Self-Defense Read Free

rebuild and looked for a place to rent.
    The one we found was on a beach on
Malibu’s far west end. Old rural-route Malibu, nudging up against the Ventura
County line, light-years from the glitz. The recession made it affordable.
    Had I been smarter or more motivated, I
might have owned the place. During my hyperactive youth, working full-time at
Western Pediatric Hospital and seeing private patients at night, I’d earned
enough to invest in Malibu real estate, buying and selling a couple of
land-side apartment buildings and turning enough profit to build a stocks-and-bonds
portfolio that cushioned me during hard times. But I’d never lived at the
beach, thinking it too remote, too cut off from the urban pulse.
    Now I welcomed the isolation—just Robin,
Spike, and me, and patients willing to make the drive.
    I hadn’t done long-term therapy for years,
limiting my practice to forensic consultations. Most of it boiled down to
evaluating and treating children scarred emotionally and physically by
accidents and crimes and trying to untangle the horror of child-custody disputes.
Once in a while something else came along, like Lucy Lowell.
    The house was small: a
thousand-square-foot gray wood saltbox on the sand, fronted on the highway by a
high wooden fence and a double garage where Robin, after deciding to sublet her
storefront in Venice, had set up her luthier’s shop. Between the house and the
gate was a sunken garden planted with succulents and an old wooden hot tub that
hadn’t been serviceable for years. A planked footbridge was suspended over the
greenery.
    A rear gate opened on ten warped steps
that led down to the beach, a rocky spit tucked into a forgotten cove. On the
land side were wildflower-blanketed mountains. The sunsets were blindingly
beautiful and sometimes sea lions and dolphins came by, playing just a few feet
from shore. Fifty yards out were kelp beds, and fishing boats settled there
from time to time, competing with the cormorants and the pelicans and the
gulls. I’d tried swimming, but only once. The water was icy, pebble-strewn, and
seamed by riptides.
    A nice quiet place, except for the
occasional fighter jet roaring down from Edwards Air Force Base. Lore had it
that a famous actress had once lived there with two teenage lovers before
making the Big Movie and building a Moorish castle on Broad Beach. It was
documented fact that an immortal jazz musician had spent a winter shooting
heroin nightly in a rundown cottage on the east end of the beach, playing his
trumpet to the rhythm of the tide as he sank into morphiate peace.
    No celebrities, now. Almost all the houses
were bungalows owned by weekenders too busy to recreate, and even on holiday
weekends, when central Malibu jammed up like a freeway, we had the beach to
ourselves: tide pools, driftwood, and enough sand to keep Spike licking his
chops.
    He’s a French Bulldog, a strange-looking
animal. Twenty-eight pounds of black-brindled muscle packed into a carry-on
body, bat ears, wrinkled face with a profile flat enough to write on. More frog
than wolf, the courage of a lion.
    A Boston terrier on steroids is the best
way to describe him, but his temperament is all bulldog—calm, loyal, loving.
Stubborn.
    He’d wandered into my life, nearly
collapsed from heat and thirst, a runaway after his mistress died. A pet was
the last thing I was looking for at the time, but he snuffled his way into our
hearts.
    He’d been trained as a pup to avoid water
and hated the ocean, keeping his distance from the breakers and growing enraged
at high tide. Sometimes a stray retriever or setter showed up and he romped
with them, ending up winded and drooling. But his new appetite for silica more
than made up for those indignities, as did a lust for barking at shorebirds in
a strangulated gargling tone that evoked an old man choking.
    Mostly he stayed by Robin’s side, riding
shotgun in her truck, accompanying her to the jobsite. This morning, they’d
left at six