna be a warm one." Healy cracks his knuckles, scans the crowd again per regulation, watches Griers jog toward the picnic square, the parking lot. He settles back to his slouch and his cigar, glancing sidelong for the turn of March's beaky profile, Griers providing the line of motion March would follow seeing such unusual haste through the crowd.
Sharp man, Holland March, if not a goofy drunk schmuck getting disco-struck by every pair of painted eyes on rollerskates. March was smart enough, and that was really all he had to be, and anything else good about him wasn't even up for eval, because Jackson Healy could like March on smarts alone and if he liked March for anything more, then it weren't nothing more than anybody else deserved for being, well, likable. Those painted eyes always looked back, those rollerskates always slowed, and even Healy remembered being the cat of that particular walk (and, in certain neighborhoods, still was), so it weren't, you know, anything more than anyone ever deserved. Jackson Healy was a fair guy, and it'd be unfair to say that March wasn't likable, and that was all there was to that.
March drapes an arm over Holly's shoulder and tugs her braid, pointing with that laconic hand toward the ferris wheel, grinning under his mustache as Holly's face lights with recognition.
Healy can't remember spotting March spot him, no eye contact even, but March follows his daughter from the picnic table and back up the Pier just the same as if he'd been waved over.
Healy gets his arm open in time to receive the hug, huffing a cloud of cigar smoke past the impact. "Ooph. Somebody's full of cotton candy." And though Holly is as aloof and self-possessed as most fourteen-year-olds, and Jackson Healy is about as friendly as a desert shrub and all the snakes under it, there is a night of blood and triumph between the two that demands a hug for reuinion.
"Elephant ears," Holly corrects, detaching to hoist herself to a sit on the wooden rail against which Healy is leaned waiting for his client. "And chocolate frozen bananas. Why are you dressed like that?"
"You couldn't get the kid some protein?" Healy shakes March's hand with the type of scorn that hovers near sarcasm, ignoring the segue about his here-to-fore secret second (first) job. "Sugar crash is gonna see her, what, comatose."
March's mouth pulls back sheepishly, but his eyes grin to match the ribbing. He throws a lazy tap at the side of Holly's knee. "There's a history of corn-dog misadventure with this one."
Holly's legs kicks out in a lazy swing. "Yeah when I was like ten, and you've barfed way more than I ever have, Holland."
March, "Don't say 'like'. You weren't 'like' ten, you were ten." He props his fists on his belt and jerks his chin at his daughter to pose a challenge, "We can get burgers on the way home, you want a burger?"
But Healy's eyebrows had come crashing down, humor still warming his voice, "Excuse me, hold on," his broad hand interrupts the air of burger debate between the March family. To Holly, "What did you just call your father?"
Holly, "Are you working for the fair, or just someone on that ride?"
March, "She called me Holland, Jack."
Healy, in low gruff tones as if impressed, "Hey now, kid, that ain't right. Is that the 'it' thing, nowadays, to disrespect the parent like that?"
Holly, biting her cheek, "Yeah, kinda. I've known him my whole life, so we don't have to be so formal, right?"
March, "Doesn't bother me any,"
Healy, "Well it bothers --" twisting on heel, first to regard March and then to regard the smaller lady-March (who was either admiring the fireworks or performing the year's longest eye-roll), "It bothers me." Healy squares his weight and wags his finger at Holly to get her attention, removing the cigar to exhale over his shoulder. "He's yer father, notcher friend or your roomate or your landlord or whatever. Call him what you want in fronta anybody else -- Lord knows I've called him worse--"
March, scuffing the boardwalk with his heel in a flail of dipped knees, struck with relief that the abuse was finally getting a light, "So much worse."
"But in front of me, you call this guy 'dad', or you don't call him nothin'." Healy reaffixes his cigar, offers his hand to help Holly down from the fence. "Capisce?"
Holly's shoulders rise and fall in a silent breath. "If you say so, Mr. Healy." She accepts Healy's hand, hops down from the fence, then falls sideways to clutch March's arm with an exaggerated groan of defeat. "Father, I do believe I shall perish soon from hunger."
Healy's chest jumps in silent laughter, cigar puff escaping. "Yer a ham," he mumbles, toasting the air with a half-open fist, an applause and a dismissal.
March, addressing the top of Holly's head as she pirouettes under their tangled fingers, "Guess we're retiring for the night."
It's Healy who feels like maybe he ought to be the one wandering on away, but he remembers his post and his job and he shifts his weight and puffs his cigar and crosses his arms and consults the dirt instead, grinning for a heartbeat that could be a wince on anyone else. "Yeah, I'll see ya at the office."
Holly waves over her shoulder and March gives a nod through the departing banter, but it's another two minutes before Griers is due and Healy watches the duo navigate the crowd, watches them glance back and wave and laugh and shove each other and hold each other up and glance back again, just March this time, stepping on his daughter's heel again, 'scuse-me-sweetie and daaad through the music and the crowd and the pop of fireworks that neither men had once looked up to notice.