Self-Defense by JONATHAN KELLERMAN

CHAPTER

2

It had been a nomad year.

Thirteen months ago, just before Jobe Shwandt had started climbing through bedroom windows and ripping people to shreds, a psychopath high on vengeance had burned my house down, reducing ten years of memories to charcoal. When Robin and I finally mustered the strength to think positively, we began plans to 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.

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